Bootstrapper

by Mardi Jo Link

  I know what the Lutheranism of my childhood has to offer, and that’s not exactly what I want to pass on to my own children, so this Sunday we give a nondenominational church a try instead.

  Will needs no encouragement on this enterprise, Luke is neutral, Owen skeptical. Combined, their approach to organized religion mirrors my own. And even though I can still feel those Easter hymns inside me, the Congregationalist reverend’s sermon about America’s “just war” and the place for such an opinion in a church on Easter still irritate me, and we won’t be going back.

  We pick a new church to visit out of a newspaper ad. The ad is small and doesn’t say much beyond the time of worship, but it does advertise that they are a flock known for their practical Christianity and their optimism, which both sound pretty good to me. I could be the poster woman for optimistic practicality, so when we sit down in folding chairs inside a gymnasium, I am hopeful our blind-date church will turn out to be “the one.”

  At the appointed time a tall woman wearing a caftan made out of wads of purple scarves sewn together twirls up to the lectern and chants a modern interpretation of a familiar Bible verse into a scratchy microphone: “But whoever takes the water I give him will never be in need of drink again, for the water I give him will become in him a fountain of eternal life.”

  Uh-oh, I think, so it’s that kind of church.

  Yes, this sermon turns out to be about the innate strength of all God’s children to confront our nation’s epidemic of alcoholism. There is emotional testimony from several members of the congregation and an overhead projector that flashes the times and locations of area AA meetings.

  Owen and Luke sit next to me in our pew, and there’s not a fidget in either one of them, stunned as they are into stillness by personal tales of Breathalyzers, jail-cell toilets, and other wayward stops on the long trek to sobriety.

  For the first time I realize that my sons are the only minors in the room. And then Will, who said he wanted to try going into the Sunday-school classroom with the other kids his age, chooses this moment to return to my side.

  “They got stuffed animals in there,” he whispers. “And they smell like pee.”

  Before I can process this non sequitur, the woman in purple marches back up front. We should use the power of our minds and the power of the Bible’s spiritual water to replace the rusty nails, the Bloody Marys, the sacramental wine.

  I casually look to the left and right. People are watching her intensely, lowering their chins and praying, and even smiling and nodding their assent. Guilt, guilt, guilt is what I feel. How could I dare feel superior to these worshippers? They have all found their church home; my sons and I have not.

  But still, this is not the thought process I was hoping to enter into for an hour by coming to church today. I was hoping to put my mind and my heart and my sons’ souls in a place where we could explore the way I felt days ago inside Tractor Supply. I was hoping to learn how to find God in our everyday lives.

  The woman in purple flounces off and a thin man with his skullet tied into a long gray ponytail begins setting out dozens of Tibetan singing bowls in a circle. He sits cross-legged in the center of them, moistens his fingertips in his mouth, and begins to “play” the bowls.

  I look over at my sons, willing them with a silent maternal commandment not to laugh. Will can’t slap his hands over his ears fast enough. Owen and Luke gawk openly, and I can’t blame them. If I wanted to hear screeching like that, I could have gone out behind the barn and pumped the rusty well handle a few times.

  Sitting in the back of this church was a brilliant move on our part, though, and the boys and I scoot out mostly unnoticed. And for the first time in months, I’ve worked up one heck of a thirst.

  I stop at the grocery store on the way home and buy a half-dozen donuts for the boys and a half-pint of vodka and a bottle of tomato juice for me. Sunday brunch. They eat all the donuts without the least bit of difficulty, but I’m done for after just one Bloody Mary. I guess a tolerance for liquor, like faith, is something you lose if you don’t exercise it at least once a week.

  So far, our sporadic church field trips have been a bust. We haven’t learned much, the time could have been better spent working, I’m drinking liquor on a Sunday just after the noon hour, and am no closer to nailing down the “What do I believe?” question than I was when we started. I feel like I’m responsible for my sons’ souls too, not just my own. Someday, when they’re older, I hope they ponder this question for themselves. But how will they do that if I don’t give them somewhere to ponder it from?

