Grandma's Hands

Great-Grandma Slutz lived in a neat little house in Fredericksburg, Ohio. If you were walking north on Mill Street (tiny Fredericksburg’s main street), you would cross a bridge over Salt Creek and then cross the railroad tracks and pass by, on your left, a house with the name “Graber” written on the door (which I pretended said “Grabber” because it was the home of a monster who would grab children who walked too close to the porch), and the next home was Grandma Slutz’s. This was the route I took walking home from school each day, starting in kindergarten.

Grandma’s house had several concrete steps—probably five or six—that led up to her porch. To me they seemed quite high. You could stand on her porch and look down at the sidewalk, where Grandma waged war on grass and weeds that dared to poke through the cracks in the walk. She showed me how to kill them by pouring salt water or boiling water on them. Both methods quite effectively discouraged further growth.

Directly across the street from Grandma’s place was the Millers’ house. Harry Miller was in my class. We all liked Harry with his freckled face, tow-blond hair, and raspy voice, but we also knew that his family was probably the poorest in the school. His house was two stories tall with dark red roof shingles for siding, and it always seemed to be wide open, teeming with Harry and his seemingly innumerable siblings. I don’t remember ever seeing his parents.

Once, Harry had a red scab in the middle of his forehead. When I asked him what had happened, he said his brother had thrown a piece of metal at him. Later when I went by his house (I don’t think I ever entered it), he showed me a heavy iron stake. It was pointed at the end and probably a foot long, an inch in diameter. “This is what my brother threw at me,” he said.

I was glad I did not live at Harry’s house.

A Woman of Backbone and Opinions

Grandma Slutz, like all the women I ever knew in my family, was a woman of backbone and opinions. When I was born, according to my mother, Grandma didn’t like the name “Steven,” so she proceeded to call me “Billy,” a name she deemed more appropriate. It wasn’t until my mom (her granddaughter and also a woman of backbone and opinions) reminded her that Stephen was the first Christian martyr, and, therefore, his name was highly respectable that Grandma begrudgingly addressed me properly.

She was the oldest person I knew, and she was the first person I knew who died.

She had white hair and wrinkles and old hands and a rather prominent nose covered by pores that were fascinatingly large. Looking at those pores, I asked her one day why her nose had holes in it. I knew it was a rude and improper question to ask, but I felt like being rude and improper. She had just gotten out of the front passenger seat as I asked, looking up at her from the back seat. Mom was driving. Grandma looked at Mom quizzically, and Mom said, “Steve, everybody’s nose has holes in it!”

She was referring to different holes than I had been, but I wasn’t going to elucidate her further lest she discover that I was being rude and improper.

Mom took Grandma to get her hair done in Wooster once a week, and I rode along in the back seat. I do not remember this event, but my mother repeated it many times over the years—we were in the car with Grandma, and I, probably about five, piped up, “Mom, tell me again where babies come out?”

Not where babies come from. Where babies come out. (I was a perspicacious child.)

Grandma harrumphed and said, “Seems to me he’s pretty young to be asking questions like that!” Mom was mortified, but she went ahead and answered my question because Dr. Spock said you should always answer children’s questions about sex completely honestly.

Grandma Slutz taught me to play dominoes. She showed me, when the line of dominoes reached the edge of the card table, how to bend the line ninety degrees and keep on going. I liked it when she referred to picking dominoes from the “bone pile” because anything even remotely creepy enthralled—and horrified—me. Well over fifty years later, I still enjoy juxtaposing those two emotions whenever I get the chance.

Mabel Ellen Alice Swinehart Green Slutz

Although I didn’t know it as a child, Grandma’s full name was quite impressive: Mabel Ellen Alice Swinehart Green Slutz.

So. Her maiden name was Swinehart. Apparently the Swineharts were known for being tightfisted, because every time one of the grandkids would mention being frugal in some way, Grandma Swartz (Grandma Slutz’s daughter, my maternal grandmother) would say, “Well, that’s the Swinehart in ya!” Apparently Grandpa Swartz heard that statement once too often, because after she said it at a family gathering one time, he burst out with, “Why are you always bringing up the Swineharts? Not a one of ’em amounted to anything except Harold,* and he was a drunk!”

Grandma Swartz was a woman of backbone and opinions who liked to repeat certain stock aphorisms ad infinitum, but that was the last time she repeated that one.

So Mabel Ellen Alice Swinehart, whom I judge to have been quite a lovely young woman, based on an old photo of her, married a man named Lewis Green (hence my distant Green cousins), was widowed, married Ott Slutz (which rhymes with “toots”), and was widowed again. Both her husbands had passed away by the time I was cognizant.

Great-Grandma and Me

When I walked the short distance from our house to hers on brittle, cold days, I would remove my rubber boots as I came in the door. It was on one such day (I don’t remember visiting her on any warm days, strangely enough) after we had visited for a while, that I was preparing to leave. It was time to put my rubber boots on again over my shoes. I could get them on, but I couldn’t manipulate the somewhat complicated clips that kept them closed. If you didn’t close them, the excess rubber would flop and flap around your calves.

