by C J Hribal
And that was all she’d say on the subject until Cinderella got snotty in the car. Then she vented a little—but not much—and everybody fell into a contemplative silence. We knew this was bad. Our parents were sociable people. If they were being quiet it was a sign of enmity between them. It could only be worse if our father kept talking and our mother remained silent. Fortunately our father decided that discretion was the better part of valor and shut up.
For the next fifteen or twenty miles we concentrated on the scenery. It was mostly rolling farmland. Black-and-white cows and brown cows and brown-and-white cows appeared in the fields. So did pigs, horses, even sheep. The corn was thigh high. I thought of the words to “Oklahoma!” but dared not sing them. There were other fields growing green stuff, too. We had no idea what they were. Our father, who’d studied up on these things, asking around at the diners he ate in, called them out as we passed. “Oats, wheat, alfalfa. That’s probably soybeans.” One field was thick with sunflowers. “You wait, that’s going to look gorgeous in another month.” Other fields didn’t seem to be growing anything but stubble. “They’re leaving that fallow so it regenerates. It’s a way of letting the fields recuperate.” Some hillsides had two or three crops on them, done in rings like colored Easter eggs. “Contour planting,” our father explained and told us they did that to stop erosion. In one plowed field that hadn’t been planted, he pointed out the gulley that had washed out because there were no plant roots to hold the soil. He was feeling okay again. He knew things. He was heading to his new life and taking us with him.
Our father pointed out the cows as we passed them. “Holsteins,” he said. “Gurneys. Swiss chard, I think.”
“Wally,” said our mother, “stop making things up.” She sounded a little better. She was trying to put a good face on things. “Really,” said our mother. “We won’t be too far away. We can go back and visit on weekends.”
Our father said nothing to this.
“Really,” said our mother. “What’s three, three and a half hours?”
“We’ll be pretty busy when we first get up there,” said our father. If you weren’t listening for it, you might not have heard the sound of another thin line being drawn in the sand.
“We’ll get back,” said our mother, trying to cover up the edge in her voice. “We have to visit Nomi and Artu.” They weren’t coming with us. Artu had gotten a job managing a Thom McAn store in the Loop, and they were moving into an apartment on Fullerton Avenue. They were city people. They didn’t have that great a desire to see what ninety-nine acres looked like.
“I want green I’ll take the bus over to Grant Park,” said Nomi.
“But this is ours,” said our father.
“So’s Grant Park,” said Nomi. “I pay my taxes.”
The landscape was starting to seem familiar. Maybe it was just that we’d seen so much of it. “There certainly are a lot of signs,” said our mother. Evidently Wisconsin had decided to opt out of Lady Bird Johnson’s “Beautify America” campaign. There were billboards every twenty feet or so—Harn’s Barn Furniture, Shakey’s Pizza, Jane’s Curl Up and Dye, Hovelings’ Waste Removal, Bolar’s Pest Control, Ariens Snowblowers, Frigo Cheese, Nate’s Marina, Aid Association for Lutherans, Catholic Insurance. “Is that insurance against Catholics?” asked Cinderella, who was still feeling bitter. “Shut up,” said our father. “I don’t want a bolt of lightning hitting us twenty miles from our new home.”
“You’re not supposed to say ‘Shut up,’ ” said Ernie, who was just innocent enough to say this to our father without getting bopped.
“It’s like the old Burma-Shave signs,” said our mother. “Remember, Wally?”
“I remember.”
Our mother cast her voice into the wayback. “You kids wouldn’t remember this, but there used to be Burma-Shave signs alongside the road every few miles. They’d tell a little story, or a joke, or a jingle. You’d drive and wait for the next one to come along. Remember, Wally?”
“I remember.”
We could see our mother’s hand slide across the bench seat and our father drop his right hand from the steering wheel. They were having a moment. All was forgiven.
Tucked in among the motels and gas stations and rolling green fields was a concrete blockhouse painted the color of a grape. And up above was its sign, which Ike, who had trouble reading, read anyway: “The Night Palace. Naughty Things for Nice People.” Then he asked, “What are naughty things for nice people?”
