Give a Girl a Knife

by Amy Thielen

  The next day when I walked to the barn to deliver the afternoon cake, the three of them were standing up high on twenty-foot scaffolding near the airless ceiling of the hot barn. Aaron’s arms that night were sticky, the insulation particles clinging to his arm hair like dust to a fly leg. Seemed I had drawn the better chore stick.

  There were five daily meals on the farm: breakfast, morning coffee and cake, noon dinner, afternoon coffee and cake, and supper. Everything was homemade, nothing store-bought. But when Ruth made the rolls, she used instant yeast, and they rose so fast sitting on the warm woodstove that you could almost watch them inflate. She didn’t cook in her squat central woodstove anymore—she used her electric range—but she did use it for burning her small batches of daily paper garbage, which we fed into the stove by lifting a flat burner with a hooked iron rod.

  “Twice a week,” she informed me, “Richard’s wife, Linda, brings the lunches and field snacks.” Richard and Linda and their two boys lived on the adjoining eighty acres, in a white rambler nearly identical to Ruth’s. Already loyal to our benefactress, I thought to myself that with Ruth running the farm, maybe her daughter-in-law should have been taking on more of the cooking.

  The first day I put on one of her aprons and opened every cupboard and drawer, and then opened them all again, thinking that if I was to be as efficient as Ruth, I should try to memorize the lay of the land. I set about making myself useful.

  I fried the breakfast sausage in her electric skillet set up on the flat cast-iron surface of the woodstove, as Ruth did, and then fried the sliced potatoes in the grease until they were brown and crispy. I made the toast, stuck a spoon into the jar of her homemade strawberry freezer jam, and set it all on the table. Then I made the rolls and a gingerbread sheet cake for the morning snack and poured two pots of coffee into her large metal thermos. Lunch, what they called dinner, was more elaborate: one day, thin pork chops, from their neighbor’s hog, dusted with flour and quickly fried to crackling brown at the edges, the next day chicken and dumplings, and always a side dish or two of plain boiled and buttered vegetables from the garden—beets, beans, zucchini. The food was simple but honest. I gained an appreciation for the natural sweetness of carrots, dug from the garden, scrubbed but not peeled, sliced into coins, boiled in water, and heavily buttered. I learned to give my meal a sweet takeaway, as farmers did, a slice of homemade bread thickly iced with butter and jam to taste like cake.

  The strange paradox of farming dictates that the people whose lives revolve around the production of food don’t always have time to linger with it on their own tables—they had no time to idolize it. Like the cycles of growing, the table here spun its revolutions, but at a higher speed.

  After I finished the lunch dishes, Ruth would pick me up at the porch and take me with her on her chores. I sat behind her on the four-wheeler as she raced like a teenager over the rutted fields, looking for mounds into which she could inject an enormous plunger of mole poison. She took me with her to the grocery store, where she introduced me to others as part of a duo who had “broken down in my yard, but are staying awhile.” I sat next to her in the enclosed cab of the two-story tractor, harrowing the fields, which looked like dragging a wide rake over the tops of the rows as far as I could tell. Sitting next to her in the quiet cab, she asked me when Aaron and I had gotten married. When I told her we weren’t, I knew she was thinking of our cohabitation in her guest room, but she just looked to the horizon and said, “You will.”

  The days were swollen with work, which oddly made the evenings more buoyant. I shuffled around her living room’s linoleum floor in borrowed crocheted slippers, fell into the deep sofa, and felt as at-home as I would at a family holiday. A tall bouquet of yellow wheat sat on top of her wood-consoled TV, its dried-out strands reminding me of the husks of palm sprays my grandma kept on her living room wall. Aaron was deeply immersed in the hardbound history of the township, and he kept Ruth talking long past her usual bedtime, trying to get to the nut of what powered the people of this community to settle there, way up north in the flatlands of Saskatchewan. In the book she found a picture of their first house, a primitive-looking straight-log cabin, and told us how in the early days of their marriage she scrubbed the rough wood floorboards with a brush until they shone. I thought of the rough-hewn floorboards in our own house and momentarily flirted with the idea of getting down on my hands and knees to scour them. I imagined doing this in the winter, as she had, with the heat from the woodstove toasting the tops of the boards and the thick arctic humors floating up from the cracks between them.