  My grandmother and my parents gave me their Lutheran beliefs: that hard work is practically a sacrament; that Jell-O is a perfectly respectable dessert to bring to a church potluck; and that the right way to sing hymns like “Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus” is respectfully—and sitting down. Church is important, I learned from them, but that’s no reason to get carried away.

  I’ve rejected what feels like religious blandness. Far be it from me to frown down on anyone’s emotional outbursts, but I have nothing to put in its place. Besides a respect for hard work, what spiritual legacy will I give my sons?

  Of the precious moments of grace we’ve experienced over the past year—standing among prizewinning zucchinis, looking up at the stars during a winter campfire in the valley, decorating our Christmas tree, triumphing over thundersnow, ordering chickens from a catalog—not one of these moments has arrived when we’ve been inside a church.

  My goal for the morning might have been spiritual connection, but my goal for the afternoon is something more down-to-earth: I’ve got to get the garden’s irrigation system hooked up and tested. I refuse to let church or liquor get in the way of what’s really important: water. Real water, and not the ethereal kind, either. The kind that irrigates your vegetables and that you control with a pump and a well.

  It’s only April, but if I want vegetables by late summer I need to get the seeds planted in early May, and if I want those seeds to germinate and grow, I’m going to need their water source to be operational before I plant them.

  Every northern farmer and every gardener knows this: the time to start working toward a good fall harvest is in the early spring.

  My irrigation system is not anything special, just a series of hoses, connectors, shutoff valves, and sprinklers that I take down, drain, and store in the shed every fall, then cobble back together again every spring. While not exactly photogenic or scientific, this system has three obvious advantages: it’s cheap, the boys and I can put it together by ourselves, and it works. Once it’s in place and calibrated correctly, I can water the whole garden by turning on just one valve.

  “Let it rip!” I yell to Owen after we get everything laid out. He is stationed at the relay pump behind the barn. I can’t see him from my spot just outside the garden fence, but I know he’s lifted the arm of the pump, because a few seconds later a pathetic trickle of water streams out from the top of my oscillating sprinkler. This spray should blast out in a forty-foot circle, but it just pulses and sputters, wetting a pathetic ring in the dirt about the size of a birdbath.

  “Shut it down!” I call.

  I unscrew the sprinkler head from the post, slap it against my leg a couple times, and dead bugs flop out. Earwigs. I screw the sprinkler head back into its metal post, call out to Owen, and he lifts the pump arm up again. This time the spray goes about three feet. We wait a few minutes to see if the water pressure will build and extend the spray farther, but it doesn’t.

  For the next hour we check hoses, open and close valves, make sure all the water is turned off in the house, but to no avail. A three-foot stream of water with no more force than that of a school drinking fountain is all we’re going to get without an intervention.

  Over the past several months I’ve noticed a drop in our water pressure whenever I have the laundry and the dishwasher running at the same time. I think back to the boys running through the sprinkler late last summer and remember that it
only spat out about half the spray that it used to. But I had plenty of other things to worry about back then, and chalked it up to a kink in the hose or an erratic electrical pulse going to the pump.

  Those things were obviously not the problem. There’s something wrong with the Big Valley’s whole water system, not with the sprinkler, not with the irrigation system, and not with the relay pump. I keep telling myself that knowing how bad things are, admitting that there is a problem that needs attention, is better than not knowing, even when that reality turns out to be worse than I’d imagined.

  But just because you repeat something to yourself over and over again doesn’t make it true. The worst thing that can go wrong on a farm besides foreclosure or fire is a bad well. And the worst time for a well to go bad is in the spring. The established vegetable plants of summer can take a little drought and still grow. Maturity might be delayed, but the plants will still flower and produce. They can wait for rain. Seeds can’t. If a seed dries out, it dies.

