MUENSTER:
OLD EUROPE IN FRONTIER TEXAS

Texans were not given to contemplating their grazing land, except perhaps in Spring, with the particular satisfaction of relatives back in Iowa at corn harvest time. But the star-spangled night sky became an overwhelming canopy over an isolated ranch, as it was to me years later over a monastery's farmhouse on the edge of a snowbound forest of rural Quebec. The universe was usually obedient, the stars followed their courses, and Progress seemed mostly a Big City notion. There was a capital in Austin, and another, relatively suspect, one in Washington DC. These Texans passed on traditions from the old continent which were more important than those which came from Washington. These came from Switzerland, but also from the firsthand experience of austerity and connection to land, the perhaps from the way all of that land isolated them from the influences of modernity, of so-called Progress. From a variety of community experiences, more than from Philadephia or Boston, came inherited notions of right and wrong, good and the bad. And there were occasional renewing of ties with Europe, far more than with Yankee New England, often because of the enduring ties of the orders of monks and nuns with their founding houses on the old continent.

Sister Theresina, who had come as a young Benedictine nun from the Swiss alpine village Sankt Johann to teach the sons and daughters of plains' farmers in the new world, was a respected figure in her square wimple, and brown and white habit. She was something of an intellectual and told my grandparents that the brightest Muenster children, such as my father, should be sent off on the M.K.T. to the Jesuit boarding school in St. Mary's Kansas. After a half-century of service the parishioners took up a collection to send her to see her mountains for a last time. My grandmother went along as chaperone. Theresina's old brother cried when they met at the Zurich train station, but on her return to Texas she claimed to have been disappointed by her homecoming, since the Swiss had built up too high into those mountain pastures she had remembered as pure and unsullied when she was a girl. She shared with her adopted kinsfolk a suspicion of skylines cluttered with windmills, much less skyscrapers. She now lies out in flat Sacred Heart Cemetery alongside her old students with no new constructions blocking her view.

A Texas homestead could be a stable, solid, reassuring turf on which to alight. When , as a child, I was deposited "out there" for a vacation I felt safe, and that I "came from good people", who worked hard, paid their bills and didn't need locks on their doors. It had something of a Robinson Crusoe island to it, with makeshift gadgets of all sorts (“necessity is the mother of invention”) and vestiges carried out from the mainland. The upstairs southwest bedroom, however, was locked as it was there great-aunt Mary had been kept for decades to keep her from running off into the fields. Mary was there because of a deal which had been brokered in the early days of my grandmother’s marriage (after she, at 17, had chosen one of the only two geographically possible suitors). At their mother's deathbed, my grandmother and her younger sister promised to take care of Mary, six months with one and then six months with the other, for the rest of her life. My cousin thinks a cash payment of $1500 was involved but our grandmother claimed that they had been promised that, in return for their caregiving, St. Francis of Assisi would come through for them in hard times. According to my sharp-eyed grandmother it had been a fair deal, Francis had always kept his side of the bargain. Mary had been allowed downstairs for years – until one day, being teased by her nephews, she ran after them with a kitchen knife. She had also tried to run away a couple of times but passers-by brought her home.

As Mary liked little boys they would bring her her dinner on a deep-bowled metal plate, just like that kept for the dog outside the summer kitchen door. When “Grandpa Gus” , the lanky patriarch, unlocked the door, she would greet him respectfully ("Good evening Mr. Hellman") and the visiting child from back East would be left in her bare-floored room, with its torn wall paper, damaged plaster, chamber pot, odd, unpleasant smells, and stark metal-frame bed over against the wall. She was toothless, my grandmother said, because “when a tooth gave her trouble, she just pulled it out”. Mary told me that the patriarch was a very good man but that her own "damn shitting” sister was a lousy cook. In fact when she didn't like the food she would hurled it across the room, but never in front of me, to whom she would show her piles of cardboard boxes full of pictures. With her blunted scissors she would spend the days cutting pictures of handsome young men, especially those clean-shaven and with cowboy hats, from Life magazines and stashing them away in cardboard boxes in her closet. It was probably a better life than it would have been in a Texas mental institution of those days.

The exact spot on which the farm was built on all that rolling land was chosen not for view, or for shade or wind cover, but by the local water diviner with his special gift, and that wavering and Y shaped-crooked stick which invisible forces pulled down with a sudden, irresistible jolt. The house was built on that spot but "square with the world" - i.e. with a compass making certain that its four walls were facing exactly South, North, East, and West. These factors would situate and orient my father's hand-built lakeside cottage in Wisconsin, despite the fact that the “squaring with world” did not necessarily provide the best picture window vistas for a particular lakeside setting. This conformity to a law of the universe was passed on from generation to generation in much the same way that old churches in Europe were situated so that the first morning offering of the Holy Sacrifice be offered facing the rising sun. Our entire Wisconsin house was built completely by hand, in what was then (a rather benign) wilderness, with the help of my Texan grandparents who come up to visit in the summer, leaving their farm in the care of my uncle Arthur. The Wisconsin electric power company was surprised to be summoned to attach a meter on a handyman's fait accompli. My father had kept up the family tradition of building his own house, and he imported parts of Texas to Wisconsin – notably the obsolete pump organ from the parish church. Once a year my grandmother would go down to the Muenster M.K.T. Station and send a Christmas package: pecan powder sugared cookies in metal tins, sacks of pecans from the along the creek below the farm, and, when I was of age, some serious M-80 firecrackers (said to be used for training the military and strictly illegal in Wisconsin), having wrapped the whole in the rag rugs she had braided.

