by C J Hribal
So we built a pond where we had a marsh. This was not quite Moses striking the rock to get the water to flow in the desert, but it was along the lines of Ponce de León searching for the Fountain of Youth, or any number of French voyagers seeking the famed Northwest Passage. Our father, like the King of Spain or France, had entrusted Wally and Ike, eager minions, boys young enough to thrill to the chase, to find the spring that he believed issued there. It would be a burbling beneath the marsh grass, he believed. He would have liked to have found it coming out in a pool surrounded by granite rocks, but there were no rocks in the marsh. So he told the boys, “Just look for the water under the grass,” and off they went in their Wellingtons, canteens on their backs, slathered in deet to keep away mosquitoes.
They never found a thing, but our father believed it was there anyway, and borrowing a backhoe and a bulldozer, he dug a small lake in the marsh’s middle. It kept turning back to marsh, but no matter. Someday there would be geese and ducks and walleye and northern pike and bass—largemouth and smallmouth—and bluegill and perch and sunfish and gar and maybe—who knew?—in the fullness of time we might be fishing for muskies, forty-eight-inch, sixty-four-pound fish we would land on treble hooks and deertail lures. It was all a matter of believing.
This was particularly true when our father lost his job. Without telling us, he’d changed companies, only it turned out the new company didn’t need him like he (and they) thought they might, and until our father could catch on with Dinkwater Chemical again, or with a more established competitor, things were going to be tight around our house. Things had always been tight anyway, nine people on a salesman’s salary, but it was worse now. How much worse we would find out soon enough, though our parents strove mightily to conceal it from us. The extent of the damage to our family’s finances, the resultant belt tightening, the blows to our father’s self-esteem, the hits our parents’ marriage took—we were told none of this. We were instead led to believe that our father was traveling less because of a “restructuring” of the company. We were also led to believe that casseroles, served six nights a week, were not an austerity measure but a move calculated to improve our diet.
At the risk of insulting the great chefs of Europe, there is no finer culinary art than that practiced in large midwestern families whereby the “chief cook and bottle washer” (our father’s phrase for our mother) makes one pound of beef or two cans of tuna serve nine people. And makes them believe they are eating something good and special and different every night. Casseroles. We ate thousands of them, in seemingly endless variations: tomato or cream of mushroom soup, elbow, flat, or spaghetti noodles, meat or fish (fish for the mushroom soup; the promiscuous burger went with anything).
It was belief that kept us eating those casseroles. Belief that what our parents told us was true. That everybody ate like this, glops of casserole mounded high on our plates. That our father wasn’t spending his time at the Dog Out, however glazed his eyes and addled his walk when he finally got home, late in the evenings, when the younger kids were already in bed. Belief that things between our parents weren’t getting worse, their “discussions” more heated, that our mother’s patience with our father wasn’t wearing thin even as she worried about him, about them, about us. We were better off not knowing that our father had lost his job. If we believed all was well, all was well.
I think Dorie is counting on this same culture of belief being present in me. Alas, she is right. My need to believe in Dorie is greater than my doubts. The diaphragm, the packed nightie—surely there’s an explanation. I am my father’s, my mother’s son. I am cursed with faith.
When things looked particularly bleak—the year I turned sixteen our father was out of work eleven months—our father was still trying to get us to believe. To stretch the family food budget, he announced, he was making stone soup. Ike had found a large, irregularly shaped hunk of granite that spring during the annual rock gleaning, and our father started to boil that in a huge soup kettle half-filled with water. “This is going to take a while,” he said. “Rocks take forever to cook. Go do your chores.”
We were suspicious, determined to find out what the trick was.
Our father added salt, pepper, cut up a few carrots, stirred. He read our minds. “There’s no trick,” he said. “It’s a rock.” He held up a stalk of celery. “I’ll add this and some garlic. You want to watch? Rocks don’t do anything exciting when they cook. They don’t turn red like lobsters or split open like clams. They don’t get bigger or much smaller.”
“So why are you cooking it?” asked Peg Leg Meg.
“Minerals,” said our father. “The minerals leach into the water and make the broth. It’ll be the main source of our vitamins and minerals tonight.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Come take a look.” Our father brought a kitchen chair up to the stove. We took turns peering over the side. There was a scummy froth on the surface and cloudy water beneath.
“Looks like it’s going to be a pretty thin soup,” said Ernie.
“Well, it’s all we’ve got. You know how it is in this family. We make do with what we’ve got. Now go do your chores unless you think watching a rock cook is interesting.”
We went outside. Sheep, the cattle, the horses. Ran water in the troughs, distributed hay, watched for a while to see if Pat and Mike would copulate. Mike’s doohickey (our mother preferred this word over dong, Tony Dederoff’s term) was amazing in its boa constrictor–like turgidity, and even though Pat was not interested, Mike’s interest rarely waned. A mating dance involving hooves and a snake that long deserved some attention.
