“Congratulations!” Her voice was warm and strong. “Peter is one year old today! Reaching one is such an important milestone!”
In the 1920s, one in ten babies did not live to see their first year. Mother never took for granted that a baby would survive, be healthy, and live a full year.
As a mother of seven, she must have felt as if she was always nursing at least one sick child. As there were no vaccinations for some childhood diseases yet, schools served as efficient incubators for illness.
A year after I graduated from college, I visited my parents on the farm. None of my siblings were there. With my parents napping and no one to distract me, I left the house. A walk was my established routine.
It was mid-March. Spring was a long way off.
I’ve always appreciated the preludes to spring and fall as much as—maybe more than—the full-blown versions: the first hint of spring to come forecast by a few shoots of grass or small buds emerging on a willow; the glories of impending fall found in the yellowing of the leaves on an oak or the swelling of a seedpod on a milkweed plant.
In some parts of China, the people recognize these “between times” by dividing the solar calendar into twenty-four seasons, naming them with lyrical aptness—for example, “awakening of the insects” and “frost descends.”
On that solitary venture, I didn’t go into the woods, as usual, but instead walked up the drive, turned left at the cottonwood tree, and began to climb the hill. Partway up the slope, I stepped off the drive and onto a field. Too small and rocky to till and plant, it remained virgin prairie. A few patches of snow dotted the hill. I hoped to find a chink in nature’s winter armor, in the form of an early pasque blossom. In our area it’s called mayflower, a misnomer because it usually blooms well before the beginning of May.
When I was a child, my mother and I would search here, scanning the dull brown grass for this harbinger of spring. It’s not the same pasque blossom you’ll find in gardens today throughout the temperate zone. Those flowers are hybrids—bred to be tall and showy. The one I was looking for is short and doesn’t draw attention to itself. A person must have a sharp eye to spy it.
Even before the first blade of fresh green grass pops up from newly unfrozen fields, the pale lavender flower, not bothering to wait for its leaves to sprout, pushes up as a bud. Then, as sun warms it, the blossom opens to reveal an orange center. When a breeze blows, it wavers on its soft stem.
There was no sign of any blossom, so I crossed over the neighbors’ driveway and kept walking northward to an area where I’d never been. A bramble of wild raspberries, composed of interlocking, winding stems covered with sharp thorns, formed a barrier ahead of me. If it had been summer, I never would have tried working my way through the dense growth, but because there were no leaves on the vines, I could see a narrow opening. Probably a deer path, I thought, and slowly forged ahead.
Sloping down to a thicket of trees was another small piece of virgin prairie. I stopped and looked ahead. I blinked to clear my vision. There, just before the tree line, I saw two small shapes, both the same color as the dead grass surrounding them. When I walked closer, I was shocked to see that they were gravestones. They’d been carved from some kind of soft stone that had suffered from the extreme temperatures. I was shaken by this unexpected reminder of death. The headstones were misshapen, and lichen had drawn crude patches of orange on their surfaces. A recumbent baby lamb carved from the same kind of stone rested atop each one. Feeling as though I were desecrating a sacred spot, I hesitated and then slowly walked closer in order to read the inscriptions, but neither names nor dates were legible.
These graves had been forgotten for decades. The land belonged to my father’s cousin, who lived at the foot of this hill. That man had inherited the farm from his father. The children—I assumed they were children because of the lambs—had not been members of that branch of our family, nor were they any of our relatives, all of whom are buried in town cemeteries. I felt unmoored by this discovery of a family’s grief and mourned for the two young ones buried here. I turned, walked back up the hill, and headed home.
In the year 2000, each of my siblings and I traveled long distances to Pierre, South Dakota, for the internment of my mother’s youngest sister, Mabel—the last of that generation. After the short ceremony in the Catholic cemetery, we paid our respects to our ancestors—my mother’s parents and her four grandparents are all buried there. Then we separated and wandered.
I looked toward the north. There, at a distance from the main cluster of graves, was a row of tombstones. Each was small, some more elaborate than others. When I read the inscriptions, I realized all of the stones marked children’s graves. Why were these little ones not buried with their families? Why were they not in the family plots behind me? I felt a deep sorrow grip me, stronger than the one I’d felt earlier at my aunt’s grave site, for she had lived well into her nineties.
There was a caretaker talking to a small group. I waited until he was free and then approached him.
“Excuse me, can you tell me why the children are buried in that row at the edge of the cemetery?” I asked him, pointing to the line of miniature tombstones.
“Oh, that’s the Wall of Tears.”
“Wall of Tears? What do you mean?”
“In the old days, people didn’t know much about how diseases were spread. There were terrible epidemics in those times. Folks thought the bodies of the little ones could pass infection on to visitors.”
Then, probably sensing my anguish, he added, “I can assure you we tend those graves just as well as we do the others.”
I thanked him, turned away from all the gravestones, and slowly walked to the western edge of the cemetery. The Missouri River meandered a short distance away, and above it, in great hillocks, rose the bluffs. Looking at them, I remembered how my mother had spoken wistfully of the Missouri River Bluffs. She, her sisters, and their friends had wandered these cliffs every spring, searching for that first blossom of the season—the pasque flower.
