3) The Unfinished Autobiography of Hannah Climena Pixley Ariail
In 1996 I interviewed Elmer Forrest, the younger brother of Lieutenant Ed Forrest, in Lee, Massachusetts. Ed was killed on April 3, 1945. His was the only name I remembered from the stories my father told when I was young, so I always would ask the veterans of Company A, my dad's company in the 712th Tank Battalion, about him.
I had interviewed Elmer two years earlier, and I asked him if Ed was married. He said Ed had a girlfriend before he left for the war, and that she still lived in town. Her name was Dorothy Cooney and she still lived in Stockbridge.
I looked her up, and soon I would visit her whenever I went to the Berkshires. She was in her nineties, never married, and still lived in the house her father built on Church Street, near St. Paul's Episcopal Church.
Among other things, Dorothy said Ed proposed to her before he went overseas, and that she told him he had a lot on his mind, and that they should wait until he returned home.
On a later visit, Dorothy dropped a bombshell: She couldn't say for sure, but if I looked into it, she said, I might find that Ed's mother committed suicide. Elmer had said their mother died when Ed was 14 and he was 7, but I hadn't asked about her cause of death. So I called Elmer and asked if I could visit him again.
I wasn't sure that if he was seven at the time he would even remember how she died, but when I asked, he described how he sat in the kitchen eating ice cream and being afraid while people in the village were out looking for his mother, who, it turned out, had thrown herself into the Housatonic River.
Ed was the oldest of four siblings. He had a sister, Vera, who was two years younger than Ed, and a younger brother Warren, who died, according to Elmer, of being injured in a snowball fight. Actually he died of peritonitis when he was a child. I forget how old he was.
Toward the end of my second interview with Elmer, he said he had a story his sister wrote that might give me some insight about Ed. There were two stories, actually. The first was written by his grandmother, who lived with a spinster daughter on a remote mountain in the Berkshires. When the daughter passed away and the house was sold, a composition notebook was found in her effects.
The story ends in mid-sentence where the notebook ran out of space, and no second notebook was ever found, although one probably exited somewhere.
Despite ending on a bit of a cliffhanger, the tale of her childhood is so powerful, both violent and humorous, that it inspired Ed's sister Vera to press her mother to write her story, which she did. In it, she describes her mother's five unsuccessful suicide attempts before she succeeded on the sixth, flinging herself into the Housatonic River in the middle of the night. And it was Ed who discovered her the next day after his father passed her body by thinking it was a log.
No wonder Ed had a lot on his mind when he left for the war.
I hope to publish Ed's mother's story, with I call The Memoir of Vera Louise Forrest McCarthy Beckley, but I felt the time was right to start with The Unfinished Autobiography of Hannah Climena Pixley Ariail, which, I'm sure you'll agree, is a deeply moving story of a turbulent childhood.
I have to give a shoutout to the late Flora Brantley, Hannah Climena's great-granddaughter and Ed Forrest's niece, for organizing both books and making a few copies for the family.
When Hannah Climena's story went live on Amazon recently, a Facebook friend purchased the first copy, and this was her reaction:
