Crunching Gravel (2 page)

 

Built of logs and axe-hewn beams, our new house sat on a knoll flanked by white birch, Norway pine, and spruce. It looked thrown together as if by a troll—the hip-roofed upper storey, with its tiny cross-paned window facing the gravel road, was askew. The surface plaster was a dismal gray. The northern hip was longer than the southern. And the weathered clapboards were badly chinked with moss and plaster. From the roof emerged a thin blue tin stovepipe, anchored to the roof with baling wire. As if the soot were burning, sparks flew, expiring on the snow.

The lower storey fit snugly into a tree-covered hill complete with a root cellar. An unpainted gray clapboard shed, jerry-built, was affixed to the lower storey, as a kitchen and storage room for mops, pails, and winter clothing. The stoop, which my mother kept brushed clean, was of cheap pine boards painted blue. All around the house, from the eaves, hung long icicles, some as tall as a boy.

Beside the cardboard-insulated door, the snow was stained where we relieved ourselves in cold weather. In spring, the weeds were luxuriant, for we also dumped dishwater there. Nearby, bared to the elements, was a small green pitcher pump, the source of our water. Beneath a wooden platform, layers of straw protected the pump from freezing.

Fronting the house was an area fenced with wire, holding dead bachelor's buttons and withered cornstalks. Beyond, snow-piled, was a three-acre field for potatoes, cabbage, turnips, onions, and strawberries. A shoveled path led down a short incline to the graveled Sundsteen Road. Snow banks were shoulder-high, with excavations hollowed out as ice caves by my sister and me. Our mailbox, with its red metal flag, was across the road, set for easy access by the mailman, Francis Sailer.

We could see the Kula farm. Mrs. Kula labored in the fields and spoke only Polish. She always wore a white babushka. Her husband was a hard-working man of great rages who cursed both sons and horses. The Kulas made little effort to fit American ways; they might just as well have been tilling fields near Kraków.

 

On the night before we washed clothes I filled two galvanized rinse tubs and set them in the unheated outer shed attached to the kitchen. In the morning we would have to remove the layer of ice formed during the night. We ladled hot water from a copper boiler into a primitive hand-crank washing machine. My job was to work the agitator. We started off with all the whites, squeezing them by hand into the first rinse, prepared with blueing, and then a second rinse. Mom and I took turns hanging the clothes outside; it was my chore to shovel snow from beneath the lines. In a few minutes, even if you wore gloves, the dampness from the wash froze your fingers, and you had to go inside to warm them. Soon we were finished, and the clothes on the line were board-stiff The sheets we dried in the kitchen and living room on rope strung up for the purpose. I loved the fragrance of fresh starch in the antiseptic frigid air. Years later, my mother blamed these conditions for her arthritis.

 

The Saturday before Christmas, Dad gave my sister Margie and me a quarter apiece for a matinee. It would be dark when we got out after the double feature. The weather was cold and clear. “Walk fast and you'll stay warm,” Dad said. I had never before seen a movie.

We arrived just as the first film began and found our seats in the dark. The credits appeared:
Rose Marie
, starring Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. I believed every moment. I knew that Jeanette could position herself on a real Rocky Mountain peak on a moonlit night, warble “Indian Love Call” across the intervening canyons, and be heard by Nelson Eddy, clad in his Canadian Mountie uniform, seated on yet another peak listening and returning the song. MacDonald was an apparition made filmy and mystical via the soft-focus effect of the camera's lens. And how I wished that Eddy were my father leading that cadre of Royal Mounties in immaculate close-order drill through the vastness of those mountains.

The second film was a shocker, an exploitation film on the Ku Klux Klan and the lynchings, torturings, and burnings of southern blacks. I had been only dimly aware of that vicious social history.

I left the theater dazed and took Margie's hand as we walked through the town toward Sundsteen Road. It was already dark, and a soft drift of new snow was falling. I loved the play of the flakes in the arc of dim light around the street lamps.

I nagged Margie to walk faster. I listened intently for strange noises in the underbrush, knowing that no hooded men would jump forth to kidnap us. I imagined a hanged man swaying from a tree silhouetted against the sky, a few feet away in a marsh. Owl hoots were ominous. A deer, startled by us, crashed into the woods. Still holding Margie's hand, I began to run. “Don't, don't,” she called. “'Fraidy cat.”

