June 2nd: Hard rain & wind storm. Rain poured in torrents. Cattle stampede & we had to be on horseback all night. Awful night. Men all tired and want to leave. Horses all gave out & men refused to do anything. Wet all night. We found the cattle all together near camp at daybreak. Worked all day hard in the river trying to make the cattle swim & did not get one over. One in our party drowned (Mr. Carr) & several had narrow escapes and I among the number. Had to turn back sick and discouraged. Am not homesick but heartsick. Have not got the blues but am in a Hell of a fix.
He got to Fort Collins, Colorado, and then to Denver, where thousands of prospectors had arrived before him and all claims were taken, so he gave up on gold and took up politics, and got himself elected mayor of Canon City and then representative to the Colorado Assembly, where he helped write the state constitution, but that didn’t satisfy him. He returned to Missouri to sweet-talk Martha Ann into moving west. She would not be persuaded, but she still loved him and bore one more child, whereupon David headed for Oklahoma Territory and settled on a claim near the Cherokee Strip. He wrote to his children:
I built a house 21 x 24, one-story of pickets, shingle roof, 6 windows and 2 doors, divided and will be when finished one like my house in MO. Dug a well 20 feet deep, plenty of water, and put up a stable for 10 head of stock, covered with hay. I am very comfortable in OK. We would like to see you all once more in this world, but it is hard to tell. It is not likely that we shall all meet again. If the Strip is open up for settlement this summer, you may come down and take a claim as I am a mile and a quarter from it. If I intend to take a claim joining OK. There is fine land on Turkey Creek joining OK. We are 5 miles NW on the west side of Turkey Creek, Sec. 5, Town 18, R8. Hennessey will make us a fine town I think as there is in OK.
And there David died, in the Land Rush of 1889. He could not stop himself, he rode to the Strip, found a tract of land to claim, leaned up against a tree to defend it against claim-jumpers, and died a few days later, at the age of 62.
This was a long story, and Lew was a slow talker and loved to digress. I heard him tell the whole story twice, both times exhausting. By the time he got to Fort Collins, I wished David would give up and go home to Missouri. But I loved the line “I do not have the blues but I am in a hell of a fix.” Uncle Lew never swore but when a man has tried to drive cattle across a big river in a raging storm, he has a right to. It was clear to me that David was in the grip of an obsession bordering on insanity—selling his farm every few years and packing up the wagons and heading west over the objections of his sensible wife—and so his children grew up with a desperate craving for stability. Wherever along the route they reached maturity, in Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Iowa, or Missouri, they stayed put. PLOP. But David refused to settle and saw something brighter ahead and set out to find it. This was not the lesson our parents tried to teach us. I admired his craziness and suspected Uncle Lew did too by the fact he told the story in detail, no comment. He let the story speak for itself: Don’t be afraid to take big chances. Live boldly. Don’t mind what others say. Do what you feel you were put here to do.
Denhams were different. Grandpa Denham grew up in a Glasgow tenement, married Marian, and sailed away to America to raise his thirteen children. He was a bookkeeper for the Soo Line Railroad, wore starched shirts with satin armbands and black high-top shoes. He was strict and watched his children closely for signs of worldliness. I remember him as a fretful old man warning children not to dash out in the street, but there was more to him than that. I was glad to come across a picture of him hoeing strawberry beds in a large garden, looking up at the camera and grinning. This is Anabel Wright’s garden near Hastings. Grandpa’s wife, Marian, had died a few years before, and now Grandpa is courting this tall cheery woman who owns a farm. He takes the train out to Hastings, and she picks him up in her electric and he hoes her garden, grinning at the lady holding the camera, Anabel. That is romance on Grandpa’s face. He hopes to marry her and he does. A man who fathers thirteen children is a man of enthusiasm. The picture is a revelation.
9
You Are Welcome
We don’t drink liquor or come near it:
The body is the temple of the Holy Spirit.
No movies, dancing, or libations,
We get our thrills from revelations.
The Lord will come, perhaps tomorrow,
Bring an end to all our sorrow.
We’ll rise to meet Him in the air
And you guys won’t be there.
Everything we say is reliable,
We have read it in the Bible.
