When I took them from the oven, the chocolate cookies were chocolatey to the point of muddiness and crumbled at the lightest touch—I may have miscalculated the exact dimensions of “½ square bitter chocolate.” The others turned out beautifully, each bite commencing with crispy resistance, then yielding to a moist center, the richness of the butter pressing fatly against the tongue. And then a sip of coffee, the cookie sweetness melting and giving way to the dark surge of the beans.
The recipe indicated that the remaining dough could be stored for up to one year.
It didn’t last three days.
In part to mitigate the barren state of the earth, I have decided to order seeds for my garden. I possess the perfect armchair for the task, a saggy old green thing that came from my grandmother’s basement and now sits on a rug beside my homemade bookshelves. Sinking into the worn cushions, I spend the remainder of the afternoon leafing through seed catalogs and recharging my chamomile tea. It is as if a sunlamp has been turned toward my soul. My winterbound spirit thaws, releasing sense memories—the shink, shink sound of a hoe cleaving sandy soil, the press of a hard seed between the pad of thumb and forefinger, the scratchy hiss of squash leaves moving in a warm breeze. I am this close to writing a poem. Seed catalogs are responsible for more unfulfilled fantasies than Enron and Playboy combined.
Blissful though it is, the annual seed catalog review adds up to a perennial tradition of willful delusion. It begins responsibly enough. Scientific approach and rigorous intent. As, for example, in the selection of beets: Notepad at hand, I calculate the harvest date of fifty-three-day Red Aces as opposed to sixty-day Cylindras, factor in the hybrid vigor of the Red Ace, take into account the sliceability of the Cylindra, cross-reference all results with the applicable hardiness zone, jot my selection in neat preruled columns including item name, associated catalog number, and miscellaneous starred comments, and then move briskly on to a hard-eyed evaluation of kale. I am in essence a minor god, with plans for my few square feet of the earth. I shall sow, and I shall reap. I am a catalyst in the cycle of life. I am also distracted by all the pretty pictures.
The seed catalog is printed on paper of the same texture as your gaudier supermarket tabloids—a stock perfectly suited for oversaturated photos of Royal Burgundy Purple Pod Bush beans, overfluffed sheaves of savoyed spinach, and lurid tomato shots with every fruity globe so taut and flawless it might have been snatched from the chest of a prefab starlet. Carrots are arranged in arresting bolts of orange. A neon splay of Bright Lights Swiss chard vibrates like a beer sign in a health food store. Purpling stems of beet green plunge into the dusty lavender crown of the stout root, sliced open in one photograph to reveal a glistening fine-grained core the color of deoxygenated blood. The play of sun and shadow on a grapelike cluster of Sweet Millions miniature tomatoes is so mustily conveyed that your parotids clench at the thought of the skin popping under the pressure of your molars and the subsequent sweet gush of pulp. A pair of Bell Boy peppers reflect the light with a blue tinge that suggests the exact feel of the cool green lobes against your palm, and I am drawn straight into summer. It is as if the catalog ink is spiked with chlorophyll. Rigorous intent begins to fray. Never shop for groceries on an empty stomach, they say. Corollary riff: Never order seeds when the world is frozen stiff and leafless.
Scientific process? That vaporizes the minute I hit the cucumber page. Ain’t no such thing as a cucumber. You’ve got your Sweet Slice Hybrid. Your Fanfare. The Ashley. The Marketmore, the Cool Breeze, the County Fair Hybrid, the Orient Express, and the Sweet Success. The Diva. The Homemade Pickles is slotted just below the SMR–58, a juxtaposition implying a genetic journey from Grandma’s backyard patch to a petri dish in some lab. Claims are made regarding the resistance of certain cucumbers to scab and mosaic. Others tolerate powdery and downy mildews. Some are parthenocarpic: able to set perfect fruit without cross-pollination. Some are designed to grow in a lowly pot, others thrive on a trellis. Over sixteen variations on a cucumber in the space of a single page. My carefully notated columns begin to dwindle.
