The Turtle's Beating Heart Read online

  Grandfather is my mythic being, representing all male ancestors. I am not alone in this confabulation. Petroglyphs in the Smoky Hills of Kansas, a region crossed by Interstate 70, often represent outlined Indigenous men—some with buffalo caps, some with feather headdresses, some bareheaded. Most have upraised arms, palms out, as though blessing a congregation or receiving blessings from the stars—or both. The insertion of human measure into the impersonal expanses makes the infinite more companionable. My eyes touch these glyphs through light beams and remember them. The human memory latches onto icons, like a birthing mother, a warrior, or the universal grandfather. The misunderstood “sale” of Manhattan for a few beads represents a conqueror’s narrative in shorthand. This is how memory works. Outcroppings of Kansas sandstone archive hundreds of male figures, along with a few women, many animals, stars, and water glyphs.

  During one excursion to Hill City in 2008, to celebrate the poet William Stafford, I travel to an anthropomorphic outline of stones in far western Kansas known as Penokee Man. This archetypal man suggests all grandfathers. To my children and grandchildren our Grandfather Bruner is no more real than this roughly delineated image, which diminishes each year as it weathers. Grandfather’s memory fades, but he is, nonetheless, a powerful if unconscious presence in our flesh and bones.

  4. Penokee Man drawing in Graham County Historical Society, by Donna Roper, after a map by Tom Witty in the Kansas State Historical Society collection, 1978. Used with permission of Graham County Historical Society of Hill City, Kansas. The author appreciates the cooperation of Jan Beecher.

  The hundreds-year-old giant Penokee Man stretches sixty feet across a hillside. He has broad shoulders, barrel chest, and large penis. He raises his arms in the same open gesture of petroglyph men found in the Smoky Hills. His feet straddle the evening sun, and at the summer solstice the sun’s orb fits exactly between his legs. Individual pieces barely suggest the whole image, yet from the air he is complete. The large outline is an apt creation for this place of unedged sky. His scale challenges people to reach for a larger view.

  Penokee Man is also a sundial. Passersby experience his calibration of time as an ongoing, organic process. Yearly deteriorations of the stones extend the past into the present. Each follows a specific, long-range clock, marking a sequence unique to Ogallala sediments. A nearby outcropping of Ogallala sandstone is the source for the outlined man. The seam runs underground into a deep reservoir of Ice Age groundwater. Exposed to the elements, the broken fragments of stone turn to gravel and then clay. I observe discrete segments of this process in my pane of time.

  Anthropologists connect Penokee Man to Blackfeet Indians’ Old Man, the world’s cocreator with Old Woman. Blackfeet people are the most far-flung branch of Algonquian-speaking people, settled on slopes of the northern Rocky Mountains. According to Blackfeet accounts, Penokee Man is a cosmic grandfather with many children, from the southern plains northward to Montana:

  Old Man came from the south, making the mountains, the prairies, and the forests as he passed along, making the birds and the animals also. He traveled northward making things as he went, putting red paint in the ground here and there—arranging the world as we see it today. He made the Milk River and crossed it; being tired, he went up on a little hill and lay down to rest. As he lay on his back, stretched out on the grass with his arms extended, he marked his figure with stones. You can see those rocks today, they show the shape of his body, legs, arms and hair. (Chewing Black Bones)

  These distant relatives of my grandfather left Penokee Man, a figure complete with “body, legs, arms and hair.”

  The connection to Grandfather deepens as I remember how he once lived in Norton County, a few miles from Penokee Man, and most likely he visited the site. Perhaps our footsteps crisscross, separated only by years.

  As I drive away from Penokee Man, toward home, I learn another landscape—breaks country. Entire communities fit into breaks, which are steep drop-offs into canyons. From a distance the land looks like even rolling hills, but suddenly the earth cracks open and drops to a small stream. This high plains region is an unfolding atlas, where creases can conceal hundreds of miles.

  The highway parallels a valley as it wends among giant swells. In Norton County the road eases its way through the long-term erosion site of Prairie Dog Creek. This is also a former stagecoach trail. Remnants of livery stables remain in some of the small towns. No doubt the passage was a way for Blackfeet and other Native peoples to travel the region. The Blackfeet elder Darrell Kipp once told me about the long-range raids the warriors made, south as far as Mexico and back.

