I have a good sweet weep. Then I walk back to the house. I want to hold Jane. Feel life in my arms.
A few days later I am on my way out the door to hook up the electric fencer. Anneliese is on the couch with Amy. They are reading Beetle McGrady Eats Bugs! “Stink bugs taste like apples!” says Amy. “I’ll take your word for it,” I say.
I’ve mounted the fencer on a post inside the pole barn, to keep it out of the rain. The power unit is an unremarkable plastic cube the size of a half-pint ice cream box. When I plug it in, a pinpoint green light glows on and off, indicating that the fence circuit is complete. The fencers of my childhood were more the size of a twelve-pack, and were commonly housed in stylized tin shrouds. One resembled the front fender of a Ford Fairlane. Another of my favorites was dusty blue with a silver-riveted logo plate and a fat orange indicator light that eased languorously from lit to unlit. I used to stand in the barn at dusk staring up at the deliberate amber blink and imagine the unit was an advance robot broadcasting homing pulses to the distant mother ship. Dad’s first fencer was called a Weedburner, an apt name considering that shortly after he plugged it in, flames swept the pasture and there were fire trucks in the back forty. In a nod to my father’s frugality, years later I would be out fencing and find myself threading the wire through partially melted insulators remnant of the fire.
Unlike many a curious farm boy, I swear I have never peed on an electric fence. I am told this blows a very specific fuse. Perhaps the act prevents prostate cancer—a longitudinal study is in order, challenge number one being the location of subjects willing to ’fess up. I do remember walking down the barnyard lane with a steel can of Off! and trying to see how close I could run it past the fence without making contact, a diversion that lost its appeal when I got knocked to my knees. To test the steadiness of his hand, my brother Jed once formed a circle around the wire with his fingers and took off walking only to zap himself flat, establishing that neither his intellect nor his fine motor skills would qualify him as a brain surgeon. One of the Carlson boys used to check to see if the fence was energized by slapping at it with his open palms. He swore that if you touched it quickly enough the shock was minimal. We assigned him special powers until the day he mistimed his swat and his hands clenched around the wire in an electrified spasm. The current would break just long enough for him to begin unwrapping his fingers, then the “on” cycle would hit and his hands would seize into fists again. Hearing the howls, his father ran to detach him.
On one of my prior Farm & Fleet runs, I purchased an electric fence tester consisting of a slim grounding wand connected by a coated wire to a plastic paddle tipped with a copper terminal. You stick the wand in the dirt and touch the terminal to the wire. There are four indicator lights mounted in the paddle; the more zap your fence generates, the more lights are illuminated. Sadly, despite the fact that I quite uncharacteristically read and reviewed the written instructions during both the installation of the fencer and the wiring of the three ground posts, I can only get two of four lights to illuminate. I recheck the wire from fencer to the farthest termination point—all clear. I recheck the ground posts—everything is in order. Still only two lights. I have no idea if that’s hog-worthy.
In the end, I test it the way the old-timers taught me. Plucking a leaf of green quack grass, I grip it between my thumb and forefinger way back at the stem end and lay the pointy end across the wire. Then I slowly push the green blade forward until I feel the first faint tingle. What you’ve got here is an organic rheostat. As the quack blade advances, the resistance decreases, and you get a better zap. How far you keep pushing is up to you. When my knuckles are about four inches from the wire it feels like someone is snapping me in the wrist with a rubber band. I figure that’ll hold pigs.
My plan had been to get back at the work waiting in the office, but I dive straight into fencing the garden. The rabbit population around here has been exploding. With no barrier they’ll decimate our vegetables. And the planting season is nearly upon us. At least these are the things I am telling myself. There is some truth to it, but there is an unquestionable element of escapism. When I get way behind on deadlines and responsibilities as I am now, I rather perversely throw myself into physical labor, which yields palliative sweat and tangible progress even as I fall farther behind.
