Angel in the Upper Peninsula - A Memoir

By Crystal Hallman

A 14-year-old girl suddenly finds herself hundreds of miles from home, living on the outskirts of the Potawatomi Indian reservation in Michigan's remote Upper Peninsula. The first in a series of three memoirs, "Angel in the Upper Peninsula - A Memoir" tells the powerful story of the author's seven-year struggle to survive loss, isolation, emotional abuse by her mother's boyfriend and sexual exploitation at the hands of her mother's boyfriend's son. Preganant by age 16 by a mentally ill man 20 years her senior, the author weaves a moving and suspenseful story of strength and resilience as she narrowly escapes her abusive marriage with her two young children. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Crystal Hallman
• Release date: Jan 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393492665

Book preview

Angel in the Upper Peninsula - A Memoir

Crystal Hallman

Published by Crystal Hallman, 2021.

This book is dedicated to Phylis Johnson, whose kindess made all the difference in my life.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmittedin any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Crystal Wergin

468 Country Club Dr

Lake Geneva, WI

262-475-7772

[e-mail]

This book is dedicated to the memory of Phyllis Johnson, whose kindness, guidance, and inspiration made this book possible.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

LISA

CHAPTER TWO

GRANDMA

CHAPTER THREE

ANN HOLLISTER

CHAPTER FOUR

BRUCE AND HOLLY

CHAPTER FIVE

THE FUNERAL

CHAPTER SIX

THE PHONE CALL

CHAPTER SEVEN

HARRIS

CHAPTER EIGHT

RUNNING AWAY

CHAPTER NINE

THE TRAIN

CHAPTER TEN

BOBBY

CHAPTER ELEVEN

SHEILA

CHAPTER TWELVE

CORNISH PASTIES

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

GLADSTONE

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

FIRST LOVE

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

JOHN GANNON

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

PREGNANT

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

FIRST BORN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

MARRIAGE

CHAPTER NINETEEN

LICENSE TO KILL

CHAPTER TWENTY

THE RESCUE

CHAPTER ONE

LISA

It was a hot summer day in late July of 1962 when my mother left my one-month-old baby sister, Lisa, on the counter at the end of a grocery store check-out lane and walked out of the store.

I had just turned six.

My mother hastily loaded the grocery bags into the back of our sky blue Chevy station wagon, quickly slid behind the steering wheel and, making a right turn onto the two-lane highway, headed in the direction of our house located three miles up the road.

As my mother walked ahead of us out of the store, I turned and looked at my tiny four-week-old sister balanced in her pink plastic car seat at the edge of the counter. Her face grew smaller and smaller and then disappeared behind the automatic glass door that closed behind me.

I climbed into the back seat after my three-year-old sister, Janie. My eight-year-old sister, Mandi, stood on the front seat facing us, making funny faces until Janie started squealing with laughter.

My mother lit a cigarette and rolled down her car window.

It was the moment that my mother turned the car out onto the highway that I realized she wasn't going back for Lisa.

Mom! I shouted from the back seat, but the cacophony of horseplay that had broken out between Mandi and Janie, and the wind roaring into the rolled down windows as we sailed down the highway, scrambling our sun-bleached mops, muffled my plea.

Shut-up! my mother barked.

I wasn't sure if my mother's order was meant for my sisters or for me. Mandi and Janie squelched their laughter but still grinned goofily at each other.

But MOM! I cried, louder this time, panic suddenly seizing my insides.

I. Said. Shut! UP! she retorted, pausing after each word, loudly emphasizing the last word, then inhaled a hurried puff on her Winston cigarette.

Minutes later our station wagon pulled into our gravel driveway. My mother quickly snuffed out her cigarette in the ashtray, opened her car door, then turned her body towards the passenger seat where Lisa's infant seat usually rested. She stared blankly at the empty seat next to her for a moment then said, Where's Lisa?

She's at the store, I blurted in a half whimper.

By this time, Mandi had jumped out of the car.

"Aww nuts!" my mother exclaimed.

Get back in the car! my mother hollered at Mandi, who stopped in her tracks, spun around, and scrambled back into the front seat.

My mother gunned the car backwards out of the driveway, sped up the sloped hill in front of our house, and made and made a jerky right turn back onto the highway, ignoring the stop sign at the end of our road.