Said our father automatically, “I don’t know, ask your mother.” So Ike repeated his question. “What are naughty things for nice people?” The rest of us wanted to know, too.
Our father waved the question away with his hand. “You know,” he said.
But we didn’t. Our imaginations were woefully inadequate for the enormity of the task at hand. What was inside there, waiting for us? Candy, treats, comic books, all the G.I. Joe paraphernalia we would need for a platoon?
Then our mother weighed in with the right intonation. “Well, honey, you . . . know . . .” and for those of us older than Ike, everything clicked in, more or less. “You know”—the phrase meant to encompass all the answers to all our questions. It belonged, we understood, to that ungovernable and mysterious territory of marriage, to what occurred after our father kissed our mother, or pinched her butt in the kitchen, and our mother said, grinning, “Stop that, Wally,” but she didn’t mean it. What she meant was, “Later, after the kids are asleep.”
So there we were, thinking abstract thoughts about the particulars of “you know,” when we turned onto Highway 45—“It’s only twenty more miles now,” said our father—and came upon a butter yellow sign with black lettering. It was the exact same color and shape as the state license plates, and except for the painted cross and lily, it was the same general design. JESUS IS THE ANSWER, the sign proclaimed. WHAT WAS YOUR QUESTION?
“That’s quite a juxtaposition,” said our mother, and if by juxtaposition she meant that the pleasure we had been experiencing as we mentally contemplated “you know” had just turned to guilt and dust, she was certainly right about that.
Just beyond that was another twenty-four-hour sex toy emporium, advertising itself as exactly that: SEXY TOY EMPORIUM 24 HR. in bright red lettering on a white sheet that snapped in the breeze. “They must have just opened,” said our father.
“How nice,” said our mother. “Business is booming. There must be a lot of nice people with naughty needs out here.”
“Mom,” asked Ike, “what’s an emperneum?”
“Emporium,” said our mother. “That’s a fancy word for store.”
“Oh,” said Ike.
“It’s a world for head scratching,” said our father. And on we drove, slightly amazed that in between the three signs and the worlds they represented were the same green clover and cloudless blue sky.
We were even more amazed when we crested a hill twenty minutes later and our father said, “There she is. The new homestead. Our answered prayer. God’s green acres.”
We were staring at a washed-out-looking ranch house set back about two hundred feet from the road. At one time the house must have been a deep oxblood color, or a reddish mahogany. Now it looked like a dry scab, the wood where it was bare a weather-beaten silvery gray. The house was set into the side of a little hill, so part of the basement was exposed and the driveway ended in a rise. The garage was underneath an L-shaped porch on what we would come to call the second floor. The Mayflower truck was already there, unloading.
“A ranch house?” asked Cinderella. “We thought it was going to be a farmhouse.” By that she meant the kind of farmhouse in picture books: a stalwart foursquare with a large attic and root cellar and well-tended vegetable garden out back. This was a split-level ranch that hadn’t been painted since it was built in the middle of the previous decade.
“Another county heard from,” said our father. “Let’s just start unloading, shall we?”
But we didn’t.
Before going into the house we had a look around. The air smelled dry. It hadn’t rained in a while, and the fields, a dusty green, showed it. You could feel sand in the wind, taste it on your teeth. Our father stood with us on the rise behind the house. The land sloped away below us toward a line of scrub trees, beyond which was an open field.
We started to run, just to experience the feeling of moving over our land, but one after another we tumbled and fell. That was how we discovered why the air was full of sand. The previous owners had hit upon a curious way of rendering their fields fallow. Or maybe they knew they were selling the place and, their hearts no longer in their work (we had heard they had moved to California), they had decided to do everything that last spring half-assed. What they had done was set the plow blades to turn up, but not over, each furrow, so that the field had the look of a baby’s curlicue, row upon row of upright waves, like Mohawk haircuts suffering osteoporosis. Every step you were liable to stumble.
