Give a Girl a Knife

by Amy Thielen

  Everyone else who came over to help, friends Dave and Steph and Chris, knew what we were in for, all of them having known the joys of pounding a sand point at their own rustic places.

  Taking turns heaving the pounder, we loaded five lengths of pipe, until when at about fifteen feet down, we hit hardpan.

  Dave, a self-made expert in the engineering of homemade systems, looked down into the hole and said, “You’re getting close to a depth that will require a stand pump, not a hand pump.” We took turns again pounding through the hardpan, and an hour later, when the string finally came up wet, meaning we were in the vein, we were at about thirty-four feet. Dave said, “And…now we’re in stand-pump territory.”

  Aaron’s junk pile in the yard actually contained a rusty old stand pump, but it was missing a few parts. We got into the truck and drove to visit the only person Aaron thought might have them, Leo Kueber—George Kueber’s younger brother. His tan house, the Kueber family homestead, stood tall on the only hill in sight, the road in front winding close to it, as it does in children’s books. At one time the house had anchored a small community called Goldenrod and Leo’s front parlor had been the town post office. Now a chair sat in front of an open window on the porch, a rifle sticking out through the screen.

  “That’s my perch for eyeing wolves!” Leo cackled. “The cattle farmers around here—and that means me—appreciate that.” Shooting wolves wasn’t normally a position I took, but on him the lawlessness was charming.

  He gave us a tour. At the center of his sprawling farmhouse kitchen stood an enormous cast-iron woodstove, its flat cook-top stretching six feet across. On the front sat a pot of Leo’s famous perpetual stew. It brewed all day, he ate some of it for dinner, let it cool overnight, and then added to it the next day. It was a woodstove thing.

  Surprising to me, food was everywhere. Buckets of onions he’d grown. Two-gallon jars of mayo from the commercial aisle at the store. A gallon of peanut butter. Strings of peppers. A bushel of apples. It seemed that Leo the bachelor was quite the entertainer. Deer camp at Leo’s was legendary. Upstairs in the communal sleeping room, a toilet sat in the middle of the room, cordoned off by a calico curtain, a convenience installed to accommodate a room that came to life during deer-hunting season. The entire place was a nesting doll into the past, a journey of retrofitting through the eras.

  We walked down the front steps toward the shed. Beaver carcasses littered the yard, tossed there for the dogs. The skulls had been lovingly licked clean, as white as if they’d been boiled. Some…not so clean yet.

  “Doesn’t quite smell spring,” Leo said, by way of explanation for the brain-fogging stench and beckoned us into the shed. Of course he had the pump parts. He was an old-ways angel.

  The next day Dave came back to commune with us around the hole. He and Aaron repaired the stand pump with Leo’s parts and tried it out. It didn’t work. For hours it didn’t work.

  “Cripes, we know there’s water there,” Dave said. “You’re just going to have to try to dig down to it. I don’t think you have a choice.”

  So Aaron, who could dig, dug. Four feet down, then six, until the top of his head lined up with the grass. Standing way down in the hole, he screwed the pump onto the pipe and tried it again. It worked. We took turns pumping. It was nearly too stiff for me to pump—How convenient, I thought, Aaron will have to pump it all—and then I filled up a quart jar to taste.

  “Pipe dope!” Aaron spat. It tasted like chemicals and clay, worse than the adhesive at the dentist. Once it ran clear it tasted delicious, though, and we eventually had it tested: about 99.5 percent pure, with a touch of added calcium. As close to perfect as it gets, and as cold as water floating with a disk of melted ice.

  Aaron lined the pump hole with stones that he’d picked up from a neighbor’s field pile and finished the steps with flat stones. He pumped up two five-gallon plastic jugs and lugged them up the hill, as he would every day afterward.

  The first time the water came rushing out, rock-cold and forceful, I felt more rooted than I had in years. This one small improvement to our simple water-and-power situation made it feel like we had entered yet another new era. Without the constant sense of a diminishing water supply, our days lost some of their anxiety and began to feel more comfortable. I could now cook, and wash dishes, to my complete saturation.

  Before I could give that a spin, we scrubbed up at the wash basin because it was time for Bruce and Cheryl’s party.

