A German Sympathizer

Excerpt 13:  the Depression hit Friesland hard too, only to be followed by WWII.  Meindert Boorsma becomes its unfortunate victim twice over.

“Meindert, you’re turning into quite a young man, you should become a member of the NSB [National Socialist Movement] like your dad!”  The encouragement comes from farm wife Tryntsje Deddes, the wife of Rintsje Haagsma, born in 1890, stockbreeder on the Tow Road in Workum.  Haagsma and his wife don’t just say it, they shout it from the roof: on the black roof tiles of the barn red letters proclaim: N S B, letters large enough for people in Parrega, two kilometers away, to read.

   “I’m not doing anything, Mrs. Haagsma!”  Meindert doesn’t want to belong to anything.” …

  The Depression takes its toll, there’s massive unemployment.

…

   The analysis of Johannes Boorsma in “The Swan”: “It won’t be long anymore, and a farmer will hang on every Frisian tree.”

…

As the Thirties go by and there’s muttering about a war-minded Germany, resentment and distrust become more and more prevalent.  …

Meindert in the meanwhile has become a senior farmhand of eighteen, almost 6’3”, strong as an ox, and entrusted with all kinds of farm work.  The work comes easy to him: he’s both handy and quick.

   “Those were good years in that small community,” he will often say later.  …

In Eemswoude he discovers the cute and charming Kubaard milkhauler’s daughter Jetske Hiemstra.  She’s a farmer’s maid on a farm about seven hundred feet farther on.

Meindert and Jetske fall in love, dream of better times, of a good-looking modest laborer’s home with a chicken run, a nice household, freedom, a permit to catch birds.

…

The tenth of May 1940, at a quarter past four in the morning, Meindert is milking a cow in the milking-yard with his sight toward the east.  And there it rises: a majestic sun which separates itself like an egg from stepmother earth.  A new day. …

   Right through the sound of the spurts in the milk bucket another sound is audible; it is the droning high in the sky.  Surely not airplanes?  In a milk yard farther on someone calls out: “It is war, I heard it on the radio myself!”  Meindert stares into the heavens, sees airplanes like flights of plovers flying to the southwest.

   When the milking is finished and the breakfast table ready, the milk hauler says to Meindert of Johannes Kaiser as he passes by him: “And you, Meindert, just tell that German old man of yours that he betrayed the crap out of us.”  With that it becomes clear to Meindert what kind of position he can expect in the coming days.

The Pentecost holidays are coming up, and Meindert and Jetske have been planning for the last six months that they will enjoy two free days together.   … But when he is going to pick her up, she acts very dismissive.  Why, in heaven’s name?  That evening he tries once more, but now she won’t even make her appearance.

   It’s as if the ground disappears beneath him; it feels as if they once again pushed him into the corner of the schoolyard, making him desperate.  He had always been able to fight himself free, but this war is already lost.  His confusion and uncertainty turn into panic.  He has to get out of here, but where to?  To Mom in the houseboat? 

…

   With the leaping pole on his shoulder he wanders through the fields, avoids the paved roads.  Along the uncertain path between peace and war.  …

   There’s no red, white, and blue flag on the houseboat.  Dad, his eyes gleaming in victory, stands in the houseboat door, not in euphoria but sure enough in his new suit.  Clean-shaven, white collar, wearing a tie, the moustache – graying a bit – neatly trimmed.

   “They’re here,” he calls out.  “They asked for this in The Hague, but don’t worry, not a sparrow will fall, Friesland has already surrendered.”

   Meindert goes to his mother who keeps herself deep inside the houseboat.  “Mom, it’s all over,” he says.

   “It is war,” he repeats, “it’s all over.”

   And on the road ahead of him, from the direction of Bolsward, hundreds of armed Germans approach, in a relaxed march.  With horse and wagon, cars, small artillery, armed vehicles, and a motorcycle soldier zooming around the whole procession.  At the Nijhuizem bridge the Wehrmacht sings, and on the side of the Tow Road Johannes Boorsma sings along….

