I Like to Go Swimming with Bow-Legged Women

James Archie Layton May 5, 1912

Archie and Opal Herzog Layton
Photo taken a few days after they were married in December 1923

Family Portrait December 17, 1938
Front row: Maidie V., Gerald B., Darrel R., Carol Ann, Richard C., Daniel E., Della Mae Second row: Golden A., Victoria Jane Walker Layton,Charles Amos Layton(80th birthday), James Archi & William El, Opal Third row: Ronald L., Julia, Annie B., Elizabeth, Alice R., Leonora W. Layton

1975

Grandfather's Song
Nan Arbuckle

The Osage family moved slowly to the beat,
circling the drum with sons and daughters,
grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Friends joined behind and beside.
We outside the dance stood quiet,
solemn as the dancers in tribute.
To have a song with Grandfather's name,
a tribute for a whole tribe to know,
respect for those now our memories--
we should learn from this pride.

My grandfather's song will have the rhythm
of train wheels on tracks, slow
regular, climbing long slopes.
It will dip and cry like the whistle
of steam rising over the valley,
sharp as red leaves on a mountainside.
Word sounds will jumble and roll
like the voices of many children calling,
playing homemade games of older days.
And in the end it will settle soft,
with the screaking click of a rocker
on a wood porch and tall hemlocks sighing, quiet
as the slow breath of an old man, remembering.

Let us, too, make songs of honor so our old men
are never quite gone.


My Grandfather lived in the house next door that my father built for him to keep the peace with my mother, since they both went on benders together. He always ate dinner with us. Before he moved next door, he lived with us, in his previous home, but I can't remember which room was his bedroom. He loved poetry and whiskey and when he was drunk, which was always, he recited poetry or naughty verse from popular songs.

One of my earliest memories is from when I was young enough for my father to spell out words, such as l-i-q-u-o-r. I told him I knew what he was spelling and he said prove it. I did. So, he stopped spelling out words. My Grandfather loved to tell scary riddles: one in particular was about wine bottles in which the speaker relished slitting women's throats and drinking thier blood. He also loved singing the refrain from a baudy tune, I like to go swimming with bow-legged women and swim between their legs, swim between their legs.

I don't remember a time when he wasn't an old man who cut our dog's hair with sheep shears or stole my mother's newly-planted flowers and replanted them in his yard because she had "too many" flowers. He cussed his leg when it wouldn't do what he wanted. He was funny, and tender, and terribly lonely. He lost his one love to another man while he was on a Mormon mission to England, married an Indian woman from Montana that his family made him give up, and finally he married my Grandmother, who was fifteen years younger than him. Grandmother Opal finally left him for another man, the Greek neighbor George Cerras, and he never remarried. He was broken-hearted and wandered the house crying that Opal had taken his "baby", referring to his daughter, nine-month-old Nancy. Grandma was awared the girls, Della and Maddie, and Grandpa was awarded the boys in the divorce,the same day Mr. Cerras was granted his divorce, but after a very brief time it became apparent that the drinking took precedence over everything, and Billy and Jerry took off through the fields for their mother's house. What's interesting, is that when I was a child, I felt an incredible urge to take off through the fields for Ogden, for what purpose, I didn't know, until now. The wanderer is part of my history. It's in my bones.

My father toughed it out,literally, and stayed behind, probably out of obligation, and quite possibly because he was old enough, twelve, to know he didn't want a stepfather. In George's defense, my Uncle Jerry told me that Mr. Cerras was good to him and was a good father. My grandmother and he were married for ten years until he died suddenly of a heart attack, and from the pictures I've seen of them together, they were obviously smitten with each other. He was much older, weather worn, and looked like a character from The Grapes of Wrath. In any case, my father barely made it out of his early years alive, a bout with rheumatic fever, no heat or food in the house, a chronically absent father, and no thanks to the strangely distant family that lived right along the same street who turned a blind eye, and in his own words, never had him to dinner. Grandmother Layton did his laundry and snuck food out the back door, lest her girls protest. He survived deprivation, extreme neglect,and even he'll tell you that he had the best of both worlds and that it was up to him to make it. It was so bad that a childless couple in the neighborhood offered to adopt him, but they were turned down. It's obvious his hardknock experience made him the scrapper, the determined to succeed no matter what, man he still is at 81. After days or weeks away from home, my father would head to Ogden to collect his own father from the 25th street bar scene, and he'd have to fight the drunks off to get Grandpa in the car. After he and my mother were married, it was the norm that when my father was away for work, a local bartender would call for her to come and get Arch. She'd drive, but her brother would go in the bar and retrieve him. And then both he and my father, and the rest of the family would have to endure the brutal silent treatment my mother meeted out as punishment. I'm grateful to report that the alcoholic gene and the silent treatment gene skipped me. You'll have to talk to my people to see what my problems are, since I'm certain my foilbles are hidden in plain site.

He died when I was very young, so I hold him in the unencumbered memory of childhood. He told me stories, he always had candy available, his home was an escape, he gave me candy money. The check I've posted was written just before he died and I don't know what it was for. I think it's sweet he always wrote in pencil.