The Company Car

by C J Hribal

  He did not tell us any of the obvious things, either, such as it rains quite a bit in the summer, particularly when you don’t want it to, and mud is not a nice thing to be kneeling in for six hours a day, and that we would come to loathe the pickles and our five acres, and that after a while we would actually pray for rain to inundate the field, to make it so god-awful gloppy that our mother would give us a reprieve, and that when we returned to the field what we wanted was for the cukes to have exploded with heat and moisture into bulbous yellow gourdlike tubers, unfit for human consumption and therefore not worth picking, and for their rapid growth to have exhausted the vines’ ability to put out any more flowers.

  But those feelings would come later. At first there was the happiness of seeing the seeds sprout. Our fingers in the warm soil, the early joy of seeing the propellers turn into leaves, the stems into vines, then the thick canopy of leaves close to the ground. We never grew tired, at least, of watching this miracle. The growth, day by day, which seemed to occur only when you weren’t looking right at it, as though there were elves in the field, cucumber fairies, who touched the vines with magic wands to make the buds appear, and touched them again to make the little cukes grow behind them, cukes no bigger than a fingernail at first, then no bigger than your little finger, so vulnerable until you tried to pick them.

  Then pick them we did, day after day, until we were praying for rain and an early frost to put us out of our misery. When our father had local calls, he would take us in the evening with our haul to the Randolph, and we would dump our bushel baskets on Randolph Muncie’s sorting machine, and the cukes dropped, some right away, too many farther down the way to our liking, and Randolph and his son weighed our gleanings, and Randolph consulted his chart, did a little math, hitched up his pants, sniffed, rubbed a finger under his nose, and announced our pathetic total in a drawl that seemed stuck up his nose. It would accumulate, of course, so by week’s end it might actually amount to something like a hundred and thirty dollars. Good weeks he might cut us a check for one hundred and fifty-six or one hundred and eighty-five dollars. One hot week it was for two hundred and sixty-two, another week it was for three hundred and twelve. We whooped, we celebrated. “Now you’re cooking with grease,” said Randolph Muncie. Our father was elated. “See what you can do?” he kept saying over and over. “See what you can do? This’ll put hair between your toes, goddammit.” Then we went to the Dog ‘N Suds and gulped down enough root beer to make us forget the pain in our fingers and knees.

  When our father wasn’t around, Tony Dederoff took us, or if he was too busy we dialed up Mikey Spillsbeth. Mikey Spillsbeth was sweet on Cinderella. Tall, gawky, and skinny, with black glasses and hair like an Airedale’s, he would do anything for anyone who gave him the time of day. And Cinderella, gangly herself, still ironing her hair straight and putting on too much eye shadow and mascara, was eager to try her newfound wiles on anybody who might prove susceptible. In a year she would be sixteen and have her license, so it was really for only this summer and fall that she would need Mikey Spillsbeth. She played him accordingly.

  It was amazing to me what a little misapplied mascara, a touch of rose pink lipstick, and a finger twirling stick-straight hair can do. She actually had a crush on a guy named Guy, the tight end for the football team, but given that Guy didn’t know she was alive, any attention was welcome. Even from Mikey Spillsbeth, who most people agreed was a little weird. He had a high-pitched laugh, and when he chuckled it sounded like a girl’s giggle. His normal speaking voice wasn’t so hot, either. It seemed to buzz in his mouth, as though he were speaking through a microphone with too much reverb. Add to that a very long and skinny neck and you had the whisperings of . . . Well, let’s just say it was good for Mikey to be seen driving Cinderella around, even if she was just using him for his car.

  It didn’t matter to us who was driving as long as those cukes were going to market. On good days with our father we might need two trips, and with Mikey’s old Rambler we might need four or five. It was greed that drove us, greed and our inability to tell our father we hated the work and didn’t think the money was worth it. Not that this would have mattered one iota to our father. Even when we did manage to tell him, along about August, he didn’t want to hear it.

