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Authors: More Than Memory

BOOK: Dorothy Garlock
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To my many friends in Clear Lake, Iowa, my hometown, who helped me remember how it was during the winter of 1958 and 1959.
A special thanks to Nels Larsen, who was the chief of police during that time, and to Iola Cash, who farmed with her husband Bob Cash north of town.
SEASONS OF LOVE
Do you remember the springtime,
When young love was sweet and strong
And we were swept by its promise sublime
Into joy and passion—headlong?
We can never forget the autumn
When anger and venom held sway.
Defaming our love and its outcome
Casting our dreams away.
In sorrow, I felt the winter’s breath,
In my arms, my daughter, so cold.
The lonely days passed stark as death
Until my ambition took hold.
It was summer at last when I found you here.
Birds sang when I knew your embrace,
But now you’re remote when I am near.
Has a new love taken my place?
That lost spring can come to us once again
Though outside the soft snow falls.
Love stands rapping at the door.
Will you say “yes” when it calls?
—F.S.I.

 

 

Prologue
Clear Lake, Iowa
1949
“I
NOW PRONOUNCE YOU MAN AND WIFE
.”
The young girl, her hand held tightly by the slim blond youth standing beside her, scarcely heard the muttered words of the justice of the peace. Still in a daze, she signed the papers that lay on her grandmother’s dining-room table.
“I appreciate your doing this on such short notice.” Vaguely, Nelda Hansen (spelled with an
e
) heard her father thank the man he had brought out from town to marry her to Lute Hanson (spelled with an
o
) so that the child she carried would not be born a bastard. His voice reached her as if through a tunnel, but, it pierced her to the heart when he returned to issue a brutal order to Lute.
“Get out of here, you little prick. My lawyer will send you the divorce papers. You’d better sign them damn quick and send them back. Hear me?” Captain Donald P. Hansen was an impressive figure in his Marine Corps uniform emblazoned with a string of medals.
“Nelda, come with me.” The boy tugged on her
hand. “Please . . . Nelda,” he begged. “We’ll get by. I’ll take care of you.”
“I don’t think you heard me!” her father bellowed. “I said get the hell out of here. Take care of her?” he sneered. “You’ve not got a pot to piss in, nor has your old man. All he knows how to do is scratch in the dirt out on that hardscrabble farm his daddy left him.”
“Donald, that’s enough,” Grandpa Hansen gently admonished, only to be quickly overridden by his son.
“By God I never thought my daughter would stoop so low as to get herself knocked up by a rutting, wet-eared, hog-slopping hayseed!”
“Captain Hansen, Nelda is my wife now. I’ll take care of her—” The boy tried vainly to stand his ground against the angry Marine captain hardened by years of experience in intimidation.
“Boy, get this through that dumb head of yours. Don’t try to contact my daughter . . . ever. She’s not for the likes of you.
You
,” he said to the girl in the bobby socks and ponytail who leaned for support against the table, “get upstairs and get your things. We’re leaving here in five minutes.”
“Nelda, it’s now or never. Don’t let him do this—”
Through her tears, she saw a big hand clamp down on the boy’s shoulder, propel him out the door, and slam it shut behind him. Over the roaring in her ears, she heard Lute’s old truck start and, with blurred vision, saw it go past the window. Then her grandma’s arm was around her, guiding her up the stairs.
Nelda had always feared her father: his loud voice, his piercing eyes, his forceful manner. All of her life she had lived on or near a Marine base and was used to hearing him issue commands that were immediately carried out. She was programmed to obey him.
Captain Donald P. Hansen had enlisted in the Marines right out of college and had quickly been singled out to attend officer’s school. The Marine Manual was his Bible. He lived for the Marine Corps. He had married the daughter of a general, a gentle girl who had given birth to their only child. Three years ago, Nelda’s mother had died during a fever outbreak in the Philippines.
When the captain remarried, his second wife understood that a career officer needed to be socially active if he expected to advance in rank. She went with him when he was called on to fulfill a special assignment in the Pacific, and Nelda was sent home to spend the school year with his parents.
Returning to the farm of his youth to introduce his new wife to his parents, he learned that his sixteen-year-old daughter was four months pregnant. He took control of the situation immediately. Twenty-four hours later, the captain, his wife and his daughter were in a car headed for the airport in Des Moines.
1950
On a cold January day, seventeen-year-old Nelda Hanson stood beside her grandparents and Lute’s mother at the graveside service for her six-month-old daughter, Rebecca, and wept quietly. She had gained an unwelcome maturity.
Sick for most of her pregnancy, she had given birth to the tiny baby girl who now lay at rest in the black Iowa soil. Her father had insisted that she give the child up for adoption, but for once in her life she had stood firm against him and refused. In the tirade that followed, she learned that Lute’s father had been the captain’s boyhood enemy. Her father swore he would never forgive her for disgracing and betraying him.
Her stepmother had helped Nelda leave Virginia while her father was away. She had returned with her baby to her grandparents’ farm only to discover that Lute had enlisted in the Navy the day after the wedding.
When she learned that Lute had not come by to see her grandparents or to inquire about her and their baby when he’d come home for a brief visit after boot camp, Nelda could not really blame him. He had been treated despicably by her father, and she had been too weak to stand by him. It was plain that he had cut her out of his life and wanted nothing more to do with her. With that knowledge, the dream she’d been harboring that they would meet again someday and renew their love, died a quick death.
Two weeks after Nelda and the baby arrived in Iowa, Becky woke with a high fever and had to be
rushed to the hospital. Nelda’s grandmother had insisted that Lute’s mother be told, and Mrs. Hanson had come to the hospital and at last held her only grandchild. During the hours Nelda sat with her beside the baby’s crib, Mrs. Hanson had been careful not to give out any information about Lute.
When the doctor told her that there was little hope her baby would survive, Nelda felt guilty for bringing the baby across country.
“Don’t blame yourself,” the doctor said. “The infection had long been in the little one’s bloodstream and would have run its inevitable course even had she stayed in Virginia.”
After the funeral service, Nelda told her grandparents that she was determined to start a new life far from her father and stepmother. Deeply disappointed in their only son for his insensitivity and his harsh treatment of his daughter, the old couple had lavished their affection on Nelda. With their support, she had been able to enroll at the University of Chicago.
The pain of the past could not be erased, but the future held hope and challenge. Nelda was ready to begin her new life.

