January Thaw -- v

“You don’t even know,” she says, but there’s a gracious, soft smile on her lips. “You remember every detail of how you described it between Garrett and me, up here at this secret place, don’t you? You told the world. You took me here,” and she has to reach for words now, “—and all I’m asking of you is my name,” she says again, but not angrily. She’s not after revenge—that’s not it. And even he knows it; he feels it in the pitch of her words. “To you I was a character, that’s all. Do you know how that feels?” And then again, “Tell me my name.”

It’s difficult for him to look into her eyes, which is to say into her soul, so he pulls a hand up across his face as if something is there to wipe away.

Seconds pass. A minute. Two minutes. Her waiting is relentless.

There are no cars coming up the road to the cemetery. Somewhere far away, a coyote. He knows he could stand here forever and not remember because it is no longer in the vault of his memory. He remembers exactly how he created her story, where he was sitting, how he walked around the room, how careful he was with the details, how hard he worked to get it right, how the next morning he went over and over it again, that lovemaking in this secret place.

He looks up to see she’s still waiting.

“You don’t remember,” she says. Her shoulders drop. “Admit it. You don’t know me at all. You don’t even know my name.” She is turning him in her hands. She can.

There have been moments in his life when deep regret pitched up against the sheer force of his indomitable will, moments he doesn’t want to remember. But it’s still hard for him. Her will is immense. He knows the silence she’s created here and now, outside of time, could go on for days, and he doesn’t know her name.

And all the while he’s standing there frozen, his face empty, the smile on hers grows seemingly more considerate because she knows she has forever. She feels no need to speak. It wasn’t how she’d planned it—what she might say, how they might talk—because she never guessed he wouldn’t remember her name, not after what he’d done, how much he’d written. But they have arrived where she wanted to take him, where, she might have said, she needed to, for his sake, and hers too, maybe. But then she wasn’t thinking of herself. Credit her this: she’s been in the neighborhood for years and years, and even though time is immaterial—and maybe because it is—there’s grace in this woman’s spirit and no more spite.

That’s why, just then, in his silence, she steps closer.

Nothing is said. She remembers that he had given her a life that she might not have had—he wasn’t wrong. People sometimes drive up to the cemetery, get out of the car, and walk to her grave; and she knows—she simply understands—that when they stand there and read the words her husband had carved in the stone—“Wife of Garret Van Engen,” words that were somewhat too shadowy with mildew now—when people stand there, people she doesn’t recognize, no blood relatives, she understands they are there because of him, because of what he had done.

It is 75 years since she’d died becoming the mother she never would be, and in that time she’d come to understand that if it weren’t for this man, few, if any, would ever pause before the stone the way some visitors still do. In those first years, people stopped often, some of them—women—even crying, her folks, full of regret for the way they’d handled everything now that their daughter was gone. Her father had come for years, but that was behind her now, and he was here, too. But then, fewer and fewer had come, her husband gone away, buried elsewhere; no one but strangers ever stand before her stone. What she’d come to understand was not so much that he had given her life—only God could do that—as prolonged it, even if the facts weren’t square and what he’d written was more than he should have. He had their love right, she told herself. That much he’d had right after all. It was strange. Maybe she was more a part of his secret place than she’d ever been in life itself, a place he’d created.

Bravely, he looked up at her once again, but still without the name she wanted. “I’m sorry,” he says. “It’s been so very long.”

“You can’t use that one here,” she tells him, and she comes even closer to him. Once again, she brings her hands up to his elbows, then pulls herself near him, has him, this big man, in her grasp. “You really don’t know, do you?”

He has to force himself to look into her eyes, and he’s struck by the fact that there is nothing menacing there. He shakes his head.

“Not even a guess?” she asks.

What he sees in her eyes is something he doesn’t remember ever seeing before, something it takes him some time to understand. It’s shocking in it guilelessness, and it seems to him like nothing human he’d ever seen. He remembers, as a boy, being told about it, what it might be; but it’s taken his death for him to see it for real, if this can be said to be real. And because there seems no anger, he opens himself in a way hadn’t, this writer who for so many years opened himself to his readers. “I don’t remember your name,” he says. “I’m an old man, and I don’t know it, and I’m so very sorry.”

She’s been holding him at the elbows, but with those words her small arms circle his broad chest and she holds him tenderly as a lover, not a lover in any sense he might remember either, but a lover that is, as she is, not of this world.

“It’s not June,” she tells him, pulling back again. She tightens her lips, stares. “That’s a beautiful name, and I wish it had been mine, but it’s not. My name was Jennie.” She backs away slightly, let’s his arms go for a moment, then reaches for an elbow again and gently pulls him with her. “Let me show you,” she says.

For the first time, he smiles. “It’s not that,” he says, “I know where you are. I remember your stone—when it was new. I used to come here. As a boy, I used to come here.”

She takes his hand, and the two of them walk back from the fence line into the center of things, from the far reaches of the northwest corner. She pulls her hand away for a moment and then pushes her arm into his, and he takes it as a gentleman would.

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 90

“You sweep men away in the sleep of death;. . .”

This morning's text brings back the story of Kenneth Lay, the disgraced CEO of Enron, an energy company that did little more than lay pipeline until Lay turned it into an immense multi-national conglomerate, over 100 billion in annual revenues and number seven on the Fortune 500 in 2000. Listen to this: in 2001 Ken Lay gave away--gave away!-- $6.1 million. That’s wealth.

But his successes took a tragic turn with the collapse of the huge energy company he’d helped create. Corruption found its way into the inner sanctum of Enron, and the company staggered and fell, first to its knees, then flat on its face, taking the dreams and financial futures of many thousands with it into oblivion.

 
It took several years for investigators to unravel the origins and the paths of the corruption, but from early on it was clear that Lay’s innocence—he claimed as much—was going to be difficult to prove. His was, after all, the desk where the buck stopped. 

 Eventually a jury convicted Kenneth Lay, friend of Presidents, Houston’s most blessed philanthropist, of fraud and conspiracy for lying to employees and stock holders.

