In the Telling

by Margaret Morth

Prarie Winter by Margaret Morth

When my father died, we had a party. That is, after his funeral on that unseasonably mild leap year day decades past, several dozen relatives, neighbors, and friends came to our family home in small-town North Dakota and resumed the impromptu party begun the night before. That had also followed a church service—the customary praying of the rosary—at Holy Trinity Church, named for the original immigrants’ parish in Austria, Die Heilige Dreiheit.
         Everyone had piled into cars for the short drive from the church to my parents’—now my mother’s—house, but I wanted to walk, to let the fresh air soothe the smell of incense out of my coat and hair, to hear the consoling crunch of gravel underfoot. From the road over the railroad tracks I turned onto the footpath my siblings and I had worn through a grass field years ago.
         When I got home, the place was already brimming with voices and laughter. On chairs pulled in from all over the house, the men made a convivial looping circle through the living room, which gave onto the large dining room where most of the women had gathered. Bright afternoon sun through the south picture windows lit up the entire space and everything in it, including the gold and avocado seventies-era sofa, framed pictures of saints and the faithful on the walls, and the animated faces of these people I’d known all my life.
         No one seemed to think anything untoward about the mostly festive mood, not so much the norm for that time and place. Even my what-will-people-think mother was savoring it, in her own way. The absent guest of honor, my father, would have relished it most of all. I thought then and always have since, what a pity it was that Dad missed it, how he would have enjoyed the Lebensfreude, the life-joy of the gatherings.
         And I felt even then, as it unfolded, a sense of something rare and evanescent that I was privileged to be witnessing. I kept the libations coming and hung in close.
         I was particularly glad that Uncle Gil was there with us, having made the long drive from Wyoming. Gil was the youngest of my mother’s nine siblings and my father the eldest of his seven, and despite the almost full-generation age difference, the two had known a fast friendship. When Gil with his mischievous million-dollar smile was around, Dad was always in a good mood.
         The only thing missing was the making of music, we being not so gifted. But then, this group made a different kind of music: the telling of stories. The old stories, from when my father and those of his time were young and the town itself was still young, its founding preceding Dad’s birth by fewer than two decades. The first settlers were still vibrant and voluble, and my father’s cohort had observed everything, missed very little, and immortalized all they could.
         “Old Man Keppl, now he was a real character,” Louey Mueller interrupted in his chirpy staccato voice—most likely not realizing that, to my generation, he qualified as Old Man Mueller, being well into his eighties, untroubled by etiquette, and a real character himself.
        Uncle Gil nodded at Louey a couple chairs over, set his amber-brown eyes on us, and resumed the current narrative line featuring one of the town’s long-gone old-timers: one Mr. Keppl, whose family had farmed southeast of town.
         In this tale Old Man Keppl, loquacious in his garbled-English way, was complaining about the laziness and loose morals of The Young. One of his daughters had married some no account, by her father’s standards, who couldn’t keep his mind on the farm work. Instead of tending to the fields, “All dey vant to do,” said Gil in a low and slow old-timer accent, “is drive arrround and drive arrround…” A pause, all of us waiting, sensing the unsaid, until Louey leapt in where Gil dared not, in this company anyway: “All dey vant to do is drive arrround and fook!”
         Gil and Louey could have kept the house going by themselves, but there were more players in this jam session, most notably my father’s brother Kurt, who seemed to take sustenance from little except talk and cigarettes. Tall and rail-thin all his life, he didn’t have much to give up to the lung cancer that took him too, a few months after it took his big brother.
         But back to Old Man Keppl, who was experiencing a revival of sorts in this interplay of new old-timers, who all joined in on the next story.
         Like many heads of rural families then, Mr. Keppl had sired as many babies as possible with the time and vigor allotted to him. By the time the Keppls’ last baby came along, well past the primes of both parents, the twentieth century had caught up even with them. Instead of home birth as most in that area still did, after a difficult pregnancy Mrs. Keppl checked into the county hospital and awaited the birth of her eleventh child. Unaccustomed to waiting and to hospital protocols, Mr. Keppl would while away some of the time chatting with the nursing staff. Once, watching an aide come from his wife’s room with a cloth-covered bedpan, he asked what it was. “It’s urine,” she replied, which he heard as “youren,” an old-style form of “yours.” He pondered that a moment and then said, “Vall, vaat am I going to do mit a bucket of piss?”
         Even the dining room ladies hooted at that one. And there wasn’t an unimpressed face in the house when Gil let go with his full-throttle, head-thrown-back laugh and his trademark “ja, ja, ja, ja!”
         The fact that none of this lot had witnessed that exchange and therefore the only way it became a story is that Old Man Keppl himself told it—and rather pleased with himself too—didn’t lessen the appeal. On the contrary, it made him that much more alive to me, as if I myself had trailed in the wake of his progress through that little but colorful world. One of the town kids, Dad’s sidekick.
        The final February day, bright and mild though it had been, suddenly swung to dusk, a reminder that a warm day in northern plains winter is as rare and transitory as the gathering itself: those like me, born here and scattered across the nation, and those who’d kept with the town and farm homes of the dwindling community. An augur of approaching years of more funerals and fewer story tellers until they too were gone to time and their stories with them.
        Now in the kitchen setting up supper, our small army of wives and aunts and daughters began slipping covers off the various kinds of hotdish, bars, and homemade pickles (bread and butter, crab apple, dill of course) brought by visitors. Aromas of cheese-scalloped potatoes, various noodles baked with cream of mushroom soup and beef or chicken, buns warming in the stove, and fresh coffee brought everyone to the kitchen, circling the laden table. A few lights were on now, but for one moment not as bright as several feverishly orange bars of sundown light streaming through the west windows.

Hours later, out through the front porch, lingering on the steps and the crumbling sidewalk and slowly into their cars, the last of the gathering dispersed. Uncle Kurt stopped and stood with both arms open wide, an air embrace toward my sister and me. “I never had daughters,” he said in the softly gravelly family voice, now so uncharacteristically expressive that I stood still to see what might come next. “But these are my girls.” We rushed into his arms.
         No doubt surprising him as much as myself, I murmured quietly that I loved him. I’m still not sure if that’s what I was feeling—mine was a singularly non-demonstrative family—but I’m glad I said it. That was the last time I saw Kurt. He died that summer, quickly consumed by the cancer and gone.
         Several years later Uncle Gil was felled by a massive stroke. In time, he regained speech, though slower, and with the help of his children he made what would be his last trip to the place of his birth, a gathering for my mother’s eightieth birthday. In his wheelchair at the kitchen table, nucleus of so many get-togethers, of talk both vibrant and murmured, and always plates of homemade cookies, doughnuts, or cake on a tablecloth of many colors, his eyes took in all of us together.
         Storytelling was mostly out of his range by then, or maybe storytelling was the truest constant: in mind and heart, the old stories at play, alive. Now and then he would bring out a punch line in that old dialect or half-translation: “Yukes, yukes! Hort sang saum!*” or “Four ice cream. Schtroh-berry.” And, knowing what came before, we could all savor it together.
         I can’t tell those old stories in the old ways. But I have them, and in my heart, I carry a host of images of that world and its scenes: moments caught out of time and kept, the tellers’ gifts, and as much a part of me as the flesh and blood they also gave me.
        Time, you don’t get it all; I get to keep this.

* (roughly): “You! You! Hold yourselves together!”