So I’m thinking of Fred as I watch my poor daughter again a week later, snipping more timothy and, yes, weeping. The things we do to the children.
Will it pay off?
I don’t know. Looking at her there, I’m thinking maybe I’ll write my own hay-making song, only call it “Wailin’ Again.” I am an imperfect father. This afternoon Anneliese asked if I could fold a batch of clothes before disappearing back into the office. I complied, but with slumpage.
CHAPTER 8
At some point every Sunday evening of my childhood there would come from the kitchen a steely rapping as Mom knocked a clot of Crisco off a soupspoon and into the popcorn pan. Like an albino slug, the white gob rode a self-perpetuating slick across the scarred pan bottom until it lodged at the low spot and puddled out. Sometimes Mom let me roll the spoon against the side of the heated pan. The residual Crisco clarified and ran from the widening hot spot until the spoon bowl shone clean, a modest but potent magic trick.
Mom kept the popcorn in a tin canister. Holding the canister against her body, she peeled back the plastic lid and—using a battered aluminum measuring spoon—dipped out a quarter-cup of kernels and poured them in the pot. They cascaded against the hot steel with the hiss of sleet pellets driven against a tin roof, sizzling electrically until Mom placed the lid, muting the spatter. Now and then we heard the abrasive scuff of the pan against the burner as she shook it to redistribute the kernels and oil. Eventually the first tentative pops came, and then a few more, and then like a metronome on a runaway came the frenetic firecracker rush like the whole string lit, miniature bull-snorts of steam escaping the lid until the expanding corn boosted it clear. Pressing the lid down with one hand and grabbing the handle with the other, Mom shook the pan again, coaxing a few more unspent kernels to blow. Then she dumped the contents into a stainless steel bowl big enough to bathe twin babies. The corn tumbled with a snowfall sound, an occasional old maid pinging the steel.
Then Mom gouged another knob of Crisco from the can and repeated the process. Between batches, she sliced apples and cheese, requisitioned one of us kids to move a stack of bowls to the table, and dumped sugar into the Kool-Aid pitcher. Whoever helped mix the Kool-Aid got to pick the flavor and lick the inside of the packet—a face-twisting treat that stained your tongue some fraudulent primary color. As ever, Mom was trying to do sixteen things at once, so the kitchen was often stratified with smoke from the inevitable burned batches. Anything short of cinders went in the bowl, and perhaps as a result to this day I fancy browned popcorn; the partial incineration imparts a malty nuttiness. When the stainless steel bowl was overflowing, Mom salted the whole works down, hollered, “Popcorn’s ready!” and there was your supper.
The other delightful part of the Sunday night tradition was that everyone was allowed to bring a book to the table. The idea of being able to read while eating was delicious in every sense. My brother John read Jack London books and Rascal by Sterling North—you will not be surprised to learn he once fashioned a hat from the skin of a skunk and currently resides in a homemade log cabin. Dad usually read Farm Journal or Successful Farming or The Agriculturalist. The younger siblings brought picture books, and during his tenure Jud flipped through his omnipresent JC Penney Christmas catalog. I read my usual Tarzan and cowboy books, but I also remember holding The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn open with one hand while I shoveled popcorn into my face with the other. It was a broken-spined hardcover. There were illustrations within, so I wonder if it might have been an abridged version. Whenever I smell scorched Crisco, I think of Mark Twain.
It must have been a sight: eight to twelve of us packed around the dinner table, heads bowed over books splayed flat (somewhere a librarian cringes), the pages held open with one hand while the other dipped in and out of the corn, back and forth from bowl to mouth, the rhythm interrupted only when someone refilled a bowl or took a pull at their Kool-Aid. When your eyes are fixed on text, you tend to fish around with your free hand, and nearly every week someone upended their Kool-Aid. The minute the glass hit, Dad jumped up to make a dam with his hands in an attempt to keep the spill from leaking through the low spot in the table where the leaves met. For her part, Mom grabbed a spoon and scraped madly at the spreading slick, ladling the juice back in the glass one flat teaspoon at a time so it could be drunk. The same thing happened if someone spilled their milk. Sometimes when I wonder how my parents managed financially, I think of Mom going after those spoonfuls of Kool-Aid like an environmentalist trailing the Exxon Valdez with a soup ladle, and there’s your answer.