Nonetheless, his story is the great American dream. Born into poverty in Missouri, he rose by his bootstraps to the shining pinnacle of corporate America. A note he sent to George W. Bush in 1998, on the occasion of Bush’s capturing the Texas Governorship, makes clear his relationship: “Please have your team let me know what Enron can do to be helpful in not only passing electricity restructuring legislation but also in pursuing the rest of your legislative agenda.” And then, penciled in beneath the type: “George—Linda and I are incredibly proud of you and Laura.” And finally, “Ken.” 

Sounds almost like a father.

 
Few on earthlings held Ken Lay’s power during the glory years at Enron. Few fell so far, so fast. Today, his name is synonymous with greed and graft, the quintessential white-collar criminal. Years later, late-night comedians still cut him up.

And then, not long after his sentencing but before any jail time, remarkably, he died; the autopsy said heart disease. Those who’ve followed the story—me included—felt somehow robbed because there should have been more before the story ended. We should have seen him in an orange jumpsuit, trucked off to prison; we needed to hear the clang of a dead bolt. We needed to feel justice.

But he died, fell over dead on a vacation, of all things, in Aspen, Colorado. It just wasn’t right. Those of us who are believers would like to see something else come out of this whole sordid tale—a confession of sin, maybe. Ken Lay toted a Bible to church every Sunday of his life, taught Sunday school for years. A frequently combative and seemingly arrogant defendant during his six-month trial, Lay should have had time to make amends, to make peace, to show us redemption. Honestly, I still feel as if the story can’t be over. We’re nowhere near denouement.

But dead men tell no tales, and now he’s long gone. His family still misses him, I’m sure, but also must feel some relief. Conspiracy theorists will never believe “heart disease.”

 
Kenneth Lay was “swept away in the sleep of death,” just exactly as the Psalm say. 

But this line from Psalm 90 is not solely about a financier named Ken Lay. It’s about us too, this bell tolling. . .

Hear it?

January Thaw --iv

 The cemetery lies a mile or so west of town, up on a bluff above the river. The view is extraordinary, the town down there beneath them, streetlights like a string of pearls in the midnight darkness, now and then a car. Occasionally, one of them comes up the road from town, driving west. The tires sing a higher pitch as they cross the bridge, but most of the time—everyone remembers the exceptions—those cars just keep going, especially at night. No one in the neighborhood hides as they pass, but then no one is afraid. Why should they be?

She knows she needs more from him. “What makes you think you know what happened—between Garrett and me, I mean?” she asks. She turns to face him, not because she’d planned it that way but because she wants him to answer her, not evade. “What makes you think you can create all of that out of thin air and sell it as your own?”

“You don’t understand—“

“It wasn’t ‘thin air’ either. Believe me, I wouldn’t feel the way I do if it was all ‘thin air,’” she says, but she’s not angry.

“I didn’t even know you,” he tells her.

“Then how is it you think you can become me the way you did?”

“’Become you?’”

“Tell the whole world what happened to me—to us—here, in this ‘secret place’ that doesn’t exist.” She pointed north and west. “Walk with me, why don’t you?” she says. “Let me show you.”

“You don’t have to—“

“Let’s go to this ‘Garden of Eden,’” she insists. “Let’s find this place you describe where he took me, this secret place where Garrett and I first made love.” She comes up close to him, and even though he stands a foot taller than she does, she seems unafraid. “You’re surprised that I say it that way?” She looks into his eyes. “Why? I was as human as you. Maybe that’s why it hurt—“

“When I wrote that book,” he says, “you were gone.”

“Not so,” she says, raising a hand as if it were self-evident. “I was here.”

“If I’d have known—“

“If you’d have known it wouldn’t have stopped you for a moment,” she tells him, her voice astoundingly mellow, restrained. “You were driven. It was your calling—these stories. It was what you were born to do.” And now she takes hold of him at the elbow. “Let’s go—you and me—let’s find this secret place.”

“I made it up,” he says. “You know that.”

“But you didn’t make me up,” she says, her hands dropping once again. She takes a few steps back but doesn’t turn around, and her voice is straight-forward, disarmingly passionless. “That’s why these people hated it—what you did—because it was half-truth, and half-truth is worse than a lie because no one knows what to believe.”

“Stories are not to be believed,” he says.

“If that’s true you never would have written a word,” she says. “You wanted to be believed. You wanted nothing but to be believed. That’s why you gave your life for your work. Don’t try to deceive—it doesn’t become you and it never did.”

Just exactly what she wants from him is not so easy to name, but she knows as yet she doesn’t have it. “We remember when you came and chose your plot, some of us do.” She doesn’t raise her voice. “We remember the tears too, not for dying but for your marriage—how it broke just then. We remember these things.”

He looks up at her, amazed.

“Of that you never wrote a word,” she says.

“It’s in there,” he tells her, “that damned agony—it’s in there. You can find it all over in my books.”

“But not her—“

“She was my wife—“

“And I am somehow less human?” she says. “And with me—you can undress me, you can have your way with me, the whole world watching.”

“Not me,” he says, and for the first time, there’s some anger. “It wasn’t me up here,” and he points at some place that isn’t real.

“Yes, you,” she says. “Because you are the one who tells all the world how beautiful I am when I lie back on the grass, my hair like some golden halo all around. You are the one who used me—not him, not my husband.”

He slouches back against his own stone. It’s not often he is speechless, but he hasn’t spoken at all since he’s come. “I gave you life,” he says. “When you were dead and gone, I gave you life.” And he points at her, embittered.

“You think maybe you’re God,” she says.

“No one would know who you are anymore—you know that? No one would pause a moment at your grave, so long ago it was you died. No one would know June Memling."

"That’s not my name and you know it,” she says.

His face seems gray and empty.

“Say it,” she says.

“Say what?” he asks, as if he doesn’t know what she means.

“Tell me my real name—not the name you gave me. Tell me the name by which I was baptized. I’m not yours.”

She stands there waiting, then steps back as if she has forever. She drops her arms from her chest, unbuttons her coat before him, then puts her hands in the pockets. She looks around, sees no one, but she knows better. Hundreds are here, listening. She doesn’t care. They may listen. They’ll want to know. Many have their own stories.

January Thaw - iii

He was an old man, and she was young, even though he’d been just a boy when she was in her agony. Back then, she barely knew him, not even in his teens. But still, when she saw him there in the neighborhood, she couldn’t miss the fact that he still had some youthfulness. She’d felt it the moment he’d looked at her that first time. She is a woman, and even though she died so very young, she had learned—as women do—to read men’s eyes. Nothing was said, but I wonder if after that first time in the short silence, she had considered not going back, afraid of him, as she had cause to be.

