Katy at the Crossroads
She traveled over 1,000 miles, and is now unable to remember why it is she wanted to come back. A FOUR-MINUTE story
In commemoration of her 104th birthday, here is one of my best tales of Katy from the Archive. If you have read it before, thank you!
She stands at the crossroads in the thin April sunlight. The wind is scented with grass and cows.
She’d caught a ride on a passing bus near the Great Northern depot in Minot, and was dropped off here in the middle of farmland, a walking distance of three miles from her family home.
It seems a lifetime since she’s stood out on this wide prairie, though she has been away only two years. She stands quiet, turning, taking in north, east, south and west. She remembers.
Remembers her mother, married fifty-two years to a man she’d never loved. Her mother who had been given to a stranger in exchange for land by her own German father and was sent off with him to America. Her years of anger and bitterness spilled over onto her six children like sour milk, leaving each one lightly damaged in his or her own way.
She remembers her father, mean and volatile. Never entirely clear what ‘wife’ meant, or “daughter”, he seemed to translate loosely, interpreting them more as servant or slave. Had he any redeeming qualities, she asked herself? No, none. He still lived here on the farm, now breaking the spirit of a second wife, his acres today owned and worked by his eldest son, a mirror image of himself.
Two of her older brothers, too wild, too unruly for school, abandoned farming and family early on, and went off to work in the copper mines of Butte. The two younger brothers have gone as well, brothers whom she loves and misses. One has gone to sea; the other, the red-haired one, is working his way through college somewhere in the Midwest.
She recalls her own childhood, a blur of tending animals, cooking, scrubbing, washing overalls. She remembers the daily threat of the razor strap, the struggle to learn English, the determination to make it through the eighth grade and leave North Dakota.
She stands alone now at the crossroads in the thin April sunlight, the wind is scented with grass and cows.
The dusty roads run true in each cardinal direction, mile after mile of wire fencing, grain silos, an occasional stand of alders or cottonwoods. It is a hushed, green landscape in the spring, with only the drone of bees, and dogs barking out a greeting to each other in the distance.
She has traveled over 1,000 miles, and is now unable to remember why it is she wanted to come back. No one is left here that she cares about. Is it the town that calls her? The oceans of wheat? The smell of the tilled Dakota earth? The persistent, relentless wind blowing from the west across the heated fields?
Oh, it is not the first time in her life that she’s made a mistake, nor will it be the last. She crosses over the county road, now, to the other side of the intersection and waits. Waits for a car — any car, or truck, or bus, that will carry her back west, back to California.
Wow! This is literally stuffed with circumstances almost taken verbatim from my own early life. Sharon, I suspect there's a definite emotional link between this superb story and that early (wretched) life... OMG!
Is it possible that she needed to remind herself of why she left?