So when Mom told me Dad had up and joined the choir, it felt like a flip-flop on one of those How To Tell if Your Child is Using Drugs moments. You’ve seen the bulleted lists: change in usual activities; change in friends; new hobbies; drastic change in personality; change in clothing choices (forty years in overalls, and there he is doing fa-la-las in a white button-down and green bow tie).
Seriously. I’m gonna check his sock drawer.
When my father and the rest of the traveling choir perform at St. Jude’s, I attend with Amy in tow. St. Jude’s was the Catholic church in New Auburn. I say was because a regional bishop shut it down en route to earning a significant promotion. That was hard to take, even for a lapsed Protestant like me. When my brother’s wife was killed seven weeks into their marriage, St. Jude’s opened their doors for the funeral without regard to affiliation. And for years now, whenever a Lutheran or Methodist event overflows the capacity of its respective church, the whole production shifts to St. Jude’s.
In closing the door, the bishop cited economic concerns. It’s always tricky when Men of God wield calculators. He showed up to do the job himself, I’ll give him that. He looked pinched but resolute. I attended the final service out of respect for my neighbors, as it was their blue-collar tithing that paid for the shingles, the pews, and the bishop’s remarkable matching cap and bathrobe. His decree has been ameliorated somewhat by the fact that the St. Jude’s auxiliary continues to make the church available for weddings, funerals, and public events—including the community choir Christmas concert.
Huffing and stomping into the foyer from the frozen parking lot, we pack into the pews, cozy in our coats. We all do some swiveling, looking around to see who’s here and who’s where. On the stroke of the hour, the choir files out, the women in their dark green robes, the men in their white shirts and green bow ties. You see a lot of gray heads up there, and some cautious climbing of the risers. The men always look scrubbed up pretty good, with fresh comb tracks in their hair. Somewhere someone is still selling Brylcreem. The women look pleased and pleasant. My mom—wearing her bifocals and with her white hair up in a bun—is there, and so is my sister-in-law Barbara. Barbara’s husband—my brother John—is in the back row stage right, his face windburned and bearded. Dad is also in the back row, stage left. Most everyone has a trace of kindergarten recital stiffness in his posture. The conductor is an animated fellow given to preacher-hopping during the rhythmic parts, and given to hand-waving during the hortative parts, but you grant him latitude because he has himself quite a job there, summoning hosannas from a pack of mannered Midwesterners. During warm-ups I note he sports a scandalous earring, but then he is the leader of the band.
And so they sing for us. I make it to the Christmas concert about every other year, and am always enchanted with the homemade joy of it all. I think of these neighbors getting their work done and hustling through supper so they can make rehearsal on time, giving up their evenings in, their television shows, their early-to-bed. Doing it as fall becomes winter, fighting the first snowy roads. Memorizing their lyrics and learning their parts, with no expectation of remuneration beyond smiling faces and afterward, coffee and cookies. I see the dump truck driver raising his voice to the ceiling panels, hear the administrative assistant weaving her harmony with that of the farm wife, and think at that very moment of the googolplex infinitude of electrified screens and bangety-bang speakers blasting away at the world, and we are blessed indeed to be in this small space, with our neighbors singing for us. The music swells from worshipful chorale to hand-clapping swing, up and down, the tempo of the piece following the tempo of the tale. The music builds and builds, soaring to the point where I am rocking in my seat and bobbing my head some when my gaze shifts to Dad in the backmost row, and it hits me as a soft shock that he looks small up there. Still the bright eyes, still the wrestler’s physical alacrity, but he is favoring one knee, and after years of little change, his hair has gone gray and gone thin. Right around his pop-out ears—the ones Mom swears she never noticed until someone mentioned it—the hair is tufted and a tad askew, so that when he peers through big glasses to see the music and sings with his eyebrows raised like he’s been surprised by the next note, he’s all absentminded-professor-looking. But more than that, the oversize glasses and the green bow tie render him childlike, even as I realize: that’s my dad, becoming an old man.