Or maybe I’m thinking them too human, these spirits. What need she fear of him, really?

So she waited, maybe, for a January thaw, a cold, crisp night with a silver moon that shines on the faces of the stones and casts shadows across the thin carpet of snow, a night when her going to him cast the whole place into silence because the others wondered what she thought of him, the man who had claimed to know so much more than he should—as if he’d seen her naked, as if he’d actually watched her make love with the man who would be her husband.

I like to think she goes to him late that night, when she thinks she’s alone, when it’s cold but not forbidding, that blue coat wrapped tightly around her, collar up. She thinks it’s a secret almost, but she knows better. The spirits are all around.

He is leaning up against his own stone, a leather coat with sheepskin collar pulled up against a light northwest wind. He is twice her size.

“You don’t know me?” she might have said.

He smiles. He always loved the attention of young and beautiful women. “Is that a question?” he answers.

She hadn’t expected another question, and it is intimidating this first time to be in his presence. “You scare me,” she tells him, which is something no one would expect a Brink to say.

Always genial, he tries to diffuse her fear. “We’re both long gone,” he says. “Besides, you’re young enough to be my daughter.”

“I’m old enough to be your mother,” she says.

“Vander Es—you have high cheekbones like a Vander Es.” He points that long finger. “Somewhere in your family line there’s Indian blood.”

She shakes her head.

“Brandsma?” he says. “Tall women, all of them. Good strong Frisian stock.”

That he could be that wrong makes her smile. “Memling,” she tells him.

His eyes narrow, his shoulders hunch just a bit, just a second or two before a long knowing smile, something she doesn’t like, spreads across his face in slow motion. He says nothing.

She nods because she knows at that moment that he knows. “And where is it—this secret place?” she says. Deliberately, she turns her back to him, walks just a few steps north, almost to the fence. “I could look forever—I have,” she says, insistently. “There is no secret place out here. This year, beans; next year, corn—that’s all. There is no ‘Garden of Eden,’ like you said. Long, flat land—very beautiful. But no secret place. You couldn’t have brought some girl here yourself because there isn’t such a place.”

She turns back to him when he offers her no answer. With his finger, he taps his temple three times.

“You can simply lie like that, and we have nothing to say?” she says. “I mean, those people you’ve lied about—we have no recourse?”

He stands, not to make her cower, but he’s thinking that there is disrespect in the way he’s slouching, and he wants her to know that what she’s said—about lying—does matter. “I wasn’t using you,” he tells her.

“Then who were you using?” she asks him.

“I mean, I wasn’t using you. I wasn’t using the real you.”

He approaches her as if to touch her with some comfort; he’s not unfeeling. But she turns away with enough clarity to let him know that she’ll have nothing of that. In life, I’m not sure he could have read that gesture, but he’s dead now, and smarter, less imprisoned. He laughs because he’s always thought he’d had a way with women—more than what he did at least. He holds his hands up as if to come clean. “No reason to be afraid. I’m not my characters,” he says.

“And neither are we,” she tells him, the collar from her coat falling back as she looks coldly over her shoulder. She waits. Waiting comes easily because she has no reason to hurry. She looks away again, towards town, towards the east.

January Thaw - ii

  

And occasionally that first week or so, the rest of them acted strangely around her because they didn’t know how she would feel about his being there, this man, the writer, given what he’d done to her.

So the Brinks being who they are and he being who he was, I think she waited. He was such a presence, always was. And he was big. He was a man. Even when he was an old man, he was a man.

The way I’d like to see it, the first few times she dropped by—her place was maybe two hundred feet or so from his, not far—the first few times she probably hid behind those big stones just south of his because she simply wanted to see him, those long legs, that great white shock of hair, a shard of big blue stem jutting from his mouth, something he’d pulled from the fence line. He didn’t smoke. Sometimes he’d stare down the hill toward the town, the grain elevator and the bridge and the river. And she saw it too, what others had said about his being almost oblivious; but how he smiled, as if he’d made the right choice when he picked out this spot, as if there was something out there that was special to him, something she thought she understood better than the others.

Not everyone up the hill is as happy as he was. Sometimes it takes a year, maybe more, before the angry ones get settled down and neighborly. Then again, some never do. They just stay in the ground or disappear altogether.

She was sure he would have chosen to live if he’d had the choice, even though he was as old as he was, as old as most of the people in the neighborhood, many of whom were actually happy to get here finally, comforted, their agony behind them, some of them claiming, somewhat jokingly, that they’d already been to hell. When she hears such things, sometimes—not all the time, but sometimes—she’s less grieved about having found herself here as young as she was at the time, just 21, and leaving her baby, her first, behind. That’s another story. Thats her story.

I’d like to think that sometime that first month after he’d come, one of her friends might have asked her—it would have had to be a friend—whether or not she’d struck up a conversation yet.

“Has anyone?” she likely asked, somewhat perturbed.

Shrugged shoulders. “We’re wondering about you—that’s all.”

She looked away as the Brinks often do.

It likely took some time before she came out from behind the Stravers’ family stone just south of his, and by then it was cold—November, and she had to pull her coat around her, the old blue one, double-breasted, the one her mother had given her so many years ago for a wedding present.

And if I know him, I’m sure that when he spotted her he smiled because she was the kind of tall, willowy young woman that pleased him and always had. She was his dream, as so many of his women were, the ones in his novels.

When she came to him from the darkness, the collar of that thick blue coat pulled up around her face, I’m guessing he didn’t recognize her. So maybe the first time they saw each other nothing happened at all. He glanced up maybe, then fell back into that pleased stare he wore as he looked over the long snow fields.

She probably went back to her place to redesign what she imagined she would say because it had not dawned on her—his knowing as much about her as he did, so very much—that he wouldn’t know her, wouldn’t even recognize her. But then, he hadn’t been around town for so long. As if that should matter; she had to laugh when she thought of it because, of course, neither had she.

________________________

Up the hill, she and the writer--the two of them--begin to talk.

