Meisy and Wiltz and Luxembourg

Wiltz, Luxembourg, WWII

The Battle of the Bulge had not gone well for a California kid named Ralph Ellis, who, like countless others in the fog of war, had lost track of his outfit and they of him. He was in awful shape, as so many were when the Wehrmacht sprung sprung an immense December surprise and bullied their way through "the ghost front" of the Allied lines in France and Belgium. Ellis was very much alone, wounded, frozen and famished, hiding out in an uninhabited house in a wreck of a town pummeled--for the second time--by the Nazi advance. He thought he was dying. He had cause to believe he was.

He had found his way to Wiltz, a tiny town in a tiny country, Luxembourg, a nation that found itself, not to its liking, in the bloody heart of the biggest battle on the European front. Wiltz, like the entire country, had got itself occupied early in the war, when Nazis stormed in, then freed when the Allies snatched it back. Then, in December's blizzards, it was beat up again when Hitler decided the only way to win was a desperate attack in the unforgiving cold.

Confusion?--all over. Death?--everywhere. Positions?--insanely scrambled. Thousands got lost, like Ralph Ellis. The U. S. sustained 75,000 casualties at the Battle of the Bulge, 20,000 American "boys" never returned. Hiding in a house in Wiltz, Ralph Ellis, some might say, was among the lucky ones.

He spent some time upstairs in that old house in Wiltz. I have no idea what unabated hunger feels like, but Ellis was feeling it. And his feet weren't just cold, they were frozen, literally frozen. That too means pain unlike any I've ever felt. And he was alone. 

On the street below, he heard voices, people speaking in German. He'd known for a day or two that he was behind enemy lines. He leaned out a ways simply to see. Two civilians were talking to two German soldiers. He leaned out farther. It seemed unreal. The Germans had a cart full of schnapps.

One of the civilians, a woman, just happened to look up. She saw him. He was seen. 

Ralph Ellis was convinced his time had come. He heard footsteps on the stairway upstairs. Yes, she'd seen him all right. The door opened. They pointed to each other--"Meisy," the woman told him. He knew it was her name. "Louis," she said, pointing at the man.

"Ralph," he said, pointing at his chest. 

Meisy and Louis engineered a way to get him out of the cold of the abandoned house and into the warmth of the tiny basement grocery store Meisy ran and where she lived. Louis played nurse, cut off one of Ralph Ellis toes with a razor blade. Had to. But Ralph Ellis was regaining strength. He was alive, still suffering but alive, dressed up in Meisy's son's clothes, sitting in a rocking chair, still alive in the back of the little store. 

When one day the Germans came in, there was no one to stop them. In a second, they were in the back room, where they told Meisy they were going to sleep in her place. 

"That's impossible," she told them. She said she had only one room and that was already full with her and her nephew here in the rocking chair.

They wore the uniform of the SS. They pointed at Ralph Ellis and asked him why a young man his age wasn't in the war effort. 

Meisy stepped between them, told them the boy was sick--were they blind? Couldn't they see that much?

"Let him talk for himself," the SS said.

Meisy told him her nephew couldn't speak because he'd been hurt in one of the American bombings. And then, or so the story goes, she just turned furious. "And don't think you're going to stay here either," she told them. She said she had nothing for them or for her to eat. "And somewhere in Germany you too have a mother, don't you?"

The SS cowed, nodding.

She had a son in the war, she said, and pointed at a picture of her boy in a German uniform, then steered them both back out into the store. "Just what would your mothers say?" she scolded, then gave them each an apple. "That's all I can give you." 

That did it. They actually cowered. "We didn't mean anything," they said when they took the apples and left the store.

Ralph Ellis said nothing but never forgot.

*     *     * 

Just down the road, Luxembourgian-Americans will, this summer, celebrate the 150th anniversary of their arrival in Siouxland, May, 1870. They'll dress up the little commemorative stone east of Alton at the place where they built their first church. The Oktoberfest Choir will sing, and the Mass will be celebrated at St. Mary's Church, Alton. 

It's unlikely, I suppose, that any of the celebrants could count Meisy from Wiltz as a distant relative. The Iowa Luxembourgians were here more than a half century before the Battle of the Bulge. 

But if I were one of them, I think I'd try to find a way to tell the story anyway or at least stories like it, stories of what Luxembourgians have done, stories of what we all could be. That the rest of us aren't dying behind enemy lines doesn't mean we don't need men and women like Meisy and tales of their astonishing selfless lives.

Lord knows, we do. 
___________________________ 
Ralph Ellis's story is adapted from John Toland's Battle: The Story of the Bulge.

AJS: Miriam and relief (ii)

The Bible doesn't say so exactly, but centuries of readers have liked to believe that Moses's big sister, the gutsy kid who walks right up to her royal highness, the Egyptian princess, bathing in the river, was Miriam. Could have been another sister, but Miriam is no bit player in the great exodus story.

It was, after all, sister Miriam who not only composed and sang a song but in fact led the Israelite chorus in a soaring melody of triumph the moment Pharaoh and hosts were swallowed up by the Red sea. "I will sing unto the Lord. . ." or so it went. Look it up.

But Miriam was no saint. She got a little pushy eventually, when she and brother Aaron grumbled about their brother Moses's superior power. "Has the LORD spoken only through Moses?" they whispered to each other. Besides, little brother Moses had up and married a girl from the way wrong side of the tracks, a Cushite. 

When the two of them groused, the Bible says, "The LORD heard this." Oops.

Still, I've always admired that little girl at the river's edge, not only for walking right up to Pharoah's daughter the way she did and walk away with baby Moses. Whether or not she was a cutie, she was a Levite, a stupid slave. She dared to be a Daniel.

Little gutsy liar is what she was. Next thing you know, she lets out a half-truth: “Shall I go and get one of the Hebrew women to nurse the baby for you?” she says, as if she'll check with the employment agency.

Thus, this little sweetheart not only rescues her little brother, she brings him home to her grieving mom, and most importantly saves a baby who will one day lead his people out of slavery. Great story. Unforgettable. 