  Toward the end of the week, Richard came over for dinner at Ruth’s with his two kids, but without Linda. As I cleared away the table, Richard pulled a fiddle out of its case and Aaron took out his small traveling guitar. The kitchen band struck it up, the sound pinging cleanly off all the hard surfaces—the linoleum counters and floors, the flat top of the woodstove, the paneled walls. Aaron sang, “She had golden memories of home…of her grandfather’s ooooold homestead…she went all the way to Ponsford on the prairie…cause that’s where her grandfather lived…” The sound had the telltale metallic echo of the 1400 AM radio station, both faraway and really close at the same time, acoustics that only a cavernous farm kitchen can create. Ruth sat at her kitchen table in a zip-up robe, tapping her soft slipper against the linoleum, cutting coupons out of the local paper with a pair of heavy silver scissors.

  —

  By the ninth day, we felt the need to make a move—or just move in with Ruth permanently. The Justy was a lost cause. Its experimental brush transmission hadn’t been up to a three-thousand-mile jaunt into Canada. We gave the car to Lee for parts. I called up my brother Bob, who was working for a car rental company down in Minneapolis, and he was able to pull some strings to allow us to rent a car in Canada, which, because we lacked a major credit card between us, we’d previously been unable to do. We posed for photos in front of the rental truck and then we took the main roads straight down to Winnipeg, this time not stopping at any off-highway towns, running over the details of our unexpected adventure the whole way home.

  A few minutes after arriving in Two Inlets, I dialed Ruth’s number back in Saskatchewan. It was six-thirty. She would be in for supper by then.

  “Ruth!” I said breathlessly, when she answered. “It’s Amy! We made it home!”

  “Oh?” she replied. I thought she would be thrilled to hear from us, but her flat voice didn’t return my fondness. I pictured her standing up next to the phone. “I’m happy to hear it. Say, you didn’t take my sewing scissors, did you?”

  I had, accidentally. I’d found them in my quilting bag.

  “Please send those back as soon as you can. Those are my best scissors.” What was I being so emotional about? her tone seemed to say.

  As we said good-bye, I got the feeling that she was leaning into her next thing, as if I could almost hear the Velcro on her shoes ripping. We were eight hundred miles away, and our chance meeting clearly wasn’t the divine intervention, the wrinkle in rural time, that it was to me. It was just over.

  —

  Back home, I was still thinking of Ruth’s physicality. The way she jumped out of her shoes at the door and pounced on the business of dinner. The way she snapped green beans two-handed so as to get through them faster. The punishing way she drove over the corrugated field’s ruts, her four-wheeler bouncing, as if it was a race against time to poison moles. The way she methodically cut coupons and organized them in piles.

  Thousands of acres of wheat or a kitchen garden a quarter mile long…whichever, she treated them the same. The act of raising food no longer seemed to me just a choice; it was just what you do. Long lines of my family had been steeped in this notion, and yet it took driving hundreds of miles north toward the Arctic Circle, and back, for it to come to rest in me. Ruth’s ambition was contagious.

  We’d traveled farther north and further back in time in search of the roots of our unlikely attraction to our h
omestead in the woods, and we’d found them. Our place could yield as much beauty as Ruth’s if I just put my belief, and my back, into it.

  Luckily, when we returned home in mid-September, the garden hadn’t yet frosted over as usual and looked to be waiting for us. The frost had come to bite, but just lightly, and all of my tomatoes were hanging ripe on the vines. We harvested two boxes of squash. And then we decided to dig out a much larger garden, carving out a fifty-foot rectangle where the hill teemed with native hazelbrush vines. Our new garden would have two entrances and terraces cut into the hill, and we’d surround it with a seven-foot-high fence that the deer couldn’t jump.

  My dream of pioneer cooking renewed, I started cooking our morning oatmeal overnight in the tiny oven set into the woodstove. It was kind of a crapshoot, but if I added enough water to steel-cut oats and wild rice, the banked fire plumped them perfectly by morning. With this dish I fell in love with inexactitude, with making things that rely less on precision and more on one’s inner knack. We topped it with butter and maple syrup and toasted almonds, good ballast for working outside.

