Coop

by Michael Perry

  During their engagement, my parents had applied to the Peace Corps. Commonly enough, they wanted to help other people. Specifically, Mom hoped to provide maternal and child health care in Central or South America. Shortly after President Kennedy was killed, they received their call. Dad left his three-month-old soybean-squeezing career behind, and they moved to Northern Illinois University to undergo their initial training. Two and a half months later, they traveled to Hawaii for a final session in preparation for being deployed.

  Hawaii was beautiful. They were given time to travel, and in a sense it was a second honeymoon. Then came a surprise. “They told us women the shift to Hawaii would bollix up our menstrual cycles,” Mom told me recently. “And sure enough, I missed one. Then, being an O.B. nurse, I noticed some other things. So I got a med tech friend to give me a pregnancy test.”

  And there I was.

  And that was the end of the Peace Corps. They informed their group leader, and someone called Washington. Can’t go if you’re pregnant, said Washington. When Mom and Dad left home they said their good-byes, not expecting to see their friends and relatives for two years. They were back in four months.

  Some nights in the farmhouse after the cows were milked and the dishes drained, Mom and Dad would gather us in the dark and show slides of their abbreviated Peace Corps stint. For a rural Wisconsin kid, the images from Hawaii were tantalizing—volcanoes, gargantuan flowers, fields of sugarcane ablaze. Whereas all I remember of the Illinois photos was a handful of images showing tree limbs and power lines laden with ice. Mom said the ice storm was really something—it paralyzed De Kalb for days—but I’d witnessed the same thing in my own backyard and wasn’t very impressed.

  Then too, I came of age during a time when the finest thing your average frostbitten Midwesterner could imagine was a trip to Hawaii. How we envied those who ventured out pale from between the snow-banks only to return a week later looking like scorched beets in pineapple shirts. “We were in Hawaii,” they’d say, fishing a tin can from the depths of a Naugahyde Aloha! travel bag. “Have a macadamia nut!” Down at the café or the tavern or at family reunions, whenever conversation turned to wintertime vacation plans, Hawaii was sure to pop up. You always envied the ones who had made the trip. So over the years I worked up this bit: if someone asked me if I had ever been to Hawaii, I’d say not only have I been there, I was conceived there. I told the story many times, often in the presence of my mother. In all my life I have never heard my mother indulge in even the most innocent double entendre or off-color comment (the fact that she says “bollix” doesn’t count, as I can assure you she is utterly oblivious of the fact that it is derivative of the mild English expletive bollocks, and when she reads this she will be mortified). Whenever I delivered the Hawaii punch line she would avert her gaze or pat her legs the way she does when she’s uneasy. And then one day when I was well into my thirties, we were at a family get-together. Hawaii came up, and I reprised the bit yet another time. Mom motioned me into the hall.

  “I know you enjoy telling that story,” she said, patting her legs. “But it’s not right.”

  Pat, pat, pat.

  “I don’t think it was Hawaii.”

  Pat, pat.

  “I’m pretty sure it was during an ice storm in Illinois.”

  Back in Wisconsin, Mom and Dad bought a house and forty acres just outside the small town of Nekoosa, and Dad hired on at the Port Edwards paper mill. I was born at Riverview Hospital in Wisconsin Rapids at 1:42 a.m. on December 16, 1964. Before Mom returned from the hospital, Dad grabbed a swath of paper from the mill and made a sign that read WELCOME HOME MAMA AND MIKE. Right next to the word HOME he did a pen-and-ink sketch of our house—a log cabin that had been tacked over with off-brown faux-brick tarpaper. Dad taped the welcome sign to the old upright piano in the living room and placed a couple of baby gifts on the bench. Mom took a snapshot of the arrangement and glued the photo into my baby book. Just to the right of the piano is the rocking chair where Mom nursed me and Dad lullabied me to sleep. Two Bibles are visible on the music rest, stacked atop each other, the gilt pages lapped over the edge within easy reach of the rocker.

