Dakota Blues (3 page)

And oh God, the Mass, with its choreographed standing, kneeling and verbal responses–rituals familiar only to the regulars. Karen would be outed as someone who no longer attended. She would embarrass Aunt Marie and Lorraine, and sully the name of her poor mother, burdened even in death with that selfish daughter from California.

She remembered her dad’s funeral, and the grief that had overwhelmed her. Tomorrow, strangers would surround her, crying and hugging her and saying how much they missed Lena. To bear the pain alone was hard enough, but to see other folks trouping into church–to see them grieving for Lena–would slay her. It would be too much. Karen rolled over, mopping at the sudden deluge of tears with the edge of the scratchy, line-dried sheet. She wished she could have stayed in California, dealing with the pain in her own way, buried in work, caffeinated and stress-driven. At least there she would function normally, familiar in her routine, running hard to keep her job, ignoring all the evidence of her poor excuse for a life.

She punched the pillows, trying to get comfortable. Outside the window, an owl hooted softly.

.

Chapter Three

K
aren stared at the full-length mirror in the corner of her old bedroom, and the mirror stared back, thankfully without laughing. Clearly, she had forgotten how to dress for prairie funerals. With its gold buttons and white piping along the edges, the expensive pantsuit seemed gaudy.

Aunt Marie stuck her head in. “You look nice.”

“Is it too much?”

“You’re from California, so people understand. And you never know what the weather will do. It might be sunny, or you can get a thunderstorm. Last summer when we buried Amos, it snowed.”

Karen hung the jacket back on the hanger. “How long do we have?”

Marie glanced at her watch, a big, round black-and-white job with a fake leather strap. “Lorraine should be here in a half hour.”

At the kitchen table, Karen opened her computer to the memo she had tinkered with on the plane. Reading the words made her mad all over again. Wes wanted more cuts, but her staff were so burned out it was affecting their home lives. As the director of human resources, Karen had listened to many closed-door tales of crumbling marriages, kids doing drugs, and employees barely holding off nervous breakdowns. She had become so adept at finding good treatment and counseling services for her staff that she felt like a social worker. At least she was able to help. That part made her feel good.

But it wasn’t just her staff that was burning out.

“You work too hard,” people told her. “You worry too much.” Those people were stupid. Karen was running hard, both figuratively and literally, because the company she worked for had been sold four times in the last dozen years, and she needed to be even sharper than usual. She got up before dawn each day to run on her home treadmill, and after a ten-hour-day and a microwave dinner at the office, she often stopped by the gym.

Driven by fear of a metaphorical Katrina, Karen worried if she failed to stay in shape, both physically and mentally, change would hurl her life around and drown her in deep, dirty water. She envied people who lacked that primal fear. They were probably more at peace than she was, popping pills like candy to quell the acid in her stomach. Some nights, when she pushed the seated leg press, her glutes and quads screaming, she remembered the videos of helpless, three-hundred pound women being lifted into lifeboats.

In the living room, the sounds of the morning crop report intruded from the TV. Corn was looking good, but soybeans were too early to tell. How many mornings she had heard that same report while she dressed for school, cleaned her room, and waited for permission to leave. Before she walked out the door, her father required her to summarize her studies from the night before, and her mother checked her room, sometimes handing her the dust rag or requiring the bed be remade over a minor wrinkle. The penalty was weekend restriction.

Karen stared at the computer screen, trying to refocus on the memo. Lately she was more easily distracted, especially by noise. She would reread the same paragraphs, absorbing little, her mind dancing from subject to subject. It may have been the relentless pressure at work, but work had always been rough. No, she suspected it was her age. One had only to look at one’s face to know the truth. Now the skin near her eyes creased into a starburst of fine lines when she smiled, and parentheses bracketed her mouth. Her young staff would be horrified if they knew she had been around when pantyhose were invented, and her first computer was an Apple IIe with five-inch floppies. Now, having a phone plugged into the wall in your house was considered so archaic they resurrected a word from World War II to describe them–
land lines
–although people didn’t use the phone to communicate anymore, and even email was almost passé in favor of texting. To remain relevant, you had to belong to a half-dozen social networks to alert your friends when you were about to brush your teeth.

