Then it is just Anneliese and me at the island, cutting and talking and sealing. I have a chance to look at her in the light and consider us together, and there is much in the year that has gone off the rails or been pushed aside or lost in the hurry, but here we are, putting up stores for the winter. When the last bird is chopped apart and sealed, we carry the cardboard boxes of meat to the chest freezer in the garage. The freezer is already filled with bacon and pork chops and pork roasts and a pair of hams the size of a tortoise. Now as we work shoulder to shoulder finding spaces for all the chicken, it feels good, like we are yoked together not just in workaday dray but in fulfilled purpose. When the last bird is stashed, we step back and look at the freezer, lid up and full to the rim with meat—every bit of it raised within a hundred-yard radius. Standing there beside my wife, both of us in tattered flannel shirts and grubby jeans, tired and our noses wet with cold, I pull her close and for a long moment we just stare at the freezer, and later we both agree it was one of the most oddly happy moments of our marriage since the exchange of vows, because we did this together.
Nearly every evening around suppertime I am reminded that John Menard is worth $7.3 billion and I am not. The evidence comes hissing from the clouds in the form of one or the other of Mr. Menard’s Cessna Citation Bravo jets returning the managerial troops from their business at the multitudinous home improvement stores, lumberyards, and distribution centers he owns all across the land. Last I checked, a used Cessna Citation Bravo will run you well north of seven figures. Rather than be disturbed by the jets (in fact the fleet docks at an airport eleven miles distant, and although we’re frequently in the flight path, the craft are still at a relatively unobtrusive altitude), I find them a fine source of existential calibration. I pause in what I am doing, tip my head back, watch them slice the sky like barracudas on the wing as I ponder current rates of exchange, and then I ask myself: “So, Mike—how’d you do today?”
In taking my measure in this manner I am following in the footsteps of my father, who has a long tradition of fruitlessly competing against Great Men of Industry. For a while it was J. Paul Getty, and lately he says he’s closely shadowing Warren Buffett, but back in the 1970s it was shipping magnate Daniel Ludwig. “Gotta go catch Daniel Ludwig,” Dad would say as he pushed away from the dinner table for yet another round of chores. At the time, Ludwig was considered the richest man in the world. Dad pronounced his last name “Lewd-vig,” which always tickled us kids. When one of our milk cows gave birth to a scrawny bull calf, Dad named him Daniel Ludwig and announced that this was the calf that would finally let us get ahead. Given the price of bull calves, this would have been a joke in any case, but in an ironic twist not only did Daniel Ludwig the calf fail to thrive, he failed weirdly, remaining skinny and rickety and sprouting patches of creepily silky hair. By the time Dad shipped him, he had gained almost no weight but had grown a pair of gnarled mutant horns.
On better days when we hustled right till dark and got the last cornfield cultivated or one more load of hay in the mow before the thunderstorms hit, Dad would dismount the tractor or tamp the final bale down, then stand in his baggy overalls and cracked leather boots, and happily declare, “Now we’re catchin’ Daniel Lewd-vig!” The grin on his face was a wide-open acknowledgment that it wasn’t ever going to happen.
During the summer I promised Amy we would pitch a tent and sleep outside one night. Now we’re getting frost and I’m about to go on a book tour and play some band dates, and the sleep-out is not going to happen. I love life behind the wheel; the road is filled with friendly faces, and the events support our little family. And while many of my friends, relatives, and neighbors are being deployed into harm’s way again and again, I am driving my Chevy to a nice bookstore in Oskaloosa. But what I suspected at the beginning of this year is true: if a man is away from home nigh unto one hundred days in a year, he will wind up doing things in passing. And you can’t farm in passing. You can’t be a good husband in passing. You certainly can’t be a good dad in passing. On my desk is a list Amy scrawled in pencil the day we planned our campout:
FOOd. watr.
