Her Kind, a novel (5 page)

The great river was not a boundary, but a convergence.

Its watershed became an early American washbasin that cleansed the past from all who moved through it from east to west, marking their passage by the number of times they had crossed it. For my family, it was one.

Fewer ventured east than west.

The river has its myriad of tributaries, but it is eventually a higher union merges as one stream to one even greater ocean.

When one is less busy looking forward, time exists to look back. To see that it really all is not as separate as it seemed. It does eventually flow into a larger shared basin washing us all clean from our separateness, our divisions.

No one owns the ocean.

It is more difficult to notice until later in life when the adventurer has finally settled on land in one place or another.

Staked a claim.

Broke ground.

Only in these final hours does one have the time to reflect on whence they have come and where they have arrived.

Sometimes they realize all they wanted to do was get there so they could place that rocker on that porch facing back east. Many wear out a fine rocker looking back east over that trail, turning over and over the moments the crucial choices were made that led to them to here and now.

It’s like that on these full moon nights when it is just the river and me. Alone with this shimmering black-navy silk carpet, a living current that has kept me company for all these years. Its movement a constant reminder of the undercurrent that lay beneath.

It knows I need my regrets, especially now. I like to think that I had choices and I made the best of them.

It may be all I really had.

Sometimes marriage comes out of necessity over false notions of love and romance.

I am certainly no expert, but I came to understand this at such an early age and it was something I could never speak of as no one wants to hear about the challenges of marriage from one who has never succumbed. Or one who was never chosen, as Lillie liked to barb. I like to think of it more as a choice, one of my own choosing.

Thank goodness your brother carried on the line and your father would be proud of that.

She would say as she tucked the loose sheets around me with the gossipy tone of a hotel maid cleaning up after uncouth guests. I was still there to listen to her bites that cut as deeply as if she stood over me with Grandma Phoebe’s butcher knife newly razored, carving out legs and wings.

Everyone forgave Lillie no matter what words departed those sweet lips. We had done it for so long; there was no changing it now. Women can be so cruel to women.

Our connection was simple.

Puritans arrived. Natives were purged.

It was all right and good to be on the side of the European.

John Howland had hitched a ride on the Mayflower as a servant and came out as a leader to claim one Elizabeth Tilley.

Safety. Union.

Matrimony. Survival.

We all became cousins then.

The day of Harry and Lillie May’s wedding was like the great river convergence.

The great river watershed converged into one channel, one course, an assimilation of Treats-Sargents-Parmlees and Condits that would forever be joined as a legacy, property, lineage.

No one talked about the blood problems in 1907. After all, the queen herself had married her own first cousin, the prince.

It was exclusiveness, a protection of sorts. Much like the royals, it kept our family within its own inner circle.

Protected.

These were like the meandering tributaries that eventually had wandered so far off the original stream they had cut themselves off from their original source.

Banded and cautered.

A flame so hot that no memory of pain had even registered.

By 1954, Harry and Lillie May were still happily married with three healthy children, so a simple matter of blood did not even ever arise as a concern. It was probably more of an oddity for their descendants to consider than it was for me by then.

Yet, Henry and Emma had both feared the spark they saw between these two children who were raised practically as siblings. Though Lillie was the elder, Harry acted with a heavy hand over Lillie May’s speech and manner even from a very young age.

Mary-Ann and Asaph were even less enthusiastic about the alliance, which came as a surprise to me.

I had expected their worldview to be a bit broader than Emma’s who I had expected to be the one to put her foot down against such a union. Yet, I suppose it was just another one of her ways to keep Harry happy, to muster whatever happiness could be offered in this world she seemed to detest.

At least with Lillie May, he had kept it all in the family.

No other devil in-laws to deal with that he did not already know well.

No family dramas to bear beyond those he already had survived.

No dark-sided personas to emerge than the shadows than those he already lived with. Harry’s sensibilities likely preferred such a setting for matrimony.

Besides, the Sargents
had all that land!

