The Mighty Queens of Freeville

by Amy Dickinson

  I have a per sis tent vision of my father making his way across the field in back of our barn. Going somewhere! His step was springy and enterprising. He drew his bucket from a bottomless well of energy and cultivated a tough restlessness that got him into trouble. He loved shortcuts and windfalls and wayward moneymaking projects, sometimes involving other men such as himself, who, when things went sour, tended to punch one another in the nose. He was full of loud bluster and profanity. He cast himself as a government-hating athletic iconoclast. He was exciting. He was handsome like a B movie star, in the manner of Glenn Ford, but with the ego of a Caribbean despot. I loved to watch him but not, I think, in the way daughters commonly love to look at their fathers. He was like an animal. Unpredictable. He would crouch beside the belligerent Holsteins in our barn during the evening milking, a hand-rolled cigarette between his lips, cursing the cows and barking orders at his team of assistants—his three disinterested daughters and silent son. Rachel, Anne, and I were more consumed by practicing cheerleading jumps on the concrete alley between the rows of cows than in being “milkmaids,” which is how our father sometimes referred to us.

  Our brother, Charlie, was having a Led Zeppelin teen hood. He did as he was told with a sort of moody indifference, but sometimes it was all he could do to keep up with our father’s barked orders, what with the lyrics to “Running with the Dev il” coursing through his head. Our father must have suspected early on that his children would not be the Dairy Princesses and Future Farmers of his imaginings, and yet there we all were—in the barn, working.

  To make ends meet on our ever-failing farm, my father was also a steel worker. He said he loved the work—he loved being outside and liked to climb and to dangle from the substructure of a building. In between the morning and evening milkings, he spent his days laying iron with Iroquois and Mohawk Indians recruited from nearby reservations. (He liked working with Indian crews, he said, because—like him—they had no fear.)

  My father left when I was twelve. It was a sudden thing, and as far as I know, beyond his travels to increasingly far-off construction jobs, he had given no warning that he would leave home permanently. Our fifty cows were in the field, needing to be milked twice a day. A neighbor helped out in the mornings, and my sisters, brother, and I did the evening milking when we got home from school. Evening chores had often seemed like a warm, antic time. My sisters and I had an understanding that the barnyardlike social rules and pecking order that dominated the rest of our lives in high school stopped at the barn door. Most often Rachel and Anne wouldn’t even acknowledge me during an encounter in the hallway at school, but in the barn they treated me almost like a peer—trading school gossip, complaining about their teachers, and teaching me the lyrics to the latest Three Dog Night song we’d been hearing on the radio.

  After our father left, our barn became quiet with anxiety. Charlie, only sixteen years old and an indifferent farmer in our father’s presence, rose to the occasion as best he could. He handled the heavy lifting while my sisters and I silently went about our business.

  We didn’t know where Buck was, but after a couple of months he called from Lowville in the North Country. He had taken up Truck Stop Joan (which was how I snippily thought of her because she worked as a waitress at a roadside diner).

  My father told my mother that he had sold our herd of Holsteins. The next day two huge cattle trucks belonging to a larger dairy in Cortland drove in and took the cows away. It was April and raining a cold, hard rain that was washing the last vestiges of dingy snow into the creek. I watched from the driveway as our cows slipped and slid through the mud and were prodded with electric shocks onto the long trucks. They were confused and bleating as they were forced up the ramp and into the dark tunnel of the truck. Even at my relatively young age, I think I knew that dispatching with the cows in such a sudden and cruel fashion was the only scenario that my father could create that I would find truly unforgivable. Sure enough, as an adult, I’ve attained an emotional stasis about many things, but not about that.

  After our cows were gone, I found I missed them terribly. They showed up in my dreams, roaming through my mother’s flower beds, lowing quietly and letting me know that we had failed them. Our old red barn was like a cathedral, looming over the landscape of my childhood. It was the size of an ocean liner, with enormous rooms, milking parlors, and lofts. After the cows left, I couldn’t go inside it.

