“I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man’s jurisdiction.” –Jim Burden in Willa Cather,’s My Antonia
When I was sixteen I drove a black 1960 Thunderbird one hundred miles per hour, my dad clueless, asleep in the passenger seat. He owned the car, and very proud of it, he was. Just the previous year he and my mom and Aunt Inez and Uncle Hicks had driven–or “flown”–this very same Thunderbird from St. Louis to Acapulco and back, over four thousand miles, my dad bragging that along one desert stretch he drove one hundred miles in one hour. On this trip my dad and I were cruising along some divided highway north of Kansas City, headed to Superior, Nebraska, my father’s birthplace and home for his first sixteen years. To get to 100 mph, I feathered the accelerator with my right tennis-shoed foot, testing whether he was truly sleeping or just resting his eyes. One hundred miles per hour told me he was really sleeping.
He deserved a good nap. He was in his late forties, and for the previous dozen years he and a partner had operated Bob and Glenn’s, a Mobil service station in St. Louis. “Bob & Glenn’s” was lit up red in neon in the front window of the station. A bigger-than-life red Pegasus, also outlined in neon, revolved thirty feet up at the corner of the station. He was Glenn, the name embroidered in red on the pocket of his work shirts. He still kept some crazy hours full of hard work, on average six days per week, ten hours per day. Three days a week he worked a straight 7-5 shift. The other three days in the work week he came home for the afternoon, napped for a couple of hours in his La-Z-Boy–drapes closed in the TV room, door slightly ajar–ate a quick dinner, usually leftovers, then headed back to the station for a few hours. When he worked those evenings, my mother and sister and I would keep an eye out for him, one of us meeting him in the doorway to take the cash drawer from him, slide it under my parents’ bed for the night.
I don’t know why my father asked just me to accompany him to Nebraska. Maybe my mother and sister had other things on their plates. My mom did work as an expediter for McDonnell Aircraft, which she loved and affectionately called “Mac.” I imagined her calling up a vendor and telling him he better ship that jet engine, or else. Once she chased a twelve-year-old me around the house for calling her a “communist dictator”–this was during the Cold War–and she screamed in a shrill voice, “You little shitass!” all the while running after me, until we both started laughing at the whole crazy scene. Even if my mom could have accompanied my dad, she probably wouldn’t have helped much with driving, almost all of it my father’s job, and probably his preference. Once when the family was traveling to Toledo to visit my Aunt Opal and her family, my mom did drive my dad’s chariot of that time, a 1953 Chrysler New Yorker hardtop, with a 331 cubic inch engine with hemispherical combustion chambers. Mom got pulled over by some State Highway Patrolman for speeding, but she only got a warning. I like to think the officer saw my mother barreling down the highway in this New Yorker and thought, “I’ve got to see this.”
* * *
Maybe my father felt some urgency in traveling to Superior, where Lena, his mother, and relatives still lived. His mother lived alone, her first husband dying in 1946, her second taking his own life in 1955, shooting himself in the shed where I once saw what looked like very dead weeds hanging from rafters. I now believe they were probably herbs. Lena would only live another year or two, and maybe my father learned that her health was failing and that he must see her soon. Superior was familiar to me and my sister. Growing up, Nebraska was our Disneyland. Instead of traveling–by car, of course–nearly two thousand miles from St. Louis to the Golden State, we could and did venture a number of times by a series of automobiles–a Dodge sedan, a Ford sedan, the Chrysler New Yorker–to visit my father’s family and mother’s, who also was born and raised in Nebraska. On these treks mom would rarely drive, and dad would hate to stop, even for us kids and mom to pee. Sometimes, especially on secondary roads in Nebraska, there weren’t places to stop, so dad would pull over on the side of the road, and we’d all take turns peeing, including mom, partially hidden by an open car door, the rest of us looking the other way. Once when we did find a place to use the outhouse facility, I recall my mother cautioning my sister and me not to sit down on any kind of toilet seat: “Germs.” On one vacation I think I recall it got up to 114 degrees, dad had to stop frequently to fill the radiator, there was no such thing as air conditioning, and on the road we closed the windows because it was less oppressively uncomfortable. The hot air blowing on our faces made us feel hotter.