In the end my order includes kale, carrots, parsley, dill, cilantro, summer savory, lemon balm, basil, sweet marjoram, oregano, lettuce, okra, parsnips, peas, squash, and tomatoes. Also three packets of cucumbers: a pickler, a slicer, and the Orient Express Hybrid. Checking my notes, I see I chose the Orient Express because the catalog copy said it would thrive on a trellis, and I have a trellis.
The seed catalogs promote several varieties of “burpless” cucumbers. I have yet to find one promoted as “burp-ish.” This is flatly a missed marketing opportunity. Among my rural and roughneck acquaintances are no small number of folks who not only savor the art of eructation, they cultivate it. There are guys on the fire department capable of melisma. I have seen a woman throw her head back beneath the Jamboree Days beer tent and let loose a burp so resonant polka dancers were moved to applause. I know men longing to belch a full-length version of “Free Bird.” Beer works, but it impairs your ability to play air guitar. There are people out here who would go out of their way to plant row on row of Burp-Mor Hybrids, County Fair Honkers, and Belching Divas.
Now that the seeds have been ordered, I have hit the apogee of my gardening season. You lick the envelope, or click Send, and you think, “There.” As if you have returned the hoe to the shed, or bundled the last cluster of garlic. Today I am buoyed by hope and visions of a rank harvest. Once the seeds arrive, all subsequent horticulture is executed within the context of reality and is therefore trying.
The snow starts late one afternoon. The first fat flakes drift aimlessly. I walk out to stand in the backyard, where I can hear the papery tic-tic of individual crystals striking the crisp maple leaves. The snowfall is more urgent now, and soon the ground is blurry brown. Then it is white. By dusk, the snow is accumulating depth. When the nine o’clock siren sounds from the water tower across the tracks, I step to the front porch and survey Main Street. At each streetlight, flakes drop through the mercury-vapor nimbus like moths in free fall. The village is muffled in snow. Every sharp line is softened and the windows up and down the street glow warm and yellow. In the deepening snow, even the meanest home looks cozy. I go to bed and roll up in blankets. The plaster walls are cold. Drifting, I offer a prayer of thanks that in all of time and space I have been delivered to this ephemeral cocoon, a pinpoint of warmth in the unknowable universe.
In the morning the snow is knee-deep and the temperature has dropped below zero. On Moose Country Radio, the gap between George Jones and Loretta Lynn songs grows wider as the announcer recites an expanding list of postponements and cancellations. School has been shut down. Several basketball games have been rescheduled. Over at the turkey factory in Barron, the evisceration team is starting two hours late. Outside, the morning is filled with the sound of snowblowers and the flat scrape, scrape of snow shovels. As we dig out, we greet one another with mittened waves and puffs of breath, cheerful as kids playing hooky. We lean to our shovels with stoic determination, secretly delighted that in the age of heated seats and convenience-store cappuccino we can still pretend to be pioneers as we strike out for milk and eggs up the block at the Gas-N-Go. The air is sharp with cold. With every inhalation, our nose hairs snap together like magnets and freeze. They thaw and separate on the exhale. We tromp around in our big boots, imagining we survive on pemmican and hardtack. The illusion doesn’t last. The plows are out, and by midmorning the four-lane is whooshing with people who dared not risk the deadly trip to work or school, but now, given a day off, will drive forty miles to the mall.
After shoveling snow, I am hungry. This is the kind of day when you’d like to step through the door, stomp the snow from your feet, and inhale a hearty dinner. Sit right down and eat roast beef. Tuck into real mashed potatoes and fatty brown gravy. Savor the overcooked carrots and onions, have another slice of meat smeared with horseradish. I am content in the bachelor life, but at moments like this, I admit to old-fashioned sexist longing. Some
times I cook up comfort food, but cooking your own comfort food is akin to scratching your own back. Same sensation, less watts. In the basement I rummage around my little chest freezer until I uncover a plastic-sealed lump of homemade pesto. I place the lump in a sauce pan over low heat and pull a pasta pan from the rack above the kitchen window. Out in the backyard, the raised beds are cloaked in snow. They look like gravestones dipped in almond bark. The row-on-row arrangement of the beds reinforces the graveyard image, and Sarah’s tomato plant is a skeletal bouquet. Now I think of my brother, alone in his house those days after Sarah died. When I turn back to the stove the pesto lump is half-thawed and the fragrance rising from the pan is pure green summer.
