Visiting Tom

by Michael Perry

  Or perhaps it isn’t patience. Perhaps it’s just cussedness disguised as patience. After Tom’s surgery, his daughters Deb and Emmy were sitting with him and Arlene when Emmy asked him to rate his pain on a scale of one to ten.

  “Ohhh, about a three,” said Tom, his scalp puckered with over thirty-five staples. “It stings a little bit.”

  “How about the headaches you were having?”

  “They were a nine.”

  “They were a ten!” hissed Arlene. “You would hold your head and say how it hurt!”

  “Well, you both deserve a spanking for not saying anything for a whole month,” said Emmy, and the talk turned to other things.

  Cussedness. Patience. And somewhere in between, equanimity. There is this story Tom tells: He was working in the yard when a car pulled in and two men got out. One was fresh-faced and young, the other appeared more seasoned. Insurance salesmen, as it turned out, pushing disability policies. Tom says he figured out pretty quickly the older guy was breaking in the new guy, showing him the tricks of the trade. The moment he stepped out of the car, the older agent straightened up and took a long, slow look all around the place, an expression of solemn appreciation on his face. Finally he said, “Nice farm you’ve got here.”

  “Yep,” said Tom.

  “Looks like you’ve put a lot of work into the place.”

  “Yep.”

  “Have you ever thought about what you would do if you got disabled and couldn’t keep it all going?” asked the salesman, setting up the pitch.

  “What would I do?” said Tom. “I’d sell the whole damn works and set on my ass, that’s what I’d do!”

  The first snow falls in October. Early, but not unheard of. It’s thick and wet, plopping as much as falling. It clings to everything, turning the granary rooftop white and frosting the conical corncrib cap like a tin cupcake. The yard is a frothy mix of white and green, the last of the grass still poking through.

  I am on the road again, and Anneliese is teaching a class in town, so our friend Jaci comes to babysit. A veteran of the Starkey Road hill, she automatically does the turnaround trick at Fitzger’s, but, forced to slow down to navigate the revised intersection, she makes it halfway up the grade before she spins out and slides backward. There are less than two inches of snow on the roadway, but it’s enough. Heading back to Fitzger’s, she gives it one more try, eking out a little more speed by crossing into the oncoming lane and then cheating across every inch of the gravel apron right up to the edge of the new mini-moat. This time she just makes it, spinning and inching over the crest and past our mailbox.

  “What did they do to the road down there?” she says when she sees Anneliese.

  Somewhere south of the Illinois state line I stop for gas and call home. Anneliese tells me about Jaci and the hill. As soon as I hang up I dial the commissioner. He doesn’t answer—all for the best, really, considering my state of unbecoming petulance—so I leave a message, then resume driving across the heartland. I imagine those who pass me wonder what all the gesticulation is about, unaware as they are that I am delivering ringing speeches to the dashboard in the oratorical manner of Lincoln/Douglas, minus the fine diction.

  The commissioner never does return my call. I decide when I get home I will pay him a visit.

  When it comes time to disperse my earthly possessions, the auctioneer will be rolling along, working his way through the precious (my scratched, dented, and loyal International pickup), the worthless (90 percent of the boxes stacked against the north wall of the shed), the odd (an inoperable antique hovercraft), and the mundane (four garden rakes, three with handles) when he will pause for a moment to contemplate a Vise-Grips pliers that is standard in all respects except for the fact that it has been welded to the grab hook from a logging chain. If you know auctioneers—and if he is one of the good ones—you know he won’t pause for long, but will improvise a line something like “Here’s a tool for all you amateur dentists out there . . .” A chuckle will eddy through the crowd, and then someone will bid it up to maybe two bucks, and the sale will move on.

