One Bucket and Only Two Hands

Alice ~ A granddaughter tends a grave on land that won't let her forget.

What you are about to read is an excerpt from WOMN, a collaborative effort of the women of Minnesota who kept showing up during Operation Metro Surge, holding the grief, the rage, the tenderness, and the fierce love that women know so well.

If you see yourself in these pages,
Pass it to the woman next to you.

---

Fort Snelling

It’s been too long since I’ve been here.

Alice stands at Great Uncle Clint’s headstone with an old ice cream bucket full of supplies in one hand, her other hand empty at her side. Years of dirt and grime had discolored the recessed letters of Clint’s name. It’s been several years since she’s been here to clean it, and the guilt of that lands on her chest like a palm pressing down.

Damnit, I forgot to stop at the good spigot to get water on the way in. . . Grandma, why didn’t you remind me?

Alice thinks, looking up at the sky. It’s been nearly twenty years since her grandmother passed. Which means it’s been a quarter-century since Grandma taught her how to tend to the graves.

She dumps the supplies out of the bucket at the base of the grave and walks several rows back to the good spigot. The gushing water splashes up the sides of the bucket and onto Alice’s linen pants.

I guess I earned that.

She makes a mental note that she probably will need an extra dose of water medicine before the day is done and decides to head over to the Fort Snelling hiking trails after she finishes with Clint’s grave.

---

Back at the grave, Alice wonders what he did in the war. She’d never asked, and now everyone who would’ve known is long dead.

So many dead.

Her eyes glaze over and Clint’s single headstone dissolves into the whole cemetery, 260,000 identical white headstones stretching in every direction around her. Her eyes unfocus and the whiteness blends into a blurred tunnel.

How many died by war? How many are underneath these graves, without headstones?

She’d never thought about it before this winter. Fort Snelling was just where Clint was buried, a cool military cemetery where everything felt precise, ordered, and clean. But now, it doesn’t feel clean at all. It felt as dirty as the green-black grime settled into the letters of Clint’s name.

This winter, when the Dakota erected their tipis at Coldwater Spring during the surge, Alice started reading about the history of the land. As she looked out over the graves, she felt sick to her stomach thinking that they may have been buried over the unmarked graves of the Dakota women and children and elders who were held in a wooden stockade on the riverbank below this bluff through the winter of 1862–63.

Am I standing on top of them? Why is there no headstone or even placard about them?

Now that she knows, and she can’t unknow it. She can’t separate her love for Clint from the sickness she feels about the ground he’s buried in, and both of those feelings are churning inside her at the same time with nowhere to go.

This land is so full of grief, and I only have one bucket and two hands.

Her knees buckle underneath her as she feels that sensation of standing at the edge of the ocean where the waves lap in and pull the ground out from under you, and you’re not sinking, the earth is just leaving. Her feet had nothing solid underneath them anymore, so she collapsed onto her knees.

She sets the bucket beside her and lines up the tools at the base of the headstone in the order her grandmother taught her. Stiff brush, sponge, butter knife, shears. She doesn’t think about why this order, she just does it, the way a granddaughter does what she’s told long after the grandmother is gone. Then, she picks up the stiff brush, dips it into the bucket and starts scrubbing away at the letters of Clint’s name.

My hands look just like yours, Grandma.

The bristles push the grime out of the C, and then the L, and Alice can almost hear him laughing, like a little boy who is just excited that someone is giving him attention. Alice doesn’t remember any real concrete details about her interactions with Clint, but she can always recall his laugh. He was always the old guy sitting in the corner at Grandma’s house with his not-wife Therese, laughing like everything in life was one big joke.

You find this funny Clint? Maybe you want to help me by making this grime a little less sticky?

And just as she thought that, a big chunk of grime flaked off from the letter N.

Thank you, I appreciate that.

And she heard him laugh again.

Once she finishes scrubbing, she drops the brush and picks up the sponge, dunking it into the water bucket. She looks to the left and to the right of his headstone, other vets had their wives next to them, but not Clint. Therese was buried in a small Catholic cemetery next to her nephew because the Catholic Church wouldn’t allow Clint and Therese to officially marry, so the military wouldn’t bury them together.

It’s not right, Clint. She should be here with you.

But the world isn’t about right and wrong. Alice wondered if Dred and Harriet Scott had walked this spot where Clint’s body lay. The Scotts were enslaved here in the 1830s even though slavery was illegal in Minnesota at the time. Their marriage wasn’t recognized by the government, and, like Clint and Therese, they weren’t buried together either.

