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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780873513722 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Minnesota Historical Society Press |
| Publication date: | 05/15/1999 |
| Series: | Midwest Reflections |
| Pages: | 211 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Freya Manfred lives with her husband, screenwriter Thomas Pope, at a small lake near Stillwater, Minnesota. Her literary memoir, Fredrick Manfred: A Daughter Remembers (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1999) was nominated for a Minnesota Book Award and an Iowa Historical Society Benjamin F. Shambaugh Award. She has written a novel called Tall and a new nonfiction book entitled Raising Twins. She is the author of two poetry collections published by Red Dragonfly Press, SWIMMING WITH A HUNDRED YEAR OLD SNAPPING TURTLE (2008) and SPEAK, MOTHER (2015).
Read an Excerpt
Frederick Manfred
A Daughter Remembers
By Freya Manfred
Minnesota Historical Society Press
Copyright © 1999
Freya Manfred
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87351-372-2
Chapter One BURIAL
On the first night of the storm, Tollef lost his way and wandered over the desert's howling floor. In the doubly black night, solicitous of the animals, he had tried to walk the short way from the house to the barn. Two days later, when the wind let up, they found his body in a drouth-crevasse near the willows by the creek, smothered in a drift of flour-fine dust. Like a mountaineer on a glacier in a blizzard, he had not seen the yawning chasm ahead. Dust drove through the cluster of bareheaded people that gathered in the churchyard. Dust filmed his coffin. Dust and the minister's word fell beside him in the grave.
The Golden Bowl
A PROCESSION OF CARS, LED BY A GRAY HEARSE bearing my father's coffin, left the George Boom Funeral Home in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on September 10, 1994, crossed the Big Sioux River, and cut across the still-green bluffs into the rolling fields of northwest Iowa. As the motorcade slowed upon entering each small town, other drivers pulled to the side of the road and stopped, raising sheets of ditch dust that settled briefly on the crawling cortege and then blew off in the hot gusty winds.
The funeral procession continued under the deep blue sky for almost an hour, through cornfields and wheatfields, past farmyards and more towns, until it turned left and uphill into the Hillside Cemetery just across the winding Rock River from Doon, Iowa, where my father was born almost eighty-three years before.
The hearse bounced to a stop beside a flapping blue canopy in the southwest corner. It was the highest part of the cemetery and still empty of gravestones. A group of mourners waiting beside the open grave watched with alert, sad, wondering faces as the plain pine coffin was lifted from the hearse by my father's three living brothers, Henry Feikema, Abben Feikema, and Floyd Feikema; his son, Frederick Manfred, Jr.; my husband, Tom Pope; and our fourteen-year-old sons, Ethan Rowan Pope and Nicholas Bly Pope.
The seven-foot-tall cornstalks north and west of the grave site thrashed wildly, fell silent, sighed, then thrashed again in the gusting wind. The mourners seated themselves on folding chairs while I laid armfuls of purple, yellow, and white wildflowers from Dad's hillside in Luverne on top of the coffin. A vase of red and white gladioli and lilies in front of the coffin blew over in a sudden gust of wind, and I set it back up, rearranging its ribbon, on which was written BROTHER.
September 28, 1981 Dear Freya and Tom and boys, When I drove down this morning in the clear yellow air of early fall, I was reminded again, as I have been so many times on such mornings, of your wedding day. There were the same lazy slowly swirled mares' tails in the deep blue sky, the same slow cool breeze from the west, the same lovely shadows under the yellowing trees, the same ocher-and-green colors of the cornfield and alfalfa lands and pastures. I still savor the excitement of that wedding day, the "funs" we all had, the people who drove long distances, the drama around the "altar" rocks, the dinner afterwards, and so on. I also remember how, hanging over it in my head, in the back part of my head, was the thought that in a few days I'd fly to California to bury my 90 year old father. Talk about light and dark, heights and depths! Many people since that day, who were there, speak of it as the most dramatic and interesting wedding they ever saw. Same here.
Love, Dad
The funeral began with a recording of original piano music composed and played by my sister, Marya Manfred. Then Fred welcomed everyone and, bowing, held Dad's Lakota peace pipe to the four directions and to heaven and earth.
The giant Minnesota poet, Bill Holm, rose with a reddened face, looked down over the Rock River, and, with a deep barrel-chested voice, sang "Shall We Gather at the River," followed by a reading from Walt Whitman, one of Dad's favorite poets. Another old friend of Dad's, the poet Robert Bly, his white hair rising and falling in the wind, read from Antonio Machado:
All things die and all things live forever; but our task is to die, to die making roads, roads over the sea.
