And Now We Shall Do Manly Things

by Craig Heimbuch

  Plus, I wanted to carry a gun into the woods and maybe stop somewhere along the way to pee on a tree.

  That would be a story worth telling.

  PART II

  SPRING

  6

  Long Road to Iowa

  I checked my mirror three or four times, hoping not to see lights. I don’t know that what I was doing was illegal, but I imagined it would be, at least, frowned upon. No cops. No cars. Nothing behind me but miles of highway rolling out like a ribbon, much closer than it appears. The cruise was set at seventyish and I was trying to adjust the zoom on my iPhone camera while maintaining control of the steering wheel. I wanted the photo that I could see out ahead of me, but it was hard to balance driving, paranoia, and my Ansel Adams vision for landscape photography. I’m just glad my wife wasn’t with me. I can’t imagine what she would say about me taking pictures while driving. True, it’s not texting, but it’s not exactly safe either.

  I love driving through the Midwest. I love the farms, the wide-open spaces, the mild shock of coming to a city or town with multiple exits. It’s like finding treasure in the sand at the beach. And on this drive, western Illinois is something to behold. It was only April, so the corn wasn’t up and most of the trees were still without leaves. There’s just something about being alone in a car surrounded by that much space, that much all-over nothingness. It’s completely different from driving alone in other places. In the Virginia Blue Ridge or the Oregon Cascades, you’re not really alone. You’re never alone in city traffic; there’s always other motorists, pedestrians, stoplights. Out here, on Interstate 74 west of Peoria, you can check out for a while.

  I snap a couple of pictures of the road rising in front of me. A truck in the distance, farm fields creeping up to the edge of the blacktop like strangers. I’m on my way to my uncle’s funeral. He died suddenly, without warning. In some sense, the best way to go. No hospice, no dreary hospital beds, nothing pending or lurking in the future. He just went upstairs to the bathroom and never came back down. I decided the moment I heard that I would make the trip. In the Midwest, in a family like mine, you don’t miss these kinds of things. Miss a wedding, maybe. A baptism, that’s understandable. But a funeral, you go. My cousin Chris was flying in from his home in Kazakhstan. He’s an oil field engineer. My parents, sister, brother, and niece were driving in from Cleveland. They, at the moment I snapped the photo, were somewhere north of me—west of Chicago, but not yet to the line.

  With eleven hours to myself, I did a lot of thinking. I thought about my uncle—the oldest of my grandparents’ nine children. Third brother up from my dad. He was the family historian. The know-it-all, but in a good way. He was the kind of guy who talked to everyone he met. He was the kind of guy who got endless enjoyment from an old farm implement catalog. He was never fancy. I remember seeing him in a suit just a couple of times—my cousin’s wedding, my grandmother’s funeral. He wore funny-looking suspenders, and his beard looked like the hide of a mange-ridden dog. He was serious, in his way, but also not. At his oldest child’s wedding—which was held in the pasture a hundred feet from his front door—he built a big bonfire by way of a rehearsal dinner. After the sun went down, he brought out a mason jar filled with clear liquid and a moldy-looking peach. A little white lightning someone had given him as a thank-you gift for some unknown favor. Uncle Don embodied all that Iowa has come to represent to me.

  I thought about him as the miles ticked by. I thought about the way he told stories, how he took me to the Surf Ballroom when I was in college so I could see where Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper played their last concert. He never forgot about the Big Bopper, even though history generally does. Once, when visiting with my wife and kids, he tried to convince me to take my sons to see the World’s Largest Tractor. He spoke of it as transformative, as if seeing it would cure all the wrongs my suburban life had foisted upon me, my sons, and my conception of manhood. I didn’t go. I should have gone.

