In a Pickle: A Family Farm Story

by Jerry Apps

  The full moon washed the countryside white as people filed out of the schoolhouse, got into their cars, and headed home. Isaac and Mary were among the last to leave.

  “’Twas a good party,” Isaac said as he fired up the old pickup and headed back home, along the dusty country road.

  3

  Pickle Factory

  Gonna be a good pickle year,” Isaac Meyer said at the breakfast table one morning a few weeks after his birthday party. “Be pickin’ cukes in a few days. Blossoms all over the place and a few little pickles peekin’ out here and there. Yup, gonna be a good pickle year. Maybe make a little extra money for a change.”

  Of course the weather was a big factor in cucumber growing, and scarcely a week went by that the Link Lake Gazette didn't include an article about the weather—too much rain, not enough rain, temperatures too cool, temperatures too hot. Growing season early. Growing season late. Nothing was ever just right with the weather. But this year, especially in May and June, the rains were timely and the temperatures warm. It was just the kind of early summer weather a farmer wants to give crops a good start before the inevitable dry weather of late summer sneaks into the area, quietly and without notice, and slows everything down—sometimes killing the crops if it hangs on too long.

  The corn had grown to knee high by the Fourth of July, and now, a week later, the oats stood tall and ripening, the cow pastures remained green and growing, the potatoes stood yardstick tall, and the cucumber patches had come on better than most years.

  “Be openin’ that pickle factory soon, Andy?” Isaac asked.

  “Expect so,” Andy said. “Got a lot of cleaning up before we can start taking in cukes. Place is always dusty and dirty after sitting idle all winter. Waiting for this guy Johnson to call, to say when I should get started.”

  Andy had no more than said the words when the phone rang, and his mother got up to answer. “It's Mr. Johnson,” she whispered.

  “Hello,” Andy said into the mouthpiece of the old wall phone. He held the black receiver to his ear.

  “This here is J. W. Johnson. You got that pickle factory in Link Lake ready to go?” Andy would know the gravely voice anywhere.

  “No,” Andy answered. “I was waiting for your call.”

  “Well, I'm calling, and you'd better get on down there ’cause the place is a mess. Stopped in last week for a look around.”

  “It's always a mess after a long winter,” Andy started to explain.

  “I'll meet you there tomorrow morning at eight,” Johnson interrupted. “Don't be late. I don't put up with nobody being late,” he growled.

  “I'll be there,” Andy said. As he hung up, he thought, Who does he think he is, telling me to be on time? What am I? Some lowly worker who doesn't know enough to crawl out of bed in the morning? If he knew the first thing about farm people he wouldn't say anything about me being on time.

  Andy had already lined up the summer work crew, some folks who had worked other years and a few new ones, too. He had asked around who might be interested in working at the pickle factory and got a few suggestions. It was hard to find good help because most workers were busy in the summer. He had told them they'd be getting a buck an hour this year, up from seventy-five cents because President Eisenhower was expected to sign into law a new minimum wage of a dollar an hour. Andy and Helen Swanson, the bookkeeper, would receive $1.25 an hour.

  Andy knew his crew was waiting to hear from him. First he called Blackie Antonelli. Blackie, whose real first name was Tony, lived near Redgranite. This would be Blackie's third year at the factory. His grandfather had come from Italy to work in the granite quarries, but the quarries had closed many years ago and the Antonellis, along with many other Italian immigrants, had found other work in the area. Blackie was twenty-one, five-and-a-half-feet tall, and as strong as a young bull. His black hair hung nearly to his shoulders—one of his defiant characteristics. His dark eyes bore right through you, especially when he was provoked. It didn't take much to provoke Blackie, either—a wrong word said and he was ready with his fists. He had a short fuse—but he liked Andy, and they got along well.

  Andy asked Blackie if he could start work at eight the next morning to help with cleanup. Blackie said he'd be there.

  Next, Andy rang up Paul “Quarter Mile” Sweet, who lived on a nearby farm. Folks in the neighborhood said Paul, though an excellent student, had a long way to go and was maybe only a quarter mile there. He was eighteen, the oldest of the four Sweet kids, and headed for college in Madison. He really needed the money. Neither his mother nor father had graduated from high school. He would be the first kid from his family to attend college.

  Quarter Mile was nearly six feet tall, blond, wiry, and strong. He had sleepy blue eyes, and he smiled easily. This would be his first year at the factory. Andy thought helping with the cleanup would be a good way for Quarter Mile to get acquainted with the place and all its nooks and crannies. He asked the young man to come in at eight the next day.

  He phoned the rest of the crew and asked them to come in on Tuesday. Helen Swanson, who kept the books and figured the salt for the pickle vats, was in her thirties. Like Andy, this would be her fourth year at the pickle factory. She worked as secretary for the Link Lake High School during the school year, and Andy had heard she was recently divorced.

  Arthur “Preacher” Ketchum was new to the crew this year. He ministered to a small flock of believers that crowded into the Church of the Holy Redeemed every Sunday morning. They heard him go on about how they were all headed straight to hell unless they followed the church's rules: “Don't watch movies—they are the devil's creation. Don't dance—it stirs up carnal thoughts. Stay out of the saloons—only the dregs of the earth frequent them.”

