The Rock

By Debbie Wonser

The Rock pulled me to itself, summoning my spirit until my young body had little choice but to comply. I’d run out of my parents’ farmhouse, barefoot if I felt wild and tough enough, on a dusty, somewhat-graveled road up the hill to my dad’s shop. Sparks often flew from Dad’s welder as he brought his antiquated farm machinery back to life. Those sparks and their molten metallic stench assaulted my senses. My mom had once flash burned her corneas when she was welding ships together during WWII, and sometimes welding sparks burned holes in my dad’s clothes. Then I’d run past some granaries and a metal machine shed and crawl through a barbed-wire fence because I wasn’t tall enough yet to straddle its rusty four wires. I took special care going through that fence; my back bore scars from being caught in its snare. Then I’d walk between two hills until I came to the Rock.

The Rock protruded like a giant triangular prism from the southernmost of those two hills in North Dakota’s deep White Earth Valley, covered in lichen, surrounded by sharp grass and cactus, purple pasqueflowers in the spring, orange wood lilies and blue harebells in the summer. From the bottom of the hill, the Rock was twice my height, but if I scaled the steep terrain, it was easy to step onto the Rock’s large, flat top. The dampness of the earth resided there in that hill. I could feel it deep in my bones. When the sun bore down on hot summer days, I could smell the hot grass, similar to the aroma of bread I baked back at the house at 350 degrees Fahrenheit in my mom’s electric oven. I called this rock my prayer rock, for it was there I’d go to say my repetitious Catholic prayers until I’d find myself conversing with my Best Friend, my God, in my own words.

I told God all about how I didn’t want Communists to take over the world like my mom and bachelor uncles said they might “unless America woke up,” whatever that meant. I asked God to give Dad a good price for his Hereford and Angus cattle. I begged for friends my own age who were girls. I lamented how mean and unfair all boys were. How much I missed my sister Sheila and wished she’d come back to North Dakota to live. How I wished I had been born with curly hair so my mom wouldn’t roll up my blond hair in the dreaded hard plastic curlers once a week. How much I worried about my mom dying.

The few times back at the house, after my sister Karen would recite the Guardian Angel Prayer with me, we’d go through the list of people she wanted God to bless, with me repeating her words, and she’d add, “…and help Debbie to be a good girl.” I very much hoped I was a good girl. I had heard all about hell and purgatory—had seen pictures even, and I didn’t want to live in an ocean of flames with my arms extended to the Virgin Mother, pleading for her to give me mercy. But on the Rock, God’s side of the conversation didn’t use sentences, words or scary pictures, but conveyed peace, and on the Rock I was understood and loved. Best of all, I was never alone.

This cathedral faced my dad’s scrap iron pile, a metal graveyard of combine skeletons, frames of old forgotten trucks and cobwebs woven by generations of spiders. The Rock was inside the Highway Pasture, so large that round cow pies lay about as a smorgasbord for flies. Yet the Rock was holy somehow, a pulpit in my own Westminster Abbey. The Rock somehow squeezed into my Roman Catholic paradigm and became the venue for my own version of a vision quest. The dolls who accompanied me on these prayer vigils agreed; this was a sacred place and they kept their respectful silence.

The White Earth Valley hosted its share of sacred places. Although the Rock held a particular fascination for me, other wonders in the valley also held my interest, like the curious rings that were about ten feet in diameter we called tipi rings. These rings consisted of rocks that were all about five pounds or so, and they were spaced about eighteen inches apart. The rocks once held down the animal skin hides of the tipis snug against the ground and kept out the sharp, biting fangs of North Dakota winds. Once Native Americans obtained axes that allowed them to make wooden pegs, they didn’t use rocks to make tipi rings anymore.

An indentation in the ground on a bluff that overlooked the valley facing west was once an eagle pit. According to the Hidatsa history, the pits were dug about five feet square and about four feet deep. The hunter would lie in the pit on grass, his head to the north. A rabbit or coyote became bait and fresh blood poured over the lung of a buffalo drew the eagles in. The hunters would lift a lid-like pit cover and grab the eagle when it landed on the bait. Then once the eagle was secured, it lost some tail feathers. It took about three eagle tails to make a war bonnet or maicumapuka. I camped overnight on this bluff once. My brother’s dog, Frank, and I woke up to a glorious morning—fog was rising off the White Earth River as red hues of dawn woke up the valley. The dew had soaked into my sleeping bag and pillow and the morning air filled my lungs with fresh oxygen. I remember thinking Julie Andrews in the Sound of Music had nothing over on me.

Joe Pancerzewski, a national old-time fiddler’s champion, would come back to visit my parents once in a while from his home in Enumcalw, Washington, and tell stories of the White Earth Valley he knew in the early 1900s. He’d tell stories of people like Morgan Marmon who raised 200 horses and let them just run loose on the prairie in the days before barbed-wire fences. Joe was always full of stories of barn dances and riding horseback through the valley decades before. “The hills never change,” he’d say.

