Visiting Tom

by Michael Perry

  In asking Tom to walk, the photographers are walking their own fine line of asking the subject to perform. The photographers have made a career out of quite the opposite. But even in the stillness of the photo they hope there will be something implied by the evident motion of Tom walking one way, the truck rolling the other. They burn four or five of the precious sheets of film and move on, hoping there will be that moment in the darkroom when the chemicals reveal Tom, the silo, and the truck in perfect stop-motion triangulation.

  You take one last look and think it would have been something to climb that silo and peek out the window before the interstate plowed through. To see the land unbroken. You are compelled, of course, to consider how the Ojibwe felt, returning to the campsites at Cotter Creek one day only to hear the sound of sawing and the lowing of oxen. Life will circle around on you. Also visible from the silo window is a gigantic billboard pointed at the interstate and advertising a casino owned by the Ojibwe. The billboard says, WINNERS, 24/7.

  THE FIELD CORN IS TALL and tasseled and the trees still green, but the grasses are beginning to slacken. It is September, and I am helping Tom Hartwig gather honey. I am trailing behind him as he pulls a flatbed trailer with one of his many Farmalls, this one a 1947 Model H.

  Tom has six Farmalls, the youngest of which is sixty-some years old, the oldest of which is a 1943 M. He also has one non-runner he bought for parts. He parks the tractors in a semicircle in his hay shed now that the hay shed no longer holds hay. There is a method to his multiple-tractor madness. “When I used to fill silo, I’d have one on the chopper, one on the blower, and one on the wagons. That way you didn’t have to keep hookin’ and unhookin’em.” If you point out each of the aged red machines has a bit of the rattletrap about it, he won’t be offended. This too is part of the plan. “I’d buy them old tractors cheap. If one broke down, I could just grab another one. No downtime. And by having all the same kind, I could swap parts around. And with my own shop, and because fixin’ things is a hobby with me, why, I got by with a lot junkier class of machinery. Our neighbor, ol’ Sally Johnson, she used to say I was about the only one she knew that could run with junk and get along just fine.”

  The careful observer will note there is one little item that belies this slacker ethos. The paint scheme of each of the Farmalls (except for the one we’re using today, which is essentially straight-up rust tone) includes a fat white stripe running the length of the cowling. Viewed from a distance, one end of the stripe on each of Tom’s tractors appears smudged with gray. Up close, you will see the smudge is actually a meticulously dense record of oil changes inscribed with a pencil. Three columns per tractor on average, spanning countless years in the literal sense, as the older columns are faded to illegibility.

  A man named Jerry has come to help with the honey as well. We met only five minutes ago, but in that time I have overheard enough of his conversation with Tom to understand that the two have known each other for some time, and once again I marvel at the radius of Tom’s circle.

  The hives are uphill from the house, tucked along either side of a narrow hollow that also shelters Tom’s vegetable garden and melon patch. After parking the tractor and trailer, Tom disappears into a small shed built into the hillside at the low end of the holler, then reemerges with a bundle of beekeeping gear, which he spreads out on the trailer bed planks. Slapping the worn wood, he says, “Built this forty years ago. Out of a 1935 Chevy milk truck and a John Deere wire-tie baler.” Jerry and I have barely shared two words, but now we shoot each other a grin. With Tom, if there’s backstory, you’re gonna get it, and after eight decades, Tom is heavy on backstory. If a tinge of boast creeps in now and then, it is diffused by solid evidence, enduring function, and the boyish smile. For purposes of compare and contrast, let us turn to the world of academia and consider the comprehensive composition of your standard curriculum vitae.

