Clearing the Line
These essays are the first ("Prairie Haunting") and last ("Clearing the Line") in my manuscript A Blur in the Field: 22 Ways of Looking for Home. In the collection, I ask everyone—buffalo and bats, sister and maps, father and fairy tales, dwellings and wind—what it means to be a woman in place. I seek sources and sites that convey how geography and memory shape us.
Every spirit builds itself a house;
and beyond its house, a world;
and beyond its world a heaven. - Emerson
The house is a crumpled toy, a giant child’s plaything stomped and cracked open, left in dirt and air. A green pine grows straight up, branches over the remains of the burned, then fallen house. Arrayed around its destruction sit rough board buildings—low barn; one-room cabin; slant-sided structure with a metal chair planted in front, as if there was a view other than tangled undergrowth and decades of cast-offs in weeds; and sprouts of volunteer wheat stalks, blown in from the surrounding fields already harvested to yellow stubble in mid-July.
My sister and I are looking for our mother, born on this patch of central Kansas land against the river, now dead for sixteen years. My son is looking for his grandmother. The photos we took that morning—rubble, cabin, field, sky—how to say exactly what they show? I am picking over this land for how memory and sadness and the fleshy loam of family conspire, until I see that I cannot see at all. The day after, the three of us looked at the pictures we took that morning, we found that whatever we captured in digital green and brown, yellow and blue, was not what we saw the morning we stood there poking around inside the remains.
*
Our grandfather was our mother’s North Star. He died when she was thirteen, and nearly every day of her next sixty years she consulted her memory father, asked herself what he would have done. We never knew him, and there are only a few photographs. Instead, what he left is a writer’s treasure, a boon to me, but also a kind of burden: a daily journal started when he was nineteen and left after he was a thirty-year-old father of two, my mother not yet born. His writing invites me to trace the labor of claiming the plot of land he named Jingletown: clearing and plowing it, building on it, bringing a wife, starting a family.
I imagine the one-room cabin we found that day was his first structure, a 1908 shelter that is strangely airy feeling in 2017, open overhead to beams and light leaking in through siding. The three of us fit inside with the castoffs—a kitchen counter with drawers, a sink, a cabinet radio with Bakelite knobs, cans of something I didn’t recognize. Outside, above the only door, the door that faces the field and river beyond, a clear glass insulator indicated that somewhere in the 20th century, there had been light in the nights, and again in the dim mornings when the farmer rose early to start work. I asked my son to climb up and claim the insulator. It came off easily in his hand, along with the stub of wood and a few bent nails that held it up.
*
If I had lived wiser, I could own a little plot by now. Instead of boxes stacked inside dusty metal storage lockers, I might have a garden and a house, a horizon, my own cups and saucers in the cupboard. Instead, I have Makeshift, my invisible homestead. I learned how to name a place from my grandfather’s writing, he who built a cabin and lived there. He cut the scrub and crossed the river, watched his kaffir corn and peach trees wither. I learned his whimsical naming and the roving eye of the pilgrim. Where I am is never good enough. It is always time to move on.
*
Is it possible that the hand plow, the small implement with Monitor Drill Co pressed into the metal collar and bound in long grass, swathing it tight, is the one Jake pushed through the clods? Is this small ruin, held to earth by decades of dirt, the one my grandfather used to mark lines into the field? Can a metal and wood implement from 1907 survive the sun and wet parked under a ragged tree? Did he leave it there for a wispy idea of might-be-me?
*
The photograph appeared on my mother’s bureau when I was 13 or 14. The woman in it seemed familiar, even kind. Her head took up the whole frame, and I wondered why her eyes were blurry, as if she had moved them, perhaps blinked rapidly, while the shutter was open. Mom and her sisters practiced a round-robin of things mostly from their youths, a way of sharing relics with each other as a reason to reminisce. That’s how I ended up with a rickety doll chair the eldest sister took out of the washhouse and brought to town. Mom hung it on a nail in her storage shed, and twenty years later, I took it down when we sold the house. Like the toy chair, the fascinating woman went missing after some time. It may have moved around the sister circle and ended up with a cousin, or likely I asked Mom where it went, and she said the picture began to scare her.
The woman, she said, was a great-aunt or third cousin or other distant relative who traveled from farm town to town in the 1920s and ‘30s working as a spiritualist. She spoke to the dead. Or for them. She brought messages from the ether to parents and sweethearts. For a while, she was part of our daily passage, and then she disappeared.