  This is not like our heat problem, or our snow problem, or our food-supply problem. This is not something I can figure out how to fix myself, with an idea, hard work, my sons’ help, and a little mental elbow grease. We have to have water, there’s only one source for it, and beyond knowing how to climb down inside the well pit and jiggle the contact points on the pump when they ice over and short out, I have no idea how to fix a well. None.

  “Whatcha got here is a wore-out pump, some corroded drop pipe, and a plugged screen,” the driller I call on Monday tells me, climbing out of the well pit.

  The pump and the drop pipe are at least sixty years old, he says, and the system is on its way to breaking down completely. When the pump was installed some time back in the 1940s or 1950s, three-quarters of a horsepower would do the job for a family. But this was before dishwashers or high-capacity washing machines or garbage disposals. Before daily showers or clog-free toilets. Because my well’s infrastructure is such a geezer, and at the end of its life, the driller estimates it is only pumping water at the rate of three GPM—gallons per minute—or about as much water as a showerhead delivers.

  “And missy, you can’t irrigate a garden like the one you got planned out there with a showerhead.”

  We were just getting some traction, too. We made it through the winter, I’ve got work, warm weather is finally here, and the boys are thriving at school. Now this. Bad news isn’t a stalk of corn or a green tomato: it doesn’t get any sweeter with time. Get on with it, I think, returning to the Mardi sutra. Rip off that Band-Aid.

  “Bottom-line me,” I say to the driller.

  We stand in silence next to the well pit while he calculates an estimate in his head. A new pump, sixty-seven feet of galvanized pipe, and a new stainless-steel screen for the wellhead, all fitted together by him with brass connecting hardware, is going to run me $2,325.00 and change.

  This figure is too heavy for me to hold for long and drops in my gut like a boulder. He might as well have quoted me ten thousand dollars, a hundred thousand, a million.

  My face must betray my panic, because the driller, a compact, kind-looking man in his sixties, looks down at his boots and makes a quiet suggestion.

  “Maybe you’d like to talk it over with your husband.”

  My circumstances are so unsalvageable that even my I-am-woman-hear-me-roar self doesn’t think to be offended by this. He is not being condescending, anyway, he’s just being practical. Most couples I know wouldn’t spend this kind of money without discussing it together first. My parents once had an agreement that neither of them would spend more than a hundred dollars without letting the other one know about the purchase.

  “I don’t have one,” I say, just as Will opens the door to let me know that we’re out of milk. Again.

  “We’re always out of milk,” Luke grumbles from somewhere inside the house.

  The driller watches this exchange, watches as Will looks hard at me for a second, says nothing, then ducks back inside and closes the door.

  “How much can you pay today?” the driller asks, sighing.

  My turn to do some calculating. If I pay the mortgage late, pay the other bills later, and use every cent of my Finding Utopia money earned in the past couple of weeks, I can pay almost a quarter of his estimate as a down payment.

  The driller sighs, then nods, opens his clipboard, and hands me the carbon copy of the bill. Just another one to add to my folder. I read through it and see that $1,000 of his estimate is his labor cost. I know all about labor, and there’s something that feels a lot worse about financing another working person’s sweat than financing inanimate pieces of equipment.

  My new Flint & Walling 1.5 horsepower deep well jet pump will be delivering 11+ GPM. “This means you can run three to four faucets wide open all day long!!” the driller has jotted down proudly. And, I think with relief, I can water all of our vegetable seeds. Those seeds will grow into the vegetables from the catalog photographs. Vegetables that we will eat.

  This bill is handwritten on preprinted letterhead, with my name and address in the upper-left-hand corner, the date in the right, and this in fine print at the very bottom: “St. John 4:14: But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst, but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.” I recognize it as the traditional translation of the same verse I scoffed at yesterday when the woman in purple read her version in church. Jotted above this verse on my bill is another absolute, this time in the driller’s steady hand. “Note: There is a 1 Year Warranty on New Pump.”

