Tornado
Nell saw the first indigo clouds swelling to the east. “That’s a bad one,” Dad said. “It’s over at Minocqua and speeding this way.” The stilled air had gotten several degrees colder. We pulled in the chairs from the front yard. Everett took the cow and calf to the barn. A vast current, like a great river, whirled through the upper sky, crackling and snapping. Near the ground, all was frighteningly calm. The storm clouds, still some distance off resembled great churning brains, the deep blacks and indigos slashed with lightning. Then, horrified, we realized that a funnel was heading for us! Its swirling tail was light-colored, almost white, in contrast with its body. It whipped treetops in its path.
Dad said we’d be safest on the floor, where we could scoot under the table. The thunder was horrendous. Birch trees swept the ground. Sheets of rain scudded past the window. The house shuddered. Guy wires holding the stovepipe to the roof snapped and flapped. The lightning was incessant. Everything was pitch black. A pair of birds flung themselves against the window. We found them later, dead.
The storm passed. The sun came out, producing a beautiful rainbow.
We checked the animals and found the barns and coop intact. The tornado had cut a huge swath through the woods, barely missing Kula’s farm. We drove to town to see the damage. Except for the loss of a few roofs, Eagle River was spared. Near Conover the storm had uprooted trees for a mile. The violence was incredible. It would take years for the forest to return.
Church
I continued to attend the Lutheran Church, was baptized, and two weeks after Easter had my parents, sisters, and brother baptized. I hurried through catechism in order to teach Sunday school, a class of fourth-graders. I was soon promoted to superintendent. My duties were simple: call the sessions to order, lead prayers, conduct the offering of pennies, teach my class, conclude the session with another prayer, count and record the offering, and then attend the adult services in the nave.
Each Saturday night, just before going to sleep, I worked over my Sunday lesson. The church provided booklets, each featuring a colored picture illustrating the biblical text to be studied. Teachers received simple teaching manuals and were encouraged to memorize a psalm each Sunday, our students one per month. I affixed gold crosses to study papers whenever a student completed a psalm. I rarely missed memorizing, reciting both on my walk in to church and on the return home. My pedagogical methods derived from the belief that passionate prayer resolved all problems. It seemed to work, even with a pair of smart alecks whose dads were church trustees. Although my mother rarely attended services, Dad usually drove us to Sunday school. I preferred to walk whenever I could, memorizing psalms.
Eventually, Dad got himself a blue serge Welfare suit, attended church, and made a friend of Rev. Krubsack, who would come to the house on visits. The reverend liked laborers, probably because of his own working-class German origins. His lugubrious air of learning, however, prevented his ever being “one of us.” His sermons, delivered in rich guttural tones, were often scary Among his principal tenets were the following: 1. Simply by being born, you have broken all ten commandments. 2. Since the only way to Eternal Life is through Jesus intercession, and since He finds public confessions of sin distasteful, the best way to catch His ear is to pray solo, in your closet with the door closed. 3. All church organizations except the Ladies’ Aid are suspect and disallowed. 4. Roman Catholics are anathema. 5. No good Lutheran boy or girl will join the Scouts—they put too much emphasis on doing good deeds and not enough on asking Christ’s forgiveness for your having broken His commandments. 6. A communicant must register at least a day in advance of taking Communion, as a guarantee that the parishioner will not “drink damnation unto himself”
It was difficult to admire someone so rigid, but I tried to live his ideals. Later, when I was drafted into the army, for nearly two years, I wrote him for permission to take Communion from a cleric not of the Missouri Synod faith. When, of necessity, I ate the wafer and drank the wine without first securing Krubsack’s approval, I felt as much grace without his permission as with it. From that experience dates my fall from organized religion.
Learning to Drive the Car
My propensities for flinching delayed my learning to drive. Dad, incredibly patient, seated beside me in the Model A, would guide me through the gears. My Achilles’ heel was sensing the exact moment for releasing the clutch.
One Sunday Dad stopped the car in the middle of Sundsteen Road. “You drive,” he said, just like that.
