Growing Up Country: Memories of an Iowa Farm Girl

by Carol Bodensteiner

  And just as I’d planned for many months, I walked up and down the midway and looked at all the games. Each game was run by a “carny,” a man with long hair and tattoos who always seemed to look dirty, who was scary yet attractive in an exotic sort of way. More than once I thought about running away with the fair.

  I’d been up and down the midway a few times with Jane and Sue, looking at the rides, planning what we’d go on and when. Each time they suggested we try one, I begged off. My mind was set on figuring out the right game to play to win the teddy bear. I kept my money tight in my fist for that alone.

  Games with only a few bears hanging on the frame were out. No doubt they were so hard no one ever won. Games with only small bears weren’t for me either. My prize would be a big bear. Finally, I found the game. It was kind of like shuffleboard bowling. For a quarter, you got three tries to knock down all the pins. As soon as I could ditch Jane and Sue, I headed back to that stand.

  From about 15 feet away, I watched others try the game and win. Or they tried and walked away empty-handed. I wanted to take my chance but I was afraid. Even though there were three lanes to play, I didn’t want to play when anyone else was there. It didn’t take long for the carny running the game to see me looking. “Come on, kid,” he called out. “Give it a try. Lots of people win here!” That was all I needed.

  Trying not to appear too eager, I handed the carny a quarter and he gave me the discs. I held one of the discs for a moment to get a feel for the weight and then with some hesitation slid it toward the pins. A couple of pins fell, boosting my confidence greatly. In a rush, I slid the remaining two discs toward the pins. I didn’t get all the pins down, but I got many of them.

  I grinned up at the carny, confident I could pull it off the next time. “I want to do it again,” I said.

  “Sure. Here you go,” he said, smiling back encouragement as he handed me three more discs.

  I got a better feel for the game this time and almost got all the pins down. It was not as easy as I’d thought it would be, but I wasn’t discouraged.

  “You better try it one more time,” the carny urged. “You almost got them down that time.”

  “Okay,” I said, handing over another of my hard-earned quarters in exchange for another chance to win the coveted bear.

  I tried again. And again. And again. Each time I came so close, each time the carny encouraged me to just try it one more time. Within minutes, I wasn’t thinking of rides or food; I was thinking only about the teddy bear. I just had to win. Quarters led to dollars. As each quarter passed from my hand to the carny, anxiety nibbled at the edges of my stomach and desire forced it back. If I tried just one more time, I knew I’d knock the pins down and the teddy bear would be mine.

  Before I realized what had happened, I had handed the carny my entire eight dollars.

  “Too bad, kid,” the carny said. “I was sure you had it. If you just get another quarter, I bet you’ll get it next time.”

  The carny’s words broke through the hypnotic fog I’d wandered in as I handed over quarter after quarter. I couldn’t believe it! In less than half an hour, I’d spent every penny I’d worked all summer saving. And I didn’t win. I stared at the carny stupefied. How? . . . What? . . . How?

  As the carny turned his attention to another rube, and that is exactly what I realized I was, I turned away, shuffling my feet in the trampled midway dust. Defeat weighed heavy on my shoulders and the shouts of carnies yelling to attract passersby to their games echoed hollow and mocking in my ears. Could everyone see what a fool I was?

  Blinking back tears, I stumbled down the midway as fear rose in my gut. How could I tell my folks? If I’d won the teddy bear, playing the game with all my money would have been justified. At least I thought so.

  It hadn’t occurred to me yet what I would do for the rest of the fair. My folks weren’t the kind to just give me more money. We could spend what we earned—although I knew they’d think I’d been foolish wasting all my money on the carnival games—Lord knows with each passing step I felt more foolish all on my own—but I was certain they wouldn’t give me more money either. It had never really occurred to me that I would miss out on rides and cotton candy and hot dogs. My plan was to win the teddy bear and have money for the rest. Eight dollars was enough money to have it all. I convinced myself I wouldn’t have minded no rides and no cotton candy and no other games if I’d had my prize. But now, I had nothing.