A good week later.  No shots are fired anymore.  The Netherlands capitulates. …

   When sometime later on a Saturday evening, the farmer gives each of them an extra couple of guilders because of the rise in milk price, Meindert quits his job with the words: “There is no place here for me anymore.”  He can no longer stomach the fact that in another milk yard nearby the milkers position themselves under the cow so that they won’t have see Meindert. …

He mounts his bike and leaves the neighborhood.  When he bikes past the yard of her parents, he sees Jetske Hiemstra sneak into the barn.  He has resigned himself and keeps pedaling on his heavily loaded bike.  The sun sinks down, not a creature is heard anymore, not a hand waves goodbye.

   The next day, Sunday morning at ten o’clock, he takes his leave from his parents and sisters in the houseboat.  A day later … he also takes leave of the land of his citizenship.  Three times he’s stopped, and each time he successfully hauls out his dad’s Addressenbuch [address book] and nice Prüfungzeugnissen [certificates].  Yes, he’s biking into Germany to get a milking job.  A day later, just before bedtime, he arrives at the farmer Hermann Girke, an invalid, in the town of Hollenbeck, not far from Muenster.

   “By golly!”  the crippled farmer exclaims, “this Meinhart looks just like his dad Johannes!”  There are so many sons in arms that there is a howling shortage of milkers.  That damn war.  Yes, his dad Johannes was a fantastic milker, Girke brags.  “Like father, like son?”

   One evening Meindert Boorsma is caught by the police while he’s secretly listening to a British transmitter.  They suspect him to be a spy, and he lands in a cell on the Hindenburgstrasse 78 in Muenster.  All he needs to do is say “yes,” but he keeps insisting that he’s not a spy.  Endless days and night follow with brutal interrogations, until he’s ready to climb the walls.

   One night a somewhat older military man comes and says calmly and convincingly: “You are free, my boy, we put you on the train tomorrow morning, then you can go see your parents in Friesland.  All set!  All you need to do is sign this paper.”  He signs.

   The next day he’s indeed on the train.  Destination: the training camp of the Waffen [weapons] SS near Graz in Austria.  By sheer coincidence he manages to avoid the blood-type mark on his underarm, but the SS-sign is tattooed in his left arm pit.

   

Like Father...

Excerpt 12 from The Comfort Bird by Hylke Speerstra; tr. by H.J. Baron

Johannes Boorsma has gained a cruel enemy; his thriving Bicycle and Repair Shop has been hit by the depression in the 1930s.

…

   It finally comes down to the fact that the Bicycle Sales and Repair Shop is barely making it.  In the 20s the pace was still steady, but since the dry summer and the three fall storms of 1928 it’s been trouble.  Not that the people of Workum and surroundings had much awareness that right after Thursday, 23 October – Black Thursday – the stock market collapsed here too.  There had been a winter, and they had felt that.  The winter of 1929.

   It became icy cold.  Johannes and Pytsje could barely keep the stove burning.  The whole month of February they sat close to the stove in their coats.  The frozen canal between Workum and Bolsward creaked with frost; it became quiet on the country roads. 

…

   On the Workum schoolyard his son was tagged as “the son of the Kaiser from the little houseboat.”  Time and again he had to defend himself and his brother and sisters till blood flowed.  With both fists.  That morning before school started his attackers drove him into the corner of the schoolyard, and when he had finally fought himself free, he saw the school principal standing motionless in the school door.  At that moment Meindert made up his mind.

…

   “No, I’m never going back to school.  Never!  I can take care of myself.”  He’s not going to humiliate himself by telling his parents about the taunting and the bullying.

   “They want to keep our kind of people dumb.”  Johannes Boorsma breathes heavily and his words come out hoarse.  “And this way they’re going to succeed too.  Because, dammit, we don’t have enough education.  My dad as a kid gathered shitty tufts of sheep wool to stay alive and on the rebound I sat under a cow when I was only twelve.  And then I recently had to place our own daughter, our Lysbeth of twelve, with a farmer.  My child in a cow barn bed with manure on its doors.  Isn’t there ever going to come an end to this slavery!”

   The Dad turns back to his son and says, now more quietly: “I’m willing to crawl on my knees, boy, if you’ll go to school and get an education.”

   “I don’t want Dad to crawl for me, I want to take care of myself.”

   “Can’t you get it through your head then that knowledge is power?”

   “I don’t need power!”  The boy is shouting now.  “When ten big boys together want to beat me up, there’s no use.”  The boy rushes out, grabs his leaping pole from the flat roof, takes a run-up, leaps across the canal and heads for the fields, in search of freedom, justice, and work.  Yes, work, for he’s not afraid of that.  Working, he can be anybody’s equal.

