Do all things believe in their own perpetuity?
When I was a young child, before my father’s brain abruptly met his windshield on a lonely highway outside Salina, Kansas, he used to stand with me in our backyard in Topeka. In my memory, it is always summer, hot but not scorching, a little humid. Not unlike that terrible day in May, after which I would have only memories of him. The lawn he carefully tended is always lush, a deep, perfect emerald falling from the back of our two-story white house down a gentle, rolling slope to my mother’s equally careful plantings of day lilies and tiger lilies, gladiolas, and peonies. Cicadas drone their endless hypnotic chant in the dark branches of the elms shading the house. The trees and their fierce, tiny singers are, like my father, unaware of their own fast-approaching doom in the form of Dutch elm disease, moving toward them as inexorably as my father’s windshield.
“See there,” my father would say, pointing beyond the perfectly trimmed lawn.
In my memory, he’s always just finished mowing and the scent of fresh-cut grass is heavy and gorgeous like the perpetual sunshine, yellow as pollen on my bare arms. He gestures beyond my mother’s flowers, somewhere past our back fence.
“That’s where covered wagons would roll through a hundred years ago.”
Was he pointing to an actual place? Or to something more ephemeral, an invisible flood of history, rushing away from us in the opposite direction from the approaching Dutch elm disease?
“There used to be massive herds of buffalo right here. The pioneers could look out of their covered wagons and see them, some of them probably walking right through our backyard.”
In illustrations I’d seen in books at school, the velvety brown humps of buffalo on their absurdly dainty legs always plodded across tall, yellow prairie grass, not the short Kentucky bluegrass and zoysia on which my father and I stood. Like the elms and cicadas and my father, the big bluestem and switchgrass probably couldn’t see the zoysia coming for them. Probably, the buffalo were no more able to understand what the pioneers in their covered wagons portended than my father could on that swiftly approaching afternoon in May. Do all things believe in their own perpetuity?
Maybe not all things. Once, my father showed me an arrowhead he kept in the top drawer of the antique oak desk in his office from which the faint smell of lemon and honey magically emerged whenever the drawer was pulled open. The reason for this, my father explained, was that after an oak tree had grown for probably a hundred years, someone cut it down and milled it and sawed it and formed it into this piece of furniture, then generations of people rubbed beeswax into the bones of the oak tree until the scents lived in what was left of the tree’s body. He reached into a little square box built into the front corner of the drawer, lined with dark green velvet the same shade as the zoysia in our backyard where it grew under the still-living elms and gently lifted the arrowhead out of its green velvet bed.
It rested in the center of his palm, faceted and notched, somehow both grey and blue, cloudy and shiny, opaque and almost, but not quite, translucent all at the same time. It was made from chert, he told me. A kind of flint commonly found in the Flint Hills of Kansas and Oklahoma. He had exhumed the arrowhead as he shoveled out a square hole in a corner of our backyard, first slicing through the emerald green zoysia before peeling back the turf like skin to remove several square yards of rich, black loam squirming with earthworms. He framed out the square hole in the earth with wooden planks, then filled it with sand. My younger brothers and I would spend hours sifting through that sandbox, first under the cool, dark shade of the elms, then later not, searching futilely for an arrowhead like the one cradled in my father’s hand, dug from our own backyard after being dropped there, a hundred, maybe 500, maybe a thousand years ago.
“Dropped by who?” I asked.
Of course, I knew about Indians. Our state, I had learned in school, was named for the Kansa tribe. Kansa, our teacher said, meant “People of the South Wind.” Those had been good Indians, with a name like poetry. I also knew there were bad Indians who attacked brave pioneers with arrows, presumably tipped with arrowheads like this one.
It had not occurred to me until that moment they might be the same Indians.
“Did an Indian shoot that arrowhead at a pioneer?” I asked. If both the buffalo and the Indians were gone (not true of course, although at nine it seemed so to me), while the descendants of the brave pioneers lived all along my street…
I couldn’t, at the time, formulate the real question I wanted to ask, but its shape hung in the air between my father and me. I touched the cool flint still cupped in his palm. I could see no blood on its sharp, perfect tip. And yet. I sensed for the first time that our backyard might be full of invisible blood, as it was full of buffalo and Indians and pioneers in covered wagons moving in their river of history beyond my mother’s daylilies and peonies.
So, what did my father tell me? Here, memory fails. I recall watching him put the arrowhead back then push the drawer shut with his thumb. Did he dismiss my question? He rarely did that. Did he refuse to speculate? Shrug uneasily? Whatever answer he offered was, I understood even then, unsatisfactory. The Indians were not like the big bluestem or the buffalo or my father. They knew exactly what was coming for them, especially by the time brave pioneers were driving covered wagons across their Great Plains and through what would become my green and peaceful backyard.
