by Dean Kuipers
“He was pretty persistent. He’d cry and say things. After quite a few weeks, he said, ‘If you don’t come back to me, I’m going to kill myself.’ Which is not like him; he values himself more highly than anyone. So that scared me,” Mom said.
Behind her back, Dad had also visited Mom’s parents and her siblings up in Holland, trying to solicit their help. He lied and insisted that Nancy had emotional troubles, trying to get them to make calls on his behalf, but not one of them would take the bait.
As summer 1978 was coming to a close, Dad came over to beg some more, and he and Mom went into the bedroom. It seemed serious. Joe had just turned eight and he posted up at the door. Brett was nine and he ducked outside and stood underneath the windowsill, listening to their voices as they argued and hissed. He clutched his once kicked stomach and mouthed, No, Mom. No. Don’t let him come back. I was downstairs with the stereo turned up loud. Dad had been working constantly and had saved some money, and he told Mom he’d already been scouting around for a piece of property where they could build a big custom house. He wanted to get away from the house by Crooked Lake and the man he was there, leave that all behind, and leave behind all the people who knew about it, too. Start fresh. After hours of talking, Mom relented. They’d try again. Brett crouched down under the window and sobbed.
Seven
God in the Many
Dad came back singing and goofing into the house by Crooked Lake that August with his stereo and his condoms and saying, “Yaaasssss! Yaaasssss!” and he already had a huge plan in motion, a grandiose, overblown plan that relied entirely on place as a conveyance for a new life. We got no family meeting, no explanation of what that three-year gap was about or why it ended. He was loose and silly like he was when we started our trap line, singing Tom T. Hall’s “Sneaky Snake” with Joe, but he was entertaining no questions. We asked what was going on, but instead of answers we got a threat, thinly wrapped in a smile: “Well, we’re not going to talk about that right now.”
Not later, either. Instead, we would move another ten miles out into the country, to a remote seventeen-acre parcel in Schoolcraft that Dad had scouted as the perfect place for the new house. He bought it from a guy in Detroit and Vern ended up with an adjoining piece of the woods that also included an old hayfield. We were trading the sweet lake life we adored and all our schoolmates and neighbors for this buggy ridge of shagbark hickory.
I told Mom I thought this was a bad idea, and she said, “I know. I don’t know if it will work. But your father loves you.”
Her life got worse almost instantly. Within days, Dad went into the Osco Drug where Mom worked and told them, without discussing it with her, that she was quitting. She found out he had been shopping at Osco’s during their separation and buying ammo and groceries and whatnot with her employee discount. Just after their reunion, Dad had gone in to buy a gun he had been looking at, and the manager, who had finally become aware of his separation from Mom, told him he’d have to pay full price. He said that Dad had abused her privileges there. Dad told him he could stick it up his ass and that she didn’t work there anymore. She loved that job and had worked there for a couple of years but the manager never called her to confirm that she was, indeed, resigning. He took Dad’s word without question and canned her.
“Right then, I realized I’d probably made a mistake,” Mom said. “He was going to control my whole life again.”
I was set to work full-time on the flower farm again the next summer, but even before break rolled around my working life got amazingly complicated. Dad said I could work on the farm, but he also wanted me to clear our new land so we could build a house. I’d have to do this on weekends, evenings, and any days I wasn’t absolutely required to be at Fred W. Nagle & Sons. This would mean getting up at four A.M. to get to the farm and then heading straight over to the property on the way home to work there until dark.
On a Saturday before school let out, Dad and I drove over to the property. We had our red Homelite chainsaw, cans of gas, a sharpening kit, and logging chains, and we had some of Dad’s carpentry tools in his handmade wood carrybox and lunches and thermoses of coffee. We parked alongside the road, and there in the makeshift driveway was a used, red Farmall 400 tricycle tractor that seemed as tall and gangly as a giraffe. “How’d that get here?” I said. “I drove it here,” he said. I forgot that he knew how to run equipment like that. The front piece of the hill had been logged for hardwood a few years earlier and all the slash and stumpage heaped a dozen feet deep in a little ravine that was exactly where the house’s walkout basement was supposed to go. The thinning of the canopy overhead had resulted in an impenetrable riot of undergrowth that had taken over the whole spot.