The lack of places to stop and pee, the excessive heat, weren’t what made Nebraska our Disneyland, not that Disneyland didn’t have similar problems. When our family–mom, dad, sister, and I–trekked to Nebraska on vacation, we experienced many strange and wonderful things. On the way there were vast ranges of grasslands with apparent cows made into dots in the distance and actual windmills, with their blades sometimes spinning madly in what seemed like an ever-present wind. In Superior itself, one attraction was the indoor roller skating rink, across and up the street from grandmother Finnell’s house on South Central Street. On summer evenings somebody opened the shutters so they looked like simple wooden awnings, and an organist announced through very joyous, rhythmic songs mostly sounding like waltzes that skating was possible, love and happiness were possible. We’d hear the music after dinner, the light inside highlighting the skaters lit up inside singly, in couples, all circling in the same direction, like planets revolving around an invisible but powerful star, the light overflowing onto the grass, into the night. My sister and I tried skating once or twice, as I recall, with not much finesse on my part, but with a sense of being a part of some folk tale. In Superior I also swam in the town’s large pool, set off many legal firecrackers under a tin can on the sidewalk in front of Grandma’s house, the tin can lasting a few explosions, rocketing up into the air, flew a toy balsa wood airplane from the nearby loading dock of the Burlington-Northern, visited aunts, uncles, cousins galore, helped make ice cream, and fished the Republican River with my dad and Smitty, Grandma’s second husband, using still-born chicks as bait. Apparently my grandmother, whose job was to “candle eggs” at “The Creamery” in town, was the source of the chicks.
But on this trip with my dad in the black 1960 Thunderbird, I would do none of these things, far too mature was I. What did I do? I didn’t welcome my great-grandfather Frederick Sund at the screened kitchen door, accepting his bottle of fresh goat’s milk, presented nearly wordlessly, smiling, as he did when I was younger. Nor did I listen to Smitty singing “Goodnight Irene,” his favorite song, his anthem, for both he and Frederick Sund died years before. And I’m uncertain whether it was on this trip that my cousin Howard fixed me up with a blind date. The four of us rode around one night, parked in the shadows at some farm, maybe his girlfriend’s parents’, where Howard filched some gas from the farm’s gas pump. Just five years later in St. Louis my dad would get the long distance phone call from Nebraska, letting him know Howard had shot and killed his seventeen-year-old wife, her mother, himself.
My grandmother met us outside her front screen door, next to what I would learn was Rose of Sharon, where bumble bees jostled one another, overloaded with pollen. She gave me a very wet kiss on the cheek. I refrained from wiping it away. The place was even smaller than I recalled, with really low ceilings, but then I was sixteen and had grown taller in the last year or two. Just four rooms on one level: a living room with a heating stove, where I believe my father slept as he and the girls got older, a bedroom to the left where I imagined my dad’s four sisters slept as children, the kitchen in back where we ate. The bathroom was off the kitchen, and Grandma’s bedroom was to the right, small and dark. That must have been the room where back during Prohibition she hid the booze in the pisspot under the bed, getting charged with bootlegging during Prohibition. Her husband Herbert would take the rap, only right since he’d been the one who’d–so the story goes–bootlegged the stuff from Chicago in his big car with secret, hidden tanks for the water of life. Grandpa Finnell also apparently served time for the crime. I can’t recall what happened after our arrival, my dad’s homecoming, except over the next day or two he said we were going to visit his only brother, his older brother, my Uncle Orie Oscar Finnell.
* * *
“And one day in a field I saw
A swarm of frogs, swollen and hideous,
Hundreds upon hundreds, sitting on each other,
Huddled together, silent, ominous,
And heard the sound of rushing wind.”
