The Turtle's Beating Heart

by Low, Denise;

  The Root family homestead is still desirable—uplands for pasturing cattle and fertile lowlands for raising forage and wheat. Variety offsets variable weather conditions. The Root family did well enough. A picture survives of the Root brothers as young men, smiling and confident. They wear rough wool trousers, vests, overcoats, and hats—newsboy flat caps and Homburgs. They are informal, and no fake Greek columns are in the photograph. They pose together in a close clump. A few years later most of the Root siblings, Great-Grandmother Charlotte among them, pose together again. The Root family members were close.

  So, for his early years Grandfather lived within the shelter of his mother’s extended family. He had the freedom to visit the nearby orchard and his grandparents’ farmhouse. The region is still a child’s paradise. Deer, raccoon, black squirrels, rabbits, and garter snakes live in yards as well as fields. This is the center of the North American flyway, where huge flocks flow north and south with the seasons. Wild turkey gather along roadsides, feeding on seeds, worms, insects, and rodents. Coyotes fill the ecological niche of wolves, and their evening conversations echo the valleys. Ornate box turtles slog deliberately through tall grass, carrying their yellow-striped shells and peering at the world through red eyes (male) or brown (female).

  At that moment perhaps Burns was an idyllic place. It is on a branch of the Chisholm Trail, now Route 77. Homesteaders included a mix of eastern immigrant tribal people like Delawares. Families of Southeast tribes, especially Cherokee and Choctaw, also moved into the plains as well as Exodusters and immigrants from the British Isles, Czechoslovakia, Germany, and Russia. Perhaps everyone got along. Several Kansan residents have told me this was a part of the country and a time when people considered “colored” or “mulatto” or “Indian” could blend in, especially in the rural areas. In Lawrence, a hundred miles east, the writer Langston Hughes’s multiracial grandparents appear in the 1870 census as white. They owned property, they were educated, and they were industrious—the cultural definition of “white” at the time.

  A shift occurred by the end of the nineteenth century, as census takers specified “race” more strictly. The Langstons are identified as “mulatto” in 1880, and then in the next decade they are “colored.” Relatives tell me that this process occurred in the Burns area as well, with less and less tolerance for ethnicities other than Protestant and northern European. My relatives gradually disappear from the town histories, except for Great Uncle Charles, whose bank and prominent wife secured his position.

  In 1889, when Grandfather was born, the small Kansas town was a safe and rich environment. He received a good education, and he learned ranching skills from his grandparents and uncles. The land itself is another, more exacting teacher, with inviolable laws of gravity, heat, and velocity. When Grandfather was a teenager, 489 people lived in Burns. Today about 200 people remain. Some nearby town sites are complete ghost towns, with all the population in cemeteries. They travel silently into the next layer of sod as barns disassemble and frost heaves the last paving stones. Time is the most precise law of all.

  *

  With a giant map of Kansas, I travel one hot, windy afternoon on back highways of the Flint Hills. I seek graves of my grandfather’s paternal grandparents, Jake and Mary E. Bruner. I hope to learn something of this couple, who were raised near the Ramapough band of Delawares. My grandfather knew his grandfather Jake Bruner while growing up, but his grandmother Mary E. Bruner was in the grave by the time he was born. No one spoke to me about these relatives from a mixed background. Even in my childhood, taverns had NO INDIANS ALLOWED posted. Families kept quiet about Native connections, but gravestones can speak when people cannot. This trip will surprise me.

  9. Jacob and Mary Bruner’s tombstone in rural northern Butler County, Kansas. Photograph taken 2013. Author’s collection.

  Pleasant Center Cemetery in Butler County is tucked into a corner of gravel crossroads, catty-corner from a white frame church. Behind a wire fence I find overgrown cedars and uneven rows of stone tablets. This plain churchyard resembles many others within the eighty thousand square miles of Kansas, small islands amid infinite ripples of grass. After marching among rows, I am about to give up when I see the Bruner name, the great-great grandparents’ tombstone. It reads: “Charles Jacob Bruner (1833–1912)” and “Mary His Wife (1834–1884).” These words, under floral engraving, is definite proof they existed.