  —

  Prior to my entrance into his life, Aaron prided himself on his ability to smoothly, strategically, stop by other people’s houses at happy hour. If he was lucky, as he often was, a drink slid into a dinner invitation. At Bruce and Cheryl’s, if they were feeling devout and healthy, the drinks offered were milk-thistle tea or freshly extracted beet-carrot juice, all from their garden. There were homemade pickles to start and soba noodles for dinner.

  If the collective hungers were up, they served gin and tonics floating with precious ice and slow-grilled pork ribs. As the fire jumped up and down in the pit, guitars were pulled out.

  This was a party of the latter variety, a feasting time. Bruce made pulled bison barbacoa in the solar oven, monitoring it all day while they worked outside in the yard, and he’d called potluck for the rest.

  I crawled sideways out of our low-riding Buick holding a covered dish that contained my most recent crush—buttery fried corn, browned in a cast- iron pan until it tasted like the sun had roasted the sweet kernels on a twirling spit. I kicked the Buick’s heavy door shut. Outside, it was what you’d call authentically dark.

  The night air, without any electric light around to dilute it, thickened into a material substance. The dark vibrated fondly around me like an invisible swarm—either gnats or a force field, it was always hard to tell. As usual, neither Aaron nor I carried a flashlight, even though we’d been negotiating similarly blind pathways all summer long at our own place. With the insouciance of twentysomethings, we felt freer without a flashlight, like it deepened our trust. It was kind of like a woods version of going without underwear.

  We walked blindly down the sandy path, like bugs drawn to the warm flames of the campfire, our pace keeping time with the conga drums. The compiled effect of the darkness, the zippered beats of the drums, and the distant sound of party voices made me feel like we were entering some kind of womb. Why must the woods settlers of the ’60s’ back-to-the-land movement be reduced to the word hippie? I thought. It puts such a negative spin on the contagious generosity, the backwoods magnificence, of that cultural moment in perfect action.

  On the potluck table where I set my corn, a full landscape quickly sprouted: there was falafel; tangy, fermented tomato salsa; black threads of a hijiki-carrot salad; Dutch-oven potatoes; and three bowls of cucumber salad, two creamy, one vinegary. (It was the week for cucumbers.) A whole slew of open quart jars lined the middle space, all of them stuck with forks: dill pickles, sweet bread and butters; pickled asparagus; sweet spiced beets; mixed hot vegetable pickles; dilly beans.

  Cheryl walked up from the house carrying an earthen pot of black beans. Small-boned, barefoot, olive-skinned, with long brown curls falling down her back, she wore a large scarf twisted up behind her neck to make a tropical halter dress. They were calling this their Shangri-La party, and she was dressed for it.

  After dinner, sitting with Cheryl in the dark screen house, I heard about her own transition to the woods, nearly fifteen years previous. When she arrived with her long nails and city clothes, all of Bruce’s friends nicknamed her Barbie.

  “As in Barbie doll,” she said, shaking her head and pulling on her beer. “They thought I’d never make it out here, with no power and no shower. I was like Ha! Bruce, just show me which ones are the weeds and which are the baby plants, that’s all I need to know.” She smiled, having long since become the woman who gingerly relocated wildflowers with the tip of her spade, who spent her days weeding their walking paths.

  “That
first year Bruce told me to give away my city clothes, including all of my heels and my collection of lingerie—vintage lingerie—and trade them in for Birkenstocks and cargo pants.”

  Now, proudly braless, her transformation from city sexpot to hippie princess complete, Bruce was now asking why she’d thrown away all of her nighties.

  “Good riddance to the heels, but I wish I’d kept those corsets with the covered buttons!” she pealed. “Gorgeous little satin buttons, and all to Goodwill!”

  “Wah, wah, poor Bruce!” I replied, wearing my own woods uniform, a matronly calico button-up and baggy olive-green military pants hitched up with a sturdy belt. We clinked our longnecks in solidarity.

