Farm Girl by Karen Jones Gowen Page A

mother died. Aunt Elizabeth was sixty-six and sitting in her chair on a summer day when she suffered a quick heart attack. Hazel Smith was staying there at the time and called Aunt Bernice out at Uncle Ford’s. I was nineteen and hired to teach school that fall, so I wouldn’t be in Lincoln to help with Catherine. She became Aunt Bernice’s responsibility.
    After that, Catherine became a bigger problem. It was up to Aunt Bernice to take care of her, and poor Bernice wasn’t equipped for it. After all, she had never married or had any children.
    We went up for the funeral and Catherine came home with Aunt Bernice and stayed out in the country with us the rest of the summer.
    When they returned to Lincoln in the fall, the two of them lived in the house with a few boarders. Not as many as before, because Aunt Bernice taught school and couldn’t do all the cooking and laundry for a lot of boarders. Besides, she had her own money and didn’t need to keep boarders for a living like her sister had done.
    I was teaching country school by then and Aunt Bernice said, “Oh, Lucille, I wish you were going to be here to help with Catherine.”
    Two years later, I moved back to Lincoln to attend the University of Nebraska. Catherine went out with a lot of guys and a few girls, and they’d drive around and go to bars. I went along a few times to be with her, to try and watch out for her, but by then she was set in her ways. I didn’t like going with them. They were wild and here I was, a non-drinker, because that’s how my family was and because I’d signed a pledge at the New Virginia church when I was twelve.
    Catherine started at the University of Nebraska, and we all hoped she would get busy with her studies and settle down, but she didn’t go to class very often. She liked a guy named Elwin who was twenty-seven, ten years older than her. When she turned eighteen, she married him. He was an established carpenter who had money, and she started wearing fancy clothes, buying herself a raccoon coat.
    In the early part of the War, there was an air base in Lincoln, and she got to running around with one of the guys there. She got pregnant by him and divorced Elwin to marry the other. He was from Oregon, and when he went overseas, she went to Oregon to live with his folks.
    Through the years, we would hear from Catherine now and then. Not very often. She corresponded most often with Hazel Smith. As time went on, her letters to me and Aunt Bernice came less and less frequently, but Hazel would keep us informed.
    Catherine had three boys from this marriage, but eventually they divorced. She had a lot of problems with her boys.
    One summer she came out to Nebraska to see Aunt Bernice and Uncle Ford. She wanted them to take on the oldest boy and take care of him, because he was her biggest problem. They said no, and that made her mad. After that, she didn’t want anything to do with any of the Markers. She stopped writing to us altogether, and for awhile we only heard about her through Hazel Smith.
    She worked as a waitress in Oregon, trying to support herself and her boys. This oldest son eventually got into bad trouble and went to prison. My heart was breaking for Catherine. It didn’t matter to me that she was adopted, she was still my family.
    I wrote to her and told her how I had enjoyed growing up with her, that she was like a sister to me. I wrote that she had always been such an important part of my life and recalled what fun we always had together. How I treasured those memories! I never heard back from her. She was mad at Aunt Bernice and probably mad at me, too.
    When Aunt Bernice died in 1970, she left Catherine $1000. I found her address and wrote again, telling her to contact this particular lawyer, that Aunt Bernice had died. I don’t know if she ever did or not. My cousin Cecil Johnson and I each got $25,000 from our aunt, and I felt kind of bad about that. But it was how Catherine had acted.
    I never heard from her