January Thaw -- i

We'll be out of town for a week, so I thought I'd run a short story, the first story in a collection of mine titled Up the Hill. It's a story with a history, an incident in a cemetery one early morning, when I was "up the hill" in the Doon (IA) cemetery where I bumped into someone I didn't expect. The story is based on the discovery of the stone of a young woman who played a significant role in a Manfred novel that plays a significant role in my life.



The photo I want is a long shadow created by a sunrise coming through the old stones in a town cemetery up on a hill above the river. It’s winter, and old snow stretches out in crusty quilts on the frozen earth.

The sun is up, far south on the horizon, and I look hurriedly for the kind of tall stone—one of the ancients—that will throw just the shadow I want. The broad sky’s colors shift quickly, and, still not finding what I’m looking for. I step back against a stone and frame a shot—still no good. I turn around. “Van Engen,” it says, “Jennie, wife of Gerrit Van Engen.” Then “BORN Sept. 15, 1899” and “DIED December 6, 1920.”

I know her. I swear it. I once knew this woman. She was just a girl.

I met her in a novel, the work of the old novelist who is right here too, same burial ground, up in the northwest corner he’d chosen before anyone else had been put back there to rest. For too long she tried to hide her pregnancy, but nothing stays hidden long beneath such broad and open skies. I know her only because I know the novel, a secondary work by a giant of a man, a book that birthed the writer in me. Jennie Van Engen is alive in me even though she died in childbirth and had no descendents.

She was here when he was buried, I’m thinking. She must have seen the burial, even though there were very few. Was she angry? Was she afraid? I wonder how she felt once he was there with her, with them, once again citizens of same town, as they were years ago when he heard her story.

I’m thinking she knows he’s there, but she waits for weeks, maybe months, time being of little concern to her, to them, after all.

He had died in the fall, when the maples were drenched in orange, and to the north those sharp lines of shorn soybean rows looked knifed into the land. She thinks he chose the right time of year—autumn is so beautiful, and there’s relief, the corn finally out although harvest is much easier now with those lumbering machines. Sometimes she wonders if anyone remembers how they used to pick corn, the way snapping ears wrenched your wrists, your lower back in constant pain until the work was finally over or snow clogged the fields.

The way I imagine it, she knew who he was the moment that pine box—how strange, a pine box!—was lugged into the neighborhood. There it stood above the ground. Everyone saw it. It was white and big—huge. Word had gone around that he was dead, that he would be buried in the cemetery above the town he loved, a town that sometimes hated him for what he wrote. She knew who he was, only too well—everyone did.

But she was a Brink, and the Brinks were timid by nature. Soon enough she’d heard how some of the others had walked over to look, gawking as if his being there was some freak show. Made her laugh to think about it, but then people had always been afraid of him.

They said at first he was sitting against a fencepost—his stone wasn’t up yet— those long legs stretched out before him. He seemed to love to look out at the fields west and north. Some remembered that time too when he’d come to the neighborhood to choose the site. That was years ago. They said it seemed as if, since his arrival, he’d rather enjoyed being alone, far in the corner, staring into the openness. Not angry either, but looking over the land as if something was right there, something the rest of them didn’t see.

She thought she knew, but she didn’t say.

No one spoke to him. But then, he had a reputation.

There were others with reputations too, but not like his.

"Everybody was somebody"

Barbara and the Wolfgang Puck maitre d'

It was a night not to forget. The one-and-only responsibility of the parents of the groom was to choose the eatery for the post-rehearsal dinner and make sure of its readiness. We'd stopped that afternoon. She'd chatted amicably with the staff, reminded them of their commitment. It was a downtown Tulsa, a Mexican food place, lots of five-stars on the website, a popular place the bride told us had a great reputation.

As indeed it did. When we showed up that night, the rehearsal behind us, the place was hopping, with a line of customers waiting for tables. The wedding crew counted a couple dozen or so, parents and close friends, so many we didn't fit even in the pint-sized waiting area. 

The dirty, rotten truth was they hadn't reserved a room. Or, if they had, the news hadn't found its way to the evening crew. There was literally no room in the inn. The place was rocking, and my wife--who'd been the one to do all the work--was at a place on her emotional register I'd never seen her before. "Why, sure, we can take you," the waitress said, "but you'll have to wait, and, no, I don't think we can seat you all together." 

The mother of the groom could have spit fire. I tried to calm her, told her we could get pizzas and go back to the motel, bring the  whole gang along or something.

"Or something" wasn't going to do it that night, so with the heart of Napoleon, she left, shook the dust off a new pair of shoes, and marched right down the street, downtown Tulsa, me behind, startled by the high octane determination on a face I'd seen daily for 30 years, her adamant determination shockingly visible to the whole wedding party. Dang it (I'm sure the vocab was rougher), her son was going to have a fine rehearsal dinner come hell or high water right there in the Arkansas River. 

It wasn't early, but when we came to a Wolfgang Puck with outside seating, she walked in, pulled on a gracious but grieving face, found the maitre d', and then explained the horror of what had happened and asked for grace. Honestly, the place was emptying.

"Let me ask the cooks if they can handle a big group yet," the woman said before leaving the front. When she returned, she was smiling. We had a place for a rehearsal dinner, and we had just one long table. 

She never told me the story I'm about to tell you until a day ago or so, when it came up somehow--how it was that our friends Marv and Helene were there at Wolfgang Puck. They'd come all to Tulsa for David's wedding. 

We were talking about Marv because he passed away last week, somewhat unexpectedly to those who hadn't known or seen him as of late. He died getting off a plane, in a wheelchair. He and his wife were returning from Mexico, a place they visited with beloved regularity. I don't know--but I can't help thinking they shouldn't have gone, not in his shape. But it was like him to go anyway because it would have been tougher not to. 

Barbara told me that she'd tipped that gracious Wolfgang Puck maitre d' royally and thanked her bountifully for setting up a wonderful rehearsal dinner, but she also said she remembered the way Marv had purposely gone to the back to find her after the meal, to speak to her. "I thought then, and I still do," she said, "that Marv pulled out his wallet and tipped her too." 

We may never know whether he did, but Barbara has always harbored the suspicion that Marv simply could not help rewarding that young woman's blessed grace. 

