South Dakota

South Dakota Jan Worth I've got nothing against memoir, currentiy enjoying a literary heyday; God knows I've made ample use ofmy own factual personal history in poems and essays. But sometimes the truth just doesn't cut it. Sometimes I just really want to tell a different version ofmy stories. I don't like the way they turned out. When I write my version, I take power. When I write my version , I am not a victim, but an architect. When I teU my version, lying through my teeth, I believe I demonstrate audacity and hope. That's what a writer does. By way of example, I offer two of the Worth famUy myths, both told repeatedly, and as if they were factuaUy true, by my father. Neither had a happy ending. One was about his father's death in 1931 at the age offiftyseven . He was hit by a truck as he went to the mailbox on Route 40 at his Indiana farmhouse. He had just gone to the Indianapolis stockyards and bought twenty brood sows. Despite this purchase, some people said it was a suicide—it was a wide-open highway, after all, and things were not going weU. The myth had it that the driver, a woman, went crazy. FoUowing my grandfather's death, the family lost the farm. In this story, my grandfather was a faUen hero, and the myth reeked of the grief and anger of abandonment . How could my grandfather, the sole provider for the beleaguered farm, the father offive chüdren, be so preoccupied? Why wasn't he paying attention? How could he do this to them? The effects ofthis event were cataclysmic , and I feel as if even my brother and sister and cousins and I carry second-hand wounds of this sixty-eight-year-old tragedy. But then, it's a classic American tale ofthe twentieth century. Lots ofpeople, after aU, have farnüy stories like this one: lost land, ravaged hopes, sometimes even miraculous rebounds. The second story, however, is the one that suits my point. It involves my father's trip to South Dakotajust before the Depression to work the harvest. 39 40Fourth Genre He was not yet twenty-one. He and a friend bought white suits, made out of duck, a heavy Unen, so as not to look Uke hoboes. (He was proud ofhis white duck suit. Nowadays I realize I've never heard of duck as a fabric except in this story . . . but it's in the dictionary. When he talked about it, he'd always say: "We wore white duck suits," dramaticaUy enunciating every consonant, as ifto seal their earnest purpose.) They clambered aboard a fastmoving freight train as it crossed my father's family's farm. In South Dakota, they worked for six weeks for a German farmer, and then they came home. Later, my father became a minister and his buddy became (far more glamorously , I always thought) a greyhound breeder whom none ofus ever met. This story should have made my father into a hero with us, his children. But he always managed to subvert the heroic potential. He always managed to teU the story of the horse trough. Apparently he found living with the Germans unnerving. They spoke almost no English—even their prayers were indecipherable to my father, a religious young man, and they had two teen-age daughters. Simply the presence of these available young women was nerve-wracking for my father, who always awkwardly bore a blend of self-consciousness, piety, and lust. These two young women would have struck him dumb even if he could have understood what they said. Meals were provided for my father and his friend, and they were conducted decorously—every one beginning with grace, just as it had been at home. But my father had never been where he couldn't talk. And then there was the food itself. Raised on plain, almost unspiced fare, his system, always a bit unsteady, couldn't take the rich German cuisine. One night, the story went, it finaUy got to him. Dreaming fitfuUy through a bout ofindigestion, he had an attack ofdiarrhea right on...