The Sale
Lightning flashes on the horizon in all directions as we
land in the last light of day, the wings of the small plane tipping toward the
tarmac in the gusty wind, first one and then the other. The rippling flash
disturbs the orderliness of the perfectly square, perfectly green, perfectly
straight-rowed fields that surround Joe Foss Field in Sioux Falls, South
Dakota. It creates shadows where there should be none. It lights uneven shapes
in brilliance and leaves others hidden nearby, the flashes rolling like a
kaleidoscope.
As always, these perfect fields
seem sinister to me, lying in judgment of those whose edges are irregular,
whose shapes won’t conform, like mine. And yet there is comfort in their
regularity too, like the patchwork quilt you pull around your shoulders on a
cold night. They are the shape of my first memories, the cry of emotion that
has no name, the edges I push without thinking, the place from which I came out
into the world. They are home.
Watertown, a city of 26,000 where
my brother and his family live, is 90 miles north on a good highway. Although
the sky has just now darkened, it is nearly 10:30 at night, evidence that we
are far north where days are long in summer. My boyfriend Wayne and I are
driving through the heart of the Sioux Nation, the gathering place of the old
tribes. I am at the wheel of our rental car. Buffalo can still be seen grazing
along this highway, although tonight they are not visible. The flatness
stretches out over the plains and it’s easy to imagine the six-foot-tall grass
that once covered it all, waving in the wind like an inland ocean. The night is
hot and sticky, and the lightning show continues, shimmering across the
horizon, first right, then center, then left, then in a tremendous flash
lighting the whole sky. The gods are restless. There are few other cars on the
road. A feeling of standing alone in the midst of all this drama falls over me,
a tiny being on a pinto pony with a twitching tail disguised as a Ford Escort.
We drive on through the eerie night,
maximum speed 75 miles per hour. Our ears are popping continuously although
there isn’t a hill in sight—barometric pressure. In the blackness I feel the
familiar tug of the past dragging me back into the girl I was. How easy it is
to fall into the silence, as if it were normal. As the road sign for Watertown
appears on our right—Watertown Exit 2 Miles—the sky rips open abruptly and a
roaring flood engulfs our windshield. I hit the brakes, unable to see the road,
and Wayne shouts, “I can drive!”
“I’m not getting out of this car to
change places. We’ll drown, like turkeys,” I yell back. “I can make it two
miles.”
The rain is unbelievably thick,
coming down hard in sheets. It’s so loud we think it must be hail, but nothing
bounces. I drive slowly, leaning forward as close to the window as the steering
wheel will allow, hoping to see the exit through the deluge outside. There it
is, and I ease off the dark streaming highway with a sigh of relief. Now there
are the lights of restaurants and gas stations, signs of fragile civilization.
I turn right and right again onto the county road leading to my brother’s new
home on the hill.
From the road we see the house,
front floodlights blazing in welcome. We pull into the circular drive and stop
the car well in front of the triple garage doors. The rain continues to pound.
“Should we run for the house?”
Wayne ventures, peering reluctantly out the window.
“Let’s wait a few minutes and see
if it lets up.”
Five minutes pass, our breath
steaming the windows, and it seems the roar diminishes. “OK, let’s go.” We
throw open the doors and scramble to the shelter of the entry, leaving the
luggage behind for now. Should we ring the bell at this hour? They are
expecting us, although they normally go to bed early. Wayne tries the door and
it gives. It is unlocked. We push it open and spot a large piece of paper, a
note, on the floor inside.
Welcome, Wayne and Dana!
We have gone to bed. Your room is
ready downstairs. There is wine and a snack in the kitchen. Have a good night’s
sleep and we’ll see you in the morning!
Love, Marlys & Jim
I think of the book In Cold
Blood, the innocent rural family murdered in the night by psychopathic
drifters. I think of my pretty home in a good neighborhood in Oakland, and know
I wouldn’t intentionally leave the door unlocked late at night for any reason.