And, you know? --whether he did or not is immaterial. That, today, on the day of his funeral, we both believe he did is itself a testimony to his great heart because, well, it would have been like him to do just that. That's the character of the man the family will bury today.

"He made people feel seen and known," his son Kurt says in his eulogy. "Everybody was somebody to Marv Rietema."

Kurt has it right. 

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 90

“. . .they are like the new grass of the morning—

though in the morning it springs up new, 

by evening it is dry and withered.”

“This is a harsh world,” she told me when I sat down for coffee. “It’s an unforgiving nice environment.” She was talking about the place where she’d lived all of her life long, south central South Dakota, on the Rosebud Reservation, north and west of Valentine, Nebraska.

Her family had come there by way of a famous government plan, the Dawes Act (1889), created by a man who, like most of us, believed in the near-redemptive power of private property. Henry Dawes’s declared that by giving Native folks their own chunk of reservation land, they would gain pride from that ownership, despite the fact that owning land was mystifying to many indigenous folks; second, Dawes and "Washington" felt that allotting reservation land to Native people—and giving them the freedom to do with it what they will—would end the whole tribal system and finally civilize the Indian.

Most historians concede the Dawes Act was a miserable failure that collapsed by way of sheer corruption and graft. White folks took advantage of Native ways and took control of thousands of acres of land originally given to the tribes. On the Rosebud Reservation, it might be hard to discern who the sorriest victims were—the Brule Sioux who lost the land, or the idealist settlers, who naively assumed all they needed to do was put up a soddie and plant some trees and they’d be on their way to the American Dream.

It’s short-grass prairie, where if the almost seasonal droughts don’t get you, the hoppers likely will. She wasn’t at all wrong, I’m sure--the world she lived in was harsh and unforgiving.

One story she told me I’ll never forget. Some great uncle and family moved to the Rosebud, to a vacant spot, from Iowa, where he’d farmed before. He planted corn, just as he always had. Spring rains came and were a blessing, she said. By July 4, the corn was better than knee-high. Life on what was then the frontier was proving promisingly sweet.

One afternoon a blast of wind rose from the south. The temperature had already reached 100 degrees, and that scorching wind—you can know its ravages only by having experienced it—all by itself flattened the entire crop. No tornado. No hail. Just a hot wind and the whole crop was gone.

“The very next day,” she told me, “my uncle put his kids and all his belongings in the wagon he’d rode in on, and left Todd County, South Dakota." He gave the horses a snicker—and they were gone. In the morning there was a promise; by evening it was gone. Everything was dry and withered.

Here in Psalm 90, Moses isn’t talking about the prairie or the harsh open spaces of the Great Plains. He’s talking about us—our aspirations, our lives.

More than anything else, he’s talking about time and the cold hard fact of death, of crops, lush and green, flattened by a searing southern wind.

When you think about it a bit, our lives are like that corn: here today, gone tomorrow. This week I'll be 75 years old. For me at least, all of that has never been more true. 

I know--there’s little that’s sweet about such sentiment. But it’s the undeniable truth. And the truth. . .well, you know the promise the John 8 offers, to all discouraged settlers.

Just too cool

It seems that over in Afghanistan, the used-to-be Taliban aren't thrilled with office jobs in town. Ain't much joy in middle-managing. The pay is better, I'm guessing, but a guy sort of comes to miss sleeping out under the open sky, toting big guns, and, once in a while, bringing down the enemy. Sure, it's rough and the pay ain't that good, but you're out there on your own, you know? You don't have ask to pee.

A guy gets tired of market food. "Life was simple and free during jihad," one former sniper said. "All we had to deal with was making plans for attacks against the enemy and for retreating."

Warn't no need of building things, just ripping things up was all the work involved. Nobody depended on you either. You didn't have to empty wastebaskets or deal with uppity women or crying babies. Life was good.

You just miss it, you know? I mean, you know--late nights around a campfire, jawing away, telling stories, dreaming about bringing it to our women. Out there, it was a man's world. If you wanted to attack, you did--or didn't. Nobody bossed you around. Nobody punched in or punched out--it was all about just being bad boys.
Now, you do the same things every day, and if people have no food, it's a problem I  got to take care of. These days, you got to find a public restroom.

Home, home, on the range. Sing it, boys.

All of that's kind of standard fare, I guess. A. B. Guthrie wrote novels, plenty of them, but a couple sing to the very same tune, even though the characters wouldn't know a Muslim if, midday, one'd walk up to the campfire. The Big Sky lays open the great joy of Bridger and Boone and all those coonskin-capped strappers who wandered the wilderness in search of furry pelts. They lived wild-and-wooly lives under that big sky. Some lived, some died, but mostly they lived lives some men work hard to relive in spendy adventure packages. A whole lot of us would rather be hunter-gatherers than middle managers, rather hunt buffalo than bust sod, like that painting up top says. 

Another Guthrie novel, The Way West, charts the path of families who embarked on an adventure that would, they believed, end in the promised land of Oregon. In order to get there--and they do, and it's a wonderful novel--they need one of those men in coonskin caps. He's the only one who can guide them, and he's the centerpiece of the novel in large part because while he is a John Wayne, he's blessed with a huge heart and a triumphant soul. 

In Native America of that era, a warrior became a headman for two reason not one--not just because he was brave and daring and proud, but because when he returned to camp he made sure everyone had something to eat. He heart was proud and big. 

There's something in the bawling those Taliban are doing these days, something downright silly and comic-book funny. But there's something I understand too, because it resides in many a soul in many a far off residence. Doesn't matter color or race or religion, pardon my giggle, but the very idea of those buckaroos visiting the toilet around the corner of the office is just too cool.

"The Taliban used to be free of restrictions, but now we sit in one place, behind a desk and a computer 24 hours a day, seven days a week," one of them said. "Life’s become so wearisome; you do the same things every day."

Just too cool. 

The choice we face

On Tuesday night, I was happy to hear Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders put our whole political mess into perspective. "We have a choice," she said. "We can choose normal, or we can choose the crazies." 

Yup, that's sure enough what she said. 

Blackbird Bend

Karl Bodner's Blackbird Hill

More than a couple of centuries have passed, so I can't imagine that some guy with a baseball bat is going to come by and break my leg. The goons, I hope, are long gone. 

