Mary Hansdottir is 13 years old when she leaves the Swedish port, boarding the steamer bound for the United States.  She speaks not a word of English but carries a note, translated by the villagers and instructing any and all kind persons to help the girl find her way.  What an age of innocence and hope.  At almost six feet in height, with waist-length brown  hair, she is an unusual sight standing at the railing waving her goodbyes to friends and family.  The voyage itself is a clouded memory of illness and despair until she finally sees the Lady of Liberty in the New York City harbor.  Pushed and shoved, she makes her way through Ellis Island immigration and is directed to the train station by another Swede, a woman from the village who has returned to the United States for some unknown reason.  The train chuffs through the night and another day and then another, wheels hypnotically clicking out the hours until, with a final screech and blasting of steam, they reach the station in Chicago.  Mary sits on a bench for several hours dozing on and off until she is awakened by a gentle voice. 
        “Mary?  Mary Hansdottir?”
        “ Is that you Uncle Nils?  Ja, so tired I am.  I did not recognize you!”
        They board the open wagon and the two horses begin the next incredible part of the journey, almost two hundred miles to Green Bay, Wisconsin.  Arriving at the farm, Mary sleeps what seems like days until she can take her place working with the animals and doing kitchen work with the members of her new family.  Several seasons dissolve as Mary labors on the farm, daily dawn to dusk. 
        At haying time one autumn, she notices a young man who seems to laugh and sing in spite of the hot and dusty labor of the fields.  She inquires.  His name is Emil Johnson and he is saving up enough money to head north to the railhead at Rhinelander.  A new paper mill is about to open and begin hiring.  Three weeks later, he leaves the farm outside of Green Bay and in his buckboard by his side is his young wife, Mary.

        The Johnson boys, Elmer, Nils, and baby Charles, sit in the yard, clad in patched Oshkosh B’Gosh coveralls.  Their feet are bare.  It is summer.  Elmer Johnson wears an Irish scally cap over his shaven head and plunks randomly on a ukulele as he watches over his younger brothers.  He can see his oldest brother on the viaduct near the railroad roundhouse, throwing rocks down on the passing trains. 
            Elmer smells the bread baking in the house and his stomach tells him there will be lunch soon. Meals are taken along with the boarders, three men who stay in the spare room when they come down from Gladstone, the new Soo Line railhead in upper Michigan.  Father is working the ‘dog-watch’ night shift at the mill this week.  He is sleeping, having worked until six AM. 
        Mary gazes at her children through the open window, the cool breeze countering the heat of the wood stove.  She hefts a huge bowl of mashed potatoes and the stew of beef, onions and carrots to the sideboard.  Elmer carries Charlie inside and all three boys wash their hands at the kitchen sink.  They sit at the long, oilcloth-covered table in the kitchen and all clasp their hands and bow their heads. 
        “God is great. God is good.  Let us thank Him for our food. Amen!"

        Another difficult year looms for the men of Rhinelander.  The mill is all but closed down, with only a skeleton crew and a single shift of work.  Emil stares into his coffee.  He has not had a paycheck in almost six months.  Although two have died and three are grown and gone, he still has four young children with hungry eyes pleading for him to provide.  The only source of income is Mary’s ironing and menial housework for Charles Lassig, the dairyman whose cows are still producing milk shipped by train every morning to Milwaukee.  There is no hope for a job.  The whole country is entering a depression, tearing at the fabric of family, driving many of the men to drink what little they have in the speakeasy taverns down in the Hungry Hollow.
        The next morning Mary rises and dresses the children sending them off to school with a meager breakfast of tea and a crust of bread.  She notices the silence in the house and wonders why Emil had not come to bed last night.  She walks down to the Hollow, asking each unsavory character she meets if they have seen Emil Johnson.  Finally a man approaches and tells the quivering woman, “Emil jumped on the Soo Line freight train this morning about 4 AM.   He and a couple of other guys looked to be headed west.”  Mary gravely nods her head, returning home to her children.

        The morning is gray and cold.  The kitchen door quietly opens and clicks shut. After twenty long years, a tired, somber man clad in filthy dungarees has returned.  He pours himself a cup of coffee and sits down at the kitchen table waiting for Mary Johnson to awaken.  Finally she comes into the kitchen, her long, gray hair plaited and piled on top of her head.  She too pours herself a cup of coffee.  No word is said.  No explanation is offered. 
        Three months later she is alone again.  He has only come home to die in his own bed and be buried in the Lutheran cemetery.  Mary kneads the flour and yeast and water, places the mixture in dented black iron pans and turns slowly to the tired, wood-burning stove.  It is another Sunday.   Her grandchildren are coming to visit. 

She is 93 years old and she lies painfully on a bed too small for her unusually tall frame. It is Sunday.  She had baked three loaves of bread the day before, but the effort has been more than her tired body could handle.  The family has gathered, summoned by the doctor’s news that there is not much time left.  A young man follows his brothers into the dimly lit room.  The ivory hand reaches out weakly to touch his own.  “Bobby, you were always so puny.” are her final words.

