Our

Story

by

Lawrence Abby Gauthier

ace reporter

The Westphalia Periodic News

I grew up in a family of storytellers, so that’s my excuse. Even when the cop pulls me over I have to tell a story.

It was hard for me to even think I was talking to a “woman.” She didn’t seem old enough, like she was still a “girl.” Not even full grown. She couldn’t have been more than four-foot eleven. But she displayed the universal imagery of authority — the uniform, the badge, the car with bright flashing lights, gun strapped to her hip.

I had just driven twelve hundred miles in twenty hours. Once I get going it’s hard for me to stop. By the time I slowed down at the outskirts of my old town, the air was midnight foggy, the blacktop pavement wet, making it hard to see painted lines on the road.

There were no clouds in the sky. A half-moon shone brightly. It had been a week since passing through earth’s dark shadow, the night of last week’s eclipse, the night mom died.

The town’s main drag through the downtown area is maybe five blocks long. The old Montgomery Wards store where mom worked part-time during the Christmas seasons to put a few extra presents under the tree had been turned into artsy souvenir shops for tourists; the old five-and-dime carried Salvation Army clothes; the drug store where we bought Topps baseball cards carried religion.

Streetlights made the wet pavement glow yellow. A Dylan song popped into my mind: “Something about her seemed familiar; I could swear I’d seen her face before.” In high school we drove up and down Main Street, “pounding the drag,” waving at the girls.

I slowed my late-model Toyota pick-up to a crawl. There was no other traffic. Nobody walking the street. Ghostly fog. I’m in the Twilight Zone. What was real? What was not?

Suddenly my reverie is shattered by deep penetrating flashes of blinding light in the rear-view mirror, demanding my attention — this is your reality now!

I’d never seen a tinier cop in my life.

I greeted her through the rolled-down window, showing her my driver’s license, which she inspected, then looked me up and down.

“Do you know why I pulled you over?”

“No.”

“You were stopped in the middle of the street.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

I told her I hadn’t been drinking or smoking anything. I didn’t mention how long I’d been driving, only stopping for gas and coffee.

She took my driver’s license and went back to her car to check me out. That made me nervous. I knew I was perfectly legal, but might have a hard time proving it… had I put the registration papers in the glove box after Culley Jane had reminded me more than once? And proof of insurance. You don’t get those plastic cards anymore that go in your wallet. It’s all on the internet, but, surely, I thought, she must have internet access in her car, which made me even more nervous. She could find out anything about me, the way I think. I’ve been to Marxist zoom groups. I always voted for Larouche, even after he died. I know Kissinger thought Larouche was dangerous.

She reappeared in the rolled-down window. If I had been flagged “dangerous,” she didn’t show it. For an instant, I saw the face of Maria, the tiny Italian princess cheerleader who wore my ring in high school “So, you’re from Colorado?” she said, handing my driver’s license back to me like she was satisfied that I posed no threat.

“I live there,” I said, “in a Denver suburb with my wife Culley Jane Carson the novelist and two cats, but I’m from here. I grew up here. Where’re you from? ” (I always ask people that to get their reaction.)

“I grew up around here.”

She was relaxing. "Visiting family?"

"My mother just died."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"It was last week, during the eclipse. Services are later this week. Ever hear of the Wahlstroms?”

“Didn’t they have a dairy around here at one time? My grandparents told me about the Wahlstrom Dairy truck coming around in the mornings to deliver milk in a glass bottle on their front doorstep. I still have one of those old bottles. My grams gave it to me. I have it on a shelf.”

She didn’t seem to be in any kind of rush to get to a crash site or anything and apparently I wasn’t wanted or dangerous — the small town at the edge of the woods was sleeping.

I felt a story coming on.

The Wahlstroms left Sweden and came to America in the 1890s. There were seven of them — the mother and the father and their five young boys. After disembarking at Ellis Island, they made their way to the virgin pine lands and 20-below winters of northern Wisconsin to claim a 40-acre homestead. They cleared land and built a shelter using hand tools. Not long after arriving, in the midst of a howling blizzard, the father died. They couldn’t make it through the drifts of snow to the nearest town for a proper burial… the widowed mother and her five young boys…

“The youngest of the boys was my Grandpa Wahlstrom,” I told her. “He was my mother’s father. He was five years old when they first arrived. He lived with us until the day he died. I'd sit with him on the living room couch and he'd tell me stories about the old days. Everybody in my family was a storyteller. Yes, we had a television — a small black-and-white thing — but except for Lawrence Welk on the weekend or Howdy Doody, it was hardly ever on. Mostly everybody just sat around telling stories. I guess that’s where I get it from."

“So, what happened?” she said.

“Happened about what?”

“About the mother with five young boys in a strange new country when the father dies in the middle of a winter storm?"

“Oh, ya… they put him in the shed out back of their shelter where he could stay frozen until they could get him into town. At night, the mother and the five boys had to listen to the wolves out back clawing and growling, trying to get at the dead father in the shed. But the boys had built a strong shed, according to their father’s instructions, and the wolves never got in.

"Over the years," I went on, "the five Wahlstrom brothers created the region’s largest dairy farm and logging operation, pillars of the community and the Swedish Lutheran Church. And they had many children, maybe twenty or so in all… including my mother.” I stopped. That got me to thinking.

The young police officer could see me looking at the badge on her chest. “That would make all those kids first-generation Americans, wouldn’t it?” I said.

She thought about it too. “I suppose,” she said.

“Of course, the children of foreign-born immigrants. My mother. Lucky ICE wasn’t around back then or I don’t know where I’d be today.”

She nodded understanding then said she had to get back to work and I said that I did too. We touched hands. She drove off one way and I drove off another way, a little more careful about keeping it between the lines.