By the time I pass by the cannon and pull into the yard, Tom has already pounded the blade, and he and John, and John’s father-in-law, Jim (a man who owns a dragline and a gravel pit, making him a magnate from where I hail), are standing in the door of the shop. Seeing me on the little green machine, they all grin in a way that makes me feel like I am piloting a pedal toy in flowered short pants. I back the brush hog up to the shop, and when I switch the engine off, I hear Tom in full anecdotal stride, right in the middle of a familiar story about the farmer down by Fairchild who had a fire that burned the barn to the ground but left the silo standing. “The insurance company wanted that silo down,” he is saying, “so we took two cannons down there and started shootin’.” John’s face lights up. After all, my brother is a man who once blocked a shotgun barrel, tied a long string to the trigger, and then fired it just to see if it would explode (it did). “It was a twelve-by-thirty-six Madison stave,” says Tom, of the silo. “Took us a while, but it came down like a tree.”
I say hello to Tom and he nods, but keeps going. “Yah, on that cannon now, a lotta people think that’s illegal, but the Gun Act of 1968 exempted antique weapons and replicas. So you can own as big a muzzle-loading cannon as you can afford powder for.” His sly grin crept in right around the phrase “muzzle-loading cannon” and lingers as he completes the thought: “Course, what you do with it, that’s maybe another question . . .”
“Were you shooting yesterday, Tom?” I ask. “I heard a pretty good boom right around noon.”
“You can hear it up there, huh?” he says, with a proud papa smile. Then John asks a question about ballistics and Tom begins to describe his process for manufacturing black powder. Although the materials are basic, the process is complex and furthermore eases over into the shady corners of endeavor some classify as “extralegal,” so let us remain vague. Correspondingly, when Tom showed up at the local emergency room with facial burns a few years back, his explanation (“I was welding on a gas tank”) may have been “extrafactual.” In a favorite visual image I never actually witnessed, Tom once told me how he tested a new batch of powder in his mother’s kitchen. “I brought a little in and tossed it on the hot stove to see how fast it flashed,” he said. “That went over real well!”
“Yah, when I started messin’ with those cannons, my ma used to shake her head and say, ‘When the donkey has it good he dances on thin ice.’”
There is talk of shooting the cannon today, but John and Jim are on a parts run and the store is due to close at noon, so they are beginning to edge toward their pickup. Sensing this, Tom shuffles his set list on the fly and hits his closing number in stride, easing back to the far corner of the shop to pull out the shovel with the curved handle. Today after the punch line, he even adds a bit I haven’t heard before, about how the highway crews are getting new uniform shirts with one pocket sewn on upside down. “That way they don’t even need to use their hands—they just stick the shovel handle in that pocket and lean away,” he says.
Everyone is enjoying the laugh when I notice John fishing around in his pocket. “What do I owe you?” he asks Tom. (Actually, he pronounces it as one word: WhaddoIoweya?) “Oh, twenty bucks should do it,” says Tom, and when John hands the twenty over I see a five folded over it. It’s a real smooth move, like he’s greasing the Hyatt Regency doorman to turn a blind eye to his Escalade in the no-parking zone. And in an even smoother move, Tom doesn’t even check the bills—he just slides them into his pocket, sparing everyone the discomfort of frank currency exchange.
“Well, whaddya got here?” Tom asks as John and Jim drive away. I show him where the iron in one corner of the mower arbor has cracked and separated. In order to provide access to the crack, I had to detach the brush hog from the tractor. “We gotta get it up off the ground if I’m gonna get in there,” Tom says, and starts ratcheting away with a rickety car jack—one of those shinbone-looking things you’d find in the trunk of your ’72 Buick—he pulled from somewhere on the floor of the shop. The jack teeters and yaws and I run around desperately stuffing wooden blocks beneath the brush hog wherever I can. At one point the jack collapses and Tom stumbles backward as the steel lip of the brush hog bites into the earth just short of his toes. “Bitch!” says Tom, addressing the jack as it lies in the grass. He goes into the shop and returns with a hydraulic bottle jack. This works much better, and shortly we have the mower propped safely aloft.
After using his torch to debride the cracked and fatigued steel, Tom cuts a section of strap iron roughly the size of the resulting gap. Using the press to bend it at an angle that matches the shape of the arbor, he leaves it to me to grind the edges until I achieve a snug fit. In the meantime we’ve discovered a crack on the other side of the brush hog, so while I’m grinding and fitting the patch and working at clamping it in place, Tom drags his cables around to weld the second crack. I’m lying on my back and working overhead when I notice a tingling in my arm. I’ve had issues with numbness in that arm for some time now and even as a young man couldn’t work with my arms raised for long before I got pins and needles, so I ignore it and keep working. But the tingling gets more and more insistent, and eventually I realize it’s happening in sync with the futz of Tom’s welder. Naturally, when I tell Tom I’m sucking up his stray voltage, he acts like it’s the funniest thing he’s heard all morning. But when he comes back over to my side and sees I have the patch fitted and clamped, he says, “Yah, that’ll work,” and I feel like the kid who won the spelling bee. He kneels down, flips his mask in place, and strikes an arc, the 6011 rod sparking and sputtering until in short order the brush hog is patched up and good to go.
