All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found (2 page)

Welcome to the club, brother, he said.

We shared another cup from a spare bottle as I toweled off with my flannel shirt. Sticky with cheap bubbly, shivering in the late morning breeze, I felt my admiration for him blossom into something more powerful, almost disorienting, uncomfortably close to envy. Without any fuss or the least hint of self-congratulation, he’d shepherded me through an experience I already sensed would last in memory the rest of my life. The closer I looked at him, the more impressive he seemed. He had the kind of adult life I lacked, not to mention a major talent, bordering on artistry, that allowed him to rise above the world whenever he felt like it, assuming the wind was right. My undergraduate reality looked insubstantial by comparison, with its basement keg parties and communal living arrangements, the rah-rah silliness of Saturday afternoon football games. These feelings were so unexpected, so far from anything I’d ever felt about him, that I could not find the courage to express them, and anyway words of appreciation had never come naturally for either of us. We had been farm kids, after all, and emotional effusiveness was not our style, not by a long shot.

In my earliest memories there was no such thing as him or me, only us. Dan and I were born one year and nine days apart, and though I was the older I had no recollection of life before he appeared. Until I went to kindergarten at the age of five we were an inseparable pair, coconspirators unmindful of language, at home in the out of doors, amid the smells of sloughs and mud and skunks and manure. We snuck ripe strawberries from our mother’s garden together, built snow forts in the windbreak of woods, swam and fished in the river, made up games of war, American boys on the American land. Growing up on a farm three miles from the nearest town, we each were all the other had, until our sister Lisa arrived three years after Dan and took her place as our mascot.

We knew early it was our destiny to be farmers. Our father farmed a rented homestead of a quarter section. His uncles farmed to the west and to the north. Our grandmother grew up on the farm where our great-grandfather spent his entire life, the original homestead claimed by our great-great-grandfather, in 1887. We were said to have descended from a Parisian pharmacist and grocer named Louis Hebert, who emigrated to Quebec early in the seventeenth century and became the man referred to in history books as “the first farmer of Canada.” Dan and I would have been the fifth generation to work the soil in the same little corner of southwest Minnesota, Des Moines River headwaters country, on the western edge of what had once been the tallgrass prairie. The first object I can recall coveting was a shiny toy tractor with an enclosed cab, which I received for a birthday gift the year I turned four. We used it to practice growing corn in a patch of earth behind the garage. We tilled the soil and planted seeds snuck from bags in the granary; we weeded the rows and watered the plants until they’d grown to scale with our tractor. Then we cut and chopped our tiny stalks the way our father did for silage, and like our father we covered our piles with a swatch of black plastic to ferment them with the warmth of the sunlight, fodder for the cattle, to get them through the lean months till the grain came in from the fields.

It was an enchanting world in its way, as most childhood landscapes are: an agrarian paradise of rich post-glacial soil, with just a sliver of the old wildness remaining to invite you past the manicured fields of corn and beans, their rectilinear geometry. Marshlands and prairie pothole lakes dimpled the low spots in the land, and where the water still pooled and on its edges, along the drainage ditches that ran square as the rows of corn, in strips of untamed earth along the railroad right-of-way, some of the ancient prairie still survived. These remnants were sparse, though, and anyway our mission was to tame the land and bend it to our will and take our living from it. We didn’t earn money by admiring it. That was a lesson imparted early.

Other lessons we learned by watching, still others we learned by doing. Our father needed the help. He was in deep with the bank from the beginning, having made his start with borrowed money, and he tended his own land while also helping his uncle on the home place down the road. As soon as we had muscles, he put them to work. We learned the toughest job first, picking rock, then later in the summer pulling weeds from the soybean fields. Rock-picking was springtime duty, before the crop was planted but after the fields were plowed. Someone drove a tractor with a loader bucket in front or a wagon hitched behind, or both, and we walked alongside it through the soft and yielding clods of overturned soil, hoisting anything bigger than a softball up into the pile. Rocks could damage the planter or, worse, the combine at harvest. Removing them was a preventative measure, a hedge against damaged machines and lost time, and among the most stupefying of labors ever performed by humans on earth. Giant cairns marked each corner of the rockiest fields, monuments to our labor and the labor of those before us. They had a simple beauty not at all in keeping with the brutality of the work that had formed them. The springtime winds chapped our lips, our hands cracked from digging in the dirt, but we knew better than to complain. Farming wasn’t easy. We heard that often enough. Rocks and weeds and bad weather were the enemies, and since one of the three could not be controlled, we had to do our best where we were able. Farming tested a person; those found wanting failed. This was the ironclad law of the life we were born for.

