Mothers are Like That

Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

My grandmother was 29 years-old the day she almost burned to death. She’d had her fifth child–a beautiful little girl–only a handful of days before. My grandfather, principal at Pioche Elementary, had taken my mother and her sister to school to school with him. Their two little brothers were asleep in the back room next to the kitchen. My grandmother, still in her nightgown, was in her bedroom feeding her new baby girl when she heard one of her sons crying. She walked down the hall and found the boys standing in the middle of the room, flames all around them. Grabbing them both, she rushed them out of the house, then came back for the baby. She had just wrapped the baby in a blanket to shelter her when the ceiling exploded into flames and moments later crashed down on top of her and the now screaming child. It ignited her nightgown, the baby’s swaddling clothes, and the bed coverings.

She told me later that the house (the year was 1932) had some kind of coated canvas which was stretched across the studs and functioned as the covering on the top of every room.  It was far cheaper than the fancy gypsum covered ceilings being experimented with at the time. As best the family could figure out later, a spark from the flu of the wood stove in the kitchen must have ignited the highly flammable material, and the fire raced across the top of the house unchallenged.

She remembers searing pain as she huddled over the baby, both of them already engulfed in flames. She called for help, but no one answered. By now the house was aflame everywhere. Shouting as she sheltered the baby under the cover of her head and arms, she groped her way out of the bedroom. Her long dark hair burst into flames, and she swatted with one hand against the fire eating its way toward the skin of the new baby, not even noticing the skin on her own legs was scalding and sluffing off in patches as she ran. The front of the house was impassable, so she headed for the double doors of the living area.

Her neighbors, assuming no one was home and that she was still in the care of a midwife, saw the conflagration and raced to save what they could. My grandfather and his brother were talented musicians who formed the core of a band which performed at many of the weddings, dances, and regional events in tiny towns populating Southern Nevada. The most valuable items in the house were his priceless violin and a baby grand piano. Neighboring men broke through the patio doors and rescued the violin; they were unable to hear my grandmother’s voice over the roar of the flames. Several of the men tried to push the piano out the double doors, but it was too large, and the walls of the house were starting to crumble from the fire and the heat.

By now the local volunteer fire department had been alerted; sirens must have shrieked as the volunteers dropped whatever they were doing and raced toward toward the house whose flames could be seen all over town. When my grandmother reached the double doors with the baby, the piano was wedged into the opening. There was no escape. She shouted frantically to her neighbors for help. A crowd was congregating outside on the lawn. They watched in horror as my grandmother and the baby appeared, burning wraiths behind the piano. Shocked at the scene before them, no one moved

In desperation and on the edge of collapse, my grandmother summoned one last ounce of strength and launched her newborn baby into the air over the piano and onto the safety of the green grass outside. Then she collapsed on the piano, more dead than alive. The burning rafters from the ceiling above crumbled fell across her already scorched legs. When she was finally pulled from the raging firestorm, she had burns over 80% of her body.

The only doctor in the area was a general practitioner who said she wouldn’t live through the night. He had no access to morphine or any other anesthetic to relieve her pain. Her closest friend and neighbor helped the doctor lay her on a bed in the friend’s home, called my grandfather from school, and waited through the night for her to die.

But she didn’t. She remembers telling the Lord she had five small children, and she refused to leave them motherless. The doctor and her friend, Leta Cowley, washed the burns as best they could, the pain of each washing sending my grandmother into unconsciousness. They worked together through the night, then the next day, and next. Eventually, Leta, my grandfather, and Leta’s husband, the local pharmacist, took turns scrubbing the burns to keep them free of infection. Leta converted a room her house into a hospital for my grandmother and the baby who had survived the fall. My grandfather called the baby “Peaches” because of her creamy complexion. It was a nickname that stuck until the day she died almost ninety years later.

I don’t know the details of the thousands of hours Leta gave my grandmother, but I do know she fed her own children, plus my grandfather, my mother, and her siblings dinner every night while my grandmother lay in agonizing pain. For 18 months. It was, of course, a miracle. But the angels involved lived in ordinary houses next door to each other.

I was born in 1946. My grandmother brought her new little one-year-old son, my Uncle Tommy–the unexpected gift they could never have imagined–to the hospital to see me. I was her first grandchild. In all the years I knew her, my grandmother never appeared in public with out makeup and neatly coiffured hair. Most people thought she was vain. I knew it was to cover up the scars. She never went without long stockings of some kind to lessen the impact of the nightmarish patchwork that was the remainder of her legs. But she walked on those legs for almost 60 years after the fire.

In 1974, my own young family moved to Cedar City. The first person to welcome me was Leta Cowley. She brought me a throw pillow she had made especially for me. Her husband had owned the town pharmacy, but had died years before. Now one of her children ran it. She was in her eighties. She knew the names and the locations of all my grandmother’s children and grandchildren.

Grandma Wilcox lived to be 98. She had refused to die when it would have been easy, so it was no surprise that when she left this world, it was on her own terms. My Aunt Peaches tried to load her into a wheelchair and take her to the hospital so she could be treated for pneumonia. My grandmother said, “I’m not going.” Then her put her head down and simply stopped breathing.

Women like my grandmother and Leta Cowley have been holding the world together since Mother Eve. Neither of them saw their lives as anything out of the ordinary. But then, mothers are like that. #Givethanks