Last week we visited an agency, a mission enterprise really, in Central America, in Honduras, where I heard the scenario of that ancient biblical tale used to explain the vision of that enterprise, a turn on the tale, and it goes like this:

Say you're down by the river and you see babies floating by in baskets, a la Miriam. Most of us would wade out into the water and grab them, save them, pull them from imminent danger. That's rescue work that has to be done. When people are hungry, really hungry, they need food, the basics. Retrieving babies from the water is relief work in its most pure form. When that work involves danger, it merits the scripture's greatest praise--"Greater love hath no man or woman than that. . ." You know the rest. 

In 2017, the American people gave 410 billion--let me write that out: $410,000,000,000--to charity, the first year on record that the total exceeded the 400 mark. Needless to say, that's some kind of cash. 

Did all those bucks cover needs? Probably not. According to Food Aid Foundation, 795 million people still don't have enough food "to lead a healthy life." It seems, as callous as it is to say it, that there's always babies in the water. There's always more we can do. 

When we use the phrase "relief work," we normally mean giving money or food or shelter to those who don't have it. The Good Samaritan did absolutely blessed relief work by helping the beat-up victim of a highway robbery get on his feet. And it didn't stop there either--he got that poor guy a place to clean up and rest--and he was a lowly Samaritan, too, a lousy, spat-upon Samaritan, the only one with a heart.

In this rich interpretation of the story by a 17th century artist named Jason Jordaens, a Samaritan dressed only a diaper, is helping the naked, bloody victim, while three heavy-set dandies sort of watch, slack-jawed, at the evident moral reckoning of what's happening before their eyes. One--the most pompous, a religious man, too--appears to help. Appears. 

There must be untold relief organizations who use the word Samaritan in their titles, who identify themselves by way of the famous biblical story. You just can't say enough about the good Samaritan. He's a model of selflessness. 

Nor can you say enough for Miriam. She took that baby from the river, walked right up to her royal highness, and saved that child for the mission God almighty had in mind--and what a mission that was. 

But last week I heard a man explain a Honduras ministry in a line that, to me, made all kinds of sense. He said it this way, something close anyway: Praise God for those who pull the babies out of the water, who save lives, who bring relief where it's most required. Praise God.

But there comes a point when those who stand at the river's edge have to start to ask themselves why all those babies are floating down the river--who's dropping them off up there, why they're not with their mothers, what's causing this damned phenomenon, and what on earth can we do about it?

That's relief work too, of a different type. There are babies in the river and no fish in the water. People are suffering; they're hungry and dying. We need an army of Good Samaritans to do something now, quickly, to pull those babies out and give away five loaves and two fishes and more.

But somewhere along the line for rescuers face a difficult question, and that question is "Why are there babies in the river?"

(More to come)

AJS: on fish and fishing (i)

Seems the line is often attributed to Lao Tzu, a philosopher who may well be part legend but is very real to students of ancient Chinese culture. As some kind of meme, it has some significant miles on it. Its implication may be foreign to kids, but most adults have taken the time to shake meaning loose from what is, essentially an extended metaphor that's only tangentially about bait and tackle. 

As old and venerable as Lao Tzu may be, the memorable line with which he is credited may well have other sources, copy-cats maybe; but more likely simply other mortals who thought a lot of about gifting the hungry with their daily bread. Here's one:

Rabbi Moses Maimonides, a medieval Jewish philosopher and biblical scholar, was widely beloved and thoughtfully read by many during a lifetime of truth-seeking in Egypt and Morocco. His wisdom has worn well. Maimonides, who was also, by the way, a physician and an astronomer, died long ago, in 1204. 

Here's yet another. 

Anna Isabella Thackeray Ritchie, all four names of her, had to be a writer--she was, as was her famous father, the novelist William Thackeray. But Anna Isabella was no slouch herself, penning a number of very popular English novels in the late 19th century, as good an era to write novels as any, more so than most. The wording of her version is altered a bit. Plagiarism lurks maybe, I think--don't you?

Today, the old line about fish and fishing is so worn that it's renewed itself in endless goofiness.  

Even some misogyny. 

But then, what's good for the gander. . .

Zenna Schaffer, who would likely be happy to point out that she doesn't rank with medieval rabbis or Chinese wise men and would be nothing without Lao Tzu, was once--at least--quoted in a book titled Funny Women. More than that I do not know about her.

One of the downsides of pithy wisdom is that what gets old soon soon becomes, well, pithy. The minute what's wise becomes cliche, it loses bite but not (necessarily) truth. Tell me I'm wrong, but it seems that most everyone who knows the line about fish and fishing can probably remember where he or she heard it and thought it through for the first time. 

Cliches may be just that, but their overuse doesn't prove they're empty of truth. Chances are, in fact, the opposite phenom operates: cliches are often true because they're almost always true. 

I'd like to say some things about a Honduras enterprise/mission that absolutely captivated me last week because it uses this old line in a way that makes all kinds of sense. It takes the line about fish and fishing, and extends it, pushes out into uncharted waters. Doesn't mock that old line or make it a bad joke--it simply asks this question: What if you give a man (or woman) a fish and a fishing pole, but discover that the river's rancid and the last fish to call it home became fertilizer a decade ago? Wouldn't you want to know why the fish are gone? Wouldn't you want to do something about that? Wouldn't you have to? 

(More soon)

Josephine Donovan's Black Soil

(continued from yesterday)

In a blizzard reminiscent of the famous Children’s Blizzard of 1888, a little Dutch boy dies when the kids are sent home as the snow begins to fall. Then, when the blizzard unfurls its anger, Little Benny Hurd leaves the Connors kids for home is in another direction. Sadly, he never gets there. His body is found a few days later. The puppy he’d been given by one of the Conners kids earlier that morning was still wrapped in his jacket. His grandparents leave Siouxland. Not everyone is made of tough enough stuff.

People die on the prairie, Benny Hurd among them. Ms. Donovan gives the number of chapters to the story of Johann Hoepner, an aristocratic young man from Germany, a boy escaping the military draft. Johann is just what Nell so desires—he’s upper class, well-educated, and can speak seven languages. A sweetheart back in Germany awaits his signal that a new home awaits her in a new land.