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Chapter 2
Oscar and Diane

Oscar Jacobson was a handsome lad clad in doughboy puttees of olive drab.  Diane Richards diminutive, tiny and fine had quiet manners perhaps derived from the wealthy ladies for whom she worked in the small Wisconsin mill town.  She was a seamstress and her skill put her in demand.  Diane's heritage was an unclear mixture of English landed-aristocracy and wandering French-Canadian voyageur. Oscar Lund Jacobson was Norwegian to the core without a penny to his name. 
        A rake and a rambling boy with a winning wit and smile, Oscar was a dancer and he and Diane danced until he went off to fight in the Great War and they danced again upon his return.  They danced until they had six kids, two boys and four lovely girls.  They lived in a little house by the Pelican River and grew potatoes and vegetables in the summer and ate the chickens and their eggs and the annual deer (sometimes one more than was legal) and frog legs and fish from the Pelican River.  Winter was a dreary blend of canned food, potatoes, carrots and rutabagas from the basement root cellar.
        In the spring, the girls wandered down old Highway 8 into town to look over the city boys and speculate.  At home, in an onerous annual task, their father drowned the puppies and kittens in the river, tied into gunnysacks to be found blowfly-covered downriver by unsuspecting fishermen. 
        Summers meant a manic swing from the rope tied to the overhanging branch or the death-defying leap from the top of the rusty bridge into the depths of the mighty Pelican.  As the season changed through fall to winter, the river froze so that the girls could skate and the boys could play hockey with the Schneider and Kowalski kids up the road. 
        Oscar did the cooking and Diane the cleaning and all the family combined to do the necessary chores of life, and life seemed carefree.  Diane dreamed idle daydreams of the stories of her rich relatives and the noble Kingsbury estate back in England.  She had a faded daguerreotype of a mansion and gate and we all hoped that, someday, she would be rich and we would too.   But there is no poverty when there is food to eat and a radio to dance to. 

The second war arrives.  The War To End All Wars had only been the beginning it seems.  Oscar heads up to Dawson Creek with his buddy, Slim and, as sourdough cooks, they do their part to build the Al-Can highway.  He is gone for three years, sending his monthly paycheck to Diane and the kids at home.  The family revels in letters and photos from a place so far away.  Uncle Dick goes to the Air Force and Johnny to the Marines in the Pacific and Eunice’s husband, Jim, to the Army and the allied forces in Europe.  Alice and Ken now have four boys.  The birth of number four son, Robert, has kept his father from a dance with death.

        Uncle Dick returns with a Purple Heart.  Johnny comes home with a Bronze Star and Uncle Jim comes home to his wife with nightly nightmares of the prisoner of war camp near Geislingen, Germany.  Diane continues to sew dresses for the fine ladies of town , no longer organizing the knitting of socks and gloves for Our Boys in Europe.  She has saved the ration stamps for sugar to make ginger snaps, the only thing she could cook with any success.  Dorothy and her little sister Katie still do  most of the cooking and kitchen work.
        Diane finds work where she can until Oscar comes home and then she returns to her post as head of the Oneida County Fair Committee for Canned and Baked Goods and director of the St. Augustine Ladies Auxiliary.  Oscar’s hair has radically receded and now has finally disappeared.  His ears and nose have increased to a comical size. His name is now ‘Shine’ to all.   He bears an uncanny resemblance to beloved musical comedian Jimmy Durante who can be heard on the radio singing, “Inkadinkadinkado”. On Sundays Shine takes his wife and family to the Labor Temple Tavern to listen to the Red and Barney duo and he and Diane twirl and stamp out the schottische and the polka.

          The grandchildren come to the farm every Sunday morning. Diane gathers them all together at the Episcopal Church after mass and in two cars, Ken and Alice’s black Chevrolet and Eunice and Jim’s green Buick, all arrive to gather at the table in the little house on the farm on the Pelican River.
        Outdoors, Ken and Jim and Johnny sit under the huge Norway pine tree near the river and smoke and drink from quart bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, tepid from the icebox.  They talk of cars and baseball, hard times and hard bosses and the inscrutability of women, but never is the word ‘war’ a part of the conversation.
         Inside, the kitchen wood stove warms kids and adults alike in more than a single manner.  Now called ‘Grampa Shine’ by everyone, with a twinkle in his eyes Oscar makes crisp fried side pork and buckwheat pancakes with maple syrup just as he had for the construction boys in Canada.  As he stirs and ladles he quips,  “The batter is never bitter!” With a smile he flips the flapjacks skillfully into the air.  For the youngest he makes special patterns on the black cast iron ‘spider’ frying pan and pronounces, “There are spiders on the spider.”  While Diane glowingly watches her grandchildren and everyone laughs and giggles, Grampa tosses the youngest child in the air, puts him on his shoulders and, tapping out a laughing buck and wing with bald head gleaming,  Shine Jacobson dances the dance of life.

        Oscar Jacobson puffs on the Pall Mall as he tugs mightily on the lug nuts of the old white Buick.  “What a time for a flat, dagnabit!”  It is easily 20 below zero and 80 year-old fingers feel the Wisconsin winter through the leather mittens.  Diane peers anxiously out the doorway, dressed in her black wool coat with the little mink collar closed tightly against the wind, its vixen teeth biting tail and then biting another tail again.  She hopes her husband will hurry as they are already late for the midnight mass at St. Augustine’s.  Shine feels a sharp, sudden pain in his left arm and without a sound, pitches forward next to the car. Diane, standing under the porch light, sees and knows and says, “Oh, Shine!”

