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  Little Gerle was very sick, but Mama still believed it was a case of too much carnival. He was sweating and hot, but Mama had seen fevers that were higher. Later on, his neck puffed up, he had labored breathing and a sore throat that got so bad that he could not swallow. That bothered Mama. She tried the usual home remedies for sore throat and congestion such as sipping hot tea with lemon and honey and setting up a jury-rigged vaporizing tent over his bed, but nothing seemed to work and Little Gerle was getting worse by the hour. It was then that Mama sent for the doctor. When he got there late in the day, she told him that Little Gerle had no interest in school, or anything, and that he had gotten worse day by day.

  The doctor took one look into Little Gerle’s nose and throat and told Mama he feared the boy might have diphtheria. The thick fuzzy coating, a sort of blackish membrane that the doctor found in his nose and throat was a telltale sign of the disease.

  Diphtheria! No one, least of all a mother, wanted to hear the word. The hill people called it the “strangling angel of children.” For ages, there was no known treatment to reverse the rapid spread of diphtheria. The poisonous disease could race through an entire community as quickly as it could spread though a child’s body. An anti-toxin to fight the infection discovered twenty-five years earlier in France was saving lives, but in rural Arkansas, there was a general distrust of such cures. It would be many years before doctors would discover a vaccine to prevent the disease before infection.

  The doctor told Mama that he needed to inject the anti-toxin into Little Gerle. She said she wrestled with the idea but he convinced her that it was an emergency. He said the anti-toxin was the best, perhaps the only, chance to save the child.

  The doctor also told her they would need to quarantine Little Gerle because diphtheria is highly contagious. It spreads easily by coughing, sneezing, and even laughing. The doctor and Mama sealed off the room and took away all the used handkerchiefs, drinking glasses and dishes that Little Gerle had used.

  Mother had been caring for Little Gerle throughout the week and she could not understand why, all of sudden, the bedroom where the two of them had slept for years was off limits to her. She was too short to see into the room through an outside window so she stacked up several boxes and climbed up on them to look in. She could see her brother in his bed and hear him gagging, but she could not make out what Mama and the doctor were saying. She yelled for them to let her in, and when they did not she began sobbing and pecking on the window. Finally, the doctor came out and told her, “Little Gerle is real sick and you must not go near him until he is well.”

  Mama said Mother stayed outside the house near the window to the bedroom and would not leave even though it turned cool when the sun went down. Eventually her yelling turned into a whimper with her repeating, prayer-like, “Little Gerle, please … please … get well.” She kept saying it and nothing could move her from her post. Later that night, Mama picked Mother up from where she had curled up in a corner. She had pulled a horse blanket up around her neck to keep warm but she was still shivering and whining. Mama carried her inside and put her to bed in a room far away from Little Gerle’s room.

  The doctor put the anti-toxin into the boy, but it was too late. As the sun rose on October 11, 1919, the diphtheria had spread to Little Gerle’s heart, his kidneys, and his nervous system. The strangling angel of children brought a gruesome death to the little seven-year-old boy.

  When Mother woke up, she ran to Mama and asked about Little Gerle. Mama wiped the tears from Mother’s face and tried to explain that Little Gerle was not hurting anymore and that he was at peace, but Mother did not understand what she meant. Mama finally told her that Little Gerle was dead, that he was gone forever and would not come back. With that, Mother collapsed on the floor screaming and kicking at anyone who got near her, but after a bit she wore herself out. Mama managed to get her back to her bed and she cried herself to sleep.

  The death of a child is always painful, but back then it was a common occurrence. The graveyards were full of little tomb-stones. The news of Little Gerle’s death traveled quickly through the community, but people were scared of diphtheria and the safest thing to do was to stay away from the Lewallen house. This was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that a child had been lost to the strangling angel.

