THERE’S A TRUTH ABOUT this town that many live but few will ever admit: Geshig is the weight that crushes any form of ambition. The sky is the limit takes on a new meaning when it comes to motivating children. By the time children reach middle school, they know there is nothing for them beyond the highway.
Small towns don’t feel timeless for a love of simpler times; their time and purpose in this world left long ago. For Geshig, the timelessness first started when the last lumber boom busted and the only thing worth a damn in the town was shipped away by train and used to make furniture across the Midwest. There are small pieces of Geshig’s worth scattered throughout Fargo, Minneapolis, Des Moines, and Chicago. But not every tree was claimed.
The red pines pine for red-clad men to spare them from the eventless life of this town. Even a stationary object cannot stand the lethargy of Geshig.
When teenagers make their grandiose plans of leaving, they say There’s nothing to do here. They don’t realize there are plenty of houses to burn down, railroad links to dig up, and roads to dismantle until the sun can once again shine on a patch of dirt thought lost to history. There is plenty to do in Geshig if the aim is to destroy Geshig.
Jeanie with the Long John Stare
SMALL TOWNS KEEP SACRED a silent watcher. Usually it’s some folksy project designed to stroke the egos of its citizens who can boast of few things proudly. These towns are the same at the roots: bootstrap-strong and timeless, census growth nonexistent, always shrinking in people despite the declarations of love and pride from the citizens.
The sacred silent watcher can be a statue made by drunken lumberjacks or a simple wall erected around the community garden with handprints frozen in concrete. The watcher houses the spirit of the town. Not a ghostly spirit, but the idea of one place in time that declares itself important. A meaningless object that reassures the citizens: It’s here, therefore we are.
The Geshig Elementary School takes a field trip every fall, and this one is half literal. In single-file lines that eventually morph into a group, the children are led from the back door of the school, past the playground, across a small field of grass, past the rusty merry-go-round, and to Jack’s Lumberjack Shack, a museum sustained by field trip revenue.
Jeanie walks alone with downcast eyes. Only in fourth grade and already branded the weird girl by classmates. No friends yet, and maybe not ever, she fears. She walks into the lobby of the museum last and hates every moment.
The year of Jeanie’s field trip doesn’t matter. Jeanie could be a grandmother by now. Or she could have died young, buried behind the Episcopalian church. Likewise, the year that the log cabins behind the lumberjack museum were built doesn’t truly matter. They look authentic enough to anyone born well after Geshig’s last great lumber boom. No one is going to grade the authenticity.
Still, it does bring disappointment to some when they learn the dusty old wooden shacks were actually built in the late sixties by Jack Kressenbach, who worked in one of the last lumber camps when he was a boy. These sacred relics have been here for only half of Geshig’s life.
The knowledge does not disappoint Jeanie because by now everything about school has disappointed her. She only gives the tour guide her attention because it’s something new to the typical day and she does not have to feel singled out since none of the children are allowed to talk.
The guide leads them into the first cabin. Though just revealed as replicas, there is an authentic feel to them in the eyes of Jeanie and all the children. Every inch is covered in dust, or rather a dustlike coating has been layered over the wax fruit, wooden furniture, and clothes.
Hanging on a clothesline above the woodstove is a pair of pale, dirty long johns. The kind with the jockey lines and small checkered pattern, but with a hooked end for the feet, like a child’s pajamas. Jeanie looked at the dirty pair of undergarments and felt a strange excitement and embarrassment.
Her face flushed and she ducked her head into her neck and shoulders. She wondered why none of the other kids were as embarrassed to see a man’s underclothes just hanging above for all the world to see. There was something not right here, something moving.
Through the rest of the tour, Jeanie kept her head low and tried to focus but couldn’t take her mind off those long johns. Were the dark stains real? What did the cloth feel like? What did they smell like? Each time the questions raced in her mind, she felt shame rush across her face again, but had an urge to giggle.
When she arrived home, she had an idea. A compulsion, really. She went to the laundry room in the basement and began to search through the dirty hamper. Inside she found socks, shirts, pants, her mother’s panties, her brother’s boxer shorts, her father’s briefs, and one pair of pale gray long johns, also her father’s.
She held them up to the basement light but didn’t know what she was supposed to do. They were her father’s so it felt wrong, but she wanted to take a whiff. She held them in front of her until she heard footsteps pound down the basement stairs.
“What the heck are you doing?” her older sister asked.
Jeanie dropped the pair back into the basket. “I’m trying to do laundry. I don’t have any clothes for tomorrow.”
Her older sister began to laugh. “You sure? You looked like you were playing with Dad’s long underwear.”
“Ick, not even!” Jeanie shouted. “I thought they were my pajamas.”
“Mmmhmm. Sure, little sis.” Her older sister laughed. “Just make sure to fold my stuff when you’re done.”
Immediately after getting caught, Jeanie ran into her room and hid under her covers. Scared that her sister somehow knew what she was doing. But slightly regretful that she hadn’t brought the pair with her.
The fear of getting caught prevented her from exploring her newfound passion for months, until her mother surprised her at the beginning of summer with a trip to a local Bible camp.
Jeanie was not particularly fascinated with the idea of a religious summer camp, but it would be better than sitting at home bored until school started again. And perhaps in a different setting she could make some new friends.
The first night, when the other girls in the cabin were putting on their pajamas, she had another burst of inspiration and since none of these other girls were in her school, she would have nothing to lose if they laughed at her.
“We should sneak into the boys’ cabin,” she announced just before lights out.
“Why?” one of the other girls asked.