Rapture’s coming in a minute,
Sorry but you won’t be in it.
EVERY SUNDAY MORNING, WE DRESSED up and drove to Meeting, passing the billboards—I had learned to read by saying Murray’s Silver Butter Knife Steak for Two and Ewald’s Golden Guernsey Milk—the heads of two light brown cows protruding from the sign—and came to the Gospel Hall in Minneapolis and walked up the steps, past the sign that said:
GRACE AND TRUTH GOSPEL HALL
LORD’S DAY
Worship Meeting 10:30 A.M.
Sunday School 9:30 A.M.
Gospel Meeting 7:45 P.M.
YOU ARE WELCOME
Theoretically you are welcome, but as an outsider, you’d be an amazing phenomenon, like a blind man holding sparklers, and we’d have to figure out how to deal with you. Inside, past the cloakroom, was a large plain white meeting room, no imagery, no crosses or candles, with chairs arranged in six rectangles facing the little table in the middle with a pitcher of wine and a loaf of bread, covered with a white cloth. Men in dark suits, women in dark modest dresses and head coverings, no lipstick or jewelry, everyone sitting exactly where they sat every Sunday. Our family in a row behind Grandpa and Grandma Anabel, with Aunt Ina and Bill and Marion, and Aunt Margaret, Shirley, cousin Roger. Sun streaming in the big windows, long silences as the Saints wait upon the leading of the Spirit. We sing from The Little Flock hymnal—no musical accompaniment, because no pianos are mentioned in Scripture. (No cars or washing machines either, I point out, and Mother gives me a look.)
There used to be more of us. Our numbers shrank in 1947 with the split between the Anoka assembly and us over a question regarding separation principles, but the root of the split was a rivalry between two preachers, Brother Ames and Brother Booth, who couldn’t bear the sight of each other. Two male buffalo locked horns. We were Booth Brethren, and Anoka cut us off from fellowship and one Sunday morning, with some Anoka people in our midst, Jim and Dorothy Hunt and Florence and Harold and Rozel and David, our relatives, and people weeping, we sang, God be with you till we meet again. By His counsels, guide, uphold you, and we parted. Anoka thrived and grew, thanks to loving elders, and Minneapolis shrank, thanks to a blockhead elder whose bullying drove the younger members from the flock. But Mother couldn’t leave her family, and Dad couldn’t leave Mother. Aunt Eleanor was Dad’s best friend, and though they were on opposite sides they were even closer after the split. They never argued about it. They sat in her kitchen and laughed and laughed—he was a changed man around her, not the silent man he was with the Minneapolis people—and clearly, family was more important than correct doctrine. Years later, our assembly having dwindled to a handful, our Gospel Hall was sold to a charismatic Black church. Our mournful remnant disappeared and the Holy Spirit moved in, and there was rapturous singing and shouting, people crying out Alleluias and Amens.
After Meeting, the eight of us ride over to Don and Elsie’s for Sunday dinner, a big adventure because they have a TV and we do not. I’d seen TV—at school, we watched the inauguration of Dwight D. Eisenhower and the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II—but we couldn’t have a TV “because it’s Hollywood,” Mother explained. In 2005, when the movie A Prairie Home Companion held its premiere in St. Paul, Mother was given a seat of honor in the balcony. I sat behind her, and I could see she was enjoying the movie. I leaned forward and said, “I hope Grandpa Den-ham didn’t
see you walking into this theater,” and she told me she had done it as a favor to me, but she laughed. Eventually, everything becomes humorous. Almost everything.
Uncle Don didn’t care about movies; he was a football fan, having played in high school in Wausau, and the Green Bay Packer game started around noon on Sunday, so the TV got turned on the instant they arrived home from Meeting, and Don took his place on the couch. He got intensely involved with the game and tended to move laterally with the play. Sometimes he crouched up close. If the Packer quarterback faded back to pass on third down, short yardage, Don threw himself at the screen: You gotta be kidding. When a ref called Holding on a Packer lineman, Don rose to his feet. “Holding! You call that holding? He stuck out his hand and the other guy ran into it. Open your eyes!” he yelled, and then he demonstrated to me how holding differs from sticking out your hand as the other guy runs into it. My dad sat quietly nearby, ignoring him: he cared nothing about football but was obliged to sit with us males in the living room; the kitchen was a sanctum of sisterhood. So he sat, looking at the paper, which didn’t interest him either. He liked Uncle Don but didn’t understand how a grown man could get excited about a game. I, on the other hand, was delighted to see a Brethren man in a state of excitation about anything. Grim solemnity was the standard, but here was Uncle Don, who an hour before stood up in Meeting and prayed a long Brethrenly prayer, now yelling at a referee on TV.
