by James Calvin Schaap

There’s almost nothing of a path around it, where a perfect circle of deep ruts ran around the one in the park I remember. Not so here. It looks unused. Behind it, barely visible, is an old pump just waiting to find its way into a lawsuit. It might well have been the very pump Ruth Suckow used to get water a century ago on this street, in this place.

Here it is. There’s no handle. To say the poor thing is useless seems somehow unfeeling. Once upon a time it had an identity. Today it’s a stubborn, iron thing city workers might just as well jerk from the well beneath it.

The Ruth Suckow park reminds me of a Suckow story that very few Iowans see anymore — “Home-coming.” It’s about a woman named Bess Gould, who’d grown up in a town named Fairhope and returns for a reunion of first settlers, after having been gone for most of her life. 

In a way, the whole story is here in the Ruth Suckow Park, Earlville, Iowa. “Home-coming” exquisitely captures the bittersweetness that arrives when childhood reminiscences return in lingering pastels. At first, Bess is delighted, lost in the unending parade of old-timers, each of whom prompts a memory she can’t help but think might otherwise have been lost. 

Then, unexpectedly, she runs into her “old flame,” Charlie, a man who is no longer the young man without whom she once could not have imagined her life — or any life at all. For a time, Bess moves almost hopelessly back in time to a homecoming meeting that is something she hadn’t planned or anticipated. 

Charlie’s wife happens to be gone, which gives Ruth Suckow some space to develop what it is she wants to examine: the sheer delight of nostalgia; even more, the near impossibility of ever really forgetting a first love. Bess is drawn back into a blessed childhood relationship completely and forever gone. And she knows it. 

But she loves the memories, relives them with equal doses of childhood joy and adult sadness. She knows it’s all fantasy. But she also knows that those old stories are hers alone and therefore somehow sacred. Fairhope has not forgotten the initial chapters of Bess Gould’s life — including her childhood with Charlie; and all of that is something her loving husband will never know or understand. 

“She felt lost and all alone,” Suckow says at the end of the story, “and her heart was wildly begging [her husband] to come…. ‘Take me away with you,’ she demands of him in the dream she creates in her mind. “‘Be everything. Make it up to me. Don’t let me die away from home.’” 

“Home-coming” ends with Bess’s painful assertion that she is not home in Fairhope, even though something very close to the heart of who she is will always quite magically remain along the creek where she and Charlie fished for minnows. Childhood Fairhope is a blessing and a treasure no one else knows, not even her husband. But how does one care for a precious thing no one else can ever know?

In Earlville, Iowa, Ruth Suckow’s little park reminds me of that story somehow, and of Ruth Suckow herself. To sit at one of those picnic tables felt to me like a “home-coming,” even though I’d never been there before. It was a return to Suckow’s small-town Midwest realities, most of which have lost their savor among today’s reading public. H. L. Mencken, her first editor, claimed to have discovered her and was first to publish her stories. For a decade or more, she was something of a star, even anthologized.

But that glory is gone now. What’s left is a little park in Earlville, Iowa, and, here and there perhaps, a copy of a novel or two. Aficionados like me can still sit right here on a bench on a warm summer day and read a story or two or three or four — maybe more — right here where she drew water a century ago. Even though I’d guess I’d be alone if I did, that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be a joy. 

Here’s the Suckow story as her park tells it: 

“Ruth Suckow loved the Iowa countryside near this site: The rolling farmlands, woods, streams, and wildflowers. She called the little house that stood here, ‘My house.’ Ruth was unknown when she came to Earlville in 1920. By 1926, she had published two novels and many short stories and was recognized in this country and abroad as the author of a fresh kind of realism. Her work tells in rich detail the life of middle-western communities in the earlier part of the 20th century: The family gatherings, church suppers, holiday celebrations, school commencements. Born in Hawarden, Iowa, on August 6, 1892, Ruth died in Claremont, California, January 25, 1960.”

It’s not a very big park. But then, neither was the lot, I suppose. Still, it was good to sit there for a time, to sit and think through the kinds of thoughts that can’t be shuffled along unmeasured, thoughts of numbering our days. 

If you’re coming across Iowa, it’s two minutes off Highway 20. Won’t cost you much time. Who knows? You might like it. Might even like her.

Do me a favor. If you stop, give that merry-go-round a spin, okay? Put some ruts in that thick grass. Make the place look lived in.

Editor’s Note: This article was aired on Dec. 2, 2019, by Siouxland Public Media, KWIT FM 90.3 and KOJI FM 90.7, and published at kwit.org/post/secret-treasure-coming-home. This article is one in a series of broadcasts on KWIT and is available at KWIT.org as well as Schaap’s website – floydriverpress.com. Pro Rege — March 2020 

Copyright © 2024 by James Calvin Schaap.
Photographs courtesy of James Schaap and Barbara Schaap. 

Listen to James Schaap read a short excerpt from Country People.

Centennial Celebration: Country People, 1924-2024

Mary Swander will give the keynote address for the public Centennial Celebration of the publication of Country People, Iowa writer Ruth Suckow’s first novel, at 1 p.m. on Saturday, September 14 at the Hearst Center for the Arts in Cedar Falls.  Her talk and other afternoon celebratory activities (including cake) are free and open to the public.  

First published in 1924, Country People follows four generations of the Iowa German American settler family, the Kaetterhenrys, from the 1870s to the early 1920s.  

“Mary Swander is the ideal writer to launch the 100-year celebration of Country People, for she has written with beauty and depth of the Iowa landscape and people,” says Barbara Lounsberry, President of the Ruth Suckow Association.  “We are eager to hear her thoughts on this 1924 novel.”

In the 1920s, H. L. Mencken wrote: “I regard Ruth Suckow as the most promising young writer of fiction, man or woman, now visibly at work in America.”  In nine novels and 43 short stories — most set in Iowa — Suckow captured the lives, passions, and struggles of ordinary people in their small towns and farms.  Her works include Iowa Interiors (short stories) and the novels Odyssey of a Nice Girl, The Folks (a Literary Guild selection and bestseller in 1934), A Part of the Institution (based on Grinnell College), and The John Wood Case (which draws on an actual northwest Iowa embezzlement tragedy).

A Ruth Suckow Traveling Exhibit will be on display in various Iowa locations in 2024 and 2025. 

For more information on Ruth Suckow, on the free Centennial Celebration activities, on hosting the traveling exhibit, or on becoming a Ruth Suckow Memorial Association member or supporter, email lounsberry@gmail.com or see ruthsuckow.org.

Ruth Suckow Traveling Exhibit Schedule
January 1 – 28, 2024: Hawarden Public Library 
February 4 – March 3: Burt Public Library 
March 10 –  April 7: Orange City Public Library  
April 14 – May 12: Bettendorf Public Library 
May 19 –  June 16: Urbandale Public Library 
June 23 – August 4: Cedar Falls Public Library 
August 11– September 8: Polk City Public Library
September 15 – October 13:  Robey Memorial Library, Waukon 
October 20 – December 1: Ruth Suckow Public Library, Earlville  
December 8, 2024 – January 5, 2025: Kendall Young Library, Webster City 
January 12 – February 9, 2025: Drake Community Library, Grinnell
February 16 – March 16, 2025: Manchester Public Library