Excerpt
Chapter One

In Search of My Paternal Grandmother

The means by which my paternal grandmother, Erdell, purchased the house was suspected. There were stories that my paternal grandmother immediately helped herself to the contents of a safe that belonged to a wealthy uncle upon his death. It reminds me of an old adage about ill-gotten possessions. The adage reminds us that such possessions are easily obtained and then easily lost. There is an irony attached to ill-gotten possessions.

Nowadays, I am older and wiser and can understand that the house was only a reminder of the good times that my father enjoyed there with his mother. He had loved his mother dearly and though he lived in the house for about four years after her death, the memories that the house possessed were too painful for him.

After four years of living alone, my father decided to leave the house, which had become a tomb of unbearable past memories. He reunited with my mother, a woman whom he loved dearly, and his three children. My father was forced to separate from my mother the awful night of the tragedy. My father was fully aware that his abuse and neglect of my mother had created a situation that caused his father in law to retaliate.

He would often ponder how he had foolishly failed to see the true character of his father in law. My father had heard some tales about the old man’s strictness and the fear that his father in law generated within his family in the operation of the small family farm. My father would sometimes say during the years of my development from an adolescent to a youth that his father in law had the burden of providing for nine children. He implied that this could have been a factor that influenced his father in law’s strict disposition and fierce behavior.

My father was human and deep within him, his anger smothered over the brutal killing of his mother. My father would carry this burden of anger and shame until the day that he died. Without doubt, my father would sometimes remember the night a shadowy phantom stood at the door of his car and in a booming and angry voice ordered him to get out of the car.

Then he would see the face of the phantom clearly and realize that he had misjudged the person standing before him. He had misjudged a man we called “Pa Daddy”. Perhaps my father had been blinded by his preoccupation of money and the wealth that it brings. So blinded by stinginess and greed that he would not see the neglect and abuse that wreaked havoc on those that he loved. In the end, money would also cause his own demise. Often it is said that the love for money is the root of all evil. It is also the root of some people’s doom.