Travel away to Nebraska with this piece of prose by Boston community member Calvin Hennig. He is also an accomplished photographer, and loves to walk his dogs in the Arboretum. He’ll be traveling to Morocco for three weeks, so look forward to some more travel photos soon.
Fremont
“The Monkey Took
One Look At Jim
And Threw The Peanuts
Back At Him
Burma Shave”
Hal was in the back seat with me. We sank into the upholstery that on hot days filled the car with a musty odor. The fabric seemed softer than it does today and the texture was better. Dad always bought Nashes. He insisted, in his mild way of making a point while looking off into the distance and speaking in a low voice, that they were the best car for the road, although we endured many ‘upside down bathtub’ jokes about their looks. I especially liked trips to Fremont. The highway was narrow… they all were in those days. Outside our home in Omaha the road began to wind its lonely route through trees, up and down small hills and out between the radiant fields. When the wind blew, everything came alive with motion, and cloud shadows raced over the land like phantom buffalo.
Through a small town or two, still a good distance away from Fremont, the highway came to the crest of a hill and we could look out for miles over a fertile valley – a carpet of topsoil several feet thick that like a patchwork quilt showed the colors and textures of a thousand fields of corn, beans and alfalfa. It took my breath away when the view broke open, a Serengeti of the plains. Descending, the road became straight and headed for Fremont. Along side of us to the right, across the ditch, our route was punctuated by phone poles, and atop of each were five or six cross arms carrying in all about 50 wires. The strung wires slacked down in unison between the poles in lyrical cadence as we traveled, and in my head the sweeping lines turned to sound: Weroou weroou weroou. The wires swung up to the pole tops over and over, and spilled down in an arc to begin again. You tried to see how many you could follow at the same pace before a crossroad or a culvert broke the rhythm of the poles with an abrupt weraah, and then weroou weroou weroou began again.
Clustered along the road, too, were Burma Shave signs about every twenty miles. They reached out and spoke like an anonymous friend. Each stake in the ground with a weathered cross board had only one line on it, and you struggled to grasp it before the next appeared and raced by. Dinah doesn’t Treat him right But if he’d Shave Dyna-mite! Burma-Shave It was terribly clever. You were filled with well-being humming down the road and seeing them, almost like they were not ads at all… as if someone put them there to make you happy. We were all part of something in those days, of a nation, perhaps, cohesive as a patchwork valley. We were sewn together, and people – well, the people I knew – considered themselves and everyone else, neighbors.
Across that valley as we traveled, millions of birds moved forward in the skies like buckshot and braided the air for miles. It was endless and of a magnitude not seen today. Irrevocable unseen forces everywhere. The sky like the land exploded with life.
Half the distance down the valley floor, we passed an alfalfa plant that spewed out a scattering of greenish yellow smoke with an unforgettable odor. I guess the plant manufactured feed pellets. Back in Omaha along North 30th Street, there was a grain and feed store that survived in tact for decades even as the last of the work horses disappeared, neighboring farms were gobbled up by developing cities or wholesale agra-business, and the unkempt appeal of open lots around the store in all directions gave way to houses. We went there on occasion, although I cannot recall why. Inside, what comes back are remembrances of how pulverized grain felt under foot, and glimpses of rows of bristly-textured gunny sacks – some exposing autumn-colored grains. The heavy, awkward sacks were piled high, swallowing up most of the noise from the outside.
Nebraska lane, by Calvin Hennig
Finally, way away on the horizon like a ship in the distance, grain elevators announced we were finally nearing Fremont. On the outskirts of town a viaduct near the elevators lifted us safely over rows of railroad tracks, and speed signs quickly slowed us to a crawl. They may have regulated the speed, but they also taught a lesson. “You may be passing by,” they said, “but we live here. The children may be playing ball, the dogs may be chasing after. We feel safe when the world is placid, when there are no chances taken.” And we respectfully obeyed the message.
