In a Pickle: A Family Farm Story

by Jerry Apps

  “By God, it's high time you heard a little swearing, Preacher. It's about time you did. This here is a pickle factory, and some of us cuss on occasion. And we don't sit around and pray before we eat. We sure as hell don't do that.”

  Preacher got to his feet, picked up his lunch bucket, and said, “I will eat my supper with Helen.” With that, he walked off to the office where Helen had taken out her sandwich and was unwrapping it.

  “Pipe down, Blackie, he's a preacher. Preachers pray,” Andy said.

  “I don't give a shit who he is. No preacher is gonna get me to pray in this pickle factory,” Blackie said.

  The remainder of the crew chuckled as they unwrapped their lunches.

  “Speaking of religion, you know the difference between a Baptist and a Methodist?” Agnes asked.

  “Don't think I do,” said Quarter Mile.

  “Baptists don't wave at each other in a liquor store.”

  Hoots of laughter all around as the crew ate their sandwiches.

  Andy wondered how this crew would come together. He knew it sometimes took a few days for people to get to know each other, to find out each other's quirks and strange doings. What mattered most was that they sorted cucumbers and salted them away each evening. They didn't have to like each other.

  10

  Long Days

  The Link Lake Gazette ran a front-page story about Jake's pickle fields and the migrants he had in his employ. John wrote about the shacks where they lived and how crowded they were. He had expected letters or phone calls from Gazette readers, but none came. So far the community didn't seem to care that migrants lived and worked at Jake Stewart's place or what their living conditions were.

  During the first days in August, the cucumbers continued rolling in to the pickle factory, truckload after truckload from Jake Stewart's thirty acres, and sack after sack from the little cucumber patches found on almost every farm around Link Lake. A couple of timely rains and sunny, hot weather contributed to high yields and happy faces.

  The days at the pickle factory were long and tiring. Andy pulled open the doors each morning at eight. Usually the first customers were already waiting, farmers who had picked their patches the previous afternoon and didn't want to wait in line at night. In early evening the truckloads of cucumbers would arrive from Stewart's farm, and no farmer with six gunnysacks of cucumbers and three rambunctious kids wanted to wait an hour for a truckload of cucumbers to be unloaded and sorted before they could unload theirs.

  The crew was holding up reasonably well, but as workers grew tired, tempers often flared. So far, Andy was able to keep everyone working, although Blackie Antonelli constantly picked on Quarter Mile Sweet.

  “Okay, college boy,” Blackie would say. “Bet you can't lift two bushel boxes of cucumbers at the same time.” Blackie demonstrated that he could easily lift the 120-plus pounds.

  Without responding, mild-mannered Quarter Mile lifted the two boxes and hoisted them over his head to show he was as strong as—or maybe even stronger than—wiry Blackie Antonelli.

  Blackie would walk away from such events without commenting, obviously thinking of some other stunt to pull on Quarter Mile, some dirty trick like pushing him into a pickle vat. Andy kept a close watch on the two of them.

  Agnes Swarsinski was like a grandma to the crew. She worked hard, took no guff from anyone, and always had a wise comment or a joke to tell.

  “Hear about the two men who walked into a bar?” she asked one noon during lunch.

  “No, can't say as I did,” Andy answered, smiling.

  “They both had headaches.”

  “What?”

  “I said they walked into a bar. Didn't say what kind of bar it was.”

  Whenever they encountered each other, Blackie and Jesús Moreno were like a pair of fighting roosters, each wanting to fly into the other. Back in late July, Blackie had made fun of Jesús's name again, saying he had no right to use then a me of Christ for himself.

  Jesús bristled, snapped open his folding knife, and made a roundhouse swing at Blackie, who jumped back, grabbing a two-by-four that was leaning against one of the pickle vats. Blackie swung the two-by-four and hit Jesús on the leg, knocking him down. Quickly Jesús scrambled to his feet, his dark eyes wide and menacing, his long, sharp knife poised to catch Blackie in the neck.

