Lost Without the River

by Barbara Hoffbeck Scoblic

  At last, he sold his beloved Holsteins. With that action, no domestic animals remained. There wasn’t even our faithful black Lab, Coal, to keep my parents company. After she’d been hit by a car, Coal always walked with a sideways limp; as she aged, her black coat became sprinkled with gray, but she continued to announce visitors with throaty, nonthreatening barks. Coal always ran to greet me, her tail wagging so hard it could throw me off balance. When, returning for a short visit, I climbed out of the car and there was no Coal, I sensed the worst immediately.

  Before I’d even hugged my mother hello, I asked, “Where’s Coal?”

  “Oh, Barbara. She’s gone. She came to the door one day and indicated she was thirsty. I refilled her water dish, and when I stepped out a little later, the pan was half empty but there was no sign of Coal. I called her. No response. She’d wandered off into the woods. She knew she was dying and didn’t want to be any bother to us.”

  Then there were no animals. My father only occasionally rode the tractor. It was very quiet.

  Deer started coming closer and closer to the house. In all seasons, my mother often stopped working to observe their interactions. Wood ducks nested in natural cavities of the oak trees at the edge of our lawn. The male duck’s plumage is often said to be the most resplendent of all the waterfowls’.

  After she had poured my father a cup of coffee, my mother got into the habit of pouring a cup for herself, too. In the house, looking out, they could talk without frightening the birds. Together they’d point to and then watch the male wood duck as he flew back and forth, feeding the ducklings. My mother would have been well aware that, though invisible among the foliage and thickets, the dun-colored female bird was working just as hard as the male to feed their hungry offspring. They’d admire the bird’s head, a kabuki-like mask of jet black enhanced by delicate lines of white set below a helmet of emerald green. All of that was highlighted by an orange bill, red eyes, and a surprising swatch of purple.

  The two of them agreed. Mother Nature had put her best effort into crafting this regal bird.

  With the unfamiliar quiet had come an unexpected reward.

  DIRT

  Before they left their native countries, some immigrants packed a handful of dirt in a small box to carry with them to their new homes.

  All of us seem to have packed a bit of the earth from our father’s farm, which had been his father’s farm, into our souls before we scattered away from that small, none-too-prosperous homestead, across the United States, around the world, into our financially and emotionally varied states of success.

  Or maybe we didn’t have to pack it. That soil had worked its way into the center of each of us.

  Helen’s dirt is identical to my mother’s dark earth, moist at the surface from a light spring rain or from careful watering during a hot, dry summer. Earth from the edge of Mother’s tomato plants, bearing their fragile white blossoms and the pungent aroma of their leaves. Earth from under the large peony plants that grew where the lawn met the flower garden. Plants that bore blossoms whose sweet scent was strong enough to mask the odor that wafted down from the barn, where the men struggled to clean out a winter’s accumulation.

  Earth: rich, moist, verdant. Mother had faith that with care, no matter the hailstorms or droughts, or early frosts, her plants would thrive and flower. She believed that was true of people as well. Helen does also.

  Patt’s handful would be the dirt that she swept, dusted, and washed out of our house. The dirt she battled. The same dirt, it seemed to her, over and over, week after week. The wind blew it in where the windows didn’t fit tight. The men brought it in from the fields and the barns, stomping some of it off in the little entryway before they entered the kitchen but shedding more, from their jackets and pants, shirts and bodies, once they were in the house.

  One time, when John and Bill were not yet in their teens, they carefully filled the pockets of their work pants and then deliberately emptied them out on the kitchen’s shiny linoleum floor, which had just been washed and waxed. They ran, if not for their lives, at least to escape grave bodily damage. And Patt, who never cried, wept in frustration. She never forgave them. She still talked about it fifty years later.

  Banishing dirt was Patt’s obsession, her religion. She expended not only time but all of her strength on her quest. If you’d met her, you might have noticed that her biceps were out of proportion with her slim frame.

  John, I think, probably packed a chunk of dirt twined through with roots from the bank of the river. He laid his trap lines there each winter, fished from its banks each summer, and, generous with his time as a high school senior, took his kid brother and sister ice skating, guiding Bob and me down the twisting, treacherous river by a full moon’s light. That night was as close to perfection as a few hours can be. I realize I’ve never mentioned that to him.

  Bill’s dirt would be from the most fertile land of our small farm, the South Forty—land he coaxed to yield, during various years, flax, soybeans, corn, alfalfa. My grandfather had loaned John and Bill enough money to buy a Ford tractor, and with that trusty tractor and that piece of land, Bill was determined to work his way to a place where he never had to borrow money again. Some summer nights as a young teenager, I fell asleep to the sound of the tractor, piloted by Bill, its lights on full beam, roaring away and returning, roaring away and returning. Always returning.

  Perhaps Bob’s came from the pigpen hill. Earth baked hard, bleached brown, with little pieces of rock running through it. Earth that never yielded more than patches of grass and an amazing variety of weeds. When we were very young, Bob, perhaps only four, and I, only two, climbed that hill, where we picked blossoms of one of those weeds, yellow mustard, which we presented excitedly to our mother. Through adversity, he’s come up with joy. In our storytelling, teasing clan, he is without rival.

