Visiting Tom

by Michael Perry

  It takes me the better part of the day to get everything opened up. And here is the beautiful thing about my wife: She sees me out there on the tractor and knows very well what has transpired. And yet when I come in for lunch she doesn’t say a thing. She knows right now I need to grunt and frown and work childishly hard at getting the thing done. Later—much, much later—I will find a way to mumble something about how maybe it turns out she was right. She is allowing me the blessed period of decompression. By the time I get around to admitting that I really should have pre-plowed, I will really mean it, and I won’t mind saying it.

  Sounds trivially silly, I suppose, but the payoff is immense. I often wish I was the brash, decisive type, able to impress my wife through definitive and timely action; that clearly not being the case, I can tell you that sleeping in the same bed with someone to whom you can admit your failings is a lasting comfort indeed. This is not about mea culpa as surrender, it is about mea culpa as mortar in binding together the uneven bricks of a human foundation.

  Earlier, Anneliese called the Hartwigs again to be sure they were okay. Arlene answered and said Tom was out on the Farmall, blowing snow. In this, I am flat-out envious of him. I’ve always gotten by just fine with the truck blade and the tractor bucket, but in the time we’ve lived here we’ve never had snow this imperviously dense. It just can’t be pushed. And while I am reduced to pecking away with my little loader bucket, Tom is across the valley with his homemade howling machine, blowing geysers to the sky, once out, once back.

  Evening. Everything is plowed out, and we have taken dinner to the Hartwigs. Amy is draining a pot of potatoes in the sink. The hot water hits the porcelain with a splatter, and steam mushrooms up to huff itself across the kitchen window. On the stove a skillet of sausages and sauerkraut is simmering, as is a saucepan of green beans. With help from our friend Mills, we ground and stuffed the sausages ourselves, combining our own homegrown pork and the venison I took last fall. In a small way, I like to think that sausage is a royalty paid on the deer skinner component Tom welded up for me. Anneliese made the sauerkraut, and she and Amy canned the green beans. The potatoes we dug as a family: me on the fork, Anneliese and Amy shifting the boxes, and Jane flinging angleworms. What you have here is your everyday Thanksgiving dinner.

  The kitchen is warm and feels even warmer for all the food and the idea of the dark, snow-fixed land all around us. Arlene has her chair angled so she can direct operations. I am sitting with Jane on my knee, doing my best to keep her occupied as she has already stuffed Cassidy with Milk-Bones. Tom is in the other room rummaging in a drawer. When he returns he is holding what appears to be a miniature wooden doll with a protruding tongue and eyes and ears to match. He gathers the girls in close and unscrews the doll’s cap, turning the figurine so that they can see that the head is hollow and studded with toothpick-sized pins that protrude inward. The pins are attached to the tongue and eyes. “When we were kids, we’d catch a blowfly and stick him in there,” he says. “Then when that fly would crawl around the eyes and tongue would come out and the ears would wiggle. We thought that was just hilarious.”

  Tom is also carrying a narrow-necked clear glass bottle. “This is my latest project,” he says, and inside the bottle I can see a wooden chair, large enough that it had to have been constructed inside the bottle. “I did it in the evenings,” he says. “I had to make these tools in order to do it.” He holds out a pair of slim, oddly twisted forceps. “I could reach to the bottom of the bottle and pick up a toothpick with this.” Then he proffers a lightweight rod with two tiny hooks he’s forged at one end. “This I used to push and crowd things a little bit.” As intriguing as his tools and handicraft are, I am as always fondest of his language, in this instance his use of the word crowd.

  Tom hands me the bottle so I can study the contents more closely. “When I was a kid, you had to make your own playthings,” he says. “And of course Dad didn’t have power tools, but we were always welcome to use his tools. The only stipulation was that we put them back.” I notice the chair has begun to dissemble. “Aaacch, I used Gorilla Glue,” Tom says. “That’s a mistake, because Gorilla Glue expands.” Still, as he stands there with those delicate homemade tools balanced on the palm of one hand and the bottle displayed in the other, he is beaming, and I am certain we are pretty much seeing little Tommy Hartwig at show-and-tell seventy-five years ago.

