Twenty years ago in the Doon cemetery

[This post has been snatched from a longer introduction to a short story I wrote a decade or more ago, an intro from a collection of short fiction I've been working on, slowly, for years, a book of short fiction that features those stories as well as the stories that brought each of them to life--to answer questions like, "Why did you write that story?"] 

In January of 2006, on an icy cold Saturday morning I went out at dawn to get a a picture or two in a country graveyard. I headed out to Doon, where the cemetery hugs the rolling hills of the Rock River, a setting that offers a graveyard even more wordless gravitas. I can understand why Feike Feikema wanted to be buried there, looking down at his beloved Doon to the east, and across fields of corn and beans to the north, fields that, even in winter, don’t shed their spacious grandeur.

I wasn’t looking for Frederick Manfred's grave because I knew where to findit. It was cold—January—and I was looking for a shot that would feature the long shadows laid across stripes of snow and columns of stone by  the morning sun—just looking for something touching, to get something visually stunning.

That’s when I stumbled on the burial site of a woman whose story I would know absolutely nothing of if I’d never read the novel The Secret Place,  a novel I bought four decades before, a novel that changed my life.

I knew that good people felt used by that novel, even though the young woman buried beneath the marker where I stood probably suffered no abuse at all from Frederick Manfred, years later, when Manfred's novel was published. She was already here. She died in childbirth.

I met that woman, a prototype, in the pages of that novel. She died at just 21 years of age, the stone says, way back in 1920. But that morning, it seemed to me that I knew her, or at least of the woman beneath the stone; I couldn’t help wondering how many people on the face of the earth, even among her own descendants, had any inkling of her story.

“We shall meet again” the stone says, in mossy text.

I stood there beside her grave, sorry that she’d died so young, and sorry too that Feike Feikema caught all that rage from the town he loved when he was just trying to tell a story that was, in part, her story.

But I was also thankful for a story that made that very burial site alive with this even bigger story I’m telling, I guess, a sprawling story that will end only when the sun sets forever over the open spaces of a landscape Frederick Manfred loved and called Siouxland, a real tome that won’t be finished until the very last story of this broad land has finally been told.

There they were, in death, the two of them, the novelist who’d used her for a story that had changed my life, and the woman he’d used.

What would they say to each other? That's what I dreamed in "January Thaw,"
a story about stories.

You can read the story here.