The Deer Camp

by Dean Kuipers

  Before and after school there were lengthy chores to do, and during Michigan’s short, sticky summers Henry wasn’t home during the day so the boys did the farming. Anyone who’s done it knows there’s no rest in it. And there was also cooking and doing housework with Grandma Gertrude. Henry had grown up plowing behind horses, and he was both cheap and set against the tyranny of the new, so if there was a hard way to do something, like lifting grain down from the upper barn in buckets rather than build a grain chute, that’s the way he’d do it. Hard Way Productions. According to Ron, the boys hardly did any homework because they were exhausted.

  Henry could speak high school Spanish to field hands and high school French, whenever that occasion arose, but he would tell you in English he was mortally afraid of hell. His goal for living was to die in the Lord. He liked going to the neighbors for pie or leaning on the fence at the cattle auction, if that’s what the day brought, but he was eager to walk on the clean side of the clouds and not be tormented by the insult of this life and the failures of all his relations. He was devoted to the one church he knew could save him, the Christian Reformed Church, but guilt hung on him like a shroud. He didn’t have an “attaboy” for good work, at least not for the older kids, and he didn’t waste one minute of time trying to make the farm work fun.

  He came by these attitudes honestly. The inscription on the tombstone of my great-great-grandpa Henry J. and his wife, Gezina, over in the Graafschap Cemetery south of Holland, is a line from Revelation: “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on. They will rest from their labor, for their deeds will follow them.” I’m surprised every day that excess pride doesn’t drip like syrup from the clouds above Holland. The Kuipers were puffed up by the prospect of their election to heaven. Threatening that pride risked violence and madness.

  I never met Grandpa Henry’s dad, Great-Grandpa John, but his pride took a beating. The first thing people say about him is that he lost two barns in separate fires, at least one from putting up wet hay. He had two years of schooling and worked like a maniac to keep his children alive through the Depression: farming, hauling gravel, selling firewood. His first wife, my great-grandma Frances, died after eight children (two of whom, the girls, died), so he took up with his housekeeper, Henrietta, and married her when she got pregnant. He left his church for a while after that, and moved farms. But maybe that wasn’t pride; maybe they gave him the heave-ho like they did me. He never went to any of his seven boys’ weddings. Two of them, Jason and Nelson, ran off to live with my grandpa Henry, since he was the oldest. John came to reclaim them because he needed the labor. He was a powerful man, hardened by work and living in a wilderness all his own, but Henry faced him down, and Jason and Nelson were forever grateful. From time to time Henry also took care of his little brother Stanley, who was probably autistic, but artful, and would appear in school plays; Great-Grandpa John put him on a grim county work farm where he spent most of his life, but Henry would get him home for weekends now and then.

  When Grandpa once overheard me talking about a 1970s TV show with my cousins, he put a gnarled brown paw on my shoulder and said in his low and sinking thrum, “Boys, boys. Satan is at work in the world today and he works through TV and magazines and music. Eternal damnation is forever, just think about that.”

  “Heinie, stop being morose!” Grandma yelled from the kitchen.

  Bruce was no more or less badly behaved than his three older brothers, but he was more willing to throw his behavior in Henry’s face. He and Henry had a bloody fistfight that effectively ended his childhood when he was sixteen. Which, I guess, is why he told me to get out at sixteen, too.

  Henry wouldn’t own a TV and the boys weren’t allowed to see movies, but when Bruce was fourteen, Henry let him drive the car into Zeeland to get to the roller rink, which was the only place he might have a chance to hold a girl’s hand or experience any of the actual culture of the 1950s. But the cops later reported to Henry that instead of parking at the roller rink, my father was flying up and down Main Street as fast as he could go. He wasn’t trying to hide it. The whole point was to show off.

  Dad was beautiful and vain and dressed like James Dean. He pushed back on his own darkness with cigarettes rolled in the sleeve of his white T-shirt and his hair slicked back in a perfect, jet-black DA.

  “Your dad was in my sister’s class at Holland Christian,” said my great-aunt Frieda Kuipers. “He was kind of rowdy, hair combed back like Elvis Presley. He wore a black leather jacket with the collar turned up.”

