by C J Hribal
Our father, coming home after a long week, a little soused and perhaps feeling guilty over having stopped at the Dog Out for three or five or eight quick ones before heading home to hearth and family, tries to make light of everything, even his own intoxication. “This will reflect on your merit review,” he tells our crying mother. Or he will ask her, a little abashed at himself, “This is going to reflect on my merit review, isn’t it?” before he collapses on the sofa and falls asleep.
But mostly he will say it to us. When we screw up, when we break something or do something so badly that we need to redo it, but especially when we do ourselves harm—cutting ourselves on broken glass, trimming under the electrified fence with a hand sickle and knocking ourselves on our asses when the blade makes contact, smashing our thumbs nailing bluebird houses together—he will try to cheer us up, make light of our anguish and pain by saying, “This will reflect on your merit review.” And after we’re bandaged he’ll say, “Back in the saddle again,” and find some other work for us to do. Perhaps we will measure instead of hammer, or paint instead of saw—whatever, he will keep us busy.
There was plenty to keep us busy. That first summer we had to replace all the doors and trim inside the house, sand, stain, seal, and varnish (three coats) all the wood, then hang or nail it all into place. With our father we put up fencing. He bought a tractor—a small gray Massey-Ferguson—and a posthole digger, and at the Farm and Fleet store he’d gotten rolls and rolls of barbwire and electrical fencing. He’d also purchased wire cutters and wire stretchers, fence staples and insulators and fencing nails and insulating wire and heavy gloves for all of us. He bought chain, circular, and crosscut saws. Our father was taking no chances in the tool department. He loved gadgets and gizmos of any kind. Having a farm gave him license to buy just about anything his little heart desired. The one thing he didn’t buy was a wagon. The Hovelings had left one behind, one with wood sides and open ends that could be linchpinned to the tractor, and it was the generally decrepit—antique—appearance of this wagon that enticed our father to keep it. It rode on a couple of bald truck tires, and he could throw just about everything he needed for fencing, including a couple dozen split rails, into its bed and still have room for us kids to sit on the back of the wagon, our feet dangling over the side.
Fencing is slow, hard, hot work, at least the way we did it, with cedar split-rail fence posts. Tony Dederoff tried to dissuade our father. “Use steel posts. They’re straight, easy to drive, and they don’t rot. Those posts you got there—they’ll rot.”
“They’re cedar,” said our father. “They won’t rot.” He and Tony were taking a break. It was early evening. Tony had come over on his way home from the Kafka Feed and Seed, and our father was standing him to a beer. Robert Aaron and I were cleaning out a hole with a clamshell.
“Termites or wood borers will get ’em, I don’t care what they told you at Farm and Fleet. If they ain’t slathered with pine tar, same as the telephone poles, they’ll succumb to insects or rot—one or the other. Three, five years, maybe, they’ll start going, and then where will you be?”
“Right here, putting a new fence in.”
“Exactly. You don’t want to be messing with all this. With steel you can go electrified or not, either way. It’s easier maintenance, too—you go out each spring with a wire stretcher, some spare insulators, and insulator wire. Scythe down the weeds, stretch, replace, you’re done. You got time to pop a cold one. This—this’ll take you weeks, especially doing it just on the weekends, like you’ve got to.” Tony raised his beer to his lips. “Of course, if you’re doing this as a character-building exercise for your boys, that’s another story.” He grinned.
We were not amused. The cedar posts were our father’s idea of picturesque fencing.
We had no idea at the time, but this was the first (or second, if you counted moving up here, too) grand, misguided idea he’d had since the boat, which rested now behind the house on matching sawhorses, a two-piece puzzle that he hadn’t quite gotten around to solving. And like all of his other misguided ideas, he was determined to see it through, at least for a while.
Our father raised his beer bottle and indicated the two of us. “This’ll put hair between their toes.”
“But, Dad,” I panted. “What if we don’t want hair between our toes?”
“Then this will reflect on your merit review.” He removed a pocket spiral notebook from his bib overalls and made a notation.
“You have to write it down?” asked Tony Dederoff. “For my kids I keep it all up here.” He tapped his temple with his forefinger.
“You’re not on the road all the time like I am. I don’t write it down, I forget. Then where would I be?”