And then, when I looked toward the small headstones, I remembered how, when I was about the same age Dorothy had been when she died, Mother told me about Dorothy’s funeral. Father Esterguard had decided to say a Mass of the Angels and so had donned white, not black, vestments. After the funeral, he explained to my mother why he had done that.
“It was the appropriate thing to do. Dorothy never sinned. She was as pure as an angel.”
As my mother told me about this, I saw her shoulders relax and heard her voice soften.
NO RECORD
It was at that stage of development when a young person is convinced she knows more than her parents that I returned to visit my mother and father in 1974. By that time, they had sold the farm and moved into a small trailer home at the edge of Big Stone City. Each of them was struggling with serious health issues. My mother had already made painful decisions about what possessions to sell or give away when they’d moved from the farmhouse, but now, knowing that a move to a nursing home was in the near future, she was whittling down her things even more, to just the bare necessities.
One day my mother said, “Would you sort the photographs, Barbara? Take yours, and put the rest in envelopes for the others.”
So that evening, after we’d eaten, washed the dishes, and gotten my baby son settled for at least part of the night, I opened the cedar chest and lifted out a large, lovely coat box, saved from some long-ago purchase. The chest had been part of my mother’s trousseau and had always sat in the dining room of our farmhouse. It served as the storage unit for photographs and small keepsakes. It was one of the few pieces of furniture that had made the cut to be saved and had been moved to the trailer home.
Viewing decades-old pictures is always difficult. The task was made harder for me because I’d always regretted—actually resented—that no one had cared enough to have a professional portrait taken of me, alone or with my siblings. There were only two snapshots from before I entered schoo
l. In each, I’m about a year old and sitting on our lawn. In one, my baby face is squinting against the bright sun; in the other, I appear more comfortable, but that photo is crinkled at the edges. I’m told that a snapshot of me—or more than one—was taken at the birthday party Helen gave me when I turned six, but the only ones that survive from that day are of my friends, guests at the party. There aren’t any of me.
I found the process of looking at the photographs very unsettling. An hour earlier, I’d been dining with my aging parents; the next, I was looking at photos of them as young adults.
I sorted and made stacks for my siblings and me. In the box were beautiful engagement portraits of my mother and father; their wedding picture, which, even though it was taken in the backyard of my mother’s childhood home, was the work of a professional photographer; the timeless one of my siblings taken in a photographer’s studio in Ortonville; and each of our graduation portraits. I was startled anew when I discovered the snapshot of Dorothy. I’d seen it once before, when I was a teenager and digging through the photo box. She was lying in a wicker carriage, her head covered by a bonnet.
I ponder what I did next. Given my unending disappointment that there was no photograph taken of my younger self with my siblings, how could I have done what I did? After I gathered mine together—the squinting one, the wrinkled one, my graduation photos—I didn’t hesitate to add the snapshot of Dorothy to my stack. If my mother saw it, her grief would be renewed. That was my thinking. I now realize that wasn’t my decision to make. Perhaps my mother would have found comfort in holding that photo, at seeing Dorothy’s face again.
Shortly after that visit, I made an appointment with the finest children’s photographer in Manhattan to capture Peter’s likeness at six months. I did the same when our second son, Stephen, was a baby, making sure that his portrait was taken at the same age. I wasn’t going to let either of my children ever have reason to feel as if he hadn’t been valued as an infant, that he had been loved less than the other.
Now, of course, the photographer was in business. So each of these sessions evolved into many poses of the baby, followed by many poses of mother and baby. Today, in the bottom of my cedar chest (no, sadly, not my mother’s) is a large, flat box that protects those beautiful portraits of my sons. Both would be mortified if I put them on display now.
On the last visit to the photographer’s studio, Joe joined us and a family portrait was taken. In that photo, Peter is a permanent age six, Stephen a permanent age three. And that portrait of the four of us has a permanent place on the piano.
In 2017, knowing my family had only memories and a snapshot to document Dorothy’s life—and with my sense of guilt at having taken the photo driving me—I decided to obtain a copy of her birth certificate. I phoned the courthouse in Ortonville, the location of the births of all my parents’ children, and asked to speak to the register of deeds. I was transferred to Eileen. I explained to her what I was looking for.
“Yes, I can help you,” she said. “How do you spell that name? And what year would that be?”
I spelled the name and told her 1927.
“No, that name’s not here. Let me go back a year.”
“That’s not necessary,” I said. “I’m sure of the year. All of us were born in Ortonville. And I know my birth certificate is there, because I’ve requested and received copies of it.”
“Well, just let me go ahead anyway and see what we have. Oh, here’s Helen, 1929, and Patricia, 1930 …,” and she continued on to me, the last.
“Thank you very much. I appreciate your help,” I said, and hung up the phone.
There was no birth certificate for Dorothy? I was disappointed and perplexed. The next morning, the reason came to me. There was no birth certificate because Dorothy wasn’t expected to live, so the doctor didn’t report her birth to the county.
There’s only a small granite stone, a single photo, and these words I write to mark her life.
