My aunts thought I was of interest, so I gravitated to their kitchens, not to the garage or barn, and I chopped as they cooked, I dried as they washed, I told them what I’d read and seen and done, and they paid attention. I said, Our neighbor Mr. Birk doesn’t believe in God. He says that when you die you go in a hole in the ground and that’s it. He drinks beer. He hit his wife once and Mother went next door and told him to stop or she’d call the police. Our neighbor on the other side, Mr. Couture, shot our dog Skeezix because he got in their garbage, and Dad had to go over and get his body off their front lawn and bring it home and bury it in the garden. The Andersons live on our road and they fight all the time and he gets drunk and their mom is extremely fat and I saw her underwear on the clothesline once and it’s size 48. The Welches are rich: they have two cars. They’ve been to Europe. I’ve never been in their house. Behind us are the Forsbergs. She has the loudest voice of anybody: you can hear her a quarter-mile away. Les Michaelson is my age and he is an only child. The other only children near us are Dianne Mattson and Jim Olmscheid and Corinne Guntzel. Her family owns a horse and a cabin up near Brainerd. She said I can go there someday if I learn to swim. It’s lonely being an only child, they watch you closely all the time, I wouldn’t like it.
I tried to amuse them as they worked. I felt useful, talking to them. They liked to hear stories about school, what we studied, so I obliged. Aunt Eleanor said, “We are all islands in the sea of life and seldom do our peripheries touch,” but my aunts were an archipelago that my island nestled among comfortably. I wrote her a poem: God smiled down on Aunt Eleanor/Who, guided by Him, did quite well in her/Choice of a man, though he couldn’t be called rich/Was wise in the Lord, Uncle Aldridge. She had a passion for gardening, raised Angus steers for meat, was an accomplished letter writer, had a good throwing arm and could swing a bat, and out of the goodness of her heart tended to a bachelor farmer neighbor. Aunt Josephine was tall and majestic, black hair tied in a bun, the handsomest of the family, who tended her flock of chickens and her immaculate garden and sang as she hung the wet laundry on the line, “It Is Well with My Soul.” Bessie was the Keillor family historian and knew everyone going back centuries. Aunt Margaret told me I was her favorite nephew. Ruby wanted to hear all about our car trips out West, so I stood in front of her and described Montana and Idaho. Elsie was ever lighthearted, Mother’s confidante, who snuck away with her to movies and football games. Aunt Frannie would swim with us in the Rum River and dive underwater and stand on her head, her two legs high in the air. Marion spoke with a Scottish lilt and had a pool table in her basement. Jean wrote poems. They all liked to tell stories. Eleanor wrote letters in a minimalist style all her own. She wrote, not long before her death:
Dear Gary,
You must have given up on me a long time ago. You wrote me a letter last winter and never had an answer and now another and I’m sure you have given up hope. Letter writing is something that I can put off forever. And I am embarrassed writing to a writer. This I can truthfully say, that I think of you much more often than I write.
I would enjoy very much a visit with you this month but the truth of the matter is that I have a husband. He is perfectly capable of taking care of everything so long as I am here but if I so much as leave the house, he falls apart at the seams.
I spent the week primarily in hauling wood and stacking it, which makes me feel like an ant trying to move the beach. I am moving wood because I am selling it. We are inundated with wood and it will not remain in a saleable state much longer and Mother was half Pennsylvania Dutch and she brought us up to abhor waste. At the same time we butchered the six roosters that have been waiting since spring. They were not chickens that I had raised so I had no particular attachment to them and I had not trained them so they were hard to catch. We put them in jars hoping to use them for chicken and dumplings. The bony pieces are dedicated to broth for persons suffering from colds.
We had a very strong wind on Thursday, which took the remainder of the willow tree. There was one gust that went through here that I thought was going to take us, too. I was feeding the animals and heard a roar coming through the woods, and I didn’t know whether to run for the house or step into the barn. I did take shelter in the barn until it quieted down a little.
