Collecte Works

by Lorine Niedecker

  what he can”

  Prose and Radio Plays

  1937

  UNCLE

  There were three crows sat on a tree,

  They were as black as crows could be;

  One said to the other see

  The farmer sowing his seed—

  Isn't he wonderful kind to the poor

  I'm sure.

  (from hearsay)

  He loved the quiet and peace of his old country home. He was a quiet man. But such a career he must have, my Uncle, as to keep him making a name for himself. Changes took place in the country while he, John Julius Benjamin Beefelbein, went on making the same name. Not aggressive—a liberal who gave and accepted all. In the fight to win the good things of life, comfort and retirement from grinding work, and in order to keep his home in the country, Uncle Babe—Matty, fifteen years older than her brother, called him Babe without thinking even when he was big—entered public service at the height of which the initials J.J. did not mean an overpowering gain.

  The family, the two old folks, sturdy proprietors of the resort hotel home, and their daughter and John, entered the fierce struggle to get ahead. But then when I speak of the family in those days I speak of Friedericka, the parent with the flying petticoats sometimes rustling as of sateen, asperity in her whole manner, and she wished she had taffeta. I knew her when I was playing around the place as the child of her niece—we stayed there, my mother and I, while my father was away in a sanitarium. Whereas Great-Uncle Gotlieb, tall, happy, head thrown back…I thought I was to call him Great Uncle because he had such great smiling wrinkles around his eyes…braided my hair and told me nursery jingles…. There were three crows sat on a tree.…And if he saw me at a distance outdoors he'd hold out his arms wide. He was too easy-going for Aunt Riecky. At this time Uncle John as a boy—I suppose I called him Uncle because he was next in line to Great Uncle, open, good natured—was away at school in Milwaukee, home only in summer. The folks were trying their best to give him the advantages. They knew he applied himself at books and was always busy learning to be somebody in an office. Matty was learning to be a dressmaker in town and already sewing for others, helping with John's expenses. Matty was a tall, lean strong figure of a woman, sharp eyes and nose but not bad looking. She often suffered from neuralgia and colds, all from having walked a mile crosslots in woods and marsh to country school—Gotlieb took the children on the road only when the road was passable—and she sat through her lessons with cold feet, perhaps wet. She was Asperity's daughter, though, and went through everything. She could be seen at times, a large handkerchief folded over her head and ears and tied under her chin, working on washboard and sewing machine. Once, I remember, after she'd scrubbed the floor, she stood clapping her hands hard to the words: now my strength is all gone! She inherited the virtue of work from her mother, as in a way did John. Inherited?—but in those days things were stolidly saved and passed along in the family and couldn't be changed. Riecky was the family, but I always thought my Great Uncle Gotlieb was somebody too: he was a naturally happy man. She scolded him for this or that—he stayed out fishing too long and didn't catch anything or slept after the noonday meal and beer or he dressed and cleaned the wild fowl he'd shot so late that she had to milk the cow and feed the horse and her blood was aroused, and this with her habit of work put her through the chores in a hurry. She always did what was needed, cleaning, cooking and directing. Was clean and saving and made it go. She said Gotlieb had a poor way of making it, no action, would never have money, but with her it was different. She could buy their food in winter and when spring came could have $3 left.

  Many times my Uncle Gotlieb of happy actions could be seen walking outdoors, food and drink in his belly, his gun in his hand. Like a landlord, Riecky said, walking around on the lawn. He was considered a good hotel man, people liked him, he enjoyed being a proprietor. A certain class of people came out from Milwaukee—cheese makers and store owners who had money. But usually he was waiting for just anyone to blow in. He may have wanted to be a policeman but outside of town there was no chance, or game-warden, but in those days there were no laws restricting the catch of plentiful game. He must have thought of some princely office or just some good job whereby he might sleep two hours after dinner and the woodbox wouldn't even have to be filled. He sold fish and canvasback ducks to a hotel keeper in the city and John helped with this when he could.

