The Turtle's Beating Heart

by Low, Denise;

  The photograph shows ornate wallpaper covering the walls, a sumac leaf pattern in sage green. No doubt Grandfather had wallpapered the simple apartment, as that was one of his skills. It created some beauty. Against that flat simulation of a forest, their lives continued.

  Each day the sun still strikes the glass windows of their home, the apartment where once my grandparents rose, washed, dressed, and prepared for the day. Each day part of me is with them behind the glass as sun renews its light. I am an elder now, almost as old as my grandparents were in that apartment. I have traveled the four directions of life: birth, youth, middle age, and old age. Now I stand with my grandfather and grandmother in the fourth and last quarter.

  Buildings have their own animus, and when they burn down, people mourn. The time my grandparents lived in that apartment, fifty years ago, makes the building a sacred site for me. The eastern windows are visible from the main street of Newton. I wish I could talk with my grandparents now and express appreciation for their gifts of life, courage, ethics, and hope.

  *

  My grandfather walks toward me on the street in the 1950s. He dresses like anyone else on the Great Plains—trousers, plaid shirt, and sturdy leather shoes. His black hair is slicked back, trimmed a bit long and still full. His eyes look to the side as he minds his own business. Eye contact is much more purposeful in this region, and direct gaze is a conversation—either a greeting or a challenge. He moves unsurely on older bones and joints, but the sidewalk is familiar, and he has his routines.

  His son visits weekly, but the grandchildren are busy elsewhere. His surviving daughter is immersed in her own family in another town. His wife and he are mostly alone, even though siblings live a few miles away. This is how I see Grandfather, in pain, and not just physical. His family is scattered. The Delaware lineage has broken apart.

  As an adult, my mother became involved with her husband’s wealthier, patriarchal family. She had a child, several difficult miscarriages, and then three more children. She did not visit her grandparents Charlotte and Frank Senior, who lived just a few miles away. After a move to Emporia, a short train ride east on the train, she seldom even saw her mother and father. Her past life, and all her Native relatives, receded as she assumed the role of a middle-class matron.

  After fifty years I can speculate about the interplay of isolation, social displacement, and alcoholism in the life of my grandfather. He had been obstreperous as a boy, but then he had channeled energy into athletics. He had wandered among different jobs, but then he had settled into employment with the railroad until he was injured. He lost two children, a terrible blow, but he succeeded in raising the two who survived. His marriage continued, perhaps because his wife simply endured, but even after the years of disgrace, he and his wife enjoyed each other’s company. I want to celebrate the successes he had and balance them with the difficulties. I want to see his face among the people I greet as I walk small town main streets in Kansas. My grandfather does not fit into the simple category of “drunk.” Throughout my life I never saw Grandfather drunk, so he had the ability to remain sober. I felt the aftermath of one of his sprees, and I do not doubt alcohol was a problem. Probably his drinking was the reason why my mother avoided family visits, especially after the last family blowup. It was, however, a surface symptom of deeper issues.

  Recent research details how head injuries make profound changes in people’s behaviors. During Grandfather’s lifetime this information was not available. Intermingling of genuine injury and alcohol abuse are impossible to tease apart so many years later, but the term self-medication adds another perspective. Stereotypes of Native people as alcoholics are still pervasive, so even Grandfather’s own family members looked no further for explanation of his problems.

  Historic trauma and transgenerational trauma are terms that describe continuing wounds of Native people’s response to bias. This is another way to contextualize Grandfather’s life. A checklist of historic trauma symptoms from the Aboriginal Healing Foundation—“isolation and withdrawal; disruption in intimate relationships; repeated failures of self-protection”—outlines his biography.

  My mother became isolated, like her parents before her. The habit of broken families continued, in a pattern of unconscious behaviors. This is a continuing internalized diaspora.