…

When his son comes home around bedtime, a mother stands in the door trembling with worry waiting for him.  …

He speaks: “I just placed myself as junior farm helper with Tsjipke Goslinga.  The boss said that I can take lessons on the side in Parrega.  For the rest I can take of myself.”

…

On an early and dark morning in November 1930 he may go along with his dad to catch golden plovers with a clapnet by the Heidenskip Skar.

…

  The dad tells him about the grandfather: “I’m telling you, the man in his youth carved a bird whistle out of a cow bone and dolled it up with little copperplates and it became a miraculous instrument.  When it was finished, he could imitate any meadow bird, and so amazingly beautiful and realistic that the birds thought of him as a bird.”

…

   The boy speaks: “Grandpa wanted to travel with the birds to faraway lands, but he thought that he would then have to leave his soul behind.  In his heart he wanted to go to America, but because of that he held back.  Dad would have liked to go to America too, but because Grandpa didn’t go, you stayed here too.”

…

   It’s quiet for a long time, then the boy says: “When I’m grown up, I’ll travel anywhere.”

   “Then you should know that in a flight of plovers, sometimes a bird travels with them to comfort others.  One who undertakes a long journey needs comfort.”

   “Mom is my comfort bird.  For the rest I’ll take care of myself.” 

The Dust Bowl

Excerpt 11 of The Comfort Bird, a translation of De treastf ûgel by Hylke Speerstra.

Here the scene shifts back to immigrant family in the Dakotas.

The Twenties … Douwe as the American David puts himself behind the wheel of his third-hand Model A Ford, and Geertsje sits behind her American pedal sewing machine made by Singer. …   Grandma Ytsje, who sticks to psalms and hymns, tries by warnings and admonitions to keep her flock on the narrow path.  “Douwe in a passenger car!  Oh vanity of vanities, it is all vanity.”

…

The courage and the persistence of Douwe and Geartsje Hiemstra were rewarded: … they enjoy a favorable spring three years in a row.  The farm production in the Midwest is doubled, the production of the David Hiemstra Farm as well.  … In the meantime almost every village now has a bank branch.

“Well Geartsje, I’m inclined to make an investment too.”

“Go ahead!”  And there goes Douwe, behind the wheel of Henry Ford’s miracle, on the way to Avon to make an investment.  In the backseat are the twins Nammen and Lolke, born in the snowstorm at the end of November 1919.  …  The twins are already farming their own little place, even if it’s just for fun: their Frisian pedigree is assembled by black-white painted pieces of cow bone.  …

Old doctor Greendale from Avon came up with a nickname for the small gentleman farmers: “The Blizzard Boys.”  The doctor feels attached to these twins; a picture of both boys hangs in his consulting office.

When in the spring of 1925 the twins Nammen and Lolke scurry to the wooden school on the other side of the hill, an upsetting message awaits them.  The teacher stands by the door and says in English: “From now on Nammen will be called Nanno and Lolke Lawrence!”  …

In March 1926 the family gets hit by tragedy.  Brother Jacob, who as a boy of barely four came to America nearly naked, so to speak, loses control of horse and wagon and is killed at age nineteen….  On November 10 another Jacob is born.  And that with Geartsje well on the way to age fifty.  

…

It is Thursday, 24 October 1929, the day that will afterward be known as Black Thursday. The New York Stock Exchange crashes on Wall Street.  …The first thing that father Douwe thinks of is to get his money from the bank in Avon, that very same Thursday. 

Son Nanno some eighty years later: “I still remember, Lawrence and me were sitting in the back of the little Ford, we arrived at the bank and there was a piece of paper on the door – “Closed.”

“The bank is closed, Dad.”

“Is that really what it says?”

“Yes, Dad.”

“Then we’re in big trouble, we’ll become dirt poor.”  Douwe Hiemstra is so shaken, he hardly dares to drive home in his Ford.

…

It turns into a grinding poverty.  Nanno in 2012: “...  Dad and Mom had sacrificed nearly everything and crossed the ocean to make a better life.  …now they were caught in a poverty that was even worse than that around 1885 in the Frisian countryside.