While shuffling through a pile of mail and miscellaneous papers beside the telephone today, I came across some scribbled notes. They were in Anneliese’s hand, and appeared to be the rough draft for a set of talking points: tired baby/tired mom/7-year-old = frustrated mom…things you can do… The subsequent notes essentially sketched out something that Anneliese brought up recently, saying she appreciates everything I am doing to pay the rent and prepare for having animals, but sometimes she wonders if I’m using work as a hideout. It made me crabby that she would even suggest such a thing, because of course it is true. I can provide plenty of justification—a man must Provide, soon I’ll be on the road again, yada yada—but there is no question I find refuge in the work, and I’m not sure I’ve got it in me to change on that front. I love to put my head down and bull.
Amy appears, apparently still ruminating on the bugs of Beetle McGrady. “Mommy says when she was in Mexico she ate a taco with crickets!” She is bursting with wonder and admiration. I wonder how often Anneliese wishes she were back in Mexico or even her Talmadge Street house and not saddled with an irritable self-employed scribbler wiring slapdash pigpens up a dead-end road.
Plunging into the garden plot, I rip up last year’s weeds and clear the overgrowth from the perimeter. Then, using a posthole digger, a level, and a two-by-two tamper, I set the poles (salvaged from where I found them leaning in a corner of the pole barn) solid and square in the dirt. Next I dig a trench so I can bury the bottom few inches of the fencing to prevent the rabbits from tunneling under. After stretching and stapling the fencing in place, I fill the trench and stomp the dirt down flat all around. Lastly I rig a gate. I keep my head down, working steadily, sweating and not stopping. There is far more in play here than work ethic. A teacher of psychology once reviewed my behavior over the long term and pegged me for bipolar—it strikes me that this desire to hide out by hooking oneself to the plow may be nothing more than the manifestation of mania. I once knew a woman whose manic swings drove her to don scarlet clothes and makeup and dance the downtown streets, whereas your manic Scandinavian will dig postholes.
With the garden enclosed, I bring out the rototiller. For the next half hour I wrassle it back and forth until the patch is fluffed and soft and ready for seeds. Anneliese has been reading up on reduced tillage, mulching, and cover crops, and we intend to move that way, but for now the plowboy in me is soothed by the pillowy look of the churned earth. I step back for a moment to take it in and am heartened by the solid set of the posts and the taut lines of the well-stapled wire. I am forever cobbling things together—it feels nice to look at a job and think it might last. Amy has stripped down to her underpants, lain flat out in the fresh-tilled soil, and is sweeping handfuls of dirt over her legs and tummy. I start to tell her no, then walk away and leave her to it, one of the better decisions I’ve made all day.
I store the rototiller and walk into the house, dirty, sweaty, thirsty, hungry, and surprised to find several hours have passed. Upstairs I can hear Anneliese pacing and Jane crying. I wash up and take the baby. Laying her belly-down along the length of my forearm, I grip her torso with my hand. We call this the football hold, and it is the one thing I seem to be able to do well, babywise. Her arms and legs dangle awkwardly, but she nearly always settles and quietens, and does so now. Perhaps it is simple syncope. Soon she is asleep.
My mother-in-law and sister-and-law are in the kitchen making venison stir-fry. When it’s ready we eat on the deck overlooking the valley. Jane is awake again and happily gurgling. We’re letting her air her little hinder out, and she celebrates her diaperless freedom by peeing on the tablecloth. A minor diversion compared to this morning, w
hen I was washing her on the changing table and with neither wink nor warning she ejected a rope of poop that arced into the wall six feet away. A true hydraulic marvel.
After the hot, sticky afternoon, storms have begun working either side of the valley and pushing a cool breeze before them. It’s nice, all of us out here together, eating and talking, laughing with the baby. I get going on the pigpen, or the garden fence, and from some imaginary omniscient perch I look down and see a man toiling on behalf of his family, forgetting that sometimes what the family needs is a man sitting still.