tea
camPStove
Flansh light
sleeping bag
Many nights after milking, Dad played softball in the cow pasture with us. We used milk replacer bags for bases and rotated available kids in from the outfield to take their turns at bat. When Dad batted, John and I ran back to stand against the woven wire fence, but it rarely did any good, as Dad would snap the bat around and drive the ball high into the white pines, where it would tumble down in increments, clunking off the big limbs and snapping twigs. We played right through dusk and into the dark, until the ball was just a gray smudge and the dew was fallen. Some nights he took a few of us fishing in the canoe. I can remember him paddling back across Bass Lake in the dark, the smell of the warm water, the sound of the Hula Popper smacking the lily pads. Years later Mom told me that many of those nights he couldn’t feel the paddle in his hands, his carpal tunnel was so bad. He would be up half the night in pain, with the next day due to start before the sun. By the time the last cow was milked the following evening, he must have been aching for sleep. And yet he made time for us. “If you tell your child you’re going to build a treehouse, build it,” says the writer Jim Harrison, “or you’ll live forever in modest infamy.” Amy’s camping list is in clear view on my desk and will remain until she and I spend a night in that tent.
I am on the road, half a state away with my usual trunk full of books. My cell phone rings. It is Amy, her voice brimming with excitement. “Guess what I am holding! Right in my hand!” I play naive. “A toad?” “No! I just got it! It’s still warm.” I hesitate, generating the next wisecrack, and she can’t wait any longer. “An egg!” “No way!” I say. “No! Really! It’s still warm! It’s brown!” “Well, that’s wonderful, Amy.” And it is. The egg cupped in my little girl’s hand is the tangible result of conversations held clear back before Anneliese and I were married. And the eager pride in Amy’s voice reminds me of what Anneliese often stresses—that we are doing these things as a family. Even if I did spend the night in a Super 8 beside the interstate.
Home again, and Jane and I are going walkabout. I have her rigged on my shoulders in the backpack. Distributed throughout the aluminum frame and snugged straps, her weight dissipates to nothing. After all, she weighs little more than a good-sized chicken. As we step into the yard, I twist my neck to get a look at her face and find her looking out over the valley below. Her eyes are wide and steady beneath the brim of her floppy cap. How far out of infancy do we lose this gaze, with its utter absence of expectation or prejudice? What is it like to simply see what is before you, without the skew of context?
We begin on the easy path—a mown strip leading to the ridge past the old circular steel corncrib behind the granary. The crib stands empty beneath its rust-streaked galvanized cap, the iron mesh twined around the south side with a few stray ivy runners. For years it has done little more than sift the wind. At sundown it silhouettes against the sky like some ghostly aviary.
The leaves are well-turned and beginning to fall. Pale brown swatches of ripening corn stripe the far hillside, and crimson swatches of sumac fill the swales like coals banked against winter. The clouds are wispy in a pale blue sky, and the air is just crisp enough that you can imagine the smell of burning leaves despite the clear air. On the unpastured hillsides the tall grass is gone lank and set to fade.
We move off the path and ease downhill into the waist-high grasses. A few weeks ago and I would be stirring up a steady click and whir of fleeing insects—now there is just the occasional grasshopper and a smattering of small ground moths. With each step I’m knocking loose seeds and husks—several of them find their way into my socks. This is an interesting corner of the farm—old overgrown grassland pasture rounding off and rolling steeply into patchwork groves. They shelter a valley where centuries of spring runoff have cut two sharp draws that co
nverge to run in a single ravine westward. The bottomland trees are gnarled and fat, and twisted in mysterious ways, and they grow overlooking sharp banks and sinuous trenches. One is so unusually configured with fat low-hanging limbs and knotholes that Amy has dubbed it her Magic Tree.
Here in the old pasture, there are a few young pine trees—all under six feet and planted by my mother-in-law and the owners previous to her—but mostly the open space is being taken over by box elders. Right at the tree line I come to the old barbed-wire fence. Much of it is still in decent shape—the galvanized wire loose from the posts here and there, and crushed by fallen trees in a couple of spots, but it hasn’t gone rusty, and it wouldn’t take much fixing. Anneliese and I have talked of grazing sheep out here, or getting some beef cows. Fixing this old fence and putting up new is on our wish list for next year. I follow the fence line for a while and find a couple of spots where the wire has been swallowed by the trees, grown deep inside the wood, and it hits me how much easier it is to speak of fixing fence than it actually will be to accomplish the task. I wonder too about clearing all those box elders, and if we’ll have to fence the pine seedlings in if we hope for them to survive the cattle.
