In a Pickle: A Family Farm Story

by Jerry Apps

  Andy's pa reached the end of a row. He turned Claude, and they slowly moved toward Andy and Johnson.

  “This'll be your fourth year managing our factory in Link Lake.”

  “Yes, it will.”

  “Gonna make some changes,” Johnson growled. He looked up to see the horse and cultivator almost upon him. He stepped over a couple of rows so the cultivator could pass.

  “Whoa,” Isaac Meyer said. Claude stopped, dropping his head. The big horse was breathing hard, sweat streaking his reddish brown hide. He spread his hind legs, and a stream of urine hit the sandy ground, nearly splattering on Johnson.

  “Chrissake,” Johnson said, jumping out of the way. “Damn horse just about pissed on me.”

  The pungent smell of horse urine mixed with horse sweat, fresh turned soil, and white pine.

  Isaac smiled. “Howdy,” he said to Johnson.

  “Got business with your kid, here,” Johnson said. “I'm district manager for the Harlow Pickle Company.”

  “Oh,” Isaac said, still smiling. “Giddap.” The big gelding took up the slack in the tugs, and the cultivator once more began moving down the field, Isaac holding the handles with the horse reins around his shoulders.

  “This all the cukes you got—this little bitty patch?” Johnson asked. He was scratching himself under his arm. “Can't be more than a half acre if it's that. No money in these little pickle patches. No money a-tall.”

  Andy had a response to J. W. Johnson's idea about cucumber patches, but he decided that sometimes it's best to keep your thoughts to yourself. That's what his pa always said. “There's a place to speak your mind. Trouble is lots of folks can't seem to figure out where that place is.”

  “Times are changin’. If you're gonna be in the cucumber business, then you've gotta have cucumbers, not just the few sacks that you pick off a little patch like this. Got to have acres of cucumbers. Cucumber fields, not pickle patches.” Johnson was waving his arms in a big sweep.

  Andy thought about all the Christmas presents these little patches had bought, all the school clothes and books and BB guns, .22 rifles, and bikes. Still, he said nothing.

  Andy and Johnson talked for a few more minutes about possible dates the pickle factory might open and whether Andy had his help lined up to start once the cucumbers began pouring in. Abruptly, Johnson said, “Just too damn hot out here for talkin’ or just about anything else. Don't know how you poor bastards stand it—you dirt farmers who keep doin’ things the old-fashioned way. All this is gonna change soon. Gonna change. Mark my words.”

  With that, Mr. J. W. Johnson, district manager for the H. H. Harlow Pickle Company, strode off toward his new green pickup. He was thinking about how to replace Andy Meyer as pickle station manager, but it was too late for this season. He knew he'd have somebody different in that spot next year. Now his mind was on a glass of Point Special Beer, on tap at his favorite tavern, the Deer Horn Bar, in nearby Willow River, where he had a small office on Main Street. Besides that, the tavern was air-conditioned.

  Buster had watered each of the four tires of the pickup. Andy's ma continued to hang up clothes. She looked toward Johnson and smiled, but he didn't so much as wave as he climbed back into the dusty truck. He gunned the engine and sent gravel stones flying as he roared down the driveway and turned south, once more sending up a great cloud of yellow dust that hung over the road before slowly drifting east.

  Andy and his dad rested near one of the big pine trees in the shade, the big gelding standing nearby.

  “Whatta you make of Mr. J. W. Johnson?” Andy asked as he took off his straw hat and wiped his forehead with a big red handkerchief.

  “A pompous ass,” Isaac said. The words hung in the muggy air.

  “Gonna be a long pickle season, working with Johnson,” Andy said. “If he blew himself up any bigger, he'd bust.” He smiled when he said it.

  “Expect he would. Expect he would,” Isaac said.

  “Have to learn how to work with him,” Andy muttered. “Not gonna be any fun.” He turned back to his hoeing.

  2

  Birthday Party

  Isaac Meyer would be sixty-five on June 18. Some of the neighbors said they should throw a party for him at the country school. Isaac wasn't much for parties—wasn't much for having anybody call attention to him. He preferred to be at home on his 160 acres, which his grandfather had homesteaded back in 1867 after spending some time fighting in the Civil War. Isaac's wasn't the best farm that God ever made. The land was sandy and as a result mighty droughty. Crops did best if it rained every week, and anybody who knows anything about farming knows that the rains seldom come when they're supposed to, or at least when a farmer hopes they'd come. Too many summers the rains didn't come on time, or the clouds didn't drop much water, and the crops in the Rose Hill School District, including Isaac's, didn't amount to much if they amounted to anything at all.

  After considerable discussion across the Meyer kitchen table—with Mary leading the talk and with substantial support from Andy—Isaac gave in and said a party would be all right, but he didn't want any gifts. They set it for a Saturday night, the day of his birthday, at the Rose Hill schoolhouse.