In the summer of 1989 I lodged with Tim’s parents for a stretch. I was trying to become a writer at the time, and began every morning in the front room, drinking tea beside a glowing coal grate and clacking away on a manual typewriter lent me by Tim’s mom. Tim had only recently moved out, and his turntable and a collection of vinyl albums remained on a low shelf beneath the windows that opened out to the street and front garden. Slice by vinyl slice, I worked my way through the music. Last night while writing under deadline, serving the clock more than the muse, I procrastinated by going online to track down a copy of Marillion’s Misplaced Childhood, an album I hadn’t heard since those mornings on Longford Road. The tears came at the chorus of “Lavender” (“Lavender’s blue, dilly dilly, lavender’s green…”), but they were tinctured with gratitude that a song might so wholly transport me back to my friend.
And so this morning I spent an hour in the pole barn digging through the boxes where my music CDs have been stored since the move. Box by box I flip through the jewel cases, scanning the spines and pulling anything that evokes our long-gone days: the Waterboys, from my first visit in 1984. Simple Minds, for whom the Waterboys were opening the drizzly day we saw them in Milton Keynes Bowl. Avalon, by Roxy Music. Pink Floyd’s Animals and The Final Cut (Tim put me onto these after finding me listening to Dark Side of the Moon for the sixth day in a row). Siouxsie and the Banshees. The Cure (thirty seconds into “Plainsong” and I am alone in the Longford Road front room at 3:00 a.m., staring out the window at yellow lamplight reflected on wet tarmac, the rain gone to mist). I pull a Bronski Beat album so I can revive the wash of summer traffic and the scent of daffodils weaving through the second-story window of my British bedroom, matched forever with Jimmy Somerville singing “Smalltown Boy,” his voice plasticky on the clock radio beside the bed as I wrote in a notebook and listened for the sound of Tim’s car pulling in the drive.
By the time I head back up to the office, the stack is such that I must steady it with my chin.
It’s a fine line that separates wallowing from remembrance, but as I listen to the music for the rest of the day and into the night, I don’t care. Track by track, I am back with Tim, riding shotgun in the left-hand passenger seat, strap-hanging on the Tube through London, or simply scuffing home from the local. It’s a mind trick, and I’ll take it. When the three-chord stomp of “Rollin’ Home” comes thumping from the speakers, we are together again, driving back from a Status Quo show at the National Exhibition Centre, smiling young men on the road to who knows.
He wanted you to remember him as he was. A clichéd phrase intended only for my comfort, I thought when I read it in the e-mail and heard it on the phone. But the music is working on me, and I’m beginning to understand. I’m thinking of Tim, dying in that room I knew so well. How in all our years of coming and going, we made it a point to never say good-bye. He knew if he called me about the cancer I would want to come over. If I had come right away, there might have been time for a few more nights, or a few more miles, but it would all be building to the inevitable stilted good-bye, my very presence reminding him he was bound to die. If I had gone over in the later stages, he would have been too far gone, in too much pain, and I would have done him little good. If I was unprepared for his death, I am just now realizing he wanted it that way. Tim fooled me. Fooled me beautifully, and gently. He wanted you to remember him as he was, and I will, and do, because he gave me no other choice. He did not choose his death, but he chose his exit.
In a feeble effort to hold up my end of the domestic partnership, I am doing the dishes after supper and notice Amy wandering out the driveway with the dogs. In ten minutes she returns. Standing with the door open, she says, “Do ants have protein?”
“Yes, they do,” I say, turning from the sink to look at her. “Why?”
“Because I ate one.”
“Really!”
“It tasted sour.”
So she chewed it, then.
The days have cycled through. The maple buds have unbundled. The hills are a green divan buttoned with clusters of bloom that foam up apple-tree pink and chokecherry white. After lunch I am trying to allow Anneliese a nap. She is upstairs, and I am downstairs with Jane across my lap. The deadlines have stacked up, so I am also trying to write, the computer balanced on my knees. But of course I can do little more than study the baby. Her sleepy tics, her bursts of rapid eye movement, her bow-perfect lips, her candy-floss hair glinting auburn in the sun. Her nose is resting on her knuckles, and her head rocks slightly with each breath drawn. I am playing music on the laptop: Innocence Mission. The volume is way down. The song sounds tinny and faint. I am studying Jane’s impossible ear—this perfect miniature conch, a leaf just partially unfurled—when the final chorus repeats, barely audible: “this is the brotherhood of man…this is the brotherhood of man…this is the brotherhood of man…” When I turn my eyes to the valley below the big window, it is beautiful for a moment and then all the blooms and green dissolve in a watercolor wash.
