PrairyErth

  Cancas Causa Kansas Kaus

  Cance Cauzes Kansaws Kausa

  Canceas Caw Kanse Kausas

  Cances Caws Kansea Kausau

  Canceys Chanchez Kansees Kausaus

  Cancez Chanzes Kanseis Kauzas

  Canceze Chonsa Kansers Kauzau

  Cancezs Consa Kanses Kauzaus

  Canchaz Consez Kansez Kaw

  Canchez Conzas Kansias Kaws

  Canci Ecanze Kansies Kawsa

  Cancis Guaes Kansis Kawse

  Canes Guas Kanson Kawsies

  Canips Ka Kansus Kawza

  Cannecis Kaal Kantha Kay

  Cannes Ka-Anjou Kants Kemissi

  Cans Ka-Anzou Kanza Kensier

  Cansa Kah Kanzan Kenzia

  Cansan Kahsah Kanzans Konaz

  Cansas Kamissi Kanzas Konsa

  Cansé Kamse Kanze Konsans

  Canses Kan Kanzeis Konsee

  Cansez Kançake Kanzes Konsees

  Canssa Kanças Kanzez Konses

  Canza Kance Kanzis Konsez

  Canzan Kances Kanzon Konthe

  Canzas Kancez Kanzus Konza

  Canze Kanees Kaos Ronzas

  Canzee Kanisse Karsa Konzo

  Canzes Kanissi Karsea Kunza

  Canzez Kans Kas Quans

  Canzon Kansa Kasas Quaus

  Caso Kansae Kase Quonzai

  And the flowers—your answer? If you chose to eat the bastard toadflax, have another helping. If you chose for euphony and ate larkspur, you’re going to need an emetic of pokeweed root. Bastard toadflax by any other name would be sweeter, and so would our perception of it.

  On the Town:

  The Emma Chase

  Broadway, west side, a storefront window, and painted on the plate glass a cup of steaming coffee, morning, Cottonwood Falls, the Emma Chase Café, November 1984: I’m inside and finishing a fine western omelet and in a moment will take on the planks of homemade wheat-bread—just as soon as the shadow from the window coffee cup passes across my little notebook. The men’s table (a bold woman sometimes sits at it, but rare is the man who sits at the women’s table) has already emptied, and now the other one too. On the west wall hangs a portrait of a woman from the time of Rutherford B. Hayes, and she, her hair parted centrally, turns a bit to the left as if to answer someone in the street, her high collar crisp, her eyebrow ever so slightly raised, her lips pursed as if she’s about to speak. (Someone calls out from the kitchen to the new waitress, On your ticket, what’s this U.P.? and the girl says, Up, and from the kitchen, You can’t have scrambled eggs up.) The portrait is of the woman history forgot, Emma Chase, who said, You can’t start a revolution on an empty stomach. She was not wife, daughter, sister, or mother of Salmon P. Chase, the great enemy of slavery and Lincoln’s chief justice, whose name the county carries. Emma stands in no man’s shadow but in the dark recess that the past mostly is. In this county, she’s famous for having been forgotten; after all, who remembers it was on the back of one of Emma’s envelopes that Lincoln outlined his Emancipation Proclamation? That’s been the story in the Falls, anyway.

  Most countians now understand that Emma “A-Cookie-in-Every-Jar” Chase has the reality of an idea and an ideal. When Linda Pretzer Thurston decided to open the café a couple of years ago, she cast about for a name, something local, something feminine, and she searched the volumes of the Chase County Historical Sketches for an embodiment of certain values but came away unsatisfied by or unaware of the facts, such as those of 1889 about Minnie Morgan of Cottonwood, one of the first women in the county elected mayor and the first—and probably the only one—to serve with an all-female city council. Minnie has stood in a few dark historical corridors herself: her daughter’s biography of the family in the Historical Sketches speaks of wild plums and a neighbor who threw her family’s clothes down the cistern to save them from a prairie fire, and it mentions her father’s founding of the county newspaper the Leader, but it says not one word about Minnie’s mayoralty or her advocacy of woman suffrage. There has not been a female mayor since.

