Central Standard: A Time, a Place, a Family

PREFACE

Preface I never knew Grandma Susan Hudgens Irelan. I never sat on her lap and ran my fingers through her hair and over her face the way that babies do as they set out to discover the world. I never smelled her skin, thereby learning that only she emitted that exact scent, a scent that a baby can use to distinguish one person from another. Grandma Susie never read to me or rocked me to sleep. When I fell down while learning to walk, she never picked me up and cured my wounds. Grandma Susie died on an operating table at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Ottumwa, Iowa, as an anesthesiologist and a roomful of nurses struggled to keep her alive while a surgeon removed a tumor from her intestines. She was sixty-six years old on that January day in 1935, eight years before I was born, and it could be argued that she had worked herself to death and that she lacked the strength to survive a critical operation that would have saved a stronger woman. In 1889, at the age of twenty-one, my grandmother had married Grandpa Marion Irelan, and over the next twenty-two years she gave birth to twelve children, all but one of whom lived into adulthood. During all those years, when not giving birth or caring for her own children, and for many years thereafter, she taught at the Drakesville Elementary School. Her obituary stated that “any work that needed to be done in church, home or community, she was willing and ready to help.” I have seen only one clear photograph of my grandmother. When my parents were still alive, this photograph always hung in their bedroom, watching over them as they slept. Now it hangs in my bedroom, where it protects me from all harm. And someday, if my children show good judgment and a willingness to share, it will protect them. After my grandmother’s death, the mortician took the body twenty miles back to Drakesville. On the day of Grandma’s funeral, the principal closed the elementary school for the entire day so that the children could attend the prayer service, the funeral, and the burial. Grandma and her family had lived on a farm just west of town, and she had taught school for so many years that every child and adult in the town and the surrounding neighborhood knew her. With those few words, I have just told you every important thing I know about Susan Maria Hudgens Irelan, the grandmother I never saw or touched. But my story doesn’t end there. It only begins. For if Grandma Susie had not lived that life as she did, there would be no storyteller pecking clumsily at his keyboard. There would have been no father, no mother, no sister, no twenty-six aunts and uncles, no cousins too numerous to count. There would have been no story of my family’s adventures on the railroads, in the packinghouse, on farms, in droughts and blizzards, in dust storms and famine, on the prairie and the Great Plains, and in lonely small-town depots. The book that you hold in your hands was supposed to be about my parents, but I quickly learned that I could not tell this story without many unplanned digressions into the lives of aunts, uncles, grandparents , and many others, long dead, that I learned about only because my parents and other relatives told and retold the same tales about these people throughout my entire life, until my father, mother, and other elders began to fall silent forever. I have heard that the oral tradition in America is dying, largely because so many people would rather stare at their television sets than talk to their friends and relatives. I hope this isn’t true. For if it is, who will tell the old stories a century from now? What man, woman, or child will remember them? And who will sing the old songs, the ballads of love, betrayal, work, despair, ruined farms, desolate towns, railroads , and brave engineers? 2 [ p r e f a c e ] ...