Iowa State University Capstones, Teses and Graduate Teses and Dissertations Dissertations 2010 Someday, when I lived in Frost Joseph Edmund Brekke Iowa State University Follow this and additional works at: htps://lib.dr.iastate.edu/etd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons, and the Rhetoric and Composition Commons Recommended Citation Brekke, Joseph Edmund, "Someday, when I lived in Frost" (2010). Graduate Teses and Dissertations. 11448. htps://lib.dr.iastate.edu/etd/11448 Tis Tesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Iowa State University Capstones, Teses and Dissertations at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Teses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact Someday, when I lived in Frost by Joseph Edmund Brekke A thesis submitted to the graduate faculty in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS Major: English (Creative Writing) Program of Study Committee: Stephen Pett, Major Professor Linda Shenk Karen Bermann Iowa State University Ames, IA 2010 Copyright © Joseph Edmund Brekke, 2010. All rights reserved. ii Table of Contents Chapter 1 - Water from the Well 1 Chapter 2 - Just Like Cousin Tommy 11 Chapter 3 - A Lot of Ground to Cover 19 Chapter 4 - Required Reading 30 Chapter 5 - Blue Earth and Le Sueur 44 Chapter 6 - Pioneering Tensions in Southern Minnesota 53 Chapter 7 - Pioneers in Faribault County (summary) 55 Chapter 8 - Frost on the Prairie (summary) 56 Chapter 9 - Growing Up in Frost (summary) 57 Chapter 10 - Dad in Da Nang 59 Chapter 11 - The Entertainer 73 Chapter 12 - The Strong Man 89 Chapter 13 - New Age Pioneers 96 1 Chapter 1 - Water From the Well When we went to Grandma’s, we went to Frost. Frost and Grandma’s were synonymous. And when we went to Grandma’s, it meant that we would also visit the farm and all the aunts and uncles and the cousins too. From our home in Rochester, I rode in the back seat of the Ford LTD – or the Pontiac Parisienne or the Mercury Grand Marquis – with my head pressed against the glass, row after row of corn and soy and corn and soy – their green and gold leaves waving like flags – hypnotizing me as we rolled westward across southern Minnesota along on I-90. Somewhere beyond Albert Lea, somewhere after the implement dealer, my dad would tap on the driver’s side window with his knuckle and say, “There’s Big Bird.” He was pointing out a pair of trees -- a short, round maple and a tall pine standing next to each other at the edge of a small, country cemetery. From a distance, they resembled the big, yellow bird from Sesame Street. One branch jutted out westward from the top of the pine like a beak. When we got to Big Bird, we knew we were getting close to Grandma’s. When we got to the “Frost” exit sign, I climbed from the stern to the bow of the Ford, sat on Dad’s lap, and slid my fingers into the brown plastic grooves of the steering wheel for the final four miles down a long, straight blacktop between more rows of corn and soy, over the chocolately East Fork of the Blue Earth River, past the steel grain bins and tired farm houses, past the cemetery, past the green sign that said, “FROST - Pop. 298.” And if I passed a pick-up or a Buick, I lifted a finger off the wheel, just like Dad. I turned left at the red brick high school, “HOME OF THE VIKINGS” and a purple, horn-helmeted warrior looked down menacingly from a sign on the north wall of the gym. As 2 we coasted into town, my Cousin Tommy’s house was on the right, just up the gravel alley behind the tennis courts. I always looked for the rear wheels of his go-cart peeking out from behind his garage. I kept driving to the next block with Dad’s foot hovering above the brake. Grandma’s house was on the corner on the right -- a white, two-story clapboard house with a porch facing west. As we turned into the driveway, I peered over the long, white hood of the car and steered the tires onto the gravel tracks to avoid the green grass between them. I could hear the gravel crunch beneath the tires, and I could see Grandma Clarice -- her soft, wispy white hair piled into croissant-like rolls on her head and a big smile on her face -- waving from between the lace curtains of the small kitchen window. I hopped off my Dad’s lap, out of the car, and onto the grass. In front of the car, just outside the back door, there was an antique well water pump with a long handle. I sprinted to the old pump and grabbed the long handle. I showed my strength by raising that iron handle above my head, then jumping up to bring it down with all my weight again and again until rusty water from a 100-year-old well started to flow in a steady stream onto the grass. I envisioned my dad pulling down on that same handle when he was a kid. The water was clear in my conjured images of my Grandpa and Grandma Brekke at the pump. They pulled cool water from the ground into buckets, quenching their thirst with a