Dakota Blues Box Set

by Lynne M Spreen

  Karen looked down at a trail of ants discovering a crumb on the sidewalk.

  “I don’t think people give grief enough credit,” he said. “It’s essential for our development as mature human beings, but it’s so painful that we try to rush through it.”

  “You can’t blame them. Nobody wants to suffer.” She stood and turned her face into the breeze, smelling the clean fragrance of rain on distant farm fields.

  “What’s next for you, Karen?”

  She smiled down at the priest. For maybe the first time in her life she wasn’t sure.

  Chapter Seventeen

  SHE DROPPED THE VAN, got a ride back to Aunt Marie’s, and borrowed the car just in time to join the professor and his crew at a dig outside town. Picks rang against stone as a half-dozen college students coaxed answers from the shroud of history. Karen, protected from the sun by a big hat of Curt’s, brushed at her own little mound of rock, hoping to expose tooth or bone, but they were almost done for the day and so far, all she’d found was rodent poop. She watched as he stopped by one student and then the other, offering encouragement or explaining.

  “How’re you doing?” He squatted next to her, his brown arms resting on muscular thighs.

  She pushed back her hat and wiped her arm across her damp forehead. “Interesting but hot.”

  “Let’s take a break.” Curt called to the students, who put down their tools and drifted toward the picnic table. Early that morning, they’d constructed a shadecloth cover, and now they claimed chairs out of the midday sun. Curt reached into a cooler and handed around ice cold bottles of beer. “How else do you think I lure them out here?” he asked, smiling at Karen’s look of surprise.

  A young man flopped into a folding chair in the shade, beer in one hand, a bone in the other.

  “I found a Champsosaurus last summer,” said a willowy brunette. “The Smithsonian in Washington acquired it.”

  “What Brittany is too modest to tell you is they also offered her an internship next semester,” said Curt.

  “They don’t pay but it’s good experience.”

  “They’ll snap you up in no time,” Curt said, beaming.

  When the refreshments were finished, the students returned to the dig. Karen felt the wind pick up, lifting the heat and lassitude of the afternoon. On the horizon, clouds were building in anticipation of a late afternoon sprinkle. She rested her head against the chair back, her eyes closed, as she savored an unfamiliar sense of–was that it? Contentment?

  “You done with fieldwork?” Curt held his beer bottle so the condensation could drip onto the sand.

  “I think I’ll watch for a while. You go ahead.”

  “Let them. They need the experience. Want to share this?”

  Karen held the cold bottle to her cheek. “What I’d do for a swimming pool.”

  “There’s a pond not far from here. But I don’t think we have that much time.” He inclined his head toward the west, where anvil-shaped clouds were forming. “Another hour, max.”

  She handed the beer back to him. “Your students like you.”

  “They’re happy to be outside. Beats working.” He started to take a sip, but stopped. “What?”

  “Watching you with them. It reminds me what I liked about my job.” She leaned forward. “Josh over there reminds me of this maintenance supervisor I hired a couple years ago. He was one of my best hires. This guy was such a natural leader, he influenced people without even trying. The other department heads started asking him for advice about how to supervise, and he got invited to hospital staff meetings and everything. We had to get him an assistant. That’s what I miss–the chemistry, the possibilities. In HR, if you do your job right, it’s alchemy.”

  “You’re an optimist, aren’t you?”

  “I do tend to see people as gems, but sometimes you have to dust them off and polish them up before they shine. But there’s another thing.” She stopped to watch a couple of students playing grab-ass instead of working. “It’s what I know. I put in a lot of time getting to the top of my profession, and I don’t want to throw that away. I just turned fifty–”

  He gasped in mock horror and she laughed. “Well, I did, and I think with maturity you settle in, you feel more comfortable with what you’re used to. Breaking trail is for young horses.”

  “Or for mature and experienced horses.” He handed back the beer. “Besides, fifty is nothing. I don’t count the first twenty years. What does being an infant have to do with where you are fifty years later? You’re gathering data. What counts is what you do after you acquire that data.”