…

The drought hangs on. …

If something does grow, like some leaves on a bush or tree, then the grasshoppers approach like an enormous green cloud.  Whatever is left on earth to plunder is consumed in a half hour’s time.  And then the coup de grace is still coming: the dust storms – the Dust Bowl – which are more destructive than the worst snowstorm.

…

Three-fourths of the herd dies from splenic fever and lung disease, and the animals that escape this death-dance contract foot-and-mouth disease.  The milk cows dry up. 

…

Nanne: “And then came the terrible day….  That morning we were about a mile and a half on the way to school and noticed that there was something odd about the sky.  At first we thought there was a thunderstorm brewing; later we figured it was a tornado.  The kids wanted to hustle back home.  But Lawrence and I were about eleven, twelve, and said: ‘Nothing doing, the school is closest!’  So we ran as fast as we could.  And then, all of a sudden, it became dark from the dust storm.  If there hadn’t been a barbed wire strung along the school path, we would’ve completely lost our way.  Fortunately our teacher pulled us one by one inside the school.

…

It went on and on, and then the door sprung open and someone stumbled into the room.  Completely covered with dust, it looked like the devil himself.  I saw that he had blood on his hands and that tears were rolling down his blackened cheeks.

‘Dad!’ Lawrence cried.  And it was our dad!  Nearly blind from the dust, Dad had followed the barbed wire fence.  He wanted to find out if we had made it safe and sound to the school.

…

In the icy winter of the Depression year 1934, Beppe Ytsje Namminga-Wytsma begins to fail; soon she can’t be on her feet anymore.  …

On 13 February 1934, in de darkest time of the Depression, Ytsje Namminga-Wytsma passes on at age 83.  A few days later she is entrusted to the soil of her Land of Deliverance.

…

After that winter, spring follows again, and a summer, and a fall, and a long winter, and then at last some improvement comes. 

…

The Hiemstras regain courage.  …

Nanno hears that there’s a great place for rent near Sharon in Wisconsin.

On December 5, 1941, a Santa Claus (Sinterklaas) evening is celebrated in a new, comfortable place near Sharon.  The voice of Beppe Ytsje can still be heard… “Beppe would say, ‘The crisis has passed, good, a Second World War has taken its place, but that’s happening on the other side of the ocean.’”

Two days after the Sinterklaas celebration the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor; WWII had now started for the Americans too.  Only nine days later they’ve located Nanno in the village of Sharon, WI.  He’s dressed in his old overalls with patches over the knees, compliments of Beppe Ytsje, when the mailman personally hands him the draft notice for military service. 

…

Nanno Hiemstra travels with the train to the training camp, Camp Barkley in Texas, …. The military training is super tough and long.  Nanno and Alice (the love he had discovered in the meanwhile) look each other in the eyes and decide to get married.  He is 21 now, she almost two years younger.

…

Life goes on till a telegram reaches them from Wisconsin.  Nanno’s older brother Charles has unexpectedly died from an internal hemorrhage.  Nammen and Alice decide to take a train back to Sharon, WI immediately. … Two days later they stand by the grave of the brother who was also their best friend.  Beside them a young mother with two small children.  Next to them his deeply grieving parents who for the third time must bury a child:. first their twins in Hichtum, then a grown son in Avon, SD, and now again a wonderful boy who already had a family.

And then, that same evening, a farewell at the little station of Sharon, WI.  Mother says: “And now you have to cross the ocean soon to fight to your death.”

“No, Mom, I promise that I will come back.”

…

At the beginning of March 1944, Nanno finds out that he will be shipped out to an unknown destination.  First he may go on leave, back with Alice to Wisconsin.  Then on to the war.

Goodbyes at the small station of Sharon.  “I pressed myself to Alice’s bulging belly. ‘Can you feel the baby?’ she wanted to know.  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I can feel it move.’  She had been expecting for seven, eight months already.

   “And then, at a short distance, I saw Dad and Mom standing there, crying, holding hands.” 

   

Smoldering Ruins

Note:The Hiemstra tribe is seeking its future in America while the Boorsma character searched for a better life closer by: in Germany and Friesland. [see Excerpt 8]

Both choices will have long-term consequences.

