Or, How Little "Bud" Kelland
Grew Up to Create Some of the Strongest Women in Literature
(Portland, Michigan - 1880-1990)
MY MOTHER
I do not know the year in which my father was
brought to America, in a sailing vessel requiring six weeks for the voyage, but
it was before the Civil War. The family settled in Michigan, which was then
important in the textile industry, and for some years my father followed that
trade — I believe until he met and married my mother, who, being a determined
and ambitious woman, transplanted him to Portland, in Michigan, where she was
the proprietor of a millinery shop, and made him a clerk in a general store.
Mother was one of the village's most up-and-coming
businesswomen. It was her pride. To be a businesswoman was to her the most
desirable thing in the world next to being a Christian, and particularly a
Christian of the Congregational variety. I am not altogether sure that on week
days business did not win over religion by a nose. She owned one of the two
millinery shops, and had a workroom where she took girls as apprentices and
taught them to trim hats. It was one of the local sights to see mother go to the
store in the morning. She scudded. I can see her slenderness now, and her black
hair and her eager black eyes as she went down the street, bent a little
forward, as if she were trying to get ahead of herself in her eagerness to
reach her place of business. The rear of her store, next door to the Weber
Bank, overhung Grand River and was adjacent to the upper bridge.
My mother, as I remember her then, was a handsome
young woman with jet-black hair and quick black eyes. She was the only person
in Portland who was ever in a hurry. She never walked, she ran. I do not think
I ever knew a more ambitious person or one so bent upon improving the state of
her family morally and financially. She worked fiercely and was successful in
her business of making and selling bonnets to the women of the vicinity. It was
she who compelled the buying of a home; it was she who was constantly planning
and prodding and rushing about in a fever of impatience to make things happen.
Because she was in her store six days a week and until
midnight on Saturdays, this did not mean that she had no time to give to me,
her only son. She also was a great reader, but while father and I read for the
sheer joy of it, mother's intention was to improve the mind. She was the only
one of us who read poetry, her preferences, quite naturally, were the
epigrammatic bards rather than those who sought merely to express beauty. Her
favorite poem was Pope's Essay on Man, which she quoted very frequently. She
knew a great many quotations, most of which were in the nature of maxims, and
she had a great detestation for Mr. H. Rider Haggard, whom father and I adored.
Mr. Haggard savored of the dime novel, and she promptly burned certain of his
books that came into the house.
Father's religion was all in mother's name.
Mother's religion was narrow, with sharp corners and no concessions. Father's
consisted in trying to sing the hymns louder than the man in the next pew and
of saying, " Yes, mamma. Yes, mamma," whenever moral issues arose.
Mother was vindictive against sin; father was willing to let sin alone as long
as it let him alone. Grandma had a sort of secret hankering after the more
enjoyable sins. With mother, everything that was not definitely a virtue was a
vice, and she even looked dubiously at some of the virtues. With her,
everything was black or white, and no funny business about it. She very
definitely believed that God used a great deal of His time thinking about her
and that He did her favors in appreciation of her rectitude. I doubt if father
ever had any particular ideas about the identity of God except that He existed
vaguely and was in favor of good and was against evil.
Father had roved the country until he landed some
job in Lansing and married mother. She was then a clerk in a Lansing millinery
shop, and ambitious beyond belief. For some reason never disclosed to me, they
moved to Portland, where mother opened her millinery shop and father left the
ranks of labor to become a clerk. But Mother was not content that he should
remain a clerk, a position which satisfied him very well indeed. She transmuted
him into a shoe merchant, exposing his stock in half of her millinery store.
The venture was distinctly a failure. Next she made a fancy-goods merchant of
him and he did pretty well because, I think, fancy goods were akin to millinery
and mother could keep her active eye on the business. Father was not ambitious
as the word generally is understood. He was not a man to strike out for
himself, but rather one who could work faithfully and enthusiastically for an
employer. He would have been happy all his life to have worked for a decent
wage, in moderate comfort and without reaching out for wider fields of greater
fortune. He was a good man, a kind man, an honest and industrious man, and one
of the sweetest and gentlest human beings I ever have known.