Just as we were picking ourselves up, a very pale pastel green Chevy pickup pulled into our drive. A farmer got out. He was short and wiry, and wore those heavy black glasses favored by accountants, governmental officials, and orthodontists. He was wearing green chinos and a blue-and-green plaid shirt. His arms were deeply tanned, and so was his face except for his forehead, which when he took off a dusty Kafka Feed and Seed baseball cap, was lily white. He was possessed, like our father, of an easy and infectious smile. He stuck out his hand.
“Name’s Tony Dederoff. I’m with the Farm Bureau. Plus I got a farm of my own other side of the hill. I heard you were moving in today, wanted to get a look at you. Is what I heard right—you’re city folk? Moving up from Chicago? Whoo-ee, that’s a long way to go. Most we’ve got usually is somebody hightailing it from Appleton. It’s not like we even get people from Milwaukee, usually, except if they stop in town for a bite on their way up north.”
Tony Dederoff was a talker. This suited our father to a T, and we could see they were going to be at it quite a while. We took off to explore.
It was a bit like discovering yourself in Oz and the enchanted monkey forest at the same time. The barns had fallen. There were two of them, and one was completely gone except for the fieldstone walls and wooden window frames and the stanchions; the other was leaning like the Tower of Pisa, only worse. There were also two outbuildings—sheds, really, probably pressed into service after the barns collapsed. One contained a decrepit-looking tractor, the other had its corrugated sheet-metal roof partially torn away. A two-tone Chevy was listing on its side in a thicket of weeds next to the Tower of Pisa barn. It was white and the same washed-out pastel green as Tony Dederoff’s truck. Its tailpipe protruded from the trunk as though that was where it belonged. This had our clubhouse beat all hollow.
In the abandoned silo we heard the hloo hloo of pigeons and threw rocks at them, though our throws were pitifully short of the mark—the pigeons were high up, on a ledge, unperturbed and unconcerned. I was scouring the barn floor for more rocks when I heard a voice creaky with age saying, “You boys stop that.” I looked up. It was an old woman in a faded housedress, the kind our mother wore. Wisps of white hair danced around her head, and her eyes were thickened with what looked like fish-belly flesh. They were both piercing and blind-looking at the same time. And her teeth! She had maybe eight in her entire mouth, and as her lips flapped at us the teeth still remaining in her jaw protruded every which way and took up residence outside her lips. And then there was the grapefruit-size lump underneath her chin, distending it and making her head tilt back. In the sunlight it looked white and purple, like an eggplant.
“There are barn swallows up there,” she said. “Don’t be tormenting the barn swallows. They, too, are God’s creatures.” She gave us a horrible, knowing smile then, like she knew exactly what we were thinking, and what she was going to do with us. And that huge lump beneath her chin seemed to swell and breed, twitch and glow as we watched. No doubt she was a witch. And like those cacti in the Southwest that explode from overwatering and give birth to a thousand tarantulas, something evil was about to break loose from her neck. We ran screaming over to the woodpiles—all the lumber from the collapsed barns—which we jumped on.
“Hey, you kids, there’s rats in those piles,” Tony Dederoff called, and we jumped off the piles as though the rats were making for our pant legs. We ran back to our parents, breathless, wanting to tell them we had moved inside a Grimm’s fairy tale, complete with witch. Our father was telling Tony that we had bought the farm for the land, not for the house or the buildings.
“That’s a good thing,” said Tony Dederoff. “It’s real pretty land, but frankly, it’s not much for farming. You only got about fifty tillable acres—more, I suppose, if you drain that marsh”—he pointed—“but mostly it’s sand. The soil you want blew away years ago over to your neighbor’s. You knew that, right?” Our father, a little abashed, allowed that he’d seen it only in winter, when there was snow cover. Tony continued, “Well, anyway, you’re down to lake bottom now, which is what this was about two million years ago. More recently, the folks who had this before you—the Hovelings?—they did everything half-assed—pardon my French—and it shows. No soil conservation at all. Plowed vertically down this hill so what didn’t blow away eroded into that lower field. Fact is they weren’t really farmers. They half-turned these fields years ago, then left them sit for soil bank. You can take advantage of it, too, if you want.”
