Visiting Tom

by Michael Perry

  “I can feed Cassidy a bone?” It’s Jane again. Young as she is, she is used to Daddy’s aimless mind.

  “Yep,” I say. “When Mr. Hartwig and I finish our work, you can feed Cassidy a bone.”

  She smiles, then recorks her thumb. We roll happily past the cannon and round the bend beside the barn. A gigantic sleepered semi pulling a fifty-three-foot refrigerated trailer shoots out from behind the whitewashed silo at 70 miles per hour, blasting past so close I can see the IFTA stickers over the fuel tanks.

  I park the pickup over by the shop.

  When my father needed something welded he drove around the three-mile block to see Oscar Knipfer, who stored his torch in the peeled-paint remains of a one-room schoolhouse, wore his overalls without a shirt, and built indestructible hay wagons composed of bridge beams and old Buicks. By the time I was in grade school Dad got his own welder, so the images I retain of Oscar and his shop are knee-high and indistinct: the driveway winding through mounds of steel heaped above man-tall weeds; a big dog; a dark garage-door-sized hole sawn in the side of the schoolhouse to admit larger projects; Oscar’s face a smudge of dirty whiskers. The work zone was a haphazard radius of tools, cables, wooden jack blocks, rags, wads of wire, fifty-five-gallon drums, scrap-metal castoffs, cast-iron oddments, and cannibalized cars doubling as storage lockers, all of it distributed as if the schoolhouse had gaped its black mouth and coughed.

  Surely somewhere inside the schoolhouse there must have been a workbench and vises, but the door was perennially blocked by industrial clutter and yet another partially completed hay wagon, so Oscar worked out in the open, sometimes atop a stack of tire rims, sometimes right on the dirt. He’d mark and clamp the pieces as needed, then kneel to lay the bead or make the cut. When he straightened from his work the knees of his overalls were dark with a mix of soil, waste oil, and slag ash, and his hands were stained the same. Odd, I think, to remember a man’s work so clearly, but not the way he talked or anything other than his overalls and an impressionistic visage.

  Before he’d let you take your wagon, Oscar insisted on painting the running gear (nonfarmers might call it the undercarriage: essentially the steel and wheels) green and yellow. I suspect he obtained the paint at discount, as it came off a tad too lemon-limey to attract the attention of the John Deere trademark attorneys who were anyway not necessarily roaming the sketchier corners of Sampson Township. Apart from their two-tone coloration and in addition to being built to carry more hay than five men might stack, Oscar’s wagons were renowned by farmers all around for their ability to run smoothly down the road. Whereas most factory-built wagons juked back and forth if you got above ten miles per hour, you could draw Oscar’s wagons at highway speeds and they tracked dead true. Dad said it had to do with the Buick parts and Oscar’s seasoned eye.

  Tom is my latter-day Oscar Knipfer, I think, as the screen door opens and the man steps out. The first time I met Tom, he struck me as resembling someone, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it until one day I happened upon a portrait of the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett. The brushy shock of hair, the fatless cheeks, the deep-seamed skin, the nose like a flint broadhead; the basics are the same, although Tom’s is a less hawkish visage, and he tends to rest his features a few creases nearer a grin. The lines in Tom’s face do not convey worry. They seem more a product of curing and mirth. Today as in all seasonable weather he is wearing plain brown work boots, a dirty white T-shirt, and jeans. The T-shirt collar is lightly frayed, and the jeans are cinched across his flat belly with a black leather belt. As he crosses the yard toward us, he walks bent forward at the waist, his elbows back and slightly splayed.

  “Whaddya got?” he says.

  “Pretty simple, Tom,” I say. “Gotta cut some rebar and then put a bend in them about five inches from one end. I was gonna hacksaw them, but I figured it’d be a lot quicker with your torch.”

  Tom nods. “Yah, that’ll be nothin’.”

  “I tried to bend’em cold, but I just about twisted the vise off the bench.” Tom chuckles, and then stumps off into the steel shed that doubles as his shop and garage. His bicycle is leaning against the Crown Victoria he and Arlene use for grocery runs. The bike is of fairly recent vintage, equipped with hand brakes and knobby tires and fitted with a basket for the mail. Back in the darker recesses, bumpered up snoot to snoot with the Crown Vic, is his Model A. He reemerges now, pushing a dolly cradling two cylindrical steel tanks—one containing oxygen, the other acetylene—and begins unlooping the red and green hoses that carry the gases to the torch. “Bought these tanks new in 1964,” he says, apropos of nothing.

