Lilies of the Field: An Autobiography by Amanda A. Courtney

CHAPTER 1

If you are going to get to know me better, maybe I should start at the beginning. On the outside, everything looked normal for a family making their living from farming back in Oklahoma, back in 1951, the year I was born. My mother said I entered the world in a big hurry, and I stayed that way all my life. She was a stay-at-home mom then, and when she was a good mother, she was superb. She powdered my little bottom and slathered my body with baby oil and laid me in the sun to soak up solar rays that were considered healthy for a child back then.

She never bought canned baby food. All of what I ate was home-canned, fresh from her garden. She had been to nursing school in Wichita, Kansas, and practiced her healing on us children every day. But even in those earlier years of my life, I sensed something seriously wrong, whether I was to blame or because my mother wasn’t happy with her life on the farm, I didn’t know. And as early as age four or younger, I learned to watch her moods like a hawk. All I knew was life could be explosive, and if I wasn’t careful, I could get hurt.

But for the most part, I was a robust, happy baby, content to spend my time in the sun where an occasional cat rubbed up against me or a chicken cruised by. When I was old enough, I took to the fields and the pastures and the canyon that lay beyond the pastures to investigate, to imagine, to dream. Every animal was my pet. Every barn and old out building was my hiding place. But my brother James, two years older than me, was difficult, according to Mother. He was a fussy baby who refused to eat and as a result, was thin and not thriving. As he grew older, he took to his room to read and rarely came out. He was bright, but playful he was not, and I avoided his tantrums and hurtful words.

I remember my father as always busy, except for Sundays when he dressed in his best white, crisp shirt and fresh, clean overalls. Some of the time, he dressed for church. But most of the time, he dressed to go to either of my grandmothers’ houses for Sunday dinner with the family. His mother, my grandma Courtney, was an excellent Czech cook, and there were always pots of chicken and dumplings and homemade kolache, a fruit-filled pastry laden with flavor. Grandma Cryer was also an excellent cook who prepared roasts and fried chicken and warm apple pie.

But most of the time, Daddy baked in the Oklahoma sun, and his hands were dirty with grease from something broken, and his nails were full of dirt. I believed his skin was permanently crusted with Oklahoma’s red dust, and even if he scrubbed himself clean, that dark red seemed to bleed through. He was proud to be a farmer, proud to sink his hardened hands into the golden fields of corn and wheat.

I remember he carried me high on his shoulders where I felt the safest in my early years. But mostly, it seemed that when he wasn’t milking a cow, he was thrusting a bale of hay or mending a fence or cutting wheat with the harvest crews that came through Oklahoma every season.

He, like my mother, was handsome and carried himself with much dignity. It was said of him at his funeral that he dressed like a railroad bum and talked like a college professor. He too was educated, having gone to college in his early twenties to study animal husbandry. That was something he was quite proud of, in that a person born in 1902 was not, on the average, well educated in that part of the country. Indeed, he was a proud man, especially of the Courtney name. He was born and raised eldest of nine children, and he had learned to work hard at an early age. It was expected of him to take over the family farming operation, although true farming was not in his blood.

He had married my mother at age forty-nine and never expected two children to come of it, especially one as argumentative as I was in later years. It went totally against his Victorian upbringing. He was serious and staunch, politically and philosophically bantering, and he liked to make his opinion known. Harry Bellmount, his neighbor and friend and governor of Oklahoma, had once asked him to run on his party’s ticket. But Daddy turned him down because he was too busy with the farm. He was known in the county as a poet, an artist, and the go-to guy for advice on anything.

Daddy. I never called him anything different and I believe he would have been insulted if I would have. Once I had referred to my Uncle Wes as Wes and Daddy came unglued. It was not the Oklahoma way, a mostly southern state that still valued the old ways. Daddy didn’t want to spend that much time with me. I don’t believe it was from lack of love, but he felt that little girls should spend their time around their mothers learning women things. Plus, he was always busy with things that could be dangerous on a farm.