  “No guts, no glory,” he told us. And “In for a dime, in for a dollar.”

  Finally he told us, “Look, you’re just getting started. It’s normal once the bloom is off the rose to have second thoughts. Just stick with it. Perseverance is all about persevering. If it’s still terrible next year, we’ll try something else.”

  Perseverance is all about persevering. That was the lesson our father wanted to teach us. That there were easier ways of earning a pittance did not seem to matter to him. He’d already chosen this way. This was what made our father a good company man. He was willing to lower his head and plow along, and while he might grumble, he would finish what he started. Our father, had he been in the Charge of the Light Brigade, would have insisted on carrying the flag.

  We caught a break the next spring, when it rained uncontrollably for weeks on end and washed the seeds we’d planted into the far corner of the field. When they finally erupted, it looked like Linus Van Pelt’s Great Pumpkin Patch. The concentration made it impossible to harvest, and the vines that did grow choked each other out. By the end of the summer we were hauling in all of seventy-one dollars a week, and our biggest week had been one hundred and thirty-six. Divide by the four of us picking, with two others toddling around and stepping on plants, and you weren’t getting much for all the muddy pain and effort. Our father said, All right, enough, he would come up with something else over the winter.

  In addition to the family garden, we were each given a vegetable to raise on our own. The theory being that we would take a special pride in seeing what became of what we had planted. The littler kids got the nonfood vegetables—gourds, pumpkins, Indian corn. Ernie took to the Big Max—a pumpkin that, when mature, regularly weighed over a hundred pounds—in a big way. He wore OshKosh B’Gosh overalls and an engineer’s cap whenever he was working on “his garden.” And who could blame him? To encourage entrepreneurship, our father announced that whatever wasn’t consumed by us could be sold for profit, and the child responsible could keep his or her money. There was a logic to this, but it was the logic of a suburban man who doesn’t understand yet where he’s living. Our neighbors did not want our vegetables. They had their own. Though their plots were far more modest than ours, they had all the vegetables they needed, and once they found a family like ours, they would lie in wait after church and heap their unwanted zucchinis, peppers, tomatoes, and cucumbers on us as though we were one of those unfortunate families whose home has been borne away by a flood or tornado. We got big honking cukes thrust on us even though our fellow parishioners knew we were growing them for Randolph Muncie. “Well, we just thought,” they’d say and hand us another sack full of something we already had too much of ourselves. And because our parents were pioneers, the first little lapping wave of what, in twenty years, would become an exurban flood, there weren’t many people yet like our father, nostalgic for roadside stands staffed by semicherubic farm offspring, a neat little row of blond children in white T-shirts with manure on their pant legs. Oh, you’d get asparagus thieves, people who’d drive out from Appleton and feel quaintly rural hunting the ditches with a paring knife, but on a week-to-week basis we probably would have done better selling our blood.

  “This is no way to make a living,” said our mother. “It’s not supposed to be a living for anybody but us,” said our father. “Whatever extra comes in is gravy. Pure gravy.”

  It is hard to think of it as gravy when you are putting your finger through the mush of a rotten starter spud, or when you see that the row of weeds you had so energetically hoed the day before were actually pepper plants, and that where you had weeded correctly had reseeded itself in weeds so quickly you’d swear the weeds had mastered time-lapse regeneration. />
  It was not a good time to be one of the older kids. Robert Aaron’s corn got blight, which grew like tumors on the stalks and ears, Cinderella’s cantaloupes and watermelons put out nice vines but miniature fruit, and my potatoes did too well. I had to keep asking everyone to help me stay ahead of the weeds, and I had to keep mounding the potato hills so the potatoes wouldn’t see the sun and turn green, and my requests, except when our mother ordered everyone to help, were frequently met with jeers of “You volunteered, sucker!”