I could not have been more than six or seven when
my mother tried a species of moral experiment upon me. The outcome filled me
with a rather ghastly humiliation for days afterward, but it added to my store of
knowledge about pretending. Another boy, by the name of Verity, came over to
spend the evening. Just before bedtime mother came in with a plate on which
were two pieces of maple sugar. One was a gigantic piece, the other quite an
ordinary-sized morsel. Mother left the plate and went out, leaving me with the
problem. Young Verity and I stared at the pieces and maneuvered, each trying to
force the other into making the first selection. But the size of that enormous
chunk of maple sugar was too much for me. I knew that Verity was my guest, I
had been lectured about generosity, I was fully aware of the right and wrong of
the situation, but I failed to measure up to it. I took the big piece.
Mother was ashamed of me. She told me so. I was
ashamed of myself. It was a major catastrophe, and I was very uneasy about its
possible consequences on my eventual salvation. I thought about it for days.
Grandmother told me privately she didn't blame me a mite, which was a comfort.
It would have been more of a comfort, however, if I had not known that morally
grandmother was much less competent than mother, and occupied a much lower
ethical plane.
Mother had rather a trying time with our morals —
not that any of us were in the least evil, but she was determined we should not
be. My father didn't bother much about wickedness if it did not bother him. But
mother was always on its trail in battle array.
My mother, who was a strict Presbyterian,
disapproved of my Grandmother Budington heartily, but nevertheless depended
upon her to run our household, because mother was a business woman who ran very
successfully the town's millinery store.
Grandmother Budington was a pagan. Grandma had a
very simple belief in God, and, I think, an idea that He was a very nice
person, much maligned as to His austerity and severity. if the world were made up
exclusively of such pagans as she, there would be an eternity of peace and
comfort and kindly friendship.
Pagan and Presbyterian had one thing in common,
which was Pagan and Presbyterian had one thing in common, which was the love of
beer, and they would send me down to the park casino with a large tin pail
which I would have filled at the bar and bring back to them in their hiding
place.
MY GRANDMOTHER
My Grandmother Budington brought me up because mother was so occupied with her business that she
had little time for domestic affairs. So it was I learned more from her than
from all the schools I ever attended. Her life's span extended from the days when
the Indians were still important to the venturesome settlers to the 1890's when
Portland, Mich., had become a settled and prosperous community.
She lived upstairs in two rooms, one of which was
bedroom, the other a sort of parlor and museum. On the walls hung an oleograph
of Beatrice Cenci, and two others of little girls, one of whom was Wide Awake
and the other Fast Asleep. Also the chief art treasure was a hand-painted
picture of the Jackson, Michigan, Fire Company fighting a blaze. All of the brave
firemen wore helmets with tall red fronts, except one man in long white
whiskers, and he wore a helmet with a tall white panel in front. This was
Grandpa Budington. In a corner was a whatnot and on this was a bottle of water
from the River Jordan and a bit of polished wood from the Mount of Olives, and
numerous daguerreotypes of former husbands and surviving children; in hard
black cases with brass hooks to keep them shut. And there was a conch shell
that you could put to your ear and hear the ocean roaring. These rooms were
Grandma Budington's refuge, and no one dared to enter them without her express
permission.
Grandma Budington was, in my
opinion, the most beautiful old lady who ever lived. In her twinkling white
hair there was not one strand that was not purest silver.
Grandmother had come to
Michigan from Albany, N.Y. in a covered wagon when she was a little girl. She
had been a true pioneer. She was distinctly the pioneer type,
strong, fearless, with a ready sense of humor and a homely philosophy. Grandma had tremendous self-respect and pride
in her appearance and her antecedents.
I was the apple of her
eye and it would safe to say that she devoted herself entirely to me and my
concerns as I was growing up.
My grandmother Budington was tolerant; to say the
least. Grandmother had been married a number of times and knew a great deal
about life and liked it. Some people were good, some people were bad, and that
was that. You took them as they came and made the best of them.
She worshiped her last husband, who seems to have
been a gentle old fellow with a noble white beard who preferred hunting and
fishing to hard labor. He was the fourth that I know of.
But reverence for his memory did not prevent her
from considering seriously the acquiring of a fifth in the person of a Mr.
Hitchcock who owned the local planing mill. He also had whiskers and was
gentle. But my mother and my aunts put a stop to any such indecency as that.
Grandma was unable to perceive either indecency or inexpediency in acquiring a
planing mill and a husband, but she shrugged her ample shoulders and let it
pass. She was then about fifty, a beautiful woman, happy and in perfect health,
but the times decreed that a woman of that age was old and must be content to
retire from life, wear caps, knit and think about the past.
Grandma
had a tremendous love of life and interest in living. She worshiped me.
