Visiting Tom

by Michael Perry

  We always used to weigh’em at Augusta Bean and Bacon Days. One of the early years they each gained 700 pounds. I had ladies tell me, “I could do that if I tried!” He cackles and shakes his head. They got to be 2,700 pounds. We had to go to a six-foot yoke.

  I got my ideas for making yokes from reading those Foxfire books. This one’s white pine. You see the knots in it. Knots, you don’t get drying cracks like you do in straight-grain wood. The way I made these, I cut a cardboard pattern that was folded in half so it was equal. Then you get, oooh, probably about a 10×12 timber, maybe 10×14. You drill your holes first, so you stay square with the world. Then you mark everything according to your pattern and take the chain saw and rough it out. I’d boil the oxbow sticks in a big hog kettle for a couple of hours, then bend’em. The first bend goes pretty good, but the second one tends to kink on ya. You want a pair of oxbows, you better have at least half a dozen sticks, because they don’t all turn out.

  A phalanx of cycles rolls through, their tailpipes obliterating his story. He stops talking. Stands. Waits. The photographers are shooting digital snapshots for reference. You want to make sure you know how things frame before you burn up the 8×10 rectangle of film in that Deardorff. No do-overs.

  The cycles recede and he takes up where he left off. We had a third ox: Otis. We called him Odie. He didn’t pull. He was just a pet. Six feet tall at the shoulder. One morning we loaded him up and took him to the sale barn and put him on the scale. He weighed 3,000 pounds. I’d be welding and I’d feel a nudge on my shoulder, and it’d be Odie. I’d scratch him and talk to him and then he’d go over to the porch and rattle the doorknob so Arlene would come out and feed him a loaf of bread. She got the bread up there at the Plank Street bakery. The lady had a shopping cart in the back full of bread and doughnuts and a sign on it that said “Otis.”

  Beneath the dust the cart is painted red and green. Tom built it from the back half of a hundred-year-old buckboard. The wooden-spoke wheels stand as tall as his chest. The seat sits on leaf springs. Eleva Broiler Fest was the biggest crowd, he says. People lining the streets eight deep. Arlene and the girls would be in there and these big lugs would spot’em every time, and stop and beller at’em. Among all those faces they recognized their own people.

  This is a tough space for the photographers, cramped and oddly lit. While they experiment with the angles, Tom keeps talking. Yah, very few people know where the term “acre” for measurement of land came from, and that was the amount of land an average man and a team of oxen could plow in one day. This country was built more with oxen than it was with horses because ordinary people couldn’t afford horses. Oxen, you could raise’em from any cattle.

  The photographers are satisfied and the flash pops. The cannon is right around the corner there, but there is a tacit agreement to save it for last. Will you shoot it for us? asks the female photographer. Sure, says Tom, real offhand, like it’s something he just might get around to.

  Sure, we can pop a shot.

  IT’S BEEN DRY HERE LATELY. Way too dry. In the fields alongside the county road the corn leaves are twisting up tight. Going all “pineappled,” as I heard someone put it. Robins pant and the chicken run is hardpan. You think of drought, you think of a bleached-bone dome and nothing to scrim the sun, but throughout this desiccant stretch the skies have been oddly busy, popcorned with cloudlets small and scattered as spooked sheep, each trailing a smear of precipitation that drapes into dissipation just above the earth. They commute the heavens west to east, giving the topsoil nothing more than a brief breath of coolness before their shadows slide on. My brother Jed, who farms forty miles northwest of here, says he’s seen the phantom rain streamers do a slow-motion swerve around his tilled fields, shrugged aside, he presumes, by thermal updrafts rising from the baking dirt. They come and go, these faux roving rainstorms, sliding here and there but never really getting it together to form up a meaningful front.

  The heat has helped blanch the oats from milky green to bleached tan and they’re ready for harvest. Actually, they’ve been golden for a while now, but whenever I get the itch to get at them I remember old Art Carlson telling my dad, “When you think it’s time to cut the oats, go fishing for a week. Then they’ll be ready.”