  I didn’t want to see anything else at the fair. I didn’t care what ribbons I got on my 4-H projects. I was sick and I stumbled back to Mom in shock.

  Collapsing into her arms, tears streaming down my face, I spilled out my tale of woe in breathless hiccups. “Mom, … I tried to win a teddy bear … and I didn’t … and I spent all my money.”

  Mom pulled me onto her lap, wrapped her arms around me and held me tight, as she crooned words of comfort. “Oh, honey. You must really have wanted to win.”

  Mom didn’t say I was foolish. Neither did Dad. They didn’t have to. I knew it. Embarrassment at my own stupidity stuck in my throat like a piece of meat eaten too fast, too big and too tough to swallow.

  Mom and Dad did fill in for the things I would have missed having spent all my money on the first day, but the fair was ruined for me anyway. I couldn’t let it go. I dragged around like a whipped dog, disconsolate, well after the carnies packed up the rides and left for the next town, long after the smell of grilled hamburgers no longer hung on the July air.

  Finally, Mom couldn’t stand my pathetic moping anymore and she took me to the Woolworth Five & Dime on Main Street. Focused as I was on winning a teddy bear at the fair, I had never paid much attention to the bears lining the store shelves. These bears were more glorious than any I could have won, and Mom bought the one of my choice. Hugging the big brown-and-gold bear to my chest, I snuggled up against Mom all the way home.

  At that moment I thought I was happy; I believed I was happy. I wanted a bear, and I had a bear. But being given a bear from the store was not the same as winning it on my own. It was most definitely not the same as earning it. I knew it then and I know it now.

  That summer, I was captured by the desire to get something for nothing. Caught in that desire, I failed to see that the midway games—even those that appeared to be based on skill—were really games of chance, contests designed to favor the carnival, matches more likely to be lost than won. Even though I was raised on common sense, knowing that I had to earn whatever I received, I followed the siren song of that desire. My pursuit of that teddy bear demonstrated in a way I could not miss how gullible I could be, how easily I could lose sight of common sense, how quickly I could be seen as foolish to my parents, to myself. These were lessons hard to learn and impossible to forget.

  After many years, I still see the fair as a highlight of the summer, but I keep my money in my pocket when I pass the carnies and hear their beguiling calls. I remember the Jackson County Fair and the illusive teddy bear.

  Options

  The long shelf of Nancy Drew mysteries constituted more than half of our home library. While sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the bookshelf, I had considered all the titles. So many options. Which one to choose? Since I had read some volumes at least three times, the question was really whether to pick one I couldn’t remember at all or a more familiar one. I forgot most story details within weeks of reading them and as a result could return again and again, reading our books with alternating feelings of stomach-clenching suspense and not-to-worry familiarity. Today I chose a comfortable world. “The Whispering Statue” was a favorite.

  When I pulled the volume off the shelf that morning, I’d been intent on finding a quiet place to curl up, but I opened the book and began reading at once. I’d moved barely five feet when I was drawn so deeply into the action on the pages that I stopped moving and stood lost in another world, a world of mysteries and clues and discovery where Nancy Drew grabbed me by the hand to race along in her life of ad
venture.

  Now I stood, leaning against the wall, book in one hand, my other arm crooked behind my back, my fingers clutching the door frame. It is another fluke of my brain that when I read, I am aware of little else around me. So I didn’t hear Jane and Sue until they were tearing up the stairs in front of me.

  “It’s mine!” Jane yelled over her shoulder as she hit the stairs, bounding up two at a time.

  “It’s not either. It’s mine. Give it to me or I’ll tell Mom,” Sue skidded around the corner from the living room, snapping at Jane’s heels. Sue had almost no chance of getting whatever it was they were fighting over, but she was as persistent as the bull thistles that defied our hoes when Dad sent us down the lane to chop the prickly giants growing wild in the pasture.

  “You’ll never get it,” Jane gasped as she made it to the top of the stairs, tore past me into the upstairs bedroom and turned, slamming the door.

  “Will too. You just wait,” Sue screeched. She dove toward Jane just as Jane threw all her weight against the door and it crashed closed. On my fingers.

