Lost Without the River Read online

  I waited. Soon a ball came bouncing off to the side. I ran for it, threw it to my brothers, stepped back, and fell down. Ten feet down! I landed on the concrete feeding trough below. I was brought back to consciousness by rhythmical tugs on my face. A concerned cow was licking me with her rough, wet tongue.

  My brothers had run to the house to get my father. I was crying when he arrived. He picked me up in his arms. I could feel his thumping heart as he held me and carried me back to the house. My mother and Aunt Marian were waiting at the door. Their faces were scrunched with worry. Marian asked me questions and put me to bed. After she talked to my parents, she told me I must stay in bed for two days. I wouldn’t be going to church Easter morning!

  The blue coat? It remained in the box on that special day. But after that I wore it every chance I got. Until it became too small. Then it was given away. I do have a lasting reminder of that Easter, however. I carry it with me.

  In 2008, X-rays were taken of my cervical spine. In answering questions about my medical history, I told the doctor what happened on that distant Holy Saturday.

  “Yes, I can see that. The damage of that fall is visible right here,” she said, as she pointed to a spot on my upper spine. “You were very lucky.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked her.

  The doctor paused and then replied, “A very slight shift in that location would have left you paralyzed.”

  III. FAITH AND PUNISHMENT

  “Never praise a child. He’ll just wind up being conceited.”

  —Roy Hoffbeck

  OPERA IN THE KITCHEN

  Opera reigned in our kitchen on Saturday afternoons. When my father was out of the house, working in the fields or perhaps shoveling snow, there was freedom—freedom to shut down the rapid-fire tallies of grain and livestock futures and the sober announcements of the continuing war in Europe and Asia. After the door closed behind him, Mother would walk into the dining room and turn the radio to WCCO, out of Minneapolis.

  Then, back in the kitchen, she continued with her chores. As she washed dishes, I reached up to grab them. Then I rubbed them on both sides with a towel made from a flour sack. Dorothy was in her crib, close by the radio. It was just the three of us.

  We worked and waited. Then a man’s deep, deep voice floated to us. I’d never heard anybody speak like that man.

  “This is Milton Cross. I’m coming to you live from New York City and the Metropolitan Opera House. And now [there’d be a long pause] the curtain is rising …”

  And another world flowed from the dining room into the kitchen.

  In my mind, I saw a room much larger than our church. Everyone was all dressed up. The man was speaking from the balcony in the rear, and all the men and women were facing forward as they listened.

  If the opera was one that my mother was familiar with, she’d begin singing, making up the words she didn’t know. When the singers soared off into musical heaven, I’d join in with nonsense words and notes. And there was one time when I heard noises from the corner where Dorothy lay in her crib. I spoke up over the music.

  “Mommy,” I said, “Dorothy likes opera, too!”

  THE SPARE ROOM

  In one stride, my father was across the room. His large hands grabbed my shoulders, and then, before I had a chance to say a word or cry out, he lifted me, holding me against his side, while he pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down on it. He threw me across his knees, and my breath went out in a sharp pain. My head swung down, and my blond hair swept the floor.

  “Why do you always have to make such a racket? Screaming and yelling—that’s all I hear when I walk into this house!”

  Dad’s hand hit my bottom hard, but before I could wonder how many more times he would do the same, I felt the liquid run along my leg. He pushed me off his knee and set me down.

  I didn’t feel any pain, only a terrible shame. As I ran out the door, I could see John and Bob trying not to smile.

  The yard looked fuzzy to me, and I stumbled on the steps. I ran around the house and slid under the side of the porch. Our spirea bushes were in full bloom, their white blossoms falling in wide ribbons to the ground. It was a good place to hide, but the space was so low I couldn’t sit up. I could only lie there and cry—cry until my throat burned and I felt the dry earth become mud on my hands and face.

  I couldn’t breathe. I wiggled out and, keeping my body close to the house, moved until I was just below the dining room window. Everyone was eating. The window was open a little, and I could smell fried onions. No one was talking. There was no laughter. Only the sounds of forks and knives on plates.

  “Okay, let’s get back to work, boys,” I heard Dad say.

  Chairs scraped against the floor.

  “Bob, wait a minute.” It was my mother’s voice. “Go find Barbara. This has gone on long enough. Tell her I saved her a piece of pie.”

  I knew Bob would leave by the kitchen door, so I quickly moved back to the front of the house.

  I slipped into the house quietly. My mother was in the kitchen, with her back turned, putting leftovers into small bowls. I tiptoed up the stairs, carefully avoiding the spot on the fifth step that always creaked. Slowly, quietly I crept down the hall and opened a door.

  This was our “spare room.” Although it had a bed and a dresser, it was never used as a bedroom. An old rocker with a gold velvet seat sat near the door. A small, battered black suitcase was nearby. This was filled with precious Christmas ornaments, and I was careful not to overturn it as I made my way to the bed in the corner. Winter clothes were piled on one end of the bed. At the other, a few faded blankets, their satin edges worn and loose, were stacked in a rough heap. I climbed onto the bed. My belly ached and my legs itched where my brown stockings had dried to them. I took the satin ribbon of a blanket and rubbed it on my check.