  She nodded. “I like it. That means I’m thirty. I’m in my prime.”

  “Exactly–you are in your prime. You’re way too young to play it safe. When was the last time you did something wild? Changed anything big?’

  “Saturday night.”

  “Oh, God, yes.” He rubbed his face, stood up, and pulled on his hat. Standing with the billowing clouds behind him, he said, “There will be a time to fall back and take it easy, but right now, you’re tough, smart, and full of energy. Try something new.”

  “When was the last time you did?”

  He squinted at the distance as he considered. “A month ago. I pitched a contract to a company in Florida, doing something I’ve never done before.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Population counts for the local fish species.” He grinned at her. “Figured if I got it, I’d get to spend the winter months in the Keys.”

  “I’m jealous. I remember one winter in Islamorada–” She fell silent, remembering languid tropical afternoons and sunset dinners on the beach with Steve. “Nothing. It was a long time ago.”

  “I understand the pull of a big city. Did you know I taught at Berkeley? Twenty minutes from San Francisco, and I loved it. Every morning, before you even put one foot on the floor, more has happened there than in a year in Dickinson.”

  “But you came back.”

  He waved the kids in, and they started collecting their gear. “I did. I prefer having my base of operations here, but I’m gone a lot. I do consulting jobs all over the country.”

  “What about your classes?”

  “I have teaching assistants. Rachel, Patrick’s fiancée, is one of them. When I’m between jobs, I come back home to teach a few classes and get my bearings.” He looked down at her, his grin wicked. “Come on, Karen, do something edgy. Move to North Dakota.”

  She burst out laughing.

  He asked her again later that evening as he grilled steaks in the shade of the weeping willow tree in his front yard. And again on his porch as they sipped a soft blend of amaretto and cognac and watched night come on, but her responses never varied, and finally they went to bed and the subject was finished.

  She awoke around two to the distant crowing of a mixed-up rooster. Careful not to make any noise, she found Curt’s robe and slipped downstairs. The back door opened with only a sigh, and she padded in bare feet across the wooden patio deck, a warming breeze whispering through invisible cottonwoods. To the east, the dark landscape rolled unimpeded by light of any kind, reaching and reaching until the featureless black met the blanket of stars and she knew she was seeing the horizon.

  Chapter Eighteen

  KAREN HELD THE PHONE between her ear and shoulder as she hunted for a place to stash another photo album. “I’m working on it right now,” she told Frieda. “Give me a couple of hours. By the way, do you know where the battery backups are?”

  “Look at the manual. That’s why I gave it to you.” Frieda hung up.

  The van stood in Aunt Marie’s driveway, doors agape, swallowing cargo and supplies. Aunt Marie and Lorraine helped Karen load, while Frieda called repeatedly to check on their progress.

  Karen chucked the phone onto the front seat with one hand, shoved the album into an overhead cabinet with the other, and reached for the user manual. She had studied the instructions on driving and parking, leveling and connecting to shore power�
��a term that made sense if you thought of the RV as a boat. At this point she felt she knew the vehicle as well as her own house.

  Although the van was small, it was well laid-out and had lots of empty cabinets, useful for stowing heirlooms. Following the directions in the manual, Karen removed the chair behind the driver’s seat and made room for another stack of boxes. She ducked back into the shed for another load and came out holding a cylindrical lamp upon whose paper shade a winter prairie scene had been painted. The lamp had kept her company through most of her childhood, and she was happy to have it now.

  The screen door slammed and Aunt Marie emerged from the house carrying the poppy seed grinder. She handed it to Karen and stepped up into the van, walking back and settling into one of the bench seats bracing the dinette table. “You know, this isn’t half bad. I would have loved to have it in my camping days.”

  Karen lifted a hinged section of counter-top. “Check this out. There’s a range, and underneath here, an oven.”

