Eighteen Holsteins and a passel of calves easily generate a barnload of body heat, especially when it’s all concentrated beneath a low ceiling insulated by hay bales stacked twenty feet deep. Sometimes during the day when the cows were settled we kids went to the barn and lay lengthwise along the backs of the tamer animals to absorb their warmth. Because of the way she tucks her hindquarters, a cow at rest tilts off-kilter, allowing you to nestle rump to withers against the ridge of the backbone while draping your limbs across a hemisphere of abdomen. You rise and fall with each bovine breath, and if you hold especially still you will feel the subterranean thump of a five-pound heart. At regular intervals the cow will lurch softly and summon a cud. The dewlap ripples, and a wad of ruminated forage rises visibly up the throat. Rolling the bolus to her tongue, she’ll work her jaw forty or so times, swallow, wait a patient moment, then raise another. It’s hard to imagine regurgitation as a form of meditation, but for cows, it is so. If you feel the animal rock forward, it is time to bail. She is working up the momentum to rise, and it is critical to get clear before she heaves to her feet, hooves scrabbling on the concrete or perhaps your toes.
Barn cats also covet the warmth of cows, but their approach was the reverse of ours; they waited until a cow stood, at which point the cat cruised in to curl up in the warm straw where the cow’s belly had rested. Fine and dandy, until the cow decided to lie down again. A cow does not lower itself gently to earth but rather shuffles about a bit and then pulls the rip cord. The older cats were usually wise to this, but now and then a youngster got caught. When a cow parks on a cat, the cat shape-shifts. In short, there is an increase in square footage. We called them pancake kitties.
All those years ago I already knew I didn’t want to milk cows for a living, and yet those winter nights in that barn remain in my memory as sanctuary. I can see Dad down on one knee, head bent to the black-and-white flank, watching the milk course through the clear tube from the udder to the pail. The very provision of his family, passing before his eyes. I was a kid, so it never occurred to me to wonder what was in his head—if he was running the math on this month’s groceries, or preparing a ruling regarding the latest bad news from school, or just longing for a full night’s sleep—but I absorbed a deep reassurance from his posture. Once when I was still a small grade-schooler but old enough to help with the chores, a traveling salesman drove into the yard, jumped from the car, strode up too close, and patted me on the head. I remember his knee bouncing behind creased polyester pants, and then, hearing the sound of the vacuum pump, he said, “Where’s your daddy? Pullin’ tits?” “He’s milking cows,” I said, as coldly as a grade-schooler could, quietly furious that this shiny-shoed stranger would barge up our driveway and profane my father’s work.
Lest I create the impression that every milking session was a hushed ritual of patriarchal ceremony, I should add that between cows Dad dangled upside down from a bar bolted to the whitewashed beams and taught us how to do skin-the-cat and the monkey-hang, and sometimes led us in chinning contests (he was an agile farmer—we often rushed to the kitchen window after supper to watch as he stepped off the porch, kicked up his heels, and walked all the way to the barn on his hands). We’d see who could pitch the milk rag into the soapwater bucket from the farthest distance. He taught us to squirt milk straight from the cow’s teat into the gaping mouth of a barn cat, which was entertaining for everyone involved except the cow. He told us Ole and Lena jokes, and we laughed whenever one of us got smacked in the face by a cow tail freshly swabbed through the festering gutter. Some nights we got to talking and the conversation ran all evening long, moving from cow to cow with breaks to dump the milk. The discussions were omnivorous, covering fishing, the price of corn, and once—I have no idea why, as Dad didn’t talk sports, but the scene persists with absurd clarity—Green Bay Packers running back Terdell Middleton. On another night, Dad looked up from where he was kneeling beside the big Holstein and in a quiet voice advised me to beware the study of philosophy because I would wind up questioning everything including my own faith, and over time and in essence he would be proven correct, although a half-read secondhand copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra does not a philosophy major make.
When the last milk was poured, Dad rinsed the milkers and hung them for the morning while I busted hay bales and kicked flakes the length of the mangers. After feeding the calves, I shook out fresh forkfuls of straw beneath each cow. Then I killed the lights and listened for a moment as the cows nosed through the hay and prepared to bed down.
