On Becoming Family
A trip to the outer reaches of the heartland, where American Indians are reclaiming territory, the VFW serves as the local watering hole and my wife's grandfather is about to be laid to rest.

We came home to our cramped one-bedroom suburban apartment, piled high with boxes from the homeware department. Boxes of cookware, a pasta set, a waffle iron and several bowls that served no purpose other than holding fruit and looking pretty, were stacked on the floor and our tiny gateleg kitchen table. They were stacked in piles we had mentally separated into "keep," "store" and "return." We maneuvered around an empty box of Styrofoam peanuts as we came through the door and into the small living room area of the apartment.

My mind was heavy with a combination of wine and over-the-counter allergy medication, the result of a Friday night dinner at another married couple's house--a couple with a fire-plug thick golden retriever. Their life, after five years of marriage, was a close approximation of what I believe Tracy and I want for our own future. A two-bedroom house in Northwest Washington, DC--a house in one of those wooded neighborhoods between Wisconsin and Connecticut Avenues that is so quiet, so completely surrounded by trees and underbrush that you have to consciously remind yourself that you are in a major city. A two-bedroom house filled with antique furniture from relatives and the Eastern Market merchants. A house with a finished basement for a big-screen television and an attic office for quiet, creative work.

I though about this place as I sat on our slip-covered couch listening to traffic whiz by and the window-unit air conditioner buzzing in my ear. I thought about it as my mind swam through the wine and Tavist D, floating from point to point and image to image.

"There's a message," Tracy said, already changed into her pajama bottoms and T-shirt. She dialed into the voicemail and I could hear, just faintly, the female robot voice say "You have one new message."

"Come here, sit down. Everything's going to be alright now..." I was babbling, but my mind had snapped back into place. Tracy's grandfather had been sick for weeks, his condition moving from a circulation problem in his leg to a series of small strokes. His goal was to make it to our wedding, but he never got out of the nursing home.

"It's my Dad." There was a sense of panic in Tracy's voice and we both knew why he was calling. "He wants me to call him back."

"Ok. Ok, everything is going to be alright honey." I was saying it to her, but also trying to convince myself. I was new to this family, new to this role as husband and it was important to get this right.

Tracy dialed the phone and said hello to her father, a fit 54 year-old FBI agent--a staunch Republican who bears a striking resemblance to George W. Bush, but with less hair and more intelligence. She immediately started crying. She was doubled over on the couch, her red hair fell around her freckled face and she sobbed loudly, her back shuddering. Court, her father, had not pulled punches, had not softened the blow. She handed the phone to me.

"Hey."

"Tracy always falls the hardest, but she's the quickest to bounce back. She'll get through this." His voice was calm and measured, with a hint of sadness. "They took Wayne off the respirator today. It could be a matter of a couple of hours, or it could be a day or two. Now, no one expects you to come out to South Dakota. You're busy, you have school, you didn't really know him well. He hadn't really adopted you yet..."

I heard this as my wife sobbed in the bathroom. My mind was already made up. "What are Scott and Tiffany doing? How are they getting there?"

"They're flying out on Sunday. The tickets are $400 round-trip to Omaha. They're going to rent a car and drive up from there. They can get a ticket for Tracy. I'm driving out with the two dogs tomorrow. I'm already packed." < br>
"OK. Give us the night here, and I'll call you in the morning to let you know what we're going to do." But I already knew we would be in his car on the way to South Dakota.

***
On Saturday morning my eyes stung and my head pounded from the wine and a lack of sleep. Tracy had stopped crying and slept a little. I was proud of her, she appeared to be bouncing back, but in the back of my mind I feared that she had just gone numb. I called Court and asked him if he "wanted some company on the trip?"

"Sure. I'd love it!" He was chipper and excited, like a college kid about to go on a road trip. "I have to warn you though, I'm taking the dogs."

"I know. I'll load up on Tavist D. It'll be fine. I may not be much for conversation, but I'll make it. Let Tray throw some stuff in a bag and we'll be right over."

