More Life's Experiences

            I was standing at the foot of the bed when the baby died.

            My grown sister, Naomi, and her big, tough husband, Walton, were sobbing as they lay across the bed. Mama and our 14-year-old sister, Wanda, were in the next room, frantically working with the baby, trying to keep him alive. Mama gave him an enema in hopes of reducing the fever.

            The memory is permanent in my mind: looking at eye level to Naomi and Walton’s shoes over the edge of the bed, and looking up to Mama and Wanda working with the baby on the kitchen cabinet. My sister, Rose and I were toddlers. I was not yet three. She was four.

            Naomi and Walton were one of the most handsome couples in Boone County, Arkansas. They had a beautiful baby boy they named Bobbie Lee. Living in a little two-room house Walton had built on his Dad’s farm, Naomi and Walton were in love, happy and planning to build a future.

            Driving the few miles into the little town of Bergman, Naomi and Walton saw a woman and four small children walking down the gravel road, not an unusual sight in 1934 when the world was in deep depression. The grateful mother loaded her children into the car and admired the five-month-old Bobbie Lee. Her children coughed all the way to Bergman.

            Bobbie Lee contracted whooping cough and died. Hearts that had been so full of love, hope, and optimism were suddenly crushed, and replaced by profound grief that permeated the very soul.

            “I’ll never have another baby,” Naomi vowed.

            In 1937 Mama had another baby, John Gordon, named after her father. Naomi and Walton came for a visit from Texas, where Walton was now a roughneck in the oil field. “When I held that baby, I couldn’t help it. I wanted a baby,” Naomi said. She had four more children.

            When Naomi was sixteen, she had assisted the midwife when I was born. Naomi and I were always close. She was sort of an assistant mother to me. For the rest of her life she embarrassed me with her favorite introduction, “This is my baby brother, Joe B. I used to diaper his butt.” Throughout her life, any time she talked about Bobbie Lee, she wept. I visited Naomi a few months before she died in January, 2002, at the age of 87. Unable to stand, she was in a wheelchair in a nursing home. We talked about old times. When the subject of Bobbie Lee came up, she  wept again.

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