He plowed with immense skill, working the plow blades into the loam and guiding the horses with their lead harness around his shoulders. Margie, Everett, and I followed, plucking earthworms from the moist turned-over soil. We’d use them for fishing. Dad plowed the large field first, where potatoes, corn, and squash grew. The small field held our other crops: tomatoes, cabbage, Swiss chard, onions, green beans, and peas. The plowing went smoothly. We had cleared all large rocks from the field, and apart from one obstinate huge pine stump, the areas were free of obstacles. Dad disked the soil and then leveled it with a drag. By late afternoon, he had finished.
My mother and Margie had prepared potatoes for planting, slicing them into bits, each with an eye for a new plant. White potatoes kept better than reds, although the latter matured faster. We planted the potato bits and corn seeds with a special gadget, a metal flanged cup on a long handle. You dropped a potato or grain of corn into the cup, thrust the cup into the soil, and moved the handle towards you, opening the jaws of the cup and releasing the seed. On you moved, a foot and a half or so, for the next hill. Every tenth hill of corn, you mixed in a few pumpkin or squash seeds.
Burning Brush
When we cut firewood in the fall, we threw the lopped branches into piles for spring burning, to lessen the fire hazard of dead scattered brush. In the spring, we trimmed the birch grove on the hill behind the house, picking up debris downed during the winter and adding to the piles. Wherever these brush piles burned, raspberry bushes sprang up.
Birth
The Poland China sow’s pregnancy was only evident a few days before she birthed piglets. We had no sure way of telling when she’d been in heat. She was always with the boar until late winter, when we butchered him. The pig shed was near the barn. Like the other outbuildings, it was of scrap pine covered with tar paper, and was just large enough to accommodate two grown pigs. During cold weather, we crammed it with straw. Weather permitting, the animals slept outside, snuggled into the pits they had dug with their snouts, searching for edible roots. The yard was well fenced, with wire mesh buried in the ground to make excavating difficult for the pigs. Late each spring, once the sow had birthed, we moved the pen to a freshly cleared area plentiful with roots. The pigs would work for us, tilling and fertilizing the soil.
Late one afternoon, returning from the lake, I noticed the sow on her side making gurgling sounds. She lay with her face half buried in mud and her foaming mouth open. Her one visible eye was closed and wet. Her vagina was inflamed and swollen. Soon a piglet oozed forth wearing a purplish semitransparent placental shroud. I had never before seen pigs born. When the second one dropped, I ran to the house for my mother.
Five more piglets emerged. Since sows are notorious for mistaking their farrow for placentas and are apt to devour an entire litter, we had to act fast. I grabbed a stick, ready to drive off the sow. We threw armfuls of straw into the pen, near the shed, hoping to entice her to where it was dry. It worked. The farrow soon found her teats and were feeding. When the piglets matured, we sold some, traded others for hay, and kept two, a boar and a sow, for the next year’s breeding.
Two weeks after the birth of the pigs, Lady dropped another bull calf We had recorded the date of her visit to Mattek’s bull, so we were sure of her due time. That morning she was restless when I led her, lowing softly, to a clearing of luxuriant timothy. I checked on her at noon. She was eating, and all seemed in order.
At about 4 P.M., I was startled by her lowing and saw her hunched, standing with her legs spread at odd angles. I ran to the field. She was straining to drop the calf, visible now up to its shoulders. She kept gazing at her rear, looked stricken, and moved in vague slow circles, as if to ease her pain. Then she lay down on her side, panting, her muscles pushing to expel the calf I knelt, grabbed the calfs wet head, and drew it toward me. The shoulders pushed clear, and the hind portions slipped forth. With a jackknife I severed the umbilical chord. Blood. As soon as the calf could stand, Lady rose, turned, and started licking it. “Quick,” Mom said. “Get the pitchfork.”
When I returned, the calf was already feeding. A huge placental mass, iridescent, resembling a great sea slug, exuded from Lady’s vagina. It could have filled a washtub. I speared it with the pitchfork and threw it over the fence. If Lady had eaten it, her milk would have soured for a month.