  I put on my best Canadian thrift-store finds—a roomy, stiff pair of men’s leather work boots with laces that ran clear down to the toe, just like the boots Dean had worn, and a thick hooded woolen sweatshirt encircled with Inuit hunters—and buttoned my hunting-orange vest tightly over that. We had a pulaski axe and a shovel, and we took turns chopping and pulling out the hazelbrush roots. I swung the pulaski into the dirt, hooked the blade under a big one, and then, with my new boots as leverage, leaned back on the pole until the root stretched and snapped. After shaking the roots free of as much coffee-colored dirt as we could, we tossed the mangled rhizomes into a pile for burning. Unlike the rich dirt in northern Saskatchewan, our woodland topsoil only measured about four inches deep, nothing more than a thin layer of chocolate icing on a thick yellow-colored cake of sand, and the garden needed every bit of it. After a week of working in the cool fall air, we decided that if we were going to keep living in this place—and, freshly invigorated after our trip, it seemed we would—we should give it a proper homestead name. We’d call it Hazelbrush, to remind us of the effort we put into it. The nut’s hard-shelled, hard-won edibility seemed to fit.

  14

  CIRCUS OF THE RIDICULOUS

  So began a three-year-long migratory pattern. We lived up north for the entire gardening season—May to September—and moved down to Minneapolis in the winter, where we would take jobs in order to save up three or four thousand dollars to fund our nonelectric (e.g., cheap) life during the summer. We considered ourselves snowbirds on short leashes, shuttling between the northern and southern poles of the state. This was our plan, when I believed in it.

  Like a mother who doesn’t remember the pain of childbirth, I somehow forgot the agony of moving that descended on me like an absolute palsy each fall and spring. Every time we had to move—to pack and clean and organize—I collapsed into a chair and threatened never to leave it. Aaron ignored me and pushed ahead. With his charming—borderline annoying—habit of making loony ideas sound perfectly sane, he framed it in a romantic light: “If we’re going to do this, we need to be pragmatic. You have to be especially pragmatic about your dreams.” Once we were on the road, I quickly recovered and realized I’d been acting like a major pain in the ass. Eventually my constant grousing irritated even me.

  That fall of 1997 we harvested the garden, then watched the frost kill the garden plants one by one. I was amazed to find out which plants were fragile—tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and basil—and which ones had the chops to hold on into the fall. (The beets, the cabbages, and the sage, that’s what.) The frost stung the Swiss chard three times before it finally capitulated, and only then, after I shuddered my way through my last freezing-cold outdoor shower (the shortest of my young life), we packed it in for the year. I filled boxes with jars of my canning—apple butter, plum tomatoes in sauce, bread-and-butter pickles, fermented dills, pickled green tomatoes—loaded the back of the truck with flats of blushing not-quite-ripe tomatoes, and then we set off in a two-truck caravan to Minneapolis. My dad, whose generosity was judicious but always well-timed, had surprised me with the gift of a vehicle—not just a loaner, but one with an actual title. It came from the unpaved back row of the lot, the part they called “the dirt,” and was what the salesmen colloquially called a “five-dollar car,” a junker they’d try to sell for a few thousand bucks. My GMC Sierra pickup truck had wide orange racing stripes down the sides with the words HEAVY HALF scrolled over the wheel wells and was a 1975, the year of my birth, which I took as a sign. I couldn’t imagine driving a vehicle that better described my new country lifestyle—and it was free! Thank God for Randy, the parts manager, who had had the foresight to install a power-steering mechanism from a local junkyard, because I could barely turn the wheel without it.

  We moved into the studio space Aaron shared with Rob in Lighthouse Bay, a nine-story concrete warehouse off the railroad tracks in the Midway, the corridor between Minneapolis and St. Paul. The dimly lit first floor was taken up with Joe the landlord’s spice business. It was a shadowy operation. Open barrels of powdered cumin, coriander seed, cinnamon sticks, and red pepper flakes lined the walls. Slow-moving rivulets of water spread out like a creek bed in the center and rodents bumped along the dark perimeter. The freight elevator rarely worked.

  I was glad that Aaron’s space was on the third floor of a possible nine and thankful for the overwhelming sting of cinnamon oil in the air, masking odors that would likely have been much worse. (It also taught me to buy spices only from reputable sources. Stapled-over bulk packs still give me the willies.)

