by C J Hribal
“I don’t know, honey, I don’t know,” said our mother. She’d come up behind us, and we were surprised to see the fingers of her left hand wrapped in gauze. There was a cut on her cheek as well, a fine line beaded with blood. “I was trying to close the window when it shattered,” she said. “It’s okay. They bled a lot, but they weren’t very deep.”
“Was that why you screamed?” asked Peg Leg Meg.
“We all screamed,” said Cinderella.
“I didn’t,” said Robert Aaron.
“Well, hooray for you,” said Cinderella.
Ike and Wally Jr. maintained they hadn’t screamed either.
“It doesn’t matter who screamed,” said our mother. “Has anyone checked the garden?”
We hadn’t. We’d been having too good a time playing with the hail. Cool lucent stones. You could see the layers that formed them once you split them open. We’d also been quietly celebrating the destruction of the pickle field. It was an almost total loss, leaves shredded, vines trampled. The hailstones still there, gleaming, almost phosphorescent. Oh, happy day.
It wasn’t until we heard our mother’s sharply inhaled “Oh! Oh, my!” that it dawned on us the damage would not be limited to what we wanted destroyed.
The garden was shredded, too. Poking up from the mud were fingers of stems, in some cases not even that. The petals of our mother’s flowers lay strewn about, driven into the mud by the rain’s fury. We did not even know their names, except for the common ones like the snapdragons and petunias. Our mother wept. Our father put his arm around her.
“It’ll come back,” said our father confidently, breezily. “A lot of this will come back. It looks bad now, sure, but give it time. You wait, a lot of this is going to come back.”
Our mother had one hand clapped over her mouth and another over her belly. “Oh, Wally” was all she could say to him.
“It’ll come back,” repeated our father, and you could tell he believed it. But his voice’s quaver told us he wasn’t sure she believed it. And he needed her to. Like it wasn’t just the flower beds he was talking about but something in their marriage, their own enterprise of being here together. It’s like in a relationship, when one party says, “I love you,” and the other replies, “I know,” rather than “I love you, too.” A sign that something is seriously wrong. When our father says, “It’ll come back,” our mother is not supposed to answer, “Oh, Wally.”
We waited to see how this was going to turn out. Our mother quivering, our father quavering. The seven of us lined up like cheerleaders: Quiver, quaver! Quiver, quaver! Kiss him, Mom, do us all a favor!
She did, the union was saved, and as soon as they fell into each other’s arms we went back to throwing hail at each other like it was confetti, like it was rice.
___
It was not the rain that did in our pumpkins, no. And it wasn’t the hail, chopping like a butcher’s knife. A surprising amount of stuff cut to ribbons in that storm came back, at least partially. Three or four plants in a row here, half a row there. Because of the hail we didn’t have the two or three gargantuan pumpkins that would make people’s eyes pop with disbelief, but we had several one hundred and fifty pounders, and really, when you’re dealing with one-hundred-and-fifty-pound pumpkins, how many do you need?
We got an early frost that year, and a pumpkin field after an early frost looks both trampled and beautiful. The vines have all gone limp, the pumpkins’ umbilical cords wither and dry, the leaves surrender to death and decay. But the pumpkins themselves look gorgeous. There is something about their orange, potbellied robustness in the midst of all that fragility that reminds one of the grandness of life and all its cycles in a way that the indiscriminately breeding pickles do not. When pickles have run their course and the last cukes on the vine have exploded into yellowy green tumors, all you want to do is smash them, stomp them with your boots, hurl them into fields, throw them against fence posts and barn walls. They are to plant growth what cancer is to cell growth. Pumpkins, on the other hand, perhaps because they are so few and so squatly ostentatious, seem like the fulfillment of something, a promise made and kept.
After the hailstorm that summer, our father said that pumpkins might indeed be a better cash crop than pickles. Next year we’d plant twenty, thirty acres of the beasts. And after we planted them, our work would consist of rolling them over in the sun.
We would, our father said, make a killing.
The tornado that came a week before Halloween made a prophet out of our father. We were at school that day, on the playground. It was a crisp fall day, one of those days that dawns bright and cold, the temperatures just below freezing, and then the air warms to a brisk forty-three or so. The sunshine so bright off the colored leaves and the air so clear it feels as though time itself has stopped, as though it could stay exactly that way forever and you wouldn’t mind at all. The clouds moved in that morning, heavy, scudding, a solid wall. The wind picked up. Little dust devils whirled away madly in doorways and across the playground, picking up leaves, swirling them off the ground and up. Then we got a blast of air, and something seemed odd. It was warm air. Very warm air. We were on the playground in zippered sweaters and corduroy coats, and the next thing we knew we were hot. Most kids took off their jackets. And then time did seem to stop. Balls rolled away from their owners, and conversation, the laughter and shouting, died away. We were enveloped by stillness. The sky, so gay and bright and inviting a moment before, took on that ominous old-bruise color. It was like a light had suddenly been switched off, plunging us into twilight. We knew what it meant. A second later the siren on top of the school started its high-pitched, crescendoing whine, and the teachers were herding us into the school’s boiler room even as the wind began its furious whip and howling.