  Anything can happen in such distant places, where time and space converge. When a child, I watched the film Lost Horizons, and the term stays with me. Shangri-La can become real at any turn on the road.

  After I arrive home, I still feel enlarged by the larger scale of experience, an immersion in a rock fissure where history stands still. As I continue these statewide drives during poet laureate days, Grandfather is more and more real to me. I plan side trips to places where he once lived—the oil fields of Butler County, Santa Fe railroad towns, and endless pastures. In his small hometowns brick streets map exact dimensions of his former life. The Methodist church, the railroad depot, an old office building, a Carnegie library—they all take on an added magnetism as I drive past them or stop for longer investigation.

  Through these years my writing style picks up a more exploratory, rambling quality. All writing is a form of travel memoir anyway, as we traverse our own memories and add new observations. Exceptional writers can make quotidian, rote moments into heroic epics. My journal entries about road trips turn into imaginative journeys, and some moments solidify into published pages.

  To be accurate about these trips, I have to describe what I observe, not what I wish to see. Kansas, like my family, with its inconsistencies, is not a perfect place. Seedy motel rooms overlook fields of gorgeous wildflowers. Rusted cars litter some Edenic hillsides. Metal utility buildings hunch wherever they wish, as picturesque red barns collapse into rubble. The eternal skies, however, make everything human-made seem as temporary as dried cottonwood leaves. The stunning beauty of land never fails to transcend scars, human and natural. Natural theology becomes my personal creed, observation of the invariable laws of gravity, light, electricity, and velocity. Penokee Man works on my imagination and expands it as well as the mysterious optics of the breaks country.

  Traveling, an elder once told me, is a Delaware tradition. Delawares traversed the Atlantic Seaboard, the Great Lakes, and the West as traders and guides. The remarkable Delaware man Fall Leaf led Zebulon Pike to the tallest peak in the Rockies. The landmark should be named Fall Leaf’s Peak, not Pike’s Peak. Pike only followed the Delaware man’s lead.

  Grandfather also traveled widely. As a boy, he visited New Mexico cousins to hunt and fish in mountain streams. These cousins returned with him to Kansas, to renew ties with their Delaware grandparents. Grandfather’s sojourns in New Mexico and Norton County are part of a larger whole, still existing in a fourth dimension where the past is a complete single cloth.

  Grandfather’s blood lineage flows back to many great-grandparents before us who survived with great courage. We descendants continue their ongoing creation, just as the sun illumines, each sunrise, the image of Penokee Man. On the plains distances expand and contract, so at times even the stars seem within an arm’s reach of the earth.

  *

  Not long after my sister Mary informs me about our Grandfather’s Native identity, I drive to his hometown of Burns, northeast of Wichita. A cousin has given me the name of an old woman who knew my grandfather’s relatives. The land is diverse, with oil fields, upland pastures, and farming along river bottoms.

  Just after the cemetery, the turnoff to Burns leads beyond the edge of the Cottonwood River. A gas station is 1960s throwback architecture, then brick streets converge on nineteenth-century downtown buildings. Some are quite ornate, suggesti
ng a former age of glory. Prosperity once blew through the town like a spring storm and left some embellished rooflines. In the aftermath utility buildings and wood-frame storefronts fill in the remaining spaces. The town is a jumble of eras.

  I find the address of a white Victorian house with petunia-filled flower boxes on the front steps. An old woman answers the door promptly. She is a fit octogenarian with tea ready. After pouring and offering store-bought cookies, with apologies, she settles into her overstuffed chair and says, “So, you are Charley Bruner’s great-niece.” I nod, and she continues, “He was a banker in town all those years.” Grandfather’s brother married an energetic woman, a schoolteacher, and in the small town they became prominent. “He kept the Boy Scouts going for years,” she says. “Your Aunt Hazel was a poet with the Kansas Author’s Club.” I have heard of this literary relative by marriage, one of my mother’s favorites. She loved the outdoors and would disappear all day into the hills and “commune with nature,” my mother said. This woman corroborates my mother’s stories.

