North Dakota

North Dakota is the landscape in which Fidelis Waldvogel’s hoped-for stopover becomes a permanent home. The state first appears to him as an immense openness, with a horizon in every direction; over time, its railroad towns, farms, businesses, gardens, and roads become the setting for the Waldvogel family’s work and daily life. Its wide distances suggest both opportunity and exposure, while the town of Argus gives that vastness a civic and domestic center.

Prairie, Railroad, and Argus

The railroad makes Argus possible, although the narrative describes its crossing of the river as an intrusion into emptiness. What the trains carry away travels east or west; what remains becomes the town. Stores arise to supply farmers, banks to hold their money, houses for residents, churches, a school, taverns, a drugstore, and eventually a courthouse. Argus becomes the county seat, appearing as prosperous and forward-looking as any place in North Dakota.

When Fidelis arrives in the state, this townscape is still strange to him. After selling the last of his sausages on the train, he steps onto the platform with thirty-five cents and a suitcase that now holds six knives, a sharpening steel, and graduated whetstones. Argus strikes him as a temporary settlement, defenseless against the flat land around it. Yet the place also offers recognizable signs of work and commerce: houses, a new limestone bank, and a principal street of brick stores. The wind’s indifference is difficult for him to bear but also brings a kind of comfort. He imagines earning enough to continue to another destination, unaware that North Dakota will become the place where he stays.

The state’s rural economy is visible in the farms and small towns surrounding Argus. Fidelis works for the local butcher, Pete Kozka, takes jobs in nearby communities, and travels to farms to butcher when someone fetches him. He has no car at first, but later owns a succession of delivery trucks. His skill at sausage-making helps increase the Kozka business, and his strict attention to ingredients wins customers: on Thursdays, people gather to buy links while they are still hot from the kettle. North Dakota is not merely a backdrop to this livelihood; its scattered settlements and agricultural trade determine how his work is organized and how he builds a place in the community.

Family Settlement and Daily Work

The money Fidelis saves through long hours and severe economy allows him to bring Eva Waldvogel and her young son Franz from Germany to North Dakota. Eva arrives on a spring day, carrying the difference between the new life Fidelis has made and the barren country she first sees. During the journey toward Argus, the land seems to her stark and unfamiliar, even though Fidelis has already made a home and business there. His welcome, spoken in the confusion of their reunion, expresses a promise of everything, but the surrounding landscape makes the meaning of that promise uncertain.

Over the years, the household’s work is rooted in Argus. Delphine Watzka becomes closely involved in the store and its accounts, taking satisfaction in inventory and detail. By marrying Fidelis, keeping a daily schedule, and managing practical affairs, she becomes one of the town’s most respected women. Neighbors seek her advice, admire her judgment about inexpensive cuts of meat and her economy, and consult her assessments. Her reading also becomes part of her public standing: books bearing her neat library signatures circulate among local readers.

The demands of North Dakota life shift with the wider circumstances of the country. During the war, the meat business abruptly receives more orders, including requests for custom kosher work from Jewish synagogues in Minneapolis. Yet increased demand comes with shortages. Fidelis has a scarce C sticker for the delivery truck but little gasoline; butter is requisitioned, so Delphine sells oleomargarine colored with small pats of yellow dye. Her distributor’s canned goods deteriorate in quality and then disappear, and eggs are unavailable because they are being powdered for soldiers. Delphine responds by mailing Markus a dozen Modern Library paperbacks, two at a time, while the family continues to manage the business under wartime limits.

Weather, Garden, and Regional Change

North Dakota’s weather and cultivated land are not stable scenery. On the road south toward Argus, Delphine and Cyprian Lazarre pass patches of stunted wheat, empty or locked houses, and fields affected by armyworms. The tallgrass that once covered the country remains along field margins, sloughs, and the river, while the patient, rainless sky underscores the strain of a dry season. The route connects isolated farms and fragile small-town businesses to Argus, but also reveals how drought and insects can unsettle that economy.

The garden at Eva’s home gives this environmental pressure a domestic scale. After the previous summer’s drought, insects hatch in abundance. Slugs consume seedlings, and Eva tries to drown them with beer in a pie plate sunk level with the ground. Her garden is rich enough to withstand much of the damage, but young slugs strip some leaves down to their veins. Snakes emerge from the edges of the grass and from beneath stones, pipes, and gutters, feeding on the slugs. The garden’s abundance and its vulnerability coexist: life flourishes, but only amid continual damage and response.

These scenes make North Dakota’s natural cycles part of the household’s experience rather than an abstract regional feature. Delphine waters Eva’s plants, tends the store, and spends an evening sitting with her friend as the garden changes around them. The state’s heat, drought, insects, and growth press upon private life, while the garden offers a small, cultivated refuge whose survival depends on attention and labor.

Roads, Return, and the Wider State

The state also matters through travel. When Markus becomes too ill to continue with the family’s plans, Delphine and Fidelis take him back toward Argus. They leave the city and drive north, checking his fever and giving him ginger beer as he sleeps and wakes. The journey passes through landscapes that remind them first of the Dakotas and then of Minnesota. Their conversation stays on safe topics for hours, until the growing darkness makes their silence feel tense. North Dakota is thus both the place they depart from and the home to which illness turns them back.

Later, Markus and Fidelis travel from the North Dakota prairie into central Minnesota on their way to a prisoner-of-war camp. The change in terrain—from open prairie to sandy pinelands and then deeper forest—marks a movement away from the familiar household and toward a difficult family encounter. Markus thinks of what he has learned from his mother, father, and father’s friends, and of the wish he cannot bring himself to voice: asking his father to sing. The road makes the journey’s emotional distance visible without severing its connection to home.

Even when the family is abroad, North Dakota remains the point of reference. In her last letter from Europe to Markus, Delphine writes about Fidelis’s health, the food they have been eating, and her impatience to get home for good. The letter folds observations of Germany back toward their North Dakota life: the new workers at the business need watching, and home is where the family’s work and responsibilities await them. The state functions as the household’s durable center, not because its conditions are easy, but because its routines, relationships, and obligations have become theirs.

Narrative Significance

North Dakota’s openness first magnifies Fidelis’s uncertainty: arriving in Argus, he sees a town exposed to the flatness and assumes he will leave once he has earned enough. The irony of that expectation gives the landscape a structural role in his story. He stays, builds a livelihood within the railroad economy, and brings his family to join him; the supposed temporary settlement becomes the foundation of their life.

The state’s defining contrasts recur across the family’s history: a vast landscape and tightly managed household routines, agricultural plenty and shortages, a garden’s abundance and its damaged leaves, the promise of a home and the long journeys that take family members away from it. Argus gathers these pressures into a specific community, while the surrounding prairie continually reminds its residents how exposed and changeable their lives remain. Louise Erdrich’s own connection to North Dakota is also explicit: she grew up there and is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe. In the novel, the state is both a lived regional setting and the ground on which work, family, weather, and memory meet.