—Pat Reid [Floyd M. Gurley],
White Thunder God (1947)
The facts are available to all, but the patterns they form depend upon the point of view of the observer. Surely the patterns are as valid as the facts themselves, because they make rational and comprehensible a way of life which has too often been considered erratic and strange. They are merely a diagram of functional processes, a reconstruction of folkways. Though the pattern is made up of facts, it differs from them as an assembled machine differs from a dismantled one.
—Walter Prescott Webb,
The Great Plains (1931)
History is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.
—Robert Penn Warren,
Brother to Dragons (1979)
From gossip the book-writer sucks a goo called information to cement edifices of assertion with
—Hugh Kenner,
Historical Fictions (1990)
In the Quadrangle:
Elmdale
Some places a traveler never really enters no matter the number of times he passes through; Elmdale, on the Cottonwood River near the junction of Middle and Diamond creeks, has ever been such a place for me. I wonder whether my failure has anything to do with the rainy afternoon, some years before I began my rambles in the county, when a speeding car, just outside the village, nearly crashed headlong into me. That’s the nearest I’ve come to getting rubbed out on a two-lane highway, a miss that perhaps set something else in motion: since then, Elmdale for me is a place of erasure, a village that seems to lose its inhabitants every time I arrive, as if they were wraiths that could come and go on whim. I always have the sense that the vaporish citizens are standing behind their old curtains to watch me from narrow openings, waiting until I move on: they are like the jungle Tasaday who for so long hid themselves from the twentieth century.
I have, of course, entered the three or four businesses yet surviving on much dwindled Main Street, where the little buildings are mostly shuttered even to Elmdalians now that the Saffordville Syndrome and floods and diesel power (steam locomotives no longer stop for water) have reduced the population from three hundred to eighty. I’ve been in the small and picturesque stone bank, in the post office, the corner grocery, and the trading post on the highway, but these encounters have been hardly more than a meeting of somnambulists: a bottle of cold pop gets passed over the counter and a few words spoken, but when the sleepers awake, they believe nothing really happened, as they believe dreams don’t “really” happen. At other times the encounters seem removed even as they occur, having in their actual moments the quality of memory, of a thing previously accomplished; they are events I witness from behind a scrim of prior time as if a present moment here is already long gone so that I cannot effectually touch the place any more than I can, say, Kasimir John Fink’s sweating hand as he planted lilacs at his Diamond Creek home. I’ve wondered whether the sensation—if it isn’t the result of nearly having crossed to the other side here—is evidence that a man dies in certain places before he dies in others, dying in pieces and places. Maybe I’ve already, so to speak, gone west in Elmdale, Kansas. Maybe I’m the wraith here, a temporary ghost.
Once, before I was aware of this little Bermuda Triangle of my soul, I almost had a real exchange. Some people I’d met in Cottonwood, a retired couple (not far from permanent wraithdom) who visit their old home in the moribund village only a few weeks each year, invited me over to pick up some memoirs; late for an appointment in Bazaar, I hurried a stop in Elmdale. Their house was old and worn, the yellowed shades drawn, and the June humidity seemed to hang like stalactites and drip darkly from the high, dingy ceilings. I had the notion that everything leaned just a little—joists drooping under me in damp rot, rafters sagging, doorjambs surrealistically akimbo—and yet these two people welcomed me as if to a soirée, and they did what I’d not encountered before in the county: they offered me a drink, a good whiskey. I was new to the place and its ways then, and, not realizing what the invitation meant, I rushed on to Bazaar. We never met again, although we did exchange a couple of letters about Sam Wood (I learned that he wanted to die in Elmdale).
Now, innocence gone, I offer this traveler’s advice: should you ever find yourself in Chase County and have a good whiskey proffered, accept: it is a rare gift. I told this story to my friend, of whom I’ll yet speak, whose mind is as eccentrically contoured as you can find among those of us walking at liberty, and he said, You violated a fundamental rule of the road: you refused hospitality. As you well know, Plains Indians took umbrage at ungraciousness. Your insensitivity put the kibosh on you in Elmdale—forever.
