Her Kind, a novel (7 page)

Washington County was God’s country.

Great-grandpa Zenas told Syl so, and that is what Grandpa Syl told me. The families who settled a place like Prosperity, Pennsylvania, were as hopeful as Eleazer Parkhurst in seeing acres and acres of unsecured property for the taking.

A signatory to Damascus.

Work hard for the kingdom and it can be yours for a lifetime.

A farm to the eldest son. That’s how it was done.

Yet, for Zenas, the church was always the real calling, complicating lineages and land records, desires and gifts.

The Pennsylvania farm went to Ira after Grandpa Syl left for his own wild territory parcel. Younger brothers left to find a trade.

At least one of them surely would become ordained, Zenas had said. Not always so easy when Zenas tended to cultivate hands over minds.

Cultivated minds did not follow his words so blindly, Grandma Laura had once hinted to me. Yet, he profoundly believed that one of his sons would hear the voice of God as he cranked on the well pump and the words would wash over him like the water washing sweat from his sunburned brow.

The Condit children of Pennsylvania had never been told of the line that led back to the great awakening. Grandpa Syl had no idea that he, too, descended from the Rev. Treat and other unique presbytery stock much less its polity.

I only wonder now if this one simple fact of genealogy may have changed everything.

Land is better than cash in the bank.

Grandpa Syl once told me proudly, hands on his hips, as we surveyed the north 40 one July morning when his corn was almost thigh high.

He wasn’t quite so declarative the next July when a sodden April, May and June left this field of puddles enjoyed by the river fowl and creatures alike making their way out of Wapsi basin and onto his tiny spurts of corn barely scaling the water line.

Grandpa Syl would be humbled by this homestead till the day he died on the 160-acre land grant along the river in Scott County. Land for the taking in 1833 well after the horrors of the Black Hawk War were done and natives were removed first to Iowa, then further south. More and more came by 1862 when you could carve out your own farmstead for the price of improvement, and posters back East said it loudly so many would hear a call to a glorious new beginning.

Fill Up Iowa!

Go to Ioway!

How could they not have come?
Emigrant’s Guide
in hand; family Bible packed away with the English linen.

So Grandpa Syl packed up his wife and three-year old daughter and headed to Iowa for the free land and another sort of freedom that only distance in miles can affect. Miles and miles of freedom from Zenas and too far to hear his spoken and unspoken obligations.

Perhaps that was simply the liberty that Grandpa Syl sought.

By then, the Black Hawk purchase was filled with as many empty promises as the words shared with the thousand camped along the upper river when they arrived. As empty as the land covenant back in Pennsylvania that had been his birthright.

Ira gets the farm,
Zenas had yelled as his parting comment, resentful especially in that moment of the son who was to be fulfilled in his image and was now fading away in his departure.

Pigheaded!

Would Syl ever regret climbing that riverbank and walking out the acres to stake corners around what he would deem as worthy of himself, his wife, his children? Perhaps it was never quite far enough away from a father who feigned disappointment, but all the while had openly favored Ira, the spitting image of his own father and a daily reminder of what he was supposed to be.

We are leaving,
he told Phoebe one day when he had simply had enough.
Start packing.

Syl came west the very day it was announced that the new land was open for the taking in 1833, that summer after the warring chief was captured and taken to the capitol in chains. Grandpa Syl loved to tell the native stories from back east, Emma had said. He would come in from a day with his father and remain in silence until well after supper. Then he shifted into storyteller and held Emma till she fell off to dream of natives and brush where her father as a giant lifted her from a cracking river ready to swallow her up forever. But we knew better.

On a November morning, Syl had walked into the Dubuque land office anyway, hat in hand.

Improvements, the clerk said as he neared the counter. Not a question, but an expectation.

Grandpa Syl had no value for the acquisition of dollars. His currency needs were defined by acres, sections, and quarters. He learned this language from the land office and began to share his wisdom widely with the other settlers as they crossed the river to square off a parcel in line with their own new start.

By the time Zenas showed up to spend the final years of his life in Iowa, it was now a state where he could be near his eldest. By now, the residents of Parkhurst no longer believed that limestone gravestones were necessary to keep the dead from rising. The weight of the markers had been used to keep the dead spirits from climbing out from beneath the heavy rocks. The ghosts had at last moved on.

But no rock would keep Zenas out of his son’s mind or Black Hawk’s for that matter.

He never told me about the day the new singing plow was crooning along and hit, what he thought at first, was field rock.

The child’s body still wore the fringed, tanned leather, and a smaller version of her tossed aside by a glinting blade, as if unimportant, like an abandoned doll’s porcelain that late March day when ice was cracking and autonomy lay beyond the fear.

