Reports from Another Desert
By Ann Klefstad

Frank Dolney and the Flowers

The girl used to go with her father on country calls, not often, but now and then, when she was 5, 6 or so. Especially she would go along to Frank Dolney's house. Frank was an old man, in his eighties, but hale and with a mane of white hair, boney, upright. His eyes were like chips of blue glass, the dry blue of an October sky. He lived far out in the country and had a big garden, not unusual, but what was unusual was that it was full of flowers. Maybe there were vegetables, raspberries, but all she saw was flowers, and they were the lavish kinds, big and ragged, all reds, oranges, pinks, the peonies, and most particularly the poppies, big red and black Chinese poppies on hairy slender stems almost too fragile to hold up those big papery heads. She loved that big unruly garden simmering under the sun.

Her father would go into Frank's little white wooden house and have a cup of coffee with him. Frank, who was a widower, had been alone a number of years, competent to make his coffee, enjoy his lavish flowers, keep his house spare and fresh, walk out the door and greet the sun, on his own. He was a man like no other the small girl had known. Usually they needed help to do any of those things. She would stay outside and smell, touch, sometimes eat, the flowers. Just small nibbles. The petals had a peculiar tenderness like nothing else.

One summer day, the girl was at home, mid-afternoon, in the New Room, sitting at the big glass-topped table by the window in streaming sunlight, looking at a book, and then also from time to time looking at the way the sun sliced quartering through the inch-thick greeny glass of the tabletop, looking at the glass on edge, the depth of the green world, all the twisting figures barely visible in the deep deep inch-thick atmosphere. Her father appeared across the room, at the top of the three small steps to the library, wearing a dark blue suit and with his arms full of flowers, really full, not really a bouquet but a flowerstack like a haystack, bunched together, spilling out into space their reds, their ragged huge petals, their hairy leaves, hollyhocks, peonies, and a hundred poppies.

"Frank sent this to you. Look, your first bouquet!"

Most earnestly she heard this as she heard most things, and fierce love for Frank, his white flag of hair and brown face, his spare house and his solitude, an air, an air of sufficiency, suddenly took shape in her chest, in the small white cage of ribs. And at the same time, a rage, anger at her father for instilling this and knowing that he had done so, his ability to glimpse into that small cage, awash in red, so casually, with such a smile. A smile meant for a child, but she, she was human. More than a child, she thought, she knew. But she climbed down from the chair and took the flowers from her father. She took them into the kitchen and as her mother had shown her long before, laid them on the table, got a cutting board and knife, and carefully re-cut each stem so that it could drink. And then found the biggest vase, the heavy clear one, filled it with water from a saucepan, one, and then another, and put each flower in, in the same beautiful rank disorder, which was the order of the flowers, in which they had arrived.

The Half Baby

This was a story that she never remembered hearing but always knew. The running woman would appear in her mind from time to time.

Once upon a time there was a small wooden farmhouse in the country. It was out on the Haug Leo road, near the Haug slough. There wasn't any paint on the boards of that house. It sat in the middle of a grassless patch, the yard, there was a fence around it, a gate. The home pasture, the...There was a two-track driveway leading away from it all the way to the Haug Leo Road. Quarter mile or so. It was straight and flat except for one slow dip as it left the yard and then rose slowly again, up to a set of railroad tracks, which it crossed and then soon reached the road, where the mailbox was.

There was a man and a woman and a baby living in that house. The man was old—in his seventies at least. The woman was young, a little slow, as people would say, but content to have her house, her family, husband, sweet baby, to work with, to play with. It was summer. It was midmorning, time to get the mail. The young woman had dark blonde hair pulled into a long braid down her back, solidly muscled, fair with sunburned face, a blue cotton housedress, a shift, really, with an apron tied over it. The baby was playing in the dirt and tufts of grass outside the house, naked and happy. The woman set out for the mailbox down the little two-track trail, closing the gate behind her, as she did every day. Her slow gait was satisfying to her, bare feet pluffing into the warm silky dust of the driveway. Every day she got to do this, walk down her own road to her own mailbox on her own feet. At home it hadn't been like this. People had been mean to her. Now she had her own everything, and there wasn't any meanness. She wouldn't allow it. She heard the one train of the day approach, and pass, behind her.

