Then I come to a straight-on head shot of Tom, and my attention fixes. His face and shoulders fill the bulk of the frame. The predominant light is directed against his left side. His eyes are deep-set beneath black eyebrows. His gaze is utterly direct, but to characterize it as piercing would be overdramatic. The photographers have not asked him to smile, and he holds his mouth evenly. The creases across all aspects of his face are riverine, each a record of repetitive expression, set and baked by wind and sun. His hair is longer than I have ever seen it, sweeping back over his ears almost as if it were blown and feathered. Atop his head it stands in a muss. Caught at the far end of a haircut, Tom’s look is less the Samuel Beckett I have previously described and more Keith Richards sans the seedy leer.
In so many ways—the wrinkles, the graying hair, even the tattered collar—this is a portrait of wear and tear. Of seasoning. And yet my first thought when I peer beyond the superficial physiognomy is of Tom the boy. It remains visible in him. It helps, I suppose, that even in this staid pose I can summon kitchen table Tom, the Tom with the stories about gathering arrowheads and running across the bridge to school, or searching the sky for Ginger the crow. The way he tells those tales, it is as if he has managed to bring that little boy with him, and I suppose he has. One night when Anneliese and the girls and I were at dinner in the kitchen Tom got to rattling off the pranks he and his schoolboy buddies pulled—killing the school bus by packing snow up the tailpipe; blocking the axle on Art Brackett’s ’37 Ford so when Art stumbled from the tavern and tried to drive off he just sat there spinning his wheels; playing hooky to go hitchhiking, only to be undone when the first car that stopped was driven by the school principal—and what I saw wasn’t an old man gone wistful but rather an old man still resonating to the glee of a young heart.
For all his stories of the past, you rarely get the sense that Tom is operating out of reminiscence. Rather more, he simply enjoys a good story and its telling. I have seen him sentimental only twice. Once was when he admitted to the photographers that he kept the cows because he liked how they looked in the field. The other came during a kitchen table visit when he got to talking about his father and the community-owned threshing machine.
“My dad ran the steam engine for that threshin’ rig. The neighbors all owned it but my dad ran it for thirty-three years. And as kids we used to get so darned excited when you’d hear that engine, he’d toot the whistle when he turned in the driveway, and we’d hear that thing chuggin’ away and we’d run over the ridge to watch it come marchin’ on up . . .”
He paused in reverie, looking out the window.
Then he returned. “That engine’s still goin.’ It’s in a museum up at Edgar.”
What I am unprepared for is how even the few months passed have imbued the image of Tom’s face with a figurative historicity. It is as if the darkroom fixer, rather than merely stopping time, has deepened it. The pictures are microscopically detailed, utterly unretouched, and yet Tom seems someone other than Tom. He is rendered intimately unrecognizable. There is some remove at play, as if I am viewing him through a binocular turned backward.
The portrait of Tom and Arlene together was taken in the dining room. Arlene is seated beside the table, and Tom stands behind her, his forearm resting on her chair back. The cuckoo clock is prominent on the wall above Tom’s head, tick-tick-ticking the whole time. The door leading to the living room is visible in the background, and down in its lower left quadrant the flash has cast the handle of Arlene’s oxygen tank in silhouette. She removed the cannula for the shoot, and the clustered tubing is visible as a shadowy wad.
Arlene was talkative that day. “Those eight days that I was in the hospital, I’d look at the clock, and I’d see two of’em!” she said, as the photographers set their gear. “The first night the doctor said to Tom, ‘I don’t know if she’s gonna make it through the night.’ But I guess I’m still here.
“I had one of those four-wheel walkers,” she said, then gave a dismissive wave. “You go out in the driveway and you hit potholes, and it goes like this . . .” She mimed the walker tipping forward. “I do not want to fall down. I don’t want to cause any more trouble. Thomas says, ‘You gotta get out.’ So we go grocery shopping, but there I use the cart.”
She paused, then spoke again, tapping each syllable into the table with her index finger.
“I tell myself: It. All. Could. Be. Worse.”
