Visiting Tom

by Michael Perry

  “I’m workin’ on a chicken project, Arlene.”

  “I’ll tell you a story about a chicken,” says Arlene. “One day this hen came up here, trying to get in the house, and I wouldn’t open the door . . .”

  “Yah, it was one of those Black Polish Crested hens,” says Tom, cutting in.

  Arlene picks up where she left off. “ . . . she went up to Grandma’s house and Grandma let her in, and the cupboard door was open . . .”

  Tom jumps back in. “ . . . first the hen walked all around the house.”

  From here on in they talk in tandem, like two musicians trading licks.

  “ . . . and there was an electric frying pan filled with papers, and she set her little butt in there and she . . .”

  “ . . . laid an egg . . .”

  “ . . . laid an egg . . .”

  “ . . . in the frying pan . . .”

  “ . . . in the frying pan . . . and Grandma’d let’er out every day to go do her duties and come back in . . .”

  “ . . . she wouldn’t mess . . .”

  “ . . . and she’d spend her time in that pan . . . and she laid how many eggs, Dad?”

  “ . . . she laid thirteen eggs . . .”

  “ . . . and hatched’em.”

  “ . . . all thirteen of’em, in the frying pan.”

  “ . . . in the fryin’ pan!”

  In the kitchen, the traffic noise recedes, but it does not disappear, audible instead as a faint nautical wash. More than the noise you sense the motion: the peripheral flicker of the vehicles beyond the barnyard, the sublimated sense of something coming and going but never gone.

  It is easy to focus on the vehicles and forget about the occupants. In the years after the interstate opened, Tom and Arlene became used to strangers showing up in the barn or on the porch looking for gas, or radiator water, or to borrow pliers, or wanting to use the phone. If they wanted gas or tools, Tom got cash up front, or held the supplicant’s driver’s license as collateral. (“People are about eighty-five percent honest,” he told me once.) In the early 1970s a man knocked on the door and asked for five gallons of gas. Tom was suspicious right away because a gallon was plenty to get to the nearest station. “Why do you need so much?” Tom asked. “Well, I gotta get to Rice Lake,” said the man, naming a city sixty-five miles north. Then the man said he had no money but would return the next day with cash. “Nope,” said Tom. “I need something for a deposit, like your driver’s license.” The man got spooked then, and walked off, only to return shortly with two quarts of Pennzoil and the spare tire from a ’73 Buick. Tom figured it for a fair trade and got the five gallons of gas. Later, Tom says, he figured out the man was driving a stolen car. But his favorite part of the story comes a year later: two girls showed up in the yard because they’d had a flat tire on their ’73 Buick.

  More than once Tom turned on the barn lights in the morning to find someone sleeping in the hay. Or he’d be knelt down welding and someone would tap him on the shoulder and ask for directions to St. Paul after going two hours in the wrong direction. Once—Arlene shakes her head when she tells this one—a young couple whose car stalled showed up shivering desperately, having set out in 20-below weather wearing sweatpants and T-shirts. Arlene brought them in and sat them beside the stove. The record, Tom says, was five people in one day. The visits diminished when CB radios became popular, and now in the age of the cell phone they have dropped to nearly nothing. These days his visitors are more likely to arrive in the fashion of the young fellow driving from New Jersey to Alaska who departed the roadway in a snowstorm and drove right through the fence and 150 feet into Tom’s cornfield before realizing the GPS could not get him out of this one.

  Still, it’s the noise that makes me wonder how they abide. This year I read Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live, and when I got to the part describing how French essayist Michel de Montaigne often slept in a bedroom located beneath an attic containing a large bell that rang out the Ave Maria every morning and evening, I immediately thought of Tom and Arlene and the highway. “The noise shakes my very tower,” wrote Montaigne, “and at first seemed insupportable to me; but I am so used to it, that I hear it without any manner of offence, and often without awaking at it.” Tom will tell you that after forty-odd years, he is used to the nonstop sound, and that it doesn’t get to him the way it did in the early days. At work, in conversation, and in sleep, he and Arlene have grown accustomed to it the same way some people do the surf, or the subway, or a regular freight train.

