Give a Girl a Knife

by Amy Thielen

  We lugged Adirondack chairs inside the fence, each cracked a beer, and surveyed our little kingdom. For all of the vegetable eating I’d done growing up, we’d never grown any ourselves. My lack of knowledge in this area was thrilling. I was twenty-one years old. We might not have had any power—no lights or running water, not even a phone line—but I remember it as an electric time, when all connections were firing. The road ahead, cooking out of the garden, stretched out long in front of me.

  —

  The mosquitoes were our alarm clock; humming at a high pitch, they dove into our ears and then teased us at close range, hovering close enough to reveal their hairy legs and garters. This was before we rigged up an army-issue mosquito netting over our bed, as both princess tent and impenetrable bug-free zone.

  When Aaron and I now talk about this era we tend to list everything that we lacked, in context with everything we eventually acquired. Our life at the house was the real-life definition of the timeless feeling I felt we had together, and the changes we made to it over the seasons compressed the nineteenth and twentieth centuries like a paper fan. I can describe it in many mini-eras.

  This was the oil-lamp era, before we got the used solar panel from Aaron’s buddy Dave and the old car battery and inverter from Bruce and were able to rig them to power the laptop and two electric lights (though not both at the same time). This was before we pounded the sand point well, when we were still hauling water back to the house in five-gallon plastic containers, which we filled at our neighbor Marie’s spigot or at the faucet on the outside of my dad’s car dealership in town—inconspicuously, after hours. This was before the porch and its beneficent mosquito screens. This was before Aaron built the new outhouse, when we still used the old spider-filled one Aaron had pulled off an abandoned farm.

  This was before we had a phone. That first summer we’d stop at Tiny’s Meats, the small meat market that sat alone on a treeless patch of ground a few miles down the road, to pick up some ham steak and any phone messages, if applicable—until Barney, the owner, shook his head and told me he couldn’t take any more of my messages. My mother’s reminder call, to “tell Amy to bring Grandma Rose’s pink glass platter when she comes to the city on Saturday,” might have pushed him over the edge.

  To ease off Barney, we made most of our outgoing calls at the pay phone attached to the Two Inlets Country Store, four miles down the road. The small store and bar (selling weak 3.2-percent beer, per Minnesota law) was, and remains, one of the three public points in this small community, an unincorporated burg populated largely by descendants of the original homesteaders and native families. The other two landmarks are the Spanish-style Catholic church, complete with a fieldstone altar built to mimic the grotto of Lourdes in France, and the Two Inlets Mill, a bustling, old-school sawmill. By the time we arrived, Aaron had already worked a winter at the mill, throwing slabs in the planing shed. The cozy store was where we bought our gas, eggs, cream, sugar, and other dry goods and occasionally did some drinking around the horseshoe bar.

  Back at our house, cold beverages were hard to come by. I kept our perishables in an old propane fridge we dragged home from a friend’s hippie homestead south of town but never actually turned on, because everyone said that the propane pilot would suck all of the oxygen from the house and kill us. So we stacked the vegetable bins with blocks of ice from the store, turning it into a semifunctioning new-fashioned, old-fashioned icebox—cool enough to keep smoked meat and dairy from spoiling. Fish or chicken, not for long.

  Starting as we did with zero connection to modern life, we added back amenities as we could afford them, at an inching pace. At the end of the first summer, after Aaron took out a bank loan for the five thousand dollars the telephone company required to run a line down our long road, we got a phone. I sat up late one night talking to my mom, the spiral cord wound around my body, and I remember trying to correct her semantics, to get her to call our place a “house.” Her habit of calling it a cabin drove Aaron crazy. “It’s a house!” he insisted. The distinction seems ridiculous now, but I got his point. A house is a primary residence, a cabin is a secondary seasonal one, and his feelings for this place demanded primacy. We were unapologetically dramatic about it—being, after all, still in our twenties.

  “I don’t mind cooking without running water,” I told my mom. “My kitchen’s kind of like the kitchen Grandma grew up with on the farm in Buckman.” She was not impressed.