We watched for a while—Pat shaking her head No way, Jose as Mike nuzzled her flanks—and wondered if this was how things were these days between our parents. Then Robert Aaron and I climbed up the aerial. We’d recently discovered that climbing the aerial got you on the roof. Up there we felt rather lordly, the rest of the household literally beneath us, and all the farm spread out before us. It was way cooler than the tree house, which we’d outgrown, and we got a thrill out of putting something so unremarkable as a roof to a new and almost magical use. We were hiding out in plain sight.
“You think size matters?” I asked Robert Aaron, pursuing a recent topic of debate in the locker room. The possessors of big doohickeys said size was the only thing that mattered; those of us on the short end of the stick, as it were, thought that wasn’t the case, but we owned no experiences that would allow us to mount a counterargument (nor much of anything else). Dorie by this time was dating Calvin Brodhaus, a wrestler who’d won sectionals and took third at state wrestling at one hundred and seventy-three pounds. He claimed he got down to weight by filling Dorie up with his jism. Even if it was just locker-room talk, and I wanted to believe that was all it was, I knew right then I didn’t stand a chance, would never stand a chance, with Dorie Braun.
“Ask Cinderella,” said Robert Aaron, who was flicking pebbles off the roof. “When she first started seeing Okie that was the word—that he was the owner of a big dong. See what she says now. How important a big dong is once you’re already knocked up.”
We would never ask Cinderella. Since her wedding she’d been walking around all hangdog, like getting married and carrying a child were the exact opposite of the greatest happiness she could experience, which was what our mother told us it should be. But it was an unhappy wedding, Cinderella’s. It was like she’d gotten to the doorway of the room where all the secrets are kept and what she’d found was a big empty sadness, and that sadness had seeped into the center of her being. The look on her face was that of someone who’d just taken a blow to the stomach, or eaten a bad bit of beef.
“Maybe it’s just the morning sickness. It’s supposed to make you feel awful.” I was wondering two things: what it was like having a baby inside you, and how those pebbles had gotten on the roof. Balls and Frisbees were up there, too, but you could account for those. But the pebbles, and that baby that was now distending ou
r sister’s belly—these were mysteries.
“Mom says she’s far enough along she shouldn’t be having morning sickness anymore. Christ, Emcee, she’s big as a fucking house. She looks like she doesn’t know what hit her.”
I didn’t know either, but I had an inkling. Those twin sons of a Catholic childhood, guilt and grief, had taken up residence in Cinderella’s heart. She had done something unfettered and free, something that she had wanted to do (though perhaps also the result of one of those “if you really loved me” scams), something that felt good (though from what Cinderella let drop in idle moments that wasn’t necessarily a sure thing, either), and the consequences had been almost immediate. God was punishing her. She had liked sex (maybe), or at least had thought it would get her something she wanted, and it had backfired. She would take it all back if she could, but it was too late. Those nuns had another success story: another woman—a girl, really—who was terrified of sex, of her own body and what it had done.
“She fell for that boy’s promises hook, line, and sinker,” we overheard our mother say on the phone to Matty Keillor. “Belief in a boy’s promises is a terrible thing.” I thought of Dorie right then—what had Calvin Brodhaus promised her? I didn’t want to think about it, but I did anyway. Especially when I heard that Dorie, too, had gotten knocked up—she was all of, what, seventeen?—and though she didn’t keep the baby (and Calvin was an SOB, disavowing any responsibility while bragging about how he did it), by the following spring Dorie was gone, off to Chicago, some said, and it would be a good decade and a half before I would see her again. The only thing she told me about that time was that she was young and stupid and that falling for a guy hook, line, and sinker was something she would never, ever do again.
Hook, line, and sinker—another of our father’s phrases. He said it without cynicism, without despair. If the bait was good, the fish bit. They might know a hook was buried under that worm, might know they were going to be reeled in, no matter. The attraction of the bait, the promise of what’s to come is too great. They block out consequences, the surety of their own death. They mouth the bait, suck it down, gorge themselves, and the hook buries itself deep in their gullets. It happens with people, too. We are driven like salmon up the river of our desires.
This may be a uniquely American phenomenon. Researchers have looked into the kinds of advertising that were used in the nineteenth century to lure people to the States: flyers that talked about gold lining the streets, posters claiming that farmers needed only to throw seeds at the ground, not even clearing it, and bumper crops of corn and wheat would emerge. Everyone was a millionaire, everyone owned his own business. Work was plentiful, land cheap and fertile, streets immaculate. It was a country without night pans, without offal, a nation of indoor plumbing and hot and cold running knockwurst. A place where every dream pursued was a dream realized. The researchers came up with the theory that America was settled by, therefore, and we are the descendants of, people disposed to believe the claims of advertising.
It was a two-way street for our father. For people to fall for something hook, line, and sinker you needed to offer them something they could believe in. Presentation was everything. You had to believe in the efficacy of what you were selling. Before you sold to anybody else, you had to sell it to, and believe it, yourself. Or at least believe that you believed. Our father had a phrase for that, too: word, line, and verse. You were swearing to the truth of what you were saying. You don’t believe me? God’s honest truth. You could look it up, word, line, and verse.