  Census records suggest they married sometime after 1850—no marriage license survives. By 1859 they had a son in the household, Francis (later he went by Frank). Their daughter, Lillian, was born in 1866, a dozen years before they arrived in central Kansas.

  I examine the tombstone carefully. The handsome stela has unusual embellishment. Above the lettering is a band of entwined scrollwork, with a four-petaled, scalloped blossom at its center. No flower exists in North America with this shape. From beadwork designs I recognize it as the Ojibwa Rose, an Algonquin design. It is also the Medicine Wheel, a representation of stages of life, from birth to old age. The four divisions represent the seasons, from spring to winter, and winds of the four directions.

  The tombstone also has the distinctly northeastern Indigenous “double curve” design, which borders the top edge, a marking with many connotations. Although North American people do not have an alphabetic script, they do have a glyphic writing system that goes beyond pictographs. Plains Indian ledger art, two-dimensional war accounts on paper, has a relationship to northeastern Indigenous glyphs. I have studied Cheyenne pictographic writing and published some articles about it. Immediately, I recognize the engravings have meaning beyond ornament.

  The double curve, an extended bracket, resembles a canoe that encloses the entire design, in this case inverted to signify death. Indeed, I have seen Algonquin bark carvings of canoes with clan totems within to represent family members. The curvilinear outline also represents the path of the sun from dawn to sunset. On the tombstone elaborate fern tendrils extend the double curve border to fill the spaces. These stems are a type of calendar, as some contemporary beadworkers have told me. Three of the fern fronds are unfurled, representing spring, summer, and fall. The fourth, winter, is curled tightly. Jake never experienced this last season in his death year because he died in November. The fern is coiled, a tiny living spiral never released into this existence.

  As I decipher the Bruner stones, I recall my mother showing me two napkins she had appliquéd and embroidered for her hope chest. She used a design from the family Native traditions: mirrored rosebuds, spiral fern tendrils, and ivy. She blended these disparate plants expertly into one flower, a grouping meaningful in terms of glyphs but not botany. The two napkins mirror each other to create a bracket, the Woodland double curve. She learned this embroidery from her Delaware grandmother, long after the exact meanings were lost to her, but the message of the earth’s lasting beauty is clear.

  When I see the floral patterns on my two-great grandparents’ tombstone, I remember my mother teaching me to embroider simple scrolled designs made from satin stitch, running stitch, lover’s knot, and chain stitch. I enjoyed the symmetrical, colorful forms taking shape on my tea towels. Mother taught me to love the floral aesthetic, in all its inflections. The garden outside the door was my teacher, as I learned how ferns on the north side of the house were first to green up in the spring. Rosebuds explode into fragrant blooms in full summer. Ivy climbs toward the sky and lasts past frost. The garden outside dies each winter, but the bright floss stitchery does not noticeably fade, nor do etchings on a marble stone.

  Most gravestones in the cemetery display Christian symbols—crosses, Bible pages, and the shepherd’s crook for lost lambs. What is missing from my grandparents’ graves is reference to European religion. This omission speaks loudly. It confirms a family tradition that some family members avoided Christian churches.

  10. Mary Bruner, paternal grandmother of Frank Bruner Junior. Photograph taken in El Dorado, Kansas, between 1878 and 1884. Author’s collection. Gi
ft of Gail Bruner Murrow.

  On this day of discovery my grandfather has an eerie presence. I imagine how he stood in these same cemetery aisles in 1912, during his grandfather’s funeral. Some service took place, whether Native or Christian or both. A cousin sent a copy of Jacob’s funeral card, ornamented with feathers, floral designs, and a vague book outline, arced like a double curve more than a Bible.

  The practice of transferring Native designs onto tombstones is not well documented, but it occurs in some nearby regional cemeteries. A few people have talked with me about Native designs in tombstone carvings. I have seen a headstone in a small Colorado cemetery with similar Northeast Woodland designs, including an Ojibwa Rose. It had a small grave house built of planks over the site, identical to traditional grave houses on the Menominee reservation today. The similarity between the Colorado gravestone and my grandparents’ is remarkable. Later I will find the Bruner design closely resembles Munsee (Stony Country Band) Delaware composition.