  Preacher, in his mid-thirties, was thin, almost frail, and he didn't seem strong enough for the work. But he had come to Andy with a story about how poor his family was—he had a wife and four kids—and how they really needed the extra money, so Andy hired him. Of course they agreed that Preacher wouldn't have to work at the factory on Sundays, even though it was open.

  At sixty, Agnes Swarsinski was the oldest person on the crew—and in some ways the youngest. This would be Agnes's fifth year at the pickle factory, and she was the life of the party. She could make people laugh when there was absolutely nothing to laugh about. Agnes was the second generation of Polish people who had immigrated to northern Ames County directly from Poland. They were farm folks who worked hard, managed to eke out a living on their small, sandy, and often stony farms, and believed in helping their neighbors.

  Agnes looked worn. Her face was wrinkled, her big hands calloused from years of farm work, and she wore her mostly gray hair tied with a little ribbon at the back of her head. But Agnes's eyes caught your attention. It wasn't their color so much as the way they sparkled, especially when she was telling a story or giving you a little of her rural wisdom. Her family spoke Polish at home, and she had a definite accent. She greeted everyone with, “Hey der, honey,” and a smile that took up much of her wrinkled face. She forever poked fun at her own nationality. For instance, one day last year she had asked, “What makes a Polack's eyes light up? You don't know? Well, you stick a flashlight in his ear.”

  The next morning Andy borrowed his pa's Ford pickup and drove the four miles from their farm to the factory at the west edge of Link Lake. He got there about seven-thirty so he'd have some time before J. W. Johnson arrived to see how the building had made it through the winter and what repairs looked necessary. The pickle factory, a low-slung building about sixty feet long and half that wide, stood in a little hollow against a spur line for the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad, which separated the factory from the Link Lake Sawmill. The factory was built in the 1930s and had been painted a dark green, but now the building had faded and was moving toward a dull nondescript gray.

  Andy walked up the outside stairs to the main floor, fished in his pocket for the key to the big brass padlock, unlocked it, and pu
lled the door open. The hinges on the door squeaked, as they had every summer he had worked there. With all the effort to keep the cucumber sorters and other equipment working, he never remembered to squirt a little oil on the hinges.

  Andy slid open the two big doors, revealing the unloading area and filling the space with sunlight. The pickle factory consisted of one large, open room, with bare wood walls. The only other source of light was a half-dozen bare bulbs hanging here and there from the bare board ceiling. A few feet back from the unloading area stood the cucumber sorter—twelve feet long, three feet wide, and four feet tall. The machine sorted the cucumbers into five size grades; farmers were paid accordingly, with the smallest cucumbers commanding the highest price. Constructed of wood and painted green, the sorter had sprockets and link chains running this way and that. An electric motor powered the sorter, which moved the cucumbers along its length with a shaking action. The slats on which the cucumbers moved were closer together in the front of the sorter, and farther apart at the back. Thus the smaller cucumbers fell between the slats first and tumbled into boxes where they were collected and weighed, followed by increasingly larger cucumbers until the largest, the number-five cucumbers, tumbled over the back of the sorter where they fell into boxes.

  Inside the building were a dozen pickle vats, which looked like little silos, each about eight feet high and eight to fourteen feet across. The vats were made of redwood, the same material used for many farm silos. Each was encircled with half-inch metal rods that kept the wooden staves together, spaced two feet apart. The building was constructed around the vats, which rested on the ground. The main floor of the factory was five feet above the ground, so when you stood on the floor, only about three feet of the vats showed.

  Square, wooden bushel-size crates constructed of wooden slats an inch apart were stacked from floor to ceiling along the south wall of the building. Each had the words “H. H. Harlow” emblazoned on a slat near the top.

  The tracks of the Chicago and Northwestern line ran along the west side of the building. The salt bin was located in the northwest corner of the factory's large main room. This enclosed area, which started at ground level with a concrete floor and went almost to the ceiling of the building, had reinforced walls six inches thick to keep the tons of salt dry and to keep it from breaking the walls and gushing out into the building.

  At the northeast corner of the building, boarded off from the rest, stood a little office, with unpainted board walls and a rustic desk with an old wooden kitchen chair pushed up next to it. A bookshelf above the desk held several Harlow guidebooks—everything from photos of diseased cucumbers to how to figure salt for the brine vats. A 1954 girlie calendar hung on the wall. One of last year's workers had hung it up, and Andy had left it there.

  “Anybody here?”

  “Yeah, by the salt bin,” Andy answered.

  “This damn place is a disaster,” Johnson said as he looked around. “Looks worse than it did the other day when I was here.”

  “It's been just sitting here since last September,” Andy said.

  “Never saw one of our pickle factories so damn dirty.”

  “Got a couple of my men coming in later this morning.”

  “Good,” said Johnson. This was the first time he'd told Andy he'd done anything right.

