. . . the emigrants . . .were talking about one particular elephant, The Elephant, an imaginary beast of fearsome dimensions . . . . It was the poetic imagery of all the deadly perils that threatened a westering emigrant . . . . Of turnarounds it was said . . . that “they had seen enough of the elephant.” — Merrill J. Mattes

By the time Dad picked up the turtle, my mother had deserted him and Margo, carrying his second child in her belly, had asked him to take her back to Tennessee. Right then, it was just my father and the turtle, trying to make sense of the alien worlds they’d somehow wandered into. The turtle in the bathtub was very much a product of my father’s world view and a symptom of the chasm between his and my mother’s. During their six-week courtship, my parents hadn’t even peered over the edge of the gulf. Only when she settled into the little cottage at the base of a tall hill in a howling prairie wilderness, where she “died a thousand deaths of loneliness,” did my mother realize she might be lost.

It’s hard to think of the divide where I grew up as a watershed. The creeks are dry most of the year, rainfall is undependable at best, and folks in one river system are always trying to steal water from another.

People have lived in this country since prehistoric times, between drought cycles. The site of a Pawnee village that far outdates White documentation lies unexcavated beneath hundreds of years’ dust devoid of pollen near the Little Blue River. The remains of a large Pawnee village are buried under generations of wind-blown dust on a hillside sweeping down to the Republican.

Even now, my imagination wanders to the ruins of old farm houses smelling of wet plaster and wallpaper glue, such as Aunt Edna’s and Uncle Carl’s crumble-down place that I haunted when I was a kid. As an adult, I’ve looked into the bewildered faces of men and women torn from the land during my generation’s farm crisis in the 1980s. I’ve seen them trying to imagine their lives, watched them struggle to conceive of living without their hands and their minds in the soil.

I think it’s my father’s DNA that makes me look at the land-forms and imagine the prairie without houses and trees, without fences and fields. In my mind’s eye, I see it covered only with rippling grasses that run before the wind. I hear it in swishing, whistling silence that feels like standing in the warm breath of God—or like having your breath torn from your lungs. I try to visualize the free people that lived in this cradle of land before my white ancestors arrived. I think about how the wind that sometimes drove white women crazy might have affected them.

Thinking about prairie wind reminds me of my first writing assignment for NEBRASKAland magazine back in the 1970s and my first argument with my editor. I began a story about the Nebraska Territory with the land.

“Too passive,” said Fred. He wanted cavalry and Indians in the lead.

“But they weren’t there,” I said. “The pioneers died mostly of accidental gunshot wounds and diseases like cholera.”

“Not interesting,” Fred said.

For Fred, the prairie was a mere stage for the larger-than-life deeds of brave men in blue. It’s only been during the last few years that I realized why I insisted on pulling my by-line from my first professional feature story. For me, the prairie is active. It is the lead actor in an endless drama. People are the supporting actors. I’ve stood on the front doorstep and watched a tornado form in boiling clouds of deep purple, green and blue-black. I’ve seen a little tongue lick out of those clouds and the twisted sheets of steel that used to be my neighbor’s grain bin, strewn up the ravine for a mile from his farmstead.

When I’m quiet, I hear insect songs in my head. My friend tells me its tinnitus, but I think it’s a summer hayfield where grasshoppers fiddle sweet, sad songs. I can remember drifting off to sleep in my father’s old bedroom at Grandma’s house with the wind singing in the screens. This place is as alive to me as our neighbor, Otto Miller, with his tub of iris bulbs that he gave to Grandma so his divorced wife couldn’t have them. Cattle graze Fred Sundermeier’s old place and on quiet evenings, the windmill screams dry bearings. I’ve been exiled from where I grew up. I can’t make a living there. But my imagination soars like a mouse-hunting falcon following the creases of dry creeks.

I grew up here. It’s my home and I won’t apologize for it. Though I recognize the occasional danger, I’m excited by the prairie’s tantrums. But my mother, a strong, brave woman, cut and ran. She said she couldn’t even recognize herself here.

 

More than a century ago, my father’s people crossed the prairie afoot or ahorseback at six miles per hour or less. They saw its breath in the bending, shimmering oceans of grass. They heard the insects, smelled the rains, felt the blast furnace of summer winds and tasted the dust. Unlike some of the people headed for Oregon who “seen the elephant,” and turned around when the dust, wind, storms, runaway animals, and simple fatigue got to be too much for them, my people headed their prairie schooner off the trails and found a place to stay. Like a lover, the prairie embraced their first breath in the morning of their lives and cradled their last in the evenings.