It took the photographers a while to get the shot of Tom and Arlene. Their antique equipment required persnickety setup and left no room for error. “You have to go through this every time you want to take a picture?” Arlene asked, raising her eyebrows and shaking her head in mock horror. Then the photographer said, “Okay, hold still now, and don’t move a muscle,” and in the silence before the shutter snapped, I could hear Cassidy’s tail swishing against a brown paper shopping bag, the muffled traffic beyond the barn, and—from somewhere in the room—an odd, barely audible grinding sound, which I eventually tracked down to a rotating crystal sun-catcher attached to the dining room window with a suction cup. “Our nephew gave us that,” said Tom. “It’s solar-powered.” By the sound of the gears it wasn’t long for this world, but as the crystal slowly spun it refracted the sunlight, swabbing the room with a rainbow blob. Just below the windowsill, Tom’s fermentation jug was bubbling another batch of wine. Beside that stood a milk can decorated with a hand-painted portrait of Chester and Lester—a gift from a lady in Pennsylvania, Tom told the photographers. A miniature cannon rested on the sideboard. None of these things appear in the portrait, but they inform my perception of the image.
If Tom’s appearance in the solo portrait was disorienting, in this portrait it is startling. To my eye, he is rendered alarmingly vulnerable and undersized. It is Tom, for sure, down to the last leather-pecan wrinkle. But his eyes appear timeworn, and it looks like he is leaning on the chair for support, when in fact I know that in the moments before and after the shutter snapped he was gibing and joking and he had just spent the afternoon nimbly touring us through his farm and life.
Last month Anneliese was sorting through some boxes and came across some snapshots taken on the Hartwig farm during her hay crew days, and they were a revelation. There was Arlene, dark-haired and laughing in her kitchen, peeling tinfoil from a pie plate. There she was at a graduation party, laughing again. And there she was perched high on the seat of one of the Farmalls, her grip strong on the steering wheel, as she drew a 14T John Deere baler down the windrow. In the tractor snapshot she was tanned and hale, sporting a pastel sun visor and looking down into the camera with her cheeks bunched up into a smile.
And there was Tom, same face, same lean frame, but with a fashion-catalogue jauntiness to his posture, and—these were the days when he still had vices—his corncob pipe clamped in his teeth. In some of the photos, taken when Anneliese was home visiting from college, Tom is wearing a sky-blue snap shirt and a coal-black handlebar mustache wider than his face, which has the effect of making him look like a slightly screwball card shark.
So: photos of Arlene pulling the hay baler, but none of Tom cooking for the hay crew. “You’d have been in tough shape without Arlene,” I said during a recent visit, mildly calling him on it.
“Oh, absolutely,” Tom replied, pressing one palm down on the table as if for emphasis. “I depended through the years very heavily on her. She helped me hay, she helped me milk cows . . . when I needed parts she’d go and get’em. And a’course the implement dealers couldn’t pull the wool over her eyes because she used to go out there and help me take the tractors apart.”
Arlene was watching him talk, using one of her hands to smooth the tablecloth. “Tommy and I will be married sixty years now, comin’ up,” she said, echoing what she said last winter. “I can still see him . . . I’d be up in that office building and there he’d go, down the main drag in that white convertible and wearing that red shirt—so he’d stick out, you know!”
The last happy little jab
there, coming right after Arlene was getting wistful, got a good laugh from Tom. Then she narrowed her eyes and squinted at him. “You weren’t always so hunky-dory like you make out you were.”
Tom clasped his hands and squeezed his forearms together on his lap, rocking forward and grinning like a kid.
Arlene looked at him again and shook her head. “He was differnt . . .”
