"This was when the Depression was coming on. There was a drought. The crops dried up and the blowing dust blackened the air so badly it was dark sometimes at midday. We put rugs under the doors and stuffed rags around the windows but the dust came right through the walls. It was topsoil. You couldn't keep clean no matter how often you washed, and even the sugar got gray. We didn't have money to buy seed for new crops and there was very little to eat. Many days, I remember, your grandma made up a big pan of johnnycake and it lasted us the three meals. There were eight of us then and your granddad did all it was possible for a man in his position to do. He kept us alive.
"We had a neighbor in those days by the name of Iver Seim."
He smiles and Jerome and Charles nudge one another. When he tells his stories, he's so transformed in the telling they're nearly as much affected by the transformation as by his words. His oval face broadens at the mouth and looks round, 'and his eyes, bright blue and nearly circular, become enormous behind his gold-wire glasses; he punishes his hair until curly locks of it cover his forehead; tugs at his watch chain, at the green suspenders under his vest, and becomes so nervous he can hardly sit.
"Iver was one of the most brilliant and interesting men I’ve met and he fancied himself a poet and had a good wife, but he ruined it all with drink. His motto was, 'There must be an easier way.' I'm not saying he was a lazy man; that wouldn't be true. He farmed two sections of land and there wasn't anybody able to keep up with him when he wanted to work, and in his spare time and at nights he was also always working away at his poetry, but he drank. He was skin and bones from worry and hard work. We never saw the lights in his house go off before 3 a.m. He was writing a book-long piece of verse he called A Medley of the Plain. He recited stanzas of it for us now and then, but I was too young to really remember much. There was a line that went, 'There must be a Creator or my life wouldn't be going up in flames every day.' Or something of that sort, better said. His language and ideas were generally above me then.
"He had plenty of ideas, it seems, but was never able to get them off on the right foot. Or maybe he depended too much on that motto of his. I remember one time he decided to reshingle his barn. We all wondered why, since it was his house that leaked and was in such sad shape. Dad—your grandpa—offered to help him with the job, but Iver just winked and said, 'Wait till you see what I've got up my sleeve, Mr. N.”
"He built a mechanical rig to lift the shingles onto the roof. It looked like an oil derrick to me. Iver said he'd use it later to lift engines out of his tractors and cars. Who knows where he got the materials to build it or those shingles he had? He lived on a fertile farm in a good location and got regular checks from someplace else— some said it was a rich uncle, others said it was his father-in-law—but never seemed to have a cent. He often tried to borrow from Dad and was always bartering with neighbors up and down the line for food.
"His shingle-lifting boom was built out of logs and pipework and ran off the power take-off of his tractor, and must have taken him weeks to build. On the second load it tipped over—'Geet out!' he cried—and tore an eave off his barn. Oh, Lord! Those shingles sat beside that barn in stacks, with moss growing on them, for as long as I can remember. I suppose it seemed an easier way at the time to him.
"He got tired of shoveling manure and decided he needed a mechanical barn cleaner, was what he needed now. He bought up feed chains from broken-down threshing machines, cut the cleats in lengths to fit his gutter, and linked the chains in a series that revolved. He had to burrow the length of his barn beneath the gutter to do it, but got it going at last. This contraption also ran off the power take-off of his Case. It worked well for a while and farmers were coming from around to admire it, and the officer of an implement company in Duluth even showed up one day to check out the possibilities of mass production of it. Iver sat on his tractor taking nips from his jug and got the cleaner going like crazy, but apparently hadn't put the proper sort of bracing in his burrow; part of the barn floor collapsed. The tractor reared up and tipped on its back and pinned him by his coveralls and the cleaner kept going long enough to drag the tractor and him into the barn with a crash. 'Holy balls!' he cried, and I thought those would be his last words, but he was hardly scratched. The luck of that man!
"Your grandpa patched up the wall and the one eave above it. That barn certainly took its knocks. 'He isn't one to ask favors,' your grandpa used to say. 'But you wish he would, before he's in so deep you can't help, because he always ends up needing one.'
