Dakota Blues Box Set

by Lynne M Spreen

  Aunt Marie nodded. “I understand, but it’s too bad.”

  “What is?”

  “That you work for such a dumpfbacke.”

  COUSIN JOAN DROPPED a corn fritter into the caldron of hot oil and stepped back as the batter bubbled. “You know Frieda’s crazy, don’t you?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I told her no. She’ll have to find another way to Denver.” Karen swiped a strand of hair out of her eyes. The kitchen was hot from all the baking and cooking, and the proximity of relatives. She hardly remembered some of them. Aunt Lizzie was so old and thin, you could practically see through her, and Joan used a cane. There was more than one wheelchair parked out on the back porch.

  “Pound the steak real good.” Aunt Marie watched over Karen’s shoulder as she wielded the meat tenderizer tool. “That way you can get away with a cheaper cut.”

  With flour up to her elbows, Karen rolled the cutlets around chunks of onion, wrapped a strip of bacon around the roll-up and anchored it with a toothpick. After browning the rollups in a frying pan, she transferred them to a casserole dish, drowned them in tomato bisque soup, and set the oven timer for forty-five minutes.

  “Perfect,” said Aunt Marie. “You’ll be a chef in no time.”

  “Joan’s right about Frieda.” Lorraine pulled a chair from the kitchen table and sat down. “She had a yard sale about a month ago. Practically gave all her stuff away. Nobody can figure out why.”

  “I can,” said Joan. “She’s goin’ to Denver to die. I would say good riddance but I don’t want God mad at me. Got enough problems.”

  Marie’s eyes crinkled with mirth. “Don’t mind Joan. She’s still unhappy about that baking contest. What’s it been, thirty years?”

  “Frieda cheated. And it wasn’t that long ago.” Joan ladled hot fritters from the kettle.

  “It surely was,” said Aunt Lizzie, her voice a raspy whisper. “I believe the peanut farmer was president.”

  After dinner, Karen carried plates of cake and ice cream into the living room where the men were fooling around with musical instruments. Uncle Roger tested the keys on the piano while Lorraine’s husband Jim plucked at a guitar. Uncle Rudy opened a black case and lifted out a long, skinny accordion. The bellows were hexagonal and edged with mother-of-pearl.

  Rudy slipped his hands into the straps at both ends, looking up at Karen from under bushy white eyebrows. “It’s a concertina, almost a hundred years old,” he said, fanning the bellows. “My father brought it with him from the Banat, in Austria-Hungary.”

  “I’d like to hear it.”

  “We should be done warming up about the time everybody’s through with dessert. Go on and get some for yourself.”

  Karen went back to the kitchen. Without a break in the gossip, the women scooted their chairs aside to let her into the circle. Joan was showing off her new wood-burning kit. “This angled thingy here? You use it for edging,” she said. “Say you’ve got a picture frame you wanted to gussy up, you can personalize it with designs or lettering or what-have-you. There’s even a tip for calligraphy. See here?”

  “You guys are all so creative,” said Karen. “I’m in awe.”

  “I crochet,” said Aunt Lizzie. She wore a faded blue shirtwaist and knee-highs that were rolled down to her ankles. “My specialty is baptismal sets.”

  “Some of the ladies around here have gotten real good at quilting,” said Lorraine. “They were even featured on TV recently. On the Today show.”

  “They’re famous,” said Aunt Lizzie.

  “Famous is relative,” said Joan as she packed up her woodworking tools. “Remember we are talking North Dakota.”

  “I wish I had time to be creative,” said Karen.

  Joan shrugged. “It’s no big thing. Gals around here are used to working hard, and when the kids grow up and move away, they don’t know how to stop. So they find other things to do.”

  “The men, too,” said Lizzie. “My Earl used to like to garden.”

  “As long as they’re digging around in the dirt or playing with knives, they’re happy.”

  “Many of them paint or do wood carving.”

  “You have to do something, especially in the winter. Otherwise you go crazy with boredom.”