  Tom has also produced what appears to be a lopsided oil can attached to a set of miniature leather-lunged bellows. A logo imprinted on the device reads WOODMAN’S FAMOUS BEE-WARE BEE SMOKER. The smoker is a nicely crafted piece of equipment, the bellows paddles cut from wood and attached to the leather by a rim of carefully crimped and tacked tin. Producing a Bic lighter, Tom sparks a small tinder fire in the base of the combustion chamber, then packs it lightly with cubical bits of decaying wood punk. “Some guys use burlap, some guys use pine needles,” he says, as he uses a miniature chisel to tamp the punk, which looks and feels like rust-colored insulation foam. “We’ve always used punk wood. You find a stump that’s rotten and you can break it up by hand.” When a wisp of gray rises from the chamber he wedges the spout back in place and coaxes the punk into reluctant combustion by working the bellows, chuff-chuff . . . chuff-chuff . . . chuff-chuff. The smoke that curls out the nozzle has a rich caramel scent. The upper edge of the bellows—where Tom squeezes the paddles to make the smoke puff out—is blackened and blistered in the manner of a hot dog left too long on the barbecue.

  We’re all wearing long-sleeved shirts with our cuffs and collars tightly buttoned. Tom hands Jerry and me each a beekeeper’s hat and leather gauntlets. He, on the other hand, is wearing short-cuffed haying gloves and over the top of his flat-brimmed DeKalb seed corn cap he has draped a vintage mesh veil that is so frayed it appears to have once been used to capture a very angry cat. I can’t imagine how he will avoid being stung.

  Tom’s hives—towers, in the parlance—are weathered, their wood grain revealed in gradations of scuffed white paint, and here and there they are loose at the joints. The nail heads holding them together show through the remaining paint as dots of bled rust. The hive caps are held in place by old bricks and chunks of firewood. Approaching the first hive in line, Tom raises the cap, puts the snout of the smoker to the gap, gives it two puffs, and then lowers the cap again. “When bees get alarmed, they emit an odor, and that riles all the rest of’em up,” says Tom, as if he’s leading a class for the county extension office. “It’s not that the smoke knocks’em out or calms them down, it’s that they don’t smell the others bein’ alarmed. And then a’course it irritates’em and they start to move.” Indeed, the bees are starting to emerge from the hive in a crawly yellow-orange cluster, like marmalade sliding down a wall. Shortly they are dropping in scatters to the grass, where they regroup on plantain leaves.

  “Weeaahll, let’s see,” says Tom. “We’ll have one of you guys start takin’ out the supers and set’em up in front of the hive. I’ll come along and blow’em out, and then the other guy set’em on the trailer.” The hives are stacked in sections; the deeper sections are called bodies, and house the bees. The supers that Tom refers to are shallower sections containing the frames in which the bees build and fill their honeycombs. Many of the supers are glued to one another with dried honey. Tom pries them apart with the little chisel (“It’s called a hive tool,” he says when I ask.) and Jerry lifts them away and sets them on edge in the grass. “All right, I’m ready for that blower,” Tom says, and I lug it over from the trailer. The machine consists of a gasoline engine attached to an enclosed fan connected to a vacuum hose. As with the trailer and pretty much everything else on this farm, it is cobbled together from spare parts and a story. “A guy who taught me some beekeeping had a factory job,” says Tom. (What he’s saying here is not that the man had a job in a factory but that the man had a factory-made blower.) “One winter I borrowed it and took it apart, then I just copied it.” He points to the blower I’ve placed at his feet. “That hose is off a Sears Shop Vac. The engine is off a snowblower. That cost me fifty bucks. Then I made the two fans. The way you balance fans like that is you put a solid shaft through’em, then spin’em on a steel rail. If they always stop at the same place, you cut’em down or weld’em up for counterbalance.” Before he pulls the starter cord, he says, “I only use this thing an hour a year, but I’ve used it for thirty years . . .”

  At full throttle, the blower is a combination of baritone roar and wind-tunnel whoosh. While
Jerry steadies the super on edge, Tom waves the tapered nozzle of the vacuum hose back and forth over the gaps between the honeycomb frames, and bees come spitting out the other side. When he is satisfied that the majority of the bees have been blown clear, Tom nods. Jerry hands me the super, and I carry it to the trailer. There are twenty-two supers to be cleared, but between the three of us, the work goes quickly. From the moment Tom blows the first super out, we work in a cloud of bees. They whip wildly around us in an abstract tornado that reminds me of the way dollar bills blow around inside those Las Vegas money-grab booths. At one point I am stacking a super when a bee crawls across the mesh before my eyes and I freeze when I realize it is inside. Instinctively I reach to tug at the mesh, but then recall being warned during firefighting training some years ago about the same instinctive—and potentially fatal—urge to yank our face mask off if something goes wrong inside a burning building. Weighing the whirling swarm outside the mesh against the one lone bee inside, I reconsider, and he never does sting me.

