It hadn’t been an easy life for Frankie. Considered an old maid at the age of nineteen with no prospects, she was given a one way ticket from Oregon to Palms, California to meet her new husband. She was a good Christian girl with skills in all the home arts. She could cook, sew, rig up a buggy, do laundry, crochet, and be a proper wife for the son of a Baptist preacher.
The son was like many preacher’s kids you hear about, carousing with inappropriate women and drinking too much in the local saloons. The preacher figured he needed to settle his boy down. One family had known the other back in Iowa, so a deal was struck, and Frankie and Abe became one.
They had six children one right after the other. The first ten years were productive. Abe’s farming business grew into building and pretty soon he owned or leased most of Cheviot Hills. They were stalwart members of the community and everything was going just fine until the small pox incident.
A new vaccine had just been invented and everyone was urged to get it. Small pox was a serious threat and the health department was trying to eradicate it by vaccinating as many people as possible. Those early vaccines had side effects, one of those being an allergy to the vaccine itself and or contracting the disease from the vaccine, and possible death.
Frankie was an avid reader and had recently been inspired by the new teachings of a woman named Mary Baker Eddy. She was promoting her philosophy of what she termed Christian Science. The major belief of Christian Science is that all problems in the world are because of error. The error of thinking, the error of doing, the error of neglect. The new religion also promoted abstaining from alcohol and no medical intervention for illness. All problems could be solved with proper thought, proper actions, and prayer.
Frankie didn’t want her children vaccinated, but Abe insisted that they show good faith to the community. She really had no say in what went forward. It was not a time when women had much power in the west. The reactions to the vaccination were varied, but the kids suffered huge swollen and reddened areas surrounding the vaccination site. Some of them became feverish and fell ill for a week or two, but Lenora, beautiful sweet Lenora, with the blond hair and blue eyes, just seven years old… died.
Frankie was inconsolable. She plunged into the study of Christian Science even more fervently. She subscribed to their new newspaper, The Monitor. She began having opinions about things. She was in favor of Prohibition, and Women’s Suffrage. She had never gone to school past the eighth grade, but she could read and she could use a dictionary, so she taught herself.
Abe came home drunk… his own way of dealing with the death of his little daughter. Her little blond curls would bounce as he bounced her on his knee. She was by far the most beautiful of their brood. But he couldn’t allow Frankie her new religion. He was a preacher’s kid, a confirmed Baptist, and a leader of the community, so he beat her as was the norm for many women in that time and he burned her books.
She rebelled as many women did during that era. Time and again Frankie would watch her books burn only to purchase another copy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, by Mary Baker Eddy. She stuck by her conversion even as Abe returned to the activities he enjoyed before his marriage.
He came home one night to find Frankie studying her books. He threw the books across the room and took advantage of his marital rights. Frankie had thought she was past the prospect of another child, but this was, in fact, just what she needed to bring her out of her mourning.
Little Dolly was born nine months later, her change of life baby. Dolly was smothered and loved by everyone in the family. But she had her own fires to burn. Women got the vote, Prohibition was in full swing, the first level of sexual freedom had been established, but there was more work to do….
(First published 2/20/12)