And then I remember we never locked any doors when my brother and I were
growing up on our farm an hour and a half east of here.
The rain is now a gentle shower,
and Wayne retrieves the luggage from the car. The note doesn’t say to lock the
door, but I do and turn off the floodlights as well before we go to bed.
Every year for the past six or seven years, my sister-in-law
Marlys has held a garage sale in mid-summer. She says she loves it because her
daughters and their boyfriends, then husbands, come to help and it’s a family
party. I have never come for the sale, but this year it includes the contents
of my 95-year-old mother’s home as well as that of my sister-in-law’s
92-year-old mother, so I have agreed to come from California to help.
Today, the day after our stormy
arrival, dawns sunny, hot, and humid. It is the day before the sale begins, and
the task of finishing the pricing lies ahead. After warm greetings all the way
around and hugs over coffee, Marlys and I arm ourselves with stickers and pens
and go out among the many tables, set up in rows to facilitate traffic flow and
already piled with neatly stacked and arranged items.
Over the years, the sale has
evolved from a one-day event to a three-day extravaganza. It has grown from
covering the tops of a couple of tables in one bay of the garage to this year
filling the entire three-car garage plus several of my brother’s large
equipment trailers parked in front. My nieces and their husbands have cleared
out their closets and storage places, and Marlys has emptied her secret stashes
of furniture, clothing, games, books, tools, whole sets of dishes and myriad
other things she has squirreled away. I know she buys many of these at auctions
and farm sales during the year, often at very low prices, thinking her
daughters might like this and that or she might use a certain item around the
house. I hope she comes out even.
I work on my mother’s dishes and
linens. It’s odd to handle these familiar things, these dish towels, these
tablecloths, the plates and cups and bowls of my youth. There’s not much I
haven’t seen before, although occasionally a surprise emerges. I turn over an
old book written in Norwegian, and then another. I carefully unwrap a set of
pewter salt and pepper shakers encased in fragile yellow paper. I haven’t seen
these before. They are engraved Clara, my grandmother’s name, and I
guess they were a wedding gift to my mother’s mother, who died long before I
was born and whom I’ve been told I resemble. As I put them in my personal bag,
an unexpected wave of regret and something like guilt brings tears to my eyes.
My mother and I have had a difficult relationship. I still want to have her
love and acceptance, and she is even less able to give that now than she was in
younger years. I feel guilty for parting with her treasured things, although
her fading mind doesn’t remember she ever had them and her faltering body has
no earthly use for them any longer. Perhaps I will keep a few of the most
precious of them, like these shakers, as a solace.
In the afternoon, Wayne and I have
an errand. His former wife, also a friend of mine, grew up in a little town
about 50 miles north of here, near the North Dakota border. Mary still owns her mother’s home, the home
she grew up in, in Rosholt, South Dakota, a town of 600 people. The house is
standing vacant and is for sale. Mary left long ago to live in California and
hasn’t been in Rosholt for many years, and she has asked us to go see what
condition the house is in.
We’re driving the same highway we
traveled the night before, which runs straight north and south the length of
the state paralleling the border with Minnesota. Fields line both sides of the
road in this farming country, although this far north the fields are more prone
to be stacked with bales of straw than lined with rows of corn.
“Wayne, look at those huge round
bales. When I was a child, they still gathered the hay and straw in shocks. I
thought they looked like golden tepees.” I point out the window to a field
filled with immense golden sushi rolls of hay.
“I remember seeing rectangular
ones,” Wayne says. “I haven’t seen these big round things before. They don’t
look like they’d stack very well.”
Right after he says this we pass a
field where dozens of the big round rolls are stacked neatly end on end,
squared off and in symmetry with the fields, undoubtedly a testament to the
rightness and the rectitude of the farmer.
“That reminds me of a field I saw
in Minnesota where the rectangular bales were stacked in the most amazing
pattern,” I say. “It had empty spaces and geometric outcroppings made with the
bales. That farmer was an artist, and brave too. And probably young.” Wayne
laughs.
