Mark Dunn - Ibid - A Life

11. Nobody came.Jewel Romine in her richly detailed, self-published family history The Blashettes and the Plints: A War of the Roses, Arkansas Style (Pettiville Library Local History Collection) departs from the accepted notion that the lack of attendance at the wedding was due to the family feud that had divided the Blashettes and the Plints for decades (but which had dipped to its nadir the year of Emmaline and Addicus’s nuptials), insisting, instead, that attendees had been directed to the wrong church. She admits, however, that as the families awaited the arrival of the bride and bridegroom at the second chapel, a feud-fueled melee did, in fact, ensue. Ms. Romine describes it in her breathless style:

“The Blashettes fell back against the north wall of the chapel, and the Plints regrouped against the south wall and the minister, a Reverend Aloysius Green, best described as a little man attached to a very large goiter, played the role of conciliator until he was silenced by a hobnail boot to the head, and both parties commenced to flinging hymnals and psalters at one another with the exception of three young female Blashette cousins who sat behind the chancel fence guiltily eating book paste.”

12. The chivaree lasted until dawn.. The serenaders also sang, “A Ribbon in her Hair; A Smile Upon her Lips,” “Sing me a Berceuse, Berenice,” Come Down to the Bandstand, Malinda,” “Roll the Hoop to My Heart.” “Gazebo Gazibo, This Boy’s in Love, Oh,” “I Have Posies; Kiss m’ Nosey!” “How Do I Know? A Little Birdy Told Me So!” “Spoonin’ ’Neath the Willows,” and “Pretty as a Picture (without the Corset Frame)” and, as the night wore on and the singers exhausted their honeymoon repertoire, “Dixie,” “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” and “Cry-baby, Cry (Wipe Your Little Eye; Go Tell Mammy to Give You Some Pie.” Odger Blashette, interview.

13. While Emmaline took in knitting, Addicus became a jack-of-all trades.Seeking to contribute to the nearly empty family coffer, Emmaline also took in wash, baked rhubarb biscuits, scoured out post-office spittoons, sold her own line of shirtwaists, provided lemonade at local temperance meetings, raised rabbits for ladies’ muffs, led calisthenics at the Pettiville School for Orphaned Indian Girls, sold home-boiled lye soap, hired herself out to 450-pound Opal Jamfry to “scratch the unreachable places,” picked apples and pecans, chopped cotton, raced a crippled nag on a bet with the horse’s owner, and read law to young law student Stanley Crew who, although illiterate, entertained dreams of being a Lincolnesque litigator. Jonathan Blashette, Early Memories (unpublished manuscript), JBP.

1. The fire started in the barn.All sources agree on this fact. They differ, however, on how the fire reached the house. Brett Benningfield in his excellent One Hundred Years of Fires in Wilkinson County, Arkansas; a Pyrogenealogical Guide (Little Rock: Cottontail Press, 1977) writes that cinders from the flaming barn must have been blown to the flammable wooden roof of the farmhouse. Odger insists, however, that the overalls of Blashette’s farmhand Slow Jimjoe McKessick caught fire at about the same time that the hay was ignited by an ill-placed cigarette, and instead of dropping and rolling upon the ground, flaming Jimjoe actually ventured into the kitchen looking for baking soda and immediately ignited a pile of wood-stove-desiccated newspapers stacked by the door, kicked over a bottle of turpentine, its lid left carelessly underscrewed, and knocked off a leaking camp lantern teetering precariously on the edge of the kitchen counter. Miraculously, according to Odger, the dimwitted farmhand not only recovered from his burns, but went on to implication in the Arkansas Queen steamboat wreck of 1895 that claimed the life of Hector Hamlen, the doily magnate.

2. Aunt Renata was not a happy hostess.Renata Goldpaw pulls no punches in her own assessment of those months in which she boarded her temporarily homeless brother and sister-in-law and their three-legged son. In her diary, Renata calls the time spent in the company of her brother’s family “hell, pure unadorned, unadulterated hell.” One entry offers a particularly insightful look at her harsh feelings for young Jonathan in particular.

“Everyone thinks Jonathan’s such an angel. Ye Gods and Little Fishes, ain’t that a rip-snorter! Ask my little Timmy. He reports that when no one is looking, Cousin Jonny kicks him — not once, not twice, but three times! Each with a different leg. Good God and Jesus Pudding, this unbearable situation had better end soon or Timmy will become a nerve-frayed little quiver-boy whom no one will want to look upon and may even throw stones at. I could not bear that! I volunteered to go with Addicus to that farm and help him rebuild the house to speed up their departure, but he declined. This morning Timmy came to me and said that Jonathan had hidden his toy soldiers and had stolen the little sweet I had tucked beneath his pillow for helping Mommy roll the dough for the lattice pie we had last night. This is while everyone else is singing the demon child’s praises. I cannot wait until the evil is removed from this house!”

Apparently Renata never confronted her brother Addicus with these charges. I am certain they were baseless. Little Timmy’s tendency toward mendacity and self-bruising was widely known, even at the time of the Blashette’s stay.

3. A fresh coat of paint was all that was needed now.Odger Blashette, interview.

4. Memories of a merry Christmas, however, were marred by an unfortunate accident.According to family historian, Candida Isbell Loring, it is unlikely that the story is true. Given the personality profile she has pieced together of Jonathan’s Great Aunt Harriet, it is doubtful that the old woman would have simply lain without complaint beneath the fallen Christmas tree and waited patiently for her presence there to be detected. She would, in all likelihood, have bellowed without recess until rescue became assured. One can only subscribe to the truth of the prevailing account by accepting the theory that the ornament lodged in her mouth made the broadcasting of her whereabouts a futile endeavor.

Incidentally, Jonathan was blessed with eleven aunts and twenty-one great-aunts from both sides of the family, almost all still alive at this point in his life. I have made no effort to catalog them or to gauge the degree to which he was close to each. Some, Harriet Blashette being a good representative, were nearly daily fixtures. Others he hardly had the chance to meet. For example, Jonathan did not see his mother’s sister Nydia for nearly thirty years, the result of her banishment to the wilds of Alaska for bearing a child out of wedlock and for attempting to assign paternity to successful local confectioner Henry Bellamy when it was clearly his deficient twin brother Benry whom the baby favored.

5. “ Your pomade has soiled my antimacassar.”Jonathan was fond of Aunt Lindy in spite of her eccentricities. However, this particular trait — the tendency to assail houseguests upon their leave-taking with charges of having done damage to her furniture and other household items — even Jonathan found a little irritating. Jonathan Blashette, Early Memories , JBP.

6. “ You put sticky wicky on my stereopticon.”Jonathan had been eating jam and bread but his hands had been tidily wiped, so the accusation was unfounded. Ibid.

7. “ That smelly stethoscope has been up someone’s ass.”Even Aunt Lindy’s last days were colored by baseless allegations against her doctor and the hospital nursing staff. Ibid.