“Then where would you be,” agreed Tony Dederoff. They were having a gay old time. Robert Aaron and I hated them.
But you could not hate him—our father—for long. And you could not hate Tony Dederoff at all. Tony was our father’s guide and spiritual mentor, at least in regards to farming. And Tony was a good guy, cheerful and blunt. His wife was happily pumping out babies, just as our mother had a decade ago, and at the age of thirty, with his own farm and the respect of his peers, he had the world by the tail. But he was always well-meaning. “Wally,” he told our father now, “I gotta tell you, Wally, you bought the least promising farm I can think of.”
“Will that reflect on my merit review?”
“Not if you fork over another beer.”
“Done. And done,” said our father, and in the dark we heard the pfsst of the church key doing its work. We kept doing ours, taking dirt out of a hole we could no longer see, while Tony instructed our father as to the order of the projects needed to make the farm a paying enterprise again.
“Nobody’s done jack on this place in ten years,” said Tony, “but you could. You got the horses.”
“Horses?”
“Five boys, if I’m counting right. You got another couple stashed I don’t know about?”
“Naw, that’s the full complement.”
Tony Dederoff found this very funny. “The full complement. I like that. You got a big family, you gotta see everything as a military campaign.” The suck of a bottle. “Well, General—”
“Admiral.”
“Admiral. The first thing I’d do, Admiral, is replow this field and plant alfalfa. You get a good root system with alfalfa. You won’t get a crop this year, but if it takes, with any luck you’ll have three cuttings a summer for the next seven, eight years. And the first thing I’d do before that is take that wagon of yours and clean out the rocks.”
“The rocks?”
“You can’t plow till you clean out the rocks. You hit a boulder with a plow blade, you’ll break the blade. These fields haven’t been cleaned in a decade. You’re gonna have yourself a bumper crop of rocks. Take this ship of yours”—Tony’s hand slapped the wagon—“drive it real slow over the fields with your troops fanned out behind it, and throw anything bigger’n a quarter into the wagon. You’ll have yourself quite a harvest. Course you’ll have to do it again next spring—the freeze and thaw cycle pushes ’em up every year like flowers. It’s amazing, really, the world don’t run out of rocks.”
We liked Tony. He was a sober, happier version of Uncle Louie. He’d come over, have his one or two beers, then leave. Of course, we never saw our father have more than one or two beers, either. It was what he was drinking when he wasn’t around us that was the problem.
But in those early days, our father’s enthusiasm for all things rural kept his drinking more or less in check. And he heeded Tony’s advice. We hauled rocks. The fields were littered with them. Our father did a slow ka-bump, ka-bump over the fields, and we fanned out in a line and threw rocks in the wagon. We found dozens of arrowheads, too. We felt we were gleaning sacred earth. We were in touch with our Bohemian ancestors, that mythical tribe of blond-haired, green-eyed Indians in which I, only too recently, had believed.
Borrowing Tony’s equipmen
t, our father plowed, spring-toothed, dragged. He planted seed in the now-level earth. With our father watching the furrow ahead, we rode the Ferguson’s fenders and kept a close watch on the seed spilling out behind. When it stopped we’d yell, jump off the tractor, and muscle—with our father’s help—another bag of seed into the bins.
If you discounted our mother—and all too frequently we did—it was a time of great family happiness. Every week we had a project. We took lumber and corrugated sheet metal from the barn that had collapsed and reroofed the sheds. Lumber, tar paper, tin—it took two days. The rusty tin heated up something fierce, and you had to be careful not to cut yourself on the sheet metal or Mom would insist on a tetanus shot, but it was glorious work. We were fixing things, making things! This! This is what farmers do! After we pulled all the usable lumber from the leaning barn, our father looped a chain around a corner pole, hooked the chain to the tractor, and pulled down the barn. That was glorious, too, watching it collapse with a great woof! of exhaled dust. So this was why that bulldozer driver merely shrugged when he destroyed our clubhouse. He was having too good a time to be disturbed. Destruction could be as much fun as—maybe more fun than—construction was. Who needed a balsa-wood airplane burning out an attic window when you could take down an entire barn and watch it woof chaff and smoke?
