The first tentative thaw began in early March. By noon the sun warmed the accumulated snow and ice, forming small streams along the shoveled paths and on the gravel road where the plows had kept the snow layer minimal. Pebbles absorbed the wan sun, warming the adjacent snow. Snow loosened from fir trees and crashed to the ground. Ptarmigan and prairie hens were in evidence, losing their skittery temerity of humans and crowding close to the fowl yard. To find a resplendent pheasant cock feeding with the hens was common. For the first time since November the chickens had the run of the outdoor pen.
Rabbits and hares scampered over the snow. Maple sap dripped. Black bear emerged from hibernation, hungry and dangerous. For several nights, a she-bear lingered in our field, eating garbage. We kept near the house, alert for noise in the underbrush.
Ice on the lakes remained thick enough for fishing. The surfaces, however, were covered with slush, so we sealed our boots with tallow. We fished in Columbus Lake, where the game fish were, and not in Minnow with its swarms of fingerling perch—“rough” fish, tiny, filled with bones.
At school we were restless, anxious for the snow to fade, eager for the reappearance of flowers and birds. Though a few minuscule buds appeared on the willows, winter still held sway; in fact, we expected a blizzard as late as early April. These were my last weeks of school before starting high school in the fall.
The delay of spring exacerbated our restlessness. Reading was difficult. I paced my chores, took twice as long as usual to clean the barn, to milk, to fill woodboxes. I wouldn’t shed long underwear until Memorial Day, that magical day when there was a whiff of summer and you could swim, although the lakes remained bone-chillingly cold. The stench of soiled wool, stale long Johns, and unwashed bodies permeated school and home, the latter chinked and weather-stripped against the cold for so many months.
The ritual Saturday night baths were always easiest in warm weather. We heated water on the woodstove—filling the copper boiler was my chore—then dumped it into a galvanized tub. Mom arranged a spot near the kitchen range, draping blankets over chairs for privacy.
My brother Everett, my sister Margie, and I drew straws for the first bath. The longest straw went first; the shortest bathed in the water used by the other two. There was always fussing as we scooped off the gray soapy scum (we called it “dirt”). Not until puberty did I enjoy my own bathwater. We used Ivory soap most of the time and, for a special treat, Lifebuoy. We believed the ads: Lifebuoy prolonged our lives. Certainly, the odor was astringent. Ivory, on the other hand, because of its reputed purity (wasn’t it 99 and 44/100 percent pure?) appealed to my mother. Once we kids were bathed, Mom bathed in fresh water. She lingered in her bath while Dad waited to take his.
Always the crude one, Dad bathed only when Mom insisted. “Dirty Old Pup” was her epithet for him, delivered not entirely without love. My mother washed his back. Then he toweled himself singing.
We hung bedding on clotheslines. We placed mattresses on old newspapers and checked for ticks and bedbugs. If there were infestations, eggs dormant during the winter would soon hatch. We were usually free of vermin. Where did bedbugs come from? From Welfare? From a visitor? One spring my brother and I were viciously bitten. Dad mixed kerosene and creosote and sprayed our mattress with a Fly-Tox sprayer, soaking the areas infested with eggs. Fortunately, the creatures did not spread to the other beds that year.
Once the teacher found lice on our scalps and sent us home with a note. Mom washed our heads with creosote cut with a small amount of kerosene, careful not to get it in our eyes. None of us liked the noisome odor, but knew there was no other way to rid ourselves. After a good shampooing, Mom combed dead lice and eggs from our hair. Two such treatments were required. To have lice was a terrible stigma; you were “dirty.” Spring, alas, brought onslaughts of other vermin, including mice and rats.
Spring was also the time for new linoleum. For greater insulation, the new coverings went right over the old. The aroma of varnish and petroleum filled the house. We soaked our hooked rugs in soap and water. My job was to wring them out. The frayed ones we took apart, saving the cloth strips for hooking more rugs. One of the last chores was washing the windows with a mixture of hot water and vinegar.
The redhorse, a scavenger fish related to the carp, spawned in late March. Only then, in those ice-cold flowages, was redhorse edible. Fortunately, the fish inhabitated very few lakes. They were bottom-feeders; their large hinged mouths scooped up mud, sifting out whatever debris—carrion, leaves—was edible. In shallower lakes the water grew so muddy that game fish died, or migrated elsewhere on the Chain of Lakes free of scavengers.
For taking redhorse, Dad fashioned a spear of three spiked nails driven through a birch pole that had been smoothed to bare wood. He angled the nails to give the effect of Triton’s spear and then filed the nails to sharp points, fashioning a small barb above each point to secure the struck fish.