So let me just call it the way I see it. Chief Blackbird--yes, I know there's a fine casino named after him, as well as a bend in the river--Chief Blackbird was Tony Soprano in braids and a blanket. The man ruled--I mean ruled--Omaha country, a chunk of Missouri River land that stretched from Yankton to Belleview and more, both sides of Big Muddy.

That's no small pickins. Took some doing, I'm sure, to rule the roost. It was, I'd guess, an entire kingdom, not to mention the fact that just before 1800 there were a couple thousand Omaha people. That's the world the man ruled, and rule he did.

He'd established his powerful reputation in war, frequent battles against every other band along the river--Pawnees, Ponca, Otoes, Kanzas. When he was a boy, he was captured by the Sioux--and escaped. Seriously. 

Chief Blackbird never lost any sleep on account of the encroaching white man. When the French or the Spanish came up or down the river, he soon enough determined the only way to deal with the onslaught was to beat the foreigners at their own game. There was, back then, good money to be made and goods to be won in beaver pelts and buffalo hides. All right, he might have said, let's find a way to cut a deal. 

Along the way, he picked up some nastiness. Blackbird, like any other mafia don, liked nice things and wasn't afraid of flaunting it. He was a wheeler-dealer, and when his starving people started smelling graft, they weren't about to take it--big chief or no big chief. 

His white traders told him he ought to take care of business, then handed over a medicine bag of arsenic. "This stuff'll take care of things," those white men told him, snarling out a smile, I'm sure.

Blackbird was in over his head, and he knew it. To hold on to what he had, he thought it just might be helpful to cast a spell and register some mysterious power. So he did. He used that arsenic like a banana clip, told people who'd opposed him that soon enough they'd get their due, swore to it. And then, shockingly, they keeled over not long after he told them they would. Wasn't a magic show either, just arsenic. Suddenly, Blackbird had big medicine; his power only grew. Blackbird became a prophet. 

And so it went until he met an enemy arsenic or gunfire wasn't going to best. The Omaha, like every other tribe up and down the Missouri, had no defense against an enemy that crept in without a sound and carried no rifles or any visible means of aggression. In silence, the enemy came in like an invisible mist, crept up and over the land in a way that left the Omaha people dead or dying.

The process grew all too clearly in just a few months. Six days or so after the fever began, people died of systemic shock--the entire body shut down. Often, those able to live through it were left blind, horribly scarred. Mercy killing was not uncommon. Warriors went into battle simply because they preferred to die with dignity. 

Smallpox took the Don. Blackbird came down with the disease--who knows how? He had no magic to fight it. 

He was buried up above ground and above the river, at a spot where today a memorial in his honor sits along Highway 75. His lifeless body was strapped to his horse, just the way he wanted to be, eyes over the river below watching for traders coming up the Missouri.   

Four years later, Lewis and Clark pulled ashore and climbed the hill to pay respects. Blackbird's mound must have been really hard to miss. 

In death, of course, he was not alone. Researchers estimate that as many as 1500  Omaha died.

He fell to a curse not even the godfather could escape. 

Something about grace

Verne Gagne (right)

I wonder now, all these many years later, whether watching WWE with Dad wasn't good for me. What it did, undoubtedly, is shake the sweet Christian soul developing in me. A thousand "Jesus Loves Mes" could be deleted by an single hour of pro wrestling. To me, its naked flamboyant aggression felt like sin, even if wasn't, even if my dad was, well, in his own way, addicted.

When I remember watching Gorgeous George or Dick the Bruiser go at it in the ring, some great wrestling star against some poor, no-name stooge soon to get his bell rung, I think of what I felt right then as sin. Yet, there I sat, beside my sweet and righteous dad, the preacher's kid, who was deliberately hiding his fascination from mom, who hated what it was her husband--and her son!!!--were watching. She greatly preferred hymns from the TV room than grunting excesses of pro wrestling. As a Christian and a woman, she found the whole enterprise, not to mention Gorgeous George, repulsive, vulgar. 

So did Dad--well, sort of.  

There were heroes too, like Verne Gagne, who, come Sunday, could have sat beside us in the pew--or in front of u s. Verne Gagne was quintessential goodness, a man who would win by putting his victims to sleep rather than the hospital. I was just a boy, but I remember thinking Dad could rationalize his sneaky peaks simply by watching Verne Gagne step quietly into the ring. Among the bad boys, Verne Gagne was a saint.

I don't remember much about our neighbor, Flick. He lived right across the street, but when his face appears in my memory I'm intimidated. I'm not sure why really, but the only conversations I remember between the two of them concerned wrestling. Out on the street, a goodly distance between us and the kitchen, the two of them would rehearse the great moments from the last show. 

Flick ran a business, the phone company, I think, and because he did he came off as the boss whenever my dad dropped over to chat. Flick made more money than Dad did, which meant something; and he and his wife, on Sunday, walked in the opposite direction we did on their way to the Presbyterians, who, you know, had only one service on the Sabbath. By their fruits ye shall know them, after.

Flick the Presbyterian loved wrestling and had himself the kind of personality that would have made him a thing in the wring. Everything came out, volume-wise, at a ten. A little stubby maybe, Flick was thick as a fireplug and he talked so loud you'd spend half the time looking to see who else might be listening in. For good Christians like my folks, his language took on a little salty once in a while too. What can you expect from Presbyterians?

So, Dad and Flick would go at it, a comedy routine. They both loved it. Dad maintained, quite elegantly, I'm sure, that pro wrestling was humbug, the whole business just plain fake. No one ever got hurt on the mat. They were all wonderful athletes who knew how to fall and how to make money. Who would win and who would lose was drawn up off stage long before anybody slipped into a satin robe. 

Flick, full volume, claimed the opposite. Wrestling was not managed, baseball was. The Boston Braves had pulled up the franchise and moved to Milwaukee. Dad loved to listen to ball games. He used to  score 'em. After the ninth, rows and lines pencilled in across the page recorded who got the round-trippers, and the hits that drove in runs. Once the final pitch smacked the mitt, he could hand you the box score. 

Flick claimed baseball was the real hoax, the whole mess set up ahead of time. Now, pro wrestling--that's nothing but muscle on muscle. Dad would shake his head. He never won, but were the two of them in a ring, by the second round my dad's Verne Gagne would have taken some hits from Flick's Dick the Bruiser.