  More problematic, he says, are the little things: Once the highway opened Tom could no longer stand at the milkhouse and hear what Arlene was saying when she called to him from the porch. And he suddenly found himself overfilling his Farmall because he could no longer hear the gasoline approaching the lip of the tank.

  When the last crumb of Milk-Bone is licked from the floor, I gather up Jane and we begin the slow process of our leave-taking, which unfolds in the usual segments, with stops for conversation every four feet or so, sometimes right through the driver’s-side window and up to the time the vehicle begins to move. Today, with Arlene tethered to her oxygen, the overtime conversation extends only to the edge of the porch, but it still consumes another ten minutes.

  “You tell Anneliese hello,” calls Arlene from the kitchen, where she’s once again avidly hosing down Mister Bigshot. “I’ll do that,” I say. “And I’ll be back soon . . . with the pork chops.”

  “Oh, we’re not worried about that,” says Arlene. “Now, back when Tommy used to do work for Frank Thurston . . .”

  Outside, the traffic noise swells back in a sleek rush. As I strap Jane into her seat I have time to parse the sound more closely. The linear hiss of tires predominates, but I hear also the fluttering whip-crack snap of flatbed tarps, the ribbony pop of tie-down straps, the psssssss of air-brake tanks relieving themselves, and the tidal whoosh of minivans and smaller vehicles. Now and then you get a whistling antennae, the tub-thumping sound of a loosening cartop cargo box, or the wocka-wocka-wocka of a trailer tire gone flat. Although the stretch is level, unexpected shifts in traffic often cause some highballing trucker to flip the Jake brake, and the longitudinal bla-a-a-a-a-a-p! drowns every other sound. Tom will tell you things were actually louder in the old days, especially back when a lot of the trucks ran the old two-cycle GMC diesel engine known as the “Screamin’ Jimmy.” “You’d hear’em bellerin’ a half mile up the road and a half mile after they went by,” Tom says, and the way he shakes his head you’re pretty sure he’s glad they’re gone, but in his eye you detect the glint of the enthusiast, and you figure maybe he wouldn’t mind hearing that beller one more time, and in fact would straighten right up just to watch the black smoke roll.

  I strap Jane securely in her seat, turn the truck around, and then pause a moment to observe the vehicular river. I imagine little Tommy, running right across this very ground, off to steal a few moments on the footbridge before school. The one-room school is gone to the ages now, but the bridges remain, and you can still see a riffle where water passes over the miniature dam left by all the rocks those boys dropped. The creek is as close as ever, but you’ll have to travel some to see it, because to cross the interstate is to trespass. You’ll have to go a roundabout mile by road, and then hike a half mile more. As Jane and I motor slowly around the corncrib and pass before the cannon on our way out the drive, a posse of fresh-leather motorcyclists blasts past, the reverberations of their exhaust splattering off the barn siding like a fusillade of angry whale farts.

  Jane is back at her thumb as we rumble over the gravel, and I wonder how much of this day will snag in those emerging neurons of hers. If she’ll remember the pyre-crapper blowtorch, if she’ll carry a vision of a cat more than half as big as she, if the scent of a Milk-Bone will forever conjure an eye-to-eye vision of a salivating three-legged dog. And I wonder if she’ll absorb the atmosphere of that kitchen. I hope so, because someday her daddy is going to tell her how that simple room played a
key role in her very existence. Thirty-nine years a bachelor, I’ll tell her, and then I met your mother, and one day she took me to meet her friends Tom and Arlene Hartwig. I can’t recall how she introduced me. I don’t recall any conversational specifics, or if we shared a meal. What I do remember is the sense of gut-level comfort I felt the moment I crossed the threshold and into the close confines of that kitchen. How the sensory familiarity was such that the moment I tucked my knees beneath the table I was immediately at my ease, skipping right past the getting-to-know-you stage and straight to shooting the breeze like I’d been there before, which in essence I had.

