Mary Ann

She haunts me sometimes.  No, she doesn't float into my bedroom like a vapor or anything like that.  Its just that, sometimes when I think about how things were in my own past, I let that spill over into thinking about how different things were during the lives of people that I knew.  I mean, hell, my Dad knew a man who fought for our side 150 years ago.  


When I was young and visiting Grandmother's house there was a picture of a very pretty girl that was kept inside a glass china cabinet.  We were never allowed to open the cabinet but we could see the picture.  It was meant to be seen.  When asked, Grandmother would explain that the girl was her niece, Mary Ann, and that she had been killed by her father years ago. The story was that he was gassed in World War One and had killed her during a flashback.   We wouldn't learn the truth for many years.


The first child of my Grandmother, Mary Ann was conceived in the act of rape.  Grandmother was savagely beaten and left for dead in a cemetery.  She survived but, being just fourteen when the child would be born, she was sent to stay with her sister Edna, in South Florida so the locals wouldn't know she was no longer pure or that the child was illegitimate or something like that. 


Mary Ann was raised by  Edna and Edna's husband, LeRoy and, so far as we know, was never told that her parents had been switched at birth.  No one was told until shortly before Grandmother died almost seventy years later.  Only Grandmother's immediate family knew.  Before Grandmother married, she told my Grandfather about it because she didn't want  to be dishonest by not telling him.  Of course, it made no difference.  He loved her and that was what mattered.  She was lucky that she got him. Outside of her parents, her siblings, her own husband and Leroy, nobody knew.  



After Grandmother died we found many more pictures of Mary Ann.  Many of them had been cropped to remove someone.  Probably LeRoy.

In those that include both Mary Ann and my Grandmother, the two are always next to each other.  Grandmother's hand will often be on the girl's shoulder.  Her "official" parents will be a foot or two away. 


At the time it made sense for a 14 year old farm girl to give up her child to her wealthy sister and the sister's wealthy husband.  LeRoy had made a pile of money in construction during the 1920s  real estate boom in South Florida.  We don't know how much but he had an Auburn and that wasn't a cheap car.  Logic and the customs of the time left nothing, really, to decide.


Unfortunately, the boom ended.  LeRoy lost everything and evidently became hard to live with.  Edna packed up and moved herself and Mary Ann back to the small, North Florida town where she was born to be close to family.  Mary Ann attended school and Edna worked in a diner across from the boarding house where they lived.


I've talked to people who knew her and they all agreed that she was stunningly attractive.  Just look at the second picture.  This was no plain, plump, corn-fed farm girl.   All remembered her as a having a sweet, cheerful personality.  One old fellow got a kind of wistful look in his eye as he talked about her.  I had been asking around the town for anyone who might have known her and been directed to him as the man to see.  I now wonder if he wasn't the fellow in the top picture because of the inscription on its back.


On April 6, 1938, my Grandmother, Grandfather and their almost eight year old son, my Father, were living in the next town up the highway.  They had no phone in the house  but didn't need one that day.  Grandmother woke up screaming that "Mary Ann is dead and Edna is hurt."  She grabbed my Dad and the three of them headed for the diner where Edna worked.  They arrived before the Sheriff got there and learned that LeRoy had shot Edna and then crossed the street and killed Mary Ann in her bed with a single shot to the heart.  He then killed himself with a shot to the heart and one to the head.


There weren't many details to find out later but the newspaper account said that he had entered the diner and tossed a note in one man's breakfast plate and then asked his estranged wife if he could see their daughter.  When Edna told him where she was, he produced the gun and fired two shots into her midsection.  He then crossed the street and finished his plan.


I cannot get my head around the idea that someone would kill the girl.  She had no part in any of it.  How was she to blame for anything?  She was just fourteen.   I have only slightly less problem figuring out why nobody in the diner so much as shouted at LeRoy as he crossed the street to commit murder.  In 1987, I talked to two people who had known her.  One was the man who had the note thrown in his plate.  It was almost fifty years after it happened and he still wished that he or someone else had done something.  You could tell that it still hurt.  I cannot imagine a Mother being so proud of her child and not being able to tell anyone "yes, that's my daughter!"  I don't even want to think about having a child murdered and not being able to grieve as a parent.  That's what haunts me.  I cannot begin to fathom one damn thing about it.


Today, Mary Ann's remains lie in my Grandmother's family plot in a small North Florida cemetery.  Its across the highway from the farm where Grandmother was born.  The graves are in the back in the old section of the cemetery.  I've looked at aerial photos and the family plot is almost straight across from the old farmhouse.  Its almost eerie.  All the graves are gray granite and all include a last name except hers.  Her's has a distinctive white granite slab inscribed "Our Loved One Mary Ann" and a poem that reads.

We loved you, yes we loved you

But Jesus loved you more

And he has sweetly called you

To yonder shining shore

The golden gates were open

A gentle voice said "come"

With farewells left unspoken

You comely entered home.

I was always told that Grandmother wrote the poem for the marker.  Googling the words yields many, many hits on the same poem on gravestones all through the 19th and early 20th centuries.  It was not original to her but I have no doubt that it was she who selected it.    I know that she also selected the plot.  Mary Ann is right next to Grandmother.  Just like in all the pictures.


After Grandmother died and we started going through the old pictures, we found that many  bear inscriptions such as "Mary Ann's boyfriend who wanted to marry her when she finished high school." That's what's on the back of the top picture.  That's why I wonder if the old man who clouded up when I talked to him in his office fifty something years later  might  be the young man in the picture.  The inscriptions on her pictures are all written in a very old, feeble hand.  Grandmother had gone through the pictures one last time before she died and made sure the girl's memory wouldn't vanish after she was gone.  Then she told  my Dad who Mary Ann really was. She wanted someone living to know.   I guess she did the best she could for her daughter right up to the end.