  “I’m gonna make another one of these,” he says, as he places them back in the other room. “I’m gonna make it a little heavier, put armrests on it, leather straps, and then a Christmas tree bulb with a plug-in. An electric chair!” When he comes back in the kitchen he can hardly deliver the punch line for grinning. “It’ll either be modern art or morbid art!”

  We are about to eat when Tom disappears and produces another bottle, this one filled with clear liquid. “Been runnin’ the still,” he says. I am teetotal, so he looks at Anneliese. “You wanna shot?”

  “Just a taste,” she says. Tom pours a sip in a shot glass and Anneliese tips it back.

  “Hoo!” Her eyes are appreciatively wide.

  “We had thirteen bottles of grape wine,” says Tom. “They were bitter. I didn’t wanna throw it away, so I decided to run it through the still. Then I figured that wasn’t really enough to run through the still, so I went down and I bought some champagne yeast down there at the Cap-n-Cork. Champagne yeast will stand up to twenty percent alcohol and your ordinary wine yeast, it’ll start killin’ out at about twelve, thirteen percent.” When he gets going in moments like these, he is downright professorial. “I took twelve pounds of sugar and eight quarts of water and you heat it and make a syrup out of it and then we had it in the fermentation jug over there by the dining room table just burpin’ away for about two months. Then I ran it through the still and the first bottle that came out was one-hundred-and-forty proof.”

  Anneliese looks at the shot glass, then says, “So if you spit that out with a lighter in front of you . . .”

  Tom’s face lights up. “Ohhh . . . that’ll burn with a nice blue flame!”

  I’m chuckling along when suddenly Anneliese’s statement registers. There is an implication of prior experience, and I make a mental note to ask her later if she ever worked in the circus.

  “Then we got two of’em of a-hundred-and-thirty proof, and one of about a hundred and ten,” says Tom. “When it gets down to forty proof we throw it out because that’s the end of it. But we mix’em all together, it’s about sixty proof, and you get six bottles. And that costs you about a dollar a quart, and that’s why the government frowns on it.”

  He pauses a moment.

  “I don’t like the stuff. Wine either. We give most of it away.”

  “I’m seventy-eight years old, and I’ve never had a bottle’a beer,” says Arlene. “Or a cigarette.”

  “I smoked a pipe for fifty years,” says Tom. “I quit twelve years ago.”

  “Did you miss it?”

  “For about a couple months. I used to smoke one of those cans in two weeks.”

  I’ve seen the cans he’s referring to—fourteen-ounce Prince Albert Crimp Cut Long Burning Pipe and Cigarette Tobacco, each tin colored a nice deep red. They’re scattered all around the shop, usually filled with bolts or old nails. There are also a lot of cigar boxes, filled with the same sort of items, but when I asked Tom once if he smoked the cigars he said, “Nah, I just use the boxes,” and so it had never occurred to me that he might have smoked the Prince Albert.

  “If I was doin’ a lot of shop work, then the tobacco didn’t last long, ’cause you had to have that pipe goin’ to think,” he says. “Weaaahhll, I went to the doctor and he said I had a little bit of emphysema. That did it.” He put the pipe down and hasn’t picked it up since.

  “Yah,” he says, “when I gave that up I told Arlene I had no more vices.”

  We eat then, knees to knees around the tiny table, the ever-present M&M jar pushed to the middle, where Jane eyes it throughout the meal, w
aiting for that moment when Tom will unscrew the cap and tip it her way. I look at both girls now and wonder how much of this they are absorbing. The first time I came here with Amy, her head didn’t clear the stovetop. Now she is shuffling pans on it, standing nearly as tall as her mother. With my late arrival, with my comings and goings, I am grateful my children will carry memories of people who have lived long and lived substantively. I am glad they will remember nights when we went visiting. I am glad they will remember their mother and me laughing and listening in the presence of our elders. Here at this table, in this moment, I feel as if I am in the middle of one long, slow exhalation.