  The Rose Hill schoolhouse was a tired old building, built in the 1890s and now showing its age. It stood perched on a hill with a decent view in three directions, especially to the east, where you could catch a reasonable look at the waters of Link Lake in the distance. Once painted a brilliant white, the school was now faded and gray. Putty around its big windows on the north and south had mostly fallen away, and during the cold days of winter, frigid air seeped into the building everywhere, challenging the big wood-burning stove that stood alone in the back of the room.

  The Rose Hill School teaches first through eighth graders, about twenty students each year, and all in one room. About the only use for the school during the hot summer months was the occasional anniversary celebration or birthday party, and infrequent school board and school district meetings.

  With the children off on summer vacation, the acre schoolyard had grown up to grass and weeds. Tall grass grew over the wooden teeter-totter. The softball diamond, with home plate just in front of the boy's outhouse, was scarcely visible, except for the sandy place where the batter stood, and the little grass-free area for the pitcher. Grass, ragweed, and even a Canada thistle or two had grown up around the once-red woodshed. One end of the building sheltered the pump, where a pump jack powered by an electric motor jerked the pump rods up and down, spewing a little stream of water into the pail that older kids toted into the schoolhouse.

  As the day of his party neared, Isaac fussed about what to wear and whether he'd be asked to say anything to the crowd, a task he dreaded more than cleaning manure out of the hen house on a hot day. Mary told him the whole thing would be painless, and if he set his mind to it, he might even have a good time.

  “Going to my own birthday party ain't my idea of havin’ a good time,” Isaac said. “It's one thing to be gettin’ on in years, but it's quite another wastin’ time celebratin’ the fact.”

  “It'll go fine,” Mary said, smiling. She knew her husband well. They'd been married back in 1920, and Andy hadn't come along until 1930, a bit of a surprise for both of them, but a welcome one, as Andy had turned out just fine. He'd even said he wanted to stay on the home place and keep on farming their quarter section after they couldn't manage anymore. That's about the best thing a farmer could hear from a son.

  Mary suggested that they drive their rusty 1950 Ford pickup over to the school so that Andy could have the car to pick up Amy Stewart. Andy and Amy had known each other since they attended Rose Hill School together. Although they'd been friends all through elementary school, the two really hadn't taken a special liking to each other until Andy was a senior in high school and Amy was a sophomore and Andy asked her to the senior prom. At first Amy thought it might be similar to dancing with your brother, but after that night at the prom she knew there was something special bet
ween them, and it wasn't like being brothers and sisters. When Andy was fighting in Korea, she wrote to him everyday, trying to cheer him up and keeping him apprised of happenings at home.

  Amy, Jake and Emma Stewart's only child, had grown up doing boy's work around the farm: driving tractor, helping milk cows, making hay, doing all the things expected of farm kids. For years she had been a gangly, long-legged kid, not homely, but not much to look at either. But when she started high school and began filling out she became, at least in Andy's mind, the best-looking girl at Link Lake High. She had long, blonde hair that shone when the sun hit it just right and blue eyes that matched the waters of Link Lake. Her smile, well, when Amy Stewart smiled a dreary place lit up and became cheerful.

  Amy had studied typing and bookkeeping in high school, so it wasn't hard for her to find a good job. After she graduated she got a job in Racine with J. I. Case, the company that made Case tractors, combines, and other such farm equipment. Problem was, Racine was a considerable distance from Link Lake, and she came home only every month or so. She had made a special effort to come home for Isaac's birthday party because the Stewart and Meyer families had been friends for three generations, and she looked forward to some time with her boyfriend, Andy.

  Amy had a notion that Andy wanted to marry her but was just too bashful to ask. If he did ask, she didn't know how she'd answer. She wasn't so sure she wanted to spend her life farming the way Andy and his dad did. She knew that if they got married Andy could immediately go to work for her father, on the Stewart home place—something Jake Stewart was hoping for because he had always liked Andy. But she first had to convince Andy that farming with an old Farmall tractor and horses, and milking only fifteen cows and planting a half acre of cucumbers each summer, like he did now, would never get them anyplace. After all, her father farmed a thousand acres, milked thirty-five cows, grew two-hundred acres of corn, planted thirty acres of cucumbers and a hundred acres of potatoes, and had regular visits from the county agricultural agent, who kept him up to date on new agricultural research.

  By the time Isaac and Mary got to the school, the three-piece band—made up of Albert Olson strumming the banjo, Thomas John Jones on the fiddle, and Louie Pixley fingering the concertina—had tuned up and was ready to go. They sat on chairs right in front of the old brown teacher's desk, which had been pushed up against the back wall, just under the blackboard that stretched all the way across the back of the school. Abraham Lincoln and George Washington stared down from above the blackboard, and just beneath them was a sample of script writing and formal lettering that students were supposed to practice when they finished their other homework.

  Someone had pushed the school seats, scarred with the initials of generations of students, to the sides of the room, leaving a reasonable space for dancing in the middle. As Isaac and Mary came through the door, the band struck up its first tune, an old-fashioned polka that made your feet begin tapping whether you were a dancer or not.

  “I hope you ain't expectin’ me to dance?” Isaac whispered to his wife.

