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