Buried Hopes: A True Drunkard’s Tale

Life is a Family Saga

Jimmy Hope. The drunkard. It hadn’t always been this bad; I imagine, or my 2x great aunt wouldn’t have fallen for him. For many years, I’d stand before Betsey Foster’s tombstone in the tiny cemetery shaded by forest that had once been farmland. The stone stands beside her grandfather’s—not her husband’s. I don’t know why it never occurred to me that the name on her stone wasn’t her married one.

Betsey briefly makes an appearance in my NOVEL as a ghost of someone’s memory after her death, which I’d assumed was from childbirth. She didn’t matter much to the story at the time, anyway. But I’ve since discovered why my Uncle Joel (who was the cemetery sexton) noted in his burial journal that he’d charged my 3x great grandfather (Betsey’s father) for digging the grave instead or Jimmy Hope.

Jimmy Hope. Grandfather Charles had never trusted him, said he drank too much, but Betsey was stubborn. I wish I had known then that Betsey was certain her husband was poisoning her! Years later, Jimmy Hope made it into the local newspaper of a town a few miles away from Solon Pond. Jimmy later in life (after abusing his one daughter who became promiscuous and insane) was buried alive.

The writer of the newspaper story told the amusing tale of some men dragging the irascible drunkard to an open grave prepared for some other poor soul and dumping him in to teach him a lesson he would never learn. They kicked dirt over him until he began to stir. From nearby bushes, they stifled their laughter as they listened to him curse and scream—at first in terror and then in anger.

He had the strength to climb out, which was a shame since he’d buried his wife’s and daughter’s hopes years before.

I wonder if any of the townsfolk knew of the suspicions that led to him fleeing Solon Pond. I don’t really know if any of the pond people except those in the immediate family knew the suspected reason for Betsey’s death. My grandfather and grandmother may have not wanted such shameful secrets to see the light of day.

Families keep so many secrets. We all want to put our best forward as if to say we have conquered human frailty. We’ve made the right decisions. Our descendants are lucky recipients of a brilliant gene pool. Yet just like the first ones in The Garden, we are fools for pride.

That’s the thing about writing family sagas—yes, they are set in the past, but as Faulkner says, the past is now. There’s never a shortage of stoic heroes, suffering martyrs, and drunken villains. The townsfolk chose to take a broken man to an early grave as a laugh, but I wonder how my 3x great grandparents felt standing before their daughter Betsey’s tombstone with a carved Bible at the top of it? The pages are blank—as if there was no scripture verse to capture their grief or the ruinous pride of their daughter.

Do you have a family story that could be a novel?