  “Year I was born, Tom.” He grins.

  I’ve positioned the truck so that Jane can observe from her car seat. Normally I’d turn her loose on the sod—she has always loved to crawl on the earth and even her size-two jumpers had dirty knees—but I don’t want to risk her grabbing hot steel or being spattered with slag. Kicking around in the weeds beside the shop, I locate a length of treated 4x4 post and prop the lengths of rebar on it so the cut points are held clear of the ground. The traffic noise flows as usual, but I am near enough to Tom that I also hear the scratch of the striker and the puhp! of the gas igniting, then the fluctuating pitch of the hiss as he fine-tunes the oxygen-acetylene mix. At first the flame is a wavering orange ribbon shedding feathery strips of ash, but as Tom alternately twists the twin brass knobs of the regulator, the ribbon stiffens and retracts into a pale yellow cone, the base of which surrounds a circle of minuscule flamelets, each one a sharp blue dart. Kneeling, Tom applies the torch to the first rod. As the flame splays out across the surface he swabs it slowly back and forth. Shortly a half-inch section of the rod begins to glow deep red, then—quickly, because this is not a big chunk of steel—incandescent orange. Now Tom presses his thumb on the cutting valve, releasing a blast of pure oxygen, and a shower of sparks spits from the suddenly molten iron. As Tom advances the torch, beads of slag drip from the kerf and drop glowing to the ground until the cut is complete and the rod falls in two. The glow fades almost immediately, but the steel sizzles in the grass, the green blades blackening even as Tom turns his attention to the next bar.

  As Tom begins the second cut, Jane calls out from her seat in the pickup truck. “Pyre-crapper, Daddy! Pyre-crapper!” I look at her blankly. “Pyre-crapper!” she repeats, pointing toward Tom as another blast of sparks erupts, and now I get it. A few nights ago on our way home from a family get-together, we stopped to watch fireworks. We thought the big booms might scare Jane, but it turned out quite the opposite: After each thunderous retort, she cried out, “More!” Of course the amateurs always have to throw their stuff, and throughout the evening the snapping of firecrackers was constant.

  Tom’s torch hisses and the sparks fly. “Pyre-crapper!” says Jane, pointing again.

  “It is like a firecracker,” I say, and wonder about the microscopic flashes happening down there in her brain, how the nascent neurons arc to make such an abstract connection.

  When the last rod is severed, Tom snuffs the torch and hangs it from a hook on the dolly handles. “Now, you want a right-angle bend? About five inches off the end?”

  “Yep.”

  Tom studies the rods a moment. “Y’know . . .” he says, then heads over to the opposite end of the shop, reaches into another patch of weeds, and begins to tug at something. I move to lend a hand and we yank out a length of steel tubing roughly six feet long and bent in a broad arc. Five-inch pipe stubs are welded at intervals along one side of the tube perpendicular to the flat axis.

  “Trampoline frame!” says Tom triumphantly. He lets the semicircle pipe flop flat so the open-ended stubs—which I now see are collars positioned to receive the legs of the trampoline—point skyward. “Stick one of those rods in there,” says Tom, lighting the torch again. I grab a rod and stand it on end inside one of the collars. Tom kneels and puts the flame to the rebar just at the lip of the short pipe section. This time when the rod glows orange, he
stays off the cutting valve, saying instead, “Awright, go ahead and bend’er.” I apply sideways pressure and feel the rebar give at the luminous joint. I continue to press the upper portion of the rod downward and it bends smooth as twisting taffy until it is parallel to the ground. When I lift it clear of the collar the rebar has formed a perfect 90-degree bend. “I knew I was savin’ that thing for a reason!” Tom says, beaming the triumphant grin of the vindicated hoarder.

  The trampoline frame serves as a perfect jig, and in minutes we have the whole batch bent. Tom snuffs the torch, and immediately the sound of traffic pushes in.