  They were not church people—this was a resort nine miles from the church the farmers were afraid of. They had a feeling about wrong-doing though, knew that you always got paid for wrong-doing, and Riecky especially knew all the orthodox sins. Was a time in Uncle Babe's life when he believed he should become a church man but he resented being preached to or thought he should be the one talking, and it seemed two hours every week wasted when he should be attending to his business and helping people. Matty, tolerant—when another German family never let a Good Friday go by without noodles, prunes and fish—says, That's alright but I wasn't brought up to be a Christian like that.

  Riecky believed in working for people who paid. If they did or especially if they didn't, she cleaned until she was aroused to a frazzle, it was her morality. She left a smell of dirty, oily rags where she'd cleaned, very rank till you got used to it. You had to go through hard things in order to get somewhere in the world, she said. She did her best to rid the place of rats, would often say they should be caught alive, taken up by their tails and dipped in tar. Matty was strong like that, rising up in her frail health.

  Uncle Gotlieb worshipped as he saw fit. He said, as he stood looking up, Trees are the best things a man can have that little while he lives. He would make chests of drawers in wintertime and neat little models for boats or small launches to be built later outside if he could get the materials. You loved to pass your hand over the models, so smooth, dark-rubbed walnut; one now hangs above Matty's sewing machine.

  I always thought the people were really good. What held them back was something they were laboring under—

  The place…trees thick, great branches. Robins' nests allowed on the window sills on the store-room side of the house. Evenings the red-wings, the wind died down, the little river still. The birds gathered close in a song of settling down…over two hundred acres…owned by the family—

  The moss green Morris Chair. The shadows plush green in the water. Pictures of afternoons of those days: women in their chairs, the mild, wild lowland, excessively beautiful, willows, ease-ness, drooping health, the ladies with long, flowing skirts, their handkerchiefs in their laps. The Beefelbeins on such occasions dressed not unlike the guests.

  —The breaths of the women wafting over the children, perfume catarrhal or from rich eating. Sweets were honored, oranges not easy to get.

  —Often nothing to do. A great deal depended on the people who came to the hotel. The Beefelbeins catered mostly to two families of cheese makers, their brothers, and friends who were store men. The two cheese makers were big people—each weighed close to 300 lbs. Withal, they were democratic, and often, Riecky thought, quite common. Their wives wore silk dresses, were refined; the entire crowd demanded good food and waiting on and no matter how sick they got from boat or beer, they always, said she, ate good. After all, they shouldn't think they were Rockefellers—there were people in the world had more money than they. She would imitate them, set two teaspoons at table even when only one was needed—for coffee, the dessert being cake. Everyone knew her, though, for a woman of few dishes. She considered herself socially superior to moneyed people—the virtue of hard work was on her side—they could get into trouble and lazy ways, she thought, spending for rich dishes and drink. The fact that her work served trouble and that it earned her not one-half dozen fresh pineapples or one new jacket in five years…she had little time to think about it.

  —Sometimes on spring election days, her money spent for taxes, she would serve Uncle Gotlieb with the blitz kuchen and soup and water-cress and handcheese he loved—always the ha
ndcheese in a jar back of the stove—and she would ride with him to town over the muddy road after the long winter—he had to attend to voting, didn't he?—an important day for men and they were treated to cigars by those who were running. John had a poem in his schoolbook about voters by a man named Whittier.…She would make it known to Gotlieb that she wanted him to buy her a blouse and a hat, thus making herself dear to him.

  —He admired her caprice; it was part of her energy and he knew which side of his life the kitchen was on. I suppose she never failed to say, several times a week, after he'd gone off with his gun and come back ready to enter: Now Pa, I've just cleaned.

  —The large range she cooked over was always hot, and always she made her own butter and sausages and bread and cheese. Some of the vegetables from the garden she canned. In summer a grocery wagon would come through and she liked to patronize the man who ran it as much as she could. We must patronize him, she told Gotlieb. Sometimes she traded wild fowl or fish for coffee or sugar. The stove would go out only between dinner and supper on hot summer days. Matty now has a beautiful electric range, and beside it on her little wood-and-coal heater is an oven to save electricity. Both the old folks often said, I don't know what it's coming to.

