Dispatch # 19
Wednesday, September 18
Marshall, Minnesota i

I progress a-crutching now something near two miles a day. Exercise. An effort to keep the thigh muscles from tightening into a perpetual rictus of pain. The effort is working.

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Thanne and I drove here yesterday directly through the country where her mother--Gertrude Bohlmann, nee Weiss--was born, baptized, raised, confirmed, married.

How could we not stop and investigate, especially since Thanne herself had not visited since she was five or six years old. We knew the name of the town nearest Gertrude's farm: Holloway, though how we were to initiate a serious investigation, we didn't know.

I tried to call Thanne's older sister on the cell phone, which call whistled and burped and passed on--but not without my hearing--and Thanne's recognizing, the name, "Fairfield Church."

Several miles before reaching that village Thanne suddenly saw a sign: "Trinity Lutheran Church, Fairfield Township." She turned right. Ahead on the right side of a narrow road was a white clapboard church, its steeple reduced to a magnificent stump, the whole surrounded by rolling fields abroad, great and gracious trees closer in and a cemetery east of the building.

There is a story Gertrude used to tell me in her latter years about the death of her father, Johann Weiss--terrible for a child to experience, terrible for the woman to recall. Gertrude herself died two years ago just shy of her 95th birthday; her father, on the other hand, died tough and young at 34--when Gertie was no more than six or seven.

Immediately upon stopping in the parking lot of the church, I tucked my crutches under my arms and slowly sling-walked toward the tombstones, all neatly preserved in perfect rows. Thanne went into the church to look for some living someone who might grant us permission to wander, who might answer, perhaps, some of our questions.

Before I found any "Weiss" at all, Thanne came across the grass with a slender woman at her side, both of their dresses flattened against their thighs by the wind, both them laughing at....

At the coincidence that she, Phyllis Gaddes, a cousin of my wife's, should have happened to be in the church at precisely the time of our arrival. Phyllis is the daughter of Gertrude's sister Florence.

"Oh, yes," Phyllis said, "Weiss is right over here"--leading us to earlier rows of stones on the south side of the cemetery, stones remarkably polished.

"There. Johann."

And I saw the place where the man was laid deep in the terrific winter of 1912, hours after his children had been drawn to church beside his own boxed body in a sleigh, warm rocks at their small feet.

But the weather in that place yesterday was clear and warm and a good wind blowing, more than 90 years after the event that focused my elderly mother-in-law's querulous remembering. I divided: the man in late summer, squinting; the son-in-law, imagining; the spirit at a mid-winter interment.

I asked, and Phyllis took us into the sanctuary, smallish, painted an unassuming white; the same chancel furniture as had been there when Gertrude's parents had been young in the 1800s; carved wooden pews now cushioned; thin pillars sprouting among the pews to support the ceiling; a balcony above the last six pews with a nice wooden balustrade of protection; a church that German Lutheran farmers built by hand and have ever since kept with little money, much handiwork, more faith.

"There, Thanne," I whispered, "that's where your mother was baptized. What do you think?"

"And where my parents were married," she answered.

"And where your grandfather lay before his funeral."

Because there were no funeral homes in those days. There was the farmhouse parlor wherein to keep vigil over the body of the dead; there was the farmhouse kitchen in which the body itself had first been prepared for burial; there was an undertaker who had arrived by train from a larger, more distant city in order to accomplish that work in the kitchen; there was the possibility of constructing a simple box quite sufficient to hold the body that no longer held the soul--no vaults underground, no absolute closures with metal clasps on metal caskets, curious designs within and without. Wood is ever more sober than pressed metals--and truer to the task.

I gazed at the head of the carpeted aisle, the constricted chancel, and imagined the young man lying on his back, his daughter gazing from her pew at the bit of profile she could see, her own soul borne down by a tragic sense of guilt.

And then this was vouchsafed the both of us, Thanne and I: Phyllis told us that the farm and the house where Gertrude spent the first six or seven years of her life was but a quarter mile up that narrow Church road. And in that house now lives a woman of genuine kindness, who, when we knocked on her door, invited us in and gladly showed us the old house that still stood concealed within her present, expanded home.

"There was the bedroom"--now a vague, unwalled area in a stretch of Arlene Beyer's more modern kitchen.

From the mists of my mother-in-law's memory I brought forth that bedroom on the ground floor where her parents once slept, the darkened room in which little Gertie encountered the core sorrow of her remembering, the thing she still was seeking to know was not her fault.