I cross the fence and go into the trees now, careful to hold the branches clear as I push through. Only ten feet into the canopy the feel of the place changes. Out in the field there was a sense of sweep and contour—in here with nothing but leaf scrap covering the ground between the big-trunked trees, I get that secret hideout feeling, the same little tingle low in the gut that I got when Ricky and I would hide out in the canary grass along Beaver Creek Road. Down here among the big trees with the sky closed mostly out, things are a gray shade of brown, so when I spot a cluster of brilliant red berries it is like a gift, and I stop to study them, kneeling down and tipping forward so that Jane might see. I talk to her quietly, reveling in the joy of being out on the skin of this rough earth, heads in the cool atmosphere of infinity, and yet able to speak so quietly and be heard. Jane wraps both little fists around the aluminum frame and amuses herself by chewing the nylon. I hike back out into the open and upward, and when I reach the ridge she is still champing happily away. I can see her chubby little arm hanging over the edge of the pack, bouncing in time to the pace we are keeping. I put my hand back over my shoulder, palm up. I see the little hand reaching now, slowly, until she lays her teensy paw in mine, then clasps her fingers around my thumb, and I look to the blue sky and think a silent Thank you.
Anneliese and Amy have gone to the neighbors to get a pickup load of straw for mulch, and I get a little zoom as I always do when I see my wife driving the pickup truck. She sets to digging potatoes in the garden, and I head for the office. Amy is unloading the straw, and Jane is happily struggling to all fours in the garden dirt as the chickens scratch and peck around her. Maple leaves are petaling down, and Jane smashes one in her fist, then shoves it in her mouth. Anneliese is beautiful with a touch of color in her cheekbones, but she also looks tired. I like to make jokes and goof on my own incompetence, but the truth is, this year has stretched my wife beyond anything that is fair. I must find a better way to navigate. As much as I love the animals, I know where my bread and butter lies, and future adjustments may have to take that into consideration. All those times I told smart-aleck stories about farming, while back home my wife fed the pigs. Even more humiliating, next week a man will bring a load of firewood—all my selfish solo chopping, and still I didn’t split enough for winter.
The backbeat of this year—and it’s laid in there deep, you have to listen for it—is that I am trying to do too much, and I’m not the one paying for it. I haven’t cooked a meal with my wife in months. The pantry is full with home canning, and I spent maybe four hours in the garden. The division of labor has become nigh unto no division at all. When my dad was milking all those cows, I still used to see him grab a broom and sweep the kitchen now and then. Lately Anneliese has been doing work as a freelance translator, and when I see her dressed up and leaving the house in a professional capacity I am simultaneously proud and ashamed that I may be depriving her of more of that. In short, I want to be a better husband and a better father, and the most meaningful progress in that direction requires me to do one simple thing: Be There; or better yet, Be Here.
This morning when I go out to feed the chickens, my boots leave a swipe of tracks through the frost. Soon I’ll have to rig a deal to keep the chickens’ water from freezing, and hang a lightbulb on a timer for the worst winter nights. The coop is still unpainted, and I have yet to nail up the trim boards Mills cut to fit the eaves. The structure itself is sitting solid, but just as Buffalo and I placed it, it remains tipped a good bit off plumb. One local wag refers to it as the Leaning Tower of Poultry. When I pull the door open—the door it took me six tries to get right on Mills’s scorching blacktop that day—there are the six multicolored ladies, beadily blinking and ready for the day. I scoop fresh feed into a feeder fashioned from two scraps of plywood tacked in a vee between a pair of one-by-four boards (a rare carpentry triumph—I found the instructions in a library book) and replenish their water. While the chickens dip and peck I raid the nesting boxes. Dad built the boxes one day when I was feeling especially behind, and then he and Amy hung them.
