A short history of silence
Minnesota may be the Land of 10,000 Lakes, but since 1997, the year my daughter Mary and I moved to Laredo , I found that the water in Texas is far different. The Río Grande slides through the monte and past the bilingual voices of two countries while off North Padre Island the swells in the Gulf hum like a tuning fork as I float face up, eyes closed under the sun; the breakers bark and slap; and the surf says, “Yes,” as it reaches for shore. The water where I grew up in southern Minnesota , however, is motionless and mute -- sloughs muffled with algae and cattails, lakes still in their glaciered bowls, even the rivers meditatively searching for the slightest variation from the horizontal monotony of the land. And in winter, the water, white and drifted in swells across the fields and banked against buildings, insulates the world like an asylum's padded cell. Regardless of the season, the most palpable and pervasive feature of rural Minnesota is the drone of silence, a blessing to those weary of talk but often a hindrance to those looking for their voice.
On Sunday mornings I was stuck between my older brother Ken and our older sister Darla in the backseat of the blue Ford. The 11-mile drive to St. John's Lutheran Church in Sleepy Eye, Minnesota, seemed endless to me, a seven-year-old kid. In front, Dad drove, one hand gripping the top of the steering wheel and the other tapping the ash of his cigarette out the window. He silently watched the fields slide by while Mom, her left hand reaching across the top of the bench seat and her white handkerchief dampened with spit, scoured dirt from behind my right ear. It was a somber trip filled with dread of the hard wooden pews, the droning recitation, the reverend's everlasting sermon, and always the fear that this Sunday there'd be Communion, which meant an extra half hour trapped in the church.
By the time we were free, the sun was high in the sky. We climbed back in the car, hoped for green at the two traffic lights on Main Street, and turned north on Highway 4 past Sleepy Eye Lake, reedy and smelling vaguely like the slough at home. Once we turned onto the county road and then the gravel township road that led to our farm, Dad sometimes sang -- not “Amazing Grace” or “How Great Thou Art” -- but “You Are My Sunshine” and what little he remembered of “The Big Rock Candy Mountain.” His voice was light then, and he was likely as happy as I was that we were on our way home and that church was seven long days away.
I loved it when my dad's oldest brother and the one bachelor in the family, Uncle Edwin -- though my brothers and I knew him only as Duke -- dropped in unannounced. This usually happened around noon on Sundays when Mom and Dad, Darla, and my three brothers and I sat around the kitchen table and ate roast beef, boiled potatoes, Old Home rolls, and Van Kamp Pork 'N' Beans. The outside door would creak open and then bang shut, and I'd look across the table at Ken, who had a clear view of the window onto the porch while I had my back to the door. Next, the second door leading to the inside porch opened, where the big upright freezer and the refrigerator stocked with a case of Pfeiffer's beer stood, where Dad's gray Dickey coveralls and Dekalb caps slumped from hooks in the wall, and where the .22 and .410 and 12 gauge shotgun hung in the rack Ken made in Industrial Arts class.
Then, Duke pushed open the door to the kitchen, and in that big, gravelly voice, loud and unruly, a voice our house was unaccustomed to, he boomed, “Hi, ya girls!” I remember turning and smiling up at him while Steve and Ron, both younger than me, laughed and shouted,
“We're not girls!” And I remember feeling grateful and surprised -- in the midst of our somber dinner -- that here, unafraid of using his voice, was one of my relatives.
Mom's brothers and sisters were small, soft-spoken people who grew up in Sleepy Eye and even as adults never lived more than 15 miles from home. The brothers -- Uncle Lloyd, who married Dad's sister Erna; Uncle Ray, who in my memory is always gray, tanned from field work, and as small as Mom; and Uncle Delbert, taller than the rest but stooped with eyes on the ground -- all farmed, and Mom's lone sister, my godmother Aunt Mildred, married a farmer. On the rare occasions when I saw them all together -- a high school graduation, a wedding, or a funeral -- they were strangely reserved, the hesitant hum of conversation about rainfall, the price of slaughter cattle, and whether corn would be knee-high by the Fourth interrupted by long sighs, paring of nails, and eyes on the floor. Maybe they were just worn down from struggling through the Great Depression; enduring World War II, Korea, and the Cuban Missile Crisis; and seeing the advent of television, travel by plane, and the incomprehensible force of the split atom. Maybe it was more than these Lutheran Midwesterners could absorb so that when protests, riots, assassinations, and yet another war in the 1960s turned the country upside-down, Mom and her siblings ho-hummed and sighed, “Is that so?”, followed by a silence that seemed to expect nothing but more silence. While the rest of the country raised its voice, they raised corn and children accustomed to a voiceless vacuum.
