Process Notes #2

Dear readers,

This year marks the 80th anniversary of an unresolved family murder in the small town of West Branch, Iowa where my family has farmed for generations. Writing back into the time and place the crime occurred, I find myself undergoing a journey into the vanishing point, driving so far past these fields and further out, where the backroads drop off and there is nowhere left to go but into the prairie soil. Under the red sun I sweat out days flown by in the peripheral, the rearview. This is a solitary journey that one must take to connect with roots, which branch off in innumerable and fleeting directions the closer one moves toward the origin.

This is a story of yearning and connection in the face of tragedy, the lessons of a family that would never come back together. These fragments of histories I gather and tenderly sift through become a scrapbook for further engagement, creating room for more questions. The field opens into a sea of tall grasses which, unsurprisingly, hide those who wish to remain occluded. You and I will remember why we came. We walk down crop rows, field mice scurrying at our feet, tics and wasps reminding us that we are still here among the living. The lesson, friend, is that you and I still have time to do everything we would like to do. The well is not dry. Let’s continue to fill it with mysteries that replenish our understanding.

Late at night, feigning sleep, I wonder about those secrets hidden below the depths of soil and have found answers that only lead to more questions. Often, I am drawn to the hour of death, the church bell’s knell. At the interstitial moment between night and day before anyone else awakens. When a shotgun is pulled from its resting place under the bed.

You can hear the church bell off in the distance, in the faraway, the same intonation that would have reverberated years ago. Before closing my eyes, I try to imagine my family’s faces so vividly, so clearly, and they appear to me now as half-waning and ghostly figures haunting the field of perception. Their only wish is that we do not forget their story.

This journey offers a renewed sense of the word “visitation.” I am new again to these grounds, roaming spaces I thought I had forgotten or tried to forget, blank as this sheet of paper that provides solace for my wandering. I am also visited by a past which impinges at the edges of the scene, and by family members on whose graves I place flowers, looking upon those slabs as markers of historical fact but also sites of generational wounds. Through acknowledging the wound and looking at it straight-through, I learn I can be a conduit for their sufferings which have become my sufferings. Thread by thread we stitch together a story that will inevitably unravel.

With ferociousness and candor,

Julia