Today the running gear is in service on our farm beneath a sporty new mobile chicken coop. It was built by my contractor cousin Ivan and is a real jim-dandy, with four retractable chicken doors, two human doors, and a pair of trapdoors situated for strategic by-product removal and dispersal. In short it is a rolling chicken condo. Every time I move that coop I look back from the tractor seat and see that off-yellow-and-green running gear at work, and I think, this is an indulgence of sentimentality I can justify.
Just recently, Amy’s pet guinea pig died. There were tears, and a small ceremony and shoe-box burial in the pine grove over past the woodshed. Some weeks later, Amy and I were walking down the driveway in the wake of losing both Grammy Pat and Mister Guinea (the latter much beloved and in residence for some five years, but we never really got around to naming him), when I asked her if she remembered Tom’s story about the crow.
“Oh yes,” said Amy. “It’s my favorite.”
“Well, I was thinking maybe that story would be some help to you when Mister Guinea died. You know, how Mr. Hartwig probably felt very sad when Ginger died, but he still smiles when he tells the story.”
“Ye-eah . . . ,” she said, and we walked quietly for a moment. Kinda ham-fisted there, doofus, I thought to myself, but then Amy spoke again. “It . . . it kind of helped me understand how you can be sad but also that these things happen. And you can still tell the stories and have good memories, but you have to go on to the next thing.”
For once I kept my mouth shut, and we walked on.
It is quite possible to reminisce oneself to death. To lose yourself in a hesternal funk. The night before the mobile coop was officially open for business, Amy and I spread our sleeping bags on the floor and camped there overnight. We giggled and imagined we were chickens. In the dark after Amy was asleep I smelled cool night air and kiln-dried pine, and I listened to her breathe, and I deemed the present sufficient indeed.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Well, let’s go get a picture of that cannon.
The cannon is just a few steps away, in the steel shed across the drive. The barrel is visible, nearly poking out the open doors, but he leads the photographers right past it and deeper into a darker corner of the shed, over to a trailer upon which is mounted what appears to be an electric motor the size of a boar hog. This is another thing I built, he says. I gave a guy a hunnerd bucks for a DC generator and I built a portable welder out of it. This part here was left over from a John Deere hammer mill, the hitch was from a New Idea manure spreader, and the wheels were from an International truck. The generator weighs eighteen hundred pounds, so I left the springs and everything on there. You just take it right out into the field and run it off the tractor. It’s just as smooth as paintin’ with a brush!
You see, I’ve got two manure spreaders in here. One breaks on a cold winter day, you’ve got another one! And that old silage chopper there, we had a bad hailstorm in 1964 and the only way you could salvage any of the corn was to chop it. So I bought that junky old chopper and blower, and, oh, guys teased me about that. But I had the last laugh on’em. I filled my silo with that for twenty-nine years!
Finally he moves to the cannon, pats the barrel. The blackened iron is dusty and speckled with sparrow droppings. Mid-barrel, a larger bird has left a whitewash splash centered around a dried gray turd. This is roughly a three-fifths scale replica of a French twelve-pounder, he says. From Napoleon’s era. You can tell the rough date of a cannon by lookin’ at the carriage. You got twin tails here . . . all the world’s armies used twin tails until 1840, when they went to a single beam. This barrel weighs about three hundred pounds. That’s only a third of what it should weigh for that diameter of bore. He grins, impishly. That’s why it jumps so, when you shoot it!
Did those old cannons ever fly apart, Tom? The photographers are looking a little leery. Oh, absolutely, he says. A lot of’em would blow off the muzzle, or they’d even blow up by the breech. But they were cast iron. Cast iron is only about half as strong as steel. He pats the barrel again. This is seven layers of steel. Toward the last, I’d have to get Arlene out there to help me lift it up on the lathe.
When I first built it, I wanted to make sure it was safe. I took it back of the hill up there and I loaded it up with fourteen ounces of powder. Then I rammed in two tin soup cans filled with concrete. They weighed two pounds apiece. And then I had a dynamite fuse about two and a half feet long. I lit it and then I ran down into the field and stood there waitin’ to see if a whole winter’s work was gonna go up!
