Dakota Blues Read Online Free PDF Page A

congregation to stand, Father moved toward the gravesite, where he sprinkled droplets of holy water on the open grave, consecrating the ground where her mother and father would spend the next million years. “Let us pray. ‘Our Father,’” he began, leading the beloved communal prayer. Karen chanted along, her throat tight, the familiar words returning. When the prayer ended, silence enveloped the crowd. She heard a bit of rustling behind her and then the simple notes of “Amazing Grace,” from Uncle Rudy’s accordion. The family sang along, right through two entire verses.
    They must have had a lot of practice to know the words, Karen thought, wiping away tears.
    The song ended, and silence fell again. Father Engel stood with his hands clasped in front of him, allowing for a moment of meditation. A light breeze rippled his vestments. Overhead, a meadowlark rode a telephone wire and sang complex melodies.
    It is peaceful here, Karen thought. She closed her eyes and inhaled the aroma of grassland and freshly turned earth. I wish you weren’t going to be so far away, but this is where you wanted to be. I’m happy you found peace.
    The cemetery workers repositioned bouquets of flowers, clearing a path to the casket. They wore solemn gray slacks and work shirts, and moved about their duties quietly and without haste. The wind whispered through the trees, and wispy clouds drifted overhead.
    “Hang in there, sweetie.” Lorraine’s arm crept around Karen’s shoulders. “It’s almost over.”
    The priest touched the casket as he prayed, and the workers stood ready to operate the mechanism that would lower her mother into the community of the dead. When Father Engel paused, the funeral director walked over to Karen and held out a basket of roses. For a moment she failed to comprehend, but then reached forward and selected a small red bud. The congregation passed the basket around until everyone held a rose. When the director turned and walked back toward the casket, the family stood and followed him. Each one rested a hand or touched a forehead to the burnished surface.
    As the line filed past, most wiped away tears, and Karen choked back her own. These folks seemed to care so much for her mother– these bent-back women with their thinning hair and blocky figures, the men frail and withered. Soon these shuffling old children of immigrants would die with their memories of near-starvation, or of a neighbor trampled by a team of horses, or a child suffocating during a dust storm. Their own parents, already gone, were the only ones who remembered saying goodbye on a German dock to come to America and live in a hole in the ground until they could build a house from sod. They bore children and cultivated the prairie, alone under the sun, the only sound that of the plow blade ripping through the astonished grasses.
    Karen closed her eyes. Her mother had known her to her very bones, knowing without asking what her daughter was feeling and what she needed, whether reassurance on a windy morning or fifteen hundred miles of distance from a difficult father. Karen had always thought her gratitude was enough, but now she tasted the acrid bitterness of doubt.
    Father Engel reached the end of the last prayer and closed the book. He gestured to Karen to come forward. With Aunt Marie and Lorraine clutching her arms on either side, she approached the casket, her legs wobbly. The breeze freshened, snapping the canvas tent cover, and the trees rustled and bent in the wind.
    As a child, Karen had been terrified of the weather, and especially of the wind and dark storms that formed funnel clouds. While her parents slept, she would lie awake in the early hours of a morning, listening to the branches of the trees beat against her window. She worried that a tornado might whirl through town, pick up their house, and kill them. Torn between hiding her head under a pillow and remaining on guard to warn her parents at the first sign of danger,