  The sound of my fingers crunching was drowned out as Sue hammered on the door, throwing threats at the top of her lungs.

  The sound of my screams was covered by Jane’s near-hysterical laughing as she leaned against the door, shoving back against Sue’s equal and opposite force.

  Sue shoved; the door opened a quarter-inch; my fingers pulsed and I pulled.

  Jane shoved back; the door firmly closed; my fingers ground into the space by a hinge.

  Every nerve in my body fired like a lightening strike, and I shrieked, “My hand. My hand. My hand!” I knew there was no blood in my face any more, certain as I was it was all draining out my fingers.

  My screams penetrated Sue’s ears at last. She looked at me and went pale. “Stop pushing, Jane,” she bellowed. “Carol’s hand is in the door.”

  There is a unique difference in the sound of children’s screams that allows mothers to differentiate between play and danger. Mom heard excruciating pain in my voice, and she materialized at the top of the stairs as if by magic.

  Half carrying, half dragging me to the kitchen sink, Mom turned the water faucet on full blast and thrust my throbbing hand under the ice cold stream. “Hold it here,” she shouted. Or she may have whispered. I don’t know which; her voice came to me as though she were a long, long way off.

  “I can’t,” I sobbed. “It hurts.” My knees were rubber. My stomach watery. Swallowing hard to keep back the bile that rose in waves in my throat, I rested my head on the cool edge of the sink, letting the tears cascade down my cheeks and drip on the floor.

  With one arm wrapped under my armpits, her leg wedged like a seat under my behind, Mom held my hand under the water. “You’re going to be okay,” she repeated. “This water will make it feel better.” After a minute she asked, “Can you wiggle your fingers?”

  I had yet to even be able to look at my hand; I didn’t even know if I still had my fingers. Her question made me realize my fingers must still be on my hand. “It hurts,” I whimpered.

  “I know it does. But come on. Let me see you wiggle your fingers.”

  Moving my fingers didn’t seem possible, let alone wise. What if I couldn’t move them? What if moving them made it hurt more? Maybe it was better not to know. I clasped the wrist of my mangled hand in the rigid grip of my good hand, afraid that if I let go, blood would spurt out or my hand would fall off.

  “Come on. Move them. Let’s just see,” Mom urged.

  Lifting my head, I forced myself to look at my hand. I expected to see mangled meat. The damaged fingers curled toward my palm and bore sharp, white ridge grooves where they’d been pinched in the door. Remarkably, beyond a few drops seeping out around the fingernails, blood was not flowing down the drain in buckets. Cautiously, I flexed one finger and then another. It was a miracle. They all moved. I gulped and looked up at Mom. “I can move them,” I whispered.

  “That’s good,” Mom straightened up, visibly relieved. “Now straighten them way out and let’s look.” From Mom’s practical perspective, once we’d established long-term viability, the emergency was over. According to Mom, pretty much any ailment could be solved with cold water, vinegar or Epsom salts.

  That was her solution the day I came limping into the house, sobbing, having just jumped off a fence where I landed barefoot on a nail sticking out of a discarded piece of lumber. My sisters and cousins jumped around like flighty grasshoppers, excited by the blood and my tears. Blood from the deep puncture wound trailed behind me across the green linoleum kitchen floor. Mom grabbed me under the arms, swooping me up onto the kitchen counter next to the sink. The toes of my foot had curled in toward the sole of my foot in a reflex reaction against the pain, and I watched as my blood oozed clean red out of the hole and streamed down the drain in a flood of cold water.

  Mom washed away layers of dirt, inspected the hole and declared, “We need to soak it in Epsom salts. Keep your foot under the water while I get a bucket ready.”

  As Mom submerged my foot in the hot water, she kept up a distracting stream of commentary. “Grandma Denter taught me about Epsom salts. It really works. Here, let me get you a cookie and a glass of milk. Did you know vinegar will cure a sore throat, poison ivy and sunburn?” I stared at her in disbelief. “Well, it will.”

