For a time, my family lived in Monterey, California. In the early '60s, not all the canneries had yet closed down, and when the wind blew in off the sea the salty smell of sardines drifted from Cannery Row all over town. Dad, a Kansas farmer, hated the smell of dead fish, the dampness and the twisted cypresses growing along the beach. The only oceans he wanted to see, he declared, were the wheat, corn and sunflower fields of Kansas. While in California we were, so far as Dad was concerned, exiles from the promised land to which we hurried every summer for two weeks as soon as school let out.
It was a long trip and, to entertain my sister and me, Dad taught us songs. We sang from California to his parents' farm near Topeka. We drove past towns with names like Needles and Jackrabbit and Escondido, singing Welsh songs of love and ash groves and going to market. Our favorite was about a Mr. Jones, which had a tongue-tripping chorus sung with ever-increasing speed until the last verse left us breathless, giggling and collapsed in the back seat. We sang these songs the way Dad had learned them, in Welsh.
One song we knew only as "Santiana." You didn't have to know Welsh to recognize it as a sea shanty. The opening words, "O Santiana, Ho!" immediately evoked images of sailors with ropes twisted around their fists, hoisting sails and bracing them to fill with the seagoing wind. It was a song for the kind of ship you imagined setting out for some piracy, for the New World, or for the shores of Africa or the plantations of Cuba for slave trading. It seemed odd for such a song to persist in a Welsh family transplanted to America. And, anyway, my dad's people had been miners, not sailors. A sea shanty among songs about ash groves and markets seemed out of place, like a ship on a prairie.
The first of Dad's family to come from Wales arrived in New York in the 1830s. One of the sons, John J. (my great-great-grandfather) left New York in 1867 and settled in the new state of Kansas.
In 1878 he filed Homestead Certificate 2179 at the Topeka Land Office in accordance with an Act of Congress "to secure Homesteads to actual Settlers on the Public Domain." The claim was signed by Rutherford B. Hayes and was for 159 and "eighty-seven hundredths" acres. The 1880 Federal Census of Pottawotomie County, Kansas, lists John J. Davis, his wife, Laura, their daughter Edna, and sons Lewellin and Arthur. The Welsh background is still evident in the sons' names but they are miners no longer: John J.'s occupation is recorded as "farmer."
Most of what I know about my pioneer ancestors is family conjecture. The first house John J. and Laura built, I've been told, was of sod and supposedly windowless, the kind of lack of foresight that landed them in Kansas in the first place. Presumably they left for California too late in the year, "sat around" in Pennsylvania for a while, and were trapped in Kansas by an early snow. However they got there, they never left, but I prefer to think they came in spring when the land would be knee-deep in prairie grass and color: wild sunflowers, snakeroot, ironweed. Thinking that way makes me think of Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, who left Mexico in 1540 to seek the Seven Cities of Cibola in a land called Quivira. Now Kansas, it was the home of the Plains tribes, the Osage, the Wichita, the Pawnee, and the Kansa, "people of the south wind." Though they did not find the riches they sought, one of Coronado's men marveled that they had found "plums like those of Castile, grapes, nuts, mulberries, rye grass, oats, pennyroyal, wild marjoram and flax in large quantities."
My pioneer ancestors sang. Of that I have no doubt because how else could Dad, born and raised in Kansas, have come to know Welsh songs? We have lost the language, except for my one, proud assertion, "Yr y fi tebot." I am a teapot. It seems to offer few conversational possibilities.
A few years ago, I visited the homestead. The original acreage had been added to considerably and the current residents, one of them a descendant of John J. and Laura, were not particularly interested in family history. When I asked about the sod house, they thought it was "up by the old crick," past the far range.
I went to look for it. It was late August, well into morning. I filled a canteen and set out with Molly, a German shepherd, tagging along. We crossed several pastures where cream-colored Santa Gertrudis cattle were grazing peaceably, uninterested in our presence. I crawled under barbed wire onto the range, acres set aside for longhorns trucked in from Texas, part of an experiment to breed rangy toughness into other breeds. I'd been warned to keep clear of them: They were tetchy and unpredictable.
