Black-eyed Susans
My grandma's survival of paternal abuse
Elli Carder
How do you save a dying plant? When the roots have given over to rot and the leaves curl and grow flaccid, how do you keep something so fragile alive?
If you asked my grandma, she would tell you to be patient. All living things need love and time. Even the grass we so carelessly crush beneath the weight of our feet, the weeds we get down on our knees to pull from the earth. If we deny them such minimal effort, then bad things happen.
Unlike my grandma, I have killed many plants in my life. From overwatering to underwatering, from not enough sun to too much — no matter how much I loved them or cooed over their pretty leaves, they died anyway.
I have seen veins of ivy crawl out like snakes, twist their five-tipped leaves over the brick of homes, and they do it all without the tender touch of human hands. Or, I suppose, despite the efforts we take to destroy them.
Love, I think, might be too much of a blanket term for what keeps something alive. Resilience seems more fitting. My stubborn will, I’m sure, keeps the tiny pothos plant in my living room from curling brown and black before its time.
Because loving something and being able to keep that thing alive are two very different things.
***
When I was little, my grandma would tell me stories about her childhood, specifically the things she suffered at her father’s hands. They were tales so dark and vivid they would stick with me for days afterward, like a husk wedged between my teeth.
We’d sit beneath the flickering, harsh light of her basement, stringing colorful beads onto copper rods to make earrings that would most likely break before I ever got the chance to show my mother.
Grandma’s basement always smelled slightly of cats and wet soil. Cats from the strays that slipped in and out of the backdoor, nibbling the food laid out for them in cereal bowls. Soil from the army of potted plants set on every free surface, lush and green, for my grandma was a necromancer of flora.
My dad wasn’t a good man, Elli, she would tell me. It was as though she were making a side comment about the weather or what she planned to make my sisters and me for lunch.
I’d watch her freckled hands slow over whatever she was crafting, her lips pursed like she was in pain. I couldn’t have been more than 9 or 10 years old the first time she told me he hit her, maybe 13 when the stories got worse.
Screaming. Hitting. She told me once she thought he was evil. I didn’t say it, but I knew she was right.
He’d been dead for more than two decades. I didn’t have any logical reason to fear him, but it made me wonder about the men I knew. How easy it was for a hand to become a weapon, for anger to morph into violence.
I’ve wondered and had long discussions with my three sisters, who also heard these stories, about why she told us them. We were too young to understand what it meant to carry the dead weight of trauma.
Pain, no matter how old, tends to leave a brand on people.
My curiosity grew, and I was too young to understand that some stories were too intimate, too painful to share even with people who love you. When we lapsed into boredom or the beads ran out, we would go out back to sit by the pond.
All manner of life existed in that yard. Tall, reedy cattails poked above the lily pads. The bubbling mouths of goldfish poked out from the pond’s surface, hungry for the Cheerios we threw to them as we talked. Birds dipped their dark heads in the fall of the tiny waterfall the pond provided, chirping in delight.
My favorite of my grandma’s plants were the regal, thin stemmed Black-eyed Susans. They grew against her fence in bunches — their yellow petals a deep contrast to the brown wood behind them — and commanded the viewer’s attention with their dainty beauty. Bees flew to them and drank their fill of nectar.
Sometimes, if I asked, she would tell me things about the different plants. I knew from our mini-lessons that the Susans were something called perennials. This meant they lived longer, usually coming back each summer to entice pollinators.
What I liked about the Susans, though, and what made me look upon them with more respect than the dahlias or the flimsy tulips, was their ability to withstand dry weather. They could go without water for a long time, longer than most of the other plants in her yard, and remain standing. I think I envied them for their strength.
It was here, cushioned by the soft sounds of nature, that we sat and sweated, passing stories back and forth. She knew all of mine, mostly because she played a role in them or because I had a habit of forgetting which ones I’d already told. Hers, on the other hand, I could never fully anticipate.
The stories I remember most clearly are the ones about her father, Daniel Hitte.
***
Daniel was a veteran of World War II. On one of the days the fighting got bad, he was shot in the leg. To survive, he had to be smart. He pressed his body down into a ditch and pretended he’d been killed.
I wonder, when I think about how he put his hands on my grandma and her sisters, if he was afraid. Lying in the mud, tasting the sweat from his brow, I wonder if he thought that he was already dead.
I wonder how the sun felt, baking the mud dry on his cheeks and the tops of his hands. If it tormented him as he tried to stay still.