–from “The Coming of the Plague,” Weldon Kees
* * *
Uncle Orie lived in Beatrice, Nebraska, about ninety miles east of Superior on U. S. Highway 136, through towns with Biblical names, Hebron and Gilead, and crossing the spot where the Oregon Trail passed just west of Fairbury. Years later I would discover Willa Cather, and learn she spent her early years in Red Cloud, just west of Superior, and discover the poet Weldon Kees, born and raised in Beatrice. My Uncle Orie was born in 1913, one year before my father, and I was vaguely aware that he was intellectually limited, what at the time and at my age then I’d call “retarded.” And here my uncle, my father’s brother, was in some kind of home for such people. I didn’t know what to expect. Apparently, my father did, at least as far as what Uncle Orie might like as gifts. Before leaving Superior the next day for Beatrice, we must have stopped at a grocery store for dad to buy oranges and cigarettes for Uncle Orie. I don’t remember much if anything about the ninety miles to Beatrice, to what at that time was called the Beatrice State Home, originally named in 1885 the State Institution for the Feeble Minded Youth. I do vaguely recall a gated entryway to grassy grounds and a large stone building awaiting us, and that we were ushered into a very bare waiting room where we sat on a wooden bench in this building while Uncle Orie was brought to us, from where God only knew.
Waiting seemed to take a long time, but it may have been that angst stretched the minutes out to seeming hours. Occasionally some person dressed in official duds would come through a door into this waiting room and we could see what looked like a gray hallway with people sitting on the floor with their backs against the wall, looking as if they were propping it up, and other people in what looked like grocery carts, one or more of these people making noises. Then Uncle Orie was led into the room, dad and I stood up, and Uncle Orie made quite a racket seeing his brother, my father. I think dad introduced me to him, and Uncle Orie seemed to be uninterested in me, more so in whatever gifts my father brought for him, the oranges and cigarettes. I think he tore into an orange or two right away, dropping the peels on the floor and making a mess. Then Uncle Orie quickly got into the cigarettes, and lit one up and smoked it crazily, puffing and puffing as if he needed the smoke to breathe. He forgot about his first half-smoked cigarette, maybe seeing a whole pack, dropped the lit one to the floor and lit a second quickly, and puffed on it aggressively, like he was starved. Maybe he was.
Then something more odd happened. Uncle Orie looked out the window of the door to the outside, apparently saw someone out there he recognized, grew very irritated and made noises, opened the door, and began running across the grounds, toward the person he saw. I think then my dad called for somebody in charge to help, and that person high-tailed it after Uncle Orie. I don’t think anything happened after that. Uncle Orie wasn’t returned to us in the reception room. I believe my dad and I left soon after this incident, maybe after my dad talked to someone about Uncle Orie’s behavior, and what might happen to him, that he wouldn’t be punished. Then, we evidently left the Beatrice State Home, the towns of Beatrice and Superior, and somehow got home, although I recall none of it, whether I drove the black 1960 Thunderbird fast on the way back to St. Louis, nothing.
* * *
The year after visiting Uncle Orie, I graduated from Ritenour High School, but just barely. I had to take a summer school class the year before graduation–I believe in English, because I had failed it–to graduate with my classmates. After graduation I worked for a year at St. John’s Community Bank doing menial things, like wrapping coin (not by hand–even back then there was a machine for that!), running outgoing mail through the postage meter machine and readying it for the mail pickup, picking up and delivering “work”–checks, deposit slips, etc., but no money–from tellers and delivering it to the Proof Department, my department. I had a couple jobs before this, none full-time, at Carroll’s Hamburgers, a McDonald’s imitator, and at Bob and Glenn’s, my dad’s service station, where I pumped gas, changed engine oil and filters, sometimes washing cars, but none of these jobs full-time. (Once my dad and his partner ran a business anniversary special, a free six-pack of Pepsi for a gas fill up, and I made the offer to a cute girl driving a car, asking if she wanted a “six-pack of sexy.” I was nervous. I think she laughed, maybe at me.) Over the next half-century I had about forty jobs, lived in a score of apartments and houses, called seven states home, a couple of them twice, almost all of that time married to the same forgiving woman. Only occasionally did I think of Uncle Orie, but that single five-minute visit reverberated, still does.