“I’ve seen it on movies. The boys are gonna try and steal our underwear,” Jeanie said, holding back a smile. “We should do it to them first.”
Not a single girl joined her, but for the first time Jeanie did not feel uncomfortable with the stares of other children. Before, she was Jeanie the Weird Girl and the eyes were mean, but now she was looked on in admiration. Her cabinmates watched her step out into the night like a heroine taking flight.
Not fifty feet away from the cabin, Jeanie was caught by a young camp counselor, whose name she never learned, but whose face she would remember for a long time.
“Whoa there, little camper,” he said, while scooping her into his arms. “It’s past your bedtime.”
Jeanie said nothing as he walked her back to the cabin. She stared into his patchy scruff, his smile, and the red flannel arms that held her, and suddenly the long johns weren’t important.
As she got back into her bunk, her mind raced with thoughts of a man in red, carrying her home from the dark of the woods.
A Sandman in the Shadows
IF YOU LIVE IN this town, you’ve seen him.
He is the nightmare of the hyperactive mind that cannot stop imagining the worst, and waking does nothing to stop it. He will find those in Geshig with dreams, if he were a spider and the web, the town.
On a normal evening, a young woman, black hair, bronze skin, beautiful beyond this town’s beliefs, walks home. She has just finished an average shift at the Misi-Ziibi Pizzeria and is walking home from Main Street toward the east end. She is an ambitious woman, a dreamer who is saving up her waitressing tips to move to Fargo and attend NDSU. She will be a Bison, take courses, and play rugby.
The first step is making it home.
As soon as she passes the openness of the town’s only busy section, trees become shrouds in every yard and the robin’s-egg-blue evening sky becomes a smoky dusk from the foliage.
That’s when he lays the trap.
“Hey, do you have a cigarette?”
The voice comes from behind her, and the young woman casually turns and smiles as if nothing is wrong. There are no strangers in Geshig. Except him. No one truly knows who he is.
“I’m sorry, I . . . don’t.” As soon as the young woman sees the figure, her mood turns into the fear that all women have experienced.
The man she sees is wearing a long brown trench coat, appropriate for autumn weather, but not exactly a popular style around town. He also wears a gray plaid beret and has his hands in his coat pockets.
“Thanks anyway, miss.”
The man does not murder or rape her. The man does not steal her money. The man does nothing but walk by and pat her on the shoulder. She is too frightened to pull away and prevent him from making contact, though she wanted to.
The fear that prevented her from pulling away is her undoing. She meets a fate worse than death for people with ambition.
She is sentenced to life in Geshig. She will never make the connection, but he has taken her ambition. He has sucked it from her heart like a ring of smoke looping back into a mouth and into tar-coated lungs.
Elsewhere in town, on another night, another year perhaps, a young and virile man is anxious for relief. He needs to empty himself in or on someone, and the first man who agrees gets into his car with no hesitation.
The riled-up man brings the other to a trail at a desolate end of town. They fuck. They do not make love, or hook up, service, mess around, or cuddle. They fuck until they are both satisfied. One is emptied and he is filled.
The man has sapped another resident of ambition, and the satisfied young man will never know why he cannot leave this silent town.
The Painted Silo
SOME SACRED SILENT GUARDIANS are true relics of the past, not replicas. The true guardian of Geshig has been romanticized only by paint. It stands higher than the replica log cabins nearby, and unlike the falseness of Jack’s Lumberjack Shack, Geshig’s guardian once had a true purpose. Octagonal in shape and painted on the bottom of each panel, there is a wooden silo in between two fenced gardens.
The images are in bright colors. One depicts an eagle holding a rose over the world and the Americas are visible. To the left is an Ojibwe medicine wheel with an eagle head and feathers hanging below. Farther left, the artist has painted a lynx or a fox, and a large pink lady’s slipper. Another image depicts two traditional Ojibwe dancers. One is a shawl dancer with a feather in her hair. The other is a male fancy dancer who appears to be riding an eagle totem. In the very center of the silo’s boarded-up door is one large and lone feather with one small medicine wheel on either side of it, like an Indian phallus in disguise.
The paint is chipping and fading away, as is the rest of the structure. Windows nailed shut and painted over are on three sides and a fourth has a door that has been boarded shut.
The silo was where the community would store wild rice during ricing season. Manoomin is the Ojibwe word for it. Traditionally told, the Ojibwe’s presence in the Great Lakes area was because a vision of seven spiritual beings told them to follow where food grows on water. Just as the Ojibwe have fallen out of their traditional lifestyle, in the late seventies the silo fell into disrepair and became a blight on the community. In the mid-nineties there was a renewed interest in the relic and it was redecorated.
On either side of the silo is a garden. One is full of vegetables, lettuce, corn, tomatoes, and peppers. The garden on the other side appears to have fallen into obscurity. An aerial view of it shows a circular pattern of lines on a mound that could be a compass or a turtle’s shell. Inside the garden only grass and weeds grow. No garden is perfect. No sacred guardian is perfect.
The guardian, were it sentient, wouldn’t want its secret revealed. Whether it’s a sacred rock from outer space, the body of a missing child, a trove of silver and gold, or just a damp, moldy space where spiders, insects, and salamanders hold dominion, no one in Geshig will ever know until the structure is crushed by a felled tree during a summer storm or by a bulldozer when the land is turned into a development project for another unneeded building. No one will truly know.
Unless, of course, the secret of the sacred silent silo after so many years of neglect was awakened by the sound of a rusty merry-go-round, and brought new life to this sleeping town.