Maybe the way he told it made our lives taste pale. Every Nebraska day and every Kansas story had a flavor like that. Exotic black cars lived there, and mysterious fathers taking kids out for a spin. A wheatfield bristled close to home, and beyond it, we knew, ran Cow Creek, and monster catfish, and nights of shenanigans trapping, tramping about, camping out, being alone. You could sip on a real wheatstraw, not this plastic. You could stand in that trim kitchen Ruby brightened, not this drive-in blacktop spotted with gum.
My father’s father, Earl, traveled for the power company, taking great sweeps to the southwest from Hutchinson, from El Dorado, from Liberal. He dropped the boys off one time near Capulin Mountain in New Mexico.
“I’ll be back through in ten days,” he said. “Can you make it north by then to Cottonwood Canyon? I think so, too. So long.”
The boys traveled cross-country, slept in caves, and licked flat pools after rain. They shot quail, rabbits, and doves with a deadeye twenty-two. They could strike a match with that gun, my father said, if they ever had to. One day they ate only a robin, sharing it wing by wing over the fire. Once at a ranch, they traded the story of their quest for a meal. They met a plowman in a dry canyon, and he took them home for stories and peaches dried in the sun. In ten days, sixty miles north from their starting place, Earl met them. He had given them a test and freedom.
“Did you face danger then, wandering around like that?” I asked my father on his birthday once.
“The world was all attached,” he said. “If only we could get lost.” As always, the story sent an invitation to us.
In the thirties, poverty gave our people a test and freedom. My father took a string of difficult jobs, and a few dangerous ones—fighting fire at the oil refinery, and holding the steel shaft of a star-drill with his hands for a clumsy roustabout to drive and drive with the sledge flashing over his head. Tornadoes came through on a binge. The Klan ran rife. Diphtheria struck. When his sister lay near death, my father burst into the room, boisterous from play.
“Is she dead yet?” he shouted. She lived, but his bright shout spun from the same family pluck that carried her through. That pluck made the heroic time. Did our small troubles deserve the name?
“Don’t pay any attention,” my father said to our blackberry scratches or sidewalk bruises. When we whined over small defeats, my father came back with a Kansas joke.
“They asked the boy, ‘Are you full yet, son?’
“‘No,’ he says, ‘I’m not full. I’m just down to where it don’t taste good no more.’”
From Nebraska, the story-testament from Brethren farmers on my mother’s side speaks most of change. The Frantz family must have webbed the whole southern quilt of Nebraska. They kept moving, preaching, homesteading around. In the books that come down from that time, the names on the flyleaves read the same, but the places keep hopping about. They farmed or studied or took the interim pastorate in Illinois, then Nebraska, then Wyoming, then Nebraska again, Kansas, Colorado, California, Pennsylvania, and Heaven. For me, these stories winnow down from my mother, Dorothy Hope; from her older sister, Helen; and from their mother, Lottie, the grandmother my brother named forever “Boppums.”
The Bible held the public secrets of those days. The palm-sized New Testament that belonged to child Lottie burrows into my hand, soft as a favored doll worn ragged with affection. Back home in Oregon, I take it up this week to learn the code I saw painted on a car, a moss-green Dodge slung low. The driver before me at the stoplight, a prim and vintage woman, had drawn this message fine as embroidery gold on the black ground of her smashed rear bumper: “Jesus on Reagan—Matt. 23:14.” In my notebook, I took that down. At my home desk, I open to that verse: “Woe onto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows’ houses, and for a pretense make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation.” The Bible spoke her mind.
The brown spine of that book lingers threadbare. The cover falls open easy as a hand releasing prayer. But if that book held the public secrets, another held Boppums’ own. We found it in her drawer—a slim, brown notebook locked shut with melted wax and a ribbon. Above the wax, writ faint in her black scrawl, this line: “Sealed till Finished.” No one would read it until she died.