"Great!"

"What time did you want to leave?"

"Oh, whenever you get here is fine."

"We can probably be there around nine, nine thirty. Oh, and when are you coming back?"

"Next Sunday."

A week. We'd be in South Dakota for a week. I would miss a week of classes and work after already missing time for the wedding. My mind paused. Should I take the escape route he'd already given me? Can I back out here? I looked over at Tracy as she filled her green duffel bag with clothes and pulled out her black suit. Her face was blank as if she were lost in a fog.

***
We arrived at Tracy's parent's house at 9:45 to find her father in a manic state of preparation. He had the car packed and was taking his two Springer Spaniels, Daisy and Jake, for a last walk.

"Let's roll!" He barked, intoning the latest battle cry from the war in Afghanistan.

Tracy and I put our bags in the back of the Subaru Outback and took our seats--me in the front with the atlas, her in the back with the dogs.

The trip from Herndon, Va. to Lake Andes, SD., takes 21 hours of driving time--24 when you factor in stops for food and bathroom breaks. The trip spans nine states: Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, the stovepipe of West Virginia, and the fat waists of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa and finally South Dakota. The idea was to make it to at least Indiana by the end of the first day and complete the trip on Sunday, arriving in Lake Andes around 6:30 PM.

Driving west from Virginia, you get the feeling of climbing to the top of the country, falling off its edge and then speeding along its flat spine. In the fall, the Appalachians from Maryland, through Pennsylvania and West Virginia are covered in a golden spectrum of light and changing leaves.

Tracy and her father traded stories of Wayne and the family; past trips to South Dakota, and the relatives I would meet once we arrived. They traded glances through the rearview mirror, chuckling as they spoke of Wayne's antics. We stopped for lunch at a Wendy's just outside Pittsburgh and I splurged on the double with cheese meal deal--Biggie Size. We ate our sandwiches on a plastic table in a patch of grass beside the parking lot and let the sun beat down on us through the chill of the early November air.

Crossing into Ohio, the highway pours out of the Appalachian mountains, through a tunnel and down through the plains. Here, the trip flattened out. There is nothing on the Ohio landscape worth looking at. It is flat and dominated by fields of corn or sod, watered by stilted irrigation pipes that look like huge robotic Praying Mantises. We retreated into ourselves, into our own thoughts, listening to old Johnny Cash songs like "Drunken Ira Hays" and staring out at the changeless landscape flying by our windows. The monotony was broken only by an occasional red swath in the highway from a slaughtered deer and a bloated corpse on the side of the road.

Indiana brought more of the same flat, shapeless landscape. We stopped for dinner at a Bob Evans outside of Indianapolis, or, as Court liked to call it, "Indian-no-place." Here we dined on chicken prepared various ways: grilled, fried and served on a bun.

Back on the road, we hurdled through the darkness into Illinois and exhaustion, finally stopping at a Motel 6 in Champagne-Urbana. Disembarking from the car and taking the dogs for a quick squirt in the parking lot, we noticed several motel patrons sporting red Wisconsin University sweatshirts. The Wisconsin football team, we learned, had just lost a football game to the University of Illinois. The fans of the losing squad woke us up throughout the night coming into the hotel, slamming doors and talking in loud, drunken voices. One particularly annoying guest was apparently locked out of his room and began cajoling, then pleading and finally threatening his roommate Marcus to open the door, before finally kicking it in.

At 5:00 AM we abandoned the Motel 6 in Champagne-Urbana, attempting to make as much noise as we could to wake the drunks in retribution for their behavior. As I watched a round table discussion on the future of the corn market, I contemplated turning up the volume on the television to full blast and leaving it that way as we abandoned the room.

We passed through most of Illinois in silence, although Peoria, "the college home of Ronald Reagan," spurred a brief debate about the former president. While we disagreed on his greatness as a leader, we were able to concur that it was unfortunate the way his mind had been ravaged by Alzheimer's disease.

