The grandmother was not always a grandmother.

Once upon a time, she was born at midwinter, labored over and delivered by someone who herself wasn’t always a mother, but had become one, a few years earlier.

On the day of the grandmother’s birth, snow drifted over and through the house, a tar-paper shack on a treeless hill, relic of the lumbering camps. No midwife attended, just a neighbor woman and the grandmother’s mother’s mother, who murmured prayers and encouragement in a mountain dialect the twentieth century would erase. The grandmother a red and squalling newborn; her two-year-old brother, crying too, in the arms of their ashen father. You will have one daughter, a crone might have foretold. She will be clever and quick and born to hardship.

Once upon a time: a horse-drawn plow, a one-room schoolhouse, arrowheads turned over every spring with the soil. This was Wisconsin in the 1920s, but at home and at church, everyone spoke Norwegian. As an adolescent, the grandmother’s father had emigrated from a mountainside village in the Gudbrandsdalen, where only potatoes could grow. Once upon an even longer-ago time, the grandmother’s maternal grandparents had left that same village, far above the tree line. They’d nudged cows aside as they carted their trunk down a narrow, winding track. Goodbye, mountains, the cows’ bells rang.

The grandmother grew up among fairytale people: misers, tinkerers, travelers. Her childhood was a steady circuit of home, school, church. She was smart, observant, sometimes cross. It fell to her to look after her younger brother. Until he came, birthing had been something cows did in spring with little fuss, tidily eating the afterbirth. At six years old, on the day of her brother’s birth, the grandmother cowered under the kitchen table until her own bestemor bade her empty a bucket of water. It tipped before she’d reached the outhouse, soiling the snow. So this was the suffering God had decreed, the punishment Eve’s sin had brought upon women. Not only exile from Eden, to places like Norway and Wisconsin, where fruits and animals were scarce and shy—but also great pain, portioned out with every birth, until kingdom come. The grandmother stood staring at the pink-and-brown snow, her mother’s blood and shit. Surely the grandmother’s own birth had not been so foul. Shivering, she kicked clean snow over the dirty; she ran back indoors.

Did the grandmother decide then no, not me? Or did she see that scene differently, or not see it at all? Maybe the two older children were sent away when the youngest was born. Maybe he was born while they were at school. How the grandmother loved school! The bright, tall room, white-washed and orderly. She always finished her lessons quickly so she could listen to the upper classes recite theirs or read the younger children their spelling words. Once upon a time, the grandmother wanted desperately to be a teacher, the only job she knew of besides mother and movie star (Carole Lombard!). But she and her brothers were needed on their parents’ hard-scrabble farm; they weren’t sent to high school, let alone teachers’ college.

Once upon a time there were dances in town, on Friday and Saturday nights. Everybody went, even the high school girls and boys. They must have seemed so young to the grandmother, once her life was no longer shaped by lessons. She danced with her former classmates, maybe, noting a new whisker here or there, feeling the hard and soft parts of their bodies against hers. But more often, she danced with the older and bolder boys. The men who, like her, were done with school and childhood. Once upon a time, the grandmother was fourteen, fifteen, trim and laughing in a violet dress and Oxfords. She was sixteen, in May, 1937, when something happened—for the first time? Repeatedly? In a car or a barn or a field?—between her and an itinerant farmhand. He was tall, dark-haired, sort of handsome; he was eleven years older than her. He spoke but one of the grandmother’s languages and broken fragments of Slovakian, his mother’s only tongue. He laughed at his own jokes, glowered at others’. Once upon a time, the farmhand hurt the grandmother—and maybe thrilled her, too. She’d already learned that women’s lot was suffering.

The grandmother became a mother, on the seventeenth anniversary of her birth, with her own mother at her bedside. I didn’t think he’d come back around, the grandmother told me, many decades later. I didn’t want him to, I heard—though she didn’t actually say that. Regardless, he did return, the farmhand, her impregnator and, soon enough, her husband. The grandmother told me You have one baby and then another and before you know it, that’s your whole life. I reminded us both of how much she was loved—but who knows what she lost in that exchange? Once upon a time, the farmhand bid on the grandmother’s basket, at a picnic raffle. In another story, she might have been at home, studying her magic books, or he might have stayed in the Dakotas, working wheat into gold. He might, at twenty-seven, have known something about contraception.

But both of them lived under certain enchantments: poverty, ignorance, the Great Depression. Once upon a time, a man came to town and took a girl to wed. The grandmother did not leave her parents’ tar-paper shack for a palace but instead, for even meaner circumstances: condemned farmhouses rented at cut-rates; a husband with a temper like a thwarted troll’s. A man who shouted and smashed things and always chose deprivation over ease. No mechanization on his farm—until the dairy cooperative demanded it; no indoor toilet—until he could no longer make it to the outhouse alone. For decades, the grandmother conjured food from flour and lard, as her ancestors always had. She bore nine children and they all loved her best. She was a grandmother by the time she was thirty-seven; she was not always a grandmother, but she was a grandmother for most of her life.

Once upon a time, the grandmother came to believe that bad luck struck whenever she dared to sing. She lay awake most nights, anxious; she worried every mosquito bite into a scab. She outlived an infant son, her older brother, her eldest daughter, her first grandson, her younger brother, her husband. She stitched, crocheted, solved crosswords, prayed. Eventually, she stopped leaving the farm, fearing the tightness that always gripped her chest.

Once upon a time, we all had grandmothers, one way or another. The grandmother in this tale was clever and quick until the end: a hip snapping sharply, a swift downward spiral. She believed in the kingdom and the glory, rewards to redeem a difficult life. What else did she believe? Lie, cheat, and steal, she used to tell me, winking. That’s the only way to get ahead in this world.

Stephanie Carpenter’s novel, Moral Treatment, won the inaugural Summit Series Prize and is forthcoming in early 2025 from Central Michigan University Press. She’s the author of a collection of short stories, Missing Persons (Press 53, 2017), and her work has appeared in journals including Copper Nickel, Ecotone, Witness, The Missouri Review, and Big Fiction. Stephanie is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Michigan Tech University. Her flash essay “At the River Country Nature Center, Nebraska City, NE” appeared in Issue 29.