  The hurried funeral for Little Gerle was mostly a private, family affair. They needed to bury his body soon after his death to lessen the chance of contagion. A few brave friends did come to offer condolences and say goodbye, so Mama asked a preacher-friend to say some words. Mama and Papa were not religious people, but they were tolerant of those who were strong believers and knew that those who came to the funeral would expect some preaching and praying.

  Church and religion were not a part of the Vermilye way. When Mama’s father left New York as a child, he also left the Dutch Reformed Church that had been so important to his ancestors. Mark Vermilye was never able to reconcile the biblical obligation to surrender to a higher power with his perceived need to be ruggedly independent and self-sufficient, and that is what he taught his family. The family would have to work through the loss of Little Gerle without the consoling balm of Christianity.

  Mama said Little Gerle’s death changed Mother. She had started out as the child most likely to break out of the classic Vermilye hill country mindset. In her first years she was warm, loving and engaging but after Little Gerle died, Mama said, “Delta sank into a spell.”

  Mother returned to school and did her chores, but she was different. She did not have her heart in playtime as she had before her brother’s death. She began to build a shell around herself.

  At first, everyone thought Mother’s spell was just a case of her being lonely and heartsick. They, especially Mama, thought she would soon get over it, but the tragic manner of Little Gerle’s death was taking a greater toll than anyone realized. She slid into a state of despair and detachment. She would not let anyone get too close, a fear of intimacy that continued for years.

  She would have nothing to do with dolls or other playthings. She devoted herself to the business of being a grownup. She cooked meals for the whole family, adopting Mama’s fondness for grease and frying fatty meats. In her teen years, she got interested in fortunetellers, psychics, and clairvoyants. Her interest in the occult would carry on for years. In the late 1940s, Mother subscribed to and read every edition of Fate, a new magazine that reported odd stories suggesting the existence of paranormal forces.

  As a child, Mother had the Vermilye indifference to religion even though Mama sent her to parochial school at St. Paul’s Catholic Church in Pocahontas. She got a good education, which was what Mama wanted, but the nuns were never able to convert Mother or shake her faith in the Vermilye way of life.

  If Little Gerle had lived, I believe he and Mother would have been receptive to and greatly influenced by Christianity, but the little girl from the time before his death was gone, buried deep—just as Little Gerle was now deep beneath the ground. The Vermilye philosophy gave her a hiding place. She became a true believer, an outspoken apostle of the hardheaded, self-centered approach to life, the core of which consisted of a few non-negotiable maxims. When adversity strikes, turn inward and redouble your effort to overcome all obstacles by the sheer force of your willpower. That and that alone will protect you from hurt and, when necessary, from “them,” and “those who will take what you have.” When it came to sickness, hardship, and death, the Vermilye worldview provided a safe harbor. In their view of life, it did no good to mourn overlong the loss of anything, even loved ones.

  When she was seventeen, Mother finished high school and started college at nearby Jonesboro. For the first time since Little Gerle’s death, it was possible to see a glimmer of the original Delta lying just beneath the hard Vermilye shell. She became a cheerleader and found a safe way, through art, to express the love she had bottled up long before. She began to draw and paint, prolifically. There were landscapes of water mills, dams and
buildings, but her best paintings were of dogs, and kittens. She was an enigma. She revealed the love and tenderness that was still in her heart and soul through her paintings, but in her dealings with people, even those who were close to her, she was careful to maintain the Vermilye discipline. She had found a way to love even as she was fending off the cruelties of the world.

  I was in midlife when I first learned all this. It was a revelation to me. Common sense taught me that the death must have hurt Mama and Mother and I could always tell that they longed for Little Gerle, but when I was young neither Mama nor Mother talked much about him. They never told me how much they loved him or how it hurt them when he died. The most Mother ever said about it was, “Little Gerle died of diphtheria when I was nine years old.” After that, she would just clam up or change the subject.

  I feel bad now that I did not understand the dramatic impact that Little Gerle’s death had on Mother, but when I was young his death was nothing more than ancient history to me. It was only after Mama opened up that I began to understand my mother and appreciate how the tragedy affected her.

