I come by my knack for writing from my mother too. I only learned this in 2001 after she died. In one of her old albums I found a clipping from the Great Falls, Montana newspaper that announced that Mary Virginia Leslie, a sophomore at Stockett High School, had won first prize in the Montana State high school essay contest sponsored by the Montana Electric Power Company. The clipping makes no mention of the essay’s topic, and my mother never talked about it.
For as long as my mother lived there, she was part of the Laguna Pueblo community and had a great many friends. One year she was invited to participate in the Corn Dance at Christmas time; her friend Louise Lucas loaned her the manta dress and moccasins and belt, and helped her get dressed. My mother didn’t talk about her Cherokee background but it was clearly part of her. Even after my parents were divorced my mother stayed on at Laguna because she felt so much a part of the community. At the post office she always helped people read and fill out Government forms and send letters to Government agencies. At income tax time she assisted people with the forms, and in gratitude they brought her all kinds of good food — mostly oven bread but sometimes big tamales or blue corn enchiladas.
CHAPTER 11
On April 2, 1966 I married Dick Chapman, who was in his first year of graduate school in archeology at the University of New Mexico. My mother and both my grandmothers encouraged me to go to school full time the fall semester of 1966 when I was pregnant with my elder son, Robert. She told me new babies slept a lot and I would have plenty of time to study. She was right.
The pregnancy took an unforeseen turn. Early one morning I began to hemorrhage and both Robert and I nearly died. Robert was born six weeks early and weighed only four pounds nine ounces. He developed breathing difficulties soon after he was born, and there were seventy-two hours when we did not know if he would survive. But ten days later he weighed five pounds and was able to come home. All he wanted to do was sleep.
My mother babysat for me when she wasn’t at work, and she enlisted her friend, our neighbor on Amherst Street, to help too. My sister Wendy babysat Robert when she wasn’t in class, and so did Dick Chapman. At night I held Robert in one arm and a textbook in the other, so I got nearly straight As that semester even with a husband in graduate school and a new baby. I was eighteen.
My mother’s true calling was to teach, and for years she taught in the Gallup, New Mexico public schools. She first attempted retirement in 1983 when she left Gallup. She moved to Tucson to live with my sons and me but my mother missed the teaching and the contact with the students too much.
When she was teaching she did not drink; retirement was a dangerous situation for her. My house in the Tucson Mountains was isolated, and my mother needed to be near more people. So in 1984 my mother moved to Ketchikan, Alaska; the local community college quickly called her out of retirement to teach at the resource and learning center where she gave special tutoring in algebra and geometry to older students who wanted to attend college. Going back to teaching had the best possible effect on her life until she retired in 1995. She died in Ketchikan on July 11, 2001.
Dick Chapman, Robert’s father, had been an English major at UNM as an undergraduate and he tipped me off about Katherine Simons, Edith Buchanan, Mary Jane Powers, George Arms, Hamlin Hill and Ernest Baughman — the best teachers in the English Department. It was Dick Chapman who suggested I take a creative writing course the semester after Robert was born because he thought it would be “an easy A” for me. I was thinking about law school then, so I might not have reconnected with fiction writing without his suggestion. On my own I found the fine poet and teacher Gene Frumkin, who encouraged me to keep writing my way, and had great book lists for his poetry classes.
Eleanor and Carl Chapman, Dick’s parents, were staunch allies of mine; in a way they were my parents too. I was eighteen and my parents had just gotten divorced and there was no money for school. Eleanor and Carl helped out financially and encouraged me to stay in college after Robert was born. They helped us pay off the hospital bills because we hadn’t counted on the expenses of a premature birth. Eleanor gave me all the baby clothes she saved when she had Dick and his brother, Steve. Beautiful embroidered gowns and hand-knit booties and sweaters and appliquéd blankets and quilts which Eleanor made. She was a wonderful artist who could draw or paint or make stuffed animals like the Cheshire Cat and Eeyore and Piglet which she sewed for Robert.
Eleanor made all the drawings and diagrams used in Carl Chapman’s scholarly publications on the archeology and pre-history of the Missouri River Valley, including the Spiro mounds where Eleanor worked on the fragments of copper plates with the wonderful bird men figures. As she did the drawings and helped to reconstruct the missing parts of the plates, she theorized that the figures had been embossed on the copper with deer horn. Eleanor got herself a plate of thin copper and a deer horn and made replicas of the Spiro copper plates to show that this was how the images on the plates had originally been embossed.
Years after Dick and I were divorced, Eleanor and Carl and I remained close. Every Christmas Eleanor sent wonderful boxes of little thoughtful gifts, mostly handmade, not just for Robert and me, but for my younger son, Cazimir, and for his father, my second husband. Eleanor and Carl died in a car crash in 1987. I miss them very much.
CHAPTER 12
Grandma Lillie used to take me and my sisters for walks by the river to the ruins of the old water pump house by the artesian springs where Laguna got its water and where the railroad got water for the locomotive engines. I remember a small pool wreathed with watercress where the water bubbled up through the sand. When I knelt down and drank, it was delicious and so cool.
She used to tell us stories about things that happened in the places we hiked and about the times she took our dad and uncle hiking in the hills when they were our age. She used to tell us the adventures she had when she was a girl in Los Lunas.
Grandma Lillie liked to say she was a tomboy when she was growing up. One time she and her sister Marie found a nest of baby prairie dogs and they managed to get them into a gunny sack and home but their dad refused to let them keep them. As it was, one of the prairie dogs bit through the end of Marie’s finger.
She’d ridden horses with Marie, and had fallen from a horse and cut her scalp on a rail of the tracks in Los Lunas. She always preferred to wear pants and only wore skirts when she went to Mass which was only twice a year on Christmas Eve and Palm Sunday. She was excommunicated when she married Grandpa Hank because he wasn’t a Christian. She could fix motors, lamps and leaking pipes. She preferred mechanics to cooking. She knew how to work on the Model A Ford to keep it running. She was always busy. She liked nothing better than to clean and completely rearrange the tool shed, down to sorting the bolts, washers and nuts into coffee cans she saved for just such purposes.
Grandma Lillie always had a pile of old used lumber and posts, and scraps of tin roofing and wire; I have piles here at the ranch of just such items that someday I am sure to need for some important task.
Poor Grandma Lillie. She always feared I’d be killed in a horse accident. She’d grown up in the days when most people still used horses and wagons because only the wealthy had cars, so she knew bad accidents could happen with horses. She’d been thrown plenty of times herself when she was a girl.