  Black-and-white photographs of old people, the men with beards, the women in long skirts and blouses with high collars, gazed down on me from frames on the wall. I didn’t recognize any of the faces. Not one of them smiled. They must have all been dead.

  I’ll just stay here until I die, I thought. And then, when I get to heaven, I’ll find Dorothy. It shouldn’t be too hard. There can’t be many cribs up in heaven. At least not with old kids in them. Dorothy will smile when she sees me. And then we’ll wait. Wait until Mommy gets up there, too.

  SEEN AND NOT HEARD

  The nonstop calamities of the drought and the Great Depression, compounded by Dorothy’s physical impairment (perhaps those two should be reversed), took their toll on my parents. And that toll fell, sometimes directly, on my siblings and me.

  Their honeymoon period was short. Mother became pregnant within a month after they were married, and then, after Dorothy’s birth, most of my mother’s time and energy were divided between caring for her and performing endless housekeeping chores, for years without the aid of running water or electrical appliances. My father must have lost quite quickly the lighthearted young woman he’d married, as worry and work overwhelmed her. There would have been few smiles and little laughter.

  My father coped by ignoring his emotional pain. My brother Bob, two years older than I, never heard him speak Dorothy’s name, nor did I.

  Relatives told my siblings and me that as a young man, my father had a playful side and always spoke with pride of how he and his college mates managed to coax a cow up the steps of Old North, the tallest academic building on campus. Three narrow flights up! I never heard whether the college administrators figured out who the culprits were—or how they got the poor cow down.

  I heard an echo of that younger man one Sunday morning. It was a tradition that our cow’s prized rich cream accompanied us to church. Mother prepared the liquid gold by pouring it into a blue Mason jar. As the youngest, I was responsible for carrying the jar to the rectory and giving it to Miss Olivia, the priest’s housekeeper. She, in turn, would place two quarters and a dime in the palm of my hand.

  One Sunday morning, we were
later than usual. I wanted to join my family in our pew before Mass started. Everyone would stare at me if I came in late. As soon as my father stopped the car, I threw open my door, grabbed the jar, and ran up a small slope, but my foot caught on the edge of the sidewalk and I went tumbling. I wasn’t hurt, but the jar broke, and I began to cry as the stream of cream widened. I knew how much work had been necessary to produce that quart of cream, and how much that sixty cents meant.

  My father was there almost immediately. I caught my breath. I tried to stop crying and waited for the announcement of the punishment to come.

  I was surprised when my father said only, “Don’t cry over spilt milk.”

  I heard him chuckle a bit at the aptness of the situation. I didn’t look at him, afraid that doing so might change his mood.

  “I’m sorry,” I mumbled, as I followed my mother up the church steps.

  The central tenet of parents in our community was “children should be seen, not heard.” They were first- or second-generation Americans, primarily from Central Europe and Scandinavia. Children were to be useful, help with the chores, and, above all, not make any disturbances.

  So my father’s behavior was the norm. When one of us disobeyed, my father spanked. My siblings say that I escaped that form of punishment. I did not. But I never felt the belt. One day Patt, who always had a keen sense of justice and who certainly was the bravest of all of us, did the unthinkable. After deciding that my father was resorting to using that instrument too often, she hid it! I can’t imagine that her action improved my father’s disposition.

  NEVER MEANT TO BE A FARMER

  My father was never meant to be a farmer. He held a Bachelor of Science degree in a time and a place where even obtaining a high school diploma was a distinction. There were a doctor and a lawyer in Ortonville, but the superintendent of schools, our pastor, and my father were the only Big Stone residents who’d earned a degree.

  His father, who’d emigrated from Denmark and learned English on his own, made great sacrifices so that his oldest son could attend high school and then college. My father majored in chemistry and, after graduating, accepted a teaching position in the tiny town of Ree Heights so that he could be near my mother, who’d moved back to her hometown of Pierre, some sixty miles away.

  My mother had not been his first love. I learned of that one summer day.

  Home from college, I asked about a ring I saw in my mother’s jewelry box. She said that it was to have been given to another woman, whom my father had met while he was at college. This was during World War I. My father had been a member of the Student Army Training Corps in high school. Immediately following graduation, he was sent to South Dakota State College for further training. Then the Spanish flu hit. My father survived that tragic time when hundreds fell ill and entire dormitories were turned into infirmaries, but many of his friends did not, including the young woman he’d fallen in love with and planned to marry.

  Obviously, my father had given my mother the ring meant for another. As far as I know, neither woman ever wore it. When she told me the story, my mother seemed to exhibit no resentment, only sorrow at the loss of such a young life. We know our parents met at college, but whether they met before or after the tragedy remains unknown.

  Mother gave the ring to me, but I didn’t have it resized, and I also never wore it. Feeling as if the passage of time had dissipated the sadness associated with the ring, I eventually gave it to a niece, who wore it as her “something old” on her wedding day.

  The only clue I have into my parents’ early relationship is jotted in my mother’s hand in one of those capture-your-memories-before-you-die books. “Was it love at first sight?” it asked her. She wrote, “No.”