"He bought a dozen Shropshire sheep to keep the yard around his place looking mowed and tidy. 'It's a bit of old England I've got here now, isn't it?' he said in an accent. But he'd neglected to fence off his garden and the sheep leveled it in a day. His wife liked that. We helped them out with vegetables that winter and got a lot of mutton in return. I still can't stand the stuff. Iver showed me this." Martin raises his left hand and pops his cuff. "If you wear your watch on the hand you don't favor, on the inside of your wrist, like this, it's less likely to get damaged, and the crystal doesn't scratch up so much.
"Around the Depression there were a lot of closing auctions going on. Iver was attracted to them in a way you wished he hadn't been. He'd go to one and start bidding and couldn't stop. It seemed he wasn't so interested in the items as in coming out on top. Again, I don't know where he got the means. He'd come over all liquored up and say he'd just sold a poem, but I didn't ever see anything of his in a book or magazine or even scratched on a pad of paper, as far as that goes. I took him at his word. He drove an old Dodge truck and he'd leave each auction loaded with so much furniture and junk you'd wonder where he'd put it all, and unload it at his back door as if he had gold. Unless he was too drunk, and then it'd sit out and get rained on a few times. He had two or three of just about everything you can think of in just about every room of his house. When he had company, there was hardly a place to stand. There was five or six beds, as I recall it, and he and his wife didn't have any kids. She kept every piece of furniture and knickknack he brought home as clean as the day it was made. She was a hard-working, solid Scandinavian, that girl, and I never once heard her complain.
"He also bought tractors. He had several makes you don't even hear about now. They were parked all around his farmyard and he had about a dozen hidden away in an old horse barn. He claimed those were special breeds, and priceless, but I think he was actually embarrassed at the number he had. None of them would run when he needed one, of course, or if he got one going, it didn't last long. He was his own mechanic, you see. When one gave out he'd leave it sit where it was until it occurred to him what to do about it next, and there were a few he'd plowed around so many times they were a part of the landscape.
"Oh, what I could tell you about starting those old tractors of his! The Waterloo Boy was cranked something like a Hart Parr, along the side instead of up at the front.
And then there was the Rumley Oil Pull. It was cooled by oil, not water, like most, and had a flywheel on the order of a John Deere. You had to grab that flywheel and give it a spin with all your might, and when it finally took hold, it shot clouds of blue smoke out of a big stack under its square front and the flywheel sent you flying!
"He had an old Flour City, which was made in and named after Minneapolis, and stood on big steel wheels, six foot high or so. It had a platform at the back where you stood to drive it. You also cranked it from there, at the back, by the platform, and the cranking spindle revolved all the while the engine was going once you got it going for good. That spindle scared me; I figured sooner or later it was going to catch me in my crotch. Iver had fun kidding me about that and then the spindle caught him there. Not a word. The Flour City moved into the horse barn with his special breeds.
"He had three or four cars he had trouble keeping on the road. There was a particular Model T he rolled three times in the course of a year. He spent his time in between tinkering on it. He had an idea on how the steering could be improved. He drove
too fast, of course, and the inside of the car was always tinkling with empty liquor jars. It seemed he never went anywhere unless he was juiced. He wasn't ever hurt in any of the accidents, and neither was the mandolin he always had with him. He loved to play the mandolin and sing, although he couldn't do either, really, not well at all, and, my Lord, that infuriated him! He was jealous of your grandpa because he could carry a tune! Dad called him a misguided perfectionist. He said that Iver was probably the kind who couldn't let a— Well, you know how you toot when you eat beans; that he couldn't do that without taking time to stop and get a good whiff of it.
"One day he came running into our yard and yelled, ‘One of my cars is on fire!' 'Where?' we asked. 'Just down the road here! Hurry up!' We all took off, about six of us, counting kids, and, sure enough, there was fire coming out of the raised hood of an old Pontiac of his. He'd thrown his shirt over the engine and the shirt was all burned up. He started scooping dirt up in his hands and throwing that on the fire. 'Help me!' he yelled to us. Most of us obliged and started throwing dirt, although we figured pretty soon this whole car would be blowing up. He pulled off his trousers in front of us kids and started whacking at the fire with those. Dad meanwhile had turned back when he saw the smoke, and now came running up with a weed sprayer filled with water and put the fire out.