  The cocoon is breached later when we open the door to take our leave: first by the cold air, then by the sight of the interstate lights smearing past as we bundle into the van. Once we make the curve past the cannon, however, it’s another cocoon, just our little family rolling out the driveway, the headlights illuminating the sheer walls of snow cut by Tom’s howling blower during the bright day.

  In the wake of the big blizzard, Starkey Hill is plowed wide open and deeply sanded. We come and go with no trouble. Then, two days before Christmas, Anneliese and I join our friends Buffalo and Lori (Buffalo’s parents were members of the counterculture) for dinner in town; their two young daughters have been spending the day at our place and will remain there with the babysitter this evening along with Amy and Jane. There are predictions for another storm, so at the last minute Anneliese and I take the plow truck. By the time we come out of the restaurant the air is twisting with snow and drifts are bridging the main roads, but when we turn up Starkey Road the shelter of the trees is such that less than an inch of snow has accumulated on the blacktop. I engage the four-wheel drive and we climb the hill easily. We are just pulling into the yard when my cell phone rings. It’s Buffalo. His car spun out halfway up the hill. He and Lori slid down backward into the intersection and they are now sitting at the bottom of the hill. I tell him we’ll bundle up the kids and deliver them with the truck. The evening ends with us at the side of the road in swirling snow and darkness—the worst possible time and place—transferring kids from one vehicle to another.

  All the way back up the hill I deliver what has now become a rote soliloquy to the windshield, then go straight to my office, where I leave one more grumpy message on the commissioner’s voice mail and request that he give me a call when he comes in.

  The commissioner doesn’t call. Then again, he had a blizzard to manage. While I was huffing into the phone receiver, he was overseeing the midnight maneuvers of over forty large plow trucks. I admit I left the message because there is a cranky part of me that just wants him to know I’m unhappy. There is also an element of told ya so! Additionally, I fire off e-mails to the township clerk and the president of the town board—they did not cause the problem, and in fact it is their conscientious sanding and plowing that has mitigated it thus far—but I am hoping they can bring some pressure to bear. I am not proud of how I am acting; then again, when I’m lugging kids up that hill I feel I have grounds.

  After Christmas, we go to Colorado to visit Amy’s father, a statement that sounds a little tricky on the face of it, but is blessedly unfreighted in the fact of the matter. Amy was three years old when we met. Her father, Dan, lives near Denver with his wife, Marie, and their two boys—Amy’s younger brothers. We’ve never really gone in for the standard half- and step- prefixes. (My standard line has become that the term stepdaughter is perfectly sufficient for conveying the situation, but utterly insufficient in conveying the heart, and above all I prefer the term lent me by a roughneck poet friend: my given daughter.) I have told the detailed story elsewhere, but the summary version is we are all grateful to say we are closing in on our first decade of getting along just fine. It helps that Amy’s father and I are both tuned to the same humor frequency, which leads me to say the entire unusually happy situation is best summarized by the time Dan and I walked into the Denver children’s museum with Amy between us holding our hands and a woman sighed and smiled at us with warm acceptance and Dan and I looked at each other and grinned, realizing we had just been benevolently—if inaccurately—outed.

  Our trip to Colorado is not strictly for the holidays. Amy’s dear Grammy Pat, a stately woman of nearly six feet who raised Amy’s father and four other children on a Colorado farm after her husband was killed in a wreck when the youngest child was one year old, has gone several rounds with a virulent cancer. To anyone who hadn’t known her previously, she would appear to be remarkably vibrant for her age, but the family can see certain new lines in her face, and there is concern that a recent remission may have been chimeric. One of the functional joys of our extended family (I prefer to misuse the term extended rather than the more euphemistic blended) is that we four grown-ups discuss things in quadruple and, following on these discussions, we have agreed it is best that Amy have a fair sense of what might lie ahead. As such, she knows that Grammy has been gravely ill and may be again. Indeed, she knows that Grammy may not survive. On the other hand, we have also done our best to be clear that this visit does not constitute a wake. Grammy is in most ways very much herself.

