Just Before Dark

By Richard S. Monkman

At the time of this writing Richard Monkman has witnessed 30,671 sunsets. He takes this literal fact, with its accompanying experiences, into the realm of the spirit and proceeds from there into a description of 20th century social history. His own personal history gives the framework for the story.

That history begins in poverty, then moves upward with the nations economy into the Middle Class. The fortuitous career choice of clerical ordination as well as wide international travel and keen personal powers of observation make the author an able interpreter of his time and place.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 30, 2012
• ISBN: 9781469168760

Richard S. Monkman

Dr. Richard S. Monkman, through education and military service, has traveled widely. He attended Hamlin University, Northwestern University in the Midwest, the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. In interim years, he served in the US Navy from coast to coast in the United States and in Yokohama, Japan. In addition, he and his wife Margaret served suburban churches in Connecticut; the Bronx; Glasgow, Scotland; Long Island; and Westchester, New York. After the death of his wife, he retired to Connecticut. From there, he continues to travel abroad and visits with his two sons residing in Maine and a daughter in Upstate New York.

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Contents

PREFACE

PREFACE

MEMOIRS HAVE BEEN called look at me books and may be of little consequence beyond family converse. This story is not in its intent a memoir, but rather a social history wrapped around forty years of one man’s public service. Those dramatic years provide a pedestal from which to view the twentieth century.

In 1904, a Russian composer, Scriabin, introduced a fifth note to music’s time-honored four-note chord, offering a hint of dissonance that would evolve into Schoenberg, Stravinsky (whose ballet The Rite of Spring in 1913 would cause outraged Parisians to tear the seats out of their theater), Hindemith, and others. In 1910, the art promoter Roger Fry opened in London an exhibition of French Impressionists and Postimpressionists, with their violently subjective viewpoints dominating subsequent painting. Diplomacy made its contribution to the growing anarchy of the times by abandoning negotiation in favor of the carnage beginning in 1914. More silently, but insidiously, James Joyce was crafting his Ulysses, the stream of consciousness resulting in the attack on the sentence as the basic building brick of written communication. In less than a quarter of a century, the foundations of Western culture weakened in music, art, diplomacy, and language itself. The rest of the twentieth century would spin out this revolution in a world that tried to walk on water.

When I was born, in 1928, the American West still breathed its romantic drama over my family, and I had as yet been untouched by those deeper seismic currents. I made it my lifetime task to internalize the West’s wilderness into one that could lose its wildness. I failed. In my generation, lawlessness simply changed its shape. World War I was followed by the Great Depression and a Second World War. A lengthy Cold War followed that, interspersed with some moderate wars, some brushfire hostilities, and several enthusiastic genocidal campaigns. Amid this there were people strangely able to snatch moments of happiness. I lived through it all and ministered, as a churchman, to seven churches during those unfolding decades.

In the years of poverty between the world wars, boyhood offered to me inexplicable riches planted in each day. The happiness and suffering experienced by so many others flavored me as well. As I grew to adulthood, I had to interpret these contradictory happenings.

Northern Minnesota’s world of nature and a tightly knit family were my first teachers. In my analytical years of maturity, the early impressions were confirmed and furthered. The Depression child, hearing that there was a prosperous world just over the horizon, expected that world to be equally virtuous. It took a whole new perspective to recognize that this did not necessarily follow. There were days, in my century of carnage and malfeasance, when it appeared that intelligence had slipped around a corner and disappeared. Throughout, in my lifelong struggles toward the light, I depended on the people about me for insight. But my convictions became my own, and they showed me that as institutions decay, as many did in this unstable time, individual qualities become more important. So I offer these souvenirs of my eight decades, memories that linger in me like thin smoke. We know the mind can’t erase; it can only scribble over its recall of events. These scribblings, from the boundaries of my character, my opinions, and my experiences, I present as a contribution toward the reader’s own personal efforts for an interior composure.

RSM

I

I HAD TO pee. Inside the ’32 Chevy, my two younger brothers slept amid a tangle of blueberry cases and loose clothing. Outside, at the nadir of the long northern night, the forty-mile swamp surrounded us, dank and threatening.

My father helped me out of the car and onto the ribbon of blacktop that ran straight in both directions, cutting a survey line through the shadowy trees. In the distance, a wolf howled and was answered by others. My father, silent, scanned the stars. I moved closer to him, unbuttoned my trousers, and spread my initials on the asphalt.

The car was disabled. Twenty miles north, in the direction from which we had come, my mother was somewhere, looking for a garage that would repair our punctured tire. Carrying the tire, she had hitched a ride before twilight and after it had been decided that my father was the more suitable parent to stay behind with us. We all had confidence in my father’s capacity to protect us whenever we were faced with trouble, and we all had confidence in my mother’s capacity to return with a repaired tire.