Alice squeezes the sponge over the top of the gravestone and watches the water wash away the last of the debris. She looks at Clint’s name, clean now, sharp white letters carved into stone.

She dunks the sponge again and starts washing down the whole headstone, running the sponge across the top and down the sides, letting the water carry the last of the loosened grime away. As she wrings the sponge out, her eyes drift toward the direction of the Whipple Federal Building.

Ugh, I can feel it from here.

Alice’s stomach turns as she thinks about ICE’s headquarters. She can feel the retch rising in her throat, that physical revulsion at how utterly horrible humans can be to each other. The complete lack of respect — for the Dakota, for the ground, for the people being detained inside.

You know what they named that building, Clint? They named it after the one white guy who actually tried to save the Dakota. The one guy who told the truth. The Dakota called him Straight Tongue. And now ICE is using his building to disappear people. Nothing has changed in 164 years. We haven’t gotten any better as a society.

Alice had been invited by friends many times to attend resistance and activism events at Whipple, but she could never bring herself to go because the worst of the worst conflicts with ICE were always reported from Whipple. She felt like the building was cursed, and it wasn’t a safe place for her to be.

Visiting Uncle Clint’s grave was the closest she’d come.

She wrings the sponge hard and watches the dirty water hit the grass. She then picks up the butter knife and starts working it under the dead grass matted against the base of the headstone, prying it loose the way her grandmother showed her. As she works, she thinks about the Dakota prayer camp tipis that went up nearby at Coldwater Spring in February.

As her right hand works the butterknife at the base of the headstone, Alice realizes that fingers on her left hand have started drumming on the side of the marble. She can feel it even now, the Dakota prayer camp drumming coming out in her own fingers, all these months later.

Drumming is a rhythm, like an effort to resuscitate the heartbeat of humanity.

Alice drops the butter knife and uses both of her hands to drum on the marble headstone. She feels the vibration move through her arms and into her heart, and that emptiness she had been feeling is rattled like the inside of a drum. Suddenly, the grief inside her, that empty place that wanted to vomit out all the pain felt different, more alive. She kept drumming, harder and harder, pushing all her grief and pain from the last months onto the gravestone. Even though she knew it was impossible, it felt like she was trying to drum Clint right out of the grave. But that’s not what she wanted. What she wanted was for her drumming to open the doors of Whipple and bring the disappeared back to the community.

Alice knows that the Dakota campout itself wouldn’t undo what’s been done, and it couldn’t bring back the disappeared. But she understood now that the intention behind the campout was to awaken humanity into an awareness, shake them into some kind of realization and plant a seed for new things to eventually grow out of all this turmoil.

And then she suddenly stops.

She sits back on her heels until her hands stop tingling and her breath comes back to a quieter pace.

Alice picks up the shears and trims the loosened grass back from the base of the headstone. She gathers the clippings and dead brush into a small pile and carries it to the nearest trash bin, then comes back and stands over the grave for a moment, looking at her work.

She picks up the bucket and pours the rest of the water slowly over the top of the headstone, watching it stream down like tears.

Then, she puts the tools back into the bucket, in the same order she used them: stiff brush, sponge, butter knife, shears.

I followed your protocol, Grandma. Every tool, every step. Even got the water from the good spigot.

Alice reaches into her pocket and takes out a small rose quartz stone, a ziplock bag, and a tiny silver spoon. She uses the spoon to dig a tiny hole at the base of the gravestone, just big enough for the stone. She puts the dirt into the ziplock bag, zips it up and shoves it back in her pocket with the spoon. Then she carefully places the rose quartz in the soil bed.

I’ll bring this home, Clint. I’ll put it on the shrine. You’ll be closer to me there.

She gets in the car and drives the few minutes to Fort Snelling State Park so she can walk to the tip of Pike Island, where the Minnesota and the Mississippi Rivers converge. Bdóte.

This is an excerpt from WOMN- a book about the women of Minnesota and what Operation Metro Surge made of us.

It’s a mutual aid effort — written by us, for us, moving hand to hand the way love does when it’s real. New excerpts will be released as I write them, every Tuesday, here on Fierce Love. When the manuscript is complete, I plan to release it the grassroots way. Self-published, and supported by grief at grounding community gathering events and independent bookstores.

If this chapter found you, it found you for a reason.

If you want to support this effort, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers will receive full chapters (not just excerpts) with my author’s commentary about my process and experience at least once a month.

Please add your voice by sharing in the comments. I’m listening. We all are.

That’s how this works.

That’s how we work.

I love you fiercely,

TeriLeigh 💜