. 6. Shadows across the Spoon: midwestern gothic

In the Spoon River country where I was raised there is an element of unremitting hardness. It was more prominent in my father’s people than in my mother’s. She was German, a hard enough race, to be sure, but he was Scandinavian, and their hardness is obdurate to the point of pathology: their calvinistic religion severe and intolerant; their relationships reserved, distant; their properties stripped of secrecy and shade. What I noticed most was an apparent hatred of trees. As the younger, smaller, less-assertive brother, my father was not much valued by his family, and it is this perhaps which saved him in the end, sparing him a significant degree of the family severity.  In a hostile setting to be ignored is to be spared.  My mother was less fortunate. As an outsider with red hair and an irrepressible nature, she was viewed with continual suspicion. In the small farming village where we lived, everyone know everything about everyone else and, despite the genuine kindness shown to my mother by a few, her years in that village were a torment to her; an underlying toxicity crept into her days and left her burdened with a lifelong bitterness.

As a very young child I saw nothing of this. My mother never spoke ill of my father’s family to me, nor did they speak to me at all of my mother. The adults did not involve the children, and all I had to gauge the adults by was how much or little attention they paid me. As far as I could see, adults were either kindly or indifferent.  My grandmother, Hildur, whose utter simplicity left a lifelong impression, was especially loving to me.  I cannot remember any anger, or sadness for that matter, shown by any adult. Doubtless these emotions existed, but they were not displayed in front of small children.

When I was much older what I noticed most about my father’s family was how readily they suppressed anything which did not fit into a strict, sterile conformity. Things tended to disappear: trees, fences, hedgerows, old houses and buildings, even animals. As I grew older and moved away, I saw noticeably less in the landscape each time I returned. The fields were gradually becoming featureless. Within their houses there were fewer and fewer objects, and the conversation was freezing into silence.

For me, this was worse than death and decay, which by comparison seemed rich and suggestive. My havens were the small, overgrown and partly-neglected graveyards, the sole places where the past was permitted to linger. When I lived in the valley of the Spoon, as a small boy on a bicycle in the mid-1950s, there were still abandoned houses and school-houses to explore, old neglected properties, stands of timber, wooded ponds, overgrown fencerows and streams and, as I have mentioned, country graveyards. As these began to disappear and as my reading became less childish, I replaced what was vanishing from my world with a literary equivalent, the world of the gothic: Keats and Coleridge, Poe and the Brontes, and many lesser lights from the eighteenth-century: Gray, Blair & the graveyard poets and other proto-Romantics, as well as earlier exemplars of the school of melancholia, the darker Shakespeare, Webster, Burton, the Milton of Il Penseroso, Hervey, Thomson and Young. By this time I was writing poetry of my own, literally thousands of lines of graveyard verse, virtually all of it expendable. In such poems, more than in any of my others, the naturalistic and symbolist strains came naturally together:

 

NIGHTFALL IN A RURAL GRAVEYARD

A disused knoll between fields, set apart
as burial ground when the first settler died:
some ninety years later a horse-drawn cart
conveyed the last coffin. Now no one knows
of any visitors other than crows ~
the gate is grappled in vine.

                                               This is no
fit place for the living, where weedy rows
of lichen-encrusted slabs recede
in the old and obdurate shade of yews.
There are presences here, not only of those
bewildered and disembodied souls
that cower about their bones like ghouls,
but of something residual, more to do
with the knoll itself, with the grating caw
of crows in the distance, the muted blue
of skies through a barren tree ~ presences
intrinsic as death, indifferent as dust,
that discompose and deter the senses,
instilling a dull unease . . .
                                                  All but lost,
the west is like absence: each fencerow ends
on that gray horizon where field and mist
and darkening sky coverge to a blur.
Mourning-doves murmur.
Night impends.

 

The Spoon River country of Stark County, Illinois, is a land where the population has been in decline since the end of the nineteenth century, a process which was gradual until the time I was born, shortly after World War II, when the process of depopulation began to accelerate.  Time and again in my poems there are references to this dying-off.

 

A COUNTRY WHERE LITTLE BUT CORN ENDURES

A stark, monotonous land, encompassed
by a distant, uninterrupted horizon
as though all the shimmering miles of corn
were a shoreless sea…

                                       and there, adrift
on the windblown acres, a solitary
derelict barn collapsed on its timbers,
the western peak of its roof abruptly
pitching out of the corn like the tilted
prow of a sinking ship…

 

THE WIDOWER

It may have been only the consequence
of his deepening age, or of something more,
something to do with the unendurable
starless nights or the drifted acres
of whiteness stretching forever away
like a dream of death ~ but whatever the cause,
he heard the scrabbling patter of mice
over carelessly piled forks and plates
as the sound of his wife downstairs at the sink
drying the supper dishes. And later,
forgetting he’d put on the kettle himself,
he waited for its insistent shrill
to summon her from her sewing, and when
it persisted, dismissed it as nothing more
than the endless and purgatorial keen
of wind in the eaves. He tendered his watch
in the nameless hour, sunk in his chair,
submerged in a phantom procession of shades
that moved through his mind like glimmerings cast
on the wall from flames in the grate, all the while
expecting to hear her foot on the stair,
till like some old sorrow from somewhere deep
in the subterranean soul of the house,
a timber groaned and he knew she was gone.
He hoisted his overcoat up to his chin
and, turning his back to the deepening cold,
slumbered by fits and starts. In the kitchen,
a curtain, darkened and limp with steam,
adhered to the windowpane till it froze.