Iowa was the great obstacle. Hours and hours of corn fields worked against us and seemed to hold us back from reaching our destination. Not only did we have to cut across the width of Iowa, but we also had to traverse the length of it to reach South Dakota.

In South Dakota, the landscape changed from cornfields to acre upon acre of open grazing land interspersed with wheatfields and clear flat sky. As much as the Iowa landscape seemed to be dominated by cornfields, the South Dakota landscape was dominated by blue sky that seemed to crush the earth flat. Three hours from Lake Andes, on a stretch of straight and desolate highway that pointed directly into the setting sun, we got the word that Wayne had finally given up.

***
During its heyday, Lake Andes South Dakota enjoyed a boomtown existence. It was made prosperous by the construction of the Fort Randall Dam, an impressive hydroelectric contraption made of poured concrete, earth and steel. It captures the power of the Missouri river and sends it across high tension wires to much of southeastern South Dakota. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the dam spawned a bank, a grocery store, a hardware store and a few small cafés including "Pete's Café," owned by Wayne's next door neighbors Pete and Ida. The dam also brought with it a town motto: "Lake Andes, the best town by a dam site." During this time the town was a model for Mayberry, with high school heroes, homecoming parades, a drive-in and sock hops. The people that held the most sway in Lake Andes were the police sheriff, the postmaster, and the members of the Masonic Lodge.

Unfortunately, the Fort Randall Dam required an entire core of engineers to build, but only a handful of people to run. When the structure was finally completed, so was Lake Andes' growth cycle, and the town has been in a period of slow atrophy since 1956. Now, the "business district" consists of closed storefronts, the VFW where the town drinks, a drug store, a grocery store, the new post office and not much else. The town is segregated between whites, who cluster near main street and Indians who surround them and buy up their homes when they die.

We reached Wayne's house as the sun was falling out of the big South Dakota sky. We were greeted by Tracy's mother Nancy, and the sight of her and her seeing of us, brought tears to everyone's eyes.

Wayne's home was a two-bedroom ranch house that had held a bachelor for the last ten years or so. The furniture was old and comfortable and the kitchen was utilitarian. The bedrooms were small and cramped. Tracy's barrel-chested, moustached Uncle Gary and his second wife Laura had already chosen a bedroom and Tracy's parents took the other, leaving Tracy and me to the fold-out bed in the living room. There were now three dogs in Wayne's little rancher: the two Springer Spaniels and Laura and Gary's Gordon Setter Lambeau. After a few days we moved next door to a basement room in Pete and Ida's house with a separate entrance. The new room saved my sinuses and gave us some quiet through the endless cycle of visitors that came to pay their respects to Nancy and Gary.

For the next five days we lived on casseroles and sweet rolls provided by the people of Lake Andes. For lunch, there was always a boiled ham and some sort of salad made from gelatin or heavy amounts of mayonnaise. Wayne's friends and neighbors brought the food and their stories. There was the woman who had taken care of him at the hospital. She was a large woman, like most in Lake Andes, with frizzy graying hair, thick glasses and folds of fat hanging from her upper arm. Her husband had died of a brain tumor and she felt like she needed to get into another line of work. "Wayne was a special one," she said. "His loss has hurt me hard. My husband," she continued without pausing. "He died at home. I took care of him and he couldn't even talk at the end. He was in pain. I think he wanted to be home, but I guess... I went to take the garbage out one night and he died. I don't think he wanted me to be there."

Then there was an older woman, a long-time friend of Wayne's, with white permed hair, a thin frame and ancient hands. She was well, but her son had gotten messed up with drugs and was serving time in Minnesota. "He wasn't using the drugs exactly, he was selling them. Oh, but he was a bad boy."

These stories were related to Nancy and Gary as if to say, "your tragedy is not as bad as ours. It was expected and appropriate. Our losses are embarrassing and sudden."

***
Even after travelling halfway across the country and comforting Tracy through the first part of her grieving, I continued to question myself. I continued to wonder what my place was in this event. When would I feel like part of this family? My answer began to materialize at the Lake Andes VFW. Uncle Gary, who, for reasons unknown, had taken a shine to me and Court wanted to take me down to the VFW, the only bar in town, for a red beer--light beer with a splash of tomato juice.

