Aunt Jes and Grandma Ola

Aunt Jes and Grandma Ola
a short story by Diana Weeks

I didn’t know what the word “kidnapped” meant…until I saw it in huge print on a Chicago times banner headline… on a folded out clipping in one of my aunt Jestine’s scrapbooks of grisly murders… train wrecks… and killer tornadoes.

“Jestine’s Books of Harrow” as our strict mother named them when she put them in the cabinet bookcase under daddy’s built in desk. The scrapbooks were out of bounds…

Until… the afternoons it rained and Aunt Jes… was baby sitting me and my brother Steve… and we sat in front of the forbidden bookcase and cried please, “please, we won’t tell”.

She had four real large scrapbooks covered in fading reddish orange fabric, the most recent still red. All were bigger and thicker than our family bible.

There were several years in each. The real old clippings were yellowed with curling corner edges pulled from the flour mixed in water paste that held the news stories to the cream colored pages. The first scary picture I saw… was of a blood painted scroll on a wall “catch me before I kill more” and a picture of a dingy slum basement and the trash barrel… where an eight year old kidnapped girl’s body was found.

I couldn’t go to sleep that night until daddy got in from his night shift at two. Still there were magnets in those murder books… every rainy afternoon… we were drawn to continue reading about all the things mother deemed to awful for children.

Aunt Jes and Granma Ola came to live with us for a while after granpa had a heart attack and died. Both granma and Aunt Jes liked gossip and were curious about crime and would tell us things learned at their beauty salon.

mother was embarrassed to be related to them because they went to stranger’s funerals, if the person was murdered or died in a terrible way, even car wrecks.

I cried every time I read and re-read the stories about the gas explosion of the elementary school in New London, Texas in 1937. Kids our age died. Blown up in their classrooms. The papers had faded pictures of stacked body parts in a bushel basket… school pictures of the smiling dead children.

Aunt Jestine was a serious newspaper story collector. She enjoyed clipping and waited with sharpened scissors…she listened to radio news programs and read the daily paper. She could smell a big story and get on a downtown bus to buy out-of-town news stand papers to glue in her grim scrapbooks.

What may be on page two of our fort worth star telegram… could be a front page yarn in California where the earthquake happened.

Aunt Jes kept her scrapbook up-to-date... Neighborhood children would arrive with thunder, before the second clap, to visit our tragedy filled library.

It was just after the war. Mother now had a job as a downtown department store buyer. She had to dress nice she explained.

Granma Ola worked nights at the hospital where I was born… sterilizing instruments.
Their hours were not the same. Aunt Jes did housework. Granma cooked and let me help. I learned how to put bread and milk in meat loaf, and make sauces for vegetables Steve didn’t like.

Aunt Jes was a grown-up but small like a twelve year old child. She let me wear her high heels for dress-up. I asked my mother why Aunt Jes didn’t have any tiddies? Mom was putting on her make-up for work. “That’s just the way god made her, now run along.”

Mother started locking her closet when she went to work... “Why do you lock your closet? I inquired? She started applying lipstick with a brush and didn’t pay me any attention.

I knew the reason. One Sunday at supper granma had ask dad if he’d seen mother’s new purple dress”. Mom interrupted “I decided to take it back”. Aunt Jes coughed and had to hold her napkin over her mouth to hide a giggle.

The End
All Rights Reserved