Looking back by orbit memory, which window shall I trust above all? I have an account of my grandparents’ wedding from the Beatrice, Nebraska, Semi-Weekly for June 17, 1902:
A little before 7 o’clock about fifty guests assembled in the parlors to witness the ceremony. Promptly at 7 amid the strains of the wedding march, rendered by Miss Daisy Wardlaw of Pickrell, the bride and groom entered the parlor and took their places under a beautiful portiere of green vines and roses. They were preceded by little Evelyn Miller, who acted her part well as flower girl, strewing roses before them.
The news account tells it sweetly, but has no heart. When Boppums died, we cut the ribbon on her book, “Sealed till Finished.” Under the ribbon, she had written, “The New Life of Lottie.” The new life bloomed there, now so old it lived in us. The cover had been closed so long, it held shut, reluctant to bend away from these first words:
This then is to be the day of days. How I shall feel when today is over and I am no longer my mother’s baby but—Harry’s wife. Wonderful words. It is to be a full day for a hundred things or two must be done —
At nineteen years, Lottie wrote that much, then went down to do her hundred chores in a daze—to hang the rope of greenery, arrange the oranges in their bowl, slip down to the cellar to see to the fixings for supper, run to the gate to meet her Harrison, and scramble through all the small emergencies of change. When the day had finished, darkened, she came back to her book and wrote all down, somewhere later that night. A few hours launched on her new life, already she looked back. The future tense had changed.
Then Sadie motioned us to come, and I taking the strong arm that I was hereafter to lean upon walked slowly through the crowded room into the parlor keeping time to the beautiful music. Then Aaron stood before us; I can just feel again like I did at that moment.
Thus the New Life’s first day ends. Harrison, the groom, lived devout, a farmer, carpenter, preacher, yet I have never heard or read his words. The diary of Lottie, the new life of this quiet woman half my age, stands for all. After her description of the wedding day—whether for joy, terror, confusion—the next stretch of pages in the book and six months of her life run blank. Did she mean to come back someday and fill this blank? Someday, with greater wisdom, she might understand such changes that first darkness brought. I know they lived with her mother then. For a time, one story says, they inhabited the barn, stacking sweet bales of alfalfa hay for walls, tables, chairs, and bed. In a photograph, their wedding gifts rise up in a great mound of crockery, linens, and glassware. Her book says nothing of these.
After this twenty-five page gap, the next entry in her book names January 1, 1903, and the tone has changed: “Thursday morning this is and we must pack. Thursday evening this is and we have packed.” Again, she writes from both ends of a day, but she has entered the rush of straight chore, whim, custom, and hope of the world. That rush includes Harrison selling the farm, a neighbor killing himself with fire, meetings for prayer and hymn, depression, moonlight, comfort, and toil.
“Harrison built our house today,” Boppums reports from their Wyoming homestead. The next day, “Harrison sawed a hole for a window in the wall.” Then, after a storm, “Harrison propped the house with a pole to keep it standing through the night.” They went broke, won back their stake, and crossed the Mojave west to the Promised Land. In the thirties once, at their little college in La Verne, California, the faculty voted to go all year without salary to save the college from ruin. This would only take a slight acceleration in their habits of thrift and cooperation. Somehow, they made it through. Somehow, even in that year, they still gave a meal whenever a tramp knocked. Not content with sufficiency, Boppums joined the weekly Ladies’ Aid Society to piece and quilt
coverlets to give away for charity. Like her stories after her time, somewhere now those quilts warm others, strangers, travelers.
In the first years, the traveling years, Boppums found her own way by stories. With child a third time, she followed a particular belief to my mother’s making. Someone told her she must spend each day of her pregnancy looking on beautiful things. Flowers, a pleasing shadow on the lawn, sunset, the moon over water—these the child within would need. Each evening, Boppums would put down her work and stand on the porch to help the colors of the sky nourish her child. She put the secrets of new life in her sealed book, and the secrets of beauty in her children.
At the end of their life together, Harrison and Lottie went back to live among the Amish of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. A kindly woman took them in for years there. They reaped what they had sown, the sweet hospitality of the heroic age.
