Country People at the station

Been reading, again, Ruth Suckow's Country People, her very first novel, published exactly a century ago, where I came on a passage that sounded familiar, even though I was nowhere near (nor even alive) to witness it. 

Let me set the scene. Country People is what the title says it is--a very real story about country people, a straight-up character study, a generational family album in the form of a novel, a novel in the form of a family album. It's not Hee-Haw, or some third-rate Sinclair Lewis. Ruth Suckow is not being condescending or in the least contemptuous, just honest, even loving in her concern with what's real.

It's 1917, and August and Emma's oldest son, Carl, is going off to the war in France. It's been a difficult last couple of years on the farm. German-Americans have found it difficult to determine their own identities--are they German or American? Furthermore, their non-German neighbors have often been more than happy to let them know that they're the hated Bosch, who've made life hard. Carl decides he's going and leaves the station in a bare bones scene that's effective, in part, because Suckow, like her characters, doesn't care to say more than what is required. This is what happened the morning Carl left, she says in this scene.

The train left in the early morning. August drove his family in, Emma and Carl and Marguerite. Johnnie and Frank and Frank's wife came in Frank's car; Mary and Elva and Roy in Roy's. There was a little group at the small wooden station: the other two boys and their families, a few people from town, one or two detached travelling men. The family stayed awkwardly in the depot, didn't know what to do or to say to one another. Johnnie and August went out to see if the train was in sight. 

Just before the train came--the morning Clipper, the Chicago train, by which clocks were set and rising timed--old Jerry McGuire the postmaster, an old Catholic who had come into office when "the Democrats came in," lined the three boys up on the station platform and read the President's Proclamation to them. It was a strange, solemn, unreal scene. Even the people who saw it didn't believe in it. The three boys standing there, their figures against the dim red of the harvest sunrise, with solemn blank faces, frowning a little to keep down any signs of emotion. One of the mothers sobbed. Emma wept only a little, effacing herself even now.

The little town was silent. Away from the station stretched pastures, the dew lying wet and heavy on red clover and tall weeds. The train came bearing down upon them, puffing out blackish smoke into the pale morning sky. It went black and big into the red prairie sunrise. The fields were left silent again. The scattered group of people on the platform got into their battered cars and drove back home to the morning chores. 

The photograph at the top of the page features Barbara's dad, my father-in-law, in uniform, Randall Van Gelder, accompanied by family and friends the morning he departed from the Alton, Iowa, train station for the war in Europe, the Second World War, thirty-plus years after Carl Kaetterhenry left from some fictional railroad station in Wapsipinicon, a town they call "Wapsie," somewhere out east in Iowa. 

There were three men leaving Wapsie, only one leaving Alton, only one family there at the station, but I can't help thinking it's something of the same picture. Dad is in uniform, his nine brothers and sisters gathered around, his stoic mother just over his left shoulder, his dad almost hidden in the back. 

Most readers today want fiction that's not about their own world, but some other. That's richly understandable and commendable. Suckow, born in Hawarden, left Iowa's small towns herself for some time, but never quite departed in her writing. 

Is it self-centered to appreciate worlds that are remarkably one's own? I hope not. The human being we spend a lifetime trying to understand is ourselves, or so it seems. "Know thyself," Socrates says. Almost uniquely, Ruth Suckow explores the worlds from which I came.