Visiting Tom

by Michael Perry

  Anneliese and Amy have gone on an errand, so Jane has joined me out at the edge of the field. The sun is rotisserie-hot, so I have fashioned a lean-to tent using an old rain poncho, a piece of pipe, and some steel fence posts. For reasons not quite clear Jane specifically but pleasantly requested her car seat rather than a lawn chair, and she is reclined in it now, eating a green windfall apple beneath her square of shade. She is two-handing the apple, gnawing her way around the equator. When circumnavigation is complete, she chucks the fruit to the weeds and announces, “Daddy, I’m going to get another apple.”

  Our standard family frugality rules forbid wasteful food practices, but the farm is profuse with apples and littered with windfalls. We feed the things to the pigs and chickens by the bucketful, so I can’t see forcing my daughter to eat them down to the core. The nearest apple tree is back across the far side of the yard, and I make a big deal of the distance. “Oh, I don’t know, Jane . . . that’s a long way . . . are you sure you can get the apple all by yourself?”

  “I can, Daddy!” she says, and takes off at a short-legged trot. In minutes she is back, taking her seat and rotating the apple into place.

  I settle into the groove of the work then, dropping the stalks in rough rows. Come winter, I’ll fork them into the chicken coop. The birds will eat the oats and some of the weed seeds, and the straw will make fresh bedding. They’ll poop in it and scratch at it and break the stalks down, and by spring we’ll have a rich pile of compostables. When all is said and done I’m not sure I want to do the math on how this all works out financially. The truth is, I’d likely lend the family more stability if I just bought bags of feed and bales of straw and spent more time in my writing space finishing the next book, or pitching the next magazine article, or putting words to a song. But there is something at work here that goes beyond financials. It nibbles at the edge of self-sufficiency, but that’s just a fraction of the impetus. It is also in part tied to the idea of putting my soft palms to the worn handles and imagining the hands placed there before mine, how much rougher they must have been, how many countless hours their owners must have toiled to lay the smoothness in the grain. There are also the contemplative aesthetics: Even as the heart thuds and the sweat falls I am appreciating the graceful curve of the wooden shaft. Its very shape is a sculptural implication of patience and craft, and the anatomical terms of the scythe—the nib, the heel, the tang, the snath—are the poetics of another age. But this is all peripheral. What really puts me out here in the field is the fact that I was raised by farmers and loggers and have never shed the atavistic sense that the worthiest work is accomplished through force applied via the body. The cutting and the gathering play counterbalance to weightless electronic letters or stories told into thin air. I am feeling what Matthew Crawford, in his book Shop Class as Soulcraft, describes as the sense of “agency and competence” associated with manual labor.

  This whole philosophical angle has its limits. One day Tom and I are rummaging in his machine shed for a piece of steel when I spy a scythe hooked in the rafters, just the same as mine. I start telling Tom about my scythe and how I’ve been using it. I tell him about how I sharpen it, using the three stones in sequence, keeping them wet, how I follow the arc of the blade.

  “Yah, sounds like you’re doin’ that about right,” he says, and inside I glow a little. There are certain skills a man ought to have, and putting an edge on a blade is prime among them; to have Tom’s imprimatur in this instance is doubly meaningful. I tell him how I’ve been refining the way I swing the scythe, hoping he might give me some advice on how to better handle the thing, but he just says, “Yah, that’s pretty much how you do it.”

  I am feeling expansive now, not just because of his approval, but because I am imagining it must be heartening for him—the old-timer—to know that some of us in the trailing generations are taking up the old ways again, studying them, doing our best to preserve fundamental traditions in the face of an uncertain future. The scythe is a cultural baton, and we are passing it down the generations.

  “Y’know what really works good?” asks Tom.

  I give him my full attention, determined to keep my scatterbrain in focus so that whatever secret he is about to share I will be able to carry it forward, hand it to my own children, be a living link.

  “One’a them gas-powered weed-whackers!”

