Dakota Blues

by Lynne Spreen

  “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 and 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.”

  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 set out 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 copper 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 buildin
g. 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 discrete 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, and 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. The rest of the women stopped here and there to visit the graves of relatives while Denise took pictures of the oldest headstones, some imported from Germany and others, more simple ones, made of local stone. Some of the graves held the remains of immigrants who were buried eighty, ninety years ago. Karen stood before one that bore a familiar surname, her mother’s. Katerina and Johann, geboren and gestorben. Born and died. Karen felt guilty, alive under the bright sunshine, thriving in the twenty-first century, comforted by all manner of modern invention. What debt did she owe them, those plain-faced great-aunts and grannies? Done with their short, hard enlistments, their bodies worn out from bearing children and tilling the soil, they lay waiting for her to make their efforts worthwhile.

  Stopping at her parents’ graves, Karen crouched down and touched the letters of her mother’s name, carved into the headstone and adorned with twin sheaves of wheat. Lena and Frank had ordered them years ago when they bought the plots of land for their final resting place. Gruesome, Karen had thought at the time, but now she understood her mother would be reassured to know where she would lie at the end.

  “How are you doing?” Lorraine grasped Karen’s shoulder.

  Karen, wiping her eyes, backed away from the newly-turned earth. “Sometimes it’s too much.”

  “Let’s rest.” They meandered toward a shaded bench and sat. Already the grass was yellowing at the tips, and soon the afternoons would turn steamy, brewing up thunderstorms and the occasional tornado. Southwestern North Dakota wasn’t an easy place. Unlike the dark, rich farmland in the eastern part of the state, here on the highlands the land was dry and windswept on its westward climb toward the Rocky Mountains.

  Lorraine pulled off her big floppy sun hat and shook out her hair. “You’re processing a lot right now. Take it easy. Breathe.”

  “So much is changing, I feel disoriented.”

  “Then slow down and take it all in. You have a lot of years ahead of you.”

  Karen chuckled. “You’re younger than me. How come you sound so smart?”

  “I’m not so smart, but Mom always told me it’s my life and I should be the one to make the big decisions. So don’t let us or anybody else pressure you.”

  “‘Man plans, and God laughs.’ Or something like that.” Karen picked up a rock and tried to scrape off the tiny cactus sticking to the side of her sneakers. Only a fool would wear sandals to this cemetery.

  They watched Denise work, angling this way and that for the perfect shot of the old headstones.

  “I can’t believe this is so close to your house,” Karen said. “You drive a half hour and you’re standing right on top of the original homesteads. You can see a tree still growing that was planted by the first relatives to set foot in America, and you can sit by their graves, if you want.”

  “Not like we ever do,” said Lorraine. “I know they’re here and that comforts me, but I don’t come out here. We go to work, come home, eat dinner, do chores, go to bed, and on the weekends, we run errands.”

  Karen gazed across the open landscape. “In California, everybody is from another place, and nobody stays put. They move in, they move out. The house next door to mine back home is only fifteen years old and it’s had three owners already. By contrast, this,”– she opened her arms to take in the whole of the countryside,– “seems so permanent.”

  The two women fell silent as Denise folded up her tripod. Then they drove back across the highway and down another dirt road, this one heading east. The Jeep turned in at an abandoned homestead and parked beside a rusting tractor. “This farm is still in Glenda’s family,” Lorraine said. “We’re going to have lunch here.”

  Glenda gathered the group around her. “There’s a creek down here behind the barn, and a nice shady place to eat. Follow me.” The women followed, carrying chairs, food, and picnic supplies. Their sneakers mashed down the overgrown grass as they trod, single file, through a grove of whispering cottonwoods to a lush clearing.

  “Who wants wine?” Marlene opened a bottle of chilled Riesling and passed it around, followed by a plate of ham and cheese sandwiches. Someone brought potato chips; another, grapes; a third, brownies.

  “So, what did you think about your mom’s old place?” asked Denise. “Was it how you remembered it?”

  Karen shook her head. “There’s nothing left of what I remember.”

  “It’s all going. We’re at that age,” said Glenda.

  “Speak for yourself.” Denise finished her sandwich and began fitting a new lens to her camera. “Did you know most of the farmers lived in soddies all their lives? They whitewashed the walls and sealed the dirt floors with a mixture of water and cow manure, which hardened into a smooth surface. Tough people. Kind of an inspiration.”

  “Mom never mentioned cow poop floors.”

  “Denise is our historian,” said Glenda.

  “You can’t do photo-documentaries without getting caught up in the research,” said Denise. “Who wants to look for shells?”

  Marlene and Denise rolled up their pant legs and waded out into the creek while the others lolled around like overfed pups. Karen unbuttoned her waistband for the small relief it gave her. Usually she was much more careful about portions, but ever since she arrived, she’d eaten like a horse.

  The sound of splashing and shrieking brought her back. Glenda laughed at the women in the creek. “They’re like a couple of kids.”

  Karen reached upward, stretching and yawning, more relaxed than she’d been in months. Denise trudged up the bank and held out a handful of dripping shells. “Look what we found. They’re Lampsilis radiata shells. The
Native Americans made them into tools. See? It’s the tip of a knife.”

  Marlene trailed behind her. “Like fossils,” she said, wiping her hands on her shorts.

  “Native Americans lived here for four thousand years before us,” said Denise. “These were their ancestral hunting grounds. When the government opened it up for homesteading, the native people were so pissed off they started murdering everybody.”

  “That’s what I would have done.” Lorraine held out her glass and Karen emptied the rest of the wine into it. Overhead in the rustling cottonwoods, songbirds tried to drown out each other’s territorial claims. Dappled shade splashed patterns across the remains of their picnic. Eyes closed, Lorraine rested her head against the chair back. Denise had flopped down on a blanket, and Marlene’s head was dipping. The brook rippled across small stones, and cicadas began buzzing overhead. Karen tried to imagine up a similar space in Orange County where she could find the same respite. The Back Bay at Newport came to mind, but that was often busy with cyclists and other nature lovers. Here, though, in the farmlands around Dickinson, solitude was abundant.

  I could live here, she thought.

  “Nothing stopping you,” said Glenda.

  Karen opened one eye. “Did I say that?”

  “You mumbled something about living here and so I say, move. Nothing stopping you now.”

  Karen stared at Lorraine, who grinned. “There’s no such thing as a secret in Dickinson,” she said.

  “Don’t let it throw you,” said Denise. “I’ve been single almost a year now. It gets easier. Good time for introspection. You can find your authentic self.”

  “Authentic self, my butt. Just get the biggest settlement you can.” Marlene tossed the empty wine bottle in the trash bag.

  Glenda folded up her chair and slung it over her shoulder. “Ladies, I’m out of here. I have to drop by the clinic and sign some checks. Karen, you’ve seen big-city health care. Want to see how the other half lives?”