I eat my lunch in the saggy armchair. From here I can see my old truck in the driveway. The body is dolloped with snow lumps that mimic and distort the underlying contours of the fenders and roof. I really don’t know where to begin with that thing. I know I can’t do it myself, but I don’t want to just turn it over to someone. Besides, I can’t afford to go that route. I need someone who will let me contribute a little sweat equity. Someone who doesn’t mind my company. I’ve been using all the research, all the gathering of manuals and cookbooks as a sort of throat-clearing exercise. Now I’m looking out the window at the snowbound hulk thinking so many of my projects start off big and then languish in disarray. I need help, that’s for sure. I’ll have to start asking around. My mechanical abilities dwindle just past lifting the hood. Righty-tighty, lefty-loosey, and after that I’ve pretty much exhausted my options.
The pesto and angel hair are warm in the bowl on my lap, the fragrances of olive oil and basil blending the exotic and the familiar, equal parts sunny Tuscan hillside and hometown dirt. A meal like this makes you want to live forever, if only for the scent of warm pesto in January. When I finish the food, I’ll place the bowl on the floor, shrug into the broken cushions, and doze.
My brother Jed walked a black path after Sarah died. There were stretches where we feared he might give up. We both serve on the local volunteer fire department, and sometimes an hour after the hoses were hung to dry we would still be leaning against his pickup while he talked against the darkness, holding out against returning to the empty bed. He threw his sleeping bag in his pickup and drove across the country to California and then came back. He put a lot of tears on our mother’s shoulder. It got worse in the winter. He just wanted to sleep. My brother John took to prying Jed from bed and force-marching him to the woods. Jed being in no condition to run logging equipment, John left him to tend the stove in the portable shack at the timber landing. No hugging or gnashing of teeth, just a refusal to let Jed go blind in the cave. This is the kind of strap-steel love overlooked by those who misconstrue stoicism as failure to engage. In the end, the broken circle closed beautifully: Sarah’s mother came to Jed one night and said there was a woman he should meet. Her name was Leanne. It worked out, and they were married.
It feels presumptuous to say anything more. Jed is a private man, and in his gaze linger vestiges of things I cannot imagine. I will end with this: Leanne took up Sarah’s garden, and when I drove by their isolated farmhouse in the wee hours of night last spring, there on the porch hung a light, glowing just above a flat of seedlings. I took it as a sign that he was back among us.
CHAPTER 3
FEBRUARY
BACK WHEN I WAS still living in the city and working split shifts at the hospital, I left my apartment one spring morning to discover my truck had been tagged with a pale green parking ticket stapled to a business-sized envelope. The ticket threw me off stride from the get-go because the truck was parked well off the street in its proper numbered spot on the apartment complex lot, but it was sure enough the real deal, one of those miniature self-sealers emblazoned CITY OF EAU CLAIRE PARKING VIOLATION and appended with clusters of red-letter fine print: Make your remittance payable to the City Treasurer…IF NOT PAID EXTRA PENALTIES WILL ACCRUE…The State Dept. of Transportation will suspend your vehicle registration. The two lines reserved for “VIOLATION DESCRIPTION” had been filled out in hand-printed all-capital block letters:
ABANDONED VEHICLE
PUBLIC EYESORE
My ears did a hot flash. I tore open the business envelope and began to read the letter within. By the second line, I was making squeaky noises like the ones you hear when you bump a wall full of bats. By the third line, I had a full-blown case of the fuming huffies.
Alpine Managment
281 Grant St.
Eau Claire, WI.
(715) 555–1433
Occupant/Vehicle Owner
This corespondance is in reguards to your vehicle. We, here at Alpine have been receiving many complaints with respect to your truck.
