This is not a work of fiction. The names of people and places have not been changed to please or placate anyone living or dead. Inaccuracies are caused by faulty recall; there is no factual research to discover heights of buildings, dates of demolition, blood types, dental records, brand names, exact locations of scars and moles. This is a documentary fantasy, the dossier of a permanently missing person.
~Eve Featheringill in her Memoir, The Glass Hatchet
My Grandma Eve was nothing if not outspoken, and while she hid a lot of her vulnerabilities in an effort to protect those around her, she always aimed to share the truth…
Even if sometimes it was a spiffed up version of the truth.
Her Memoir, The Glass Hatchet, is a perfect example of this balance.
The Glass Hatchet was written in the early 1980s and is, what was supposed to be, Book One of several books in a series she called The Tin Bridge.
(I’ll let you let your mind wander on the meanings of those titles.)
I, however, only hold Book One and am unsure if she ever wrote the additional chapters of her life, my Grandpa Phil’s life, and the lives of her children, or if she just never got as far as she wanted to.
All that aside, The Glass Hatchet tracks her ancestors from the mid-1800s through her early years in Marion, Indiana in the 1930s.
There is so much in those pages that I could (and still may) share with you, but today I want to share the heartbreaking story of little Leah and her brother, Dale, in relation to how oral history can scramble itself up over the years and decades, despite our best intentions.
See, my Grandma Eve’s father, Dutch, had two siblings who died at young ages in what appear to absolutely horrific accidents, Leah and Dale. As my Grandma Eve documented the history of her paternal side, she wrote about the births of each of her aunts and uncles as well as the passing of Leah and Dale.
Eve wrote:
Leah wandered away across the alley to Mrs. Oatis’, and there she and the Oatis girl grandchild fell, hand in hand, into a large seething copper washboiler, gave one great scream and boiled and drowned and died.
She also wrote:
Dale, thirsty from a lunch of dry biscuit, tried to find a drink of water. He found a tin-cup of bug-killing gasoline instead, and died horribly.
These heartbreaking stories must have been told to her by someone in her family, whether be it her father, any of his surviving siblings, or her Grandma Hannah. And somewhere, over the years, the details must have gotten mixed up because it was actually little Leah who drank the gasoline.
See, in my quest to document as much as possible and unable to find anything online about Leah or Dale, I reached out to a Research Librarian in Marion, Indiana who was able to find the following piece in the Marion Chronical from June 20, 1899.
I cannot fathom the devastation they all must have felt at Leah’s loss and this is why these little details matter.
She was a tiny child who was deeply loved and lived a too-short life.
Her death impacted everyone who knew her in innumerable ways…
Ways that most likely impacted each subsequent generation in ways we may never understand.
And so, as a way to honor her and the grief she left behind, I believe the truth is important to document now so that she may be remembered properly by those of us alive now and all who’ve yet to come.
I don’t fault my Grandma’s memory (or the memory of whoever told her of Leah’s death)…
And I’m so glad to live in a time when we can, in fact, practice the factual research she spoke of.
Our oral histories are deeply important… but so are the facts.
And so what of little Dale? Did he fall in the copper washboiler? I don’t know yet, but I will keep looking.
The historical Marion newspapers are currently being digitized and there is hope that the process will be complete this summer.
I don’t know if the stories were truly swapped or if something else may have happened, but I plan to honor Dale as I honor Leah, by saying her name and speaking her story into the world so that her memory can live on as whispers in all of our hearts.
Onward,
Melis