I help him stow the tools and welder, and we lower the brush hog and reattach it to the tractor. Then I say, “Well, Tom, whaddoIoweya?”
“Fifteen,” he says. “That’ll cover it.”
I reach into my pocket and blanch. Check my other pocket. I’ve done it again. Nothing. I think of John, and how smoothly he palmed the cash and a little something extra, and how that moment compared to this, what with there being zero lag time between the price and the payment.
I cop to my penury, and right on cue the stories begin: Frank Thurston, the Buford boys, the eagle shitting . . . I squirm through the entire litany, the sickly grin in place, gone from the winner of the spelling bee to the knucklehead who forgot his homework. Still, the discomfort is predicated on a history of neighborliness, and although I can’t get that tractor into road gear fast enough, I’m smiling as I do it.
When Jane achieved potty-training last year, there was a hitch: She couldn’t reach the bathroom light switch, so one of us still had to make the trip with her. As a remedy, our friend Lori made her a “Light Angel”—a thin two-foot strip of wood with a hole and a scallop cut in one end. Jane quickly learned to use the scallop to push the switch to “on” and the hole to pull it to “off.” As a father, I found this a liberating development because now she truly could go to the bathroom by herself, and I didn’t have to shift my lard. Then came the night not so long ago when Jane disappeared into the bathroom and then—after an extended interlude—hollered, “Daddy, I have a sur-PRIZE for you!” Talk about your daunting summons. Because the poor dear may read this one day (and because I may one day require her to assist me in a similar manner), I’ll go light on the details other than to say you just never know when that fire department hazmat training is going to save the day. But the real emotional kneecapper came as we were leaving the bathroom. I instinctively reached for the light switch and Jane scooted in front of me, blocking my way. “No, Daddy, no—I want to show you!” And with that she rose up on her tippy-tiptoes, stretched her hand as far as she could, and with one tiny little finger, flipped the switch and cut the light.
I felt my heart split.
Oh, I knelt and hugged her, and told her we were proud of her, and that she was our big girl, and she beamed, but as I wandered back to find Anneliese and share the news, I felt as if I had stepped off a ledge and into a v
acuum where I was falling and fruitlessly trying to grab armfuls of time. How odd that a happy moment would permute into such hollow helplessness, and how silly to be pitched there by the click of a switch. And yet in that one unpremeditated instant, my daughter—already in the other room and jabbering at a plastic horse—inflicted me with a case of emotional hiccups.
It is natural, when from the mushy island of middle age you watch your toddling daughter or study the lined face of your octogenarian neighbor, to wonder just how long one will be (as I heard a caller to Moose Country 106.7 put it recently) “upright and taking nourishment.” I asked Tom once after his stroke if he had worried about dying when he was in the hospital. “Nah, not really,” he said, raising both hands and his eyebrows as if to say, Whadd’ya gonna do? “I had a good friend in high school, Bart Miskey. He was six feet five, like a beanpole, and the year after we got outta high school I remember we were shootin’ the breeze one night, talkin’ about how old we were gonna get. And I remember tellin’ him if I didn’t make it to be eighty, I’d be disappointed. He thought that was hilarious. And then he says, ‘I’ll never see thirty.’ And he didn’t. He drowned when he was twenty-five.”
“So you’re two years into bonus time,” I said. “Yah, I guess so,” said Tom, after a small laugh. “And I just bought a brand-new wire-feed welder—I’m either an optimist or an idiot!”
I cannot imagine I will live to be an old man. I have had neither visions nor premonitions. I’m not laying money either way; I simply can’t imagine it. I feel too vulnerable. Anneliese, who is ten years my junior and of the “what you think about you bring about” persuasion, knits her brow when I talk this way, and I am never quite successful when I try to explain I’m not being fatalistic, I’m being okay with it. Two-plus decades of making fire and rescue calls have tinted my glasses in this respect. You simply never know when you’re going to step off the mortal curb. Furthermore, I was reading Montaigne again last night, and after quoting Horatio to the effect that even the cautious man can never foresee the danger that may befall him, Montaigne rattles off a list of acquaintances who were crushed in a crowd, killed at a tilting, choked with a grapestone, hit in the head by a turtle, and fatally smacked with a tennis ball. Because I no longer require one, I will likely escape dying in the manner of Montaigne’s emperor felled by the scratch of a comb, but as a guy who raises his own bacon I did take very seriously his invocation of the ancestor of King Henry II who died “by jostle of a hog.” Conversely, in the department of Something to Shoot For, Montaigne does cite no fewer than six men (including a pope) who perished “betwixt the very thighs of women.”