As I’m sure you would agree that a clean and respectable place to live is an important item to all those who reside in this particular apartment complex. We have contacted the local police department, as well as our own lawyers, and have found it well within our rights to impose certain standard on our tenants.
Now I was sputtering like a cat stricken with galloping hairballs.
I’m am sure that this problem can be quickly remedied. Please call us before any more actions are taken.
The fine you have already received can and will be paid by our financial service if you resond to us with in the next 48 hours.
CALL WITHIN 48 HOURS BEFORE ANY FURTHER ACTIONS ARE TAKEN.
Sincerely,
E. Thomas Packard
Regional Operations Manager
There commenced an epic snit. Independent observers would later report the manifestation of visible indignation vapors, which for the record are off-yellow and shoot mainly from the ears. My heart was beating high in my chest and I was quivering with pique. A second read-through of the letter left me flat-out barking.
“We, here at Alpine…” We, here?!? The royal We?! Tone-wise, E. Thomas, we are off on the wrong foot.
“…have been receiving many complaints with respect to your truck.” I raised my green-eyed gaze to the buildings around me. Suddenly every window had twitchy curtains.
“As I’m sure you would agree…” You don’t get to be Regional Operations Manager without knowing how to blow the twin smoke rings of insincerity and unction up the backside of those you despise.
“…a clean and respectable place to live is an important item to all those who reside in this particular apartment complex.” More than you know, E. Thomas, more than you know. My particular apartment complex window faces the pallet-stacked hindquarters of a Shopko. Specifically, the litter-snagging loading dock where a depressed woman chose to asphyxiate herself beneath her car one recent frozen morning. What manner of clunker-parking clod would corrupt such a vista?
“We…have found it well within our rights to impose certain standard…” Under which purview Alpine Management has crammed twelve hulking faux chalet apartment buildings into a single city block, half of them overlooking the service entrances to a strip mall.
“I’m am sure that this problem can be quickly remedied.” Yes. I’m getting the rifle now and will be up the water tower shortly.
“Please call us before any more actions are taken.”
I was jabbering with rage.
You don’t work yourself into this sort of state so that you can get put on hold and blow a vein. I fired up the International and dropped the hammer for 281 Grant Street.
Even when it was shiny and new, the International L-120 wasn’t set up to win beauty contests. It had a squatness. The fender lines were too square. In his book International Trucks, author and International expert Frederick Crismon refers to the L-Series as looking “squashed.” Alongside its Ford and Chevy contemporaries, the L-120 was the plain girl with thick ankles. Heavy-duty engineered indeed. In contrast to the refrigeration division’s frothy femineering superficialities, the L-Series trucks had been completely reworked when they were introduced in 1949. International advertised the trucks as “new from bumper to taillight,”
and according to the International Truck Color History, there was substance behind the hype. Nearly everything—the engine, the chassis, the suspension, the brakes, and the look of the trucks themselves—had been redesigned. In fact, apart from one optional three-speed transmission, Ertel and Brownell claim that the only surviving items traceable to preceding models were the hubcaps.
Advertisements and sales literature from the time reveal that International was especially proud of the L-Series’ redesigned “Comfo-Vision Cab.” At seventy inches wide, the Comfo-Vision cab represented an expansion of ten inches over the previous K-model cab, and was pitched as the “roomiest on the road.” It featured an adjustable seat (previous seats had been fixed in one position) designed to provide “head room, elbow room, and leg room for the biggest driver in the business” and “lounge chair seating for three.” In a promotional photo of the cab taken from the perspective of the hood ornament, two undersized men in milkman caps gaze at the camera like a pair of bemused bookends. You could squeeze between them maybe one installment of The Bobbsey Twins. Additional selling points included the addition of adjustable vent windows (“open and close with the flick of a thumb”), an adjustable cowl ventilator to admit fresh air, and live-rubber cab mounts upon which the cab was purported to “float.” I can report from the seat of my pants that this claim was optimistic in the extreme.
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