He turned off the engine and changed seats. I set the choke and started the ignition. He cautioned me to release the clutch slowly. I tensed, pushed in the clutch, set the gear, and released the clutch. There was a loud rumble and clank. I had broken the axle! Why couldn’t I learn something so simple? Other boys did. “Next time you’ll get it,” Dad said. We pushed the car off the road. “Well, let’s get Kula.”
Kula returned with his horses and pulled us home. Dad was greatly inconvenienced—for a week he had to walk a good mile to catch a ride to work. He traded a pig for a new axle, brought it home, and on the next weekend repaired the Ford.
He insisted I try again; delaying would only make it harder to learn. This time we practiced near home. Caution paid off. I learned to feel that subtle moment when the clutch releases itself and the car moves forward. Within days I was driving short distances up and down the road.
Eventually, I bought myself a used Model A, and learned to make minimal repairs. If I had patience, it appeared, I had mechanical aptitude. I learned also that smearing your hands with grease and grit was not an odious experience.
Dad never teased me about my differences from other boys. My brother, for instance, loved cars and hunting. Dad encouraged my “book” education, saying he hoped I wouldn’t end up digging ditches as he had to. He helped me buy an old reconditioned Underwood typewriter through the Sears, Roebuck catalogue.
Columbus Lake
I met Bill and George Jolly one morning at their house at 6 A.M. Their seventeen-year-old brother, John, a freckled, husky youth, was still asleep on the bed the three of them shared. He was lying on his back and his sheet had worked up across his chest, revealing a sizable erection. George settled a noose of fishing line around John’s penis and dropped the loose end of the line out a nearby window. “Watch,” he laughed, running downstairs.
The black thread moved with delicate tugs. John grew even more erect. George yanked harder, and John awoke, cursing. “That’s George doin’ it again, right?” Keeping the string taut, he went over to the window and urinated. George yelled, ran back upstairs, and proceeded to wrestle his naked brother to the floor.
Later, while George ate breakfast, I helped Bill dig night crawlers. They loaned me a cane pole; they each had casting rods. They jammed some bread and cheese into a bag, which would serve also for bringing fish home.
To reach the lake we traversed a superb stand of virgin timber—pine, hemlock, and cedar, with some yellow birch. Partridge flew from thickets. When we reached a floating bog, I matched my footprints to George’s. One misstep and you were up to your waist in muck. As it was, on any portion of the bog your feet were under water. The trick was to leap to the next clump before the mass sank deeper under your weight. The vast lake was visible a hundred yards off We soon reached high land and a rapid creek that flowed into the lake.
We dropped our gear on the sand and stripped to our underwear. The shallow water was rife with pickerel weed. Beyond was a drop-off where Bill planned to fish. We tied fish stringers and a small bag of worms around our waists. George showed me how to bait the hook.
Bill hooked two walleyes and some bass and bluegills. George caught a pickerel, which he threw back, saying it was too bony, and nearly a dozen bass, bluegills, and large perch. My catch consisted of six bluegills and three smallmouth bass.
We stopped for lunch, stripped, and had fun swimming and splashing. When we were thirsty, we simply scooped up handfuls of water and drank
. A doe and a fawn appeared. A black bear, fortunately without cubs, spied us and waddled back into the forest. While Bill continued fishing, George and I lay stretched out on the sand, absorbing sun and talking about girls. He claimed that he “did it” with Alice Carlson. She was the oldest of a brood of children left motherless when their mother had died giving birth. I knew George was fibbing, yet I chose to believe him, enhancing his prowess, fearsome and mysterious to me. Perhaps I had a crush on George, of the kind youths have on one another. I don’t know. The more masculine—and crude—he was, the better I liked him. I wished for the afternoon never to end.
Impregnation
Charlie Mattek had staked his Guernsey bull in the north pasture, waiting for Lady. When I led her to the gate, the huge Guernsey caught her scent, grew aroused, reached the end of his tether, and pawed the ground. While he grew frenetic, his penis dripping, Lady seemed oblivious of him and kept munching grass, well beyond his reach. When Charlie pulled Lady nearer, the bull began licking her, his penis a hot rod of meat ready for penetration. He shuddered and withdrew, lowing. Strings of semen dripped from Lady. “That should do it,” Charlie said. I led Lady home. I was to bring her back if she remained in estrus.
