My Mother Never Worked
by Bonnie Smith-Yackel
“Social Security Office.” (The voice answering the telephone
sounds
very self-assured.)
“I’m calling about…I…my mother just died…I was told to call you
and see about a…death-benefit check, I think they call it…”
“I see.Was your mother on Social Security? How old was she?”
“Yes…she was seventy-eight…”
“Do you know her number?”
“No…I,ah…don’t you have a record?”
“Certainly. I’ll look it up.Her name?”
“Smith.Martha Smith. Or maybe she used Martha Ruth
Smith…Sometimes she used her maiden name…Martha Jerabek
Smith.”
“If you’d care to hold on, I’ll check our records—it’ll be a few
minutes.”
“Yes…”
Her love letters—to and from Daddy—were in an old box, tied with
ribbons and stiff, rigid-with-age leather thongs: 1918 through
1920;
hers written on stationery from the general store she had worked
in
full-time and managed, single-handed, after her graduation from
high
school in 1913; and his, at first, on YMCA or Soldiers and Sailors
Club
Professional Model 3.3
stationery dispensed to the fighting men of World War I. He wooed
her
thoroughly and persistently by mail, and though she reciprocated
all
his feeling for her, she dreaded marriage…
“It’s so hard for me to decide when to have my wedding day—that’s
all I’ve thought about these last two days. I have told you dozens
of times
that I won’t be afraid of married life, but when it comes down to
setting
the date and then picturing myself a married woman with half a
dozen
or more kids to look after, it just makes me sick…I am weeping
right
now—I hope that some day I can look back and say how foolish I was
to
dread it all.”
They married in February, 1921, and began farming.Their first
baby, a
daughter, was born in January, 1922, when my mother was 26 years
old.
The second baby, a son, was born in March, 1923.They were renting
farms;my father, besides working his own fields, also was a hired
man for
two other farmers.They had no capital initially, and had to gain
it slowly,
working from dawn until midnight every day.My town-bred mother
learned to set hens and raise chickens, feed pigs, milk cows,
plant and
harvest a garden, and can every fruit and vegetable she could
scrounge.
She carried water nearly a quarter of a mile from the well to fill
her wash
boilers in order to do her laundry on a scrub board. She learned
to shuck
grain, feed threshers, shock and husk corn, feed corn pickers. In
September, 1925, the third baby came, and in June, 1927, the
fourth
child—both daughters. In 1930,my parents had enough money to buy
their own farm, and that March they moved all their livestock and
belongings themselves, 55 miles over rutted, muddy roads.
In the summer of 1930 my mother and her two eldest children
reclaimed a 40-acre field from Canadian thistles, by chopping them
all
out with a hoe. In the other fields, when the oats and flax began
to head
out, the green and blue of the crops were hidden by the bright
yellow
of wild mustard.My mother walked the fields day after day, pulling
each
mustard plant. She raised a new flock of baby chicks—500—and she
spaded up, planted, hoed, and harvested a half-acre garden.
During the next spring their hogs caught cholera and died.No cash
that fall.
And in the next year the drought hit.My mother and father trudged
from the well to the chickens, the well to the calf pasture, the
well to the
barn, and from the well to the garden.The sun came out hot and
bright,
endlessly, day after day.The crops shriveled and died.They
harvested half
the corn, and ground the other half, stalks and all, and fed it to
the cattle
as fodder.With the price at four cents a bushel for the harvested
crop,
they couldn’t afford to haul it into town.They burned it in the
furnace for
fuel that winter.
In 1934, in February, when the dust was still so thick in the
Minnesota air that my parents couldn’t always see from the house to
the barn, their fifth child—a fourth daughter—was born.My father
hunted rabbits daily, and my mother stewed them, fried them,
canned
them, and wished out loud that she could taste hamburger once
more.
In the fall the shotgun brought prairie chickens, ducks, pheasant,
and
grouse.My mother plucked each bird, carefully reserving the breast
feathers for pillows.
In the winter she sewed night after night, endlessly, begging
cast-off
clothing from relatives, ripping apart coats, dresses, blouses,
and trousers
to remake them to fit her four daughters and son. Every morning
and
every evening she milked cows, fed pigs and calves, cared for
chickens,
picked eggs, cooked meals,washed dishes, scrubbed floors, and
tended
and loved her children. In the spring she planted a garden once
more,
dragging pails of water to nourish and sustain the vegetables for
the
family. In 1936 she lost a baby in her sixth month.
In 1937 her fifth daughter was born. She was 42 years old. In 1939
a
second son, and in 1941 her eighth child—and third son.
But the war had come, and prosperity of a sort.The herd of cattle
had grown to 30 head; she still milked morning and evening.Her
garden
was more than a half acre—the rains had come, and by now the
Rural Electricity Administration and indoor plumbing. Still she
sewed—
dresses and jackets for the children, housedresses and aprons for
herself,
weekly patching of jeans, overalls, and denim shirts. She still
made
pillows, using the feathers she had plucked, and quilts every
year—
intricate patterns as well as patchwork, stitched as well as
tied—all
necessary bedding for her family. Every scrap of cloth too small
to be
used in quilts was carefully saved and painstakingly sewed
together in
strips to make rugs. She still went out in the fields to help with
the haying
whenever there was a threat of rain.
In 1959 my mother’s last child graduated from high school. A year
later the cows were sold. She still raised chickens and ducks,
plucked
feathers,made pillows, baked her own bread, and every year made a
new
quilt—now for a married child or for a grandchild.And her garden,
that
huge, undying symbol of sustenance, was as large and cared for as
in all
the years before.The canning, and now freezing, continued.
In 1969, on a June afternoon, mother and father started out for
town
so that she could buy sugar to make rhubarb jam for a daughter who
lived in Texas.The car crashed into a ditch. She was paralyzed
from the
waist down.
In 1970 her husband,my father, died.My mother struggled to regain
some competence and dignity and order in her life.At the
rehabilitation
institute, where they gave her physical therapy and trained her to
live
usefully in a wheelchair, the therapist told me:“She did fifteen
pushups
today—fifteen! She’s almost seventy-five years old! I’ve never
known a
woman so strong!”
From her wheelchair she canned pickles, baked bread, ironed
clothes,
wrote dozens of letters weekly to her friends and her “half dozen
or more
kids,”and made three patchwork housecoats and one quilt. She made
balls and balls of carpet rags—enough for five rugs.And kept all
her love
letters.
“I think I’ve found your mother’s records—Martha Ruth Smith;
married
to Ben F. Smith?
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Well, I see that she was getting a widow’s pension…”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Well, your mother isn’t entitled to our $225 death benefit.”
“Not entitled! But why?”
The voice on the telephone explained patiently:
“Well, you see—your mother never worked.”