The buffalo were killed, I would later learn, to keep them from eating grass the settlers wanted for their livestock, and to keep the Indians from eating buffalo they wanted to keep themselves and their families from starving.
My mother, like my father, grew up in the Great Plains, in a small wooden house built by my grandfather outside Rolette, North Dakota, a hardscrabble rural town jammed up against the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation (Mikinaakwajiwing in the Ojibway language) and the Canadian border. The oldest picture I have of my mother is black-and-white, square as photos frequently were in the early 1940s, edged with a white border. She is probably five years old, wearing a short dress, bobbed hair, and a skeptical expression. Her younger sister, my aunt, probably two years old, stands solemnly next to her in a matching dress (like nearly all their clothing, sewn by my grandmother), one pudgy finger in her mouth. Between them, invisible, is a tiny ghost, their brother who died as a baby and about whom neither my grandmother nor grandfather could ever bear to speak.
Behind the house, not visible in the photo but there nonetheless, is the open prairie. In those days, it was still blanketed with yellow prairie grass, although patchworked as well with soybeans and wheat and pasture for livestock, mostly dairy and beef cattle the pioneers brought to replace the buffalo they had slaughtered. The buffalo were killed, I would later learn, to keep them from eating grass the settlers wanted for their livestock, and to keep the Indians from eating buffalo they wanted to keep themselves and their families from starving.
My grandmother was the third oldest child of 13, or the fourth oldest of 14, depending on how one counts dead children. She had two older sisters and an identical twin born moments before her who perished beside her at the age of five in the little cot in which they both lay, struck down together with smallpox. Although she survived the smallpox that killed her sister, every summer when my grandmother’s arms and neck grew tanned from working in her garden, the pale, untanned smallpox scars emerged like cloudy drops of milk on her skin. Miraculously, she said, none of the other children in her father’s house came down with smallpox. And there were many children in the house.
Once, my grandmother told me she had almost no memory of her own mother in which her mother was not pregnant. She said she and her two older sisters would lie together in their shared bed at night listening to their mother in the next room beg their father to leave her alone, she couldn’t stand another birth, the next baby would kill her, please. Please.
When my grandmother’s oldest sister was 16, her next sister 15, and my grandmother 14, they laid in bed listening to their mother beg their father to hitch up the wagon and take her to town so she could have this baby in the hospital, something wasn’t right. Please.
Her father instead roused my grandmother and her sisters and told them to help their mother deliver their sibling. My grandmother called this baby, whom she adored and helped raise, unlucky number 13. He was the 13th child, he weighed a brutal 13 pounds when she and her sisters pulled him from their mother, and even had 13 letters in his name.
Unsurprisingly, her mother never got out of bed again, succumbing to what was still called, in those days, childbed fever. Her father told the girls to be sure to get the bloodstains out of the sheets next time they did the laundry.
In our living room in Topeka, my mother had a large brass pot with a golden pothos that climbed a thick, square, four-foot-tall moss post. The stems of the pothos vines were as big around as my little finger and enveloped the moss post entirely, their green- and gold-splashed leaves covering it like a glossy cloak. My grandmother had given my mother a cutting from the golden pothos in her own living room in the little wooden house in North Dakota in 1954, on the day my mother moved to Grand Forks to go to nursing school.
My grandmother had loved going to school, even in a one-room schoolhouse so frigid in the North Dakota winter children would walk to school across the frozen prairie carrying both their schoolbooks and a hot potato, hastily excavated each morning from where it had been buried the night before in the banked coals of their family’s wood-burning stove. They would shove the hot potato in their coat pocket and use it to warm their hands as they sat at their desks in the morning, breath smoking in the small, icy room until the school’s wood-burning stove and the close-packed young bodies raised the temperature to something resembling comfort. Each child then ate their potato for lunch.
Like her two older sisters, my grandmother had been forbidden by her father from returning to school after her mother died and the three girls were tasked with raising their new baby brother and the other nine children. She made sure no one ever told her girls they could not go to school.
My mother, her oldest daughter, not only graduated from high school, but was valedictorian of her graduating class at the Deaconess School of Nursing in Grand Forks. This honor helped her get a rather prestigious job for a brand-new graduate, at the world-renowned Menninger Clinic’s pediatric hospital in Topeka, Kansas. The Menninger Foundation provided small apartments for its unmarried female nurses, and my mother moved into one with her nursing books, two small cardboard suitcases carefully packed with clothes and toiletries, and the cutting from her mother’s precious and exotic golden pothos.
She met my father in the Clinic’s hallway one night when they had both pulled a nightshift. He was working his way through college as an orderly, mopping floors and emptying trashcans. After he graduated and they married, she would use her salary as a pediatric nurse to support him through law school, then he would be hired as an attorney at well-respected law firm in Topeka and they would buy a two-story white house with a spacious lawn, mature elm trees, and an antique oak desk for his office.