Memorial Day
The county’s two commemorative days were Memorial Day and the Fourth of July. The former began at 10 A.M. with a parade led by members of the American Legion, the high school band, the Legion Women’s Auxiliary, and a scattering of town dignitaries in automobiles. Paper poppies, in honor of the vets who had died on Flanders Field, sprouted in buttonholes. To be sure of a vantage spot near the depot, we arrived at nine. My sister wore a flowered dress Mom had made on her treadle sewing machine. My dad, my brother, and I wore new Sears shirts. We were promised ice cream cones at Zimplemann’s Parlor, an enterprise run by a domineering old German and three plump unmarried daughters. To the rear of the parlor was a violin in a glass case, which played, via mechanical fingers after you inserted a dime, a limited repertory—two or three Strauss waltzes and a few sentimental American love songs by Carrie Jacobs Bond.
Promptly at 11:00, the hour of the Armistice ending World War I, Dr. McMurray flew over in a red biplane and dropped a wreath of poppies into Eagle River, near the iron bridge. McMurray was a physician of doubtful credentials. If one could, one chose Dr. Oldfield, the only other doctor in town. McMurray drank too much and loved regaling his patients with his reputed feats as a war ace in France.
Occasionally, flowers drifted free of the wreath and floated out over the crowd. Catching one brought good luck. Later, after Fred Draeger, the district attorney, delivered the Decoration Day speech, everybody marched to the cemetery, led by the Legion, the band, and the dignitaries. An honor guard fired off salutes.
Two of my mother’s brothers had been gassed in the trenches, surviving with health problems that led to early deaths. Several local vets had been mortally scarred by mustard gas. There was rejoicing when these veterans won modest government pensions.
Before leaving home that morning we put a watermelon in a washtub, on ice. Chicken was prepared the day before, for chicken and dumplings. The meat, cut in pieces, lay soaking in salt water. Mom believed that soaking removed the blood, or the “wild” taste. Margie and I baked a cake, one of our favorites, from a flour bag recipe: a white cake made with lard, sugar, eggs, and maple flavoring, frosted half an inch thick and tinted bright red with food coloring.
Hens and Chicks
A hen was ready to set when she refused to leave the nesting box, ruffled her throat feathers, and glanced at you from the shadows with a suspicious red eye. Once off the nest, she clucked maternally, as though a parade of chicks followed her.
Three hens chose almost simultaneously to set, which meant a rush on our egg supply. Most fowl could accommodate up to a dozen eggs. For three weeks the setters sat, clucking softly as they turned eggs with their beaks. Turning guaranteed that the embryos would not adhere to the inside of the shells. Every two days we would close the henhouse door to the other birds and scatter grain. The setters emerged, exuded huge, noisome deposits of dung, ate and drank, and returned to their nests.
Of the forty-five eggs set to hatch, forty produced chicks. If a chick had trouble breaking through its shell, we assisted by enlarging the beak hole. By the end of spring, we hoped to have nearly two hundred chicks, which we would fatten, killing them in the fall, keeping only the sturdiest pullets for our new laying flock. My mother canned quarts of chicken for winter eating.
The chicks spent their first days on newspaper spread near the kitchen stove in an area blockaded by chunks of wood. An overturned cardboard box, with entry holes, supplied a hiding place. They ate cornmeal and oats. We each had favorites, which we gave names. Eventually, we divided them between the mothers. Brood hens avoided the main flock, preferring shade and concealment under low shrubs.
No creatures are more brutal than hens. Helpless chicks are always in danger of being pecked to death. A hen bitten severely by deer flies is an easy victim of the flock. They peck at her head relentlessly until she dies. Runts are also the victims of this selective killing. We saved some hens by removing them in time and treating them with ointment. Curiously, Crip did not participate in these slaughters, leaving the dreary business to the hens.
Graduation
Five eighth-graders drove with Miss Crocker to the commencement exercises at Eagle River High School: Makinnen, Eileen Ewald, Bill Jolly, my cousin Grace, and I. Representing our school, I would present a three-minute speech. Miss Crocker worked on the text, a set of platitudes about the future, education, and the world as ours to win. I rehearsed it, assisted by Miss Crocker, a dozen times.