We had an experience the day the wind died down. The doorbell rang one noon and when I went to the door there was a young bushy-haired, bushy-bearded man with a gun in a holster on his hip and a shotgun cradled in his arms. In the split second that I had to consider my options, I wondered if I should slam the door and lock it but then I said to myself, “Oh, don’t be a coward!” I walked out the door and asked if I could help him. He was furious and said, “You shot my dogs!” Of course, we hadn’t but it was next to impossible to convince him. He finally cooled down enough to tell me that he had followed their tracks and the tracks came into our yard. Eventually he settled for trying to follow their tracks further. I was not impressed with his intelligence—he lives up on the corner in that old schoolhouse that was converted to a house.
I feel I have not covered much ground in this letter but it is suppertime and I must stop. Thank you for the book you sent that defines old English terms. I read it and realized how old I am because I knew most of them. We have had numerous very favorable reports of your lovely wife, Jenny. Someday you will stop running around and Jan and I will come to your house and introduce ourselves.
Very much love from your Aunt Eleanor
Her letters were a precious gift—a busy woman taking time to pen an account of her doings—and so the letter (or column, essay, blog) became my favored genre. Writing columns for Time, Salon, the New York Times, or “Talk” pieces for The New Yorker or a Lake Wobegon monologue, they all originated in the pleasure of an envelope from her and the page within, the writing style in which I could hear her voice. My uncles didn’t tell stories lest they betray weakness or frivolity. They discussed the correct way to lay concrete or the meaning of the verse in Deuteronomy where it says God will set us above all the nations of the earth. They were not comedians. Uncle Don was the exception; he’d tiptoe into the bedroom where his boys and I lay in the dark, and he leaned over us and whispered, I’m going to find out who’s sleeping and who’s playing possum, and he put his head down by mine and growled like a bear, and it was thrilling. Aunts wanted to be friends. Aunt Ina once told me how, at age 21, she took the streetcar to a Ford dealership on Harmon Place in Minneapolis and bought a Model A and, though she had never driven before in her life, she and two girlfriends drove from Minneapolis to Yellowstone Park on dirt roads across South Dakota and Wyoming, saw the geysers and the mountains, sold the car, and came back by train, and then she took a job in an office and settled down as a proper young lady. The story was counter to Denham cautiousness, about allowing yourself a dramatic adventure and I was honored to be confided in. Mother and Elsie, fixing Sunday dinner, told me about the summer of 1931 when they took the trolley up to Anoka to the Keillor farm, and Elsie and Mother both were taken with young John, eighteen, and they were fifteen and sixteen, and admired his handsome good looks and his kindness, and they recalled his fun-loving sisters, the ailing father, the ride on the hayrack behind the big horses, the odd house of fireproof concrete, the brook nearby, and suddenly it occurred to me that Elsie, not Grace, might’ve won John and then who would I be? The beauty of the story and how it might’ve turned out otherwise.
Uncles did not tell such stories. They didn’t confide in me. Why should they? I was a child, I knew nothing. But I wanted to hear how they happened to meet my aunts and had fallen in love, the whole story, leaving nothing out, and now I wonder if maybe I should’ve asked.
Aunt Ruth was a Saturday night regular at our house. She had no children, so she treasured her nieces and nephews. We sat by her ankles as she told about Thomas Keillor, at the advanced age of 45, leaving Yorkshire, taking his wife, Mary Ann, and twelve-year-old son John to sail to Nova Scotia on an overcrowded ship that was und
er-provisioned, the ship’s owners knowing that many passengers would die anyway and why carry food for the doomed? They wound up near Dorchester, New Brunswick, and intermarried with the Crandalls, who had fled from Connecticut when violence broke out there in 1776. They had taken the side of law and order, which was the losing side. With other Loyalists, they left their houses and property and fled north. Thomas Keillor died three years after landing in Canada: the perilous voyage was for his children’s sake, not his own. His son married a Trenholm girl who bore a son, Robert, whose son William had a son James Crandall Keillor who became my grandfather.