  In addition to the heat, we have lately suffered under a profusion of gnats. Normally we have just enough breeze up here on the ridge to push them clear, but today is baking-oven still and the bugs orbit my head like erratic electrons. They loop wildly, seemingly with only the barest navigational control. One has just now careened into my left eyeball, and as I lower the scythe and straighten to blink it out, I see that Jane’s car seat is empty beneath the makeshift tent.

  “Jane?” I say, my voice only half raised.

  Nothing.

  Louder: “Jane?” If you’re a parent, you know how it goes. There is every reason to believe she is giggling behind the nearest tree, and every reason to fear far worse. I let the scythe drop to the stubble and jog uphill, calling her name again, more loudly. Absolute silence, and suddenly the air seems to thicken and close in on me, muffling everything. I run to the yard, cover it corner to corner. Into the house then and back out, zigzagging to every structure or place in and among the buildings I can think of where there might be danger, some place to fall, or get hung up, or trap an ankle. Even as I lurch about, my internal voice is saying I am overreacting, that she couldn’t possibly have disappeared, but reflex quickly outstrips rationality. I am crossing the blacktopped skirt of the garage—hollering her name now—and wondering where to sprint next when I register the tiny chime of a voice—not a word, not daddy, but just a sound I recognize by the pitch of it.

  I find her just over the lip of the hill, down by the old barnyard where the berry bushes bristle among the railroad-tie posts. She is splotch-fingered and wearing a smeary maroon grin. “I’m picking berries, Daddy!”

  It’s been a decent year for berries. No bumper clusters, but handfuls of black caps and velvety raspberries if you’re willing to reach in and suffer a scratch or two. It’s been fun introducing Jane to the idea that treats grow on bushes, and now here she is, purple palm outstretched, a half-smashed black cap balanced at the center. I take the berry and eat it. Then I hold her close and tell her how very, very, very important it is to answer Daddy when he calls.

  “I was picking berries, Daddy,” she says again, as if that explains everything. Then a look of concern crosses her face. She points to my forehead. “What is that, Daddy?” I swipe at my forehead, and when I bring my hand away the edge of my palm is covered with sweat-logged gnats. Apparently the combination of my perspiration and all those insects has turned me into human flypaper. I explain to Jane what gnats are, wipe them off in the grass, and then we pick and eat berries. When we have had enough, we walk back to the oat patch, stained hand in stained hand. The heat is still oppressive, and Jane asks me to fill her wading pool. “How about if we go swimming in Cotter Creek?” I ask. “Yes! Yes! Yes!” she says, one pogo per exclamation point. I retrieve the scythe from the oat stubble, hang it from the granary rafters, and we head for the house to change into our swimming suits.

  We have access to the creek through the property of some friends a short drive down the road. They’re not home, and all is quiet as we park the car and I unbuckle Jane from her seat. We make our way around behind the house and down a footpath through the trees and into a patch of canary grass taller than my head. Forcing my way through the grass toward the gurgling sound of the creek, I find a spot where a log projects out over a sandbar and we step into the shallows. “Huh, huh, huh!” Jane says at the first cold shock of the water on her feet, but she acclimates quickly, stomping and splashing. The creek is barely ten feet wide, but the current is swift and the sand bar drops off darkly, so I grip her hand at all times. “Let’s dance and twirl, Dad!” she says, and I know from our many living
room ballet sessions that what she really wants me to do is sweep her in wide circles so her feet skim in and out of the water. Then I wade off into a belly-deep hole and swish her back and forth while she giggles and giggles. Then we slosh back up to the sandbar and dance, she rising on her tippy-toes and fanning her fingers, me stomping around white-leggedly.

  We take a break then, sitting side by side on the log. The stream is deeply canopied here, the scorching day shut out, the air mud-cool. Jane leans in tight and shivers against me, elbows tucked to the sides of her belly, wrists crossed over her chest, teeth chattering. Now the mosquitoes show, whining around our ears and settling on our bare shoulders, where I feel the first itchy-sweet bite. But she doesn’t want to go just yet. She just wants to sit there huddled next to her old dad, and I can’t find it in me to budge. The love I feel is nearly overcoming, and as always in these moments the joy is crowded by a breathless realization of how fleeting this moment is, a desperate desire to burn it deep in some crease of the brain so that you might call upon it even as you let go this world.

