When you go into a store like YesterNook, you almost always find something of a personal nature tucked away in one of the booths. It may be a yearbook or a scrapbook. Sometimes, it's old medals and awards. Most often, it's photographs.
Photographs are fascinating, especially when there are people in them. Those people were real. They lived and breathed. They worked and played. They were someone's parent or grandparent. They had a history that is totally hidden to us as we look at them now, hanging in a vintage shop.
What happened? Was there no one to take these memories after them? What were these lost histories. Who were these people?
In an effort to bring some of these folks back to life, we'd like to present the following story. We know it's not the real life story of these people, but it reminds us just a little of the reality of their lives.
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Gussie and Bertie weren’t really our aunts. In fact, they weren’t anyone’s aunts. Folks just got used to seeing them as the
town’s maiden aunties, since they seemed to be everywhere and do
everything. From the mayor to the pastor
to the undertaker, we all called them “Aunt Gussie and Aunt Bertie.”
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| "Aunt" Gussie |
Now, I came closer than most people to having them as
aunts. In a way, they kind of were my
aunts, just not by blood. Their older
brother Earl married Granny’s sister Dorcas a couple of years after she was
widowed when the tobacco barn fell on Uncle Cleve. That made Earl an uncle by marriage, which
sort of made his sisters aunts by extension, or something like that.
Gussie and Bertie were as close as two sisters could
be. You rarely saw one of them without
the other. They did all their shopping
together. They worked in the garden
together. They cleaned the house together. They went visiting together. They both sang in the church choir. They were nigh on inseparable, best of
friends as well as sisters.
But it wasn’t always that way. They had a terrible spat in their younger
days and ended up not speaking to each other for over twelve years. Seems they had both taken a shine to a horse
trader who passed through town from time to time. His name was Rufus, and he was a right fine
looking fellow, if a little shifty. He
took to wooing and courting both Gussie and Bertie, without ever giving either
of them any clue as to which way his affections really lay.
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| "Aunt" Bertie |
It wasn’t long before they took to squabbling with each
other something fierce. From there,
things escalated to dirty tricks. Gussie
locked Bertie in the cellar one time when Rufus came to call. Bertie retaliated by pouring syrup all over
her sisters hair right before Rufus called the next time. Their mama, Esterline, was at her wits’ end with
the two of them and was about to forbid both of them from ever even mentioning
his name again when the unthinkable happened.
Rufus left town with Coraline, Gussie and Bertie’s much
younger sister. Turns out he’d been
using their squabble as a distraction so he could court Coraline on the side,
knowing full well that Esterline would not approve of her youngest daughter
being wooed by such a scoundrel. The
whole town was shocked. Esterline was
devastated. And Gussie and Bertie kept
right on fighting. Each one blamed the
other for Rufus’ betrayal, convinced the Rufus would have never made eyes with
Coraline, if there had only been one older sister to court.
Eventually, they stopped speaking to each other. At all.
Not one word. They would talk to
Earl and Esterline, but not to each other.
There was nothing anyone could do to get them to even acknowledge each
other’s presence, much less try to patch things up. Earl married his first wife Bessamine and
moved out, leaving Esterline stuck at home with her uncommunicative daughters.
The strain was too much for Esterline, who began having
hysterical fits. Eventually her health
totally broke, leaving her confined to bed.
She began to waste away, unable to eat.
Finally, she passed away crying for Coraline and begging her remaining
daughters to make peace with each other.
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| Coraline |
Gussie and Bertie inherited the house and settled into a
routine of ignoring each other that stretched on for years. They cooked separately. They ate separately. When they sat together in the parlor, each
one sat in a chair with the back turned to the other, staring into a corner
like a naughty child on punishment. No one in town dared to ask one of them about
the other one for fear of the torrent of wrath that would be unleashed. Folks began to talk about the “crazy sisters”
who lived in the big house and “sat in the corners.”
They spent so much time and effort ignoring each other
that each one convinced herself that her sister did not really exist. The specter floating through the halls of the
house was merely a fragment of a memory and nothing more. Gussie and Bertie each existed in her own
solitary world. Until one night changed
everything.
Bertie was in the kitchen washing her supper dish, when
Gussie walked through. All of a sudden,
Gussie sneezed. Bertie found herself
caught in the grips of all the lessons in manners and decorum that Esterline
had drilled into her daughters. Before
she even realized what she was doing, force of habit seized her tongue and she
heard herself saying: “Bless you.”
No sooner had the words escaped her lips, when she
realized what she had done! She spoke to
Gussie! Evil, foul, Rufus-stealing
Gussie. She had broken her vow of
silence and now had not the slightest clue what to do next.
She stood there frozen, the wet dish in her hand
suspended above the sink. Her mouth was
hanging slightly open, and her eyes were growing wide, as terror began to grip
her mind. Whatever was she going to do
now?
At last she turned to face her sister, who was standing
frozen in the middle of the floor. Her
mouth was agape and her eyes were frozen wide with terror in an expression that
exactly mimicked her sister. As they
stood there silently, mouths open, hardly daring to breathe, the strangest,
most unexpected thing began to happen.
Gussie and Bertie began to laugh.
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| Uncle Earl (right) and Aunt Dorcas |
It started as a silly giggling fit, but soon spread to
hearty guffaws, as they fell into each other’s arms. Laughter turned to tears turned to talking
turned to yelling turned back to laughter.
On and on throughout the night, the cycle repeated itself. Each one would laugh at herself. Then they would laugh at each other. Then they laughed at themselves as a pair, as
they bared their souls and let go of all the pent up resentment.
They went through a pot of coffee that night, followed by
an entire bottle of Earl’s blackberry brandy.
They held hands over the table and begged for forgiveness, which was
quickly granted. Finally, as the sun
rose, they declared two things. First,
they had wasted enough time. Nothing,
especially not a man, was ever, ever going to separate them again. Secondly, it was really Coraline and Rufus they
were each angry with. They vowed to
never speak of her or Rufus again.
Story continues after the break.