The VFW is a robin's-egg blue, windowless building that sits on main street next to the vacant bank building and an empty lot. There is a parking lot behind the building and next to the lot a group of three, two white men and an Indian woman sit perpetually drinking Thunderbird wine.

"What's the word?" Court asked, referencing the old Thunderbird commercial. "Thunderbird!" He answered. "What's the price? Fifty twice. What's the reaction?" He asked again rhetorically. "Satisfaction!" A large smile spread across his face.

There was a hand-printed sign on the door to the VFW that said "Door is unlocked. Come on in!" In the town's more vibrant days, the VFW was a "private club," and patrons had to be veterans of foreign wars" or at least know one. As we came into the bar we ran into a bald man in his late seventies. He was dressed entirely in light blue denim--pants and shirt--as if he was attempting to match the exterior of the VFW. Lyle was an old friend of Wayne's, and Gary recognized him immediately.

"Just where do you think you're going?" he asked. "Get back in there and let me buy you a drink."

"Oh well, if you twist my arm," Lyle said as he walked back into the dark barroom.

"Lyle," Gary continued, "You remember Court, Nancy's husband. And this here's my new nephew Dave. He's about to have his first red beer."

"Well, I'll join you for a drink, but I ain't having one of them."

Inside, the VFW is typical of any dive bar. It has wood-paneled walls, adorned with beer signs and posters, four new electronic dart boards that keep track of score and rely on plastic tipped darts that fit neatly into a plastic, screen-like boards. There is a pool table in a side room and on Wednesdays the back wall can be drawn back to reveal a large florescent-lit room where the town gathers to play bingo.

We sat at the bar and Court ordered three red beers from the young woman behind the bar, while Lyle had a Wild Turkey on the rocks. There was one other man at the bar. He was just on the other side od thirty-five, had a brown mustache and a sly shit-eating grin on his face. He was smoking a cigarette and nursing a Jack Daniels. He wore a camouflage cap, the front of which featured a hooked small-mouth bass leaping and twisting from an unseen pond. He eyed us, me in particular, as we downed our cold red beers, which tasted as good as they could considering they were made of Coors Light and a shot of Campbell's tomato juice.

As I drank my beer with these men I somehow began to feel as if now, after being here in this desolate hometown and drinking with them, I was becoming part of the family--part of their history. I was the new son-in-law, the new cousin and I didn't balk at things like red beer and the VFW. In fact, I felt strangely at home. After all, I had grown up in a small town in Pennsylvania coal country. My grandfather was an avid hunter, a pheasant hunter no less who trained his own bird dogs.

"Hey Lars." Gary acknowledged the man at the end of the bar. "Get any hunting in yet?"

"Nah, I don't hunt pheasant. I like Ducks. Ducks and Geese."

"Not me." Court said. "Too cold and wet sittin' in a blind like that."

"Yep." Lars said taking another sip off his drink. "Hey Gary, you'll like this. Last Spring, Don, from the co-op. He was out goose huntin' with a couple a' guys. This flock comes in low for their decoys and Don, he calls the shot. Well, one guy lets loose with his late and hits one of them geese when their right on top of the blind. The goose crashes right into the blind, only thing is--it's not dead! The goose is wounded, but not dead. Its flopping around in there, causing hell, until Don gets his senses and shoots the thing."

Gary simply shook his head and took a pull of his beer, Court had no reaction and Lyle seemed to have drifted off into his drink. But this reminded me of a story I had once read in a New Hampshire newspaper while visiting relatives.

"You gotta watch out for them." I said, after draining my beer. "Seriously, geese can be dangerous. They can kill you."

All four men looked at me. They were surprised. Not only had a dared to follow up Lars' story, but I was professing to have some unknown insight into the man's quarry.

"Oh yeah. I read about this guy once, in the newspaper. He was canoeing in New Hampshire and he saw a goose in the water."