  Mother had a life-long need to stay busy and be productive. As she aged, the need became an obsession that led to an endless array of focused, time-consuming projects. She crocheted. She knitted. She sewed. She gardened. She cooked. She read and she kept records, records of everything. In 1984, when I was running for the United States Senate I happened to pick up her copy of the Little Rock telephone directory. I noticed that there were hundreds of names highlighted throughout the book and asked why that was. She stunned me when she said it was something she did each year when the new telephone books came out. Mother would spend days, every year, going through the entire book, page by page, highlighting the names of all the people she knew. In the 1984 directory, the one I happened onto, there were more than six-hundred names highlighted. It was a treasure-trove for my campaign, but it showed me how much Mother valued and needed friendships even as she struggled, throughout her life, with the Vermilye requirement to keep her distance from people.

  Talking about my mother’s early life is a delicate issue because it is not my intent to be critical of someone so dear to me. My thoughts are merely an attempt to explain how she, a loving little girl, adopted the Vermilye worldview after Little Gerle’s death, a way of thinking that stayed with her for decades. It dominated her and thus affected me.

  Mother’s life was further complicated when she was twenty years old by the onset of the Great Depression. The economic troubles that Americans face in today’s world are in stark contrast to the grim reality Americans confronted between 1929 and 1933. The Great Depression lasted forty-two months with an unemployment rate that reached twenty-five percent in 1932. In those days, the only safety net was the soup line. Mother’s personality and character were pretty well set by then, but if there had been any hope of pulling her back from the stoic Vermilye philosophy of life to what she was before Little Gerle’s death, the Great Depression washed it away. A square meal and a job, any job, were hard to come by. People were frightened and their fears were justified. There was every reason to stick with her hard-shell, self-sufficient persona.

  Mother did not have a split personality or schizophrenia, or anything that serious. Nor was hers a case of developing the kind of hard heart often mentioned in the Bible, because when she was little she did not learn much about Christianity, or any religion for that matter. That was not the Vermilye way. Mother was not fighting with God, as is the case with many who are nonbelievers. She was simply protecting herself from the pain she felt when she lost the little brother she loved so much.

  To get by during the hard times of the Great Depression, Mother worked full-time at the Lewallen Café. The whole family was living pretty much hand to mouth. They spent long hours working and managed to stay in business by offering inexpensive meals that would stick to the ribs. In the midst of the rough economic times, they opened a dance hall in the café building. People were hurting, so the dance hall was a big hit. They needed an escape from the pain of everyday life in a depressed rural Arkansas. Nevertheless, the church folks were unhappy with the dance hall and many think that was the beginning of a move, later successful, to vote the county “dry.”

  What was in store for this enigmatic young woman? The Lewallen Café and Dance Hall was the hot spot in Pocahontas and Mother was right in the middle of the excitement.

  2

  SOFT HEARTS: THE BETHUNE WAY

  Are we not like two volumes of one book?

  Father’s Day Quote: Marceline Desbordes-Valmore

  In the summer of 1932, a thirty-five-year-old, good-looking crippled man from Little Rock happened into the Lewallen Café. He had been in before, and Mother had noticed that he was always the center of attention. His infectious laugh and friendly countenance drew people to him. Mother was attracted to him for those reasons, but he also stirred something in her that she had not felt since the days when she showered Little Gerle with love, a fresh chance to comfort and love someone.

  Thus, providence led Edwin Ruthvin Bethune, the man who would become my father, to my mother.

  He, like Mother, had lived through a terrible experience when he was a small child.

  Daddy was born and raised in Ashley County, a fertile, swampy part of Southeast Arkansas. Steamboats came to this inland county in the old days just as they did in Pocahontas, but they did not come on a river. They came on the Bayou Bartholomew, a shallow body of still water infested with snakes, alligators, alligator gar, big snapping turtles, and other abominations common to the lowlands of Southeast Arkansas. The steamboat captains hauled goods and people in and out, but they had to negotiate a lot of snags, fallen trees, and other hazards endemic to the swamps. Many boats went aground before making it through. Once the steamboats tied up to the town dock the scene looked a little bit like the docks of Pocahontas, but the resemblance ended with the steamboats. Life in Ashley County was considerably different from life in the hill country west of Pocahontas.

