“And I believe in the Holy Ghost, The Lord, and Giver of Life, who proceedeth from the Father and the Son; Who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified; who spake by the Prophets: And I believe in one Catholic and Apostolic Church: I acknowledge one Baptism for the remission of sins: And I look for the Resurrection of the dead: And the Life of the World to Come. Amen.” –The Nicene Creed The Book of Common Prayer
I have always been the same one you see
before you now. I used to sit in my father’s
barber shop after school, waiting to be walked
three blocks home to dinner.
My father does not eat things he must touch;
he believes tiny clippings from the heads of
hundreds of farmers linger in the long life line,
the knuckles, the nails, the cracks of his
hard, fast hands. I flinch when he moves near me,
even though I know he will beat me for betraying
that fear in public. There are involuntary things
about myself that I would change, if I could.
It is May of 1966, and Vern Steinmaus is getting
an uptown shave. My father flicks a straight razor
over a stainless basin, its tortoise handle glossy
as the wet blade. His customer is feeling grand
today. He buys the whole box of twenty-five cent cigars
propped open on the walnut back bar. Svede Olson,
has more than once mistaken me, with my pixie haircut,
my faded dungarees, for a boy in the barber shop,
but he ignores me. “Save your money, Vern,” he chides,
waving off the proffered smoke. “You’ll be buyin ’nuther
gas truck for this new one: Steinmaus and Sons. Huh.”
The barbershop smells of fuel oil from the open stove,
the blue flavor of cigar smoke, curried scents
of Wild Root, Brylcream, and Talc, grease and manure
from boots and coats. My father takes a bottle of
Canadian Club from behind the tin-lined wet towel bin,
pours it into shot glasses, and passes them around.
“Steinmaus and Sons,” Vern sighs, and Svede and my
father, spitefully drink it down.
My mother’s parents came from Germany
and have visited there once, on their twenty-fifth
wedding anniversary. I know this because we have
a walnut cuckoo clock, souvenir of that journey.
Their children speak only English, and aren’t sure
where the ancestor’s village is. On St. Patrick’s Day,
my mother dresses me in green for school. I ask
if I am Irish. “Not enough so’s it’ll hurt you,” she says.
“Have zis vit tle penny,” my Grandfather says
as he flicks me a dime. I show him my bank
when he visits, and he fills it up. My father calls them
“The Arends folks” when we are at home, “the Krauts”
in the barber shop. “The Krauts,” he says, “belief
zey haf no ac cents.” This always makes him laugh.
When my grandfather’s limp gets worse, my mother’s parents
argue about it in front of the grandchildren. The limb
is bad; it must be removed, but my grandfather refuses.
“Ich glaube Du bist verruckt,” Grandma Arends
shouts from the kitchen. The screen door bangs.
Grandpa pours more cream into his coffee, until
the saucer is full. “Vich ohf yu vould haf some tea?”
he asks us blandly, and we eagerly drink from his plate,
like kittens nuzzling stones in a gunny sack.
We were not allowed near the river. My father said
you could follow it all the way to Mexico, though.
I dreamed often of finding a small boat and
letting the current carry me to where people spoke
Spanish and took long naps in the afternoons.
I was German and Danish, I knew, but never
was convinced that other countries really existed.
In 1969, Neil Armstrong walked on a moon
that seemed closer to me than Europe ever could.
Back then the railroads went somewhere.
At night, we spied Hobos’ fires beside the tracks.
In the mornings, beggars came to our kitchen door.
Mother gave them sandwiches and kept us at breakfast
until the Rock Island whistle faded toward Fort Dodge.
My friends and I walked the tracks every summer day,
finding steel bearings like spherical quarters, and twice
as negotiable in childhood’s provincial economy. We left
pennies and nickels on the gleaming rails, finding
oblong smears of precious metals after the freighters passed.
Our parents said a single dime could derail the longest train,
but we set soda bottles to explode, squashed wild berries
into jams, even watched from the ditch as a cattle catcher
flung Steve Dirksen’s new Stingray bike like a bull would
toss a rodeo clown from its horns.
We yearned to migrate with the cattle cars, stared into the faces
at each window of the evening passenger trains, even envied the
railroad workers who hand-pumped past, checking for uneven track.
And when I lay me down to sleep each night,
I dreamed of lying on the ties. I wondered
how my metallic-tasting cares and fears would stain the rails.
It was sick, my Sunday school teacher told us, to think like that.
Tommy Rhoades had a real live German Army helmet
that his Grandpa Frank brought home from the war,
its chin strap cut by government issue utility knife—
to spare the victor’s touching his victim’s warm jugular.
We played “Big One” in the woods behind his house,
wielding toy rifles and potato hand grenades.
The helmet, and the person who wore it were always the enemy:
“Helmut War Mutt,” stalked in a vicious game of hide and seek.