When I was a teenager, I relished long summer days alone on the B John Deere cultivating soybeans or corn. To alleviate the boredom and because of the putt-putt-putting of the tractor, the scrape and scratch of shovels against rock, and the privacy of crops all around me for half a mile, I sometimes tried to sing. I belted out off-key versions of Woody Guthrie's “This Land Is Your Land,” Bob Dylan's “The Times They Are a Changin',” the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” or out of desperation, “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” I sang the Lamberton High School fight song and even bellered like a calf as I drove beside the pasture where the Herefords grazed. I'd bawl again until the cows trotted down the fence line behind me, their udders swinging, their eyes wild with wonder at the idea that a calf was hidden somewhere on t he tractor with me. Alone for long summer hours with only killdeers and jackrabbits for company, I found that my voice gave me a lot of pleasure.
Mom just sat there on the tree stump east of the house. It was summer. Warm. She wore a white sleeveless blouse and blue pedal pushers. She sat facing south and looked across the patches of grass and dirt on the lawn where my brothers and I played football. She must have looked across the fields, down the barbed wire fence line that ran between Donneth Krinke's soybeans and Henry Shiller's small pasture, and across the ridge where the land sloped into the Cottonwood River flood plain where my brothers and I trudged on hot, humid days with the orbits of deer flies and clouds of gnats swirling around our heads.
Nearly 12, I peeked at her from behind the sheer drapes in the living room, puzzled by her stillness and wondering how long she'd sit there.
She could see the dark green poplars and elms south of Shiller's place where the cratered ground of an exhausted gravel pit was pooled with water. Once Ken found a six-point antler from a white tail deer there, and a few years later one of Henry Shiller's grandsons swung a .22 rifle after a bounding cottontail and accidentally shot his younger brother.
She just sat there. Her hair, short and lifted from her head in finger-sized rolls, had been set in pink foam curlers last Saturday night, but this was Wednesday, and her slightly graying hair only quivered in the soft evening breeze. She probably saw the tops of the towering cottonwoods in the valley and the plume of dust trailing a pickup on the gravel road to the Catholic cemetery on the far side of the river. But then she hung her head and might have looked down past her knees to her pale legs where blue veins branched like rivers and lakes on a map. Sometimes her shoulders shook, like the withers on a horse trying to stir off the flies. But then I thought I imagined it, and she'd look up and off into the distance again.
From that stump the world extended just two miles. The tallest structures on the southern horizon were the Lamberton water tower and the Farmers' Elevator grain silos. But now dark had fallen, and she'd have only seen the small flashing red lights atop them both and on the radio tower standard on the south end of town.
Later I stood in the stark white fluorescent light of the kitchen with my three brothers, looking at Dad, and waiting for him to explain. He sat at the end of the kitchen table wearing a gray shirt and pants and old brown leather lace-up work boots. His face was long and thin, dark with stubble, tanned; his brown hair was receding, short, and matted across his pale scalp. He smelled of sweat, Winstons, and Pfeiffer's beer. He shrugged and moved the cigarette wedged in the crotch of two fingers to his mouth.
She sat there even after I had gone upstairs where I laid in the dark with my feet at the head of the bed and watched her out of the east window. Fireflies blinked in the ditch along the road, and crickets creaked. The harsh white of the yardlight in front of the house threw her shadow long and thin before her. She may have seen the stars on the horizon above the town lights, the faint teapot of Sagittarius and the jewelled tail of Scorpio. But since she didn't lift her face to the sky above, she wouldn't have seen the long band of the Milky Way arcing out of the southwest, bending overhead, and sinking into the northeast.
Later my dad's angular weight creaked up the wooden steps and around the corner to their bedroom. Outside she still sat on the flat rings of the stump, but in the morning when I woke up she was gone.