  I take an old scythe down from where it is hooked over a rafter, tip it butt end down, and run a damp whetstone along the curve of the blade. The heavy sliding door of the granary is open to a full view of the valley below. We’ve lived here a handful of years now, and as a longtime flatlander I still marvel at the swoop of the vista. Through a split in the hills two miles distant I can see a segment of the interstate, the cars and big rigs shuttling to and fro. If I shift to the east a bit I can just see Tom Hartwig’s steel shed, the one where he stores the cannon. The rest of his buildings are obscured by the ridge.

  Decades have passed since this granary was a granary. The cupolas designed to admit the auger spout were removed and shingled over years ago, the only evidence of their existence the two lighter squares of roof boards up at the peak that have not faded to gray like the originals. The bins themselves are gated with store-bought lumber and hardware that suggests someone converted them to horse stalls in the 1970s or ’80s. Over there by the double doors, the year 1946 was scratched into the foundation before the concrete dried. The wall inside our garage is dated 1947. Tom told me once that buildings like these came about because of money the government made available after World War II. Two years ago we covered the south-facing shingles with a bank of twenty-four photovoltaic panels. The roof is just a few degrees short of perfect for catching the sun and, depending on the weather, we can scrub away up to half of the electric bill, although on average it runs closer to a shy third. The payoff on this project is decades distant, but the electric cooperative just announced another rate increase, bad news that nonetheless accelerates the return on our investment.

  I use three whetstones to sharpen my scythe. Each is a slender oval that fits nicely to my palm. They vary in grit from coarse to fine. One was quarried in Austria. When I’m in the field I carry the whetstones on my belt in a repurposed plastic pop bottle half filled with water. In addition to providing lubrication and keeping the grain of the stone from becoming clogged, the water makes a slurry of the stone and steel particles, thus enhancing the sharpening action. It’s calming to work in the old granary with the sunshine angling in and a cross-breeze pushing through. I spend a lot of time on the road, and sometimes it seems as if this country is either sadly slumping or hyperactively rising and no in-between. It’s a solid comfort, then, to stand here on this concrete floor with that date etched in the foundation behind me, watching other people run the distant interstate. Sometimes I think maybe the only thing I’ve learned in this life is to simply inhabit moments like these. To feel the sun, see the valley, hear the stone rasping on steel.

  My wife, Anneliese, and I live with our daughters in an old farmhouse at the far end of a dead-end township road that rises on a grade so steep the local cross-country coaches truck their high schoolers out here for interval training. Every year they use colored chalk to inscribe the asphalt with yard markers and inspirational slogans. NO PAIN, NO GAIN, it says, halfway up. Three-quarters of the way, YOU CAN DO IT! Then, just short of the crest: POP THE TOP! I do some running now and then, and every time I slog across POP THE TOP!, my inner voice says, Son, that happened about a mile ago.

  Starkey Road, it’s called. Nothing but hill, top to bottom. It’s only two tenths of a mile long, but the pitch is such that if you’re headed uphill and more than an inch of snow blankets the blacktop, you need a full head of steam upon approach or you’ll ascend three-quarters of the way and then slide down backward—a bracing experience if you are hauling several thousand pounds of milk or a vanful of family. You really haven’t butt-clenched the seat covers until you’ve surrendered a hill mid-blizzard, in the dark, in reverse, with the wheels locked and no point of reference but a pair of obscured mirrors.

  To pict
ure the logistics, imagine a line bent at a 90-degree angle, with the point of the bend softened into a curve. This is the county road. When we come home from town we approach the Starkey Road intersection on the county road from the north and make a left-hand turn to go up the hill. However, anyone who has ever lived up this hill quickly learns that making the standard left-hand turn in snowy conditions is futile. Instead, if there is any accumulation on Starkey, we continue through the curve of the county road a half mile or so and then—after turning around in Fitzger’s driveway—approach from the west. This approach—and the fact that a wide patch of blacktop aligns the right-hand lane of Starkey Road with the right-hand lane of the county road—allows us to build the hammer-down momentum required to make the crest. For decades everyone—including each and every milk truck driver, school bus driver, delivery truck, and mail carrier—has relied on the straight-and-speedy approach.

