Visiting Tom

by Michael Perry

  “If we did add some gravel . . . or gravel showed up there, whatever . . . would that help?”

  On the afternoon of Halloween, we take the girls trick-or-treating in the neighborhood, with the Hartwigs our last stop. Tom smiles broadly as he opens the door and sees Jane in her tiger whiskers and Amy dressed as a witch. Jane drags her stuffed tail off in search of Milk-Bones while the rest of us seat ourselves around the table. Tom looks good. His hair is thickly returned, the scar completely obscured, and any lingering weaknesses are gone. “You’re doing okay then, Tom,” I say. “Yah,” he says. “I just went in for my checkup and they said I’m doing fine. The air bubble is gone, everything looks fine.” He runs his hand through his hair, over the spot where they lifted his scalp. “Only thing is, the part where they took out the piece of skull is lower than the rest. I told the doc he shoulda done some mudjackin’!” It’s a good little joke if you know that mudjacking is a process for elevating uneven concrete slabs.

  We visit and catch up. “The bear that left that paw print on the honey shed window has been visiting again,” Tom says.

  “Tore the bird feeder down,” says Arlene.

  “Weaaahhll, he’s gettin’ ready for winter,” says Tom. “Here a while back we had one hibernatin’ in that big culvert they run under the interstate. It’s a thirty-inch culvert, high as the table, and he filled that whole thing. And when I first found him, I went down and shined a flashlight in there, and there was them big ol’ green eyes lookin’ back at ya. I called the Department of Natural Resources and they told me if it was a female she’d have young ones in January and by February you’d hear those little ones squealing. Well I went down there in February and didn’t hear anything and those green eyes were still lookin’ back at me, but instead of filling that culvert out like he did at first, now you could see daylight past him, he had lost that much weight. The water started to run on the eighth of March that year, and I went down and checked, and he was gone. He had gone the other way, and the guy that lived over there heard a commotion on the patio, and there was that big bear, two feet away. He told me, ‘If I didn’t have a heart attack that night, I never will!’”

  Amy and Jane are listening with wide eyes. Arlene is beaming. I think of him small in that hospital bed and how good it is now, seeing him back in his corner, on his chair, telling his stories.

  “Good to have him back, Arlene?” It’s a dumb thing to say, I guess, but I said it.

  “Tommy and I will be married fifty-nine years now, comin’ up,” she says.

  “Yah,” he says. “Sixty years ago we were goin’ together hot and heavy!”

  “Thomas A.!”

  Anneliese and I smile at each other. We know when Arlene calls Tom “Thomas A.!” she’s acting happily aghast. It’s good to see them ripping it up like this. We’re being allowed a little peek back at the two young kids setting out on a date in that long-gone Ford convertible.

  On the way out the driveway, I hold Anneliese’s hand. I don’t believe they have yet perfected the genetic miracles that will be required if I am to share life with her for sixty years. But there is something about seeing Tom and Arlene sparking at each other there that freshens my affection for my wife. When we reach the end of the driveway I turn my head to check for traffic and there, smack on the centerline, is the bear. I turn right instead of left and drive toward him, then pull to the shoulder in a place where the girls can watch as he meanders off the road and into the pines. We stay until he disappears into the brush, me squeezing my wife’s hand while behind us the witch and tiger giggle at the sight of the bear’s shiny black galumphing butt.

  After the October snow, there is next to nothing. All the way through Thanksgiving the countryside lies uncovered. There are flurries, but the township trucks throw down gouts of brown sand and we climb the hill with no trouble. Still, you know it’s coming.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  There are stories even between the poses. As Tom leads the photographers from the silo to his sawmill, he stops to put his hand on the trunk of an oak tree. The trunk is the circumference of a patio table. When Tom was still a young boy one of the last of the local lumber barons visited the farm and talked about logging at the turn of the century. They had this idea, says Tom, that when they were done logging something, they should burn all the slashings and leave everything clean. When they burned those slashings they burned the little trees, too. He pats the oak, looks up at it. But they missed a strip of big oaks here. This is the last one.