  If I were to meet my grandfather as he passes me on the sidewalk of a prairie town, where the same buildings stand unchanged after generations, I would see a story of sorrow. It is evening. He ends his shift as a clerk in the liquor store and climbs stairs to a modest abode. Dinner awaits him, radio, and other small comforts, including whiskey. During these last days of his life Grandmother sent birthday cards in the mail, each with a dollar bill. Grandfather did not reach out.

  *

  During the funeral of my Delaware Indian grandfather, I was shocked silent at the sight of the large wooden casket. I was thirteen and frightened of death. A handful of people sat scattered about the pews, but they gazed only at the priest as he chanted a psalm.

  Lying at the front of the chapel, Grandfather was the center of attention yet also removed—present and absent at once, one of his usual tricks. The Episcopal priest ignored the dead man as he eulogized a lost penitent traveling to heaven, no one I recognized. The set order of the “Burial of the Dead” from the Book of Common Prayer was foreign to me.

  I turned my attention to Grandfather’s monumental oaken coffin. In the church he lay within the wooden centerpiece, with no flowers, so its grain shone uncovered. Auburn plumes swirled the length of it. I thought I saw a meandering flight of black birds tracing the smooth corners, lingering in the arabesques of frozen tree growth, but they disappeared. The rush of their wings was almost audible, like his words.

  Grandfather spoke to me through my memories. He described downtown streets, his deceased baby daughters, cancer’s unfolding, and the patience of wood as its patterns create double curves. I barely heard the priest complete the psalm: “For I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner, as all my fathers were. O spare me a little, that I may recover my strength, before I go hence.”

  Responders’ amens died away. The high register of the organ wheezed a recessional. All of us stood and waited for my grandmother to stagger down the center aisle with my uncle holding her arm. She was already halfway to the next world, and a few months later she would die and descend into the earth to lie by her husband’s side.

  In the church foyer I met one of his brothers—a dark, white-haired man, Uncle Harry, distracted, who barely nodded. My mother held my arm and whispered to keep quiet around this stranger. This is how I understood she was ashamed of her own family, including me, as she pushed me behind her. I should remain silent, muffle my conversation, and stay within my own invisible box, like my grandfather.

  Later in the car my mother said, “Dad seldom spoke, but people listened when he did.” She said nothing else, and I wondered if this was meant to be a compliment or not. Then she was unusually silent. On this one day she ceased her incessant talk. She did not think to explain death to my sister or me. This silence, at an important moment, was another aspect of her removal from emotional situations.

  My sister Jane remembers this as her first funeral—“so painful,” she wrote me in a letter recently, and “so much unspoken.” She was sixteen. In my memory an odd amnesia occurs. I remember the casket, the uncle, Mother’s tense silence—and not my sister’s presence. The internalization of the isolation was so complete that I erased memory of my sister-ally. We did not discuss the experience with each other until recently.

  Weeks after the funeral, I became afraid of dying in my sleep. If I did not pay attention, I also would become paralyzed, taken away from home, and put within a wooden container. Grandfather, one of the few adults who listened to me, was imprisoned underground as eternal punishment. I might be laid alongside him forever, and no one would notice our calls for help.

  Now I understand how paralyzed he had been most of his life as he fol
lowed an unplotted course between a time when “Indian” wars were barely concluded and another time when Native people had recognized legal rights. His family missed the Delaware migration to Oklahoma by a generation, yet they identified as Native. They were like my grandchildren through marriage, who are not able to enroll as tribal members because of their mixed heritage. Their enrolled Menominee and Lakota parents raise them, so their ethnic identity is clear, yet politically they are not Native. This limbo is the fate of many Native people in the United States.

  I hope Grandfather is not lost in a distant heaven beyond the sun but rather nearby, settled deeply in rich bottomlands mud of the Cottonwood River, in sight of each full moon and each day’s sun. Turtles join him in the winter to share a living dormancy. In spring sun thaws the ice, and everything comes back to life. In this world his words continue to mingle with the morning mists. As they resound, they keep heaven and earth in motion.

