Roses for Mae and Oscar

“Mae!!!…..Mae!!!.......Mae!!!” The old man lying on the nursing home bed knows that he is dying. From time to time, he is hallucinating and he will call out “Mae!!!.....Mae!!!...Mae!!!”. Later, my father told me that Mae was the name of his first wife.

The dying old man was my grandfather, Oscar Oliver Saunders. Mae, the one that he was calling for, was Mae Falls Saunders my grandmother. Together they not only shared a great love for each other, but they also shared a terrible secret. They kept that secret even after their deaths.

They first lived in the little town of Trenton, Texas. They would fall in love, marry and have six children, three boys and three girls. One of those girls was my mother.

Mae had died long before I was born and my grandfather would remarry two more times. So in my growing up years I never gave much thought to the grandmother that I never knew.

After I was grown and had married and had children, the shocking story of their secret became known to their children, my mother and her bothers and sisters and to us, their grandchildren. My mother had great difficulty accepting the story of that secret.

The terrible secret they shared was that as a child, in 1892, Mae’s brother, John, killed their father, Alfred Falls…..with an axe. The story of this murder was the sensational news story in all the newspapers at that time. At the age of fourteen, he was sentenced to Life in prison. We don’t know all the details of what happened and as to why John would want to kill their father. However, in the testimony at his trial, it came out that Alfred had been beating his son with a bull whip for playing with his pistol. It appears that John had been playing with the pistol again and was due for another beating ….with the dreaded bull whip. A bull whip is about ten to twelve feet long and has a leather tip on the end that can cut through flesh like a knife. The person being beaten has to be tied to a tree or something to endure the beating. In today’s world, I suppose this would be considered child abuse to the extreme, but at that time it was a father trying to control the dangerous impulses of his young son.

After Mae was married and got her share of her father’s inheritance, they moved far away and bought a farm near Uvalde, Texas. They hoped they were far enough away that here nobody would know their secret. A few years after they had moved there, Mae died of tuberculosis.

Oscar, the grandfather I knew as a child, was a big strong outdoorsman man and an extremely devout Christian. He did not smoke or chew tobacco, he did not drink alcohol, he did not play cards or gamble, he did not dance, he said the blessing before every meal, he did not use profanity and he did not gossip. He put on a freshly ironed shirt with a black necktie and with his Bible in hand went to the Baptist Church every Sunday and taught Sunday School. He did every single thing a devout Christian is supposed to do.

It would take me a lifetime to begin to understand what I think was happening with Oscar on his deathbed. I think that Oscar believed that Mae, after her death, was in Heaven, so he wanted to live his live in a way to ensure that he too would go to Heaven to be with her again. In his hallucinations that day when he was near death, in his mind he was entering Heaven and he was calling for her. “Mae!!!.....Mae!!!...Mae!!!...