THE GOOD-FOR-NOTHING
MY GREAT GRANDMA FOUND A GOOD-FOR-NOTHING MAN IN A FISHING NET and I know it's weird but I'm guessing she didn't think so because she married the good-for-nothing and had three kids with him. My family is actually forbidden to say his name so I didn't grow up knowing what his name was. I don't even know if she knew what his name was. All I know is, she was a funky little spinster with a really good clam chowder recipe, and she married a man who was nineteen years her junior. He was so tall they had to stand like several yards away to get him in the wedding photo so the details of his face is blurry. She said he was the handsomest man she had ever clapped eyes on too. He was also very quiet and never said much. My grandpa remembered only one tiny thing about his father and that's that he had really cold, clammy hands.
My grandpa's sister however, remembered more than that. Her parents got married right after they met, so she was born within the first year of their marriage, a marriage that lasted only five years. Her whole life since she insisted to everyone that her father didn't leave, that he wasn't a good-for-nothing, and that he was killed. She vowed never to forget the day.
My grandpa's brother would laugh at her because he seemed to remember 'the day' too.
The day the good-for-nothing left, there was a beached whale with its tail wound up in fishing gear. The town's fishermen speared it to put it out of its misery then excitedly took it apart.
The neighbors presumed that the good-for-nothing left during all the commotion. What twenty-one year old would in his right mind would marry and stay married to a forty-something? As soon as the town economy was secure he didn't feel guilty enough to stick around.
Somehow, probably because she knew the story of how her parents met, the poor sister connected the tangled whale to her tangled father. She cried for a whole week, 'My daddy! My daddy! They killed my daddy!'
Even as an adult she would argue vehemently with all the family every holiday about it which ended in disowning us for a few months.
My own grandpa would quietly agree that it was a silly notion, but I heard once that he could never watch that one whale movie without tearing up.