'DON'T LOOK BACK' Lessons from a woman of the Plains
Loxterkamp, David
'DON'T LOOK BACK' A mother's farewell David Loxterkamp O bells ring for the ringing! The beginning and the end of the ringing! Ring, ring, ring, ring! William Carlos Williams, "The Catholic...
...She had stashed this trove in her apartment closet: a classic case of "out of sight, out of mind...
...It was the same horizontal wind that suspended the flag outside our motel room at four in the morning when I would go alone to sit quietly with my dying mother...
...It cannot be picked up and moved like so much merchandise...
...I take it not as some veiled proscription against searching for my biological parents (though it may be that, too...
...Yet the silence lingers and is all that remains, finally, when the bells cease their tolling...
...So when she offered to dine out, we jumped at the chance...
...I thought I had died and gone to heaven...
...We took our places proudly at the head table along with Father and the immediate family...
...the untimely death of her spouse and our family's struggle to be "normal" in the aftermath...
...On the morning of a departure, she would shoo us down to Dick's 66 for a fill-up, and, upon our return, meet us at the door of her apartment...
...Come to her aid, O saints of God, come forth to meet her, angels of the Lord...
...It has, like everything in mother's keep, that musty smell of stale cigarettes...
...Here people are wedded to the land, not only by the burden of debt but by their sense of duty to work it, by the indisputable lay of its existence beyond their mailbox, their fence rows, their stand of timber...
...the grain cars wait on miles of track that service the colossal concrete silos...
...It is addressed "to all my children," with instructions to be read only on the advent of her death...
...Look for the mothers who remain: Mother Church, Mother Earth, and the mother whose stiff blue hair your daughter stroked as I slept in my pillowed repose...
...Alleluia...
...But as we crunched away on the parking lot's loose gravel, I could see her sad face peering from the shadows behind half-drawn curtains...
...to be with Ed again, and to join all the angels and saints at the great feast...
...Supper...
...Even during Mass, the "moment of silent prayer" after Communion is lost in our rush to a more meaningful liturgy...
...Do not leave as an orphan...
...But she knew the jig was up when she could no longer finagle a cigarette from the nurses-her nurses-even with the threat of a hunger strike...
...Then she would slip behind the kitchen door...
...We gave silent thanks during the blessing for a half-day free from school...
...and the Reigelsburgers, who farmed and helped organize the annual spread at Saint Margaret's Turkey There is no path that leads away forever, especially when you are orphaned once and raised where roots run deep...
...It is a comforting calm, this silence worn easily and often by the dwellers of the Plains...
...Mom was never one to drag out endings or mince good-bys...
...But the truth is that mom was increasingly out of mind during her later years...
...He is near us, faith believes, nor questions how...
...Not as orphans are we left in sorrow now...
...The bells have shattered the old rule of silence: a silence imposed against unpleasantries we might otherwise mention at the supper table...
...Standing like a sentry in her aquamarine terry cloth bathrobe, she would hug us with one arm while dangling a cigarette in the other...
...The death of my mother has changed Iowa's grip on me...
...Requiem aeternam dona ea, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ea...
...Then Rosemary and Ed got the adoption papers and brought me home, raised me on the flat rich farmland of western Iowa, where you learn to appreciate straight roads and good schools...
...The silences in my life have nearly slipped away...
...Over the last several days my senses have been filled with Catholic bells, and the ginger-sweet smell of incense, and the waxing wind, and the tingling anticipation of harvest, and the haunting lyrics to Sunday's hymn, "Alleluia...
...I still cling to an hour or two each morning, rising before the family stirs, to sit silently in the green glow of my desk lamp...
...I'll never forget the stunned, disappointed look on her face when I nudged her shoulder one day, and she startled awake...
...I find her purse...
...It is the relentless wind of the Midwestern prairie, a presence and force to be contended with, a force that for generations has thinned our topsoil, thinned our young people, thinned us of the courage to be different...
...We were waiting...
...But on the eighth beat, the sexton draws hard on the thick rope rising to Saint Margaret's steeple, and pierces me again with his requiem bells...
...Tostenrude's fifth-grade class...
...I grope under my seat for the small cache of mom's belongings...
...As we stand in the shelter of the graveside tent, the wind whips through the brittle stalks of corn that surround us, and tugs at the canvas ties...
...There, the family gravestone has waited thirty years to receive my mom's dates, opposite my dad's...
...a silence that filled our vacant house after daddy died and Mom returned to work...
...And from the moment of her admission she muttered, "Port, port, oh port...
...You could identify seven towns from its gentle slope, owing to the tabular lay of the land and the enormous concrete grain elevators that rise from every disappearing dot on the Iowa map...
...This is her strange legacy...
...The morning ride to work, the evening meal with my family, the shopping trips and hectic appointment schedules are all filled with news and conversation, noise and chaos...
...She liked our visits, but loved them short and sweet...
...She had been ready for the priest and his holy oils...
...her exodus from Saint Louis...
...This is money back from the purchase of untold cartons of Winston Lights and bottles of Extra-Strength Tylenol and rolls of toilet paper that mom's friends purchased for her on weekly outings from the nursing home...
...Written in 1983, it was the last time mom attended to matters of the estate...
...The altar boys would gather in the sacristy to don our cassocks and white starched surplices...
...Those values stick, and I find myself today in a similar profession, my father's career, where the doctor and farmer both come to realize that success depends upon loving what you look after...
...the early death of her invalid mother...
...The standing joke became, "I would have fixed a rump roast if you had stayed another night...
...Here lie Russ and Maureen Ranney, our next-door neighbors, he who drilled my teeth and she who filled the cups of the coffee klatsch and were the best of family friends...
