Mom's Crazy Relatives

Every family has a relative that they don't claim. Mom had a large group. When I researched Ancestry, I found out a little bit more about this side that I had never known. First of all, they were Scottish, not Irish as Mom claimed. Secondly, that side of the family can be traced back to King James of Scotland. Several members fought in the American Revolution. One had been the inspiration for the book, A Light in the Forest, which became a Disney Movie. Overall, their history was full and rich of remarkable people. Somewhere along the way though, they became Mom's crazy relatives.

 We rarely interacted with Mom’s side of the family.  I heard stories about Grandma G.’s side, the Campbells, but, as with Mom’s siblings, we did not interact with them either. Mom would often say that the Campbells were all drunks and a bit crazy. She called them “drunk Irish relatives.”

She never knew that they were, in fact, Scottish. I always wondered how bad my forefathers were that their descendants changed their ancestry uniformly from Scottish to Irish.

According to Mom, Dad didn’t want us kids to have anything to do with the Campbells. This apparently stemmed from a funeral before I was born; Donna was about five when she attended with Mom and Dad.

The only story I ever heard about the funeral was from Donna. Dad never discussed the “your ma’s crazy relatives,” and Mom never told me the funeral story. Once Donna told me the story as an adult, I had a better understanding of my parents' shunning of the Campbell branch of the family.

Donna said: “It was one of the older men, a local man of some importance in the small village. He lay in the casket at the front of the church; his wife and their family were sitting in the front pew. A commotion started from the back of the church, making everybody’s heads swivel to gawk.

A big fat woman in a black dress was coming down the aisle toward the coffin, wailing and sobbing and carrying on. Screaming in grief, she threw herself onto the coffin, trying to climb in with the body.

The wife leaped up from the pew to pull her off. A fight broke out between the two women; hair was pulled, faces scratched. The pallbearers had to tear them apart.

In the squabble, the coffin was knocked over onto the floor. The funeral director and his helper had to shove the body back into the coffin. I don’t know if the wife was aware of her husband’s mistress before the funeral, but it was sure public knowledge after.”

One of the few stories Mom told me about the Campbells involved two brothers. One brother had a good-paying job on the railroad with benefits. Unfortunately, he got his girlfriend pregnant.

Mom said, “Her dad was coming over the next day with a shotgun, and there was gonna be a wedding. So, he took his savings and gave them all to his younger brother so he would marry the girl instead. Her dad wouldn’t mind; he just wanted a wedding. The brother agreed to the marriage, and the deal was set.

But after the brother got the cash, he jumped on the next freight train, leaving town and his older brother and girlfriend behind. The next day, when the younger brother was nowhere to be found, the older brother married the pregnant girlfriend.

And she was the one I liked most out of the whole damn bunch. Years later, the younger brother returned, but the two couldn’t be in the same room. The older one threw his brother through the plate-glass window in the town’s bar. Had to pay to replace it.”  

While driving Mom to that woman’s funeral, I learned the story, and I keep her name a secret out of respect, even now. The older brother and his shotgun bride stayed married and had more children, who likely never heard their parents' story. 

At the funeral, I was approached by some elderly ladies.  Looking at me from top to bottom, one announced, “Well, I know you are a Campbell.  But who is this lady with you?”

“She is my mother,” I replied, “She is a Campbell.”  

Mom told me later, “The Campbells never liked me much, said I took after my father.” 

In my twenties, I was drinking in a dive bar in Bemidji, Minnesota, when I met a cousin from the Campbell side. He bought me a drink and came over to introduce himself. Wearing a baby-blue polyester leisure suit (it was the eighties), he was overdressed, trying to be suave and debonair. 

Bringing a drink to my table, he introduced himself.  I immediately interrupted him: “My mother’s side is Campbell. Where are you from?”  This safely switched me from bar pick-up to a possible family snitch. After a quick run-down of genealogy, we knew we were cousins.

Later, I told my mother about meeting my Campbell cousin.

“Jesus Christ, Mom! I could have crawled into bed with a relative. You gotta help me out here. Who the hell else am I related to that I should know about?” 

Dad started laughing, and Mom said, “Well, you don’t need to be picking up men at bars; you don’t know what you might end up with.”