Despite how the Peters pushed the Irish and knowing my maternal grandmother had a Welsh family name, everyone of their mixed bloodlines contributed to the melting pot I am, the purest one-quarter Grandpa Koftan's Czech. I've always been partial to that Czech, for him, and because next door to Center was Verdigre, nine miles west, still speaking Czech when I was growing up. I will always regret that my kidney stone attack in Salzburg kept me from my planned stop, on the way back from Greece and Italy, behind the Iron Curtain in 1969 at one of Europe's most beautiful cities, Prague, often used in films for other places, as a pilgrimage specifically for Grampa. So it's been very special, knowing how he would've relished seeing his grandmother's, aunt's and uncle's, little cousins' graves, in what a homemade sign now labels Branek [sic] Birgent Cemetery. I think of that great immigrant desperation to endure steerage, the cheapest ship passage with the animals and cargo, for the many months crossing the Atlantic and then the desperation to survive on a treeless prairie with its continental climate of blazing summers and fierce winter blizzards. Ever since I've been to Beranek Cemetery, thanks to Robert Clayton's lead, I feel I am squandering my days when I am not busy accomplishing something. I've said before that Grandma Koftan taught me to love cemeteries, full of history, and here is one of family sadness and great mystery, as I indicated in "Beranek Revisited." A great great grandmother who lasted only six years here, dying two months before her daughter, her daughter's leaving two young sons, who die at the ages of four and six, two years later in the same month. A wife buried here, her husband in South Dakota. One of two wives buried in South Dakota, the other here with their husband.
I may or may not pursue the distant relatives for answers, for I discovered six Zelenkas in the region by Googleing the White Pages for Table Rock and Pawnee City, which explains how the flowers were at the graves of Albert and Barbara Zelenka. I am curious whether it was disease, hardship, what was so fatal, captured for all time in this tiny country cemetery, seen here from the western gate.
As the historical sign just across from the dirt road, 500 feet on the way to Steinauer, sings, the area was the American story, an ethnic mix of European pioneers willing to gamble their lives on the land. Which is why, always in the back of my mind, was Cather's great My Antonia, my next entry's musings.
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