When We Have Shuffled Off

            My wife called me from upstairs—modern ways that we communicate: “Kneifel’s house burned down.” She didn’t have to add, “at Krkenoše.” I checked sources online, as she did also on her own device, and eventually we came together in an embrace of generations and eclectic anecdotes: the handsome woodsman, widowed son-in-law to old Kneifel, provider of occasional eggs and fresh milk, infinite blueberries we’d pick along the way on countless walks along the mountain ridge, had perished in this fire. Gawkers’ block and grief would coil within the questions, way too early to pose as such.

            “What might become of this quintessential place?” A relic of Sudetenland, where we acquired our neighboring chalupa in 1947. Kneifels never had to abdicate, their name a guarantor for times on one side and the other of the war; Czech being their second mother tongue, they fit right into cultural quixoticies—(Kafka’s metamorphosis)—a nightmare not quite dreamed of on such shared bucolic space. Our decades grew together, through and beyond conventions communistic, into modern inquiry that keeps community alive: voting democratically and trading eggs and milk, stories and well being, timeless in our Krkenoše cul-de-sac.

            My mind meanders back to 1977, when brothers Jon and Josh and I were seated at our father’s house in Bejou, Minnesota. The phone rang just as Dad had served up hot SpeghettiOs, the sauce the same color of the fiberglass chairs in his kitchen, cool and lean-back-able in the wonderful summer that had sparked our imaginations.

            Two nights earlier we were in Grand Forks to visit relatives—including my father’s clandestine cousin Doug, who traveled the country racing sprint cars. We met him at the county fairgrounds track, showing off his newly sponsored thoroughbred: shimmer brown with well-placed decals from Union 76 and Camel cigarettes. His number was 1 or 7 (or something in between). His cab exuded confidence, with state-of-the-art handles trimmed in scented leather, haloed by a roll cage that reminded me of monkey bars and backyard memories.

            Then to the business of racing: two qualifiers and a final, all top finishes for Doug, sudden celebrity of our family. My cousins and brothers went crazy over the way he whizzed past everyone, lapping several cars, raising dirt around the oval like a shark fin. And at the evening’s final checkered flag, we rushed down to the pit area with awe for his machine, and him. He pat his car and then our heads—love retains a following—and gave his voice to several interviewers, sprinkled with toothy grins to us. “This means, of course, you’ll have pole position in Omaha,” some reporter claimed, keeping track of circuit points. Doug lifted his eyebrows and the corners of his mouth, clearly believing his unbelievable run: “the engine’s running perfectly, my crew is just the best, want to thank all our sponsors, and fans, and” autographs and au revoir… The evening shuffled off into the starry infinite.

            Diving into our SpeghettiOs, we could tell the phone call wasn’t light. Dad, a Lutheran pastor prone to talking with whatever set of circumstances, held his cheek to muffle his replies—some questions, surely, but mostly ‘mhmms’ of acquiescence, prima facie, as things go. “Boys,” he offered, a quarter minute after hanging up the phone, “that was about my cousin Doug. Do you remember that he—”

            “—earned pole position in Omaha,” my older brother blurted. I had only known the name of that city through a television program: Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.

            “Yes, he did,” Dad said, and gathered ways of gathering, “…. That he did.”

            “How did he do?” I asked to fill a gap. I think I already knew, having heard Dad need to pace this same routine a couple years before. It was with the Zilligans, then: a murder-suicide of a family going through divorce; we’d eaten at their home the week previous—just Mrs Zilligan and her kids (our age) and…

            “Well,” Dad searched for words, “he started off ok… Just like in Grand Forks, he finished his qualifier in first place. Kept him pole position for the next race.” He paused, expecting Jon or Josh or me to ask something, add a dram of understanding… I stared into my bowl of SpeghettiOs, spelling less than I loved to do with alphabet soup. “And so, he started off that second race.”

            “How did he do?” one of my brothers—or maybe me—echoed.

            Dad nodded at the need to know. How would any of us do? “He crashed. You remember those corners in Grand Forks, where the cars have to slide sideways to keep straight?” We nodded. “Well, at one point he couldn’t quite keep it straight. He rolled, they said on the phone, off the track and into an empty lot, so nobody else got hurt. Seventeen times he rolled, and somewhere in between his seatbelt broke. The roll cage might have helped a little bit, but in the end, boys,… he died.”  

            Silence, and more inspection of SpeghettiOs. At some length, Josh asked an everlasting question: “but… how is his car?”

            Jon practically rose to thwack that materialistic banality into oblivion, myself in full support. But Dad put his arm into the middle of the table, as gently as any Abe Lincoln, whom he resembled. “Now, Joshua,” he leveled, looking more at Jon and me, “that is a very good question.” No sarcasm. No condescension. No judgment about how an 8- or 10- or 14- or 40-year old takes in harsh news. Both Josh and Dad would die early, 46- and 51-years old, respectively. That leaves Jon and me to linger with such questions (not entirely alone, of course).

           

            And so there goes a collective sense of isolated fate in Krkenoše. A couple dozen hours ago, this woodsman turned his bedding to the alpine air and faced a February blessed with normal snowfall, hinting at some relief of drought. He must have smiled at that, like Doug, in pole position….  
 

Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2019)