A Requiem For Adelaide
To most everyone who lived in Mason County, Adelaide Bernson was known as the Devil’s daughter.
A rambunctious ball of fire blessed (and cursed) with the ability to mesmerize and captivate anyone and everyone she came in contact with, Adelaide was a self-assured girl who marched to the beat of a different drummer. There’s simply no denying it; when it came to Adelaide “Dolly” Bernson, the mold was broken—smashed into a million bits. She was a one-of-a-kind kid; a girl without equal.
But despite her charisma and charm, she was most assuredly the daughter of the Devil himself.
Oh yes, the details.
Adelaide Bernson entered the world back in the winter of ’32. Born to struggling immigrant farmers who were trying to scratch out a living on a small plot of land in northern Minnesota, she took her first breath on a frigid, gray December’s morning in a run-down farmhouse with razor thin walls and a tar-paper roof.
Traveling at 100 miles an hour, Adelaide’s mother could already sense that her only daughter was a restless soul. Even as the town’s doctor was making his way up the family’s long dirt driveway, it was apparent that she was in a rush to make her way into this world. Later, as her mother nursed the child bathed in the crimson glow cast by the wood-burning stove, Adelaide was given over to fits of restlessness. For better or worse, there could be no denying that Adelaide was going to be a handful.
As a point of fact, as the years passed by, her mother’s impressions proved to be reliable as her daughter pressed down hard on the accelerator and exceeded every speed limit ever established. Indeed—ask around—it didn’t take Adelaide long to reach territories unknown to anyone who grew up in the hard land of Mason County.
But I am getting seriously ahead of myself here.
In the early days of her childhood, Adelaide was known to do strange and unusual things; not mean-spirited things mind you; but out-of-the-ordinary things; things not normally done by people who lived during that time.
Whimsical and energetic by nature, she was the sort of girl who would get the urge to bake a seven-layer cake at nine o’clock in the evening dressed as the wife of Einar Gerhardson, Norway’s beloved prime minister. Reciting aloud rhymes from McGuffey’s Reader, she would single-handedly destroy the dilapidated kitchen in her culinary quests.
A casualty of her own ambition and whimsy, it is worth mentioning here that although Adelaide had a brilliant imagination, she also had a ridiculously short attention span—the kiss of death when it comes to making seven-layer cakes. To be sure, the accounts of her baking failures were legion. In fact, if you were to take a short trek to the weeds out back of the old farmhouse, there’d be no missing the plentiful and abundant remnants of her failures.
Still, despite pushing the boundaries of traditional behavior, Adelaide Bernson was adored by family and neighbors alike. She was, as I said before, a one of a kind kid.
And although I’d like to tell you good things were in store for Adelaide, to do so would be less than honest.
For some strange reason—perhaps it was her adventurous spirit or the copious amounts of unsupervised idle time—Adelaide Bernson unexpectedly began to pursue more mature adventures.
Far too eager to experience the world on the other side of the fence, it wasn’t long before she started making time with the men who worked the farms and barns of Mason County. Fueled by her inexplicable desire for attention, Adelaide had crossed over into dangerous territory and her precociousness would prove to be her undoing.
Over the following months, stories of Adelaide’s scandalous escapades spread like wildfire throughout the small farming community. So bawdy were the stories that followed her, her mother, the pastor, and even Dolly herself, agreed that it would be best for her to drop out of school in the summer before ninth grade rather than to have to endure the smoke from the fires that burned throughout the small farming community.
Shortly thereafter Dolly Bernson disappeared.
Rumor had it she moved into town and, after struggling to make ends meet, took up with a number of men of questionable character. From time to time, messages would get back to her mother, but over the course of years, they lost touch completely. Adelaide “Dolly” Bernson drifted from town to town for the rest of her life leaving behind only remorse and ruin—forever to be known only as the Devil’s Daughter.
With her only daughter gone, Adelaide’s mother fell into the clutches of a one-color world. Overcome by disappointment and never able to completely leave behind the memories, she hardened her heart and would never again experience the kind of joy that only Dolly could bring.
And so it goes in the life and times of a small town farming family. But for those who have lived in such a place, everyone knows that things are not always as they appear; sometimes it takes years for the truth to be fully revealed.
And this certainly was the case for Dolly Bernson.
Some 30 years after Adelaide had begun her descent into nothingness, her father lay dying of fever in the dilapidated bedroom of the Bernson family home. Ravaged by illness and racked with guilt, Ingmar Bernson begged the parish Pastor for absolution of an unspeakable sin. Having stolen the innocence of his only daughter, he knew in his heart that he was about to pay dearly for his sins. Breathing his last, Ingmar Bernson’s soul was lifted from his lifeless body and into the void it was hurled.
There are no longer any traces of the Bernson family in Mason County.
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