  “Only if you’re retired,” said Lorraine. “Some of us don’t have time to get bored.”

  “Quit complaining. You’ll get your turn.”

  “I doubt it, the way the country’s going. I’ll be working until I drop.”

  “Who wants more cake?”

  Karen held out her plate for another guilty slice. Her aunts and cousins might not wear the latest styles nor do Pilates four times a week, but they knew how to keep their families healthy during a North Dakota winter. They were expert cooks, even if they still prepared food as if their families worked all day in the fields. They could decorate their homes with what they made by hand, and clothe their children with a few yards of cheap cotton from the fabric store. Did the world still appreciate that kind of strength?

  The first jubilant notes of a polka called to them from the living room, and the women pushed back from the table. Karen dug her camera out of her purse.

  The older women scrunched together on the couch, while the younger ones sat on the carpet. Karen found herself singing along with her elderly relatives to a familiar beer-hall polka, and felt both dorky and sad. Aunt Marie, always seeming to sense her moods, squeezed her shoulder. Rudy pressed the accordion’s buttons and moved the square bellows in and out, the mother-of-pearl embellishments twinkling in the lamplight. The women clapped, keeping time, and Karen remembered seeing her parents whirling around the floor of the banquet hall at St. Joseph’s. As a child she had learned to dance with her father, but he was impatient and she, self-conscious. The best dancing she ever did was with her mother, when the bandleader summoned the children onto the dance floor for a twirl with their parents.

  The music brought back another form of nostalgia, reminding Karen of her neighborhood back home in Newport where it wasn’t unusual to hear polka music coming from a passing car or truck. In California they called it banda music, the familiar polka beat having migrated into Mexico in the eighteen hundreds from German settlements in Texas.

  Rudy’s work-worn fingers moved quickly across the keys, and he opened and closed the bellows as he had for the last seventy years, as his father had taught him before leaving European soil. A blanket of melancholy threatened Karen. When the notes finally faded, Lorraine nudged her. “I think I heard your phone.”

  Karen checked the display and called voicemail. Steve sounded upset, so she slipped into the back bedroom and called him at work.

  “We need to list the house,” he said without preamble.

  “I’m fine, thanks, and you?”

  “Sorry. I’ve been trying to call you for the past day and you haven’t answered.”

  “And now that I have, I find you’re calling to kick me out of our house.” She felt her pulse accelerate, readying for battle.

  “Look,” he said, his tone softer, “I know you’re pissed, and I’ve told you a million times that I’m sorry. But let’s be practical. Sell it to me and we can skip the realtors and save ourselves a bundle.”

  Her fingernails gouged half-moons into her palms as she pictured his new family in her house. The cul-de-sac, the multiple bedrooms, the pool–it would be a perfect nest. Just not for her.

  “The upkeep is a bitch,” he said. “You don’t like the house anyway. This is your big chance to buy something more to your liking, and I can make you a generous offer.”

  “You’ve been planning this for a while, haven’t you?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “None, but I want to know.” She could picture him, head bent, fingers pinching the skin between his eyebrows.

  “Drama doesn’t help.”

  “Tell me,” she said. “When did you decide to go out and get a new life, Steve? When did you decide to get rid of your old wife an
d impregnate some kid?”

  “She’s not a kid. She’s thirty-two.”

  “Oh, fuck. You could be her father.”

  “Come on, Karen.”

  “So I just want to know, when exactly did you decide to obliterate our marriage?” She was shouting at him in a frantic whisper, pride gone, futility no object. “I want to know when, because I want to try to remember what I was doing when you were fooling around with Miss Thirty-Two. Or did you decide before that, with the red head? Or the brunette?”

  “You’re hysterical.”

  “Are you all right?” Lorraine stood in the bedroom doorway.

  “Fine.” Karen covered her mouth with her hand, as if that would stop the emotion from pouring out.

  Lorraine leaned into the phone. “Tell the asshole I said hi.”

  “Very nice, Karen. Way to make your whole family hate me.”