He stops to laugh, as if nothing would have been more entertaining than that cannon flinging shrapnel every which way. Instead, he says, it jumped back six feet and blew a wad of fire the size of a red fox. Using a hand mirror, Tom shone sunlight up the barrel and had a look. There were no cracks, no distortion. I knew then, he says, that it was perfectly safe for four or five ounces of powder.
The photographers and the young girl help Tom roll the cannon into daylight. The steel rims grind in the sand and ping against the gravel. That’s good, he says, when the cannon is in the middle of the driveway. I shoot from here so nobody accidentally drives through right about the time I light the fuse.
He fetches the rammer, a six-and-a-half-foot wooden rod capped with a wooden plunger the size of a forty-ounce beer can. But then he rams it in handle-end first. Makin’ sure there’s no mouse nest in there, he says. Once I got it all loaded and there was a mouse nest in there and I couldn’t get it to fire. So I packed a dynamite cap in there and lit the fuse. Oh, it went.
He makes a trip back to the shed, returning with a plastic five-gallon bucket in one hand and a Dinty Moore beef stew can in the other. The stew can has been filled with concrete. This is our cannonball, he says. Now he fishes around in the plastic bucket and pulls out a shot glass. Then he fishes again and produces a roll of Reynolds Wrap, tears off a square, and shapes it around the shot glass. After it is formed to his satisfaction, he hands the tinfoil husk to the female photographer and places the shot glass back in the bucket, trading it for a plastic screw-top quart milk jug. Removing the cap, he tips the jug so the mouth is over the tinfoil receptacle and then taps it as if he is peppering a steak, and soft gray powder spills out. A fluid ounce of whiskey equals about four dry ounces of black powder, he says.
When he is satisfied with the amount of powder, he folds the foil into a neat packet and places it inside the barrel. Then he introduces the rammer, fat end first, and runs it gently in until he meets resistance. Removing the rammer, he picks up the Dinty Moore can and palms it into the fluted muzzle, then takes up the rammer again and drives it inward until the projectile is seated. Throughout, he stands wide-legged and holds the rammer in two hands parallel to his stance. If something should go wrong, if the powder were to ignite, he might get some slivers, but slivers beat a rammer through the liver.
Sometimes at this point Tom will ask a newcomer to help him wad up an old newspaper. As he tamps the wads, he’ll ask, Y’know what the newspaper is for? There are a few guesses. He just smiles at each one, says, Nope, nope, nope. Finally, his face cracking into the young-kid grin you’ve come to expect, he’ll say, It’s for nothin’—it just looks good when she blows!
No newspaper today, as the confetti would be a photographic distraction. Rather, the next object out of the bucket is a Skippy peanut butter jar. Removing the blue cap, Tom draws out a length of fuse. It looks like a fat piece of stiff blue string. He inserts it into the touchhole. That’ll penetrate the tinfoil and go into the powder, he says. Now he kneels behind the cannon, sighting along the top of the barrel, wiggle-waggling the twin tails and using a bead welded above the butt end to help him align with the target. Now he twists the elevator screw to fine-tune the range. He admits the odds of hitting the red bull’s-eye on the far hillside is quite literally a long shot. The cannonballs tumble, he says. The air deflects them. When they do hit the target, half of them go through sideways.
Everything’s ready now. The ph
otographers are poised, hoping to catch a muzzle flash, or at least some smoke. Even with your hands over your ears, you hear the traffic just the other side of the shed. Sealed in their linear world, they have no idea they are sliding past live weaponry. Using a charcoal lighter, Tom touches a flame to the fuse. The fuse sputters and twists to ash.
Fire in the hole, he says.
And then nothing happens. Tom waits a good minute, then reaches in the bucket and pulls out an old-fashioned hand drill, inserts the bit in the touchhole, and reams it out. Back in war times, he says, if they were gonna lose a gun and didn’t want it to fall in enemy hands, they carried a thing like a large cotter pin they could slip down the touchhole. Then they’d beat on it and it would spread and the enemy couldn’t fire it until they got it drilled out.
He tries a second fuse.
Nothing.
I think some’a them fuses have got a break in’em, he says. Again he reams the touchhole. Threads a third fuse and lights it.