She reached the mailbox; felt inside. It was empty. Most days it was. Sometimes not. They got the newspaper. Sometimes there was a letter from her auntie. Sometimes something from the bank. She looked up and down the Haug Leo road, a gravel road; no traffic, no cars. Most days there wasn't. They lived farther out than the tar road, where the drag racers went. She turned and strolled back to her house. There was something on the tracks, though, that she could see as she drew near. When she reached them she couldn't believe what she saw: two halves of a baby, cut right in half at the waist! Unbelievably, you know, it was her baby. Crushed, but cut, two pieces! It took a while to realize what had happened and by that time she'd snatched up the two halves and was running down the driveway, to the road, running down the road, one half of her baby under each arm, running on the gravel, each heavy footfall too slow. How many miles did she run before Hank pulled his car over and picked her up, drove her to the hospital in town? A couple? She was not to be spoken to, she was lost. The girl never heard what happened after that. If a story was a story, a real one, there wasn't any after. That seemed clear enough.

The Boleks

A story that sifted into her mind from so many sources, she couldn't remember when she'd first heard the beginning. But maybe it was working on a Saturday with her sisters and her mother, in the big kitchen, baking, her mother recounting the story of another woman, a woman who had come from another world, as her own mother had, except the direction was different. Her mother's mother had come from the big gore in Gudbrandsdal, from the comfort of it, her own family's education, ease, the dressmaker who would come and stay for a month to make clothes for the family, the parties, her own sleigh and horses that she'd drive across the country to week-long house parties with friends. That woman, the girl's grandmother, came to Duluth, a bare little city on the big lake, and made a smaller sparer version of her home, trimmed out with all the refinements of domestic technology and habits of comfort.

But Mrs Bolek, it had been so different. She was Czech, Bohemian, her husband John Bolek was too. Decades ago, he had come first from Europe, from the little village, where he could never have owned his own farm, and claimed land near Greenbush. He was big, tall, black-haired, dour. Silent. He always wore a big black felt wide-brimmed hat, like something out of a Western. Well, he had had a girl back in Bohemia, and he promised to send for her when he could. They didn't write back and forth—maybe he couldn't. But after two years he sent her the ticket to come.

In those two years, though, his girl had found other things to do, and had no wish to cross the ocean and come to America, to Minnesota, to Greenbush, so far away from her life. But she had a friend, someone who had never met John but who wanted to get away, to get out. She was working as a hired hand on a farm, there was nothing for her there but work and more work. She could see her whole life there in one day of labor. There was nothing to make any other day appear. So she took the ticket and went to America.

So John Bolek met the train, she'd wired that she was coming but not that she wasn't who he wanted. It wasn't his girl who stepped down from the train, it was another woman, small, slight, a little thing. He never got over his rage. He hated this trick so much that he married her, took her out to the farm, and made her miserable, silently, mostly. She soon took to her bed, her room, and after her youngest son grew old enough to cook, never went downstairs again.

She had three sons. Two were big, black-haired, tall, silent, like their father. They worked with him, and did farm labor at the farms around as well. They were famous for their ability to shovel shit—that is, to work hard, well, and with superhuman strength at simple and tough jobs. They were inseparable, and never married.

But the third son—Johan—was her boy. He was small, slender, not quite all there somehow, very girlish in some way. He never went to school. He did the inside work—cooking, cleaning, caring for his mother until she died. He lived on the farm all his life and had on his dresser two photographs: one of the local priest, Father Montgomery, and the other of the Doc, the girl’s father. They were his only friends, fathers of a sort, as his own was not quite a father, not quite human, maybe, a farm beast of some sort. Though Johan must have loved him. He cooked his father's meals all his life.

Now Johan was very tender and affectionate to his mother. He was good at loving, but never found anyone else to love except his mother and the priest and the Doc. Every Christmas he would send a card to the Doc, sometimes it was a birthday card and sometimes, say, a confirmation card, and even sometimes a Christmas card, and in the card was always taped a dime or two.

When Johan was in his late forties, his father, whom he'd lived with and cared for all these years, finally died. "Johan came into the clinic today," said the girl's father at the dinner table with tears in his eyes, laughing, "and he told me, he cried, 'Doc, now I'm an orphan!'"