Excerpt 10

End of February 1919.  Johannes Boorsma is Frisian again among the Frisians.  As long as it lasts.  On the way to his small houseboat on the Franeker Canal …he hears the call of the first oyster catcher.  What a mild late winter!  And there is not such good news: he will have to tell his wife pretty soon that he just lost his farm job and is now unemployed.

…

[He’s been humiliated by his employer once too often, and this time he responds in kind, with the inevitable result.]

   When he will deliver the bad news to his Pytsje pretty soon, she will say: “Johannes, my boy, did it have to go this way?”  “Yes,” will be the response, “in this case it had to.”

   As he thinks about it, a twinge of pity shoots through his breast: not self-pity, but pity for her.  Pytsje, with her longing for peace.  She’s the only one who can calm the lion, but she’s not nearly always successful.  And still she’s behind him all the way and gives him all her support.

   It’s a dark, moonless night; the path to the houseboat leads over uneven polder dikes, through muddy tracks, and across wide water-filled ditches.  Crap, he feels the sludge seep into his clogs, but this time his dreams are not to be undone by a couple of wet feet.

   In his dream the image of a magical landscape beneath steel blue summer skies rises before his eyes. … A horse is harnessed to a showy carriage, a flag with stars and stripes is waving in the wind, a couple of children playing between cattle and flowers, swallows high in the air like phantoms against the deep blue.  Does he hear the call of the golden plover now?  You bet, gliding from the mountains comes a huge congregation of golden plovers.  They’ve arrived home after a journey over sea and lands.  And among them, a solitary “comfort bird.”

Johannes feels the mire … run into his clogs again.  What kind of foolish dream was this?  Did this dream awaken a secretly hidden longing in him?  America?  He keeps going, in confusion now.  His dad was according to the mayor not good enough for America; the old man’s longing turned into resentment, if it wasn’t hate.  No America for Dad, then not for me either.  Don’t talk to me about America.  Then Germany is preferable!

   There, in the Ruhr District he lived like a libertine.  … He wanted to become German with the Germans…. He was getting closer to feeling what animated the German, but for some reason or other it wasn’t becoming his home.  After he saw in 1914 the cannon fodder march in columns to the trenches of the First World War, he was back on the home yard.  …

   He came home with a mustache like that of the German Kaiser.  A call to military service lay on Mom’s plush table cloth.  In neutral Netherlands he had to be mobilized. 

…

   In late summer 1915 he saw Pytsje Jongsma come biking up the Warnzer Cliff.  “Where are you headed?” he called after her.  She could’ve just kept biking, … but she stopped.  A handsome young man in uniform laid his hand close to hers on the handlebars.  With his severe, perfectly cut mustache he looked more like a general than a soldier.  And she, she was a tall young lady with eyes the color of the South Sea beneath a north wind-swept spring sky.

   After that they became inseparable.  In mid-September 1916 they biked together to Koudum to give their marriage notice, and that was high time, for on 6 April 1917 a beautiful daughter was born to them.  Lysbeth.  On 24 April followed his honorable discharge from “service with the militia.”  Not enough money for a house, but enough for a little old houseboat.  Pytsje always gave him space, but that evening she said: “For our child’s sake both of us must be responsible and aim for stability.”

   Thus a steady job with a farmer.  And then it started again: from one farmer to the other.  Always and everywhere the pitcher would be filled with water till it broke....

And now he has to deliver the black tidings to Pytsje again.  Fired, while she’s ready to give birth.  …  

Without even an ounce of veal for Pytsje, he stands before the gang plank….  After he lets himself down into the hold, he turns the flame of the lamp higher.

   “You’re late!  The baby is here already.”

   He takes the kerosene lamp from the hook, turns the flame higher and lights the scene  where the voice came from.

   “Good god, Pytsje.”  There she lies, on a mattress on the floor, with a cloth-wrapped baby, the umbilical cord still tied to the mother.

   “It is a healthy child,” she reports calmly.

…

    An hour and a half later mom and child are resting, clean and peaceful.  …

She says: “Are you aware that we received a little fowler?”  And she says his name.

   He nearly loses his voice when the boy’s name is announced: “Meindert, Meindert Birdie.”