Only two more hours of daylight: Redhorse ran best late in the day. We parked in a grassy area above the fast-moving water. Against the sandy bottom, meandering fish were visible. Some waited in place, depositing roe. My uncle had already arrived. I heard my cousins’ voices upstream. The horizon was utterly blue, with a hint of a salmon tint from the setting sun. In the distance rose a pair of pine-covered hills. Honking Canada geese flew north to nesting areas.
The stream was about two feet deep, with the occasional deeper pockets preferred by largemouth bass. Dad told me to bring the gunny sacks.
He speared from shore. When he flung a fish on the grass, its weight tore it from the spear barbs. Although the water was icy, Dad decided he’d wade in for better luck. When he began to lose feeling in his toes, he came out and massaged his feet. Then he returned to the water. The fish, frenzied to spawn, kept coming. In less than an hour I had filled three gunny sacks. We strung more fish on clothesline rope.
Dad dried his feet and put on his shoes, and, after dumping the fish into the car, we set off to find my uncle. They had filled a dozen gunny sacks. The redhorse had never been so prolific.
That night we scaled, gutted, and filleted the fish, which we smoked in my uncle’s smokehouse. In exchange, we kept the fires going. The best-tasting fish required a week’s smoking.
I loved this plenitude: There were more fish than we could eat. And smoked fish kept indefinitely. “Redhorse eat drowned people,” my mother said. We devoured the fish cold, boiled, fried—in casseroles and sandwiches and with sourdough pancakes.
That we might starve was a common fear. Counting on relatives was difficult. Though my uncle had a larger and richer farm than ours, his selfish wife, Kate, rarely shared their largesse. The burden on Dad of keeping us supplied with food was immense. If there was no money for meat, if the Welfare supplies ran out, there was only one alternative—hunt and fish. He worried particularly in early spring when our potatoes and carrots had gone soft, sprouting in the root cellar. But soon Lady would have fresh grass for pasture, her milk would turn sweet, and she would drop a new calf And our vegetable garden would grow.
With ice pick and hammer we chipped ice from deposits near the pump. When a gunny sack was full, we smashed the bag broadside with the hammer to crush the ice for our single-quart hand freezer. Mom prepared a mixture of canned blueberries—our favorite—or of fresh or canned strawberries, cream, sugar, vanilla, and beaten egg, dumped it into the can, inserted the dasher, and placed the whole into the wooden freezer, securing the crank top. We packed the ice loosely, alternating layers with salt. After nearly an hour of churning, the ice cream was set. The person who cranked the mixture got to lick the dasher for an extra serving.
The pink and white flowers of the rare trailing arbutus, indigenous to a few of the northernmost regions of the United States, exuded a special fragrance. Peeping forth from patches of snow, they seemed pure. The rarest blooms were tinged with lavender.
My sister and I made morning excursions for the flowers, shaped them into small bouquets, packed them with wet starflower moss, wrapped the moss in waxed paper, and filled two oblong cake pans with them. At 6 P.M. Dad drove us to the railway station. The train from Milwaukee, bringing fishermen and tourists, arrived at 6:30.
Margie and I positioned ourselves on the platform where most of the passengers detrained. We were shy, and I felt more than a tinge of self-pity for our poverty. Since I found it difficult to ask for a sale, I positioned myself in front of a potential customer and held up some arbutus, mumbling, “ten cents.” For large bouquets we asked a quarter. The selling took less than an hour; by that time the train had moved on toward Land O’Lakes. We sold about half of our flowers, making slightly over a dollar apiece. The remaining bouquets we hawked in various stores along Main Street. My dad, easily affronted, took it as a personal insult when a storekeeper refused to buy. We enjoyed a good season if we cleared $20. Except for an occasional fifty cents for a movie at the Vilas Theater, we saved the money in a tomato juice can for fall school clothes.
Our Sears, Roebuck Silvertone operated on storage batteries. We were so far from the transmitters in Chicago and Milwaukee that reception, except for early mornings and after dark, was filled with static. The radio, covered with a crocheted doily in a pineapple pattern, sat on a shelf above our dining table.
“Stella Dallas” was my mother’s favorite program. Every morning, Dad tuned to WLS, “The Prairie Farmer Station,” for the country music stars. Evenings we heard “I Love a Mystery” and “Amos and Andy.” My favorite comedian was Fred Allen. I despised George and Gracie and found Jack Benny only marginally funny. I rarely found “The Lone Ranger” or “Jack Armstrong” absorbing. Our Saturday ritual: Dad bought peanuts in the shell and the Sunday Milwaukee Sentinel. We were on our honor not to read the comics until dark. Then out came the peanuts and paper, and on went the radio. My program was “The Hit Parade.” For an entire year I kept meticulous records of all the top songs, awarding elaborate percentages, so that on December 31st I would know the year’s winners. My statistics were pointless, however, for on the final Saturday of the year the program featured its own rundown of the top songs.
