by Lynne Spreen
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 almost 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 f
ully 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?”
“There’s a clinic a couple towns over, and they’ve got phones. They can call for help if you have an emergency. Nothing wrong with living in a quiet little place. Folks here are self-sufficient, and they take no guff from anybody.”
Karen drove by a paint-peeled bar and grill. A crooked sign saying “Bernie’s” swung in the breeze, and a station wagon sat rusting out front.
“A cousin of mine was in there having dinner some time ago,” said Frieda, “when these two gents drove up in fancy business suits. They go sit at the bar and wait for the bartender. Pretty soon old Bernadette comes outta the back room and asks what they’re having. They say they want some kind of fussy cocktails, and Bernie leans over the bar at ‘em and bellers, ‘Where d’ya think you are, Dickinson?’”
A stray dog tucked tail and scooted across the road in front of them. “Lots of people live around here on ranches or farms, but they’re not close in,” said Frieda. “You wouldn’t even know they’re there unless you followed one of those dirt roads.” She pointed at a distant hill. “They’re out a few miles, and they keep to themselves, but if they need supplies, this is where they come. Other than that, all they have is family.”
Karen wondered about children raised in such isolation. A day at the country schoolhouse would seem a welcome dip into civilization, with the rest of their time revolving around family, chores, and farm life. People would be alone so much, they’d get used to the sound of their own minds. Characters formed in such a hardscrabble Petri dish would either develop iron in their spines or a desperate hunger for escape.
Frieda jabbered on, identifying every point of interest, and not letting Karen pass a single one without stopping. As soon as the van quit rolling, Frieda would haul her old body off the seat, expecting Karen to get out and share the magic, which she did with fake enthusiasm. Although she appreciated sampling the history of the area, they were behind schedule. She had planned on four hours to reach today’s destination in the Black Hills of South Dakota, but at this rate it would be dark before they reached the mountains.
Frieda bent to examine a concrete-and-brass marker consecrating the memory of yet another dirt road, its ruts cut deep a century ago by prairie schooners. Karen kept telling herself to be patient. Soon enough they’d be in Denver, and she could drop the old woman and be on her way, alone at last. She hungered for some quiet time, and the chance to think and chart a path for the rest of her life.
They watched a herd of pronghorn antelope wheeling away from the road, their white rumps flashing as they sped away. “Lord, they are beautiful. I always appreciated the years Russell and I were able to travel. Sandy enjoyed it too, at least until she got to be a teenager.”
They stopped for lunch in the agricultural Mecca of Bowman. Frieda argued for getting into the van’s larder and making sandwiches for a roadside picnic, but Karen, imagining a mess in the galley, talked her out of it. Instead they found a sandwich shop where they sat at a table and watched the ranch folk come and go.
A few minutes after they got rolling again, Frieda’s head dipped and she began to snore. Karen took a belly breath, her body relaxing as she realized until this point, she had been holding herself rigid. In front of her, the road spun southward without end. The wild fields on both sides of the road revealed an astonishing palette of light yellow, orange, pink, blue, and three colors of green: pea, mint, and forest. They were crossing the Great Plains, the ancient seabed that had drained in the Cretaceous, its primordial shells and fishy skeletons now layered under foot. South Dakota, though treeless, was not flat. Rather it was cut by red rock gullies and dotted with fertile wetlands, ponds surrounded by cat tails, and small conical rock formations that rose from verdant fields. Although fenced with barbed wire, the land was uncultivated. Knee-high green grasses were edged with rusty gold seed heads, and when the wind blew, the grass undulated in waves. Among the miles of hillocks and swales, the occasional roof or windmill or crumbling rock chimney bore witness for long-ago families.
A burned-out homestead disappeared in the rear-view mirror, the structure abandoned as if the land had no potential and no value. To Karen, long used to the wall-to-wall crowding of cities, this abandonment defied logic, until one looked around at the vast expanse of grassland. Going about her days back home, she had assumed America would soon be filled with houses, airports, and shopping malls but today’s travel along the western edge of South Dakota dispelled that notion. This land would never be developed. There was simply too much of it.