Lately I see my grandfather’s lines in my face. From the time I first remember him, Grandpa’s chin was bracketed by twin furrows, one running from either corner of his mouth at a slightly widening angle down to his jawline. The effect was to make it appear as if his lower lip and chin were of a unit separate from the rest of his visage, in the nature of the Nutcracker prince or a ventriloquist’s dummy. To the grave, Grandpa kept himself in trim, but the lines nonetheless lent him a set of jowls. If I stand before a mirror beneath the bathroom light and flex my face into an expression of pursed-lips disapproval, those very same lines form. For now I have to force them up with a grimace, but with each passing year they appear more readily. Recently I saw myself on television, and there they were. They are joined by other signs, of course: the old-man ears, slowly expanding in relation to the rest of my head; an earlobe inscribed with the cursed cardiac crease purportedly linked to heart disease; the standard follicular shifts (baldness, yes, but also sproutings too off-putting to scrutinize in this space), including my single eyebrow profusing into an obscurantist hedgeworks evermore threaded with white and requiring regular hacking back; a change in the alignment of a toe; and finally the ever more pervasive musculoskeletal creaks, cracks, and pinches. Twenty-plus years of all-nighters spent slumped before a screen (well, for the first five or so it was a ribbon and a platen) or blear-eyed behind a steering wheel while fueled by truck stop coffee and cellophane-wrapped gas station treats have certainly lowered my trade-in value. In addition to the chin lines, I note I am well on my way to a matching set of Grandpa’s baggy eyes, and the two vertical scowl lines above the bridge of my nose are etched for the duration. In this my forty-sixth year I am compelled to admit I may be composed of something other than mystery and light.
There are times when I look at my daughters—especially Jane, who is only now forming solid memories—and wonder if she will always think of her daddy as an old man. When my father was my age he had already seen me out of college. There are moments at forty-six that I feel irredeemably spent. Bald and worn out. Other days I feel not a whit removed from eighteen, although both of these states are tied more to my psyche than my physique.
Last year a dear friend turned fifty. He got to moping on it. I am five years his junior, and find him to be remarkably well preserved. He has thick hair, a trim figure, and still plays league hockey. “I don’t know what he’s complaining about,” I told Anneliese. “He looks younger than I do.”
“Yes he does,” she said.
A hesitation of point-five seconds would have been a reasonable kindness, don’t you think?
We have reached the season of fireflies.
Much is made of the year’s first robin, and fair enough. Although the celebrated red breast is actually dull orange, when viewed in the context of brown sod and remaindered slush the bird does provide a reliable emotional boost. But the first firefly! Through the deciduous declension of autumn, after the crystalline stricture of winter, and into the yes-no-maybe spring, it is possible to forget that such an insect—easily more magical than your standard unicorn—even exists. Then come the blue-green blinks, furtive in the grass. Doling out love by the lumen; is anything so naturally fantastic as a firefly’s butt? It is as if star seeds cruise the earth. I spotted this year’s first just two weeks ago while crossing the yard after dark to perform the nightly ritual of securing the chicken coop for the evening. Perhaps young firefly damsels swoon when they see my headlamp afloat, believing it to be the most fantastic butt of all.
Now the fireflies have grown profuse, and last night, when I made the evening chicken rounds after tooth-brushing and bedtime stories and tuck-ins, I was so overcome with the phosphorescent countryside that I returned to the house and pried the children back out of bed. I snatched a few bugs from the air and we held them loosely in our fists as the light pulsed from between our fingers. Then we released them and stood quietly hand in hand, marveling at the terrestrial Milky Way stretching from our very feet and lavishly beyond to the valley below. The hills were stroboscopic with love.
Another day has passed into another night, and I am standing at my desk considering a cardboard packet. It’s slim, but has some heft and is of portrait dimensions. Within is a sheaf of prints from the day Tom led the photographers around his place. The packet has been on my desk for quite a while. I’ve been coming and going, on and off the road, on and off deadline, hoarding shards of time in between for farm and family. I began to cut into the packet the day it arrived but then remembered Tom at the sawmill, and the customer who complained that he didn’t saw fast enough. I figure I can take my time to get the most out of it, Tom had said, and I felt the same about the photographs in the packet. I understood the work that went into them: carefully framed and shot, developed by hand, everything one by one. I didn’t want to flip through each image and then rush on to the next thing. I wanted to study them without constraint. See if they might reveal something more about Tom or life itself. That last bit sounds grandiose, but have we a more elementary responsibility? I placed the packet aside until such time as I might absorb the contents more deeply. Now, after dark, with the children abed and a high wind blowing a storm that never seems to arrive, I believe this is that time. Although it is late, I go to the room above the garage, make coffee, put on music, and pull the pictures from the packet.
Duri
ng my first pass through, I have trouble getting beyond a browse. There are a multitude of shots—Tom seated on the running board of the Model A; Tom beside his cannon, standing with the rammer upright like a soldier caught midway between attention and parade rest; Tom stabbing his palm with his index finger in the midst of emphasizing a point. Each image triggers a rush of recall extending far beyond anything captured in the flat replication, and the more associative aspects take over: When I see Tom’s hands cradling the knurled boring bar holder, I recall the dirt-grease scent of the cluttered shop; when I see him standing before his sawmill, I hear the scolding of a jay from a windblown Norway pine; when I see him backlit in the haymow, I feel the soft crunch of ancient chaff beneath my feet; and of course, implied in every image, the nonstop traffic soundtrack.
Visiting Tom Page 19