We left the barn together then, pausing a moment to turn and check Orion’s progress. He was above the barn now, just clearing the roofline, halfway through another all-night cosmic hurdle. Satisfied by the sight, we turned for the lights of the house.
Down here at our new place, I work in an office above the garage. While stumping the short distance across the yard to the house after writing late into the night, I often stop and study the silent structure, knowing my wife and daughter and the unknown unborn one are in there slumbering under the assumption that I have somehow been using the time to provide. Spinning a living from typing and talking and traveling is all well and good, but I can tell you the project does not bear up under scrutiny at 2:00 a.m. and ten below. Especially if you’ve just burned six hours and two pots of coffee tweaking a sentence fragment that holds together like cheese crumbles. Calvin Coolidge notwithstanding, sometimes persistence is just a batty cat slapping at a mirror.
I’m not trying to become the farmer my father was. I’m not even trying to become my father, although the parallels are lately multiplying. But I reconnoiter with his example constantly. Tonight I stand in the cold and study Orion for a long time. The first day I set foot on this place, I became one quarter-twist discombobulated and got it in my head that west was north. I know better now, but still encounter a fuzzy two-second delay when verifying my bearings. So it’s good to see something familiar in the firmament. From Orion I pivot to locate the Big Dipper, which never leaves the sky. This too is a comfort. Tracing a line from the base of the dipper to the lip and beyond, I locate the North Star. Dropping straight down to the horizon, I shift my gaze a few degrees west, where forty miles north my father is asleep, his children gone about their business in the world.
CHAPTER 3
I am in the office working after supper when Anneliese calls. She is having contractions. “I think they’re just Braxton-Hicks,” she says, using the term coined for the nineteenth-century physician who left his name to false labor, “but they’re coming pretty steadily.” She is just over six months along, and I am immediately light in the chest. When I get to the house she is breathing through a contraction that has lasted over a minute. I go into full Evelyn Woods mode on the stack of birthing books I was supposed to have read months ago, fingertipping the indexes and speed-scanning everything I can on premature labor. Ten quiet minutes pass, then Anneliese says, “Here’s another one.” Another follows five minutes later. And yet another forty-five seconds later. Then another five-minute gap. Even as I’m reading pertinent sections aloud to Anneliese, I’m trying to convince myself that it is nothing, but I am not feeling brave at all. Then the cycles slowly subside. By bedtime nothing is happening. I am a worry champ, and pull the stethoscope from my emergency medical kit to double-check the baby’s heartbeat. It’s there, but I check it three more times before we are asleep.
I was raised in an obscure fundamentalist Christian sect. Our ministers (we called them “workers”) divested themselves of all possessions and went forth two by two, spreading God’s Word by means of gospel meetings held in village halls, bank basements, and American Legion posts. If you came as a stranger you would notice the quietness as the people gathered, removing their caps and hanging their coats without conversation before seating themselves in the neat rows of folding chairs the workers had set beforehand. Just inside the door one of the workers would pass you a copy of Hymns Old and New from an open briefcase at the back of the room.
The loaner hymnals were the size of a thin Reader’s Digest and bound in brown plastic, and they were lyrics only—no notes. Still, it wasn’t tough to sing along. We took things slow and kept a lid on it. If there was a piano available, someone might play it, but soberly. One night a tough old farm lady named Florence took a seat on the bench before the aged upright piano in the Prairie Lake Town Hall. Florence wore orthopedic shoes and horn-rimmed bifocals and kept a hanky tucked in her bosom, but when she leaned into that first verse she laid a left-handed barrelhouse rumble beneath the praise such as we had never heard before. Our eyebrows shot up and we swung right along, delighting in the spirit of it. Afterward the older brother worker had a quiet word with her and sadly Florence cut the honky-tonk. Another time an itinerant evangelist showed up late for gospel meeting and crept into the back row with a tambourine, which is like showing up for a Gregorian chant armed with a pink kazoo. I stole glances over my shoulder every time I heard a muffled tinkle.