Most probably, such talk is nonsense, yet between Elmdale and me something is different. If you’ve walked through a gallery in a big museum and unexpectedly found yourself alone among unshrouded mummies, with their mirrors and combs and golden toothpicks on display, and then gotten the willies as if ancient souls resented your voyeurism, you have an idea of me in Elmdale. Still, a village that I can never really catch in the throes of existence is an unwonted gift of the road, and its lure is this strangeness, something I’ve chosen not to monkey with by forcing it into actuality. Elmdalians and I will remain sleepers.
At the heart of this dreamtime is an incident I missed by nearly ninety years, yet it’s something I’ve never found distorted and disconnected like my own encounters. Clara Breese, a former schoolteacher, and her husband, owner of a general merchandise in the village, sent their daughter, their only child, off on the Santa Fe to the normal school at Emporia in the autumn of 1903; pretty Julia Breese suffered from incipient tuberculosis, but she was uncommonly bright, an apt pupil, and she did well in her studies even though she wrote her mother to ask God to help me to perceive readily in Arithmetic (some of us understand divine intervention as our only hope with numbers). Julia wrote her parents often, and the letters evoke every now and then her collegiate life in a time of hoop skirts and patent medicines, but mostly they are piled up with gratitude and duty and piety, so much so that, when I read them in the little book entitled Julia, which her mother had published in 1905, I nearly smothered in righteous goodness, and I wished for the girl to complain, or pull a prank, or sass the arithmetic professor. Perhaps Julia knew she was dying—the letters can be interpreted that way—and felt a seventeen-year-old girl’s last days were not proper for anything beyond safe and standard nineteenth-century Christian joy—that is, a gratitude that things are no worse in our dark and transitory vale. She did not finish her first year. Late on Christmas afternoon in 1903, she and her parents arrived in San Antonio with hopes the dry southwest Texas air would cure her. Two weeks before the vernal equinox of 1904 Julia died. Clara Brandley said that Mrs. Breese never recovered from her daughter’s death, and the mother wrote in a notebook: We can only fancy what a welcome we’d give her if she came back.
All of this is by way of background to a couple of letters Clara Breese did not include in her memoir of Julia; I saw them only once, yellowed pages I transcribed, and, perhaps in the doing, as if an incantation, created the core of my Elmdale dreamtime: for me, the village now lies in it far more so than it does in township nineteen-south, range seven-east, immediately southeast of the Santa Fe tracks and U.S. 50. These are parts of two letters Clara sent to Julia in early September:
Business has been reasonably good. I have a nice basket of grapes—wish you had them. I sold John Holmes six bottles of prickly-ash bitters for five dollars—he thinks his stomach is out of fix.
I got up late and have gotten breakfast, washed the dishes, brushed the front porch and dining room, emptied the refridge pan, fixed up the bedroom, slopped the chickens, fed the cat three times, and now can step on the porch without a howl greeting me. Visited an hour or so with Maxine, washed my neck and combed my hair, and gave Edith her instructions for the forenoon’s work. I did that twice since it was to nicely dust the dishes and shelves and counter and rearrange the dishes. I know that where she dusts she doesn’t
rearrange things. I expect her to improve a lot under my charge. I want to know, are the plaids showing much in the windows in common goods? I suppose stripes are past.
Although the Breese store is gone, their house still stands on Main, and, whenever I pass through, Clara is on that porch, pausing in joy of work accomplished and the high expectations for her daughter’s health and studies: Clara slows her tasks to write Julia, hot dust rises from someone passing down Main, and the morning lies closed in by the steady sawing of katydids as if they were cutting off the last days of summer to stack them for the coming cold. Clara wipes the wet cloth over her white throat as women once did, and she runs the cool around and over the back of her neck, and she is ignorant of this: her days of contentment, her times with Julia alive and not a memory, are draining away invisibly like a leaking sinkhole pond until there will be only the small cleft in the bottom, hardly enough, it would seem, to let so much pass through so quickly.