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        He was eighteen and she was fifteen and he was a senior, the center on the basketball team.  He was the “Swedish giant”, six feet three inches tall and she was a skinny little Norwegian girl, no bigger than a minute.  She lived out ‘in the country’ and came to school from ‘the farm’ on the rickety yellow bus.  Her parents, Oscar and Diane owned a small half-acre piece of land three miles outside of town on the Pelican River.  The vegetable patch and a chicken coop bore small resemblance to a working farm. 
        Ken lived up on Alban Street, a city kid who loved to stop on the way home from school, dropping rocks from the overpass onto the trains below.  He was a ‘zoot suiter’, a ‘kidder’. ‘twenty-three skidoo!’ and ‘marzeydotes and dozeydotes and liddlelambzeedivy!’.  Alice silently glowed from the attentions of an older man.  Next week he would leave for Madison and the state basketball tournaments.  Already there had been one editorial in a local newspaper protesting the unfairness of someone so tall being allowed in the high school tournament.  In  1930 James Naismith’s ‘basketball’ was still in peach-basket infancy.  After every score, the ball was returned to the center of the floor for a ‘jump ball’, an unfair advantage for a team with one so tall.  The locals expected that the Rhinelander Hodags would take it all and capture the State crown for the first time in school history.
        Ken and Alice said goodbye at the bridge near her home.  She said she would be waiting for him and that she hoped he would be careful.  He quipped, “Careful of what, all those wild women in Madison?”  She blushed and he continued.  “Ah don’t worry Hon. There’s no one but you for me!” A week later as promised, she was seated on the top of the rusty iron bridge, the March wind blowing cold but the sun heating her black wool coat.   She saw his Ford flivver from more than a quarter a mile away, up near the Soo Line tracks.  He parked just off the road near the riverbank and as he walked toward her she could see that his head was not held high. 
        “They cheated, Alice.  They held me, one in front and one in back and whichever side was away from the ref, they held me.  We got killed.  We were out of the tournament in the first round.”  She touched his hand and they walked wordlessly to the car and drove aimlessly toward town, past the city dump and over the bridge at Slaughterhouse Creek down to Brown Street where the banner  flapped dolefully in the breeze.  “Welcome Home, Hodag Hoopsters!”

        Christmas Eve is cold and the interior of the little cabin near the river is freezing.  The oil-fired space heater glows an amber-orange keeping a small area near it tolerable if you are fully dressed.  Small piles of snow line the walls where the wind blows through the largest cracks in the log chinking.  Ken is late tonight, but it is to be expected.  He has worked all day at the paper mill as an accountant, but his second job as bookkeeper for the local music store is especially time-consuming during this Christmas season.  Tommy is tucked into his crib, near the blazing stove, but not too near. 
        A small tree has been decorated with handmade stars and has two solitary packages underneath.  She has bought a silk tie at J.C. Penney for her husband and a blue woolen blanket trimmed with satin for the baby.  She hears the door and hears him shake the snow from his coat and stamp his feet on the linoleum.  When he comes into the living area, he has his hands behind his back and she knows he has a surprise gift for her as well.  “Not till the morning, Hon.” He places the tissue-wrapped parcel carefully underneath the tree next to the other packages. 
        In the night, the contents of the chamber pot beneath the bed freeze solid.  The morning dawns crisp and very cold, perhaps 25 below.  Alice rises quietly and stokes the kitchen stove with three split logs, her ragged chenille bathrobe is pulled tightly around her.  Her breath clouds the kitchen air.  Entering the living room, she is greeted by the putrid smell of male cat. It is very strong.  She sees the tracks in the snow near the back wall.  She looks at the packages under the tree, sprayed and fouled beyond repair.  Crying, she takes the soiled paper packets into the kitchen, opens each one gingerly.  Placing it near her face, she grimaces and then tosses them one by one into the now merrily burning wood stove, a silk tie, a pink cotton camisole with white lace, and a blue baby blanket, lost forever.
        Alice steps outside, crying softly.  She puts snow into the percolator, steps back inside and places it on the stove and waits for it to melt before adding some of the precious coffee.  A flitch of bacon and eggs taken from the henhouse will be the Christmas breakfast along with slices of bread from the day before.  She will toast them directly on the iron stove-top. She changes the baby and then wakes her husband from his tired slumber.  “Merry Christmas, Hon!”

             I am escorted outside by my mother.  At the age of three,  I am afraid of everything.  “Fraidy-cat, Fraidy-cat”, is my brothers’ constant teasing chorus.  I begin to cry when I see my three older brothers lined up in the yard.  They are covered from head to toe with tar that they have found near the railroad tracks.  It is the first day of school and they have discovered a smelly barrel of creosote on the afternoon hike home.  Like dogs with dead fish, they cannot resist.  New jeans and flannel shirts are hopelessly ruined, as are the heavy brogan shoes.  All have been bought only a week before and are meant to last the winter, like the ‘pig-shave haircuts’ administered by Ma.  A month’s wages vanish in a time when money is very hard to come by for a family with four growing boys. 
        Pa takes his belt out and gives Tom a single crack on bare buttocks.  Tom begins to cry and so does my father.  Dick winces but sullenly refuses to utter a sound until Gary receives his punishment in turn and then, he too bursts into tears and then the entire family is crying.  It is the last corporal punishment to ever be administered in the Johnson household. 
        Ma borrows gasoline from the neighbors to try to remove the tar from the hair and skin of the now naked boys.  The large washtub is filled with water from the outside pump and lye soap burns as white skin turns red.  The clothes are burned in the barrel out near the pump.  I wait patiently in the basement until my brothers arrive. Gary is still snuffling and red-eyed. Together, we form a ring around the bakelite radio in the middle of the floor.  As on any night after school, at five o’clock and before our call to supper, we listen to the sound of gunshots, barking malamutes and a whirling, windswept blizzard. “Ovaltine presents! Sergeant Preston of the Yukon!!! On, you Huskies!”