We had to wear suits. Mine was a new ugly brown plaid wool one that Dad had wangled from Welfare. The pants were incredibly baggy, rough, and cuffed.
The final week of school was a mixture of ebullience and sadness. Each afternoon we played games. Only the graduating students raised and lowered the flag. We also rang the hand bell. We agreed to divide the tadpoles, about thirty of them, we had nurtured in jars in the sandbox. All had legs and now resembled toads rather than frogs. I would keep mine until the tails were gone and then free them in a ditch. On the last day, we turned in our books and had lemonade and cookies. This was Miss Crocker’s final year of teaching; she was marrying the town jeweler.
The commencement exercises were boring. Chairs had been set up on the stage. When the superintendent called the name of a school, the teacher and students took seats. After the student representative spoke, diplomas were awarded, complete with handshakes and congratulations.
When my turn came, I arose, conscious of my ugly suit. I recited the first lines. Then someone laughed. Burning inside that wretched suit, I forgot my lines. With Miss Crocker’s prompting, I was able to stumble on. I had let her down. Neither my mother nor my father attended—Dad couldn’t leave work, and my mother felt she had no appropriate clothes. Her best dress was a gingham Welfare dress. This she was too proud to wear.
Fido
As a name for a dog “Fido” is neither clever nor original. It is a corruption of Fideles, or “Faithful”—a generic name evoking dog qualities.
Our Fido was short-haired and large, with orange and black markings. From the time he was a pup, he lived outdoors. Unless the weather turned impossibly cold, he remained in his doghouse, a structure built of old planking with a tar-paper roof and an entry hole just big enough for the dog to crawl through. We made the house small so that in bad weather his body heat would be contained to keep him from freezing. We never chained him.
He was a good watchdog. Given my fear of the woods and the dark, I took Fido with me whenever I walked in the forest or did night chores. He was fed almost entirely on table scraps—no canned or dried dog food. Occasionally he hunted, and we would find a chewed rabbit on the door stoop, or the remains of a wild duck. There were occasional mishaps with porcupines, and Dad would use a pliers to extract the needles from Fido’s muzzle. When he was a year old, Dad castrated him with a razor blade, pouring on a mixture of oil cut with turpentine as a disinfectant. “Only way to keep him home,” Dad said. After that, tamed, Fido lived out his life, finally falling victim to crippling arthritis contracted from those bone-chilling winters.
Miscarriage
Something was amiss that morning. Was it my mother’s goiter acting up again? To avoid an operation, she’d answered an ad in a woman’s magazine for an ointment and beads. The beads, amber seed shapes glued to small copper disks, were to absorb “vibrations” from the ointment, conducting “charges” to the swollen goiter tissue to dry it. For weeks she smeared her neck and wore the huckster’s beads. When no lessening of the swelling occurred, she stopped using the beads.
She kept the beads in a shellacked tortoise shell on her dresser. I’d taken the shell from a mud turtle I caught in the strawberry patch. I boiled the turtle, and when the meat was soft I poked it loose with a stick and hung the shell in a tree until the remaining meat was eaten by ants. The shell rested on a piece of window glass near Mom’s curling iron. The dresser’s oval mirror was held in place by bent wood painted a mahogany tone, resembling horns. Nearby hung Mom’s wedding picture. In exchange for three pullets, an itinerant photographer had enlarged a small photograph, the only one of the wedding extant, and framed it in a tin oval frame tinged rose and green.
I gave Mom hot coffee. She was facing the wall, utterly still.
“Mom?” She turned and smiled. “What is it?” I asked. She sat up and drank some coffee.
“I’ll be all right,” she said.
After a few moments I returned to the south pasture where I was helping Dad erect posts for a new pigpen. The spot was mud-luscious with dank, black soil. The pigs were ecstatic. When we finished, I returned to see how Mom was.
She had thrown off the quilts and was covered by a thin blood-stained sheet. “Get Dad,” she said. “Hurry.”
