What They Left Behind

On my father's side, there was my grandfather.

My father's father.

He was a policeman in another city—or another state, depending on how the geography of those old family stories was explained to me. What I remember more clearly is his reputation.

He was a rough man.

And, according to the stories that came down through the family, he was also known for taking bribes.

His family had come from Spain. Whether he himself was the immigrant or belonged to the first generation born after the move is one of those details I can't state with confidence anymore.

What I do know is that he stood out.

He was something like six-foot-three or six-foot-four, thickly built, light-skinned, with blue or green eyes—I have heard both—and blond or very light hair.

In the country where I grew up, especially in those years, a man who looked like that was difficult not to notice.

Apparently, women noticed too.

He had children with more than one woman.

The part that makes the family tree particularly interesting is that two of those women were sisters.

My grandmother and my grandmother's sister.

Both had children by him.

There may have been other relationships. There may have been other children. I honestly don't know enough to untangle the entire thing, and I don't want to pretend that I do.

Family history is sometimes less like a tree and more like somebody dropped a plate of spaghetti on the floor and then asked the grandchildren to reconstruct it eighty years later.

This is one of those cases.

There were darker stories around my grandfather too.

I hesitate to use a neat word like abusive because I don't have every fact in front of me, and most of what I know arrived through other people's memories. But I also don't want to soften him into something he wasn't.

He could be a dark man.

That much survived the telling.

On my mother's side, things weren't exactly simpler.

My maternal grandmother had been married before she married the man I knew as my grandfather—or, more accurately, the man who was my grandfather, because I never really knew him.

He died either before I was born or when I was so young that I have no memory of him.

Her first husband was a different story.

According to the version I heard many times growing up, he drank heavily.

He worked hard too, apparently. Construction, I think, or something similar.

But whatever good qualities he may have had were buried underneath the one thing everybody remembered:

He beat my grandmother.

Badly.

And eventually she decided she had had enough.

By the time she made her move, she had already contacted relatives and old friends. They told her they would help. They would get her out. Take her somewhere else. Another city. Somewhere he couldn't easily reach her.

All she had to do was leave.

But my grandmother did not simply leave.

One night he came home drunk.

Or he had been drinking at home.

I don't know.

Eventually he passed out.

My grandmother waited until he was asleep, picked up something heavy—I remember hearing that it may have been some kind of metal bar, although I wouldn't swear to it—and beat him with it.

Then she ran.

And as far as I know, she never went back.

They never formally divorced.

Years later, when the man died, something strange happened.

Despite everything that had happened between them, he apparently still considered my grandmother his wife. Maybe even, in whatever damaged way he understood the word, the love of his life.

He left things to her.

Land.

Property.

Money.

And my grandmother refused all of it.

Every bit of it.

She wanted nothing from him.

Nothing from his estate.

Nothing that could be traced back to the man she had escaped.

There is something in that decision that I understand.

There is also something in it that I don't.

Because pride becomes much more complicated when children are hungry.

After leaving him, my grandmother survived the way poor women had survived for generations.

She worked.

Hard.

I don't remember the exact years. The thirties, maybe. The forties. Somewhere around there.

She washed other people's clothes for money.

Not with a washing machine.

She carried loads of laundry to the river and washed them by hand.

That was work.

That was survival.

And years later, her children never let her forget what she had turned down.

My mother, my aunts, my uncles—they would bring it up.

If you hadn't been so proud.

If you hadn't been so stubborn.

If you hadn't refused everything.

Maybe we could have had a better childhood.

Maybe we wouldn't have struggled so much.

Maybe our lives would have been different.

It is easy to admire somebody for refusing the money of the man who abused her.

It is also easy to understand the children who spent years paying for that decision.

Both things can be true.

Eventually my grandmother was with the man who became my grandfather.

I never knew him, but I was told he worked as a sculptor of some kind. He made religious figures—angels, statues, things for churches.

There is probably more to his story.

I just don't have it yet.

What I do have is the woman who remained after all of that.

And she was hard.

Whether the poverty made her that way, whether the violence she survived made her that way, whether she had always carried some of it inside her, or whether it was all of those things mixed together, I can't know.

I only know what came afterward.

Some of the violence she escaped did not disappear.

It changed hands.

It changed houses.

It changed generations.

And when her children eventually confronted her about the life they had been given, I have to admit that part of me understands them.

Maybe accepting the land would have changed something.

Maybe accepting the money would have given them an easier childhood.

Maybe not.

There is no version of history available where we get to run the experiment again.

All I have are the choices people made and what those choices left behind.

On one side of my family, a tall policeman with a reputation for bribes, women, power, and darkness.

On the other, a woman who beat her sleeping husband before escaping him, refused everything he later tried to leave her, and washed clothes in a river to survive.

None of these people knew me yet.

Some would never know me at all.

But their decisions were already moving forward.

Their anger.

Their pride.

Their violence.

Their survival.

Their stubbornness.

Their mistakes.

Their strength.

Whatever they carried, they passed some of it on.

And sooner or later, it was going to reach me.