  He strutted the halls of Holland Christian, bestowing his bright smile on this girl and that. That smile contrasted with his dark skin; in old farm photos, he looks like a Native American hunter with a spread of pheasants laid before him. One of my favorites shows him looking impossibly glamorous sitting bareback astride his blue roan horse in white jeans, sweater, and penny loafers. Henry had bought the horse for Bruce when he was fifteen.

  But the photos give more away. Most things about Bruce were right on the surface. You could peer through his dark, nearly indigenous face and his movie-star lips and his mod wardrobe and see that his heart was full but his soul was thin and malnourished on rage and fear. He didn’t know what he was meant to be.

  He worked busing tables at Van Raalte’s, the Zeeland restaurant named after the Secessionist Church dominie who founded the Christian colony of Holland and the Christian Reformed Church, and whatever money Bruce made he spent on clothes and gas and cigarettes. He was fastidious and jealous about his look, and would be for life. He went to Zeeland Christian schools up through ninth grade, and he wanted to go to the public school, Zeeland High, where all his friends went. That’s where all the Kuipers boys wanted to go, but Henry sent them to Holland Christian High School and there was no discussing it.

  “I first laid eyes on him when we were sophomores in high school,” said my mom. “We had assembly and this mass of new kids were there. I sat about three rows behind him.”

  They were both fifteen and went on a date within weeks, to watch the Zeeland High School Chix play football, but they didn’t date each other exclusively. Mom had guys lining up to ask her out, and Dad had girlfriends hidden away in Zeeland, one of whom became Nancy’s crosstown rival. “He was tall, dark, and handsome. He was a hit with the girls,” Mom said. Dad had a Ford that broke down a lot, and Nancy recalled a few dates at the auto shop. But when it ran, they would skip school and drive to Grand Rapids just to go to a diner, or go to Lake Michigan.

  Bruce’s big brothers, Dale and Vern, were both Marlon Brando–handsome and ladies’ men, and had cut a trail for Bruce at Holland Christian. Bruce was dogged and enthusiastic and ecumenical in his tastes; you might say he was liberal. He was girl-crazy, and he put immense energy into getting under those poodle skirts. He broke hearts, and when he did he went back to Nancy. They never did go steady, but they liked each other’s company. Bruce needed to be out on dates, because when he was home he just got deeper and deeper in trouble.

  “Your dad had an incredible ability to push buttons,” said Jack. “I remember sitting outside one day and I hear this hellacious commotion in the house, yelling and carrying on, and your dad comes cuttin’ out of that back door. You had the old wooden screen door on a spring and WHAM! That door slaps open and he comes across the back porch, and here’s this little mother right behind him about five feet tall, with a mop. And she took a swing at him and she broke that green mop handle right off across his back!”

  When fall 1960 came around, Bruce told Nancy he wasn’t going to Holland Christian for his junior year but was switching to the public high school in Zeeland. He never informed Henry, and it took a couple of weeks for the old man to find out. But when he did, he found Bruce doing chores out back and meant to give him a demonstration of what hell would be like. Henry hadn’t had to resort much to the belt, but he came at Bruce, and much to his surprise, his sixteen-year-old son fought back and slugged his father right in his leathery face. “He punched hi
m. If I remember right, I think he broke Henry’s jaw,” said Ron.

  “He broke his jaw,” affirmed Jack. “Out in the corncrib. Dad came in and said he fell on some machinery or something and hurt himself, but that wasn’t the real story.”

  Mike, who was about four at the time, said, “Your dad was unruly, and Mom was trying to keep the peace and Henry was wild-eyed.”

  Henry threw him out, but Grandma Gertrude saved him. She convinced Henry to let him stay until he could figure out where to go. No family could fly apart with her in it. Gertrude was Heinie’s one saving grace, and he adored her. She was a short bolt of energy with curly red hair, and unless we were going to church I never once saw her wear anything other than a raggedy flower-print housedress. She could match Henry’s mulish work ethic step for step. As she constantly cleaned and gardened and prepared coffee and meals, she would whistle parts of hymns that she never finished. She was easy to talk to and knew more than she let on. The two of them were in love for life, and Henry truly believed that God had bestowed on him at least this one blessing, and her sanity constantly pulled him back from the edge.