Ours was an invisible church—a church with no name, and a church that didn’t believe in churches. We were the church. As the New Testament instructed. When it was time for Sunday morning meeting, we convened in private homes. To raise a structure and call it a church was the worldly way. A church made of hands was soon cluttered with altars and crucifixes, and was thereupon idolatrous. These false churches, they were not walking in Truth. They were whistling off to Hades. This was a shame, because I knew some real nice Lutherans. In conversation we spoke of each other as the Friends, and sometimes said we were in the Truth, but there was no letterhead anywhere with “The Truth” stamped across the top. When we said we had no name, we meant it sincerely. Yes, but it has to have a name, we would hear, again and again, as if we were playing a trick. Sometimes the outsiders called us names—the Two-by-Twos, the Dippers, the Black Stockings, the Damnation Army—but these were outsiders. Outsiders—as we were reminded at gospel meetings—were worldly. Not worldly as in “sophisticated.” Worldly as in “set to sizzle.”
Gospel meeting opened with hymns and a prayer. Then the younger worker preached for twenty minutes or so. After we sang another hymn, the elder worker preached the longer second half, and then after one more hymn and prayer we were done. The workers rarely brought the brimstone; rather, they generally spoke in a narrow range of tones somewhere between astringent history teacher and gentle physician. After preaching a town for a few weeks, they might “test” the meeting on the closing night of the run. During the last verse of the final hymn, anyone who hadn’t done so previously was invited to stand and profess their faith in Christ. This was a serious step—in short, it meant you were officially joining up. You were now walking in the Truth.
I admit there are times while traveling in certain circles that I take some perverse joy in letting slip that I was raised in an “obscure fundamentalist Christian sect” because for some disinclined folks the phrase conjures a wild-eyed tribe of charismatic Bible-wingers hoarding automatic weapons and diesel fuel within a walled compound. When I reveal that I am no longer a member, there is the underlying inference that I escaped under cover of darkness and must forevermore avoid Utah. Sadly for the sake of cocktail talk, ours was a pretty low-key operation. No speaking in tongues, no Holy Rolling, and grape juice for communion. We kids went to public schools, our parents worked regular jobs, and at first glance the only thing you might notice was that our mothers wore dresses and stacked all their hair up in a bun. Mom did wear high-top construction boots with her maxi skirts, so that was a little offbeat.
In what can now be seen as some sweet irony, my mother was known in her youth to repeatedly state that she didn’t care who she married as long he wasn’t a farmer—in fact she once declined a marriage proposal from a barge worker after he told her he had saved nearly enough money to buy his dream farm. Mission accomplished, then, when in 1963 she wed my dad—a freshly minted chemical engineer with job prospects in Minneapolis. They met via the alphabet, which placed them proximal on the Eau Claire Memorial High School homeroom seating chart: Perry, Peterson. He first caught her eye with his assiduous study habits; every morning he’d take his seat, crack his books, and buckle down. She later found out that he was cramming for his first-hour Spanish class.
Mom was smart, proper, and devout, having professed her faith in the Truth at a young age. Dad was smart too, but he was a worldly boy, and although he was pleasant and quick to grin, he sometimes comported himself as a potty-mouthed hotshot. Short, small, and quick, he was a champion wrestler. He wore his hair buzzed close to his scalp. This accentuated his ears, which were small but curled outward in the manner of Frito Scoops. In testament to his skills as a grappler, the vulnerable ears were not cauliflowered.
My mother was shy to the point of pathology, but she did possess reserves. Once—unbeknownst to Mom—her socially active cousin placed her on the ballot for class secretary. Mortified when she learned of the conscription, my mother’s immediate inclination was to decline, but then she decided she would just smile and say hello to everyone in the hall, and she was elected. My father claims this same proactive cousin attempted to set him and Mom up when they were freshmen, but Mom says she never knew of this.
All through high school then, my mother and father began the day together but never dated. On graduation night, they wound up at the same house, with a group of other students gathered for—as Mom once described it while rolling her eyes and shaking her head—“a learned discussion.” When the colloquium concluded late in the evening, my father wanted to take a different girl home, but missed his chance when she left with another boy. Dad drove Mom home instead. Somewhere on a dark road, he ran out of gas. Oldest trick since the invention of the internal combustion engine, really, except that he honest-to-goodness did run out of gas. They walked the last three miles. The county had recently graveled the roads and Mom ruined her heels. The young couple reached my mother’s house at 3:00 a.m., and she woke her father to ask if she could borrow his car and a can of gas. Grandpa said sure, fine. He trusted her. By the time she got back home again, it was 5:00 a.m. At around that same time my father was waking his parents to explain where he’d been. They accused him of lying.