  Lorraine dropped a sleeping bag on the floor of the van. “Don’t leave Frieda alone with the stove.”

  “Look over here. There’s a complete bathroom. We even have a shower. Isn’t this clever?” Karen pulled aside a section of carpet to reveal a drain. “You close the folding doors, pull the plastic curtain around you and turn on the water.”

  “Everything you need.” Aunt Marie said without smiling.

  That night after dinner, Aunt Marie pulled out her last round of artillery, the family photo albums. She sat on the sofa with a heavy album in her lap, the book’s spine crackling with age. The first page held yellowing images from the family cemetery. With the magnifying glass, Karen studied a double headstone into which a black-and-white portrait had been set. “George and Elizabeth. Were they my great-aunt and uncle? Died in nineteen-eighteen. Look at this. They were teenagers.”

  “They were your great-greats. Or would have been. They were only married three months when the flu pandemic hit. He died first, but they didn’t want to tell Elizabeth because they thought the news would kill her. Then she died, too.”

  “So sad,” said Karen, turning the page.

  Aunt Marie tapped a finger on the photo of a hardscrabble farm. “There were some good years after that, but then they had the Dust Bowl and the Depression. The drought turned everything upside down. You’d just about get a little crop and then here come the locusts, three, four times a year. They’d even eat the paint off the tool handles.”

  “I wonder if the farmers were ever sorry they came over here.” Karen paid close attention, understanding that the sharing of family history was important to her aunt.

  “The Germans had no other choice.” Aunt Marie turned the page. “They had to escape the military back home or they’d get sent to the front lines to fight the Turks. They were nothing more than cannon fodder. So when word got out that you could get a hundred and sixty acres of free land in America, you better believe they got on the ships and came.”

  She pointed at a photo showing a line of children standing in front of a clapboard house. A woman on one end held an infant, and on the other, a man stood next to his grown son. The children, ten in all, ranged in age from the youngest to the eldest. “That’s us. Mother and Dad didn’t know what they were getting into. Winters like nothing they’d ever seen before. Lot of the settlers died, either from farm accidents and no doctors, or from childbirth. Think of your grandma doing all the cooking, mending, and farm chores, and all that time she’s either pregnant or breastfeeding. They had babies every two years. Some of these families had fifteen, sixteen kids.”

  A picture showed a young woman standing in a buckboard wagon, holding the reins of a team. “Was it true when Aunt Frances was a teenager, she had to drive the wagon to town for coal? Mom said she was embarrassed in front of the men.”

  “That was a man’s job, but Dad was dead, and she was the oldest. In town, they would look at her.” A smile creased Aunt Marie’s face. “When we ran out of coal, Mother had the little ones pick up cow patties in a gunny sack. Lena about had to be whipped to do that, because when the weather turned warm and you picked up a patty, there’d be maggots underneath.”

  Karen, grimacing, turned the page.

  “All us kids had to walk up and down the rows of crops pulling weeds from the mustard plants,” said Aunt Marie. “I had to dip a sage branch into poison and put it all over inside the chicken coop to kill the lice.”

  Aunt Marie looked up from the pages. The light from the kitchen caught the deepening crags in her skin. “Mother and Dad worked like animals to feed and clothe all of us. It was the Depression, and nobody had proper shoes and the winters were so bad. We kids had to haul water from the windmill. When it froze, we broke it with an ax.”

  “Little kids! You worked like adults.”

  “We had to. In town they called us ‘farmers’ and said we were stupid, but farm kids grew up fast. One winter, when your Uncle Carl was a little boy, he went out in a blizzard to feed the cattle and almost couldn’t find his way back. That was after Dad died. Mother got scared. Right after that, she tied a rope from the house to the barn so if it ever happened again, a person wouldn’t get lost and freeze to death.”