  While Tom coils his hoses and the rebar cools on the ground, I poke my head inside the truck cab to check Jane and immediately discern that she has loaded her shorts. I grab the diaper bag from atop the drivetrain hump and the truck seat becomes a changing table. Pyre-crappers, indeed, I think. When do the nascent no-more-pooping-in-my-pants neurons fuse?

  When I called Tom earlier to make sure he was home and available, I asked him what I’d owe him for this project, and—as he often does—he said nothin’. So I told him I’d pay him with a packet of homegrown pork chops, and he said, Well, I figure that would cover it. Now after snapping Jane’s onesie back over a fresh diaper, I start rummaging through the cab for the chops, but they are nowhere to be found. I distinctly recall taking them from the freezer before we left, and slowly realize I managed to leave them on the lid after I closed it. If forgetfulness were a sport, I’d have a shoe contract.

  Tom and I have known each other long enough now that trust isn’t an issue, but there is a singular psychological gap between handing over payment in the moment as opposed to days or even hours later. There’s also an anticipatory cringe because I know what’s about to happen: First, he’ll tell me not to worry about it. Then he’ll launch into a stream of stories about every deadbeat and no-account grifter who ever skinned or stiffed him over the years.

  “Tom, I’m a little embarrassed,” I say when he emerges from the shop.

  “Yah?” he says.

  “I promised you pork chops, and I forgot to bring’em.”

  “Aw, don’t worry about it.”

  “Well, I’ll bring’em, I just feel like a deadbeat.”

  “Nah, I know you’re good for it.” There is a brief pause. “Now, that Frank Thurston, every time he came here he’d forgot his wallet and his checkbook. Minute I’d shut off the welder, he’d start slappin’ his pockets . . .” Tom pantomimes patting at his shirt and pants with a look of exaggerated surprise.

  I manage a tepid, “Heh-heh.”

  “Yah, and then once one’a them Buford boys come over here, lookin’ for a one-inch bolt. He spied one layin’ on my lathe, and he said, ‘That’s just what I want,’ and he picked it up and took off. I thought, ‘Well you S.O.B.!’ Later that fall, he calls me up, he had a gravity box fulla corn, he was just pullin’ up on Mackey Road, and the hind axle broke. He wanted me to come and weld a new one in. So I take that portable unit I got, and a torch, and I cut it out, welded a new one in, and normally at that time I used to charge twenty bucks. I charged that boy thirty, and to this day he didn’t know the difference! And then ol’ Fredericks over there . . .”

  It’s a detailed rundown, extending over several minutes and featuring a cast of every character who ever cut Tom short or didn’t drop cash on the barrelhead. Herb Vinson, the neighbor who reliably produced his wallet but invariably found it empty. Turk Jackson, whose checks bounced like a red rubber kickball. The guy who wanted to borrow five gallons of gas on a credit card. You know the end is near when he circles back to Frank Thurston. “Yah, that Frank was so tight, we used to say he squeezed a dollar till the eagle shit.”

  “Heh.”

  “ . . . and a nickel till the buffalo gave milk!”

  I just stand there, toes curled tight.

  “Nah,” says Tom, apparently in conclusion. “I’m not worried about you payin’ up.”

  I muster a wan smile.

  “I can feed Cassidy a bone?” It’s Jane, and I could kiss her for the diversion.

  In the house, Arlene is seated at the kitchen table, her chair angled to face the front door. She has only recently returned from the hospital where she spent the better part of two weeks in a coma related to numerous health issues culminating in profound pneumonia. Her forearms rest on a wheeled aluminum walker, the rear legs of which are fitted with tennis-ball skids. Transparent oxygen tubing coils at her feet and trails off into the dining room, where it attaches to a green oxygen cylinder, the miniature medical equivalent of the one Tom has just used to fuel his torch. A wire basket attached to the front of her walker is filled with miscellany: pill bottles, Kleenex, a portable phone, and a plant mister set to “stream.” Today when I step through the door she doesn’t greet me, but rather snatches up the sprayer, hollers, “Mister Bigshot!” and starts pumping the trigger, shooting thin jets of water all around my feet. Startling as this is, I am not the target. Rather, the sprayer is her means of preventing a ponderous black-and-white angora cat—the aforementioned Mister Bigshot—from escaping through the screen door, as he is attempting to do now. “Mister Bigshot!” says Arlene again, finally getting zeroed in and spritzing the cat in the snoot. He shakes his whiskers and retreats, but within three steps has regained the air of languorous insouciance so central to the feline nature and pads off to nap in a sunbeam. Tom closes the door behind us and circles around to take his customary seat on a wooden chair in a corner between the cluttered table and a countertop teetering with books and periodicals: A Civil War Treasury of Tales, The Iron Brigade, Kursk, Tricks & Secrets of Old Time Machinists, Navajo Code Talkers, Winds of Freedom, The Complete Modern Blacksmith, Car & Driver. And that’s just half the stack.