  For a brief couple of months, I was a treasured only child. Then the other kids started coming, and for the duration of my childhood they kept coming. Just inside the front door of my parents’ current house you will find a row of ten wooden lockers stretching fifteen feet from the welcome mat to the kitchen. Dad constructed the lockers himself and may have been in a rush, as the pencil marks are still visible through the varnish. Each locker had an integrated bench seat and separate spaces above and below the coat rack area for headgear, mittens, coats, and boots. Mom called the lockers “slots” and assigned us one each, using a grease pencil to inscribe our names above the coat hooks. Despite the nifty setup, the slots were forever overflowing with winter clothes and chore clothes and whatever we dumped after school, and Mom was continually admonishing us, “Clean up your slot!” which out of context sounds strangely personal. It was a losing battle. The porch nearly always looked like the back room of a Goodwill store under the inattentive management of compulsive ragpickers.

  When you tell people you were raised in a large family, they come right back wanting a specific number, but we operated on a sliding scale. I have had a multitude of siblings; some born of the same womb, some adopted, some fostered, and some arrived in the nighttime absent formal affiliation of any sort. Some stayed for a weekend, others their entire lives. The last time my mother put a pencil to it, she calculated sixty or so children had come into her care. The one time we all sat for an official family portrait, in 1979, there were eight kids and two adults, so let’s just say on average we were a family of ten. Or know that one night before supper in the early 1970s Dad put an extra leaf in the dinner table, and it never did come out. “Grab what you want the first time,” he would say whenever we had guests at mealtime. “It ain’t comin’ around again.” He replaced the chairs on one side of the table with a wooden bench upon which we sat shoulder to shoulder. Mom summoned us to supper by leaning out the porch door and rattling a cowbell, and we came from all corners.

  I was five months old when Mom and Dad took in their first foster child, a five-week-old infant with microcephaly. Her name was Connie, and she was “pre-adoptive,” meaning Mom and Dad were to care for her until the county arranged permanent placement. Some time later the social worker told her Connie lived just three months after leaving. Because Mom was a nurse, the county also began sending her “special needs” children. The first of these was a young boy named Larry. Larry was recovering from rheumatic fever, and per doctor’s orders was supposed to remain confined to the couch. Today Larry would likely be diagnosed with some behavioral disorder or another, and his family simply couldn’t manage him. He came with holes in his clothes, Mom says, and he was a handful, but full of fun.

  Eventually as Larry regained his strength and was so allowed, he put me in a cardboard box and rolled me around the house on my Playskool Walker Wagon. Then one day he pulled me from the box, wrapped my fingers around the wagon handle, and turned me loose. When I flopped, he picked me up and relaunched me. Again and again we set out across the linoleum tiles, Larry hovering as I stumped along to the rattle-jingle of the balls and bells bouncing in the cylindrical cage of painted dowels that spun between the wheels. Eventually he weaned me from the Walker Wagon and turned me loose without props. One step, a couple steps…again, every time I fell he would right me and relaunch me until one day I just kept going. On average, I have been toddling smoothly ever since.

  I don’t remember Larry, of course. In the photographs, he is a gangly kid with horn-rimmed glasses and a big grin. Mom says he would trap the cat under the sofa and then, employing the cardboard tube from a roll of wrapping paper as a megaphone, holler, “Come out, Kitty, with your hands up!” When he had recovered from the rheumatic fever, the county moved him back home. Years later my parents heard he was injured in a bicycle or motor
cycle accident, but they know nothing more than that. It’s something, though, to study that black-and-white photograph of me in the box, him with holes in both pant knees, and think, somewhere out there—if he survived—is the boy who taught me to walk.

  For a short time, it appeared as if my parents had settled in Nekoosa. Dad went to work at the mill in the morning, and cut firewood out back in the evenings. They were content at home, but Dad was dissatisfied in his work. Hired as a “research scientist,” he spent most of his days at a desk with nothing to do but watch trains come and go. As he looked out his window he began to formulate the idea that he would be happier in the northwest part of the state. He had pleasant memories of visiting his uncle Robert, a farmer up near Spooner, and his family still went deer hunting in the area every November. When a job matching his qualifications became available at a small factory in Bloomer, Wisconsin, he took it. This was a little farther south than he and Mom were hoping, but when a farm fifteen miles to the north came for sale, they decided to take the plunge, paying $14,900 for the buildings and 160 acres—80 of it tillable, the rest swamp and trees.