There are three eggs this morning, two of them warm. Likely there will be one or two more by the afternoon, as lately we’ve been nearing consistently peak production. I drop one of the miniature doors open and the surviving Barred Rock pokes her head out first. When I look back just before going into the house, three of the hens are out, tilting their heads curiously at the frost.
And then it’s out of the cold air and into the warm air of the kitchen, and the sound of bacon in the pan. I sure liked having those pigs around, but Bob the One-Eyed Beagle and his crew cure that bacon slow and smoke it with real wood, and at first whiff all residual reservations vaporize. Anneliese is frying potatoes and onions in a cast iron pan. I dice up some tomatoes and garlic, and while they sauté I whip the eggs for scrambling. Amy is setting the table, and Jane is burbling in her baby seat. The ceiling fan in the living room is pushing the heat from the woodstove back to the floor and into the kitchen. We sit down in our small circle for a breakfast in which everything but the salt, pepper, and olive oil came to the table by our own hand. Here we are in the slantways house, the fire warm, our plates full, our chickens tiptoeing from their crooked coop out there on the hill.
EPILOGUE
Before our family grew large, my brother John and I shared the north bedroom of the farmhouse. The town road ran north-south past the garden, and at night the headlights of southbound cars pushed through the windows and slid across the plaster. A shifting rectangle of light would appear on the wall beyond the foot of my bed, pass slowly to the right, then bend around the corner and work back toward the head end, all the while growing narrower and narrower until the rectangle squeezed to nothing and the room was dark again. Traffic was rare back then, and the slippery patch of light always got you wondering where people were going.
Every night, Dad would climb the bare wooden stairs with his Bible in hand. He’d seat himself on the edge of the bed and read a chapter aloud. I can still recall his weight on the mattress, the way it drew me toward him. He’d leaf a bit to find his place, the parchment pages all whisper and crinkle. There were a lot of books in our house. None of them sounded like that book.
He read the chapters in sequence, one per night. He read steadily, with neither adornment nor portent. Just the way, as a matter of fact, that he lived. At the end of the chapter, he rose, tweaked our covers, bid us good night, and left the room. He’d snap the light switch on his way out the door, and start in on a hymn. It is one of the bedrock memories of my childhood, him singing as his footsteps receded down the hall. I can picture his toed-out gait, accentuated by the Li’l Abner curl of his leather work boots. He sang the way he read, purely and plainly, although he had a tendency to hold back on a syllable now and then and drop it behind t
he beat, just a dab of jazz. His voice echoed up the stairwell until he was downstairs and the verse was done. Shortly we would hear the lullaby murmur of our parents in conversation, and the clink of a spoon on a bowl as Dad had his bedtime cereal or a dish of ice cream.
How warm we were in our beds, watching the light slip silent around the room until it shrank into darkness and we went heavy-lidded to sleep.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost, to my parents—anything decent is because of them, anything else is not their fault.
Gene Logsdon, Ben Logan, and Jerry Apps—country chroniclers long before I tossed my first forkful.
John and Julie—ever since we got out of prison, things have been going great. Mills (redneck doula and amateur body piercer), Billy and Margie (Knuckles, R.I.P.), Buffalo (Gosh, I hope it’s sunny for the next thirty years), Racy’s and the Racy’s crew for low lighting, late hours, drop-shipping, and a tab (and a special hello to Mister Happy for making me appear to be Miss Congeniality by comparison. Are those beans dolphin-safe?). Karen Rose for math. Krister for the usual rescues. Matt Marion for work and cat stories.
Robert Gough, from whose book my cutover synopsis was drawn. Wisconsin Historical Society, the curators of www.monarchrange.com, and Mary Beth Jacobson at the Dodge County Historical Museum.
Our Colorado family. ALR (giving public radio some low end). McDowells—indulging me now for decades.
Alison for the start, Jennifer for the finish (are we there yet?), Jeanette Perez, Rachel Elinsky, Jason Sack. Lisa, Tina, and now Elizabeth. Scranton (books in boxes!). Mags everytime.
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