Two persons influenced my religious beliefs: Mrs. Ohlson and Adeline Mattek. Mrs. Ohlson arrived early that spring with two teenagers, Fern and Russell, and convinced Dad to let her refurbish a dilapidated shack we had on our property. She had separated from her husband, Harry, a fellow WPA worker on my dad’s road-building crew. Harry, in fact, first broached the subject with Dad, saying that he would stay in town in a room but that he couldn’t afford to rent both a house for his family and a room for himself Dad agreed to help this mild-natured man, and on one weekend Dad, Harry, and Russell erected a shack of poplar poles just a stone’s throw from our house.
Through that summer Mrs. Ohlson sunbathed in bra and panties, displaying herself on an old army cot. Her teenagers found work in town, so the entire day was hers. She was in her late forties and had sagging bosoms and a floppy stomach. Her hair was done up in tightly rolled curlers. She was often tipsy.
Margie and I would sneak up on her, hiding, making animal sounds and throwing pebbles on her roof Mrs. Ohlson would scream that she knew who we were and then lie back quietly on her cot.
On one occasion she caught us red-handed; and when she challenged us, clad in her usual scanty fashion, Margie ran off while I stayed to face her.
She motioned for me to sit. “I don’t hurt you,” she began. “Why do you hurt me?” I had no answer. She brought cookies from the house and then began to talk about God, extolling a “personal relationship” with Jesus as her lodestone. She asked me if I had been baptized. I said I had never been to church.
She picked up the Milwaukee Sentinel. “Here.” She pointed to an article on the “Imminent End of the World.” A sect in Mattoon, Illinois, her home town, had given away all their earthly goods and was planning to sit on their church roof at midnight on May 15th, Armageddon Day, to be assumed directly into heaven. “If they’re right,” Mrs. Ohlson said, “since I’ve been baptized, I’ll go to heaven. But you and your family will never get there. You’re heathens.” She depicted hell in frighteningly vivid terms.
During the next weeks, Mrs. Ohlson seemed obsessed with Armageddon; her newspaper carried even more features on the heralding sect. My parents declared Mrs. Ohlson “bonkers.” That’s why Harry had left her. Whether you go to heaven, my dad insisted, depends not on your being sprinkled with preacher water but rather on your conscience. God doesn’t care, about churches; He cares about your soul. You don’t need mumbo jumbo. My mother’s views were conditioned by her views of social inequity. If we did attend church, she felt, our clothes would betray us. The townsfolk would be condescending. Such attitudes, she insisted, had nothing to do with God. All are equal in His sight. If you wore a grass skirt, painted your rear end with varnish to keep it warm, or dressed in the latest fashion, it was all the same to God.
May 15 was flawlessly clear, hot enough for a straw hat. By late afternoon, black clouds had formed; they lingered in the north, producing a brilliant sunset. Going to bed that night was a special ritual for me. Good-nights, embraces, kisses. I kept my apprehensions to myself and read the Bible—chapters dealing with Christ’s arrest, crucifixion, and ascension. Shortly after midnight, winds and rain of cyclonic force shook the house with incredible lightning, thunder, and hailstones. I covered my head and prayed, sure that the house would be swept off, that we would all be killed. If only I were baptized!
The night passed. Several large trees near the road were uprooted. Heavy rain filled the swampy depressions below the house. The sky was sunny and windblown, the air fraught with a fresh chill. Mrs. Ohlson’s predictions had not come true. I was not disappointed when the woman took herself and her children back to Matoon at the end of the summer.
Adeline Mattek seldom glanced at our house. No matter the weather, this remarkable girl, scarred with a harelip, never missed Saturday mass. On this particular morning there had been a deep snowfall. The county plow was not yet working. Adeline appeared wearing an ankle-length green wool coat, a knit scarf and a large navy blue cap. She walked fast with her head down, which gave the illusion that she was about to fall on her fece. Perhaps that was how she hid her harelip.
I had seen the inside of her home only once, when I stopped for a drink on my way to find Lady, who had strayed. An impression remains of two rooms, one filled with sagging beds and couches where Adeline, her four brothers and sister, and her parents slept. (One brother, Charlie, was the musician who fished with my dad and eventually married my North Dakota cousin Evelyn.) Gunny sacks had been sewn together and filled with straw for mattresses. Although Adeline, about seventeen, was the elder of the two daughters, she lingered in the background while her sister gave me milk to drink.
She had dropped out of school and now stayed home looking after her family. Her joy was her religion. Adeline puzzled me, and as my fear of hell grew, I grew obsessed, loving her with a platonic intensity.