  “You deserve it.” Karen hung up. She reached a hand out to Lorraine, who pulled Karen to her feet. “You’ll be fine, Cuz.”

  Karen wiped the tears away with both hands. “I know.”

  “Want me to tell them you don’t feel good?”

  “No, I’ll be out in a minute.”

  Lorraine closed the door, and Karen closed her eyes. She’d known about Steve’s women, but they were biennial blips that faded away, whereas she and Steve had hung together through miscarriages and parental deaths and that breast cancer scare a few years ago. Their marriage endured even as they grew apart, and Karen had taken this to mean that, while the gloss was gone, the foundation was strong. That’s what she saw with her mom and dad’s marriage, and she assumed that was how it would be for hers.

  She noticed the distance between them, but figured adults grew apart as they matured. There was nothing wrong with pursuing your own interests. Both of them were workaholics–that’s what attracted them to each other in the first place. If Karen had to work late yet again, she knew Steve was self-sufficient. No matter what happened, she and Steve would be together until death. They would make the best of things.

  But then, about a year ago, she noticed he was on the computer long after she went to bed. He told her it was work, and got irritated when she pressed. Then one day he packed his things and left. Said he wasn’t sure anymore. He needed time to think.

  At first, she argued, then railed, then bargained. It didn’t matter. Steve left with a trunk full of suitcases. Said he’d be back to get the rest of his things, and that Karen could have the house.

  She raged through the house, dragging his things out to the garage and the trash. When she wore herself out, she drank prodigious amounts of wine and missed work for the first time in years. Peggy covered for her until she was able to function normally again, and as weeks and then months passed, Karen accepted Steve wasn’t coming back. What she hadn’t figured out was what was supposed to happen next, so she worked long hours and deferred the question. They hadn’t spoken since her birthday, when he called to ask if she still had his golf clubs.

  Chapter Eight

  ON MONDAY MORNING, Karen stood in front of her mother’s closet, sifting through for something to wear. Lena had been about the same size but a foot shorter. Luckily it was summer, so the length wouldn’t matter. Karen found a pair of Capri’s and a tee shirt and went to start a bath.

  Marie tapped on the bathroom door.

  “I help at the food bank on Mondays. You want to come with me? We can use another hand.”

  “I’m going with Lorraine out to the country today.” Karen opened the door. “Some kind of historical field trip with Denise. And a picnic.”

  Aunt Marie nodded. “Say hello to the farm for me.”

  “HERE YOU CAN SEE WHAT’S left of the house.” Denise pointed at the bare remains of a stone foundation. “Down the slope over there, that little bit of rock marks the footprint of the barn. Let’s go look.”

  Karen lagged behind as her new friends tromped down the slope, flushing pheasant from cover. The birds’ metallic-green and cop- per necks flashed in the sun as they angled low toward a patch of wetland, intent on the reeds that thrived in runoff from the farms.

  Lorraine slipped past her. “You okay?”

  “I’ll be fine.” Karen listened to the women’s voices fade. Behind her, a meadowlark trilled and the grasses waved across dormant fields. She’d seen the same wind patterns moving across the waters at Newport Bay, and the comparison between ocean and prairie didn’t escape her. Both were endless and, in the wrong season, unforgiving. To think her mother had lived here as a child, played and worked and suffered the winters here in a barely-insulated farmhouse, almost defied imagination. It was a side of her mother Karen almost couldn’t imagine.

  The warming air carried the essence of clover and bog. She inhaled deeply, drunk on the fragrance of the land and the absence of sound. All around her, the remnants of her family’s history spoke in whispers, calling to her, but the landscape had changed.

  In the decades since Karen last saw them, the ramshackle buildings had fallen or been knocked down, the materials salvaged or trashed, and farmland restored. The breeze picked up and she closed her eyes, turning her head one way and another to adjust the degree of quiet, until she heard distant voices shouting at her to catch up.

  “Watch where you walk,” said Glenda. “Somewhere around here is the pit for the outhouse, and you can still fall into one of those holes and get seriously hurt.”

