Crunching Gravel (7 page)

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.