After a suitable interval, the guinea pig whistles and flips his purple plastic igloo.
CHAPTER 6
Today a dog bit me grievously upon the ass. I apologize for the salty talk, but it was a galvanic moment.
I was wrestling a pig at the time.
So—two firsts in one day.
I have had my heart set on owning pigs for a while now, but as with so many of my projects, reality has taken a backseat to cogitation. A lovely thing, to sit back and ponder what One Shall Accomplish without having to actually lace one’s boots. To price sausage makers prior to carrying a single bag of feed.
Farmers though we are, my family is short on pig experience. Dad didn’t care for the smell of them, so we never raised any. Most of the farmers around here used to keep a sow or two, but they were being slowly phased out in favor of cows and crops by the time we came on the scene. I have a fragmentary memory of peeking into a penful of piglets over at the Norris North place when I was a toddler. Dad may have lifted me to look over the barrier, because I retain an omniscient perspective of the litter startling below me, shunting away in a single flowing motion, like a school of frantic pink minnows.
My sister Kathleen and her husband Mark have raised a couple of pigs each of the last few years. Mark does the butchering himself, using his skid-steer bucket to hoist the carcasses for the evisceration and skinning. My brother John hasn’t raised pigs for a while, but he often tells the story of the first pair he butchered. They were brothers from the same litter and had shared the pen every day of their lives. On butchering day John shot the first pig between the eyes, and by the time it hit the ground, the other pig was licking up the blood and nibbling at the bullet hole. John used to raise his eyebrows and reenact the scene as if he were the bemused survivor: “Huh! Fred died!”
Then, half a beat later and still in character, he’d brighten: “Let’s eat ’im!”
My youngest brother Jed raised pigs for several years but recently sold them all with the exception of his favorite sow, Big Mama. The sow hasn’t farrowed for a while, but he keeps her on pension because he doesn’t have the heart to ship her. Big Mama is approximately the circumference of a backyard LP tank and nearly as long. These days she is docile and grunty, but when she was younger, Big Mama had a litter and began to savage them. Our family grew up reading the wonderful James Herriot veterinarian books, and someone recalled a story from All Things Wise and Wonderful
in which an old farmer dealt with this very problem by procuring a bucket of ale from the nearest pub and letting the pig drink herself docile.
Having neither pub nor beer at hand, the boys sent Dad to town for a twelve-pack. This was great fun in light of Dad’s teetotaling ways, which had become quite public a few years back when one of the incumbent town board members encouraged him to take his turn as a public servant and Dad agreed, but first vowed he would never sign a liquor license. No problem, said the official, only two of the three people on the board are required to sign. Dad was elected to the board, and sure enough shortly thereafter one of the other two board members needed a liquor license. Ordinances stipulate that you can’t sign your own liquor license, so Dad was on the spot. He didn’t sign. So you can appreciate the murmur when New Auburn’s one-man temperance union approached the counter at the Gas-N-Go and plonked down a case of Ol’ Mil. I imagine the word reverberating up and down the street: “Seriously! Bob Perry! Swear t’God! Hittin’ the barley pop!”
But the sow guzzled the beer, and it did the trick. With half a jag on, she let the piglets nurse in peace. Everyone was happy: the sow got a snootful, the piglets got dinner, and my brothers got themselves a good story to tell. As did the garbageman, when he dumped Bob Perry’s recycling bin the following week and noted a smattering of crushed beer cans.
In all the buildup to getting pigs I have pretty much exhausted the reserves of my brothers and brother-in-law, peppering each with question after question regarding the housing, care, and feeding of porkers. Fortunately they are men of patience who furthermore have learned over the long term that their indulgence will be amply repaid by the quality of entertainment provided by my incompetence once I get rolling. These are men who can build things and fix things. I am convinced they frequently convene outside my presence to compare notes and shake their heads in wonder. They have so far stopped short of poking me with sticks.
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