Now that we kids have grown and have kids of our own, “popcorn Sunday” has become the unofficial get-together night. There is no formal planning, you just drop in. Sometimes it’s just a handful, sometimes the crowd is big enough that an additional table is required. Often it’s brothers and sisters, but our friends and some of the neighbors also show up. For a decade after I moved back to New Auburn I lived six miles from my parents and rarely made it to popcorn Sunday. After I met Anneliese and introduced her to the tradition, she became the one who pushed for us to go more regularly. Now that we have moved farther away she is even more avid about keeping the date, and at least once a month she asks, “Are we planning on going to popcorn?” It makes me feel good, because I take it as a sign we have become quite solidly married.
Today the answer is yes, and Amy is tickled. She knows she’ll likely see her cousin Sienna, and they will race toward each other on the sidewalk to hug with such aggression you fear they’ll knock teeth loose. If her cousin Sidrock is there, she and Sienna will do their best to doll him up in clothes from Grandma’s dress-up box, and then they’ll all sit down at the play table and fight over who gets the green bowl and who gets the purple bowl.
We smell the popcorn as soon as we hit the porch, and when we step through the kitchen door it’s a relatively full house. Mom and Dad and Tagg are there, and a little girl named Gloria Mom is caring for on a temporary basis. Gloria has severe epilepsy syndrome and is sitting strapped in her rolling chair beside the Monarch woodstove with her feeding tube hung from a hook on the wall. Mark and Kathleen are sitting on the piano bench, and Sidrock is charging around with a plastic dinosaur. John and Barbara are seated on the bench by the window beside Jed and his wife, Leanne. Amy and Sienna are already clacking around in high heels and tiaras, and just as we are dishing up the corn, our neighbors Roger and Debbie drop in. They have a truck farm down the road, and Roger and Jed share fieldwork. Roger is a John Deere man to the bone, and he sees to it that Jed’s little boy Jake—currently roaring in and out of the kitchen with a plastic tractor—has plenty of green toys.
The table is the same as it always was, the Formica of the center leaf brighter than the rest because it sat in a closet out of the sun the first few years until the family grew large. Over on one side of the aluminum trim you can still see the saw marks from the remodeling days when Dad used the table as a sawhorse. When we were kids Dad sat at the head of the table, but tonight he’s sitting on the oven door of the woodstove holding Tagg, who grins and drools per usual and waves the back of his hand at everyone who enters. Occasionally he pauses to woof or bite Dad on the arm. Mom sets the giant bowl of popcorn at the center of the table and Jed starts dishing up, the bowls passing around until everyone has one, the cheese and apple plate following, as well as a plate of vegetables. There is no Kool-Aid, but rather pop—the cheap stuff from IGA.
We don’t read around the table anymore—too many grubbing little hands to manage that—but there is nonstop visiting. There is some discussion of current events and low-level nonmalignant gossip with careful circumventions around certain areas of politics, and a lot of stories from the past. Dad usually doesn’t say much unless we convince him to get going. In my favorite moments someone will crack a good line and I’ll look over and catch Dad with his head tipped down, his eyes closed, and his shoulders shaking silently. That’s the full-on sign that you’ve caught his funny bone.
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sp; Jane is fussing, so I take her out through the porch and into the addition. Settling in the recliner, I cup her diapered butt in one palm and tuck her head beneath my chin, and shortly she is asleep. This is one of those moments I’m trying to soak in, to remember what it is for her to fit my chest like this. In the other room I can hear my family talking and laughing, and in here it’s just me with the baby asleep and Jed’s boy Jake grinning at me from beside the coal bucket that still holds the blocks Dad glued together with soybean paste all those years ago. Jake’s favorite movie is Cars, and every now and then he says “Pang!” and tips his tractor back on its butt, just like in the film. Now Sidrock comes roaring in, and shortly after him Amy and Sienna, but Jane snoozes through it all, the noise of her generation drowning out the sound of the previous generation around the popcorn bowl in the other room.
