Our Lady of the Prairie

by Thisbe Nissen

  Michael neither registered surprise nor argued when I told him I was going to stay with Eula to help with the baby while Ginny and Silas were away. It was an easy bluff, a ready excuse if anyone asked. Once I was out of sight, Bernadette could pretend I’d never existed. Ginny would still be Michael’s daughter, Bernadette’s granddaughter, but with a hazy origin story—left on the doorstep, perhaps, the mother run off, never to be known, never to be named.

  The following day, Michael took his mother to the beauty parlor, then out to lunch and a movie matinee, to give me time to extricate myself from the house. I will admit that I also took the opportunity, while doing laundry, to glance around the basement. Deep in a bag, back on a shelf, I found Bernadette’s ALBUM. In a different bag, in an unmarked envelope, I unearthed another piece of the bizarro puzzle: two photographs that, unlike the album, I believe to be genuine artifacts of the woman’s life. And, God help me, before I left for Prairie I took all these things upstairs and scanned them. No proof ties them to Bernadette, and I doubt I’ll ever learn who the subject is, but I contend that these are two photographs of the same man, young and old.

  You may question the eyebrow, the nose, but I say: look at the hairline, jawline, ears. He may have fought in a war, been injured, scarred, changed. Who knows what life he led? I do not think he is Michael’s father—he bears far too great a resemblance to Bernadette. But the Armond girl he most resembles is the beautiful one. He looks like Virginie; Ginny is who he looks like.

  In addition to the photos, I have the paper they were wrapped in, a piece of old ledger bearing a list of names. Since its discovery, seventeen other renditions of the same list have surfaced among Bernadette’s things, but this is the first one I found, and the one I think of as the original.

  I did the research: most of these names match the names of World War II U.S. military personnel. Aside from the parenthetical nicknames, their format follows a dog tag’s: first, middle initial, last. Some of these men are still alive, some not. I haven’t attempted contact. What would I say? Hi, I found your name in the possession of a woman I knew as Bernadette Maakestad, though her maiden name may have been something like Armond, but that’s hard to be sure of as well. I could tell you what I know of her, but I doubt any of it is true. It all sounded like an email scam: Goodmorning my dear Sir, Utmost importantly I write you to of News you have Son 60 years old with Nazi, lady. Please Kindness as to wire $10,000 USD OK! And so no body learn of past insurrection private matter of family. Beesseched you by Phillippa Maakestad, MFA, your daughter inLaw marries to half Nazi son yours.

  3

  * * *

  W HAT

  [A] good quiltmaker’s mind was free of all preconceived notions of how a quilt should be created, even from an influence as close as one’s mother.

  —Alvia Wardlaw, “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend”

  THE YODER FARMHOUSE sits atop a lolling hill on Iowa Route 1, three miles east of Prairie. Approaching by car, the way the road’s configured, you can’t see the house until you’re past it. The driveway’s blind, and now there’s a shiny DOT sign at the site of the accident that says as much. No morbid roadside shrine to Orah and Obadiah Yoder—though there’s no one in the county who doesn’t know what happened here—just HIDDEN DRIVEWAY, and also the yellow sign with the black buggy on it. They’re reminders: this is where.

  Surrounded by miles of cultivated corn and soy, the Yoder parcel is just three acres, the house, the barn, a few outbuildings. Commercial ag bought up the land but, as is common around here, had no interest in the house. Orah and Obadiah had worked out a rent-to-own arrangement when they first got to Prairie from their previous community, wherever that was, and the fifteen-year agreement was paid in full shortly before they died, so the house and its acreage belong to Eula and Silas outright. The Yoders always kept a huge garden—cooked, canned, and ate what they grew. The remaining land some might call overgrown, but I prefer “prairie restoration”—a graceful return to native grasses and wildflowers, a tiny pocket amid the regimented rows of genetically superior corn brought to us by Monsanto, the Mengele Institution of American Agriculture.

  Like many an Iowa farmhouse, the Yoders’ has rooms aplenty, added on year by year as some Amish family grew, and outgrew, their living quarters. I chose a small room upstairs with a couple of windows for some modicum of cross-ventilation and began a new life. An illusion, I know; I’d just grabbed a few books and teaching things, some summer clothes from our River City house where a quarter-century of life’s accumulation remained, but it was nice to flee to a place where very little is required, and where listening to crickets is a fine way to pass an evening.