In twenty minutes we were home regaling our parents with lurid details about the Klan. I could barely eat supper.

 

Samuel Peters (1902-1969) was from a German-Irish family, traced by a Mormon cousin back to a Tunis Peters who emigrated to America in the eighteenth century. When Sam was two, his mother died of a ruptured appendix and German measles, and Sam was raised by an older sister in a North Dakota prairie sod house. His dad, Richard, scavenged mines for a living and was gone for days at a time. Five years later, the sister disappeared, and Sam was alone, isolated from neighbors. His only food was sourdough pancakes, which he would bake over a primitive cookstove using wood he himself gathered. All of his life, his breakfasts included these pancakes, made with bacon drippings and topped with sugar.

His formal schooling consisted of two grades in a one-roomed prairie school. Eventually he became a carnival roustabout, worker on threshing crews, and mechanic. Though semiliterate, he believed in education. He taught himself electronics and to play musical instruments by ear—accordian, banjo, mandolin, fiddle, and guitar. He had a special gift for colorful verbal images and was popular in bars and at work.

He built our house and outbuildings, fashioned a saw machine from an old Model T engine, managed our livestock and farm, fished and hunted, and provided us with much physical affection. He grew easily disgruntled with bosses and foremen and often quit jobs. In the 1960s he established his own blacksmith shop. He suffered lower back problems. He was over 6' and always listed to accommodate his back. Despite the poverty, the bad teeth, the coughing, and the wrenched sacrum, he seldom complained. Perhaps since his own mother died when he was a babe, his Dorothy was both wife and mother to him. He often resembled a jolly, big child. In his fifties he contracted stomach cancer: All his life he had downed baking soda and drunk much beer. One morning at the Lincoln town dump, where he was the caretaker, he shot a stray dog, had a heart attack, fell into some flames, and died. He was only sixty.

 

“Yes, there's where it went in,” Dad said, pointing to the smashed wooden bridge. “Want a closer look?”

He took our hands and we walked to the very spot where Rick Burns had lost control of his Chevy and plunged into the icy water. His high school sweetheart and fiancée, Marjorie Price, was with him. They were still both down there under the broken ice, in who knew how many feet of water. The ice was about two feet thick, normal for late November, even when the current was swift, as it was here. Black water roiled on to the junction with the Wisconsin River, beyond the bridge.

“They slid on a patch of ice,” Dad said. “They say Burns wasn't a drinker.”

I had seen Marjorie Price a couple of times walking to town. She had lived with her parents just a few houses south of Sundsteen Road. What a harrowing death! Had she grasped Rick Burns to her as they drowned? Were they still locked in a lovers' embrace?

“The sheriffs coming with a tow truck.”

“I don't want to stay,” I said to Dad. “Take us home.”

“Sure,” Dad said.

A number of cars were parked now, waiting.

Later, Dad saw the bodies in the car as hoists and winches raised the Chevy. Although there was no chance of reviving them, the deputies pumped their chests.

 

Walk past the outhouse, a two-seater, with the ubiquitous Sears, Roebuck catalogue handy for wiping, toward two log buildings half buried in snow. One was the chicken coop. On warm days the hens and the single-combed white leghorn rooster ate grain scattered in the snow of a fenced-in yard. The rooster, who crowed incessantly, had trouble standing since all of his toes froze off during forty degree below zero weather. We called him “Crip.” He was a pet. He did his business well—most of our eggs produced chicks. The interior of the coop was dark but whitewashed, with nesting boxes. A triple set of roosts fashioned from birch poles accommodated thirty hens. In the very center, buried in the floor, was an old gas-tank heater.

Our cow, Lady, and her yearling occupied the other barn. Lady's stall was nearest the door. Near the top of the wall was a trap door for light and for throwing out manure. By spring, the manure pile, which we stoneboated to the fields, was taller than the barn. The stoneboat was made of planks mounted on wide sled-runners, which was drawn by horses. A mound of hay, cut by my father in neighbors' fields, along the public roads, and in the marshes, stood sheltered by some fir trees.