  There is a turnaround where Starkey Road terminates atop the hill, and I am told that over time it has been a popular spot for drinking and necking, although in our few years here it has collected only a scattering of beer cans and scant evidence of love. One spring I did find a backpack containing schoolbooks and a blister pack half full of unidentifiable pills. The whole works was slung deep into the brush, as if it had been ditched at the sight of approaching headlights. The pills had turned to mush, stymieing my detective work. I also discovered a detached license plate, which I intended to have a sheriff’s deputy pal run through the system, but while verifying the ethics of that request I put the plate in the pole barn and have only just now remembered it.

  Two driveways can be found atop the dead end. One departs at a right angle and leads to the home of a neighbor. The other—ours—runs straight off the terminus before curving out of sight through a patch of oaks. Where the right-angle driveway is a smooth asphalt beauty, ours is a heaved and honeycombed jumble of busted-up blacktop and beweeded potholes. Point being, if you make it more than twenty yards down the ruts and don’t realize you’ve left the public road, well then either you’re not paying attention, or yer snoopin’. And if you make it all the way to the end of the driveway, which describes three curves and runs a couple tenths of a mile, well then you’ve definitely intruded.

  After we moved here, it was not unusual for unfamiliar vehicles to come nosing in, pull around in front of the garage, perform a rubbernecking Y-turn, and then ooze on out back the drive. My in-laws lived here nine years previously and had the same issue. It didn’t seem like a real big deal, although it was more unsettling when my wife and daughters were home alone, or when we arrived after being away to find tracks in the snow, or—more than once—when we came upon someone in our yard simply having an unabashed look around.

  I have a writing space in a room over the garage. My folding-table desk faces a set of windows positioned directly above the garage doors. The vantage point is such that I can see the granary, the pigpen, a distant hill, and a good swath of the yard. I also have a direct view to the asphalt pad in front of the garage doors. This is parentally strategic, as the children and their playmates tend to congregate there with their bikes and trikes, and since I keep the windows open and they forget about me, I am able to gather reams of actionable intelligence. When spats break out and I magically materialize (the door to my office exits at the rear, allowing me to circle the building and appear out of nowhere), armed with a veritable transcript of the preceding events, they gape at my omniscience. The other option is to deploy the Voice of God technique, which is to say I go all stentorian on them through the screen, with the effect that they momentarily freeze like African dik-diks before a lion’s roar. And regarding uninvited pilgrims, I can also report that if you sneak around the garage and park yourself right at a trespassing driver’s left elbow, a declarative “How you doin’!” is usually sufficient to bounce them headfirst into the dome light.

  As a bachelor of thirty-nine years, I was late out of the gate on the dad thing. My elder daughter, Amy, was three when I met her, and four when her mother, Anneliese, and I married after a chance meeting in the Fall Creek Public Library (In Six-Word Memoirs on Love & Heartbreak, I told the story thus: “Bachelor visits library. Books wife [nonfiction].” I have offered to license that quote to the American Library Association for use in all of their promotional materials; so far, nothing.) Amy is now as tall as my shoulder, and last year as I watched from the dark at a ballet recital she moved so graceful-ghostly through the blue light in her white costume that I was reduced to the usual parental mist. This had something to do with Art, but even more to do with Time. Then again, I am Adam’s-apple deep in the middle-aged maudlins and the same poignant pang recurred a week later when Amy dragged the garden hose into the pigpen and refreshed the wallow while dancing barefoot in her swimsuit as the hogs flopped about like giddy mud-rassling walruses.