  And so it was that in June of 1966, the three of us put the noxious stacks of the Port Edwards mill in the rearview mirror of our ’56 Chevy wagon and headed across state for a new life in the northwestern corner of Chippewa County, Wisconsin. To this day both Dad and Mom claim the motivation behind the move was to raise their children in the country—there was never any plan to farm. In fact, when I ask him about it now, Dad says, “I don’t think I even realized I had that particular defective gene.” He went to work at the factory in Bloomer, making $2.20 an hour. But within a year he got a half-dozen sheep, and not terribly long after that he drove over to the neighbors and came back with the milk cow, and despite all the best-laid plans, my mom became a farmer’s wife.

  One of the reasons we’re having a baby is that Anneliese felt Amy should be allowed to grow up in the same house as a sibling. When she asked my opinion, I didn’t really know what to say, having never known any other way. The first sibling I can recall was a girl named Eve. She had blond hair and cat’s-eye glasses. I remember her pulling me in a wagon beneath the yard light beside a wild rosebush, although there is a black-and-white photograph of that moment in my baby book, and I wonder if I have animated it for memory’s sake. Eve was yet another “pre-adoptive” child, and she stayed with us for a year before the county placed her permanently. My father says her last night on the farm was one of the worst of his life. She cried and screamed that she didn’t want to go. I would only see her two more times—once a decade later when we were teenagers and she came to a nearby Bible camp, and once at her wedding reception. Both times it was wonderful to catch up, but so much time and life had passed that it was difficult to envision her as the sister I knew. In fact, while I can clearly remember her face from the days we played on the farm, I cannot summon it from either of the later two visits.

  I don’t know where Eve is now. Our last contact came fifteen years ago in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where I had heard she was serving as a police officer. During a trip to the public library I got caught up in the stacks and returned to find I had overstayed my parking meter. When I read the signature on the citation, I recognized Eve’s name, and thought fourteen bucks was a fair price for the fun of getting a parking ticket from a long-lost sister.

  My brother Jud was mentally disabled (we simply used the term retarded in that age) as a result of complications at birth. He was the youngest of five boys orphaned when their mother died of cancer and their father subsequently shot himself in the basement, experiences that added a layer of psychological trouble to his preexisting problems. He was prone to fits of yelling and screaming, and occasionally ate his mittens. The day he arrived we celebrated with a rare stop at the A&W root beer stand in Chetek. We had a four-door Chevy Impala at the time and there were kids crammed front and back—Dad was at work, so Mom was driving. After the waitress fixed the tray to the window, Mom started passing out hot dogs, beginning with Jud, who was seated directly behind her. When all the dogs were in hand, Mom set to divvying up French fries. When she turned to hand Jud his portion, he was swallowing the last of his hot dog, napkin and all. Another time he devoured an entire bag of unpeeled oranges. For all his voracious eating, Jud was always thin as a rail, no doubt due to the fact that he never stopped moving. He wore out a series of wheelbarrows, and used to sit sidesaddle in a little red wagon and push himself round and round the driveway with the sides of his feet until his leather boots wore through. When given a book, he would page through it compulsively until it was shredded. Since he was so hard on books, every Christmas my grandmother wrapped the JC Penney catalog and gave it to him. It was his favorite present. He’d strip away the paper and start flipping through the pages, front to back. When he reached the end of the catalog, he’d flop the catalog over and start through again. My brother John and I shared a bedroom with Jud for a while, and we remember waking at 2:00 a.m. to the sound of the pages going flip, flip, flip in the dark. Flip, flip, flip…FLOP. Flip, flip, flip…FLOP… By the time next Christmas rolled around the catalog was in tatters.