Our mother, home with Peg Leg Meg, reported on what we could not see. She watched it from Robert Aaron’s room. From radio reports, the tornado formed southwest of town, and the funnel stayed off the ground until after it had passed over the town and past our school. It first touched down about a mile from our house, exploding our neighbor’s barn and killing thirty-four dairy cows that were trapped inside. It was tearing branches off trees, upending tractors and corn pickers, shattering corncribs, ripping off roofs, dropping power lines. Poultry, pigs, horses, sheep—if it was in the tornado’s path it became airborne, and everything in the air became a missile. Our mother could see it coming over the rise from our neighbor’s. It was on the ground now, not bouncing as it first had, and was making a beeline for our house. That was when our mother covered Peg’s body with her own, crouched on the floor, and began to pray.
The roaring, our mother reported afterward, was tremendous. She could hear windows shattering upstairs and the walls thump-thumping as debris pummeled the house. She could feel the suction of air on her body even though she was below grade and inside a house. She was quite certain that she was going to die, and she prayed that her children would be taken care of. Then the roaring stopped, and she realized she was still on the floor, protecting a child who was complaining, “Mommy, get up, you’re hurting me, I can’t breathe!”
Our mother and sister were saved because tornadoes rarely make a beeline for anything. They meander, they wobble, they zig, they zag. This particular tornado passed, as we could see from the wake of its destruction, about fifty yards west of our house. It took out our neighbor’s trees and our toolshed. It picked up one of our cats and heaved it into the house. Curiously, although the toolshed was gone, its walls distributed among the trees along our creek bottom, the tools themselves were still on the benches, the lawn mower still on the floor. Coming home from school on the bus, we passed one scene of destruction after another—cornfields flattened, trees split in two or completely uprooted, barns missing their centers, houses with their roofs peeled back, lumber and barn siding and bark stripped from trees littering the road and fields. A huge oak that stood near the corner of our property and our neighbor’s was not missing more than a b
ranch or two, but sheets of green-and-gray metal roofing from the Myerses’ barn were embedded deep into the trunk and into the crotch of branches that formed the crown. When we got home we found a lot more of the Myerses’ barn roof, sheet by sheet, littering our ravine, wrapped around trees as though corrugated sheet metal were nothing more than wet toilet paper. Standing on the rise behind our house, you could see a couple of exploded areas in our creek bottom where the tornado had touched down, and then it must have skipped over our hill and done its final damage to the farms on the other side. We heard about those in the coming days, once the power lines were up and phone service restored. Miraculously, no one was killed.
Given the severity of the storm, it was easy to overlook what was missing. We came home to find our mother crying with relief, a little dazed, still clutching Peg Leg Meg’s hand. “Mommy, you’re hurting me!” Peg kept squealing, and our mother said she was sorry. But she didn’t let go. It wasn’t until we’d walked around the house twice, looking at broken windows, the dead cat, torn up shingles, broken tree branches, the tools residing in bare air, that Ernie asked, “What about the pumpkins? What happened to the pumpkins?” He was standing in the field behind our house. The ground was bare. It was as though someone with a push broom had swept it clean. The wilted vines, the fat orange pumpkins—everything was gone.
Flying pumpkins. It seemed almost too comical to be believed.
“Where could they be?” Ernie wondered, and as we gazed down the field, looking for a flash of something orange, we wondered the same thing.
In the days that followed, we found out. Like everything else lifted by the storm, they had become missiles, fat orange bombs thrown like fastballs at the objects they ultimately hit. Cars were destroyed by them. Cows up to two miles away were killed by them. Pumpkins had wiped out chicken coops, flown through bedroom windows, taken out dining room tables. Barns had been aerated by them, tractor engines caved in, apple trees knocked down like bowling pins. We got calls every day for weeks as people found out who the projectiles belonged to. They couldn’t sue, of course, act of God and all that, but the callers asked our father to stop growing them. Avoid the near occasion of pumpkin sin seemed to be their message. “How often are there going to be flying pumpkins, for chrissakes?” our father asked them.
“One time was too many,” they answered.
The next year the pumpkins were gone, at least as a cash crop.
“We were putting too much emphasis on the summer growing season anyway,” said our father the next spring. “We need a year-round crop. And what grows year-round?” asked our father. “Animals,” he said, not giving us a chance to answer. “Chickens, sheep, cattle. Also mushrooms. We have moisture in the basement anyway. We may as well take advantage of it.”
Our father was nothing if not an optimist. Often his chest pocket—which held a pocket protector filled with mechanical pencils and pens and a palm-size circular slide rule—was decorated with a button that said “Accentuate the Positive” or “Ask Me Why I’m Smiling” (we had our own theories, none of which would have reflected well on our merit reviews). To his credit, he did not let our family’s failures in agriculture get him down.
He also didn’t always explain his intentions. His first experiment with beef cattle was a calf we named Molly. We assumed it was a pet. We fed it supplements, let it suck on our fingers, groomed it like a dog. Come September it was gone. Our parents exchanged looks when we asked what happened to Molly but didn’t say anything. Later that month we had a cookout. Our father was doing up a big stack of hamburgers. He also had a few pounds of hot dogs and some Polish sausage, each sausage linked to its compatriots with a little twist of intestine, though we didn’t know that at the time. One by one we were served. Clutching our paper plates and our hamburger buns, trying to keep the potato chips from flying off in the breeze, we were suddenly seized with dread as it dawned on us what our father might be serving us.