  Barring a miracle, it is going to take me a lot longer than that to pay him off. But I will do it.

  Time, my own tiny faith, the phases of the moon, and growing our own food are all sitting next to each other, not on a church pew but on one big continuum, spinning and spinning. My sons and I are just four small marks carved deep into some unfathomable cosmic wagon wheel, hanging on.

  By the end of April all that remains of winter is a big pile of melting snow left over from Pete’s occasional and “anonymous” snow-plowing. The lawn is a greenish sponge, poppies sprout from the perennial border, and robins fly back and forth from the pasture to the lilac hedge, carrying little bundles of forgotten hay in their beaks. The migrating birds come back to the Big Valley, even though my bird feeders are still empty. There’s no sign of Edgar, the injured green heron.

  I’m deeper in debt for the well, but at least I will be able to water the garden we’re getting ready to plant. To save money, I shut off the furnace. We’re outside most of the time now, anyway, or the boys are at school. All we really need to stay warm are jackets, turtlenecks, long underwear, and a morning fire in the fireplace. That’s the only time of day the house is still so cold.

  “Tendernesses, / hesitantly, reach toward the earth / from space,” Rilke wrote of this season, “and country lanes are showing / these unexpected subtle risings.…”

  Most of my mail-order seeds have arrived and with the new well pump the sprinkler soaks the soil perfectly on my say-so. I like the idea of tenderness being expressed from above. Especially if it is expressed toward us, down here on our country lane, and I’m anxious to get my hands in the dirt again. The only harsh brown left anywhere on the Big Valley is, of all places, in the garden.

  Winter broke down everything left over from last fall except some cornstalks, dry sunflower stems, and a trellis of ragged bean vines. Usually, these would have been composted over the winter, but last fall there just wasn’t time to get the garden put to bed properly. With the promise of green surrounding as everywhere else, these plant husks stand guard over soil just waiting to envelop our recently arrived vegetable seeds.

  This is my favorite thing about spring. It’s the shortest season of all, sometimes there’s barely enough time for a calendar page to slip between snow and summer, but it somehow manages to last long enough every year for me to clear out the old and start again.

  I choos
e Will to help me with this task, since lately I’ve been depending so much more on his older brothers than I have on him. I’ve leaned on the two of them for help not just with the physical work, but with a lot of the emotional work, too. Time for Will to do his part.

  I point to the garden, point to the stalks and husks and vines, then point to the compost pile.

  “Do I have to?” he says, when I lay out the job.

  Will is such a grumbler lately where hard work is concerned that I’ve devised a strategy just for him. If he accepts a chore cheerfully and completes it well, I release him from further responsibility and he’s free to go about his day. He’s free to build with Legos, make elaborate Matchbox racetracks down the stairs, set up his army-man wars, or build forts in the woods.

  But if he complains, either when the job is assigned or during his completion of it, or if his work is subpar, I make him finish it properly and then I follow up with another chore—preferably a harder one that takes him even longer to complete. And here’s the kicker: I don’t say a word to him about this trick. And if he doesn’t figure out what I’m up to, this could go on all day.

  “How much are you paying me?” he asks, as we pull on our old boots and our work gloves.

  “Same as I’m making,” I tell him. “Zero dollars.”

  “Awesome.”

  That sarcasm just signed you up for another chore, buddy, I think, running through the options in my mind and plotting out what that next chore will be. Picking up all the litter out by the road? Picking up all the dog crap in the backyard?

  “I can’t believe I don’t even get an allowance anymore,” he says.

  Okay then, dog crap it is.

  I do have a reason for treating him this way. I want him to grow into a man unafraid of hard work. A man who approaches a challenge cheerfully and with resolve, no matter what that challenge is. A man who takes pride in the results for pride’s sake, and not always because he’s getting paid. I want work to be as natural to him as it is to me—something that’s just a regular part of his day, whether it’s caring for the dogs, shoveling snow, or putting the dregs of last year’s garden into the compost pile.