  “Not unless you want to,” she said.

  “Can't recall the last time I polka danced.”

  “Maybe we should try it, see if we remember how.”

  “Later, maybe. Ain't as young as I used to be.”

  Card tables in the back of the room sagged with casseroles and sandwiches—bologna, cheese, and chicken salad—red Jell-O with bananas, baked beans, cold chicken, white cake, and chocolate cake with cherries. A big birthday cake adorned with six big candles and five little ones stood in the middle of one of the tables. Nobody wanted to stick sixty-five candles on a cake.

  When Andy and Amy arrived a few minutes later, they immediately began dancing. The band had shifted to an old-time waltz, the kind where you can swing around the floor but still do a little snuggling with your partner if snuggling is what you have on your mind.

  Isaac was greeting his neighbors, John Korleski, who lived just across the field to the east; Allan Clayton, who lived to the north; Floyd Jenks, whose land bordered his on the west; and of course Jake Stewart, who farmed a vast acreage to the south. Isaac and Jake had grown up together, gone to school together, and played softball together, but now they seemed to have drifted apart, since Jake had taken up “big-time farming” as Isaac called it.

  But on this night differences were set aside as the neighbors of the Rose Hill School District celebrated Isaac's sixty-fifth birthday. Talk about closing the school was on the minds of some people, and attending Isaac's party reminded them of how important this little school building had been to them and their families. The school had operated for seventy-five years.

  Jake Stewart was one of the chief supporters of closing down the place. Because he was president of the Rose Hill school board, and because he had so many acres of farmland and hired a fair number of people to work for him, his word had considerable clout. Jake had one ear out for the Department of Public Instruction people in Madison, who constantly pushed him to convince his neighbors that closing the school was a good idea. The university in Madison occasionally sent up some young researchers to hammer the nail with talk about better math scores, better reading scores, better nearly everything if the kids out here were bused to the Link Lake Consolidated School.

  People listened to Jake because it was kind of comical to hear him talk, even though his ideas were generally not what many of his neighbors believed in or wanted to hear. Jake was a tall, skinny fellow with thick gray hair and a chin nearly as wide as his forehead. He walked like he was headed into a strong wind, always leaning forward, to the extent that some folks predicted that one day he'd just topple over face first and drive that big chin of his straight into the ground. He talked with a kind of high-pitched twang. If you weren't looking at him when you were hearing him, you'd swear it was a woman talking—lots of folks said that, but not to Jake's face, of course.

  Thoughts about the school's future swirled through people's minds as they danced the polka and old-time waltz, and even danced to songs from the old country, folk songs you'd call them. Haunting tunes, some of them, quiet and thoughtful and packed with meaning. Louie Pixley led these old tunes on his button concertina, which he could really make talk.

  Andy and Amy stole away from the crowd and sat out on the front porch of the school, where they looked off toward Link Lake in the distance. With a full moon, it was nearly as light as a cloudy day as they sat holding hands and watching the lights of Link Lake's Main Street, not much brighter than fireflies at this distance. The lake itself was a black emptiness surrounded by trees and fields.

  “You still like your job?” Andy asked.

  “It's okay. Pay is good,” Amy answered.

  Andy could see the moonlight on her hair. He squeezed her hand a little and then put his arm around her, pulling her close. She put her head on his shoulder.

  “We had good times at this school,” Amy said.

  “I remember how you hit a softball farther than about anyone.”

  “Did a lot of farm chores in those days.”

  “Remember the dirty trick that you and Kate Hampton played on Claude Olson and me when we were in high school?”

  “Sure do,” Amy said, smiling. “That'll teach you to go skinny-dipping in Link Lake.”

  “How'd you and Kate find out we were out there that night?”

  “That's my little secret.”

  “Wasn't a very nice thing you girls did, running off with our clothes. And then just sitting there on shore and waiting for us to get cold enough so we'd have to come out of the lake bare naked.”

  “You and Claude were a sight to see, backing out of the water and covering up with both hands what you didn't want us to see.” Amy was giggling softly, as only she could.

  “It was mighty embarrassing. About as embarrassing as it can get.”

  “Don't think I ever told you how white your little behind was, compared to your tan back. Just as white as fresh snow.”

 
; “I don't want to hear any more about me being naked.”

  “It was very funny at the time. When I see Kate we still talk about it. Course she and Claude are married now. She must have seen something that appealed to her.”

  “Cut it out. You got me blushing right here in the dark.”

  Someone had begun singing Happy Birthday, and Amy and Andy walked back in the school to join in. A pause followed the singing. People expected Isaac to stand up and say a few words about what it was like being sixty-five years old. Finally he got to his feet.

  “Well...well...well, I'm now sixty-five,” he said. “Thanks . . . thanks for comin’ to my party. Appreciate it.” Then he paused as if to think of something else, and finally said. “Ah, hell,” and sat down.

  Everybody clapped and came by to shake his hand and tell him what a good neighbor he had been all these years and wish him lots more years of good health.