6
Liberation
JOHN WAS DRAFTED INTO THE Army in 1943 and boarded a train to basic training in Virginia, and to Mother’s great relief, was not sent to Europe but to New York, to sort mail in the Army post office. Dad wrote to Mother, “Dearest, Remember that sweet smile you gave me as I went through the door to the train tracks? That has never left my memory.” She got $100 a month from Uncle Sam, and we four lived on the farm with Grandma for a year and then with Aunt Jean’s family in Bettendorf, Iowa, and then moved to Bloomington Avenue and then to Jean’s on Hubbard Street in St. Paul while Dad saved up to build a house north of the city. No wonder family meant so much to Mother. She was friendly to neighbors, polite to strangers, but family was who you could count on in time of need. Years later, when Dad fell off a barn roof and fractured his skull and contracted spinal meningitis, Aunt Eleanor put everything aside, left her children in Grandma’s care, and came straightaway to nurse the patient and stayed a month until she felt no longer needed. We knew she would and she did. Mother and Elsie spoke on the phone daily; they had been in cahoots since childhood, and Jean had been their surrogate mother, so she was very tight with the two of them. Dad and I drove up to Anoka once after his brother Lawrence had become president of the First National Bank. Dad stopped to visit him, and I said, “Do you have an appointment?” He said, “I don’t need an appointment, he’s my brother.” And walked into the bank and was shown in and sat down and visited. Family took precedence over social standing. A schism in the Plymouth Brethren left Dad on one side and his siblings on the other, but it didn’t change their feelings for each other. Jo or Eleanor or Lawrence or Jim, Dad could knock on their door and then walk in, feeling at home in their house.
The house that Dad built, 1947. 2 BR up, 1 down, 1 in bsmt.
In the summer of 1947, Dad bought an acre of cornfield in Brooklyn Park Township north of Minneapolis from a farmer, Fred Peterson. We all drove out to watch the bulldozer slice through the corn down into black dirt and gray-green clay. The next week, a big truck with revolving tank lowered a long chute and pumped wet concrete into the pit for the slab and Dad and his brother Lawrence started laying the concrete-block walls and framing partitions of two-by-eights and two-by-fours to make interior walls. I went along to help, but they didn’t need me. The two brothers were best friends and worked easily together, mixing mortar in a trough, cutting boards for the forms, the whine of the circular saw, and they didn’t notice me walking away, down a dirt road toward the river. It was a good feeling to be on my own. I followed a path that led to a fence with a sign, Keep Out, and I climbed over it and there, down a slope, was the great Mississippi, a row of mighty trees along its shore. I walked along the bank to where the water was shallow, flowing over rocks, and I took off my shoes and waded in. I was stunned by the bigness of the Mississippi. I’d never stood in moving water before and there was so much of it. God had created this and I could imagine Him admiring His own work.
I skipped flat stones into the V of the current moving through the rapids, on its way to the Gulf of Mexico. Nobody had shown me how to skip flat stones, it came naturally. I tossed in a chunk of branch, and it floated away heading due south down the middle of America. It was rather majestic, the splash of the rapids, bird cries in the great hush, no sounds of motors or voices. You could imagine it was wilderness. I put on my shoes and walked back the way I had come. Dad and Lawrence paid no attention to me. I had discovered the Mississippi River and stood in it, and I alone knew this. It was a good feeling.
That summer, Dad and Lawrence finished framing up the walls in the basement, did the wiring and plumbing, insulation and drywall. They dug a cesspool, planted a few maple and birch saplings and a row of apple trees, and on Labor Day we left the city and drove out in our Ford, the five of us, towing a trailer full of cast-off furniture, me in the back seat by the window, telephone poles flashing past, and Dad turned down the dirt road and there it was, our concrete bunker, flat roof covered with tar paper, surrounded by mud and scraps of lumber. Mother studied it for a moment, said nothing, and led us down the steps through the laundry room with the water pump and into the kitchen and living room and two little bedrooms. A historic moment. After squatting with relatives through the war years, now we had a home of our own, underground, a hideout. Bunkbeds for Philip and me, a daybed for Judy, a double bed for our parents, nail kegs for chairs, orange crates for cupboards. Kerosene lamps. An icebox in the kitchen, lined with tin, a block of ice in the upper compartment, bought from a vending machine at the lumberyard. Eventually Dad built a house atop the basement with a proper front door and an upstairs with two bedrooms, but we were content in our burrow. Across the dirt road where our mailbox stood was a big cornfield. A few neighbors’ houses along the road. Judy and I trotted around and met the Andersons, Coutures, Welches, and Streges. We were going to give them gospel tracts (Where Will You Spend Eternity?) but were too shy to hand them out directly, so we slipped them into mailboxes instead. Telling people they were liable to go to hell did not seem like a neighborly thing.