Here on the new place there is much to do. Most of our things are still in boxes. A goodly bunch of the rest of our things are still in the New Auburn house. As far as self-sufficiency, Anneliese and I are doing our best to aim low—some eggs, some pork chops, some firewood; if we can raise just a portion of the heat and groceries by our own hand this first year, it will be an improvement on years previous. There is also the small matter of me nattering on about how I intend to be a subsistent man of the land even as I spend a quarter of the year ramming around the country with a trunkload of books. This is hardly proper behavior for a father, a husband, or a husbandman.
Also, we have a baby on the way. Due in early spring. Anneliese has proposed the tot be birthed right here in the crooked old house. The first time she brought this up, I laughed in a Hahaha! Good one! sort of way, and then, seeing her gaze harden ever so slightly, I said, well, yes, sure we could discuss that, sure! Hahaha! This time the Hahaha was a little higher pitched.
CHAPTER 1
This morning while splitting wood, I attempted to clear my left nostril using a rustic maneuver known as the “farmer snort” and misfired badly. My Eustachian tubes have yet to assume their former diameter. I bubble-gummed an eardrum, shot fizz out both tear ducts, and may have permanently everted one eyeball. I believe I sprained my uvula.
The act of blowing one’s nose without benefit of Kleenex is a skill appreciated along a wide spectrum of background and endeavor—synonymous terms include fisherman’s tissue and air hanky. But I grew up calling it a farmer snort, because them’s my people, and them’s who taught me.
The lessons were not formal. Watch and learn, learn by doing. Same way I learned to spit. Although Dad nearly derailed me there. We were walking from Oliver Baalrud’s barn to the house for a lemonade break between unloading hay wagons when I puckered up and gobbed a stringer down my miniature bib overalls. I’d been watching Oliver all day. He was a diminutive Norwegian and an accomplished spitter—not big tobacco-ey streamers, just frothy little pips, but he did it constantly, and the flecks flew sharp and straight. Gosh, it was just the neatest thing. He could do it while talking, pitchforking, or backing up the tractor. I wasn’t even in kindergarten yet, but I was trying to march beside my dad like a little hay-making man, and I guess I figured spitting would be the thing. When I goobered on my bibs, Dad didn’t break stride. Just looked down and said, “Don’t spit until you know how.”
Boy, that set up a conundrum. How you gonna learn if you don’t do?
I guess I got around it. Later, when I lost my milk teeth, the new set came in with a pretty good gap. This helps with the aiming, and has a rifling effect. Given a gift, you work with it. I can sit in the kitchen and knock a horsefly off your doorknob.
Executed smartly, the farmer snort is a source of transcendent clarification. In short, it really lightens your head, and consequently your day. Conversely, a snort misplayed can put a serious crimp in your karma. As with most things in life, your odds of success improve through focus and rehearsal. Determine your dominant nostril; visualize success; think through the snort—that sort of thing. I have encountered people who claim to be able to perform a hands-free double-barrel farmer snort. I am skeptical and not about to hang around while they prove it. The first time I saw my wife farmer-snort, I felt a renewed flush of affection and thought, Now there is a woman who can endure.
I split wood because I boldly predict that next winter will be cold. Climatic creep notwithstanding, one retains the long johns. Ever since I departed the home farm some twenty-four years ago, I have warded off winter with a twist of the thermos
tat. Now that we’ve moved to the farm, we have backup electric heat, but the preponderance of warmth in our house is generated from within a square steel box in the living room, and the thing must be fed. I have this spot where I like to chop; it overlooks a swale that breaks into the valley below. Now and then I pause to un-bend my back and absorb the view. I feel hardy standing here, muscular and flush with the full pulse of labor. There is sweat in my stocking cap, my typist palms are nicely sore from gripping the ax, and the splintered wood at my feet is tangible evidence of my attempt to provide for our little family of three. Our farmhouse—just up the slope from where I stand—is a mishmash of remodels and add-ons clad in scuffed aluminum. The windows are uncoordinated, and the floorboards are straight out of a carnival funhouse. Moving from the kitchen to the living room, you step up a four-inch riser; keep moving on the same plane around the central wall, and you will circle right back to the riser, having never stepped down. This creates an M. C. Escher effect and helps explain why my mother-in-law refers to the bathroom hall as “that wheelchair ramp.” But at the heart of the structure is a log cabin built in the 1880s, and it is dead solid. A few of the hand-squared logs are still visible along one side of the living room. They are the width of a boar’s back. Pausing ax in hand to gaze off across the territory, I picture myself as some austere pioneering backwoodsman on the order of Abe Lincoln—albeit dumber, stubbier, and unlikely to alter the course of human events, unless you count snoozing at a stoplight.