  This odd tool dates back to an evening last year when we went to visit Tom and Arlene for dinner. I cleared a space on the kitchen table and placed the Vise-Grips and the grab hook in careful arrangement (imagine the jaws of the Vise-Grips as the jaws of a fish and the grab hook as the dorsal fin). I asked Tom if he could weld them together in that relationship. He picked the pieces up and examined them, scraping the Vise-Grips handle with his thumbnail, judging the nature of the steel. “Yah, I can do that,” he said. Then he set the pieces on the counter and took his seat behind the table. I smiled then, because I recognized the moment for what it was. I spent my childhood and over half my adult life in an area where much of the lake property was owned by people from outside the area. These same folks (we called them “lakers”) often hired my roughneck pals to cut trees and pull docks and do basic caretaking and maintenance. Invariably—especially if they were recently arrived—the lakers tried to establish a firm work schedule, often through persistent and increasingly querulous phone calls. In nearly all cases this triggered a reverse customer service model in which every follow-up call dropped them five places down the list. It wasn’t that my friends didn’t want—and in some cases desperately need—the work; it was that in a dynamic heavily weighted one way and with implications of hop to it, my friends were maintaining dignity by controlling the one thing they could: their time.

  So what Tom was doing here was letting me know the shop was closed for the day. I can do it—but I ain’t doin’ it tonight. Two days later Arlene called to say the tool was ready and I could pick it up anytime.

  Now on a cool morning after Tom has returned home and the early October snow has melted away I rise before first light, don my camo togs, and sneak with my bow and arrows to a deer stand set in a ravine in the back corner of the farm. I intend to sit for just an hour or two, then get on with the day. Dawn comes in gray, and when the light is sufficient I pull my pocket copy of August Derleth’s Concord Rebel and settle in for a read. This year’s tree-stand reading list has included Proust’s Overcoat, some C. S. Lewis (The Great Divorce in full, and then a partial attempt at the much chewier Mere Christianity), and one cowboy book. I have also worked on miscellaneous essays and book bits, and completed both the first draft and final revisions of the collaborative liner notes for a John Prine tribute album while sitting fourteen feet above the ground with my back against the trunk of a Norway pine in a cloud of Tink’s #69 Doe-In-Rut Buck Lure (clearly a pinnacle artistic moment). Over my outdoor life countless creatures have been spared due to the distractions of literature. As hunters go, I am PETA’s favorite.

  An hour of Derleth and I have seen nothing. I rise to tuck the book in my hunting bag and gather my gear when I spy a small buck approaching. Quiet as I can, I finish stowing the book, take up the bow, and when the deer is near and presents itself in broadside, draw and shoot. It is a clean hit and the deer drops at the edge of a swampy patch. After I gut and drag him from the woods and register him at the gas station in town, I back the pickup into the pole barn, where my deer skinner is set up. It’s a homemade device operating on a snatch-block arrangement, with power supplied via a hand-cranked boat winch. Using a noose attached to a pulley system fixed high in the pole barn rafters, I raise the deer just above the ground and skin out the neck and forelegs. And then—from a shelf right near the skinner—I retrieve the Vise-Grips modified by Tom and clamp them on the deer’s hide at the point where I’ve separated it from the nape of the neck. Once I’m satisfied the jaws have good purchase, I fix one end of a short chain to an anchor point on the floor and snug the other end into the grab hook Tom welded to the pliers. Then, by cranking the boat winch I simply ratchet the deer out of its skin. I am thrilled with how well it works, for I have fantasized about owning my own deer skinner for years. If this strikes you as unbearably medieval, imagine, if you will, my youth spent trying to pry the frozen hide from a stiff dee
r using nothing but smallish bare hands and numb fingers, and you will understand that my feelings for the skinner are equivalent to those of the Manhattan yogi for her brushed aluminum juicer. Plus, who wants breakfast sausage with its hair on?