But things don’t work out for Johann Hoepner. The land is a stern taskmaster, time passes and he doesn’t appear able to escape the mud soddie people helped him build when he came. Finally, when the woman he loves stop writing, Johann takes out a rope and ends his life beneath a cottonwood.

Nell is heartbroken, not only because the community lost one of its own, but also because his death kindles once more her grievous fear that this place can kill, spiritually, emotionally, and physically.

If there were a church fight or two, the novel could well have been written by a Dutch Calvinist. There isn’t. The Connors are Roman Catholic, and Nell is bountifully religious, close to God, constantly in prayer. For years, Nell insisted that when their foster child, Sheila, was of age, she’d be sent back east for the kind of education her children were sadly missing. It’s her dream. It’s the vision that allows her to live out here at the edge of the frontier. But when that time comes, Sheila decides otherwise.

Nell’s heart and will are broken. Her only comfort is that all of this is somehow, unthinkably, in God’s will. She goes alone to her bedroom, bearing the burden of what she believes to be her failure, then lies their quietly, admitting no one, seeing no one.

In her calm she realized that in this as in all other things she must be reconciled to His indomitable will. Her spirit of fight was of no avail; she must accept fate. Her recent flash of anger went out like the lightning of a storm. She got up from her bed with a feeling akin to that experienced after the birth of her children here in this room—she had been down in the valley for a while, but she was up in the heights again.

And then she says, “It’s God’s will.” And with that, “Nell bathed her face, combed her hair, changed her wrapper, and rattled up some custard pies for the men’s dinner.”

Sheila’s decision is to follow a man who loves her, a Native, a Yankton Sioux from just on the other side of the Big Sioux River. There’s a racial story here too, a complicated little mystery that opens up at the end of the novel.

But the novel’s heart has less to do with race than it does with place. Wild Goose, the Lakota man who loves Sheila, may well be more of a symbol than a human being, because when Sheila leaves with him for the west, for deeper and even less “civilized” frontier, Nell’s loss couldn’t be more profound.

But what her daughter’s decision determines is that, for Nell Connors, life is here too, on the prairie, in a community of tough ethnics that fight at the drop of a hat or a stolen pitchfork.

And then there’s the railroad. It’s come to town for the first time, creating a celebration like none other this little fledgling community has ever seen. What’s more, it is, to Nell Connors, a kind of redeemer. Once upon a time, it had dropped them off at the far edge of any community. Once upon a time it had loosed them from the life they’d once lived, dumped them unfeelingly into an unwelcoming world, a sea of grass where as far you could see, there seemed to be nothing at all.

It’s the railroad that saves her, a link with her own childhood and the blessings of an established community with good schools and endless opportunities. When the railroad comes to town, linking old and new, Nell Connors finds herself ready to settle down.

Black Soil is not a great novel. Donovan’s power of description occasionally shines in glorious portraits of the prairie beauty that belie Nell’s great fears; but Donovan wanders through several characters’ perceptions with an annoying omniscience, and the perils of the prairie—grasshoppers, prairie fires--are what one might expect.

Still, for those of us who live here, Black Soil is a great read, even if it’s not great literature. It’s a great read because it brings us back to a time when those of us with roots here need to remember. It wasn’t always easy. Farming wasn’t always a business, and opportunity was as abundant as a bin-busting harvest.

That we don’t know our history better allows, even generates a certain kind of arrogance. To read Black Soil today, 150 years after white folks like the Collins came to Siouxland to seek a better life, no matter where they came from, is humbling, something to think about when you pass a tractor and a planter this spring, something to consider when you look up and down endless rows of corn and beans stretching into a horizon that never ends.

Josephine Donovan's Black Soil

The Dutch-American Museum, Orange City, has a few original corn stalks from those early years.

You sometimes wonder—or at least I do—if there will come a time when Sioux County, Iowa, has enough hog confinements. Industry is the name of the game here; the descendants of all those Dutch Calvinists could write primers on how to work, how to farm, and how to make money.

Confinements sit on every available hill, more than any other adjacent county, but then agriculture is a huge business here, empowering everything, keeping life afloat and a culture intact. It’s difficult to imagine the region in its wild, pristine state, almost impossible to the natural world as an antagonist. There’s hail and even a tornado or two; there are still almost unendurable winters, like the last one; and torrid summers still create hot winds that once upon a time laid standing corn to waste in just a few days.

But to think of this world outside my window itself as some untamed wilderness, as a powerful force to somehow be conquered is simply not possible in day when the best cabbed tractors are steered through the fields by satellite technology. In many ways, we’ve subdued the earth.

Maybe that’s why it took me half a novel to determine the central conflict when I started into reading Josephine Donovan’s Black Soil, her engaging rendition of the perilous settlement of this corner of the region Fred Manfred named “Siouxland.” It’s just hard, 150 years later, to think of what she calls “the prairie” as a bleak and pitiless enemy.

But once upon a time, it was. Once upon a time, grasshoppers darkened the sky and devoured just about every living thing, engorging whole sections, mile after mile of farmland, making the earth seem to crawl. Once upon a time, the devastation they created brutal poverty no descendent can begin to imagine. Once upon a time, prairie fires ritually consumed the region. Once upon a time, life-and-death drama occurred on October stages all over the region. Once upon a time, white folks were scared to death of the Native people their own new homesteads unkindly dispossessed.

If you’ve read Giants in the Earth, the Rolvaag classic, nothing in Donovan’s Black Soil is going to be new or visionary. The gender differences are classic in what some call “Middle Border Lit”: men like Per Hansa and Tim Collins loved the adventure, loved opening the earth and making it abundant with row crops. Meanwhile, in a whole series of novels about homesteading, women felt abandoned beneath the eyes of a gargantuan sky on a land so bare there seemed no place to hide. What’s more, frontier life required abandoning families back home, meant endless sweat and none of the blessings of life in established communities back east.

Nell Connors, the woman at the heart of this 1930s novel, is just such a pioneer woman. She’s neither Dutch or Luxembourgian, traditional Sioux County ethnics, but, oddly enough, Irish Catholic and a Yankee. Her roots are back east in Massachusetts, where she remembers visiting the most honorable Dickinson family in Amherst, including the ethereal Emily, whom she remembers as a poet.