  In Prairie, Eula was mistress. Twice a week I went into River City to teach my joke of a class—the students and I were just clocking the time—otherwise, I helped Eula in the garden and the kitchen, with the baking and with Oren, and did what I could to free up her hands for stitchery. Inept with a needle and thread myself, I served as Eula’s ironer—and have the burn scars to prove it—to earn my keep. Also, I chauffeured. We took Oren’s car seat from Silas’s Festiva and installed it in the Volvo, and I drove Eula and her cookies and quilts to Bluntmore’s Auction on Wednesday evenings and to the Friday-afternoon River City Farmers’ Market—the same market where for years I’d bought her mother’s heirloom tomatoes and rhubarb pies, tasting Orah’s recipes as they matured, watching her children grow, and chatting with her in a way I now know was not looked upon favorably by her Amish neighbors.

  It was at Bluntmore’s, one Wednesday evening back in the early spring of 2002, that Orah mentioned Eula’s interest in taking a job outside Prairie. I’d gone to the auction feeling those late-March, early-April muddy Iowa doldrums and wanting to get out of the house. Orah and Obadiah sat behind a table laden with plastic-wrapped pies and potato breads and baggies of snickerdoodles and molasses crisps. Behind them hung a quilt of Orah’s; others lay appealingly folded on an upturned crate beside the table. I hadn’t seen the Yoders since market season ended the previous fall with the last of the gourds and pumpkins, and when I’d paid for my apple butter, a loaf of dill bread, and the crosshatched peanut butter cookies Michael loves, I stood awhile by the table catching up with Orah. Most Amish women do not pass time with a customer—a Modern—trading updates on gardens and children, but Orah was no ordinary Amish, traditional as she may have appeared beside her children. Silas and Eula are in many ways like the first-generation American-born students I teach, acculturated in manners entirely their own.

  Eula’d just turned sixteen in 2002 and was ready for her rumspringa. Though the transplanted Yoders had their issues with the Prairie Amish community, they’d been deeply saddened by Silas’s defection a few years before. In his own Amish way, I think Silas brought his parents as much anguish as Ginny brought us. The Yoders had decided that when Eula came of age they’d handle things differently, so when they asked her what steps she’d like to take toward worldly knowledge, and she said, “I’d like to work a job. Not in Prairie. In River City,” it seemed a reasonable request as far as rumspringas went, and Orah took up the task of securing employment for her daughter. She might put her domestic skills to use, Orah suggested: cleaning, baking, sewing, some carpentry even. I had always liked this family a great deal, and I welcomed the chance to know them better—in a way I hope wasn’t merely fetishistic or opportunistic. Also, I’d lost my weekly household helper back in December when she’d graduated from the university, and had an eye out for someone to replace her, so it all felt fortuitous.

  Ginny had spent the better part of that year at a Quad Cities care facility undergoing the electroshock therapy that ultimately enabled her to live her life instead of skittering toward its end like a guttered pinball. Eula began her rumspringa job with us around the time Ginny came home. On Saturday mornings, Silas would leave his River City rental apartment, drive to Prairie to fetch Eula from their parents’ house, bring her to us, and then collect her again in the early evening to
get her back to the farm. Since he’d left the Church, declining the adult baptism, Silas lived on his own in a shabby studio in town and worked construction with a bunch of other lapsed Amish and Mennonites. At first, the chauffeuring seemed a lot to ask of him—all that county highway travel just so his sister could iron my placemats—but it soon became clear that Silas would’ve gladly driven Eula, daily, to Timbuktu and back if it meant a chance to see Ginny Maakestad.

  Of course they’d met before, had seen each other almost weekly at markets and auctions since they were kids. Once, when Ginny was a teenager, doing drugs, and disappearing for days at a time, she went to the farmers’ market hoping to find me and ask for money, but I had a rehearsal and didn’t make it to the market that afternoon, and it was Orah who spotted Ginny huddled behind the public restrooms. To be driven home in a buggy no doubt had an effect on my daughter, but it was Silas, age twelve or thirteen at the time, who I imagine was most affected by the experience. Scary as Ginny may have looked—skinny, doped up, wild-eyed—she was still lovely, even in her seediness, and maybe all the more intriguing to a boy like Silas.