At my desk, I put down the Bible, take up her diary with the broken seal, and ask myself, what should I quilt and hide, and when will I finish? In this city, what secrets, what new life should I now tuck away, so children may break the seal, and witness nourishing ways?
Boppums keeps a little room upstairs in my head to do her ironing and storytelling, to mend and recite, to suffer horizontal her final illness, and then to stand up breathless the morning of her wedding when Harrison came riding on his horse, bent down at the gate, and kissed her on the mouth in front of everyone. In her room, glass curtains billow inward. The door swings open, lit by lilac and flat sunlight, then by kerosene. Threadbare travelers of grace tap at the door, drift through the house, leave their names in the Bible, and pass on. Alone, she looks up from the hem she stitches to watch a moth batter the lamp. Then she looks down at me, drawn up by light through the small wick hatch to stand at her knee.
“Tell about the fishermen,” I say, “and the storm.”
“Nebraska?” she mumbles. The straight pins between her lips wiggle and gleam.
“Yes, Nebraska, please.” My elbows rest on her knees. The apron, safety-pinned to her bosom, hangs up a blue meadow busy with pockets. Here her thimble clatters like a little bell, and there her scissors twinkle and snip. Between finger and thumb, she spreads the pins from her mouth like a tiny fan. Her hymn-voice trembles. Pins to the cushion, story to me.
“One time, Kimney-pie, we all went out to the lake—threshing done, the barn full. The men took up their net and waded in. August, so the water ran mild. The Lord stood by us. They made a great catch of fishes, and everyone, even the children, stepped into the water to help them haul in that net. We had cottonwood fires to prepare the fish. Then men laid their black coats down over bundles of straw, and women spread a white cloth on the earth. Can you imagine—a white cloth, and everything washed by hand? We broke open the bread, and read from the Book. We prayed, we ate, we talked of the year. But as we sang, a great storm came up. I remember the lake rolling gray, and thunder. I can see lighting pricking the horizon like that.”
She pricks the back of her hand with the silver needle, red thread trailing.
“The men cried out. ‘Aaron, does lightning fall on your house there? And there, Miley, yours?’ But the storm passed over us. No tornado then, no blaze. We calmed the horses. The moon rose to show us our way home.”
In my head then, Boppums bends down. She sews and hums. Her story ends, but not the sewing. Not ever.
Once, when I came home from college, I learned that story had never happened. No lake, no black coats, they said. At least no one could remember it. Did I confuse the time Jesus called the fishermen from the Sea of Galilee? Did I stitch the New Testament story to a Nebraska storm? The saints of the family fit the Bible better than they fit my first world of the 1950s. In my small head, it seems, the heroic age had snatched a story from Bible culture and pinned it to the family lore.
After Boppums died, when I lay down for sleep one night, in the fragile trance between light and defeat an odd sentence spoke to me: “If my grandmother were alive today, she would be ten feet tall.” I snapped back wakeful, wondering. Surely logic pulled that sentence out. Once I stood only tall enough to climb her lap, and listen to stories. Now that I am grown, she stands above me like ripe corn or moon, heroic goddess of age.
The family stories took on starch when I first came across Depression photographs by Walker Evans. In his images of poverty’s troubling elegance, I got smuggled back alive, and saw the vague evening glow of heartland stories brightened to noon. Taken by daylight, his photographs stare nevertheless like lit night windows, and I stare back. I see through them to hidden summer, to the Great Depression where a grand, spare order of hard sunlight blooms, a secret flavor of cool interiors. In that tranquility, the human face becomes a hieroglyph for persistence. A father feeds his children by the sheer mule-pull of his face. A mother stares flat at the camera, as if it has said to her what no one ever said: “Will you rest a moment, please?” The plainest object shudders in a sacramental glow: table, broom, churn, bowl, bed. By foglight, the pool hall façade flexes its cathedral splendor. In the sanctuary, Sabbath light on the Sunday-school organ unfurls a tool for justice. In a farmer’s room, the wicker chair mended with wire stands as a throne sufficient for an afternoon of eternity.