  The oaks, some of them were pretty good size. The state said if we stayed outta their way we could have the logs. Arlene’s dad and I dragged logs for three days. We had three acres covered. The ones that were solid we picked out for saw logs, and we got 13,000 feet of lumber, and then we had a firewood pile over 100 feet long. And that year I mixed I think it was twelve or thirteen pounds of gunpowder. Arlene’s dad and my dad would go ahead and drill holes in those firewood chunks, and then we’d go along and load’em all with powder, and then we’d take the propane torch and go down the line, it was like giant corn poppin! Boom! Bang! Boom-boom!

  Before the interstate went through, there weren’t many big trees here. There were pines, hundreds of them, down in the creek bottom. Yah, I planted’em. When I was in high school. He holds out his hands, makes a saucer-sized circle. They were about this big. About sixteen feet high. Not quite big enough for pulpwood. They spent three weeks bulldozing and burnin’em.

  They gave me sixteen cents a tree. At that time, I guarantee you, if you’d gone out on state land and cut a Christmas tree, it woulda cost you a minimum of fifty bucks.

  But when you own it, well, then it’s not worth much.

  Today the only trees along the interstate fence are young Norway pines. Lately they’ve begun dying. All the exhaust, Tom figures. Or road salt.

  Just beyond the oak is a gas tank elevated on a steel frame. The frame is mounted on wheels. Some’a them zoning people, they’re picky about where you stick a gas tank. So I put it on wheels. If they don’t like it here, I’ll put it there. If they don’t like it there, I’ll put it here.

  Near the gas tank, deep in the weeds, detached from the front end of the 1943 Farmall M tractor that will push it come winter sits Tom’s homemade snowblower. He fashioned the thrower paddles from forty-inch lengths of three-inch well casing split in half and deployed in twin fan-blade arrangements that turn counter to each other. They spin on shafts and bearings taken from an old hammer mill, and the housing is made from the rims of a bull wheel from a grain binder. The chute—Tom calls it a spout—was constructed from blower pipe robbed from an old threshing machine. I wanted it to throw snow fifty feet, he says, so I took a piece of string twenty-five feet long, pegged it at one end, and used it to draw a radius on the ground. Then I bent the spout to match the radius.

  That first year I powered it direct off the tractor. But whenever it’d start chewing through real deep snow, the engine would bog and the revolutions would drop and I’d have to constantly step in the clutch and let it cure itself. The manner in which he employs the word cure is a reminder that poetics are not strictly the purview of poets. To remedy the bogging issue, he fitted the blower with its own engine.

  Yah, it’s a thirty-seven-horse Wisconsin. It was off a silage chopper. Got it for thirty-five bucks. The valves were stuck, so I pulled the heads and broke’em loose. When it was time to put’er back together I didn’t have a new head gasket, so I painted the old one with aluminum paint. That was forty years ago, and it’s still runnin’. I rigged it so I can reach the clutch and throttle from the tractor seat.

  It’s a horrifying machine close up. You can stretch both arms and not come close to spanning the intake. The uppermost reach of the paddles is nearly sternum high. You imagine a safety inspector from OSHA dropping in a dead faint atop his clipboard. In action, the paddles whirl invisibly fast, scooping the snow and hurling it up the chute to arc across the sky. It’s fun when you get a nice overnight snow with
a lot of ice crystals in it, says Tom. You blow that snow on a sunny morning, it looks like Ol’ Faithful! Once out and back, Tom says, nodding toward the driveway. That’s all it takes.

  Up in one of the healthy Norway pines a jay scolds, his voice cutting through the sound of traffic, which, as ever, runs steadily. Oughta be a toll road, Tom says as he turns away from the blower, and all’s I wants is a penny per. That’d be a decent living.