Grandma Slutz had arthritic hands, and it was hard for her to use them. (I remember she once showed me a trick of getting a button through a buttonhole using a bobby pin. She had to do it that way because her stiff fingers wouldn’t cooperate.)

Grandma struggled and struggled to close those boot clips for me. She finally got just one closed. (There were at least four on each boot.) She sat back with a sigh and said, “Well, that’s the best I can do,” and sent me on my way home. I waited till I reached the sidewalk in front of her house to undo the clip. I was afraid if people saw me walking from her house to my house with one boot tight and the other flopping and flapping, they might laugh at me. (Apparently I considered asymmetry a potential cause of mirth.)

I was an intelligent child, well liked at school, and in general possessed no shortage of self-confidence, but I did harbor a number of strange neuroses, and the idea that the world was watching everything I did and might, just might—horrors!—laugh at me was one of them.

I should have waited till I was farther away before unclasping the clip because Grandma, watching me from behind the storm door, let me know she was none too happy with me for loosening the boot after she had spent so much effort closing it. I gave her a weak but, I hoped, endearing smile and went on my way, both boots flopping and flapping. It was the right decision, even though Grandma had disapproved. No one laughed at me even once.

The Flood of 1969

Four months before she passed away, Grandma survived the infamous Flood of 1969. It’s a story worth relating.

On July 4, 1969, our family plus our Brinkerhoff cousins had gone out to the country to a farm that Grandpa Swartz owned but rented out to others. I was seven years old, and we spent the day picnicking and wading in the creek. I recall that I was wading very carefully, trying not to get my shorts wet, when I stepped in a hole and suddenly and unexpectedly was in water up to my waist. I was humiliated, and the fact that I heard the adults laughing behind me made the blood rush to my face. This was ten times worse than walking home from Grandma’s with only one boot buckled.

I dared not turn around to look, because maybe, just maybe, they were not laughing at me, and, if I looked, I might find out otherwise. Even at that age I knew it is sometimes better to choose blissful ignorance over painful truth.

It was on that day as well that, when we boys said we had to “go to the bathroom,” the adults told us to do it against a large tree nearby. My twin cousins, Jim and John, and I complied. I was embarrassed because we were outside, but it must have been okay because our parents had told us to do it, right? Then I saw somebody—either Grandpa Swartz or Uncle Russ, I would imagine—photographing the proceedings. I didn’t think it was funny at all—it was highly improper, and I believe I firmly gave my opinion to the adults. Again, they just laughed.

In case you’re wondering, being photographed relieving oneself against a tree is worse than stepping in a hole in the creek and getting wet to the waist. It is worse than walking home with one boot unbuckled.

At some point at the end of that perfect day (meteorologically speaking), we packed up and started home. I recall that our family—Mom and Dad and my brothers, Keith and Eric, and I—were going to go to the fireworks that night, but a torrential, monsoonlike, storm started. We drove around in the dark for a while, planning to go to fireworks, but we saw some in the distance that were being shot off early because of the horrible weather. So we turned around and went home and to bed.

I don’t know what time I awoke, but I know the house was completely dark and shaking with immense explosions of thunder and cascades of rain. I checked my parents’ room first—no one was there. So I went downstairs, and there sat Mom in the living room, alone. She told me the town was having a flood, and Dad had gone out in the storm to help anyone who might need it. Because that’s what small-town folk do.

The house was dark, the power having gone out. And we could tell our cellar was filling with water because every once in a while we would hear jars of home-canned fruit and vegetables clanking into each other as they floated around. My brothers slept through it all, but Mom let me stay up to keep her company. It was the first time in my life I stayed up all night long.

I learned later that one of the people who needed help that night was Great-Grandma Slutz. Knowing the town was flooding and knowing how close to the creek her mother lived, Grandma Swartz was frantic to get to her and make sure she was okay. So she and Grandpa drove to her mom’s neat little house near Salt Creek.

Grandpa maneuvered his pickup through rapidly deepening, swirling water that covered the streets and arrived to find floodwater from the formerly narrow Salt Creek wildly swirling around Great-Grandma’s house. And there she was, standing on the porch, awaiting rescue. Her concrete steps were under water—the flood had nearly reached her porch floor.

Grandpa Swartz was absolutely terrified of water, never having learned how to swim. Grandma looked at him and said, “You have to go get Mom!” He replied, “I’m not getting out in that water! It’s up to my waist!” To which Grandma replied, “If you don’t, I will!” And, being a woman of backbone and opinions, she meant it.

Terrified, Grandpa opened the truck door and, feeling his way with his feet, slowly fought the current until he reached the porch. He picked Great-Grandma up—thankfully she was not a large woman—and carried her back to the truck, where he and his wife took her to their home, out of the floodwaters’ reach.