It was Peg Leg Meg who voiced the question on our lips. “Is . . . is that Molly?” she asked, her head nodding at the burgers sizzling on the grill, their juices spittering the coals below. Our father exchanged a look with our mother, who was stirring potato salad. “You may as well tell them, Wally,” she said. He nodded. “It’s time you knew where your food comes from,” said our father, not at all unkindly. “We raise animals so they can feed us. It’s okay. It’s what nature and God intended.” Our father leaned down farther, his round face slightly obscured by smoke. “Yes, honey, this is Molly. And it’s okay for you to eat him.” (We were, it turned out, shaky on cow gender.)
Meg’s lower lip quivered and her mouth opened and her jaw worked, but no words came out. Then she managed a quavering “I-I-I-I-I’ll have a . . . a . . . a . . . ho-ho-hot do-o-og.”
One by one we echoed her. Our father was left with a good ten pounds of thawed hamburger patties that were drawing flies and a clutch of kids all sitting as far away from the scene of the crime as possible.
“The pig your hot dogs are made out of, the pig’s name was Rupert,” called our father to us disgustedly. “You didn’t know him, but his name was Rupert.”
The black walnuts were in some ways our father’s deepest disappointment. He had the idea that a black walnut, started from a seedling, would in twenty or thirty years, be ready for harvest, and given what black walnut was going for on the open market once it was sized and cut for lumber, a mature tree was, he had read somewhere, worth a good twenty thousand dollars. That was per tree, he liked to point out. “When you kids are ready for college and tuition is due,” he said, “we’ll just go out to the woods and harvest one of those black walnuts. Presto, four years of college paid for in one stroke of an ax.” It was a lovely thought, but like most lovely thoughts, it ignored the facts. The trees would be mature closer to our children’s college years, not our own; inflation would make his idea of how much a college education cost quaint if not laughable; and we were not miniature Paul Bunyans, felling trees with one stroke of an ax. We would use a chain saw, like normal people. Although for all those black walnuts grew, an ax, and one stroke at that, would have been plenty. Two other things our father didn’t take into account: soil that was too acidic for black walnuts, and a deer population that seemed to love the black walnut seedlings as though they were champagne and caviar. Our father had us plant four hundred black walnut seedlings. In a few years less than than thirty were left, and most of the ones that made it to maturity were too misshapen to use for lumber.
But should one be judged on one’s success, or on the size of one’s dreams? Our father’s plan was to start out small and end up big. In actuality, he started out too big and things ended up small. He wanted to be an entrepreneur, he wanted the farm to be his monument, but he wasn’t around enough to make his dreams a reality. He couldn’t be there for the day-to-day of it that might have kept things humming. And we blamed him for it.
There was also that fact that he was not a robber baron like his idols. He was not driven like that. He was driven to dream, not driven to succeed. He was no Al Capone, hiding out in the Wisconsin north woods, and unlike Dillinger, he would never shoot it out with police. He was too nice a guy for that. He didn’t cut corners. He played by the rules—a quaint, almost outmoded way of thinking.
I remember being taken to the Dog Out once. It was a Saturday afternoon, the time of day when men in bars, if they aren’t pathetic, take on a kind of heroic stature. Especially if you’re still a kid. While our father jawed with Mike the bartender and a couple customers, I became fascinated by a cardboard sign that jutted from a metal clip above the cash register. Like the Hamm’s beer signs of a few years before, the sign pulled me into its universe:
Y.C.H.J.C.Y.A.Q.F.T.J.B.
T.Y.
What did it mean? I wanted, needed to know. It was a code of some kind, the deciphering of it the entrance requirement for some secret society, and only the elect would be admitted. I wanted to be among the elect.
But I couldn’t mak
e hide nor hair of it. Meanwhile our father had been lured into a game of pool by a sharpie, a stocky guy with a pencil-thin mustache and wavy black hair combed tight to his skull. He wore a polo shirt under a gray suit coat. When he smiled you could see the gaps between his teeth, and he smiled a lot. He looked like a gangster on holiday. I paid only fleeting attention to the game. I wanted my father to win, but I’d seen The Hustler. This guy looked like a professional who went town to town, setting guys up for big falls. My father was an earnest mark. And besides, I was trying to figure out what those initials stood for. But twice during the game I happened to look over after my father had scratched and the sharpie was putting the cue ball down at the wrong end of the table. “We broke here, right?” he asked my father, but it came out sounding like a statement, not a question. And you could see why he wanted the break there. He’d have an easy shot. The man, I realized, was a fraud. If you were a really good player, you didn’t need to change ends of the table like that. My father’s scratch should have been all the help he needed. He was no sharpie. He was a guy who liked to dress like a sharpie and pretend he was a sharpie, but he lacked a sharpie’s skills. So he resorted to tricks like pretending he didn’t know what side of the table the break was on.