One state I called home was Massachusetts, where I’d entered the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing in 1978. While a student there studying with Joseph Langland, Madeline DeFrees, and James Tate, I happened to start writing poems about my Uncle, sometimes in his voice, “about” in the sense of revolving around, as a satellite about the Earth. Of course, it wasn’t his voice. I couldn’t recall one word Uncle Orie had said, not one syllable. The voice was an imaginative act–a mask, a premise, a wise fool. In fact at one point I also referred to these poems as The Fool Poems, or as The Oscar Poems, Oscar being my uncle’s middle name. Not all of the poems were first person, but all of them centered on this main character and his experience with the world, mostly disturbing, sometimes heartening. Some of the biographical details I’d heard over the years in passing about Uncle Orie got into the poems, but most was made up, an attempt to get at the imaginative, human truth of Uncle Orie’s life. After meeting Uncle Orie, I think I asked my father why he was like that. I think my father said that when he was an infant Orie was scalded badly with hot water, and this made him the way he was. As a cause of mental retardation, this makes no sense now, but somehow satisfied my need as a sixteen-year-old to have this melodramatic explanation for my Uncle’s nature, however momentary my experience of that nature.
After I’d written a number of these poems, James Tate asked to see some for College English, where he was Poetry Editor. He accepted a few of them, and was happy that the poems would probably make all those academics scratch their heads, or worse. Other poems in this series appeared in a few other magazines and subsequently in two books. Here’s a few lines from “Oscar’s Birth and Early Years”:
Into his ear she lets the story fall,
eardrop by eardrop.
Your soul was thieved when damned water
scalded you, knives and forks jingling
from the noise—
that immaculate scarf pulled quickly
through your throat,
you, our first son, our firstborn.
It’s in Oscar’s mother’s voice, an attempt to understand, accept, maybe even rationalize her son’s condition by means of myth, boiling water scalding Oscar, making him scream, and changing him forever from a perfect infant into a feeble-minded youth. It’s a terrible parody of the Eden story, this time some accident damning Oscar to life outside the Eden of normality.
I have not paid heed to these dozen or more “Oscar” poems for many years. Most have not been included in any book, mostly because they didn’t fit in, were unusual, like Uncle Orie. But two summers ago my wife and I made a 1,796 road trip–that’s one way, and piloting a Honda Civic, not a Thunderbird–from Massachusetts to Cedar Rapids, Nebraska, via stops in upstate New York, Chicago, St. Louis, and Kansas City. We were going to a reunion, with cousins and second cousins mostly flying in from St. Louis, Florida, Texas, California, and even one who lives half the year in Brazil. Once they flew into Omaha, they had to rent cars and drive an hour and a half to Columbus, Nebraska, where ten of us stayed, no lodging in Cedar Rapids, where my Aunt Mary lived, our ultimate destination, another hour’s drive away. We were there to celebrate her ninetieth birthday; she was our last surviving aunt or uncle. It was certainly fifty years or more since I’d laid eyes on her. As far as relative height went, we went in opposite directions, up for me, down for her, that is until the last few years for me as my spine has been slowly collapsing in on itself, a calcium implosion. Aunt Mary still had a wonderful accent which I didn’t know how to identify except to say it was Western with a smidgen of its sweet, languorous drawl.
On the return home I succeeded in persuading my wife–who had Czech roots in Nebraska–to let me drive through Superior, Nebraska, my father’s and Uncle Orie’s hometown. I stopped on the highway in front of the Superior town sign so I could have my picture taken in front of it, as if I were entering someplace truly foreign, my Zanzibar, and needed a photo as evidence I had truly been there. As it would so happen, I apparently did not have such a picture taken, since I cannot find it in my files. But we definitely visited Superior, definitely drove past the town swimming pool, definitely drove to South Central Avenue and parked so I could gaze at my Grandmother Finnell’s house where our family vacationed, and so I could reminisce seeing the roller skating rink, complete with its wooden shutters, across from my Grandma’s house. But there was no roller skating rink, no recognizable houses, only a few basic, bare structures, no immense shade trees near a driveway where in summer we made ice cream by hand, the cousins taking turns turning the crank until Grandma said, “It’s ready.”