wooden ladle on a hot Minnesota day. Then Grandma hung clothes on the line. Grandpa took a break from hauling grain in his big truck, slaked his big thirst at the pump. I envisioned them in the kitchen, scrubbing potatoes with a brush dipped in that water, warming well water up on the stove and washing themselves with it in a wooden barrel on Saturday nights. I was doing as they had done. 3 None of that ever happened, according to my dad, when I asked him about the pump years later. By that time, it didn’t matter. It was my ritual -- pumping the long handle, watching the rusty water come gushing out in spurts. I pumped faster, harder, and the water came rushing out in a steady flow, and I placed my hands under the spout and felt the cool water on my small hands. Sometimes I would splash it on my face. The mythologist Joseph Campbell said rituals remind us to live with intention and help us realize that we are “participating in the inevitable energy of life.” I didn’t know what drew me to that long iron handle when I was a kid, but I knew I had to get out and pump water from the well every time I arrived in Frost. There are nine streets in the town of Frost, and the branches of my family tree shade th every one of them. Grandma and Grandpa Brekke bought their house on the corner of 4 and Stanley for $900 in 1940 and never left. My mom grew up across the street to the north. My dad’s sister, Connie and her husband, Bill, raised four of my cousins in the grand old Maland house across Stanley Street to the west. I’m named after my Great Uncle Joe Kallestad. After a tour of duty as an infantryman in Italy and France during WWII, Uncle Joe returned to Frost, worked as a clerk at Ike’s General Store and the Post Office on Main Street, and lived rd alone in the house he grew up in at the corner of Howard and 3 Streets until the day he died. Both of my grandfathers worked at the grain elevator at the southern end of Main, along the railroad tracks. My Great Aunt Bea was the bookkeeper for the farmer’s elevator, the only woman ever to work there. My Great Grandpa Amund Brekke ran a roller rink and movie 4 theater on the second floor of the old opera house on Main. The Frost city limits encompass one half square mile, but it seemed to be the center of the universe when I was growing up. From the water pump in Grandma Clarice’s back yard, I ran into her arms at the back porch door. “Well, hello there!” she said, giving me a squeeze with her left arm, holding the door open for my mom, my older sister, Nicci, and my younger brother, Luke, with her right. Inside the back entryway, the smell of musty basement, menthol cigarettes and beef roast coalesced into “the smell of Grandma’s House.” I would let go of Grandma and run into the kitchen where Dad ate a handful of mixed nuts from the cupboard. Every time he got to Grandma’s, Dad would kiss his mother, snap open the cupboard to the left of the sink and inhale a handful of Planters from a bottomless can. Then he would disappear into the living room to talk to Grandpa Eddie. I opened the fridge, pull a Mr. Pibb off the plastic six-pack holder and stuff a couple Keebler Fudge Stripe cookies into my mouth. Then, I followed Dad into the living room. Grandpa sat in his wheelchair in the middle of the crowded room. “Hello, Joey,” he said, in a growly voice. “Jeez, you’re getting big.” Grandpa Eddie was a big man. In all the pictures I have seen of him before his first stroke in 1972, his build reminds me of Dick Butkus, the 1960s-era Hall of Fame linebacker for the Chicago Bears. I had seen pictures of Butkus on football cards in a Mankato card collector’s shop, and I was instantly struck by the similarity to my grandpa. They had the same short-cropped crew cut, a half-inch of bristly hair that accentuated the cinder-block shape of the head. They both had a pronounced jaw, thick neck, big arms. In one of my favorite photos of my Grandpa Eddie, he is holding me in his left arm in the tiny dining room of their home in Frost. It is a small, three-by-three-inch, fading color 5 photo from 1976. I am two years old. Grandpa’s right arm is in a white sling, and the sky- blue straps stand out in contrast against a stone gray work shirt with black buttons. I am looking at the camera over my left shoulder, stone-faced. I was a sober toddler by all accounts. In the photo, Grandpa Eddie is laughing, apparently working hard to get a smile out of me. He is not looking at the camera, but at me, laughing, a broad smile on his face. I have always wished I had known the Grandpa in that photo, the strong and jolly man I always heard about. I never knew that man. I don’t remember him standing without his quad cane or holding onto my father as he slid himself from his wheelchair into the passenger side of the tan Pontiac hatchback Grandma Clarice drove back and forth from Frost to our house in Rochester, from Frost to the Mayo Clinic, from