He has the Boorsma habit of checking out the weather before turning in for the night.  This time he does so only to breathe in his deep happiness all alone.  With his back turned to the cold north, he’s staring in southwesterly direction, and a feeling descends on him that there, in that black emptiness lies their future anchoring place.  Back in the old polder…nearly at the end of the world, … on the mill yard of the small farmer and dreamer Freark Smink.  ....  As miller he would have only one boss, and that’s the wind.  However rough and changeable that gentleman could be, Johannes “Kaiser” would adjust himself to it. …

   “All is settled,” he says in German, when with a feeling of full contentment he takes one more look at his wife and children that night.

   It’s almost midnight when Johannes Boorsma thinks of one more thing.  He raises his bike from the hold, pushes it through the marshy ground to the roadway, and pedals to Hichtum to tell his old mother Willemke that there’s a Meindert again.

…

His employer, Freark: “There comes Her Majesty ‘Meadow and Water,’ with the Kaiser himself at the helm. … The mill and the living arrangements are free.  As far as that goes, you can move in there tonight if you want.  And what’s expected from you?  Milling!  For the rest it’s up to you….” 

   Johannes plunges ahead: “Free living on the mill yard, four liters milk per week on top of that; at the expense of the polder commission, you shouldn’t get stuck with that, Freark.  On these conditions I’ll see to it that here in the Skar children will never come home again with wet feet.”

   …

And now the farmer would like to know what Johannes thinks of the “current Germany,” where after WWI “the ruins are still smoldering.”

   “Dear Freark, there will come a time when the Germans will lash out again.  I know, you’re leaning toward the broken gun, but not I!  After the signing of the Versailles peace treaty in 1919 I don’t believe in peace anymore.  With that treaty the Germans are even more humiliated; as losers they’re being undressed by the French and now as well by a growing power like America.  That’s going to turn into war again.  I’m telling you: humankind and war are inextricably connected.”  

   “But Johannes, do you know how many young people fell in action within a couple of weeks just by Verdun?  More than 200,000!  Every one of them a fine young man!  Such a thing should never, never happen again.  Get rid of the guns!”

…

The Twenties.  Never before has Johannes Kaiser lived so long at one and the same address as on the mill place by Freark Smink.  The milk route for the Workum Cooperative “The Good Expectation” flourishes and delivers a basic income.  Day in and day out the milk cans of eighteen farms hustle through the hands of the Kaiser.

All goes well, until the milk factory Board outsources the milk route anew.

 “Now what?”

 He’s out.  …

... The next day the Kaiser has vanished. … all of the Heidenskip community knows about the silent exodus: “They appear to live now in that little houseboat that for ages has lain in neglect ….”

It is now 1929.  Johannes and Pytsje in the meantime live with their six children in a larger and newer houseboat.  Its name “Meadow and Water” has expanded to “BICYCLE SALES AND REPAIR SHOP J. BOOMSMA.”  In the evening the … paper is tossed through the boat door, once a week supplemented with the Sunday edition of the Rheinische Post.

   A couple of years later.  In Germany the ruins continue to smolder and the wounds continue to smart.  That’s how it’s put in the Rheinische Post, but according to the Kaiser, [pontificating in the local tavern,] it won’t be long before the roses will bloom again.  “...

   “What are you talking about, Kaiser!”

   “Let me tell you exactly what I mean.  In the end, you and I will need the national socialists in Germany.  When they get in power, then the farmer and his hired man will both ride in the same kind of beautiful car.”  The farmer who’s listening after this will pedal past the Kaiser’s Repair Shop, even if he has two flat tires, for the farmer in no way wants to ride in the same car as his hired man.  And that’s how Johannes Meinderts Boorsma, on the way to his ideal, relegated his own fate to the dustbin.

…

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.”

I Want to Live

Excerpt 7

[Note:  this is an ongoing series of excerpts from my translation of

Hylke Speerstra’s De treastfugel, published both in Frisian and in Dutch.

The book, translated as The Comfort Bird, seeks a publisher.]

(Johannes Boorsma, driven by need and ambition, seeks his fortune in Germany.

It wasn’t easy to leave his parents behind.)

A father in tears, a mother trying in vain to calm the storm.  He remembers that he ran outside and through the window saw the old man sitting in the house, his back turned to the outside world.  Mother brought her son to the small gate by the road.  “Son, wherever you will go, weigh your words.”  The mother and the son, who dearly love each other, shake hands, while the father has his back turned against the evil world.