In our confused political re-enactment, we shouted “Sieg Heil”
and “Heil Hitler” while we killed the helmeted child, bending
rubber bayonets against his skin until it bruised.
We argued every time over who got to play the dirty Nazi.
Although her whole life was given to rural labors,
My Grandma Arends found no smallest creature expendable.
In her big farm kitchen, winter lambs and twin goats,
runt piglets, and pecked hens curled atop blankets
and old coats in cardboard sties. Bleating bottle-fed appreciation,
pecking an enameled mixing bowl filled with feed, they survived
like family members, until they were sturdy enough to
return to their rightful fold. But each remained
one of the few feeders on the lot with names.
She cooked every harvest meal for forty farm hands,
served outside under a spreading willow tree.
My grandfather and uncle sat inside at the table,
and after lunch, they gulped their tea
while the workers played mumbly-peg, sticking
pen knives through the sun-burned grass.
I thought my grandmother gave up on me
when I was ten and refused to reach under
the angry hens to gather eggs at dawn.
They squawked and pecked and fought
with the wings of Zeus. There were so many things
my grandmother could do. Sunday mornings, she bid me choose
a duck, a goose, even a lamb alive in the flock at breakfast
to eat for dinner. She gathered strayed cattle, birthed calves,
loaded pigs for market, castrated boars and bulls,
and plowed a straight furrow in the dark. When I was grown,
I was fated to chastise myself for not being brave
enough to learn all that she could demonstrate.
In seventh grade we learned American history from Mr.
Hubbard, the football coach; he taught to win. After Columbus,
and the Indian chief Inkapaduta—who had a double set of teeth,
and Washington and the Whigs, and Lincoln and Tad
who were pulled from a top hat in a log cabin,
and the Louisiana Purchase, and the Rough Riders,
and the Monroe Doctrine, came lessons almost tangible:
history my parents could remember first-hand.
My father told me how his mother rushed
out into the yard in an apron to say it was VJ Day.
Twirling back into her kitchen with her large,
gingham pinafore spread, it was the first time
he saw Thelma dance. And so it crystallized,
an igneous layer in memory.
My uncle showed me the great glass batteries in the
farmhouse basement, a certificate that said my grandfather
was permitted to buy rubber tires for his tractors during the war,
a gasoline ration ticket. My aunt recalled saving up tin cans and
toothpaste tubes for the war effort, and my mother played 78s:
“Over There,” “White Christmas,” and “I’ll be Seeing You.”
One afternoon in school we saw two films:—first, scratched, flickering
images of pleading people crammed into train cars, starvation victims
who staggered and wobbled like foals, skeletons thrown like
kindling into a pit. And there were tanks passing quickly and evenly
spaced like ducks in a shooting gallery, goose-stepping soldiers,
and a man with thin hair and a brief mustache underlining his nose.
The sonorous voice of a narrator boomed too-loud
from the speaker on the projector, explaining that this was Nazi
Germany’s systematic extermination of the Jews.
The second movie was about an intense-eyed, very grave girl
named Anne Frank who hid in an attic with her family and
wrote a diary that made our own private confessions trite.
I thought of myself, reading Nancy Drew in the closet
after my father closed the door of my room each night.
I knew this couldn’t be true. No one had ever mentioned it to me.
How could the torture of millions have been kept a secret? There
was a cuckoo clock from the Black Forest in my own living room.
My grandparents had cursed in German on the other side of their
kitchen door. How could this have happened
in my own parents’ lifetimes, and they did nothing to stop it?
My mother was casual in her response; she didn’t realize I’d
never heard about it. It was a long time ago, in Nazi Germany, and
it would never happen again, she said. My Grandpa Arends was
three years dead. Grandma Arends’ dementia had taken her back
through childhood into restraints at a nursing home. I was not a
German anymore.
For thirty hours my mother labored to bring her breached first child
into a world of wholesome prosperity where the Mousketeers spelled
the end of every afternoon, and Elvis Presley or James Dean postured
the public standard for bad boys. Jaundiced and just over three pounds,
I came with damaged knees and hips into Webster County, Iowa, August 1959,
into a squeaky culture that loved to pretend otherwise.
“Mack the Knife” was the number one song on the charts that night.
My father filled out my birth certificate, his hands red and blistered
by hours of winding his handkerchief into knots. He rejected the christening
they’d chosen, saving it, perhaps, for a more viable child. Raileen, my
given name, came from his grandparents’ names and was invented to
give originality and identity to a tiny gravestone.
My mother hemorrhaged for days following my birth, unconscious
while continuous transfusions carried her through surgeries and
anxious vigils. Thelma Peterson refused this grandchild when the hospital
sent her, motherless, home. “A bad seed, she’s nearly killed our daughter-
in-law at nineteen, and now she’ll die, leaving an evil ghost in our house.”
Alberta Arends left her daughter to survive and carried an early lamb home
to her kitchen. Awakening my infant incarnation for bottle-feedings night and day,
her stubborn sense of duty passed for unconditional love in my stoic family.