  It was a wet summer, though, so by July the more waterlogged vegetables never flowered. But the zucchini went wild. We took a special joy in pelting each other with overripe zucchinis and cucumbers. They burst open on your back, a mushy spray of seed and goop. When we got tired of that, we threw them against fence and telephone posts, enjoying the splatter. We shot skeets with them, too, and stabbed them with pitchforks or halved them with shovels, or heaved them into the field and listened for the plunk, thunk, splat of their landing.

  It didn’t matter, though. There were always more vegetables. In just a few short months we had gone from shivering with delight at being able to grow our own food to being hardened vegetable murderers, eager to find a Final Solution to the Vegetable Problem.

  The littler kids did not share our bend of mind. Not raising anything you’d want to eat, or needed to pick, they could watch their stuff grow all summer long. Pumpkins, ornamental squash, Indian corn—you left that stuff alone. The only work they had was with Ernie’s pumpkins, which at a certain point needed to be thinned, and as the summer wore on, turned occasionally so they got orange all over. Ernie, Wally Jr., and Peg Leg Meg were just waiting for the fall. With little kid certainty, they knew they were going to make a killing. And they did, at least compared to the rest of us. The three of them wound up covered in gravy.

  Ike ended up doing fine, too, with his Indian corn, but he didn’t seem that interested in the money. He was fascinated with the idea that this multicolored corn, these red and orange ears, these starburst purple and white kernels, connected him back to an ancient culture that used to roam our land, fishing it and harvesting it and hunting it, long before white settlers came this way, long before, even, Columbus “discovered” this country. When we field-picked rocks, Ike walked with an eye toward finding arrowheads and spear points, and what he found fueled a lifelong love affair with Indians. When Tony Dederoff told us (after Ike had shown him the arrowheads) that there were burial mounds in our woods, we believed him. We felt special, to be living on holy ground. The whole farm was holy. And when we went running in the woods, or worked our way through the trees playing army, we could feel the spirits of the Indian warriors who had trod this ground before us. Ike felt it more than we did, though, and he kept feeling it long after we found out the burial mounds were actually dredge mounds from when they’d cleared the creek bed thirty years previous.

  In the fall our father took some of Ernie’s pumpkins to county fair weigh-ins, and the size of these pumpkins—one weighed in at one hundred and eighty pounds and took two men to lift—plus the photos our father took of Ernie sitting inside one of his hollowed-out pumpkins, drummed up a lot of business for the little kids. Ike seemed not that interested in selling his corn, but Wally Jr., Peg Leg Meg, and Ernie basked in the glow of their successes.

  So did our father. For the next spring he planned a scaled down vegetable garden and a huge field of pumpkins, half in Big Max, half regular. Lots of ornamental gourds and Indian corn, too. The cucumbers again, of course. “We had one bad year with them,” said our father. “It can happen to anybody.” As a concession to our mother, he didn’t protest when she announced she was putting in flower beds, both around the house and in parts of the vegetable garden. “The kohlrabi and Brussels sprouts,” she announced, “are not long for this world.”

  “I grant you permission to deviate from the master plan,” said our father. He was grinning but only half-joking.

  “Fuck you, I don’t need your permission,” said our mother. It was the first time we’d ever heard her say “Fuck.” She was joking, but there was an edge there, too. Our father dutifully sketched in the flower beds on his graph paper. Little rectangles at the ends of the huge squares that were his—and Ernie’s—pumpkin patches.

  The weather, of course, was under no obligation to cooperate. The next year started wet, and things got bedraggled and moldy. A drought followed. We ran hoses, lugged water, gave each plant its own drink, and saved those plants that hadn’t gotten too yellow or white green. We felt pretty good about being the garden’s Red Cross. Then came the tornado warnings.

  “It doesn’t rain but it pours,” said our father as we stood outside our house, looking to the southwest. The sky had gone from deep gray to deep slate to a yellowy purple green—the color of an old bruise. The wind had been blowing very hard, and then it had gotten quite still. Although it was a mid-July day, it suddenly felt chilly.

  Our mother came out of the house hugging her arms. “Wally, I’m freezing.”