As Easter neared, I read the Bible with increasing fervor. Whether I understood or not, each word was truth. Even the interminable “begat” verses were mines of spiritual ore. I meditated over the saccharine color prints of Jesus with lambs, of Jesus being scourged, of Jesus dying, and I began to talk to Jesus, shaping the air with my hands, imagining Him as my very own.
The circumstance resolving my struggle was my first ejaculation. I had no idea what had transpired. I woke during the night to find my belly wet. At first I thought it was blood. Without disturbing my brother, I crept from bed and found a flashlight. Where had the strange substance come from? My parents told me nothing of sexual change, and I was too naive to relate my own seminal flow to that of farm animals. My fevered psyche interpreted the incident as a warning from Jesus that I must be baptized.
I resolved to go to mass the next morning, Palm Sunday. My parents approved—though not without some hesitation that I might turn Catholic. I waited for Adeline to walk past before setting out myself I hoped to remain anonymous, so I decided to attend a later mass.
I dallied along the road, examining pools for frogs’ eggs, throwing sticks and stones into a swirl of rusty water emerging through a culvert near Mud Creek, and admiring a grove of juneberry trees loaded with blossoms. Twice I turned and started back for home.
By the time I reached St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, the second mass had ended, and there was no other. Jesus, I felt, had arranged this timing for some umbrageous reason of His own, sheltering me from Catholicism. Services were about to begin at the Christ Evangelical Church across the street. On the steps were Eileen Ewald and her parents. I had had a crush on Eileen ever since she appeared in second grade and said “sugar.” It was not the word itself but her cultured tone in saying it that struck me as special. I ached to be in love with her.
I followed Eileen into the church and sat in a pew at the very back. I was entranced by the pale oak altar with its pastel plaster crucifixion. The organ music, the first I had ever heard, was splendid. All through the sermon, by the Reverend Joseph Krubsack, I sat in a daze. Jesus had directed me here!
I lingered until Rev. Krubsack was alone and told him of my wish for baptism. He promised to baptize me and my family on the Sunday after Easter. But I would not become a full Lutheran, he warned, until I had passed Instruction.
My faith in Santa Claus and the Easter Rabbit disappeared when I was eleven. I had seen oranges in the box of groceries Dad brought home. We never had oranges except at Christmas, and Santa usually brought them, putting some in stockings and leaving the rest on the table. “Stay up tonight and see,” Dad said.
Margie and Nell went to bed early, anticipating sugarplum visions and reindeer hooves. I yawned and said I was sleepy, too. Dad was listening to some boxing match. “No you don’t,” he laughed. “You stay up with us.”
When the boxing ended, Mom brought out toys and fruit. We stuffed stockings and placed the toys in strategic spots for easy discovery. Considerately, my parents did not deprive me of all surprise—they put out my gifts when I was in bed.
Easter was always easier than Christmas, less a matter of deportment than of colored eggs and chocolate. We tinted the eggs on Saturday, using Paas dyes and decal transfers. That evening Margie and I hid eggs outside, creating elaborate maps for finding them, one map per egg. Margie hid mine and I hid hers. We included our parents, fashioning the most complex hunt for Dad. Easter morning was chilly but sunny. My father refused to participate, despite our fussing and pleading. When we found them, all of the eggs were cracked and frozen.
On Easter mornings we visited Mrs. Kula. She had sent an invitation via her daughter Celia to visit her. She appeared at her door wearing a white babushka. Since she spoke no English, she smiled and waved us inside, where she gave us two brightly colored eggs and a few jelly beans. She did not wish us to linger, for she soon opened the door, bowed, and smiled us out. Years later, one of her daughters said that her mother’s ritual was an ancient peasant one: If you could inveigle a non-Catholic, a non-Pole, to receive gifts on Easter morning, that person would be your scapegoat, carrying away your entire year’s burden of sins. We were oblivious to these subtleties.
For five dollars, my uncle hired out his team, Bill and Bess, for plowing. I was a coward near horses, and when Dad asked me to drive the team while he steered the plow I refused. Horses would suddenly shake their necks and bare their teeth.
My uncle was a hard driver. I had seen him beat Bill with a club while the horse was tied in his stall. In pain, the horse broke free and ran from the barn toward Minnow Lake, with my uncle in pursuit. I followed and saw him corner Bill, who waited docilely while my uncle, his wrath spent, grabbed the broken halter and stroked Bill’s neck with surprising gentleness.
Eruptions of violence always dismayed me. In a recurring dream, Osmo Makinnen threatened to attack. When I sought to defend myself my arms froze at my sides. Usually I woke in a sweat. Why my impotence? Dad had given me pointers—and he had boxed at carnivals. To support my ineptitude, I found the Bible useful. If you followed Christ’s example, you simply turned the other cheek. I found the violence of men far worse than any violence of horses. A man enraged by a horse unleashed an enormous force few men could hope to restrain.