In our dim burrow, the little basement window wells soon filled up with snow that winter as Mother grew so enormous she could barely move from room to room. I asked Dad what was wrong with Mother. He was putting up heating ducts, and he said that she was expecting a baby. He kept hammering as he said it. He said, “They say there may be more than one.” He looked worried, but then he always did.
In the spring, Dad planted hills of corn, set tomato plants in and a melon patch. The apple trees were skinny as your finger, and over the years they gave up a bounty that made him feel prosperous. In April, twin baby brothers appeared. They just happened, without explanation, and were laid on Mother’s yellow chenille bedspread for relatives to come gaze upon one Sunday afternoon. They were a carnival show. I stood in a forest of legs of aunts and uncles and felt a total eclipse. Mother dressed them in identical outfits. Dad took movies. Hundreds of pictures of them were pasted into scrapbooks. Two boys, Steve and Stan, sitting, lying down, bouncing in their bouncy chairs. They were a wonder of the modern world.
The twins and the sister, Linda, who came along three years later were my liberators. Mother had her hands full, Dad worked two jobs, so nobody ever asked me, “Where are you going?” when I got on my bike, I was free, no supervision. Mother worried about the river after Frankie Renko tipped over in his kayak and drowned, but the river was boys’ territory. We were free there. So down to the river I went. Once four neighbor boys and I floated on a truck inner tube, heading for the island with the abandoned stone house, but the tube caught the current and we were swept miles downstream and had to walk home dripping wet. I was missing a shoe. Even so, Mother was too busy to notice. I swam in the river, canoed it, skated on it, holding my jacket open for a sail. I joined up with Kenny and Chuck and Jim and Billy and roamed along the river, shooting each other with cap guns, fighting the Civil War, taking captives, holding trials on charges of treason, enacting deeds of valor, chasing Stonewall Jackson through the valleys of Virginia. The ravine and river shore were a boy sanctuary. No adult ever came around to ask what we were doing. Fathers worked at jobs or worked on their yards, mothers kept house, the woods belonged to us. When we tired of drama, we lay on the shore and discussed great questions. What if you found out you had one day to live? What if you found a big bag of money, thousands of dollars, lying in the ditch? We talked about life on Mars: would the arrival of Martians mean the Bible was untrue? When we’re old enough to drive, will cars still run on highways or will they fly through the air? We debated, “Would you rather be blind or deaf if you had to choose?” I chose deafness; I wanted to read. What if the Communists took over and demanded we renounce Jesus Christ or else drink a pitcher of warm spit? We came home for supper and then played Capture the Flag in the dark. Our mothers called our names from far away, and I knew my mother’s voice so I knew when she was only warming up and when she really meant it.
In the summer, our ki
tchen turned into a canning factory, billows of steam from a pressure cooker, and Mother filled Mason canning jars with dill pickles, beets, beans, peas, tomatoes, peeling and slicing and stewing them, apple butter, and corn—every year, a bumper crop of sumptuous sweet corn, feasts of corn, the ears husked as I walked from field to kitchen where the water was boiling. Four minutes in boiling water, then buttered and salted, the freshest hot corn in Hennepin County. This was what Dad had in mind when he bought the land from Mr. Peterson: pure decadent pleasure. Six ears of corn apiece, chewing it off the cob like horses did. Then fresh raspberries for dessert.
I started school the fall after the twins were born. Benson School was a quarter-mile south on the highway, a handsome 1917 brick edifice, named for Elmer Benson, the last Farmer-Labor governor of Minnesota and a supporter of Henry Wallace in 1948, with three classrooms, two grades to each room. We first-graders sat on the sunny side of the room, near the windows, and the second-graders near the wall, and we listened to each other’s lessons. Washington and Lincoln stared down at us from the wall, like wife and husband, Washington prim and disapproving, Lincoln sympathetic. High windows looked out at a sandlot field and swing set and monkey bars and grove of oaks. We sat at wooden desks with iron scrollwork on the sides, a shelf below for books, lumps of petrified gum stuck to the bottom of the shelf, initials carved in the sides. Great canvas maps like window shades mounted on the side wall, Europe, The World, The United States of America. Mrs. Shaver, her white hair tied in a bun like Grandma’s, wrote words in big loopy letters on the blackboard, and we copied them, the curve of the tail of the g and j and y, the delicious curves of b and d, of m and n. I was a slow reader and she kept me after school to read aloud to her on the pretense that I was doing her a favor, entertaining her as she graded quizzes, so I stood before her desk, book in hand, and read aloud. “Listen to him,” she said to Bill the janitor mopping the floor. “Doesn’t he have a wonderful voice?” And I swelled with pride. I got remedial help and at the same time felt privileged. That winter, watching a movie in class, I could read the text faster than it scrolled up from the bottom of the screen—“Once upon a time, in a land far away, in a beautiful castle in the forest”—and I took this to mean that I was smart, which came as a relief.