Benjamin Vander Kooi, a family friend and my father's trusted lawyer, read from Ecclesiastes. Uncle Henry, Dad's youngest brother, his voice soft with grief and love, read the keenly logical, manly-hearted poem Dad had requested, from "On the Nature of Things," by the Roman poet Lucretius:
Death Is nothing to us, has no relevance To our condition, seeing that the mind Is mortal ... We may be assured that in our death We have no cause for fear, we cannot be Wretched in nonexistence. Death alone Has immortality, and takes away Our mortal life. It does not matter a bit If we once lived before.
My husband, Tom, read "I Died for Beauty" by Emily Dickinson, Dad's favorite poet, "Sonnet V" by Edna St. Vincent Millay, and "Men's Tears," a poem I'd written for Tom's mother's funeral. Then another of Dad's old friends, Waring Jones, stood up and knocked on Dad's coffin and said, "Fred? You in there? I know you're not-you're in here," holding up one of Dad's best-selling novels, Lord Grizzly. He told a few stories about how Dad researched the novel by crawling around on all fours with one leg bound in a makeshift splint, eating grubs and ants to see how they would have tasted to the book's hero, old Hugh Glass.
When he opened his eyes once more, he saw it. His grave. Beside him, not a yard away, someone had dug a shallow grave for him, a grave some three feet deep and seven feet long.
Old gray eyes almost blinded with tears, with extreme pain, green bottleflies buzzing all around, he stared at it.
His grave.
He shook his head; blinked.
His grave.
So that was it. He was done for. His time was up.
His grave. He lay on his right side looking at it, bewildered in a wilderness.
"Ae, I see it now, lads. It's this old coon's turn at last."
Lord Grizzly
The poet John Calvin Rezmerski read from the last pages of Green Earth, where Free (my father) has a conversation with his dying mother, Ada (Alice), about being a Christian and a writer. The passage tells the story of how my father's beloved mother reacted to his dreams of being a writer and what she said to him about remaining true to himself. My father often told me how much he missed his mother and how tragic it was that she died when he was barely seventeen. But he always added that "in one way it was good" that she had not survived his father, Frank, because she might not have entirely approved of his novels. "And I'd have had an awful time explaining my vision to her or going up against her," he said, "because she never yelled at me. If I did something wrong, or she thought I hadn't been entirely honest, she'd just look at me sadly and I'd feel terrible, deep in my guts."
"I hope to go to heaven tonight, Free." Ma looked down at her fingers where they fumbled through each other in her lap. "And, son, I'd so like it if someday you could join me there and live beside me in glory."
"Ma."
"You're such a strange one. I sometimes don't understand you at all. You are not of us, really. You are not like any we have lived with."
"Oh, Ma, except that I'm too tall for doorways, I'm just like everybody else."
"You and Uncle John with your quips. No, son, I'm serious. I would very much like to have you in heaven with me and Jesus someday."
"Yes, Ma."
"At the same time, though, I don't want you to pretend to be a Christian just to please me when privately you're not.... Don't be a hypocrite. God hates a pious fraud." ...
"What do you want to become?"
"A storyteller."
"What kind of reader do you have in mind?"
"Smart people, mostly. Doctors. Teachers like Professor Ralph."
"And not the average Christian?"
"Of course him too. If he wants to read them."
"What will your books look like? I mean, the nature of them?"
"Oh, like Jack London's. Or that Hardy you once wouldn't let me read. That kind."
"What a strange boy you are."
"Don't you like it that I want to be like them?"
Ma shook her head to herself. "Ada's boy a writer. Free, of Alfred and Ada, turned out to be one of those writer fellows." ...
There was a loud call up the stairwell. "Hurry, Free! or you'll never see your ma alive on earth again."
Free was out of bed and into the legs of his overalls in one motion. He skidded downstairs. He bumped into Pa in the semidark of the living room. They bungled into the bedroom together as they fastened their suspenders.
They were too late.
The heart had stopped completely. It was done. The cheeks were losing their color. Before their very eyes her spirit rinsed out of her flesh like water soaking away in sand....
Free wrote the obituary for the church paper, The Watchman, at Pa's request. "If you're going to be a writer," Pa said, "let's see what you can do with that."
