When I’m Dead and Gone

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Then, in the dark, the stories would spill out. The truth about her childhood was this: My grandmother had been a cowgirl on the Montana plains. When she was just 5 years old, her mother, Glenna Stewart, left her husband, Vernon, in Ohio and boarded a train for Montana with her two little girls—my grandmother and her sister, Kathryn—a trunk filled with her collection of fancy velvet dresses, and a few relics from her life. In Montana, Glenna became an itinerant schoolteacher, traveling around the state for months on end, leaving her two daughters to fend for themselves in small coal-mining towns. The stories of the abandoned girls were infinite. Their house burned down. They got lost in blizzards. They spent a summer on the Lame Deer Indian Reservation, where Louise Big Foot and Mary Shoulder Blade taught them Cheyenne.

Like her daughter, Glenna had a large imagination and a great passion for life. She loved music and men. She'd ride into town every so often, give my grandmother money, then ride off again. My grandmother, meanwhile, dreamed of growing up and leading a sophisticated life in the East with a tall dark gentleman who would love her enough to give her a Tiffany diamond and a house filled with treasures.

As it turned out, my grandaunt went to grade school and my grandmother did not. She was too busy mothering her younger sister. At first her dreams of escape seemed futile. But she read incessantly, especially about medicine. She was fearless and learned quickly. When Kathryn was bitten by a rattler, my grandmother broke the crystal on her watch and used it to cut out the venom. She learned to make poultices from bread doused in milk to heal open wounds, and to extract lice with larkspur and ether shampoo.

At 18, using her sister's name and school records, my grandmother was accepted to nursing school in Brooklyn. Nursing was what she loved best. In Brooklyn she thrived, and soon after she finished her degree she met my grandfather, heir to the dying Buster Brown shoe empire. In his youth, he'd been the model for Buster Brown.

Some nights at my grandmother's house, a strong Maine wind howled and it seemed the entire ocean was curling into a wave to devour Last Morrow. Grammy pulled me in tight against her chest and talked just to comfort me. In Montana, during winter, she'd lie on a mattress on the floor with her little sister, all the blankets they could find piled on top of them. Outside a blizzard raged; their mother was far away. She would hold Kathryn close in her arms to keep them warm, the way she held me now, and tell her the same stories of our family's past. "I wanted to know where I came from," my grandmother explained. "Knowing makes me feel I've always been, and will always be, alive."

In the mornings my grandmother became concrete again: "What would you like when I'm dead and gone?" She wanted me to choose objects, as if somehow my choice would teach her who I was and who I would become as a grown woman. In a sense, it was a way for her to peer into the future.

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