Book of the Week

 Kin Types (Finishing Line Press) 

by Luanne Castle

 

By Sharon Waller Knutson

Luanne Castle knows how to tell a good story so it was no surprise to me that her chapbook Kin Types was an Eric Hoffer Award Finalist.

 Kin Types is a collection of lyric poetry, prose poetry, and flash fiction that imaginatively retells the lives of private individuals from previous generations,” her website says.

“The book exhumes the women who have died long ago to give life to them, if only for a few moments, Through genealogical and historical research, Luanne Castle has reconstructed the stories of women and men from Michigan to Illinois to the Netherlands. Read together, the pieces create a history of women dealing with infant mortality, vanity, housewife skills, divorce, secret abortion, the artist versus mother dilemma, mysterious death, wife beating, and a brave heroine saving a family’s home.”

She begins the book with this poem:

  

Advice from My Forebears

Always use hot pack canning for your green beans
and test your seals at the end.

Don't grab a burning oil stove without considering
the consequences.

Don't get in debt. If you don't got it, don't get it.

Make up your mind what church you'll attend
and go there as often as you can stand.

Be Dutch or you ain't much.

Get the log out of your own eye so you can get
the speck out of the other’s eye.

We can't talk about it, but here's your great-grandma's
Eastern Star ring so you will have a signal.

Never pick a fight but if someone hits you,
hit them back.

Always plant marigolds in your vegetable garden
and keep a compost pile out beyond the shed.

If they come to your door, feed them. Then send
them on their way.

Just let be.

Be careful with a needle; that's how your Grandpa
got blinded, coming around his ma's knee.

Sit on my finger, nobody ever fell off.

Watch your step on deck so you don't fall off the boat
and get skewered by the anchor like your Uncle Lucas.

Don't quit writing like I did. Make me a promise.

Quit scowling or your face will freeze that way.
.
If you see somebody's thumb stuck in the dyke,
don't pull it out. 

I have chosen stories that gripped me as a sample of the powerful poignant pieces in her book.

 

 

 July 9 1920

Half-Naked Woman Found Dead

On Thursday night last, the body of Mrs. Louisa Noffke, 73, was discovered at the shoreline of Emmons Lake by an unidentified passerby. The farm of Mrs. Noffke, a widow, abutted the lake. It appears that earlier that evening, Mrs. Noffke left her home, ripping and losing half of her clothing along the way. The blouse and stockings were not recovered. She managed to scratch and bruise herself as she trampled a path in the tall weeds, which led from the adjacent property down to the water.  

Mrs. Noffke immigrated to this country from Germany with her husband and infant son when she was 25 years old. She will be interred in a metallic coffin next to her husband at Lakeview Cemetery. Her property is to be divided between her daughter Clara and her son Herman. A probate order was issued within 48 hours of her death.

The last time Mrs. Noffke can be found gracing our pages is 27 years ago when son Herman was charged with assaulting his father, the late Charles Noffke. Herman did a ghost dance around the room, then buckled into his father and, securing a grapevine lock, flopped him so hard that the jolt jarred all the plaster from the ceiling.  

Herman claims it was necessary to subdue his father because "the old man" came home with his "tank full" and proceeded to make things lively. After cuffing Herman's mother, Charles Noffke kicked furniture around the room, and threw the old brindle cat through a panel of the door and "whooped her up for all he was worth."

Defying expectation, Mrs. Noffke’s life got no easier when her husband died. Coroner J. B. Hilliker pronounced Mrs. Noffke's death due to indigestion.
The First Baby Still Sleeps Long Hours

When windswept rain rattles the window panes, a draft blows out my last candle. I take good care of the taper. How will I finish my new dress in these 17-hour nights of December without light? I’ve thought of hemming the skirt at Christmas candle lighting, but the chintz threatens to become grubby where I’ve worked too long on it. If Carel hadn’t been called back to run the family store, we wouldn’t be moving to the provinces. I’m still wearing the dress my mother made me with the little lace shawl, a replica of her own, but I follow the new style and add my own touches--a short flowered skirt over a long plaid one. The waist is high with a long apron. With this fashion I don’t need so many yards of the same fabric, but can mix patterns. Carel tries to persuade me that Goes is a big city, too, but it’s not as fashionable as Middelberg, with our spectacular gothic town hall and tall merchants’ homes. Carel doesn’t realize I used much of the candle money to make the dress, but I can distract him in the dark. The baby still sleeps many hours in these black months. I hope to wear this dress for months before I have to let it out. No doubt another baby will be along soon, as little Jacoba arrived like a clock, and my mother said I am a young and healthy one. I suspect Carel approves of the new dress. He kisses the back of my neck when I bend over my needle. But mother scolds me, foolish and spoiled by an ignorant husband. If I wasn’t trying to sneak time for sewing whenever possible, I’d be sleeping, nestled around Jacoba who smells of rising bread, in this gloomy season with the tang of salt and cold entering the house when the door opens. Next spring, I hope to walk the dunes, alert for nests of seabirds, before the second baby grows too burdensome.

Johanna Cornaaij Mulder
1782-1863
Middelburg, Zeeland, Netherlands
Goes, Zeeland, Netherlands

 

 

The Ill-Timed Elopement

The floral dress, ruffled and sheer, lies crushed in the cupboard under the weight of schoolbooks, laced footballs, and a catcher's mask her new husband hides from his mother. She threw books out the windows and burned them in a bonfire when disease reached her brain. Now she dies in the next room, wan and hollow in her nightgown, calling out to the young wife for compresses and water, water, more water, saying I can't die before I see my grandchildren and remember to save the scraps for the dog as she lingers in that peculiar odor of illness past blueberry season to peppers to pumpkins to the last dried husks and leaves that her son clears out with the weeds. The mother can no longer make it to the window--now closed against the dangerous air--to watch, but whispers to the wife for a cool hand on her forehead--or some garbled craziness to which the daughter-in-law is too kind to react and only wants to rescue her elopement dress and do it again in a few months when this is over.