Generations of chasms opened and drawn shut preceded my parents’ struggle to find common ground. Grandma told me about a lot of those generations. I found some of them in old county histories and archives of all sorts. In 1989, I was team-driving a semi tractor-trailer with a poet from Vermont. I remember Virginia where the first of my traceable Carpenter ancestors stepped off the boat to become George Washington’s neighbor. That was more than two-and-a-half centuries ago. Sometimes, silver mists lit by Virginia moonlight and brilliant reds, golds and greens lit by sunlight must have taken his attention from the job at hand. I remember mists and maples in Ohio, where the Shawnee took five-year-old Joey Swope in 1756, to become the foster brother of a war chief. I imagine members of my family, years later, walking those same woods and tall-grass prairies in search of medicinal herbs they would use in their new places.

A century later, in 1856, they ferried across the Missouri at Nebraska City. They waded the Little Nemaha and settled within its curves on the south bank of the South Fork. Two generations later, in 1918, they moved on across the Big Nemaha, the Big and Little Blue rivers and settled on the divide between the Little Blue and the Republican in Webster County.

 

By the time Grandma Hazel came to live with my youngest son, Ben, and me, we had sorted and identified all the photos and recorded all the stories she could remember in a kind of extended seánce. She was one hundred years old. I’d pestered her, not only for all the stories about the old days, but also for some kind of perspective on those chaotic months or years when my dad and mom struggled to be together—or apart. I’ve never been quite satisfied with her answers, when she gave any. I grilled my mother and my Aunt Nina, too, and they both tried to give me some kind of answers. When I met Margo for the second time in 1988, she gave me another unsettling perspective. My dad had died before I could ask for his side of the story, but Margo allowed him to speak for himself by sharing many of the letters with which he’d courted her. She’d kept them for forty years.

Grandma had moved in with us when she left the hospital following an attack of congestive heart failure. She’d awakened struggling to breathe, used her Life Alert necklace to summon a neighbor who called the ambulance for her. For more than a decade, she’d lived alone in a little yellow house near the Methodist Church in Blue Hill. Before that, she’d lived at the home place tending to her daughter, my Aunt Nina, who had Lou Gehrig’s disease. Grandpa was long since dead then and Grandma was well into her eighties and wearing out.

Sometime during her ninety-ninth year, Grandma had had a car accident. Her doctor wasn’t sure whether the accident caused her stroke or the stroke caused her accident, but her strength never really returned. She’d begun feeling off balance when she walked. She hated that walker, but it had kept her motoring. Once we’d added saddle bags so she could carry things, she was better able to accept it.

She’d given up her driver’s license on her own and rode the Handi-bus to the nursing home, another inconvenience that tried her patience because it wasn’t always available. The night she couldn’t breathe, I think she “saw the elephant” because she never stopped fearing that she would smother. She couldn’t sleep with the bedroom door closed. When it was open, my study light kept her awake. She wanted to sleep with the window open, although temperatures were dipping below zero at night.

 

I tend to look for scientific explanations of supernatural things, but I’d read something about entangled particles by then and my world view had begun to change. If a particle light years away from another particle that’s entangled with it “knew” to change orientation the instant its partner changed, anything seemed possible. Mostly I remain a skeptic, but I still can’t deny the overwhelming sense I had of my grandfather’s presence hovering in my living room those nights when Grandma couldn’t sleep. I remembered an essay by Loren Eiseley called “The Bird and the Machine.” He wrote that he’d captured a little falcon for a zoo. The falcon’s mate had escaped and he thought she was long gone. In the morning, he took the little hawk out of the box where he’d imprisoned it.

“I saw him look that last look away beyond me into a sky so full of light that I could not follow his gaze,” Eiseley wrote.

Without any real intention, he laid the hawk on the grass. The bird didn’t move for a second or two, then, without seeming to move, he was gone into the sun where Eiseley couldn’t see him. But from somewhere in that sunlight, a cry of “unutterable and ecstatic joy” came ringing down.

“Straight out of the sun’s eye, where she must have been soaring restlessly above us for untold hours, hurtled his mate . . . . I saw them both now. He was rising fast to meet her. They met in a great soaring gyre that turned into a whirling circle and a dance of wings.”

 

By the time she moved in with me, Grandma Hazel was all “played out,” but not done struggling, and my sense of my grandfather, dead more than forty years by then, was one of hovering in hope and despair, like the falcon. He seemed full of deep sorrow that he couldn’t be there to help Grandma along, as she’d cared for him in his last days at home.