The sound is hollow and solid at once. The boom you’d expect, but with a note of a cork popping. The cannon rolls backward two feet. At this proximity the sound has a concussive physical presence, and what strikes you is the split-second suddenness of it, the irretrievable nature of the instant. The shot flies high and to the right, snapping off bits of greenery before lodging in the hillside. Tom reloads, re-aims, and touches off another round. If you look across the field rather than stare at the muzzle, you can actually see the split-second swipe of the stew can flung through its flat arc. Naturally you imagine the field of battle and the horrifying idea of a projectile slow enough to see but too fast to dodge. This one misses the bull’s-eye but blasts a hole through the outer edge of the white plywood. Everyone whoops.
TODAY I LOOKED OUT FROM my window above the garage and saw more than I deserve: a green valley, a populous chicken coop, a pink plastic tricycle. Yesterday Anneliese snipped a fistful of garlic scapes from our garden and used them in a pesto that is even now refurbishing those parts of me tainted by Zebra Cakes and sloth. There is a ring on her finger symbolizing the fact that despite a blizzard of torn tickets, I finally won the hapless bachelor lottery and ought to act like it. My wife—even now I sometimes pull up short at the word, so unexpected is it still—my wife, and her eyes so blue they still have the power to pull the breath from me across the proverbial crowded room. She has brought forth two daughters, each with the selfsame blue eyes, and when they hold my hand and call me Dad I feel simultaneously princely and lumpy.
Now it is bedtime. “What should we read tonight?” I ask Jane as I enter her bedroom for story time. “Why Things!” she exclaims, reaching into the stack and pulling out Where the Wild Things Are. We go in stretches of reading the same book for up to a week straight. We read in a rocking chair, and far from fearing the monsters on the page, the tot on my lap points them out with fascination, and comments on Max’s state of mind based on his changing expressions. During the wild rumpus, we bounce and rock the book so Max and the monsters can march and boogie and swing from the trees.
When the book is closed, I lower her to the bed and tuck the covers under her chin, a great comfort I remember from the perspective of my own childhood. When I lean down to kiss her brow, she takes my face in her hands and studies it with a frown.
“Daddy getting old?” she says. Not so long ago she did a similar thing, staring at the top of my head, then saying, “Daddy’s hair fell down!” Our children are mirrors that will not serve vanity.
“Yes,” I chuckle. “Daddy’s getting old.”
She flops down and rolls to her side. Around her thumb, she says, “I can have a scratchbacker?”
“Scratchbacker,” I say, and begin the back-scratch routine.
“Tell me about my day,” she says, and I do. This too is an echo of comfort because I remember while drifting off as a child I would review my day from beginning to end and it was a calming thing, a way to put everything in order for storage. For Jane, the review invariably begins with “You woke up, you had breakfast . . .” and goes from there. Depending on the hour or how tired Daddy is, I sometimes go a little CliffsNotes on the whole deal. But I’m still not off the hook, because the moment I finish she says, “Tell me about a funny day,” which means I am now to tell a story that begins, “I woke up, I had breakfast . . .” but then must unspool from the viewpoint of some mystery person or creature, until she pegs it. “I woke up, I had breakfast, I started pecking at worms, I . . .”
“A chicken’s day!” Giggles all around.
“I woke up, I had breakfast, I combed my big beard, I started my bulldozer . . .”
“Uncle John!”
And then I kiss her one more time, and it is off to dreamland.
Of course not. There is the sippy cup to top off, the clock-radio classical music station to switch on (in the pickup truck it’s classic country . . . at bedtime it’s just classical), the night-light to adjust, the fan to run, the crack of the door to fine-tune . . .
But finally she does go to sleep, and I have that moment where I stand there in the night-light glow looking at the tiny figure and feeling at once overwhelming love and overwhelming fear that I won’t get it right. Your heart quakes, even as it swells so large your breath is tight. In the next room Amy is preparing to sleep as well, and I utter a little existential prayer that tonight there will be no anxiousness. When the last light in the house has been switched off and all is settling to silence, I lie in bed reviewing my own day, wondering—when it comes time to tell kitchen table stories of their own—how my children will cast the character of their father. I reach for Anneliese’s hand, and it is there.
Very recently there has been talk of developing the land adjacent to ours. It’s all very tentative, and zoning requires that the plots be limited to one house per thirty-five acres, so it’s not as if there will be pawnshops and a Zumba franchise alongside the pigpen, but our property lines and topography are such that if the project moves forward we will most likely see a new roadway carved twenty yards from the garlic patch, and forty yards from the granary door. There would be two or three new houses in view. As recently as two or three years ago, this news would have had me up at night. I’d have been chewing it over and over. I’m not happy about it, and I hope it doesn’t happen, but over time—and thanks in no small part to five years getting to know Tom Hartwig—I’m learning something about how to face change, especially in light of finite time and limited resources.