Aunt Elsie put the pies in the oven, apple and lemon meringue, and the pot roast came out, and she made gravy, and when dinner was ready, if the Packers were on the march, dinner might need to be delayed for a few minutes. Then we trooped in around the table and the TV sound was turned down as Uncle Don thanked the Lord for the food before us and for His death on Calvary’s cross, and we dug in, while Elsie quietly disparaged her cooking so as to ward off compliments. The potatoes were dry, she said, and the meat overdone, the creamed corn too salty, but of course the dinner was sheer perfection. If the Packers took possession, if they came within field-goal range, Don kept an ear out and was apt to slide over a few feet to where he could see the screen. He was a man besieged by conflicting forces. A perfect dinner, powerful Packer loyalties, his wife’s patient disregard of the game, the holiness of the Lord’s Day, and wretched officiating.
Once a month, Brethren gathered to mail gospel tracts to the survivors of people listed in the obituaries, telling them they should accept Jesus as their Savior or else wind up in the Lake of Fire. I pointed out to Mother that this seemed cruel, to suggest to the grieving that their loved ones had maybe wound up in hell, but she felt it was an act of mercy. I asked if we knew of any people who’d been converted by the tracts we mailed. “It’s not for us to know,” she said, “it’s for God to know.” Our next-door neighbor, Mr. Birk, was an atheist who said, “When you’re dead, you’re dead. They stick you in a hole and you don’t come out. Anything else is a fairy tale.” (Though when Mrs. Birk said she wanted a new couch for the living room, he said, “People in hell want ice water.”) Dad was friendly with him, but they only talked about carpentry and cars, not the Last Judgment. It was Mother who once went next door and testified to him about the Lord and he laughed at her. She stood in his doorway, hands on her hips, and told him that Jesus had died for his sins. I was impressed by her gumption. Mother was moved by Mrs. Birk’s having to endure her husband’s drunken tirades and wanted him to know that God was watching, and so was Grace Keillor.
One morning in late May, the phone rang in our upstairs hall and Mother set down her clothes basket and answered. There was a long silence and then she said, “Oh no.” My cousin Roger Hummel had drowned in Lake Minnetonka. He was seventeen, about to graduate from Central High that week, a tall boy with a crew cut, a sharp dresser with a sweet smile. He had rented a rowboat with a girl named Susan, whom he had a crush on, and she dove into the water from the stern and he dove after her though he could not swim a stroke. Perhaps he thought it would come to him as a natural reflex, but he sank and panicked, arms and legs thrashing. Susan grabbed him by the hair, but his crew cut was too short to get hold of and he pulled her under and she had to fight free. She called for help and swam to shore and Roger disappeared. A couple hours later, sheriff’s deputies dragged the bottom and brought his body up.
Thirty years later, a woman approached me at the airport and said, “I’m Susan. I was with your cousin when he drowned.” We stood and talked. That day was still vivid to her. She had taken a lifesaving course and there was Roger, terrified in the water, and nothing she had learned could save him in that horrific minute. She was shaken, describing his wild panic, her attempt to get hold of him, and also the fact that she felt responsible: he had a crush on her and that’s why they were there, but she was not attracted to him. She was starting to realize, way back then, that she was attracted to women, and didn’t know how to tell him. He died for unrequited love, of a mysterious kind.
