I want to tell you, the best I can, about my Aunt Kathleen. The first thing most people mention when they describe her is that she was very beautiful. All of my Big Mama’s children were stunning, truly, and looked like movie stars. But, in Kathleen, it must have been that kind of attractiveness that’s powered by personality. Everybody knows that kind of woman who lights up a room when she walks in. But Kathleen’s was a kind of careless beauty. Big Mama said when Kathleen dressed and fixed herself up, she was the prettiest girl in town. But when she slouched around and didn’t care how she looked, she was the plainest. Everybody loved her and wanted to be where she was just the same.
I’ve seen pictures of her. The one with Doc in the newspaper the morning after they died seems very matronly to me. My Big Mama always had a black and white photo of Kathleen in a frame in her living room. It reminded me for some reason of Tallulah Bankhead. But she was like Tallulah in other ways too. She was wild and willful and impetuous and had a terrible temper. She held a grudge for a long time. She was fun and funny, smart and talented. Played piano and sang. Never self conscious and never, never cared a whit about public opinion. People were drawn to her, and time spent in her presence was all the more precious and treasured, because in a minute, you might be excommunicated from the chosen few.
Kathleen had the audacity to marry and divorce twice before she was 25 years old. That must have been a record, and shameful too, in the 1930s in my hometown. I seriously doubt that she was ashamed of it. She loved passionately while she loved. But once angered or scorned, she didn’t forgive well. Obviously, her mother couldn’t do much with her even as a teenager. But once she reached adulthood, she was uncontrollable.
Kathleen came in her mother’s house one evening and announced she had a date. She went in and got herself ready, then came out and proceeded to turn the lights down instead of dusting, which is what she always did. She also always checked to see which silverware had been used, so it could be put away without washing with the rest of the dinner dishes. No use wasting motion. This particular evening, Big Mama asked her who her date was. Kathleen replied that it was Dr. McIntosh. Well, Big Mama like to have had a fit. Dr. McIntosh was nearer to her age than Kathleen’s. And his first wife had suffered a long time with some awful disease (Big Mama couldn’t remember just what). And though the poor thing had worked at dying a long time, she’d only just died in June.
“Where did you meet up with Dr. McIntosh?” she asked.
“Well,” said Kathleen., “He came down from his office to the Mason Hicks store and I spoke to him. And he asked me to go out tonight.”
Well, Big Mama knew Dr. McIntosh’s people wouldn’t take to Kathleen. Why, his wife, whose family was prominent in the funeral home business, hadn’t been in the ground six months. Why it was indecent for a widower of such short duration to be a-going out on dates, for the townsfolk were bound to talk and it would be a big scandal. So she stated her case. It was, once again, all for naught.
Nothing would do but for Kathleen to go out on this date. She said “Mama it’s no use you a-fussin’, cause you might as well know now, I’ve made up my mind to marry him.” She didn’t come home that night. Big Mama didn’t sleep a wink. In the morning, Kathleen telephoned to say that she and Dr. McIntosh were married.
Big Mama used to say Kathleen got her orneriness from her natural father, Mr. Stone. And that could be true I guess. He came to Ragland about 1908 or ‘09, an up-and-coming young businessman, and swept my grandmother off her feet. Big Mama’s daddy was a blacksmith, a solid line of work in those days of broken wagon axles to fix and horses to be shod. His daddy, according to the census, had been an illiterate “wood chopper.” So there had been no legacy to start out on. And it was still a struggle to raise a large family. His wife helped out by taking in boarders. Some boys from the country worked at the local factories and needed a bed and board for long periods. And Big Mama did her share of the work.
Ragland was a boom town a hundred years ago, with a new idea a minute. Young entrepreneurs came in and set up shop. The automobile was new and all that came with it. Ragland had brink plant, a cooperage mill (for making barrels), a soft drink bottling plant and other similar forward-looking enterprises. Many men of commerce came in on the train needing a place to stay the night. So along came Mr. Stone with the idea and where-with-all and guts to build a hotel. He made it even better by being bold enough to build it of concrete, drawing on the town’s largest industry, cement. So, he became somewhat of a local hero. He was also a rogue and a rounder, and while courting, he was free with his money.