He was disappointed, if not disgusted, that my brother was considered so weakly and pampered so strongly by my mother. He never got a chance to show my brother the ropes of the farm. On the other hand, I was always ready to tag along wherever Daddy went, and I think now he would tell you I was a bit of a daddy’s girl.

My fondest memory of him was sitting between his knees atop the tractor as we plowed rows for our crops. He would see me running on the field and stop the tractor and lift me up by one arm. I thought he had to be the strongest man in the world. In 1956, I remember we had just got electricity on the farm, and even though we had no indoor plumbing, thus no bathroom, we did have a TV soon after acquiring electricity. My dad was as proud of it as though he had invented it himself, and every Saturday night, we had to watch Gunsmoke.

However, plans for an inside toilet never happened, and I remember making the long jaunt out to the outhouse in hail, rain, snow, and sleet. For extreme emergencies, a porcelain pot was hidden under the bed. We did have a little red pitcher pump in the kitchen that was fed from a cistern, which was more than many farming families had at the time. This is where Daddy hung his hat, just inside the kitchen door.

The farmhouse itself seemed huge to me then. It had been built by my grandfather in the late 1800s, a wood-frame, two-story home with two bedrooms upstairs and two downstairs. The bedrooms had been added on after it was apparent he would have a large family, nine total. I never knew Grandpa Courtney as he died the year after I was born, but I heard from Daddy’s sister that he could be quite abusive with the children and Grandma Courtney. He ran the family with an iron fist. It was said Grandma bowed down to him in fear and had even gone into labor with my father while helping to pull a plow behind a horse through the fields.

Daddy, the oldest and the one in charge of his siblings, always laughed when he explained that he was twenty-one years old before he woke up with a dry night shirt. He supervised his younger siblings and felt they were his responsibility until the day he died.

As much as I loved my father, our relationship would change as I grew older, and I thought I knew better. It was a bone of contention for Daddy. His intention was for me to do what he said when he said to do it, no argument. I had other ideas.

At a very tender age, I learned that Mother was not the same person from one time to the next. Yes, she was president of the Mother’s Club, the ladies auxiliary, involved with FFA, PTA, and even taught Sunday school. She worked her fingers to the bone washing clothes either by washboard or by ringer washer. She fed us many meals she prepared from her garden and the chickens she raised. She threw the best birthday parties for us kids, better than any of the other children’s mothers around the farm community. She drove loads of wheat to the grain elevator, fattened harvest hands on fried chicken and mashed potatoes and corn—everything she raised herself.

And yet the children she raised knew there was something missing, something not right that none of the other mothers did. Other children seemed not to be frightened of their mother, but we were.

CHAPTER 2

From as early as I can remember, I knew that whatever she tried to hide in a coffee cup made her act differently. It was a yellow liquid that foamed and tickled my nose. She quickly went from being different to becoming violent and this is where the idea of a normal family life flies out the window.

It started out as her getting grouchy, of this or that hurting, of someone doing something to annoy her, which caused her to reach for whatever came out of that bottle; and she tried to hide it in the coffee cup that made her behave the way she did.

And then she would do things to us that broke my heart. With my brother, it was the enema giving. Many times I witnessed his yelps as she entered him with an enema tube hooked to a metal canister. She claimed he was constipated and need a ritual of enemas to clean him out. With me, it was the abuse.

First of all, I was not the little girl she wanted. In fact, I was bigger and stronger than my brother, and the only thing I ever complained about was the pain in my feet that followed me throughout childhood into adulthood. For this, she bought me orthopedic shoes that were not cute nor could she dress me in sweet little girly dresses because I was too big. Once she took me to a specialist to find out why I was so big. The doctor simply asked her, Do you want me to shrink her? She huffed out of the office, complaining I was too lazy, didn’t help with the house enough. I was as worthless as tits on a bore pig because I preferred to be outside with my beloved pets.

The list goes on until the mental abuse became physical. Early on I felt that I just wasn’t right, from the pain in my feet to the curls in my hair.

I still weep when I think of the mental abuse, and I still grimace in pain when I talk about the physical pain even though it abated many years ago. It stopped because