Perhaps he saw the roots of his life reach down into the ground where he lay in that ditch. Perhaps he saw them as they were, and maybe even as they could be. A house in the suburbs, a dog, a son, a beautiful wife. The American dream put out a lure to tease him.
He’d later meet a tall woman with dark hair, and he’d marry her. She’d go to church on Sundays, pray to God when she sinned, then pray again when he did. Her voice would come to his ears like the brush of wind, soft even when she was angry. To her, he would owe everything. Later, for all she had given him, he would repay her with fear.
When my grandma’s dad came home from the war, he was awarded the Purple Heart for his bravery and the wound in his calf. He was granted a “thank you” for the horrors he’d endured and the sacrifice he’d made in blood to his country.
Like a lot of young men who come back home from wars, he was not the same person he’d been before he left. He developed a drinking problem that stayed with him through his marriage and the birth of each of his six children.
My dad was mean, my grandma would say. I knew it wasn’t the same kind of mean that existed between me and my sisters when things didn’t go our way. When she said mean, she was thinking of bruises and threats made in drunken slurs. She was thinking of the way her mother flinched when Daniel came home, his boots the sound of stones dropping on the floor.
For a long time, I understood very little about suffering. I thought the worst pain anyone could experience was death or a scraped knee. But in my grandma’s eyes, I saw an ancient kind of suffering.
Sometimes villains live in the bodies of people who are supposed to love and protect us. The lines between good and evil are so skewed they might as well do away with them entirely. Most times, people come out of their battles structurally changed, living with scars from their fighting and exhaustion that no amount of sleep can do away with.
I’m starting to believe she was right when she said you had to love the plants under your care.
Just as with plants, if all you give someone is water and sunlight — the basics they need for life — and refuse them love, then they wilt.
***
On some visits, grandma would fall into a melancholic rumination. I’d attempt to steer the conversations over to happier things knowing she went quiet after a while if we talked about her father. Somehow we always came back to what had been done to her when she was younger. I think partly this was because she’d never been able to fully unpack it. Maybe she was only talking out loud, speaking the truth so it could become something tangible.
My mom tells me that at the end of Daniel’s life, he found God. How he didn’t see Him in the soft faces of his children, I can’t be sure. Why didn’t he find Him sooner when he met his wife who loved him through his cruelty? Why did God let him go on for so long with no sign of stopping? I try not to ask myself that last one.
I knew my grandma loved her father, as children often do despite the pain suffered at their hands. I’d seen static-edged, low-quality home videos of him talking to her and her siblings when they were grown. The smiles and laughter were as real as anything.
I wondered how a man like that could be capable of such wickedness. But more than that, I wondered how my grandma had survived, how she was standing before me and how she hadn’t broken apart already.
***
I recently visited my grandma in the home she’s now lived in for around 10 years. It doesn’t hold memories of Daniel, but I think she still feels him with her. Not quite a ghost, but no doubt something that haunts her.
It’s one thing to be hurt by someone you love, but it's another to have that person share your features. When you look into the mirror or pass by a window, you see the remnants of them like patchwork on your body.
***
We took a tray of frosted oatmeal cookies out to the yard, my grandma’s little dog Coco yapping at our heels. My three sisters and I sat out in the iron garden chairs on her cement porch, watching her water the flowers with her hose.
Perhaps, after all that her father stole from her childhood, she’s trying to make up for all those lost years, all that lost love. Plants can’t tell you they hate you or grab your wrists and squeeze their nails into your flesh. Plants ask for nothing but water, sunlight and love. She’s got a lot of that, enough to feed a forest.
Nibbling on the cookies, fussing over the sticky summer air, I think of what it must’ve been like for her when she was my age.
Did her father have a garden? Did his heavy hands sew love into the soil as hers do? I wondered how he had turned into something so different from the image I had of him in my mind.
There are still holes in my grandma’s story that I will never know. There are details I don’t want to be privy to and ones that I would never ask her to share. But still, I see her strength in so many things.
The greatest lesson she taught me was that, in order to survive, you have to want to live. If the only reason my pothos plant kept rearing its coin-shaped leaves toward the window was because of that stubborn will I mentioned, then that was good enough. If the only thing that got me out of bed in the mornings were my books, then that was good enough.
I think my grandma lives for the smiles on her family’s faces, the laughter that echoes in her kitchen, the stray cats and the potted plants.
I think she gets up every morning with the hope that pain is not eternal. Though scars may not fade, they certainly do lose their sting.
Wherever Daniel is, Heaven or Hell or somewhere in-between, I wonder if he sees her. I wonder if he’s sorry.