The same group of students gathered again the next night, but according to Mom the discussion wasn’t as fun. That night Dad drove the other girl home.
The other girl didn’t stick. Later that fall, when Mom was in her first year of nursing school and Dad was a freshman at the local state college, he asked her to homecoming.
In Mom’s words, the date was “a great fiasco.” She agreed to go to the football game, but as she was already a member of the Truth, which had strictures forbidding dancing, she refused to attend the dance. Furthermore, Dad had been drinking the night before, and was certain Mom could tell. She says he couldn’t wait to get her home and off his hands. At the door, she invited him in for cocoa. I delight in the image of my dad blowing on that hot chocolate, his toes curled tight as a pipe clamp, sweating out the last of the previous evening’s booze and just—I have to assume—dying for a real drink. He drank the cocoa and bolted.
One year later, they went on a second date. “This is getting serious,” said Grandma Peterson. And despite the slow start, it was. Within a year Mom was on her way to being smitten. But she was troubled: in the Truth marriage to outsiders was forbidden. And she felt strongly that shared faith was the most critical bond of marriage. Dad was a discontented Methodist, but when he asked to attend Sunday meeting with her, Mom told him no. She thought worldly people were only allowed at gospel meetings. That spring, she went to Mexico to visit a pen pal in Guadalajara. She had begun writing to him when she was twelve and he was fifteen. The boy was now a medical student, and engaged to be married. She found him pompous. But she liked his sisters, and enjoyed her time with his family.
Mom had begun praying for a good husband when she was very young, and in Mexico her prayers continued. But now she was praying for the strength to tell my father that she could no longer coun
tenance dating him when she had no intention of marrying outside her faith. On the way home, she rehearsed her speech and redoubled her prayers.
Two surprises awaited her. The first was a letter from the Mexican medical student: he wrote that he had ditched his fiancée and intended to marry my mother. She could come to Guadalajara and be his wife, he said. She would also have to convert to Catholicism, but that was easily arranged.
The second surprise was more pleasant by a mile. With Mom away in Mexico, Dad went directly to her father and asked if he might come to Sunday morning meeting. Grandpa said sure. Moved by what he saw in the quiet gathering, Dad arranged to attend a gospel meeting. He was prepared in his heart: when the meeting was tested, he stood, committing himself to Christ, and, by default, to my mother. They were wed in September on my grandfather’s front lawn against the backdrop of a trellis decorated by autumn leaves. Per Dad’s request, the wedding cake was chocolate. In the portraits, Mom is a dark-haired beauty in a sheath dress, holding a spray of autumn mums. Dad looks like a spiffed-up little boy who won the pine box derby but could bolt the podium. Later it would be discovered that one of the attendants who signed as witness was underage, leading to the delightful possibility that despite their eminent respectability, my parents might officially qualify as shacked up. On those poignant occasions when someone hauls off and calls me a bastard, I peep furtively left and right, and then whisper, “Entirely possible.”
The newlyweds honeymooned in a rented cabin up north near Danbury, Wisconsin. Dad went fishing while Mom read books in the boat. Clearly there was dew on the rose—in the forty-two years since, I have never once seen my mother in a fishing boat. Upon returning to Eau Claire, the couple took up housekeeping in a small downtown apartment, and my father began a job search. Within a month Dad was hired by Archer Daniels Midland to study alternative uses for soybeans, and the young couple moved to St. Paul, Minnesota. Apparently Dad’s was the perfect gig for a science geek—among other things, he experimented with reconstituting soybeans in the form of cheese curls and glue. Throughout my childhood there was always a large tin coal pail in the playroom. It was filled with laminated blocks, and Mom still keeps it in the living room for the grandchildren. I only recently learned that the blocks were manufactured during one of Dad’s experiments—the laminations were held together by soybean glue. I am ill-informed as to the current state of regard for soybeans in the fixatives industry, but I can report that after four decades of grubby mitts and slobber, those blocks are holding fast.
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