  Despite the building’s grunge, we loved our little corner of it. Through the squint of youth, we had the ability to smudge out all the unsavory details and see just the brilliant shine coming off the nugget of the central idea of it—in this case, the enormous space. Our corner unit measured about three thousand square feet, had walls of grimy marble, and was full of light. Aaron and Rob each commandeered a big studio space, Aaron working on his wood carvings in the front room, and Rob welding his tall steel sculptures in the middle. In the back, they partitioned off a small living space, whose walls they painted barn red and covered with their collected paintings and dusty thrift-store finds.

  For artists, it was a coveted live/work situation. On par with those, the living part of the equation wasn’t legally sanctioned, although Joe the spice magnate never cared.

  In fact, he loved to hang out with his tribe of tenants, often inviting us into his seedy back office to shoot the breeze. Standing on the worn red carpeting and leaning against the front corner of his desk, papers sliding loosely on top, he’d say, “Want some lunch?” If we shook our heads in dissent, he’d look at us incredulously and say, “You sure you don’t want some noodles?” as he sprayed butter from a can onto a paper plate of microwaved pasta and dressed it with a few shakes of canister Parmesan. The nine floors of Lighthouse Bay were filled with artists and street punks and, come evening, homeless guys who wandered in to sleep in their favorite crannies in the dark corners. The backyard was usually occupied by an encampment of hardcore kids, heavily inked-up and metal-punched, who stayed in a bus with the words CIRCUS OF THE RIDICULOUS painted on the side. They traveled the country hopping trains and survived by Dumpster diving for food and materials. Some of them made zines, some of them supported themselves by fire-dancing or riding comically tall bicycles in their circus. Even though I learned to say “No thanks” to their proffered dumpster produce after using a batch of “perfectly good” rotten onions, they were affable and interesting warehouse-mates. When it got cold that fall, a bunch of these kids and their trusty canine sidekicks moved into spaces in the building, some into the studio directly above us, where they set up shop fixing motorcycles and illegally tattooing faces.

  Joe seemed to love the madhouse aspect and wielded his power via his henchmen, a band of young Mexican guys. Some of these wo
rkmen possessed advanced college degrees earned back in Mexico, in fields like engineering, but they set their gazes out far ahead of them as they hustled around doing Joe’s bidding in exchange for his inflated American cash. “Calling all Mexicans! Calling all Mexicans!” he’d broadcast over the loudspeakers. He was king of the whole shithole kingdom.

  The bathrooms were few and far between. There was one on the sixth floor and one on the fourth floor, but the latter was so bad, so terrifically foul, that it had a nickname: Little Bosnia. I will spare you the graphic details, but in short it was at Lighthouse Bay that I cultivated the ability to hover for any length of time over any toilet seat. It made me wonder if warehouses like ours (not free to us in particular, but free to some of us) weren’t called squats for another reason.

  Aaron and I spent our time much as we had up north, except that most mornings he went to work as an assistant to a stonemason. He was also working on a number of large pieces for his first real gallery show, so he was fairly solvent and hopeful, but I spent most of my days sitting on the couch, knitting, waiting for a potential employer to call. Easily, this was the nadir of our brokeness. When running errands, I didn’t have enough money to go out to lunch, so I would go home and cook up a batch of white beans with a ham bone, my bangs dragging in my eyes. That I couldn’t afford a haircut or buy a pound of good coffee beans or fill up the truck with gas without feeling a bolt of anxiety never occurred to me to be the reason for my general distress. Broke was so quickly my baseline.

  I made dinner in the evenings and afterward Aaron worked on his sculptures while I read books and underlined the passages I liked. When he knocked off work around 11, we’d sit in the cowhide-covered chairs in the glow of the warm light from the floor lamps (with Aaron, the lighting is always good), and our talk would balloon. We’d get excited about our future, the drives we would take, the places we could go, the ways we would improve our place up north…and then we’d sometimes sip straight Jim Beam from little shot glasses to calm ourselves down, sitting among the thrift-store finds that grew more precious to us by the blooming minute. On the weekends we listened to public radio—Bluegrass Saturday Morning—and I made some halfhearted attempts at sewing a patchwork quilt, gently pumping on the small treadle sewing machine Aaron had dragged in for me. In February, we planted our seeds for the next year’s garden, stringing up grow lights suspended just above the sprouts. It was a big space and cold. I piled on thick wool socks and sweaters and timed my phone calls around the heater: when the industrial blower hanging in the corner intermittently came to life, its flames glowed through the grille menacingly, like dragon teeth, and its fan bellowed so loudly that it drowned out all conversation.