Or set fire to an immense pile of rubble and lumber?
We did that in the fall, when farmers burned their ditch lines and leaves. The air smelled wonderful. Acrid, pungent, sweet—there are few smells that can transport you to another time quite like the smell of burning leaves. The smell of an ex-lover’s perfume glimpsed on a city street, perhaps, but what did I know of that then?
Our contribution to the fall burning would be our lumber piles, swollen with torn out fencing. Our father ran a hose—two hundred feet of it—out to the piles and stationed us around them with pellet guns and twenty-twos and pitchforks and spade forks and scoop shovels. Our father wielded a pistol and a four-ten shotgun—what he called his squirrel gun. The idea was we’d kill all the rats and mice as they ran out, not give them a chance to relocate in the newly sided sheds, where we hoped to keep chickens and horses and sheep and some beef cattle someday.
Although our father had trained us in gun safety, and was a dues-paying NRA member, the notion of seven or eight or nine people in a circle all shooting at the same objects running out from the center did not raise any red flags for him. I mention this only in hindsight. It didn’t occur to anyone else at the time, either.
Our father circumnavigated the piles with five-gallon cans of gasoline. He sprinkled liberally. He added an oil change’s worth of old motor oil for good measure. We stood back, our weapons poised. Tony came over to help. He had a twenty-two rifle; his oldest son, Matt, had a Daisy BB gun; and Borowski, his hired hand—a kid not much older than Cinderella—had a sixteen-gauge shotgun. There was soda and beer in a washtub of ice water back at the house. It would be a party. When everything was ready, our father took two empty pop bottles and filled them halfway with kerosene. Then he took two strips from an old bedsheet and poked them into the bottles, leaving three or four inches of wick sticking outside. We recognized these—Molotov cocktails. We’d seen them on television. We just didn’t know you could use them for this. And we were surprised our father knew how to make them. We thought only student radicals and Negroes in inner-city ghettos knew about these things. But maybe it was something you learned in the Navy, too. He lit them with a Zippo lighter, then handed one to Tony. The flame was long and smoky. Our father said, “Ready?” and Tony Dederoff nodded. “On three,” said our father. “One, two . . .” And they lofted them together.
Elsewhere, it was the tail end of the Summer of Love. In Augsbury, on the old Hoveling farm, we were gathered like extras for an updating of Frankenstein—the villagers-storming-the-castle scene, ready to burn or shoot or pitchfork to death anything that moved.
Of course, there were casualties. This began when the bottles were first thrown onto the piles. Our father’s didn’t break. Tony Dederoff’s did, and a huge roar went up from the pile on the east. Our father was just reaching into the pile to retrieve his cocktail when the heat and some flicker of flame from Tony’s pile set off the kerosene-gasoline–motor oil mix in our father’s. The concussive WHOOOMPH! of all those inflammatories going off at once knocked our father backward, blackened and seared his face, and burned off his eyebrows and most of the hair on his knuckles. He lay there stunned. The cocktail was in his hand, still burning, as he sat up, dazed. Given our father’s girth, sitting up in itself was an ordeal. By the time he noticed the cocktail in his hand, the fire was running down inside the bottle. Our father had barely launched it when it struck a board projecting at an odd angle from the great jumbled pile and exploded a few feet from his face. Glass erupted everywhere. Our father screamed and fell back, his second wounding. Blood was pouring from his face and hands from a thousand tiny and not so tiny cuts. And underneath the smell of burning gas and wood, the stench of burning oil, there was the smell of burning protein—hair, fur, flesh. Something alive was going up in flames.
“Here they come,” yelled Tony Dederoff, and I felt like I was that guy at the end of the movie Wake Island, where the last you see of the doomed Americans wearing World War I–issue helmets is a lone guy spraying death from a machine gun, twisting and turning to ensure the largest field of fire.
