Grandma Lesley made the world's best cinnamon rolls. Champion stock. Old-timers in Grant County, who knew her as children, still speak wistfully of those rolls. After my parents were divorced, my mother and I lived with her parents in the Dalles, and once a year, we'd go down to meet the bus and greet Grandma Lesley. She always stayed about a week, but I secretly wished she stayed there all the time.
I'd wake up in the morning and listen eagerly for Grandma Lesley bustling around in the kitchen, the clanking of pans and bowls. She'd let me help a bit by fetching eggs or unwrapping the countless butter wax wrappers. Still. I think no one could copy the recipe or make it quite right, though hundreds have tried.
When I was young, I thought her singing made the magic happen. She sang "Billie Boy," "The Sinking of the Maine," and "The Strawberry Roan," my father's favorite. "Keep singing all your life, Craig," she advised. "If you're singing, you can't be crying."
I had never seen her cry, nor ever expected to, but as I was working on Burning Fence, I ran across her old diary entries that showed she had plenty to cry about. Anna Jackson Lesley met my grandfather, Jasper, when she was 12 and he was 38. She claims he was the first man she saw in remote Tillamook County, except for her relatives. Given her life, despite their difference in ages, he must have seemed like a savior.
She writes:
When Daisy, my youngest sister, was born, my mother and stepdad took off hunting and was gone five days. During the time they were gone, the no good dogs which my stepfather always kept around et our food. Leaving me with his two children and my baby sister for 4 days without any food. I was so sick that I couldn't eat when they come back. They didn't shoot any meat and I don't remember what we lived on in the period right after that.
Anna lived with her mother and stepfather under these conditions until she was 12. Although she was old enough to attend school, they wouldn't allow it. They still took off time to hunt and Anna writes: "We et mostly bread and bacon grease. The stock all died before the winter was over ? from starvation."
During the early years of their marriage, they homesteaded at Lost River and had six children in seven years. When things proved too tough there, they headed to Grant County where the soil was rocky and the task of farming more onerous. They didn't have the proper clothes for the bitterly cold weather, "We was always sick."
Anna wouldn't see Tillamook or any of her own relatives for another thirty-five years. In Grant County she had five more children ? twelve altogether. Then when Dora, her oldest daughter, died of diptheria, she raised her three children as well.
My grandfather Jasper wasn't around much of the time. Friends would stop by promising riches in the Alaskan, Idaho, and Califoria gold fields. Then he'd be away for months. "I'd never see him until harvest time. Then he be mad."
When Jasper died she stayed a widow for six years. She remarried but found little love in it: "I never knew what real love is. Each of my marriages was a marriage of convenience. First to get away from my family and the next for someone to help me and my family and heavier responsibilities.... For twenty-nine years straight, I always had a baby in the house."
When I read that last diary entry, it speared me through the heart. No wonder she always insisted on singing.