  When the last super is blown clear Tom switches off the blower engine. Instead of silence we are enclosed in the persistent mosquitoey whine of the bees—now clear of the smoke and flying in a mad swirl of reorientation—and, of course, the sound of highway traffic. Tom backs the trailer the short distance to the shed and we carry the supers inside. Tom will let them sit for two or three days while the last of the bees exit the frames, then extract the honey. We shuck our beekeeping togs, and as he leaves the shed, Tom carefully secures the door. “Been a bear tearin’ up the garden all summer long, and last week it took down one of the bird feeders,” he says. “See that?” He’s pointing to the window of the shed. Smack in the middle of the pane a smudged paw print is visible.

  I am due to pack the car and head out on a road trip and Jerry is here to cut firewood, but the weather is pleasant, so we lean against the trailer for a bit and shoot the breeze. Tom says his honey production is way down this year, and some of the honeycombs have been sealed (“glued”) before they were full. He blames this on two intensely rainy stretches we had this year—one in July, and one in August. “They don’t fly in the rain . . . and when they aren’t out workin’, they make monkey business. They either glue everything down, or get to makin’ swarms. I had five swarms this summer, and that’s unusual, because they had plenty of room. And when they swarm, you cut your population in half because your old queen leaves with half the bees. Arlene and I were readin’ the other day in the paper the average colony’s got sixty thousand bees in and it can go as high as eighty. And they will fly a total of fifty thousand miles making one pound of honey.” He rattles the numbers off like he’s memorized them for a quiz, but by now I know his retention is such that if he’s around and sharp ten years from now he’ll trot them out just as quickly. “Makes y’feel kinda guilty when you go up there and take it away from’em,” he says, smiling in a way that tells you it clearly doesn’t.

  Beekeepers have been plagued with a sharp increase in colony collapse over the past decade, and over time I’ve heard Tom shift his speculation on the cause. When we first met, he figured it was cell phone towers. Later he figured it was mites. “The latest I’ve read is genetically modified crops,” he says today. “These Frankenfoods. And it makes the most sense of any of’em yet, because in order to get it tolerant to some of these herbicides, they treat the seed with nicotine. And all the while that plant is growing it is secreting a little bit of nicotine. And nicotine is an insecticide. I think that makes the most sense yet. And the United States uses more genetically modified crops than anywhere in the world, and we’ve also got the highest incidence of colony collapse among the bees. And the butterflies are gettin’ less, and the bumblebees . . . I didn’t see very many bumblebees this year.”

  “Tom, you sound like a tree hugger,” I say.

  “Weeahhll, and another one, there’s been a drastic decline in frogs. Now the latest link on them is atrazine. I don’t know . . . And another one that’s almost nonexistent, this summer I saw one snake. When I was a kid you always saw snakes. You’d find their skins, you don’t see any of that anymore. Something is . . .”

  He just lets it hang there. There is a swipe of honey on the trailer bed. It’s covered in bees, doing all they can, I suppose, to salvage this thinnest trace of an entire season’s work. “Hey, you guys go up there and pick out a couple watermelons,” Tom says, ending the session and climbing to the seat of the Farmall. “When the curlicue is dry, the melon is ready,” he hollers as Jerry and I step into the patch. Tom grinds the starter on the H. The engine spits and then catches, the old Farmall running with a fluttery purr, accented by the ting-ting of the hinged rain cap flapping atop the exhaust pipe. “Throw’em on the trailer,” Tom says as Jerry and I return with our melons. The clutch on that H isn’t the smoothest, and when the tractor lurches forward, my watermelon rolls off the back of the trailer and cracks open when it hits the ground. Down in the yard, I carefully place my split melon on the truck floor, then bid Jerry and Tom good-bye. I tell Tom I had hoped to help with the extraction, but won’t be around. “Weeaahll,” says Tom, “if I’m still around next year, you can help me then.”