One lasting image is of my father beating Lady. I had been told to graze her in timothy along Sundsteen Road. Since she was always docile, I went to the house for a drink of water and lingered talking to Margie. When I returned, Lady was not where I had left her. Shortly, I heard my dad’s angry voice—the cow was in the cornfield. When he flung stones at Lady, she sped crazily across the potato field. Dad cornered her near a fence, grabbed a tree branch, and beat her. She stumbled and fell, quivering, her belly swollen with calf I grabbed the branch. Dad was shaking with rage. I flung my arms around Lady’s neck. I felt her blood on my face. Slowly, she righted herself I told Dad it was my fault. “It’s all right,” Dad said. “Take her to the barn. Give her water.”
There didn’t seem to be much Dad couldn’t do. Before plowing, he loaded a stoneboat with cow manure and spread it over the field. He emptied the outhouse, reserving the rich human ordure for the garden plots. He joked, saying he could tell the Saturday night deposits by the peanuts.
He plowed with immense skill, working the plow blades into the loam and guiding the horses with their lead harness around his shoulders. Margie, Everett, and I followed, plucking earthworms from the moist turned-over soil. We’d use them for fishing. Dad plowed the large field first, where potatoes, corn, and squash grew. The small field held our other crops: tomatoes, cabbage, Swiss chard, onions, green beans, and peas. The plowing went smoothly. We had cleared all large rocks from the field, and apart from one obstinate huge pine stump, the areas were free of obstacles. Dad disked the soil and then leveled it with a drag. By late afternoon, he had finished.
My mother and Margie had prepared potatoes for planting, slicing them into bits, each with an eye for a new plant. White potatoes kept better than reds, although the latter matured faster. We planted the potato bits and corn seeds with a special gadget, a metal flanged cup on a long handle. You dropped a potato or grain of corn into the cup, thrust the cup into the soil, and moved the handle towards you, opening the jaws of the cup and releasing the seed. On you moved, a foot and a half or so, for the next hill. Every tenth hill of corn, you mixed in a few pumpkin or squash seeds.
When we cut firewood in the fall, we threw the lopped branches into piles for spring burning, to lessen the fire hazard of dead scattered brush. In the spring, we trimmed the birch grove on the hill behind the house, picking up debris downed during the winter and adding to the piles. Wherever these brush piles burned, raspberry bushes sprang up.
The Poland China sow’s pregnancy was only evident a few days before she birthed piglets. We had no sure way of telling when she’d been in heat. She was always with the boar until late winter, when we butchered him. The pig shed was near the barn. Like the other outbuildings, it was of scrap pine covered with tar paper, and was just large enough to accommodate two grown pigs. During cold weather, we crammed it with straw. Weather permitting, the animals slept outside, snuggled into the pits they had dug with their snouts, searching for edible roots. The yard was well fenced, with wire mesh buried in the ground to make excavating difficult for the pigs. Late each spring, once the sow had birthed, we moved the pen to a freshly cleared area plentiful with roots. The pigs would work for us, tilling and fertilizing the soil.
Late one afternoon, returning from the lake, I noticed the sow on her side making gurgling sounds. She lay with her face half buried in mud and her foaming mouth open. Her one visible eye was closed and wet. Her vagina was inflamed and swollen. Soon a piglet oozed forth wearing a purplish semitransparent placental shroud. I had never before seen pigs born. When the second one dropped, I ran to the house for my mother.
Five more piglets emerged. Since sows are notorious for mistaking their farrow for placentas and are apt to devour an entire litter, we had to act fast. I grabbed a stick, ready to drive off the sow. We threw armfuls of straw into the pen, near the shed, hoping to entice her to where it was dry. It worked. The farrow soon found her teats and were feeding. When the piglets matured, we sold some, traded others for hay, and kept two, a boar and a sow, for the next year’s breeding.
Two weeks after the birth of the pigs, Lady dropped another bull calf We had recorded the date of her visit to Mattek’s bull, so we were sure of her due time. That morning she was restless when I led her, lowing softly, to a clearing of luxuriant timothy. I checked on her at noon. She was eating, and all seemed in order.
At about 4 P.M., I was startled by her lowing and saw her hunched, standing with her legs spread at odd angles. I ran to the field. She was straining to drop the calf, visible now up to its shoulders. She kept gazing at her rear, looked stricken, and moved in vague slow circles, as if to ease her pain. Then she lay down on her side, panting, her muscles pushing to expel the calf I knelt, grabbed the calfs wet head, and drew it toward me. The shoulders pushed clear, and the hind portions slipped forth. With a jackknife I severed the umbilical chord. Blood. As soon as the calf could stand, Lady rose, turned, and started licking it. “Quick,” Mom said. “Get the pitchfork.”