Grandma and I hadn’t visited his grave that year as we’d always done in the past. Like elephants, my grandma, my son, and I visited our family bones. Unlike elephants, we can’t handle the bones, so we placed vases of peonies. And, with our fingers, we read the stones, as if we were blind, touching the names etched there—Cecil, George, Sarah, William, Hiram, Jasper, Olive, Mae. We even visited Doc Hostetter, who’d delivered three generations with Sicily’s help.

Once when I was little, in a quiet little corner near Great-grandma Sarah and Great-grandpa Will, Grandma pointed out a tiny, unfinished, stone—red granite, I think. It was Dan Erven’s arm. Dan lost it in a corn picker accident, she said.

That arm always excited my imagination. I wondered if Dan’s family helped him bury his arm. How did he come to have it? Did the doctor hand it to him after he sawed it off? Did he have to ask for it? Did he bury it himself as part of learning to cope with the missing part of himself? I even tried to visualize how he could hold the spade, one-handed, and leverage dirt out of his arm’s grave. It was my first introduction to the concept of living after losing a big piece of yourself.

Grandma and I both thought of Dan’s arm when my nephew, David, lost his leg.

David’s resemblance to my father is striking. Dad had played center on his high school’s state championship basketball team in 1933. David was sixteen, sixty years later, playing varsity basketball as a sophomore for the same high school and being scouted by a major land-grant university, when he had his accident. We found ourselves wincing as he limped, remembering all the fluid elegance of his body running down the court. I’ve often thought, since then, of the contrast between the cold green lights of the operating theater where they took his leg, labeled it hazardous waste, and disposed of it, and the warm glow of candlelight in my great-great-great grandmother’s birthing rooms.

David’s recovered as much of his life as possible now, I think. Grandma didn’t live to see him pick up the threads and march forward. But he comes from tough stock, she said. She described pathfinders and explorers, men and women who opened the frontiers and filled in the maps. One generation would gobble up a few hundred miles of prairie and stay for a while. Then the next generation would gobble up a few hundred more. I’m sure Grandma had some awareness of the massive theft and genocide that took place those years, but not necessarily of how I would be a receiver of stolen property when I inherited the home place from her. Somehow, we seldom talked about that, or about the generations of relationships, both peaceful and violent, between my ancestors and the Indians.

Her mother talked about baking bread when she was a girl. She’d feel like she was being watched, then look up and see Indians peering in the windows. Grandma Frank said they always gave bread to the wandering remnants of the tribes. Grandma Hazel remembered that, when she was a girl, her dad always allowed wandering Indians to take as much of his sweet corn as they wished. That’s all I learned from Grandma. She could talk about seven generations in vivid detail with some cloudy, painful spots. When it came to the generations before Nebraska, I was on my own. The rest of what I know came to me from books, archives, and Aunt Nina’s notes.

 

I’ve thought a lot about the scattered people and my grandparents who recognized them as suffering human beings. I wonder how their grandparents justified the theft that led to that suffering. I’ve come to cherish the prairies where I grew up and I think maybe that helps me to understand how the First People must have felt about those same hills and winds and wildflowers.

As Grandma told me about the folks I never met, she ignited my imagination. Day after day, she would collapse time and space for me, speaking in the same tense and the same breath of people long dead or far away and those right in front of her. She always knew the difference, but it didn’t matter. We were all equally immediate to her. I could almost hear the voices. Sometimes they would whisper like the shuffle of bare feet crossing the kitchen in nighttime silence when the cows have their calves and the womenfolk peer at dark skies, looking for funnels. Sometimes they’d mumble like my grandma’s Uncle Jasper whose lower jaw was shattered and part of his tongue blown away by a rebel miniball.

I could almost see her Aunt Ada tearing across the prairie ahorseback, skirts flying over the animal’s rump, trying to end yet another pregnancy. Grandma said Ada never rode a horse unless she was pregnant, and it never worked. But who could blame her? She had a bunch of kids— Gaylen, Alva, Merle, Darrel, Vera, Berdean, and Juanita—and no apparent aptitude for discipline. The kids ran wild and Ada had no control. That lack of control resulted a little bit of frontier justice that caused a fight between Hazel’s mother, Frank, and her sister-in-law.

“Uncle George lived right down the hill from us,” she said. “The boys were climbing the windmill. Mom told them to get down out of there and just about that time Gaylen ran by behind my mom and hit her on the butt.

“Her left hand just came around like that and hit him before she even thought. She knocked him down. They wouldn’t speak to us for a month. I’ll bet he remembered that, though. It was just what he needed.”