...The album told her visitors and nurses that this is our mother...
...While I was back, I heard someone say on the radio that "farming is one of those occupations where labor is not counted as a business expense...
...the Zeemans, whose daughter Cathy was struck by a passing motorist as her bicycle veered onto Elm near the tracks where we had played...
...Her eyes would water, but never release the tears she had long since learned to blink back...
...It is harvest time now...
...On the other hand, she was ready to die, ready to let the double pneumonia and anemia and probably a concealed cancer carry her away...
...Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon her...
...I tell you these are the same bells that rang in Mrs...
...the Tiernans down the block, who kept rabbits and teased me mercilessly about my big blue eyes...
...Eighty pounds was all that was left of her, lying peacefully in the bed, suspended on a sea of sighs and moans...
...Mom's card (with a feathered image of Saint Francis on the front) will join a rubber-banded deck tucked away in my top desk drawer...
...I was born here, my parents say, or at least kept by the good sisters of Saint Joseph Orphanage in Sioux City until I was two months old...
...In the quarter-century since I left home, the old neighborhood has picked up and moved here, slowly over time, from spacious Elm Street where disease has claimed more than the summer canopy...
...Rosemary," he had bent low to whisper in her ear, "are you ready to meet your Maker...
...And in this silence I remember my mother most, and the Plains, and the church...
...We tore the seal last night at supper, with mom freshly in the grave, and dwelt upon her deciding line: "Remember that I loved you, and don't look back...
...She was somebody in her life, someone vigorous and strong and big on the rules (except when they applied to her...
...Then silence floods over the land, for five seconds...six...now seven...
...Farming is something else again...
...And spreads silence over the land...
...It is more...
...In the purse also is the letter...
...All of us in silence waiting...
...And not from tears choked back, but from the steam rising off the rump roast...
...The wings of our plane make a low bow to Eppley Airfield as we veer east toward the patchwork quilt that is Iowa-from-the-air...
...Finally, Father Weingart would lead us down the center aisle to the darkened church vestibule, where we would greet the funeral procession with the solemn, soothing phrases of my Latin childhood, "Subvenite, Sancti Dei, oc-currite, angeli Domini, Suscipientes animam eius, Offerentes earn in conspectu Altissimi...
...The sound soared to the third-story window of Rolfe Elementary and High School, two hundred yards across the playground and catercorner from Saint Margaret's...
...the combines and six-row harvesters are fueled and idling...
...shot-filled with the weight of 73 dimes, 37 nickels, 7 quarters, and 215 pennies...
...And diminished by that fact, and by her broken record of bodily complaints, and by a taste for cigarettes that satisfied her more than her meals...
...It is about honoring the silences...
...They have released me from exile...
...her sister's alcoholism and early internment in a nursing home...
...It is hefty...
...After the funeral Mass, the motorcade crawls its well-worn route to a small parochial cemetery at the edge of town...
...Especially when you are orphaned once, and raised where roots run deep...
...she is not merely what you see...
...The same wind that swept over us, my sister and brother and me, one week previous when we visited the pioneer cemetery at Old Rolfe...
...From somewhere deep inside that husk of a woman came the raspy conviction, "Amen, alleluia...
...But there is no path that leads away forever...
...They are, for our German-Catholic relatives, a trading card that marks the passing of the generations...
...Of all this, I remember most the dinner rolls, steaming bowls of corn and mashed potatoes, casseroles and slabs of ham that spilled from my plate, and the whipped cream salad whose concealed nuggets of cottage cheese would nearly gag me...
...accepting them as part of the cadence of life...
...Long after the bells stopped ringing, the altar boys would join family and friends in the church basement for a Rosary Society dinner...
...William Carlos Williams, "The Catholic Bells" The crack of a church bell splits the crisp autumn air...
...I can almost hear the silverware clinking, the bellow of a "howdy neighbor," the whine of my mower as it pushes through their tall grass or, in winter, a snow shovel that scrapes clean their blanketed walks...
...I finally realized that the word was "report," a duty she had discharged for over fifteen years as nursing supervisor after my dad had died...
...She is now ruined and decayed, waiting to be raised to her final reward...
...Over her practically dead body she was brought by ambulance to the Pocahontas Community Hospital...
...It is about this silence, imposed by her death, and the sorrow it sows in our separate lives...
...It is about the pain she bore silently: the divorce of her Catholic parents...
...Receiving her soul, presenting it to the Most High...
...Squinting through her puffy lids, she moaned, "Oh my God, David, it's just you...
...Her life was told in today's homily, which seemed only a slightly expanded, more salvific rendering of what the funeral home had printed on last night's prayer cards...
...But today these bells reach me in the first car behind the hearse...
...I have no doubt that when again I see those puffy eyes, they will sparkle...
...And so, she says, "Look around...
...the silence of disappearing voices on a land that is losing its own...
...Just a few days earlier, Rosemary was still her feisty self...
...And we grew to appreciate how exhausting they were on her...
...Remember that I loved you, and don't look back...
...We are following my mother, dead at age seventyfive...
...the Biedermans, who pumped home heating oil...
...they have borne me to this graveside farewell...
...Once a month or so these bells would summon me to my sacramental chores...
...Then we would hastily arrange the cruets of water and wine, ready the censer with a charcoal puck, and light the towering candlesticks that flanked the bier...
...When I was thirteen my dad died, and ever since I dreamed of leaving home...
...In our waiting, the children assembled a photo album that spanned mom's life, from her nursing graduation to her wedding, to all the vacations, birthdays, holidays, and reunions that followed, and the visits by her children that slowed to a trickle in recent years...
Vol. 123 • October 1996 • No. 18