  My sexless garb hardly made a case for the romance of dressing the rural part, but I failed to see it, for back then I rarely looked in our single foggy antique mirror. As if proof of the fact that illumination was not a given in those days, I have loads of memories but very little photographic evidence of this time. It comes as no big surprise that the girl who didn’t carry a flashlight also didn’t take any pictures. I have a mere handful, and whenever I look at them, it’s a stare-down. To the girl standing next to the enormous log on the Hanna Ore forest road I want to say: Get yourself a real haircut! Good Lord, at least a decent bra! You look like a schlumpf!—the sloppy state of dress my grandma Dion had cautioned me against. But the look in the girl’s eyes goads the camera to a challenge, staring my future self down with a distressing amount of haughtiness, clearly high on newfound self-sufficiency.

  Suddenly, the rain started to pound down and people streamed into the screen house, crowding in on me and Cheryl. A bunch of people were still outside, some huddled under the umbrella over the table, some dancing out in the rain. Everyone was excited because the rain was filling up their rain barrels. Aaron and I joined them, because we possessed rain barrels, too, but were delighted with the irony of not needing them today or the next day. With the hand-pumped well, we finally had a backup water source. Truly, when it rains, it pours.

  16

  CHEF SALAD, NO EGGS

  Another winter spent down in Minneapolis, another summer up north at the house in Two Inlets—our third. The sun had been hitting my face in our loft bedroom for hours already. The birds had been awake forever and were already on to lunch.

  Thud…thud, thud.

  I registered the sound before I saw the clock: 9:00. I was really late for work.

  But what the hell was that? Was someone at our door?

  It could be. Around Two Inlets, and especially before we had a phone, visitors would just show up unannounced at ungodly early hours. Our neighbors got a kick out of our throwback lifestyle and loved to pop in on us in our little cabin out in the woods—like people used to in the old days.

  I looked out the kitchen window and didn’t see anyone in front of the door. A closer look revealed that a massive snapping turtle had crawled up out of the creek and ass-planted itself in my flower bed next to the door and was now whapping its prehistoric tail against the wood. With eyes like shiny coffee beans, he glared menacingly at me. His knobby, vicious head was not tucked inside his shell; it was definitely out.

  “Don’t open the door, he could bite your arm off,” Aaron shouted down from the loft. “We’re going to have to get a stick, or an oar, for him to clamp onto so we can lead him away.”

  Whoom, whoom. The thumping was like a vise tightening on my cranium. Wickedly hungover, glowing from the inside out, I was thankful to have an excuse—even an absurd one—for being late for work. I called Jorg, my boss at the Schwarzwald Inn on Main Street in Park Rapids, mumbling about a snapping turtle at my door and not being able to leave my house.

  “What?” he shouted, as if he couldn’t hear me. “What? What turtle? What the hell are you talking about?”

  Finally I started whining. “Jorg, I can’t come to work today. I’m sick. I am so hungover. I’m sorry, I just can’t function.”

  He paused for a second and then yelled into the phone slowly and distinctly: “WE ARE ALL HUNGOVER HERE! GET YOUR ASS TO WORK!” He hung up.

  The previous summer I had worked a couple of days a week at the Schwarzwald Inn, the German-American diner on Main Street, mostly just showing up to make some pies and prep some carrots and onions for the soups. Jorg paid me five dollars an hour, hardly worth the price of the gas to get there. When I walked into the restaurant this summer, now on the short-cooking schedule for three-day weeks, I saw an unfamiliar head of spiked platinum-blond hair on the line. When she came around the corner, she was flustered, her words coming out in spits and stops.

  “Hey, I am Tonya!” she said, pronouncing it Tone-ya. “From Mallorca.” We pumped hands. Fashionably lanky, she had what some locals would call an out-of-town figure.

  “And that is Klaus,” she said, tipping her head to the hot line. Her boyfriend Klaus, tall and dark with curls that licked the collar of his chef shirt, had grown up in Germany with Jorg, and he and Tonya had met while both were cooking in her native Spain. Why they decided to work that summer in Park Rapids I never did understand. Tonya and I struggled to talk, but we shared the international languages of cooking and fashion. I introduced her to all my favorite permanent garage sales in town, where she found tons of perfectly outrageous vintage outfits for her drag-queen friends back home. Straight from Dolores Nepsund’s garage to a nightclub in the Balearic Islands—it was a clothes pipeline that I treasured, and figured had to be a first.

  “Amy,” I told her, “from Park Rapids.”

  “Estoy crudo,” she said, sticking out her tongue to loll at one side of her mouth. “Cru-do.”

