Wilma

 

I have tried not to give Aunt Wilma much space in my memories, but she’s a hard one to forget. Though she lived and died a long time ago, she looms large in the stories passed down through my family, and I am too often reminded of what Flannery O’Connor wrote about the “Christ-haunted” South, about ignorance and cruelty wrapped in the thin veneer of religion.

I was just a child when Aunt Wilma would show up at our house with Mary Frank, as Mama was setting the supper table. I was old enough, though, to wonder what my uncle had ever seen in her. She couldn’t have been more than fifty then, but everything about her seemed ancient. Her black high-collared dresses covered her arms and legs. She pinned her hair up in an old woman’s bun. In the face that I can see yet, she has high cheekbones and dark, piercing eyes, but I couldn’t imagine the old-fashioned woman was ever what you would call pretty.

She was a foreboding figure. So was her adult daughter.

Aunt Wilma was a preacher. And something was terribly wrong with Mary Frank.

Their Pentecostal church didn’t go in for snake handling, not that I ever heard, but they practiced foot washing, fasting, and speaking in tongues if the Spirit got hold of you. I found it odd that the church didn’t allow girls and women to cut their hair or wear make-up or jewelry, but here was a woman allowed to preach. I don’t know what kind of credentials Aunt Wilma had except a burning zeal, but she had followers. Somehow, Daddy’s brother, Frank, had met her and was taken with her. Perhaps it was her religious fervor that attracted him.

Their marriage was scandalous enough in the eyes of Daddy’s big family, who were as rock-solid in their Baptist beliefs as the Pentecostals were in theirs, but the fault lines grew deeper when children came along and needed medical care.

Because Aunt Wilma and Uncle Frank believed doctors and medicine were sinful.

In the 1930s and 40s, even into the 50s, brush arbor revival meetings were widespread in rural areas of the South. Everything was high-intensity. Singing, guitars and tambourines, preaching, praying, shouting. It was part religion, part entertainment. Aunt Wilma and Uncle Frank, young and caught up in the excitement, didn’t let their children slow them down a bit.

My grandmother insisted that Mary Frank had been normal at birth, as healthy as any child. Some little girl, lugging the baby around during the revelry at one of those meetings, must have dropped her. No one could prove that had happened or whether she’d suffered what we now call a traumatic brain injury. No one used words like cognitive impairment in those days, but clearly she was seriously impaired. The seizures that developed would persist the rest of her life.

The memory from my childhood is of the adult Mary Frank, a big, shapeless woman with bad teeth and eyes that veered in different directions so you couldn’t be sure if she was looking at you. Sitting across the supper table from me, she would rock back and forth and eat like a feral creature when she wasn’t singing a mournful tune or shouting, “Hallelujah! Praise the Lord!”

No tests were ever run, no doctor consulted. Mary Frank simply lived her life in the “not right” category.

She had a younger brother, McGee, who lived into his early teens. My grandmother was convinced that he had not recovered from measles when Aunt Wilma and Uncle Frank hauled him to the brush arbor meetings, where he “lay on a pallet on the hard ground, breathing the night air.” Pneumonia set in, and he died. The child spent his last days in his own bed, but he never saw a doctor. He was never given any medicine to alleviate his suffering. I can only imagine how frightened he was, struggling to breathe, trusting his parents, as children do. But his parents refused to seek any kind of medical intervention.

The thread that runs through the stories about Uncle Frank’s family is the absolute refusal to seek medical care, the certainty that doing so would be sinful in the eyes of God, that prayer was the only intervention for sickness. It happened again, with Uncle Frank.

The family stories weren’t clear about what made him ill. It might’ve been tuberculosis, though another version was that he’d been fasting too long, and his body could no longer accept food. The point was always how he denied any medical treatment for himself. His mother and brothers and sisters begged him to let them call in a doctor, but he and Aunt Wilma refused. They sent the family away and brought in church members to pray over him. No doubt their prayers were fervent, as were my grandmother’s. Daddy and his brothers and sisters prayed, too, though they never stopped believing that God helps those who help themselves. Whatever had caused his illness, Uncle Frank likely could have lived. But he wasted away, rejecting the “sin” of medicine.

I grew up hearing those stories. Whenever Aunt Wilma and Mary Frank left our house after a meal, I’d have questions. Whenever I’d see them in town, getting out of their decrepit old car, dressed like they’d wandered in from another century, I’d go home and ask Mama for more details. Whenever Aunt Wilma called our house, wanting help, I would bristle.

“Mary Frank’s sick,” was Aunt Wilma’s appeal. Sick usually meant having seizures.