  The sheriff came to the house, delivering papers to my mother. “Sorry, Jane,” he said as he handed her the summons. He looked down at the floor. My father had charged my mother with “cruel and inhuman treatment,” which was the only way to get a quick divorce at the time.

  We had an auction. The Munson family ran all the auctions in our area, and they handled things. Glenn Munson, who was a sophomore at our high school, was the auctioneer. He was born with muscular dystrophy and got around school in a wheelchair. Glenn’s father and uncle hoisted him onto a platform set up in front of our barn’s enormous doors. He had a microphone hanging around his neck. He called the auction in a speedy high-pitched singsong auctioneer voice and swayed back and forth like Stevie Wonder at the piano. Our neighbors bid on our rusty farm implements, milking equipment—even the leftover hay stored in our barn—and loaded them into their pickups.

  My mother and some other women were gathered around a large coffee urn in the kitchen. They sipped their coffee and talked in low voices. I told my mother to come out and see the auction, but she said, “No thanks, honey.” It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment that the public selling of our possessions would be a hard thing for her to witness. Later in school, whenever Glenn Munson wheeled by in the hallway, I felt him looking at me compassionately.

  The summer after my father left, my brother quit high school and hitched his way through Scandinavia with a friend for several months. Then he joined the navy. It was many years before he came home again. Mom went to work as a typist at Cornell University. She typed very fast—almost a hundred words a minute.

  One night about a year after he left our family, Joan—now my father’s second wife—called. “Where is that bastard?” she asked. My mother said she didn’t know.

  My father surfaced again several months later. He had taken up with Jeanne, a formerly close friend of my mother’s from many years ago. He was local again. When I was sixteen and playing Zaneeta Shinn in our community production of The Music Man, I heard that he was drinking beer at the local bowling alley with some of the older cast members after rehearsals. “He’s a riot!” they said. Yeah. He’s a scream, I thought.

  Buck and Jeanne started moving around. They lived on Long Island for a time while Buck worked construction at the Plum Island Research Facility. They lived in Vermont and Connecticut, where he found work on farms and trimming trees. Then they moved to Port Allegheny, in North Central Pennsylvania. Jeanne was sick for a long time and then died of emphysema. My brother told me she smoked right next to her oxygen canister. He thought she might blow herself up.

  When I went to college, my mother left her typing job and went to Cornell as a full-time undergraduate. Then she got her master’s degree at Cornell. At fifty-three, she started a teaching career, first at Cornell and later at Ithaca College. She bought herself a nicer coat and carried a briefcase.

  An elderly neighbor with no family who lived up the road left his house and all of his property to my mother when he died, and she moved away from the empty farm and resettled up the road in the little place, which was lovely and ghost free. No ethereal Holsteins roamed the property, and whenever I stayed with her at her new house, I marveled at the sweet dreams I had while sleeping in the guest room.

  My father bought a large old white delivery van, such as laundries use. After Jeanne died, he started driving around. It was as if he was exploring an imaginary sales territory—with himself as the only product. One time during a summertime visit home when Emily was a baby, I was sitting on the porch with my mother when he drove by, slowly. I look
ed over and saw my father’s unmistakable silhouette. “Who’s that?” she said. “I think it’s my father,” I told her. He turned around down the road and came back and drank a cup of coffee with us on the porch. I hadn’t seen him in at least ten years, but he was pretty much as I remembered. He was full of optimism, ideas, and schemes involving sure-fire ventures such as fish farming and emu-raising. He thought he might go to Nova Scotia to pick apples. I pictured him living in his van on the edge of an orchard in Nova Scotia, which turned out to be exactly what he did.

  The last few months had been hard on him. While Jeanne was slowly dying, my father had had a small stroke and had a pacemaker installed. After a few days in the hospital, he went AWOL and hitchhiked back to his little house. He opened up the top of his shirt to show me his pacemaker. I could see the outline of a disc the size of a half-dollar sparking away just under the surface of his chest.