  5. Frank Bruner Junior, age fifteen or sixteen, at railroad crossing in Burns, Kansas. Author’s collection.

  My hostess sips her tea and says: “I don’t know much about your grandfather. He wandered so much, from Kansas City to California and back.”

  “I thought he just lived in Newton,” I say.

  “He ended up in Newton after the war.” “The war” is always World War II for people of her age. She takes up her teacup again, looks at me, and then confides, “I worked in the Bruner dulcimer factory awhile.”

  Small isolated towns look for any possible way to develop business. My mother had mentioned her cousin and this unusual enterprise, but I did not realize he employed anybody. “I heard about the Walnut Creek Dulcimer Factory,” I say.

  “Yup. It went out of business. Your cousin moved to Oklahoma a year ago.” I had not heard this coda to the tale.

  “Oh, no,” I say.

  “Your cousin, he was a real character.”

  I understand her colloquial shorthand for very eccentric and intelligent and interesting and, again, very eccentric, all at once. Most differences are forgiven with this endearment. Many “real characters” inhabit small Kansas towns. With luck I might become a real character myself.

  She spends the afternoon sharing her uncensored opinions. She describes former triumphs of the town, including the first consolidated school district in the state. “There were fun times,” the elder tells me. She describes how teenagers played sports and celebrated picnic holidays with cakewalks and tug-of-war. Youngsters gathered at the railroad crossings, my grandfather among them, and shot targets.

  She knows the exact house where my great-uncle lived, the bank where he worked, and the drugstore where he ate lunch. She tells me about Grandmother Charlotte, my grandfather’s mother, who was a widow when this woman was young: “She might have been Indian. She looked it. But no one talked about those things.” Grandmother Charlotte, she intimates, also was a real character who lived with her son and daughter-in-law until she died in 1954.

  “You can see for yourself what’s left at the town museum,” she says to me. “Just go a few streets over to the old high school building. I called for someone to unlock it.”

  I thank her for tea and take my leave.

  The large, square brick high school building is not difficult to find in a town six blocks wide. I climb steep concrete stairs to the entrance. Upon entering, I see this is a doubly abandoned building—no longer a high school and no longer the town museum. Dust and cobwebs are thick. In the entrance hall locked glass cases display rows of trophies, with each former victory neatly labeled. The young athletes are long absent, as are the teachers, parents, janitors, and classmates. The transience of glory is an explicit lesson as photographs fade to gray outlines.

  Classrooms are display areas for town antiques. One room is filled with Victorian dresses, another with china plates and glassware. Photographs create a jumbled mound on one table. I look for anything about my family as quickly as possible, so I can finish and leave this spooky place. Among the photos I see several my mother already has. Finally, I discover one new photograph of Grandfather’s older brothers, dressed like dandies. They look a bit ridiculous now, especially in puffy necktie bows, but no doubt they were fashion plates.

  6. Two brothers: Charles Bruner and Frank Junior in bow ties, 1895–1900, Burns, Kansas, area. Author’s collection. Gift of Gail Bruner Murrow.

  7. Burns State Bank, ca. 1900–1909. Samuel E. Cobb (right), Charles Bruner (back), and Theo Cobb, daughter of Samuel Cobb, who became wife of Alf Landon. Landon was twenty-sixth governor of Kansas and opponent of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936. Author’s collection.

  Another photograph shows the older brother, Charles, as a young clerk with a prominent banker, Samuel E. Cobb, grandfather of former senator Nancy Landon Kassebaum. Nancy’s mother, Theo (Landon) Cobb, is a small girl in the photo. Among the paper rubble I also find a town history that quotes Cobb, founder of the bank: “My mother died when I was about three years old. . . . I made my first fifty cents hoeing hedges.” Cobb became the first mayor of Burns, despite his humble origins. Another large photograph of Cobb is a formal portrait. He has a broad, handsome face. His dark complexion partly merges with shadows. He appears to be American Indian. The history article explains that Cobb left Burns in 1909 for Topeka to become a prominent citizen. Uncle Charles bought the bank and stayed in Burns until his death in 1971. His wealth, like Cobb’s, came from hard work, not family fortune.

  On a side table I find some regional books for sale. One volume is a compilation of centennial memories, and the other is reprinted newspaper clippings. I tuck bills in the on-your-honor collection jar. The local histories will prove my family did exist in this dip in the horizon, a place that prospered as citizens waited futilely for the train company to establish a major route to Kansas City. This community still waits in its wrinkle of the grasslands.