  So, the café had no name until one night at the family supper table Linda and her identical twin said simultaneously in response to something she’s now forgotten, The Emma Chase! Soon, newspaper ads for the café printed Emma’s chocolate chip cookie recipe, and they asked townspeople to search their attic trunks for information about her. One day Whitt Laughridge came in with a large, framed portrait of an unidentified woman he’d found in the historical society vault. Thurston said, Yes! At last we’ve got Emma! Unsatisfied with history, she had invented a persona and then had to invent ways to get people to accept the name. Her ads and fabricated history worked so well that she, who grew up five miles west in Elmdale, she became to the citizens Emma down at the café, and she doesn’t mind.

  There are other things she does object to, such as the racist joke a fellow told a while ago at the men’s table and to which she said loudly from across the room, Did you hear that one at church, Ray? and sometimes to sexist comments she’ll recite from the café refrigerator, covered with stick-on slogans like a large, upright bumper: THE ROOSTER CROWS BUT THE HEN DELIVERS or WOMEN’S RIGHTS—REAGAN’S WRONGS.

  Linda Thurston is trim and pretty, a dark strawberry blonde given to large, swinging earrings; today she wears a pair of silvery stars almost of a size to be hoisted atop the courthouse cupola for Christmas. She sits down across from me to see what I’m scratching in my notebook. Now I’m copying what is on her coffee mug:

  I HAVE A B.A., M.A., PH.D.

  ALL I NEED NOW IS A GOOD J.O.B.

  Her doctorate is in child psychology, she is thirty-nine, divorced, and has a son, John. She calls across the little café to the new waitress, We can’t do scrambled eggs over easy.

  We talk, and then she brings the guest book to me. In it are names from many states and also from Russia, Italy, Israel, and she says, My friends say I’m the white Aunt Jemima of the women’s movement, a radicalized, storefront feminist whose job is to get cowboys to eat quiche Lorraine even if they call it quick lorn. I’m an aproned militant known for scratch pies, soups, and breads, the one who’s taught a waitress Lamaze-breathing on a café floor.

  A man, his spine crumbling with age, his eyesight almost gone, comes up and holds out a palm of change for his coffee, and Linda takes out thirty-five cents, forget the tax.

  Three years ago she and her young son lived near Kansas City, Kansas, where she worked with battered women and handicapped children, some of whose fathers couldn’t remember their child’s name; they all were poor city people who lived anonymously. She was also president of a large chapter of the National Organization for Women, and she campaigned and typed and marched. When Ronald Reagan became president and inner-city social programs started disappearing, she found herself depressed and beginning to wonder who the enemy was, where the battlefield was, and she didn’t understand why ideas so apparently democratic and humane were so despised and thwarted, and she was no longer sure what it meant to help the disadvantaged or to be a feminist. Women seemed in retreat from action to the easier, safer battles of awareness. Things were retrogressing.

  On a trip home to Elmdale she learned that the old and closed Village Inn Café was for sale, and she looked it over, found a broken-down and fouled building, and, suddenly, a fight against dirt and dilapidation, enemies you could lay your rubber-gloved hands on, looked good, especially when she heard the county-seat citizens wanted a pleasant place once again to sit down with a coffee and find out whose cattle it was that went through the ice, whose horse had sent him over the fence. A group of Broadway businesspeople met in Bell’s western clothing store and offered to buy the café building and lease it to her until she could pay for it—after all, she was a native—and so Linda Thurston decided to live out her fantasy of running a little homey restaurant, and she moved back to Chase County, where, she hoped, the Hills could heal. Her friend Linda Woody, a state lobbyist for NOW, had also wearied of the struggle against Reaganism, and joined
her, and the once dingy, moribund café became unofficially the Retreat for Burned-Out Social Activists, a place where the women could serve homilies, history, and cold pasta salad.