  So the big cheese makers would write to Great Uncle Gotlieb to meet them in town at the depot with the two-seater: Will be 4 of us, will make it worth while for you. And when he'd get there he'd find four beside the two big men and two kegs of beer and a barrel of cheese and other food and suitcases of luggage. Uncle would have to go twice back and forth with them and then again to leave his rented buggy and one horse and bring his own horse and small buggy home, a long day, and sitting alone on this last trip, darkness closing in, mosquitoes, he thought how long he would have to wait—two months, six months, for his money—he could have got it after a month or so, Riecky at him why he didn't, but he had his pride and wouldn't ask a dollar from anyone and he knew they would pay in full and more too whenever they got around to it.

  And it wasn't long before they had him making merry with them, blowing the foam off their beer mugs splotch on the walls. And they pressed cheese upon him. Perhaps they liked people to whom they could be in debt and surely they liked to have people in debt to them. They took enjoyment in those who owed them something. We love you to stay this way, poor, working for us, they said, we want to be your Patrons. Postponement of the pay might even extend over into the next year but then a silk dress would accompany the big check and a silver dollar for Matty and John each. It was just their leisurely, aristocratic social-democracy, perhaps even a kind of aesthetic. They were cultured and didn't have to think of money. And my Great Uncle was cultured too and couldn't demand. Really everyone accepted it as policy. The cheese people still held the mortgage on Uncle's place and although it put Gotlieb in embarrassment to have to be a little late with the interest, that's the way it was in the country. It was this confusion that kept Uncle Gotlieb doing things for them without knowing just where he was. Undoubtedly much the same thing contributed to John's later political and business decorum of letters and dinners and third persons and, as Matty said, handkerchief wavings. So as the days went on the more the Beefelbeins had to do for their boarders so as to be sure the bill would mount up to where they might sooner be paid. Meanwhile their beer would run out and Uncle could make a little profit selling them his own.

  The one man paid Uncle Gotlieb or Johnny immediately upon rowing him out in the boat, and more, so as to keep them working to make it up. The other cheese man would never pay. He wanted to be rowed out onto the lake, the little river emptying into it a quarter mile down, and then rowed around in the bay, fish a little here, and a little there, the oars under the hands cracking, blistering in the hot sun. He would forget to pay, he didn't mean anything by it, he just didn't settle. Both men left the feeling with the Beefelbeins that money was the power but that it made people fat and lazy, money corrupted those who had it. Such people had it too good, Riecky said, high livers. The men sometimes sick from wine or beer had to have Gotlieb support them up the stairs to their bedrooms. I can remember seeing him half carry one of them up and Riecky's summer wurst hanging from the ceiling of the upstairs hallway.

  The feeling that money was bad. Same with machines, city industries that used newer and newer machinery and threw men out of work. Money, principally, was bad.

  It was a hard pull. If things had gone better, John might have continued his education in Milwaukee, this way it was broken off when he was nineteen. He came home, wondered what to do with himself. Roamed with the dog, quietly amused himself, greeted some of the old hotel guests, kept shy of new ones. He was usually a happy person like Uncle Gotlieb, looked like him, same pleasant good face, his nose more of a button, stature about the same—in fifteen years more he was to take on a plumpness making him appear bigger than his father. Plump—Matty shook her head and said he must be taking after some ancestor they'd all missed.

  Often John as a boy was not to be disturbed. It seemed to him the less he did the more his mind worked. Gotlieb understood this in a way, considered the boy more refined than he was himself, educated, his world therefore a little different from that of the old stogies in the wilderness. Let him drift a bit. Johnny would take a boat, paddle out and lie in it. He would look at a tree in a certain light; his sensations the moment he looked formed the tree, he thought, and no one else would find that tree to be just what he found it, and he wondered if the song sparrow would have perched there just then if he hadn't been looking. But Riecky was watching. As John landed back on shore she said, Time for those trees to be cut, been hanging there crowded too long.