  And thinking about him got me thinking about other midwestern men. My dad, my uncles, those I am related to and those I have come to know. Their stoicism. Their ability to stand up and face a fight. The way they talk about doing what’s right and what’s good. They don’t like taxes, they shoot guns. They are patriots. They liked Ike. How many other great men have called the Middle of America home? Well, off the top of my head: Henry Ford, Frank Lloyd Wright, the Wright Brothers. Ted Nugent is from Michigan. John Wayne. I’m reminded of Herbert Hoover as I pass his memorial highway just east of Iowa City. Bob Feller and Jim Thome. Warren Buffet, Ulysses S. Grant, Warren Harding, Abraham Lincoln for God’s sake. Harry Truman was from Missouri, I think that counts. Ronald Reagan. Charles Shultz. Walt Disney and Ray Krock. Michael Jackson was from Indiana, though I’m not sure he counts. But Larry Bird and Magic Johnson—Indiana and Michigan, respectively—certainly do. Harry Houdini claimed to be from Wisconsin, though he was born in Hungary. Miles Davis, Ely Lilly.

  The writers alone who called the Midwest home make for a staggering list: Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Elmore Leonard, Mark Twain, Carl Sandburg, Kurt Vonnegut, Saul Bellow. Jonathan Franzen is from Illinois. Two of my personal heroes, Bill Bryson and Garrison Keillor, are from Iowa and Minnesota. The lists go on and on.

  All my life, I thought I needed to be from somewhere else in order to be the person I wanted to be, but the more I drove, the more I realized I was already from somewhere. As the miles wore on, past Waterloo and on the home stretch to Mason City, I contemplated the men of the Midwest. I thought about all their accomplishments that, inevitably, led to a critique of my own. I’m in my thirties, a husband and a father, and, yet, I don’t feel like a man. I feel like a watered-down version of a man. I certainly don’t feel like any of the men listed above and don’t even feel like a Heimbuch man. I feel like my life is too much about compromise. That’s not to say that being a man means living without compromise, but I do feel too ready to give in, too willing to cower, to hide from problems, and to shy away in the face of opportunity. I realize that, if I am ever to become the man, the husband, the father, the writer I want to become, I need to learn how to face life standing up.

  I spent two days in Iowa for the funeral. I shot about five hundred rounds with my brother and cousin at the shooting range my uncle Mark has built on his property. I slept in his basement and listened as he explained the finer points of gun mechanics, hunting laws, and the latest thing that has him pissed. I realized I don’t allow myself to get pissed. I don’t roar the way he does. Uncle Mark has kind of a famous temper. When he witnesses something that he feels isn’t right, he speaks his mind. When his kids do something stupid, he’ll yell himself hoarse about it. But, inevitably, he hugs them and helps them out of the jam they’ve gotten into. He told me stories about the jams he’s been in. He told me about getting in trouble in college, about my dad getting in trouble. He embraces his failures. I’ve never been in trouble—not really—and yet, I tend to run at the first sign that I might be wrong—cover it up, silence it. It makes me feel weak, to hear someone talking about how they’ve been wrong. Because I could never do that, could never admit it.

  Hours were spent in small conversations. My dad and his cousins told hunting stories. My cousin told me about the time he did something that got him in hot water, something brave and unthinkable for me. My dad told the story about the first time he went deer hunting. He was younger than I am and already married with two children. He was so scared he shot the same buck three times. “They told me to keep firing until it went down,” he said, laughing. I tried to relate to the story, but, really, I couldn’t. I don’t know what that feels like. I don’t know the nerves, the twitching hands. I don’t know what a real adrenaline rush feels like. I don’t know the thrill of the hunt. My best adrenaline story involves working up the nerve to ride a roller coaster that was particularly tall. What kind of a man am I when I don’t know what it means to tell someone off when they have
it coming? When I have no idea how it feels to be in the wilderness possessing the power of life and death?

  I chided myself for not understanding what the other men were talking about when discussing their guns. I berated myself for not disagreeing with Uncle Mark when he said something about President Obama and “those damned Democrats who won’t leave Bush alone.” I wanted to tell him that the Republicans were still blaming Clinton seven years after he left office and that the fact that we’re still paying for two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—not to mention tax cuts—just three years after President Bush left office is worthy of disdain. But I demurred. I chickened out. I tried to tell myself that it’s about respecting my elders, about blending in, and that discretion is the better part of valor, but I am not brave enough for valor, so I say nothing.