In 1990, the year my daughter Mary started kindergarten, we lived with my brother Ken, his wife Paulette, and their two kids Michael and Ann on their small farm near Lamberton and slept in the bright, two-room basement under the kitchen and living room. I was finishing graduate school and commuting 75 miles to Mankato two or three times a week, and because I usually took night classes, I didn't get home until around midnight. Of course, by the time I pulled into the yard in my old yellow Gremlin and trudged through the garage door, the house was dark and still, and everyone was in bed. Ken's dreaming coonhound Delbert twitched and yipped on a rug in the laundry room, Ann and Michael were quiet in their bunk beds upstairs, and as I felt my way down the steps, Mary breathed heavily in the front room of the basement. The two windows on either side of her bed were bright with moonlight reflected off the snow, and I could see Spunky, one of three cats in the house, curled up next to Mary and three or four books scattered across the pink patch quilt. Mary loved Dr. Seuss and the Bearenstain Bears, and Ken or Paulette read these or other books aloud to her, Ann, and Michael each night before they went to bed.
During the day when I was at school, Ken was at work, and Paulette was baking or washing clothes or vacuuming or doing all the other things that needed doing, Mary sometimes wanted to read a book but couldn't because she hadn't learned to read yet. To solve this problem, I read her favorite books -- Hurray for Hampton and Dr. Seuss's Fox in Socks, ABC, and Hop on Pop -- into a portable cassette recorder. As I reached the end of each page, Mary honked on a harmonica or tapped a glass with a spoon or strummed the strings of a guitar so later, even if I wasn't there, she'd know when to turn the page.
Today, for the first time in nearly 15 years, I listened to that tape. My voice was nasally as if I were fighting a cold as I read Hop on Pop and drawn out in a long, exaggerated yawn on “Y is for yak, a yawning, yellow yak” and carefully enunciating “beetles in a battle with paddles in a bottle on a poodle eating noodles” so that Mary would hear each word even when I was three counties away in Dr. Solo's Traditional Grammar class.
I lived in silence for so long that it often seemed natural. Finally, however, now that I'm well into my 40s, I've come to an understanding of my own voice and especially of voice in writing. It's not the rote monotone of computer-generated words at the end of an 800 number or the flat, unintelligible legalese of an insurance policy. It's not a classroom full of children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance or a congregation regurgitating responses to the minister's call. Voice is what makes the reader feel that a human being is behind the words on the page and that that human being cares about what the words say.
Voice reveals personality, demeanor, and emotion. It's the quality that calls up a genuine image of a writer who speaks with the authority of first-hand experience. The words have a force, a magnetism that pulls the reader into the writer's world, much as when walking by a store window we find it impossible to avert our eyes from our own reflection or when a voice behind us calls our name and we can't resist turning and searching the crowded sidewalk, all the while expecting to see a friend or a long-lost relative. The voice the reader hears and the texture of the writing -- its soft liquidity or grating harshness, its proper restraint or coarse candor, its baroque high-mindedness or steel-edged severity -- reveal the speaker's true self. And again I see that like rainwater seeking its own level and filling the empty hollows and bowls of the land, my voice fills the restraint of my memories and the silence of blank pages.
( Randy Koch teaches English and directs the Writing Center at Texas A&M International University .)
Local Writers at Work
¶ “Dancing on Barbed Wire,” a poem by local nurse practitioner and columnist for 10-4 Magazine Norma Hannigan , was recently accepted for publication in the San Antonio Express-News .
¶ The newest issue of La Frontera , Laredo Community College's literary magazine, was unveiled recently by editor Dr. Toni Howell during a reception recognizing contributing writers and artists. Student award winners included Jennifer Torres and Teresa Santos in prose and Myriam Garza, Walter Muñoz, and María Esther Sierra Salas in poetry. Copies of the magazine are available on the first floor of LCC's Kazen Center or from Dr. Howell in the Adkins Building.
¶ The South Texas Writing Project Summer Institute, a four-week seminar held at Texas A&M International University for local writing teachers and directed by Lucinda Farrokh and Dora Flores , concluded recently with a public reading at Rosita's Restaurant on Calton. Fourteen local teachers -- representing TAMIU; LCC; United South, United, Martin, and LBJ High Schools; and Cigarroa and Los Obispos Middle Schools -- read original works written and revised during the Institute.