  As he told a shaggy-dog story, Bob kept a motel room full of us quiet for half an hour as he built to the punch line. In that disheartening room, my sisters, my brothers, three sisters-in-law, and I erupted into laughter. We laughed until the people next door pounded on the wall and Patt complained he’d made her wet her pants.

  This, on the night before our father’s funeral.

  Mine? Earth, dust, soil, loam, clay, mud. Who else but the writer in our family would ever spend so much time thinking about all these different words for dirt?

  And which dirt would I take from that farm I long to return to?

  In my small box, I’d pack some from the ravine, which stayed green even during a long, dry summer. The ravine where I hurried each day in May after school. The only place where all the violets bloomed—lavender, purple, white, yellow—and where, a few weeks later, buds of columbines opened into small chandeliers of red and gold. Earth that demanded I use my patience and memory, so that when I returned the next spring or summer to the right spot at the right time and found the violets of different hues, each on its own timetable, I was not surprised, but rather rewarded and renewed.

  But how could I have gotten to me—the youngest, the last, the end of the line, the baby—without writing about the person for whom the dirt of that small farm was most vital? My father. My father, who struggled all his adult life to work that dirt, trying to provide enough food and dollars for our family of nine.

  He worked just to keep the dirt in place. In the ’30s, he watched in despair as his rich topsoil blew eastward, far beyond his farm and neighboring Minnesota. After ten years, the Great Drought finally came to an end. Some years, the spring rains merged with melting snow, transforming our quiet stream into rampaging torrents that often overran its banks. After the water receded, my father would walk the fields, head down, shoulders drooping, to survey the damage. He’d kick at the layers of jetsam: gravel, twigs and branches, rocks, and, among it all, unseen seeds, which the following summer would yield a frustrating assortment of weeds.

  For him I’d pack a handful of the dirt he’d picked up after a crop-saving July rain. Dirt
from a freshly tilled stand of field corn. I can see him squat, reach down with his large hands, reddened from years of work in the sun, pick up a handful, raise it to his face, and inhale the sweet smell of his land, his life.

  Now, have I included everyone? No, there’s Dorothy.

  She never felt dirt beneath her bare feet, never fell, skinning her knees on bits of gravel, never had the fun of making mud pies, the matter oozing through her fingers. I’ll give her those and add the dust mites that, when the light was just right, glittered and sparkled as they danced above her crib.

  VI. RETURNING AGAIN AND AGAIN

  THE MOURNING DOVE

  As a small child

  I rode with my father at twilight

  down clover-fringed dirt roads

  to check the fields of grain.

  I asked him

  what made that lovely, lonely sound

  again and again.

  The mourning dove, he told me.

  How can a morning dove sing

  at this time of day?

  And then my father

  Tried to tell me of mourning.

  ANOTHER GOODBYE

  1983

  As the kneelers were raised, their collective rumble echoed through the church.

  “Let us pray,” the priest intoned, and everyone stood for the final blessing.

  It was the end of another funeral in the white clapboard church that stood on the western edge of my small hometown. Its spire reached into the late-morning sky, toward what I hoped was the direction of heaven.

  What was the first funeral I attended in this church? That would have been my sister Dorothy’s. I was seven. It was horrible. I sat alone and confused. All my brothers and sisters were in the front row, side by side, with my mother and father. I was in the row behind them, wedged between my aunt and uncle, whom I didn’t even know. I sat, knelt, stood. Up and down I went. I tried hard not to cry, but the tears streamed down my cheeks anyway. I made a noise as I tried to keep my nose from running. My aunt turned toward me and frowned.

  “Blow your nose,” she whispered, as she handed me a small white handkerchief.

  My husband, Joe, gave me a nudge, and I returned to this day, this service. It was time for our sons to join their cousins for the recessional. All the male grandchildren were honorary pallbearers for this service, my mother’s funeral.

  I had been the last of my family to arrive for the viewing, three days earlier, after a long, exhausting trip from New York. Appropriate, I supposed. I’d been the last born, the last to leave home. I’d hoped to have some time alone with my mother, but that would be impossible. I was lucky we’d arrived before the end of visiting hours.

  When Joe, our two sons, Peter and Stephen, and I had pulled up to the large white house, it had already been dark for two hours. Tall columns flanked the doorway. I opened the back door of the car and helped my sons out, then crouched down so I could look into their faces.

  “You don’t have to go see Grand-mère if you don’t want to. There’s another room where you can sit and wait. As soon as Daddy is able to leave, he’ll take you back to the motel. If the pool’s still open, you can go swimming.”

  As I told them that, a little crack in my wall of grief allowed me to be amazed that the run-down motel in this small town in South Dakota had an indoor swimming pool.

  Neither Peter nor Stephen said anything. Realizing how scared and sad they were that I was leaving them in this strange place in such painful circumstances, even if only for a short time, brought tears to my eyes. Then I noticed that Stephen was tightly clutching his brother’s hand. They have each other, I thought, as I turned and led the way.