When I returned, the calf was already feeding. A huge placental mass, iridescent, resembling a great sea slug, exuded from Lady’s vagina. It could have filled a washtub. I speared it with the pitchfork and threw it over the fence. If Lady had eaten it, her milk would have soured for a month.
The county’s two commemorative days were Memorial Day and the Fourth of July. The former began at 10 A.M. with a parade led by members of the American Legion, the high school band, the Legion Women’s Auxiliary, and a scattering of town dignitaries in automobiles. Paper poppies, in honor of the vets who had died on Flanders Field, sprouted in buttonholes. To be sure of a vantage spot near the depot, we arrived at nine. My sister wore a flowered dress Mom had made on her treadle sewing machine. My dad, my brother, and I wore new Sears shirts. We were promised ice cream cones at Zimplemann’s Parlor, an enterprise run by a domineering old German and three plump unmarried daughters. To the rear of the parlor was a violin in a glass case, which played, via mechanical fingers after you inserted a dime, a limited repertory—two or three Strauss waltzes and a few sentimental American love songs by Carrie Jacobs Bond.
Promptly at 11:00, the hour of the Armistice ending World War I, Dr. McMurray flew over in a red biplane and dropped a wreath of poppies into Eagle River, near the iron bridge. McMurray was a physician of doubtful credentials. If one could, one chose Dr. Oldfield, the only other doctor in town. McMurray drank too much and loved regaling his patients with his reputed feats as a war ace in France.
Occasionally, flowers drifted free of the wreath and floated out over the crowd. Catching one brought good luck. Later, after Fred Draeger, the district attorney, delivered the Decoration Day speech, everybody marched to the cemetery, led by the Legion, the band, and the dignitaries. An honor guard fired off salutes.
Two of my mother’s brothers had been gassed in the trenches, surviving with health problems that led to early deaths. Several local vets had been mortally scarred by mustard gas. There was rejoicing when these veterans won modest government pensions.
Before leaving home that morning we put a watermelon in a washtub, on ice. Chicken was prepared the day before, for chicken and dumplings. The meat, cut in pieces, lay soaking in salt water. Mom believed that soaking removed the blood, or the “wild” taste. Margie and I baked a cake, one of our favorites, from a flour bag recipe: a white cake made with lard, sugar, eggs, and maple flavoring, frosted half an inch thick and tinted bright red with food coloring.
A hen was ready to set when she refused to leave the nesting box, ruffled her throat feathers, and glanced at you from the shadows with a suspicious red eye. Once off the nest, she clucked maternally, as though a parade of chicks followed her.
Three hens chose almost simultaneously to set, which meant a rush on our egg supply. Most fowl could accommodate up to a dozen eggs. For three weeks the setters sat, clucking softly as they turned eggs with their beaks. Turning guaranteed that the embryos would not adhere to the inside of the shells. Every two days we would close the henhouse door to the other birds and scatter grain. The setters emerged, exuded huge, noisome deposits of dung, ate and drank, and returned to their nests.
Of the forty-five eggs set to hatch, forty produced chicks. If a chick had trouble breaking through its shell, we assisted by enlarging the beak hole. By the end of spring, we hoped to have nearly two hundred chicks, which we would fatten, killing them in the fall, keeping only the sturdiest pullets for our new laying flock. My mother canned quarts of chicken for winter eating.
The chicks spent their first days on newspaper spread near the kitchen stove in an area blockaded by chunks of wood. An overturned cardboard box, with entry holes, supplied a hiding place. They ate cornmeal and oats. We each had favorites, which we gave names. Eventually, we divided them between the mothers. Brood hens avoided the main flock, preferring shade and concealment under low shrubs. No creatures are more brutal than hens. Helpless chicks are always in danger of being pecked to death. A hen bitten severely by deer flies is an easy victim of the flock. They peck at her head relentlessly until she dies. Runts are also the victims of this selective killing. We saved some hens by removing them in time and treating them with ointment. Curiously, Crip did not participate in these slaughters, leaving the dreary business to the hens.
Five eighth-graders drove with Miss Crocker to the commencement exercises at Eagle River High School: Makinnen, Eileen Ewald, Bill Jolly, my cousin Grace, and I. Representing our school, I would present a three-minute speech. Miss Crocker worked on the text, a set of platitudes about the future, education, and the world as ours to win. I rehearsed it, assisted by Miss Crocker, a dozen times.
We had to wear suits. Mine was a new ugly brown plaid wool one that Dad had wangled from Welfare. The pants were incredibly baggy, rough, and cuffed.