        Sunday night at the Hodag Bar on Highway 8.  The Red and Barney Duo are playing “Roll Out the Barrel”.  Ken and Alice sit at the bar while Stuts and Bobby play pinball from a chair pushed up against the machine.  Spinning, reeling, folks polka under yellow smoky lighting and emphatically stamp, joyously rattling the floor on the 2 and 4.  Gary eats licorice and Dick, sucking on a bottle of red pop, asks his father for another dime for the pool table.  Tom, the oldest boy, is talking to a young girl who is still dressed in Sunday morning church clothes.  He has just finished his shift as a bowling pin-setter.  Underneath the accordion and drums, the sound of pins falling at the bowling alley in the connecting room echoes and repeats.
        Ken Johnson chewing on his ever-present cigar, drinks another shell of Rhinelander beer and absently hands his #2 son a coin.   His fedora is slightly askew.  He still wears his loosened necktie, even though it is near midnight.  We think he looks like actor, Jimmy Stewart.  Alice lights yet another Pall Mall saying to the bartender, “Just one more little snit, please”, pointing to her small glass.  “Ken, you have to go to work in the morning…it’s time to get the kids home.  They have school tomorrow.  Are you OK to drive?  Tommy, he could drive.  He has his license now.”  The Johnson Family, seven strong, troop together out into the midnight Wisconsin snow.

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Chapter 4
Johnny and Ferlie

John Jacobson, 44 years old, sits upright in the bed with several pillows propped behind his back.  Bandages cover his hair and eyes. The surgery has failed to remove the entire tumor and has rendered him sightless.  The pain is immeasurable.  A young man enters the dimly lit room with guitar in hand.  In a somewhat fearful voice, the boy stutters, “Hey, Uncle Johnny.   It’s Bobby.  I brought my guitar.”  There is an uncomfortable silence for a moment.  Johnny clears his throat and spits into a paper cup.  

“Bobby, play some of that old ‘Hank’ for me.” 
“Hey! Hey! Good lookin’!  What you got cooking…”

          The family has gathered for the summer reunion at the farm.  Grandmother Diane is in the kitchen directing the set up of the food from the icebox and pantry to the tables set up next to the well pump in the shade of the big Douglas fir tree.  Peering down from its lowest limbs are two boys dressed in bib overalls.  Their hair is white from the summer sun in contrast to darkly tanned skin.  They are chewing pieces of resinous pitch that has leaked from the many knots on the tree trunk. 
            A jade green 1939 Buick Special pulls up the short, rutted driveway with Eunice and Jim plus the Jacobson clan all the way from Seattle, Dick and Dorothy and their two children Janet and Jim.  They  carry potato salad and a bone-in ham wrapped in tin foil.  Jim Pelletier lugs a wet, wooden crate of Rhinelander beer in quart bottles, still cold from the Hodag Bar off-sale store.
            Johnny and Ferlie Jacobson stroll hand-in-hand down from their home up on the hill about 100 yards away.  It is still just a plain, concrete block basement.  The newlyweds have yet to be granted the loan for the lumber and materials to build the first floor structure, but the flat roof is sealed with tar and will do for a domicile until the money is approved at the Merchants State Bank. 
            Recently discharged from the Army, Johnny has resumed his job at the mill as an electrician.  His Bronze Star has lent him some small celebrity in the community.  He has received his commendation for capturing forty Japanese soldiers single-handedly and today's family reunion is really in honor of his return from the Philippines.  Similar celebrations have been held for the return of Eunice’s husband, Jim, from the prison camp in Germany and Dick Jacobson from his post with the Allied forces in England.
            Johnny’s wife, Ferlie, is blonde and buxom and reflects almost stereotypically her Swedish heritage.  The Wisconsin community holds an incredibly rich mixture of ethnicities. Most of the neighbors are Scandinavian and northern and central Europeans, Swedes, Finns, Norwegians, Poles, Bohemians, English, Germans and a scattering of Dutch and French.  Ferlie is physically powerful with a strong Scandinavian presence. She suffers little nonsense from her husband and, consequently, their relationship is sometimes strained.  While she loves her handsome Johnny, he often reflects an uncomfortable amount of the jocularity that is his father, Shine Jacobson.  Johnny, like his father before him, sees his role in life to make everyone around him laugh and smile, often at the expense of what his wife views as personal dignity.
            Ferlie bristles in embarrassment when her husband, always the life of the party, puts beer bottle caps into his eyes and parodies, “Don’t roll those Rhinelander eyes at me!  I can tell you been out on a spree…” Everyone around her laughs, but in a short while, when Johnny places two Pall Malls in his nostrils and begins an off-key rendition of “Smoke, Smoke, Smoke That Cigarette,” Ferlie Jacobson, her cheeks burning, excuses herself and walks slowly back up the hill to the unfinished house.
            Entering through the door opening that protrudes from the ceiling/roof, she descends the wooden stairway to the living area, neatly arranged with second hand furniture.  Flicking away a piece of dust from the wind-up clock on the sideboard, she continues into the small kitchen and peers out the single window on the south side of the structure.  She finishes the morning dishes, drying them on an embroidered towel and stacking them neatly on the temporary cupboard of unfinished two by fours.   In the distance she hears the faint sound of singing.  She turns on the radio to access the news from WOBT, “The Voice of the Northwoods”.  Instead, she is greeted by the raucous stylings of ‘Whoopie John’ Wihlfahrt and “The Beer Barrel Polka”.
            The party continues into the afternoon.  Songs are sung and Shine Jacobson does a little ‘soft shoe’ for the assemblage.  The food disappears from the table under the pine tree.  Plates, glasses and flatware are cleared away and the younger kids begin to doze.  Janet, Katie and Dorothy skip rope, laughing when the gray cotton cord tangles around their legs.  As the sun begins to move and the shadows lengthen, the second crate of beer, renewed by a quick run back down old highway 8, begins to empty.  ‘Dead soldiers’ are lying on their sides with flies drunkenly buzzing at the necks of the bottles.  Suddenly, heads of men, women and children alike turn as a man riding a child-sized bicycle, shoots by them all down the hillside bank and a laughing, Johnny Jacobson plunges fully-clothed into the muddy Pelican River.