It was no wonder these uninhabited acres had called out to oppressed Europeans in the last century. They crossed the Atlantic in steerage, landed in New York, and packed aboard trains that chugged farther and farther away from the cities to remote train stations, little more than wood platforms in the middle of the prairie. From there, they continued by covered wagon until an axle broke, the oxen dropped, or winter caught up with them. Then they drove their stakes and made the best of it.
Karen felt privileged to be rolling along solid blacktop in her gasoline-powered, self-contained schooner. Now and then she noticed a clump of scraggly trees, so rare, it was clear they were planted by someone who had tried and failed to muscle the land into submission.
Occasionally they passed boggy marshland carpeted with purple lilies and yellow mustard plants. Pronghorn grazed next to fat, sleek horses, not at all like the horses she passed in dirt lots in the more rural stretches of southern California. She wished every horse could fill its belly with wild grasses and roll around in clover.
The horizon was bounded by hills and flat-topped mesas, the land in the foreground eroded with ravines and grassy draws. It made a treacherous path for stampeding herds or the lone rider far from home or help. Once out here, a person would have no choice but to stare existential reality in the face.
Chapter Twenty
In mid-afternoon, the van crested a rise beyond which lay a town, and beyond that, the Black Hills of South Dakota where their evening campsite waited.
Frieda awoke when she felt the van slow. “Is this Belle Fourche already?” She pronounced it ‘bell foosh.’
“Almost.” The highway brought them into town past a wrought-iron cemetery, over train tracks, past a granary, and over the river. A once-critical frontier outpost of sheep and cattle yards at the confluence of three rivers, Belle Fourche stood at the dead center of the contiguous U.S.
They merged with a procession of rumbling, hissing eighteen-wheelers and ranch trucks, their big duelies caked with mud. The road broadened to four lanes and carried them at shopping speed past the Dairy Queen, a package liquor store, and Black HillsTractor. Outside a Pizza Hut, a couple of cowboys wore spurs on their boots and numbers pinned on the backs of their shirts, identifying them as rodeo riders. City hall, a humble one-
story, stood on a lawn surrounded by gnarled oaks and cottonwood trees. Their cotton-fluff drifted onto the windshield like snow.
Outside town, the highway began to climb toward the Black Hills. The van handled the grade easily, and within the hour, Karen was inhaling the crisp fragrance of pine. The forested mountains, a novelty after the flatness of North Dakota, sheltered the old frontier town of Deadwood. The van crawled along Main Street with the flood of summer tourists, past the Holiday Inn and McDonalds lurking behind faux-eighteenth-century facades.
She turned into the parking lot of a small market next to a casino. “We should get some milk and something for dinner. How about burgers?”
“We’ll need more than that. You don’t want to go hungry out on the road.” In the store, Frieda grasped at the handle of a shopping cart and pointed it down an aisle, throwing in boxes of Hamburger Helper and cans of soup.
“You’re buying too much. We’ll be in Denver by tomorrow night.”
“This is how me and Russell always did it.” Frieda turned around, her cheeks lightly flushed, her eyes bright. “Loosen up. We’re on vacation. Hey, I’m going to stick my head in next door. Who knows? Might win a jackpot.” She left Karen to take care of the bill and wobbled out the front door.
Fifteen minutes later, their larder packed to the limit, Frieda returned with a paper cup full of coins and a thumbs-up. “I got lucky. Come on, girl, we’re burnin’ daylight. We need to find a place to stay.” She reached in the door pocket for the battered guide that had seen her and Russell though two decades of camping. “According to this, there are about a half dozen good places right around here. Let’s start at Rock Ridge Resort and keep going until we find one that grabs us.”
Karen put the van in gear. “I already made reservations at Sunset Pines RV Park.”
“But how do you know we’ll like it? It could be a dump.”
“It got good ratings on the internet.”