Lars looked at me with that same shit-eating grin and I wanted to stop the story, to say I couldn't remember. But I had started with such gusto that turning back was impossible. I started to feel like the damn bass on his foam hat--twisting and out of water.

"He got to close to the goose. It had a nest there, with baby geese. The goose flipped the guy out of the canoe and drowned him--held him under the water with its head. I swear to God."

There was silence--dead silence--as the men looked at me in utter disbelief.

"Must have been one hell of a goose." Lars finally said, stifling his laughter but not his smirk.

"Well, maybe he wasn't a strong swimmer, but... That's the way it happened." I defended myself while backing off the story at the same time.

"I believe it." Gary finally said. "Yeah, Geese are strong and their nasty, nasty birds."

"Oh yeah!" Court agreed. "You get too close to their territory, they'll go after you. Bite a finger off or something."

Lars, just shook his head and took another drag off his cigarette. "Well Don, he shot this one."

Court and Gary had tried to save me, and I now felt some sense of belonging--that any attempt to embarrass me, was an attempt to embarrass them.

"You should have seen your new son-in-law at the VFW there Nance," Gary said later in the kitchen as he and his sister prepared ham sandwiches. "He was trading goose stories with Lars. Told him something I don't think he'll ever forget."

***
The next day, Tiffany and Scott showed up in their rented Taurus. The mood among the family was a mix of humor and sadness. I listened to Tracy, her sister and Scott reminisce about their grandfather. There were stories about his plan to rip out all the carpeting in the house and fill it with sand and hammocks. To make it a South Dakota beach house. Or, perhaps, he would take out the attic and make the house into a hunting lodge with Cathedral ceilings.

Inevitably, the wake came on Wednesday. There was debate between Gary and Nancy on whether this would be an open or closed casket viewing. Eventually, they had decided on an open casket, since, as Nancy put it, Wayne "looked so nice." The viewing room was small and only five rows separated us from Wayne. The shock of his ashen face coming out of the casket was too much for Tracy and Tiffany to take, and they broke down immediately into tears. After a few minutes Scott and I took them out to a wood-paneled waiting room that hadn't been updated since 1975. It was carpeted with green shag and the couches and chairs were covered with an orange faux velveteen. The girls calmed down and we turned our attention to making fun of the room's outdated decor and the outrageous picture of television's Mary Hart on the cover of "South Dakota Monthly." We met and greeted some more of Wayne's friends and headed home to eat ham and cookies.

Later that night we returned to the funeral home for a Masonic ceremony. While some Masonic Lodges may be the powerful hidden oligarchies of conspiracy theorists, the Lake Andes Masons function as a club of lost souls holding on to the dreams of a dying town. Lyle, who led the ceremony, stood in front of Wayne's casket with four other men ranging in ages from late 60s to early 40s. All appeared to be South Dakota farmers, except for the youngest man, who looked like an out of place lawyer wondering what had happened to the all-powerful brotherhood. They wore short white aprons around their waists and white gloves. A squat fat man with noticeable hat hair had a large open book that appeared to be a bible coming out from his waist and held up by a leather strap lashed from the corners and around his neck.

The group said prayers for Wayne and placed small sprigs of evergreen on his chest, a symbol of the lasting brotherhood of the Masons. One man read in the halting speech of someone new to reading aloud, if not reading in general. He confused his pronouns and sounded out words.

Gary's sons, Troy and Travis, showed up during the ceremony and sat at a bench cleared out by the Masons. I could see the shock on their face as they looked behind the black-suited men and saw the sallow head of their grandfather. The brothers had driven their minivan from Austin Texas and were staying at a hotel outside of town.