Another black, suffocating pause in which I felt the vanished waters of the ancient sea rushing back and drowning me in my living room.
Two days after the police knocked on our front door to tell my mother my father had crushed his brain against his windshield on a highway outside Salina, my grandmother arrived. My grandfather had been visiting one of his sisters in Montana when the news came, necessitating that he catch a later flight that would arrive in Topeka the following day. The day my grandmother arrived, my youngest brother was two years old and napping upstairs along with my mother, who was so stricken with shock she could barely speak. My grandmother bustled around the kitchen that afternoon, washing dishes and wiping countertops, before telling me to take my other brother, who was seven, outside to play.
It was May, a week or two early for the cicadas, but the sulfur yellow butterflies had already begun making erratic crossings of the velvety green lawn to investigate the sweet violets under the elms. I stood for a while, picking restlessly at the bark of one of the trees while my brother half-heartedly shoved his Tonka trucks around the sandbox, but I could not settle myself, could not fully name the terrifying rush of emotion pounding through me like the invisible river of buffalo and blood and soon-to-be-dead elms, as though the vast lacunae my father had so often pointed at had somehow moved from our backyard into my own small body.
Eventually, I let myself back in the house and slipped quietly into the living room where our dachshund, Penny, luxuriated in a slanted rectangle of sunlight, the top half of her sinewy body, russet as autumn leaves and sleek as a seal, stretched under our round, stone-topped coffee table. She whacked her tail against the carpet in greeting as I wiggled under the coffee table and curled myself against her, stroking her long velvety hound dog ears and staring absently up at the bottom of the table, poised above us.
The coffee table had been in the house when my parents bought it, along with other pieces of old furniture my father had restored. Four slender, gently curved oak legs supported a round bentwood hoop, like a wagon wheel I imagined, on top of which rested a circular slab of polished limestone. The limestone, which my father told me had been quarried in eastern Kansas, was a hundred different shades of cream and ivory, but more beautiful, in my opinion, were the multitude of tiny fossils embedded in it—little sea creatures with intricately folded shells like clams or the spiraling shells of snails. A special few sparkled with quartz crystal that my father explained had filled in their vanished bodies, turning them to stone millions of years ago when all of Kansas, even our backyard, was just the muddy bottom of a prehistoric sea.
From under the coffee table, I could hear my grandmother talking to my grandfather on the kitchen phone. At one point, she stuck her head out the kitchen doorway to scan the living room, but I was drowsy and still, half in the square of sunlight, half cuddled under the coffee table with Penny, and she didn’t see me. Her side of the phone conversation was a comforting murmur that I heard, as children often do with adult conversations, without really listening to it. What time was my grandfather’s flight, she wondered? Oh, in all the rush she had forgotten to pack her shower cap and bedroom slippers, could my grandfather bring them?
Then, “He was drunk. Again. After six months sober. Six months!”
For a moment, I couldn’t understand her words, as though they belonged to an unknown language I didn’t speak.
“She said the deputy told her when he got the car door open, empty whisky bottles rolled right out at his feet.”
I froze with my hand on Penny’s warm red flank, my brain gone equally motionless, soundless as the blank space of my grandmother pausing to listen to whatever my grandfather said to her across the telephone wire from the little wooden house in North Dakota.
“They told her he swerved across into oncoming traffic and hit a semi head-on. Thank God the truck driver is okay, or this could’ve been even more awful.”
Another black, suffocating pause in which I felt the vanished waters of the ancient sea rushing back and drowning me in my living room.
“His head hit the windshield.” Her voice began to wobble. “He’s in a coma now and they don’t expect him to wake up. Even if he does, they told her his brain is too badly damaged. He’ll probably… he’ll never…” My grandmother made a noise somewhere between a moan and a gasp, as if the vanished sea were choking her as well.
I don’t recall the rest of the conversation, although I must have heard it. I remember instinctively pressing my hand hard against the limestone slab above me, its underneath side cool against the tiny heat of my palm. As though my hand alone could stop whatever had just fallen, or was about to fall, or would fall for the next hundred years on me and my mother and my brothers, the youngest of whom was sleeping upstairs with my mother’s grief-wracked body curled around him as I was curled around Penny. As though my nine-year-old hand could hold back the rush of ancient seas and my father’s windshield, dead buffalo and elm trees, pioneers and Indians shooting perfect blue-grey arrowheads at wagonloads of killers right in my own backyard. Knowing exactly what was coming for them. Unable to stop it, but somehow bound to try.
Sara Spurgeon’s essays have appeared in Slate.com, The Sun Magazine, and the edited collection We Are Nature Defending Itself: Women on Bodies, Borders, and Place. She co-directs the Literature, Social Justice, and Environment Program at Texas Tech University. Reach out at saraspurgeon.com.
Header photo by Dima Moroz, courtesy Shutterstock.