“Soil bank?”
“The government pays you not to grow crops. You don’t make as much as if you were farming it, but you don’t make a whole lot less, either. The Hovelings put just about everything into soil bank. Given the way they plowed, that was probably a good idea.”
“We saw their billboard on the way up,” said our father. “Did they own a waste removal business?”
“Septic tank cleaners. Those were cousins. They had enough trouble dealing with their own shit—’scuse my French—let alone handling somebody else’s. What wasn’t fallow they had in corn, which takes a terrible toll on soil, especially soil like this, if you let it. They depleted the hell out of it, then got a contract with their septic tank cousins to dump what they pumped out of the tanks onto the fields here. The bowel movements of half the county are probably fertilizing your fields even as we speak.”
“I’m not sure I wanted to hear that,” said our mother.
“Of course, you could always grow potatoes. Potatoes do well in soil like this. They like it sandy.” Tony Dederoff wiped his glasses. “Real pretty land,” he repeated, “but I wouldn’t want to make a living off it. Even if it was good soil and it was all tillable, you got about half what you need to make a go of it. You got other employment?”
“Sales rep for Dinkwater Chemical.”
“A peddler, eh? What do they sell?”
“Industrial defoamers. I sell to paper mills.”
“You’re in the right place then.” Tony looked at each of us. “I count seven,” he said. “Five on the school bus come this fall?”
“That sounds about right,” said our father. He turned to our mother. “It’s seven, right? You haven’t had any I don’t know about yet, right?” Our mother only smiled.
“I drive this route. These don’t look like they’ll give me any trouble.” He flicked Wally Jr.’s nose. “I’ve got five kids myself. I’d have more, but then I’m younger than you.”
“So you have an extra job, too.”
“Most folks do. For me it’s farm, Farm Bureau, and school bus driver—in that order. I play a little accordion on the weekends, too.”
“Really?” said our father. “I used to play accordion and sing.”
“We’ll have to get together sometime.” At that moment a rather docile and arthritic-looking dog appeared from somewhere and Tony bent down to pet him. “This is the Hovelings’ dog, Charlie. Looks like they left him. He’s a good dog, but I wouldn’t let him inside the house. Like most things they owned, the Hovelings didn’t rea
lly take care of him.” He kept petting the dog. It looked like a beagle-Lab mix and was very appreciative of Tony’s attention. It hadn’t barked once since we’d arrived. Once we started petting the dog, Tony stood up. “Church?”
“Catholic. There’s St. Stephen’s in Augsbury and St. Ambrose in Chetaqua, right?”
“Don’t forget St. Genevieve’s in Holton. That’s where me and the missus go.” Tony Dederoff shook our mother’s and our father’s hands and got back in his truck. He leaned his head out the window. “Hope to see you there. It’s a nice crowd no matter how you slice it.”
“I like him,” said our father as Tony Dederoff backed his truck down our drive.
“You like everybody,” said our mother.
Before Tony Dederoff was even out of our driveway we were imploring our mother about Charlie. “Please, Mom, can we keep him? Please, please, please, please, please?!!!”
Our parents exchanged looks. Our mother sighed. We cheered.
“But he stays outside!” said our mother. “In that barrel over there. That must be where they kept him.”
Like everything else the Hovelings owned, the fifty-five-gallon drum Charlie lived in was rusted, full of holes, and obscured by weeds. There were some blankets in there, a smell of must and wet dog, and probably half a million fleas.
“We’ll start by burning that blanket, and getting this mutt to a vet.”
“Today, Wally?”
“Okay, maybe in a couple of days. Kids, don’t touch the dog, or at least don’t let him get in your lap. And wash your hands after you’ve touched him.” Our father regarded the dog, whose rheumy eyes were those of a St. Bernard. “He’s not going to be much of a watchdog, is he?”