  Linda Thurston says: I saw it as a haven of rest from political struggles, a place I’d have time to write up my research. If we could undermine a few stereotypes along the way and wake up a few people, that was fine too. I’ve never seen my return as going home so much as going forward to my roots, but I don’t think I’ll stay long enough to grow old here—unless I already have. I believe when the time comes to go back to whatever, I’ll know where that is. I’ve learned you can go home again, but I don’t know whether you can stay home again.

  Refurbishing the café became a community task: the seventy-eight-year-old furniture dealer power-sanded the chipped floor, the clothier painted, a drywaller showed the women how to mud plasterboard. They came to love the exhaustion of such work. Then they got to the Wolf stove, which yielded its encrusted grease to no woman, man, or method from scrapers to torches. One day two fellows came in with an idea: they dismantled the range, put it in the back of a pickup, hauled it to the county highway yard, turned a steam hose on it, and reassembled it into the beauty of new sculpture, and someone happily wrote on the blackboard Thurston had set up to list possible names for the place: the Clean Stove Café. Also on the board were the Double L, the Quarthouse, and Soup and Psychological Services, this last already beginning to have some meaning.

  The women did not flaunt their politics, and the town was enough impressed with their hard work to ignore their era now! bumper stickers, and strollers stopped in to watch the work or help out or just pour themselves a cup of free coffee. After six weeks of reconstruction, the women papered over the street windows to create suspense for the opening a couple of days later while they completed last details. In a county where beef stands second only to Christianity, where gravy and chicken-fried steak are the bases from which all culinary judgments proceed, the women offered eggplant parmigiana, linguine with clams, gazpacho, fettuccine Alfredo—and chicken-fried steak. Business was excellent, and the first day they sold out of pasta primavera, and the women were certain they could keep their pledge never to serve french fries or factory white bread. All their eggs came from Chase farms; on weekends, in season, they prepared calf fries fresh from county pastures (and tolerated jokes attendant to feminists grilling ballocks), and they catered meals to businessmen in lodge meetings and ranch hands at corrals.

  Linda says to me: Scratch cooking all the way. The highest compliment is a woman saying, “This is as good as I make at home.” But the men bitched all the time about no french fries or white bread so we gave in and cut our own fry potatoes and baked our own white bread, but, still today, if you want a grilled cheese between a couple of slices of Rainbo, you’ll just have to go someplace else. That’s the only little thing we haven’t compromised on.

  We’ve never changed our deeper values because we refuse to divorce being café owners from our feminism. We’re tolerated for it and sometimes we’re defined by it: I heard a man ask his friend what a crepe was and why something like that would even be on the menu, and the waitress told him, “They’re for the ERA.” And that’s right. We employ only women, and we try to bring to them what we’ve learned. In the first days of the café, a wealthy lady told me there were no battered women in the county, and she believed that, but she’s been misled—the problem is just buried. Not long ago at the health fair in the school gym we sponsored a display about services for abused women and children, and we found out later that some people were afraid to stand in front of it because a neighbor might think they were abused. And one day a woman said to me, she was holding back tears, “You ought to get out of here—the longer you stay, the worse you’ll feel about yourself as a woman.” Maybe that’s a minority view, but it’s valid. The other side is that people here are still close to their pioneer ancestors, and they all can tell stories about strong and capable grandmothers. For a long time women have owned businesses in the county, so we’re accepted, but then the café isn’t a hardware store or a transmission shop.

  The young waitress has just given a single check to a man sitting with two women, and Linda explains to her to give each person one, and she says, Don’t assume the male always pays, and to me, Separate checks also protect privacy—people watch and read something into who picks up the tab. I ask whether lack of privacy isn’t the worst thing about a small town, and she says, And also the best. I love going to the post office in the morning and knowing everybody. The only time we honk a car horn is with a wave. It’s touching when somebody asks about my son or my dad’s health. We can’t afford not to care about other people in a place this small. Our survival, in a way, depends on minimizing privacy because the lack of it draws us into each other’s lives, and that’s a major resource in a little town where there aren’t a thousand entertainments. There’s an elderly man who lost his little granddaughter to a drunk, a hit-and-run driver, a few months ago. Every time the old gentleman comes into the Emma Chase, he retells the story, and every time people listen. What’s that worth to a person? Or to a community? A café like this serves to bond us.