Dad.  He felt himself tied to his birthplace which he seemingly hated and loved at the same time.  And always longing for a better place.  … The real fate of Meindert Birdie was that he had been born without wings; he had always talked and sung with the birds, even able to fly around a bit with them.  But he caught on that he lacked wings.  What remained was only an anchor which he dropped then here, then there. 

…

What do you want to do, Johannes Boorsma?  Live in fear all your life, or live? …

Johannes , on the way to Frillendorf.

[He finds work, enjoys himself, and is paid well.]

On Sunday evening, 11 August 1912, Johannes is at the door of his old parents in Hichtum.

   “Dad is waiting for you, boy,” his mom whispers.  “He’s close to the end.”

   “Here is Johannes,” his mom whispers while she opens the bedstead doors a bit wider to let in some light. …

   “Dad!”  Two dull eyes that light up and fasten on the son.  He reaches out to his son what once was the iron-strong fist of Meindert Birdie and now seems as if the son is holding all of his dad in that one hand.

   A day later, on 12 Monday August 1912, Meindert Boorsma, age 63, dies.  Laid out with his hands folded on his chest, and hidden in those hands the thing with which he had serenaded his longing for the Better Land.  Johannes had taken the bird whistle back home with him from Germany.  “It belongs with Dad on his last journey, it is the mirror of his soul.”

A Shipful of Hope

Excerpt 8

Geartsje Hiemstra-Namminga feels herself trapped in a haunted no-man’s-land where chaos and confusion reign.  …

   She hears the blast of the ship’s horn.  The 12,000-ton ocean steamer is leaving the dock.  Her stomach churns, then it turns.  A ship loaded with uncertainty and hope.  More than a thousand men, women and children of a hundred different kinds and who knows how many languages.  Torn loose from their roots.  …

Geartsje’s three fall asleep at last: Jacob four years old, Ytsje two, and Hizkia eight months. …

   Some more hours later, deep in the nausea-inducing stomach of the steamship, Geartjse Hiemstra-Namminga stumbles around with three whining kids.  They are wet and dirty, and the lost diapers have not re-surfaced. 

   “The little fella is asking for the breast.”  Grandma is awake and in command again.  “Mom, I feel like I don’t have a drop of milk, I’m dry.”

   “No milk left?  I’ve never had that happen.”  The old lady has a way of hurting her daughter from time to time. …

   Later in the evening there are signs everywhere of the increasing wind.  …

“The Lord will protect us and take care of us.”  And with those words Grandma is going to go to sleep, trying again to get a head start on her rest.  Douwe and Nammen have been upstairs and come back with the news that an icy cold winter wind together with splashing water clouds chased all the happiness seekers from the upper deck.  …

   Something seems wrong with the Noordam.  It is rumored that in such a serious storm it can sail at only half its power, for otherwise it would bury itself so deep inside the enormous waves that it might never surface again.

   “The ship is just trying to stay afloat.” …

Now they discover the bad shape Grandma is in.  Totally done in.  For the first time the daughter has to wash and change the mother.  Geartjse carefully pulls the smelly undervest over her head, and then there’s still a flannel undershirt that needs changing.

   Wait, what is that?  Something drops out of a secret inside shirt pocket.  A white envelope.  A letter.  From Springfield  SD, delivered in Hichtum.  The address written in ink is from none other than Lolke.  Did Grandma in Hichtum hide a letter from Lolke?  She must have.  Why then didn’t she open the envelope?  Because there might have been an inconvenient truth inside?  Geartsje takes hold of the envelope and pretends to know nothing.

Because of the extremely bad weather and other setbacks, the ocean journey takes a week longer than usual, but then the weather improves.  After Grandma too has recovered, her first words are: “Are all of you still here?” …

Later, at night, while Grandma snores her own dream, Geartjse and Douwe open the letter from Lolke in South Dakota, and read:

  “Dear family

   […]Here west of Springfield the summer seemed to run its course so

    ideally, but now by us on Norwegian Hill the bitter cold winter weather

   is getting the best of us.  In the fall we heard little good news from the

   Biesmas who live west of Sioux Falls, and now nothing is heard from

   them at all anymore. It’s not likely that they crossed the Missouri, because

   over there it’s said to be even worse and twelve farm folk were frozen to

   death.  It is so bare and miserable here, every sane person

   is heavyhearted. Think hard before you start, tell our mother that. […]”