She,
too, was a great reader, though she read very painfully, moving her lips and
spelling out each word as she went along. She owned one book which she read and
reread all the years I knew her. As soon as she finished it, she would start it
again. It was a paper-backed novel entitled Her
Dark Marriage Morn. She wrote only with great difficulty, chewing her
tongue as she formed the letters.
Her
great preoccupation was knitting. For hours she would sit, her fingers fairly
bristling with steel needles which continued to click even after she closed her
eyes in an afternoon nap. I was twelve years old before I wore a stocking that
did not come from her hands.
Twenty-four hours a day she had a pot of tea
steeping on the woodstove, and to the great scandal of my mother, she smoked
cigars for a time because some dubious medical man had told her tobacco was
good for "stomach trouble."
In Portland we did not make calls, except on rare
occasions; we went visiting. Grandma was a confirmed visitor and receiver of
visits. She would put on her black basque with the strips of jet trimming,
equip herself with needles and yarn, and fare forth with me in tow to spend the
day with some old lady, preferably a widow who was a good cook. The start was
made in midmorning, and the visit lasted until it was time to go home and get
supper. The old ladies knitted and rocked.
Invariably, if it was vacation time, she took me
visiting with her, and the first of many calamities which have littered my life
occurred when we went to visit a friend of hers who was not in such affluent
circumstances as ourselves. One mark of this affluence was the inevitable
appearance of pie on the table for dinner and supper.
On this dreadful day I finished my meal, wiped my
mouth, pushed back my chair and said, "I'm ready for my pie."
There was no pie, and I remember my bitter
humiliation. It seemed to me I had done a cruel thing for which there could be
no forgiveness. I had, in effect, twitted our hostess with her poverty, because
there could be but one reason for not having pie on the table, and that was
that one could not afford it. This was my introduction to acute embarrassment.
I have since encountered it all too many times.
When grandma was not knitting she was piecing
quilts in one of the time-honored patterns, and then up would go the quilting
frames in the dining room, and in would come certain old-lady neighbors to
quilt and drink tea and gossip while I pretended the space under the quilt was
a cave or a tent or the den of some ferocious beast.
She also sewed rags for rag carpets, and I have
wound these into balls — so many yards of brightly colored fabrics that it
seems to me they would reach around the world.
But her main business was having the best time she
could contrive in our simple surroundings, and I find some happiness in
believing that she succeeded.
One Christmas when I was about six or seven, I was
given a book called Stories of the Bible. It was, in fact, a complete Bible,
chapter by chapter, put into language that a child might understand. It became
one of my favorite books, not because of its religious significance, but
because it was such good reading, with so many excellent stories and heroes in
it. I read it over and over until my knowledge of the Scriptures was, and
continues to be, considerable. I used to read this aloud to grandmother, who
liked it as much as I did.
There
was a boy who lived a block or so away, a much smaller boy than I, but a very
belligerent young person. His main avocation was being, as we expressed it,
"after" me. When you were after another boy you made for him every
time you saw him and chased him home. I went about in fear of young Cappy
Allen, a state of affairs of which he was well aware, and every time I would
poke my nose out of my yard he would chase me back into it. One day I was
fleeing for the front gate when I saw grandmother standing there blocking the
way.
Grandmother Budington in pungent sentences, the
gist of which was that I would never amount to anything if I went around
letting myself be "put on." "You turn right around and lick that
boy," she said, "or I'm goin' to take the hide off'n you."
Between facing grandma in such a mood and being
demolished by Cappy, there was only one choice. I turned in a panic and rushed
at my pursuer. To my astonishment, I found myself presently sitting astride his
chest in victory, but not knowing exactly what to do about it. I looked up at
grandmother, who said nonchalantly, "Let him up." And then to Cappy,
"He could 'a' licked you any time he wanted to."
That was a notable lesson. I perceived vaguely, as
Cappy went off in tears, that he had been mostly sound and fury. He had been
pretending to be a ferocious little boy, but was neither ferocious nor
efficient. He was an exploded myth. It occurred to me that I could pretend the
same way and save myself a great deal of trouble and build an enviable
reputation as a dangerous citizen. The point seemed to be that the boy who
pretended first was the one who chased the other home.
It remains distinct in my mind that I was still
afraid of other boys and very much afraid to fight, but that I assumed a pretty
cocky air, went around bragging how I had licked Cappy, and that my father was
teaching me how to fight, and that my uncle had been a Mississippi River
steamboat man who could thrash any given number of men with one hand. It was my
first practical experiment with pretending, and the results were most
satisfactory.