A man with a bulldozer could have cleared it in a couple of hours, but Dad’s romantic idea was that he and I were going to do this work together. We spent most of that first day just figuring out how to untangle this natural mess, what to cut, what to yank out with chains, where to pile the mess so we could get rid of it. He was excited about the prospect that I would salvage and sell cords of good oak firewood out of that pile. “We’ll split the profit,” he said, and then seeing me glowering said, “Okay, you keep it. I guess that’s fair.”
When summer break came, my old jeans and boots stiff with mud and grime from working on our building site, I motorcycled to the farm, sore and already dead tired from working weekends, and weeded mile-long rows of glads on my hands and knees. It was going to be a shitty summer.
That Saturday, Dad drove me out to the land and dropped me off at the curve in the road where the muddy driveway stabbed through an enormous thicket of blackberry. We’d cut the brambles back the previous weekend and they oozed an acrid, burned smell like someone had scorched a field of ragweed and tomato and Queen Anne’s lace. It stung the nose and I loved it, the smell of summer. I unloaded the tools and Dad told me he’d be back later. As he drove away, I knew that was it. Those first weekends had been about the extent of our working “together.” For the next two months, I worked there mostly alone in the soggy summer scald and sometimes way past dark in order to get a bit of cool. There was one neighbor within sight about three hundred yards down the road, a Dutch farmer named Polderman with a brick house and a small barn and one baby boy and a few beautiful daughters my age I knew from school.
At dusk, when it was too dark to see what I was chainsawing, Mom would swing by to pick up the tools with her hotrod Nova. Dad was still at his office, but he didn’t want us to leave the chainsaw or any tools out there because “some hillbilly” would steal them, and I couldn’t carry everything on the motorcycle. Dad and I hardly saw each other for those months. Dad would come home late a lot of nights, and I’d be out on Crooked Lake, slapping mosquitoes as I lay on Fenstermaker’s dock or one of my friends’ rafts where he couldn’t find me. The stars slowly turned to the soft banging of the oil drums under the raft. I didn’t want to be home discussing the next day’s work with Dad. I didn’t want to talk to anyone about what I was doing. I just wanted to float.
I was angry about the isolation but not the work; most of my friends also worked, pitching bales on family farms or taking seasonal jobs detasseling corn or tying grapes. I was fifteen, but some of the kids I knew had turned sixteen and could work in shops. Day after day it was me at the farm, or me and that slash pile, or both.
Every morning on the property would start cool and fresh with dew, with my T-shirt clean and my Red Wings and Levi’s stiff from drying out overnight. I’d sharpen the saw blade with a raspy round file and fill the tractor, conscious of the morning breeze off Little Paw Paw Lake below and the patter of birds and the light drilling of tree frogs. But after I started that saw and the sun rose overhead and the sweat started flowing, the cicadas and peepers seemed to shriek to make themselves heard and the mosquitoes and deerflies swarmed in clouds; the woods and I seized each other in a fever of carnality. I’d be knee-deep in steaming black muck, jeans and shirt soaked in abrasive grit that tore my
skin, rolling some swamp-stinking piece of stump against my chest and arms. As the rotted bark slid off I’d mash fat white grubs and termites and earwigs and slugs against my body, wolf spiders an inch and a half wide running up my face (and once into my mouth; they’re sour), wrestling with decaying wood in a drenching sweat, trying to muscle it, mostly losing, feeling myself merge with the rot and muck itself.