  This late summer afternoon my husband and I leave tobacco for these grandparents who were almost lost. I am grateful to discover verification of Jake and Mary Bruner’s existence as well as the additional narrative added by the floral glyphs, completely unexpected. The Woodland pattern confirms the family Native heritage in another form of Indigenous documentation. In my last glimpse of the cemetery the white-hot sun heats all the stones in a purifying fire. I imagine the peace that will descend once again after we leave.

  *

  On a recent visit to Burns my husband and I find the entire downtown is bustling. This is the city’s annual Classic Car Show. Model T Fords line up on the brick main street, like they did in Grandfather’s lifetime. A man drives one slowly across an intersection, its motor churning like a lawn mower. His feed store cap seems out of place as he steers the elegant old car.

  Most of the nineteenth-century downtown is intact. A few antique stores flaunt sunflower-trimmed banners and declare they are open for business. Inside the first one I notice peony-trimmed plates on a round oak table, ready for Sunday dinner. Perhaps distant relatives once used them in their kitchens. Colorful quilts hang on walls, similar to the one my great-grandmother Charlotte Bruner made for my mother’s wedding day. The pioneer artifacts look no different from those of other small towns. Domestic arts of cooking, gardening, and sewing are universal, whether the women are African American, British Islander, Czech, German, or Native. All brought the same goods from the East.

  11. Frank Bruner Junior on a wagon in Burns, Kansas, with nephew Dan Bruner. Author’s collection.

  Grandmother Charlotte’s quilt for my mother’s hope chest was a circle design, the wedding ring pattern, in pink and white cotton. The interlocking circles resonate with motion of the medicine wheel image. The great number of heirloom quilts in the antique store affirm the widespread practice of this art.

  The small town’s most numerous businesses are these commercial museums, antique stores where historic castoffs can be restored to the present. The country style of décor is one construed from old-time survival goods such as canning jars. Quilts represent perfect economy—rendering rags into symmetrical, ordered compositions.

  As I look around, sun glistens through old bottles, tinted blue from sunlight acting on the glass. Prisms dance in the air, so the room is alive with glistening rays. Only when I look in the back storeroom does the old building seem haunted.

  The small town has changed little since my grandfather’s boyhood. I find the downtown office where my great-grandfather once presided as a clerk and a postmaster, when the building was new. The brass knob on the door is locked, so I peer through the blurry window and view an empty room, where my grandfather’s father must have sat working. I expect to see his face on the other side of the glass as he peers out of the past.

  On Main Street ceramic roosters sit by each store, the “roosters on parade” town project. Some are neon orange with white stripes. Others have feathers painted red and brown. They are familiar. My mother displayed a blue ceramic rooster in her kitchen, and I have it to this day. Burns uses the rooster as a community mascot, and like our family, no one explains why. It might hark back to a Spanish rooster pull. This area, near the Santa Fe Trail, was once under Spanish rule. Or a rooster might commemorate poultry as an economic resource. In one family story my grandfather raised fancy breeds of chickens for the county fair, so perhaps it celebrates a countywide specialty.

  A parade begins, led by a yellow 1958 Corvette. Little kids run the sidewalks. Dogs bark. Nowhere do I see relatives, only the setting where their lives unfolded. When the last finned Chevrolet rolls past, we look down the street for the last time.

  As we leave, my husband sees a figure at the edge of Kickapoo Road, the county throughway named after an Algonquin tribe related to the Delawares. It is a man wearing early-style motorcycle goggles: a ghost or a figment from another time.

  “Did your grandfather drive a motorcycle?” he asks.

  “Maybe,” I say. “He owned a garage for a short time, in 1913. He was mechanical.”

  I feel a chill but see only grass blowing. Wind is as constant as the passing of time in this rural hamlet. My grandfather’s life fades further into the past one more day as sun shinnies down the blue western sky.

