Her Kind, a novel (14 page)

Crossing a river was nothing compared to crossing an ocean.

Crossing the ocean had been a break as loud as an independence day fireworks celebration, a break in the bondage to a homeland that never really let its children completely grow up, be free. Think for themselves.

The answer was always simpler than the action.

Leave.

But once on new soil, a new ground, the generational shift always occurred and children became bound once again to a redefined sense of heritage, security. The place of family and history that was place bound.

Only the bravest would decide to leave it again.

Ashbel Woodbridge Treat was once part of the great rebellion as he brought together the Treats, the Bulkeleys, and the Woodbridges, three English lines into a single American man who fought for a freedom from a sovereign and won.

A freedom taken by geography an ocean apart.

Ashbel needed the unbounded promise of the new territory. Yet, when opportunity arose, he could not leave the east. Thinking on it in the warm dank evening of an independent memory of a promise made in a dark underbrush surrounded by the king’s men who could not see him.

He swore to never leave.

Here it was he had fought, survived, married, and would die—buried on his own parcel, leaving it to his children who would remain. This was not the Connecticut land of his grandfathers, but that of his own making. The new York. He had lived through it, so he would stay put now that he had made this safe ground.

Surprising to everyone except maybe those who knew her best, it was to be his daughter, Laura, who would go west. A Woodbridge-Bulkeley-Treat turned Parmlee for an unfounded reason. Her justification she would never explain.

Laura would follow Moses as if he could part the sea, and she would take the east with her.

She would begin anew.

Unbounded.

She crossed a great river and landed safely home. Her reasons remained her own.

After the great glacier had receded and the ice melted, the river valley was formed. The finest of materials migrated into the valley and the persistent stream became a great river surrounded by the richest of soil from which civility was born.

I saw the sky in the river this morning.

No one owned the river,
Black Hawk said as if he whispered in my ear.

Or is it my grandfather here to join me now? Their words seem so similar at this early hour.

Clouds reflecting on to the water, as if they are moving across the man-carved channel guaranteed at nine-feet as only engineers can assure. Yet, no one can guarantee delivery of a clear sky.

This day is my prayer.

Sea to sky.

Sky to sea.

As if one were a reflection of the other.

One moving, parallel to another, and one as still as the handheld mirror turned upward on my dressing table that I can no longer reach. Not that I want to see what it reflects back to me, but it is the reaching that I still pray for, as the reaching is what keeps me hopeful.

Who is to say which is what.

What would I see if I could reach across the room and grasp that mirror now? What are final days of a life if not given to contemplation, reflection, a path to meaning.

Regret.

What was it Emma had said about crossing the river?

Everyone became your family then.

I wonder sometimes now if it is like that when we cross over. Where is your family when one feels so very alone on this day counter to your birth?

The other side of this very long journey.

As Mr. Twain told us, when Mr. deSoto first saw the great river, he was so taken that he died on the spot, and was rolled into a carpet and dumped in the river by his priests and soldiers. Fortunately, for me, I have enjoyed this masterpiece a bit while longer and without such hysterics that are more typically blamed on women.

This I know now for sure. The joy plus the sad is what makes us real.

We cannot separate ourselves from what is our own,

what made us,

what brought us here.

No one can escape the sad if they seek the good.

It may recede, yet always returns like the river does, always finding its own way.

Such vanity visits me in this final hour.

Will anyone care on Sunday morning when I don’t take my pew? Will they even remember who used to sit there eight minutes to eight, smiling at babies and sisters and lifelong friends now long gone before me?

Who will cry at my funeral?

I have no children or grandchildren to surround me. My property has already been signed to my brother, my nephews. Let them pick and fight over what they perceive of value.

I say, shame on them for giving me no grandniece to carry on this beautiful name!

When they read my name on the Parmlee mausoleum, will those years carved with such care have meant something? Will these words explain? Will they know I was always more of a Condit-Treat than ever a Parmlee-Treat?

I will reside there soon enough now with my dear sisters, John Forest, and the first family, gone on too soon before me. And Emma and Henry: brought to Iowa on someone else’s dream. A dream that for them turned to an infinite grief with each passing child.

Yet, somehow they bore on.

How odd that I see a mourning dove at my window. It must be near time now.

I found no husband in my day to lay down by my side. No children at my feet. Harry and Lillie May will not join us. They will have their own plot soon enough to lay out their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Yet, only if the generations remain here.

Some of them may have their own dream of moving on. Some will know there is always something better than what our parents and our grandparents willed for us.

Others will inherit the magnanimous and infectious spirit of Grandpa Syl and take a journey across land and water to carve out his own resolve of his own making on his own terms, and some will possess Emma’s strength to carry on in spite of it all.

Still others will pass long before they are ready, and others will use that long slow time to reflect as I have here.

I pray now for all of them that they may find their own crossing.

My sweet Lord, I have no secrets left to share, and please remember me, my dear great river.

For
I was here!

Ask Me

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.
I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

William Stafford

Even though a work of literary fiction takes many liberties, the story of Rose Emma was inspired by true events of the great migration. The journey to assemble Rose’s manuscript was a long one for such a minimalist work. I am indebted to an incredible creative team without which this story would not have seen print: Sarah, Decker, Burton, Kristin, and Pratt; the Midwest Writing Center and the LeClaire Writers for their singular encouragement: keep writing; professor emeritus Glenda Riley for her inspiring alternative texts on pioneer women; Jotham Halsey and Ebenezer Condit for their genealogy of the Condit family; John Harvey Treat for his genealogy of the Treat family; writing and research spaces like The Writers’ Well, the Sea Islands, Scott County and the city of LeClaire, especially the courthouse, libraries, historical societies, and the Buffalo Bill and Putnam Museums; the great river; and mostly to Rose and Emma, I will always remember.

Created in 1722, Caslon was the first major typeface to be used for the English language. It continued to be the dominant type in the American colonies in the second half of the 18th century. Recognized for its slightly bracketed serifs and old-style irregularity, Caslon maintained its popularity when Carol Twombly created Caslon for Adobe in 1990.

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