Edith - Used Like a Plow

          Emory and Edith Straker started their married life on a farm in Mooers, NY. 

The farmhouse and barn, which may still stand, although shakily.

          There is a touching but troubling story connected to this house. Edith’s first child was a little boy named George (1893) whom she simply adored. Evidently Emory didn’t share her infatuation with parenthood, and regarded his firstborn as an unanticipated burden. (This is puzzling, because surely Maloney Maria and Daniel gave him the Birds and Bees talk.) Anyway, Edith seemed to fear that her husband might harm her son. One day when she was down on her knees painting the farmhouse’s floor, little George trailed after her, leaving his tiny footprints in the wet paint. In later years, when she repainted the floor, she carefully skirted around the footprints so she could preserve some aspect of her child, no matter what happened to him.
          Emory was a hard-working one, as all farmers are, but he was careful to enforce his marital privileges. Every Sunday he would order his children to stay downstairs and leave him alone while he locked himself in his bedroom with Edith. I suppose he was indignant each time another baby mysteriously appeared, which happened in 1894, 1899, 1902, 1903, and 1907.

          This last birth in 1907 constituted my Grandmother Frances’ earliest memory.  The sight of Edith standing at the stove with two-hour-old Ernest balanced on her hip, cooking dinner for a gaggle of farmhands, haunted her to her final breath. The unspoken message “A woman’s first duty is to care for the menfolk” is one she vehemently rejected.

           By 1910 the family had relocated to a dairy farm in Woodstock, Vermont. Edith toiled on dutifully throughout these years, albeit in increasing discomfort. She had developed an umbilical hernia, which is usually caused by obesity, heavy lifting, or multiple pregnancies. In her case, all three factors converged.

          One of Edith’s great-granddaughters describes her in a short poem as: “Used like a plow/ Browbeaten, worn out/ Disposed of unmourned.” This is a little melodramatic, but contains more than one kernel of truth.