What his camera loved, I love. Through these windows, I stand in attendance there. I wait upon my people. Evans and his companion of rumpled inspiration, James Agee, drove south to Alabama in July of 1936. What Agee called “the object of our traveling” was to form “an independent inquiry into certain normal predicaments of human divinity.” Their traveling brought them to three families in the hills, and to the making of the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. That book delves by the blade of light and the tools of dreaming deep into the local habits of day and night, toil and praise. Few have read Agee’s night-writ prose, but every family must write such a book. By such chapters, every family lives: “A Country Letter,” “Money,” “Shelter,” “Clothing,” “Education,” “Work.”
What they did by traveling, we do by memory. We travel back by stories, forward by the hope those stories teach. We center our account where Evans and Agee set out, the heart of the thirties. What they did by giving order to a book, chapter by chapter, we do by telling troubles in the rich, thankful light of the voice. We make stories of stories by changing them. Stories from other times get pruned away from chronology and grafted onto that hard decade’s stump. When Boppums hungered and wrote her Wyoming homestead diary in 1915, she rehearsed a part for our heroic age. When my own baby bottle froze solid in 1951, but I survived beside it on the back seat of the family Dodge hurled across Iowa, that story fit backward into the decade of light. We lived in a Quonset of tin. Have we done better since? At the age of eight, I tried to convince my parents we could buy an abandoned chickenhouse, trim away the blackberry vines, build a wood floor on the earth, and all move in. That house wrote my greatest dream.
History names “The Great Crash of 1929,” and history names “The Great Depression,” as if only money could give backbone to a mood, and the human spirit must lie sickened by the slack thermometer of the price index. It may have seemed so then, but family stories have it otherwise. Somehow, bitterness, if it lived then, died later. By family stories, our spirits rose up in those days and boldly walked the Earth.
What made us bold, in stories? What made us up and about when others were down and out, according to the news? For one thing, families simply do not follow the same chronology as history. The growth of calendar years, the summer-wood rings in a tree, the concentric rim on the flat scales of salmon—all play out sequential and exact. Families never do.
One night, across the mountains from home, we sat by candle-light with Mrs. Bell, a family friend. We launched our cabin through the night with stories. We told Kansas. We told Iowa. We told chickenhouse. When her turn came, she set the full spread of her family tree beside the little sapling of American history.
“Take my grandfather,” she said, sipping red wine. “He was alive when
George Washington was President. Think not? Hah! I know it’s hard to believe.” The fire rattled and the wind bent low. How many winters could fill a man’s life? You had to do more than die to fit the pantheon.
“You see,” she said, “he was born in 1796, grew up on the family’s New Jersey farm, but he was not in haste to marry. His parents died, he ran the place alone. The Civil War came, and the story says Grandpa was working his hayfield when two blue soldiers came riding by, whipping their horses to foam and shouting the alarm.
“‘Lincoln dead—shot dead by assassin!’
“‘Fine!’ shouted Grandpa back. ‘About time someone got the old buzzard!’ And he swung his scythe with happy spite. Oh, he was an odd one. But with the War done then, and Grandpa ripened to seventy, he courted and won a young lass of twenty-three. She planned, no doubt, to inherit his farm and live on past his timely end. Not so. She bore three children to him—my father the third—and then she died.”
Mrs. Bell sipped again. Out across the meadow, a coyote lingered howling on a word, and soon others joined in all along the creek. In her story, the middle of the nineteenth century seemed closer than the coyote’s frosty message. Abe nudged us. George gave us his firm grin. Our candles burned low.
“Well,” she said, “Grandpa tyrannized the children four years past his hundred, before they laid him under the hill. Father was fifty when he married, in 1920, and that puts me here before your very eyes, never mind how old.”
Her face startled the candlelight, bold as wine. She sipped. We sat back marveling. Statistics proved her story probable. How do things go? In our simple daze of wine and midnight, the family table between us billowed wide as a century, and contracted to a coffin pod. Story by story, the lips of Mrs. Bell made the proud scroll of the calendar dwindle away.
Having Everything Right Page 10