Richard Wolkomir & Joyce Rogers Wolkomir

 

 

 

My husband recently asked if I remembered which Dakota my Uncle Wayne came from, North or South?

 

It was the North, a ranch.

 

His father died when Wayne was a toddler, and his mother carried on until she cut her finger. Out on the plains, far from hospitals and doctors, before the discovery of antibiotics, a cut finger could be fatal, and it was—she died of blood poisoning.

 

So five-year-old Wayne, my eventual uncle by marriage, got dropped on his grandmother's ranch, expected to earn his keep. 

 

One day his grandmother demanded he harness the work horses to a wagon, a four-horse-hitch, to do heavy hauling around the ranch. Those huge Belgians got away from the child, leading to temporary havoc.

 

Wayne's grandmother apparently decided: this kid's more trouble than he's worth. So she shipped him east, to his other grandmother.

 

I picture that little boy, at a prairie train station. He's wearing his Stetson, with a note pinned to his shirt, saying where he's supposed go, a thousand miles away. He's got a bag with what clothes he has, and he's carrying his .22 rifle.

 

He's alone.

 

My aunt, who one day married Wayne, told me: "One of those grandmas was just as mean as the other."

 

Wayne served as a marine, in World War II, on Iwo Jima. I suppose that wartime stint must have stuck in his mind as his greatest adventure, but I think he had an even more telling adventure—I sometimes think of a small boy, alone, on the plank platform of a prairie train station, with his Stetson and his rifle.

 

Pinned to his shirt: his ultimate destination.

 

—Joyce 

 

 

 

When I was in sixth grade, a kid my age confronted my father, at the town's bowling alley.

 

"I'm going to get your son," he said.

 

My father warned me, watch out for Flick.

 

Several weeks passed and one evening my father spoke to me before supper.

 

"Did Flick give you trouble?" he asked

.

"Yeah," I said.

 

"What happened?" my father asked, looking grim.

 

"I knocked him down and that was the end of it," I said.

 

I'd never seen my father looking so pleased, and relieved, and so proud of me.

 

I hadn't thought much of it. Even as a sixth grader I somehow knew this was Flick's sad attempt to get my father's attention. He came from the shacks down by the river, and I suppose he envied me having the father I did, a man well-liked by everyone in our small town.

 

I'm not sure what I learned from that non-episode, but I do still remember it after all these years. Maybe it's to have some compassion, because a person may be nasty out of unhappiness. Maybe it's that some are doomed from birth, by mean parents, or squalor, or bad luck.

 

Not many years later Flick died miserably, apparently drowned in not much more than a puddle, in the parking lot of a run-down resort, up in the Catskill Mountains.

 

--Richard