  “Sure, it’s great if Aaron’s doing all the water hauling!” she said. “What happens if you’re out there alone?”

  My mom thought I could conquer any urban mountain and rule any office kingdom, but she doubted my ability to haul water; that pretty much summed up the fretful stance she took to my growing self-reliance. She must have forgotten that I had minored in women’s studies; I wanted to haul water.

  I didn’t know how to tell her that I felt like I’d been given the chance to pass through a wormhole into an older, wonderfully unspecified time. I tried to persuade her that we weren’t thinking small; we were dreaming big.

  My dramatics brought about the opposite intended effect. Being a mother—and being my mother, for whom the details of modern domesticity reign supreme—she tearfully confessed: “I’d happily call it a house and not a cabin if it weren’t what it is…which is more like a hovel!”

  I glanced into the kitchen, cataloging the things that would look awful to her: my gross open bucket full of compost; my black-bottomed pans fired sooty from the hot yellow flames of the propane burners, which unlike her, I ran on high; the rough wooden windowsills whose burrs caught on the dishcloth and couldn’t be properly wiped; my favorite rusty peeler. I imagined her standing beside me as I cooked, watching from the wings as I rinsed out a bowl with a dribble of cold water, wiped it, and used it again—because I didn’t have hot running water—and the woman who believed that everything had to be sanitized in a 145-degree dishwasher looked crestfallen. She didn’t even have to be present for me to feel her thoughts bubbling up in me. I knew what she’d say: Rust! That’s not even sanitary.

  Okay, I thought, this was perhaps not where she imagined her daughter living upon graduating from college—a rough-hewn log cabin with gaping floorboards out in the Two Inlets State Forest. Not only did it lack power and refinement, but it also lacked distance from the town from which she had so dramatically fled with us in tow, a town to which I—to her puzzlement—had so enthusiastically returned.

  I forgave her the digs about our house. The place wasn’t her style. But I couldn’t help but scowl into the darkness at her for moving me away when she did, for deepening my nostalgia, for complicating my life with this need to go home to this place that held little hope for my future employment.

  “It just feels like home,” I said meekly.

  “But it’s not even the same Park Rapids you grew up in. You were a town kid.” And then she sighed and said with more tenderness, “Honey, home will always be wherever I am.” I knew exactly what she meant, that home was me, Bob, and Marc, sitting around her table, eating her pork roast, her spaetzle, her gravy.

  I worshipped her pork roast, but after we hung up, I thought, No, I’m sorry, Mom. Home will not always be where you are. My home was a place. The proximity of where we sat, just twenty-five minutes from my hometown Main Street, mattered to me. I didn’t yet know exactly why, but it mattered a great deal.

  —

  “Hey, Aaron, will you take out the buckets under the sink?” I pleaded. “They’re full again.”

  “Sure—but don’t you want to get outside?”

  This was one of Aaron’s constant refrains. He didn’t understand how I could stay inside the dark house all day while the sun was shining outside, when the tasks of the garden were calling. Habit, I guess. Odd for a girl who had moved to the woods, but I had always considered myself firmly an inside person. I’d never been very nature curious. My directionals were always better in malls than they were in the outside world. I was reall
y good with up, down, right, and left; north, south, and the rest never really took.

  Initially I rebelled against this call of the wild. Like a turtle coaxed to stick out its head, I pulled it in more tightly and curled up defiantly in a big chair with my book. Eventually, our way of life forced me to leave my chair to go to the edge of the woods to dump pots of frying oil, to the herb bed to get thyme, to the garden for a hot chili pepper, to the shed to get oil for the lamps or wood for the stove when it grew cold. To the outhouse to pee.