  Among the trespassers the interstate has delivered to Tom’s door is included Death. Yah, within a mile of here we’ve had one, two, three . . . five fatal accidents. First one was to the south, two guys were haulin’ a D8 bulldozer. During the night they must have fallen asleep and run up on the guardrail. The D8 broke loose and sheared the whole cab off. And then one year it was a bright sunny day in the afternoon, we had just finished haying, we were in the house having coffee. And there was a hell of a commotion out here and I ran out, and a semi went into the median and he crossed the other lane, drifted way over to those big oak trees on the far side, and he hit one of’em and rolled the cab right under the trailer. Killed the driver. And when they dragged the guy out that was in the sleeper, he was alive, but his thighbone was stickin’ out of his pants. Then up there by the overpass, an old guy had a heart attack, he was comin’ eastbound, and he crossed the median and he ran into the fuel tanks of a semi that was hauling a full load of cheese and it caught fire. The black smoke just rolled, and the cheese ran all the way down to the county road.

  He guides the photographers to his sawmill now, cutting between the backside of the shed that stores the cannon and the woven wire fence establishing the boundary of the interstate right-of-way. Across the highway, a white cross is visible. It is fourteen feet tall and stands on Tom’s property, just outside the state fence line. He points it out for the photographers. Yah, n’that cross over there, there was a woman state trooper killed over there. They wanted to put a memorial up for her but the state wouldn’t allow a crucifix on public land. So they come to me, asked me if they could put it on my land. I said sure, on one condition: You make it big as you can.

  EVEN THE GOLF BALL WON’T help me now.

  “This one’s gonna be a golf-ball job,” my father would say while securing the hay baler power takeoff shaft in the shop vise prior to replacing the universal joint bearings—a real knuckle-busting spirit-warper of a job. We kids would grin because we knew Dad—a studiously nonprofane man—was referring to a long-standing joke he picked up from his last factory job: Before undertaking a difficult task you place a golf ball in your mouth to block the bad language. It’s a perfect kid joke because it combines a goofy image with the illicit implications of naughty words.

  Mounting the snowplow should not be a golf-ball job, but it is. As with many once-a-year tasks, I complete it with roughly 75 percent efficiency, and, boy, that other 25 percent is a real steam generator. Today I had already scuffed a knuckle and was only just managing to keep a lid on the fizz when I crossed behind the truck in frustrated haste and rang the trailer hitch with my shinbone, resulting in an impromptu performance piece I like to call the Howling Hopscotch of Rage. Only an asbestos-coated golf ball would have survived.

  I am in haste because drifts are sifting through the gap beneath the pole barn door, and the steel roof is rattling with wind. It is the second week of December, and we are about to get a whomper. “Blizzard of the decade,” said ol’ Jay Moore in the Morning on Moose Country 106.7, and I have procrastinated mounting the plow until I saw the whites of the flakes. Tut-tut, say the strict calendarists among you, and fair enough, but then as the cut-rate Scandinavian Zen master Yogi Yorgesson famously never declared, “Who sniffs the rose before it blooms?”

  I finally get the plow locked, climb into the cab, and nose out into the storm. The snow is no longer arriving in distinct flakes but rather sweeping across the windshield in a blur of stripes. I close and secure the pole barn doors, then plow my way up to the house. Our two pole barns are located downhill by the old barnyard; over our winters here I’ve learned the hard way that because of prevailing winds, both pole barn doors often get socked in with several feet of snow, as does the narrow lane, so despite the availability of two roomy sheds, I park the truck on the upper level beside the old pumphouse, run an extension cord to the block heater, and head for the house. The chickens are fed and the coop battened down; the firewood is stacked tall beside the stove. This early on, there’s not a lot to do except settle in and let it come. Anneliese calls Arlene to see if she and Tom are set for the storm, and Arlene says all is well and Tommy has his monster snowblower set to go.

  At noon I start the truck and plow out the driveway, continuing all the way through to the bottom of the Starkey Road hill. Down on the county road, it appears the plow trucks may have made a pass, but it’s hard to tell, as the snow is still flying unabated, and on the way back up the driveway my fresh plow cut is already beginning to drift in. At this point it will be all the county and township plows can do to keep the main arteries open. And the way this stuff is blowing in, it’s even more likely they’ll pull the plows in until there’s a chance of keeping up. On a day like this the configuration of the intersection is a moot point. Ain’t nobody goin’ nowhere, and I only plowed as much as I did to keep a basic path in case I get an ambulance call or we have a family emergency. I park the truck, plug it in again, and spend the afternoon up in my office, writing.