The chickens are growing quickly, and scoot back and forth from the tractor to the pump house like old pros. At first we had to reach inside the tractor and fish them out one by one, and reverse the procedure in the morning when we moved them from the pen into the tractor. But now when I pull the tractor up to the pump house door and drop the gangplank, they skid down it on their heels, then hightail it straight into the roost. One poor little chicken is always last. She is racked with constant tremors. They came on early and have persisted, so we call her Little Miss Shake-N-Bake. The tremors affect her gait, and it always takes her a few tries to hit the chicken tractor ramp straight on. But she’s game. You can see her gather herself, resolutely struggle to point her wagging head at the door, and then, like the drunk choosing the one in the middle, dive for it. If she crashes into the side of the door, she simply gathers herself and tries it again. Sometimes I give Little Miss Shake-N-Bake a boost. As a result of watching her struggle, Amy has come to love Little Miss Shake-N-Bake as her favorite chicken.
The pigs are rapidly churning up their patch, upending clusters of quack, bumping up rocks, and now and then—based on the occasional barking seal noise that floats up from the pen—testing the limits of the electric fence. They are beginning to lose some of their charm, grunting aggressively and nipping at my calves when I enter the pen to refill their feeder. Try lying down once and see what happens, they seem to be saying. But it’s still fun to grab the slop bucket and call out “PIG-PIG!” just to hear them woof and see them come bounding out from their excavations to press their snouts against the wire panels with their ears in the “What’s up?” position. They quickly outgrew the rubber tub I bought at Farm & Fleet, so I have taken one of the many plastic barrels Mills scrounged from the dump and cut it in half lengthways to make a durable feeder. When I fill it with slop the pigs dive in feetfirst and fight for every morsel. Sometimes one of them slips and winds up sitting in the soup. Sometimes Cocklebur nips Wilbur in the ear until little spots of blood appear, but so far she has stopped short of devouring him, and he chows on, smacking grotesquely and apparently unconcerned. Wilbur is bigger, but Cocklebur runs the show.
I’m up in the office reviewing notes for a story, and Jane is propped in the green chair again. She’s still a tiny little bean, and I can still balance her on my forearm, but she’s fattening up some, getting a little marshmallowy in the legs, and rounder in the face. Lately she’s been working on holding her head steady. She hasn’t quite got her cranial gyro dialed in, and there is a lot of bob and weave. Sometimes she’ll really get to wobbling, and you can’t help but think of Little Miss Shake-N-Bake. She’s also been working hard to summon her first laugh. We’ll make faces and her eyes will crinkle and her mouth will twitch up, but then she just sputters and gacks and hacks. The other night when Anneliese was bathing her in the bathtub, I leaned over and asked Jane if she was happy and I swear she said “Uh-huh!” but then it was back to happy drooling and there has been nothing since.
Here in the office now her face has begun to crumple. I switch the music from Tom T. Hall to Gnarls Barkley and turn it up. Her head bobbles in the direction of the speakers, and I have bought myself three more minutes.
Down beside the pigpen, the sweet corn is tasseling. I weeded it just once, and it came on remarkably well. The soybeans, on the other hand, have been all but swamped by the quack. It is midmorning, and Amy and I have come down to feed the pigs zucchini. If you just chuck whole zucchini in there, they tend to ignore it, but we’ve found that if you chunk it up they’ll have a go at it. Instead of using knives or even a spade, we slam the zucchini against the wire panels. If you do it hard enough, they dice themselves. It’s a very satisfying transformation. Cocklebur seems to be lagging behind Wilbur size wise. She’s nice and healthy looking, just smaller. I haven’t wormed the pigs, figuring that since they’re the first pigs on this patch in twenty years if not forever, it’s not necessary. Now I’m second-guessing myself, so I wait until Cocklebur goes over into the bathroom corner (pigs tend to defecate in one corner of the pen only) to do her business, and then I crawl over the panel and study the poop, kicking it apart with the toe of my boot. I don’t see any worms. Maybe she’s just smaller because she’s a girl.