James was a hewer of timber in a shipyard in Chatham, New Brunswick, had been hewing since he was fifteen and was skilled at the craft when he got word from his sister Mary in Anoka that her husband, Mr. Hunt, was dying and he came on the train by way of Albany, arriving just in time to attend Mr. Hunt’s funeral, and so his course was decided for him. He didn’t care for farming, but he switched from shipbuilding to farming, helped raise Mary’s three children, and might’ve returned to shipbuilding, but he was entranced by the schoolteacher across the road. Dora Powell was a progressive and a Methodist, like her father, and she believed that every woman should have an education and a career, so that she would never have to depend on a man. She had begged her father to take her and her twin sister, Della, to Chicago to the Columbian Exposition of 1893 to see the wonders there, the moving walkway and Ferris wheel and motion picture theater, but they were only thirteen and he thought that was too young. She and Della had learned Morse code so they could share answers in school and they became two of the first female railroad telegraphers in the United States. At the Anoka depot, they had posed as one person named D. Powell. One worked the morning shift, came home for lunch, changed clothes with her twin who then worked the afternoon. In her early twenties, she came to teach in the school across the road, and she boarded with James and his sister Mary. James served on the school board. She liked that he knew history. She admired his ancestor Elder John Crandall, the Baptist cleric in colonial Rhode Island who befriended the Narragansett Indians and learned their language, and Prudence Crandall the abolitionist and women’s suffrage activist, so his heredity passed muster. She was 25, he was 45, they married in St. Francis.
Dora and Della, 1886. They learned Morse Code so they could talk in class.
Grandma told Aunt Ruth: He was a tall handsome man with a brushy mustache and I was told he was part Indian and I liked that. He was very good to Mary and he raised her three children and then he started paying attention to me. He crossed over the road to the schoolhouse after the children had left and followed me around washing the blackboards and clapping the erasers, and I moved away from him but not so fast that he couldn’t catch up and then he kissed me. I hadn’t been kissed like that before and back then it meant something. I agreed to go with him to town and get married, and as soon as he told Mary, then we got in his wagon and went away and did that.
Mary Hunt moved to her sister’s up the road, and James and Dora came back to his house, and he carried her into the house and left the horses standing hitched to the wagon, their reins hanging down, until morning. He had attended to his sister’s family for twenty years and now he intended to start his own. He doted on Grandma. She was the only farm wife around with a serving girl to help her with chores. He called her “My Girl” and sang to her in a clear tenor voice and until he was very old carried her up the stairs at night to bed. He fathered eight children. He bought the first Model T in Ramsey Township. He drove it home and went to turn in at the yard and forgot what he was dealing with, and he pulled back hard on the wheel and shouted “Whoa!” and the car went in the ditch and he had to hitch up his horses and pull himself out. He was laughing when the car went into the ditch, and he was laughing as he towed it out.
She told about Grandpa Keillor rousing his brood from their warm beds on a winter night and bundling them up and leading them up the road to the pasture to see, on a nearby ridge under the full moon, a silver wolf, sitting on his haunches, gazing back at them. She was scared and asked, “What if the wolf attacks us?” and he said, “He won’t so long as we stay close together.” She told about the day the house burned down—the children looking out the schoolhouse windows and seeing their house in flames. Ruth was home sick from school and she and little Eleanor heard Grandma cry out and ran downstairs, and one wall of the house was in flames. Ruth pumped a kettle of water and threw it at the flames as Grandma hauled an armload of bedding and books and pictures out on the lawn and was about to go back for Grandpa’s desk drawers, but he grabbed her, he’d run up from the field, and he wouldn’t let her go back in. The children formed a bucket brigade, but it was too late. A chimney fire. “I never saw him so sad. He and the neighbors shoveled out the debris and Uncle Allie built us a new fireproof house with concrete walls, covered in stucco. Mother missed the old house so much. But Dad wanted one that was fireproof.”
Philip and Judy and I lay on the floor mesmerized. The house fire was part of a Keillor saga that begins with James Hunt’s death from TB and James Keillor’s journey to help his sister, whereupon Grandma Dora leaves her job as a railroad telegrapher in Anoka when her twin sister, Della, marries Frank, and Dora takes a teaching job at that country school in Ramsey Township and boards with Mr. Keillor and his sister Mary. She sits across the table and they talk night after night about all sorts of things and he chases her around the schoolhouse and kisses her and thus our family gains the sensible influence of progressive Methodism to temper the Brethren idealism. Everything I knew about our history came from my aunts, nothing from my uncles.