The Darwins, David and Daryl, on the other hand, were hooligans and dumb as could be. They lived in a ramshackle house with rusted-out cars in the yard, and they were eager to beat up other boys. The playground was strictly segregated: the girls played kickball and stoop tag on the grass in front of the school, and the boys played pom-pom-pullaway on the gravel. No teachers watched over us, it was open season, and the Darwins loved to be It and chase boys down and pound on them. In the lavatory, they liked to yank on your pants as you stood at the urinal and make you wet yourself. They liked to go after Ronnie, a boy who was large and slow and fearful and who’d been held back in school, what we called “retarded.” They snuck up behind him and punched him in the gut and kicked him when he fell, or they went after Sheldon Herdine, a girlish boy with pretty blond hair. They were evil. Two scrawny knuckleheads with flat noses and small feral eyes, bruised hands, torn clothes, who roamed the playground, eager to jump someone, no provocation needed. I was appalled, but Billy Pedersen stood up for Ronnie and told the Darwins to leave him alone. “Who’s going to make us?” they said, and he went at them, fists swinging, and connected with a Darwin’s snout and blood appeared and the bully yelped and ran away as his brother backpedaled toward safety. Men in my family weren’t battlers. Mother had told me: “If someone hits you, tell a teacher, don’t hit back,” but what worked better was to hide. I developed keen peripheral vision to keep track of the bullies’ whereabouts so I could avoid them. I became evasive. I retreated. I never raised my hand in class; Corinne Guntzel did, waved her hand eagerly, I kept my thoughts to myself. I didn’t talk in the lunchroom. Once a boy threw up, a big york and a splash, and Bill the janitor had to come with a mop and a bucket of disinfectant and I resolved never to throw up at school: too much attention. And I never did.
Lovely Mrs. Carroll taught third grade, and we were thrilled when she told us she was expecting a baby, and then she was promptly dismissed— pregnancy was grounds for dismissal then—and Mrs. Fern Moehlenbrock took her place, a kindly woman who allowed me to spend recess in the school library, safe from Darwins, reading Richard Halliburton’s adventure stories, and Little House in the Big Woods, The Three Musketeers (Sacré bleu!! Mon Dieu!!), a relief from cruelty. Books became my family, the Ingalls family on the prairie, Heidi, Hans Brinker. I read about Black Beauty, Penrod, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. I loved a book, Runaway Home, by Elizabeth Coatsworth, about an artist and his wife and their three children who migrate cross-country in a house trailer from Maine down the East Coast and across the South and up to the state of Washington. Every morning, a new place in which to eat breakfast. You make friends and then leave them. Fixing lunch as the landscape slips past. Domestic life and adventure, all in one vehicle. The absolute ideal life. I discovered Roget’s Thesaurus, which opened up glittering pools of lingo, jargon, argot, patois, officialese, idiom, and phraseology of all sorts and made me feel like a scholar, sage, savant, well-armed to scuffle, skirmish, scrap, confront, and combat any scoundrel or rapscallion. The Darwins knew nothing about synonyms. Billy Pedersen and I vied for supremacy in the weekly spelling bee. I read the dictionary to study spelling, which got me thinking about words. Sausage has the word “usage” in it: this interested me. Librarian contains a bra. There is a turd in Saturday. Billy thought I was smart because I told him that “fatigue” is pronounced fa-teeg and not fat-i-gew. So he lent me his comic books with ads in back for “love pills” and a pair of binoculars that could see through clothing. A man’s eyes bugged out as he stared at a buxom beauty in her undies, beads of sweat popped from his brow. And an ad for Dynamic Tension exercises developed by Charles Atlas, a former 97-pound weakling who became the World’s Most Perfectly Developed Man. There was a picture of him and his enormous biceps. He appealed to me because I’d suffered the humiliation of dropping an easy pop-up, running in from right field, the ball in easy reach and then it bounced off my chest. A turning point. It was the summer Grandpa Denham died in a nursing home. I was ten. I was allowed to attend the funeral. My only previous encounter with death was staring at the Egyptian mummy in the Public Library. His funeral, seeing the tears of my aunts, the stolid faces of his sons, George and Jim and Bill, was a high point amid the crushing boredom of that summer, mostly spent sitting on the riverbank, hurling rocks at sticks floating along, too old to play cowboys, too young for everything else. I took an eye test and had to get glasses, and after that I stayed clear of organized sports and stuck to the disorganized; instead of the respect of my peers, I sought the approval of teachers and aunts. My best friend, Billy Pedersen, who wasn’t afraid of bullies and was a good speller, caught pop flies one-handed. I didn’t know until many years later that a congenital condition called Duane’s syndrome causes my eyes to lose focus when looking up, a splaying apart, a divergence, and suddenly everything became clear: I dropped the fly ball, and the humiliation drove me to hide in the library, read books, turn inward, become a writer. I was 78 when Dr. Chaiken told me. Why go to a shrink if you have a great ophthalmologist?
