Dogland | Page 7

the sky, then shake his head. After several weeks of this, he said, "Another goddamn beautiful day," hitched up the trailer, and started back to Minnesota. Pa always laughed when he told that one.
Wade and Bette Nix had six children: a daughter, a son, a daughter, then three sons. From the names Bette Nix gave them, you would think she was a devout Christian. The boys were Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; the girls were Hope and Faith. Whether Charity died young, in the womb, or was never conceived, I do not know. What a fifth son might have been named, I cannot guess. I know that Grandma Bette believed in the Lutheran church for human company, but she found her spiritual comfort among the beans and tomatoes of her gardens, and the tribulations of the shadowy actors on her afternoon soap operas.
What the young Bette Nix might have believed or sought, I cannot say. Pa would say Grandma Bette believed in having her children do her work and sought to keep them working. The only story he told about Bette was about how he would run down to the creek beside their farm whenever she chased him to beat him. If he made it to the creek, he was safe. She was too fat to scramble down the steep bank after him.
The only story Grandma Bette told that I remember was about crossing a river in a covered wagon when she was a girl. The water came up through the floor boards, but they crossed safely.
When her second son was born, Bette said his name would be Mark. My Grandpa Wade, who Pa said never spoke unless he had something to say, looked at her and at the red-faced baby and said, "Mark Christopher." Bette stared at him, but he offered no explanation and left their bedroom.
The first names of her children seemed to satisfy Bette's wish to shape a pattern for her neighbors to admire. The children's middle names were those of dead relatives and presidents. Pa's middle name was Homer, but he always signed himself "Luke H. Nix." When he was in the Merchant Marine, he had his middle name legally changed to "H." so he could continue to say, as he always had, that the "H." stood for nothing.
After Uncle Mark was born, several years passed before the birth of my father, and then the birth of his younger brother. The Nix girls had school and chores around the farm house to keep them busy, and the oldest boy, Matt, had school and field work with Grandpa Wade, so Uncle Mark served as Pa's babysitter at least as often as either of his sisters.
Soon after Pa entered school, Matt Nix left it. Uncle Mark became the oldest male Nix at a tiny public school filled with Hansons, Olsens, Petersons, and Lundgrens. When the Nixes got into fights with blond town boys, Uncle Mark was the family champion. Pa began to start fights with older boys, knowing that Uncle Mark would come to his aid, until the day Uncle Mark saw what was happening and let Pa get beat thoroughly. Pa had a bloody nose and a broken tooth from that one. He laughed whenever he told about it, and so did I.
The Nix boys had a reputation for an easy way with girls, according to Pa. When Uncle Mark was a teenager, he had the easiest way of all. He was tall and good-looking, he played the guitar, he drove a shiny Studebaker convertible, and he was the captain of the football team. It's true that almost every boy in that community was tall, and Mark only knew a few songs and probably didn't play them well, and the Studebaker was second-hand, and there were so few high school boys in that small town school that anyone who wanted to could be on the football team. But it's also true that boys and girls both liked Uncle Mark's smile, and not everyone was brave enough or driven enough to sing in front of others, and the Studebaker's paint gleamed and its engine hummed, and even if anyone could be on the team, only one could be captain, and that one was Uncle Mark.
And it's also true that my Pa got in a lot of fights when he was young, and the person who'd sit him down and hear his story and tell him he'd fought well whether he'd won or lost was Uncle Mark.
The story about Uncle Mark and Grandpa Wade goes like this:
"Mark and your Grandpa Wade and I went into town one Saturday morning for supplies, and this fellow I didn't know came out of the store and stopped in front of us. We didn't think anything of it; we just began to move