  Our father said, “That’s because the temperature’s dropped twenty degrees in the last ten minutes.”

  “Can it do that?”

  Said our father, “It can do anything it wants. Feel that stillness?” He wet his finger and held it up, checking for a breeze. “And you can practically taste the electricity in the air.” I stuck my tongue out, expecting to feel the tang of metal. “We better get downstairs.”

  The southwest corner of our house was Robert Aaron’s room. His windows faced the road. We packed in there, on the bed and floor. Because one of my chores was changing sheets every week, I knew about the Playboys under his mattress. If things got really bad, I wondered, would it be a sin if you spent your final moments contemplating the parabolic breasts and the discreet pillow placement on a sable-haired, sapphire-eyed beauty from Greece?

  Our father brought in the fifty-four-band overseas radio, the one that could receive Argentina, and, more important, Cubs games from Chicago. Our mother opened the windows an inch. She and our father went through the house, opening windows. The sky was a boiling darkness. When the wind started shrieking, our mother said, “Let us pray, children,” and we did, our heads down, our eyes closed. I pictured the sloe-eyed woman from Greece, whose pendulous breasts might be all I would remember of this life as we were carried into the next. I pictured Patty Duckwa, whom I recalled now only when I touched myself, and I pictured Dorie Braun—who favored cutoff jeans and T-shirts—wearing only the former. Dorie was just beginning to get breasts, pointy things under her T-shirts, and I’d noticed that some days she wore a bra—the straps were visible under her T-shirts—and some days she didn’t. While we waited for our house to be lifted up around us, and were praying to Jesus for our safety, I was getting a boner.

  The house did not lift up around us. No twirling house in the sky, no witches going past on bicycles, not even Tillie Bunkas with her goiter. The winds became fierce, and rain lashed at the house, and then we heard the hollow stinging of hail, little tip-tippings on the window that sounded like someone quietly rapping, over and over. “Close the windows, close the windows!” yelled our mother, and she and our father left to shut what they’d just opened. We dared to look out. The hail was pea-size and bounced when it hit the ground. It almost looked like it landed and then jumped up again, for joy. Then there was a shift. It was not rain with some hail mixed in; it was hail with a little rain mixed in. And the hail was marble-size, and larger. It sounded like both a drummer and a jackhammer had gone to work on the south and west sides of the house. Furious poundings, hard brutal thockings, thousands of them, as hail met wood. Upstairs a window crashed and our mother shrieked. The sky had gotten so dark our crime light went on. Then the lightning struck, immediate and furious, a flash so bright it lit up everything before it knocked out the power. We shrieked, too, then were plunged into darkness.

  Rain followed. Great buffeting gusts of it, and once the crime light came back on and we could count “o
ne one thousand, two one thousand” between the lightning and the crash of thunder, we could make out in the gray half-light the shapes of trees bent double by the wind.

  “Are they going to live?” asked Ernie, his eyes wide with wonder and fright.

  “What?” I asked, wondering if he meant the trees, the crops, the animals, what?

  Answered Ernie, “Everything.”

  There is something about coming outside after a storm into gorgeous sunshine, the wall of slate receding behind you, the sun brilliant, the air crystalline and clear, the trees, the eaves still dripping, that makes you feel as though you have survived something. And you are glad. You count fingers and toes and walk around in a daze. We felt that way as we surveyed the damage with our father. Our mother, our father said, was “still putting herself together,” whatever that meant. We checked the house first. The siding on the west side, where our mother had spent so many hours getting the wood to drink up paint, was ruined. The wood looked like it had been sandblasted and beaten on with ball-peen hammers. We touched the indentations with our fingers. Our father whistled. Three windows had been cracked in the hail assault, one had shattered. While our father checked the roof for damage, we threw hail at each other and examined the trees. Branches were stripped of their leaves, and on the smaller trees the bark had been shredded. “Will they live?” Ernie kept asking. “Will they live?”