Into the Wild 
Aunt Sister
Cantankerous and independent, sharp-tongued and opinionated, Rosita Holdsworth Hollar was a frontier woman who loved teaching children and acquiring land, a terrible cook who had no use for housekeeping or fashion, a loner who was self-sufficient well into her nineties. In other words, she was the best role model a girl could ask for.
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She kept a journal every day for sixty years and wrote stories based on tragedies that she had witnessed in her social work: a girl who longed to drown herself because of painful boils in her ears, a stillborn baby preserved in a jar of formaldehyde so it would not become a duende, a troublesome spirit. She had an eye for the tragic and the grotesque. This did not include a tolerance for the salacious. When I was in my twenties and writing a novel, The Raven's Bride, I would sometimes read aloud to her what I had written during the day. On one occasion the passage involved a sexual encounter between Sam Houston and a woman in a barn, and at Mama Two's request I reluctantly forged my way through it at the lunch table. She was quiet for a while, sipping little spoonfuls of her soup. Then she said, "That was very vivid. It was very clearly depicted." I knew better than to take this as a compliment and waited for the other shoe to drop. She had another spoonful, put the spoon down on the table, looked at me directly, and added, "Why don't you blur it just a little."
She developed an annoying habit in her later years of watching television with the sound turned off while people were trying to have a conversation with her. On one occasion an uncle of mine was telling her how a bank had loaned someone an amount of money. Mama Two was watching CNN with the sound off and was unresponsive to the story. Finally, my uncle said, "Mother, that just drives me crazy when you do that. It seems like you're not listening. Can't we turn the TV off?" Very slowly she turned to look at him, as if her thoughts were far away. "I was just wondering, dear," she said pensively, "if 'loan' can be used as a verb." She had not only been listening, she had been diagramming the sentences. She was, I believe, one of the most controlling women I have ever known—disapproving and loving in the same breath.
I am her namesake and have always wished to be more like her. Her goodness and accomplishments continue to impress and intimidate me. But I am more suited to long hours of solitude, pecking out words and chiseling down my sentences. From time to time, with a sense of obligation, I have served on community boards, but I was always puzzled by the budgets and the power structures and at times only vaguely cognizant of what, exactly, I was supposed to be doing. It is when I am alone and my fingers are poised on a keyboard that my heart begins to thump and my mind to find passion and focus.
GIVEN A CHOICE, I SUSPECT I might choose my grandmother's assets over mine. But I was not given a choice. Instead I was given Aunt Sister to balance my view of things and provide another type of role model. Aunt Sister did not have Mama Two's charm. She had a caustic Texas stubbornness. She said what she thought, coyness be damned, manners be damned.
I was never at ease with her bluntness, being more accustomed to subtlety and nuance, and even today cannot explain why I felt such an affinity with her. But I always felt linked to Aunt Sister, and I think she did to me. She would write to me when she was leaving the farm: "I'm going to Brownwood to visit a friend from other days. If we have any real illness in the family, let me know . . ." I regret now that I did not know her on more equal terms. There were too many years between us. We never lived in the same town. Our relationship had mostly to do with books and my writing. She read my manuscripts and told me to "eat" my vitamins and keep the novels "percolating."
Even though they were so different, Aunt Sister and my grandmother adored each other. They had grown up in a close-knit family, milking cows together in the mornings and staying home from school during hog butchering time. The girls were Rosita, Mary Elizabeth, Eleanor, and Willie, and the boys were Kirk and Robert. They were a family of frontier people, but the frontier was dying off. They went away to school. My grandmother's three sisters earned seven graduate degrees among them. My grandmother attended the University of Texas in the summer and taught first grade back home in Kerrville and Center Point in the fall and spring to make ends meet. Then she married Howard. Aunt Sister married Roy. Aunt Eleanor married Dean Wilson, a grocer, and settled in Beeville, where she taught school, like her sisters. She was the only one among her siblings who ever drank or smoked, and many of us in the younger generation secretly admired her for it. Aunt Bill, as we called Willie—or Dr. Willie Holdsworth, as her students at UT referred to her—sent a telegram to her sisters the day she received her doctorate from Columbia: "Educated, by gosh." She never married, though in her old age she showed me a stack of love letters from a man who had wanted to marry her many years before. She had turned him down because he was an atheist. She was the most beautiful of the sisters, and the most persnickety.