* * *
In the 1920 U.S. Census for Superior, Nebraska, my father’s family includes five people: Herbert and Lena, the parents, and children Glenn (misspelled as “Glen”), Nellie, and Opal. Uncle Orie’s name does not appear, even though he was the eldest child, one year older than my dad. In the 1920 U.S. Census for Beatrice, Nebraska, entries for the “State Institution for the Feeble Minded Youth” include fifty names on one page of “inmates,” all male–maybe segregated by gender–ranging in age between four years and fifty-two, even though this institution was for feeble-minded youth. (There were probably twenty more pages of inmates, considering the Institution’s inmate population totaled at least one thousand people.) “Orie Oscar Finnell” is one of the inmates. His age is listed as six years old. My uncle is unsurprisingly still listed among the inmates in the 1930 and 1940 Censuses for the Institution, adding the information that in addition to his being unable to read or write, at ages sixteen and twenty-six, he was unable to speak. And the Census for 1940 indicates that in the previous week, he had been employed three hours. Doing what, I wonder.
When I met him in the early 1960’s, he was at least in his late 40’s, so by then he had already resided there over forty years, and the inmate population of what was now called the Beatrice State Home totaled over two thousand. This would explain my seeing on our visit “inmates” seated on bare floors in hallways, leaning against walls, and lying in carts. Space was rationed, a limited necessity. As a matter of fact, Deena Winter in the Lincoln Journal Star writes that by the late 1960s, a few years after my dad and I had visited Uncle Orie, “the state had squeezed 2,300 residents into an institution built for 800.” Not only that, Ms. Winter reports about sterilizations at the Beatrice institution:
The Legislature had passed a sterilization law in 1915, and by 1966, the state had sterilized 752 people at the institution.
The Lincoln Star applauded such efforts, writing in 1920: “Nothing can be more horrible than the thought of permitting the birth of children destined to be feebleminded or criminal or insane, unnecessarily. Why not quarantine against the germs of human degeneracy?”
–Lincoln Journal Star Jun 14, 2009
* * *
I believe many caring people worked at the Beatrice institution, and that Uncle Orie probably lived in deplorable, overcrowded conditions for decades, and that these two beliefs are not mutually exclusive. I also believe people in Nebraska and around the nation were at a loss about how to help such people, and whether they were even people, so degenerate were they. (In Massachusetts, where I live, a very similar story can be told about the Belchertown State School for the Feeble-Minded, which finally shut its doors in 1992.) I trust that Uncle Orie over the decades he lived in Beatrice had occasional visitors, including his sisters and brother and mother and perhaps father. I think that maybe the poems I wrote stemming from my five-minute encounter with Uncle Orie are an apologia of sorts for my doing nothing to help him, which makes me wonder whether much writing is an evasion of experience or a rendering of it.
Remarkably, Uncle Orie spent the last couple years of life at the Good Samaritan Village Perkins Pavilion, a nursing home in Hastings, Nebraska, after spending seventy-five years, or ninety percent of his life institutionalized. I think I heard that when Orie was about eighty years old, a minister took responsibility for Orie and found a place for him at the Good Samaritan Village. He died there, aged 83, about a month after my father. In one of the last poems inspired by my Uncle, “His Last Will and Testament,” I have him say:
People, share what’s left of things
but not my body.
Bury it in the hometown named after
the pretty woman.
Plain stone. No flowers. I hate flowers.
Dennis Finnell has published four books of poems before Ruins Assembling, winner of the Things to Come Poetry Prize from Shape&Nature Press, 2014. The most recent is Pie 8, winner of the 2012 Bellday Prize. His first book is Red Cottage, which won the Juniper Prize from the University of Massachusetts Press. His next two books, Belovèd Beast and The Gauguin Answer Sheet, were selected for the Contemporary Poetry Series from the University of Georgia Press. He has received grants and fellowships from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, The Ragdale Foundation, and MacDowell, and taught at the University of Tennessee, Mount Holyoke College, Wesleyan University, and Greenfield Community College, where he also served as Co-Director of Financial Aid. Born and raised in St. Louis, MO, he now lives in western MA.