  The memoir-writer me has so many questions and wishes I had pushed her to tell me more. The daughter me is glad I didn’t.

  What happened in Ree Heights, that little town sixty miles east of Pierre, set the course of my parents’ lives. My father accepted a position at the high school there, teaching math and chemistry. One of his students happened to be the son of a school board member. That son was either dumb or lazy or both. For the first term, my father gave him a D in math. During the last term, the time when teacher contracts were renewed, the student’s father demanded that my father raise his son’s grade.

  “If his work improves, I will,” my father replied.

  The student’s work did not improve, and my father failed the student. His contract was not renewed.

  The next year, he managed to find a position in New England, North Dakota. The town was a little larger than Ree Heights, but my father was miserable. It was located much farther from Pierre and the woman he loved. My grandfather was planning a trip back to Denmark to visit his family, the first and only time he made that journey after immigrating to America, and my father offered to manage the farm in his father’s absence.

  It seemed appropriate that my father stay on there after my parents got married. My grandfather generously offered to lease his house and his farm on the banks of the Whetstone River.

  Passage of the Homestead Act in South Dakota in 1862 fueled the settlement of the state. Pioneers were granted ownership of the land, typically 160 acres, after farming it for five years. My grandfather had filed papers for his sister, Ella. (The document is signed by Theodore Roosevelt and dated 1905.) After my parents moved to our farmhouse, he and my grandmother settled into the smaller house on that property on the prairie-like fields northwest of Big Stone City.

  No part of my parents’ courtship could have been easy. My mother was a Catholic of French-Canadian descent. (Her ancestors fought under Montcalm in the Battle of Quebec, and her grandfather traded with Indians at the time of Lewis and Clark’s great exploits.) My father was a Lutheran, one generation removed from Protestant Scandinavia. And Big Stone City was composed of a great divide: Catholics versus Protestants.

  What conversations did my parents have about this important issue? My mother was devout; she would have been unyielding. My father converted to Catholicism. At that time, their union would have caused an uproar, similar to the tempests surrounding interracial marriages in the 1950s.

  In our town, Catholics and Protestants viewed each other warily. The respective houses of worship were off-limits to nonmembers; Protestants didn’t attend weddings or funerals of Catholic neighbors, and vice versa. The town minister was even known to cross to the other side of the street while walking, to avoid meeting the priest. By the time I was old enough to be aware of these relationships, this division had been eased because of the masterful diplomatic skills of Father Esterguard, who, as soon as he was assigned to our parish, reached out to Catholics, Protestants, and nonbelievers alike.

  My father became a farmer in fact but never in spirit. He refused to wear the eminently practical bib overalls, de rigueur uniform of that occupation. He approached farming with a scientist’s eye, meticulously tracking the quality of milk his Holsteins produced in order to perfect the herd. To aid him in calculating the amount of fertilizer to be used, he sent corn samples to be tested at the state lab. He became the first farmer in the county to rotate his crops. He subscribed to South Dakota Conservation Digest, following an early interest; his essay entitled “National Conservation” was selected to be read at his high school commencement in 1917. And, although he was not naturally mechanical, using ingenuity, he fixed the farm machinery. But my father had no enthusiasm for the day-to-day care of animals or the repetitious labor of field work. Rather, he loved to experiment, to plan, to devise, to act. Alas, he was trying to earn a living in a way that was mostly tedious, boring, and disappointing.

  My father was offered a chance to escape that drudgery. In 1941, the US government was recruiting men who weren’t eligible to serve in the armed services to aid in the war effort, including bright minds to support brilliant ones. My father was “requested” to use the knowledge he’d gained in college and take a position at a chemical company located near Chicago. Later, he l
earned that the company was supporting the Manhattan Project, which developed the first nuclear weapons. In talking about this to Bob, my father said the pressure for him to accept the job was intense, so much so that my father, who rivaled Lincoln in his honesty ethos (Abe supposedly walked six miles to return a three-cent overcharge), told my brother, “I almost had to lie.” Somehow he managed to sidestep the dilemma.

  When I heard this story in 2012, I assumed that my father had declined the offer because of the difficulty that moving a household of seven children would have entailed.

  “No, that wasn’t it,” he told Bob in his later years. “I just couldn’t tear you kids away. You would have been lost without the river.”

  My father was without sentiment and had no patience for superstition or ignorance. He was practical to a frustrating degree.

  When I complained that he’d driven over a patch of wild purple asters at the edge of a field, he fired back, “What? Those are weeds!”

  When I objected, he answered with his maxim, “Any flower growing where it doesn’t belong is a weed.”

  He could be blunt when talking about a person’s frailties, and seemed to have no concern for the feelings of his children. My father’s telling of the latest confrontation in the ongoing feud with the neighbor woman enlivened many of our supper conversations. He seemed to cultivate his dislike of this woman, his cousin’s wife, Irene, who was a new arrival from Minneapolis. She had an outspoken nature and didn’t fit in with the local standards of what a woman “should” be, and that rankled my father. Sometimes it seemed he believed women, like children, ought to be seen and not heard.