South Dakota Memory I

Our birthing begins our journey towards death. Of course, we don’t see it that way. At least not then. The first death that touched me involved cats…orange tabby cats. They showed up at our door crying for food on a beautiful autumn day and my sister and I begged to keep them. I believe there were three of them. I don’t remember what we named them…we might have been three or four years old, the cats, kittens really, not full grown. We could play with them outside, and we fed them outside. They were not allowed in the house. Dad’s rules. The snow started early that year, like it can in South Dakota. It wasn’t a light snow, it fell thick and heavy through the night as the temperatures dropped. The cats mewed for a while. “They’ll be fine. Their cardboard house is full of blankets. They have each other and long fur,” Daddy said convincingly. The wind picked up howling around the corners of the house hungrily, whipping the snow into sharp peaks. We fell asleep; the cats whose mewing had stopped long ago were forgotten. In the morning though, with the drifts of snow piled so high up on the porch that the door wouldn’t open, we remembered. Mom bundled us up and shoveled down the steps, throwing huge scoop shovels full of snow off the buried cardboard box. We reached inside…the cats had turned into ice replicas of their living selves. They were frozen as solid as the clothes mom pushed through the wringer washing machine on wash day. They lay flat, rock hard and lifeless.
My Grandma Anderson’s death is the death I remember most from my childhood because I loved her so much. She lived in a little silver trailer out behind my uncle’s house. I thought it was a doll house, it was so tiny. Uncle Kink had built a little addition on one side of it big enough to hold a couple of chairs and a tiny bathroom towards the back. From here, you walked into the original Jet Stream. It had a dining room table with bench seating on three sides and a galley kitchen with tiny appliances, doll sized compared to those we had at home. This lead into the only bedroom with a double bed that filled up nearly the whole room.
I visited Grandma a lot. She fed me tiger meat (raw hamburger on crackers), and thin mints with ice cold milk. We played cards and Parcheesi and she read me love stories from True Grit magazine. Because I was chubby and got teased a lot by the other kids we would discuss how to get rid of my belly fat. “It looks like bread dough.” “I wish we could just take a butcher knife and cut it off.”
I remember asking once or twice about my grandpa, but she wouldn’t talk about him. She had been 23 when she came out to the Dakota’s to homestead her one hundred and sixty acres. He had been in his forties when he came up from Missouri to homestead the land next to hers. He courted her and married her fairly quickly. I don’t know at the time if she knew that he had another family in Missouri…several children and a wife who he had promised to come back for. I doubt it.
My father was the second of three sons. He never had anything good to say about his dad either. He got whipped and beaten so much he finally left home and school in the 8th grade.
“What makes a man that mean?” he asked me once a few years before he died. He’d been telling me about his dad throwing a mattress over my Uncle Kink when he wouldn’t stop crying. “Kink wasn’t even a year old. The bastard took that big heavy mattress off the buckboard and threw it over the top of him.”
I was sitting in Mrs. Meyers 3rd grade classroom when they came and got me and told me grandma had died. It was early spring and she’d been walking down to the post office and had a stroke. We didn’t get to go to the funeral. I tried to ask Faye some questions about the whole thing, but she just crawled under a big chair in the living room and said, “I don’t want to talk about it.”