  In his teen years, Jud was tall and distinguished, with a shock of John Kennedy hair and a patrician jawline. When he was relaxed and his most obvious tics were suppressed, he projected an air of erudition. One evening a stranger drove into our driveway looking for directions to New Auburn. My brother Jed, then about ten years old, gave the man perfectly good directions. Just as he finished, Jud sidled up. “Go north. Two miles, take a right, then straight,” said Jud, in a fractured recitation of Jed’s directions. The result was utter nonsense—beginning with the fact that New Auburn lay to the south—but the way he rattled it off, it sounded believable.

  Jed pointed up at Jud. “He’s retarded.”

  “OK, little fella,” said the stranger, chuckling and patting Jed’s head. Then he climbed back in his truck, drove to the end of the driveway, and, exactly as Jud had instructed, turned north to nowhere.

  During much of my childhood we double-, triple-, and occasionally quadruple-bunked. When my brother John and I slept in a converted closet at the top of the stairs, we could stand erect on only one side of the “room,” as the other half was transected by the roofline. Per John’s request (he now owns a dump truck and a sawmill and will deny this, but I can provide photos), Mom painted a butterfly on the slanted ceiling. It was an attempt to evoke spaciousness, but that just meant when you stood up, you smacked your head on a flat plaster butterfly.

  With an eye to the expanding brood, Dad began to remodel the old three-bedroom farmhouse in the early 1970s and expects to finish the project any time now. There was always some wall being knocked out somewhere. Jed learned to climb ladders while still in diapers, and at one point when the ceiling was being reconstructed we amused ourselves by fishing for sandwiches through a hole cut in the upstairs floor. We’d set up an ice-fishing tip-up over the hole, lower the line, wait for the tug that released the flag, and then reel up a sandwich Baggie.

  Eventually it became obvious that the house simply wasn’t big enough, and Dad hired my uncle to help him build an addition that exactly doubled the size of the house. John and I were so excited at the prospect of having our own rooms that we would drag our sleeping bags through the second-floor window into the partially constructed addition and sleep on the subflooring with nothing but the naked stud walls separating us. Years later when I viewed reruns of WKRP in Cincinnati and saw Les Nessman delineating imaginary office walls by strapping tape to the floor, it reminded me of John and me sound asleep in the unheated addition, separated only by two-by-fours on sixteen-inch centers. When the addition was finished, the upstairs hallway was over forty feet long with nine doors.

  The house was now officially bigger than the barn. We treated it as a combination amusement park and gymnasium. Mom had a no-running-inside rule, but beyond that she pretty much turned us loose. We tore apart the couch and used the cushions to build
forts, and we used a cardboard refrigerator box to construct a submarine in the living room. Donning the flippers and snorkel masks Grandma Perry brought back from her vacation in Aruba, we’d belly-crawl out through the imaginary pressurized porthole and frog-kick across the linoleum, scanning the murky depths with the miniature flashlights that same grandma put in our Christmas stockings (Grandma Perry ignored the No Christmas rule and Mom and Dad let us). Mom kept the house stocked with art supplies, and often mixed up finger paint, which we swabbed across giant chunks of waxed paper torn from one of the rolls Dad got at surplus when he worked at the Port Edwards mill. I sat for hours at the play table looking at the bird feeder outside the picture window, drawing blue jays and evening grosbeaks, with Mom’s copy of Birds of North America as my guide. We had a Visible Man (his halves held together with rubber bands) and we studied his visible liver, but like most kids, we were mostly interested in stripping out his skeleton, as it reminded us of Halloween. We used our Tupperware Build-O-Fun kit to cobble up Dr. Seuss–like vehicles, and passed snowbound winter mornings inhaling the scent of wood smoke from our Temp-O-Matic Woodburner set. When the wood-burning got tedious, we would “accidentally” jab the red-hot Wonder Pen into the Styrofoam packing and sniff the poisonous yellow smoke. We dumped out our Lincoln Logs, strewed our Tinkertoy Master Builder set from kitchen to porch, and used Mom’s saucepans for army helmets. On winter nights when it got dark early Mom let us turn out all the lights in the house and play hide-and-seek. I remember the giggly-scaredy feeling of trying to hold super-still when you were just about to be found, and the clatter of pots and pans as one of my siblings bailed out of the cupboard and made a beat-feet break for the in-free post.