  Part 2

  Cutting Ties

  Dorothy Bruner Dotson (1915–2002)

  Eva (later known as Evelyn) Bruner returned to her parents’ house in Kansas City for delivery of her first baby. On October 27, 1915, the thirteen-pound daughter, Dorothy Lea Bruner, drew her first breath. The new baby was almost bald. Grandmother tied bows on her fuzz-covered pate to prettify the little girl. Finally, black wavy hair with chestnut highlights grew in, neither her mother’s blonde curls nor her father’s straight ebony hair, but instead a cross-blend. My mother resembled neither of her parents. All her life she went her own way.

  At first many family members surrounded the little girl. Maternal grandparents Edmond and Catherine (Tomlinson) Miller lived a few blocks west of the Delaware and Wyandot neighborhoods. Edmond was both Irish and German, from Illinois by way of Ottawa, Kansas. Mary Catherine, or “Cap,” was of Irish descent, from Vermillion County, Illinois. She earned the nickname Cap, short for Captain, because she ruled her household with military order. She also had prophetic dreams, another reason to obey her. When she dreamed her husband could be killed in a train wreck, the next day he quit his railroad job. Indeed, according to the family legend, his train derailed. This intuitive sixth sense is another family inheritance. My mother always knew what I was hiding from her since she had extra awareness of all people around her. She craved time alone to separate her own feelings from those of others. Only when she was elderly did she attend church, at the early morning services, when her hypervigilance would be less taxing. I suspect this sensitive nature came from her Grandmother Miller.

  21. Frank Bruner Junior with his firstborn child, Dorothy Lea Bruner, 1915–16. Author’s collection. Gift of Gail Bruner Murrow.

  Cap Miller was a lifelong Presbyterian. Not much else is known about her, not even her parents’ names. Her youngest daughter, Frances, had a chronic lung condition, probably cystic fibrosis. Care of this invalid cast a pall over the Miller household. The birth of a healthy grandchild must have been a joyous distraction.

  My mother told me how important a daughter’s birth had been to her father’s family, the Bruners. Mother had no Delaware girl cousins or even aunts. While other families celebrated the birth of sons, matrilocal Delaware people depended on the female line. Grandmother Charlotte was her closest Delaware female relative, and in the future, they spent a lot of time together. Birth of a girl was welcomed.

  So, Dorothy began life as the center of attention within the extended family. Grandparents, uncles, cousins, and her parents doted on her. Her mother and father posed with the baby in individual portraits. In one photograph Frank seems especially delighted with his firstborn child, as he looks into her eyes.

  The new daughter was willful, smart, energetic, and finicky. She must have been a fussy child. She had an acute sense of smell, so bad odors bothered her. Sounds also could bother her. She heard distant tones acutely, and blaring noises were painful. Her high-strung nature must have kept everyone on edge. She was an only child for eight years, and for the rest of her life she expected to be the focal point of any conversation. She had little curiosity about her support cast but, rather, saw herself as the star performer.

  She had only superficial interest in her family and knew little about her origins. She knew nothing about the hybrid Kansas City community where she was born. This patchwork of communities resembled eastern Oklahoma, another former Indian Territory, as Delaware tribal member Lynette Perry describes: “Delaware, Cherokee, white, Osage, it didn’t much matter to us. We pretty much accepted our neighbors as folks, even did a lot of intermarrying.” I never heard any hint that Frank Bruner and Eva Miller’s marriage in Kansas City caused any clash. In contrast, across the river in Kansas City, Missouri, the tradition of slavery lingered. Miscegenation laws were in force until the 1960s. As a result, many mixed-race people chose to live in Kansas City, Kansas, where tribal communities persisted.

  The Kansas River flows through my mother’s birth town and joins with the Missouri River, so bottomlands animals populate the terrain. In early summer bullfrogs bellow from the shallows, and blue herons wade the creeks. Many varieties of turtles—snapping, softshell, painted, slider, mud—navigate the muddy banks, and some of them must have found their way into the Bruner cookpot. The legs, neck, and tail are rich stewing meat. Subsistence fishing and gardening can provide basics of a family’s sustenance but no cash income.