  While this was going on, both Carlos and Andy were in the office, checking on some delivery figures. Who should step between Jesús and Blackie but frail little Preacher; he just walked right up and stood between them. Both were so surprised that they immediately stopped fighting.

  “Get out of the way Preacher, or you'll get yourself killed,” Blackie said.

  “I am a man of the cloth, a man of peace,” Preacher said quietly. “Violence solves nothing.”

  Catholic Jesús Moreno would pick a fight with anyone, but he had great respect for preachers and priests.

  “You two cool off and go back to work. Put away that knife, and park that two-by-four,” Preacher said.

  The young men did as he ordered. From that day on the crew at the pickle factory had new respect for the quiet man who had insisted on praying before they ate their meals. But they also wondered if something was going on between him and Helen; since the incident about praying before their supper, Preacher ate both his noon and evening meals with Helen, in her office or outside in the shade of the factory. Andy had heard that Preacher was counseling Helen, and she did seem more cheerful as the weeks wore on. Andy appreciated that Helen was no longer coming to work crying or crying on the job. And through it all, not once had she let up on her work. Not one of the reports that she filled out—payroll records, salt records—came back from J. W. Johnson's office with errors noted. Johnson had earlier commented that the bookkeeper at the pickle factory in Willow River was a dud. Nearly every week a report had to be corrected. Once an entire vat of cucumbers there had been salted improperly, and the higher-ups in Chicago had to figure how they could save the hundreds of bushels of cucumbers in the vat—all gherkins, too. Johnson said he wished he had a bookkeeper like Helen at Willow River.

  Helen began attending Preacher's church services on Sunday mornings. She had asked for Sunday mornings off, and Andy had said he could write the few checks from the handful of growers that brought in their cucumbers on Sunday mornings. Helen was always back promptly at noon with a big smile on her face.

  There were still about six weeks left before the cucumber season would wind down and the factory would close. Andy kept his fingers crossed that he could keep everything together, keep the workers from fighting with each other, and keep Jesús and Blackie from killing one another.

  Carlos Rodríguez had heard all the details of the fight between cocky Jesús Moreno and hotheaded Blackie Antonelli. Like Andy, the last thing he wanted was conflict between the migrants and the locals. One August evening, after the last sack of cucumbers had been dumped into the sorter, he retrieved a bottle from the front seat of his truck and passed it around, suggesting everyone take a drink.

  The crew, with the exception of Preacher, usually enjoyed a can of beer or a snort of whiskey toward the end of a shift. But when they took a mouthful of the clear liquid being passed around, they knew they'd tasted something different and more powerful than anything they had ever swallowed.

  “Tastes like kerosene; burns when it goes down,” Agnes Swarsinski said as she passed the bottle on to Quarter Mile Sweet. She was shaking her head back and forth. Quarter Mile took a big swallow, coughed, swallowed hard, and tried to hide the fact that his eyes were watering. Preacher took a smell of the bottle. “Devil's drink,” he pronounced and passed it on to Helen Swanson, who took a big drink, swallowed it, and took another drink.

  “Are you staying, Helen?” Preacher asked. He couldn't believe that she would drink from a bottle being passed around. “I'm heading on home.”

  “Good stuff,” she said, in a whisper, as the drink had taken away her breath. “I think I'll stay a little whil
e.”

  “Tequila,” Carlos said. “Tequila from Mexico. Good, huh?” He smiled broadly as the bottle went around a second time.

  Soon the migrants and the pickle factory crew were laughing and sharing stories. Carlos talked about what it was like to be a migrant and travel around the country. The pickle factory crew listened intently, for none of them had ever been out of Wisconsin, except Agnes, who had once visited some of her relatives in Chicago.

  It was after midnight when Andy dumped the last bushel of cucumbers into its appropriate vat and added the salt and water. He hoped that Helen had figured the salt correctly.

  When Andy arrived at the pickle factory the next morning a half-hour late, he saw Preacher setting on the steps, reading his Bible.

