Memories of Grandma Jaques
The photo shows the Jaques home and tree referred to in this story.
The home was at 100 E.Pearl Street, Marshall Hill, Monett Missouri
The home was at 100 E.Pearl Street, Marshall Hill, Monett Missouri
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She was withered and worn and wrinkled, her hair a streaky gray, pulled back into a bun with stray wisps hanging on either side of her face. She never wore her "store bought teeth". She said they hurt her. I never saw her really dressed up in the sense that one dresses for church or a wedding. Over the plainest cotton dresses she always wore a large square cornered apron tied at the waist. I learned at a very early age to love that apron. It meant security. Many were the times, as I ran from a sure spanking, she would hold it up and shout "Run to Grandma, Honey!" and I would be gathered in the folds of that apron as she reasoned with my mother, Lenora. "Now, Nory..." she would say, deflecting her daughter-in-law's wrath once again from her favored grandchild. As I said, that apron meant security. She could barely read and only with difficulty sign her name. Deserted by her husband (Bill Jaques) shortly after the birth of her second son, she reared both sons, Millard Nathaniel and James Oscar Jaques, herself. She also made a home for her two daughters Odie and Alice, by a former marriage and her husband's two daughters, Mary and Becky, by his former marriage.
(note: I have the names from Elsie while she was alive, and I believe that there are errors here. Mary is often called Molly and Becky may be Rebecca Jane Jaquess, and if so, there is a story from the Ellis family that Rebecca's mother was killed by a kick from a horse. Also, Bill Jaques abandoned the family probably three or four years after James Oscar's birth as he appears to be a boy in the only surviving photo of the family, taken in the late 1880s or early 1890s.... Sylvia) Her young son, James Oscar, was unmarried and by the standards then prevailing, made very good money. He lived in her home and I suppose, contributed to her support. Nevertheless, she "took in" washing. It was only when rain or snow prevented it that the heavy iron kettle wasn't boiling over the wood fire under the huge tree in the yard at the west side of the house. The white clothes were always boiled, the theory being that the boiling bleached them and kept them very white. In any event, the boiling, and the fat slick bars of yellow lye soap, which she made, herself, certainly served to sterilize bedding and undergarments. There was no lawn on the west side of her house. The earth was smooth and hard and cool to my bare feet. In good weather, the area was broom swept daily. The rhythm of Grandma scrubbing clothes on the bright brass washboard, the smell of the fire beneath the black iron kettle plus the hum of the Frisco Railway's generator plant along with the occasional itinerant bee constituted a blend of smells and sounds as fitting and proper as the score of a symphony. There was no city water piped into Grandma's house on the Southeastern edges of Monett Missouri in the Marshall Hill district around 1910, nor to the house next door, for that matter. The water hydrant was on the property line east of Grandma's house and supplied both families. I don't know how they apportioned the charge for the service, but I do know that Grandma carried buckets of water from that hydrant around the west side of her house to fill the kettle and the wash tubs. On rainy days a fire in the kitchen stove kept a large copper boiler going. Grandma's house was very old. There were closets, pantries and shelves in the most unusual places. On the shelf back of the stove, along with the can of bacon fat and a box of matches, there always was one peppermint waiting for me. The house was generally thought to be on a corner (the address was 100 E. Pearl Street) but the unpaved street sort of curved at that point and it was stretching a point to call it a corner. Her house was either the first or the last house on the street depending on which direction you happened to be facing at the time. Down the road that ran past the west side of the house were the pickle factory and the stock pens. The pens had been built by the railway company so that livestock being shipped to market could be taken from the stock cars and watered. By some law or regulation the railway company was required to do this for the animals. The stock pens were a primitive affair with a twelve inch board running along the top from which the trainman could prod the last uncooperative steer into the chute and back into the stock cars for the rest of the trip to market. Through reasoning born of experience the 'knights of the road' usually detrained at these holding pens. To ride right into town was an invitation to sure arrest, and the pens were on the outskirts of the town. It was rare, however, that the railway detectives strayed far from the proximity of downtown Monett in order to arrest an errant hobo who had no evil in his heart and was content with a night's sleep under the pickle factory's huge vats of brine wherein reposed the cucumbers grown in the area for use by the processing plant. Grandma's house was just a stone's throw from both the pens and the factory. Grandma felt that her house was marked in some way so that every hobo on the road knew she was an easy mark for a meal or a dime, but in reality the location of her house was the cause of it all. Though I now know that she was awake, many is the night that I've tugged at her nightgown and whispered "Grandma, someone's in the kitchen!". She would answer softly "Hit's all right, Honey, hit's jes' some pore ole bum gittin' hisse'f somethin' to eat. If we don't hurt him, he won't hurt us." Next morning we would find evidence of a repast and the pantry clean of leftovers. Aside from food eaten, never was anything taken. Not that Grandma had anything of much value --but it seemed that there was sort of a gentlemen's agreement not to harm or steal from her. She would have given them the food anyway, had they asked, so taking it the way they did was not theft. Times were simpler then. Whenever I stayed with Grandma overnight we thought of it as a time of celebration. At least I did and I thought she did. About dusk we would go for ice cream. In those days, around 1909, ice cream was so rich and full-bodied that it could set for half an hour and scarcely melt a drop. When you finished eating it there was a feeling of wax on your upper lip because you had licked your lips and the butterfat adhered to the fine hairs there. Grandma lived on the wrong side of the tracks in Marshall Hill. We would go down the hill to the riptrack (short for repair inspect and paint. A siding off the main tracks.) a series of tracks that led to nowhere; a place set aside by the railway company for the repair of freight cars. Grandma would maneuver us through the maze of wrecked and empty boxcars to the far side where she would wait while I went on to the drugstore to buy a quart of ice cream. She always used the excuse "I aint dressed fittin." She would give me a half dollar and I am positive that many a time that half dollar represented her entire earnings for a wash that day. Many times, on our way back, to my consternation, she would halt, pull her skirts out in front slightly, and, standing, she would make water. Grandma had papered her dining room herself It was unique in that it was done entirely in old newspapers. Only Grandma would have thought of putting the comic sections closest to the floor. After supper and the ice cream, and with me fortified by a huge slab of bread spread thick with butter and piled high with sugar, she would put the kerosene lamp on the floor and we would inch ourselves around the room reading the "funnies". Eventually I knew them by heart and then suddenly there would be new ones in place of the old ones we had read so many times. With the new ones I would occasionally have to tell her the correct word -- or was she subtly teaching me? God bless the St. Louis Post Dispatch - which my Uncle Oscar insisted on buying each week -- at ten cents the copy. Luxury! Came the day Grandma was to take a trip. She would go to Wichita Kansas, to visit her two daughters who had moved there. I was to accompany her on the trip. It was at her insistence, I was told "so she wouldn't be alone" . I fail to see how a small child could be any great company aside from having to be taken to the bathroom and dozens of trips to the water cooler for a drink, but she insisted, and I was allowed to go. There is a river in Wichita, and with the river, mosquitoes and soon after returning home I came down with a very severe type of malaria. After several weeks in bed I was unable to walk, though the doctor had had said I could be up. My parents put me in a baby carriage and we went to see my Grandma, my choice of whom I wished to visit on my first day out. In return for the trip I had promised that I would go to bed very early, a prospect not too appealing to be because of the arrangement of Grandma's bedrooms. Grandma had two bedrooms - the front bedroom off the parlor, and the back bedroom off what now would be called the family room. I disliked the back bedroom because it was so far removed from everyone else in the parlor, but I was terrified of the front bedroom because of the picture that hung on the wall beside the bed - "The Lion's Bride". I was led to believe that it was a print of a very famous painting , and the legend was that the lion was in love with his trainer, a very beautiful blonde lady. By some extrasensory perception the lion discerned that the lady was going to leave him because she loved a human. So the lion killed the lady and there he lay in all his majesty with the very dead lady across his paws, glaring down at me in the bed directly beneath the picture. For years after I was grown all my nightmares were of lions just on the verge of devouring me. So of the two bedrooms, I chose the back bedroom and in the early evening, I was put to bed. I suppose my parents assumed I was asleep, but it was Grandma who stole in to see. I was very hungry and a whispered conversation resulted in her promise to bring me something to eat. She slipped out to her neighbor's house and borrowed what she thought would be something I could have, and in all my life I have never forgotten the wonderful taste of a cup of milk and two soda crackers. She was only fifty-nine when she died in 1914. I was only eight but I remember my deep grief at her going. I cherish the memory of the togetherness we shared, the water boiling in the yard, the "funnies" by lamplight and I shall always treasure the love and understanding evidenced by a cup of milk and two soda crackers. From notes by Elsie Jaques Stivers, reconstructed by Sylvia Stevens Written in the 1960's and never published. Identifying details supplied by her and by her granddaughter, Sylvia Stevens in March 2000. Grandma was Sarah E. "Sis" Ellis Jaques. Her older son, Millard Nathaniel "Nathan" Jaques, was Elsie's father and Lenore Hartung was Elsie's mother. Submitted by Sylvia Stevens |