The final week of school was a mixture of ebullience and sadness. Each afternoon we played games. Only the graduating students raised and lowered the flag. We also rang the hand bell. We agreed to divide the tadpoles, about thirty of them, we had nurtured in jars in the sandbox. All had legs and now resembled toads rather than frogs. I would keep mine until the tails were gone and then free them in a ditch. On the last day, we turned in our books and had lemonade and cookies. This was Miss Crocker’s final year of teaching; she was marrying the town jeweler.
The commencement exercises were boring. Chairs had been set up on the stage. When the superintendent called the name of a school, the teacher and students took seats. After the student representative spoke, diplomas were awarded, complete with handshakes and congratulations.
When my turn came, I arose, conscious of my ugly suit. I recited the first lines. Then someone laughed. Burning inside that wretched suit, I forgot my lines. With Miss Crocker’s prompting, I was able to stumble on. I had let her down. Neither my mother nor my father attended—Dad couldn’t leave work, and my mother felt she had no appropriate clothes. Her best dress was a gingham Welfare dress. This she was too proud to wear.
As a name for a dog “Fido” is neither clever nor original. It is a corruption of Fideles, or “Faithful”—a generic name evoking dog qualities.
Our Fido was short-haired and large, with orange and black markings. From the time he was a pup, he lived outdoors. Unless the weather turned impossibly cold, he remained in his doghouse, a structure built of old planking with a tar-paper roof and an entry hole just big enough for the dog to crawl through. We made the house small so that in bad weather his body heat would be contained to keep him from freezing. We never chained him.
He was a good watchdog. Given my fear of the woods and the dark, I took Fido with me whenever I walked in the forest or did night chores. He was fed almost entirely on table scraps—no canned or dried dog food. Occasionally he hunted, and we would find a chewed rabbit on the door stoop, or the remains of a wild duck. There were occasional mishaps with porcupines, and Dad would use a pliers to extract the needles from Fido’s muzzle. When he was a year old, Dad castrated him with a razor blade, pouring on a mixture of oil cut with turpentine as a disinfectant. “Only way to keep him home,” Dad said. After that, tamed, Fido lived out his life, finally falling victim to crippling arthritis contracted from those bone-chilling winters.
Something was amiss that morning. Was it my mother’s goiter acting up again? To avoid an operation, she’d answered an ad in a woman’s magazine for an ointment and beads. The beads, amber seed shapes glued to small copper disks, were to absorb “vibrations” from the ointment, conducting “charges” to the swollen goiter tissue to dry it. For weeks she smeared her neck and wore the huckster’s beads. When no lessening of the swelling occurred, she stopped using the beads.
She kept the beads in a shellacked tortoise shell on her dresser. I’d taken the shell from a mud turtle I caught in the strawberry patch. I boiled the turtle, and when the meat was soft I poked it loose with a stick and hung the shell in a tree until the remaining meat was eaten by ants. The shell rested on a piece of window glass near Mom’s curling iron. The dresser’s oval mirror was held in place by bent wood painted a mahogany tone, resembling horns. Nearby hung Mom’s wedding picture. In exchange for three pullets, an itinerant photographer had enlarged a small photograph, the only one of the wedding extant, and framed it in a tin oval frame tinged rose and green.
I gave Mom hot coffee. She was facing the wall, utterly still.
“Mom?” She turned and smiled. “What is it?” I asked. She sat up and drank some coffee.
“I’ll be all right,” she said.
After a few moments I returned to the south pasture where I was helping Dad erect posts for a new pigpen. The spot was mud-luscious with dank, black soil. The pigs were ecstatic. When we finished, I returned to see how Mom was.
She had thrown off the quilts and was covered by a thin blood-stained sheet. “Get Dad,” she said. “Hurry.”
He came, gesturing for me to wait in the living room. Mom was weeping. Dad was consoling her and soon emerged with something wrapped in newspaper. “It was a new boy,” he said, holding the wrapping to his side. He grabbed a shovel from the shed, went out behind the bedroom, and buried the baby near a small stand of white birch.
Mom was shivering. The bleeding would not stop. We piled quilts over her, and Dad went for the doctor.
The doctor we preferred, Oldfield, was out of town, so McMurray, the war ace, came. We were suspicious of him. My parents believed he was drunk when he delivered my brother and put too much silver nitrate in Everett’s eyes. For weeks Everett had been blind.
The doctor finally emerged from the bedroom, saying that the baby had been five months along. He didn’t want to see it. He gave my mother paregoric for the pain, and with flannel cloths stanched the blood, which he said would have stopped of its own accord “via the body’s natural healing.” He warned of complications and then patted my head. “You didn’t need another brother anyhow, lad. Too many mouths to feed as it is.”