  Crudo. I didn’t know a lick of Spanish. She made a quick sketch in her kitchen notebook and then I guessed it: “Hungover! You’re hungover!”

  “Yes! Yes!” she replied, hopping and doing a tiny clap, totally delighted.

  I guessed she had heard about the turtle.

  “Amy!” Jorg bellowed. We quickly scattered—her to the back prep, me to the grill. We could hear the little bell on the front door dinging away. We served nearly a thousand hungry tourists on busy weekends, most of them queuing up for Schwarzwald’s famous smorgasbord and the rest ordering hot short-order plates. I tied on a white apron and threw a sausage patty for myself on the grill. Troy read out a table: “Two stuffed hash browns, a pork chop breakfast, and a kid pancake.” Troy, a chesty guy with permanently wet-looking curls, was surprisingly graceful. He spun around to the grill. “And a solo schnitzel.”

  Jorg smiled theatrically at me and said, “Oh, look who showed up for the battle!,” which was how he referred to the Sunday brunch service. And then he snarled, “I want you to show up on time! And I want you fed!”

  “Okay, okay,” I said. Maybe it was time to reel things in a bit.

  He glanced out the peephole kitchen window to see who had ordered the schnitzel. It was a big guy, patiently waiting with his legs planted wide at 10 and 2. Jorg dipped into the reach-in cooler, grabbed a second piece of tenderized, paprika-dusted pork, and threw it into my working breading bowl, which was circled with planetary rings of dried-on egg wash. “Better do two.” Damned if they were truly ravenous, but the skinny ladies only got one. At the Schwarzwald we cooked not only to order but also to size.

  —

  When Jorg bought the restaurant that his parents had established, he inherited Arlys. And, unfortunately, she did not do hash browns.

  When I first met Arlys she must have been tipping eighty years old, the last twenty of which she’d spent in the back prep area. She had a frizzy mess of hair like a woolly pad and shuffled around the kitchen stooped into the shape of a lowercase f, slinging five-gallon buckets of fodder vegetables as if she were working a farmstead instead of a kitchen.

  I worked the grill with Klaus and Jorg, and sometimes Troy. Tonya took to the back, helping Arlys, whose job it was to peel all the vegetables: countless five-gallon buckets of russet potatoes, onions, and twenty-five-pound bags of food-service carrots
so fat you couldn’t get your fingers around them. Arlys’s duties included grinding the ham for the ham salad, making the house cinnamon rolls, and washing the dishes. For a long time she didn’t so much as speak to me as growl. “Move it. Hands out of my dishwater,” she’d say when I hopped in to work on the backlog. A human routine, she wasn’t looking to hand off any of her daily tasks. Soon I came to understand her loyalty to the dish circuit when I watched her openly scarf uneaten food off the plates.

  I knew we had come to a meeting of the minds, though, when one day she came in with a jar of pickled tomatoes, tiny pear-shaped yellow ones she had grown herself, and shoved it toward me. “For you,” she said, her rheumy eyes sparkling. The ring was caked with rust, throwing my trust for their food safety into doubt, but I had to admit, they were lovely and exactly my kind of thing.

  On Fridays Arlys started her main vocation, which was making the dozen or so salads for the Sunday smorgasbord. In addition to the most obvious things, like an Italian-ish pasta salad with black olives and mini pepperoni slices, she also made a classic German salad of ham, cheese, and pickles that didn’t quite translate without good German ham; a herring salad with apples and Miracle Whip; a crushed ramen-noodle-fake-crab-almond thing with sweet sesame dressing, so addictive it was like the opiate of Midwestern salads; a greasy little turkey giblet mixture, nearly cleansed with a strong dose of vinegar (when I asked about the contents of that one, she always just cackled); serviceable deviled eggs, chilled to cadaver stiffness; a few varieties of Jell-O, usually orange chiffon or something with suspended cubes of canned fruit cocktail and miniature marshmallows; and chocolate pudding, which in some way had slipped into the “salad” bar—perhaps through the gate the Jell-O left wide open. Proper Midwestern salad buffets such as this one ensure that your meal is properly bookended in sugar, so that everything you eat before the meat main course is sweet, including the so-called savory salads, right up to the desserts that follow.