It’s difficult to imagine what my great-great-grandfather William and his family would have thought about this act of vigilantism; I like to imagine that they’d have been mortified, or at least troubled. In all likelihood, though, the Dondinos probably shrugged it off as a fitting consequence for the crime. “A woman’s virtue is above all else” was a message passed from parent to child in my family, all the way down to my own mother’s ears. “You can spit and curse, but it’s no kind of man that would hurt a woman.”
* * *
My great-great-grandfather William Dondineau began working in one of the several mills that lined the edge of Lake Superior, fitting comfortably into the white working-class immigrant population of Duluth’s West End. Industry was growing and William did his best to keep up with it, staying in the lumber and logging trade for the next ten years. Eventually his advancing age and memories of his earlier farming days drew him away from the city, and in 1896 William and Sarah pulled their children from school (Louis was now fourteen years old and in the fourth grade) and settled near Superior, Wisconsin, on a small homestead in the tiny farming town of Bennett.
The photos we have of early Bennett show a series of small homesteads, often surrounded by peeled and cut logs stacked in triangular formation, waiting for transport to the mills. The land surrounding the half-dozen or so farmhouses is bare and open; if the notations on the backs of the pictures didn’t identify the location specifically, it would be easy to mistake it for a Midwestern Plains town. Modest farmhouses and smaller tarpaper shacks are connected by wooden boardwalk-like sidewalks to what passes as a well-traveled Main Street.
My great-grandfather Louis stayed on the homestead with his siblings to help run the small farm and tend to his parents in their old age. In about 1904, at the age of twenty-two, Louis married a young Dutchwoman, Nellie Vanderpool, and in 1907 my grandfather Ray was born. Six years later, Nellie would die of an unknown illness. Louis left Bennett a widower and single father, returning across the waters of Lake Superior to raise his son in the now booming city of Duluth.
CHAPTER 8
Like his father, my grandfather worked in the sawmills, as did his father before him. The timber trade spread from Minnesota to Washington State and the Dondinos followed. The men in my family were loggers and sawmill workers, embedded in the grain of the lumber industry. Among the family portraits and backyard snapshots scattered in a shoebox of old photos are several pictures of my forefathers standing proudly in front of enormous felled logs, saws or axes in hand, plaid shirts tucked firmly into rugged jeans. For four generations, the men in my family have worked hard to provide for their families, clearing the natural landscape of its towering timber in the process, cutting the fallen corpses into neat boards that would one day be used to create a framework for the new homes of happy families everywhere.
When my own parents met in Edmonds, Washington, in July 1965, their future family was already nearly complete. My mother came to the marriage with my sister Karen in tow, a two-year-old who had been born out of wedlock (a crime worthy of ostracizing in 1962; Karen would forever be the living embodiment of Don’t Ever Think It Can’t Happen the First Time). My father arrived at his second marriage with his own children as well: Julie, also age two; Brad, age four; and Beth, age five. The two single parents had been introduced by a well-meaning, albeit shortsighted, friend. My mother desperately needed new tires for her car; my father worked at a service station and knew how to use a lug wrench. And maybe the coupling, if not perfect, was at least deemed socially acceptable for each of them.
In hindsight, I can see that their union might have been driven more by their desire for stability than by chemistry or any real emotional connection. I don’t remember witnessing a great deal of conflict between my mother and father, really, but those moments of gentle affection, shared laughter, the joy in one another’s company that a child sees here and there when his parents are in love—those things just weren’t there for me to see. And when I speak with my mother about it today, it becomes uncomfortably clear that, at least in her eyes, they were together simply because they were there for each other.
“It was 1965 and I was an unwed mother in a small town,” she explains. “That wasn’t okay then.” Hearing my mother describe her ostracism is heartbreaking to me today. But people who had been friends to my grandmother for years, women who had accepted recipes and prayers and heartfelt good wishes from her, walked past without so much as a glance, ignoring her as if she’d been a complete stranger.
“It was hard to see her go through that and it upsets me even today,” my mother goes on. “Anyway, your dad was a nice guy, we got along well and he had a stable job. He definitely understood the need to be a responsible parent. I think we were what the other one needed at the time.” They settled about thirty miles north of Seattle in the Boeing and Weyerhaeuser suburb of Everett. Almost a year after they married, I came to join this colorful and raucous bunch.
For as long as I can remember, my father worked the lumber mills. The vernacular of the sawmills had become such a part of me that for a time I believed I was destined to do the same. I imagined myself like him, leaving the house before my kids came home from school, returning home well past the hour they’d been tucked into bed. Sawdust-caked boots, soft yellow earplugs, and a nagging, sore back would be the future I had to look forward to.
One of my earliest memories of my father is of him coming out of his shift at the Simpson Lee mill. I’m young, maybe four, and it’s one of the rare occasions when it’s still daylight by the time he’s finished his shift. My mother, my brother Brad, the girls, and I are crammed into the back seat of our Volkswagen Fastback, me lying across the ledge in the back window the whole ride, a human projectile just waiting for a hard brake. In this scene we’re all sitting there watching the doors intently and suddenly I hear the voice. The booming, ethereal, disembodied voice that echoes from the tower says something I can’t quite make out but I know that whatever it was, it means that all the men (and a few women) will be coming out the doors any minute. And sure enough, my dad ambles out, lunch pail a’swinging, the one that looks like a plain, skinny, black barn. My brother asks him if he has anything left in his lunch and he pulls out a package of pink, coconut-covered mounds of cake and marshmallow. He tears open the wrapping with his huge hands and breaks off pieces of cake for each of us, popping the last bit into his mouth.
Some years later, my father moved from Simpson Lee to Welco Lumber, a mill across the river and farther north, in Marysville, and we kids saw him even less. He began working the swing shift, 3:00 to 11:00 PM, the schedule that would dominate much of the final act in his role as my dad. Other than a few treasured memories of bedtime read-alouds and the occasional serenade as he strummed his guitar, my father’s presence during those years is best illustrated by the oil-splotched empty space next to our fence in which his blue Chevrolet pickup sometimes sat.
In 1970, when I was three years old, we moved from a rental home in a more rural part of Everett to a planned residential neighborhood in the suburbs. We were part of the first wave of families to move into this development, several of whom took advantage of government subsidies to help purchase their homes. The development was named Heritage North, perhaps an homage to our struggling pioneer forebears, our tract houses circling seemingly sacred mounds of dirt in cul-de-sacs like wagons protecting the last standing trees. (For some reason, years later, our neighborhood would inexplicably be renamed Heritage West, causing my friends and I to suddenly question all that we had assumed about the geography of our little world.)
The cul-de-sacs of our neighborhood sprang from the main drive like leaves from one long, slightly curving stem that snaked its way lazily through the development. The houses in each had been designed and built by the same contractor, so each cul-de-sac was a jumbled replica of the one across from it. There were three styles of houses: the one-story rambler, a rectangle with a carport on one side and a windowless wall on the other; the split-level, where families could coexist without ever actually seeing one another; and the model we had, the two-story A-frame, a house that was mostly roof from the front and mostly triangle from the sides.
The fact that our neighborhood was structured in such a predictable way created an often surreal experience for me as a child. At any given time, I would find myself in a sort