It’s a good day for splitting. Fifteen below at dawn, and even in mid-afternoon the oak is frozen tight. Wet wood split in summer absorbs the ax with a punky tunk! You spend half your time wrenching the sunk blade free; the beveled steel cheeks press out a watery froth. Today at subzero, nearly every stroke terminates in a crisp ker-rack! The halves part neatly, releasing a scent like musk and cheese. The exposed wood is laced with crystals of ice that refract the sun and salt the grain with an interstitial twinkle.
I split a while, then stack a while.
The baby is due in early April, just over three months from now. After a slow start, I am astounded at the speed with which Anneliese’s belly is growing. Whatever is in there, it is a kicky little creature, and prone to nocturnal hiccups. Nearly every night when we lie in bed, Anneliese’s midsection begins to lurch sharply and at measured intervals. It is my understanding that the sensation is equivalent to the baby playing foosball with Anneliese’s innards. It is tough to drift off with a miniature single-stroke engine boing-boinging between your liver and bladder, and compounding the problem, ever since Anneliese became pregnant, she has been struggling with insomnia.
We do not know if we are having a boy or a girl because we have had no ultrasound, and barring some pressing sign or symptom, will not have one. Anneliese is defiantly self-directed in these matters, relying on a coterie of friends covering the spectrum from pagan shamans to a home-educated evangelical Christian nutritionist. I have gone to the medicine cabinet seeking an aspirin and come up with powdered kelp.
I am nervous about the baby business, but this is hardly news. I am nervous about everything—from last year’s tax calculations to the blinking light on the answering machine. Discussions in the arena of health care do not always go easy between Anneliese and me. Thanks to the holistic curriculum provided to me by the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire School of Nursing during the years I thought I knew what I wanted to do for a living, I am willing to give consideration to a wide range of alternative treatments, but remain decidedly partial to Western medicine. In part, this comes from my unwillingness to swim against popular tides, coupled with extreme trepidation about doing the wrong thing. My wife does not labor under the same unattractive state of wimpitude. In a marriage that has so far been everything I hoped it might be, our most difficult—even heated—discussions have been about medicine. Having said that, regarding neonatal issues, she has several advantages, chief among them being that (A) she is carrying the baby, and (B) since we are paying for prenatal care and delivery out of pocket, I am happy to go along with the economically attractive elements of her program.
Economy is as economy does, and having observed my progress at the woodpile for a month now, Anneliese has lately begun lobbying for a wood-splitting bee, in which we invite the neighbors and get the whole works done at once. She says I shouldn’t be toiling out there all alone. I suspect she has also calculated my ax stroke to BTU ratio and fears that by next February we’ll be busting up the last of the kitchen chairs for kindling. “We can make chili,” she says. “Terry can bring his splitter, and we’ll get it all done in one day.” It’s a good idea, and indeed, our neighbor Terry has offered to share his gasoline-powered wood splitter. It’s a smooth little machine with a small engine and hydraulic ram mounted on a steel I beam that rides on a set of trailer wheels. You just hook it behind your tractor or pickup and tow it to wherever it’s needed. Once the wood chunks are placed on the I beam, the operator moves a lever forward and the hydraulic ram pushes the bolt of wood against a piece of beveled steel the shape of an ax blade. The hydraulic pressure is slow but inexorable, and even the toughest knot-bound snag comes apart into manageable pieces. The first time I saw an automatic splitter I was a kid, and it was an overbuilt homemade contraption. Nowadays you can pick ’em up at the Farm & Fleet, all painted and shiny.
