The Secret Place -- iii

Once upon a time just outside of Doon, Iowa, a large sign stood proudly along Hwy 75, heralding the town and bellowing proudly, “Home of the novelist, Frederick Manfred.”

Time was, of course, when Manfred came a whisper away from the National Book Award with a novel he titled Lord Grizzily, his version of an old trapper tale that took place out in the northwest of South Dakota, long before white men figured the land out there was worth more than the Natives on it. Lord Grizzily carried home some significant prominence, made the town proud, it seems. 

When The Secret Place came out, the sign came down, brutally. Someone did it in with a chain saw, middle of the night, a kind of literary vigilantism. Someone didn't like it.

I assumed, back then, my own self-righteous people were the culprits. Manfred didn’t write dirty books, but he did write at the advent of a time when open portrayal of sexuality began to be not only allowed but even encouraged. When the Doon town sign came down, I figured it was the work of Calvinists who ran the place, the same people who made sure Manfred's novels weren’t on the shelf of the college library.

That was a conclusion I carried for most of the next 40 years—vengeful, self-righteous Calvinists hated all that close-up sex. However strong that sentiment may have been, I was wrong about assigning blame. 

I was in Doon, years later, helping the sister of a friend of mine who’d died. She asked if I’d come over and help her determine what to do with her brother’s treasured library, which was extensive.

We were talking about Frederick Manfred because her brother owned a complete collection, all of them signed, a shelf of volumes she was going to keep, she told me. Manfred was long gone by that time. We were talking about my friend’s deep and solid appreciation for him when the story of the sawed-off town sign on HWY 75 came up. I mentioned it because to me dropping that sign seemed an act infused with equal portions of pitiable sadness, cartoon humor, and, for a Dutch Calvinist like myself, cultural shame.

She stopped sorting and looked at me. “Well, you know who sawed it down, don’t you?” she asked.

To me, it was “the town.”

“You never heard about that?"

I shook my head.

She seemed dumbfounded. She squinted at me. “Why, it was the family,” she said, shaking her head, as if cause/effect was in clear operation.

“The family?” I said.

“Of the girl—her family. They’re the ones who sawed it down.”

Some years later, there I stood, camera in hand, between two graves, one of them Frederick Manfred’s, at the northwest edge of graveyard, the other one belonging to someone named Jennie Van Engen, 1899-1920, a young bride who died, the novel claimed and the stone suggested, tragically, in childbirth.

The family felled that highway sign. Who knows?--they may well have been offended by the way Manfred described the sexuality; but what deeply offended them--I'm not sure we have a name for it--was the odd sense that their sister or their aunt or their whatever got used, used like as if she were nothing more than a cardboard doll, used, almost as if she'd been raped. Used, then tossed. Used, in a story Manfred wrote to try to win some lit prize he'd not been able to with Lord Grizzily. Used, which is to say abused.

And if the two of them were there, if the two of them would sometime that night simply step out of their graves, wander over to where each other was and talk, I couldn't help wondering what Jennie would say. 

That’s what the writer in me thought that day, looking for long shadows of the dawn on a winter morning in the graveyard on the hill west of town.