So.
Other things, of course, have happened in Elmdale, and I’ve heard a few stories about them, but I’ve never found anyone like Clara to infuse them. Indians widely believe that the past belongs to everyone, but only the proper storyteller can open it, and archaeologists know that in any dig some shards remain mute, isolated, and disconnected, waiting for other hands to come along and discover their pattern and reassemble them.
For example: in August of 1897, when her daughter was eleven, Clara Breese woke in the night to two explosions and roused her husband, who alerted five other men who heard two more explosions while they were dressing and taking up their guns. The men surrounded the little bank on Main, and, in the deep darkness, fired willy-nilly toward it while the unseen burglars went out the front door with drafts, postage stamps, and seventeen hundred dollars. With the dawn, the citizens could see they had plugged good the buildings on each side of the bank, but it they had hit just once and the thieves not at all.
In August of 1989, soon after I had photographed the fine Cottonwood-stone bank with decorated Ionic pilasters, a robber entered it at half past ten in the morning and slipped a note to a teller, the employees just then entirely women. Neatly typed on the paper—actually an envelope torn in half—was this:
Very quietly
VERY quickly
Fill this bag with money, big bills first!
No alarms or I shoot: your choice
Now MOVE!! Quietly—quickly.
The thief walked out the front door with about twice as much cash as ninety-two years earlier, but by eleven o’clock a new deputy (in hot water for wrecking a police car in a chase the night before) sped over Osage Hill and arrested him a few blocks from the bank and found the money in a hole. The accused man, who fancied himself a writer, denied the robbery, but police later found the other half of the envelope in his car: the return address on it was the Kansas State Penitentiary.
Five miles southwest of Elmdale used to be Clements (drawing upon memory or stories, citizens still apply the name to a mostly empty piece of gravel road): other than a fine, tin-sided building—closed up—and an old Quonset hut, Clements, Kansas, belongs to dreamtime, a result of the Syndrome and one too many fires alternating with floods (if you’re ever looking for a place with a number of villages built in stupid locations, look no farther than Chase County: such happens when whites refuse either to heed the lay and insistence of the land or to listen to Indians). About the time of the last Elmdale holdup and fifty-eight years after burglars robbed the Clements post office of twenty-nine cents, police broke into the Quonset hut and arrested three men brewing up methamphetamine, a drug called crank that they planned to sell in Topeka.
But Clements today usually makes the news because of the splendid twin-arch, camel-back stone bridge over the Cottonwood a half mile out of what was town; it’s a somewhat secluded span often considered the loveliest bridge in the state and, after the courthouse, the structure most cherished by countians; yet, despite its being on the National Register, a battle over its survival is imminent: a man told me, The dang highway boys got that triple-archer over to Bazaar, but they’re going to play whaley getting this one. If you thought they was an uproar over them courthouse cedars, watch what happens here. Not far from the bridge, but five years before it was built in 1886, a terrific March hailstorm and high water hit Ed Holmes’ low-lying log cabin, and silt covered several deep piles of hail; that Fourth of July he and neighbors unearthed the still frozen hail to make rare cold lemonades and thunderstone ice cream. For people hunting measures of American progress, this happened not far from where the crank was concocted.