  I’m scribbling things down, and she watches and says, Growing up in this county I learned not to ask questions. If people want you to know something, they’ll tell you. I say that I must be a popular fellow, what with a question mark in every sentence, and she says, You don’t count. You don’t live here. Besides, the word is out that you’re in the county. You’ll be tolerated even if they do think you’re about a half bubble off plumb. She watches me write that down, and she says, We can’t afford to ostracize each other just because we don’t like this one’s politics or the way that one raises her kids. You can get away with it in a city—picking and choosing—but here we’re already picked. Participation by everybody discourages change, and the radical gets cut off. But if we give aberrant behavior a wide berth we don’t usually reject it completely. Every merchant on Broadway can tell a story about some petty shoplifter whose pilfering has been ignored to avoid a bigger problem. For an outsider it’s different: if you—yourself—would espouse something terribly unpopular like government ownership of land they’ll just question your sanity, but pocket a candy bar and they’ll have you arrested. If I do either one, it would be just the reverse. We have limits, of course. The first and most powerful enforcement is gossip and scorn. They’re the sap and sinew of a small town.

  When she gets up to ready the kitchen for lunch, I ask whether she or the Emma Chase has ever been scorned, and she says, You’d be more likely to hear that than I would.

  Now, late afternoon, October 1988: the painted coffee cup still steams on the window, and stalwart Emma Chase looks over the stacked chairs and onto Broadway, and the dank odor of an old and unused building slips between the locked twin doors. The café has been closed for nearly a year, and there’s nothing more than a hope of somebody reopening it, although everyone is tired of coffee in Styrofoam cups and factory cookies in the Senior Citizens’ Center a few doors down. Linda Woody has gone to Washington as a NOW lobbyist, and Linda Thurston is sixty miles up the road at Kansas State University, an assistant professor in rural special education. The café is for sale, and she’s asking eight thousand dollars less than she paid for it, in spite of its becoming known as one of the best small-town eateries in the state, in spite of a Kansas Citian’s offer to underwrite the franchising of Emma Chase cafés.

  I’ve just returned from lunch with her in the student union, where she said, Standing in front of that big Wolf stove I kept remembering my degree and how useless it was becoming with every fried egg. I’m forty-three, and I’m ten years behind my colleagues. I worked long hours at the café, and my feet hurt all the time, and I got arthritis in my hands, and finally I realized I didn’t want to work that hard day after day and still not earn enough money to send my son to college. Every other businessperson on Broadway has at least one additional source of income—the
furniture dealer runs a funeral parlor, the owners of the two dress shops have their husbands’ incomes, the filling station man has another in Strong City. The Emma Chase would support one frugal person, but it wouldn’t even do that without weekend city people. Tourists coming to see the Hills, bicycle clubs—they kept us alive after we earned a name around the state by being special. But there were local folks who never came in, and I’d ask them what it would take to get them inside, and they’d say, “We let the kids decide where we’re going to eat out, and they choose McDonald’s.” How does a box of toys in the Emma Chase compete against television commercials! And there’s something else: good home-cooking is common in the county. Franchise food is the novelty, especially when it’s twenty miles away. What our café offered, city people wanted, but they also wanted clean floors, and the cowboys were afraid to come in and get the floor dirty.

  I asked, was it a loss, and she said, I lost some money and something professionally because I never found time to write, but I realized my fantasy, and I was at home for the last two years of my father’s life. And I got to live again according to the dictates of rainfall and the price of cattle and grain and the outbreaks of chicken pox. I was part of a community rebuilding its café, and working with those helpers let me see men again as people instead of the enemy. It meant something for my son to go to school with children of neighbors I went to school with. And—I think I can say this—because of the café, I see my femaleness differently: now I think feminism means being connected with other people, not just with other feminists.

  She was quiet for some time, and then she said, There were losses, no question, but there was only one real failure: we never did get the farmers to eat alfalfa sprouts. They know silage when they see it. Maybe we should have tried it with gravy.