Prairie Son

by Dennis M Clausen

Overview

Prairie Son is the true story of a boy who was adopted out of an orphanage in the early 1920's and raised on a Midwestern farm to be more of a worker than a son for his adoptive family. The story is told through the point of view of Lloyd Clausen, the author's father. Lloyd survived the Great Depression, drought years, and spirit-crushing poverty. On his adoptive parents' farm, Lloyd was denied basic dental care, an education, decent clothing except for what he bought with his own trapping money, and support for his emerging singing talents. He was also left at home or on the shore when other fathers took their sons fishing or to community outings. When his adoptive mother made it clear that she did not even want him around, the parental void in Lloyd's life was filled by a hired man and a huge police dog named Buster. Ivar, the hired man, taught Lloyd the many skills he would need to survive later in life, and Buster was his constant companion and protector. Delores, another adopted child who lived on a neighboring farm and had a mysterious past, was his other companion and protector. The friendship the two adopted children shared eventually turned into youthful, adolescent love until fate separated them. Yet, Lloyd survived and eventually located his biological parents through a series of extraordinary coincidences and the assistance of others who sympathized with his plight and helped him find his ancestral roots. When Prairie Son was first published in 1999, it became somewhat of a national, statewide, and regional publishing sensation. Dave Woods, Past Vice-President of the National Book Critics Circle, wrote that Prairie Son, the winner of the 1999 First Series Creative Nonfiction Award, attracted "all manner of national attention, a consummation devoutly to be wished for by a small publisher." Prairie Son was also nominated for several national book awards, and the University of Minnesota voted it one of the five most favorite books published in 1999 by a University of Minnesota alumnus. Since it was first published in 1999, Prairie Son has become a voice for many other children who were adopted to be workers and later struggled during their adult years with the legacy of those early life experiences. Goodbye to Main Street, a recently published sequel to Prairie Son, chronicles Lloyd Clausen's son's quest to answer the lingering questions still remaining in his family history and the people who made his own life possible.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781541357761
Publisher:	CreateSpace Publishing
Publication date:	02/23/1999
Pages:	262
Sales rank:	564,889
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.55(d)

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

From the Orphanage to the Farm

I

Dear Son:

    I've been told that most people can't remember anything from the first years of their lives. I disagree. I have one very vivid memory from a time when I was only a few months old. I remember it as well as I remember what I was doing five minutes ago. I am a baby, very small, and I am being held by someone who cares very much for me. I can feel the warmth and the love of this person reach out and envelop me in a way I have never felt at any other time in my life. I know instinctively that this person is my mother, and I feel secure and loved in her arms. I am at peace with myself and my life. I only want to be with her and no one else.

    Then two strange arms reach out for me and pull me away from my mother. I know something is very wrong, and I get very upset. I cry, I kick, I cling to my mother's clothing with my tiny hands. I know that she is crying too, for I can hear her. She sounds just like me. Then I am pulled away from her. I feel the world moving on all sides of me, and I fall asleep.

    When I wake up, I am in a strange place. It is not the place I remember, and again I start to cry. I reach out for my mother, who had held me and loved me, but she is not there. I want her to hold me again. I want that more than anything else in the world. Then someone else, another stranger, picks me up and tries to comfort me, but I do not stop crying. For many days, nothing can console me. I want my mother. No oneelse can comfort or console me.

    Then many strangers walk by and peer into the area where I lie awake, looking at the ceiling and crying. Eventually, two of the strangers pick me up and carry me away from the small cubicle that has been my home since I was taken away from my mother.

    Somehow, as the strangers carry me away, I cling to the memory of my mother. I still remember how she held me, and I want to feel her arms around me again. I want that more than anything else in the whole world.

II

Years later, I learned that I was almost five months old when my mother gave me up for adoption. I will not go into her reasons for putting me up for adoption. Not now. That will come much later in my story. But on the day my mother gave me up for adoption, I somehow knew that she was holding me for the last time. And I fought with every bit of strength I had in my little arms to keep the stranger from taking me away from her.

    I know now that the place I was taken to was the orphanage, and the many strange faces passing by my tiny cubicle were the people who were checking out the babies to see which one they wanted to adopt. The two people who took me with them one month later, when I was six months old, became my adoptive parents: Claus and Marie Clausen. I learned to call them Ma and Pa. That is what they taught me.

