A Wild Surmise

When Did a Self Begin?

174 When Did a Self Begin? In memory of my mother, Carmen V. Klein, 1922 – 2006 I Eared wheat, silky corn, squash blossoms at the bulbous end of a squash, that vegetable umbilical squirreling through the garden, around the gate post, its tendrils like ringlets of a green god rising and twining. This is what I know from childhood, pictures in my mind for growth. I could add the animals straying in their pastures or stolid in pens in the farmyard, or the daily industry of egg laying in the chicken house and the chickens pecking in the dirt. Where did a self begin then? Not to speak of me, but her. Hair cut straight across her forehead in photographs, hungry eyes. Even now they say hunger, but not as deep and dark. II Childhood in rural South Dakota. Rough row to hoe, everybody says it. If you didn’t grind and till and plow, and even if you did and the rain didn’t come or spring frost killed the shoots, if the food didn’t come up out of the ground, you starved. 175 But her great-grandfather kept the eggs to give to the plow horses for their coats. What economy of scale explains this? Her own mother, sickly all her life and dead at age fifty of leukemia, most often a childhood disease. Where did my mother begin, then? In scarcity, in the dry rows at the edge of the cornfield where the watermelons lay heartless after pillage. The boys from town or the tramps on their way to the river taking the best. Each younger sister taking something away. Time spent untangling the curls of the sister who cheated and the sister who lied. Cooking the one steak for the sick mother who grew up on bacon grease sandwiches carried to school in the small black tin. My mother’s father at the tractor yelling as she began to turn over the engine, “be the boy in the family.” She the one yelled at most, made of other people’s demands. Nightly fearing the sleepwalking sister would tumble down the stairs and she be blamed, though more often than not the sister was found in the morning covered with quilts in the bathtub. 176 III Measured against the river undercutting the bank, what force would be the one to point to? The swelling tide of a small family or war and disease and three children to raise during hard times? What river cut the bank out, left no island, instead a tearing away of soil, the sound of deep roots separating from the flat planet of prairie and sailing away? I learned to fear standing too close to the river out there in the pasture, the car left running while the grownups walked to the edge to watch the flood carving a new river bed, knowing the wet hollows would spring with mushrooms, that hundreds of pale heads would rise from the mysterious spoon-like depressions where rocks had rolled away in the current and downstream. They were the other children of the floodtide, drowned and drowned again forever. That swamped and silent life leaving its impressions, its shadows like thumbprints. Identity flowing onward, then gone by, forever gone by. 177 IV There were vast monochromes she could stare into, horizontal beiges stacking like lines of muted music if she could but reach to hear it over the constant wind. The striated sky lowering until the horizon disappeared and the tornado clouds came up, the birds silent, animals huddling in the corner of the field, the lowest place where the creek shoveled under the barbed wire fence, the grey posts with their roots hanging free of their tether to earth. Then more wind, blocks of blue-black chunks like slate stacking and twirling, like the way she starts to think—a habit of mind that’s a confusion of ends and means— sky gone dark to storm and swirl, stunned there like the plains tipping on their axis into night. Then little stars stabbing through, stuttering for hours across the great black flatness after wind. Her aunt, once picked up in a tornado and flown a mile, had cornstalks driven through her ears. She could hear only through the soles of her feet. Cars and trains sang up her calves. She would sway side to side, reach a hand out to someone, a...