  “Good morning,” Andy said. His head was throbbing.

  “Good morning to you, Andy, and what a beautiful morning it is,” Preacher answered.

  “Oh, yes, it is a nice morning,” Andy muttered.

  The rest of the crew staggered in shortly after. Andy did not scold anyone for being late.

  11

  Pickle Days

  In 1948 the city fathers had decided that they needed something to attract people to the area, to give local businesses a boost and, as the village president said, “Put Link Lake on the map.” They agreed to erect a statue—something that would stand out and make Link Lake a special place to visit. But what kind? Should it be a huge Holstein (most farmers owned cows), a giant sandbur (these pesky weeds were everywhere), a bundle of wheat (the area once grew acres of it), or a statue of Increase Joseph Link (the pioneer pastor who founded the town in 1852)? After weeks of deliberation, the decision leaned toward a statue of Increase Joseph. That is, until a representative of the H. H. Harlow Pickle Company stepped forward and said that Harlow would cover the cost if the town erected a cucumber sculpture. Faster than you could say “Mother Harlow knows pickles,” the city fathers decided, unanimously, to install a giant cucumber.

  Now the challenge was to find someone to build the statue. They all agreed it should be made of wood, because that would be the cheapest. The committee chairman, John Dobrey (the local undertaker and furniture store owner), started looking for a carpenter to build the big cucumber. Dobrey soon discovered that finding someone qualified to construct a thirty-foot-tall cucumber was not easy. When he found a couple of local carpenters he thought might be up to it, they turned him down. They said they were accustomed to building straight things, and clearly there was nothing straight about a cucumber.

  With a stroke of genius, Dobrey thought to contact a builder of farm silos, a fellow from Westfield, one Alphonse Steinnecker. Silos were, of course, cylindrical, as was a cucumber, at least somewhat. After considerable thought, Steinnecker took on the project and spent most of a summer measuring, sawing, pounding, forming, shaving, and sanding until he had a monster cucumber erected on a concrete platform with three concrete steps leading up to it. “You gotta have a firm foundation for an artistic work like this,” he proclaimed. “And you can quote me on that.” The immense green cucumber replica stood on one end of Main Street, on a little hill that overlooked the lake.

  Not everyone agreed it looked like a cucumber, especially during the construction phase. Some said it resembled a ruptured blimp that had landed on its end and kind of crumpled in the middle. Others said it looked like an enormous Polish sausage. A couple of young guys leaving the Link Lake Tap one Saturday night came face-to-face with the near completed sculpture and said, “Looks like what Paul Bunyan's dog would leave behind.”

  Of course it was the latter comment that made the rounds of Link Lake and set tongues to wagging about whether they'd made a huge mistake asking Steinnecker to build something he'd never built before, no matter how firm its foundation.

  When Alphonse finished the carpentry work, he leaned an extension ladder against the structure and began painting it green. Opinions began changing. Especially when he painted the black spots representing the cucumber's spines.

  “Yup, looks like a cucumber. Sort of, anyway,” an onlooker said.

  Two nights after the structure began looking like a cucumber, a wicked thunderstorm blew across Link Lake and fiercely buffeted the new sculpture. In the clear light of morning, Link Lake citizens noted that their new attraction leaned to the northeast several degrees, but was otherwise unharmed. No one could figure out how to straighten it, so forever after it was fondly called the Leaning Pickle of Link Lake. A plaque, screwed firmly to its base, read, “Donated by the H. H. Harlow Pickle Company, in commemoration of the importance of cucumbers to the community of Link Lake, Wisconsin, 1948.”

  It made sense for the community to follow with the sponsorship of Link Lake Pickle Days. The annual celebration was a way for the community to show off its big cucumber, and Pickle Days soon became its most important celebration. The American Legion sponsored a second-rate parade on Memorial Day, and the community sponsored a short fireworks display on the Fourth of July, but clearly the town saved its energy for Pickle Days. Some said more people attended Pickle Days than the Ames County Fair at Willow River. That was probably an exaggeration, but people did come from miles around to take part in all the hoopla centered on the lowly cucumber, and to see the big green statue.