To America

 

Excerpt 6         -from The Comfort Bird by Hylke Speerstra

 

It’s around seven in the evening of May 1905 when someone’s at the door.  A young man.  Did Ytsje really go so far as to respond to that small ad in Hepkema’s paper? [a Dutch regional newspaper, Nieuwsblad van Friesland, but often called Hepkema’s paper after the editor]  A “decent milk hauler” asked for a place to board in the area of Bolsward.  Yes, they had become subscribers to the paper, and mother didn’t skip a word.  “A decent milk hauler,” she had said aloud while reading.  Now that the oldest boys were out of the house, there was room for “a tame sheep.”  Where is the ambitious young man who dares to cross the ocean with daughter Geartsje to take up quarters on the other side?
   A boarder makes his appearance.  But will that be the one?  Geartsje, sent by mother to the door, opens the door slightly at first, then wide.  For the moment she is speechless.
   “Douwe Hiemstra!”
   “Come on in.”
   She shakes hands with him but forgets to identify herself.  She feels the firmness of his handshake.  And callouses.  This could well be the milk hauler.
   “I’m Geartsje of Hizkia and Ytsje,” she hears herself say.  The old man in the arm chair has the appearance of an old patriarch with his snow-white hair and beard, but it doesn’t take the guest long to realize who’s the one that waves the scepter.  Mother!              “And how old is Douwe,” the wife wants to know.
   “Almost twenty-two, Mrs. Namminga.”
   “As if foreordained, Douwe is not much older than our Geartsje!”
…

   “Board and room.”  Mrs. Namminga doesn’t want to skirt the issue anymore.  She’d been thinking of four and a half guilders a week.  Bed, meals, laundry – everything included.

   “Let’s go with that.”  Douwe had really regarded his mission a success already at the door.  Who knows but there could be more included than board and room.

…

   On the first Monday morning after Douwe’s arrival in Hichtum, a long new-fashioned snow-white underpants is dancing in the spring breeze right next to Geartsje’s flesh-colored panties.

   “Oh gosh, this is going to be trouble,” Meindert Birdie calls out right after twelve when passing on the church path.  “Watch out, Geartsje girl, all you need is a clothes pin letting go and the new boarder has you pregnant with child.”

…

   Not a half year after Douwe entered the backdoor, he leaves with Geartjse through the front door.  On Saturday morning, 20 May 1905, they marry in Witmarsum.  And it’s high time.  They quickly rent a room in the neighborhood.

…

   In the cruel cold of February 1906, after a long and difficult delivery, Geartsje gives birth to twin boys: Jabik, named after Douwe’s father, and Hizkia.  … .  After a day and a night filled with worry and empty doctor promises, both boys die. 

…

 

It’s a half year later when an informational evening is held in Bolsward about emigration to America.  “This is where all of us need to go.”  Ytsje succeeds in taking Douwe and Geartsje, her son Nammen with his Lysbeth Struiving, and her still single son Lolke along.  Douwe even gets his peer Johannes Boorsma to join. 

But Johannes challenges the speaker: “People, don’t let anybody mess with your heads, what we’re hearing here is nothing but gospel, syrup and honey.  You can also earn good money on the German dairies, you can travel in one day from Leeuwarden to Cologne by train, but even there by Ruhr and Rhine it’s not rice and raisins every day.  Except that from Germany you can go home for a few days for the egg hunt or celebration of the Bolsward Fair.”

…

A good four months later, on Friday 21 September 1906, Hizkia Nammens Namminga passes away.  The cause could have been a strangulated hernia.  When the immediate family gathers in the mortuary in Hichtum on Saturday 22 September, the oldest son Sibbele looks his mom straight in the eyes when he says: “It was out of respect for my dad that I didn’t go to America as quartermaster.  Only in Hichtum could this man be happy.” 

…

   It is the third son who not much later is the first to board the boat to New York.  As bachelor he wants to prepare the way for those to follow. 

…

Four years later, Ytsje gets her way: she will travel under His care to the new world.  Accompanying her will be Nammen, his wife Lysbeth Struiving with their five children, and daughter Geartsje with her husband Douwe Hiemstra and their three small children.  On the night of 16 to 17 February, 1911, the steamship Noordam will be ready for sailing – regardless of weather.