I could tell more of the story of the Flood of ’69—how the next day after the rain and floodwaters subsided, Mom and I walked downtown to find everything changed, many things destroyed. The new firehouse, which the town had just started to build, now was nothing but a cinder block footer with tires and other debris scattered all around it. The railroad tracks were nothing but mangled metal rails and piles of huge wooden ties. Rail traffic would never again pass through our village. Salt Creek bridge was bizarrely askew—its supports and walkway violently twisted out of shape like something from a Dr. Seuss illustration. Another bridge, at the south end of town, was also severely damaged, and people told of watching a nearby house get washed away, half of it going over the bridge, half of it going under.

Strangely, I don’t remember any details about damage to Grandma’s house, but I do remember visiting Harry Miller’s house on a later day. Harry showed me how high the mud had been in their house after the flood—evidenced by a four-foot-high dark, oozy stain on the wallpaper.

And the End . . .

Well. That was July of 1969. Later that same month the world watched a man set foot on the moon for the first time. Grandma thought everybody was making far too big a deal out of the whole thing. Why in the world had they taken Divorce Court off the air to make room for this ridiculous news coverage about three men flying to the moon?

It was early November 1969 when I saw Grandma alive for the last time.

I was walking home from school, and it was bitterly cold. (Yes, I know that’s a cliché, but, really, it was!) I remember my face hurt—it felt frozen—and I decided to stop at Grandma’s to get warm because she lived about halfway between school and home.

I don’t remember much about the visit. I probably stopped in just long enough to warm up—if I was smart, I didn’t bother unbuckling my boots. Mom had told me Grandma was sick and had a nurse living with her now. The nurse didn’t really look like a nurse—she wasn’t dressed in starchy white, the way nurses were supposed to dress. She looked like a middle-aged mom with graying hair, and she smiled at me.

Was there a hospital bed in the house? I can’t remember. How did Grandma look? I can’t remember. What did we talk about? I can’t remember that either. But having been sufficiently warmed, I trudged the rest of the way home, convinced that had I not stopped, town authorities would have dug my body—blue, stiff, and brittle as an icicle—out of a snowdrift once the spring thaw started.

The next morning Mom called me to her room as she sat on her bed. Was she crying? I think she was. And she told me that Grandma Slutz had died last night.

I was eight. She had been the oldest person I knew, and she was the first person I knew who died.

I don’t remember her funeral, but I remember what we referred to as “calling hours,” or “the viewing,” in a house downtown that had been converted into a funeral home. Looking at the window above Grandma’s casket, I could see, between the venetian blind slats, that it was dark outside. The parlor’s furnishings were heavy and oppressive—dark brocades with paisley patterns and velvet curtains and an aged, thick carpet. I remember a Tiffany-style lamp with tiny clear beads hanging on threads that encircled the glass shade. To me the funeral home was furnished exactly the way a funeral home should be furnished.

I clearly remember Grandma lying there. My head wasn’t much higher than the lip of her casket. She looked as though she were asleep in a bed that would have been far too small for a living person. I looked at her hands, gnarled by arthritis but no longer causing her pain. Enthralled and a little horrified, I desperately wanted to touch them. What would a dead person’s hands feel like? I lifted a hand to do it, but I couldn’t. I just rested it instead on the edge of the coffin.

A few days later, eager, as are most children, to attract attention by boasting of experiences that others have not had, I told my class that my grandma had died. Our teacher, Mrs. Younkin, expressed interest, so I continued. “And I touched one of her hands after she was dead,” I said.

“What did it feel like?” Mrs. Younkin asked.

I hadn’t seen that one coming, and a flicker of panic started to rise in my chest. “It was sort of—sort of—,” I said, struggling and waving my hands in front of me in a gesture intended to convey nothing in particular. What did it feel like? My mind raced—normal? hard? squishy? My classmates probably wouldn’t know it if I lied, but Mrs. Younkin would.

“Cold?” asked Mrs. Younkin.

“Yeah, cold,” I said. “It was cold.”

I don’t remember being sad about Grandma’s passing, although I must have been, especially when I walked by her house. But I had a child’s implicit, unshakeable faith that she was in heaven, so, really, there was nothing to be sad about.

Although she avoided telling people her age—a little scrap of vanity she held on to till the end—she lived to be ninety. I wonder now what it was like for her, having a bespectacled, red-faced little great-grandson—chatty, intelligent, somewhat neurotic—stop by every now and then to play dominoes or to talk. I hope I brightened her days.

Her home used to warm my hands, feet, and face. Her memory still warms my heart.

* “Harold” is a fictional name. I cannot recall whose name he actually used.

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All photos courtesy of Eric Skaggs. Check out his excellent family history blog "Stories from Skagend."

Mangled railroad tracks.

Remains of the firehouse.

Holmesville Road washed out.

Townsfolk surveying debris, south bridge.