"How can I ever thank you?' Iver said.
"How did it happen? "
Dad asked.
"Well, I cleaned the block and rocker-arm covers with gasoline this afternoon,' Iver said. 'I really shined her up. I used all the gasoline I had. I was coming over to ask if I could borrow some from you, so I could turn that hay of mine that got wet last week, when the car here ran out. Then I remembered I always carry a five-gallon can in the back here, because the gauge in this doesn't work, so I poured that into the tank but it wouldn't start, so then I siphoned some of it back out— I also carry a siphon hose—and I took off the air cleaner and poured some in the carburetor, and I guess it got slapped around. When the engine finally took hold, flames shot up. How can I ever thank you, for goodness' sake?'
" 'Before you thank me,' Dad said, 'I think you better check that engine there. Your spark-plug wires will have to be replaced, at the least, and that fan belt. You got a pile of dirt all over the top of your carburetor somehow, and now this water has just made it mud.'
" 'Do you think it'll start?' Iver asked.
"A few weeks later I went by his house and most of the windows were broken out and his furniture lay in the yard in a circle around it. He'd gone on a bender and cleaned house. For the next few weeks he was repairing furniture like a penitent. And then his wife disappeared. Run off to her father, some said; off with another Swede, according to others. I imagine Iver had bad luck with that poem of his, too.
"His belongings and his farm were eventually auctioned off. All of us in the family felt too bad to go. They say that Iver ran alongside the auctioneer, trying to convince the bidders of every item's worth, and scared people off. I saw Iver once after that. The folks and the kids were away at church and I was doing the chores alone. I was sixteen. I was walking toward the house in the dark with a bucket of milk in each hand when I heard something big in the grass. I took off for the porch spilling milk all the way, and then through the grass came this— Well, it was Iver all ragged and dirtied up and wearing a cowboy hat. He was crawling along on his belly. He crawled up to the porch and cocked a bloodshot eye at me. It was the first time I'd seen an adult act like this, and I was deathly afraid.
" 'Am I headed right?' he asked in a tiny voice. " 'What?'
" 'Headed right. I’ve been traveling this state by the stars since I struck the river's mouth.' " 'What do you mean?'
" 'An ash can,' he said. He had his hands like paws on the ground.
" 'An ash can?'
" 'Yes, Martin. Even an ash can tell a Norse from a souse.'
"Well, I had to laugh. Who knows how many times he'd pulled that one? But here he was, out a wife and farm and on his knees, on his belly, literally, and still trying to be his same old self, or whatever he was, and I thought, Here's a man I'd like to help. So I put down the milk and locked my knees and lifted him up, and he slapped my back and cried in a funny voice, 'Thanks a lot, Martin. I'll write that Medley yet.' And then he ran off down the road laughing in a way I'd never heard anybody laugh before, and hope not to hear again.
"He'd come to our house once before, on a Halloween, in that same cowboy hat and a pair of long winter underwear. He had a tractor chain around his waist with an alarm clock wired to it, and when Dad opened the door he pointed a keyhole saw at him and said, 'I'm the Bony Granger, and I've about had it. Put 'em up.' Oh, Lord, Iver! He had a pinto riding horse he called Bone-head. I keep looking for a book entitled A Medley of the Plain, or any book by Iver Seim, but I've yet to see one to this day. In his own fashion he had a knowledge of the world in order to act the way he did at times, and it's a knowledge I'm just coming onto."
He's moved to the edge of the chair and placed his hands on its arms, elbows turned out, as if to rise. Jerome and Charles move back and can feel from behind, from the couch where their mother sits embroidering on a dish towel, a current of empathy and protectiveness. Their father clears his throat and settles his weight into the chair again. If he's relaxed, his stories rise of their own volition from an untroubled, indemnified, and inexhaustible source.