  It is no good to overthink these things and I am spared the sentimental whirlpool when I feel a hard lump between my butt and the log and realize it is my cell phone. “Rattafrat!” I say, managing to maintain a G rating.

  Jane straightens. “What, Daddy?”

  “I got my cell phone wet!”

  She shakes her head with her eyebrows raised. “Well, that’s a problem.”

  The skeeters are really digging in now. I wrap Jane tight in a towel and carry her up the path. When we reach the yard, she asks me to put her down. When her feet touch the ground she runs up the lawn and around the house toward the car, and in a beautiful bit of mangled syntax, hollers back over her shoulder, “I will win you, Daddy! I will win you!”

  A man once told me I didn’t so much have a family as a sorority. When I shared this joke with Tom, he chuckled in recognition, having shared the same census (as well as living in the same house or across the yard from his mother for over seven decades) for many years. In light of his experience, I once asked him what advice he could give me about raising daughters.

  “Weeaaahhll . . . one time my youngest daughter came home and told me some boy was teasing her at school. I said, you tell him he may think he’s a smart feller, but he’s just a fart smeller!”

  I guess I was looking for something a tad more Robert Fulghum.

  “Then I told her if that don’t work, tell’im he looks like a goat sucked’im!”

  You will understand I did not scribble any of this right down. But over time I have learned something about Tom: The best stuff emerges when you skip the interrogatories and just visit. Or better yet, just wait. After the joke, he sat quiet for a moment, then said, “Ah, but you shouldn’t tease a kid. And sarcasm is wasted on’em, ’cause they’ll take it literally. When I was a kid the neighbor died, and someone said he dug his grave with his teeth. I puzzled on that one for years.

  “Nah, you just play it day to day. You do what you can for your kids, and don’t go overboard. When the girls would ask me for something and I hadn’t made up my mind, I’d just go, Hmmmm . . . That wasn’t a yes or a no. Once my oldest daughter wanted to get her ears pierced and I said, Nope, if you get your ears pierced, you have to get your nose pierced, too.”

  Now we were veering a little more in the realm of practical application, although that last bit loses a little steam in this perforated age.

  Arlene was sitting beside Tom, and at this point she interjected. “One thing Tom and I never did was go anyplace without the kids.”

  “Yah, we never left the kids with anybody,” said Tom. “Except sometimes Grandma, since she lived right here.” He paused, looking at the table. Then he raised a hand. “One of the things that does make you feel bad, when you get later in life, why, in the early years you’re always hard up for money. You wish you’d have had a little more when the kids were little, so you could have done more with’em, or for’em.”

  As a frequently absent dad, this last line of talk hits close to home. My absences are driven by work and opportunity, and they feed the family, but still. You don’t know until it’s over how the math will work out.

  I have never met Tom’s daughters. They are long grown, and the youngest is my age. I don’t know how they would characterize their dad. I can only go on certain clues, one a 1970s-era Arctic Cat minibike in the grass outside his shop. The last time I was over there, Tom stepped over the bike on his way to get a piece of pipe and said, “I’m tryin’ to find a set of rings for that thing, because that’s all that ails it.” I noticed that the minibike had a decidedly nonstock trailer hitch welded to the frame.

  “What’s the deal with the hitch, Tom?”

  “Oh, my younger daughter Emmy used to get the mail with that scooter, and she’d bring water to us in the hay field. She had a little dog named Buffy. That dog was an ideal dog for a little girl, because Em used to put her in her baby buggy and put her bonnet on her and put lipstick on her! But she was always complainin’, ‘If I had a trailer, Buffy could go with me.’ So I put a hitch on there, and I had one of those little garden trailers with no springs, and poor Buffy would set in that trailer, bouncin’ on that shale driveway or across the fields, the exhaust blowin’ all over her face. Why she didn’t just bail out, I don’t know.”

  He stopped then, for a moment, then spoke. “Once a parent, you’re a parent always. But the kids . . . the kids are like visitors.”