Frost to St. Mary’s Hospital. When I think of Grandpa Eddie, I see him sitting in his wheelchair in the middle of that living room in Frost, parked in front of the TV, watching Hee-Haw, Dallas or Lawrence Welk. His hospital bed is to his left, stretching more than halfway across the north wall of the crowded sitting room. Several amber-colored bottles of pills, a copy of TV Guide and the remote control are on an orange and brown TV tray to the right of his chair. I don’t remember talking to him much. Whenever we’d go to Frost, I was so geared to drive my Cousin Tommy’s go-carts and dirt bikes, I didn’t spend much time inside talking with my handicapped Grandpa Eddie. I remember hopping up onto his tall bed each time we left to go back to Rochester after Christmas, after Easter, after a summer visit. I always leaned over the edge of his wheel chair to kiss his bristly cheek and say, “Love you, Grandpa.” I didn’t usually take time to do that upon my arrivals. Instead, I would run right past Grandpa Eddie, through the living room, out the front door. I would feel the wooden porch 6 steps give a little under my feet, and I would sprint through the grass, across the street to my Cousin Tommy’s house, spilling and sipping Pibb as I ran. Tommy’s house seemed to be the biggest in Frost. It was certainly the tallest. The giant pine trees reached up as high as the tiny windows of their third-story attic. I would run around to the back door and walk into the kitchen where my Aunt Connie was feeding a cat or tending to a pan of Sloppy Joes. Many times, though, Cousin Tommy would be back by the garage, standing beside the big bucket seat and scarred red frame of his go-kart, pouring gasoline from a red metal can into the idling Briggs & Stratton engine. When I hopped behind the wheel and slid my tennis shoe onto the accelerator, I felt the blood pulsing through my body, I saw my future on a racetrack, and I hoped I never had to go home again. Growing up in Rochester (“The Big City” to my cousins), I ached for a life in Frost, across the street from my grandparents, within walking distance of Uncle Joe’s. I wanted to live the small-town experience my relatives all talked about, laughed about, told stories about every time they got together. I wanted to haul feed buckets to the hog barn with Grandpa Morrie just north of town. I wanted to walk “uptown” by myself and get the mail for Grandma Clarice at the Post Office every day. I wanted to waltz into T.J.’s Bar with a fistful of quarters like my Cousin Tommy and play Ms. Pac-Man in the smoky dark while old farmers and truckers drank beer. Door to door, Grandma’s house was only 96.6 miles from home, but it seemed like another country to me. A better country. In Frost, a kid could do things unimaginable in the city. Tommy and I could walk uptown alone and buy Lik-M-Aid candy at the little grocery store. We could throw the football back and forth in the middle of the street, planting our feet at the curb before falling “out-of-bounds,” and sprint door to door, rounding up Frost kids to 7 play football on the sprawling high school field by Tommy’s house. We could knock on my Great Uncle Joe’s back door any time of day and be invited inside for a can of Mountain Dew and a full-sized Snickers bar. Even before dinner. In my imagination, that’s how Tommy spent every day. He was living the life I dreamed. Frost looked different than my home in Rochester as well. There were more tractors and grain trucks on the roads than cars. Main Street was one block long -- a grocery store, a hardware store, a bank, and a Post Office. Dogs and cats ran loose around town and everybody knew them by name and temperament. And instead of Rochester’s famous Plummer Building and Mayo Clinic rising up into the sky from the middle of town, the colossal grain elevator loomed over south end of Frost, alongside the railroad tracks, the towering grey sheets of steel rusting in streaks from the rain and sun. Tommy drove the go- kart right through the gravel loading area of the elevator where the diesel trucks parked, but I always spun around and gunned it for Tommy’s house as soon as the black rubber tires hit that gravel driveway. The elevator always seemed a bit menacing to me, too big for a town so small. I figured I would get used to it in time, learn to drive in between the grain bins, beneath the parked semi-trailers, navigate the gravel alleyways with confidence like Tommy, someday, when I lived in Frost. My other big boyhood dream was to stay at the farm -- overnight or all summer long. Either one would have been fine with me. My Grandma Mabel and Grandpa Morrie lived there with my Uncles Mike and Terry. The farm was about two miles northeast of Frost. The property was a homestead farm and had been in my Grandpa Morrie’s family for over a century. It was beautiful, set back from the gravel road on a gentle rise along Brush Creek.