Aunt Ernestine McClean, “Aunt ‘E,’” lived on North Union Street… Nine Five One North Union. There was certainly no speeding on North Union. It was a street made of brick, and very large speed bumps insured the proper amount of reassuring tedium. And it was a placid neighborhood. Fremont was low and flat. Aunt E’s house was a small two-story gray affair on a generous corner lot with a tree arching protectively overhead. The small porch and front door faced North Union, and the driveway to the back of the house was entered around the right on the cross street. Kitty corner from the house was the playground of a grade school with the brick school house behind. Aunt E was the principal. She had taught all her life, beginning as a young woman in one-room school houses in towns much smaller than Fremont. Cousin Larry and Hal and I could play ball or climb the tree in the yard, or go across the street and use the swings or teeter totters. The spaces were broad and open, and we moved about in them secure from peril.
It got hot, of course. Air conditioning was for big urban buildings. Occasionally winds whipped the dust up, cooled us down, and mysteriously marked time along with our lives.
Aunt E. She had a voice distinct from all humans. Soft, strained, and filled with gravel, you needed to listen to get the words. “I just can’t fool anyone on the phone,” she rasped in self-mockery and with a tincture of pride. That was only the sound. What drew you to her and what drove that voice was a mix of impeccable character and good will. They were palpable. But she could seem distant, too, at least to a child. There was a hint of self-righteousness – a sisterly trait shared by my mother. Aunt E was also one of those inner directed people who moved decisively. At such times, I recall her in profile, as if having come to a conclusion based on facts and assisted by some unseen, indisputable moral compass. It was a kind of grit common among plains women of that generation. Her mother had died when she was barely a teen-ager, and her father soon brought the children up from Kansas to dump them in the care of a sister and her husband on a remote farm nine miles east of Herman, Nebraska. There they were worked hard with little masking of the fact that they were secondary siblings. The simple fact is that people struggled. To exist was labor, not work.
The porch and front door led into a small dining room. To the right on the front corner of the house was the living room that looked out over the yard toward the school and in the far back corner was a bedroom. In the early days before a remodeling, a vast kitchen to a child’s eye was close inside the front door. A dining table was in the center of the kitchen with various pantries, a bathroom and a back porch area surrounding off the main space. At that table over many meals a childhood saga was played out… uncontrollable giggles that became uncontrollable laughter. The protagonists were Larry and I. Aunt E strategically sat us as far apart as possible, but soon I would look up at Larry, catch his eye, and we’d start. No amount of willing or scolding could contain it, and soon, Larry or I was sent into one of the pantries to cool off. It was hopeless. Mother and Aunt E would try to be stern, and perhaps occasionally were stern, but what lingers in my memory of those times is the sense that they knew the goodness and innocence of it all and would not have traded it for the world. These were the children of sisters, and the sisters could only have relished in their closeness as they experienced that stage of their lives, and at the budding ties of their progeny.
Not infrequently, Aunt E made taffy, and Hal, Larry and I would take turns with one another pulling it. When I think of the pantry in that house, I think of taffy, because that was where it was kept when finished and cut into pieces. We snuck in often, of course, raiding the container.
Through and out the side door on the left of the kitchen – the left of the house – was Aunt E’s tomato garden. There must have been other vegetables, but the tomatoes are what I remember best. Continuing straight one came quickly into the adjacent neighbor’s yard. The back of the house had a singular construction that is locked in my memory: an eve about four feet wide that descended from the roof all the way to the ground. Even then it seemed a strange design, because it made the house vulnerable to thieves… as if there were any. It was also a tempting invitation to kids to climb it, and time was spent trying to be sure the owners were not home before we jumped on.
When I stayed over – and frequently this was for several weeks in the summer, I slept in one of the single beds covered with white-knobby cotton bedspreads in Aunt E’s room. On her wall-papered wall was a framed image I associated with a world of elders I knew I could not yet understand – a black on white silhouette of an agelessly sweet woman with a dainty profile. She was wearing a generous dress and bonnet, and was watering flowers. Countless times I starred without blinking at the picture, then closed my eyes and watched the same image appear like magic – this time white on black – inside my head. Aunt E kept a large tin can under her bed that she used in the middle of the night and emptied in the morning. Mom told me that she packed that can in her suitcase if she took an overnight trip. Whenever I happened to wake up in the middle of the nightly ritual, I froze and held my breath so that she would not know I was awake.
