The first clear memories I have of my maternal grandmother (Narcissa Cross) I was four years old. I may have been young, but I knew evil when I saw it. She scared the bejeesus out of me. Although Narcissa was, probably, only five foot eight, or so, my grandma seemed, to me, to be a giant. She always wore dark dresses that buttoned up to the neck and down to the wrists. She had black hair and piercing, inky black eyes, and her mouth turned down at both corners, in a, perpetual, angry frown

When I was older my mother and I used to talk about her early life and family. She was the ‘middle child’, and her family made sure that she knew her place. Her sister, Ruby, was the oldest, and, the “pretty one”. Her brother, Jess, was the baby of the family and the only son. And, as her mother (Narcissa) explained to my mother, as a child, “You are the one we didn’t want.”

It is hard to imagine someone being so deliberately cruel to a child, unless you know it was Narcissa speaking. This is a woman who, when my mother was four, beat her until she passed out to “break her spirit.”

I think some of the hatred must have been because my mother was so dark. Narcissa was a racist, and one of the more embarrassing family secrets was the introduction of Native American blood into the family line when the wife of a missionary on a reservation in Oklahoma gave birth to a ‘half-breed’ child; one of the many ‘secrets’ in our family. And, it must have been ‘bitter rue’ to my grandmother when she realized that this dark and alien looking child she didn’t want was the brightest of her three children.

Over the course of many years, my mother and I talked about my grandma and what might have made her into this harsh and bitter woman. My mother said that she thought that Narcissa might have done well in the modern world, with her ambition and brains, but, life in the late 1800s and early 1900s gave her no opportunity to channel her energy in the direction she would have liked.

She had been married, at seventeen, to a man twenty years older than herself, and by the time she was nineteen she was a widow and back to living at home in Missouri, with her parents. This is where she met my grandfather, who was married, at the time, and had six daughters. This didn’t stop Narcissa. In fact, nothing ever seemed to stop her from getting what she wanted. Within a year my grandpa had divorced his first wife, abandoned his family, and moved Narcissa to the barren plains of Eastern Colorado.

Over the next six years, between his trips to try to find oil in the Southwest, they had three children, but by the time Jess was born, Grandpa had had it and he left his new family, and never came back to stay. That may have been one of the smartest things he ever did.

I was, probably in my mid-thirties when, during the course of a conversation, my mother said that when Narcissa’s first husband died there were some unanswered questions, and, on the part of the dead husband’s family, some open suspicion regarding his demise. There was no legal action and nothing ever proven, but Narcissa had not seemed to be, exactly heartbroken.

This brings me back to my instinctive fear of her. As afraid as I was of her, I must have stayed out of her way as much as possible, so the only clear memory I can call up, from my early childhood, is that of a confrontation between Grandma and my sister, Dolores, when I was four.

Dolores was always ‘sickly’; if she didn’t have a runny nose, she had an earache, and if it wasn’t that, it was something else. She was seven, just three years older than I, and was skinny as a rail, and as I said, my grandmother seemed to be a giant. The memory is like a movie in my mind. My grandma was standing in front of the screen door and beyond her I could see the freedom of the dirt yard and the bright sunshine. In the house it was cold and dim, and my sister, in her faded flour-sack dress, was standing between my grandma and me. My grandma had just told us, “If your mother loved you, you wouldn’t be living in a shack like this.” (I found out, when I was older, that this was very typical for Narcissa; undermine the parents, whenever possible.)

My scrawny sister looked up at her and said, “Bullshit!”

I remember that, for a moment, I couldn’t breathe. I was paralyzed with fright, and I think I was waiting for lightning to come out of her eyes and strike Dolores dead.

Dolores grabbed my hand, and pulling me behind her, went around my grandma and out the door.

In 1996, my mother and grandmother both long gone, I received a call from an author, in Missouri, who was writing a biography of my cousin. He had gotten my name through family sources and he asked if I would mind giving him some background on the family.

We must have talked for an hour, on the first call, about the family and who was married to whom, and the children, and as much as I could tell him about my cousin. He asked if he could call, again, and I said, “Why not?”

About three months later, I received a second call. We talked for a few minutes, and then he asked me how much I knew about my grandmother.

I laughed and told him, “Well, she scared me, and I’m fearless.”

That loosened him up, After we quit laughing, he asked me what I knew about her first husband.

I said, “Virtually nothing. He’s just a name to me.”

There was a pause, and then he said, “Would it surprise you to know that there was speculation that she might have murdered him?”

My reply, “There is no evil act that she could have committed that would surprise me.”

He said, “That’s a pretty brutal indictment.”

I said, “She is one of two truly evil people I’ve met in my life. I don’t think there was anything she wouldn’t do to get what she wanted.”

I believe that all of the family knew what my grandma was. She left a trail of damaged and broken people and families behind her all of her life. This family “secret” was never truly a secret, at all.