All I knew, as a six or seven-year-old was that Dad was somehow transfixed by what he claimed to despise. It was clear too that he was much more comfortable watching pro wrestling if Mom was having coffee with her neighbors. 

Today, all these years later, I can't help thinking it was good for me--this sparring Dad did out on the street in front of our house, a comic ritual argument that left both of them giggling. It was good for me to see my dad argue righteousness that he couldn't quite manage himself. 

Verne Gange, Dick the Bruiser, Haystack Calhoun, and, of course, Gorgeous George--he loved 'em, even though he knew darn well he shouldn't. 

Somewhere in the mix it seems to me there's a story about grace.

Dick the Bruiser

   

Little Sioux, Saturday morning

If it wouldn't be for the skeletal branches up top here, you wouldn't know that the land wears a ermine quilt, and the temp is well below freezing. The tufts of seed clumps might well seem like leaves. For a moment, I thought I might be witness to a sun stack, the kind of phenom when successive layers of clouds form burniing morning chimney. Didn't quite happen, as you see. 

The optical illusion here is created, I think, by the sense that the tawny background is vastly closer than it actually is. That's some kind of shelter buildiings for animals in the foreground; it's not a toy or something I photoshopped in. There really is that much snow on the ground. Because the trees are just now catching the sun, I stopped to shoot. Somehow it's a freakish shot. But the colors are blessedly rich and, check for yourself, oddly similar to these:

The O'Brien County Prairie Center keeps a half dozen buffalo, and I can't not stop to see if I can get some epic shot. That morning, I got this--the kind of picture people use for church directories, Ma and Pa nicely posed, hardly primpted. I'm always on the lookout for snowy bison and had hope on Saturday, but there these two sat atop an unseemly pile of stuff. Still, it's a nice background, and the two of them do look posed in a churchly sort of way.

This is close to what I wanted to get--the immensity of billowing white land right now. This isn't fresh snow--it's at least a week old; but a week of really cold temps keep it almost pure. In this picture, my trusty camera admits that truly big shots, no matter how hard it tries, are really hard to come by.  Here's another.

The hills along the Little Sioux River are elegant right now--or at least they were on Saturday morning; but this shot, like the former, doesn't show it. I still find it hard to capture the beauty of big land and big skies in a place like this. It's all really gorgeous, a bride of land. I just can't get it in the camera. 

And then there's this guy, in color, too, although you wouldn't guess. I must have a couple dozen shots of this old solitary oak, big as life, out there on the hood of the hill. Even when there is no color, its perseverance is worth recording. 

And this, finally, is what forms the area--the Little Sioux. I've spent far too much time with the Spirit Lake Massacre, 1857, a kind of beastly prelude to the Dakota War of 1862. This whole scene, this whole valley, was ruled by Inkpaduta, a Wahpakutee headman (Santee Sioux), who engineered a killing spree of pioneers on and around the Iowa Lakes.

He didn't want anyone to tell him what to do--white or red. He felt himself a victim of injustice because a white man had killed his brother and his brother's family, but there was no justice for such a heinous deed. Soon, in fact, there'd be a bounty for killing Indians.

That white people were moving into the neighborhood was no excuse for him to carry out the butchering he and his band did. Inkpaduta was not a nice man. No one should even try to assert he had his rights or whatever. There were other tribes and bands right here before his people arrived. They chased them out too. Other Santee bands wanted nothing to do with Inkpaduta even before his mad killing spree.

Anyway, this was his world, his land, his home. Even though I'm armed with nothing more than a camera, I'm always conscious of this being the world he loved, the land of Inkpaduta. 

Sunday Morning Meds--Psalm 90:4

 

“For a thousand years in your sight

are like a day that has just gone by,

or like a watch in the night.” 

When my father died, the poet Scott Cairns sent me a poem he’d written at the death of his own father. Like no other poem I know, it offered consolation—and still does. Countless times I’ve sent it on to others who’ve lost parents or friends. It’s titled “Words for a Father,” and it begins with “and,” as if we’re probably overhearing some ideas that have been brewing in our heads for quite some time.

“And this is the consolation: that the world
doesn't end, that the world one day opens up
into something better. And that we
one day open up into something far better.”

He’s talking about afterlife, of course—our visions of the eternal, of heaven. None of us know a thing about what the afterlife will look like, but our differing views (streets paved with gold, good fishing, no more wind) all share the same basic conviction: there, things will be better. That much for sure: things will be better.

Then he visits a vision of things, narrating carefully one possible sense of dying:

Maybe like this: one morning you finally wake
to a light you recognize as the light you've wanted
every morning that has come before. And the air
has some light thing in it that you've always hoped
the air might have. And One is there to welcome you
whose face you've looked for during all the best and worst
times of your life. He takes you to himself
and holds you close until you fully wake.

There’s no Mormon Tabernacle Choir, only a sweet light and a single, strangely familiar face, a maternal God whose welcome is a blessed, wordless calm.

And then the lines that seem most memorable to me—or certainly were in those days following my father’s dying.

And it seems you've only just awakened, but you turn
and there we are, the rest of us, arriving just behind you.
We'll go the rest of the way together.

What hurt me most at my father’s death was the sense of his being gone, alone, the rest of us seated in the church he’d attended his whole life, all of us, his entire family. To the terror of that emptiness, Scott’s poem is sweet and grand relief, profiling eternity by promising us all—my father and his included—that a thousand years in God’s sight are like nothing at all. Nothing. We’ll be there soon ourselves.

That, is comfort.

This winter count(s)

It's called a "winter count," a buffalo hide painting from the Kiowas, the note says, who, like other plains Indians, created a pictoral history to notch their story--their stories, I guess I should say. The etched in image at the top of each of those vertical bars tells reminds the band of that a year's most prominent memory. 

Sadly enough, a century later in Orange City, Iowa, we've got no way to explain what each of the skeletal line drawings is meant to signify. One of them features a man in a black hat--maybe that was the year the Black Robes came around, white man's medicine, the big news of the year.

That sprawling buffalo hide is called a "winter count" because it registers the years, the winters. Let me translate: I'm just a couple of weeks away from celebrating my 75th birthday. Should you ask, I'd say, I'm "75 winters." If you make it through an Iowa winter, you done something of note, brother or sister.