The alternative is to flail away madly with a splitting maul, sweating like an overheated stevedore and likely working up a stellar case of carpal tunnel. My wife is right. My pecking away solo is silly, and my left arm has been numb for a month in a dermatome representing the ulnar nerve. But I’m not out here to be efficient. I’m out here to clear my head. To feel the ax rise and fall, to blow the breath out on the downstroke and drive through the bolt. To bring the blade down dead center and see the wood explode—the satisfaction is, I suppose, similar to what a golfer feels when connecting with the sweet spot. When you hit the wood just right, it doesn’t feel like you’ve dealt a blow, but rather that the steel head has floated through the wood. When you miss, on the other hand—when you deliver a stroke that ends in a dead wedge, or kicks out sideways and caroms into the dirt—you’re often left feeling disoriented, sometimes with the same numb-palm sensation as when you swing early and hit a baseball off the tip of the bat.
I want to split wood by hand for the same reason I want to have pigs and chickens. You want to eat meat, you raise an animal and kill it, or at the very least steal its eggs. You want to stay warm, you knock the wood into little chunks. Beyond that, there is the idea that primitive, meaningful work delights the mind. When undertaken in the absence of compulsion, I should say. One regularly finds that praises of an honest day’s work are frequently sung by people in clean clothes. I am thinking more along the lines of the character created by Jim Harrison in the novel Returning to Earth, who says his blue-collar jobs “kept me grounded in actual life.” I am being selfish about the wood. Proprietary, even. When I chonk a chunk into the firebox, I want to stand back and claim it a bit. A man, being a man. Providing.
You take that ax in hand, and it frees your mind. Of course, too much dreaming and it will also free your toes. I am regularly dramatic with my wife about accumulated pending deadlines and backlogs and time spent on the road, only to have her look out the window and see me there chopping when I should be typing. In proposing the firewood bee, she is being eminently sensible, and that is where we part company.
If she brings it up again, I shall tell her I am freeing my mind.
The centerpiece of my parent’s farmhouse is a stout Monarch Model 3755D wood-burning range. Carl Carlson, the man who homesteaded our farm, bought it as a wedding gift for his wife Charlotte when they were married in 1920. When he vetted the stove prior to purchase at the Farmers Store in New Auburn, the salesman demonstrated its durability by jumping up and down on the open oven door. Product testing of equivalent rigor is unimaginable in our stamped-tin age and will furthermore get you Tasered at the Best Buy. Behold the mighty
nation gone slack.
When the Carlsons installed an electric range, the Monarch was banished to the basement. Mr. Carlson reattached the stovepipe to the chimney, and Mrs. Carlson used the stove to burn garbage and make lye soap. By the time my parents arrived, it was coated with rust and dinge. Looking as ever for ways to pinch pennies, Mom and Dad decided to move the stove back upstairs and use it to supplement the furnace heat. In order to do so, Dad had to disassemble it—unbolting the warming ovens, detaching the water jackets, and generally breaking it down into the smallest components possible. It was still a prodigious project; I have seen the original catalog materials for the 3755D, and it weighs 442 pounds—that’s a lotta microwaves.
A neighbor came to help with the lifting, and once the stove was reassembled upstairs, its squat bulk anchored the entire first floor. Mom cleaned it up and rubbed it down with blacking, and although the shiny bits were dimmed and pitted, they did take a polish, and the blue Monarch logo still scrolled beautifully across the white porcelain enameling of the oven door. She rarely baked in the stove, but we often came in from wood-gathering expeditions to the scent of smoked ham and vegetables in a cast iron pan that had percolated on the stovetop all day long, and as we ate, our caps and mittens dried in the warming ovens flanking the central stovepipe and its butterfly damper, which reminded me loosely of the Batman logo. On cold school mornings, we tussled to see how many of us could plant our hindquarters on the warm oven door.
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