  He became interested in the fyke net fishing, got together a small outfit with Gotlieb's help. When John had saved $250 he put it into a cheese factory. The man who came around had been a good talker. Wisconsin was a great dairy state, cheese factories were doing a big business. John's education cut off in his freshman year of Normal School he realized he must depend now on working with his hands and then invest his savings, depend on what money could bring as to further education and leisure. He must be able to stand up against any man. A decent supply of money was good. A decent business, a fair profit—as he looked about him he couldn't quite help coming to that conclusion so early…he came to it helplessly. But it may be said to his credit that he was never against most of the things money can buy. He was a man who wanted to spend money and have nice things. When a chair was without a pillow or an upholstered seat he would reach over to the sofa and get hold of one of Matty's dark red plush cushions. She would indicate he should take the little old pad that the cat used but he would wink and say, This plush is just as good. Or at table he'd butter a piece of kuchen in place of his mother's or Matty's bread maybe getting dry and hard, and with Uncle Gotlieb's smiling wrinkles acclaim buttered kuchen just as good. Riecky and Matty always held the hard view.

  The way the cheese industry developed—a factory sprang up here or there in this country by itself for itself but somehow supposedly for the common good, entering the free competition against others that sprang into individual profits if lucky. Some got themselves joined to a big chain controlled possibly in New York. “Filled cheese” was produced by mixing foreign fats, animal or vegetable, with skim milk. The original butterfat extracted, a cheaper substitute used. In some cheese was found the best cottonseed oil. Much of the full cream cheese was excellent for people who could afford it. John's factory springing up north of Milwaukee was going to produce good cheese. He hit upon putting his money into this concern and letting it work for him. It failed. A big monopoly forced out, sprung, the little one. Uncle Babe went to Milwaukee to the old cheesemaker friends to try through them to bring pressure to bear—he was always to say: find the right people and through them bring pressure to bear—but they were in the business themselves. He didn't think the men in charge of the factory were really dishonest—they had to suffer with the rest—they were making a cheese that was not “filled.” New York
Cream Cheese it was called. Showed they believed in honest food products.

  The Beefelbeins were great cheese people, always had it in some form or other. In the years Riecky was making it at home the state was producing many thousands of pounds and always doubling the amount annually. Hers was good, they knew what went into it, they were used to it. They might have bought some that was better. And again, her sausage meat—to this day Uncle John can find no sausage meat like the old people made it in their homes—he can't think what it's made of now. And shoes—paper!

  Matty, dully, when she heard of John's failure: Cheese kriste. And then went about her housework with force. The way she looked at it, it was just whether you were lucky or not. Baking, weather, business, all depended on luck.

  John, well, he felt—poorer. His mind went back to the Indians, he could only believe their life was best, they had no financial troubles and they had been happy with what they had. At times during his life his mind went back like this. Isolated country living: each family attending at home to its own needs, what a man could do alone was best. Still, he couldn't worry too much now, he was young and everything was possible. You had to go through hard experiences, he guessed, before the good things of life would come. Life is a struggle. The fittest survive…. etc…. He went at it harder, fishing, always the desire to make something of himself, become a director himself. Gradually he went in deeper and hired a crew of five men. Hard work but making money.

  One morning he went out to raise his nets. The game warden who had to supervise for the state, see that only carp and buffalo were taken to be sold, told Uncle John he couldn't raise nets, orders from Madison. At the same time John happened to know the permission to raise nets was given as usual to a man engaged in fishing farther down the river. Immediately he got himself a letter of introduction to the governor of the state, Uncle John, went and explained his cause: he'd paid license and was law abiding, now for no apparent reason the state would do this to him. He hinted that the other man down the river had paid more to gain favors? In ten minutes the governor cleaned out the conservation department, fired everyone who had anything to do with it and thanked Uncle John for coming—just like that.