  After coming off the road I never feel like a better husband and father than when I am splitting and stacking the last rack of firewood, or tossing the final forkful of oat straw into the chicken coop just before the big snowstorm hits. I feel like I am doing the things a man is duty-bound to do. (My head and the hovering countenances of several former nursing instructors suggest some consideration of gender roles and patriarchy might be in order, but in this case I am reporting straight from the heart and my head will have to just sit over there in the Corner of Unreconstruction for five minutes.) I hunt deer for reasons that are cultural, sentimental, and caveman-innate, but I draw the deepest satisfaction in this moment, when I am down here in the shed working to turn the animal into meat that will cross our table one meal at a time. I occasionally butcher a chicken, and sometimes a rabbit or grouse, but deer are the only animal I take fully from hoof to table on my own. When the lucky winner returns home from the auction that future day, perhaps he’ll puzzle over the Vise-Grips a moment, then pitch it in a drawer or hang it on a nail, not realizing that what he has in his hands there is one of my dearest possessions: an original Hartwig, signed with a welder and existing as a literal and metaphorical link in the chain of family, food, and life lived in commerce with the finest sort of roughnecks.

  I arrive at the highway department unannounced, and am perhaps beginning to emanate an aura of disturbing persistence, because prior to sitting with me in the meeting room, the commissioner summons his patrol supervisor to join the conversation. The supervisor’s name is Ron, and we shake hands across the table.

  I begin with the standard recitation, reassuring the commissioner that I appreciate his position and intentions regarding the intersection. I still mean it, although I’m not sure he believes it, especially since he knows by now it is simply the preamble to a dissertation on all the reasons I think he did the wrong thing.

  “That said, you know why I’m here,” I say, trusting he has heard my voice mails even though he never called back. “We didn’t even make it out of October before someone slid off the hill.”

  “I did say we would revisit this in the spring,” says the commissioner.

  “I’m not sure why we need to wait,” I reply. “I mean, October . . .”

  The commissioner embarks on his standard recitation: The rationale for the redesign, the people speeding off the hill, safety as the prime objective. As he talks, he sketches the intersection on a pad of paper. “See, traffic coming from this way is no big deal, but from this direction . . . an older person would have to crank their head around, and they just physically can’t do that . . .”

  “Here’s where I’m getting frustrated,” I say. “You keep telling me about these safety issues, but we’ve created a safety issue by not allowing people adequate speed to make the hill.”

  There is a long pause. We all three stare at the commissioner’s doodle, as if it is some form of neutral ground.

  “I don’t know how else to put it,” I say, after a while. “I’m not makin’ it up. This woman . . . third week in October, she’s comin’ off the hill backwards, and she’s a middle-aged teacher. She’s not hot-roddin’ . . . and she’s been drivin’ up that hill for ten years.” I grew up dropping my gerunds, and have noticed that I tend to drop them even more aggressively in uncomfortable situations like these, perhaps as a result of some unconscious effort to convey a certain blue-jeans simpatico.

  Now Ron speaks. “Well, one concern, if the township even made it out there to plow . . . I mean, if there’s inches of slush and stuff on there, would going straight up help you to get up there with a car?”

  My face remains relaxed, but I am clenching my figurative teeth, in part because we seem forever and ineluctably to veer back to the nonissue of plowing. There weren’t “inches” of slush when Jaci missed the hill, and the benefit of going “straight up” has been central to my thesis from the get-go. In fairness, Ron hasn’t heard my pitch before, so I review, and also reiterate that the trouble begins long before there is accumulation sufficient for plowing, and therefore sending the plows out early is irrelevant. I’m filled with my usual liver flutters and the frustration creeps even more deeply into my speech patterns, which begin to sound like something blown from the overextended bellows of a one-note, comma-free accordion: “We didn’t have to send them out early before and then it also makes me look bad because it makes me look like I’m in here complainin’ that I want the plows out and my brother’s a town guy up north and I know what you guys deal with plows, you got people callin’ ya all the time sayin’ ‘where are ya!?’ and I don’t wanna be that guy.”

  “M-hm, m-hm,” murmurs the commissioner, staring at his notepad and perhaps wondering just how long I’ve been on the meth.

  “I’m saying we don’t need any sort of special concern.”

  He rallies. “Well, any plows that would have to go out early would be township plows, so . . .”

  I feel the accordion snap, then sag. My jaw follows.