I thought about that little exchange a lot in the months that followed, and whether or not there was any rancor beneath the teasing, or what sort of history it might have been based upon. Even in the best circumstances, I don’t doubt that over the course of six decades, differnt occasionally lost some of its appeal. Whenever I hear someone described as “quite a character” I wonder how the home-based reviews might compare. The perspective shift from observation to cohabitation can be clarifying. My own grumpiness has long been a point of humor in our family, but it hangs on more than a thread of truth. Recently, after I issued some parental edict, Amy waited until I had gone off to my room above the garage, then confided in Anneliese that she was afraid to talk to me because I was so irritable. This rightly jolted me. From the day I met her Amy has been a delicate spirit, prone to anxiety and nocturnal weeping on behalf of the world in general, and I found myself wondering if in my sullen clomping around I might already have rent some fabric not easily mended.
I think, too, of all my literal and figurative ramblings, of how many times I was off somewhere telling my tales of raising chickens, pigs, and babies while Anneliese was right here raising the chickens, pigs, and babies . . . and gardening, and canning, and dealing with the leaky basement, and teaching yoga, and holding down stints as a freelance Spanish translator and an instructor with the foreign language department of the local university. When I am on the road I develop teen-level absence crushes on Anneliese. I send her notes and call her to say sweet things I fail to say when I’m actually home and sharing the same square footage. I pull out of the gray parking lot of some early-morning truck stop, jaw set and chin quivering, imagining myself a lonesome rider at the gates of dawn; meanwhile, she is back at home dealing with piano lessons and doctor appointments and the kitchen drain and lesson plans, and has oddly scheduled exactly zero minutes for pensive gazing. Or for taking maudlin phone calls from a situationally lovelorn husband sitting in a distant bookstore parking lot with a Starbucks and some free time.
I am ten years older than Anneliese, but she is the grown-up in this relationship. People chuckle when I say that, but I’m not going for a laugh. When you’re lucky you should just say so. And then write yourself a stern reminder not to fall back on that luck. There is this male tendency to believe that somehow the initial two weeks of snappy dressing, full eye contact, and best behavior will balance out thirty years of holey underwear, mumbling, and anatomic decline. It is one thing to be a work in progress, quite another to be a work in regress. Familiarity is no excuse for lowering your standards. Or so I said to myself last week while standing saggily before the bathroom mirror in my holey underwear.
The last time Arlene had a spell, I got a call from Emmy. Tom had phoned saying Arlene was weak and not talking sense. Emmy was at work and wondered if I might run over and check on her mom. I wasn’t home, and it sounded like maybe a stroke, so Emmy rang off and had an ambulance sent. Had I been home I would have been paged to the call. For the second time now, I was out of range when the Hartwigs needed help. However, by chance I was in town and only blocks from the hospital and so I drove over and was waiting in the ER when the rig arrived. After the paramedics wheeled Arlene to her room—she was barely conscious—I left to let the nurses do their work and waited in the hall for Tom, who had followed at a safe pace in the Crown Vic.
When he came ambling around the corner and started toward me, I was struck again at how the frame—be it provided by a camera lens or the vanishing perspective of a gleaming hospital hallway—informs the image. How the Tom I knew—the fellow holding forth from his chair in the kitchen corner, or expounding on the explosive properties of box elder–based black powder, or setting the lathe to turn a shaft—suddenly appeared as a slightly bewildered old man finding his way across the icy-smooth tiles.
He drew fairly near before recognizing me. The door to Arlene’s room was closed, so I escorted him just around the corner to a family waiting alcove and we sat down. After he matter-of-factly described Arlene’s symptoms I got him to talking about his honeybees, and this seemed to mitigate the surroundings. Shortly the nurse appeared and ushered us into the room. Arlene looked terribly gray, and was lying motionless with her eyes closed. As Tom approached the bed Arlene’s eyes opened, made contact with his, and then closed again.
A phlebotomist arrived and drew a curtain around the bed, so Tom and I moved back to the hall and stood together outside the door and visited with Emmy, who had just arrived. Although he looked out of place, Tom conveyed no distress. The phlebotomist departed and shortly afterward Emmy and I were in conversation when we realized Tom had slipped back into the room.