    But I have always carried inside of me the memory of my natural mother. I carry it today. At times, when life just didn't seem to be worth living, I would think back to the way I felt in her arms. And somehow I would find the strength to go on. I knew that someday I would feel those arms around me again.

    This all took place, you must remember, at a time when adopted parents were not screened as carefully as they probably should have

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Excerpted from Prairie Son by Dennis M. Clausen. Copyright © 1999 by Dennis M. Clausen. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Table of Contents

Prologue	1
From the Orphanage to the Farm	7
The Prairie Wind Song	18
Life, Death, and Hay Thieves	30
Death is a Constant Companion	45
A Blind Horse Leads Us Home	58
Windmills and Wells	71
I Lose My Parents	84
Family Secrets	99
Ivar, King of the Hired Men	111
We Almost Starve to Death	123
Dirt, Drought, and Death	135
At the End of the Field	149
Skinning Skunks	162
Searching for the Past	177
Echoes From a Distant War	192
At Last, the Mountaintops	205
The Search Continues	216
New Voices in the Prairie Wind	230
Postscript	241

Editorial Reviews

Prairie Son will appeal to senior readers, Midwest history buffs and readers of creative non-fiction. It will be especially touching for anyone who has been a part of adoption. -- ForeWord Magazine

Anne-Marie Oomen

When his father was dying of cancer, novelist Clausen (Ghost Lover) suggested that the "impossibly distant" wanderer write his life story to reconcile a life marred by failed relationships. Lloyd Clausen filled three legal pads with a summary of his experiences, which his son spun into this powerfully sentimental narrative of Lloyd's hard-luck coming-of-age on the Minnesota prairie during the Depression. Striving to preserve his father's humble, plainspoken voice, Clausen fashions an "autobiography" that descends too often into bromides and cracker-barrel philosophizing. But not even the press to find lessons behind every anecdote can dilute the undeniable power of Lloyd's tragic story. In many ways, it's an archetypal account of Depression-era hardship: evil bankers extort sexual favors from farmwives, families draw together during hard times. But Lloyd's life was harsher than most. Adopted by a poor farm couple, he suffers through a childhood that is a litany of Dickensian abuse and inhumanity. Banned from the house by day and locked in the cellar while his mother entertained a lover, forced to run the farm while his father played cards or fished, beaten at home and at school, he grows up little more than a beast of burden. His closest emotional attachment is to Buster and Minnie, the farm dogs he considers his "real adoptive parents" and protectors. The heartbreaking frankness with which Clausen relates his father's quest to find his birth mother and establish a place in the wider world elevates this chronicle from mere bathos to something more like a testament to one boy's heroic, if flawed, struggle to maintain his humanity in the face of overwhelming odds. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The harrowing story of his father's youth on the Minnesota prairie, from novelist Clausen (Ghost Lover, not reviewed). When Clausen's father, Lloyd, died, he left (at his son's request) a rough outline of his life. Clausen père had mostly been absent during Clausen fils's growing up; he was a cipher, though Dennis did know that Lloyd had had a rotten life as a child. So, using his father's sketch as a starting point, and broadening the story with material gathered from historical societies and newspapers of the time (and his father's few acquaintances), Clausen recreates his father's young manhood. And a sorry story it is. The author tells, in his father's voice, of being adopted by a farm family, not as a cherished member of the clan, but as cheap labor. Throughout the early years, he is ignored (when not being stropped) by his father and routinely tormented and physically abused by his mother. As a young boy, he summarized his life as "chores, beatings, long hours locked up in the cellar." He takes solace in his dogs; feels confusion over the dark car that pulls up to the house when his father is out working in the fields; and is ineffably grateful for the small acts of kindness shown him by neighbors. The family's hard luck is so rudely ever-present, it's as though they are the target of some malicious force: harvests go bad, cream is contaminated, the mother's affair is discovered (repeatedly), the hogs get cholera, the bank forecloses. Clausen lightens the tale with evocations of the rural landscape and with the rare sweet character-such as the Sanders brothers, who built windmills all day and played their violins at twilight. Sounding an authentic tone, the author steersclear of psychologizing, although his "knowing" innocence can aggravate. It's almost impossible to finish this chronicle of classic wretchedness without feeling a sudden appreciation for all things decent in one's life. .

Kirkus Reviews