  Although I cannot speak definitively regarding Tom as a father, I can speak definitively to what it might have been to approach him when he was occupying the role. My wife did not have a blithe childhood. Her parents divorced when she was a toddler, and when she was seven years old, her mother married a man who owned a farm just down the road from the Hartwigs’. Things were not easy, and perhaps Tom and Arlene knew this, because Anneliese recalls Arlene stopping on her way home from the bakery to share from her trunkful of Otis treats: bread that was expired but just fine, and maybe powdered doughnuts (Otis didn’t care for the way they clung to his tongue), but Anneliese remembers especially peeling the sticky cinnamon rolls from their flattened packets. When Anneliese was fifteen her mother divorced the farmer and moved the girls to town some six miles away. Despite the distance, Anneliese and her sister spent even more time with the Hartwigs in the ensuing years, mowing the lawn, washing windows, picking crab apples, and loading hay wagons in the summer. Although it was never spoken, Anneliese says the Hartwigs were clearly aware that she and her sister were hungry for elements of stability and refuge. There was reciprocity: While the girls were paid for their “official” work, they and their mother often responded in kind by bringing homemade meals or pitching in to paint the kitchen or hang new wallpaper. After Anneliese went away to college, she made it a point to visit Tom and Arlene whenever she returned home. When she met me—and after I had survived a vetting process I hadn’t even known was under way—we naturally found our way out to the farm.

  Very early on—perhaps the third or fourth time Anneliese and I visited the Hartwigs—Tom must have seen hearts in my eyes, because while Arlene and Anneliese were in the other room, he had a word with me.

  “That girl there,” he said, indicating Anneliese. “You know she was on my hay crew.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “Outworked any boy I ever hired,” said Tom, and nothing more said.

  Later, upon reflection, I realized this was intended less as a testament to Anneliese’s character than as a challenge to my own.

  When the oats have lain in the sun two days so the green weeds can dry, I take the pickup to the field and fork them into the bed until the heap is higher than the cab. Then I back up to the granary and fork them into the old horse stall. It doesn’t take long for the stack to build to a satisfying size. I do five loads today, and Amy and Jane ride back and forth with me. While I work in the sun, they stay in the cab, singing songs and talking nonsense. When I rake the final forkful
from the stubble and pitch it to the top of the pile, I pull my new cell phone from my pocket and snap their photo. They are hugging cheek to cheek, their blond hair straw-bright in the low-angle afternoon sun. Somewhere down the road in some motel room I am going to flip the phone open to that photo and it will hit me like a tanning light.

  I don’t know if Tom Hartwig can make me a better dad. That’s incumbent upon me, not him. There are moments like the one the other day when Jane asked me to fill her wading pool and my first inclination was to demur, because there is always work to be done. That day it was the oats still standing, today it is a magazine deadline, tomorrow a compelling Twitter exchange, the day after that, something else. And more often than not, the work wins out. But sometimes, just as I’m drawing the heavy mantle of toiling martyrdom over my shoulders, I think of that Arctic Cat with the trailer hitch, drop the flimsy cape, and off we go to Cotter Creek.

  For the first year up there on our farm off the Starkey Road dead end, the uninvited yard traffic came and went, and we mostly just observed. Someone suggested I post a Keep Out sign at the entrance to the drive, but I resisted. Back when my folks moved to the farm up north of New Auburn, Wisconsin, the general procedure was that if you bought a piece of land, the neighbors hunted on it the first year just like always. The second year you maybe had a quiet word with them. By the third year, you had the property to yourself. Lately, though, the first thing folks seem to do the minute the ink dries on the real estate forms is slap up No Trespassing signs every forty feet. We took this as a sign of greenhornery, and so I didn’t want to go that route. I have also been taking into account Seneca the Younger and his belief that “things sealed up invite a thief: the housebreaker passes by open doors.” You put up a nice Keep Out sign, and maybe people start thinking you’ve got nice things. We have no complaints, but the truth is we live in a drafty-windowed farmhouse with mismatched doors, and while there are a few goodies in the pole barn, my favorite possessions are either worthlessly esoteric or heavy and hard to move. Regarding the rest of our stuff in general, you’d get a poor return on your thievery.