We had been picking blueberries back up the highway, at the farm of my grandparents on the forest-buried Minnesota–Manitoba border. While my two older sisters and an older brother had stayed at home in Bemidji, eighty miles south of our stranded vehicle, we five had made the annual trek for fruit, an important supplement to our garden economy.

A loud rush of sound, a monstrous expelling of breath, exploded in my right ear. I was the oldest boy on the trip—nine—but now, on that desolate road in the blackness of the Swamp, I jumped and clung to my father’s large frame.

It’s a deer, he said. Then, to usher me through my fears and remind me that even at nine, I was a man, he chose to tell me of the iniquities of the New York Yankees.

That was the one subject that could draw my father out of himself. He had been a semipro pitcher, and as baseball gloves had been a luxury, he had the broken fingers to prove it. The semipros, in the context of my father’s history, had consisted of two teams playing each other on weekends and passing the hat for the five-cent spectator fee. The winning team shared the proceeds, which amounted to about a nickel a player. That payment made my father ineligible to play amateur ball.

The Yankees have too much money, he said. They don’t play ball, they buy it. They buy up all the good players. We were midwesterners, Cardinal fans, and Dizzy Dean, the Cardinals’ pitcher, was our hero. Dizzy is having a good year, my father said. He helped me back in the car. I loved my father. I loved him and I was wary of him: he was a tower of strength. And he had a dark side.

=

My father was a half-breed. His mother was half-English and half-Chippewa; his father, Cap’n A. P. J. Monkman, was half-English and half-Cree. Cap’n APJ was well over six feet tall, an imposing broad-shouldered figure who sported an expansive black beard. A gambler and a drinker, he owned Winnipeg—or at least, the land on which it was later developed—for one night. The next night, he lost it in a card game.

These phantom ancestors tended to open up a piece of land, sell it, and then move farther west. They were pioneers, explorers, beaver traders for the Hudson’s Bay Company, now infused with Indian blood, cutting-edge, civilized primitives living off the land, occasionally coupling up with an Indian woman—called a squaw—and then moving on into still more remote places. In many of them, most of them, Indian and white blood interplayed in their genetic makeup, and they shifted from one world to the other without segue. That hereditary ambivalence would resurface in my generation in quirky ways: an exaggerated reaction to medications, easy addiction to alcohol, an uncommon love of the outdoors, nomadic yearnings, all contradictorily couched in a white man’s affinity for progress. Monkman Pass in the British Columbia Rocky Mountains tells how far west the family representatives reached.

In 1876, there were three categories of Indians on both sides of the borders on the great midwestern plains. There were the warriors who had fought US General Custer (and the entire white incursion) at Little Bighorn; there were the agency Indians who accepted white financial allotments and succumbed to white oversight; and there were Louis Reel and the French Indian mestizos, who were fighting for independence and the right to secure title to land recently transferred from the Hudson’s Bay Company’s territory to the Canadian government. Reel was declared an outlaw in 1875; his band of conspirators included Cap’n Monkman. When the uprising, Reel’s second rebellion, failed in 1885, Reel was captured, tried for treason, and hanged. Monkman fled across the border and walked over a hundred miles on the ice on the Lake of the Woods with English troops in pursuit.

The facts of the Louis Reel (also spelled Riel in some history books) Insurrection, as taught in Canadian schools, are white facts; the Indian facts differ. The former tell a story of a ragtag protest that collapsed. The latter record one chapter of a long retreat before the injustice that accompanies all imperialism. White facts shout. Indian facts mourn.

And so came Louis Reel Monkman, my father, who would suffer from the bigotry of parochial Roseau, Minnesota, the town where he was born a few miles south of the border, a town where Indian blood was considered as much a stigma as Negro blood was in the American South.

Louis Reel Monkman left Roseau when he was fifteen, to ride shotgun on the Wells Fargo stage to the North Dakota state line. The Indian Wars had recently ended, and the job was not as dramatic as it sounds; the work consisted mostly of handling baggage and keeping an eye out for the occasional bear.

Louis had wanted to go to college in Saint Paul, and his older brother had talked of working and saving his money to send him there, but the brother died of a burst appendix, so the young man was reduced to becoming a laborer. He married and fathered three children—Evelyn, June, and Gerald—before his wife, Ida, died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-six. In her last days, Louis drove her children, in a borrowed car, to a distant sanitarium to make their good-byes. The dangers of infection forbade their going into her room, and a last view of their mother was a face in a second-story window and a slowly waving hand. Necessity allowed little time for grief; shortly after that tragedy, the family’s house burned to its foundations, and they lost all their possessions.