My going to kindergarten a year before Dan nudged us apart, as did overheard jokes about our paternity, for though we were close in age we looked nothing alike, to the point where that was our most notable characteristic, the one people fixated on—our physical dissimilarity. Under “comments” in his baby book, our mother had written the first things said about him at birth, among them:
He’s so different from Philip
. I had our mother’s dark features, he had our father’s strawberry blond hair and fair skin. Our personalities and interests formed as distinctly as our looks. I became a reader, asthmatic and sensitive, squeamish around farm animals, more comfortable baking cookies than baling hay. Early on he showed competence with his hands, unafraid to plunge his arm into a sow and extract a piglet, quicker to learn how to drive a tractor or run a grain auger, more instinctive with tools. Being the older brother meant never wanting to show weakness in his presence, so I scooped manure and castrated pigs alongside him, outwardly capable, inwardly doubtful. I’m sure anyone could have seen which of us was touched by a faint delicacy of manner, and anyway our 4-H projects told the tale. Dan always showed a hog at the county fair, while I played at artsier things—black-and-white photography, model airplanes.

The one thing we’d always taken for granted, that we would someday be farmers, became the one option unavailable to us the year I turned twelve. The bankers lost their patience; we held a sale, packed our things in boxes, and left the only home we’d ever known to the wind and time. We’d been found wanting, not in work ethic but in financial viability. Old Lady Leysen rented the land to a neighbor, and that was the end of another homestead. No one would ever live there again. The buildings would eventually be burned to the ground as part of a training exercise for the local volunteer fire department, leaving only a metal Quonset hut and a concrete silo as headstones to mark our failed efforts, the rest of the rooms of our childhood consumed in flame.

As much as I missed certain special places on the land, places where I felt the first tendrils of connection to things more enduring than the human-built world, I was also secretly relieved when we left. I’d never felt sure of myself in the more complicated work of the farm, never gained a feel for it, the way Dan had instinctively. A fresh chance at self-invention appealed to me. I can’t say how Dan felt, though of course I can guess. I never asked, and he never said, but I had cause to wonder if in the loss of the farm he lost something of himself he could never recover.

As a teenager I became obsessed with sports. I trained for basketball and track in the humid clamor of the high school weight room; I pored over copies of the
Sporting News
after I finished my homework at night, dreaming of one day seeing my name in print, if only in the local sports pages. Dan focused his efforts on the wood shop, becoming skilled enough to hire on summers with his shop teacher, with whom he built furniture and cabinets. As a wrestler, he viewed my passion for basketball as something of a retreat from manlier pursuits. Insofar as my teenage mind believed anything with bedrock conviction, it was that the fast-break style of the Los Angeles Lakers in the Showtime years was the pinnacle of team-sport artistry, and Dan countered by claiming that the Detroit Pistons—known as the Bad Boys, for their intimidating physicality and brutish antics—were his favorite team. He spent the weekends tinkering with cars, an investment of time and energy that confounded me, since he would smash them up during races at the county fair each August, undoing all his hard work in a few loops around the track.

No one was surprised when I went away to college and he chose the path of blue-collar work. It was the natural move for each of us, and after he accepted our aunt and uncle’s invitation to move to New Mexico and bunk with them while he got himself settled, he existed only on the far edge of my consciousness. We were brothers in our early twenties, each of us making his own way in the world, more than a thousand miles apart. I suspect he thought of me as infrequently as I thought of him.

