BRCMD -11- Momma's New Name

Momma's New Name

In early spring of that following year, or maybe it was the year before, we went to visit my mother's Aunt Lizzie down near Mountain Home, Arkansas. We'd been to see her before and I vaguely remembered the place.

Tucked off the main road on a crooked little dirt lane between oaks and pines and rocky outcroppings, Aunt Lizzie's storybook house was built of timber and native stone and looked as if it, too, had grown out of the mountainside.

Aunt Lizzie was a widow and all of her children except A.J. --her youngest son-- had left home. At about thirty years old, A.J. looked amazingly like his Uncle Francis, my grandfather (Aunt Lizzie’s baby brother), except that he still had hair. He was named after his other uncle, Gerome, and if you have to ask, you are not an Arkansawyer.

The cafe in town was run by Aunt Lizzie's daughters. We had stopped and eaten breakfast before going up the mountain. I liked the cafe because the food was good and Mom's cousins had kids. All of these second cousins (or in Arkansas reckoning, fourth cousins) were older than me but willing to play.

Now an odd thing happened here, too. I discovered that my mother had a name besides the one I had always called her, which was Momma. That's because her cousin had the same name, they were both of them named Rilda which is a German name and not that uncommon in that part of Arkansas at the time.

Lots of people thought Momma, or her cousin or her sister-in-law were named Hilda, or Velma, or Wilma or even Wilda (??!!?), but they weren't; it was Rilda, pronounced Rildy in Arkansas. Momma compounded the Germanity of it all by having a German middle name, too: Louva, which is a German version of Louise. Our German ancestors were from what is now the Czech Republic, by way of France, the Netherlands and England; they were a stiffneck lot to hold onto such names, I guess, after five generations since leaving Moravia.

There was even another Rilda in the family, sort of -- Momma's first husband, O.P. Moser, had a sister named Rilda. O.P.'s first name, by the way, was just the initials, O.P., he did have a middle name, Columbus, which had saved him from serving in the army in WWII with just initials, like the famous RB Jones who didn't even have periods after his initials and so was known as Ronly Bonly Jones. A kind-hearted sergeant tried to tag O.P. with “Oscar Paul” (a compromise based on the military alphabet which would have been Oscar Peter) but it didn’t stick.

Aunt Myrtle's husband Warren Brown had a brother who had had only one initial, just a G, until he was drafted during the war. The enlistment sergeant had decided that the G stood for Green and and so he became Green Brown which was sort of appropriate considering the olive drab Army uniforms. He was Green Brown ever after because it was on his discharge papers, too.

O.P. had been in the Army, but had died of a cerebral hemorrhage brought on by an asthma attack while on medical leave, which is why Momma wasn't married when Daddy met her at the carnival in 1947. She had been working in the cafe with her other cousin Rilda, but had gone to the carnival with Gladys and Velma for a day off.

So everyone in town knew her and called her Rildy which was how I found out she had a name besides Momma. Of course, Ma and Pa and her sisters had been calling her Rildy all along, I just hadn't noticed. Daddy and I called her Momma and I wondered vaguely at the time if Daddy was as surprised as I was to find out she had another name.

Like most of the buildings in and around the town, the cafe was made of stone and timber and had a sharply pointed roof. Inside it was warm and smelled of pie because pies were always being baked there, it seemed. Apple and berry were the favorites around there but they also had peach, apricot, mince, pecan, rhubarb and shoofly.

Shoofly pie is like pecan pie with a little cornmeal or oatmeal on top instead of the pecans. It is practically pure syrup with a thin crust and in that part of Arkansas was generally made with the local mild-tasting molasses, made from sorghum or millet instead of sugar cane. You can’t buy the stuff outside of the states of the lower Mississippi, and the California branches of Arkansas families are always asking anyone who visits back east “to fetch back some sorghum.”

Everyone in town knew what a baker Momma was from when she worked in the cafe when she was married to O.P. and they all asked if she were back to make the pies again. This happened every time we visited and if we stayed more than a day, she usually got up early one morning and made pies for the cafe. She was proud of her pies and had a right to be.

We didn't stay long enough in town for her to do any baking this time and I'm not even sure that I got to play the jukebox. They had a big one in the cafe, and if I asked politely, one of the waitresses would take a nickel decorated with red fingernail polish out of the cash register that I could use to play a song if someone would hold me up high enough to push the buttons. The polish on the nickel was so the jukebox man who came once a week knew that the cafe had played that song and not to count it as one a customer had paid for.

We didn't spend long at the cafe, though, just long enough for a breakfast of ham and biscuits and gravy and then we headed up the mountain. I didn't want to leave the cousins because I knew there was no one on the mountain to play with. Aunt Lizzie's nearest neighbor was almost a mile away and didn't have any kids at home, either.

The mountain was steep and stone walls lined the properties along the road, just to keep the houses from sliding down into the valley below. It was beautiful, but lonesome.

After hugs and kisses, with the grown-ups talking in the parlor, I got sent out into the backyard to play by myself. Aunt Lizzie said I might find a new litter of kittens there and this intrigued me.

We had a cat at home, an orange tabby called Mama Puss and she had recently had kittens, too. I knew I wasn't supposed to touch kittens until they had their eyes open so I asked. Aunt Lizzie assured me that her kittens were several weeks old and getting into mischief all by themselves.

So out I went. It was a huge backyard, wide and deep, an acre or two, with groves of apple and black walnut at the back, a flagstone court near the house, homemade swings, a teeter totter, and a fence made of the same timber and stone as the house. A few outbuildings, privy, pump house, root cellar and smokehouse dotted the property, too. I'd been warned to stay away from the cellar and smokehouse because of spiders.

I found the kittens near the pipe frame of the swings. Mother cat had dragged some burlap and muslin and a raggedy old ticked pillow into the hole under one of the swings to make a sort of nest. She lay there, purring loudly and looking around like the most satisfied animal that had ever lived while the kittens and I romped around her.

I never got a good count of the half-grown kittens, they moved around too much, but there were more than six of them. I could count but sometimes got mixed up when I got above seven. Most of the little furballs were either ginger or gray tabbies but there was at least one calico and one tuxedo. I loved them and wished that the kittens at home were old enough to play with, too.

I have to explain about Santa Claus now, before we get to the sad part of the story.