Even though in those days most sensible single girls of 22 had almost given themselves up to hopeless spinsterhood, my grandmother had refused the advances of many suitors. She had till she died a postcard from a young doctor who was smitten with her and willing to marry her at any time. One young man offered her a ride across the river in his wagon. He then stopped half way and refused to go further till she promised to marry him. He was persuaded to continue when she pulled her little pistol out and promised only to shoot him if didn’t take her to the far side.
Big Mama had her fair share of gumption and hard-headedness. So she may have been mistaken in blaming all Kathleen’s orneriness on Mr. Stone. He must have been a man of many charms, and could be Kathleen inherited those. At any rate he was able to do what so many before him had failed at. Big Mama fell in love with Mr. Stone, and against her mother’s wishes, married him in December of 1911.
Mr. Stone’s building project, lauded in the newspaper’s wedding announcement as a $6000 cement hotel (pronounced SEE-mint HOE-tell), the most modern in St. Clair County, was still under construction at the time of the marriage. But when it was completed, Big Mama went to running it, while Mr. Stone went out in search of other business opportunities. The marriage was short and disastrous.
They “went to work,” as Big Mama would’ve put it, and had two babies right away. Kathleen was strong and healthy. But her younger sister was sickly from birth, and in spite of all the anxious care her mother could give her, she died in September of 1913. And Mr. Stone was given to drink.
Unfortunately, he was one of those loud, obnoxious and abusive drunks. When he went on a tear, he terrorized his household. Big Mama feared for her life and the lives of her children. I believe she made up her mind to leave him shortly after the death of her baby, and I don’t doubt she told him of her intentions. She was nothing if not bold and free-spoken.
As it turned out, he was no meaner when drunk than when sober. Big Mama’s daddy had a mortgage on his home held by the Ragland bank. Some time that fall, Mr. Stone went to the bank and bought that mortgage. Then he let Big Mama and her family know that he could call the loan and throw them out of their house at any time his chose to do it. Maybe that threat is what kept her in the marriage and running his hotel until January.
Mr. Stone’s last drinking binge must have started over the weekend. Big Mama took the baby and went to a friend’s house, Mrs. Golden’s. She was afraid to go to her mother’s because they had the typhoid there, and she didn’t want the baby exposed. Also, Mrs. Golden had one of them new-fangled telephones. As a powerful man with influence, it didn’t take Mr. Stone long, once he made up his mind, to find out where his wife and daughter were staying. On Monday afternoon he came to Mrs. Golden’s house, broke through the front door, and pulled Kathleen out of her mother’s arms. He stated his intentions of taking the child to his parents’ home in Calhoun County and said that he would see to it Kathleen would never see her mother again. Frantic, Big Mama called her brother, James Farmer, and pleaded with him to find Mr. Stone and get the baby away from him.
I am certain by that time, James was sick of the way Mr. Stone had terrorized his sister and his parents as well. James found Mr. Stone at McAnnally’s store near the railroad depot. He had gone in to buy the baby a cap. Well, I imagine it was cold that January afternoon, and he’d left with her in a hurry. She didn’t have on a coat either.
Big Mama told it to me this way. Her version differs with some of the newspapers of the day. But I believe this was from her brother’s statement. When James entered the store, Mr. Stone was holding the baby. There were, no doubt, some heated words between them. Mr. Stone put the baby on the counter and grabbed the knife from the store’s butcher block. He “made at” James with the knife as if to stab him, and James fired a pistol into Mr. Stone’s head. He was, according to all reports, dead before he hit the ground.
My grandfather, Ed Hart, was a deputy sheriff living in Ragland in 1914. He arrested James and took him to the county seat to jail. In spite of the circumstances, James was tried and found guilty of murder and sent to prison. I assume he was prosecuted by Ernest Forney, who, according to his published wedding announcement of 1914, was the county solicitor. Mr. Forney remained in the position of county solicitor for several decades. He was county solicitor at the time of Kathleen’s death.
Big Mama’s brother James served only a few years in prison, and after his release he applied to the governor for a pardon. We could find no record to indicate whether or not that pardon was ever granted.
But this much I do know. Before James was released from prison, his sister married the deputy sheriff who’d arrested him. And Ed became a father to Kathleen and loved her the rest of his life as his own child.
The Right Southern Corner is a series by Sara Rast
Copyright: 2008 Sara Love Rast. All rights reserved.
The Right Southern Corner