After the ceremony, the family gathered at the house for beer, wine, whiskey and more casseroles. It had been the first time in two years, with the exception of our hectic wedding, that the entire Nelson family had been together in the same house. There was a lot of catching up that night and the more everyone talked, the more at home I felt, the more I felt included. Troy, Travis and I drank beer and talked about music. They were in several bands down in Austin, playing weddings, bars and clubs--whatever kept instruments in their hands and food on the table. We rifled through Wayne's button collection, kept in two shoe boxes. There were campaign buttons worthy of the Smithsonian: "Nixon, now more than ever," several praising South Dakota's own George McGovern, and a small red, white and blue pin that simply said "TAFT." There were others for local politicians, some that professed a love of hog racing and still others that revealed Wayne's bawdier side: "You can pet my dog, but don't touch my pussy." I laughed with my new cousins over these buttons and each of us pilfered a few as souvenirs.

***
The next morning was the day of the funeral and I came across the lawn from Pete and Ida's early for breakfast, anxious to have some homemade cinnamon buns with the gourmet coffee Travis had brought from Austin. Tiffany and Scott, banished to the living room, were already awake, as was Court. All three were staring at Katy Kouric discuss the war in Afghanistan with a "senior analyst."

"I've got a job for you big boy," Court said as he walked into the kitchen. His voice lowered. "we need to get Wayne into the church."

I gave him a questioning look.

"The funeral director. He needs help getting Wayne into the church. There are some steps. You, me, Gary and Scott are going to go over there in a couple of minutes here and bring him in."

The Lake Andes Presbyterian church sits on a tree-lined street in the residential area of town. Wayne was buried on a wind-swept fall day, and leaves were swirling from the gutter and down the street as we pulled up to the curb to bring him into the church. The undertaker, cloaked in a beige trench coat, was waiting for us next to his black hearse. I was wearing a flannel coat borrowed from Gary and the wind cut through it, hitting me full in the chest. In what seemed to me like a waking dream, the funeral director opened the tailgate of his black car and pulled the oaken casket from the hatchback--it sat on rollers and slid out with little effort. We grabbed the casket railings that flipped up from the side--Scott and I on one side, Court and Gary on the other. The box was light and we could have carried it with one hand each, but we used two arms to guard against any kind of unspeakable mishap. No one spoke as we carried Wayne up the concrete steps of the church.

Inside, the church was warm and I rember deep purple carpets and a bead of sweat working its way down my forehead. We took Wayne up another flight of steps, shifting awkwardly because they were so narrow. The undertaker's assistant greeted us in the vestibule and he unfolded a brass-colored metal stand that would hold the casket. We placed Wayne on the stand carefully, shifting the casket so it was centered. The undertaker then wheeled him to the side and flipped open the lid of the casket revealing Wayne's torso, folded arms and head. The funeral director talked absentmindedly about the ceremony as he pulled out a crooked piece of metal that resembled a hand drill. He inserted the device into a hidden spot in the back of the casket and began to ratchet up a platform that tilted Wayne's head up to a forty-five-degree angle so he could look out from beyond the box.

"Let's get out of here," Scott said. He later admitted that the undertaker's mechanical treatment, the behind the scenes look, as it were, "was about all I could take," and I agreed with him.

This early morning task brought me fully into Tracy's family. It was a final incident, an intimate nuance I shared with them that served to bring me into their circle. The entire week was building to that one shared moment. I had been a part of something that none of those attending the funeral later that afternoon, not even most of Tracy's relatives, would know about.

The funeral came and was followed by a ham and Jell-O salad lunch served by the women of Lake Andes in the purple-floored church basement. It was a moving ceremony filled with grieving and sad chuckles at Wayne's eccentricities. I choked down the ham and butter sandwiches and poked at the gelatin concoctions and--along with Tracy, my in-laws and cousins--guessed at what was suspended in the Jell-O.

At the cemetery overlooking the town and the vast wheat fields that surrounded it, the old men of the VFW shot a 21-gun salute and taps played on a tape recorder as the wind whipped through Wayne's family. He was lowered down into his final resting place, next to his wife. Tracy's tears dried on her face and she shivered in the cold, huddling up next to me. But for me, this seemed like a postscript to the morning, where, in the quiet of dawn I helped three men carry a fallen father and grandfather and became part of a family.