"When I graduated from high school, in 1931, there wasn't money to send me through college. No money? My Lord! Our farm was mortgaged to the hilt, we'd sold most of the stock, we kept a Model A going on the road with binder twine and coat hangers, and your mother and your Grandma Jones looked on us as rich. Ha! I'd heard so much about the money my Grandad Neumiller had I felt we should be rich, but that's another story for another time. When your Grandma Neumiller needed flour or sugar from town, I'd ride in after it on a little old bicycle with hard rubber tires that had once been Dad's, to save on gasoline. He'd built a cart with steel wheels that hitched behind the bike, which was an antique that once belonged to him, as I said, and he'd bequeathed it to me and it had since passed down the line of kids, I'd graduated to a car and now I was back on that, pulling a hundred pounds of flour behind in the steel-wheeled cart. Oh! my knees stuck out on both sides, like this, the steel wheels squealed and creaked, and I knew everybody in the whole countryside was watching me! Every time I got demoted to that— thing! —I'd take the long way around from town, so your mother wouldn't see me in my shame."
He removes his glasses and with the back of his hand wipes a wet streak of laughter from his cheek, composing himself into the person he shows outside the house: solemn; the decorous high-school principal, the parishioner who attends Mass every day, the conscientious paterfamilias with a garden in his yard and a clipped hedge around a newly painted house, which townspeople and neighbors like to look at now.
"I knew it was important to your grandad that we kids get a college degree, and I figured I had to try to set an example, since I was the oldest, even if I went for only a year. There was confusion about a baseball scholarship that I don't want to talk about right now, and then I applied to Valley City State Teachers College and was accepted. I found a job that summer pitching bundles.
You went out with a hayrack and team and loaded up the bundles of grain that had been stacked into shocks to dry, then drove to the threshing machine and pitched the bundles from the rack into its rattling feeder teeth. It was a chaffy, dirty inferno around that machine at the tail end of August, I'll say, and the pay was twenty-five cents an hour, for man and hayrack and team, and I was grateful to get it. I missed Iver. He always worked hardest at threshing time. I gave your grandpa a dime on every quarter I earned for the use of the wagon and team. He wasn't going to accept it but I insisted, by George; it was his team and wagon and I made that stick. I put in two hundred hours, fifty dollars' worth, and even taking into account your granddad's cut, I remember going off to school that fall with the feel of a lot of mon
ey in my purse. I had one of those leather purses with a clasp lock at the top then.
"I joined the National Guard because they gave you a uniform and I needed pants to wear. For most of my meals I had breakfast food with water on it. Milk was too expensive. I used to walk to the other side of town because I found a bakery that sold day-old bread for three cents a loaf. The following quarter I got a job at a sorority, waiting table and washing dishes and floors, and had my meals there. At first I could hardly hold it down, the food was so rich.”
His eyes blink and scintillate and he stares beyond them with a fixity of focus that makes them feel the past is so close he's staring at a particular face in it.
"When I was eleven and we were on the home place outside Mahomet, your grandpa bought a Golden Guernsey heifer calf. She was one of the few Golden Guernseys for miles around. She was registered. We had the papers on her. We had to transport her a hundred miles to have her serviced by a registered bull, and it took several trips to get her with calf, but it finally happened at last, and we could feel a better future ahead, or at least I could. The calf would bring a good price and when we got back on our feet financially Dad was going to start a herd of Golden Guernseys.
"One day I went out to fetch the cows for the evening milking. It was one of the first nice days that spring and I could see the buildings of Mahomet and the windmills of neighbors who lived miles off. The cattle had been barned up all winter, so the pasture was heaven to them, and they'd found a growth of grass in a swale along the creek and wouldn't leave it for love of God nor me. I hollered and slapped their rear ends, but they'd just switch their tails and step to one side. I got so mad I picked up a rock the size of a baseball and threw it into the bunch of them. The Guernsey dropped like she'd been shot. Instantly killed. It probably couldn't happen three times in this world.
Beyond the Bedroom Wall Page 18