  Garden-variety nostalgia was in play, sure. But when Anneliese and I left that night, and after I had dropped her off and was headed back to my very bachelor home, there had been a key change within me. As I watched her laugh and trade stories I saw signs of an old soul. A person who paid her respects, and paid them to the sort of people much of the world passes by at top speed. Prior to our night in the Hartwigs’ kitchen I saw Anneliese as beautiful, desirable, smart, and strong. More than enough, in other words, and easily more than I had earned. But as I watched how she honored Tom and Arlene with nothing fancier than honest talk and clear laughter, I began to realize I had found a person perfectly and unpretentiously matched to the roughneck kitchen of my dreams.

  Rounding the final turn for home, I can see the road equipment working at the base of Starkey Hill. As we draw nearer, I slow and pull wide around the crew. Jane is jabbering and pointing at the equipment when I realize they aren’t working on the county road, but are rather marking up the intersection that links the county road to our town road. Taking a closer look as we pass, I am taken back. If I’m reading the situation right, the intersection at the base of the hill is going to be completely reconfigured. The straight shot—the essential straight shot—is being recut and hooked, bent in the shape of a J so it meets the county road at the apex of the curve.

  I feel a twinge in my gut. Something between worry and resentment. If we lose the straight shot, we’ll never be able to climb the hill in a snowstorm. This being Wisconsin, it seems a fair consideration. And I’m thinking about all those days I’m away, when Anneliese is alone here with the girls. I’m seeing them stuck down here on the curve, the snow swirling down, and me off telling cow jokes in Oskaloosa. Now the scales are tipping toward resentment. As we climb the hill in the fading light Jane has pulled her thumb and is chattering away. I maintain my end of the conversation but I’m wondering who I have to call to keep this road straight.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Portraits in the barn now. The haymow. The barn is built into a hillside, so you can walk right into the mow. There must have been bats in here, he says, pointing to the hay wagon. It is covered with dry particles of black guano, like someone let loose with a pepper grinder in the rafters. The hay wagon hasn’t been moved in a long time. The chaff littering the floor is settled and dingy. A small stack of bales remains, all of them leached of color. At the south end of the barn nickel-sized bursts of sunlight pop through the knotholed siding. Tom says, See the mortise and tenon? Not a nail in this barn. All held together with wooden pegs.

  The bones of the barn are dead solid, the ridgeline dead straight. Over there at Stube’s mill, Tom says, back in the 1800s, they used to saw with power from a little log dam. That must have been slow sawin’. He runs his hand over an anchor beam. Here now, this, they must have had a steam engine, because you can see the marks where the saw went and they were using a feed of about a half inch per revolution. That’d be about a fifteen-, maybe an eighteen-horsepower steam engine. They’d float this lumber down and pitch it out where the D bridge is.

  We quit milkin’ in 1991. Arlene didn’t feel able anymore. I kept the cattle around for company.

  He smiles sheepishly at that. Then, brushing his hand in the air like he’s dismissing a fly, says, Weaaahhll, I liked in the summertime to look out and see my cattle in the fields. But then when I was seventy-seven I decided if I got laid up there was nobody to take care of them cattle. So I sold’em.

  The photographers are positioning the camera. Through vertical gaps in the barn siding you can see the interstate traffic passing: blip-blip-blip. From misty morning solitude to 23,200 vehicles through the pasture daily. He knows the numbers because a couple of years back the state put a counter out there. Eight-point-five million a year. Sometimes winter evenings when the air was still he would climb up to throw hay down and the diesel exhaust would be acrid in the air and he could see it hung in the space between the bales and the roof.

  While he waits for them to set the shot he stands with one hand stuffed in his pocket, the other on the hay wagon. He was explaining how a pulley system ran the hay hooks, but he’s quiet now, gazing up where the rigging used to be. His head is tipped back and quartered away, his profile caught in the light from the wide-open door. You don’t know what he is thinking. You do know he put up hay in this space for the better part of seventy years.

  I met a guy once, he says. Had the same last name as me. He asked me: Hartwig—what does that mean? I don’t know, I told him. I think it’s German for “hard work”!

