The Middle of the Forest

"Jeanette!" Annie called from the porch of the big house, "You and Martha take your cousin Ann over to the field and pick her a mess o' beans to take back to Miss Berta's to go with their dinner."

Annie Thorne was a large woman with an even larger heart. As I walked with Jeanette and Martha to the bean field, I tried to figure out just how we were related. Annie's husband, Duran, was one of Uncle "Dude"s boys, and Uncle "Dude" was a brother to my Great-grandmother, Euna Thorne Hughes. That made "Dude" my Mom's great uncle, so Duran and my grandmother were first cousins. I suppose that meant Martha and Jeanette were my third cousins, but it didn't really matter, because everybody living in the Helmic community were "kin." And I never went to visit Annie and her brood without being made welcome.

Jeanette, Martha and I reached the field with our large, empty sack. Jeanette, as oldest and tallest, raised a section of the barbed wire fence so that Martha and I could crawl through, and then we held it up for her. I'm sure there was a gate somewhere, but we never bothered to use it. Martha moved quickly to the first hill and started picking. "Just how much is a mess, anyway," she asked.

"Well," Jeanette mused, as she turned to me, "Who-all is over to Miss Berta's anyway?"

"All of my family: Mom, Dad, my brothers and me, and we drove up just behind Uncle James and Aunt Mary Lee with Brian and his sisters. Uncle Feagin and Aunt Norma will be here by dinner time."

I had fallen in behind Martha and Jeanette, and watched, trying to copy the deft way they picked the fuller pods as we walked our way down the row. "That sounds like at least a sack full," Jeanette said in a merry way. "Just how many kids does Feagin have now?"

"Four, counting the baby, Martha Ann."

"Yep," nodded Martha, "sounds like we need to pick a big mess, for sure."

Martha swelled up a little. "Feagin named his little girl Martha Ann, too? How many does that make?"

"Let's see," I replied. "There's you, and me, and now the baby,"

"Uncle Howard's youngest," joined in Jeanette, "and probably more from kin that's moved away and lost touch."

"Does anybody remember her?" I asked, "The first Martha Ann, I mean?" Jeanette was two years older than I was. The first Martha Ann was her great-grandmother, my great-great. She died a month after I was born. She was ninety years old. She had been born in Western Missouri, at the start of the Kansas-Missouri Border Wars, had lived through the Civil War, and buried her mother, Ailcy, before she was ten, moving with her father, step-mother, and the other surviving children to Texas.

"Kind of," said Jeanette. "Mostly I remember her hands. They were all swollen, and her fingers were twisted and curled. Momma always said the rheumatism gave her a lot of pain, but ever time I remember seeing her, she was smiling."

We continued down the row, the sack of beans beginning to fill up. "She was as kind and good," Martha said, "as her daughter was mean."

"Martha!"

"Well, it's what everybody says. Not any of us knowed her, since she died before we was borned. But I know I've heard lots of people say it: Euna Thorne Hughes was about the meanest woman ever lived, even though her mother was the kindest."

The sack we brought with us was, by that time, full almost to bursting with bean pods, so we walked back to the house, talking mostly about other things, and by the time we were back, Annie had anther bag, filled with biscuits. Annie Thorne made the biggest, lightest biscuits I ever saw anywhere, and I could smell them all the way home, as I trudged, by this time, back down the sandy road to my grandparents farm. By the time I got back, my Uncle Feagin and his family had arrived. Grandmother brought several bowls out to the front porch, handing me the smallest, and she, my mom, my aunts and I sat at one end and snapped the beans, while the men all sat at the other end, my Great-Grandfather Hughes; his son-in-law, my grandfather Windham; my dad and his brothers-in-law; all telling fishing stories. I sat where I could clearly see my great-grandfather, sitting with his chair leaned back against the wall, smiling and talking softly with the younger men, all of whom gave him their complete respect. He was clearly a good man. I was, and still am, puzzled by the circumstances. I, like several of my cousins, was named for his mother-in-law, whom everyone called a good woman. But his wife, her daughter, was, according to everyone who remembered her, a mean-spirited woman who visited her misery on the whole family, to a degree that we all live with the repercussions to this day. I could see the remnants on my own mother's face, as she sat, angrily snapping the beans that were a loving gift from her own cousin, that my cousins and I picked on a glorious afternoon in a country bean-field.

I still wonder what made her so mean, and why she passed the meanness on to my mother.


Ann