1962

            Ferlie Jacobson sits in a brown metal folding chair.  She is surrounded by the quiet green of the Forest Home Cemetery.  Next to her sits her daughter, Diane, sadly and stoically holding the hand of her younger sister Karen, who in turn holds the hand of sister, Heidi.  Curtis stands at attention next to his mother.  In Ferlie’s lap, cuddled up next to a triangle of folded American flag, sleeps the youngest boy, Kermit, who stirs slightly with the sound of the muted trumpet playing ‘Taps’.  Father Kimbrough drones on about ‘ashes to ashes’. Bluejays squawk in nearby pines, a dog barks in the back yard of the Juetten house and a rusty truck filled with rubbish rumbles by on old highway eight, past the bridge at Slaughterhouse Creek, to the City Dump, turning left on the old road that leads down to the Pelican River.

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 Chapter 5
Gertrude and Ernest

            Charles Groves lay uncomfortably in the filthy room.  The laudanum had dulled the pain, but the smells and the moans of the dying men around him brought nightmarish visions of the sights and sounds of fighting at Appomattox.  His leg wound had grown gangrenous and he would be scheduled for amputation as soon as the harried doctors got around to him.  If he died in the meantime, his name would simply be added to the growing list of casualties of the great disaster.  It was neglect that saved him.  No doctors arrived with their saws and knives. Flies, instead, visited the bandaged mess and he realized in his stupor that his wound was alive with larvae.  The doctors returned several days later to find the gangrene eaten away and a conscious but miserable man with a partially healed leg who required only a change of bandage, a crutch and discharge papers.

1865

Captain Groves limped back to Johnson County to try to resume his life on the farm.  His wife, Mary, waited for him with their seven children.  She had given up her university studies and kept the farm functioning in his absence. She had also become the de facto ‘doctor’ in the area, sewing cuts and setting bones and helping with the midwifery in the absence of male doctors gone to war.
            On Charles’ return his wife quickly realized she would be forced to maintain her role as family leader and breadwinner.  Charles Groves was a broken man with a cane and a limp and little zest for life or work.  Becoming more and more distant and unproductive, he sat on the porch in a bentwood chair, dreaming and muttering of the war, while the family worked and waited on his needs.  His incapacity was understood but resented.  Mary Groves, her son Harry, and daughters Ethel, May, Katherine, Jenny, Nelly and Gertrude continued to work the farm outside of Iowa City. 
            The children rose in the dark with their mother to help with the chores and then hurried to the schoolhouse.  In spring and summer and fall they had no time to attend formal classes but were home-schooled in the evenings after the weeding and the watering and the harvesting and the canning while Captain Groves rocked on the porch.  Gertrude was the final Groves to graduate completing her education diploma from Normal School and intending to be a schoolteacher.   Then she met Ernest Hall.

As one of the first graduates from the new Iowa State College in Ames, Ernest Hall methodically began his search for employment and his quest for matrimony.   The first was accomplished through an advertisement in the Des Moines paper in a listing for a school superintendent in the new State of Minnesota.  The second manifested herself as he walked along the muddy boardwalk on Dubuque Street in the state capitol, Iowa City.  Spotting a bonneted figure in a full gingham skirt and bustle, flashing dark eyes and a shy smile, Ernest lifted his hat and issued a broad ‘Good morning!’  The young woman feigned disinterest, but a dainty kerchief embroidered with tiny flowers fell from her sleeve as she hurried away in proper disregard for his attentions.
            Later that week, Ernest attended a box lunch social sponsored by the Presbyterian Assembly.  He was a dapper young man, six feet in height with a shock of thin, whitish blond hair.  There was no mistaking the petite figure demurely seated in the corner of the room.  It took only a moment for Ernest to arrange an introduction and return the handkerchief.  He purchased the box of fried chicken for an exorbitant price but considered the money to be an investment in his future.
            Following a brief courtship, the couple headed north along the Mississippi River by wagon, crossing the new Soo Line railway spur near Minneapolis and underneath telegraph wires that sang like cicadas in the hot August evening.  Gertrude peered with growing desperation at the lessening evidence of civilization and the increasing desolation of the boggy Minnesota woods.  Ernest had acted strangely on the trip, alternately full of excited enthusiasm at the sights and sounds of passing Nature and, just as suddenly, soundly asleep with his head on his chest and the reins slack in their guides.  It was a good thing that the horses seemed to know how to follow the riverside path.   As they arrived in the small farming community of Aitkin, west of Duluth, the newlyweds were led by local dignitaries to a small home and their chests of clothing and wooden boxes of provisions unloaded from the Prairie Schooner.  They were presented a bouquet of prairie flowers and a wooden box of wild rice, ”Collected by the Red Indians from the river and mighty tasty!” said one of the women in the welcoming party.  As they finally waved to the departing locals, Gertrude closed the door of the tiny clapboard house and breathed a sigh of relief tinged with dread.  Although raised on a farm, she had been a city girl for most of her adult life and she suddenly wondered about the wisdom of this move into solemn isolation from her family and friends.