Nell Connors is married to Tim, a wonderful man with a huge heart, a man not well suited to build the farming life at the edge of the frontier. He doesn’t lack ambition, but he’s not dedicated to making the work—or farming as a profession. His eye is elsewhere. More than once I’ve heard old Iowa men talk about brothers who were sent off to school for the ministry or education once it became obvious to Ma and Pa that they didn’t have the wherewithal to farm. Tim Connors doesn’t either.

But it’s not her husband’s skewed predilections or laziness that brings Nell Connors grief; it’s the unspeakable realization that her children are walking off to school in bare feet and, once they get there, receiving a third-rate education, at best, in a world where its far more important to milk than read poems.

It’s the sheer force of “the prairie” that she fights, that makes her wonder if Siouxland can ever become a home. When she sees a boy with artistic talent return from working cattle “out west,” swaggering as if he were little more than a chaw-spewing cowhand, she feels and fears the overwhelming power of open spaces. “A sadness came over Nell Connor as she walked back to the house,” Donovan writes. “Does the country make the man, or the man make the country?” Nell Connors’s fear is for what her children won’t have, what they’ll never experience, what they’ll miss out here on the hard-hearted Siouxland prairie.

The Dutch fare well in Black Soil. The novel is set somewhere near Primghar, where the locals watch Hollanders arriving in hoards at the western reaches of the county (“the Dutch are coming in thicker than hops!” someone reports). The Dutch, Nell says, are exceptionally clannish, more so that the Germans and the Luxembourgians; but they keep their towns and themselves clean and tidy, just like their farms. They work hard, and, in the novel at least, the occasional Hollander who wanders away from the colony and into foreign Siouxland regions always makes a good neighbor.

(More of Black Soil tomorrow)

Reading Mother Teresa--Ambassador of Joy

“Shout aloud and sing for joy, people of Zion, 

for great is the Holy One of Israel among you.” Isaiah 12:6 

There’s something so elemental about Mother Teresa’s success that when you witness it, you’re shocked at its simplicity. “Every Sunday I visit the poor in Calcutta’s slums,” she wrote in letter. “I cannot help them, because I do not have anything, but I go to give them joy” (27).

Ambassador of Joy.

Because she had nothing in her pockets, she didn’t have to refuse beggars. Quite simply, she had nothing to give them except joy, which is, of course, a marvelous gift – and very, very expensive.

Great cheerleaders don’t win ball games, and everyone knows you can’t reverse malnutrition with a smile, fight disease with sheer happiness, nor deliver people from hapless poverty by a winning personality.

Some significant criticism of Mother Teresa and her work begins with that knowledge, the assessment that just being nice isn’t enough. That criticism is understandable.

But it can’t deny her gift.

What Mother Teresa brought to the poorest of the poor, and gave away freely, was essential for life: she brought them joy – joy as a synonym for love. In the same letter, she tells the story of a mother whose family suffered immensely, a woman who “did not utter even a word of complaint about her poverty,” a woman who begged Mother Teresa to return: “Oh, Ma, come again! Your smile brought sun into this house” (27).

Mother Teresa brought that family the sun.

I don’t have neighbors so deeply impoverished. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t know from whence his or her next meal will come. Those sad children with extended bellies – you’ve seen them in a ton of photographs – live somewhere in a world other than my own. I’m a long ways from Sudan and all the way around the world from Calcutta.

But then, I suppose, darkness, like hunger, has a thousand faces.

And I can, just as nimbly as she did, lug in the sun, even as she did.

Or could, if I wanted. 

Do I?

Homecoming--addendum

So just about the time I wrote "Homecoming," forty years ago and more, this little poem came out in the literary magazine of the college where I was teaching. I had nothing to do with the choice or the magazine, but I saw the name and did a little inquiry. Bonnie Kuipers was from South Dakota, and, in all likelihood, a descendant of Albertus. 

Her DNA wouldn't have been enough to prompt me to put this poem into the book--with the story; but its subject matter is really somehow related. I won't try to interpret the thing and tell you what Ms. Kuipers is thinking exactly, but there is something of the same love/hate thing going on here--and that prairie wind marks it plainly as the work of someone whose grown up in it.

I asked her for the poem--she was 20 years old back then, I'm sure, no more--and she sweetly accepted. 

Wherever she is, and if she hasn't forgotten, she knows that story. I think that perhaps I told some other Kuipers descendants long ago too. But I don't know that anyone else in the world knows that the poem I used almost as an intro to the story I've been telling was written by the prototype of Albertus DeKruyf, the man who decides, for his own reasons, not to move himself or his people to the land of milk and honey, to stay instead in Dakota.
___________________________________ 


Going Back

When we came back
no one had lived there
     since '45--
                      and you looked 
     like a woman out of time,
             broken, used,
     gone past your prime.
I knew you had been waiting.

You'd been too long
with the sun and rain
and those infernal prairie winds--
      scarred where they'd beat you
     but still smiling--
   how much of a lover
   could you expend the wind to be?

   You're tired of the talk
   that has run about you--
     some have forgotten you
     years ago and some can
     never forget what you
     used to be--

You'll finallly die
burdened by memories
and relics of the dead and gone,

You'll creak and collapse
in a gentle way--
in slow decay,
     as a woman going down
     caressed by her lover--

still smiling at the wind.

          --Bonnie Kuipers

Homecoming--a story (iv)

It's decision time:  here endeth the yarn. It seemed to me so incredibly unlikely that he'd stay in South Dakota. I knew something about the years--my own great-grandparents were there too, and they left, went back east to Iowa. Lots of people left. But somehow Albertus Kuypers stayed. Why? That book about South Dakota Hollanders didn't say why, so I had to take a shot at it myself. What you read is what you get.

Is it stubbornness? It just seemed to me that what I knew about this man some stijve kop. I simply couldn't imagine it was an easy decision. What might have happened on that train, and how was it that he decided what he did?

The fact is, I respected him for staying, even though my own great-grandparents left, even though many did. Don't know if that'll come through or not. 

You know what's going to happen. Let me know you think.