The Botterons
Visits from local families were rare. Only the Botterons spent occasional Sunday afternoons with us, until the quarrel over Father Coughlin. When he was in his teens, George Botteron immigrated from Glarus, Switzerland, and married a Polish woman from Chicago. Rose babbled as much in Polish as she did in English, which often disconcerted my mother. There were three children: Norman, Rose Helen, and Gerald. Norman, the oldest, was my age. We lived too far away for walking, so roughly once a month we exchanged visits by car.
The Botterons taught me off-color Polish words. The only one I remember is pitchkie, for penny-bank slit, or vagina. There were a few insults and curses, mostly based on the reputed stupidity of Slavs. Norman arranged “shows” with his sister and a neighbor girl. For a penny each, the girls would pee in coffee cans.
George Botteron was an accordionist, so he and Dad played music. Rose Botteron’s hatred of Jews was utterly irrational and derived from her girlhood in a Chicago slum. She seemed the archetypal farm wife, tending to animals and fowl, her apron filled with grain or fat brown eggs. Norman, Gerald, Everett, and I fashioned slingshots and arrows for hunting birds—we never bagged any—and played endless games of tag and giant step.
One afternoon the Botteron kids and I returned from swimming in Perch Lake. Norman, in a loud bragging voice, tattled to the adults that I had pulled up some of old John Simon’s potatoes. True, I had been thoughtless, showing off; I had merely wanted to see how big the potatoes were. Norman had promised not to tell.
Botteron dared Dad to punish me. When I blurted out that it was only one hill, Dad yanked me to him, turned me over his lap, and spanked me. He threatened to tell the sheriff next day when he went to work.
I hid in the grove behind the house, staying until after dark. The fact that my punishment had occurred in front of visitors hurt far worse than the spanking itself Why did Dad need to save face? Before that he had never once slapped me.
For a week I spent most of each day hidden in the woods, positive that the sheriff would haul me to jail. I hid close to the house to be ready to run if an officer drove up. I feared asking Dad if he had indeed notified the sheriff. He had no inkling of the effect of his discipline on me.
Caddying
A few hours of training prepared you for the Eagle Waters Golf Course, a nine-hole course that covered a picturesque area of pine and birch groves winding near a major channel that connected the vast series of lakes known as the Chain of Lakes. Here, muskellunge fishing was the best in the world. To reach the club we hitchhiked fifteen miles to the Chanticleer Inn. From their boat dock we shouted across to the clubhouse, where the caddy master, doubling as bartender, sent a boat to fetch us.
An experienced caddy walked us through a few holes, showing us how to hold the pin-flag to keep it from flapping and deflecting the player’s concentration. We were advised to walk a few steps behind our player, always to the left, ready to supply any club he wished. We were to keep our mouths shut unless spoken to—“and keep your eye on the ball.” Our first responsibility was to know where a ball flew and to lead the player to it. Seventy-five cents for nine holes. The caddy master, Jack Bacich, was impressed whenever players asked for us a second time. We contributed our tips to a kitty, divvied up by Bacich or his sister Betty at the end of each week. As I recall, the Bacichs took 15 percent for “managing” the fund. They kept complaints to a minimum by giving us free ice cream bars or Frozen Turkey candy, a white nougat marshmallow treat. Some days we sat around for hours, waiting to work. We talked dirty a lot. Occasionally there was the titillation of pocket-sized obscene treatments of “Maggie and Jiggs,” “Out Our Way,” “Blondie,” and “The Katzenjammer Kids,” circulated by the older caddies who had purchased them at a local gas station. Moon Mullins pumped Maggie; his organ was as fat as his forearm.
A high point was the Homeowners’ Loan Corporation Golf Tournament, sponsored by the Chanticleer Inn, with prizes going to the winners and their caddies. Bacich assigned us to players according to our seniority. Most caddies worked the week, earning $25 before tips. We usually served the same player, unless he complained to the caddy master, who then switched us around. One player I held in particular awe was Edgar Guest, the most popular poet of the day. He was a short, pudgy man who wore plaid knicker-type golf pants and a plaid cap with a visor. His verses, widely syndicated in newspapers, reached a huge audience. His most famous lines were “It takes a heap o’ livin’ / to make a house a home.” He stood for easy values and the virtues of everyday lives. Another of his much-loved poems was an ode to the outhouse, that structure so indigenous to rural America.