A faint knocking awakened Gertrude before the usual crowing of the rooster of the farm down the lane.   She shrugged on her dressing gown, carefully opened the front door and spied a basket with a weakly crying baby girl inside.  The note said simply, “I am Lolita.  Please take care of me.”  Ernest and Gertrude had been living in Aitkin for six years and, as residents of a very small town, it was noticed by all that they were childless.  Someone had believed that they would make proper parents.  There was never thought of an option.  Lolita would become their first child.  And, as so often seems to happen, less than two years later, Lucille was born, followed four years later by Marguerite. 
            But the addition of children to the household made little change in Gertrude’s unhappy frame of mind, for she had discovered the depth of her husband’s laziness and unambitious nature.  While he daily attended his job with good humor, he did little work.  His secretary entered his office to find him frequently sound asleep in the leather chair.  Ernest missed appointments and was become increasingly inefficient in his job as superintendent.  Moreover, when he came home at the end of the day, his continual napping and unwillingness to perform the simplest household work became an increasingly source of irritation to his harried wife. 
            Gertrude found herself chopping the wood to fend off the winter cold and shoveling the drifted path to the privy and to Ernest’s car.  In summer she cooked the food that she had raised in the garden outside the creaky little house, but little thrived in the short Minnesota growing season and she was becoming deathly sick at the thought of eating any more potatoes.   She received letters from Iowa City and relatives bragged about the height of the corn and the size of the melons they were raising.  They were proud of the victory gardens that they tended and the help sent to the boys in Europe fighting the Great War.  When asked to assist with gardening or other household work, Ernest frequently just yawned and went back to sleep.  In another time, her husband’s malady might be viewed as a narcoleptic sleeping disorder, but to his family and to the citizens of Aitkin, he was just bone-lazy.    Gertrude had experienced many years of demanding laziness from her father, Charles, and she was vexed that this same kind of life had been visited on herself and her three daughters.
            That summer a prairie fire burned for several weeks, covering most of the state of Minnesota with a red haze and gray ash.  At one point, the fire had come so close to their wooden home that Gertrude had dug a deep pit and gathered wet blankets to cover her family.  Her husband, unable to make it home to help, had stayed in town at the school office building, dozing in his chair.
            In a few more days the fires in the countryside finally burned away.  A state that had been covered with snow and ice for seven months was now gray and barren and blackened.  Then, it began to rain.  The black flies and mosquitoes rose like magic from the ash-filled puddles terrorizing her daughters’ arms and legs.  Soon everyone was covered with welts.  Sixteen years had been long enough.  Gertrude gathered up her belongings and her three daughters and headed back to Iowa City.  She had not considered divorce.  Gertrude had no intention of taking a chance on another lazy man.  She simply left.   Letters were exchanged and Ernest even took the train down from Minneapolis to Cedar Rapids for occasional summer visits to his absent family, but Ernest and Gertrude were a couple no longer.
            Times were hard in Iowa City in 1925 and she was unable to find work as a teacher.  Using skills learned as child, Gertrude began to take on work as a seamstress.  She copied fine dresses from pictures in the pulp magazines of her day and there always seemed to be someone who wanted her expertise in spite of the depression that had settled on the country.  Scrimping and saving, like her mother before her, with little help except an occasional postal money order from Ernest, Gertrude managed to provide for her family, all three daughters graduating from the university in Iowa City. 
            She kept the small apartment after her children were gone, but loneliness set in and she quietly moved in with daughter Marguerite and her husband Tim and their growing family.  She cooked and cleaned and baby-sat for the youngest, Margery, walking her to school everyday. 
            One day, Ernest Hall suddenly reappeared, compassionately brought back to their Iowa City home by Marguerite and Tim. They had found Grandfather Hall still in Aitkin, living in a small hut converted from a chicken coop.  He had lost his job with the school district and later his post as a local agricultural agent.  He was old and tired but Gertrude accepted him, in spite of her vows to the contrary.  Her grandchildren looked on curiously at the old man they had never known. They snickered at the thin gray hair and spotted hands but watched in awe as Ernest gulped a raw egg from the shell before every meal.  Then, the children gazed in surprise as their prodigal grandfather, sitting quietly at the dinner table, put his chin to his chest and fell asleep.

The tiny, bent figure had begun her 96 years in a log farmhouse with the Sac Indians living just a mile down the isolated Iowa wagon track.  She had watched the end of the Great War and World War Two and the Korean War and Viet Nam.  She had witnessed the arrival of the steam train in Cedar Rapids and the rise of the automobile and the sight of airplanes in the Iowa sky.  She had seen her own children grown and schooled and her grandchildren and great grandchildren.  She ended her days quizzically watching the televised image of a man in a strange white suit leaping from a platform to the dusty surface of the moon saying, “That’s one small step for a man…one giant leap for mankind.”

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Chapter 6
Lena and Timothy

to be completed

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Chapter 7
Tim and Marguerite

            An old man sits at kitchen table, twirling a cane that rests against a metal brace on his left leg.  He peers through rimless  glasses at the woman seated across from him in her wheelchair. The light is getting dim and it is sundown.  
“Who are you?” he inquires.
“Why, Tim, I’m your wife, Marguerite.”
            Dr. Timothy Fairchild III clenches his jaw several times in an agitated fashion, then calms himself and states ruefully,  
“I was afraid you’d say that.

