Grit, Grace, and DNA, Part 2

Or: How Pearly Jack Merwin Walked North into Canada and Disappeared

The year: 1945 or thereabouts.
The place: Plentywood, Montana.

My grandmother, Effie Agnes Marie Desonia, married an onery man called “Tiny.” Don’t ask me why. Tiny Merwin owned a bar, consumed a good deal of the booze, and wasn’t nice to his young bride.

Having a goodly amount of gumption herself, Gramma divorced Tiny and moved to Scobey, Montana—with her four children—where she set up a restaurant called Aunt Effie’s Café.

She purchased a pallet of heavy “Buffalo China”—crockery with green stripes on the edges that weighed roughly five pounds apiece and would survive three generations of use. Use that would break lesser dishes.

In her little café—built on grit and tenacity—Gramma whipped up hearty meals of meat and potatoes, biscuits and sausage gravy, and her own special recipe for chicken-and-dumplings, which her grandchildren would one day devour with elbows out.

The day came when Gramma wanted more from her life.

So she sold the café and moved some five hundred miles west to the big city of Missoula, Montana, with her sister Lucille (Aunt Cele).

Thus, they set off together to find themselves “good men.”
It worked.

They both married kind and hardworking husbands, and they stayed coupled until death did they part. Gramma married a man named Robert Morris, who was the only grandfather I would ever know—or would ever care to know.

But this story isn’t about Gramma and Grampa.

It’s about the onery man’s brother, known to me only as Pearly Jack.

And here’s the legend of how Pearly Jack Merwin walked north into Canada and disappeared.

One fine spring day, for reasons unknown to me, Pearly Jack got fed up with the faults and bad manners of white men. All white men. So he made this proclamation:

“I’m headin’ north,” he said. “And I ain’t stoppin’ until I don’t see another goddam white man for a hundred miles.”

He packed up all that he felt he couldn’t live without—warm clothes, his entire bank account, some extra cash stuffed into an empty salt tin, and perhaps a faded photo of his family—and loaded up his pickup truck.

Pearly Jack drove about five miles north, or thereabouts, when his audacious plans came to a screeching halt. His ratty old red Ford F pickup foundered in a giant swamp of mud and wouldn’t budge forward or back.

Committed to his proclaimed intent, and with mud up to his calves, Pearly Jack consolidated his scrappy belongings into two beat-up leather suitcases.

All the rest he left in the cab of his unlocked jalopy—sunk in the mud in the middle of the dirt road, keys dangling in the ignition like an offering to fate—and set off to Canada on foot.

And that was the last anyone in Plentywood, Montana, ever heard of Pearly Jack Merwin.

Word—or perhaps speculation—eventually spread through town that Pearly Jack settled somewhere in Saskatchewan, Canada, and made his way in the world by trapping and trading in furs.

Through Merwin DNA—or through my beloved Gramma’s influence, or both—I inherited that same gumption, along with the bulldog persistence to deliver whatever a task asks of me. And then some.

I can also be stubborn beyond reason.

My tunnel vision can grow so fixed that I can’t make nimble course corrections, let alone drop a project until it burns to the ground.

On the other hand, as the leader of my own parade, I sometimes feel stymied at every turn, as though I’m marching in loops. I get discouraged. And I quit.

Still, my heart reaches ceaselessly back to my Gramma—and to my great-uncle Pearly Jack—who showed up in the world with gumption and tenacity, and who remind me that quitting doesn’t have to be the end of the story.

Sometimes it’s just the muddy part.

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This is Part 2 of a new seven-part series, Grit, Grace, and DNA—an excavation of legacy: The brilliance, the burden, and the quiet ways we learn to live butter side up.It continues with Part 3, “I Inherited Tenacity: How Aunt Toots Fended Off the Oil Men.”

Read Part 1, “I Inherited Courage: How Lon and Cecilia Threw Themselves from a Moving Train” here.

Side note: I would love it if you would follow me on Substack. All my content is free, and you don’t have to jump through a bunch up hoops to find me. Thank you! ❤️