  Sometimes on these forays I’d pause and look at the creek that encircled us. The widest part had to be a mile across, but it was no swimming hole (unless you liked gambling your limbs with snapping turtles). It was more like a nature preserve, the geese and swans and redwing blackbirds holding court by day, the wood frogs and splashing beavers and crooning wolves taking over at night. I sat down in the grass under one of our birch clumps with my cup of coffee, the trees’ papery bark flapping like loose skin, the flickering sunlight warm on my arms, and it felt good to be small. Just an inconsequential animated speck in the great big woods. The animals were doing their own thing. The birds swooped down around me in gangs to peck competitively at the ground, oblivious to me. The dandelions opened up with the sun but pulled in their yellow arms at around dinnertime, hiding their blooms just when I was getting ready to go looking for their greens. Every plant in the garden had its own companion look-alike, a weed that had sprouted next to it in an attempt to pass detection: feathery fronds among the carrot tops, purslane under the round potato leaves. They were survivors.

  I finally understood why so many locals called their houses a “place” and why they would give it a name, as if it were a living being. The interior and exterior walls of our rough board-and-batten siding were rightly, fluidly, connected.

  At times, the boundaries needed enforcing.

  Standing in the kitchen one morning, I felt a tickle on my ankle and looked down at the gaping floorboards at my feet and into the sand beneath the cracks. There, a sharp spire of green leaf jauntily rose. Was that a blade of grass? No, the leaves were too thick and too stiff.

  It was corn.

  A cut kernel must have popped off my cutting board and landed directly below the sink, where my vigorous sloshings sprinkled it with water and the sun beaming through the window gave it a rooting chance.

  I laughed and let it live for a day. The next morning I skewered its roots with a butter knife, dragged it out, and dropped it in the compost.

  —

  My dad was glad I was back in town, if mildly suspicious. The man who had known me previously as a sore teenager gifted in passing on late Macy’s bills found my new rustic life a little incongruous, but, to his credit, never said so. He simply shook his head and pronounced that we were “living on love out there.” What we were living on, literally, was a blooming vegetable garden and a fantasy that was part hippie and part nineteenth-century homesteader.

  The feeling that we inhabited a different era, or maybe the twilight zone, persisted when I went to town that summer. Walking Park Rapids’s Main Street, crossing the double row of parking in the middle of the street, the scale felt off to me, as if I’d dropped into a miniature diorama. The streets looked too wide, the stores too small, the people as faux-familiar as television characters. There was my fifth-grade sex-ed teacher, ringing up my order at the coffee shop. There was my brother’s hockey coach—never could remember his name—waving me down. Faces came back as if in a dream, characters I should have remembered. It had only been six or seven years since my mom had moved us to the city; to the residents of Park Rapids my absence was just a sliver. I retreated back to our house, and to 1895, and fired up the oil lamps.

  The truth was, if the place hadn’t been a little intimidating, I wouldn’t have liked it so much, and the lack of electric light compounded this. That fall, every night at 6:30, just before dinner, we experienced about twenty absolutely nonilluminated minutes: When the darkness fell inside the house, the oil lamps couldn’t compete with the glowing sunset. It wasn’t until the sun slid behind the trees that the lamps could finally take over.

  After dinner, Aaron set a lamp by his side to work on a large bas-relief wood carving, using chisels and a mallet to knock images into a six-foot-wide slab of bowling-alley floor he’d scavenged. Its scene involved intriguing buildings and situations: social clubs whose members had recently taken off, leaving the evidence of their wrongdoing right in the yard; garages with trucks backing out; uprooted trees whose wiry roots formed a madman’s hideout; tiny little broken-down fences leading to nowhere. One evening when we had our neighbor George Kueber, the owner of the sawmill, over for dinner, he teased, “Would have to be a pretty skinny rabbit to get through that fence you carved!” The carved slats were as thin as flat toothpicks, and the varnished, painted edges were soft and rounded, as if overfondled by generations.

  I tried to be similarly creative and junked around with a letterpress set I’d found at a garage sale. But not having a crafty bone in my body, mostly I read, to my total saturation; there was nothing else for me to do. I sat at a table covered with cookbooks, books of essays, the Becker County historical records of Two Inlets Township. In this I read of people who shot ducks and nailed them to the outside of their cabins to age, judging them ready when their bodies fell from the necks; of times when porcupines were protected, even if they did strip and kill trees, because they were so slow and could always be caught if a person was hungry; of the Widow Knapp, one of the first settlers in Two Inlets Township, who lost her husband soon after she moved out into the forest, but at the end of her hardscrabble life “drank her cup and murmured not, happy now in her old age to think she won the fight, and is honored by all who know her.” I was particularly drawn to the farm women’s journals, to stories of women who made complex impractical pastries in rudimentary kitchens, who wrote of making “chicken fixings” in the flush times and suppers of “just flour doings” in the lean.