  *

  In 1889, Grandfather’s birth year, all of his family and neighbors struggled through a cycle of hard winters in a hard land. The year before, temperatures had stayed below zero for days. In some isolated farmsteads entire families froze to death. Farming and ranching are hard physical work under the best of circumstances and dangerous. People die from snakebites, falling from horses, and tractor accidents. Weather can kill in any season—drought, tornadoes, floods, lightning, and blizzards.

  Perhaps the extreme weather cycle of 1888 brought out the worst in people. Cousins tell me about the rise of prejudice after Grandfather’s birth. Vigilante groups such as the Kansas Anti-Horse Thief Association kept rustlers from the lawless Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, from decimating ranches. These groups were independent and often violent. This was frontier country, with justice meted out in beatings and lynchings. After 1900, according to a state survey, lynchings targeted African Americans more often, rather than criminals. That is one visible measure of increasing racism. The Ku Klux Klan began to grow, with some members drawn from the vigilante associations. This was the back story developing when Grandfather was a boy.

  12. Frank Bruner Junior as a baby, center, about 1891, with brothers Harry (left) and Charles (right). Author’s collection. Gift of Gail Bruner Murrow.

  During Grandfather’s early years, however, all went well enough. My mother told me stories of this time period, when Grandfather was a quiet but stubborn child, sometimes even unruly. He walked to the schoolhouse with his brothers but then slipped out the back door and would be gone all day, wandering the hills. Finally, the teacher sent for his mother. Strong-willed Charlotte forced him to stay. As a boy, Grandfather had an independent streak, but he understood who ran his matriarchal household.

  I feel kinship to Grandfather’s legacy, from my own long and happy days alone in the countryside. Perhaps, like him, I would have been called “hyperactive.” As a child, I spent entire afternoons seeing how fast I could sprint up and down the block. Sitting at a desk was sometimes torturous, even with a hidden book to read, especially in spring, when the air smelled of damp earth. I sympathize with Grandfather’s rebellion against school schedules. I never dared to leave the school grounds like he did or face my mother’s wrath.

  Despite difficult conditions on the Great Plains, trains connected the small town with the outside world. The West of those days had odd mixes of frontier and Victorian cultures. Parlors often had ornate furniture laded in from the East, including pianos, while in the kitchens families subsisted on home-canned tomatoes and eggs. Outhouses were not uncommon in the 1950s and later.

  In Grandfather’s day trains transported the latest inventions to town, including photograph
y. An uncle by marriage owned a local studio at the turn of the century. His gold-gilt name, Adam Bell, appears at the bottom of a few family portraits. During these years in Burns, the 1890s to 1905, Frank and Charlotte Bruner took their three sons to the photographer regularly. For these occasions they dressed them finely. One portrait shows Grandfather as a baby in a christening gown among Greek columns, a painted backdrop, with his older brothers in Lord Fauntleroy bow ties. Outside the door was the Great Plains, but inside the studio a dream world of European fables took form. Every picture of my grandfather shows him in formal finery.

  13. Bruner brothers Charles and Frank Junior, in a deeply shadowed portrait. Photograph taken in Burns, Kansas, area, ca. 1900. Author’s collection.

  14. Frank Bruner Junior, young boy portrait, taken in Burns, Kansas, area, ca. 1895. Author’s collection.

  The offstage presence of Grandfather’s parents is almost palpable in the studio photographs—the boys’ hair is plastered perfectly into place. Fine jackets, perhaps borrowed from the studio, amplify their small frames. Even in store-bought suits and short hair, the boys’ Native origins are apparent. In most images their black hair and brown eyes, as well as darker skin, make striking profiles against sepia paper stock. In a few instances studio tricks lighten their coloring. During development the photographer could “dodge,” or overexpose, the negatives and wash out the photograph, although this would leave high-contrast mottling. Several times my grandfather appears to be a blond, but deep shadows in his trousers show the optical trickery. I wonder how that affected Grandfather, who was light-skinned in some photographs and in others wore his own dark skin. Photographs suggest how much of a liability the Native identity was. The photographer had a repertoire of disguises, and he used them. The dodged photographs added to a family narrative of European ancestry.