There was something special about building your own roof over your head, and never once calling in a professional to fix or help maintain it. Many years later my father returned from his father’s funeral with the paint-spattered old claw hammer that had hung outside in the barn. By then my father had begun to get cranky at the progress of urbanization around the Wisconsin homestead, and the mansionizing of some of the old fishing shacks on the lake shore. Texas Hereford ranchers like my grandfather carried serious carbines alongside their drivers' seats in their cars (for coyotes or wolves surprised lurking around sheep or cattle) as well as for self defense. One night a shot was fired out of the dark at my uncle Arthur's tires as he was returning from a heated school board meeting, and cousin Jimmy “blew the head off a damn fool” who was trying to rob his gas station. My father kept a small “varmint gun” (22) in the Wisconsin broom closet, and a shotgun for the ducks and geese he eventually stopped shooting at and began to tame and feed. Muenster was not like living in a cowboy movie but in the high-sided claw-footed bathtub, where a Yankee child might have felt safest, one had to be wary of scorpions scurrying up out of the drain. Still, my father had great difficulty facing the fact that Wisconsin was, and would inexorably become, a much more domesticated and tamer place.

Although it hardly seemed so to the naked eye, our isolated Texas place was part of a closely knit community. When great aunt Mary died in her seventies, and the death knell was heard out on the ranches, few of those who picked up the telephone party-line for the news remembered that girl who been taken to Church as a child but then lived as an invisible neighbor all those years. As I discovered when I returned for a visit many years later she is buried with a conventional grave in the Sacred Heart Church cemetery, a flat well-cut field, alongside the Church, where stones, much the same size, are lined up in obedient rows, as in an Iowa cornfield.13 Nearby is a stone for Great Uncle Herman, blown to bits years ago at 22, when he tripped carrying a box of dynamite clearing stumps from a pasture; my grandmother and her sisters had gathered his "beautiful curls" off the field for several yards in all directions. Mary was near Grandpa Gus who had sheltered her - a bit like poor Anne De Gaulle alongside her famous General father in the churchyard at Colombey les deux eglises in France. Sister Theresina was with the Benedictines, not so far away. On a previous visit, our host, great Aunt Fritz, was proud to show off her own grave, birth date already inscribed, alongside that of her bounty hunter husband Joe who had already passed on to the next life. Often absent on long trips, he would return to town with a sack full of wolves ears to be exchanged to the authorities of the State of Texas for hard currency. A great shot, he "never did a real day's work in his life" but was much appreciated by kin folk for supplying them with quail when they were in season. Fritz had supplemented the bounty money to raise five kids by cooking for weddings and suppers in the parish church, and – as she showed my wife and I on the tour of the dead kinfolk - was proud that her tombstone was every bit as nice as her sister’s, who had had it easier. She asked if we wouldn't send her a pair of French Eiffel Towers from Montreal for her huge salt and pepper shaker collection.

What did the pioneer Texas generation pass on to those grandchildren and great-grandchildren, who seem, at least at first glance, pretty much like other small town people in the southwestern United States? Now things are easier as Muenster is visibly prosperous (in contrast to Protestant neighbors Gainesville or St. Jo) and even the John Deeres are air-conditioned. For better, or for worse, the pioneers' senses of self and community seemed, in certain important life events, to have remained quite different from those usually described as "modern", or as those of the great authors of the canon, (names not always household words in Texas). The autocratic Benedictine pastors are gone, but after spending long years working in oil fields on the other end of the earth, sons of Muenster come home to die and then lie among kinfolk in the Sacred Heart cemetery where their stories can be told to visitors. The sense of self of the pioneers' descendants, wherever they have lived and whatever their religious or political ideas, seemed indelibly marked by the memories of “their people” … at least as much as by the values of the so-called American "melting pot".

When I studied in graduate school with the most celebrated of American historians, I discovered they knew little, of anything, about the history of the people I came from and were devoid of curiosity about them. I took my grandmother to visit the precious antique dormitories which had housed the Puritan seminarians in the Harvard Yard but she was unimpressed, finding them rather dour: “Why did they make all the windows the same size?” She would have preferred to visit a working farm in the Berkshires rather than the sacred memory places at Faneuil Hall, Bunker Hill, Lexington or Concord. Since then we have been gifted with the novels and essays of people like Muenster's neighbor Larry McMurtry, who have helped give a richer and broader view of Texas, and of the United States, to a wider world. But there is no substitute for trying to learn your family's history firsthand, rather than from books, while the witnesses are still in this world.


© John Hellman
March 3, 2011 guest column

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