Between Clements and Elmdale is Clover Cliff Ranch, another National Register site, its 1883 stone house and big barn and outbuildings once nearly the equal to Stephen Jones’ Spring Hill; now the barn is gone, the land broken up and sold off, and travelers along U.S. 50 see only the handsome two-story rock house against the side of the low bluff. It was otherwise in 1912 when Vachel Lindsay, thirty-three years old, passed through the county on his long walk from his home in Illinois to New Mexico, earning his way by trading poems he carried in an oilcloth rucksack. In a time when the likes of countian Adam Ice put up skull-and-crossbones signs near Clements as warnings to hoboes, Lindsay came down the Cottonwood Valley one June afternoon as he followed the highway and Santa Fe tracks, which here for some miles exactly parallel each other like lines strung between telegraph poles. He found his back labor easier to trade for a meal than his poetic ones, especially during alfalfa harvest. I believe I understand his encounter at Clover Cliff, which he misnames; here is a picture from his book Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty:
Much of the country east of Emporia is hilly and well-wooded and hedged like Missouri. But now I am getting into the range region. Yesterday, after several miles of treeless land that had never known the plough, I said to myself: “Now I am really West.” And my impression was reinforced when I reached a grand baronial establishment called “Clover Hill Ranch.” It was flanked by the houses of the retainers. In the foreground and a little to the side was the great stone barn for mules and horses. Back on the little hill, properly introduced by ceremonious trees, was the ranch house itself. And before it was my lord on his ranching charger. The aforesaid lord created quite an atmosphere of lordliness as he refused work in the alfalfa harvest to a battered stranger who bowed too low and begged too hard, perhaps. On the porch was my lady, feeding bread and honey to the beautiful young prince of the place.
Lindsay’s long walk through Kansas, nevertheless, created in him an extravagant idealism apparent in his book with its proclamations (so like Walt Whitman’s, when, thirty-three years earlier, he rode over the tracks Lindsay walked), euphoric assertions about how the villages of middle America will soon abound with craftsmen, artists, philosophers, great-hearted statesmen. Nineteen years after his tour, Lindsay died from drinking Lysol.
The quadrangle: in the way that is almost a pattern here, a watercourse cuts the quad nearly centrally. The Cottonwood flows in from the southwest to turn eastward around the big foot of Osage Hill, a nearly level-topped ridge that goes beyond hillness in its massive breadth and length. It is a rampart that more than any other thing marks off the eastern part of the county from the western half, the occidental side of Chase showing fewer people and a less troublous past, an area that appears to me less under the domination of human history; the white past, especially, seems to lie not so densely here. Except for the small river valley, the topography is more even, less tumultuous, having the quiet of deep seawater rather than the noise of a steeper coast that is eastern Chase, where the continuous re-forming of the hills through erosion is more evident. And so it is that, in this county anyway, history assumes the aspect of the land it arises from and occurs upon.
As the Cottonwood passes through the quad, it so twists upon itself that it flows toward every point of the compass, a half-dozen times turning completely around as if changing its mind about yielding its waters to the Atlantic. One afternoon,
below the high south-side limestone bluffs, I paddled between the deeply cut banks of the Cottonwood, and I thought my compass had gone awry, so quickly did the needle swivel. Yet the railroad and federal highway that follow the river, never more than a mile from it here, strike nearly perfect and unyielding forty-five degree angles to true north, and state road 150, a highway built in the Franklin Roosevelt years largely with shovels and wheelbarrows to give more men work for a longer time, runs precisely east and west. Passage across the quad, then, is either by angles or arcs: people waste not an inch of time, but the laggard river is a traveler that finds arrival nothing more than the consequence of its reluctant flux.
If ever there was a homebody of a river, it’s the Cottonwood: even in flood it heads not so much downstream as out laterally. Most of the time it would hardly move at all if not for the overriding crustal plate that has lifted western Kansas some three thousand feet higher than Chase County; in this way, the sluggish and relentless slipping and de-forming of the great crusts are the forces that propel the Cottonwood out of the county, and what is happening a few miles under the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains helps determine the shape of, say, Osage Hill, which, in its turn, helps determine what has happened on it. So the citizens of Elmdale are the children of many parents, and tectonics is one of them: raise the Rocky roof-beam higher, raise it faster, and Elmdale, Kansas, is a different town, maybe never a town at all.
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