  The scent of greenhouse flowers and a faint smell of chemicals pushed out as I opened the door. I saw my sister Patt right away. Helen was a little farther back. I didn’t have to call to them; they’d been waiting. And, as though it were their only purpose that evening, they came to me. As Patt stepped to my left and Helen to my right, my daily role of mother slipped away. I was kid sister again, and Helen, Patt, and I were one. We would never speak to our mother again. I no longer had to hide my grief. I sobbed into their warm bodies.

  We have each other, I told myself.

  “We’ll take you to her,” they said.

  Seeing the three of us together, relatives and neighbors silently stepped back into the vestibule. And one more time we four women shared the same room.

  Three days later, at the funeral, my pain had not dulled. I stood up automatically, trying not to weep openly as all of us waited for the priest to speak. My mother’s casket rested a short way from me. Forever closed.

  There was a slight delay. The organ didn’t burst into its usual rich tones. My brother Bob got up and walked to the front of the church. His words were clear, but the familiar rhythm of his sentences was missing. He sounded plodding. There would be no punch line. He was making a request on behalf of the parish.

  “Because of the extremely muddy conditions, please don’t drive into the cemetery. Park on the county road and walk to the grave site.”

  Bedridden and confused, my father wasn’t able to be present, but my brother’s request added a practical note that he would have appreciated. In fact, he’d probably prefer that no one even disturb the sodden grass.

  “What’s all this fuss about?” he would say, “Mother’s gone. What difference does any of this make?”

  The funeral director touched my shoulder.

  “It’s time now. Put their parkas on.”

  I did so, and then the director led my two young sons up the side aisle toward my mother’s coffin. An icy blast of air reached me as the church doors were opened wide. Peter reached for Stephen’s hand, and then the two of them, leading their older cousins, followed my mother as she left the church for the last time.

  My chest hurt. I resolved to visit my father as soon as all of this was over.

  THE FINAL FLOOD

  The summer following my mother’s death, my siblings and I juggled the timing of our visits to our father so that he’d have company more frequently.

  So when Joe and I traveled to South Dakota with our boys, the first thing on my agenda was to visit my father. I set the alarm in our motel room for five and then awakened early to turn it off so it wouldn’t disturb anyone. I had laid out my clothes before going to bed so I could dress quietly, and I heard only soft, rhythmic breathing and a few muffled snores from my sons and husband as I closed the door and locked it behind me.

  My father had always started his day at 6:00 a.m. That was in the dark winter months. In July he would have been up at five, latest. I was hoping that I’d see him at his best at this early hour.

  The melancholy song of a mourning dove floated across a field on the other side of the highway. Many of the landmarks had changed. Even the highway followed a new, strange route. But this morning the air, the light, and a familiar bird welcomed me.

  The eastern sky stilled me for a moment. Wide ribbons of vivid purple and orange lay along the horizon, and overhead wispy drifts of clouds reflected faint variations of those colors on a great comforter of soft blue.

  The night before, for a few miles out of Big Stone City, the route of the highway had been familiar. Glancing to the left, I’d seen a light glimmering through the trees, but it had not been a welcoming sight, as it once had been. It gave out a lonely feeling. The light came from the building that had been my parents’ home all those years, now remodeled and modernized, now a dwelling for strangers.

  Five minutes later, the road was foreign to me—wide, straight, and level. Gone were the gently rolling hills, the winding curves, the dips that my brothers, driving our old Ford, liked to take a little too fast, so that my stomach lagged behind the rest of my body, landing with a thud when the road leveled out.

  Also gone was the infamous “twelve-mile corner.” I wondered if the cluster of seven white wooden crosses that had been erected to memorialize veterans who were killed in World War II still stood the
re. Once, they had caused all but the most callous of speeders to lift a foot from the accelerator for a brief moment.

  I decided to walk the short way to the nursing home, but as I left the motel parking lot I realized that the outskirts of this small town had been designed for drivers, not pedestrians. I was forced to walk along the edge of the highway. A large semi trailer whooshed by me, throwing up dirt and gravel, and I stepped farther off the road. I was now walking through tall grasses, their tops bowed down with bushy heads. Soon my hair, where it rested on the back of my neck, was wet. It would be a typical South Dakota summer day: sunny, windy, and hot.

  The smell of newly mown hay from a nearby field caught me by surprise, and I remembered a summer day when I had stepped out our kitchen door and saw my brothers bringing the baled hay into the barn. Alone, I’d been on my way to pick strawberries, a quiet, wearying, never-ending job, and I’d resented my brothers’ camaraderie, the noise and heft of their work, the tangible nature of their accomplishments.

  I walked up the concrete path to the nursing home. Everything was clipped and neat. A revolving sprinkler sent iridescent sparkles of life-giving water onto the lawn. Another dry summer. How we worried about water all those years.

  I opened the door to the facility and stepped in. The air was cool but felt dead. At the end of a long corridor, a small nun dressed in a traditional habit sat at a desk, writing in a logbook.

  “Excuse me. Good morning.”

  “Good morning.” Her eyes seemed to scan my flesh and soul in a glance.

  “I’m Roy Hoffbeck’s daughter Barbara. Is it all right if I visit him now?”

  “Well, you’re here bright and early. But that’s okay—you can see him before his bath.”