Although this is Alice's story, it is very much my retelling. I am choosing to write her account from memory, because her life has become part of who I am and how I remember things. I am strongly considering making her own writings available for others to read. For now, I do not want to carry the weight of revisiting them. I read them as a young woman. I heard the stories through the years. Where my memory fails, my own imagination steps in. It will be interesting to see where. Let this narrative be its own measure of how memories are fluid and shape us — sometimes for good, sometimes for ill.

Alma Fraser married a man twice her age. She was a young graduate of the University of Oklahoma, trained as a schoolteacher at a time when the state still fully funded college for its own children. In marrying Robert Hill, she became his second wife in a small, religiously conflicted town. Because his first marriage had been in the Church, local convention, according to some, said Alma was not legally his wife at all. That stigma settled over her sense of self and would eventually be a subject of cruel schoolyard taunting to her children.

The early years of their marriage went well, for the most part. They moved away from the small town and settled outside Oklahoma City. Three healthy children were born. Land Robert owned near the state capital struck oil — black gold — and he came into real money. He was generous with his brothers, financing their various enterprises. For the first years of the Depression, the Hill family did not feel the blow as sharply as many others.

Over time, things grew complicated. Robert’s brothers had crisscrossed counties from Oklahoma into Colorado and down through Texas, going from farm to farm, speculating. They offered cash-strapped to landowners, buying half of their mineral rights while leaving them full surface rights. On paper, it seemed not to change daily life for these farmers and ranchers, and it put real money in people’s hands. Then the collapse reached them. The accountant at the bank that managed most of Robert’s investments committed suicide. Records that proved many of those investments were stolen. Eventually, the lawsuits were lost and the sheriff came and moved them out of the good house — the one with the mohair sofa. They ended up back in Kingfisher, the town that had never fully welcomed Alma.

Before they returned to Kingfisher, Alice was born. She was not healthy. The pregnancy had been hard, and the financial ruin bore down on Alma. By the end the pregnancy she was nearly catatonic, able to move only with help during the last months of the pregnancy. Alice was born at home, but was soon taken to the hospital, unable to keep any nourishment down. There were no NICU units back then. I expect there were scheduled feedings and diapering, but really, was it a kindness to prolong such a wee thing's suffering? Was little Alice more of a crib number to work into rotation than a cherished newborn? It was two months before release for Alice, whatever the conditions really were for the infant.