The Turtle's Beating Heart

by Low, Denise;

  Indian blood has been the rationale for Grandfather’s drinking in his later years, but my older brother gives me another perspective. I visit him and his wife in northern Arizona, where he lives within rings of volcanic mountains.

  He greets me outside, and while he parks the car, his dogs sniff me over thoroughly. After the dogs celebrate my entrance, he seats me at his dining room table. It is round, almost identical to my older sister’s, and our conversations are similar. He also spent extended time with our grandparents. After he attended Harvard, at age seventeen, he stayed out a year and worked at a Kansas newspaper before returning to complete his degree. The newspaper was in Hutchinson, a few miles from Newton, where our grandparents and Uncle Bob lived. He learned firsthand stories from our grandfather.

  “Perhaps you would like red wine,” he says to me. Dogs and wine are comforting family rituals.

  The open bottle is on the table, aerating. We settle and sip a rich Malbec. After sharing news, I ask, “Please tell me again about Pop’s injury. When did it happen?”

  17. Frank Bruner Junior and grandson David Dotson, ca. 1958. Photograph taken at Emporia, Kansas. Author’s collection.

  “I don’t know exact dates.”

  Talking to my brother is odd because I copy so many of his gestures. I followed him around when I was a toddler and imitated him as closely as possible. He twists his mouth sideways while contemplating a slightly unpleasant idea, as I might.

  I try to jog Brother’s memory, “He worked for the Santa Fe railroad in Newton for twenty years. He must not have stayed with the railroad long after that.”

  “No,” my brother agrees. “He received disability, a small sum but enough to get by. He was drawing disability when I visited him, about 1961, when I was working for the newspaper. He was old then—it was a few years before he died.” My brother goes on to recount this life-changing tragedy of Grandfather’s work life. Grandfather, then in his fifties, was switching cars among trains in the railroad yards. Suddenly, a load in a boxcar shifted and slammed him in the head. He never recovered fully. The accident changed the fortunes of the family.

  This was after my mother had married, so the family downsized and moved to a smaller house. Uncle Bob was still a boy, and he worked odd jobs as soon as he was able.

  My brother stops a moment, then says, “Use of alcohol probably became habitual for Pop, especially with Prohibition over. Alcohol laced with laudanum was a regular pain relieving medicine in the pharmacies. What else could he do?”

  I think about those tough times and say, “Yes, who can blame him?” My other grandmother bragged how she had taken the pledge to never drink but took brandy for “female trouble” each month as medicine. Medicinal brandy was in a separate category from saloon whiskey. “Pop knew what was available in pharmacies, with his background working in them.”

  I think back to my visit with our uncle a few years earlier. I tell my brother: “Uncle Bob told me how he grew up in a small house near the edge of Newton, but with a lot big enough for a garden. It is right next to Sand Creek, so soil would be good.” I pause and count years. “That would be the late 1930s because Uncle Bob was born in 1923.” I recall how I drove by the house the summer before, and it was smaller than I had imagined. “The yard was just big enough for a garden. Uncle Bob said Grandfather stacked rabbit cages across the back and raised them for meat. Cinnamon lop ears, other fancy breeds.” That part of Kansas continues to be a commercial source for rabbit meat. “When you visit Kansas, I’ll take you by the Rare Hare farm out by El Dorado,” I say. “You can find rabbit meat regularly in the restaurants. I always wonder if they descend from the lineage Grandfather raised.” We both laugh.

  “I don’t remember that house,” says my brother. “They were living in a small apartment downtown when I knew them. They were terribly poor.”

  “Uncle Bob said they built a coop and had chickens, pigeons, and guinea hens,” I say. “When he was a boy, they always entered poultry in the fair and won medals as well as some cash. Several times he went to the state fair in Hutchinson with his winning entries.”

  “I never knew that,” says my brother.

  The truck farming years were long over when my brother visited in the 1960s. We both agree that Grandfather found ways to survive with his disability. He raised his teenaged son, and he also befriended our father’s younger brother, Robert Dotson, who was the same age as his son. My father told me how Grandfather Bruner had influenced Robert and other people, in quiet ways. Robert liked being around the garden and learned agricultural skills. Grandfather Bruner had helped shape this young in-law greatly—Robert later studied agronomy in college and became a professor in that field.

  “Pop was always good with children,” says David.

  “Yes, I remember,” I say. “He played cards with me for hours and talked to me like I was a person, not just a fluff girl. He never condescended.” He modeled to me how children are active beings capable of dialogue, not the blank slate idea of childhood that was current in the 1950s. This modest man demonstrated by example rather than by issuing orders to his underlings. Most details of my grandfather’s existence within the community of Newton have vanished, but his legacy remains through his influence on his son, son-in-law, grandson, and also the brother of his son-in-law.

  American Indians of Grandfather’s generation had limited acceptance in small towns like Newton. My mother talked about the Oklahoma Native man Frank Lindley, who was the revered basketball coach of her high school from 1914 to 1945 and also its principal. “Chief,” as he was called, devoted himself to school athletes, many of whom went to the University of Kansas to play under James Naismith. He authored books about basketball and invented the zone defense. But when, after many years, he applied for school superintendent, he was turned down. So he resigned and left town.