 

THE GREYING EDGE OF A WINTER EVENING

In Stark County, in his eighty-third year,
my grandfather died. The tall gabled house
overlooking the creek and bottomland
from a rough oak ridge stands empty now,
but nothing changes. The west-facing pane
of the window-bay where he watched from his desk
again glazes red as sunset crowns
the rim out beyond the timbered slopes
and, again, a raw wind sculpts the snow
into curving drifts across the back yard.
A familiar hour, the graying edge
of a winter evening, when day and night
walk the same bare fields. An ice-refracted
ray of rose imperceptibly moves
among old mementos lying upon
the darkened oak of his desk, igniting
the interior of a glass paperweight
and warming the copper of four old coins.
In a matter of days, we will all convene
for the sorting out and dividing of goods,
the auctioning off of machinery,
of cattle and parceled land, the settling
of last accounts. But for now it’s as though
my grandfather’s only just left his chair
and wandered off somewhere along the hall
or down the darkened stairs to the cellar.
Nothing has changed. Once more, as in all
the uncounted winter days of his life,
the early dusk haunts the empty house,
the quiet rooms darken, the furnace kicks in.

 
THE OLD MASTERSON PLACE

Though barren for years, still it crowns the knoll,
walls weathered gray, roof a gaping hole,
windows like empty sockets in a skull.

 

EPITAPH

Concealed under corn, the wreckage of farms,
rotted timbers of buried silos and barns,
the hard rusted shards of harrows and plows,
the fallen-in hollows of cellar and house,
long-buried fragments of saucers and crocks,
doorknobs and buttons amid clay and rocks:
such are the secretive depths of the sea
of corn that extends to eternity
from the banks of Spoon River: beneath the sky,
beneath all we see, generations lie.

 

In one respect in particular, the Spoon River of my family is unchanged from the Spoon River of Edgar Lee Masters: the prevalence of death.  

 

LOVE AMONG THE GRAVES

Through the whole of an autumn afternoon,
we lay at the foot of a graven stone
in whose sunken shadow we made our bed ~~
a spray of nightshade encircled her head
and the play of dappled light on her cheek
and along her throat made it hard to speak ~~
the fragrant grass was long and unmown,
her blouse undone and her hair windblown,
and none but the cold indifferent dead
bore witness to all that was done or said.

And though half the village had damned outright
our renegade love, we savored our plight
and as outlaw lovers we vowed to stay
till dusk had obliterated the day ~~
the long hours passed and the last light waned,
yet still in delirium we remained,
lost in caresses increasingly bold,
clinging to all we could never hold
until, lying in ruins, at length, we slept,
as high overhead the cold stars crept.

And when the last star had died with the dawn,
I awoke to find her utterly gone ~~
by tracks of her skirt in the silver dew,
by a remnant of ribbon left as clue,
I traced her to where an old willow bent,
loosening languid leaves in the current
of Spoon River . . , and there where it wended
deep into shadow her story ended,
a glimmer of silver arms in the stream
and halos of floating hair like a dream.

 

THE HARVEST

Toward evening they found him out in the field
behind the tractor, lying face down.
The husking-bed of the cornpicker held
a mangled glove, but no blood or bone.
His hand was intact.

                                        They puzzled it out.
Something, most likely a stalk, had jammed
the snapping rolls. As he freed them, they caught
a finger, ripped the glove from his hand,
and gave him so unexpected a shock
he dropped on the spot from a heart-attack.

They laid him out in the bed of the truck
and ferried him home.

                                        As they neared the yard,
she stepped from the doorway, twisting a lock
of hair round her finger, staring hard.

 

HANGING OUT THE WASH 
                           IN THE MIDST OF FALL PLOWING

The sight of billowing sheets in the wind
caused something to break in the little child,
not only because, like anything wild,
they wrangled and whipped but because their fall
and lift afforded glimpses of all
the impending darkness that lay beyond:
the sinister acres of cloven land,
the miles of merciless black without end.

 

AFTER THE AUCTION

With nothing left but a rented room
in town, after which the county home,
his remaining choice was plain enough:
by dint of grit and a cane, he made
his way up a steep and gullied road
to the wasted oak that crowned the bluff
and there, looking back on what was done,
on his fathers’ acres auctioned off,
he pulled from his belt a loaded gun.

 

THERE ARE STORIES

There are stories you know without knowing quite
how it is you know them, stories without
any point to speak of, except the point

of their own peculiar strangeness, stories
as empty of purpose as any abandoned
barn in these barren fields, enduring

against all likelihood or good reason.
One such story took place around here
a lifetime ago. An old couple died–

whether, as may be, by Providence
or simply by luck– they died, either way,
on the very same day. He died before lunch.

The daughters decided to tell her nothing.
She appeared to take no notice of sharing
her bed with a corpse, except to complain

of his icy feet. She was dead before dark.
And that’s all there is to that story.
No one recalls anymore who they were.
 
 

The larger story of Stark County, Illinois, of the northern Spoon River country, is of an agricultural way of life giving way to an urban way of life, and all of the profound cultural changes such a transition brings with it. In one sonnet I address this transition directly, in a confrontation between generations, between a father and son.

 

THE PRODIGAL

In the end the thing that disturbed him most,
the thing he remembered most through the years,
was when he returned to the family place,
to the hard unforgiving acres where
his father still farmed, and recalled again
the inherent knowledge he once possessed
simply by being his father’s son–
a knowledge foregone, consigned to the past,
till he saw it rise up in his father’s face
as a look of reproach: that nothing gained
by talking has worth, that cattle and land
are the only wealth befitting a man,
that a landless man is like Adam cast
from the Garden, shamed, and forever lost.