It was a hassle to climb up and down off the tractor to chain out heavy logs, so I’d just try to roll them and more than once I collapsed under a section of oak that was simply too heavy to carry, maybe two hundred pounds, and I had to lie out on the cool muck for a while until my back would stop spasming. The work was brutal, and it was a brutality I created myself. The more the pile talked to me the deeper I went. This was the part of my day I really liked and I still like now, when my body is hot with work and wanting the next chunk of wood, when the air throbs with electric insect bombination, when time becomes irrelevant and everything is blurry with sweat and gasping, and there’s not a square inch left to keep clean.
In this state of altered consciousness it was easy to make a slash pile become a house.
There were few words for the experience because there was no one to talk to. Mom felt bad and borrowed an AM-FM radio that I could set on a stump, but after a few hours I’d always turn it off. By midmorning almost every day I had transformed into something a little other-than-human—clothes so wet they bagged and slipped and even a hot wind would raise goosebumps, talking to myself, my imagination ringing with a huge chorus of voices, a standup version of the rot that lay under the bark and burst white grub guts and the jeering of crows.
The crows were the sign: when I was deep in it, crows and jays would come down from the tall hickories above and sit on a stump and bob their heads at me and dash in to pick grubs and escaping insects. Once I was a muck-thing they lost their fear, I guess. I saw a little of what they saw through their eyes. I learned in biology that the word human comes from the Latin humus, meaning soil or earth. The intelligence of the place opened itself within me.
At lunch I would sit on a stump and think about the muck. The life in the moldy, slimy stumpage was rich and black. The bugs and fungus and salamanders there seemed loud. The pile stood in direct contrast to the sterile fields I walked all day on the flower farm. Everything in that gray-dun soil had been killed except for the crops. It was dead silent.
The old patriarch of the flower farm, Fred Nagle, had separated the world into useful and nonuseful species, and for him, farming was a cosmic battle, an apocalyptic war between a God who fed his people and a Satan who commanded legions of weeds. “That nutgrass is from the Devil, and we battle Satan for our very lives,” he would say, as the Nagle kids all rolled their eyes. But I thought about what he said as I walked and drove those fields, where all the fencerows had been long torn out and even the ditches were mowed and sprayed. I thought about how many people felt the way Grandpa Nagle did, that we were at war with nature. That it was our mission as a species to eradicate all the others. My mind tore at the surface of things.
Dad would come out to the land on weekends, sometimes for the day and sometimes for five minutes, and he was delighted to see the hole in the forest growing. He would power up the chainsaw and swing it like a scythe, mowing down brambles, then usually get back in his car and leave. We once spent one whole weekend pulling out flowering dogwoods with the tractor because they form an understory and he didn’t want anything to block his view.
“I want to see through the trees,” he said. He’d also take down big sumacs and slippery elm and tulip trees and others he thought were no good compared with hickory and oak and beech.
Somehow, Dad and old Nagle both agreed that God wanted them to clear the land, to reduce its complexity, to banish the useless species as a way to make way for clean thoughts and deeds. I was finding the opposite. Working in that rotten slash pile, I thought it was perfectly obvious that nature favored more-ness, not less-ness. More species of tree and frog and bug and fungus, not less. More exchange or communication between them, not less. Everything in that slash heap was very explicit about its desire to live. All you had to do was grab onto a little dogwood tree with both hands and pull and you would feel it tugging back. A place was richer or poorer because of the number of exchanges that went on there, all of which fired the imagination.
I wasn’t sure what God was or if it existed, but if all things were an extension of God, then its fullest expression was more, not less. I was starting to talk with the minister of the new church Dad had joined, Pastor Stulp, and I understood there was a tension in God between one-ness and many-ness. The one-ness, God as a unity, I might never see. But God as many-ness was right here before my eyes. Life and God and nature expressed itself through difference and diversity. There had to be difference in order for two things to talk to each other—two different people, for instance, or one tree talking to the other tree through the white threads of fungus that connected trees so they could share nutrients and chemical signals—and if there wasn’t any communication between things, then there was no world. The world wasn’t actually made of things: it was made of the communication between things.
