Until Death Do You Part, by Nove Meyers

“I guess you know I’m going to Hell now,” she began.  “I’ve done a lot of bad things in my life, but when you decided to study for the priesthood, I truly believed that it meant God had forgiven me.”

 Define bad. It’s not just that they had broken the mold when God made my mother, but I think her creation is what triggered that phrase in the first place.  Her behavior constituted its own category. Still, I was not prepared for what I heard next.

“I think I’ve told you before that I was married, briefly, to my cousin.” 

Well, no, not exactly. I’d known that both her parents had died during the Depression when she was just fifteen.  Her older brother had gotten the insurance check and had taken off—leaving her with two younger siblings, aged two and four.  “What’s a girl to do?”  she always used to ask, telling us the story of how she’d opened a little tavern, a honky-tonk she called it, on the outskirts of Austin, Texas, to support herself and her siblings. So, there she was, selling beer to the CCC boys before she was legally old enough to drink herself. She’d called the place Bella Vista.

 “Clyde came out to Bella Vista,” she explained. “He was several years older than me and hadn’t seen me since I was a kid on the ranch. And suddenly, he was taken with me—I was a cutie—and wanted me to marry him.  Of course, I told him ‘NO WAY.’  He wasn’t bad looking and was nice and all, but we were cousins, first cousins.  Still, he kept pestering me, and I kept saying no.”

“Bella Vista was just getting started, and we weren’t making hardly any money yet.  I was boarding my little siblings, Bonnie and Rusty, in town and trying to keep them in school.  When I fell behind in their ‘keep’ the landlady threatened to kick them out and the school people were making threats about taking them away from me.  They were my siblings; more like my kids, and the only thing I had left from my parents.  But I was a single woman, barely twenty myself, and I was in the beer business.  This is when Clyde came back around and switched his tactics.”

 “Mac, if you marry me, I can support us, and we can keep the kids.  You can stay home and take care of ‘em. And we don’t have to ‘do’ anything if you don’t want to.”

  “It worked.  I was getting desperate to save my kids, and I agreed to marry him, though not in a Catholic Church.”

My mother married her own first cousin? Before my dad? Seriously? But then it got better.

 Actually, worse.

 Much worse.

“So, we got married.  But then Clyde changed his tune.  He wanted me to ‘sleep with him’ and told me that as his wife I was obligated to do so.

‘A man has rights’, he said, ‘when he takes a wife. And you promised to love and obey me, just a week ago.’

 I refused.  I just couldn’t do it.  It was wrong, even to save the kids. We were standing in the little cabin that I had built for myself on the creek, right next to Bella Vista.  Clyde went to the bedside table and pulled out the silver-handled pistol that my Daddy had given me before he died, to protect myself.  He pointed the gun at me and yelled, ‘If I can’t have you, nobody can.’   He missed, twice, before turning the gun on himself, and pulled the trigger.

I screamed, and my helper came running from the bar.  We carried Clyde out to the middle of Bull Creek Road and flagged down a passing car. We got him to the hospital, where he lived for three days.  The sheriff came and questioned me, but Clyde insisted that he had shot himself.  I was grateful for that, and I agreed to lie in his hospital bed and hold him while a priest came in and married us in the Church.”

Although that was how Mother told the story that day, later, I overheard her tell a different version to someone else.   In that story there was a struggle over the gun.  It was unclear whose hand had held it.  Three shots were still fired, all into Clyde’s torso—an unlikely suicide scenario. It’s no great surprise that the sheriff had had his suspicions.

Murder? Perhaps.  Self-defense? Quite possibly. Either way, Clyde died.

I listened silently, watching Mother’s face.  Now, that I wasn’t going become a priest anymore I was starting to hear confessions—my own mother’s—but I had no words to absolve her from her ghosts.