His pride had all been used up in fertile loam and steel until a doeskin dress had crossed its furrowed path. He was never quite the same about the land after that. We stand on their shoulders, Grandma Laura had said to us, but remember Grandpa Syl was not there that day. Perhaps he would have understood and been somewhat comforted by those words.

Moses’ heart just saw it so differently. He was not so burdened, like his wife, by a lineage that came before him. He was one of many who were able to cross a river and leave it all behind. A line of demarcation. A daily reminder of when and where he had begun. Started over. No context.

A new sun means a new day, as Syl would say. A second chance, as if the first had never occurred. A redemption without the compulsory remorse. A penance redeemed for as simply as the slot that accepted a smooth wooden token at the Scott County Fair. Top prize.

No, Grandpa Syl was of another breed altogether, Grandma Phoebe would explain to us those times when he would tear up in a very unmanly way and turn away as if we did not see.

This was surprising for us from this sun-leathered man, more typically hard as the steel-nosed plow he so loved.

A giant to us, too.

Guilty for the asking. Guiltier for the taking.

God’s country.

Grandpa Syl always said that the summer before Black Hawk died, the river smelled like the dead fish of a wrenching execution, or as if they were the left behind from the rapture.

Dead on the shore.

Dead on the banks.

Dead to the world.

Laying themselves out in all of their glistening pallor and gore; drawing forth the mayflies from their early second hatch. Their brief lives made even shorter by an inability to leave their dying friends whose destiny, too, would be only a matter of days.

Time was up.

You could not go near the green tree without inhaling that horrible stench, he said.

The sight I imagined was much worse than any smell.

People of the yellow earth, the Sac chief had said, this was our home. Our ancestors remain here. I can touch them now, visit them in the brush near the sacred river. They speak to me as loud as they did when I was a child and had no voices telling me not to listen.

Thank you for letting us return here to our homeland today.

We sat in our yard chairs, listening as attentive spectators to a culture we did not understand any better today than when Grandpa Syl had crossed the river. He said there were 1000 natives camped along the Iowa side, the land that eventually became our Parkhurst. Grandpa Moses had avoided this encampment by taking a steamer to cross at Rockingham, so never felt like he was moving in on anyone, taking anything other than what was his to take.

Probably the first white man they had ever seen, Syl always said. Even then, I knew this was not true, but would never have corrected him. It was his history. His guilt.

It was like viewing another religion.

Awkward.

We felt adrift without our own rituals to expectantly draw on or to draw from, but the odd phenomenon was that we did feel this spirit of which he spoke.

I remember seeing her for the first time that day when the Fort was 125 and we had traveled from Parkhurst to the island for the celebration. How odd we would celebrate such a fortification, a prison of doomed Sac and Meskwaki that had housed a shackled Black Hawk and sons.

Terrorists in chains.

Vacant.

Now more would come.

That’s what I remember of that day. I recall those vacant eyes that did not wander.

When you finally accept you are lost, only then can you be found.

Her people said she was born with a second sight. At least that is what I overheard some Sac women saying about her, helping Clara with her plate as we gathered chicken and biscuits.

Is this what they eat?

I tried to quiet her and move her closer to their conversation so that I could eavesdrop. Prescience, someone had called it.

Behind the serving tables, easels presented portraits displayed of her in tribal regalia. I wonder now if she had known then that she was royalty. Great-great-granddaughter of a shackled chief.

Thunder clan.

Grandma Laura had said quietly to me once when I was reading a dime novel, and actually did not scold me for it, that squaw was a white man’s word carried west from the bay colony and given to those who must spread, reproduce, and be shared to have value.

The childbearing genre.

They could not understand skwa and the radiant beauty of these female partners. They were not easily tamed like their own wives and daughters with commanding words, so they used the word to brand her.

Perhaps I had read that somewhere else as I tried to understand Grandma Laura’s words, but of course it would be years and years later that I would recognize the important instruction.

Force is always used when no patience for words exists.

Retreat is sometimes necessary for us. It can mean survival, she had whispered.

I could not tell if she were speaking of us, the natives, women, Germans.

The other.

Years later, I would read in special collections that they had buried Mary in a borrowed plot from the Potawatomi in Tecumseh’s cemetery.

Alone in a back corner, underneath the brush she could continue to hide her glory. Her own thunder.

Apart.

Her husbands buried with their nations, her children with their ancestry. She alone now, in this unmarked plot devoid of her heritage.

A princess who lived a 44-year life taking the most puritan of all names to her grave.

Mes-ic-o-nah-ha.

Skwa.

Oddly, I find comfort in such ironies now.