  IF YOU DRIVE THE BYWAYS around these parts, take note of the names: Frayzee Road, Goost Road, Hartzgraff Road, Shoemaker Road. Next, cross-reference them with the local phone book (while it still exists) and you will find the matches quickly run to double figures. Tom Hartwig—not coincidentally at all—lives on Hartwig Road. Our little road, the dead end, is named Starkey Road, after the family who farmed our acreage up through the 1970s. A Starkey cousin still farms in the valley below us, and others are scattered all around the area. And although I grew up some forty miles north of here, my own ancestry is represented on the local plat by Peterson Avenue, named after my great-grandfather, whose red barn still stands just eight miles from the Starkey Road intersection.

  Even when we can’t claim a road by name, we claim it mile by mile, drive by drive, trip by trip. The way a road unfolds before us becomes imprinted. It frames our geographic perceptions, gives the horizon context. The turns, the contours, even the potholes become part of the familiar rhythm of passing through our day. Of simply knowing we’re headed into familiar territory, and at the end of the day that is what the heart seeks: familiar territory. It quite naturally follows, then, that we become proprietary about our roads, even unreasonably so. I believe I have legitimate concerns about the changes planned for our intersection, but there is no question I am also reacting to something more visceral. Every time I hit that straight stretch and was lifted toward home, I laid another layer of emotional lacquer on my mythology of this place. You know better, but you come to believe the road is yours, no matter whose name is on the street sign, that it is an untouchable element of the landscape. And once we memorize that landscape we don’t want it to change. Of course it is not our road in anything other than the taxpaying collective sense, but we let ourselves slip into that mode of feeling and there is always a bit of the old rug being tugged from beneath our feet when changes come. For instance, when my neighbor Denny—he lives at the base of the hill—told me recently that the township plans to cut back the trees along Starkey Road this winter, my first reaction was a heartfelt awww. Over time, the tree lines on either side of the road have encroached well into the ditches, with several large maples extending their limbs to touch branches above the centerline. It is soothing, on sunbaked summer days, to exit the scorching main road and ascend beneath the leafy green arch. In autumn, at peak color, it is like motoring directly into the September page of a bank calendar. Our attachments develop despite the fact that the laws of right-of-way are clearly stated and you can tack your own tape measure to the centerline and figure out exactly which trees the chain saws will take. Emotion really shouldn’t come into it. And yet I feel a twinge. Could be worse: When it came time to trim the white pines along Hartwig Road a few years back, one of the neighbors put up such a stink the crew had to pack a sheriff’s deputy along with the
chain saws.

  After I saw the crews preparing to reconfigure our intersection, I placed a few phone calls. Because the intersection involves both a county and a township road, there was some confusion over exactly where to properly register my concern, but ultimately I was directed to the office of the county highway commissioner. The woman who answered the phone said I should attend the next meeting of the highway committee. There would be a “citizen input” segment, she said, during which I would be allowed five minutes to speak my mind. I immediately began putting together notes. I also began to find myself rehearsing impassioned speeches while jogging or collecting eggs. More than once I caught myself standing in the coop actually waving my hands and raising my eyebrows for emphasis. And then on a Friday morning before dawn (the highway committee meeting convenes at 6:15 a.m.) I drove down Starkey Road and off to the county highway department building in nearby Altoona.

  When I arrive, the committee members are already sitting elbow to elbow around two conference tables, most with Styrofoam cups of coffee, a few with doughnuts. Surveying the group, I see men who could pass for my dad and my brother John, both of whom have served on their respective town boards and have endured all the public hectoring and second-guessing such positions incur. The complaint box overflows and the thank-you cards are sparse. In short, the look of these folks makes me feel like I have a shot at making my case.

  The commissioner—whom I have never met in person but immediately identify by his position at the head of the table—is wearing silver-bowed glasses with dress shoes and a tie, and he looks a shade more deskbound than the rest of the crew. I figure he and I would be neck and neck for the softest hands in the room. I choose a seat against the wall in one of a handful of chairs provided for the public. The room is so small that when the commissioner leans back, my knees nearly brush the Naugahyde of his chair.