And kindness and sunshine attended our visit yesterday. Arlene is a grandmother herself, whose son works this farm as had she and husband since 1970. Clearly, she loved our company. How companionable to me was all this countryside and the people so swiftly friends, people without guile--at least to the two of us. How rectilinear and righteous and gracious besides.

And none of that contradicts Gertrude's memory; in fact, such communal support and response is what could contain the sorrow from having gotten worse--and could serve the grief that had to follow.

But here is the story and the context of her question, whether it could have been her fault.

Hard on the Christmas holiday (perhaps, in Gertrude's memory, the very day the holiday would commence) a terrible snowstorm struck down upon the county. It began to snow in the morning, even as little Gertrude traveled to school--with others in a wagon, I believe, pulled by horses. As the morning advanced drifts appeared and grew deeper. A good wind got up and howled. By mid-morning the little girl's father had begun to worry enough on her behalf, that he set out in his own shoes for the schoolhouse. The wagon wasn't his, and older children might find their ways more easily than she, more easily without her. While Johann strode through the snow, wind and cold and the blind curtain of white increased. (This is all Gertrude's memory.) Her father arrived at the school door, entered, dressed his daughter for the weather, and turned to lead her home again.

Gertrude says that at supper that night her father seemed rather quieter than usual--though whether he was in fact subdued, or whether hindsight has invested him with this quietude, she could not truly say. This she knew to be fact: that he ate little, rose early and went straight to bed. The child felt the weight of such changes, and drew her own lip shut.

"It wasn't midnight," Gertrude told me. "I know because my mother and I were sitting up listening to the wind at the eaves. And at first I thought that's what made the house shake. The house was shaking. And moaning, I thought. On account of the storm. But then I heard shouting. It was a great roaring coming from the bedroom."

Gertrude's mother went to the bedroom first, and then into it, Gertrude following immediately behind. She put her hand upon her mouth: her father had gone mad. He was leaping up and down on the bed, roaring curses, his face swollen with blood, his heart filled with fury, horrifying his daughter--for Johann had ever been a good man of patient ways. But when Gertie's mother reached to soothe him, the man cocked an arm and whacked her across the jaw.

"Gertie! Get the neighbors!"

I don't know how far a child would have had to go. Maybe a hired man was near. There were not telephones, electricity, plumbing, any such swift convenience. My mother-in-law never told me whether she had to rush to beg help of accommodating neighbors.

"It took four men," is all she could say over and over during the final years of her own life. "It took four men to hold him down. Four men to wrestle my dad...."

By the next morning his sweet temper had returned. He touched his little girl lightly, lovingly--and without any memory of the night before. The sun twinkled and glared from snow treacherously deep. And Gertie kept wondering how much the insanity of the night before was due to his trek to bring her home. And could he possibly mean the things he had said and done? "Brain fever?" she questioned me over and over. "Not real anger, right? Not my father, right? And was he already sick before he came out for me?"

Three days later Johann Weiss slipped silently from the world.

And the undertaker came by train.

And Gertrude stood outside the closed kitchen door, listening to unfamiliar sounds and the flowing of much water.

And then she stood by the trestles that held the box that held the body of her father in the parlor, candles and kerosene flames lighting the room in a low, trembling orange pallor.

And then she and the children were loaded with warm rocks under the blanket on wide sleigh--a sledge, perhaps--and traveled the road to church exactly as Thanne and I drove it yesterday in heat and the green haze of trees; and, the grave having been chopped out of the frozen earth, after the service, in thick winter cloaks, all the friends and relatives and clergy and members of Trinity congregation gathered at the precise cliffs, the sheer short drop into eternity, and the box was lowered into quietude, into zero at the bone.

"My mother wore black. All that next year she wore black. And she cried at times. But the tears I remember most," Gertrude told me in the month before she herself broke a hip and died of the complications, "were the tears of her next wedding. Grandma said she must marry again. And there was a good widower named Kohler, with children of his own. And mother agreed, of course, to marry, because she could not live off her parents, she with me and Florence and Clarence and Herbert. Mother married.

"But on the day of her wedding she wore black still. And she cried. She walked the aisle, crying."

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Oh, and have I mentioned that there was a Trek Bicycle Shop in Alexandria? And that my bike was taken there the same time my body was removed to the hospital? And that the damage was minimal? And that the helpful staff there refitted and fixed my Bone Breaker for a price remarkably generous?

We will ride again together, BB and me. And on long trips too. But perhaps trips of somewhat less publicity.

Walt