Karen was on top of all of it. She wasn’t going to be steamrollered by the passage of time and changing conventions. Even though it took a lot of energy and constant vigilance to compete, she didn’t intend to lose her job to some kid. Over the years she had developed a thick mental playbook for managing young employees confused by W-4s and the need to hide their belly-button rings. She nurtured them, but not too much; used humor, but only to a point. Hovered discretely and disappeared. So far it had worked, and she planned to continue that strategy until she retired.

She shut the laptop. There would be time enough after the funeral to save the world.

At the church, a white hearse stood vigil at the curb and a long line of cars snaked out of the parking lot and into the street. Half of Dickinson seemed to have turned out to pay their respects. Mourners surged across the parking lot in waves, dressed in modest dark clothing and low-heeled shoes. Karen didn’t see “Juicy” written across a single butt, bellies were covered, and bra straps stayed tucked inside blouses. Small town life had its compensations.

A man stood at the parking lot entrance, wearing the black suit and cape of the Knights of Columbus. Waving toward the Lexus, he removed his feathered chapeau and bowed. Then he lifted a traffic cone out of their way and signaled them forward into the spot behind the hearse. As they passed, Aunt Marie turned toward the window. “God bless you, Robert.” She gestured toward the back seat. “Do you remember Lena’s girl?”

“So sorry about your mama,” the man said, reaching for Karen’s hand. She felt the sting of tears, and they weren’t even inside the church yet. At the base of the stairs, she was surrounded by well-wishers. Aunt Marie ran interference, calling out the names of long-forgotten friends and neighbors as they approached, saving Karen from the embarrassment of not remembering. She greeted stoic relatives and tearful friends who either nodded to her or hugged her desperately depending on their degree of anguish, but when the driver stepped to the rear of the hearse, every voice fell silent. Karen heard the clasp release as the driver turned the door handle. Strong young pallbearers, standing in for Lena’s elderly friends, eased the burnished oak casket out of the vehicle. A truck driver, approaching on the narrow street, stopped his rig and shut down the motor. The smell of creosote wafted across the field from the rail yard.

Flanked by deacons and altar boys, Father Engel waited at the door of the church. The pallbearers placed her mother’s casket on a rolling carriage and wheeled it into the foyer, where it was encircled by Karen’s family. When quiet fell again, Father began to speak, his voice magnified by the microphone on his collar.

“We welcome Lena, here in the narthex,” he said, “the part of our church where the sacrament of Baptism is performed. In this way we symbolize the cycle of life and death. We celebrate the end where we celebrated the beginning, as all life is everlasting.”

Karen swallowed hard as the priest sprinkled droplets of holy water onto the casket while murmuring a benediction. He handed the dispenser back to an altar boy and placed his hands on the wood, eyes closed in prayer. Then he stepped back, and the men eased the carriage through the double doors and up the center aisle. Karen and Marie, arms linked, trailed after to the strains of a violin from somewhere near the altar. At the front of the church, they genuflected and entered the first pew. Lorraine, her husband Jim and their children and grandchildren followed, filling the next two rows. She heard her nieces and nephews sniffling, but Karen herself had no children to mourn the death of their grandmother. Even if she had, Lena would have been a stranger to them, a little old lady from far away who sent them greeting cards on birthdays, with perhaps a few dollar bills folded neatly inside.

At the altar, Father Engel waited until all were seated. When the music stopped, he made the Sign of the Cross. “The grace of God our Father be with you.”

“And also with you.” The parishioners sat down with a great whoosh, and Karen followed their lead. She no longer knew the rituals, having become what her mother called an Easter-egg Catholic.

The choir began a hymn, one she remembered from the early years, when she was required to attend Mass every Sunday and on all Holy Days. “You don’t want to die with a mortal sin on your soul,” Lena would say, as determined to save her daughter from Hell as from getting run over by a car. Even if they were on vacation, camping in some distant mountain range, Lena would find out the time and location of Sunday Mass, and for the rest of the week remind Frank and Karen to save one pair of jeans so they’d have something clean to wear to the campground service.