“I can’t get any sleep. I’m too worn out to bring in wood. The house is cold and we’ve run out of food.”

“Why doesn’t she get her church to help!” I wanted to know.

My grandmother had watched her son and grandson die and had seen the pitiful life her granddaughter lived. I knew what she thought of Wilma’s concept of sin. She had been a no-nonsense woman, and maybe I had some of her in me.

But Mama and Daddy always went to Aunt Wilma’s aid, without complaint. Daddy’s sisters, too. Sometimes it took several days before Mary Frank came around to a state that was “normal” for her. After the family members had attended her through the long nights, cooked enough food to sustain her and her mother for a while, brought in firewood and cleaned the unkept house, they would leave, knowing, I suppose, that they had done all they could do, until Aunt Wilma called again.

I remember one particular morning when Mama came home after a night with Wilma and Mary Frank. Mama had severe back pain, a ruptured disc, it turned out, that would soon require surgery and a long hospital stay and recuperation. Yet, she had responded to Wilma’s plea for help. I heard her telling Daddy that Mary Frank kept flailing all through the night, fighting to get out of bed, and it was a struggle to quiet her. All of that while Aunt Wilma slept soundly in another room.

“Why do you do it?” I pressed, and I said some other things, too, reminding her of what Aunt Wilma’s religious dogma had demanded of her children and how she had sent Daddy’s family away when Uncle Frank was dying.

“Well,” Mama said, “I can only answer for myself. I can’t answer for Wilma. And Mary Frank is not to blame, either.”

My mother was a much better Christian than I have ever been.

 

Years passed. I left home and hardly ever gave a thought to Aunt Wilma and Mary Frank. But when they were mentioned on my visits with Mama and Daddy, I always felt my anger rise. I had children of my own by that time, and I couldn’t fathom the notion that any mother, especially one who called herself a Christian, could reject medical care for her children. Uncle Frank had made his own choice, but their children did not get to choose.

Aunt Wilma was way up in years then. Mama said she was wanting to give Daddy her Power of Attorney and make him her Executor of her will. Before I could register a fierce protest, Mama said, “But I told him he should not even think of it. Wilma is in poor health. When she dies, somebody will have to take care of Mary Frank. Wilma ought to get somebody from her family or her church to do it.”

It was the only time, I thought, that Mama had not acquiesced to Wilma’s appeals.

Sometime after that, Mama said that both Aunt Wilma and Mary Frank were living in the nursing home, there in town. One of Wilma’s nephews named George had agreed to manage her affairs. I never heard whether Aunt Wilma put up a fuss when he moved them from their home.

Mary Frank didn’t live long after that. But Aunt Wilma was thriving.

 

Though Mama was close to all of Daddy’s sisters, Ruby was more like her own sister. One day Ruby called and said, “You’ll never guess what I heard. They’re giving Wilma medicine at the nursing home!”

Mama was shocked. She wouldn’t believe it unless she saw it with her own eyes. “We need to go visit her,” she told Ruby.  

So they went to the nursing home.

Mama reported that Aunt Wilma was sitting up in bed, smiling, bright-eyed, that she complimented the food and her clean bedsheets and the nurses, that she was in better spirits than Mama had ever seen her.

            And then a nurse came in and gave her half a dozen pills, which she swallowed happily.

            Ruby was the one who asked.

            “Wilma, what were those pills?”

            Mama didn’t sense that Aunt Wilma was apologetic or even the least bit embarrassed or reluctant in her admission. “That’s the medicine they give me,” she said. “I don’t know what it is, but it helps my breathing.”

            “Wilma! You never in all your life took medicine,” Mama pointed out.

            “I know,” she said. “But George told me it was all right. I was having such a hard time getting my breath!”

 

            When Mama mentioned one day that Aunt Wilma had died, I had a whole new set of questions that would never be answered. Had she ever regretted denying medical care for her children? Did the decisions she made for them ever weigh on her conscience, or did she only feel the weight on her own lungs, in her old age? Had she ever comprehended what it meant to give up her lifelong belief that medicine was a sin only when she gasped for breath? Or had her dogmatic religion simply blinded her to the irony? Did she ever feel like a hypocrite?

            I wished Mama had asked all those questions after she’d watched Wilma take her life-saving medicine, but that was not my mother’s way.

            “I can only answer for myself,” Mama said. Her way was more about compassion than finger-pointing, even toward people like Aunt Wilma.

            And I know I would do well to follow my mother’s example.

But some part of me has always thought Aunt Wilma should’ve had to take her own medicine. Which of course was no medicine at all.