  At suppertime there is still no sign of things letting up. Temperatures are due to dive once the snow stops, and Anneliese suggests I might want to plow everything out once before we head to bed so all the additional snow doesn’t pack down and set up overnight. No sense in it, I tell her. It’s coming down so fast it’ll just fill right in behind me. “Okay,” says Anneliese, and I think to myself, What a gift to have a wife so free of fuss and nag.

  Someday, years down the road, I will instead think to myself, Hey, that “Okay” had the slightest little eyebrow lift right at the end of it, the same as the time I told her she was wrong about the wiring on the cattle waterer, that I didn’t have to call the butcher ahead of time, and that we had more than enough firewood. Instead, I help tuck the girls into bed, bank the woodstove, and go gratefully to rest as the wind and snow bunt and tick against the windowpanes.

  In the morning it is ten below, the iron earth hidden beneath snow carved and hardened by the night’s unceasing wind. This is not snow that blankets the earth, it enamels the earth. The wind abates as the sun rises, but when I open the woodstove door to the cold firebox I still hear the tubular swirl of air passing across the chimney top, as if some giant were piping it like a native flute. After kindling the fire—leaving the draft wide open and the door cracked until the flames are rushing—I layer up in flannel and Carhartts, draw a bucket of water for the chickens, and step outside. Detouring on the way to the coop, I stop by the plow truck to see if it will start. Twisting the key, I get not so much as a click. It’s not the battery, because everything lights up fine. I trust the starter is frozen. Crawling under the truck, I rap it with a hammer a few times. When that doesn’t do the trick, I move the magnetic heater from the oil pan to that part of the starter where the magic elves live (some call it the solenoid).

  I stomp off to the chicken coop, not because I am upset but because that is the only way to walk in snow this solid. Rather than leave tracks, I punch holes. The morning sun is starkly bright, striking the earth at an angle that highlights the scoured contours of the yard: humps and scallops and backbone drifts that curl sharply around the downwind corners of the outbuildings. Steam wisps upward from the water bucket, and in the coop the chickens are shrugged and fluffed deep in their feathers.

  After the chicken chores are done and before I try the truck again, I climb the ladder to the granary roof and clear the photovoltaic panels, which are blindered beneath six solid inches of marzipan. It seems counterintuitive to be harvesting the sun at ten below zero, but the panels are actually more efficient in the cold, so I w
ant to take advantage of the clear skies. While I am up here on the snowy peak I can provide a public service announcement of a sort: Although there are inherent advantages and cost savings to installing solar panels on an existing structure, if you live in country like ours, by the time you’ve made it through your first winter you’ll find yourself thinking maybe you should have shelled out for the ground-level rack. My neighbor lent me a roof rake equipped with a special soft blade that won’t damage the panels, but on a day like today, when the snow is as hard as this, there is nothing for it but to crawl up on the roof and push it loose. But that’s unsafe, I can hear you saying, to which I reply, Boy, is it ever. Plus: Electricity! Now and then Anneliese peeks out the window, and I imagine her thumb hovering above the speed-dial, prepared—I’d like to think—to dial 911, although in fact she may very well be on the line with our insurance agent, Stan, bolstering the payout on my whole life policy.

  When the panels are clear and downloading the sun, I try the plow truck again and it starts. Thanks to the plowing I did yesterday, I make it out the driveway without much trouble. But on the return trip, when I veer over to plow the blacktop apron before the garage, the blade hits with a whump and the truck stops dead, wheels spinning. I back off and hit it again, but gain only about a foot. Anneliese was right. I got so caught up in declaring the foolishness of plowing while the snow was still falling that I blithely locomoted past the idea that this was the sort of blizzard that not only dropped snow, it packed it, jammed it, tromped it, carved it, and then froze it solid. Had I plowed out yesterday, I’d have a shot. As it is now, the snow simply will not be bladed. I will have to start the tractor and clear the whole works one scoop at a time. As I sit there staring at the impermeable wall of snow off my front bumper and the reality of my day sinks in, I resist the urge to check the rearview mirror and see if Anneliese is watching now.