New houses sprang up here and there, but we were still surrounded by truck farms and open country. Every summer, Billy Pedersen and I earned money hoeing corn, picking radishes, strawberries, onions, peas, and pumpkins. We worked in the afternoons so the goods would be fresh for the farmers’ market in the morning. The farmer counted my harvest and paid me a dollar, some of which I spent at Yaklich’s store on a Pearson’s Nut Roll. I didn’t get an allowance, I was on my own.
I biked west past Fred Peterson’s farm to Victory Memorial Field with the empty hangar and the wrecks of abandoned Piper Cubs, tires flat, engines gone, an Army training camp during the war. Charts and papers strewn in the office. We boys chose our planes and flew them agai
nst German Messerschmitts coming in low over the cornfield and blew them out of the air, and then I biked home around suppertime, and Mother looked up and said, “Where were you?” and I said, “Riding my bike.” That was sufficient explanation. I went where I felt like going and stayed as long as I liked and nobody needed to know the details. Other boys were interested in baseball, but I was a loner. Riding quietly away from potential problems and disappearing became the formative experience of my boyhood. I was briefly in Scouts at the Izaak Walton Lodge and then quit, having failed to reach Tenderfoot rank. I avoided 4-H entirely. My only organized recreation was the war against Hitler and his Nazis. My city cousins lived with strict supervision under the eyes of grownups, played Little League, wore uniforms, but my friends and I played catch, shot hoops and played HORSE. On hot days we cooled off in the river.
It was rather idyllic. Nobody paid attention. We played hockey on backyard rinks with wheelbarrows for goals and rolled-up magazines for shin pads and we kept playing even when our feet had lost all feeling. No fathers came around to try to coach us. We lived independent of the adult world. Adults had no fun, from what we could see. If someone’s parent called your name, it meant you were in trouble, so we kept our distance. And when I was ten, I dared to ride my bike into Minneapolis to the big library downtown. I knew the way because Mrs. Moehlenbrock’s class took a field trip to Franklin Creamery to watch milk bottles jiggle along on a conveyor belt to be filled and capped and then to the Star & Tribune to watch the giant presses roll out a roadway of paper to be cut and folded, stacked and bound. In the newsroom, pale bespectacled men smoking cigarettes did not look up from their typewriters as we children filed by, and I was impressed by their coolness, ignoring our admiration.
I set out on my bike, a couple bucks in my pocket, without a word to Mother, who was occupied by the little kids, and headed south toward downtown Minneapolis twelve miles away, down Washington Avenue past a busy sawmill and lumberyard, auto salvage yards, printing plants, a barrel factory, a slaughterhouse where men stripped to the waist loaded trucks with beef carcasses hanging on hooks from little wheels on overhead rails, their shoulders to the beeves, flesh on meat. Nobody paid me any attention, a slight boy with wire-rimmed glasses, crew cut, yellow nylon shirt, new jeans, black-and-white Keds. I turned up Hennepin past flashing lights of cocktail lounges and a penny arcade and the Alvin Theater offering GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS in their underwear. I knew the route well; we drove it every Sunday morning on our way to the Grace & Truth Gospel Hall, I sat in the back seat, my hair slicked down, in a pressed white shirt and dark pants and a tie, with a Bible on my lap, memorizing a verse for Sunday School—“The wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life”—and now I looked up Hennepin and saw people earning their wages, men drunk in doorways, loose women, beggars with hats in hand, tough guys, hoodlums, lunatics.
That Time of Year Page 5