“Yeah, and he was probably from
somewhere else too,” he says as he looks over at me. “I’ll bet he eventually
had to conform and stack his bales like everyone else, or else he moved to
California like you did.”
I nod, remembering how glad I had
been to escape.
From the highway, we
turn onto the county road leading to Rosholt, seven miles away. Soon we see a
few buildings.
Rosholt has the look of all small
towns in this part of the world. It looks like the towns around my hometown in
southwestern Minnesota, rich in spirit and poor in resources. There are few choices—one
grocery store, two gas stations, two bars, two churches (one Roman Catholic and
one Lutheran)) and one furniture store whose owner doubles as the town’s
undertaker, embalming the departed in the back room. Mary has told Wayne of
sneaking into the back room of the furniture store as a young girl to watch the
embalming. Entertainment here is limited.
Mary’s house is easy to find; it’s
the only red house in town. Mary’s mother had it painted bright red, and she
was proud of it. Wayne and I pull up in the driveway.
“I wonder if we should have tried
to find the realtor to get the key,” Wayne says, as he turns the car off and
opens his door. “Mary says the realtor doesn’t like to come over here because
it’s on the bad side of town.”
“How could a town this small have a
bad side?” I laugh, as I follow him up to the house.
Wayne tries the side door. It’s
unlocked. He pushes it open onto a small porch. To the left is the inside door
going into the kitchen. It’s also unlocked and it has a huge hole in it.
“Wow, this is kind of a mess.” The
carpets inside the house are dirty and torn. The walls are stained with what
looks like water leakage and there are a few empty cardboard boxes strewn
about. Otherwise the house is empty. I take photographs all over the house to
send to Mary. There is a car, 1970’s vintage, parked in the garage on the other
side of the porch. I take photographs of the car, and the open door, and the
tilting For Sale sign on the front side of the house.
There are several abandoned houses
in Rosholt, including one across the street from Mary’s house. Mary thinks she
has an offer for her red house, although it is a very low offer. Now that we’ve
seen it, we think she should take it.
“What do you think the good side of
town looks like?” Wayne asks.
“Let’s go look.” We giggle as we
drive the four blocks to the other side. It looks the same, although there are
no red houses. Possibly Mary’s red house, so different from all the others, is
what makes her side “bad.”[LH1]
After 45 minutes in Rosholt, we’ve
seen all there is to see. Back on the road, we return to Watertown. The girls
and their husbands will have arrived while we’ve been gone, and we’ll all catch
up over dinner and then go to bed early. The sale starts tomorrow at 10:00 a.m.
and we need a good night’s sleep.
It’s Thursday, 9:00 a.m. It seems
most people would be at work on a Thursday at 9:00 a.m. When I look out the
window I see this is not true. It looks like most of the people in South Dakota
are here in my brother’s front yard. There are cars packed into the circular
drive and lined up on both sides of the long driveway leading to the county
road. There are cars stopped on the road. There are men walking around with
thermos bottles of coffee. A woman calls on the phone to ask if we are allowing
early buyers. Marlys is firm that the sale starts at 10:00 a.m. as advertised.
My brother goes out to pull the
flat trailers holding the furniture around to the front with his truck. He and
Wayne and my niece’s husband Jason stay in the front to chat with the men and
to keep people from taking the price tags off the furniture to claim it early.
At 10:00 a.m. sharp, we raise the
garage door. Marlys tells of people crawling under the slow-moving door in
years past to be first into the sale, but this year the door moves quickly
enough and the opening is orderly. We hand out cardboard shopping boxes as our
customers enter. Business is brisk and there is soon a line of people checking
out, each with two or three overflowing shopping boxes. This goes on all day,
in a steady flow. People come from all around, from farms, from towns in
Minnesota and North Dakota. It’s a social occasion. The tables empty and we
fill them again, re-fold, re-stack, replace. When a group of Hutterite women in
long skirts and bonnets enter, their children in hand, heads turn
surreptitiously. They are different and viewed with suspicion.