*
The day we found the homestead, I took a photo of my son walking toward an outbuilding in a blurry stand of trees. He is wearing wheat-colored pants, a leaf-colored shirt, and a cap of sky. I turned to my left and photographed the harvested field against dense trees that line the riverbank. In the next photo, of the cabin—I swear it’s there, but trees obscure the dark wooden angles. I enlarge and enlarge until a fragment of lintel boards and door come clear. Or is it a stripe of shadow? An invisibility that pictures can’t disclose?
Though I said I would wear socks and long pants and douse myself in bug goop, I did not. Rough weeds clung to my bare ankles and I brushed off biting flies. Maybe it was another kind of sting. My sister bushwhacked her way almost to the barn, picking up crockery and trellis and bringing the broken debris to me. She discovered a garden arbor behind the house, welded pipes with a gate attached, overgrown with high summer weeds, green hanging from the top. Remember, she said, how Mom said snakes hung from an arbor? And how afraid she always was? I pushed through underbrush far enough to see, as if it was 1930 and I was my mother, age five, vines hanging in shade and twitching with the breeze.
*
When I was a girl (a phrase my aunt taught me to say when she was old then as I am now), stories of growing up in the country attracted and bored me. I hung in the kitchen to eavesdrop on Mom and her sisters while they smoked and drank coffee, their demeanors usually a little indignant about something in a letter passed around or a phone call one of them recounted. I loved grown-up womanly conversation, one aunt’s perfume and slippery nylons, and the other’s attention, her cuffed blue jeans and ornery glance. When they slipped into reminiscence, I drifted into the dining room, where I could monitor the vocabulary but didn’t have to hear another wistful memory of their dad or long-dead pet.
Though she was the baby, Mom was the keeper of their father’s farming journal, his flat straw boater from the teens, and things left in his pockets when he died in a car crash after the driver fell asleep and smashed into a concrete culvert. We looked at these objects rarely, after taking them down from where they were boxed and stacked carefully on the high shelf in our parents’ closet. These were things of a rural past, most of them ordered in town and delivered on a train a week or more later— eyeglasses and wallet, a piece of harness, a folded handkerchief.
*
I wish I had stepped into the weeds, into the insect welter, stood on the fallen rubble and put my hands into the dark of a crevice under green shingles or through the barn’s low door.
There I might have found them—writer of the daily work and weather, little girl with a 1920s bob and white bow, horses that pulled the harvester.
*
What we took away: Philco radio dial, Hemingray insulator, rose painted bracket, broken bowl, coal bucket, chicken feed trough.
What we left: sky, river, sand, field, pine, house. Our breath.
Prairie Haunting
Kansas is made of two parallel masses—hard ground and wraparound firmament. Weather here comes from the West, ambling or roaring over the Rockies and asking all this terrain to come out and play. My parents were shaped on this thin land bound by fluctuating blue. People like them take a lot for granted, like the scale of the land and how easy it is to be lost in the vast welkin, sky so relentless you walk around wearing your tiny human shoes under the scrutiny of a god.
We are raised humble here, small as we are. Under this sky, my father’s spine was crushed in a work accident before he was called up to fight. And in this place, he and my mother had their three children after the war, after a long rehabilitation that helped my stubborn father walk again. I asked them once why Kansans seem ordinary and didn’t get much in reply, but as I grew older and learned to think for myself, I found out what I’d been taught to ignore.
Here, amid the westward-rising Great Plains, powerful ideas blow in. People died here to keep Kansas a free state. Women smashed taverns to protect their families from men who drank away the grocery money, and women here voted nearly ten years before the Nineteenth Amendment made it federal law. Less than a century later, heroes from Topeka took their case to the Supreme Court to guarantee a child’s race would not determine the quality of their public education. Here is the North American origination point, the center simply a bronze disk in a field. Here is the pull and push of the continent, the geodetic datum. A sixth of the world map’s coordinates array from a pasture 12 miles due north of the Garden of Eden, a concrete and stone environment that a Civil War veteran built to express his unconventional political and religious views.
These elemental forces—human and atmospheric—made me. I originate from late arrivals who blew in only a hundred years before I did. Both farmer grandfathers spoke vocabularies from somewhere else, though they learned their dialects here. This land taught them new words—American sounds like blizzard and drought. This dirt courses through my blood, the dry soil of an after-harvest field still holding up rows of cut stalks.
On an April day, I go to the field my grandfather cleared and planted in another century, his arms and back pushing the plow, guiding the horses. I spend an hour reading aloud from the crumbling ledger pages he covered with descriptions of his daily work. I spend the night a handful of miles away in an 1894 hotel rumored to be haunted. There are ghosts here, but not those that foot-step rooms and stand in mirrors. Our spirits are worth digging for. They require us to scratch and plunge, to hone the edges of our plowshares. From here, I listen to roots’ fingers pushing beneath the topsoil, excavating the unspoken places where inheritance begins.