Working in the woods, I was like a demolition expert defusing a bomb, cutting the wires one by one. Diminishing God a little at a time every day, and making the world too safe. Every farmer, and pretty much every human being everywhere, was doing the same thing: clearing their little patch, not thinking it will matter much, replacing the chatter with silence. It got to where I was disgusted with myself and my role in this treachery. I wanted to make the world louder. I wanted to sneak a couple of wolves or pumas into the thicket and watch imaginations explode all over the township.
Only a kid absolutely desperate for company would think these things, and I was desperate. I was communicating infinitely more with this slash pile than I was with my friends or family. Between the flower farm and clearing Dad’s land, I wasn’t getting much lake time. I’d either go straight to the land or come home and get Mom’s Nova so I could carry the chainsaw, but I was running things all on my own.
Then the summer took an amazing turn: suddenly Dad announced we were taking a trip out West, and for three and a half weeks we drove the Rockies in a rented Winnebago on a mission to fish the Yellowstone and the Firehole and Madison and a bunch of other good rivers, most of the ones we’d skipped when we left Seattle a decade earlier. Joe and Brett and I fished so close to elk that we could hear their bellies rumble as they watched us warily through glassy black eyes. At the Sun Canyon Lodge in Montana I was thrilled that the horses would walk right into the dining hall and take carrots out of the cook’s hand, and a mule climbed into our RV. That was the only time someone else cooked for us, as Mom had planned and provisioned three weeks of meals. I felt like a real fisherman again when I caught one decent trout out of the ankle-deep Sun River, but I seem to recall that Brett and Joe were hauling in fish by the bushel. On the way back, we hit rivers in the U.P.
It was the best trip we had ever had as a family, a kind of miracle, but there wasn’t much summer left when we got home. Dad was in a panic to get the contractors to frame in the house before the snow fell. Two-a-day football practices were starting soon, so even though he was worried about how it might look at his new church, he had me on the building site seven days a week.
One afternoon when it was about one hundred degrees Fahrenheit I walked through the ditch and down the road toward the neighbors, trailing a wake of deerflies behind me. I don’t know that I agonized about it at all, I just started walking. I was thinking about the Polderman daughters. I crossed over their yard and went to the front door in my filth-encrusted jeans and black, sweat-soaked shirt and rang the bell. Mrs. Polderman opened the door just a crack.
“Yes?” she said. I had never met her but I think she knew who I was.
“I just wondered if the girls wanted to go for a swim,” I said. They had an above-ground pool in the backyard. I didn’t have
a swimsuit, so I guess I just imagined we’d all swim naked in the name of health or something. I had no idea how this would work or why I was even asking.
“Oh, our girls don’t swim on Sunday,” she said, and closed the door on me.
Sunday? Was it Sunday? I walked across the street and into the trees. The days all seemed the same. I guess I had no idea what day of the week it was. But then I started to think: she didn’t seem mean or angry that I had asked. Would she have said yes if it had been a Monday? My dreams started to expand.
I was standing in the ooze, chainsawing a tough, knotted crotch of red oak and blinking the mosquitoes out of my eyes when suddenly the saw blade bucked back and cracked me in the shin. I fell forward trying to get my leg out of the way and stabbed the sizzling saw blade into the dirt and rolled over it in a somersault. I felt myself rush back into my human mind on a wave of adrenaline. I arrived fresh; I didn’t know where I had been moments before. I had been somewhere in orange roots and insect whine. I blinked and blinked and then flipped the power switch on the saw to “off” and pulled myself onto a log and got back into being human.
My pants were cut and there was blood. I figured I had sawed my leg half-through and needed to act fast. There was no way to call for help. It was twenty years before my first cell phone. I fished a bandana out of my lunch bag to make a tourniquet and tried to gauge how far I’d have to crawl to the Poldermans. I imagined they’d rush out in swimwear, dripping pool water on me while loading me into John’s truck. I felt very calm about the whole thing.
