The Secret Place -- i

That Saturday morning what I wanted to get was a couple of fine shots of gravestones adorned in long, early morning shadows. I headed out to the Doon cemetery, where the stones hug a rolling hill above the Rock River, a setting that offers a cemetery more silent gravitas than graveyards ordinarily have.

Frederick Manfred, a prolific American novelist, wanted to be buried up there on the hill above town, as if he could look down at Doon, the beloved village of his birth, and across fields of corn and beans to the north, fields that even in winter don’t shed their spacious grandeur. That’s where his grave stone stands today.

But it was cold that morning, and I was looking for a particular image, something visually stunning—the long shadow of a new sun over an old grave.

That’s what I was looking for when I bumped into the stone of a woman whose name I recognized immediately. It was eerie, oddly mystical. I hadn't expected to know anyone out there, after all. I never had family in Doon, and I certainly wasn't looking for her. That I knew her at all was itself an epiphany because I wondered whether anyone else did. She was someone whose life I would not have known at all had I never read an obscure Frederick Manfred novel called The Secret Place.  I turned around and there she was, as if I knew her, and she died already in 1920.

I had read The Secret Place when I was 18 years old, and like nothing else in my life, that slim old yarn made me think I’d like to write stories someday. Honestly, that novel--and, in part, her life--changed mine altogether. Of course, I knew her. Maybe she was looking for me.

But The Secret Place wasn’t a great hit right there in his own hometown. I'd heard the story from a bona fide Doon resident, the sole newspaper man in the village. But back then I only partially understood why that novel wasn't all that popular among the townspeople. It took me most of a lifetime--and years of writing myself--to come to understand that the good people--not to mention the bad--from Manfred’s own hometown felt used by his telling the world Gerrit's--and Jennie's--story.

Some of it, and its sadness, is true. Frederick Manfred used prototypes, used characters from the streets of town to make the novel come to life. Even though Jennie Van Engen was forty years in the grave when The Secret Place was published (titled, then, The Man Who Looked Like the Prince of Wales) that novel was based, in part, on her sad, short life, more particularly, on the sad story of her husband, Gerrit.

When Jennie Van Engen died, she was just 21 years old, or so the stone says, a century ago. Still, the morning I stumbled upon that stone, I couldn't help feeling I knew her, or at least of her. I couldn’t help wondering how many people on the face of the earth, even among her own descendant family, had even an inkling of who she was or the dimensions of her tragedy.

“Till we meet again” the stone says above her name, in lichened text.

I stood there beside that grave, sorry that she’d died so young, and sorry too that Fred Manfred, Feik Feikema, caught all the anger he did from the town he loved when he was just trying to tell a good story, part of it hers.

The story was not even really about her. It was about the wild boy she married, a man who I knew Fred himself admired, even held up as a hero. Gerrit Van Engen, at least in Manfred's mind, was a kid who could have played majors if he hadn't been born into a brood of Calvinists who couldn't play ball on Sunday. He was hot, a rebel with a cunning smile that couldn't be refused. At least that's the way his younger cousin saw him as the two of them, Gerrit--a decade older--and Feike grew up through a rambunctious Doon childhood. 

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Tomorrow: Me and The Secret Place