  I realized that I was relieved that he had left us. All I had to do was look at my mother, the college professor, sitting on the porch in the house that she owned. More than once she’d said that if Buck had stayed, she’d be living in a trailer, and I knew this was true. My father’s life tended toward chaos, and he didn’t like to be alone.

  Six months later, Buck was back from Nova Scotia, once again living in Port Allegheny. He had married again. Her name was Jean. He said he’d met her at church. So far, his wives were named Jane, Joan, Jeanne, and Jean. He had become the many-married protagonist of a George Jones song. Like the old joke goes, I fantasized that if our particular country-and-western song was played backward, the extra wives would fall away one by one, the barn would right itself, the cows would back themselves off of the cattle trucks and into the barn, and my father would somehow reverse himself and be the man I remember striding across the field—going somewhere.

  One summer day when Emily was nine, I was upstairs when there was a knock on the door. Emily came up to get me. “There’s a man at the door,” she said. I introduced my father to my daughter. “Emily, this is Buck. My dad,” I said. I had told Emily about my dad over the years; as in discussing her own father, I never criticized him, but in telling stories about my own childhood I cast Buck as an interesting character of sorts, which is, ironically, exactly how he would choose to portray himself.

  “Hi there, young lady,” he said.

  “Hello,” she said.

  He brought Jean in. She seemed like a nice older woman; she was a primly dressed grandmotherly type. Buck said that he thought they’d stay in the village overnight and sleep in the van, parked in front of my sister’s house. Jean looked to be in her seventies, and I wondered if she would go for sleeping overnight in my father’s delivery van. By nightfall, they were gone. He and Jean didn’t last long—I think her children intervened.

  Pat was next.

  I first heard about my father’s latest wife in a phone call from my sister. News of our father traveled through the family in a circuitous, seemingly random fashion. After we had delivered bulletins about our gardens, kids, cousins, and the latest fight with the school board, a sentence or two about Buck would occasionally bubble to the surface, lumped in with the “in other news” section of the broadcast. Rachel didn’t know much, only that Buck had gotten married. Again.

  Dad popped in with Pat unannounced later that summer. Emily let them in and hovered in the background while I served coffee and he talked manically.

  Buck said that he had started keeping bees and was selling honey. He told me that he and Pat lived in the farmhouse she grew up in and had inherited from her father. In the fall, during deer hunting season, Pat ran a boardinghouse for the hunters who descended on the area to kill game on the state land just across from their house.

  Then suddenly, as was his practice, he jumped up, said, “Well, it’s time to go,” took Pat by the arm, and left.

  “What just happened?” Emily asked me.

  My father just happened, is what.

  I didn’t see or hear from Buck again for several years, when he called to say that he had shot a bear and had to go to court. He said he wanted to tell me the story and I knew I wanted to hear it, but it took three months before I could get out to Port Allegheny.

  I decided to make the trip on the day after Thanksgiving. Emily was with her dad in New York City for their annual Macy’s Day Parade and dysfunctional family extravaganza. I thought it would be best if she were spared being exposed to my father on his own home territory; he had a tendency to live in what I thought were depressing and chaotic conditions, and I felt a twinge of embarrassment. After celebrating Thanksgiving at my cousin’s house on Main Street, I left early the next morning for the drive to Port Allegheny. The cartoon topography of low hills and valleys around Freeville was awash in tints of brown and gray; it was Andrew Wyeth season, a sadly depressing time of year brightened, for some, only by the prospect of venecide. Gunfire rang out all morning in the fields surrounding the village and Toads diner was filled with camouflaged deer killers swapping hangover lies over their morning coffee.