He came, gesturing for me to wait in the living room. Mom was weeping. Dad was consoling her and soon emerged with something wrapped in newspaper. “It was a new boy,” he said, holding the wrapping to his side. He grabbed a shovel from the shed, went out behind the bedroom, and buried the baby near a small stand of white birch.
Mom was shivering. The bleeding would not stop. We piled quilts over her, and Dad went for the doctor.
The doctor we preferred, Oldfield, was out of town, so McMurray, the war ace, came. We were suspicious of him. My parents believed he was drunk when he delivered my brother and put too much silver nitrate in Everett’s eyes. For weeks Everett had been blind.
The doctor finally emerged from the bedroom, saying that the baby had been five months along. He didn’t want to see it. He gave my mother paregoric for the pain, and with flannel cloths stanched the blood, which he said would have stopped of its own accord “via the body’s natural healing.” He warned of complications and then patted my head. “You didn’t need another brother anyhow, lad. Too many mouths to feed as it is.”
This was Mom’s third miscarriage; only one had been intentional. She had tried to miscarry Everett. Isolated and homesick for North Dakota, facing a difficult life after Margie and I were born, she had wanted no more babies. When she found herself pregnant with Everett, she sought advice from my uncle Pete’s wife, Kate, the French Canadian who specialized in mild necromancies. She recommended ghastly mixtures of cod-liver oil, ground chicken gall bladders, strong coffee, moisture gathered from cows’ udders, and honey, warmed into a smooth blend and swallowed neat. The child remained firmly in utero. Mom would load my sister and me into a wicker baby buggy and push it for hours over graveled roads, thinking she could jar the fetus loose. Nothing worked. She blamed herself for Everett’s maladies, the bad eyesight, mild epilepsy, and slowness to learn.
Dad drove McMurray back to town, and Mom finally slept. Margie and Nell returned from Aunt Kate’s, where Dad had sent them for the day When I told Margie what had happened, she listened and then went to the kitchen and made herself a peanut butter sandwich. I sat down on the floor, holding Fido to my chest.
Timber
On weekends I accompanied Dad to Buckotaban Lake, where we peeled logs for the Wisconsin-Michigan Lumber Company. Dad and a friend, Marion Briggs, were hired to strip bark from the logs and pile them so that sledges and tractors could reach them for easy hauling. Briggs was a tall, husky man in his thirties, with a small daughter. He had been abandoned by his wife, reputedly a Spanish dancer. His mother raised the girl, keeping her in homemade dresses of an ugly Victorian style. Briggs was a violinist who, under mysterious circumstances, had given up his career. Only rarely would he consent to perform. He encouraged Dad to play instruments. They earned thirty cents for each log trimmed of branches and debarked. By working hard, they could finish six or seven trees an hour. My job was to peel logs Dad had trimmed and slashed alo
ng one side. I used a “spud,” or tire iron. Pine bark came off easily. The spruce were difficult though. On these I used a drawknife, a blade with two parallel handles, scraping free the obstinate bark without gouging the wood. Since I was slow, Dad worked most of the spruce himself The best logs would be sawed into lumber, the remainder pulped. Our clothes and hands were coated with pitch. Only kerosene would cut it.
Briggs worked by himself creating his own piles of timber. One afternoon he walked over to me, chatted briefly, and then whipped out his penis. There’s a protocol for relieving yourself in the presence of other males: either you turn your back or you stand beside them, facing the same way; neither of you gazes at the other. Briggs’s member was almost equine; I had never seen anything like it. Dad came over and spoke curtly to Briggs, who never displayed himself to me again.
Ethics
Dad’s trustworthiness and honor were tarnished by a feeling he shared with others of his subculture. Whenever you could exploit either the “haves” or the “government,” you did it. One evening he invited me to go with him for a walk. After a quarter of a mile or so, we came to a rise of highland where the soil had been freshly shoveled. “There,” he said proudly. “I’ve buried dynamite.” He had stolen the explosives from his WPA job, intending to use them for excavating a basement. Over the basement he planned to build an extra room. He described the sensitivity of the caps, how a brusque hit would detonate them. The foreman made regular reports of the dynamite supply to superiors. If he came up short, they would investigate. Dad cautioned me to tell no one.
Crunching Gravel Page 6