This old tale is in Sign of a Promise, a book of stories about Dutch immigrants to the Upper Midwest. If you'd like a copy, let me know. I can take care of that. 

___________________________ 

Albertus De Kruyf never saw George Stevenson again. He left the Pullman and the Northern Pacific as he planned at Jamestown, but searched for the dark-haired American, hoping to give some kind of farewell. But Stevenson hadn't appeared, and when De Kruyf had boarded the older Union Pacific for the long ride to Armour, he felt almost guilty that he hadn't been able to end the relationship as he would have liked.

Once off the major east-west line, he saw all quality dwindle. The cars were dark and cramped, old and worn; the rails were poorly laid and bumpy, and the train had to grind to complete stops in clapboard towns like Sydney, Millarton, Nortonville, Edgeley, and Monango in North Dakota, and Winship, Frederic, Barnard, Westport, and Gage in South Dakota, railroad towns slapped together at the whim of some businessman in some city far removed from the Dakota flatland, towns that lived only on the blackened breath of the steam locomotive, towns that stood on the naked land like rows of boxes, unsheltered from the whimsical that had, with the passing of the buffalo, people said, become sultan of the desert plains, ruling with a seasonal caress of hail or dust or snow.

But this was his land. Even the prairie grass grew thin on the long sloping hills. It was so like the ocean, he thought, remembering the joyous arrival in the new country. But he recalled, too, how some of his own group, seduced by the scurrilous land agents, had departed and broken their promise of homesteading on Dakota land. He was their leader. His plans were always Dakota. Even in the old country. The remainder had come with him to Harrison, to Overijsel, to Friesland and Nieveen, to towns built with their own hands.

But the land was dry. Drouth in ’85, crop failuire in ’96, hail-out in ’87, average years in ’88 and’89, nothing again in ’90, a good year in ’91, ’92 and ’93 were slow, nothing all this season. all this season. Too many years of dro u th , of bu gs, of to little yield. Some settlers had left, others suffered badly. He watched from his window as the Union Pacific rolled on over the Dakota grassland, brown and lifeless in the early spring. He had seen Washington now, tasted its produce. Weeks he had spent there, touching the land, pricing the land, trying to envision his own Dakota colony transplanted. Here, outside his window, stunted gray stalks barely stood upon the crusted face of the prairie, retarded and beaten by weather that seemed anathema to man and beast. Not even trees could grow in Douglas County, some had said before leaving.

But there was more, he knew. The trains were part of it, the immigrant faces, the velvet chairs, George Stevenson. The Lord had laid before him another vision of sorts, but like a man blinded by the sun, he could but dimly see the meaning behind it all.

This was his Dakota, the land of his dreams since leaving Holland, the land of horror since his arrival.



Two nights later, Albertus De Kruyf had supper with his children, and afterwards, while the women worked in the kitchen, he walked in his son's fields, his own grandson on his arm. He kicked at the soil and found it loose and dry. He saw his son's footsteps raise tufts of dust, even in the spring. He stopped a moment, cupped his hand in the soil, then poured the earth slowly from his palm. It ran in fine grains.

"Not so good today, Father," his son said, watching him. "But we are learning. There's more livestock this year--more cattle, more hogs, less reliance on crops. The Hollanders don't learn quick, but they learn. But look at this." He pointed at tiny fragile shoots poking through the dusty topsoil.

De Kruyf reached down and dug beneath the plant. He scooped up a clump of earth and searched through the dirt for the seedling. There was a root there. He broke the earth around it and saw it, soft and weak.

His grandson laid a hand over his shoulder. Albertus DeKruyf took the boy in his arms and rubbed the dirt from his hands, remembering so clearly a very clean, upturned palm. He stood, lifted the boy with a mock groan, and started walking back to his son’s house, a fine, frame house, the child laughing over his grandfather’s shoulder. 

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You've probably not noticed the picture at the top. It's something I took in eastern South Dakota, but I used it because of the old pair of wagon wheels, but also because that emerald sense of early spring lays right behind it. 

Hope you liked the story. The Schaaps will soon be back from Honduras.

Homecoming--a story (iii)

One of the reasons I was so taken by Kuypers cross-country railroad trip was that he'd come to his promised land south to north, oddly enough. Most Dakota Dutch--like my great-grandparents--came from east to west along a well-established immigrant trail, hitting Dutch communities in New Jersey and Michigan or Wisconsin or Illinois, or some variation thereof. The Kuypers' immigrant group were bound since Holland for South Dakota and got off the ship from the Netherlands at the port of New Orleans. From there, by steam ship, they came up the Mississippi, then the Missouri, from St. Louis, to a place (still exists, by the way) named Running Water, which would have been little more than a day a way from their destination, south and west of Platte, South Dakota. 

Here's where the story-teller loses to the historians: I've always assumed his colony was the one named Friesland, now gone by the way; and I've always thought--or at least liked to think--that Kuypers' colony raised the Christian Reformed Church's very first bona fide academic star, Dr. Henry Zystra, whose Testament of Vision was required reading for all Calvin College students for generations.

Just thought I'd throw all of that in. 

Anyway, I need George Stevenson, who you might already have pegged as a stereotype or a straw man (you wouldn't be wrong). He's interesting, but got a bit too much of the ugly American in him.

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“Hey, you’re the Hollander,” Stevenson pointed up and into DeKruyf’s face, then offered the right hand again, palm upward. His drawn face broadened into a smile, and his black eyes shown like onyx as DeKruyf shook the hand once more.

“Back by the Zulus, eh? Know someone back there?”

There were no words like that in his vocabulary, save for some reference to the Dutch of South Africa.

“Zulus—immigrant cars. Always call them Zulus. Don’t rightly know why. Just everyone does—Zulus.” He stopped to think about it himself. “Kinda’ crazy, isn’t it? Everybody says it in the business--Zulus they call ‘em. Anyway, some of your people there?”

“No, no,” DeKruyf shook his head lightly, still smiling, unbuttoning his coat. “I wanted to see once yet the whole train. My family will want to know everything. They may too, travel like this someday.”

“Leavin’ soon, I bet, aren’t you?”

