Concerning Grandmother Emmaline
Madison, it was but two years ago in this very same place that Joseph and his sisters were surrendered by poor troubled young Mother Anais and Grandmother Emmaline to the state foster home system. Anais suffering post traumatic conditions from the nightmarish scenarios of being mismatched and married to the older and much meaner Benito with her being only but a young girl fated to be cast into such harsh and unkind desert whirlwinds.. There was not enough money or space to care for the offspring of such an ill fated pairing, there was more to the story perhaps than clumsily chosen words and phrases are able to faithfully tell.
It goes way back. It always goes so far away, one may never know the actual details.
Emmaline and her first husband Jean Louis lived with their five offspring in the hollows of Hickman County Tennessee near the quaint little town of Good Water.
Jean Louis worked as a lumberjack, helping progress to scalp the native land of hair. Hills were bristling with old growth in those days of yore. He indulged in the pleasures of drink frequently, Firewater my friend, spring of the Devil.They were hewing an existence from the earth, water soil of this sometimes generous sometimes selfish land, People of faith, simple and powerful. People lost in a new wilderness, haunted always by the old. Anais was the eldest girl child of Emmaline and Louis. Emmaline of hardy English, Irish stock receding into historical mists of Old Country. Jean Louis of French and native American blood, wild spirited and of questionable character in the area of being a responsible husband and father. Anais has one older brother, a younger brother and two younger sisters. Theirs was a basic down to earth life with few of the frills offered by city and civilisation. Perhaps Cormac McCarthy would have recognized them as prototypes or archetypes, the sort of individuals that formed the fabric of a transitory agrarian region caught up in the manic threshing machine known euphemistically as The West. Human fodder and immortal souls thrown into a constant flux and flail.
Fathers, Mothers, Children. Family lines spiraling back down through the ages. All the faces, bodies, schools of thought, actions wished and taken. Kinetic. Implied. Otherwise and elsewhere.
Anais gifted with beauty and innocence born of faithful Christian Emmaline and firewater acolyte Jean Louis somewhere in a shaded hollow glade of a time by-gone. The Devil is sending a man for her in a scant few years, a man with soul forfeit. Just another Cain branded with the mark of the fallen. The fallen are fiendish and clever.God help the future. May God save us all. For this man would be named Benito. Joseph and his sisters were to be the next round of beings to join a mad spiraling dance of mortality. Big deal. Let’s go.
Problems in the family unit:
Hard times in the hollow. Emmaline tries her best, which is really a very good best to care for her five children in a post depression era. Post War prosperity hasn’t found their rural niche roost yet and probably won’t until long after everyone alive has moved a spot or soon on down the great loop to a sky kingdom somewhere or some such metanalogy.
Jean Louis has disappeared. Deserted? Maybe. Run off with a traveling medicine show headed out West to another Great Sunset. Joined up with paper cap gun slingers, rum runners and ghost lands speculators.
Emmaline is left to her own devices, which although considerable are not quite enough to keep the kids well fed and clothed.
One bright morning Emmaline is down by the creek washing a plucked rooster when a man with a supernaturally straight back carrying a heavy railroad tie on a broad shoulder walks by on the path alongside the creek. This classic midwestern gothic character named Popeye Woodsie is destined to become Emmaline’s second husband.
Popeye: Howdy ‘Mam, looks like you have washed all the feathers off that bird.
Emmaline: Well, wish I had more birds to wash, with five hungry mouths at home to feed, this scrawny thing won’t last past supper.
Popeye: I do admire a woman with some gumption. Name’s Woodsie, Popeye Woodsie.
Emmaline: Why I’m Emmaline Langley, pleased to meet you Mr. Popeye.
Poetry by Chaucer Whethers
Written on 2026-09-24 at 19:43
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