Green Earth
Arthur Huseboe, Dad's dear friend and director of the Center for Western Studies at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, spoke next: "Fred was a newspaper reporter in the 1930s. He believed the discipline of news writing made it possible for him to be a novelist. He told me once that he could get around Sioux Falls faster than most drivers because he had been a reporter. And he wrote his own obituary as a reporter would, and I'm going to read from it because it tells the story of Fred Manfred, the reporter of Siouxland: 'When Mr. Manfred's first books appeared,
Eastern critics in New York were inclined to hail him as a new and important voice in American letters. Gradually, however, they became disenchanted with his writings when it became apparent he was not writing caustically about the Upper Midlands as Sinclair Lewis had done. Mr. Manfred was, in fact, celebrating his own country by telling his version of the truth about it. He invented a name for his country, Siouxland, which embraced the Big Sioux River watershed. He wrote about Siouxland much in the manner of a Faulkner writing about Yoknapatawpha County or a Hardy about his Wessex, in depth, with great insight in all its aspects, from Indian times to contemporary times. The range of his themes and the variety of his characters is unmatched in American Literature. Wallace Stegner in his foreword to Conversations with Frederick Manfred remarked, "The inside of Fred Manfred's head is like the fairgrounds on the Fourth of July. Everybody is there, wide awake and alive."
'Mr. Manfred wrote a statement for Contemporary Novelists, published by the St. James Press, London:
"It has been my dream for many years to be able to finish a long hallway of pictures in fiction dealing with the country I call Siouxland (located in the center of the Upper Midlands, USA) from 1800 to the day I die. Not only must the history be fairly accurate, and the description of the flora and fauna fairly precise, and the use of the language of the place and time beautiful, but the delineation of the people by way of characterization living and illuminating. It has long been my thought that a 'place' finally selects the people who best reflect it, give it voice, and allow it to make a cultural contribution to the sum of all world culture under the sun....
"The final test of good fiction rests with how well the characters come through, their reality, their meaning, their stature, their durability, no matter what the situation may be. The characters should be so well done that the reader should not be aware of plot or the unraveling of time in the work. The reader should be lost in the story. The plot should be hidden like a skeleton is in a flying eagle.
"If a 'place' truly finds voice, at last the ultimate sacred force speaks.
"And in the usa, Western American literature does this best."'"
At the end of the funeral, Maryanna Shorba Manfred, our mother and Dad's former wife, made a short heartfelt remark about how "sweet and strong" Dad had been. And Fred reminisced about their early times together as father and son, concluding with a story of how they played pickup baseball in the yard. Then Fred placed the baseball they had played with on the coffin and sat down.
July 15, 1973 Dear Freya,
It is a cool windless Sunday and the sun is out very yellow and this afternoon Freddie is going to play in a double-header here against Slayton and before we go he and I will play a little pepper game (I throw little short quick pitches to him and he hits them accurately back to me, all to sharpen his eye before the big games) and then we'll grab a bite. All day in the sun.
Love, Dad
Finally, amid laughter and tears, I read "Frederick Manfred and the Hospital Chaplain," a true short story I'd written while Dad was dying in the hospital. And then Dad's funeral was over.
After the funeral Fred invited everyone to a public memorial to be held on October 1 at Roundwind, Dad's home in Luverne, Minnesota. He read an excerpt from my father's detailed instructions:
I prefer a cheerful memorial meeting to be held at Roundwind. Start the meeting with music. Serve sandwiches and wine afterwards. I want everyone to drive home in a cheerful frame of mind thinking good thoughts about the making and reading of good books.
My father had also left careful instructions for his burial, which Fred did not read. Here, in part, is what Dad said:
Coffin to be a simple knotty pine box made by a good local carpenter. (Or I may build it myself.) No tampering with body. Dress me in a gay suit. I want to be buried with my own heart, blood, guts, lymph, brains, lungs, and turds.
The funeral directors waited for the mourners to depart. They'd informed us it was "the custom around here" for everyone to leave the cemetery before they covered the coffin with dirt "because our customers don't care to see what happens to their loved one after a certain point." I had warned the directors that I might want to stay longer, and when I did, Tom and Bly and Rowan remained as well, watching the coffin disappear into the black earth. Robert Bly looked back and strode up the hill to rejoin us, and Bill Holm and John Rezmerski drifted back, too, as did others, a half dozen or so. Our son Bly stood watching with large solemn eyes, and Tom put his arm around him. Rowan wept long tears that ran down his face onto the front of his white shirt, and I put my arm around him. Robert Bly was crying, and he put his arm around me as all of us watched Dad go down into the earth, and it was not bad at all, it was good-a circle of grief and good-byes. Robert Bly said, "Your dad was an old sweetie, wasn't he?"
"Yes," I said.
"He must have had a nice mother in his early years to be such a sweetie," Robert said.
"I believe he did," I said.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Frederick Manfred by Freya Manfred
Copyright © 1999 by Freya Manfred. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents PREFACE....................XIOne BURIAL....................1
Two BEGINNINGS....................13
Three THE END....................93
EPILOGUE....................187
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS....................199
Photographs following page....................82