  Indeed, our time with Grammy is all we might hope for. She retains her elegant bearing and entertains the children by discussing the critical elements of wig selection in the wake of her chemotherapy. The house is wall to wall with relatives I have come to know by incalculable chance—not the sort of thing you would plan, but as I look around at children who have already grown a foot since I first met them, and at Amy’s hard-charging younger brother who wasn’t even born the first time I nervously met the family, and as I look at the grown-ups and realize we’ve now got shared history and stories and anecdotes, well, I realize at its best this world is happy in so many unpredictable ways. The children sit at Grammy’s feet to open their delayed Christmas presents while we grown-ups update each other on the year passed, adding another layer of stories to our acquaintance. My favorite moments come in the evenings, when we all gather in the kitchen to prepare dinner and Dan and I wind up shoulder to shoulder, chopping vegetables and running sauté pans, while outside, the post-holiday Christmas lights glow in white-framed silence, the season fading, the new year already under way.

  Back in Wisconsin, Anneliese’s mother, Donna, and her husband, Grant, are house-sitting and chicken-watching for us. It’s natural enough, as they lived on the farm for the nine years prior to our residence. I call to check and see how things are going and learn that Anneliese’s sister, who has been successfully navigating Starkey Road since she got her driver’s license, was on her way down the hill when she slid straight into the newly excavated moat where the straight shot was removed. Neither she nor her passengers were injured, but they did have to exit the car and push her back onto the road before another car came down the hill. On another night, Donna and Grant hosted a get-together at the farm, and although there was less than an inch of snow on the road, a number of the guests had to leave their vehicles clustered at the bottom of the hill while Grant shuttled everyone back and forth with the four-wheel drive. Calling from Colorado, I leave another message with the commissioner, and use my laptop to send another e-mail to the town clerk. Later, looking at myself in the mirror as I brush my teeth, it does occur to me that if I were to enact this level of tenacity elsewhere in my life I might be able to buy the Starkey Road hill and configure it however I pleased.

  We say good-bye to Grammy Pat as if it were any other Christmas, as it seems there is no other way. Then we depart for home with the car stuffed with gifts and our camera card filled with photographs of Grammy happy amongst her generations. On the interstate many hours later, in the darkness while Amy and Jane sleep, Anneliese tells me quietly that she was up in the middle of the night and found Grammy in the kitchen, racked with pain.

  If, as a civilian around these parts, you attach a snowplow to your truck, you assume certain socio-moral-ethical responsibilities that you may or may not be able to meet. Last winter I se
t out for town after a particularly vicious blizzard only to discover Cotter Creek Road socked tight with a quarter-mile-long drift blown in like concrete. My approach was from atop a long hill: On the far end of the drift I could see stranded cars; on the near end I could see my neighbor pecking away with an old International tractor and a straight blade. In order to operate he had to push the snow into the ditch at an angle, back up, reposition, and carve off another slim slice. He was maybe an eighth of the way through and gaining only a few feet at a time. When he checked over his shoulder and saw me coming, I flashed my lights and he backed off to one side. As my truck picked up speed, I couldn’t help but feel sympathy for him, all bundled up on his old tractor, overmatched but doing the best he could. As I roared past, I gave him the nod, understood by a certain breed of men to convey mutual understanding and cool competence. At full velocity, I dropped the blade and angled it sharply for maximum snow displacement.

  Some things I suppose you should see coming. But so caught up was I in humming the theme to Underdog! that it never occurred to me that the snow might displace the truck. The density of the drift was such that when the blade made impact, the angular force shunted the front of the vehicle violently aside, then spun it right around. I went from sixty to stuck in a split second and sat there poleaxed. The undercarriage of the truck was so jammed with snow that even in four-wheel drive it took me a while to rock it loose. When I finally backed meekly past my neighbor, he was apple-cheeked and grinning from his tractor seat. I didn’t want to, but I rolled down the window. “You havin’ fun?” he said.