“Jamestown,” Albert told him.

“Just a hop, skip, and a jump,” George Stevenson said.

There was so much Albert told himself he didn’t know.

Stevenson looked around a bit, as if he didn’t want anybody to hear. “You ever been in a ritz?” he said.

DeKruyf had no idea.

“—The show car? The private Pullman?” He looked around shiftily. “Let me tell you, you haven’t seen it all till you seen that. Come with me,” he said covertly. “I can get you in there.” He rolled his eyes. “This is something your kids wouldn’t believe.”

Back they went through the cars until George Stevenson stopped. “Now you let me do the talking, see?” he said. “When I say something to you, just answer in your own language, see. And I can handle the darkies—I know how to talk to ‘em.” He reached into his pockets and retrieved his gloves, then pulled them tightly over his hands.

Quickly, they walked through the fresh air and into the adjoining car, and in a moment a Negro porter in a neatly pressed black suit stood before them, a huge black man. “Y’all can’t be in here,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“The name is Stevens, Theodore Stevens, and I’m with the company,” he told the man. “I work out of Seattle with special accounts.”

The man towered over George Stevenson, but Stevenson countered his physical inferiority with a pride that vaulted high above the porter.

“Here’s the story, my dear man—this gentleman behind me is a very, very rich Dutchman who’s interested in taking some of his people, his associates, on a excursion to the coast.” He took a quick half0-turn back. “Now, granted, he may not look like our rich New York friends, but take it from me—this is the way his people always dress.” He hunched his shoulders timidly. “You know all about that, don’t you? He needs private accomodations, and it’s my responsibility to show him around. So, I’ll be sure to pass your name along if you’ll just get out of the way—we won’t be long.”

“I’m not allowed to admit no one to this car here while the train is running,” the porter told them.

“Listen, Mr. Villard is a personal friend.” He pointed at Albertus. “Of this guy too, see? He doesn’t know the language, or he’d say so himself. Maybe it’s lucky that he can’t or if he’d a heard you he’d already decided on the Union Pacific.”

The black man was not interested in letting anyone cross his path. “You got a card or something?” he asked.

What Stevenson said then were words Albertus wasn’t expecting. “Now listen, boy,” he said, and you listen good, hear? This guy’s a rich bird, and if Northern loses his account, then some poor darkie will be wearing that good-looking suit of yours and you’ll be pickin’ cotton—you hear?”

The porter moved slightly, just far enough for the two of them to get through to wherever they were going.

Stevenson didn’t let it alone. “What’s your name, boy?” he said. “I got to get your name because you can bet that Mr. Villard will hear about this—he’ll be thanking you personally, I’m sure.” He patted the black man’s shoulder. “I know you can’t just let any trash comin’ in here—I know that’s your job. I get that.” He pointed quickly. “We’ll just be standing here a minute or so, just not at all in your way, hear?”

The porter walked to the front of the car. Albertus DeKruyf had never seen anything quite like that. He wondered if all Americans were like George Stevenson.

Stevenson’s hand swept through the air in a grand gesture of a master magician. “How’s this, wooden shoe?” he said.

DeKruyf was stunned. Not even in Holland had he seen anything quite like it on a train, so lavish. The ceiling was rich, hand-carved walnut, festooned with what seemed gold embroidery. Stained glass windows ran along the canopy, surrounding a flamboyant chandelier. Velvet curtains framed the huge side windows, and matching upholstery, complete with dangling fringe, dressed a showroom of rockers and straight chairs on a shimmering oriental rug. Spacious mirrors adorned the walls that separated the compartments, giving the whole interior even more elegance and at least the appearance of extra space. It was a palace on iron wheels. He imagined himself sitting here, pipe filled with imported tobacco, his wife clean, content, happily watching her darling grandchildren play on the colorful carpet.

"What does it cost?" he asked, astounded.

"To build?--who knows? Couple thousand? Couple hundred thousand? To rent? Fifty a day, I think."

"Fifty?" De Kruyf was incredulous. "Who can spend so much money?"

Stevenson seemed to purr as he shaped his mustache with his fingers and pursed his lips. "Goodly number, my friend. Car like this is always booked. There's a lot a rich folks in this land, you know. That's what I been tellin' you all the time. There's lots of 'em what already got theirs. The rest of us just gotta take it when we can get it, you know. This here's a great land. Who knows, move yerselves up to Washington, and a coupla’ years you might be here yourself.”

Homecoming--a story (ii)

Let me apologize for the lack of action in this story. I was so enamored with what 19th century passenger trains looked like, far too interested in showing off what I'd discovered. I remember plotting out where they'd be when, too, although I can't imagine I have it right--I screw up my own itineraries. 

Albertus is going to get some exercise by walking through the cars today. Don't be surprised if you start to think the Great Northern is a bit of a microcosm. 

Spoiler alert: Albertus Kuypers stayed in South Dakota. I knew that when I wrote the story, and so should you while reading it. As a writer, I've just got to figure out how to determine the nature of  his motivations. Lots of his people--and his Dutch neighbors--did stay, however; they left for Washington, although that fact plays no part of the story I'm writing.

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Just outside of Bismarck, Albertus De Kruyf decided to work his way through the train, since he had somewhat less than several hours before catching the Union southbound out of Jamestown. He checked his baggage beneath the bench and walked back uneasily toward the retiring room. A news butcher approached him with an English paper, but DeKruyf, more to rid himself of the nuisance than anything else, bought an additional supply of tobacco before opening the red oak door to the next car. 

The air was cool and moist beneath a canopy of clouds that shrouded the sun since the train's descent from the mountains. Yet he felt almost joyous, because that moisture would be received with great thanks by the people; he hoped it would reach his own people in Douglas County. Furthermore, the tension of living with so many strange Americans could be at least momentarily forgotten in the isolation of the decks between cars. No one saw him smile broadly here; no one saw him raise his hand upward, pulling out the stiffness that had worn into his arms and legs. There was something in him that wanted to shout, to scream like a child, to release the fatigue of doing nothing but sitting through the interminable expanse of this huge country. He stood straight momentarily, observing the heavy, gray clouds of spring rolling through the sky. He was nearly home.