  “On the plus side,” said Denise, aiming her lens at them, “if you look carefully once you’re in there, you might find an artifact or two. People tended to drop things.”

  The women picked their way through the grass, watching for snakes and alert for treasure. “I like to think of Lena’s family living here,” Marlene said. “I can see kids playing under the trees, and chickens scratching around by the house, and laundry flapping on the line, and maybe even a team of horses plowing up and down that field over there.”

  “That’s how she described it to me,” said Karen.

  Denise capped her lens. “I’d like to go to the cemetery next. I want to get some of the old headstones, but it can wait if you’re not cool with it.”

  “I’m good,” said Karen.

  The women piled back into the trucks and headed south, passing the beaten sign that marked the town of Lefor, or what remained of it. “It’s kind of pathetic,” said Lorraine. “Little old sign whipping around in the wind for nothing.”

  “But people still live here. Look, there’s laundry on that clothesline.” Karen imagined herself stepping outside with a basketful of wet laundry on a balmy spring day.

  “I think it’s depressing. I never come out here.”

  “I would,” said Karen. “It’s peaceful.”

  “We’ve got peaceful right in town. You don’t have to go anywhere to get it.” Lorraine followed the cars ahead as they turned off the highway and rumbled up a dirt road, dust coating the fence posts as they passed. The yards were overgrown and the homes looked tired. Lefor was a museum piece, a colonial village that seemed almost to exist solely to demonstrate how life worked in the olden days. The disparity between her perspective and that of Lorraine’s made Karen feel like an outsider. She felt the pull of homesickness for California, while at the same time knowing she’d feel as disoriented if she were back home. With her parents gone and her marriage kaput, nothing felt like home anymore. She and Lorraine fell silent.

  “There’s the old bank,” said Lorraine. “Somebody burned it down in the twenties, but by that time, Lefor was deteriorating, so they never rebuilt.” She drove slowly past the rock-walled structure, no bigger than a one-room jail.

  Karen studied the old building. About the time Butch and Sundance committed their first robbery, the first Model-T chugged out of Henry Ford’s factory, and San Francisco shook and burned to the ground, forty-two German families fled Europe for the Great Plains. They arrived here, sometimes living in dugouts scooped from the earth until their fortunes improved sufficiently to allow the
building of sod houses. Later, if they were especially prosperous, they built homes from the abundant rocks dredged from the farm fields.

  The caravan stopped in front of St. Elizabeth’s, and the women piled out and climbed the two flights of cement steps to the unlocked entrance. Inside, the aroma of old incense and candle wax reawakened Karen’s memory of daily Mass, and she felt lightheaded. The wooden pews were cool and smooth to the touch, and the hardwood floor was so old it dipped in places. Along the wall and under the stained glass windows, the Stations of the Cross were inscribed in German, barely understandable and yet deeply familiar. Denise snapped discreet photos as the rest of the women moved quietly to the door, where Karen touched her fingertips to the bowl of Holy Water, made the Sign of the Cross and went back outside.

  Following her friends up the path towards the cemetery, she wondered how often the early settlers walked over this specific stretch of packed earth. How many of her relatives had preceded her toward the burial grounds, their eyes focused resolutely above the graves, their grief assuaged by a firm belief in a glorious future? In order to feel more at home after leaving Europe, the immigrants chose homestead parcels in the same configuration as in the old country, so one’s neighbor to the south in the Banat occupied the same placement in the new town. They built a church and named it after the one they’d left behind. They fenced off a cemetery, and unlike the original church, the burial ground endured, welcoming generations of settlers and their children and grandchildren.

  At first Lefor had thrived, with a post office, a mercantile exchange, and even a primitive bowling alley. There was talk of a railroad, and funds were raised, but World War I interfered, and the town began to decline. Over the years the younger generation, continuing the original migration, moved away from the farms to cities to other states. Now the spire of St. Elizabeth’s rose above a cemetery whose occupants far outnumbered the residents of the town. Drying vegetation crunched under her feet as she made her way across the slope, reading the names on the primitive stones.