Leaving Rollingstone. Kevin Fenton
The book lovingly describes the project of Rollingstone: how the town was founded in the 1860s, in the valley that the evicted Dakota named E-yan-o-min-man-wat-pah, “a stone that had been rolling”; how, although the founders lacked the isolating zeal of religious sects, the village attempted to continue the Old World rather than to create a new one. America is too glibly viewed as a place to start over. The early settlers left Luxembourg not because they wanted to reject it, but because they could not find jobs or land. A nostalgia slowed and sweetened the town from the very beginning. The first settlers missed Luxembourg; they were homesick, which is to say they were heartbroken. Rollingstone was born as an extension of Europe
In Nilles’s book, time stops at about 1920, and this reflects the wish of Rollingstone’s founders that things stay the same. Our family wasn’t Luxembourger, but we wanted the town to stay as it was, too.
What amazes me most about Rollingstone are the photographs. The cover photo emphasizes the link to old Europe: women sit demurely in billowing skirts and blossoming hats; and men in vests, bow ties, boaters, or bowlers are arranged along the branches of a tree just behind the women. Only the plants—scruffy pasture grass, complex ferns, swarming leaves—are familiar. It’s less an American scene than the subject matter of the Impressionists. But the names are familiar. Most of the men are named Rivers. The women’s names include one Rivers, and also a Speltz, a Kramer, and a Dietrich—all names I knew from grade school. I was looking at the great-grandparents of Butter Rivers, whose dad ran the creamery.
The faces in the book are even more startling than the names. The people I knew in 1960s Rollingstone weren’t born yet, but their faces were: the shadowed eyes of certain of the Herbers; the fine features of some Hengels; the intelligent squint of Mr. Rivers; the doughy face and curly hair of Mary Nilles’s brother, Myron; the sharp, serious faces and dark hair of the Kronebusches. And it was these repeating names and recurring faces that could—when things otherwise weren’t going his way—bother my dad and cause him to mumble, in the vague direction of his problems, goddamnLuxembourgers.
* * *
While Rollingstone was 95 percent Luxembourger, it was 100 percent Catholic. I breathed this Catholicism when the smoke from censers swung at certain Masses sweetened the air. I felt this Catholicism in the bumpy flow of rosary beads in my hands and in the strain in my knees, which trembled from kneeling too long. I sensed it in the rhyming morbid prayers I mumbled before bed (“Now I lay me down to sleep./I pray the Lord my soul to keep/If I should die before I wake,/I pray the Lord my soul to take”). I saw it in the curtseying fames of votive candles, in the mannequin intensity of the saints in the church, in the Virgin with her heart on the outside of her body, in the jeweled stories told by stained-glass windows. I heard it in the tolling of church bells and the tinkling of the sanctus bells the altar boys rang at intervals. In our house, frosted glass hands prayed on dressers, statues of the Virgin calmed the buffet, Christs writhed on crucifixes on the wall, Communion candles waited in the purgatory of attics, and rosaries were as ubiquitous as house keys.
Catholicism even shaped our play. When Colleen and Sheila were old enough to read but not to reason, they placed apples on the cross as an offering for Jesus. They found a note that said that Jesus preferred Hershey bars. Thinking they were witness to a miracle, they told my mom. Mom recognized Dennis’s handwriting. She had to tell them about how she did the same thing with raisins when she was a little girl, and how her older brothers had pulled the same trick on her.
But the Catholicism I was born into wasn’t all playful. A document that I discovered in the basement of the Winona County Historical Society embodied the harsher side of this Catholicism. Its letters’ indentations suggested the whack, whack of manual typing. The document—unsigned, undated, apparently created in 1954—sketches the history of Holy Trinity Church—the first settlers, the first Mass, the first church building, the first resident priest, and then, twenty-five years later, the school. The school, so solid and central in my boyhood world, is surprisingly tenuous, “an ambitious project in so small a parish.”
By 1954, the “ambitious project” had graduated only 256 students, yet the report notes that “Rollingstone has given to the Church eight priests, twenty sisters, one brother, one seminarian now in second philosophy.” One out of every eight students who graduated from Holy Trinity became a priest, nun, or brother.
The report ends with an exhortation: “But that noble history is also a challenge to this generation. God alone knows how much faith and courage may be required in the lives of those who now face the uncertain future.”
An even more interesting document can be found within the parishioners’ report. To fortify its call to faith, the history quotes the July–August issue of the Social Justice Review:
These are extraordinary times, and call for extraordinary Catholics. Otherwise, in countries such as ours, extinction is a possibility. The old faith is at war with the new paganism.
The prose reminds me of nothing so much as the times when my mother would grab our wrists when we tried to steal the raw potatoes she was preparing. She wasn’t a big woman, but her grasp was amazingly strong, and we could never get away. Similarly, the prose here is all knuckle and tendon and assertion.
I don’t want to seize on a few hypocrisies—say, the German cardinals saluting the Führer at Nuremburg—because, when pushed, I’d have to admit that my own beliefs aren’t free from the toxins of contradiction and denial. And I do not want to fall into the time chauvinism that reflexively views the present as enlightened and the past as so much superstition. If “pagan” is viewed as simply non- or nominally Christian, the world probably is pagan.
What frightens me here—and in the larger article—is the sense of a man ossifying into a God. War gives us permission to kill, a power that is normally reserved to the Deity. Lutherans were condemned to hell. A son or daughter who married a Lutheran was disowned. Protestants with children who thought about moving to Rollingstone were pulled aside and discouraged by a committee of townsmen because we could not provide them with a public school.
Catholicism was our calendar and our clock. We observed holy days of obligation such as All Souls’ Day, the day after Halloween when we prayed for the souls of the dead, and the Feast of the Assumption, which celebrated Mary’s bodily ascension into heaven. We waited for Christ during Advent and deprived ourselves during Lent by giving up candy or TV. The Masses of Holy Week—Holy Thursday, with the washing of the priest’s feet; stark Good Friday, without music or Communion; the vigil of Holy Saturday; the joyous release of Easter—felt like travel. We lived in Rollingstone and Biblical Palestine.
I can’t remember the name of a single mayor. I can remember the name of every priest. I was raised in a theocracy.
* * *
I was born into stories—stories told at our kitchen table as teenagers fought over pizza and poured themselves fizzing pop, as adults played joshingly competitive games of 500 Rummy over coffee and caramel rolls. Our stories picked up the rhythm of the cartoon, the energy of the pop song, the quick cut of the sitcom, and the giddiness of karaoke. Maureen would sing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” Dad would sing whatever novelty song was popular at the time. While some people are nostalgic for a more leisurely time, I’m nostalgic for a more accelerated one.
Even the explanation of my name arrived as an anecdote. Before you were born, Dad took all of the kids to Dairy Queen and promised them that if they voted for the name Kevin, they could get anything they wanted. Mom wanted you to be named Maurice after Dad, but he thought that being a junior put too much pressure on a kid. Mom never had a chance.
And I learned about the rest of the family through such snippets: Mom once looked out the window and saw Dennis chasing Maureen with a rake, like Wile E. Coyote chasing the Road Runner. (Moral: Dennis is almost comically competitive.) When the girls wanted to play with Maureen, she told them they were going to play “family” and that family consisted of the following Warholian performance art: get in the car and wait the fifteen minutes it would take to get to a theater in Winona, come back into the house and “watch a movie” on the television for two hours, “get sick” and take sadistically unsweetened Watkins medicine, and then go to bed indefinitely while Maureen