  Seven, eight years later, when Silas was tasked with ferrying his sister to and from her job with us, yes, he did have ulterior motives. But so, too, did Eula. A job for its own sake wasn’t all she wanted; Eula had her eyes on a sewing machine, not a treadle one like Orah’s, but a motorized Singer. Ultimately, she’d have it converted to run off an air compressor or a car battery, as the Amish do, but when Silas took her to the Mennonite Consignment Store so she could spend her first month’s pay on the deposit and sign a payment plan, it was to our house in River City that they brought the machine. We set it up in the little sunroom downstairs, and thereafter Eula spent part of her Saturday working for me and part of it on her quilts.

  By then Silas was no longer just dropping Eula off in the morning and picking her up at the end of the day. Each week he returned earlier and earlier to fetch her, until he arrived not at five p.m. but noontime, and he’d spend the afternoon helping us with projects around the house while Eula quilted. Eventually he quit the pretense of dropping her off, and just parked the car and spent the day replacing rotted porch boards, weeding the garden, or driving Ginny in his little orange Festiva for lunch at the Slidy Diner. It’s an amazing thing watching two people discover that it’s to each other that their individual lives finally make sense. And if one of those people should happen to be the daughter you thought might not live to see fifteen, let alone twenty-five, your feelings of salvation and gratitude and sheer beatific glory might be impossible to overstate.

  Two years later the Yoders were dead, Eula had a baby, Ginny and Silas were married, and I’d left Michael and gone to live in Prairie, among, but not of, the Amish. When I was not chauffeuring Eula, watching Oren, or helping with house and garden and baking work or with Eula’s quilts, I passed the time on the front porch or in my hot little second-floor room, not prepping for my fall show but reading the collected works of Lucius Bocelli. I began with A Past That Does Not Pass: Repression in French Memory of the Vichy Era, his discussion of the inadequacy of a standard historical approach to address “the history of memory.” His scholarly interests centered on the conflicts between collective, “dominant” memories and individual, dissenting ones—between the history a society might prefer to perpetuate of itself, and any contradictory, less persuasive, less flattering histories. “Vichy syndrome” is how the experts describe the apparently widespread failure of French memory to account for Nazi collaboration.

  What I understood of Lucius’s work worried me for reasons that had nothing to do with Lucius or Vichy. I was worried about memory: although Michael and I hadn’t ruined Silas and Ginny’s wedding in real time, we would ruin it retroactively, once the truth was out. For what is an event but the stories we tell of it? History is determined by dominant, persuasive memories, their telling and retelling. No one at the wedding knew what was going on with me and Michael at that time; the popular version of the wedding story might be rosy—until they found out we’d split up soon thereafter, that I’d been having an affair. Then the event could no longer exist in any light except that cast upon it by concurrent happenings, retrospectively revealed. However the wedding may have seemed as it happened, once Ginny knew the truth, she would never be able to believe the story as she’d experienced it, only the one shadowed by my sins.

  She and Silas sent Eula one postcard from France, a vintage reproduction: Grande Semaine Maritime Française du 9 au 16 Juillet 1906. The illustration is of the port at Le Havre as seen from a hill, ships and sailboats dotting the distant water. In the foreground, a woman in a white plumed hat and boa holds a pair of binoculars in one gloved hand, while the other hand waves a white hankie in adieu to a departing steamer. On the flip side it says: Bonjour! ♥, G&S. If they sent anything to the house in River City, I never heard about it.

  They were due home at the end of the first week of June. Michael was to fetch them from the airport—Cedar Rapids, not Chicago, barring tornadic interference. He and I spoke on the phone the day before, and I asked how he thought we should tell them about us.

  “How? We just tell them.” He’d grown belligerent alone in that house with his mother.

  “Yes, but, together? Separately? You’ll see them first—or I could come to the airport—”

  “You want to have them get off the plane—”

  “Michael—”

  “—jet-lagged and exhausted, and truck them off to a booth at Perkins so they can learn our marriage is over, over a nice slice of pie and a cup of decaf?”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it.

  “Don’t,” he warned, but I didn’t know what exactly he was cautioning against.

  “You sound like me,” I said.

  “Wonder of wonders.”

  “Could you not say anything right off? I’ll be at Eula’s. When you drop them we can—”

  “Great,” Michael said. “Welcome home! Bam!”

  “It’s not ideal,” I began, “but—”

  “Tell them you couldn’t last another day in a house with my mother—it’s not a lie.”

  “It’s hardly the whole truth.”

  Michael was silent then. Resigned, he said, “Do what you like, Phil. I’ll bring them to Eula’s. You want to greet us with iced tea and misery, great.” He paused. “Great,” he said again.

  The day they returned was unseasonably hot. Ginny’d wanted to be back for Jazz Fest in River City that coming weekend—live music downtown, vendors, crafts, sidewalk sales, tastings, reunions. I pictured her, with Silas, running into former teachers and classmates. They’d all known her as such a basket case, but now, when they asked how she’d been, Ginny could say, “I’m well. This is my husband, Silas. We just got back from our honeymoon.” It’s not actually something Ginny would say; it’s what I would say if I were Ginny, and I must remind myself once again—no matter how much better off I think Ginny would be if she’d just do what I would do if I were her—that she is not me. She’s really nothing like me. You might think twenty-five years would be long enough for this to sink in, but I could probably tattoo it on my arm—GINNY IS NOT YOU—stare right at it, and still not understand why she won’t just do as I do.

  Michael picked them up at the airport; Eula, Oren, and I awaited their arrival on the front porch. That time of day, the porch was cooler than the house, but still we were sweltering. Eula rocked in the porch swing, working a bit of embroidery onto the quilt top she was doing for Ginny and Silas—all white, shades of white, different textures and prints, bits left over from Ginny’s wedding dress, Orah’s aprons, old sheets, flour and feed sacks, all embroidered white on white. She inherited her mother’s gift, her technical skill and craft, but it wasn’t until Eula bought that sewing machine and started quilting Saturday afternoons at our house that she began to improvise and experiment, to move beyond the traditional Amish geometrics. The quilts she and Orah stitched by hand are beautiful, of course, but com
pared to what Eula does now, they’re so staid. What Orah might have thought of Eula’s quilts I can’t say, for Eula’s quilts, as they are now, would not exist if Orah were still alive.

  That hot June day, as we waited on the porch for the honeymooners to return, I was reading—or pretending to—in a chair so old its wooden seat was cushiony with rot. I kept looking over at the baby, penned by couch cushions into a makeshift playpen, as he ran his hands over the quilt beneath him, fingertips feeling the changes in texture, patch to patch. Eula made Oren’s quilt from scraps of things that belonged to members of the family, those he knew and those he’d never know. There were bits of Obadiah’s coveralls, strips of Orah’s old dresses, wedges of a shirt I remembered on Silas years ago. I don’t know if Eula sneaked in something of Oren’s father’s, if she had anything. Occasionally I’d spot a bit of material I hadn’t noticed before, point, and ask, “Eula, what’s that, there? The tan, with the flecks?” Inevitably, it was something from Orah’s scrap bag or a bit of an old tablecloth. What did I imagine? That one day I’d ask and Eula would say, Oh, that? That’s the shirt Oren’s father wore the night Oren was conceived. I tore it off him in a fit of passion and then hid it away in my sewing box.

  I once saw a poster in the Gas Stop convenience store advertising a concert at the Prairie Park pavilion: a Christian folk duo from Montana—probably evangelicals out to save the Amish—two handsome young men gazing out from a Xeroxed wheat field. The timing’s off—Eula got pregnant just a month or two after her parents were killed—still, I have pictured her and the hippie songsters staging their own tiny Woodstock in Prairie, Iowa. The minstrels are invited to park their van on the Yoders’ land, and Eula slips out of her room and into the night to join them. In my imagination, her parents are asleep upstairs—an impossibility, for they were dead before Oren was conceived, but it’s my imagination, goddammit, so there, if nowhere else, Eula can slip out and leave Orah and Obadiah asleep in the house while she joins the boys at their campfire. When the three climb into the back of the van, it’s at Eula’s bold suggestion: “It’s getting chilly, isn’t it, outside here? May we go in? Into your van?” She’s like something sent from God, this one—that’s their capital G, not mine—this lovely, ample, deep-voiced girl, a mane of thick, dark, freshly brushed hair curtaining her beautiful face. Awed, these two earnest, Christ-loving boys and Eula sit cross-legged beneath billowing Indian tapestries staple-gunned to the van’s ceiling. They smoke a joint—I don’t even know if it’s Eula’s first. The scene isn’t tawdry but lovely, all three trying to suppress giddy grins. Eula initiates, reaches out toward the face of one young man and the hand of the other at the same time. She draws the face to hers, kissing this one’s mouth while placing the other’s hand beneath her heavy breast. In this way I do feel partly responsible: the only place I can imagine her having access to any of these ideas is in some book or video from our shelves in River City. Perhaps it’s perversely appropriate: I’m “Grandma Phil,” as close to a grandparent as Oren will ever come, with Orah and Obadiah gone and his father’s identity a mystery.