Epilogue from Sibling Reveries

My sister, Mary Killinger-Weeks, has written three or four books on her own and one in tandem with three of my brothers. It was a collection of stories from the depression days in Wisconsin and it was well received by friends, family and neighbors who read it. They, my sister and brothers, asked me to collaborate but my memories didn't go back that far. I did contribute a short essay though that became the epilouge to the book - Sibling Reveries.

Epilogue from ‘Sibling Reveries’ By Tony Killinger

I stood looking down at my father’s grave on a warm day, late in summer. As I did, I recalled an event from the New Testament. Jesus stood before the open tomb of his friend, and in a clear, commanding voice said, “Lazarus, come forth.” To the shock, and probably the terror of those watching, Lazarus stumbled sleepily from the opening in the earth, alive and confused. I was not there on that day when Christ demonstrated his dominion over death, nor was I there for many of the events that have been set down in this volume. Nevertheless, I believe them, just as I believe that Jesus gave Lazarus back to his family. I could not call my father from his grave no more than I can command memories to come from a time and a land that I have no recollection of. I was only about three years old when we left Wisconsin. How strange it is that this land has called to me now at such a late time in my life.

Wisconsin, to me, was a vacation place. Pa and I went there nearly every summer for a week or two. That is a memory I do have. Our family existed as a unit for a very short time in spite of our obvious claim to longevity. If you aren’t killed in a war or the victim of accident, chances are you can live into your nineties as a Killinger. The Zeestraten genes are nearly as powerful when it comes to long life. I was still a baby when my brothers went off to fight in World War II and just a bratty kid when they all came home. During those years it was Ma and Pa, Sis, Jim and I.

When the boys came home they were grown men and it wasn’t long before they began families of their own. Sis got married too, Ma and Pa split up and Jim and I were all that was left. Then Jim was killed in a car accident out by the Conservation Club curve, north of Owosso. Fourteen years was all the time that God gave us together and most of those years were pock marked by the absence of somebody.

My older brothers were heroes; they had fought in the war and had survived. My father was neither hero nor villain to me and I never felt that I needed to make that choice of him. I never understood his capacity for violence or why people gravitated towards him. It was just the way he was. It seemed to me he was at his very best after he had about three beers under his belt. The charm and friendliness oozed from him then.


My mother was a fiercely independent woman and about a hundred years ahead of her time. She would have been comfortable and happy in today’s world, I think. She spent a lot of time working in factories and so she welcomed new technology. It meant that her work wouldn’t be quite so hard. Mother could sit a horse or drive a car and had little fear of either of them, but she liked it when they came out with automatic transmissions or sewing machines that could zigzag. I remember a time when we spent about an hour watching a flimflam man selling a vegetable slicer in Woolworth’s five and dime. She didn’t buy one, but it fascinated her just the same.

Pa was different in that aspect as I recall. He liked the old days and the old ways. He was quick enough to get into the chain saw era when he went back to cutting pulp and timber, but it was the work in the woods that he enjoyed it was that north woods where he was most at home.

There is an invisible line that dissects the state of Wisconsin. It starts in the east on the shore of Lake Michigan at Marinette and heads west. It goes through Antigo and Merrill and then sort of wanders west-southwest to Eau Clair and ends up in St. Paul, Minnesota. South of that line is the Wisconsin that the geography books tell us about. Beautiful rolling meadows and thousands of contented black and white cows, small stands of hardwood trees and red barns with white trim dot the landscape.

To the north of that same line another Wisconsin becomes more dominant, the land of the north woods and deep shaft iron mines. It is a country so starkly beautiful that it numbs your mind. In the old days it had to.

Life was tenuous and fragile and the country was terribly hard. The winters were too cold to imagine and the summers brought mosquitoes as big as sparrows by the millions. Poverty lurked like a vulture in the big trees, waiting for one more little tragedy to befall a family and then it would swoop down and devour them. Poverty, at least, was well fed. Men had to be as hard as the country to survive and their families had to be uncommonly lucky. Few were.

I don’t think my father ever got over leaving the North Country. It was as though it had beaten him and he wasn’t a man to be defeated easily. At a time in his life when he could have gone anywhere, we went back. He died there and perhaps he was happy with that compromise.

A couple of hours before I visited Pa’s grave I drove through Shanagolden, or what used to be Shanagolden. It is mostly gone now. The Swanson house is there and a couple of other buildings, but the woods have reclaimed the rest. The farms that did survive look prosperous and secure. It is not melancholy to look at, but you could not help but wonder what happened to all those good people. The country hasn’t changed, but the woods are no longer a threat. It is the people who have changed.

Those same winters that froze the weak ones and stranded the strong now beckon to snowmobilers and cross country skiers. Old farm houses are modern day deer camps. The ones who left now return and spread their tourist dollars over a permanent population that is far smaller now than it was back then.

The people in these stories are pioneers, in the purest sense of the word; pioneers in a country that never seems to outgrow its need for pioneers.

I’m not quite sure if it is the beauty of the country, the simplicity of the life, or just what it is that calls me back there to a place I scarcely know. Perhaps it is my father who calls me. He is there with his parents and his brothers and sisters, but perhaps he needs something more. Maybe it is just me who needs to be comforted.