  I mentioned to my cousin Tommy that I was thinking about coming out for a pheasant hunt in the fall. We were sitting in the basement at Mark and Linette’s house. I was staying in the spare bedroom down there, and neither Tommy nor I could sleep all that well. I think after a couple of days of potlucks and receiving lines, we were both a little tired of nodding reverently and accepting or giving condolences. So we played video games.

  Strange that in my midthirties, Tommy, then sixteen, is the one I feel the most comfortable hanging out with. I guess in some ways you just never leave the kids’ table.

  “I’m thinking about coming out in the fall to go pheasant hunting,” I told him during a particularly quiet game of video football. He didn’t exactly drop his controller in amazement, but he didn’t say anything either.

  “Cool,” he said after a pregnant pause.

  “Do you think you could help me figure out what I need and schedule the thing?”

  “Hell yeah,” he said. And I tried to imagine what my reaction would have been had one of my older cousins asked me to help him or her, had they taken an interest like that. I would have been flabbergasted. I look at old photos of family gatherings and can never remember what circumstances led up to them being taken. Even now, all grown up with a family of my own, I think about how separated I feel from my generation on my dad’s side. My mom’s side? Well, I don’t even know all their names, let alone have a private memory of a time spent together with them.

  But Tommy and his brother, Will, are different. Will is thirteen years younger than I am, Tommy another three years younger than that. But they’ve always felt more like siblings separated by distance than cousins. Maybe it’s because Uncle Mark has always felt like more than an uncle and Aunt Linette more than an aunt. Maybe it’s because they are the people in the family my parents are closest with, but I’ve always loved being with them.

  Once, when Jack was small, Rebecca and I went to visit Mark’s brood in Iowa for a long weekend. We spent long days just chatting, letting Will and Tommy play with Jack in the massive yard and listening to Mark tell stories about a family that was mine and yet something so unfamiliar. That tends to happen in big families. There tends to be one or two siblings who move away and their children are raised apart from the rest. We were those children, my sisters and I, and my dad was one of those siblings who left. Mark never left. He remained, an epicenter in a family bound for a quake. He and Linette built a house on the property where my grandmother had spent nearly her entire life. They did it to help her, to be there, and to give their boys an upbringing they could never get living in town or in another state. I listened for hours as Linette told me about my grandmother’s favorite recipes, how she liked to can blackberries from her garden near the back of the seven-acre property, right next to the shooting range.

  We’d have a bonfire in the yard in the evening and after Jack had gone down and Mark and Linette had gone to bed, Rebecca, Will, Tommy, and I would stay up late playing cards and singing silly songs. Here were two boys in the throes of adolescence, on the cusp of the independence that comes with driver’s licenses and high school football, yet it seemed like there was no place they would rather be than with us, playing canasta and cracking each other up with falsetto versions of Stevie Nicks, singing about the white-winged dove.

  Still, for all this familial bonding, there were reminders that in addition to being great hosts and kids cool beyond their years, Will and Tommy were still brothers. Will has always been the quiet one. The brainy one who loved to get his little brother’s goat. And at that point, he was probably fifteen and developing that cockiness that comes with pubescence. But while Will’s confidence was growing, Tommy’s temper was inherited from his dad and was already in full blossom. Most of the time, it was pretty simple. Little jabs from Will, big demonstrative lashes from Tommy. Will would tell Tommy he was an idiot, Tommy would tell him to go to hell. But on the second-to-last day of our trip, I witnessed something truly amazing, something that astounded me as the much younger brother of two sisters, a man so afraid of conflict that I refuse to send back food when given the wrong order.

  Will and Tommy were helping out a neighbor across the street. Apparently the neighbor was out west and the boys had agreed to take care of his dogs. This involved crossing the road a couple of times a day, getting the dogs out of their pen, feeding them, changing their water, and tossing a ball for a bit. Will had been riding Tommy’s tail for a good bit of the morning and since the afternoon sun was getting pretty hot, we had decided to take Jack inside and lay him down for a nap. While we were doing that, Will and Tommy had gone across the road to perform their duties. I went back outside and was wandering about the property under the cool shadows of the ancient oak trees when I looked toward the road and saw Tommy coming back. I would say he was walking, but it actually seemed more like the stride of a man on his way to murder his wife’s lover and he was muttering under his breath like a deranged homeless person.