  Dad announced he was joining the Air Force, and he never went back to high school. He lived on the farm for another year and a half and worked as a clerk at Van’s grocery. He and Nancy continued to date as she finished school.

  I had never heard about his fight with Grandpa before I started working on this book. My mother had been on the Kuipers farm many times, but she’d never heard of it, either. It was another one of the things they didn’t talk about.

  “It was very painful to watch the adults, or the big people in your life, fight,” said Jack.

  “I missed some of this, because I was so determined to get the hell out,” said Ron. “I never said a word to my dad from about the age of fourteen to seventeen. I refused to speak to him. So I was the most trouble, that way. I would only grunt. I moved out at eighteen, and when I say I moved out, I really closed my eyes. I didn’t look back. I didn’t go to visit or anything. I moved in with [his wife] Ruthie’s parents, who lived two or three miles away. They were my new parents, really.”

  At every opportunity, the boys ducked out of the house and into the fields to hunt.

  “I hated the isolation on the farm,” said Ron. “We just weren’t part of the world. On Sundays, we had to stay in the house because you had to read Christian literature and we had no interest in that. You had the Banner, and it was awful reading, of course. So we’d sneak out the upstairs window on Sunday afternoons.”

  “I figured out that if I took the stock off my .22 rifle, I could stick it down my pants,” Ron added, laughing. “So you’d just have the barrel and the trigger mechanism, and we’d go out with that.”

  “We just didn’t have a lot of other stuff to do,” said Jack. “You’d get a winter day, and if you could find something to shoot, you’d shoot it.”

  They had to slip out from under the shadow of the afterlife and be part of the living. A quarter mile to the west ran the Black River, which they called the “swamp ditch” because it dragged sluggish and rank through a broad river valley black with rich muck planted in onions and celery. In its tannic flow thrashed and shrieked their living salvation. Sometimes they took pitchforks and gigged for carp, aiming at the little bow wave the fish made on the surface. The boys saw that the Latino migrants who worked the muck had a better method: they would use a big piece of chicken-wire fencing as a net, hauling out carp and cooking them.

  “Somehow we managed not to stab ourselves in the feet, as we were barefoot in there, though sometimes we’d step on a big snapper,” said Ron. “We were hillbillies.”

  The boys were around lots of people who hunted, including Grandma Gertrude’s brothers Jay and Hank Brink, who had deer camps. Jay worked for General Motors and went to the Upper Peninsula every fall to hunt deer and play cards and tell jokes around a fire, and Great-Uncle Hank had a place near Dead Stream Swamp, a huge white cedar bog northeast of Cadillac that was lousy with deer. Their experiences were probably the germ of the great dream of cabin life that resided within my dad and all his brothers, a refuge from the tension of being constantly separate from the world, a bivouac you returned to over and over and that inspired thinking about the habitat.

  “The Brinks have a better-balanced life. They like to have a beer and laugh, and go hunting and play cards. They weren’t so tense,” said Mike. “So Dale and them gravitated toward the Brinks. Plus, Dale worked construction and he was always around great fishermen and great poachers, or whatever. He learned well!”

  Dale charged off into the fields, and Ron and Vern and Dad were right behind him. Like the farmers all around them in that era, their methods were far from discriminating. They shot hawks and bald eagles and crows and owls, mostly because those birds killed chickens. Given the fervor with which everyone killed these predators and scavengers, you would have thought chickens to be the most important economic asset in the county. On the once-a-year occasion that a red fox would make the grave mistake of entering the township, the Kuipers boys would wage an all-out campaign to snuff it, trespassing across fields and chasing it in cars. The dog would bark in the night, and they’d all pile out the door in their underwear to take turns blasting at a raccoon in the big tree in the yard. They trapped muskrats and mink along the river when they could find them, and shot pigeons out of the top of the silo and songbirds in the bushes for no reason at all. They routinely killed cats, because feral cats eat game birds, but that had consequences. “You’d throw open the doors to the barn and the walls would rattle with rats,” said Great-Uncle George, Grandpa Henry’s younger half brother. So they shot rats in the barn, even after Vern found a couple of boxes of dynamite up in the beams and realized they’d been shooting at them.

