As a boy more inclined to the indoors than to the outdoors, I grew up on Alfred Hitchcock movies. I’m not sure what effect the movies had on me. Maybe my clear sense that bad things can happen to good people had its nascence in those creepy Hitchcock movies, such as The Birds or Rebecca. My grandmother–whose TV I used to watch these movies–never approved, but she didn’t really approve of anything on TV, with the exception of the Huntley and Brinkley newscast and the St. Louis Cardinal baseball games.
The best Hitchcock movie-critics say, not me–was The Rear Window. Maybe because its leader actors were James Stewart and Grace Kelly. They were Hollywood royalty even before Grace Kelly traded tinsel town for the real crown. I generally watched these movies at night–because that’s when they came on TV in an earlier age when Amazon was just a forest in Brazil and not a behemoth shopping center somewhere in web world. If you’re going to watch one of these movies, I suggest an earlier viewing–if possible–but maybe that’s the easily frightened child in me and not the sixty-something man who doesn’t believe in monsters beneath the bed anymore, just in the monsters in broad daylight.
Should you watch The Rear Window, I promise you’ll get pulled into the plot quickly. James Stewart–convalescing in his apartment–spends his days and nights watching his neighbors in the complex through the rear window of his place, which in the 1950’s was a common enough practice, but in these times would be high on the creepy scale. One night he sees something bad happen in an apartment and he becomes convinced a man has murdered his wife. So, he sets out to prove it on his own, assisted only by a neighbor–Grace Kelly. You’ll have to watch the movie for the conclusion. No spoilers here.
Personally, I don’t recall seeing anything bad–that bad anyway–happening outside my window, although I have seen bad things happen. I once saw a drunk man hit a car across the street and crash into a big tree with enough speed to uproot the tree and wake up all the neighbors. It was six in the morning, so it was scary. I don’t know why the man was drunk at six in the morning. Obviously, it had been a late night of drinking.
But I remember my mom telling me about something really bad that was seen through a window–not a rear window–but a window on the north side of a house. It was the first time I had heard this particular detail about a story that had been shared in the family for many years. The story goes back to the early 1930’s, when dirt was so solid in the air that horses couldn’t breathe and humans put their heads in cupboards to try to get a breath. The Dustbowl–as historians dubbed it–turned parts of the Midwest into a Biblical plague zone. You can’t expect a story to end well that begins so badly.
My paternal grandparents tried to raise their new family in these hard times. Already they had put two of their six children in the ground–their second-born, Lawrence, after ten days on earth, and their only daughter, Ida, who had struggled to live for four months. There were four boys left now, with Delton being the oldest. He turned ten on a hot August day in 1932. You might expect him to be passing his time at a fishing hole or looking for worms so he could fish. But the Dustbowl had dried up all the fishing holes and the worms had been mummified in the ground. Besides, there were more important things for a ten year old boy to do. Delton was needed on the farm. He worked in the fields with his dad and a hired man, as they tried to cajole the ground into waking from its coma. They had a full day’s job every day.
That particular day began like any other day. It was the middle of September, the 15th to be precise, with work on the farm that surrounded the unpainted wooden house that was home to the four boys and their mom and dad. Delton and the hired man were in a nearby field. Delton was plowing a field with a horse pulling the plow. I know it’s difficult to picture a ten-year-old boy, scrawny and suited in overalls, doing a man’s job, but it was the way it was.
Horses are known to be skittish animals. You’d think with their size nothing would scare them, but it’s the opposite. Something–probably a snake, since snakes have brought ill upon the earth from the start–spooked the horse. A spooked horse has no sense except self-preservation and so it was startled and started running like it was a quarter horse and not a plow horse. The boy behind the plow was forgotten as the horse charged ahead and the boy held onto the reins for dear life.
And so, on that sad day the small boy’s dear life was sacrificed like Isaac’s was on the sacrificial heap of branches as Delton got tangled in the ropes. The horse showed no mercy and dragged Delton’s bloodied and broken body behind him with little regard for his cries or for his last breath. It seems even heaven did not hear those cries. It was the hired man who saw it and who ran, but who couldn’t run fast enough to stop the horse before it had turned into a tragedy. The hired man picked up Delton’s limp and lifeless body from the ground and ran towards the house.
My grandmother–Delton’s mom–happened to look out her North window. Maybe she saw movement. Maybe she heard noise. But what she saw would shatter her heart. She looked and she knew. Now, she would bury a third child, her firstborn, the flaxen-haired ten-year-old boy she had named Delton Douglas. For now, all she could do was hold his still and warm, small boy’s body in her arms.
Delton’s story is a family story that has been told many times. And it should be because Delton, the ten-year-old boy, should be remembered. He never had the chance to grow into a man, to dress up for a date with a pretty girl, to kiss his mama goodnight one more time. He deserves to be remembered, not for who he might have been, but for who he was–just a ten-year-old boy who never got to be a boy because he had to be a man before his legs were long or his arms were strong.
I visited his grave not long ago in a nowhere place on the way to nowhere. A young man was mowing the grass on the graves. I stood by my young uncle’s tombstone and I asked the high heavens why such bad things happen. There was no answer, just the sound of the lawn mower on the other side of the cemetery. Later in the day, I told my mom that I had stopped to visit the family graves.
As I said, the story had been told to me many times before, but this time my mom added something that had never ever been shared with me in the telling of the story. As we talked about the day Delton died, she paused for just a moment and said to me, “That’s why your grandmother could never look out the north window again.” I asked my mom to repeat what she said because it was all new to me. And so she said it again. My grandmother had looked out the north window of the house when she saw the hired man running with Delton’s dead boy. And she never could make herself look out that same window again. Never.
In later years, when all of these sad things had passed into the dustbin of history along with the Dustbowl, other family stories abounded about my grandmother. She was a strong and strong-willed and strongly-remembered woman. Such is the stuff of stories. One particular story was how she liked to make changes to the rooms in her old house. Not just by moving furniture or by buying a rug. No, she’d get our her hammer and her saw and she’d close up a door while opening up a door in a different spot. She’d do the same with a window. She’d board up one and cut a hole in the wall to make a new one. She did it so often it was a family joke. But now, I’m left to wonder if it all began when she looked out that north window and saw her dead son being brought to her. I could understand how a person, after seeing that sad sight, would want to get a hammer and nail boards across that window so she never had to look out of it again. Some things are just too awful to see twice.
— Jeremy Myers
In later years, when all of this sadness had been left in the dustbin of history along with the Dustbowl, other family stories abounded about my grandmother. All types because she was a strong, strong-willed, strongly remembered woman. One story often told was how she liked to change the rooms in her house.
Sunday Brunch 