Two minutes later, we were back at the grocery store, my mother hastily urging my sisters and me to back out of the car and into the store.

As the four of us approached the check-out lane where I had last seen my baby sister, I could see a group of ladies dressed in light blue dresses gathered around her as she lay in her infant seat, now wide awake, all of them smiling and cooing at her.

My mother approached the ladies, her lips tight, and slowly shaking her head with a chagrined, mea culpa half-smile.

I don't recall what my mother said to the ladies in the blue dresses, but there was a lot of chuckling and good-natured laughter as she gathered up Lisa and we all headed back out to the car.

My mother had a way of talking herself out of situations, a certain witty charm that, combined with a movie star beauty that resembled Elizabeth Taylor - deep striking brown eyes, thick black eyelashes, high cheekbones, and wavy jet black hair contrasted by brightly painted red lips - she often seemed to be able to sidestep the type of scrutiny that most ordinary people would elicit. And on this day, it was no different.

Lisa was my mother's fourth and final child. It was shortly after she became pregnant with Lisa that the birth control pill was introduced in the United States, and my mother would often proudly proclaim that just days after Lisa was born, she had been the first in line at the doctor's office to get on The Pill, often buttressing her boast with the pointed observation that One kid is enough for anyone!

Although my mother didn't seem to feel the same way towards children as most mothers did, and I'm sure she felt a twinge of regret for leaving Lisa behind at the grocery store, I suspect that if she had returned to collect Lisa that day and one of the blue-dressed checkout ladies who was lovingly cooing at her had said to my mother, I'll take her if you don't want her, my mother would have been ever so grateful.

But instead, we would take Lisa back home to the tiny yellow one-story house in the Delavan Inlet that my grandfather had helped my parents purchase shortly after I was born. With Lisa, we were now a family of six living in a one-story, one-bathroom bungalow whose three bedrooms were so small each barely accommodated a double bed and chest of drawers, and whose only source of heat was a large brown space heater located in the living room near the front of the house just outside my parents' bedroom. Mandi and I shared the bedroom at the back end of the house across from the bathroom, and Janie and Lisa shared the middle bedroom, where a crib occupied the length of one wall for eight straight years.

Just before my 11th birthday, my grandfather would purchase another much larger home for us to live in, seven miles away from the Delavan Inlet, in Williams Bay, Wisconsin – an old Victorian-style house that had been remodeled into a two-flat where he and my grandmother would move into the upstairs apartment.

During the 11 years that we lived in the Inlet, my father worked as a gas station attendant and later as a grocery store manager. My mother, who quit school to marry my father, worked as a waitress at a resort up the road from us called Lake Lawn Lodge, where she would dress up like an Indian maiden wearing a faux deerskin fringed skirt, a colorful beaded vest, and a band around her head that had a tall feather sticking straight up from the back of it.

It's unclear to me how my parents met, but I do know that my mother was 16 years old when she approached my grandparents and asked their permission to marry my father, who was 21. Later, when I would ask my grandfather why he had allowed my mother to get married at such a young age, he replied curtly, To keep peace in the family.

As the story goes, when my grandparents initially said no to my mother's pleas to marry my father, she threw such a tantrum that they finally relented. But not before my grandmother looked my mother straight in the eye and said, For every tear you're crying now, you're going to cry a thousand later.

My mother would later admit that my grandmother had been right.

And although I don't know for sure if my grandmother was aware at that time that my father had recently finished a stint in a Chicago prison for armed robbery, her dire warning to my mother seemed to indicate that she did.

And so, in May of 1953, my father had my mother's name tattooed on his left arm, framed with a ribbon of red in the shape of a heart, and the two of them were married in a private civil ceremony. A year later, my sister, Mandi, was born.

Although I would come along in May of 1956, I would not be the next infant that my mother would care for as her own. In 1955 my mother's brother, Dick, and his wife had a baby boy who they named Wesley. Shortly after his birth, Dick's wife had a mental breakdown and took off, leaving my uncle to care for Wesley by himself. My Uncle Dick was serving in the Navy at the time and was unable to care for Wesley, so, at my grandmother’s urging, my mother agreed to take him in.  After a short time, however, my mother, with a toddler of her own and now pregnant with me, found it to be more than she could handle, and Wesley was