 

 

C
hapter
O
ne
August 1958
S
HE WAS HOME
. S
HE HAD LIVED IN
C
HICAGO FOR
quite a few years, but she had always considered Iowa as her home.
Over the years since she last had been here, she’d forgotten how hot and sultry it was in summer and how high the country roads were graded to allow the winter’s snow to blow off and into the ditches on each side. She’d forgotten the miles and miles of cornfields, though she was once again amazed at how corn could be knee-high by the Fourth—a farmer’s standard for a good crop—and be well over six feet tall in time for the county fair in the middle of August.
Nelda drove slowly through Mason City, remembering marching down Federal Avenue with the Clear Lake High School Band on Band Festival Day. Lute had met her, and they had sneaked away to eat a hamburger before she had to board the school bus back to Clear Lake.
She passed the fairgrounds, where acres of cars and stock trailers were parked, and the grandstand,
where rodeos were held. A Ferris wheel was spinning, and pennants were fluttering. During her other life, she had been there, holding tightly to Lute’s arm as they strolled toward the cattle barns. Lute had loved to hang around the stock pens, looking at the champion stock and talking to the boys who were exhibitors.
Lute. How long had it been? Eight years? She could scarcely think of herself living that other life.
“Want to get out, Kelly?” she said, hearing a whine from the back seat. “I’ll find a place for you.” Turning off at a crossroads, she drove a short distance and stopped. When she opened the car door, the big Irish setter jumped to the ground, shook himself, then went the few steps necessary to reach the tire, where he hoisted his leg.
“My tires will be rotten by the time we get to the farm,” Nelda complained as she stroked the dog’s head when he returned to her. “But what the heck! You’ve come all the way from Chicago in this old car. I know you’re tired of being cooped up. It won’t be long now. You’re going to think you’ve died and gone to heaven when you see all the space you’ll have to run in.”
She drove the eight miles into Clear Lake singing Elvis Presley songs to Kelly. When Kelly lifted his nose and howled, Nelda said, “You don’t like the hound dog song? How about ‘Heartbreak Hotel’?” Kelly howled again. “You don’t like that one either? What’s the matter with you, dog?”
She reached Clear Lake, turned down Eighth Street, and drove past Central School.
“This is where Grandpa went to school, Kelly,” she said to the dog. “It’s old. Grandpa said it was built back in 1912. The redbrick building at the end of the block is where I went . . . for only a year. On the steps of that building, Lute asked me to go out for the first time. I was afraid Grandpa wouldn’t let me go, but he liked Lute, and he said I could. I just had to be back by ten-thirty.”

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