Carstens

“Yethir, yethir!” shouted Alvin. “This here is a good spread you have here, Jean. You have done yourthelf proud, ain’t she Clarenth?”

Clarence, the other huge man at the table, grinned his open mouthed, vague-eyed smile and agreed with a mumbled, “Yethir! It schorley isth!”

And so we were off on a new meal adventure with the Carstens from South Dakota. Cousins they were. Three of them today. Alvin the eldest brother seemed to be spokesman for the trio—Arlene, their sister sat between them and patted their napkins into their laps, moved their water glasses back on the table away from their waving elbows and took care of their shirts spotted with gravy. She spoke very little. Alvin and Clarence were here to cement the bonds of family, and were proud to show their progress and fame earned in the agriculture world of South Dakota. Alvin had a new topic today. He had found a church that he particularly liked and had persuaded his siblings to go along with its services. Now he was ready to allow us into his church if we’d only take up the beliefs and ritual that he found so alluring.

Daddy had grown up with these cousins until they moved out to the homestead as children with their parents years ago. It was there they had survived the droughts of the ‘30s, the depression, the war. How? They’d be happy to tell you of their privations and the skill they’d used to overcome the shadows of disaster. When their parents had died, they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and trudged ahead over their dry land sugar beet farm. They also grew necessities like scallions and radishes—a treat to hear them discuss—each spring.

It was surprising to me that the entire family had the very same speech impediment. Was it anatomical, or was it in imitation of one another? Was it perhaps the way we all were meant to speak and for some reason did not? I could do it. Ah, yes! Give me a chance and I could speak the most moist of the phrases of the Carstens. After they had gone home, I’d show up at the dinner table and demand, “Pleash pash the stchalt!” My parents tried hard not to laugh. (After all, these were family members who went to the trouble to travel across country to be with us and it behooved us to be nice. This while stifling their laughter severely.)

Arlene carried her hazelnut cake on her lap seated on the large bench seat of their pick-up truck. Through dust storm and rain squall, Arlene protected her cake from bumps and bobbles and it went into the boarding house at night when she went to bed. Now it was in the kitchen being cut into slices, though the hazelnuts were drying up and falling off, and the icing was a little bit drab. Still she was contributing. Bless her, she was contributing. Poor Arlene who had gotten away from the farm to cook for a county poor farm for some years, but was called home to care for her mother and father, and before they were buried, she was needed for her brothers, neither of which proclaimed good health.

Alvin, you see, had cancer. He was convinced he’d had the severest, most malignant cancer there was and he’d be happy to demonstrate it to you. The dinner table was one of his prime venues for showing the surgical cavern created where a surgeon in Savannah cut out the offending tumor from his jowl. “Yesthir, he just took that canther and cut it out and throwed it in a bucket. I ain’t been bothered sintch!”

Invariably, we were just getting into our fried chicken when he gave us the report and his index finger was greasy from selecting his chicken piece from the platter. He’d toss his head back revealing the hole in the jowl, insert his finger into it and crow, “Right there is where it waith!”

Clarence had trouble of his own which he loved to share. He was the youngest and as such, kind of a baby needing to be treated with especial kindness. As a little boy he had gone out into the sugar beet fields to help harvest and he wore his new shoes. They rubbed a nasty blister on his heel, and before he had a chance to tell anybody, he took the blood poisoning and had to have his leg removed! Nobody could imagine he’d ever walk again, but there was a craftsman nearby who made him a wooden leg which he put on with lots of straps, hinges, and buckles, and he did walk. Oh, he was lame as could be, but he could with his crutch go up and down stairs and ladders, for heaven sakes! Out into the “peacsh orschardcshs” he went picking “buscheslsh” of fruit. Ah, but he was a help around the house as well, and he could drive a car clear across the Midwest. One of his favorite shows was to take an ice pick and jam it into his knee where it vibrated and wobbled back and forth. This caused little kids to cry, but made Alvin laugh heartily. “Lookit Clarentch! Ain’t he jist a causation?”

Now this day Alvin was concerned with Uncle David’s failing health and probable death impending here in our neighborhood. Alvin had a new religion just brought to this country in Dakota, and he wanted to introduce it to us all in time for David’s services. He folded his fat hands on the table and told us about the church.

“Yesthiree, the menfolks are on one side of the church and the women on the other. The men run the church, and one man runs it all who is the Deacon. He goes to the next man and gives him the kith of love. Yesthir! This ain’t no little kith, this is a real kith—right on the mouth! Ain’t no little peck on the cheek kinda kith! it is a real kith of LOVE! It talks about it in the Bible! You ought to read it thometime. And this here kithin’ continues until all have been kithed, and we think the women folk are doing it in the kitchen at the same time, right, Arlene?”

But Arlene was tidying up the table and seemed not to hear him. Grandma, however was heard to say, “Why, Alvin that is the most outlandish thing I ever heard of, and you can leave me out of it!”

The Carstens like to stay with every family a night or so and the family generally worked out who would accomodate them the various nights they were here. One evening when I came home from school, I found Clarence in the kitchen looking into cupboards. Later I heard his wooden leg go “SQUEAK-CLUNK SQUEAK-CLUNKING down the basement stairs. I heard him return. Mom encountered him back in the kitchen and asked him what he was doing.

“Oh we are to eat at Ruthie’s tonight, and I was jist cheching on yer odths and endths,” he admitted. This became a family watch word for years after. Never accept an invitation until you’ve checked the groceries where you are.

I don’t believe the Carstens brought the new religion to our neighborhood in time for Uncle David’s funeral. You see, the Iowa branch of the family was pretty stubborn as well. Over the next few years, we saw less and less of the Carstens as they grew older and less able to travel. The last time they were with us, Clarence had to take Alvin by the arm and guide him around. Alvin was bewildered and needed constant accompaniment. I saw him take his pocket watch from his watch pocket in his pants and consult it. Then he dropped it down the waist band of his trousers. Clarence stepped up and hauled the watch up out of Alvin’s pants saying, “Better look out Alvin. Lotsha guys loosh a good watch that way!” I was touched by the role change.

And then they were gone. We got notices that one or the other of them had died and were buried in the Kiss of Love Cemetery out in Dakota, but we never went to see it.

We did have a visitor from abroad, a Carsten cousin who came by to meet and greet us and remember his Dakota family. This Carsten had been born and reared in England and was a baker there. We were eager to meet him especially seeing he was quite unlike his cousins. Mom was especially eager and she started a conversation with him at once.

“Say, Nigel, tell us what it is you bake over there?”

“Oh, well,” smiled Nigel, “Probably sctuff you never heard of—like cruelersch, or schoneth…”

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