The funeral was at Albin Chapel on Nicollet, a beige-colored room, draperies, perfumy, squishy organ music, his classmates weeping. We trooped in past the coffin banked with flowers where the body lay in a gray suit, white shirt, and tie, his prominent Denham jaw, his crew cut. Aunt Margaret and cousin Shirley sat in an alcove, behind a transparent curtain. Roger’s brother, Stan, was stationed in Korea and couldn’t get leave to come home. Roger’s father, Paul, had run off with the other woman when Roger was a baby, and the story was that Paul had almost taken the baby with him, and so we contemplated how the baby’s kidnapping might have saved his life. Some of my aunts wept, and we all sat in shock. Aunt Margaret sat, composed, silent. Mother wept at the grave-side and later I asked her why, since now Roger was in heaven with the Lord, and she said, “We don’t know that. He went to a dance at school.”
The next week, Mother enrolled me in swim class at the YMCA downtown. It met daily for three weeks; Monday morning I waited on the highway by Mrs. Fisher’s asparagus field and caught the bus into town, disembarked at the Public Library on 10th Street and walked over to the Y on LaSalle and through a side door down the steps into a locker room reeking of chlorine where an old man handed me a key and told me to take my clothes off and put them in a locker. I stripped down to my undershorts. “Those too,” he said. I grew up in a proper home and when I stepped out of my shorts, I crossed a line I’d never crossed before. He pointed me to a large dank shower room and turned on the water and I stepped under it. Cold. He pointed me to a steel door marked Pool and I went through. Forty other boys, all naked, sat around the long pool, feet dangling down into the water, and I joined them. A couple of fat ones, the others spindly like me. The instructor strode in, holding a clipboard. He was lean and muscular and wore black swim trunks. He called off our names and we answered Here except one boy said Present. The instructor glared at him. And he told us to jump in the water, hold onto the side of the pool, and kick our legs. Then he told us to float by pushing away, take a deep breath, facedown in the water, hands at our sides, as he stood on the side, holding a long pole for us to grab onto if we started to sink. I tried to do what he said but it was so strange, an act of faith, and I got scared and tried to stand up but the pool was eight feet deep, and then I got really scared and he jabbed me with the pole and I grabbed it. “What’s the matter with you that you can’t follow simple directions?” he yelled. “Try again!” I clung to the pole, trying to lie back in the water as he’d told me to do. “Let go!” he said. “We don’t have all day.”
I was scared of water, and the instructor was a sadist. He enjoyed his superiority. He strode around behind us and explained swimming as if this were as simple as walking and then sent us into the water, five at a time, and told us to swim, and belittled those who couldn’t. “Come on, ladies, put your faces in the water,” he yelled. “What are you scared of? Follow directions!” I stuck it out for two days and on the third I could not make myself go down those steps and strip naked. I turned around and went to the library instead. Spent two hours looking at books, then went to the W
CCO studios on Second Avenue to watch Good Neighbor Time with Bob DeHaven and Wally Olson and His Orchestra, a live show at 11:30 with a studio audience. Ernie Garven played the accordion, Burt Hanson sang, and Cedric Adams came in and read the news at noon. My mother read his daily column in the Minneapolis Star and loved his reminiscences of boyhood in his hometown of Magnolia. After the news, I got on the elevator and there he was, smiling, in his blue pinstripe suit and shiny brown shoes, and I stood next to him and felt the greatness of the man, fame exuding from him, and smelled his cologne. He was the most famous man in Minnesota. Airline pilots reported that when Cedric said good night at the end of his 10 p.m. newscast, lights dimmed all across Minnesota. Occasionally he substituted for Arthur Godfrey on his CBS morning radio show in New York, a native of Minnesota heard nationwide, and there I was standing next to him on an elevator, a profound moment, a corn picker from the sticks brushing up against a national celebrity, and then the door opened and we stepped out together and I heard his gravelly voice and famous chuckle up above. Mother admired him because he made her laugh.
Every morning I boarded the bus to downtown, intending to be brave and instead went to the library and then to WCCO for a brush with greatness. I didn’t imagine Cedric Adams was afraid of water. I imagined him diving off the stern of a big yacht and swimming to shore and shaking himself like a dog. He was a great man, and I was a sneak and a coward and a liar. And every day downtown was a fresh lie—“How was swim lesson?” Fine. “What did you learn?” We learned to float. “I really want you to learn to swim.” I will. “You’re not afraid of water, are you?” No. “Are you sure?” Yes.
That Time of Year Page 8