After the champagne baptism, we drank beer and made dinner and spoke of work and school and other such pleasantries. We played a game of Monopoly with Emily and her parents, settling into the banter of good-natured competition, affectionate teasing of the kind that made everyone around us laugh. The elation from our early morning flight continued to hum in my mind. The whole day had about it the character of a festive reunion. Beer flowed, old stories were retold, others told for the first time. Late in the evening, when Dan asked about my work as a reporting intern for the
Fargo Forum
the previous summer—our mother, he admitted, had sent him some of my clips—I had enough beer in me to tell him the truth, which was that the whole experience had been something of a farce.

One Monday morning, shortly after my feature on the city’s pet groomers was splashed across the entire face of the B section, along with color photos of poodles and dachshunds undergoing various forms of makeover, I decided I’d had enough. One month remained of my internship, one month more than I could stand. I skipped breakfast and went straight to a sports-medicine clinic. To a kindly but perplexed nurse, I explained that I was with the drama department at the university. We were putting on a play in the fall, and in the play there was a character who wore a sling on his arm. Our prop room lacked a sling. I asked if she might let me borrow one, or, if that wasn’t an option, whether she might take cash for it. She seemed to pity me for some reason, perhaps the transparency of my lie; she let me have the thing for free. I told her I’d stop by with a couple of complimentary tickets in the fall, before the play opened, and she pretended to sound pleased.

Half an hour later I appeared in the office of the managing editor, empty shirtsleeve dangling at my side like a flag of surrender. I explained my history of shoulder trouble (true), told him in detail how I’d dislocated it over the weekend in a game of pickup basketball (false), and informed him that I needed to leave immediately to see my doctor back in Minneapolis about the likelihood of major rotator-cuff surgery (preposterous). The old man stabbed out his cigarette and lit another, wheezing as he shifted his enormous girth in his chair. He peered at me over the top of his half-moon glasses.

I’m sorry, I said, but I can’t stay. I can’t even take notes anymore.

You can use a tape recorder, he said.

I don’t have one.

We’ll get you one.

But I can’t even type, I said, wiggling my pathetic chicken wing for emphasis.

Sure you can, he said. You’ll just have to use one hand. Hunt and peck. Half the monkeys in the newsroom type that way.

His arguments were futile. By noon I’d packed my car, having worn the sling the whole time in case a colleague from the paper drove past the empty frat house—Alpha Gamma Rho, the farm-boy fraternity—where I’d rented a room for the summer. I was thirty miles down Interstate 94, smoking a celebratory joint, when I remembered I wasn’t really injured and didn’t need the sling.

Hearing this, Dan snorted so hard that beer geysered out of his nose. He’d never thought of me as all that amusing, and though I’d done my best to leave out the boring parts of the story, I hadn’t expected to hit his funny bone quite so squarely. His reaction proved contagious. We laughed until our faces were wet with tears. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d done so. Maybe we never had.

The joint, he said. It was the joint. I can see you lighting it, no hands on the wheel.

Soon afterward, perhaps wanting to be funny in his turn, he mentioned—apropos of the coming holiday—that he planned to take an out-of-town trip over the long weekend, to a balloon rally in the northwest part of New Mexico, since he wouldn’t have to work on Martin Luther Coon Day.

My shock was immediate and visceral. I wanted to believe I’d misheard him. Dan had a smirk on his face, a look of mischievous pride, that assured me I had not misheard. No one else seemed to notice or care. He may have thought it a harmless joke, but for me it was neither harmless nor a joke, so I went to the fridge and got another beer, then another as the conversation limped on. I performed some elaborate mental contortions to avoid placing the blame for the remark where it belonged, with the owner of the mouth that had uttered it. I settled on the notion that he was taking his cues on the postures of masculinity from the men he was hanging around at the time, men you might call, to be gracious about it, illiberal. With time and maturity he’d see the folly of their crude worldview. He’d shake off those bits of boilerplate prejudice he’d borrowed in the project of crafting a self and become his own man.