It never seemed to bother Aunt Sister that while her sister Mary Elizabeth was founding hospitals and building libraries and being waited on at her dining room table, she herself was killing chickens from the back yard for dinner. The house, as I remember it, smelled of rancid food and moldy old books. There were so many books stacked in the rooms that pathways had to be made between the stacks so that one could pass through. Mama Two tried to give Aunt Sister things to improve her standard of living. She used to send clothes—fine wool suits—but Aunt Sister never wore them. She tried to hire someone to help Aunt Sister cook, someone to clean up her house, someone to replace her faulty pipes. But if she wrote a check to Aunt Sister to help pay for these things, Aunt Sister would only set the money aside to buy more land. "Don't give her any money," Mama Two began to tell the family. "If you want to do something for her, pay the contractors directly."
The problem was, Aunt Sister didn't want anything done for her. She was self-sufficient well into her nineties. She loved land, cattle, dogs (often maimed in some way and acquired late in their life), books, and children who wanted to learn how to read. Her letters to family usually involved information about the crops. I have a letter that she wrote at the age of 94: "Cropwise we are blessed with early rains and a fine first cutting of hay. . . . Cattle have fared fine—sold reasonably well. The seedling peach I so nearly took out three years ago yielded a good harvest." The letter goes on about her dogs, a kitten that had survived "the hazards of barn owls and dogs and other cat enemies," and how the recent removal of cataracts had allowed her to read telephone numbers without her glasses. It draws a vivid picture of Aunt Sister's daily life in her farmhouse: "I store away feed and count the days until grass will rise again."
THERE IS A CONCEPT IN science called "regressing to the mean." Along any spectrum, there is the tendency for things to move toward the middle, to average themselves out. For example, if a mother is particularly tall, it is likely that her daughter will be shorter. If a father has an unusually good disposition, it is likely that his son will have a worse one. If a parent is exceedingly brilliant, ambitious, or neurotic, it is likely that his children will be less so. The world is peopled with remarkable families that peter out somewhere along the fourth or fifth generation. The drive, the gift, whatever it is—the blood?—gets watered down.
If you inherited the turned-up Crook toes, the Holdsworth moles, or any version of the large Butt nose, you were considered blessed in my family, though an outsider might see it differently. I was lucky (or unfortunate) enough to acquire all three, though in mitigated versions. My Holdsworth moles are smaller, and there are fewer of them, than those carried so unapologetically by my great-aunts and great- uncles, but nevertheless I am preposterously proud of the fact that I seem to have more of them than my siblings or my cousins do. My dermatologist has for years wanted to remove them, but I have clung to the Holdsworth moles as tenaciously as they have clung to me. They are a mark of my heritage.
Over the years I have watched my glasses begin to slide down my nose the way Aunt Sister's did, my chin begin to jut forward. "Well, Aunt Sister," my own sister says to me sometimes, when I have made a snarky remark at the dinner table. I would be presumptuous to believe that I am like Aunt Sister. But at times there is a certain slippage in attire, a certain oblivious neglect of formality that seems to come to me from nowhere—from some inexplicable link or strand of DNA, a remnant of the past. Left to myself, I will work all day at the computer in the T-shirt I have slept in, jog in that same T-shirt, shower, and put on another T-shirt, which I will sleep in and wear the next day. Hanging in my closet are a number of timeless designer suits my grandmother gave or handed down to me that, like Aunt Sister, I have never worn. I recently found myself speaking before an august gathering wearing a jacket from a thrift shop and ten-year-old shoes. The "Aunt Sister gene," as my mother calls it, had leaked through. It also shows up in my pack-rat propensity. When my mother insisted last summer that I remove the boxes I had stored for years in her attic, I discovered among the artifacts a collection of high school hall passes, clippings of hair from horses I had loved, instructions on how to wear my orthodontic headgear, and the beard of a turkey I once shot.
I am undecided as to whether I should be proud of these meager tokens of a link to Aunt Sister. My home is not—as hers was—an eyesore; I am not committed to a life of squalor; I am investing in Pilates classes to prevent my posture from folding into hers. But having her image before me—sharp-tongued, opinionated, generous if she liked you, scornful if she didn't—elevates my mood at unexpected times. It liberates me from the burden of good breeding.
I have managed, in my forties, to have the second child that I so badly wanted. My husband and I have given her the middle name of Holdsworth. With a son and a daughter, our family is complete. I have learned how inescapably the generations segue into one another, how strong the ties can be. How comforting the memory of an odd old woman who refused to be anyone other than who she was.
My Library