  Jane, our younger daughter, was born in the upstairs hallway of our old farmhouse and is these days roughly the same age as Amy was when we met. Jane is predominantly a delight, although given to fits of comporting herself as the emotional equivalent of a D8 Caterpillar bulldozer: Viewing life as a big pile of dirt, she drops her blade and plows through. We are regularly reminding her to use her “tiny voice,” and once when she was still in diapers I found myself telling her she was behaving like a “ruinous termagant.” Sadly for me, she is lately supplementing blunt force with more intellectually based weaponry, including linguistic lawyering. The first time I caught her sticking out her tongue behind Mom’s back, I issued the usual interdictions. A day later, after instructing her to pick up her socks, I whirled and caught her mid-stick. Rather than retract her tongue, she flattened it, stuck it out even farther, and let her mouth gape open. “I hope you’re not sticking your tongue out,” I said. “I’b dot!” she said, brightly. “I’m saying aaahh so you can check my tongue, and that’s a good thing!”

  Then last winter, after fruitlessly fighting a stubborn infection, she went on a course of oral antibiotics. They were allegedly cherry-flavored although the way she fought them they might have been skunk oil cut with maraschino bitters. Every dose went down with storm and stress. One evening, despite having internally sworn never to do so, I broke down and defaulted to the old leveraged standby: “Can’t you drink your medicine like a big girl?”

  Glug. Straight down the ol’ hatch.

  Night two: “Can’t you drink your medicine like a big girl?”

  Glug.

  Night three: “Can’t you drink your medicine like a big girl?”

  The blue eyes were cool as shaved ice, the gaze steady. “When you are a big girl, you can drink it.”

  I am going with the theory that this level of sustained intellectual engagement will keep the old man young. This line of thinking suffered a severe setback at five o’clock this morning when the tot thundered into our bedroom to stand six inches from my ear while doing jumping jacks and gleefully hollering, “WE ARE GOING FOR A NIGHTTIME WALK!”

  We live on a farm, but I am not a farmer. I feel compelled to make the distinction right up front because for the sake of promotional shorthand I am sometimes represented as such. We raise fifty or sixty meat chickens every year, we have another sixty or so layers, and, depending on whether or not you know the location of the secret refrigerator, we may or may not generate a little feed money by selling brown eggs on the black market. The pork in our freezer spent its time on the hoof snuffling around within sight of the yard, and whatever they didn’t root from the ground, I lugged to them. Out there on the ridge you will find a modest stand of corn, and downslope from the garden are plots of oats and wheat. Occasionally I travel down the road and help one of my neighbors bale hay; in return he chugs up here with his John Deere 620 and three-bottom plow and flops enough sod to give me a new corn patch. So I spend some time in barn boots. But when it comes to making a living, I do it mostly by typing. Books and magazine articles, the occasional poem. Another eighty to a hundred days per year, I hit the road to give talks,
perform at small theaters, and play music with my band. You may have pigs, chickens, and a spotty half acre of corn, but if you are absent from the operation upwards of one hundred days per annum, you dare not designate yourself a farmer. Should I return from one of these excursions to discover my pigs are all hooves-up and the chickens have molted and bolted, well, that’s a bad weekend. But it doesn’t mean I’m gonna be entering desperate negotiations with the banker. Real farmers have something on the line. In short, they bet the farm.

  Full-scale or not, it feels good to walk from the granary into the oats and set to swinging that old scythe. I’m sure my technique is suspect, and having spent some time in online scythe forums I realize lighter European scythes are all the rage these days, but I don’t care because with each ungainly swing I’m remembering the day I strode across the freshly tilled dirt with my little shoulder-strapped seed broadcaster, sowing seeds in hope . . . and now, here I am, reaping. I learn pretty quickly that the key is to keep the blade low and flat to the ground, and to swing through the oats rather than at them. Sometimes I get lazy and the tip of the blade scubs the turf like a poorly played pitching wedge, and sand spatters the dry oat stalks. Other times I angle the blade up too much and it flattens the plants rather than cuts them. Mostly, though, I get a good, clean cut and how satisfying it is to hear the severing crackle, to see the plants laid out in a flat bouquet, the stubble neatly shaven. I go for a long while beneath the sun, the sweat pouring from me, but my body coming into its own. When it’s warmed up and humming like this, all the accumulated impingements of middle age seem to disappear.