  The Hartwig kitchen is small and close, dominated by the bulwark of a cast-iron wood range dating to 1893. Add to that the encroaching cupboards, the kitchen sink and dish-stacked countertops, a refrigerator, a modern electrical stove, a small wall-mounted porcelain utility sink, and an overloaded coatrack, and there’s not a lot of room to maneuver. The wooden floors are dark brown and unpolished, but worn to smoothness by over a century of boot soles. The table is always happily cluttered with mail and pens and notepads and cookies and saltines and—always—a Skippy jar filled with peanut M&Ms.

  The worn floor, the dim corners, the bacon-grease undertones . . . this is the same kitchen I’ve known from clear back to my Jane-sized days when we went to visit our neighbors in Sampson Township. These are not the kitchens of slick magazines and stainless-steel appliances. These are kitchens of clutter and stack, of the dishrag hung and the pans piled. Of the countertop ice cream bucket spilling onion husks and potato peels. Company is happily received with no preemptive clearing of the decks. Just clomp right in, boots and all. Your chair is waiting, more often than not left at an open angle, ready to receive the next visitor. This kitchen feels like the one in which Dad and my brother John and I would take our bologna and rhubarb sauce lunches when we helped our second-generation Czech immigrant neighbor put up hay. It was in a kitchen like this that we sat around a table with the Baalruds after their anniversary shivaree, when we all snuck up the drive and made a ruckus beneath their windows in the dark. This is the kitchen of Art and Clarence, the Norwegian bachelor brothers who farmed just north of us and who before sitting down to visit would set their obese dog Tootsie up with a heaping bowl of crumbled bread soaked in milk. When we visited our neighbors in those days we just naturally sat in the kitchen. In fact, it would have felt stiff and strange to sit in the parlor. What I’m saying is, the first time I walked through the Hartwigs’ door and into that kitchen, I knew exactly where I was.

  Today I take the open chair facing Arlene, lower Jane to the floor, and ask what I always ask: “What’s Mister Bigshot weigh these days?”

  “Seventeen pounds,” says Arlene. In his prime, the cat weighed nineteen. The Hartwigs’ other cat, Oscar Underfoot, goes thirteen.

  Jane is tight to
my knee, giggling and squirming as she tries to avoid Cassidy’s lapping affections. A frantically happy sausage of a mutt, she whips her tail with a vigor that pitches her butt back and forth in an odd dip-and-swoop accentuated by the missing hind leg. Circumnavigating the dog, Jane toddles away into the pantry just off the kitchen. “I know what she’s after,” says Arlene, eyes sparkling. I follow Jane and find her up to her elbows in a box of Milk-Bones. When she withdraws her hands, each fist clutches three biscuits. A seventh biscuit falls to the floor and she tries to pick it up, but with her teensy fingers full, she only manages to push it around, and while she is doing so, another biscuit drops from her hand. This frees up space in her fist and she snags the original dropped biscuit. Then she starts scrabbling around after the most recently rogue treat. And drops another. And picks up the one previously dropped. And keeps repeating the process. I’m expecting her to pitch a fit, but she remains inexplicably placid, dropping and retrieving biscuits one after the other, until finally I give in and grab the current loose biscuit myself. Back in the kitchen chair, she stands at my knee, doling out the bones one at a time as Cassidy twists herself into knots of slobbering joy.

  Arlene pushes a plasticine tray of lemon crème sandwich cookies my way. She and Tom buy them at Stockman Farm Supply in Osseo when they make their weekly grocery trip in the Crown Vic.

  “So what brought you here today, Mr. Mike?”