We peeked, and he was at the bedside again. As we watched, Tom drew off his cap and brought his face close to Arlene’s. “How you doin’, Ma?” he said, in a voice so gentle it seemed another man’s. As before, Arlene’s eyes opened, met his, and closed again. Cap dangling in one hand, he reached out with the other—that same hand I’ve watched at the welder, at the torch, at the lathe—and ever so carefully caressed her brow. “We gotta get you better, Ma,” he said, his voice earnest, but still soft. “We had a goal, remember? Sixty years together.”
The hand was still now, resting on her hair.
“We’re almost there, Ma . . .”
It turned out Arlene hadn’t had a stroke but rather a severe systemic infection. She recovered in short order and came back home. I’m still not sure what the “hunky-dory” comment alluded to, and I likely never will. Not my business, not my place. I don’t imagine you do sixty years as a flawless skate. I talked to Emmy about what we saw in the hospital room that day, and she says her father’s tenderness took some time in coming. That for all of her childhood it was the farm first, always the farm. That she’s not sure he would have touched Arlene’s brow twenty or thirty years ago. But here in these later years, she says, there has been a shift. Toward tenderness, yes, but also—this just in the last year—toward frying his own eggs.
It is important, now and then, that overgrown boys be called to account. Recently a woman who had seen me perform a humorous monologue approached Anneliese and said, “Your husband is so funny!”
“Yes he is,” said Anneliese, without hesitation. Then, demonstrating impeccable timing of her own, she added, “ . . . onstage.”
Rimbaud wrote of “the friend neither ardent nor weak.” I do believe I found her.
As did Tom.
I return once more to the portrait of Tom and Arlene together. Again I am focusing on the contrast between the Tom who opens the screen door or fires up the torch or slaps his hands at a funny story and the Tom I see on the one-dimensional prints. Now I turn to the simple head shot again. The one taken so close to his face. Just Tom, looking into the camera. “Your head is a container,” he told me once. “It can only hold so much.” His forehead is tall and square above his narrow face, framed above and to both sides by his brushy hairline. It occurs to me now that the photograph was taken only a few weeks prior to his craniotomy. Even as the shutter snapped, the bleed that would send him pitching into the corn was incipient. And now I am thinking of him looking so unexpectedly tiny in the hospital bedsheets. The low-level shock I felt at seeing him that way and the way I feel at seeing him in these photographs are echoes of a sort. The Tom I carry with me is the Tom of action: Tom behind the welding mask; Tom blowing bees from the honey supers; Tom fired up over long-lost highway battles. The Tom I know best is the Tom of rawhide, of strap steel, of the quickening glint. Posed before his sawmill, he looks curmudgeonly; posed beside his cannon, he looks dour; posed in his own parlor, he looks waifi
sh.
When I talked with Tom in the nursing home, I was surprised that he wasn’t fidgeting for home, or feeling bereft. That he was simply occupying the moment as it was offered him—and catching up on his sleep. I go back to the pictures again, and his eyes, and slowly I see a shift. What I saw as worn and weary, I now see as something closer to placidity. Patience. Both he and Arlene are simply looking at the camera and waiting. Surely this is the rarest of expressions in this instant-message world. We are not used to seeing patience and may therefore be slow—or unable—to identify it. Seeing placidity, we mistake it for disconnection. In the time it took the photographers to shoot those photos, a few thousand vehicles swished past on the interstate. You wonder how many—if any—of the people within those vehicles were accepting the moment. Instead you have the image of white knuckles on the wheel, clenched guts, feet and fingers tapping. The drivers and their passengers have reached the impotent outer limits of human capability, which so far allows us to project ourselves anywhere immediately with the ironic exception that our actual cell-based selves remain constrained by the rules of physics, which, even at ten miles over the limit, will prevent us from getting to Milwaukee any faster than the coffee-soaked Cheeto crumbs at the bottom of the cup holder.
There is vulnerability in these black-and-white photographs, and why not: One day you fall off your bike and cannot locate the mailbox. But the eyes, I think I’m homing in on that now. Who looks you in the eyes these days? We are either checking our phones or checking for what’s next. Tom’s eyes are checking for what’s now. What is. And how to live within it.
Visiting Tom Page 20