  Extended families that saw each other perhaps only at Christmas gathered during Pickle Days. Main Street store owners decorated their windows with green bunting. The Ames County Art and Photographer's Society held its annual competition on Pickle Days weekend, and all entries depicted cucumbers in some way. Society members prominently displayed their work in the various store windows for all to see for several weeks leading up to Pickle Days. The displays included paintings and photographs of cucumber fields, the leaning pickle statue, people picking cucumbers, little children holding cucumbers, even the Harlow pickle factory. This year, a blue ribbon was tied to a painting of an enormous cucumber leaning against a big oak tree, with a smiling farmer standing next to it. The caption read, “We grow them big in Ames County.” The painting was proudly displayed in the Link Lake Mercantile window.

  Pickle Days meant money for the local businesses; they all supported the celebration and planned for it months in advance. Businesses included the Link Lake Mercantile: “Buy your overalls, Wolverine shoes, six-buckle rubber boots, and groceries all under one roof ”; Link Lake Grist Mill: “You bring it and we'll grind it”; Johnson's Hardware: “If you've lost a nut, come see us”; Amery's Clothing Store: “Our long underwear does not itch”; Sven's leather shop: “We repair soles”; Link Lake Motors: “Your local Ford dealer”; Wendell's Mobil gas station with the Flying Red Horse: “You need gas, we got it”; Dobrey's Furniture Store and Mortuary: “We are here in your time of need”; the Link Lake Cheese Factory: “Standalone Limburger cheese our specialty.” And of course there was the Link Lake Tap, which was consistently criticized but always filled with customers, especially on weekends.

  The Link Lake Gazette’s office was tucked between Sven's leather shop and Korman's Restaurant. The Gazette regularly ran editorials reminding people to shop at home and resist driving to Stevens Point, Oshkosh, Berlin, or Willow River when they needed something. “Is it worth losing a local business by saving a quarter on a pair of pants purchased in Oshkosh?” “Is it worth seeing the grist mill close because you thought you could save a dollar by hauling your grain to Willow River or Waupaca for grinding? On a snowy day in winter, when you are forced to drive twenty miles on slippery roads to have your cow feed ground, you will wish you had frequented the local mill.”

  Link Lake celebrated Pickle Days the first weekend of August, in the peak of the cucumber harvest season. The parade on Saturday afternoon drew the most people, followed by the “Big Pickle Polka Dance” on Saturday night. Of course, that morning, everyone gathered to watch the local cucumber judging in a tent set up in the parking lot in back of the Link Lake Mercantile. The competition for best cucumber in the area was keen, with a traveling plaque in the shape of a
huge green, spiny cucumber going to the winner. Last year Isaac Meyer had won the award, but some people griped that he shouldn't even have entered his cucumbers, what with his son, Andy, managing the pickle factory. Andy had nothing to do with the contest; in fact, he didn't go near the judging tent, but people talked nonetheless.

  This year Jake Stewart had his eye on the prize and the fame that accompanied it. With thirty acres to select from, he figured he would easily be named the pickle champion of Link Lake. The Ames County agricultural agent and J. W. Johnson judged the event. After much deliberation, Jake Stewart was declared the pickle champion of Link Lake for 1955. “Best cucumbers I've seen in a long time,” declared Johnson.

  The pickle factory opened as usual that Saturday, with a few pickup loads of cucumbers arriving before ten o'clock. Nobody wanted to miss the Pickle Parade. Main Street was already packed full by mid–Saturday morning. The town marshal, Justin Quick, wearing a bright green shirt commemorating the day, closed the street at eleven for the parade. That same hour, Andy shut down the pickle factory. He would open it again at two and then close it at six so everyone could go to the dance on Main Street. Andy changed into his army uniform, which he'd brought along that morning, and headed down to where the tractors, horses, floats, a band, and other parade participants were gathering.