  I figured that if I made it out of my home county alive and raced for the state border, I had a chance of making the trip without being taken down by a stray bullet. As I neared Port Allegheny, I stopped for coffee at a gas station and saw in the local paper that no bears were killed in Port Allegheny during the short season; my father’s off-season August kill had been the only bear killed by man in the area all year.

  I crossed the Allegheny River at the edge of town, following my father’s directions. The country was rough and rolling and it reminded me of him. I knew my father’s place immediately from the number of vehicles in various states of repair parked beside and behind the house.

  A large flatbed truck pulled up close behind my car on the road and followed me into the driveway. My father eased himself out of the cab and jumped to the ground. At seventy-two, he still had the Glenn Ford vestiges about him, but he had a noticeable limp and looked as if his life of hard labor had more or less caught up with him. “Ummmm, I gotta go do a job,” he said as he waved my way. “It shouldn’t take too long, so you can wait here.” As usual, I wondered if he was struggling to remember my name. (He had a habit of never addressing any of his children by name, and we had all become accustomed to being called “Hey You” or “Hey Kid.”)

  I asked Buck what he had to do, and he said he had to move a building for some guys he knew. I asked if I could come along and he said, “Umm. Yeah. Sure.” I climbed into the truck, and we rumbled back in the direction I had just come, back over the river and down the highway.

  I hadn’t ridden in the cab of a truck with my father for thirty years, but the sensation of jouncing along, high off the road beside my old man, surrounded by the detritus of his work life—the discarded receipts and gritty unpaid bills, along with the smell of tobacco and spilled coffee—was instantly familiar. I liked it. I admired his truck. He told me it was made in Brazil and that it was a goddamn work horse. I asked him how big the building he had been hired to move was. He said he wasn’t sure, but he didn’t think it was too big. I asked him how much he was making for the job, and he said $50. “Jesus, Dad, that doesn’t sound like very much money to move a building. Do you know how far you have to take it?” He said he didn’t know but he didn’t think it was too far. He had already gone to the Sears store forty miles away to pick up a water heater for someone that morning—this second job would help to pay for the truck.

  Buck turned the flatbed down a narrow road and into a tidy trailer park. Three big guys were waiting for him, leaning against a decorative split-rail fence. Two of them sported mountain man beards and were taking pulls off of quart-size bottles of iridescent green Mountain Dew. It was a cold day, and they looked like robo-men pounding down radiator fluid. The building in question was a large prefab garden shed with faux barn doors. The doors were decorated with crisscross timbers, such as you see in Andy Rooney/Judy Garland movies. One look at it and I had an instant hankering to put on a show.
/>   The owner of the shed had sold it to a woman a few miles down the road—all my father had to do was get it there. Buck produced seventy-five feet of heavy chain, and while the other men were encircling the shed with the chain, he expertly backed the flatbed close to the operation and then tipped the bed at an angle so the end was touching the ground. Then they hooked the chain to a winch and slowly hoisted the shed onto the bed of the truck. The other men pushed from the back, grunting directions as they exerted themselves.

  I kept picturing little minidisasters of the kind I remember from my childhood, like the time my father sent us kids into the woods with one match apiece to build a campfire, and the one fire—his—was caught by a shifting wind and burned down an acre of brush. Or the time my father decided to speculate on sugar beets and planted forty acres of this particular “crop of the future” instead of our usual corn crop. That summer we had a drought and the sugar beets didn’t come up, but the weeds did. Dad sent us kids into the field with a picture of a sugar beet plant to pull weeds and try to spot some seedlings, but there were none. Or the time he was going to outsmart the Arabs and bury a huge tank in our back pasture and fill it with oil. The tank sat in the pasture, large enough to become a local landmark and eyesore, rusting away in the weather until my mother had to pay someone to haul it away.

  The shed operation was going smoothly, and I felt a bubble of pride as I climbed back into the cab of the truck. We were moving a building. It was here, and we were taking it down the highway to there. Fifty bucks for less than an hour’s work seemed like a good deal, and as we rolled down the highway, I told my father so.