Through Grandma Hazel’s stories, I attended Grandma Sicily Hendricks’ ninetieth birthday party in March 1902, in Uncle Wesley Hickok’s maple grove near Douglas. Slender and delicate, Sicily wore widow’s weeds, with a cape trimmed in tassels and lace, and a white lace bonnet. I could imagine the sun filtering through the trees, the sawhorse-and-plank tables with bright tablecloths, the dozens of children tearing through the trees in games of hide and seek.

Grandma Hazel claimed that Sicily never lost a mother during all the years she practiced midwifery as she moved over and over across the eastern half of the continent. Given the terrible risk of infection, called milk fever, hemorrhage, and carrying a baby that’s simply too big to deliver, Grandma’s claim seems hardly credible. One trait that’s passed down through generations of my family may have made some difference, though. We really don’t touch each other. Grandma Hazel told me that her mother, Frank, did not want people “slobbering over” her babies. Perhaps our reluctance to touch saved some mothers’ lives. Grandma says that’s the “Scotch” in us.

I visited Sicily’s daughter, Catharine Smith, her legs swollen by dropsy, baking her husband’s favorite sugar cookies and struggling to breathe in a room full of her husband’s and son’s tobacco smoke. Catharine’s daughter, Great-Grandma Frank, harrowed fields with a tree limb and curled her daughter’s long, blonde hair around her fingers, while her husband, Will, whistled at his work behind the draft horses. I saw Sarah Colburn, with legs galled like cottonwood trunks from too much childbearing and too many buckets of water. She baked soda biscuits for her family every morning, including mornings after giving birth.

We even visited my mother when she arrived from the nightclubs in the cities, learning how to wash on a washboard, use catalogue pages in the outhouse, and wring a chicken’s neck—until Grandma had mercy on the chicken. I saw my father, back from the Pacific with his new city bride, raising hybrid tea roses and watering a weeping willow tree, a misfit on the prairie, kind of like my mother.

Those months when Grandma lived with me, Ben was barely thirteen, struggling in school and enduring abuse from his classmates. I was finishing a graduate degree and running out of money. My assistantship was about to end. Although Grandma’s Social Security paid all of her expenses, I needed a job. My son desperately needed my attention. So I decided that Grandma really had to live somewhere else, a place where she would have people to take care of her while I looked for work and attended to my son’s needs.

My mom, my sister, Jo Ann, and I made arrangements for her to take a room at the assisted living center in Blue Hill. Grandma had lived in Blue Hill for sixty years, we reasoned. She knew almost everyone there so she wouldn’t be lonely. The assisted living folks promised a salt-free diet, so I thought she would be safe. I knew Grandma hated leaving my home and that she felt abandoned. I knew the move would be hard for her and I knew that family and community meant everything to her. But I felt I had to do this. So I did, hoping community would help take the place of family.

A month later, she was back in the hospital because her heart became too congested to pump oxygen. I learned that her salt-free diet had included green beans with bacon and Polish sausage. Once out of the hospital, she went to the local nursing home where Nina had lived for more than a decade. This was to be temporary, but she folded her hands over her chest and quit breathing very early in the morning of June 6, 1997.

 

We make choices in our lives that we struggle with for as long as we live. Moving Grandma killed her. Before her time? She was one hundred years, six months and twenty days old when she died. It’s impossible to know how long she could have lived in my home. I chose the next generation over the previous, something I’ve no doubt she’d have done, too. Still, I have this little niggling doubt that haunts me. When I was a small child, living with Grandma and Grandpa, waiting for my parents to decide to be married to each other and to be parents to me, Grandma carried me over the mud puddles when it rained. I promised her then that I would carry her over the mud puddles when I got big. I’ve only broken two sacred oaths in my life. I still struggle with both.

Grandma herself, a day or two before the funeral, told me to let go of that. In the most vivid dream I’ve ever had, I met her in a parking lot somewhere. She wore her short gray coat with the big turquoise pin on the shoulder and she had no walker. Her balance was fine and she didn’t look worn out. Startled to see her, I stood and let her walk toward me in her old, slightly-bowlegged gait. She touched my arm with her crooked fingers, damaged in a pump jack, and said, “You done everything you could.”

Then I was awake, disoriented.

Maybe George had stopped somewhere waiting. Maybe the entangled particles of George and Hazel had met somewhere in a falcon dance. Maybe he told her that she couldn’t care for Nina forever, “Hazel, you worry about things that will never be. You done what you could.”

As I wrote Grandma’s eulogy, I called my sons, my nephew and niece, a cousin or two, my mom and my sister. Each contributed a story, a line or two. My sister gave me Walt Whitman from “Song of Myself.” I used his lines to end my last tribute:

“I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in icy jags.
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health for you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged,
Missing me one place, search another,
stop somewhere waiting for you.”