DIRT, REVISITED
As I reread what I’ve written, I see that on a shelf above my desk there’s a book entitled Dirt. I’m grateful it survived the move from our country house; so many of my books did not. I take it down, and a sheet of yellowed paper floats out. I unfold it and read these notes I scribbled years ago.
Cleaning dirt from under my fingernails
before dressing for the prom
Mud oozing between our toes wading in the river
Dirt in the creases of my father’s forehead
Mud, sucking strong, impossible to drive through
Moist dirt mounded above my mother’s grave
Dirt frozen too hard to take my father’s coffin
Dirt
Damned dirt
Blessed dirt
RETURNING HOME
This was the first trip back since my father’s funeral. I thought it would be truly depressing, but it was so wonderful having us all together, the knowledge that neither our mother nor our father would be there didn’t really hit hard. Until, that is, everyone decided to drive down and look at our farm.
We jammed ourselves into one car. When we turned off the highway, I was vaguely aware that the dirt road had been widened and its surface topped with gravel. Different, altered, changed. I should have begun to prepare myself for what I’d see at the end of that road. My brothers were loudly but good-naturedly arguing about some detail of the past, so no one heard my moan of pain. Even though I’d visited a few times after the barn had burned while my parents still lived there, it was a horrible shock as we turned the corner at the bottom of the hill to see a one-story concrete building where the tall barn had once stood. During all those years, the traditional wooden structure and its companion silo had continued to reside in my mind. The fire had not deleted its image.
Of course, I knew that another family—a nonfarming family—now owned our place, but again I wasn’t prepared for what I saw as we continued. The house, even though I knew it had long been painted brown, shook me. I looked away.
The curves and twists of the river had changed also, but that didn’t upset me. Floods had been causing that to happen forever.
My brothers were busy commenting on the improvements the new owners had made. I was trying not to notice those changes. But I couldn’t help but see the awful gap where the lilac bushes on the south side of our lawn once bloomed. All of them—purple, lavender, white—had been pulled out. Worse, the wildflowers that Patt had dug from the woods and planted by the kitchen door, and that my mother had faithfully watered for years, were no more.
And there was no way I could ignore what was happening to the beautiful old cottonwood. A part of our day-to-day childhood was dying. We always made that tree the goal of our races: “I’ll race you to the cottonwood and back.” Now, its beautiful crown showed gaps and there was an ugly crack in its huge trunk. A metal band encircled its circumference—an effort, I assumed, to hold it together.
But it was only when we began to drive back to town that I became aware of the worst sacrilege. The new owners had lowered the hill. Cutting down? Filling in? I don’t know how they did it, but now the big hill was only a slope. It seemed as though I was the only one of my siblings who was upset.
When I voiced my indignation, Bob didn’t miss a beat. “Just goes to show that you’re older than the hills,” he told me.
Our hill had offered challenges—for fun and for survival. When winter set in and there was a good covering of snow, we’d carry the long sled to the top of the hill. If he were there, John, my oldest brother, would climb on first. No matter the makeup of the group, the oldest got the premier spot. In descending order of size, the others would climb on, one on top of the other. Saying a prayer that we wouldn’t hit the cottonwood, the last would make a run for it and, at the final moment, slam on. Off we’d speed. The top person would fall off, sooner or later. Then another and another would topple down. Often the only one who arrived at our front door still on the sled was the lucky rider on the bottom. This en
terprise was the biggest challenge at night when there was no moon, only stars, to give us light.
That was all about fun. There was no inkling of that fun when we drove up the hill when it was covered in mud or snow or, worst of all, coated with ice. That sharp curve, just before the steep incline, made it essential that the driver hit the gas pedal with just enough force at just the right location to give the car enough momentum to make it to the top—without sliding off into the ditch. If we didn’t make it to the top, the only option was to back down the treacherous surface and start all over. No wonder Mother’s reaction as we climbed into the car was always the same: “Let’s say a Hail Mary.”
Our farm is gone. What I loved is no more.
When I’m dying—if I’m given half an hour’s notice—I’ll drive that bumpy old road one more time. When I start out, I’ll take those winding curves slowly, roll down the window and smell the sweet clover and wild roses of summer. Or perhaps I’ll make it early spring and stop the car when I’m almost there. Walk on the small field of virgin prairie again. Maybe I’ll be lucky and find the first flower of spring, the delicate, pale lavender pasque, with its fuzzy little stem. Stop to listen to the birds. I’ll climb back in, and as I approach the hill—the hill the way it should be—I’ll speed up, take that curve a little too fast so that the car rocks a bit, and then …
There it will be, the way it once was! The cottonwood green and healthy; the barn tall and strong; and the house white—oh, yes, white again! And, of course, the river beyond.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
With gratitude, I’d like to acknowledge the following:
First and foremost, my two sons, Peter and Stephen, for their advice and support throughout, even before, this memoir was begun.
My siblings, Helen Allen, John Hoffbeck, Bill Hoffbeck, and Bob Hoffbeck, who remembered with me and who never doubted that I would—someday—get this done. And to my dear departed sister, Patt Johnson, who always encouraged me to write.
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