1925

        Marguerite Hall is fourteen years old and has only recently moved away from her small town life in Aitkin, Minnesota to Iowa City, Iowa.  The university town of 20,000 people seems a metropolis to her.  She does not miss the cold northern weather of Minnesota, but she sorely misses the open spaces of the rural environment.   Most, she pines for the horses.  While Ernest and Gertrude had not had the money to invest in livestock other than chickens, daughters Lolita, Lucille and Marguerite had found easy access to the neighbor’s farm horses. They were welcomed and allowed to ride and gentle the working stock on an almost daily basis.  In return, the girls cleaned the tack, saddle-soaped the leather fittings and curried and groomed the horses to their hearts content.
        Marguerite sees the ice-wagon approaching down Governor Street, drawn by two matched Belgians with hairy feet flying. They are beautiful and she cannot suppress a giggle of tomboy joy.  The driver clucks his charges to a stop and the young girl runs down the steps, reaching up to stroke the necks of the powerful beasts.  The iceman, a young high school boy of about 17 or 18 years of age clad in a leather apron, looks to the front porch where the poster in the window requests one and a half blocks of ice.  Another pasteboard square announces “No Milk Today”. 
        Young Tim Fairchild, center on the City High Little Hawks football squad, draws his ice pick, skillfully separating a half-block and grips and balances the pieces with his tongs.  A hefty lift of one-hundred and fifty pounds to his back and shoulders and then a stagger up the steps, where Marguerite, dutifully ceasing her attention to the horses, holds open the screen door leading to the porch and the galvanized, metal covered icebox.

 “Can I ride along with you today?”
“You have to ask the drover.  I’m just the iceman.”
         Daily that summer afternoon, and the next and the next, Marguerite meets the leaking, creaking ice wagon and rides from Governor Street grinding all the way to Burlington, down side streets, sitting between the boy and the burly old teamster, leaping to the ground to hold the door to each porch and each icebox.  Dark-eyed tom-boy, Marguerite,  glances at the young man sitting next to her who is clueless to his future.

1940

        Marguerite Hall walks through Rogers Park to the El train to board the number 5 north to Cook County hospital.  The neighborhood where her dormitory building sits is in the center of the near south side.  She is apparent in her white nurse’s uniform, but though she stands out from the rest of the citizens, she is protected with respect for her vocation.  Like her two sisters, she has graduated from college in Iowa City as a dietician and is taking her internship in Chicago.  She feels totally secure in an area where most white folks would be trepidatious.  The residents think she is a nurse in her white uniform.  They do not realize that she is a dietician.  And neither the University of Chicago nor the Cook county Hospital, nor her co-workers realize, she is already Mrs. Tim Fairchild.  She has had to hide her marital status to be allowed to live in school housing and to hold her scholarship. 
        Her secret husband, whom she visits as often as she can, is studying dentistry at the University of Iowa, 200 miles west in Iowa City.  On occasional weekends, she returns to spend time with Tim and to tutor him for his anatomy classes.  While he is the most organized person she has ever known, he does not seem to retain the endless and confusing body of terms and terminology that make up the human anatomy. 
        As Marguerite tutors her husband, she thinks of and invents mnemonic games and methods of remembering that fit his mental-set.  In the end, she too becomes expert in the parts of the body.  The long distance love affair is a partnership shared in many ways.

1943

        Captain Tim Fairchild has reported for duty at Fort Riley, Kansas.  The choice as a member of the National Guard is to enlist as a captain or be drafted as a private.  As a dentist, he has found little work in the Army.  The young doctor fills or pulls a tooth now and then for a general or his wife, but this is not what he has been drafted for. Instead, he is exposed to a frightening new alternative for his talents, facio-maxillary reconstruction of wounded soldiers evacuated from the front lines to the base hospital.  The work is onerous with many patients arriving with little face left to reconstruct.  His studies of anatomy stand him in good stead, but the gruesome task totally overwhelms the young dentist and changes his worldview forever.  Sweating through his mask, he peers through rimless glasses and tries to replace the agony and pain he sees before him with visions of his daughter, Gerry Lou and his newborn son, Tim waiting with Marguerite miles away in Iowa City.  The horrors of war mix with the beauty of his family and he lasts through yet another day.

1946

            Dr. Tim Fairchild peers into the putrid mouth of Old Man Yoder and skillfully asks a question that requires no answer.
        “You been using that special brush I gave you last month?  Looks like you could grow potatoes             between your teeth, Ira.  This one will have to come out. It is abscessed”.
            He reaches over into the Clavitron and chooses an extractor.  He has already numbed the tooth.  The job is done quickly, his hands are washed for the thirtieth time that day and Old Man Yoder, mouth full of gauze, is on his way out to his farm south of Iola, Wisconsin.  Tim knows he will receive little pay for this day’s work.  Old Man Yoder’s farm is in receivership and the bank has agreed to let him work off the overdue mortgage by sharecropping his own farm.  But Tim can count on a bushel of corn or some tomatoes or perhaps a side of pork or maybe just some eggs.  He has moved his family to this poor practice in the Wisconsin town, but already feels the economic crunch.  Poor sandy soil, fit only for potato farming and boggy cranberry marshes with a poor seasonal harvest offer little to the members of the community or to his family.  It is time to return to Iowa City.

