Josephine & Pete

Josephine & Pete
Originally uploaded by Tokyorosa

Look at this photo of my gorgeous grandmother and my grandfather on their wedding day. One of the things that I love most about this photo is that it doesn't even begin to hint at the often brutal and chaotic future that they were facing down.

My grandfather turned out to be incredibly violent. I remember my grandmother telling me about one beating that she took from him for giving cookies to a mentally retarded man who came to the door asking for sweets. He used to do things like take away her shoes so she couldn't leave the house. It seems a perversion or a special kind of self-loathing to love such a man, but many women do exactly that.

My grandmother actually married my grandfather twice. The first go around produced my mother and uncle Floyd. Then they divorced and ten years passed before they married again. The second time around produced my aunt Charlotte before they were divorced.

I met my grandfather only once, when I was about eight years old. My mother and I were walking home from my grandmother's house and he pulled up in a car or truck and my mother introduced us. He offered me money which I refused to take. Years later, people at his funeral--people I had never met, people from his new life--would repeat that story.

He died when I was about eleven and he was about sixty-one or so. He committed suicide after attempting to murder his girlfriend. She was thirty-six years old and about eight months pregnant. In his mind, her crime was leaving him. Both she and the baby survived a shotgun blast. He used the same shotgun to blow off the top of his head. He was cremated and buried in Santa Fe, where he shares a grave with his oldest son, my uncle Floyd.