  I fancy the phrase “on the road,” as it conjures tumbleweed horizons, figurative artistic martyrdom, and muraled tour buses dieseling through the night. In fact, it’s generally just me in the family van with a box of books and a late check-in at the Janesville Super 8 after totally rocking the public library. Still, away is away, and as Jane and Amy and I sit on the steps eating Tom’s watermelon and spitting seeds at the chickens before I pack the car to leave, I wonder if I am doing right by them. For better or worse, I decided a long time ago that it would be a mistake to plead apology for my absences, as that tack seems to send the subliminally confusing message that Dad is choosing to leave you behind in order to do something he would rather not. In fact, I love what I do, I’m grateful to do it, and in combination with Anneliese’s work it adds up to a living (at least as of last Tuesday). I add the parenthetical not as a joke but as a nod to the realities of our chosen path of self-employment—last year’s royalty checks added up to exactly one-eighth of our annual health insurance premium, a situation that left me gratefully flabbergasted that I should receive royalty checks at all while simultaneously prepping me for a recent e-mail in which a reader said I should be ashamed of myself for spending so much time away from my family and should instead stay at home and “live off your royalties.” I heartily agree, and await further news. There is also the question of whether this person would send the same e-mail to my brother, telling him to stay home during planting season and live off the royalties in his corncrib.

  But of course I wonder. The day I sat in the Hartwigs’ kitchen and listened to the couple say they never left the kids behind, that has hung with me. The day Amy lost her first tooth, I was on the road. The day she went to the chicken coop and came dancing back to the house with our first egg, I was on the road. Once when Jane was an infant I was gone on a book tour for two weeks, and when I lifted her from the crib upon my return the change in her shape and weight stunned me. Always preternaturally tall, Amy is now grown lanky and her carriage is beginning to speak of womanhood. This summer she took swimming lessons at a nearby university, and one morning as I escorted her to the natatorium I caught a group of six college boys in a simultaneous head-turn. I wanted to take her straight home and never leave her side. But for the moment half our mortgage comes from “the road,” and lucky us. Inevitably, our children come to see us as we are. Not as we wish we were, or even as we should be. Furthermore and as ever, our relatives serving in the trucking industry and military provide immediate perspective. So I sit with my girls here and work on accepting what we have: the melon, sweet and dribbly and good; the not-so-ladylike p’tooey sound of two girls learning to launch the seeds along the maximum arc, and the giggles as the chickens chase them down; the shared view of the valley below; the time at hand.

  I am gone for three days, a
nd when I return Tom is in the hospital.

  Some time ago the minute hand on the Hartwigs’ cuckoo clock spun loose and would no longer turn. Tom knew a fellow in Mondovi who repaired clocks, so he and Arlene got in the Crown Vic and drove that way. Arlene chewed on him a little during the trip, because he kept drifting the car leftward. They got the clock repaired, and then on the way out of Mondovi the town cop pulled Tom over. You were crossing over the centerline, sir, said the policeman. Then he gave Tom a warning and sent him on his way.

  Back home the next day, Tom rode his bike out to get the mail. Standing astraddle the top bar, he reached for the mailbox and pitched headfirst into the asphalt. Picked himself up, got the mail, and rode back to the house. The following day, he took the Crown Vic. Stopped at the end of the driveway, opened the door, stepped out, and pitched headfirst into the corn. Had a heckuva time getting back up, he told Arlene.

  That’s it, said Arlene. We’re going to the doctor. She called a neighbor, and he drove them to the clinic in Osseo. Early in the assessment, Tom admitted to the doctor that he’d been having headaches for a month. The doctor ordered a scan, and the minute he saw the results, paged the ambulance. It’s a twenty-five-mile run from the small Osseo hospital to the bigger hospital in Eau Claire. The interstate makes it a straight four-lane shot, and the crew ran the rig hot, siren wailing and lights flashing, Tom flat on his back and flying past his barn at maximum allowable speed. At the hospital in Eau Claire, they hustled him straight to surgery, shaved half his head, lifted a section of his skull, and relieved his brain of a good-sized bleed.