Marlys sits at the check-out desk
all day, adding up sales, chatting with customers, evaluating the occasional
request to take a check, deciding whether to reduce a price.
“Would you take thirty-five dollars for that
china hutch?” The woman points to a dark wood cabinet with a curved-glass door.
The cabinet is marked $55.
“Oh dear. Well now, that hutch is
my mother’s and there are a lot of memories associated with it.” Marlys’
expression is wistful, as if she is thinking back over the years that hutch was
in her childhood home. “You can see there’s hardly a scratch on it. I don’t
think I could let it go for thirty-five dollars.”
“Well then, would you take forty?”
The woman looks back at the hutch. You can see she really wants it and has
already imagined it filled with her own china. Then she looks at her husband,
who is standing just outside the garage door next to the check-out desk.
“I’ll tell you what, I’m willing to
split the difference with you,” Marlys smiles. “How about forty-seven fifty?”
The woman looks again at her
husband, who nods. With a big smile on her face, she says, “Yes. That will be
fine,” and reaches into her purse.
“Have a chocolate chip cookie, and
one for your husband too.” Marlys takes two cookies from the plate next to her
with a napkin and hands them to the woman as she takes her money with the other
hand. In a moment the cookies are eaten and the hutch is on its way to a new
home.
Marlys is a born negotiator, and really seems to love the back and forth
conversation with people coming through. My brother Jim has owned an excavation
and demolition company for many years, and when a customer is slow to pay his
bill, Marlys goes out. She always gets the money, even if she has to stand on
the slow-payer’s porch for hours, patiently but determinedly talking through
the screen door. It’s good for business in several ways, not the least being it
saves my brother, whom I adore, from having to go out and lose his temper.
At 6:00 in the evening I go in to
cook for our crew of eight. At 8:00 p.m. we close the garage door and Jim pulls
the trailers back into his shop. It has been a full day, and we re-hash it over
dinner and drinks before falling into bed.
* * *
For three days they file through to
find a bargain, to find something different, to add something new to their
lives. They are a friendly people, but reserved. There is little emotion, and
if two women want the same thing, one stands back waiting for the other to
politely acknowledge the other touched it first. There are no harsh words, no
raised voices, and no children run crazily through the aisles. Children stand
next to their mothers. The men for the most part wait outside, standing around
talking grain prices and the weather, waiting to be consulted about a
substantial buy or to carry a heavy item to the family truck. My brother stands
with them. They all know each other. They all depend on each other. They are
all customers, providers, diggers of each other’s basements, growers of each
other’s food, granters of each other’s loans and credit. They are good people,
and for the most part honest and upright.
Still, I wonder if there isn’t
something more here, behind the extreme control of emotion. The longer I’ve
been away, the more I see it when I return. A hint of it peeks through the
careful placidity of these faces and the polite ordinariness of the
conversation, the smile, the nod, the reluctance to touch, the prohibition of
excess. Who are these people, really? Does the calm surface hide a dark place
in the soul of a few, the legacy of Vikings and Huns, the ancient shadow of
berserkers, passion, pillage and chaos? I hope so. It would make them more like
me. It would help me feel less foreign here, less like an outsider.
Wayne and I leave Watertown the day
after the sale is over, rising at 4:00 a.m. to drive back to Sioux Falls on the
now-familiar north-south highway. A tornado went through the area just east and
south of Sioux Falls the night before.
As we speed by in the dawn, we see tree branches and large pieces of
metal strewn along the side of the road.
The people here may be reserved, but the wildness of the weather makes
up for it. It seems a good time to
leave.
We board the little plane at Joe
Foss Field, and settle in as we push away from the gate and taxi out for
takeoff. With a surge of power, the plane pulls up, and the perfect quiltwork
squares of the green fields are visible once
more as we climb into the clouds. They are beautiful, and I smile at the
pleasure I feel as I leave them behind.