Heat lines snaking up from the grass blurred my vision, but I didn't see anything moving and figured the cattle had gathered in the shade of the trees around a distant water tank. When Molly and I were in the middle of the range, some of the longhorns stepped out of the trees to watch us. Two young steers immediately charged. Their horns, so picturesque from a distance, lose their charm when they are closing in on your backside. With Molly wheeling and barking, keeping between the steers and me, I hightailed it for the nearest fence, diving under in a style that was not graceful but which served the purpose, and lost my canteen in the process.
Damn. No going back for it now. Molly and I went on, crossing a field striped with orange butterfly weed and blue coneflower. These gave way to the tall prairie grass that once dominated the Kansas plains. There was big bluestem, towering over us in sprays up to eight feet, Indian grass plumes waving among it, nearly as tall, and golden. Quail periodically fluttered out of the switchgrass, nervously calling me away from their nests. And, everywhere, buffalo grass, the short, tough grass whose roots held together the sod that settlers cut into blocks for their homes.
We climbed a low rise, and there stood the sod house. It has windows, but these may have been a later addition, so that mystery was still unsolved. I could touch the top of the door frame easily; John J. had not been a tall man. There was one room only and a loft. No door; mice scuttled across the floor when we entered.
A post in the middle of the room had marks spaced at irregular intervals. I realized they were the markings parents make to track the growth of their children.
It was hot in the sod house and stuffy. My shirt was soaked and sweat poured down the sides of my face. I stepped outside where Molly now lay panting in the shade. It was good to feel a breeze from the rise over which we'd just come. I walked down to the crick. It was dry now but would have been handy to the house, and it was easy to imagine the little run of water playing a central role in the family's life.
Because I was hungry, I could imagine it was lunchtime, what country folk call dinner. John J. and Laura's children would be wading in the water or lying on the shaded bank making leaf boats for the current to carry away. Much of Laura's day would center on the crick, too: She'd boil lye soap on its banks, fill buckets with water to carry to the garden, cool her churn in the current's flow on butter-making days.
On the day I was imagining, Laura is resting between chores. She has her feet in the crick, and she's leaning back on her elbows, letting the water run over her, drawing off the heat and dust and the tiredness. Which is how John J. sees her when he comes through the cornfield on the other side of the crick with his hoe across his shoulders and the image of the dinner meal in his mind. He steps over the crick as his children run to him all calling excitedly to be noticed, the way children do, and his wife rises to meet him with her water bucket in one hand.
They turn to the house. She mentions it's a good day to hang the mattresses outside to air, so hot and dry. He agrees, though he'd not mind a good soaking, the corn could use it. They both look up to see what the sky promises.
And there it is, coming straight at me just as it came at them out of the blue, clear sky: a massive cloud shaped like a ship, moving slowly, evoking images of sailors with ropes twisted around their fists, hoisting sails and bracing them to fill with the seagoing wind. It's the kind of ship you imagined setting out for some piracy, for the New World, or for the shores of Africa or the plantations of Cuba for slave trading. It's a ship to sing about. The cloud ship looks solid and heavy; sunlight falls across its bow and through its sails. Its shadow darkens the earth.
"Children, look!" I could imagine the little family standing transfixed, as I was, before the cloud ship driven by Plains breezes, coming over the rise with its cargo of rain and heat. And I could imagine, as evening fell, the family recalling the ship. My family liked to sit on the porch of my grandparents' house and sing into the night until it was so dark we became invisible to each other. No more than voices, harmonizing. The prairie sky was speckled with stars and the night with fireflies and, one by one, the children would fall quiet, as did my sister and our cousins and I, listening to the older people talk with longer and longer pauses between one story and the next. Fighting sleep, one of us would rouse up. "Sing something." And the grown-ups would laugh and sing just one more. I could imagine the children of the sod house doing the same and John J. protesting, as Dad did, "But I've sung all I know."
"Sing about the ship."
And then, across the Kansas prairie, into the star-riddled night would flow the deep tones of a shanty brought to America from Wales, rolling out slow like a ship plowing through waves, through clouds, "O Santiana, Ho!" carrying children away to dream.