The men in her life

When Cora Maria Taylor was barely ending her teenage years, she married a man named Floyd Everett Wilson.  She had grown up in southern Illinois her entire life in the small town of Brownsville.  She grew up poor.  In her pail at lunch she had turnip sandwiches.  She would smell the peanut butter sandwiches of the little rich girls across the lunch yard and yearn for it.  Decades later sitting at her kitchen table in her house miles away from Brownsville, I would ask her why she put peanut butter on everything.  She told me the story of growing up poor, those turnip sandwiches, and the little rich girls.  I wondered how poor someone had to be in order to not have peanut butter.  When my own father was on strike from the factory, he would stand in line for the free food in big white containers.  Peanut butter was always among the cheese, dry milk, and other things I thought looked inedible.  I think I disliked peanut butter for the same reason she loved it.  I yearned for the ham and cheese sandwiches, honey and strawberries, and packaged cookies the other little girls in the cafeteria had.  I ate hot lunch because it was free.  When the factory workers were allowed to go back to work, I still ate hot lunch at school, but somehow it tasted different when I knew my family was paying for it.  Floyd Wilson was born in Beardstown.  Both his parents died in the flu epidemic, and he was separated from his sister and sent to live in the Baptist children's orphanage in southern Illinois.  He learned how to farm; he learned how to cuss, and he learned how to smoke.  When he turned 18 in 1927, he had to leave the orphanage and go to work for a local farmer who boarded him. Cora Taylor was 5 years old then; she was just beginning to dream of peanut butter sandwiches.  Cora would get an eighth grade education before she went to work as a nanny and housekeeper for the farmers next door to the farm where Floyd worked.   Slightly crippled by childhood polio, she was very shy and self conscious of the results of the disease which had mainly settled in her leg.  But she met Floyd, and he loved her, and  she loved him very much.  She did not like that he smoked, but when I look at pictures of the two of them, she is gazing at him.  They married in February of 1942.  She was not quite twenty; he was not quite thirty-three.  Six months after their wedding, still adjusting to marriage, the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and the world was at war.  And soon after, Floyd was drafted into the United States Army.  He would be gone for three years.  Her brothers would go to, and she was left behind to care for her aging parents and to find work at a local factory making the underwear the soldier's  would wear.  She had an apartment with her sister in town.  Cora and Floyd exchanged letters for three years - beautiful letters of love and war and longing, and how it would be when he returned.  In November of 1945, the war had ended and Floyd came home to the woman he loved.  Almost exactly nine months to the day after his return, my mother was born, and they moved here to 1425 County Road 1950 North to the tenant house on the landowner's 80 acres Floyd would work with Cora's brother, Chettie.  Five and half years is all they would have together.  In July of 1951 Floyd did not get up for breakfast one day, and that was the end of their marriage.  My mother doesn't remember much -- Grandma sobbing uncontrollably; the local ladies coming in and out of the house cleaning, cooking, and taking care of her baby brother.  There was no local funeral home, so the funeral director prepared Floyd's body in his home, and the service was held in the church.  He was buried in the cemetery just down the road from her house.  I drive by it everyday on my way anywhere.  I never knew him.  Uncle Dwight told me he was 6'3" and strong.  He looks it in the pictures.  I think I have his hands.  My mother looks so small in his arms.  I have the last picture that was ever taken of him, and he looks so happy sitting with my Grandmother and her children on the front porch - facing west.  I love to sit on the porch and face west.  I like to see where I'm going.  Today I sanded and painted the cabinets where she stored her dishes.  I imagine her working in her kitchen and preparing my mom and Uncle Dwight's breakfast after losing her husband - cleaning the house and tending to the farm and animals.  I wonder if she ever took much time to cry.  She had so much work to do - did she really have time for tears?  She was twenty-nine years old.  When I was twenty-nine, I had already been married and divorced twice - I took lots of time for tears.  Life sometimes doesn't turn out quite the way we plan.  Forever can suddenly become really short.  But, even in the darkest days of winter, a daffodil can bloom.  The Christmas following Floyd's death, Cora would receive a card from an Army friend of Floyd's.  She wrote to tell him of Floyd's death.  He wrote back and told her of his own wife's death from breast cancer.  She had left him with two children - a daughter and a younger son.  Their courting was long - five years in all - many letters and a couple of road trips.  He was in Oklahoma.  He came here - then she went there.  Then when my mother was ten, they married - Cora and Carl, two ten year old girls, and two seven year old boys.  Two more girls would come to complete their family.  Carl was the man I would come to call Grandpa, and the only man I would ever hear my mother call "Dad."  He worked the land side by side with Chettie securing the tenant home as shelter for twenty-six years.  Then in March of 1981, days after her 59th and my 9th birthday, he would die in the night in the same room where Floyd passed.  He was 72 years old.  It would be my first funeral.  I would wake to the sound of my mother sobbing uncontrollably in the kitchen.  My father was frantically throwing clothes into suitcases.  We would stop halfway in the trip so my mom could call into work from a pay phone - no cell phones in those days, and we had left the house way too early for her boss to be taking calls at the office.  When we got to the house, I remember how my Mom grabbed onto my Grandmother and how they sobbed and sobbed.  It would be the first time I ever saw Grandma cry.  The preacher came soon after we arrived, and we held hands in a circle and prayed for the peace of Grandpa's soul.  The ladies and the food came next.  People in the south know how to cook.  There were so many pies, the uncles plugged in an old RC machine in the garage, and we stashed desserts out there too.  I ate an entire cherry pie myself over a period of two days - except one piece which I think my Uncle Robert ate.  I threw up the night of his funeral - all cherries -- and a man I didn't know in a military uniform helped take care of me.  They laid me on the floor in front of the big furnace where I had seen Grandpa lay many times to play solitaire at night while we watched Dukes of Hazzard or Channel 14 news.  We buried him in the ground next to Floyd, his old Army buddy, and almost thirty years later we placed her gently between them.  Tomorrow I will work on cabinets again after I go to the church where she always went.  Tonight I will probably fall asleep again thinking about cement countertops and L-shaped kitchen layouts.  I hope one day soon, to have a few moments alone in the finished kitchen to make a peanut butter sandwich, sit at the table, and cry.  But not today.  Today, I scrub, sand, paint, frame, sweep, build, repair, and mow.  Because with so much work to do, who has time for tears?