The rich harmonies of a Latin choir still had the power to bring her to tears. Their voices swelled along with the fragrance of burning incense as the censer clanged against its chain. Karen groped in her pocket for tissues.

When the priest strode across the marble floor of the sanctuary to the podium, the music ceased. “We are gathered here today,” he began, “to celebrate the life of Lena Hess Weiler, and her ascendance into heaven to join our Heavenly Father in everlasting joy.”

He glanced down.

“A reading from Paul to the Romans.”

Karen bowed her head, mindful of those who still believed. Father’s voice faded as her eyes wandered across the altar, and the marble floor made of sand-colored squares alternating with white, to the back of the church, the sanctuary, with its high altar holding the Tabernacle. On the floor at the base of the podium stood a clear vase filled with golden spears of wheat. Dickinson, community of farmers, revered the grain, the basis of life in biblical terms. An abundant harvest was a sign of divine favor.

“‘For you did not escape slavery to fall back into fear…’”

Karen rolled the words around in her mind, thinking of their applicability to her own life. She had felt so proud to have earned the title of executive, when to have stayed in Dickinson might have sentenced her to a lifetime of minimum wage jobs. Yet what had she accomplished? In reality, she was little more than a slave herself; a slave to Wes, a slave to the employees whose welfare caused her to lose sleep, a slave to the fantasy of self-sufficiency. How independent was she, really?

Aunt Marie nudged her. “Are you going to take Communion?”

“I’m not prepared,” she said, grateful for the phrase that excused one, without explanation, from parading up the center aisle to receive the body and blood of Christ. That lack of preparation could result from failing to make time for Confession the day before to robbing a bank and committing murder on your way out the door.

“At least come up for a blessing.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Come.”

Feeling foolish, Karen followed her aunt to the altar, where she mimicked the example of others by crossing her arms over her chest in the shape of an X, fingers touching shoulders. Instead of stepping back in revulsion, Father Engel placed his hand on her forehead and prayed, the warmth of his skin as reassuring as a parent’s embrace. Karen’s plan to grieve privately began to crumble. When she returned to her seat, she fumbled for a new package of tissues.

As the swelling voices of the choir ended the Mass, the pallbearers returned the casket to the hearse, and the church emptied into the parking lot. Led by a police escort, the cortege rolled through the industrial district and over train tracks, past dealerships and storage units, and on into farmland, where early hay lay drying in windrows. The narrow road carved a path through fields intersected by streambeds and cutbanks. They passed a crumbling set of cement steps standing alone in the middle of knee-high grasses, and Karen recognized the remains of her mother’s one-room schoolhouse. A dirt lane ran past the school and over a rise, beyond which lay a valley and the farm where Lena had been born. Like most of its contemporaries, the farm had had no running water and no electricity. Survival was subject to the whims of weather and the price of commodities. In one good year, the wheat harvest overflowed the granaries, depressing prices in the teeth of the Great Depression. Lena had spoken of the Dust Bowl when great dark clouds loomed over their farm. Her family ran for the house, but grit coated their teeth and settled in their lungs and across their fields. The wind brought dust and locusts but, in the “dirty Thirties,” little rain.

The family endured as the earth cracked and the harvests withered. Lena and her sisters wore dresses made of feed sacks, but when the feed ran out for the last time, the starving horses and cattle were sold. Until the families could move to town, they accepted commodities from St. Elizabeth’s church. In her adult years, Lena would become nauseous at the sight of raisins.

Karen felt goose bumps at the memory. Having escaped to California, her life seemed safer than that of the farmers, but only because she cultivated her career with the same desperate eye to the weather. She felt that she lived on a razor’s edge between success and disaster. The keen appreciation for catastrophic change that loomed over the horizon lingered in her genetic memory, whether wrought by tornado or grassfire, economic downturn or the caprice of an overfed CEO.