A Road Trip Into America's Hidden Heart - Traveling the Back Roads, Backwoods and Back Yards. John Drake Robinson
the little church where Augustine Tolton was baptized appears to have survived its painful period of neglect, thanks to a spirited rescue effort powered by one lady. I remember how that rescue came together.
A dozen years ago, speaking to a cultural heritage conference in St. Louis, I asked attendees if they knew about Augustine Tolton or where he lived. None did.
But after the event, one lady asked me for directions to the little church. Her name was Gwendolyn Crimm, and at the time she worked as the ethnic coordinator for the Catholic Archdiocese of St. Louis.
A year later, my family was on a Memorial Day tour of graveyards when we rolled up the long path through a canopy of tall cedars, into the St. Peter’s Church grounds. There was Gwen Crimm with a dozen young scouts from St. Louis chopping brush, mowing grass and painting the trim on the church. For Gwen, this was just the first step.
The next year, the church had a new roof, and the interior was restored. The bishop said a mass at the tiny church. On that Sunday morning, the scores of visitors were greeted by something else: Several dozen simple wooden crosses stood atop the unmarked graves on the perimeter of the cemetery. Those are the graves of the slaves who lived and worked in the farms and fields around the parish. Locals say one mass grave contains as many as 30 bodies—victims of a deadly cholera epidemic.
Father Augustine Tolton’s bones lie in nearby Quincy. But his influence extends well beyond that, reaching out from his roots in tiny St. Peter’s Church, where Monroe and Ralls counties meet along a line of unmarked graves.
The Dinner Table
Taking the Highway 15 exit ramp off the Avenue of the Greats, I can get to anywhere in tiny Shelbina in five minutes, as long as a freight train isn’t crawling through the middle of town.
It wasn’t, and that was a good thing because the chime on my radio signaled it was straight-up noon, and as the newscaster began his first story, I knew lunch was already on the table.
From different directions, Robert Shoemyer and I arrived at the table at the same time. We exchanged greetings as we sat down to the glorious task of absorbing a 15-course meal. Robert is a family friend—and my hero. He farms for a living. And like most folks who toil the whole time the sun is watching, he stays young behind his weather-beaten face that looks all the more leathery as he sits hatless across the table from me, his balding pate a pasty white above a tan line as stark as the rustline in a porcelain tub. That tan line is testament to five dozen seasons on the seat of a tractor, sowing soybeans and feeding cattle. Robert has the energy and the enthusiasm of a kid despite his 75 years. He owes his stamina to early rising and hard work and clean living, but mostly to his companion for 50-some odd years.
Dorothy Shoemyer’s kitchen table looks like a Grandma Moses painting. Everything is on it. Everything. Her face would be on the label of the grocery-store package that says “grandma’s home cooking,” if there was such a package. Robert and I dug into a home-grown, sit-down, all-you-can-eat, family-style, “don’t stop now because there’s only a spoonful of cottage cheese left and finish up those peaches ’cause I can’t keep up with ’em fallin’ off the trees and here, have some more fried chicken ’cause there’s not enough room to put all this stuff back in the fridge” dinner from Dorothy Shoemyer’s kitchen table, featuring beef and gravy and new potatoes with green beans from the garden and sliced home-grown tomatoes and cucumbers from her garden, too, and corn and relish and pickled beets and bread and butter.
Robert watched me coax the last drops of chocolate syrup out of a Hershey’s squirt bottle onto a dish of vanilla ice cream. I worked the squeeze bottle like a bellows, violently expelling a few drops of syrup in a flatulent whoosh, then waited as the air wheezed back into the plastic bottle.
“Give it here,” Robert said. He grabbed the squeeze bottle and decapitated it, held it in one hand and a gallon milk jug in the other. He poured milk into the syrup bottle.
“Chocolate milk,” he explained,“ and I don’t even have to dirty a glass.” Dorothy Shoemyer chuckled as she flitted like a hummingbird from stove to table to sink.
“More ice cream?” she asked.
“No, thanks,” I demurred, as I watched Robert shake his squirt bottle to make his chocolate milk. I was stuffed. It’s rare that a weary road traveler gets a home-cooked meal, especially for lunch.
Robert’s work ethic is impressive, and he’s married to Saint Cook. But that’s not why he’s my hero. Robert finds a use for everything. Or a short cut. And I knew that as soon as he finished his chocolate milk, the squeeze bottle would find the recycling bin. This lunch was a refreshing oasis in my sojourn through this big, throwaway world.
Back on the Avenue of the Greats, I was still three hours away, as the crow flies, from St. Joseph. Damn the crows. My hands and my wheels worked together to steer me through the landscape like a trackless Tilt-A-Whirl. The trip was a dream for a guy who battles attention deficit disorder. And in the beginning, when nothing lay before me but untraveled roads, I didn’t obsess about completing the long journey. Truth is, I really didn’t have a plan or a system to reach this fuzzy, forming goal of driving everywhere. But I kept track, marking my map, taking notes, dodging turtles and squirrels, stray calves and texters. I chipped away at my map, line by squiggly line.
Along every mile, I counted every yellow dash in the road’s center line, one after the other. I counted them all, a whole state’s worth. My mental abacus wore thin counting yellow dashes, as I retraced routes a hundred times to get to fresh pavement, and I counted the dashes then too. Their number is staggering but unimportant. It’s only one more burden in my quiver of compulsions. The yellow dashes speak only one language, but the places and the people along the roadside, even the dead ones—especially the dead ones—they have better stories, and those stories connect the dots in this journey.
I packed along the eyes of Everyman and my car provided the persistent “putt putt” of Pac Man. The spirits of Chief Tatschaga and Black Dog guided me past the menacing signs of doom, always reminding that the end is near. The highways themselves reminded me of that, because each highway has an end. Highways have souls. They showed me.
My map’s cover spells Missouri. But the adventure could just as easily be Texas or Manitoba or Lilliput. The map called out the names; I traced the stories. Every fold in the Ozarks, every bend in the rivers, every drive down the main drag in 700 towns reminded me that even as my map sets the stage, it can’t produce the play. Maps squish miles into millimeters. They conceal identities even as they reveal names. They’re lazy and they won’t work on their own, preferring to doze, folded tight as a sleeping dog, gravitating to dark out-of-the-way spots like glove compartments and magazine racks.
Maps are threatened by a lot of things—by GPS devices that talk to us in a soothing female voice, by TV shows that tell us where to go even as they hinder us from getting started, by packaged tours that lead us by the nose, and by airlines that require us to be on time so we can wait, and stand in lines and take direction from people who wish they were on vacation. But mostly maps suffer from those twin bookends that fence the borders of our lives: familiarity and neglect. We drive toward familiar. We neglect almost everything else.
I drove up Highway 15 and took the back roads to Looney Creek. It’s a peaceful spot, like most country cemeteries. Gentle hillsides, breeze flowing through the trees. It’s where my mother’s great-grandfather is buried. But his demise was anything but peaceful. He was murdered in Macon during the Civil War, executed by Union soldiers who had arrested him and nine other local men suspected of being Southern sympathizers.
That was the Macon Massacre, September 26, 1862.
After the massacre, eleven-year-old Edgar Davis Drake helped family members bury his dad at Looney Creek Cemetery. And then Edgar returned to work the family farm on Tiger Fork with his mother and brother and sister. The war raged on around Shelby County, but it was over for the fatherless Drake family. Edgar would tell my mother the story until he died in 1942 and joined his father at Looney Creek.
Beyond this peaceful spot, on this autumn afternoon,