So it was with the stone soup. A part of us believed our father was cooking stone soup because a part of our father believed it, too. When we climbed down from the roof and came back inside along with everyone else, there it was, a pot of soup, and sitting on the counter was the stone, still steaming. We gaped.
“Just took it out,” said our father. “Wash yourselves, we’ll eat in a few minutes.”
Our father served us. “A key ingredient of stone soup is the stone itself,” he said. “You don’t get this richness without the granite. Limestone is good, too. So’s feldspar.” He looked around the table at us. “God’s honest truth. Word, line, and verse.”
“Wally,” said our mother. “Tell them.”
Our father kept ladling. “In the Second World War there was a soldier who got separated from his company. He ended up in a small village ravaged by the fighting as it had gone back and forth, and he had no food. There wasn’t much to be had in the village, either. He was hungry. Every door he knocked on he got the same answer: Sorry, no food. One woman gave him a big soup pot, however, and in the village square he built a fire and filled the pot with water. He washed off a chunk of rock that had been blasted from the village wall and put that in the pot. A woman came out to watch him. ‘What are you making?’ she asked. ‘Stone soup,’ said the soldier, stirring. ‘It’s a little thin, but a carrot might help.’ ‘I think I have a carrot,’ said the woman and brought one back with her. An old man came by and asked, ‘What are you making?’ and the soldier said, ‘Stone soup. So far I have the stone and a carrot, but some celery would be nice.’ ‘I think I know where I can find some celery,’ said the old man. And so it went. One after another of the villagers came by, asking the soldier what he was cooking, and to each the soldier said, ‘I’m making stone soup, and it’s good, but you know what would make it just a little better?’ and he would name another ingredient, and one by one the villagers, who could not feed the soldier or themselves, brought the necessary ingredients: flour, potatoes, tomatoes, salt, a chicken, onions, leeks, more carrots, garlic, pepper, a bit of bacon, a hunk of ham. To make room, the soldier took out the stone and kept adding ingredients, and the village and the soldier that night ate very, very well.” Our father looked around the table, pausing to fix each of us with his gaze. He’d been drinking while we’d been out; his gaze was a little wobbly, his eyes glassy. “That’s the way the story goes. Word, line, and verse. Now lately I’ve been hearing things about this family. Things about your sister. Things about my job. About my not having a job. Things I don’t want people repeating. What gets said in this family stays here. Nobody in this family goes it alone. We are Czabeks. Never forget that. What are we?”
“Czabeks,” we said.
“What was that name again? I don’t think I heard you.”
“Czabeks!” we said.
Our father went into the singsong of a drill instructor. “I can’t hear you.”
“CZABEKS!!!” we yelled.
“That’s better,” said our father. “Never forget that. We are Czabeks. Count on it. Believe it.”
“Hook, line, and sinker,” said Robert Aaron.
“Word, line, and verse,” I echoed.
“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” said our father.
17. Odysseus in Later Life
THE DEMOCRACY OF FAILURE
I head down the field carrying a flashlight. I’ve drunk enough to have a buzz going, and I’m wondering if it’s going to be the same old same old when I rejoin my siblings. It’s already the same old same old with Dorie, but I’m not sure what to do about that.
In the lower part of the field, rising out of the scrub trees and marsh grass so pale it looks translucent, Ike’s tepee eerily appears like a ghost from another century. It’s the real thing, this tepee. Ike cut and trimmed the twenty-foot poles himself, cut and stitched the sailcloth, learned how to lash the poles, how to wrap the cloth so there’s a smoke hole, and how to tie in a drip ring so the tepee stays dry even in a downpour. Deer ribs worked through slits in the overlap hold shut the entrance. Even though frost is settling, inside it’s toasty. You can see the smoke rising from inside, hear the hum of the gas burner.
If there’s a protocol for knocking on a tepee, no one’s informed me what it is, so I just lift the flap and scoot inside.
“Speak of the devil,” shouts Ernie. “Welcome aboard.” He waggles his beer bottle. If he hurt himself falling off the roof, he’s
since self-medicated to where pain has no hold on him. “May you be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows you’re dead.”
I don’t bother pointing out the contradiction. I sit down on a pile of woolen blankets. Underneath are straw and pine boughs. Ike says four couples could sleep here comfortably, though it’s usually just him, Sam, and their children. Wally Jr. is sitting on “the couch”—two bales of straw covered by a tarp and a horse blanket. Meg and Ernie are next to me, Robert Aaron is across the way, sharing a bearskin rug with Ike. Between us a good-size fire blazes in a fire ring dug six inches deep and banked with granite rocks. Off to one side is the space heater, set on low. Everyone’s face is a soft yellow-orange.
“Hail, hail, the gang’s all here,” sings out Ernie.
“No Cinderella,” says Meg.
“No, no Cinderella,” says Wally Jr. “We’ve established that. Next topic.”
“I just hope it’s going to be a nice day tomorrow,” Ernie says, fishing in the cooler for another beer. “They’ll cancel the balloon ride if the weather’s not perfect, right?” He looks at me. I was the one who set up the balloon ride, contacting an outfit that would be willing to go up this early in the year, when the winds are unpredictable if not downright freakish.