This was Mom’s third miscarriage; only one had been intentional. She had tried to miscarry Everett. Isolated and homesick for North Dakota, facing a difficult life after Margie and I were born, she had wanted no more babies. When she found herself pregnant with Everett, she sought advice from my uncle Pete’s wife, Kate, the French Canadian who specialized in mild necromancies. She recommended ghastly mixtures of cod-liver oil, ground chicken gall bladders, strong coffee, moisture gathered from cows’ udders, and honey, warmed into a smooth blend and swallowed neat. The child remained firmly in utero. Mom would load my sister and me into a wicker baby buggy and push it for hours over graveled roads, thinking she could jar the fetus loose. Nothing worked. She blamed herself for Everett’s maladies, the bad eyesight, mild epilepsy, and slowness to learn.
Dad drove McMurray back to town, and Mom finally slept. Margie and Nell returned from Aunt Kate’s, where Dad had sent them for the day When I told Margie what had happened, she listened and then went to the kitchen and made herself a peanut butter sandwich. I sat down on the floor, holding Fido to my chest.
On weekends I accompanied Dad to Buckotaban Lake, where we peeled logs for the Wisconsin-Michigan Lumber Company. Dad and a friend, Marion Briggs, were hired to strip bark from the logs and pile them so that sledges and tractors could reach them for easy hauling. Briggs was a tall, husky man in his thirties, with a small daughter. He had been abandoned by his wife, reputedly a Spanish dancer. His mother raised the girl, keeping her in homemade dresses of an ugly Victorian style. Briggs was a violinist who, under mysterious circumstances, had given up his career. Only rarely would he consent to perform. He encouraged Dad to play instruments. They earned thirty cents for each log trimmed of branches and debarked. By working hard, they could finish six or seven trees an hour. My job was to peel logs Dad had trimmed and slashed along one side. I used a “spud,” or tire iron. Pine bark came off easily. The spruce were difficult though. On these I used a drawknife, a blade with two parallel handles, scraping free the obstinate bark without gouging the wood. Since I was slow, Dad worked most of the spruce himself The best logs would be sawed into lumber, the remainder pulped. Our clothes and hands were coated with pitch. Only kerosene would cut it.
Briggs worked by himself creating his own piles of timber. One afternoon he walked over to me, chatted briefly, and then whipped out his penis. There’s a protocol for relieving yourself in the presence of other males: either you turn your back or you stand beside them, facing the same way; neither of you gazes at the other. Briggs’s member was almost equine; I had never seen anything like it. Dad came over and spoke curtly to Briggs, who never displayed himself to me again.
Dad’s trustworthiness and honor were tarnished by a feeling he shared with others of his subculture. Whenever you could exploit either the “haves” or the “government,” you did it. One evening he invited me to go with him for a walk. After a quarter of a mile or so, we came to a rise of highland where the soil had been freshly shoveled. “There,” he said proudly. “I’ve buried dynamite.” He had stolen the explosives from his WPA job, intending to use them for excavating a basement. Over the basement he planned to build an extra room. He described the sensitivity of the caps, how a brusque hit would detonate them. The foreman made regular reports of the dynamite supply to superiors. If he came up short, they would investigate. Dad cautioned me to tell no one.
I carried this burden for weeks, forgetting the dynamite only when snow blew and the ground froze. Whether the rip-off ethic was generic to our class only, I do not know. Is one a thief if he takes from the rich? Later, when I worked in grocery stores, I took cakes, soft drinks, and packages of lunch meat and, hiding in the basement among stored boxes of food, had great feasts. These “fringe benefits,” unofficially bestowed, would never be missed, I thought. So far as I knew, Dad never used the dynamite, nor was his cache discovered by the authorities.
Dad gave me a Spanish guitar, one he had bought through a correspondence school. Dad played accordion, violin, and mandolin at taverns, usually accompanied by Charlie Mattek, who played guitar and sang. Dad said that if I practiced, I could join the duo and make some money.
Dad bought a guitar book, and with his usual patience, showed me how to place my fingers—G-F-G—and to strum time. Once I learned chords, he played his violin and I accompanied him. His favorite tunes were sentimental country songs from his childhood or ones he had learned as a roustabout and farm hand: “Over the Waves,” “Red River Valley,” “I’m Dreaming Tonight of Sweet Hallie,” “The Prisoner’s Song,” “Red Wing.” He made no effort to learn popular songs.
Hardly a day passed without his playing or singing. He sang us to sleep, holding both child and banjo on his lap. On the rare occasions when we had company, Dad performed. On good days we would take kitchen chairs to the front yard and play The music seemed so perfect, so pure in contrast to our lives.
Although I learned to manipulate a handful of guitar chords, I never mastered the skill of picking out solos. I strummed mechanically, rarely feeling the music. When I later played tuba in the high school band, despite hours of practice, my playing was rote. I lacked Dad’s spontaneity; he could relax, and, immersing himself wholly in his art, produce music.