Still, there was something in my father that never surrendered. He could be defeated. He could be humiliated. But always, always, he picked himself up, ready, in behalf of his family, to suffer further setbacks. As a child, I didn’t understand much about the concept of character, but I knew—and trusted—strength. We were in good, strong, calloused hands.

The heroic imagination is out of favor now, ridiculed as overly romantic. Death and primitive communication have combined to dim the figures in our past, people barely visible through a family fog, those who placed us on the earth and formed our personal outlines without any sense of their own heroism.

In the Monkman past were the ancestors who left the Orkney Islands off the northern tip of Scotland. I carry a surname that was coined after the Norman conquest, when a new system of taxation required a more specific designation of individuals. Earlier, only first names were used. But three Johns and two Henrys in a village, with no further designation, only confused the new tax ledgers. So surnames were invented, usually derived from the taxpayer’s occupation. A monk, by common custom, had a servant assigned him, called—logically—a monk’s man. Hence my inherited name, with only a nine-hundred-year gap between that ancient dogsbody and my own ordination.

The Cree past exhibited a refusal to surrender. Ninety percent of the indigenous Americans died in the century between 1620 and 1720; the Cree, once the mightiest of the tribes living above and below the present Canadian midwestern border, were crippled by an invasion of smallpox that met no immune defenses. From a proud people to one reduced and outcast, that diminishment became part of our family saga. My father’s history was a silent story, told and retold deep in our bones.

If my father’s history was shrouded, my mother’s was even more veiled. She was born Catherine Elizabeth Appleby, in Banff, Alberta. Her parents lived in the woods thirty miles from Roseau, Minnesota; there was never any explanation as to why—or how—they traveled over 1,700 miles for my mother’s birth.

She was the third child, the third girl, to be born in her family. Her two older sisters, Fannie and Melinda, died in a fire that destroyed the family’s house. We learned that from my mother; as much time as we were to spend with my grandparents, they never referred to the tragedy.

Catherine went to school through the eighth grade. Two years later, when she was sixteen, her parents offered her a vacation in Canada to visit someone she called an old man. She traveled by train, alone. Soon after her arrival, she wrote letters home begging to be allowed to return. After some time—it was never made clear how long—the old man asked her if she wanted to go home on the train to visit her parents. She jumped at the idea, and he bought her a one-way ticket. Thus ended my mother’s first marriage.

Now, eighteen, her girlhood gone, and back in her parents’ home near Roseau, she learned of Louis Reel Monkman, thirty-five, a widower with three children who needed a housekeeper and a caretaker for the children. Catherine Appleby went to live in his house. They were married in December of 1927, when she was nineteen. On January 1, 1928, in the midst of a blizzard, Catherine was taken by sleigh, pulled by my father and my older brother, Gerald, to the house of a midwife, where I was born. My parents’ wedding anniversary was never acknowledged or celebrated in my presence.

Such hardscrabble lives left little psychic space for personality expression, even less for the searching out and nurturing of veins of private promise. Necessity ruled, survival dictated. All through my coming adult life I saw neglected abilities in my parents, latent, lingering as might-have-been’s in their histories. My father, for instance, rough-handed and attuned to manual labor, would spend his Sunday afternoons scribbling out lengthy paragraphs of his views on a number of subjects relevant in the news of the day. He would press us teenagers to read his efforts and we would recognize plagiarism from some of the articles in that day’s paper. But he presented them as his views and wanted them noticed, wanted not to be mute in his smothered world.

My mother likewise stretched beyond bare labor, constant though it was. She lived with birds, listened to their songs and identified every one, somehow found time now and then to read cheap romances borrowed from the public library. Her schooling had ended early but the appetite had never died.

As we children waited through the long night in the midst of that vast Northern Minnesota wilderness we had no slightest inkling of the intricate dynamics of our parents’ struggles. They had to find food for eight people when there was no food. The demand went on for years. And still, there was that primitive reaching for something more than food. In those days of calamitous social waste there were countless such people who lived with undeveloped potential, often unrecognized even by themselves, and they scrabbled for a future.

=

In the morning, the puncture repaired, my mother returned to us. She was a small woman, bright spirited and cheerful when left to her own nature, and her own nature rebounded faithfully after difficulties far greater than a mere damaged tire.

For three days after we arrived home in Bemidji, my mother, as she did every year, cooked and canned our harvest, putting up for the long winter ahead. In the window above the sink, she placed pages of poetry that she memorized as she worked.