There was some unease in that knowledge, however, for he had been sent to Washington as a representative of the colony. Albertus DeKruyf, no one else, had been able to see the beauty there. No one else had tasted of the bounty, had felt the moisture deep within the dark earth, had envisioned a new town, a transported colony flourishing in verdant new surroundings. But now no one else could make the decision. This barren land, this flat, lifeless land, or the new land so far away. This land of frequent fires, this land where grasshoppers came in waves, the land of drought, of brutal winters--this land, or the promise of a vision only he had seen.

He stepped into the adjoining car, closed the door softly behind him, and walked in. The car, like his own, was a Pullman. People sat comfortably on upholstered benches, reading, talking, some even playing cards, while others, sprawled in rather unsightly postures, tried to catch more sleep. The next three cars were all Pullmans, well-provided with the collapsible, padded upper berths, most of which were pulled up and out of the way during the day, held snugly to the ceiling by chains, while the passengers lounged beneath, separated, perhaps, by the hinged table which stood between the two facing seats. Pullmans seemed a taste of the promise of America.

With the next car, however he was much more familiar, even though it stood empty. Although the passage was marked by no additional obstructions, DeKruyf knew immediately that a change was imminent, for the picture differed drastically. The same stove sentried the door, but in the place of upholstered seats and collapsible bedding, clean but hard wooden cubicles stood, boxed atop each other. The immigrant car was not new to him. He’d seen it on the way to Washington, the people packed in like animals in cattle cars. He’d sometimes traveled with immigrants who’d come from the east.

Old women sat there as if in a trance their grayed hair swathed by triangular scarves. Children ran and played where they could find an opening, chattering and squealing some foreign language. Men sat soberly, smoking pipes or cigars. Some sipped from clear, unlabeled bottles. The air hung heavy with the odor of uncleanliness, the stench of stale smoke, the pungency of open liquor. The vision, the smells, the noise was haunting, the chaos, the madness. The immigrant car was almost empty now. The sound of the rails chanted through lifeless walls.

He passed through slowly, as if it were a graveyard, and came to the next car, this one alive with Chinese, whose monotone staccatos almost hurt his ears. Some smiled as he passed; most failed to acknowledge his presence. Square-shouldered Russians filled the next car, then more Orientals. 

One vision drew them all together on this pilgrimage, one vision compelled them all, and De Kruyf understood himself the sweet illusion, for he too had slept on such a hard bench as these, hoping for something which existed only in his mind, but pained by a gnawing realization, growing with each passing mile that somehow reality wouldn’t or more pathetically, couldn’t fulfill the vision. But he was different now, he told himself, for this time he had seen the land, tasted its crops and smelled its richness. He passed back through the immigrant crowds, walking like an American in a land of Babel, face forward, chin lifted in a vain display of acquitted self-assurance, the human desire to empathize subordinated to the knowledge that his own car was the Pullman.

When he left the last immigrant car, he drew the door softly shut behind him, as if he might wake the occupants from a satisfying sleep. The cold spring air woke him to the realization that he was learning something, that the Lord was committing something to his understanding, if only he could discover what it was. He paused for an unspoken prayer, then passed back into the Pullman, shutting the red door and turning directly into the face of George Stevenson.

Homecoming, a story (i)

My first attempt at writing grew out of a quest for identity. We'd just left Arizona and moved to Iowa. I'd left a teaching job in an all-American suburb of Phoenix and decided to try to figure out who I was, what kind of background I was from. I'd always known I was Dutch-American, but other than the experience of being that, I had no thoughtful sense of what that meant. 

Once the three of us arrived, I told myself I wanted to know. In Chamberlain, SD, at a truck stop that sold buffalo burgers, I found Hollanders of Charles Mix and Douglas County, a memoir by a man named VanderPol, a housemover and fine story-teller. Loved it. Just loved it. It's still somewhere around here, been with my for almost fifty years. 

Among a host of other things, in that book I discovered the story of Albertus Kuypers, a Dutch immigrant who'd come here with a whole circle of people, come south to north actually, to South Dakota. Back then, I changed the name from Kuypers to DeKruyf, but don't be fooled: Kuypers is the man I'm thinking about.

The story is fiction. What's history is that Kuypers, like Joshua and his men, once visited the Land of Canaan--for Kuypers, that was northwest Washington--with the goal of determining whether the colony he'd brought over with him from the Netherlands, and still lived with, close to the Missouri River, whether the whole bunch might move, lock, stock, and barrel, to the Pacific Northwest. He had reason.

But he also had reason to stay in South Dakota. What I was interested in was how that played out in his life and in his heart. conflict--how he saw the question, how he understood opportunity, and how he made it back and forth on Great Northern railroad, a man who knew so very, very little about a whole new world in South Dakota.

I hope you find it interesting. It is itself a half century old.
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Almost unconsciously, Albertus DeKruyf flicked the ashes from the bowl and dropped his pipe, still warm, into his breast pocket, while his eyes held fast to the mountain range and the grace of the majestic Yellowstone River meandering vein-like down the musculature of the Rockies. For nearly two hundred miles his perception had been owned by the view from his window; ever since Livingston, the Northern Pacific had courted the wily Yellowstone, crossing  it  once, twice before Billings, contented thereafter to follow the river through a backdrop of snow caps and jagged cliffs.

Downward, slowly, elegantly, the train slid, leveling out here and there for a prairie, or, while the river waited politely, rising momentarily to follow the sloping hills. DeKruyf rested on his bench, one arm propped beneath his chin as he held the view and juxtaposed it, kiddingly, with the devil's offer to Christ in the wilderness. Israel was barren, a desert, he remembered, but had Christ been offered this. . .he scolded himself for such mockery. Besides, his land was unproductive.

Then there was blackness. The lamps burned faintly in the Pullman, but the sudden switch from sunlight to tunnel darkness rendered only blindness. The coach lurched as DeKruyf squinted into the dark, waiting for his eyes to adjust. Then he felt a thudding jolt on his bench, and tried to catch some glimpse of the intruder.

