Content Disclosure: Mild Language
My Great-Uncle Jed (later the reporters would favor his full name, Jedediah Ezekiel Andersen) did not go to war a second time until he was in his eighties. Nor did he distinguish himself locally before that. Instead, he had lived an almost bona fide hermit existence on the land his Danish father had homesteaded in 1899, tending corn and alfalfa, baling hay, and raising chickens and Herefords. Except for his scandalous refusal to attend Verburg Township’s Christian Reformed Church, he blended inconspicuously into a community of Dutchmen and Englishmen whose ancestors had settled and cleared southwestern Michigan’s forests. Occasionally he showed up at the Old Timer’s Cafe for coffee, but his existence went largely unnoticed in an agricultural community where social life consisted of polishing off a short stack at the firemen’s pancake breakfast or camping out on lawn chairs for a barn burning. No one expected his obituary to require more than a couple inches of newsprint.
Jed’s wife Sadie, a formidable but kind woman with a cornsilk complexion and hair the shade of ripened wheat, had died decades ago. Although she used to read me bedtime stories when she visited and trained me in the Dutch custom of putting out a shoe instead of a sock at Christmas, I remember little about her. According to my father, Jed’s only nephew, Jed met Sadie at her parents’ newly acquired general store four weeks after he returned from the war. He had been stationed in the Pacific, an experience he refused to discuss; we knew only that he had been taken prisoner somewhere in southeast China.
Sadie Vandebunte alone seemed able to break through his reserve, convincing him the upcoming Sadie Hawkins dance had been so dubbed in her honor to welcome her family to the community. When she “confessed” to feeling too humiliated to attend such an important event without an escort, she shamed him into offering. Sadie fell hard for the dark-haired Dane, who had taken up whittling with the men gathered on the general store’s front steps. For twenty years, Sadie and her big periwinkle eyes continued to maneuver everything else about her life with Jed, and he followed willingly.
After Aunt Sadie died, I guess we all thought of Jed as an amiable if slightly reclusive widower, a salt-of-the-earth farmer who lived in sequence and harmony with the sun and the Dutch and confined any stubbornness to run-ins with unexpected storms, errant cows, and droughts. Between livestock and crop catastrophes, he rocked and whittled for hours on the wraparound porch his wife had insisted he build. If he communicated at all, it was with his collection of carved owls or his German Shepherd, Barney (successor to a long