Whenever I wrote poems, I wrote in his manner. At six I had attempted verses and short stories based on cute animals—raccoons, possums, skunks, frogs, crows, and robin redbreasts. My first public recognition came when the superintendent of schools saw one of my Rocky Raccoon stories, written in a pencil tablet. When the teacher singled me out, the superintendent patted my head and told me to keep writing. That spring I wrote poems, hoping to enter one in the county fair. The teacher selected a narrative piece and drew a picture to go with it. That fall I realized she had written an entirely new poem, “The Teacher with a Bully in His Class,” and entered it in my name. She had printed it in Gothic script and affixed a drawing of an old-fashioned schoolmaster berating a hulking, obstreperous boy standing by, waiting to be birched. The poem received first prize, a new dollar bill. When I questioned the ethics—the work after all, was hers—she laughed and said that I had tried so hard to write she wanted to “assist” me. After that, I kept my verses private, limiting myself to an occasional story and keeping elaborate notes on meetings of our “literary club.” Among the few books constituting our school library was Guest’s famous volume The House by the Side of the Road.
I took every opportunity to watch Guest tee up and drive his ball down the fairway. He was an indifferent golfer, but because of his fame he was assigned our most experienced caddy, Mike Tomlanovich. On Friday, the last day of the tournament, I screwed up my courage and asked him to autograph a golf card, which I then prized for years. The paradox of a True Poet (as I regarded him then) arranging home mortgages, a form of usury, never struck me. He certainly was a departure from my naive image of the poet as a romantic loner in lace cuffs, seated at an open casement window at dusk, plume in hand, seized by Inspiration.
The golf course was my first real involvement with the world outside home and school. This, a real job, differed from selling arbutus, peeling logs, and picking potato bugs—jobs I had done for my dad. For the first time, I sensed real possibilities in the larger world.
Finn Hall
A closed community of Finns inhabited Phelps, a lumber town north of Eagle River. Importing cooperative ideals fro
m Europe, these people found a locale of hills, firs, lakes, and swamps resembling the homeland. They established a cooperative sawmill, grocery and hardware stores, a school, a health service, and a cow fund. If any of their group lost cows from disease, calving, or drowning, the fund replaced the animal. They believed in free and universal education from grade school through university. Their ideals, like those of other immigrant Scandinavians settling in Wisconsin and Minnesota, influenced the culture at large. The Progressive party, led by Senator Bob La Follette of Wisconsin, set a national tone that incorporated Scandinavian social values.
A conspicuous Finnish effort at community outreach was the erection of a hall for meetings, festivals, and dances. These events supported the cow and family funds. The hall, built of pine logs, was located a half mile from Sundsteen School. Across the road was a grove of virgin evergreens, a spot I always feared. The deep recesses might easily conceal bear or a leech-covered wild man of the woods. One winter morning I found blood all over the snow and decided a man had been killed there. My quieter mind said that it was a deer. A fetid odor of death emerged from the sunless earth below the gigantic cedars.
The Finnish overseers scheduled Saturday night dances, charging half a dollar for each male attending. They imported a trio of semiprofessional musicians from Watersmeet, Michigan, who played both traditional and popular music. My cousin Frenchy attended every dance, drank, and got into fights. To many young men, the pursuit of violence was more important than the pursuit of women.
No other place in the immediate area so appealed to young bucks for acting out mating rituals, turf defenses, and ego pecking orders. To my cousin, cut lips and black eyes were badges of honor. Occasionally, Everett and I walked to the hall to listen to the music. Once, in the parking lot, we witnessed a vicious fight between Frenchy and another husky youth. The excitement was palpable. When Frenchy was getting the worst of it, his brother Jim jumped in. Shortly, the fight turned into a melee. Officials tried to stop it but couldn’t. My brother and I, fearful, left before the fight ended. The next day Frenchy and Jim boasted they had smeared the gravel with their attackers, men from Michigan looking for trouble. When the hall was finally closed to dances, the young stags moved to other venues to work their macho imperatives.
Crunching Gravel Page 8