Alice Melville lived in a one room shack at the ass end of an onion field in Bakersfield, CA for forty years, or the entire second half of her life. In any case, it's the only house I ever knew "Granny" Melville to have. My father, mother, brother and I would drive out from the coast, over the Grapevine, down the hill and switch to the 99 headed for Bakersfield. The shack wasn't quite in Bakersfield, so technically is would have to be listed in real estate ads as "Bakersfield adjacent" (L.A. joke). Somewhere a few miles out of town, we would pull off the highway and take a service road a mile or so to a dirt road and on to the shack, which if memory serves could be seen from the highway.
Anyway, it hadn't always been that way for "Granny". She wasn't really my great-grandmother, having been my grandmother's aunt and taking in Marge when her father left for Africa, South America, the world. Alice's family was said to have come from money in Ireland, leaving from Cork was fashionable and expensive. How she came to be in Bakersfield only the Mormons know for sure, but she did in the 1920's. She married a wealthy man and together they owned and operated a hotel, servicing travelers on their way north from L.A. or south from nothing. According to family legend, Alice even had an affair with Charlie Chaplin who stopped one night on his way to film The Gold Rush in Lake Tahoe, a story that has always been a source of pride in our family. In any case, the Depression hit and they lost the hotel, lost the money and her husband lost his life. Alice was left to herself. Over the next decade or so, she slowly sold off the property that surrounded "the big house" that she still owned. Eventually, she couldn't afford to keep that so she sold it on the condition that she would be allowed to stay in the servants' quarters on the farm, or, if you prefer, the aforementioned shack. And that's where she lived from the late 30's until the time that I would go to see her as a young boy in the 70's.
Shack might be too generous a description of the corragated tin and one inch boards that looked straight out of a Dorothea Lange picture. We would go see her three or four times a year, driving the two hours there and back with my father, who as a peddler drove for a living, at the wheel. The place itself was an 8' by 8' square with two "rooms" and a porch, which is where Granny Melville sat listening to Gene Autry's Angels play baseball on the radio, rocking in her chair, drinking pint bottles of Lucky Lager in the heat of Baker's Hell. We would arrive and naturally have to use the bathroom, an outhouse with no light and no septic tank located around back of the shack. Those were the fastest trips to the bathroom of my life. We would then go "in", though I'm not sure all of us truly fit in the shack. The front room had a chair and a wood buring stove, which served to heat the place and as an oven. She had a cast iron skillet and a tea kettle, but not much else. There was electrictiy, but no running water. She had an old refridgerator full of beer and other food. The back room, the smaller of the two, contained a twin metal bed with an old mattress on top and a small dresser where she kept the ancient floral print dresses she would wear. There were newspapers against the walls along the floor to keep the wind from coming through the visible cracks.
These trips meant the world to her, though I'm not sure she ever said so. She was a hard woman and not to be messed with. When we would go out, my brother and I would play in the dirt, or with the cats, but you didn't mess with Granny. My dad would restock her beer and then we would take her out to town for Chinese food, which she loved. We would come back and stay for an hour or two catching up. She would show my mom and dad her latest letter from a President, this one from Jimmy Carter. She had letters from every American President going back to Hoover. Then, in the late afternoon heat of a Bakersfield day, we would get back in the car, wave goodbye and leave her sitting on her porch, rocking, sweating and faintly smiling.
Once, after one such visit, we went to see my dad's Uncle Duke and Aunt Madge in neighboring Oildale. Duke and Madge were Okies like my grandfather and had settled there in the 30's. Duke had a Model A Truck that was fully restored and he took my brother and I for a ride. He had a tree in his back yard that grew 5 different kinds of fruit, a Steinbeckian man if ever one existed. I couldn't help but think of Granny Melville at Duke's house, wondering how such splendor could be so close to such poverty.
Eventually, Alice grew too old of body and mind to fight off the efforts of various concerned family members to move her off the land and to a real house with water and everything. In her mid 80's she went to live with my grandmother in Santa Barbara, but she was never the same. I won't pretend that to know what life lessons I learned from spending time with her, or what cosmic significance her life story entails, but I think of her from time to time. That she was the matriarch of this white trash family of my mother's side makes perfect sense. Knowing that family as I have come to helps to understand why she would choose to live in that shitbox in Bakersfield for as long as she did. I last saw her in Cottage Hospital, around the corner from my grandmother's house. She was dying and didn't know who I was, or any of us for that matter. In her mind, she was rocking in her chair, listening to baseball, drinking a pint bottle of the bad stuff and minding her own fucking business.