I send Amy up to the house to turn on the hose tap, and we fill the wallow. This has become our favorite activity of the day. The pigs revel in the water, sticking their snoots into the stream, closing their eyes, and letting the water play over their cheeks and face. Sometimes they chomp at the water, and oftentimes Cocklebur gets so worked up she stampedes herself in tight stiff-legged circles, her chunky body teeter-tottering fore and aft. Then she flops at the rim of the wallow and slowly rolls until she goes over center and slides right in. When the sun is hot and the pigs are caked with dried mud, something about the water hitting their skin gives them the itches. They lean hard against the shelter and rub back and forth. Sometimes they back up to a steel post and wag their hindquarters back and forth to hit the right spot. Today I lean in with the grass whip and scrape it back and forth across each pig. The dust flies off their bristly hides, and they grunt happily. With Wilbur, if you hit just the right spot he groans and his knees give out.
On the way back to the house I notice the hose connection is leaking. The brass fitting is squashed to an oval. Apparently it got run over. I’m making a trip to town later today—I add a hose repair kit to the shopping list. Amy and I make sandwiches and eat them on the deck. We’ve had a great morning of being pals. After lunch, I grab a shovel and we go out to the compost pile to dig angleworms. When we’ve got a nice couple of handfuls, we take them over and drop them in the chicken tractor just to watch the chickens fight over them. In between bites of worm, they clean their beaks by swiping them back and forth in the grass. Next we raid the pigs’ bakery stash for a bag of English muffins and scrub them across the poultry wire. This has a cheese grater effect. The crumbs shower down, and the chickens peck crazily.
Like the legendary bullet unheard, the worst bad news rarely gives warning, but rather drops on your head without so much as a shadow to announce it. Think of a feed bag filled with lead shot and allowed to achieve terminal velocity before the dead thump, the impact so echoless and mundane that for one dumb moment we fail to recognize the devastation for what it is.
When the cell phone rang the first time, I did not hear it because I was wandering around the home improvement store and had left the phone in the cluttered front seat of my car. When it rang the second time, I had just departed the lot and was merging to the frontage road. I fished it out, flipped it open, and put it to my ear. Anneliese, her voice dreadfully calm: “You need to go to the hospital. Jake had an accident. He’s coming on the chopper.”
Over twenty years now I have responded to emergencies in the instant, and for the first time ever I went dead blank. I remember the car moving silently down the road while I tried to put the name in context ( Jake…Jake?), tried to get a fix on the message, tried to know what to do, and then the familiar cold focus cleared my brain. I flipped the turn signal and turned right opposite of the way I had been headed.
My brother Jed knew he wante
d to be a farmer from the time he was in diapers. He was still in them when he climbed aboard the Ferguson tractor and managed to punch the starter and get it lurching forward, although thankfully the key was off so he didn’t go far. When he was a preschooler I built him a haymow on the doghouse and rigged a pulley system so he could pull up the miniature hay bales that Dad made for him by hand-tripping the baler knotter. When he got older, my folks had a tough time getting Jed to maintain decent grades in school—not because he lacked the aptitude, but because he simply didn’t see the need for any lessons not available on the farm. In high school they homeschooled him for a while, mainly to prevent him languishing in a classroom. Mom taught him to make bread, how to cook and can, and how to patch his own jeans. Dad assigned him farmbased math problems and lined him up with a work-study job at the feed mill in Chetek. He pushed railcars, unloaded feed, and learned some agribusiness.
He returned to school for his senior year because he wanted to graduate with his friends, and then as soon as the cap and gown were stowed, he began muscling out a living. By turns a farmer, a logger, an over-the-road trucker, and a laborer for any occasion, he supports his family doing whatever it takes as long as it’s honest and borderline legal. For a while he did custom choring—milking cows and overseeing the operation for farmers who wanted to take a week off, or needed temporary help. He was good at it. A couple of farmers came back to find milk production had actually gone up in their absence. Word got out, and he got hired a lot. In the meantime, he was carving out his own living—running a joint milking operation with a friend for a while, doing custom fieldwork, and always the logging and truck driving. He saved up and bought the neighboring farm and took to raising crops and young stock. He got some pigs. And after years of bachelorhood, he found a blond country girl named Sarah and married her. They had been married seven weeks when Sarah was killed in a car accident. Jed answered the call as a member of the fire department and was the first on scene. He did as he was trained, but it wasn’t enough.
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