Near the barn, on a path leading to Minnow Lake, was the pigsty. We kept three pigs, a sow and two of her last litter. Even on the coldest days, they rooted through snow and fussed and quarreled over their swill. Their floorless shelter, which we maintained with straw, was made of saplings, with a tar-paper roof The pigs were white with large black spots. They crowded together for warmth. Icicles hung from their mouths. Their eyes frosted over.

Half of our forty was arable. The rest was given over to swamps. The frontage on Sundsteen Road adjoined my uncle Pete's property and marshy state lands. Most of our farm was sandy. The rest was in trees. A creek choked with dead logs emptied into Minnow Lake, known for its thick muddy bottom. Leeches swarmed there. When we stocked the lake with bass and crappie fingerlings, the bloodsuckers disappeared and the scavenger perch diminished. We tried excavating lake mud with buckets and shovels but soon gave up on ever having a sandy place to swim. There were extensive cranberry marshes. Across the lake, hills led to my uncle's farm. Beyond it lay the impeccable Ewald forty.

Dad bought our farm through the Homeowners' Loan Corporation, established by Franklin D. Roosevelt. The loan, arranged through the local First National Bank, was for $250. All $40-per-month payments were waived until Dad found work as a mechanic and could leave his job, which paid $10 per week.

 

“What's he doin' settin' there? Waitin' for roses to bloom?” George Jolly first noticed Lars the Swede, half covered with snow, sitting on the front stoop. His hands were stiff along his sides. Leaning back against the front door, he appeared to be sleeping.

Lars and a friend, Carl, lived in the green tar-paper shanty a quarter of a mile from the Jolly farm. It was the last dwelling you passed before entering the forest leading to Columbus Lake. George, his brother Bill, and I were going to the woods to check muskrat traps.

“He's dead,” said George, peering into the man's face. “He froze to death,” George looked in the front window, then pounded on the door. No response. Carl was not there—or was he inside, frozen too? No smoke came from the roof pipe. Since the men were heavy boozers, we guessed that Lars had come home drunk, had found the door locked, had no keys, and had fallen asleep sitting in the snow, waiting for Carl. The freezing would have been gradual. Lars's lips were a purplish blue. His eyelids were covered with rime, as was his short sandy beard.

“Come on,” Bill said. “Let's go tell Dad.”

“I'll stay here and watch,” George said. “I don't want no animal chewin' on him.” He turned to me. “Bob, stay here.”

The vigil seemed interminable. Death stained the surrounding air with a lethal dye. Earlier, standing on the bridge looking down at the hole in the ice where the lovers awaited rescue, I had felt something both frigid and sultry, something quasi-mystical. A filament of spun glass connected me to the Swede. The filament drew me toward death.
I would not go! I did not want to go!
Death was a patina of green decay, worms, and fatty exudations from the eyes, ears, and nose. I was ill-prepared for the strange blend of death and life in the Swede's peaceful corpse.

 

To enter the kitchen, you passed galvanized washtubs, a copper boiler, a clothes wringer, a rick of firewood, mackinaws, fur-lined caps, and mittens on spikes. Opposite were unpainted pine cabinets. We couldn't afford paint. The cupboards had defective knotholes and flangings. Knobs on the doors were empty sewing-thread spools. Each door had a small Guernsey cow clipped from an evaporated milk can. There was also a thermometer, courtesy of Brandner's Grocery where my father charged groceries.

A counter held canisters of flour, sugar, salt, and an old blue roasting pan used for washing dishes. Dishrags hung from hooks. Below there were more cupboards. Near the door were two galvanized water pails. There was a dipper, which the entire family used for drinking. My sister and I took turns filling the pails. On the coldest days, once we had thawed the pump, we filled the wash boiler to be sure we didn't run out before we could reprime the pump.

The Home Comfort kitchen range, of cast iron, had a myriad of uses. It was wood-burning, which meant that my mother needed ingenuity to bake bread. Warming ovens stored fry pans and kettles. Ornamental aluminum strips curved down the sides. A reservoir unit for holding warm water adjoined the firebox. Within easy reach sat a covered wooden crate for holding wood. Each day it was refilled from outside ricks. The oven had neither window nor thermometer. You inserted a hand to see when the oven was hot. On a window ledge nearby were cleaning powders, soap, and a straggly Christmas cactus.