I’m on my way to visit Tom now. On a tractor, which means I get to use road gear. If you grew up a farm kid, nothing beat road gear. Road gear was the highest available gear selection on the tractor, intended—as the term implies—for use on the road. Whatever you were doing—raking hay, harrowing, cultivating corn—you always looked forward to road gear. Road gear meant the work was done. Road gear meant you raised the plow and dropped the hammer, the wheels spinning clots of mud into the air until the tire lugs cleaned themselves. The little tractor I’m driving today doesn’t really have a road gear; it’s just got a pedal you push to make it go faster, and somehow the thrill isn’t quite the same, but it’ll have to do.
The tractor and the brush hog attached to it actually belong to my mother-in-law. It’s a real nice rig, although when my brother Jed the farmer saw me on it he smiled like it was just the cutest thing ever. I’ve been using the brush hog (basically a monstrous mower) to clear trails and the brush around the pigpen, and it has developed a crack in the housing, so I’m taking it over to Tom so he can weld it up. I look forward to all trips to Tom’s but this one especially because I’m commuting on a tractor and also my brother John is over there today. Tom is teaching him how to pound a sawmill blade.
Over time a sawmill blade will get knocked out of true. A little fat here, a little skinny there. Nothing visible to the naked eye, but it can create a terminal wobble. I’ve watched Tom pound the blade on his sawmill, and basically it’s an esoteric art involving a large hammer. He lays a metal straighte
dge across the blade and marks the high spots with a piece of chalk. Then, using the hammer on one side and a heavy chunk of steel as a backstop on the other, he pounds the chalky patches until the blade is flat and true.
I take it easy going out the driveway so I don’t shake the brush hog loose what with all the potholes, and I take it easy going down the Starkey Road hill so the tractor doesn’t get away from me, and I slow but don’t stop—it’s a yield sign, after all—as I pass through the new blankety-blank intersection, but when I hit the county road, I push the throttle fully forward and let the tractor run.
We’ve been here five years now, and although we’re still newcomers, we’ve accumulated some neighborly history along the route to Tom’s place. Behind me at the base of Starkey Road is a pile of sawdust where the Zack brothers and I made firewood using their old buzz saw and the logs left after the township trimmed the road. Denny Zack and his wife run up the hill to tend our chickens when we’re gone, and sometimes I take the girls down to throw food in their goldfish pond. A bit farther down the road is Farmer Jerry’s place, where we get milk. I don’t know a lot about the couple who live around the next curve except that they are in their nineties and the man still goes bowling. Another mile and I’m passing the homestead of the neighbor with whom I trade haying help for plowing help. The husband and wife who live in the house on the next corner both taught Anneliese in high school; sometimes they buy eggs from us. The next family along the road has two little boys; we often trade babysitting, the husband built us a set of shelves, and last year I brought the tractor down here to till their garden. Afterward we played kickball with the kids until dark.
I don’t know what we’ll do if the development comes. Maybe stay. Maybe pick up and move back to my hometown of New Auburn, currently population 562. Maybe spend a year in Panama. Anneliese and I have discussed it, and if someone showed up with a check one day that would allow us to pay off the banker and make a clean move to a smaller, more manageable place, there’s a pretty good shot we’d sign. There is some irony in this, as I had reservations about moving to this spot in the first place and have just recently begun to feel I could be happy here for the long haul. I have always defined myself—and probably always will—by sense of place, in particular six square miles including my hometown of New Auburn, and my parents’ farm. I could be content within that little block forever. To this day when I hit the interstate exit up there I feel the longing. But lately I’ve been second-guessing the whole idea of place. Not in a negative way, but in a ruminative way. I am lately considering the idea of attachment as a confining indulgence. Confining in that there is so much world and so little time; indulgent, in that dithering over where one might best park one’s hinder is the greatest of luxuries in light of humanity’s travails. I keep the tractor pedal flat, getting all the road gear out of this toy that I can, but I can’t escape the idea that just as we’ve established all of these neighborly connections we may be bound to sever them.
Visiting Tom Page 18