The rabbits were first. They bolted, zigzagging as they leapt, and we let them go. The rats came next. They were big and quick, some of them like house cats. We had mowed around the piles to give us a clear line of fire, but that was good for only thirty feet or so before the long grass started, and behind us was the drop-off into the ruined barn, with its nooks and crannies, into which a rat could disappear. We had to be quick or they’d escape. Fortunately, the bloodlust was upon us. Or at least upon my fellow villagers. They fired and hacked and beat with efficiency. I watched as Wally Jr. speared one with his pitchfork and flung it, trailing blood, back into the fire, the rat making a little fliiiiip sound as it came off the pitchfork. I watched the rats dying and tried firing, but it froze me, seeing them scurry and die. My aim, with a pellet gun and a bent sight, was pitiful. I led them too much, I aimed too high. Invariably, just as they were about to reach the grass, or had reached the grass, Tony Dederoff or Borowski or my older brother, Robert Aaron, or my younger brother Ike would swing and fire, and the escaping rat would die, or lie there wounded, or turn little circles in the dirt, like Curly from the old Three Stooges shorts, or turn and do flips and cough its death throes. Wally Jr. or Ernie had the job of impaling the survivors or scooping up the dead and throwing them back into the flames.
The flames, the flames. Perhaps I shouldn’t admit this, but the other reason I was not doing my part in the great rat hunt of 1967 was I was as mesmerized by the flames as I was by the rats running their invisible mazes as they tried to escape. Given the broadness of the two piles and their intersection, it was amazing to me that the flames shot up not in twin columns but in a single conflated pyramid of fire that narrowed as it reached the sky. A good Catholic boy, I recognized that imagery: the flames—red, yellow, and edged in black—traced, inverted, the sacred heart of Jesus. Joan of Arc died in flames like these. Joan of Arc—not much younger than Patty Duckwa. And if I could hold the image of those two women in my head simultaneously, it must mean that, yes, indeed, we were in one of the lesser rings of hell.
The fire and the heat were tremendous—you could feel them as a physical presence. The shimmering waves kept you at bay, and we worked on the outside edge of that, killing and killing and killing. Surely God would reward us for this glorious and necessary evil.
Suffice it to say I was all mixed up. I felt bad—rats, too, were God’s creatures. They wouldn’t have survived this long if Noah hadn’t brought them on the ark, but I felt good, too. There was something beautiful about the way the flames leapt into the sky, the air shimmering around you, distorting everythin
g you viewed into elongated sine waves—the trees, the clouds, a bird flying, your father lying on the grass.
Our father. We had forgotten about him. Crazed with bloodlust, heady with our accomplishment, we had not noticed that our father was still on the ground. He was no longer bleeding profusely, but he was bleeding, and his face looked scorched, the eyebrows missing, his forehead a great red bullet. He was still stunned, still looking up at the sky. It had been only a few moments, really, since he’d first been blown backward. Everything was happening in a nether time, both quickly and in slow motion. Was it like this at Custer’s Last Stand, I wondered, things winding down in a frenzy? We were still killing things, and I was celebrating what might have been my only kill, a rat I’d caught in the teeth, spinning him around where he lay very still, facing what he’d been fleeing, when I saw a baby rat leave the pile and make a beeline for my father’s trouser leg, which was big and loose and open and inviting.
Of course no one saw this but me. And I knew why we were killing these rats in the first place. They were evil. They ate chicken eggs and carried disease. If one were to bite my father, he could get rabies or bubonic plague and die a horrible, slow, lingering death, and there would be nothing anybody could do for him except amputate the parts that turned green and comfort him in his misery while he lay dying. It would be against everything we knew and held dear to put him out of his misery. We could do that for rats; we could not do that for a rabid and gangrenous father. So I had to stop this panicky rat from inflicting a slow and painful death on our father. One problem, though, was that I panicked. The other was that I was a lousy shot. I led the rat too much. The first shot entered just above our father’s heel, in the fleshy part of his ankle. He had ignored the advice he had given us about wearing work boots or Wellingtons. He had on a pair of canvas deck shoes offering no protection from a well-meaning son with lousy aim. The second shot, when the rat was going up his trouser leg, hit his calf, the third, his thigh. My father was screaming, the rat was burrowing—no doubt both were in panic as to where my next shot might go—and it was Wally Jr., little Wally, who solved matters by skewering the rat with his pitchfork. Only a single tine pierced our father’s leg, but it went deep, and our father jittered and danced like one of the wounded and dying rats before Wally removed his pitchfork from both the rat and our father’s thigh.