II

ONE SUNDAY MORNING, many years into my ministry, in an affluent New England church, I served communion to a workman with roughened hands and dirty fingernails. The image of his outstretched hands came back to me as I was descending stairs to join the parishioners for coffee in the church basement. Suddenly, I longed for my boyhood: the dirt between my fingers, my skill with a slingshot, swimming in cold water, the sound of crinkling snow, the taste of food from our garden, the illusion of an endless future. I missed, at that moment terribly, my siblings, my school, my mother—and my father.

In the early years in Roseau, Minnesota, Pop worked for the Great Northern Railroad. One icy winter day, while unloading logs piled high on a flatcar, he lost his balance, fell from the top of the load, and struck his head on the rail below. He was taken to a hospital; at home, there were hushed, frightened whispers about his possible death. It was, however, only a serious concussion (although when he did die, in 1972 at the age of eighty, an autopsy showed neural damage that may have been one result of this accident).

There were to be more serious consequences to my father’s accident. Work injuries meant the loss of a job without compensation. As there was no work in Roseau comparable to the Great Northern Railroad, after the accident, Pop worked as a woodcutter. Men cut wood where snowdrifts and topography permitted, sometimes trespassing, sometimes not. In the freezing mornings, he went into the woods with one lard sandwich in his lunch bucket. If money allowed, he would have salt on the lard. In the woods, the cold was so severe, the men urinated on their hands to warm them enough to keep working. At night, Pop came home, the legs of his overalls stiff with ice and his coat covered with snow. Often, the lard sandwich was still in his lunch bucket: it had been too frozen to eat.

And there were many other mouths to feed: by 1935, seven years into my parents’ marriage, the family had grown to six children: Evelyn, June, and Gerald (the three children whose mother had died) and I, followed by my younger brothers, Bobby and Alan. We eight Monkmans lived in the downstairs of a shanty owned by Mrs. Strickland, a Swedish woman, in Roseau, a village of one thousand people. The other 992 residents were Swedes and Norwegians.

Occasionally, when times were particularly desperate, Pop went outside the law to provide for the family. Although he refused to drink alcohol—his father had been an alcoholic—he once made a run across the border and smuggled whiskey back into the States while Prohibition was still in effect. And later, when another accident—this time mine—had saddled the family with a hospital bill, he cut firewood without permission on government land, sawed it, split it, and used it as currency to pay the debt. These excursions outside civil law were uncharacteristic; he was an honorable man.

And a violent one. Our family lived on tiptoe, always watching vigilantly to determine that day’s direction of the winds of my father’s moods. Pop’s rages were directed, mostly, at my mother and my older brother, Gerald, Pop’s first son, from his first marriage. Gerald was six years older than I. I saw the beatings, from time to time, from my crouch on top of the woodbox. My mother, terrified, could only look on with us. Pop beat her too on many occasions. Sometimes she would run into a room, close the door, and put a table knife in the doorjamb to keep it shut. Pop’s rage did not extend to destroying a door casing. Sometimes I cowered with my mother inside the room.

My mother would go to great lengths to avoid my father’s wrath. In a brief time of prosperity, we once owned a cow. Her job was to move the cow after it had grazed the available grass in the radius of its tether. One day, as she untied the cow, it bolted for the horizon, and my mother—terrified of my father’s temper if the cow were to escape—clung to the rope and was dragged, crying and screaming, across the field. When she returned to the house, the cow gone, her dress torn, and her hands bleeding, my father lived up—or down—to her expectations. The evening was a dark one for us all. It was a day or two before she was able to once again carry water for the laundry, hand scrub the clothes of eight people, chop the heads off the chickens and pluck, clean and cook them for our suppers, and memorize poetry.

The adult I have become clearly sees the story: cruel hardships crushed my father’s spirit. He was ground down by circumstances for years on end, and a continual denial of any chance at self-expression joined the endless sense of failure over his work and the necessity of feeding his family. The adult understands that—but the child I was still trembles.

Those who lived through the 1930s and early 1940s capitalize the word Depression. You can hear the capital D when we speak of it. Cushioned generations have no inkling of the reality of those years. Men lost their pride, many for the rest of their lives; women’s dreams died in their wombs. Life was grinding work and anxiety. The Depression was far more than an economic downturn: it was a world without a bottom. Every day with food was Thanksgiving. We were to learn that war is noisy violence; we already knew the silent violence of poverty. In all those years, my father’s nature was hard to find. He was a house with the shades drawn. You knew he was in there, and you knew he wanted to come out, but it just never happened. If he was to be known, it would be through his silences, and in the rare moments of exposed feelings.

During one potato-digging season, Pop traveled to North Dakota in a carload of men seeking work as migrant laborers. My mother heard nothing—no word, no money for food—until