  Invisible lines of bias create complex social rules in isolated prairie towns, as Lindley discovered. My grandfather, with his Indian blood, also could not fully participate in community life, especially with his burden of chronic pain.

  “Did Pop ever talk about being Indian?” I ask my brother.

  “Never,” he says. “It was just understood.”

  “Uncle Bob doesn’t remember ever talking to his dad about it,” I say. “Perhaps he took a vow.”

  “It would be a real barrier in the small town,” says my brother. “Letting it go was a reasonable choice under the circumstances.”

  We agree our grandfather made an unspoken decision to never discuss his background. He chose his wife’s people. For Delaware and other related groups, children follow the mother’s traditions. A man expected the woman’s family to take precedence.

  Our German Irish grandmother gave her children a foothold in the mostly white community. Blood, however, does not follow human direction. Even our grandmother would make occasional comments about the Native lineage that also imprinted our family. Indian blood was her stereotyped term for problems that Irish, Germans, and just about everyone else might have.

  *

  California was a place Grandfather visited as a young man, where some of his Root cousins had settled. Grandfather knew how to hop a train and ride the rails, so he might have traveled the West Coast widely before marriage. In his later years, my brother told me, our grandfather meandered away from his Kansas home and ended up in distant states. Grandmother would receive a call in the night, or Uncle Bob would. Maybe Pop was on binges. Maybe he needed to get out of the small town’s isolation. No one ever knew the full story, but always Grandfather found his way back.

  On our visit my brother told me about the disastrous poker game that occurred in the 1940s, a night of terrible losses. At this time my grandfather suffered aftereffects of his head injury, maybe complicated by drinking. Perhaps his employers were involved. “Grandfather was set up to lose,” my brother explained. “He gambled big on a sure hand. Four aces, odds of one in fifty thousand draws.” My brother himself is a skilled cardplayer, and he
memorized all the odds while a teenager. “But his opponent,” my brother continued, “had a straight flush, clubs.” This coincidence was incomprehensible, and Brother made it clear cheating was involved. If it were railroad men who swindled our grandfather, which fits with dates of his work record, then this was one way he could be removed from the payroll without legal difficulties. A disabled worker was a liability.

  18. Frank Bruner Junior and Evelyn (Miller) Bruner in Oakland, 1940s. Author’s collection.

  “No one knows the full story,” my brother concluded.

  Whatever the ultimate cause, this incident resulted in complete financial bankruptcy. Grandfather lost all his savings—probably the house, plus more. This was a time of great difficulties. Grandfather’s own father had died, so he was grieving. Grandfather was in his early fifties, injured, and unable to work as a laborer.

  Grandfather and Grandmother made a new life in Oakland, California, where Grandmother worked at a department store for a regular salary. My oldest sister remembered that our grandmother was in the women’s clothing department. She was the family breadwinner—almost unheard of in the late 1940s. Widows and wives of service men worked but not women in households with men. This job was an opportunity, a position she would never have in her Kansas hometown. She started paying into her own social security fund.

  My brother remembers how fond both Grandfather and Grandmother had been of Oakland. They lived near a park, and a group of men had a regular poker game. I suspect Grandfather was the ace player and won often.

  One afternoon, Grandfather dressed in a double-breasted suit and accompanied Grandmother on a boat excursion. In the photographs he stands close to her as she looks over the rail, away from him. They are stylish, slender, and unsmiling. In another picture he carries a rolled newspaper in his hand. He looks to the side and stands awkwardly. He looks like a haunted man, despite his fine clothes.

  In all the photographs Grandmother wears a hat, gloves, and heels. She sent luxury clothes back to Kansas for my older sister Mary to wear—mink collars, rhinestone pins, and cashmere sweaters. They were in my mother’s closets for years after Sister left for California herself. Perfect style was my grandmother’s specialty. These photographs also show a close woman friend, perhaps one of the cousins, with Grandmother, also dressed to the nines. These are stark photographs, with no community or family around except for this one friend. During their time in California my grandparents were at a distance from all their children and grandchildren. Yet they managed. They stayed until our grandmother reached mandatory retirement age.

  Back in Kansas, they lived with my parents in Emporia, when I was a baby. Then they moved back to Newton, to a small downtown apartment near their son. Grandfather worked odd jobs in these latter years. They seldom spoke about their time in California. Photographs of another, more glamorous life are all that remain.

  *

  City directories of the 1950s show some of my grandfather’s last employment: taxi driver and liquor store clerk. My grandparents rented rooms above the taxi stand on the main street. They had no car, but they could walk to downtown stores, and when Grandfather worked for the taxi company, they had transportation. In his last job Grandfather had access to discounts at the liquor store, and perhaps he began drinking more. A head injury might worsen, with headaches. Alcohol can ameliorate pain, but this medicine takes a toll.