  When I put aside the books and tried to write—something, anything—I was totally stumped for subject. The idea of writing fiction, of making things up out of the ether, terrified me. Instead, rambling paragraphs destined for essays came out, nothing more than quotable fragments. Finally, after much sighing over the legal pad, I reached a conclusion: I didn’t have anything to write about. It was with pure, hedonistic glee that I realized this and capitulated to my real obsession: reading cookbooks. I treated this infatuation like it was a job and gave it all of my time.

  One night Aaron’s sister, Sarah, came out for dinner, and afterward she and I sat at the table—me with my cookbooks and some hot-off-the-letterpress canning labels, her with her knitting—while Aaron knocked away at his carving in the studio, a few feet away, the whacks of the mallet echoing off the tall log walls. He was playing an old scratchy classical record on his hand-cranked 78 player, and every ten minutes he stopped to flip it over.

  “So is this what you guys are doing out here?” she asked bluntly, but without judgment. She was getting ready to leave for the Peace Corps in Latvia, to enter her own rural stopped time. Like us, she was deep into the cultural pastimes of two or three generations previous.

  I looked at the table covered with opened books scratched up with notes and the labels I’d painstakingly stamped out for my latest batch of blueberry jam, all six precious half-pints of it.

  “This is pretty much it,” I admitted, suddenly feeling like I should have been doing something even marginally as ambitious as she was.

  “No, no, no!” she backpedaled. “It’s nice. Kinda feels ‘cultural’ out here.”

  “Cities,” Aaron said, ashing off his cigar, “collect culture, but it all begins in the country.”

  We laughed out loud because we all knew that he was full of shit, including him, and topped off our shot glasses of sherry, because for a few blooming seconds we wanted to believe it.

  —

  I might have fancied myself a rural advocate, but I
soon learned that early American homestead cooking was not for the weak. I’d read that before electric mixers came along, meringues were whipped to a froth, then to shiny peaks, on a shallow platter with a kitchen fork. I used a whisk, but still: None of these recipe writers thought to mention how much it hurts. The physicality of early American cooking—the dough beating, the heavy pot-hauling, the picking of leaves and stems from an entire bushel of chokecherries—called up energy from a part of me I hadn’t known I had. The part, it turned out, that got a kick out of monotonous hand labor.

  Toward the end of one afternoon’s nonelectric flourless-chocolate-cake production, my whisk hurling into egg whites that were finally firming up like cement compound in sand, my arm began to throw fire and burn high up on the deltoid. I listened to the birds arguing and the swans squawking and the squirrels chittering over select bits from our compost pile, and then I let out a screaming chorus into the wilderness, happy to be making cake by hand and to be almost done with it. I hoped my brother Marc would appreciate it.

  Like homing pigeons, two out of us three kids had returned to Park Rapids, Marc to live with Dad for his last few years of high school. I felt a need to take care of him, the baby brother so far from the mother nest, and did so in the only way I knew how, by leaving phone messages with the night’s menu on his answering machine. He expertly played baby-of-the-family aloofness and accepted only reluctantly, if and when the menu sounded good enough, usually on my second or third offer. But I knew that our house was to him what it was to me: within driving distance of childhood but thankfully outside its borders.

  I stuck a corsage of fragrant pot marigolds into the mirrored ganache top of the chocolate cake, slid the braised chicken in wine sauce into the stove’s tiny firebox to bake slowly into itself, and retired to the porch, where Aaron and I both liked to have our predinner smokes—a stanky Camel for me and an odiferous pipe for him. The porch was still in process at that point, just raw boards laid on square pilings, like a boardwalk hastily assembled for the set of a Western movie. What happened next could have been written in the script.