The valley held its share of tales of horse thieves who, once caught, were buried facedown after their hanging, and mysterious, still-unsolved murders in its past, but most of the population were hardworking Scandinavian and German farmers and ranchers who somehow eked out a living in the brutal climate. Indeed, the valley exacted a heavy toll from all its humans, young and old. Children took on adult responsibilities early.

I was eight years old, but I reasoned since I could create white yeast bread from scratch, I was old enough to move away from home and get married. Marriage seemed like the ultimate emancipation from my parents and nine siblings and all the injustice I perceived I faced as the baby of the family. Never mind I had no marriage prospects; that seemed like a minor detail.

I think I coveted my own personal freedom so much back in 1976 because two hundred years before, the United States had declared its independence from Great Britain. I scoured the hills for wildflowers that were red, white or blue to transplant in front of my playhouse to celebrate the bicentennial. My wooden playhouse used to be a sleigh that would transport children to a one-room country school in the winter. I, too, attended a one-room country school, but in my day, parents drove students back and forth to school most of the time in their cars or trucks. I remember walking home from Chilcot School one time in the winter. It had been awful. I wore red and white checkered polyester pants and when I stepped onto a snow bank, I’d sink, time and time again, until my wet legs were numb with cold. At least the White Earth River (we called it “The Crick”) was frozen, so that it was easy to cross.

That summer, the closest to blue I could find to plant in front of my playhouse was some purple alfalfa, and its long tap roots were longer than even my 8-year-old ambition wanted to fully excavate. Yet loving God and loving the United States seemed to go hand in hand, and I did what I could to pay proper homage to my country that year.

In January of 1976, my sister Sheila, mailed me the New Catholic Picture Bible from her home in Illinois where she worked for a publishing company, and I had devoured its stories. I thought of Moses, the angry old man who struck a rock to bring water to Israel. I caressed the cold hard rock under me. I could never strike it; that would be like allowing the U.S. flag to touch the ground, like spitting out the lily-white communion wafers Father Lukach dropped on my tongue on Sunday mornings or Saturday nights.

A few pages later I read about Joseph. His brothers hated him so much they sold him into slavery, but Joseph forgave them and even saved their lives and the lives of their families. The giant-slayer, David, was one of my favorite characters. He, too, was discounted by his family and later became king of all Israel. I decided someday, when I’d birth a son, I’d name him David.

Meadowlarks, robins, warblers, goldfinches, crickets and bees sang in my surround-sound choir by the Rock. When I’d break into song myself, the choir would listen. I composed songs about God, like David in the Bible did, and nobody laughed. My five older brothers at home often laughed at me; nature did not.

This church had no dress code and when I look now at the one photo I have of my eight-year-old self, I have to say that was a good thing. On the picture, I’m wearing a pinkish shirt, buttoned to the very top, and brown and orange plaid pants. But the Rock didn’t mind. The Rock also did not mind my guests, Cleo, the big white tomcat, and Huckleberry, the un-pedigreed dog, who followed me wherever I walked outside, but never in the house, for a dog’s place was outdoors, my dad said. Only when calves had hypothermia would Dad allow animals in the house, and they’d get a long soak in our home’s only bathtub. I’m sure the calves had stories to tell their moms when they were reunited outside about the little-girl human who shampooed their hair when she thought no one was looking.

One time, I forgot a little doll blanket I had crocheted and brought out with me to the Rock. I found it weeks later, unraveled by a bird to make a nest. This was the only tithe the Rock exacted of me, but I didn’t mind.

The Rock never demanded casseroles for potlucks, never argued which Bible translation was best, never threatened to take me off its membership roll when I grew up enough to move away and didn’t visit as often. The man I loved proposed marriage to me not far from the Rock, and later our son, David, who grew four inches taller than any of my brothers, picked orange lilies on its hill. When I was forty, my favorite brother’s ashes flew over the Rock, free at last from chronic myelogenous leukemia as a July wind carried him south.

I wonder sometimes if the Rock misses that innocent, lonely girl who sat, cried, and prayed on it. I wonder if the notes of my childhood songs still ricochet off the scrap iron pile, the sound waves ebbing in and out, even after all these years. Yet the Rock, the scrap iron pile, the birds, the wind and the wildflowers have become a part of me, always with me, as much a part of me as my blue eyes and North Dakota accent others say I have but I can’t hear. Churches made with human hands keep disappointing me. The Rock summons me still.

Debbie Wonser lives near Tioga, North Dakota, 3 miles south of the hospital where, when giving birth to Debbie, her mother admonished the nurse not to wake the doctor “because I’ve been through this nine times before.” Debbie holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from North Dakota State University where she paid her tuition by working as a writer and news editor for the Spectrum. Debbie later worked as an intern, writer and researcher for Common Cause Magazine in Washington, D.C., and studied short story and novel writing with the Long Ridge Writers’ Group based in Connecticut.