My mother’s mother nourishing one more precarious offspring into life.
While I, tiny and gnarled, lay in a wicker bassinet beside her oven door,
filling immature lungs with heavy air: the steam of dumplings, apple pies,
yeasty loaves, the sodden smell of duck drippings and basted hams. It was
months before my mother could return to Grandmother’s laden table. By then I slept
to strains from German lullabies and, wearing plaster casts on both my misshapen legs,
studied from my crib a heavy-footed nurse-maid with long gray braids.
After my parents divorced, I wandered virtual and emotional terrain in search of
home, a nomadic tinker circling the Sahara of angst and adolescence.
Each semester’s registration cards in college declared a new religious affiliation:
Lutheran, Catholic, Agnostic, Atheist, Buddhist, Existentialist, Alcoholic.
I satisfied all the prerequisites for a philosophy course in contemporary diaspora— a “special topics” course I passed during a disaffected sophomore semester. Dr. Tollefson lectured on Babylon, Palestine, Krakow. We read books about exile and holocaust.
By then Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau were suburbs of the collective unconscious. Everyone was guilty, apologetic, and fascinated by the death camps. Personal suffering enabled us to empathize. Depression, emancipation from conservative parents, addictions, socio-economic shifts, Whitmanesque urges distracted and attracted me constantly.
I read in a library book that the Nazi death toll reached eleven million: six million
Jews and five million “others”: gypsies, homosexuals, the handicapped, the mentally-ill,
liberals, intellectuals, Communists and Poles. These are the unmourned, the twice-lost,
the names that are not read in synagogues during Yom Hashah. Remembrance!
Why does no one resurrect these dead? My legions lost. Uncounted in the census,
hidden in asylums and hospitals for the infirm—their survivors as powerless as their dead.
When will we organize their Va’ad Ha-Hazalah, their Yad Vashem, their Holocaust Museum?
I raise my weak noise—voice of no one’s daughter.
Today I am the same age as my grandmother was on V-E day, when the war ended in Europe.
I am of the country, the culture, the society, the community in which I live—as was she.
I have voted in five presidential elections, owned eight automobiles, bought two houses, earned three college degrees, worked for a salary over half my life, lost three miscarriages, survived one house fire and three tornadoes, sailed the Sir Francis Drake Channel, undergone three surgeries, marched twice on Washington, written to nine congressmen, and buried four grandparents.
When my Grandma Arends’ body died, years after her brain had ceased to register more than
simple pleasure or pain, the farmhouse that had been rented out, had to be sold. We began sorting the accumulation of a frugal life on two continents—condensed further into boxes in the basement. My cousins and I found a warped violin, its bridge unglued; a pith helmet painted white, a contraption for sorting seeds, an apparatus for candling whole cartons of eggs, a wringer clothes washer, a shotgun with termite grooves along its stock, a wooden crate with the bones of a sparrow inside, a pillowcase stuffed with quilting pieces cut from my grandfather’s shirts and ties, a tablet bearing in the square print of a second-grade student, the name: Raileen P.
I lay atop the chest freezer along the north wall of the basement, the one resembling a burial vault that once contained dressed ducks, corn cut from the cob, chocolate-dipped ice cream bars. The tablet held, on faded rainbow pages, notes from conversations with Grandma Arends while we weeded and picked through the Xanadu dimensions of her garden: “President Kennedy is bad. We don’t need a Catholic in the White House.” “We shouldn’t fly to the moon. God doesn’t want us messing around up there.” “We don’t have to see colored people everytime we turn on tv.”
I heard these words in her own voice. They were as genuine as my amazement at
discovering them again. I felt the sun on my thin, bare arms, my shins tickled by
feathery carrot tops, the moldy smell of soil and ears of corn. I remembered pea pods
piled in a stainless colander, bed sheets hung lifeless in the August air, loaded apple branches propped up by wooden tripods. My pupils contracted as I squinted into this sun-streaked, black and white vision of summers long ago.
I remembered the legion faces of Nazi sympathizers on the flickering film and felt dizzy and sick
as I had in seventh grade, learning of the Holocaust for the first time. There in the crowd, I saw it. I saw it again: the face of my grandmother, her fist raised. My imagination imposed her visage on every face in that crowd:, her tightly woven hair, the horn-rimmed outline of her eyeglasses. Under the narration, I heard her voice in the muffled cheers. History is always
subjective, always personal.
I shook my head, felt the cool top of the freezer, looked around at the boxes on the floor,
smiled weakly into the faces of my cousins. The air sparkled with dust. The room smelled of damp pulp, rotting timbers. I stumbled toward the light streaming through the cellar door.
What had I survived? There was no getting around it. In her mother country, in her own language, my Grandmother, my Grandma Arends, wants me dead.
© Copyright Rai Peterson, 1996
Used by permission.