"Excuse me, sir. Been working for this railroad for close to ten years. Been up this way three, maybe four times before, but I'm so dumb I couldn't remember the tunnel. Shoulda’ chosen another time to visit the convenience. Shoulda’ remembered the tunnel is what I shoulda’ done."

DeKruyf grunted lightly, shook his head and snapped back his hand from the back of the bench, folding his arms together in a fluid motion which he hoped would convey some sense of ease.

"Tunnels are something, eh? Them Irishmen bully their way through mountains, ‘zif all that rock wa'nt nothin'."

DeKruyf's eyes adjusted slowly to the glimmering wall lamps until the American man who shared his bench. The man was dressed in a brown striped suit, buttoned tightly through the chest over a matching vest and a white shirt with a turned-up collar that pointed simultaneously into two bushy black sideburns. His right arm draped over the bench, and in his left hand he held a brown derby. A thick black mustache fanned over his lip and straightened into his sideburns, forming a kind of cow-catcher over a thin pointy face.

"No wonder the Union was first. Ever been to Nebraska? Nothin' but flat land. Lay in' track's easy as cut­tin' butter. Just roll along." His right hand pushed snake­-like toward the front of the car. "Don't cost as much either." He pointed out the window.. "You imagine how much blastin' them Irishmen had to do through here? Couldn't lay no more than a few feet a day. Mountains look gorgeous, but they make for tough roadbed.” He turned suddenly. “Where you from?"

DeKruyf adjusted his weight to better face the big man. "My home is in South Dakota now."

"Dakota?--then you know. The Northern had to deal with winters, too. You know about winters--and Indians. I'll tell you, Dodge never knew how easy it was to the south. Why we just passed Custer; go south about fifty miles and you could still see the blood of the general, I’m sure. The Sioux are a rough bunch. Don’t get the message easy. Cost Villard a fortune to get ‘em moved outta' the way—darn near broke the company.” The derby jumped into a gesture with each sentence. “The name is Stevenson—George Stevenson. Been working out of Seattle. And you? He held his thin right hand out, cleaned to lily white, palm upward.

“Albertus DeKruyf.” Albertus watched the man’s hand disappear into his, but the grip was tight and energetic.

“DeKruyf, eh?—Hollander.” Stevenson said. “You going back to get some family?”

Stevenson’s eyes were dark, set far back in his head, and when he squinted, his thick, black eyebrows nearly hid them. His nose pointed downward, straight and rigid as a roofline, nostrils hidden in the underbrush beneath.

DeKruyf folded his arms again and crossed his legs. “I have been to Washington to look at land there. I am thinking of moving maybe.”

“Washington, eh?” Stevenson raised the black mantle above his eyes, forming two separate brows.

“North—Whidby Island maybe—or farther.”

“Never been there. Beautiful country though. All of it is up there. Got it all over South Dakota, that’s sure." He laughed as if the comparison was perfectly nonsensical. "Ever notice that no companies push through there? No sir—Union took Nebraska. Northern takes North Dakota, even Hill chose North. Yessir, that’s some country you got their—downright inhospitable. Gonna’ be movin’ soon?”

DeKruyf found Stevenson engaging and warm. The natural antipathy he felt toward Americans faded in the company of such a man. He rested an arm over the bench.

“I must yet decide if we will leave,” he told the man.

          “Well, tell me why in God’s name wouldn’t you?” Stevenson said. He didn’t really mean it as a question.

          The train emerged from the tunnel as quickly as it had entered. Sunlight splashed into the Pullman, dousing the lamps in its wake. Stevenson visored his eyes with his hands. “That’s a whole lot better, eh?” He turned slightly away from the window. “Beautiful country this. Like to have me a cabin here someplace. Do some fishing and hunting. Right there maybe.” He pointed out the window with his right hand. “Right there on the old Yellowstone.”

          DeKruyf looked from his window. It was beautiful. “A cabin?” he said.

          “Some place to go sometime when it gets busy, a little home away from home.”

          Made no sense of DeKruyf. “Mr. Stevenson—” he said.

          “I don’t take with formality—call me George.”

          “—you are working now for the railroad?”

          Stevenson fingered his mustache and bit, and tightened his lips. “No--don’t work for the railroad anymore. Don’t like what’s goin’ on, see? Decided to get myself out. Got a family some place in Minnesota, I think. Ought to get back there if they’ll have me.” He shrugged his shoulders.

          “Your job? —what was wrong?” He’d read about the scandals. He had seen the giant paintings of America when they had all lived in the old country. People from all over Europe had been cheated. He knew many who had come to this country with nothing but a picture from a lantern slide in their hearts, thinking themselves somehow heirs to the riches of the new paradise.

          “Double-dealin’--railroads do some lyin’, my friend, some lotta’ lyin’. Just couldn’t live with it no more, no sir, shouldn’t do it, you know, cause one day all them lies are going fall in like wet circus tent, and everybody that’s under it—especially the little guys like me—is going to get squashed--if you know what I mean.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t take them lies no more. Didn’t see no kind of advancement in front of me no more either—no future, and if a man can’t be moving up in life, I mean, well, that’s something. Then when I just know the whole business is going to be fallin' in, why that was it, you know what I’m saying’? I just took what I could get and cleared the heck out.” Once more, he shook his head. “A man’s gotta take what he can get when he can, right?”

          DeKruyf said nothing.

          “You know what I mean otherwise you wouldn’t be looking for no Washington paradise for you and yours.”

          Albertus smiled and nodded politely. Stevenson settled back on the bench for a moment, then slid forward suddenly. "Well, seems to me I was on the way to the convenience. 'Sides, I been stealin' your attention from the Yellowstone. Been on this trip myself, what-- three, four times now­--gets old, you know?" He pointed to the window.

"You're welcome to stay, Mr. Stevenson."

"Call me 'George, if you please.'"

"Yeah--George."

Albertus watched his new friend march to the end of the car. He reached for the tour guide and located the position of the train. Next stop would be Miles City, at the confluence of the Yellowstone and the Tongue.

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What I remember very well about thinking my way into this story is the seeming shock of discovering that Albertus Kuypers took a train to Washington. What you'll discover quickly is that almost all of the story happens on this old, steam-belching passenger train, circa 1890.