  Karen sat quietly as Aunt Marie fingered the pages. What would it feel like to be one of only about three people left in your family that had shared such a life; the only ones who remembered the scrape and crunch of poor shoes breaking through snow to feed bawling cattle? What happened to the memories when you died, but more than that, what happened to the lessons learned, the maturation a person gained from living through such hard times?

  “We had fun, too,” said her aunt. “It wasn’t all work. We’d get an old box and slide down the hill for hours.” She chuckled. “Your mama was the youngest, so it was her job to make toilet paper. You take a page from the catalogue and do this.” She pantomimed the scrubbing motion of tenderizing a piece of paper. “We liked the Sears catalogue. It was the softest.”

  Karen came to the last page and closed the book. “That was nice. Thank you.”

  Aunt Marie nodded sadly, but she rallied when Karen hugged her.

  “I’ll expect you back here next summer at the latest. Don’t make me wait till I’m so old I don’t recognize you anymore.”

  “I promise.” The vow came easily, a poor gift to the woman who had offered to give up her house if only her niece would stick around.

  Chapter Nineteen

  ON FRIDAY MORNING, Karen drove the camper van down the street to Frieda’s. It moved heavily now that it was fully laden with luggage, heirlooms, and groceries. The mirrors stuck out from the sides like giant dinner plates, a fact for which Karen was grateful since the RV was a couple feet wider on either side than any car in her experience. It was also longer. And taller. She maneuvered it slowly to Frieda’s curb and set the brake.

  At her knock, Frieda shuffled down the hall, peering up through thick lenses on oversized glasses. She wore a lavender velour track suit and a scarf tied over her hair. “Would you go on around the back and check the cellar door, make sure the padlock’s on?”

  “I did. It’s locked.”

  “All right then. I got in the beans and squash over the last few days, gave them to the neighbors. They tried to hide but I found ‘em. Come winter, they’ll be glad to have them. Now what else?”

  “I’ll get your bags.” Karen loaded the one small suitcase and toiletry bag. Then she stood in the kitchen, arms folded, leaning against the warped laminate counter as Frieda checked and rechecked that the appliances were unplugged, shades drawn, and windows locked, then started all over again. After a few minutes Karen went back outside to wait on the front porch. She perched on the warm cement steps, the smell of diesel and creosote wafting down from the rail yards. The grandfather clock in the parlor chimed ten o’clock before Frieda finally locked up the house for good.

  Now they were leaving Dickinson, heading south on eighty-five. With the excitement of the open road and a
belly full of caffeine, Frieda could not stop talking.

  “I’ve been cooped up way too long,” she said as they headed through farm country. “It feels darned good to be out.”

  Karen nodded and pretended to listen while getting acquainted with the demands of the Roadtrek 190.When a crawling green tractor suddenly appeared over the rise in front of them, she learned how to slow the van quickly without spilling its contents. When an oncoming eighteen-wheeler passed them on the narrow road, Karen figured out how to battle the wash from the rig along with the ever-present prairie wind. The fully packed RV cornered wider now and was slower to respond, but it ran smoothly.

  Frieda was too excited to notice Karen fumbling around. “There’s the sign for White Butte.” She gazed at the sign as if it pointed toward heaven. “The Butte is the highest place in North Dakota. Wagon trains took it as a landmark on their way west. You need that, otherwise the prairie will swallow you up. Look, here’s Amidon already.”

  The town consisted of twenty-three residents, a derelict gas station, and a run-down market, in front of which was parked a police car from the nineteen-fifties. Someone had dressed a mannequin in a policeman’s uniform and placed it in the front seat to deter speeders. Several bullet-holes pierced the driver’s door.

  “Not much of a town,” said Karen.

  “It’s big enough. You’re used to the big city, but to people in North Dakota this is normal. Your friend Glenda has folks here. Their farm is out there to the west. Amidon is the county seat. They’re very proud of that.”

  They passed the courthouse, as sleepy as the boarded-up collection of shops and falling-down homes on the other side of the road. “I couldn’t imagine living here,” said Karen. “Where do they go if they get sick?”