  Ron tries to reassure me. “I don’t think anybody would look at it as you asking for special treatment . . . but if it’s somethin’ where it’s easily maintained where the plow can go up it whether it is early or whatever it may be or it’s one of the first roads on their route, then so be it. The thing of it is what we’re tryin’ to prevent is a safety issue.”

  Apparently my jaw muscles have now popped up like Ping-Pong balls, because Ron quickly presses on. “Yes, we may have created a winter issue. But during the summer, when we were out there building on the road, I wasn’t the only person that seen somebody fly down that road and not even yield. Shoot right out in the intersection with the trees and stuff there. I wouldn’t want my family coming around that corner and getting hit.”

  We are in the meeting room for over half an hour. The time doesn’t really drag, because time doesn’t drag during a fencing match. We are riding the same old conversational carousel: snow, safety, snowplows, snow, safety, snowplows. People “shooting” off the road every which way. At one point the commissioner says that the problem lies in the fact that whoever built the road all those distant decades ago cut it at an angle exceeding contemporary standards. “Nowadays, I don’t know that it would even be permitted,” he says. I must have twitched, because with some alacrity, he adds, “But that’s not the point.” In a change of course, and clearly seeking common ground, the commissioner describes his boyhood home. “My parents have a very steep approach to their driveway . . . and there were times, you know, you get six inches of snow, and in a two-wheel-drive vehicle . . . you just go like crazy and see if you can make it and if you can’t, you end up going any-which-way backwards.”

  Indeed.

  “There were a number of times I just ended up parking the truck down at the bottom of the driveway and walked up and waited until we got the driveway plowed. Then I drove up.”

  I am struggling with how to frame and fully express my perception of this proposal—the suggestion that my wife and children should abandon their vehicle beside the road during a snowstorm and walk a few tenths of a mile up a road designated as terribly dangerous because of all the downward-careening cars—when again the commissioner reads my thundercloud face and clarifies.

  “My point is, I understand what you’re saying about needing to make a run for it.”

  We lapse into another gridlocked silence. I take a surreptitious glance around the joint to see if the walls are padded. Then, breaking the silence with a tone of polite finality, the commissioner offers to call the township personally to ask if—wait for it—they might send the plows out earlier.

  “No,” I say. “I’d rather face-to-face, I’m frustrated, I’m not ang-ang . . .” I actually have some sort of laryngeal seizure at this point that chokes me off
for a second and results in me performing an inadvertent but most credible imitation of Berkeley Breathed’s late-lamented Bill the Cat.

  I get my breath back and continue. “I am a little bit upset but I’m not a yeller and a ranter.” Here I give a wan chuckle. “Maybe I’d be better off if I was.”

  “You’ve been very civil.”

  I wonder: Are you really civil if you’re not feeling civil?

  And then, believe it or not, we’re off again. More discussion of right-of-way issues, the width of the gravel apron, more on slip-siding cars and expanded landing areas. At one point Ron leans forward and points to the sketch on the pad of paper, right at the spot where the edge of the new roadway meets the fresh excavation—the mini-moat—preventing us from going straight up the hill. “If yer to look at fillin’ in just a little bit of the edge . . . how much would you need? How many feet?” Then he catches himself. “I’m not telling you this is something I would do, because I wouldn’t, and legally I would definitely not anyway.”

  “I can’t give you feet,” I say, “but whatever we need to basically keep the car straight.”

  “So maybe another car width?” asks the commissioner.

  For a moment there is hope, but then the conversation derails right back into more discussion of cars launching Joie Chitwood–style into the maples, and miscellaneous legal liabilities, and then I decide it really is time to wrap things up.

  “You guys got work to do,” I say. “I appreciate your time. I guess we’ll just see how it goes.”

  “We’re tryin’ to . . . again it’s . . . different things . . .” The commissioner trails off. It feels a little like breaking up in high school.

  “And we definitely feel your situation,” says Ron. “I got little kids, too.”

  I gather up my notes, the commissioner gathers his. Just before I leave, Ron speaks one more time.