  For the rest of the morning, I remained in the kitchen, soothed by Mom’s ministrations of Epsom salts and cookies. And it did work, that time and many times more throughout my childhood, though how I avoided tetanus all those years, I’ll never know. In the world of day-to-day ailments, Mom operated, quite successfully as a matter of fact, as though there wasn’t much a doctor could do that she couldn’t take care of just as well with Epsom salts, cold water or vinegar.

  I couldn’t see that Epsom salts or vinegar would do anything for my fingers, though. The cold water was helping some, but blood thumped like a timpani in my ears and in my fingers as I inched the tips straight out. Blood pooled and caked black around the edges of my middle fingernail. The nails of both my middle and ring fingers were already a deep purple, and my index fingernail wasn’t looking so good either. My entire hand was bright red, which Mom assured me was from the cold water. She was convinced I would not lose my fingers or my hand. I was not so sure.

  While I was getting immediate medical attention from Mom, Jane raced out to the barn to tell Dad, omitting, I’m pretty sure, the part about her slamming the door on my hand. By the time Mom had persuaded me I would live, Dad strode into the house.

  Dad’s solutions were more personal, and to be honest, unorthodox. On more than one occasion, for instance, he blew cigarette smoke in my ear to cure an ear ache. It worked.

  “Better let me take a look at that hand, Squirt,” Dad said. He led me outside where he sat down on the bench in the breezeway between the house and garage and pulled me up on his lap. Dad smelled of clean dust from the corn he was grinding for the cows.

  As soon as I was on his lap, tears streamed down my face again. My hand hurt like crazy and I flinched as he took hold of my fingers. Considering how rough and calloused Dad’s hands were, his warm touch wrapped me in reassuring safety.

  “Wiggle your fingers,” he said. I didn’t tell him Mom already made me do that, because Dad was the ultimate authority. Tentatively, I wiggled each finger.

  “That’s good. They’re not broken,” he confirmed. “But you’re gonna lose those fingernails.”

  “It really hurts, Dad,” I said, dissolving in a renewed flood of tears that formed dark, wet blotches on his shirt.

  “I expect it does,” he agreed. “There’s blood behind the nails. That’s why they’re getting all black.”

  I considered my fingers. My nails would get black. They would fall off. Things just got worse. A wave of self-pity for my poor hand swept over me, and a fresh bucket of tears fell.

  “There is something we can do about that,” he said when I’d cried myself out.

  I looked
up at him, my spirits bright with both faith and hope. Dad always knew another way, usually a better way. Once I’d gotten ringworm, a red circle of scabby pimples on my forearm by my elbow. Maybe I caught it from a cow, Dad said. He took me to the doctor in Preston who looked it over carefully and pronounced that the only way to get rid of it was to pull out each and every hair on my arm and then use a special salve every day for two weeks.

  My mouth went dry, dropping open in horror at the very idea of pulling out all my hair. A blanket of fine, silky hair had covered my forearms as long as I could remember. I looked up at Dad, telegraphing panic. Dad just looked at doctor. “The hell you say,” he snorted. “There’s more than one way to skin a cat,” he said, and we left.

  Dad was none too taken with higher education. He finished eighth grade in a one-room country school and never went to high school. He learned everything else he needed to know working. It was just such ideas as the doctor put forward that confirmed his skepticism. And assured that he didn’t send us to a doctor on any regular basis. “Paper don’t care what you print on it,” he said more than once, summarizing his thoughts on book learning.

  When we got outside, Dad said, “That’s not the only way. I know at least two other ways to get rid of ringworm, and damn, you don’t have to pull out any hair.”

  “What are they?” I asked, grateful forever that Dad didn’t leave me with the doctor.

  “One way,” he said, “is to smear cow shit on the spot every day. That will kill it.” He looked right at me when he said this and never blinked. “The other way is to use the same salve we use on the cows when they get it. You can decide when we get home.”

  I climbed into the pickup truck, my arm crooked so I could clearly see the crusty red ringworm circle, a circle completely covered with hair. All the way home, I thought about pulling out each individual hair.

  Dad shook his head solemnly when he shared the doctor’s comments with Mom, “The doctor said we’d have to pull out all her hair.”