The Disappearance

My great aunt Emelia stood in the kitchen of the two-story farmhouse and looked out the window at the knee-high corn stretching a half-mile southeast to a crooked line of trees. Heavy, humid air sighed through the screen, and cicadas whined like sirens in the grove of cottonwoods and box elders behind the house just two miles east of the South Dakota state line. On the other side of the room, her younger sister Tillie, whose husband Gerhart had died less than a year before, stood at the stove, a faded flowered apron tied around the waist of her light blue cotton house dress, her back to Emelia. She gripped a potholder, and when she opened the oven, the smell of fresh bread filled the room. It was only about 9:30, but already the July heat swelled over the farm and settled in every crack, crevice, and corner of people, house, and farmland.

When Tillie went to the cellar, Emelia pressed a dishtowel embroidered with sunflowers against her cheeks and wiped it across the back of her neck. Then, she draped it over Charlie’s chair at the table in the center of the room, walked to the porch, and pushed the door open. A tractor engine growled in the direction of Oscar Ronning’s place, a quarter mile due south. She went down the two steps to the dirt path and the short gravel driveway, crossed the county road, and walked down the slope through waist-high grass, thistles, and milkweeds to the quiet water of Lake Hendricks. Swallows sailed inches above the glassy surface, and dragonflies patrolled the shore.

When Tillie came up from the cellar, she dumped the onions and red potatoes cradled in her apron on the counter and called her sister’s name. She went to the window where Emelia had stood. Near the edge of the cornfield, chickens scratched at the dirt around the cinderblock shed. She went back to the counter and began peeling potatoes in the sink.

When Emelia still hadn’t returned by 10:00, Tillie went outside and found Emelia’s husband Charlie talking with Oscar Ronning. Together they searched the yard, the outbuildings, and the grove. Eventually, they crossed the road. At 10:30 they found Emelia’s body floating in Lake Hendricks.

I can’t help wondering what drove her to vanish into the water in 1949, to leave her husband of thirty-nine years, her sister, and three adult children behind. Granted, she had faced her share of sorrow over the years. Three of her and Charlie’s children died within a few days of their birth: Martin after two days in 1912, Arlene after four days in 1924, and Lyle in less than one in 1930. Shortly before this Saturday morning, she had been admitted to the Hendricks hospital, so she may have been facing some serious medical problems, too. But still.

I suppose I can’t let this go because in the past month since I moved back to rural Minnesota I’ve realized how invisible we can be under the long sprawl of sky, in the expanse of landscape patched with fields, in a tree-lined bottom where water gurgles around stumps, riprap, and storm-dropped limbs. Minnesota writer Bill Holm, whose Icelandic ancestors settled around Minnesota, not far from Lake Hendricks, wrote that “prairies, like mountains, stagger the imagination most not in detail, but size. As a mountain is high, a prairie is wide; horizontal grandeur, not vertical.” Out here a crop-dusting plane is visible from several miles away as it climbs from behind a grove, dips a wing into steep bank, dives back down at a field behind a windbreak, and skims the tassels or long rows of soybeans before yanking the nose up, and banking again into a steep turn to make another pass. You can see grain elevators and wind turbines and cell towers from ten, even fifteen miles away. It’s this scope, this size that makes disappearing easy, maybe even necessary.

Drive down a county road, and I might not see another car or pickup for miles. Walk a few feet into a field where the corn is over eight feet tall and the rows stretch for a half mile or more, and I’d be gone — invisible from the road and out of sight of a drone overhead. Come winter, wander off into a blizzard, swallowed up by the horizontal snow and unable to see beyond my outstretched arm, and I’d be left groping for a fence post, a silo’s cold concrete, a tree — anything I might read like braille for clues as to where I am. Or walk down one of Walnut Grove’s streets during this pandemic, and it can feel like the place is abandoned, a quiet ghost town of neatly mowed lawns, sloping driveways, and silence broken only by a dog’s faint bark or the wind sighing through the high limbs of a cottonwood.

A few days ago I drove to Lincoln County, stopped at the courthouse in Ivanhoe for a 1950 plat map of Hendricks Township, and then headed west to the site of Charlie and Emelia’s farm place in the bend of County Road 14 on Lake Hendricks’ south side. The place looked abandoned — grass up to the faded blue window sills of the white house, a wooly tree limb arced over the red fenders and steering wheel of a tractor, and a hand-painted No Trespassing sign attached to a fence that wandered off into the overgrowth above the ditch. I drove past, turned onto the gravel road south of the place, and stopped. I got out and looked back at the house and glimpsed the lake through the trees.

When I got back in, turned around, and drove back toward the place, three people — a thin stooped-over man wearing a cap and brown shirt and slacks and two young women, one tall with broad shoulders, the other short and rounder, each wearing a white face mask and walking on either side of the elderly man — slowly crossed the road from the direction of the lake and started up the driveway to the house. I pulled in behind them, stopped before the No Trespassing sign, and walked one of the two tracks of the lane bending into the yard. As I approached them, they turned. The women stayed put, but the man trudged back and we talked. He remembered Charlie and Emelia, said the land was homesteaded in the 1850s and the house built in 1898. When I asked if I could walk around and take some pictures, he looked at the ground between our feet and, as if I’d said nothing, replied, “I’ve got kidney stones.” Then, he turned and started back toward the women, and the three of them slowly walked through the grass in front of the house.

I hurried back to the road to retrieve my phone and then back up the driveway. There, in the middle of the yard — where the tall grass surrounded a Ford pickup, another tractor, and a horse-drawn cultivator — I faced the porch from which Emelia took her last walk. The two women and the man were gone. Maybe they went inside or trudged around the back side of the house, but I heard no voices, hadn’t heard the porch steps creak or the front door slap shut. It seemed as if they’d simply vanished into the prairie or the past.

Or maybe I’m the one who’s disappeared.