Larry quickly grew into a tall, good-looking and popular young man, and I idolized him. Many times he would take me along with him to a girlfriend’s house where we sat on the front porch sipping lemonade and talked and laughed. He had an irresistible way of speaking ever so slightly from the corner of his mouth in halting phrases, a mannerism that had to have begun early on with a stutter. And his hands animated the flow of words, opening, rolling out and closing phrases. He was a handsome fellow with a creative wit, a twinkle in his eye, and a ready laugh.
I was younger, more insecure, and felt ponderous by comparison; Larry simply enjoyed life more than I did. He and a best friend and I would ride around in Aunt E’s car, and I recall them once pounding out an ad rhythmically on the dash shouting joyously “Mama get Real Kill. Mama get Real Kill. Kill them bugs.” There were visits over the years to an annual fair held in a town park. Money was a bit scarce. Aunt E would give us some when we left the house, and it was up to us whether or not to waste a ride on one of those horrible centrifugal force rides and miss out on cotton candy (I preferred the latter), or whether, walking the arcade, to work the gears operating a small crane inside a glass box that could pick up a treasure and swing it over toward the chute, dumping it (sometimes) and into our waiting hands. Larry loved those games, seeing them as a challenge to his skills.
Back down North Union, a left on East Military Avenue, and many blocks toward the end of town was the municipal swimming pool – a defined area of light and joy that mesmerized like liquid amethyst. It was a heady combination to walk out beside the calm pool in the morning sun, to feel the breeze, watch the water trickling quietly over the edges, and to smell the chlorinated water. Subdued early morning swim classes gave way to the raucous energy of scores of kids screaming and jumping into the cold water by noon. My cousin – tall, handsome Larry – became a life guard. His two areas of marked expertise were ping-pong and swimming. He jokingly made fun of ping-pong as a ‘sissy sport,’ but he was extremely good at it, and we played frequently at the local YMCA. There was little ‘sissy’ about his ability in the water, however, and years later he became part of a Marine Corps swim team.
The hard part for me of the countless swimming pool moments was women. Most of the kids in the water were just pre- or just post- pubescent, but the life guards were young men and women, filled with the early juices of sexuality. The female life guards were wonderful to me – Larry’s young cousin and sometime pool mascot. But I was caught square in the middle of wanting motherly affection and passionate embraces. Such is the confusion of those maturations which seemed then so agonizingly slow.
Thirty Days Hath September April June And the Speed Offender Burma-Shave Trips home were often at night and I could rarely stay awake before reaching Omaha. The cool night air rushed into the automobile. The windshield sported the marks of hundreds of night insects coursing between the fields in completion of their strange brief destinies. On one such night, I was in rapt awe of the moon over the fields, so huge and giving off such a brilliant silver light. “Dad,” I asked. “Why does the moon follow us like that?” “Because it likes us,” he answered.
After serving in the Marines, Larry married and went to the University of Nebraska, graduating first in his class of dentists. He and his wife – one of those lovely women whose front porches I visited as a boy – at whose wedding I was best man, had four children who grew up to become a graphic artist, a dermatologist, a school teacher, and a physicist. They live in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where Larry is now retired. I visited Aunt E with mother over the years where I always relished my raspy greeting and warm hug. I still have among the things on my desk a small gift from her, perhaps given at Christmas one year: two small pieces of glass leaded around the sides and hinged with tape to form a diptych. Written in script above red flowers on each panel is: “To someone special…. from someone who knows.”
Aunt E died of intestinal cancer at a hospital in Omaha. I can never think of this difficult end without having an image flash into my mind of one of those bright, hand pump poison atomizers we all used in those days, its big belly and long handle propped up beside the side door of her house near the tomatoes. A few years ago on a visit to the Midwest, I swung off an interstate to try to find the house. The tree had been cut down, and the lot was surrounded by a cyclone fence. “Not here,” I wanted to say. I was very moved by the loss of Aunt E, and have harbored for years the idea of trying to reveal an inspired vision of the pure beauty and simplicity of her life, and when and where she lived it, very much in the fashion of Marc Chagall painting. This is but a fraction of what I had wanted to say. Should the piece ever be written, I would call it – And the Spirit of Aunt E FlewOver the Corn Fields – released to become part of that great good Nebraska earth that spawned her and that she so magnificently reflected.
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