This morning, just outside my window, it's -2 degrees. We're expecting a high of 14, which, for the record, would be significantly warmer than yesterday. 

I can't say enough about how beautiful this winter has been--I mean plenty of windswept drifts perfectly manicured and sturdy as sculpture in the cold, cold air. We've had a week of radiance, the hoarfrost turning the a dusty, dirty rural world into something from Disney. 

But it's been cold. Oh, my, has it been cold. Here's the back yard.

Men and women my age should be shooting pictures of organ pipe cactus somewhere around the Lost Dutchman Mine, not a few dead handfuls of grass against a sea of alabaster. 

Anyway, these pics are not my "winter count," but this morning, as frigid as yesterday's and likely the next, I'm here to say that this winter counts. 

Sheesh. Even the cat has cabin fever. 

Morning Thanks -- What it is I believe

a winter sparrow

The Puritans, who talked more about work and vocation than almost any community before or since, articulated a helpful idea that Eugene Peterson later termed "vocational holiness." The idea is that we are sanctified--made holy--not in the abstract but through our concrete vocation. 

That's from a book titled Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life, written by Tish Harrison Warren, who happens to be an Anglican priest, someone you may know, either by her books or by the fact that she contributes regularly to the op-ed pages of the New York Times.  

We're reading Liturgy of the Ordinary, together, not because it's number one on some evangelical book circuit, but because it was, well, around. I'm not sure who of us picked it up. It's seven years old, so it's not hot stuff anymore, although I'm quite sure it was when it was published. Neither or us remember buying it, but, for sure, both of us could have.

Christian holiness is not a free-floating goodness removed from the world, a few feet the ground. It is specific and, in some sense, tailored to who we particularly are. We grow in holiness in the honing of our specific vocation.

The "message" of the book--it is a "message" book, even something of a how-to, is that being a believer means tuning the liturgy of your life--your work, your leisure, even your petty burdens--into ever ready Godliness. What it seeks to devour among believers--and this is a believers' book--is the idea that Godliness is basically the province of the church. All of life is religious is the sermon she's honing throughout.

We grow in holiness in the honing of our specific vocation. We can't be holy in the abstract. Instead we become a holy blacksmith or a holy mother or a holy physician or a holy systems analyst. We seek God in and through our particular vocation and place in life. 

As we were reading this just last night I stopped right there and told my wife that I knew all of that and believed it--knew it and believed it for a long, long time, for most of my life, in fact. I don't remember learning it. I can't point to day or a week or a college class and say, "That day--that day in catechism I came to understand the truth of "holy vocation." I just know it, and when I read it last night--I mean the paragraph I just quoted--I was struck with a sense of the fulness of a blessing. 

There are scribblings in the book, markings from my pen and Barbara's pencil; but it's clear that neither of us ever finished reading Liturgy of the Ordinary. It's our book, and it somehow simply showed up so we decided to read it, and it has been good, maybe because we so heartily agree with what she says, maybe because her dogged determination to make brushing her teeth, reading her e-mail, even arguing with her husband into vital "spiritual" work is often, well, entertaining. It's a book that makes you smile.

But this morning as I move ever closer--two weeks away--from my three-score and ten + five birthday, I just want to repeat what I told my wife-of-50-years last night. "I know all of that," I said, and this morning I'm thankful that I do.

This morning's thanks is for nothing more or less than a worldview, something really, really basic that's forever in me, something I learned somewhere along the line, something I've come to believe, heart and soul and mind. It's who I am. 

Josephine Donovan's Black Soil -- ii

(continued from yesterday)

In a blizzard reminiscent of the famous Children’s Blizzard of 1888, a 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--his own home is in another direction. Sadly, he never gets there. His body is found once spring melts the snow that took him. The puppy he’d been given by one of the Conners kids earlier that morning was still wrapped in his jacket, and like the boy, dead. His grandparents leave Siouxland. Not everyone is made of tough enough stuff.

Benny Hurd is not the only one to go to his death on the prairie. Ms. Donovan gives a hundred pages to the story of Johann Hoepner, an aristocratic young man from Germany, who is escaping the military draft. Johann is just what Nell so desires more of—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 well 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 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 of the era. 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 in Sheila's life, the young adoptee decides otherwise.

Nell’s heart and will are broken. Her only comfort is that all of this is somehow, unthinkably, 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.

She needs, as all of us do, to tell herself what her catechism has taught her to believe, that in this as in all other things she must be reconciled to His indomitable will. Her fighting spirit is of no avail; she must accept fate. Her anger went out like the lightning as the storm abated. She gets up from her bed with a feeling akin to that she experienced after the birth of her children here in this room—she had been in the valley of the shadow for a while, but she rises to the heights again.

And again 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, Wild Goose, a Yankton of mixed blood from regions just west. 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 Omaha 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. Late in the story, her Nell and Tim discover that the child they left when she was abandoned is of mixed blood herself. Nell’s loss couldn’t be more profound, not because Sheila is Native, but because Sheila's going back to Massachusetts, to civilization, had been manna to Nell's hungry soul. When she meets Wild Goose, her future is determined.

What her daughter’s decision determines for Nell Connors is that a good life can be had here too, on the prairie, in a fledgling community of ethnics who fight at the drop of a hat, a stolen pitchfork, or some silly sleight.

And then there’s the railroad. It’s come to town for the first time, creating a celebration like none other. To Nell Connors, it's a kind of redeemer. Once upon a time, it had dropped them off at the far edge of civilization, dropped them off where the rails no longer lay. Once upon a time it had loosed them from the life they’d once lived, left them in an unwelcoming world, a sea of grass where as far you could see, there was nothing at all.

The railroad renews her, establishes a link with her childhood and an established community with good schools and endless opportunity. When the railroad comes to town, drawing together the old and the new, the story ends because Nell Connors finds herself ready to settle down.

Black Soil is not a great novel. Donovan’s powers of description occasionally shine 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. Black Soil brings us back to a time we do well to remember. Life wasn’t easy. Farming wasn’t always a business, blessings came few and far between.

That we don’t know our own history allows, even generates a certain a species of arrogance. To read Black Soil today, 150 years after white folks like the Collins came to Siouxland to seek a better life 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.