  Johnson began unrolling posters and stapling them to the factory walls. One was a large painting of a white-haired woman with a jar of cucumbers on her kitchen table. A wood-burning cookstove stood behind her. “Mother Harlow's Country Made Pickles,” the large print read. Andy smiled because he knew that none of Harlow's pickles had ever seen the inside of a farm kitchen, especially one with a wood-burning stove.

  Johnson tacked up another sign, this one featuring a cucumber field with rows extending as far as a person could see. “Bringing Nature's Bounty to Your Table,” the inscription read. Large print across the top of the poster shouted, “H. H. Harlow Pickle Company, Chicago, Illinois.”

  Signs reading “Quality Comes First,” and “Mother Harlow Knows Best” followed. Andy didn't say anything; the signs added a bit of color to the brown walls.

  His posters hung, Johnson moved on to inspect the office. A few minutes later, Blackie Antonelli and Quarter Mile Sweet arrived, and Andy introduced them to Johnson, who growled a greeting.

  “Damndest mess I ever saw,” he said. “Get that naked woman off the wall,” he ordered. He was pointing at the girlie calendar. “This here is a business place, not some kind of peep show.”

  Andy didn't take the time to respond. He showed Blackie and Quarter Mile where the brooms and cleaning supplies were stored and put them to work. Then he returned to the office, where Johnson was still fussing.

  “Where're your salt records?” Johnson said as he pulled open the desk drawer and began fumbling through the papers.

  “Your office has them,” Andy answered. “I sent them in last fall.”

  “Oh,” Johnson said. “Where're the payroll records?”

  “You got those, too.”

  “Well, what the hell kind of records have you got?” Johnson fumed.

  “Haven't got any. Sent them all in.”

  “Helluva way to manage a business,” Johnson snarled. “Place is filthy, records are missing, and tomorrow you open.”

  He stormed out of the office and almost ran over Blackie, who was sweeping just outside the door.

  “Kid, you need a haircut. Don't want no long-haired workers around here. Mother Harlow likes things neat and tidy.”

  Blackie didn't even look up.

  “You hear me, kid? You git that long hair chopped off.”

  “Yeah,” Blackie said. He wasn't one to take orders from strangers, no matter who they were.

  “What'd you say, kid?”

  “I said, ‘yeah.’”

  “Does that mean you're gettin’ your hair cut?”

  “I didn't say that,” Blackie answered.

  Andy could see Blackie bristling, growing madder by the second. One thing about Blackie—you never confronted him like Johnson was doing. When you did, you might end up with a busted nose, no matter who you were.

  “Better clean up that corner back of the vats, Blackie,” Andy said.

  Blackie whirled around and stormed off to the back of the factory.

  “Young wiseass,” Johnson said. “You see he gets his hair cut, or he's out of work. You hear me?”

  “I hear you,” Andy said, but he had no mind to force Blackie Antonelli to cut his hair. As long as it didn't get in the machinery or hang over his eyes so he couldn't see, Andy didn't care how long Blackie's hair was.

  “I'll be back with the records this afternoon,” Johnson said, climbing down the steps. “Better have this place shipshape by then.”

  Soon his shiny green pickup was kicking up gravel as he roared away. Andy knew right then that this pickle season was going to be a long one. The way Johnson was fussing and fuming, Andy wondered if he'd keep his job through the week.

  Late that afternoon Johnson hurried into the pickle factory clutching a pile of records. He dropped them on the desk and growled to Andy, “Here's what you need.” He glanced around the now clean and tidy factory and said to no one in particular, “Son of a bitch, but they got her polished up real good.” And once again, he roared off in his pickup.

  4

  First Cukes

  The day after the cleanup, Andy Meyer and his crew waited for the arrival of the first cucumbers, which would signal the start of the pickle season. Johnson had told him that Jake Stewart's new migrant boss would be bringing in at least one truckload of cucumbers by late afternoon. But Andy wondered if any of the small growers had seen the signs he had posted at the Link Lake Mercantile, at the Grist Mill, and at the Link Lake Cooperative announcing that the Harlow pickle factory was open for the 1955 season and paying $20 per hundred pounds for number-one cucumbers (the smallest, called gherkins, up to an inch-and-a-half in length), $15 for number twos, $10 for number thr
ees, $5 for number fours, and fifty cents for number fives (six inches long and sometimes as big around as a woman's wrist).

  The small ones brought the most money, but it took many of them to make a pound, while one number-five cucumber could weigh close to a pound itself. Problem always was how close to pick the cucumbers. Pick everything in sight and it might take four days before there were any more to harvest. Leave the littlest ones and in three days they'd be about right for number twos, which is where most farmers figured the money was—even if Harlow always emphasized picking the smallest ones. And of course no matter how good a pickle picker, some cucumbers continued hiding under a big leaf, or off in a corner somewhere to grow into number fours or number fives.

  Andy had asked Helen Swanson to come in by eight on Tuesday morning, to set up the office and put in order the books that Johnson had dropped off. The rest of the crew showed up right after noon. Andy had them do some cleaning they'd not gotten done on Monday, but mostly they waited for the first cucumbers to arrive.