Harry would never be a dirt farmer from Iowa. He would own the dirt, but someone else would get their hands dirty. The future father of his children, his empire to be built from the work of those who came before.

No, Mary-Ann and Asaph looked less fondly on the possibility of their only daughter taking up with her entrusted nephew taking her hand as his wife. You can only imagine the talk at the ladies society. I don’t know how my sisters and I sat through it.

At first, both their parents could not bear it.

Yet, at the end of the day, Lillie May loved Harry and she always had. It may have been a mixed-up kind of sibling-like, cousin love at first, but then it grew into something more permanent.

Then needed.

She needed it for always and finally her mother saw that simple truth. Lillie May was not strong like Mary. She needed a man, so it may as well have been our Harry.

After all, Lillie had been telling the family since she was eight years old that she loved her cousin. We would smile and then benignly gasp as if it were a shocking surprise, believing then such immature proclamations would never survive adolescence.

Perhaps if Grandma Laura were still around it would have never been allowed. She was probably the only one of us who had the strength to say no.

Don’t be foolish.

But without her input, Emma never connected any wrongness to this budding relationship. She just went on with that tilt to her head and stoicism paid for in those long nights on prairie grass beds before any house was built, when a fire circle chat dispelled the dark fear of natives and coyote.

Survival.

Necessary partnerships for the breath of life.

So it was to be. Harry’s aunt became his mother-in-law; Lillie May’s aunt Emma was gone seven years before, so she would never know our Emma as hers. She would only remember the stony aunt she barely knew, the one that the grandmother they shared made excuses for as the one her own mother, Emma’s sister, could not understand.

Henry had died that same year, so the only permission to be gained was from Asaph and Mary-Ann who were more concerned by that time about titles and deed transfers than their own daughter.

I looked over at the father of the bride (uncle of the groom) and wondered to myself whether 11 fingers and 11 toes had crossed his mind. Mary-Ann likely. The bride and groom likely did not know nor cared that they shared a Treat great-great grandfather on both branches of the same family tree.

The only relatives who would condemn this union were long ago in the ground. If naysayers were here, they did not make their presence known to the groom, who showed little discomfort or nervousness. His church-face piety already in full use.

My sisters and I took our regular pew with no pretense or any confusion on which side of the church to be seated. We had come to watch this lottery of homesteads for we had to see it for ourselves as much as we were obligated to attend as sisters of the groom and first cousins of the bride.

Land offices in Dubuque and Iowa City. Five-year improvements to make it their own that consumed a lifetime.

Now the names of Condit, Parmlee, and Sargent that littered the Scott County plat books and the great river shoreline would eventually be one.

But the best view of it all was from this second floor window and Condit shall still read on this deed until I take my last breath.

All Harry needed that day to put his solitary name on these plats was for his sisters to be gone.

Henry (Harry) Deacon.

No Treat name given to carry on in Iowa. Things change. It was a new country.

No descendants.

No sharing.

All his.

He had lived to carry it forward.

H. D.

Today, the whole world seems a much safer place, even as I lay here ready to depart from it all. Trouble is what Harry has taken to calling me, as if I cannot hear him. He cannot stifle me now. I can still find a way to have my own say.

Unlike Emma, I will not die keeping it all at bay.

Perhaps you now know this to be as factual as my Grandma Laura’s warning when children tried to keep their secrets from the elders. The ominous power would come to claim us if we were to be dishonest.

Truth always seeks its own level.

Only a woman is strong enough to keep it from breaking surface. A man is less able to keep the demons or truth at bay. They eventually spill it all to save their own hide. That is what I believe and no one can take these words from me now.

Stoicism is not a female virtue, but a self-imposed penance. I will use it more like the Greeks.

My will is mine own. I have lived a virtuous life of my own choosing.

Yet, in a woman’s strength to do so, to bring truth to light, she will pay an inevitable price that he will never completely understand.

The weaker sex.

The emotional one.

I can hear Grandma Laura now.

Truth be told or die in the keeping.