Cora Wilhelmina DeKorn Zuidweg
1875-1932
Kalamazoo, Michigan, United States

Lucille Edna Mulder Zuidweg
1912-2000
Caledonia, Michigan, United States
Kalamazoo, Michigan, United States 

And So It Goes

Their beginning
Pieter scrubbed before he visited Neeltje on the porch, but the oily smell of herring clung to his skin and hair, to his coat and boots. He left at ten every night. Later, she would press her hands, the ones he held as they sat turned toward each other in the small chairs, to her face and inhale. It had the effect of smelling salts or a burnt feather, reviving her from the dullness she felt when he was not around.

Their ending
When he felt invisible cold vines wrap around his ankles and calves, he saw her more clearly than he had in twenty years. His son Karel whispered that he would be seeing Mother soon. Pieter first thought he meant the mother he had never known, but then realized it was Neeltje and smiled at the image of her standing before the light.

And so it goes

On those evenings, her parents sat at the table inside the window, struggling to keep their eyes open over her mending and his reading. They didn’t seem to notice when she and Pieter disappeared from view for a half hour. Or in the early months when she first let out her skirt.

He thought of his family—his children, grandchildren, and their children. His oldest great-grandchild married young, but she didn’t have to. The man was older, a college graduate. Their first living room furniture was made from California orange crates, and Pieter doubted she realized her great-grandfather had ever been anything but a shrunken old man. Or that he had built chests and credenzas when Grand Rapids meant well-made furniture.

To get permission, they had to contact his mother’s father, the legal guardian that had signed Pieter and his brother into the city-run orphanage four years before. Old enough to be financially responsible for himself, but not old enough to sign his own marriage license. Laws written by old men who couldn’t remember their youths.

Every three months he moved to a different farmhouse. He was supposed to be with his eldest son Karel this season, but Karel’s wife Clara had cancer of the womb and lay dying in the upstairs bedroom. Now he had taken ill at Pete’s where the pies and fried chicken weren’t as good as Clara’s. But they treated him well, bringing him his pipe or a shawl when he asked for it.

She was a 16-year-old ex-schoolgirl when Karel was born. She swaddled the baby carefully, and against her mother’s instructions, carried him to the dock to wait for Pieter. When he said they should leave their families and move to Kloetinge where he could learn the trade of shoemaker, her cycles stopped again. Jan was born in Kloetinge without family nearly.

Nine children born to Neeltje. Two funerals. The one he remembered in color and detail was the first, young Jan, three months old after they had arrived in Michigan. Neeltje was only 19 when she buried her second born. After that, she went some place Pieter couldn’t follow. Gradually, over the next 44 years, he stopped searching.

When Pieter’s wealthy grandmother passed away, his own bequest bought Pieter, Neeltje, and their two babies a voyage on the S.S. Zaandam to New York and then a train ride to Grand Rapids where other Zeeuws had moved. Their young blond family was dutifully welcomed, but without warmth, into the neighborhood. A church elder hired Pieter on at his furniture factory.

For years Pieter wondered if the sawdust and paint chemicals would harm his lungs, exposed as he’d been to first Karel’s and then young Henry’s tuberculosis. But he retired without incident, although his legs sometimes gave him trouble, especially in damp weather.

Neeltje’s motions with the children were deliberate and patient. When she washed small faces, their eyes gazed up into hers. After Rosa died, she gave birth to yet another daughter and called her Rosa. The child they called Nellie after her mother was born slow with a pinched face and poor eyesight.

His mind wandered further back in time. The orphanage teacher with a swaggering moustache beat him across the back of his thighs with a cane after daily prayers. Afterward, Pieter found adventure stories in the Bible and imagined himself far away on another continent.

Neeltje did things without fanfare or explanation, and that’s how she died. He wasn’t sure what happened, but after he saw she was gone, he realized that even though she’d been at his side since they were teens, he had the sense he didn’t know her. Perhaps he’d been mistaken not to try to pull her back after Jan’s death. He should have tried harder. Now he envisioned her as a teen with a broad plain face, a bashful half-smile, and colorless hair. He’d made her a mother many times over, but she had been only a girl.

Pieter didn’t have a photograph of his mother. As he grew up, he didn’t know her stories. When Pieter was fifteen, his father died and not one of the older siblings, the uncles, or his mother’s father came to save his younger brother and himself from the orphanage that resembled a dark brick church adorned with stone angels. City taxes, including those of his uncles’ import business, had helped support the institution for years. The family figured they might as well make use of it.

He wanted to do it all over again. He would look often at her, at Neeltje, smiling or frowning. And at the children laughing with their mother. The smells of the fish, the leather, the fresh cut wood would be with him, but he would notice her so that when she died—because it always came to that—he would be prepared. He would see the way she was. The way they were. And it would be enough.

Pieter Philippus Mulder
1865-1953
Goes, Zeeland, Netherlands
Grand Rapids, Michigan, United States

Neeltje Gorsse Mulder
1868-1932
Goes, Zeeland, Netherlands
Grand Rapids, Michigan, United States