Anna Sedilek Pavelka & Cloverton Cemetery

While I wonder whether the Berans who lived next door in Center and the Machs who farmed east of town are American-shortcut versions of the Beraneks and Machas I found buried in Pawnee County, I was also remembering another country cemetery, one I've visited three or four times.  When I went to Hastings College for a summer and a year, I liked a girl from Red Cloud; she and others at school made me aware of Willa Cather's My Antonia (as you probably know, that's pronounced AN-toe-KNEE--yah) and her grandson or great nephew being an elder of a church close to campus.  So in my college junior year I read that moving novel, one of the most definitive about the immigrant experience, now ranked regularly among our greatest novels, even by old curmudgeons like caustic H.L. Mencken, and especially meaningful for me because the main family was the Czech Shimerdas and so much, like kolaches, was familiar.  I saw Red Cloud for the first time that year--once--but have been back.  It has since become a national center for Cather studies with regular annual conferences, and I dropped down after a nephew's all-state football game at Hastings College a few years ago to see the restored Opera House where Cather acted in trouser roles (women playing men) and wrote her name on a backstage wall.  Except for her Southwestern writing, such as Death Comes to the Archbishop, almost all of her writings are set on the Nebraska prairie, such as O, Pioneers, A Lost Lady, My Antonia, One of Ours.  The Cathers themselves emigrated from Virginia and, before moving into Red Cloud, first tried farming north of that small town, neighbors to the Sedileks, the Czech source of the book's Shimerdas.

My Antonia is not just about the Czech experience, various other ethnic immigrants part of the cast, just as the Steinauer historical sign mentions.  I don't think it was as devastating for any as it was for the Sedileks.  They had to live in a dugout, as Dad said my grandparents and children did for a time, on the windswept, treeless Great Plains, one overcoat for a large family, so that the father, a classical musician untrained for farming, dug a pit by the stove for his daughters to try to stay warm and later committed suicide in despair.  Neighbors brought them food and fuel when they could.  Anna/Annie became a hired girl in town for well-to-do neighbors of the Cathers so that Willa had a long acquaintance with her and, years later, had the pleasure of visiting her and her family on the Pavelka homestead.  Red Cloud becomes Black Hawk, and the narrator, Jim Burden, is Willa Cather herself.

So to partner Beranek Cemetery are these old photos of Cloverton Cemetery, between Blue Hill and Bladen.  If you know what a correction line is, you drive north of Red Cloud on U.S. 281 until you come to that right-angled jog and turn left, west, off the highway where you can see the signaling rectangle of cedars amid the corn and alfalfa fields.  The photo is angled to take in Anna and John Pavelka's graves to the left, along the north edge. 

 

Here lies My Antonia and her husband.  Since I attended Hastings College in 1957-58, she had died not much earlier (1869-1955), though she lived a long widowhood, John's dates 1859-1926.

 

 

If I recall correctly, you drive south from the cemetery, take the road west for a very short distance, then turn back south to come upon the Pavelka farm.  The view looks west down their entrance lane.  It looks very much like many other Nebraskan farmhouses except that it's maintained and empty because of its historical significance.  Interestingly enough, "Neighbor Rosicky," title character of a much-anthologized short story of hers, was a neighbor to the south. 

 

 

In the PBS "American Masters" series, the chapter on Willa Cather, recently rerun, children are shown pouring up out of the storm cellar in the foreground in the small apple orchard.  I've mentioned the much rougher sidehill version Grandma and Grandpa Koftan had, but the dual purpose was the same, also for the Luckerts.  It was the place everyone took refuge in during a severe storm or tornado, and it was also where canned goods and produce like apples and potatoes were kept, long before atomic shelters were stocked in the Cold War years.  The view looks north and slightly east.

 

 

And this is the overcrowded Cather house, a block west off the south end of Main Street in Red Cloud, where Willa shared a large attic room with her brothers, with a little side apse/room of sorts to herself where she first began to write.