  One year when Dale was home from his mission work, there was a big migration of snowy owls from the Arctic and every farm had a white owl or two sitting on the fence posts. Dale drove around in the car and shot them by the scores. It wasn’t to eat. It was just plain ignorance and sublimated rage.

  “If it moved, we killed it,” said Ron. “But why? Why would we shoot a blue heron?”

  They would have shot a whitetail deer, but they rarely saw one near the farm. Deer were few in the southern half of the Lower Peninsula, and the intensive deer-range management programs that created today’s two-million-strong deer herd didn’t start until 1971. The farmers they grew up with weren’t big on self-examination; they went on extirpating every wild thing from their farms until they themselves passed away.

  Even Jack and Mike, who came along seven and thirteen years after Bruce, respectively, and got along better with Henry, still managed to find trouble. “I got a new .22 rifle and I was driving with my friends and there was a rabbit and I started blazing away out the window,” said Jack. “I didn’t see there was a cop right behind us. Henry had to come bail me out of jail and when we got home, it was pretty much the worst night of my life.”

  To eat, they shot quail and rabbits out of the fencerows and the prize of all prizes, the ring-necked pheasant, a big, robust bird imported from the steppes of Asia that thrived on corn and grain fields. They treated pheasants much differently than other game. To kill a pheasant was to bag a delicious meal, and three or four could feed their large family. Grandma Gertrude pan-fried the pieced birds in butter and salt, which is the same way my mom, Nancy, would make them, and that is a gorgeous dinner.

  “On the farm, we’d eat them year-round,” said my great-uncle George. “You’d go out in the snowstorm, in the corn that didn’t get picked, and those birds would be buried deep in the snow to keep warm, but the tail feathers would be sticking out and you’d just grab him.”

  When it was pheasant season, the boys kept a loaded shotgun on the tractor, in the barn, and one behind the door of the mudroom, a room they called by some kind of mangled Dutch phrase, the back “haukie” or “hawkie.” If one of them had a car, there was always a disassembled twelve-gauge underne
ath the front seat, with a few shells easily accessible in the glove box; if a rooster flew over, you slapped that gun together and grabbed the shells and left the car in the middle of the road. Pheasants were an obsession. Pheasants were holy.

  The Henry I knew was morose, but soft. A couple of my cousins told me he hit them when he was angry, but to me he seemed bruised. I was eating lunch with him at his house when I was a kid, one of Grandma’s noontime spreads of fried Spam, applesauce, Roman Meal bread with room-temperature butter, sliced tomatoes, radishes, and coffee. He took some tomatoes and said in his muted purr: “You know there’s only two types of people in the world.”

  “What are they?” I said, wide-eyed.

  “Those who put sugar on a tomato, and those who put salt.”

  He then proceeded to sprinkle sugar on his. That’s when I knew: softy. Bruce ate his with sugar, too. Wounded romantics, both. I like tomatoes just like they are, with neither sugar nor salt. I’m the third type of person who likes the flavor of the world just as it is.

  Dad broke Henry’s jaw, and Ron wouldn’t speak to him, but Dale’s rebellion was the most flamboyant. He got his name in the paper for poaching a few times, and then there was this headline on the front page of the Holland Evening Sentinel of November 10, 1956:

  ZEELAND’S “ELVIS” FAN PAYS $25 FOR PAINTING

  Zeeland (Special)—Elvis’ best fan is out $25 and won’t be able to see his idol’s name on the city water tower anymore. Dale Kuipers, 21, Route 3 Zeeland, admitted to Zeeland police and city superintendent L. A. Sears that he climbed the 135-foot tower east of the city on M 21 and painted “Home of Elvis” in red letters four-feet high beneath the city’s name. Kuipers said he climbed the ladder alone, carrying a can of barn paint, and told Sears he was willing to pay $25 to have the lettering removed.

  Dale left school and went straight to work doing construction. In the winters, he chased the bikini-clad women of Florida. He discovered his life’s purpose after meeting a charismatic and influential Baptist preacher named Garland Cofield in Holland and later attended a Bible college in Tennessee.