  Soon the new father looked for work. For years he had no permanent position. A city directory lists him as a stenographer before his marriage, so he had office skills, but he did not continue with office work. For a brief spell he owned a repair garage, but that failed. Perhaps alcohol was a factor in his instability, but my mother never indicated it was a problem when she was a child. She remembered her father as a practical-minded craftsman who took pride in a job well done. At this distance in time the simplest answer to his employment trouble is his ethnicity. My Native husband encounters prejudice regularly. In western Kansas, not far from Grandfather’s home, he recently went into a truck stop to pay for gas and was treated badly—glares and snide comments. This was a not-so-subtle twenty-first-century lesson. If Grandfather did not act subserviently, he no doubt experienced consequences. Underemployment is a pernicious aspect of racism.

  As they moved around, my grandmother set up housekeeping in one rooming house after another. After a few years, further difficulties occurred when her second pregnancy ended tragically with the death of one twin and with the second twin terminally ill. This was a hard time, as her husband sought work in California, Kansas City, the Great Plains, and back in Kansas City. They finally settled in Newton, Kansas, not far from Burns. Perhaps family connections or old neighbors helped him find employment. He became a brakeman working in the rail yards for the Santa Fe railroad, good pay for the region. His job was protected by unions.

  In Newton, as Dorothy started school, she enjoyed the most prosperous part of her parents’ lives. Railroading was a respected job, so the family had an above-average place in the stratified social scale of the small town. They could afford an arts and crafts style house in a middle-class neighborhood. As she grew up, my mother enjoyed a circle of close girlfriends. This was the best time of her life, she told me later, before adult responsibilities. She attended the Episcopalian church and loved the social activities. She told me several times that she liked Episcopalians because the Methodists could not dance. By the age of twelve she had met my father and flirted with him. I never saw my mother dance, but she commented on what a skilled dancer my father was during their teen years. His uncle owned a jazz club in Wichita, where they and their friends were welcome. This successful teenage interlude is what Mother remembered about her childhood, not the family difficulties after high school.

  At home her mother cooked, sewed, and gardened. Her mother served rich meals, when a milk cow was part of the household economy. Hand-churned butter found its way into desserts, sauces, and table spreads. She relished food all her long life.

  At sixteen Mother attended a summer camp, Mar
y-Dell Camp, in nearby Abilene, Kansas. From there she wrote home in July 1931, “I’m coming along keen in rifling.” She passed the pro-marksman award and was about to start her next higher rating. No doubt her father had given her early shooting lessons. Perhaps Grandmother Charlotte shared her derringer. My mother excelled at croquet and rowing, but swimming was a challenge. She wanted the highest rating in every activity, at camp or on the lake. “I’m getting as brown as an Indian,” she wrote, in an ironic reference to her dark complexion. She described the food, her friends, and sharing a cabin with seven girls. “I’m having the swellest time I’ve ever had,” she concluded. Some of the camp counselors were young college women, and she clearly admired them. She could see that college was the next benchmark. She already loved school and competed for the highest grades.

  22. Dorothy (Bruner) Dotson, age sixteen. Photograph taken in Newton, Kansas, 1931. Author’s collection.

  She addressed her parents and little brother in this letter; sent greetings to an elderly great-aunt, Hanna Bair; and ended affectionately, “Lots of love, Dorothy.” I never heard her say “I love you” or anything intimate during my life, but at that time this was a casual sign-off. In these letters she seems confident and happy.

  My aunt sent these letters to me after Mother died, or I would never have known about this camp experience. A gap occurs between these letters and high school graduation. I remember only my mother’s stories of poverty during the Depression, not the extravagance of a summer camp. Mother told me that her parents could not afford to send her to college, so she qualified for a scholarship. When the stipend ran out, as the Depression deepened, she had to quit college to work in a doctor’s office. She prided herself on this work and studied Latin medical terms to improve her performance.