  I trudge back down the steep high school building steps to my car. On the way out of town, I make one last stop, the Burns Café and Bakery, for a sacramental meal of rhubarb pie and coffee. The lingering tartness of the fruit transforms the drive home through the Flint Hills into a religious experience. Shadows of misty ridgelines blend into the horizon, and the past swirls into present time as I contemplate the childhood days of Grandfather in this landscape of constant change.

  *

  I open pages of the Burns centennial history and discover how my grandfather’s life began. The Burns Monitor reports his birth in 1889: “Mrs. F. L. Bruner presented her husband with a 10-lb. boy as a Christmas present.” Frank Bruner Junior was the third and last child. The town was at its height, as prospering ranchers and farmers accrued solid accounts in the local bank. The new baby’s father was a postmaster and a clerk. At first the Bruner family flourished in the hometown setting, with grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins nearby. They all were among the founding families, if not exactly prominent citizens.

  The Burns history book lists the Bruner family as arriving in 1878, the same year as Grandfather’s mother’s family, the Roots and Bairs. All had Delaware ties, not recorded in the public documents.

  Grandfather’s father, Frank Bruner Senior, had origins in New Jersey. He was born in 1859 and arrived in Burns with his parents, Jake and Mary. His romance with Charlotte Root, newly arrived from Ohio, is easy to imagine. No story remains, but Charlotte lived within a few blocks of the small business district where he worked. They met and married. They had a child by 1885, another one in 1887, and my grandfather in 1889.

  8. Frank Bruner Senior as a young man. Author’s collection. Gift of Gail Bruner Murrow.

  When Grandfather was born, his cowboy grandfather Jake, legally Charles Jacob Bruner, lived ten miles outside of town. He had remarried after his children’s mother died in 1884, and some family estrangement is apparent. At Jake’s death in 1912, the second wife’s name appears on the ranch plat maps, so Jake�
�s children were disinherited, or the land may have been hers before marriage. In historic records only one mention occurs: “Among those who developed the livestock industry during the early days were . . . C. F. [sic] Bruner.” He did not participate in town activities, so probably he spent most of his days in the country.

  A photograph remains of Jake Bruner with his son, Frank Senior, and another man, possibly a son-in-law. Jake is dressed in worn boots and holds his cowboy hat in his hand, a contrast to Frank’s city garb—a three-piece suit. Frank, according to my mother, was sickly and not able to work on the ranch. He had “rose fever,” the term for allergies. In this family photograph he has delicate features. In contrast, the father, Jake, has a ragged beard and a hard look in his eye. Jake emigrated from mountain country adjacent to the present-day Ramapough Lenape Indian Reservation in New Jersey. The 1860 census records indicate he owned nothing in New Jersey, he was a day laborer, and he was illiterate. No record of service during the Civil War remains, and his whereabouts then are unknown. Family stories suggest several of his children died in New Jersey. The missing stories nag at me. Why would Jake and his wife, Mary, leave their homes in middle age and chance the hard country of the Great Plains? Within a few years Mary died. Perhaps she had tuberculosis and went west for the low humidity. Perhaps she grieved dead children.

  By the time of the 1900 census in Kansas, Jake farmed and ranched on mortgaged land. Hard rural work is the same, no matter what the geography.

  Closer to the new Bruner baby’s family, a few blocks away, were the maternal grandparents, Samuel Root and Mary Ann Bair—her maiden name is spelled Bear in the Ohio records, Bare, and finally Bair. Some censuses show her as “Indian,” and Samuel’s mother also is indicated as Indian in Ohio census records. This family lived on the edge of Burns and had farmland farther south where they raised seven children. By the time Grandfather was born, they had many grandchildren. Later a neighbor would write about Sam Root’s nearby cherry and apple orchard in the town history book, how “children chose it as a favorite place for climbing.” Some of the apples went into rural staples of vinegar and cider, including hard cider. Apple growing was part of the family’s Ohio experience. Near their land was a Delaware settlement called “Chauquecake,” which means “Apple Orchard.” They continued orchard cultivation in Burns.