  Growing cotton and cutting hardwood were the main ways to make a living, and for that reason a sizeable number of black people lived in Ashley County. Their ancestors had come to the country and the county as slaves.

  The Bethunes were more fortunate. They came freely to America and thence to Ashley County. Exactly why they came to America is lost to history, but thousands of Scots, like the Bethunes, fled the hardships of their homeland in the early to mid-19th century. A number of the emigrants of this period were facing eviction from the land because of the Highland Clearances that converted large agricultural estates to sheep farms. Others, displaced by the Industrial Revolution, simply hoped to find better opportunities for their skilled industrial or professional talents.

  The earliest records of my father’s family tell how Barbara Bethune of Scotland sailed from a secret departure point in 1820 to South Carolina with her two boys, John and Roderick. Her husband, the father of the boys, had died a few years before. The best record of the family’s early years in America was a handwritten letter from Uncle Roderick Bethune in 1894. He wrote that the family first settled in Camden County, S.C. and lived there for several years.

  These Bethunes came from Markinch (mark-ineh’) Parish, in County Fife near Edinburgh, but the lineage traces to the Isle of Skye.

  For over a hundred years before Barbara Bethune arrived, Scots by the thousands settled in South Carolina. It was, for that reason, a welcoming place for the family to get started on their American adventure. Soon after they arrived, young John Bethune married Frances Shaw, and they had two boys, Samuel McBride, and Roderick Alexander, and a daughter, Rebecca.

  By and by, the family was enticed to move to Bullock County, Alabama because of their friendship with the McKinnon family. The senior McKinnon was a physician. His influence inspired both Bethune boys to go to Tennessee Medical School. Upon graduation in 1859, shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War, Dr. Samuel McBride Bethune, my great-grandfather, moved to Ashley Cou
nty, Arkansas. He established a medical practice in Snyder, and it was there that he met and married Sarah Jane Herren.

  On March 15, 1862, he enlisted in the Confederate States Army. There is no record telling why he joined so it must have been a sense of duty. Whatever the reason, it turned out to be a lousy decision. He enlisted as a private in Company G of the Eighth Arkansas Infantry Battalion, also known as the Ashley Light Infantry. His unit immediately deployed to Mississippi to cover a bloody Confederate withdrawal from the railroad crossing at Corinth shortly after the monumental battle at Shiloh. They suffered significant losses at Corinth, and after that rearguard action, the unit marched to Port Hudson, Louisiana where they joined 6,000 Confederates who were trying to keep Admiral Farragut and the Union Navy from controlling the Mississippi River. The Union Army encircled the garrison at Port Hudson and commenced a siege that lasted forty-eight days, the longest in American military history. During the siege, the Confederates suffered heavy casualties and had to eat mules, horses and rats. When the Confederates at Vicksburg surrendered to General U.S. Grant on July 4, 1863, the commander at Port Hudson had no reason to continue the defense of the Mississippi. He negotiated surrender terms that included a parole for all enlisted Confederate troops. Private Samuel McBride Bethune headed home to Snyder, Arkansas to resume the practice of medicine. His star-crossed service in the CSA was over, but it would be almost two years before General Robert E. Lee would surrender at Appomattox.

  The Reconstruction of the South after the Civil War brought hardship and persecution, particularly for those who had served in the Confederate forces. The impact of Reconstruction was greater in Ashley County than in Randolph County, because there were few black people in Pocahontas and Randolph County. Another factor lessening the impact of Reconstruction in Pocahontas was its proximity to the Missouri border, thirty miles, and a history of townspeople interacting and intermarrying with people from the North before and after the Civil War.