Aunt Elsie wrote:
Granny McKay had lived with her son Jim for years who’d been seeing a lady, Louise, but felt he couldn’t leave Granny. He was Christian Science. He was going to be best man at George’s wedding and then suddenly Jim died and everyone felt so awful that he missed out on marriage. Mary made a blueberry pie for his funeral and your mother and I were doing dishes that morning and taking our time as we always did, that’s how your mother and I became so close, I washed and she dried because she was taller and could reach the cupboards. She sat on the windowsill, drying a platter, and the blueberry pie was sitting on the sill, cooling, and she knocked it off and it crashed to smithereens and she felt so bad, but Mary just made another one. We went to his funeral and afterward we snuck away to a movie, which was strictly forbidden, Dad didn’t want us to set foot in a theater, but we enjoyed the movie until there was a lightning storm in the movie and we spotted our brother George sitting two rows away, and we snuck out and never saw the end. Your mother was seeing your dad around then. Our dad had pulled her out of high school because he thought she was boy crazy and sent her to live with Jean and Les and she went into nurse’s training and got a job for the Quinlan family, who owned the department store, taking care of their old uncle who couldn’t walk. He told her one morning he wanted the Journal so she ran down to the corner to get a copy of the Journal and came back and he’d wet his pants. He wanted a urinal. Oh, she had stories. That’s why she loved nursing, you got to know people. But mostly she talked about your dad.
There is a whole novella in that paragraph with my tall mother drying a platter and knocking a pie off the sill, and going to the forbidden movie after Jim’s funeral, and looking for the newspaper when the man needed to pee. No uncle of mine would’ve written a letter like that, admitting to having tasted the pleasures of life. Life was about struggle, fidelity, devotion to the Lord, not about conversation and jokes and going to the movies.
My aunts were circumspect, but if you asked pointed questions, they would tell you that Aunt Margaret’s husband, Paul, had abandoned her and run away with their kids’ schoolteacher in Cottage Grove. Margaret sat in front of me in Sunday morning Meeting, and Paul’s sisters Leila and Pluma sat across the room, facing us. If I leaned to one side, I could see the three of them in a triptych, the whole story. Aunt Margaret bore her trials without complaint
, putting her faith in the Lord. After she died, her two surviving children, now mature adults, located their father and his lover in Seattle and made a trip there to grant him their forgiveness. He wept when he heard of his younger boy’s death by drowning and Margaret’s hardship. This was a haunting story, like the house fire story and the death of Joe Loucks. But I also heard stories about Halloween pranks that my uncles may have been involved with, or not, but the aunts described them in some detail, a story about boys disassembling a Model T Ford and reassembling it on the roof of a machine shed, and a story about tipping over outhouses on neighboring farms with the farmer inside the outhouse, trousers around his ankles, sitting on the hole, his bowels opening, as the vandals pushed the outhouse over on its door so that the victim had to evacuate through the hole he’d been emptying his bowels through and perhaps landing in the pit on top of his own waste products. It was cruelty beyond my imagination, carried out as a joke, but only permissible on October 31st. Any other day, you’d be thrown in jail.
Some stories were out of bounds: Uncle Lew had been in trouble at the Post Office for stealing money, and the family loved him dearly and kept his wrongdoing secret so that we children could love him too and not judge him. And then of course there was my parents’ late marriage, a secret carefully kept for sixty years, no whispers leaked.
The only uncle who told stories was Lew, Grandma’s brother, and he was more like an aunt in that way. He visited us, bringing boxes of sugar wafers and bags of peanut brittle from his company, Ada Claire Candies, named for his wife. He loved to tell about his grandfather David Powell, a restless farmer, born in Pennsylvania soon after the Louisiana Purchase, married Martha Ann Cox, they started having babies and, though a farmer, he kept moving the family west, to Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, begetting ten children all told, including a set of triplets, and he then took off with a group of men he organized in 1859 to look for gold in Colorado, leaving his wife and children behind. It was the nineteenth century when irresponsibility was called pioneering. A reporter for a Chicago paper followed them from Iowa to the Mormon Trail to Laramie and then into the mountains and the land of the Cheyenne. David wrote in his diary:
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