  “Tommy,” I called and he looked up, veering toward me. I could hear him muttering, absolutely spitting mad and noticed that his T-shirt was wet. It took me a second to realize that Will wasn’t with him and judging by Tommy’s gait, I wondered if he had murdered him and fed him to the dogs. It turned out I wasn’t far off. “Where’s Will?” I asked as my twelve-year-old cousin drew closer.

  He looked me straight in the eye and spat, “I can’t get any Goddamn respect around here.”

  “Tommy, where’s Will?”

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “Where’s Will?” I asked, feeling a sense of genuine concern by this point.

  “He sprayed me with the hose, so I locked his ass in the kennel,” he said and walked past me into the house. Even now, just remembering the moment, makes me chuckle. Partly it’s because I love the idea of the much smaller younger brother succumbing to his own fury and managing to throw the older brother into a dog kennel and partly it’s because I know this is going to be Jack and Dylan someday. The age difference is about the same, and so are the personalities.

  I doubled over laughing and went inside to tell Rebecca and Linette what had happened. Rebecca had the same reaction as I did, a combination of mortification, admiration, and hysterical laughter. This was, sadly, not Linette’s first rodeo when it came to refereeing the boys, and it wouldn’t be her last.

  “Thomas, you march back over there and let your brother out of that kennel,” she snapped. And Tommy, a good son at heart, did as he was told, but the moment he left the house, she laughed so hard she cried. We all did that night. We all laughed about it. Even Will. Then we played a few games of canasta.

  Ever since that particular moment of that particular trip, I’ve looked at Tommy as my coconspirator. He’s been my point of contact with the Iowa relatives and the person I turn to when I need a good laugh.

  He gave me some advice about clothes and equipment, reminded me about the things I would need to do in order to hunt legally, and even recommended a book about the ringneck, one I had not seen on Amazon or in Barnes and Noble. He even agreed to go with me and offered to let me use one of his shotguns if I needed. />
  The next day the drive back to Cincinnati was dull and gray. A freak spring snowstorm had blanketed much of Iowa in white, and the sky—cloudless and pristine on the drive over—was hung low with clouds. I couldn’t stop thinking about my dad, my uncles, the great men of the Midwest. And the more I thought, the more I felt this weight of unmet expectation on my shoulders.

  I looked around as I drove, at the farms, the fields, the wide-open spaces and was, somehow, cut raw by the nobility of it. I imagined the farmer working the land, tirelessly putting forth effort to make things grow. I was enamored by this place, these people. The Midwest, which for so long was nothing and nowhere to me, had me intimidated. And I began to wonder if I can ever rise to meet its gaze.

  The thoughts came like raindrops—individual and constant. I needed to pull off, to take a break. I stopped at a truck stop to stretch my legs. I went inside and walked around the food court. I was thinking simultaneously about my uncle Don—whose funeral was a reminder of the power a man derives from being honorable, decent, and interested in other people’s lives, as he must have been to the five hundred or so people who came to the visitation. I’m thinking about my own funeral and what people will say—

  “He was pretty funny.”

  “He was punctual.”

  “He was very tall.”

  “He really liked to read.”

  “He was a pretty good guy, but his dad was better.”

  Jesus, what’s wrong with me? I wondered.

  And then I heard something that brought everything back into perspective, that immediately put an end to my self-flagellation. Three people were sitting at a table in the food court, wrapped in heated conversation. Two men, about my age, were arguing with a woman who was maybe a little older. The men looked like truck stop sophisticates—cheap, pseudodesigner jeans adorned by custom leather cell-phone/chaw cases. One had a hands-free microphone in his ear. It wasn’t the kind you see on urbanites, but, rather, the kind you see on drive-through attendants. The content of their discussion reminded me that not all midwesterners are great: