Dakota

Excerpt 9: a continuation of my translation of Speerstra’s The Comfort Bird.

On Wednesday morning, 1 March 1911, the Noordam glides past the Statue of Liberty into the New York harbor.  It is clear, cool, and almost windless.  While Ellis Island – the island of tears – lies waiting a bit farther on, here and there a tear is already wiped away.  But in the huge customs warehouses everything runs like clockwork.  After three hours all passengers, except for a few with medical, administrative, or personal issues, have set foot on American soil.

…

   There they go, finally feeling the solid ground of the Land of Deliverance under their feet.  …

The real America.  They’re standing in Grand Central Station, ready to begin their train journey.  To the city of Sioux Falls. 

It becomes a matter of patience, the journey lasts 33 hours. 

But then they’re welcomed by a bright late winter sun; and there five adults are standing with eight children in the middle of America on a nearly forsaken platform.  Each one looks around cautiously, one even more worn out than the other.  The shortage of diapers was supplemented in the train with pieces from Grandma’s flannel undershirt and underpants.  And still the old lady acts as if she knows nothing of the letter in the pocket of her undershirt.

…

It’s sixteen hours later, in the late night of 5 March.  Douwe and Nammen look at the station clock of Yankton and note that their watches are still in sync.  An old lady with a basket stands in the wooden station building.

…waiting for them in front of the station are two large covered wagons and a one-horse-drawn flat wagon, with the moving crates already loaded.

“Namminga folk to Springfield, Hiemstra folk to Running Water,” the driver cries with a shrill voice. 

…

That morning at half past seven Douwe and Geartsje with their three children reach the address in the area of Running Water.  Farther ahead, in a depression, the Missouri River

lies glistening in the first light of morning.  It’s almost too much for Geartsje again.

In what kind of town or region did Nammen and Lys with Grandma and the kids end up?

   They themselves happened to arrive on the Ulbe Eringa Farm.  They can promptly pull up at the breakfast table.  Eringa’s prayer sounds like a sermon in a cathedral. 

…

   For the exhausted Hiemstras there’s bread with pork lard, but no rest.  And neither diapers.  For Eringa was only responsible for the welcome, the sermon, and the stories.  “Well, I’ll bring you now to the Wijnia Farm, there’s plenty work there for a farm worker and his wife.  All right!  We’ll see each other again in church tomorrow.”

   That same afternoon around mealtime they find themselves with the three little children on the Wijnia Farm.  Again, Geartsje doesn’t dare to mention sleep; and after all, for the first time in her life she’s lodging somewhere.  But Douwe takes the chance.  “It’s high time that my wife and kids get a little sleep in their system.”

   But no, the dinner table is ready.  “The river!” Wijnia begins, “we can’t quite see the Missouri River from here, but sometimes we can sure hear it. Watch out, I’m warning you now!” 

…

Wijnia plants himself at the end of the long dining table and closest to the pot.  There is his own chair of command.  To silence his large household the man merely needs to hem.  As one very much in charge, he looks around, and commands:  “Respect for God!”, folds his hands, and in a wide-ranging prayer makes mention of a blessed trip from Hichtum to Springfield.  Amen.

…

   Douwe …glances at the forsaken prairie through the small window.  The way the land looks here must be the way it first saw light after the Flood.  He feels himself drenched in a wave of emotion, and he thinks to himself: we shouldn’t have done this.

   An hour and a half later Douwe Hiemstra, formerly milker in Hichtum, is farm worker and Geartjse a help for day and night on the Wijnia Farm in Running Water.  It lasts for a week, …then: “Wijnia, I can make a lot more on the Lee Nickel Farm, so I’m going to leave with wife and kids.”

   “Then off with you!”  Wynia is getting angry; his other half stays milder: “Oh, how ungrateful!”  She says it while she snatches the plates off the table.  What Douwe says next is nothing Geartsje has heard him say before; he quotes Meindert Birdie: “It’s been drummed into me here: Whoever makes himself a sheep is going to be eaten by wolves!”

   When the Nickel boys pick them up the same day with horse and wagon, they stand ready, fully packed. …

A half year later Douwe and Geartsje move for ten dollars more a month to the Tommy Jones Farm, and after that it’s on to the large town of Avon, for there they can acquire eighty acres of good farmland for a moderate price.  First rent, of course.  As one who came from Penjum, Douwe seeds it first with wheat, but by harvest time the price of grain has gone south.  After a couple of months Geartsje’s household ledger is in bad shape.  Poverty.  If the oldest children hadn’t come home twice a week from the Thys Bakker Farm with a gallon of soup, they would have been at hunger’s door.

On a Sunday morning after church, Douwe bumps into a side job: he can become gravedigger for the cemetery of the fast-growing  village of Avon. 

…

   When Douwe comes home one night in 1916, later than usual, Geartsje notices that he’s not well.  He lacks appetite and has trouble sleeping.  It’s as if she sees her own dad in him, father Hizkia who from all the setbacks could also hit bottom.  What if Douwe himself should have caught the deadly flu?  It didn’t take long for the truth to surface: “Geartsje, I can’t take this job anymore, the grief in the cemetery kills me.”  In a week’s time he’s had to dig who knows how many children’s graves.

   And so Douwe leaves the dead of Avon and moves his young family to Norwegian Hill.  There, in the middle of nowhere, a forsaken farm is for sale.  They take it; they don’t ask why it is forsaken.

…

It’s a warm Sunday afternoon in the last part of July 1918, when a hot prairie wind blows around Norwegian Hill; in the hollow the Missouri shimmers in the backlight.  The Rocky Mountains are apparently generous with water again - the river is lively as a deer.  Together the farmer and his wife stroll to the top of the hill and see, deep in the hollow, their wheat field, undulating in the hot wind.  Their golden triangle, the fruit of their toil in sweat and tears.  The crop is ripening, almost three feet high.  Together they walk down the slope toward their wheat field.

   In the distance against the slope the dark red of their house with barn and cowshed contrasts against a steel blue sky.  “Grandma is taking care of the kids,” she says, “I think that she can see us.”

    “What a wonderful promising crop,” he says.

   “Nobody can surprise us here,” she says.  “Come.”  He understands. They do it, in their own ripening grain.

   …

 A good two days later, during the night of Tuesday to Wednesday, the barking of the Scottish collie Birdie wakes them up.  The barking becomes a howling cry.  Douwe shoots out of bed and strides on bare feet across the yard.  He hears noise behind the wooden barn.  He goes down, and the murmur turns into a rushing.  The Missouri!  Now he dashes down the hill.

   When some fifteen minutes later he resurfaces in his underwear, Geartsje has come to meet him.  “The Missouri,” he pants, “the Missouri has ripped all of our land with it.  Geartsje, my dear, we’ve lost everything.”  All their hopes and expectations have been torn away, every scrap of land by a roaring river. 

But just as a healthy tree always grows new leaves, so Douwe and Geartsje will gather new courage; that same year they return to the forsaken Tommy Jones farm to try again through hard work and smart farming. 

…

  It’s the beginning of November 1919.  They were able to rent some additional land.  And then the winter hits.  Forty degrees below on top of a knee-high layer of snow.  In the meantime Douwe has more than one in Geartsje: any day now another child may come and this time she is so heavy, she hardly knows what to do.

   …

   Grandma emerges from the side room with birth news: “A great big boy!  I’d say at least ten pounds, and I’m talking about Frisian pounds.  I think it should be a Nammen.”

   A half hour later Grandma is back:  “Another big boy!  Another heavy one.  This should be a Lolke, Douwe!”  Doctor estimates the boys together at nearly eighteen pounds.  And Geartsje is doing great.  “Only, the old doctor is exhausted, so I tucked him in next to Geartsje in Douwe’s place.”

   …

   “As long as I have you here now,” begins Grandma Ytsje Namminga-Wytsma, “I want to give you some good advice: If you as man and wife want to yield to each other’s desire, you should do it after the day’s work in the evening.  Not in the daytime, and never outside, that only makes for hefty babies.”