  19. Jane (Dotson) Ciabattari, the author’s sister, and the author, ca. 1995, in Lawrence, Kansas. Author’s collection.

  In later years Grandfather seldom visited our family, but I remember each meeting. He was quiet, sitting in a chair without comment or even, it seemed, a breath. That did not mean he had no effect on everyone. I felt his presence; I felt the attitude of my mother toward him; I felt my grandmother’s continuous minor key sorrow. During these 1950s visits we played cards together. He passed on gambling skills, which have helped me in many ways through the years. He passed on his stories about the KKK and union struggles. Never was he drinking when we were together.

  One cold night on those grasslands hills barely contained by a grid of streets, after I went to bed, he drank with my father. When I awoke in the morning, no one spoke. I felt some afterimage burned in the air, like the moment after a lightning strike. My mother was angry at both of them and gave me the impression both had imbibed.

  That night ended in a contentious argument. My mother entered into the fray, and she was full of fury long afterward. Our grandparents never visited after that. In my bones I always knew the Greek arc of tragedy: events proceed to a final, unalterable destiny.

  My dad once told me what a kind man Grandfather was, but drinking was his downfall. That was the theme of his later years. That is the last memory most relatives had of him, and in time it became the only memory, a broken stone man stretched out on a prairie hillside, fading with each winter’s frost.

  Only recently have I appreciated what an influence Grandfather was on my father, who descended from British Isles and Cherokee abolitionists on one side and Confederates on the other. He broke from his own father’s Republican affiliation and become a Democrat. He joined a union and became a leader, and he broke with his father’s more extreme Christian beliefs and acquaintance with the KKK. Even though it was unspoken, Grandfather Bruner’s influence on the family continued through my father. I remember my father telling me how every person, no matter what race, has the same rights under the Constitution.

  Father taught us to consider the welfare of the community and the importance of service as an ideal, over individual profit, in contrast to his businessman father’s example. He became active in local politics, and his signature letters to the Emporia Gazette editor William Lindsay White became famous as solo Democrat commentary in the Republican town. In later years my father joined the county social welfare board and the library board. He was a good son-in-law to the maverick Native man, my grandfather.

  They shared the vice of strong drink. I remember how my father drank for days after their falling out. The two men had been friends, and my father missed him.

  A relative once told me, “I always knew Frank Bruner was Indian because of the way he couldn’t handle alcohol.” Stereotypes are one of the most insidious of Native difficulties.

  I responded, “Why do Irish, French, Russians, and Germans have such bad alcohol problems? Where is there a family without such problems?”

  In the middle years of the twentieth century a man’s children die, and he suffers chronic pain from a work accident. Effective antidepressants and painkilling medicines do not exist. No twelve-step programs exist. Civil rights laws are decades in the future, and prejudice is a daily occurrence. My grandfather endured pain, and he drank.

  Grandfather, a lifelong smoker, developed lung cancer in 1962. My mother worried as the disease wore him down. She and I and my sister took the train to visit him several times in their apartment. The grandparents’ rented rooms in Newton seemed darker than ever those winter months.

  The last time I saw him was soon after surgery. Grandfather took my mother aside and raised his shirt to show scars across his chest. Through the doorway I saw the jagged stitches on his skin. I realize now he tried to keep this disfigurement hidden from me, his granddaughter, by leaving the room. He did not want me to remember him as a wounded, dying man.

  *

  I remember a visit to my grandparents’ home when I was about ten, a few years before their deaths. This was a rare event. My mother left my brother, sister, and me with her parents for an hour or so. We were all awkward, as we hardly knew our grandparents by then. Grandmother served a meal of Campbell’s Soup and sandwiches. My brother took charge and made a joke—“What? No chips in the china?” He made it clear this was nicer than home, and Grandmother smiled. We all laughed, relieved.

  I recall how strained the atmosphere was, how my grandfather was in the other room with no explanation (the one time I suspect he was drunk), and how my grandmother’s lips trembled. My brother
, at sixteen, was the parent figure who eased the conversation along.

  When I return in memory to that apartment, the rooms always seem unnaturally dark. I visited that downtown building recently, and it has an eastern exposure—so early-morning sun hits the window and recedes in a tidal wash of yellow light, leaving the rooms in a long twilight of sepia shadows. My memory was correct. On our afternoon visit we entered long shadows, when life seemed about to ebb away from our grandparents.

  I appreciate their quiet heroism as they faced old age. At the end of their lives my grandparents struggled with decades of loss, yet they organized their lives to be independent. Basics of radio, newspapers, library books, and delivered groceries sustained them. My grandmother had regular rounds she made downtown to shop and perhaps to see friends at the lunch counters.

  20. Evelyn (Miller) Bruner, Mary (Dotson) Marchetti, and Frank Bruner Junior in Newton, Kansas, apartment, 1960. Author’s collection.

  My California sister, Mary, visited them in 1961, about a year later, and she brought a television. This was a luxury item and surely a welcome gift for older people who seldom left home. Sister made the two-hour car trip with my brother to see them, and as much as I begged, I was not allowed to go. Brother took the last photograph of the grandparents, my sister, and the television. The Kodak flashbulb washes out half the picture, just like details of my grandparents’ lives are partially lost in the family lore. My grandmother is almost invisible.