1952

           Clad in white coveralls with mesh protective netting covering his pith helmet, he loads the white wooden hive supers on his wagon and pulls them carefully to the door to his basement.  Housed in a neat clean area is a centrifuge for extracting honey and all the necessary tools and wood for maintaining the 18 hives under the fruit trees in the back yard.  He is seldom stung by hive bees as they consider him part of  the backyard family, but he feels a comfort and isolation in the garb of the beekeeper.  Using a metal wedge to separate the hive supers, Tim discovers that a particular hive has starved to death from a mite infestation over the winter.   He carefully removes all of the comb and wooden frames and disposes of them in a small wood-burning stove.  A blowtorch is used to char the inside of the super and then each wooden surface is scraped, wire-brushed and then painted to assure no infestation remains.  Tim replaces the cleaned and refurbished hives under the lilacs and goes back into the house to call the company in Davenport for a new swarm to replace the dead one.
        In the early morning, before leaving for the office, he walks out to the lilacs and discovers that an active swarm have already inhabited the vacant hive.  Wild bees have wandered in and quickly squatted in the lowest super.  Tim cautiously backs away and quickly dons his garb to inspect the new swarm.  As he lifts the supers away, he feels the fire of a sting on his ankle and two more on his wrist.   He has forgotten to secure his pants legs and to tuck his sleeves into the gloves.   Worker bees are giving their lives to protect the hive.
        Distracted by his mistake and vulnerability, the super slips from his hands and falls back onto the hive, askew.  It crushes a section of the already constructed waxwork.  On inspection he discovers that he has killed several workers and drones but worst of all, the queen has been destroyed.  In dismay, Tim replaces the super, and goes into the house to remove his clothes and wash his hands.  Upset, he heads down to Dubuque Street and his office above the Beauty Shop.
        At five PM Dr. Fairchild says goodbye to the final patient and he locks his door and heads home, immediately changing into his bee wardrobe to inspect the new hive.  Carefully lifting the super, he discovers that all evidence of death has disappeared and that several cells have been enlarged to accommodate the growth of new queens.  The first queen to mature will emerge from its elegant cradle of wax and sting the other queens to death.  The ruling monarch will mate with the drones and produce the members of the new generation, replacing workers whose wings have been flown into tatters and soldiers who have offered their stingers as buzzing kamikazes. 
        As the summer moves inexorably through its cycle of life and death, the wild hive sings its way to prosperity, filling the supers with honey from the fruit and nut trees on his property and from the mix of clover and sweetgrass covering the backyard.   Oblivious to the injustice and death to a prior queen and other hive members, the swarm soon learns to benignly accept the presence of the man in the white coveralls who frequently stops and stares and marvels at the wonder of Nature and the beautiful single entity that is the hive and its citizens.

1958

            “You do it like this, one foot up and then the other and step and balance, step and balance.  It’s easy!”

            Marguerite has come home early from her job as head dietician at the University dormitory.  It is summer and the dorms are only half filled and student workers are minding the store.  A tom-boy in her youth, she demonstrates to her dark-eyed daughter the technique of walking on the handmade stilts she has constructed of 2X2 fir from the shed that now houses her husband’s beekeeping supplies.  Grandma Gertrude Hall peers out of the window to see what is going on, but remains anonymously in the cool of the back bedroom.  Cicadas buzz in the heat of the Iowa evening and there is incessant humming from the white tiers of beehives under the lilacs.  Suddenly, the young girl is startled into a vision in slow motion as her mother, losing her balance, staggers in reverse toward the wall of the house and the perfectly placed open window.  Marguerite falls backwards and comes to rest, her butt wedged tightly and completely into the window frame.  She is captured, unable to move.  Her daughter at first alarmed and then relieved, bursts into laughter and unsympathetically runs into the house to alert the other family members and get the camera.

1960

        It is dawn and Tim loads the station wagon carefully as he does before each family vacation trip.  All loose articles are wrapped in foam or old carpeting.  Each item is carefully protected from chafing against its neighbor.  He cannot abide the sound of items rattling as the family travels in their summer jaunts together around the U.S.  The family still sleeps as he goes back into the house and carefully washes his hands and applies a hand cream.  He has made arrangements for the care of the garden and his bees.  Today, they will be sailing along I-80 in one of the longest and least interesting stretches of Iowa, through Nebraska and on to the destination, Pikes Peak, Colorado.  The gigantic Oldsmobile is like a land yacht.  The children complain of the boring landscape, but make do with games: license plate numbers poker, colors of automobiles, animals spotted in the fields.  Tim’s daughter, Margery, hangs her head out the window and lets the breeze blow through her hair in spite of dire warnings of calamity from her father. 

        “If a car comes by too close, you’ll be decapitated!” 
       “If you get hit in the face by a bird, it’ll kill you.” 

Suddenly, just as her father has predicted, the young girl feels something strike her face.  She lets out a small cry and pulls her head quickly into the car.  The impact is minor but startling.

         “Something hit me in the face!”
        “See!  You should listen to your father!” Marguerite chides the girl.
        “Pink! I win!” 

          Her older brother, Timothy Marsh Fairchild VI, beams in victory.  A pink ’58 Desoto with Charcoal Gray trim and huge vertical fins passes their slow-moving Oldsmobile.  Margery and Gerry pay him an oatmeal cookie each, his winnings for that round of the game.  The cookies are the only sweet treat allowed by the family.  They have never tasted Coca-Cola and living in a health food conscious family who raise their own food, the children are unaware of hypnotic spell of junk-food.
        Minutes later, Margery complains of a buzzing in her ear, but the family members dismiss the girl’s complaint as nonsense.  They carry on down the road and climb the mountain. The heavily loaded station wagon struggles in the ascent, but manages the summit. 
        Two nights later, in a motel, Margery complains of an earache and the thermometer reveals a fever.  Cool towels and some warm oil soothe the pain and quiet the buzzing sound in her ears.  The fever wanes and the family continue on up to Wyoming and the southern entrance to Yellowstone Park. 
        After the family returns to Iowa City, Margery is struck by another fever, this one of 104 degrees accompanied by a powerful earache that even the warm oil and cool compresses cannot suppress.  <