Crunching Gravel (3 page)

You were struck immediately by the unfinished nature of the living room. My father had never covered the studs, and had instead tacked up old newspapers and flattened boxes for insulation. Culled pine boards, considered too imperfect by the lumber company to sell, protected us from some of the cold. Nail ends securing tar-paper protruded from the roof

Despite its limitations, the room was cozy. A round oak table with much-chipped and ill-matched chairs sat near the kitchen. White china plates, cups and saucers, glasses, and much-abused flatware, plus an array of condiments. Behind the heater were hooks for drying clothes. A pair of small windows facing the yard were curtained with flannel. Two varnished rocking chairs. A shelf with a radio. We were waiting for Kate Smith to sing “When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain.” A sky radiant with northern lights produced the best reception. On other nights, we could hear only by clustering near the speaker. Dad was taking a correspondence course from the De Forest electronic school. Mom studied with him, teaching him to pronounce and understand the words he didn't know. He turned pages by first wetting his finger with his tongue. His hands were large. Car grease was embedded in the skin around his cuticles. He was excited when his papers earned A's.

 

To reach the cellar you raised a door in the center of the living room. A crudely fashioned ladder led down into a black stench of decaying potatoes, onions, and carrots blended with damp seepage from earthen walls. It was advisable to cast a light before you descended. Shelves filled with mason jars were crammed with string beans, peas, carrots, beets, rhubarb, strawberries, wild blueberries, juneberries, raspberries, pickles, and watermelon preserves. There were also jars of chicken, venison, and pork. Potatoes buried in sand had started to sprout, sending out long, anemic, serpentine roots. Onions hung in bags from nails. There was also a crock of sauerkraut and the last of Dad's home brew. My parents did well at gauging the amount of food we'd need. The cellar hole, about seven feet deep, sat well below the frost line.

We heard a rat thumping in the cellar. Finally, our flashlight spied him. Dad knocked a wooden box apart, trimming the boards, narrowing the trap. He tied the trap door with a buckskin string and inserted a chunk of Welfare cheese. When the creature ate, the string would snap the door shut.

On the third morning Dad had just left for work driving the Vilas County Relief truck when Mom and I heard a terrific clatter. We'd caught him! I climbed into the pit and retrieved the box with its enraged prisoner. He was the largest rat I'd ever seen.

Mom removed the stove lid. I positioned the trap over the fire, with the door toward the flames. The rat's frantic movements shook the box. With a heated poker I beat his toes, forcing him into the flames. Screams, the smell of singed fur.

 

From the living room, one ascended two steps to my parents' bedroom. The double bed had a brown metal frame, a cotton mattress, sheets of bleached flour sacks, and two patchwork comforters. Above the bed were a newspaper photo of Jesus cradling a lamb, a photo of my grandmother, and my parents' wedding picture in an oval metal frame with a cluster of metal flowers at the base. In this portrait, my mother wore her hair in bangs, as was the fashion in 1923, and a string of fake pearls. My father wore a dark suit with a white shirt and tie; his hair was cropped at the sides. He was twenty, my mother sixteen.

On the floor was a hooked rug my mother had made. My parents' clothes hung from a birch pole angled across a corner. Like the living room, this room was unfinished. There was an old stool covered with geraniums, now dormant, in metal cans. Near the door was my four-year-old sister Nell's cot. Apple crates held her clothes, dolls, and coloring books.

More rough-plank stairs led to an overhead bedroom. As you ascended you might scrape your skull on the vicious ends of tar-paper nails projecting through the roof There were crates for books and toys. Our play area was adjacent to a tin stovepipe. Well-worn linoleum protected our knees from wood slivers. Standing erect was possible only in the center of the room. The hip roof saved heat, but also induced claustrophobia. Small paned windows, askew, were in both ends of the room. Thin curtains on string covered the icy glass. No wall was finished, nor were the window frames and sills painted. A double bed occupied the far corner. Here I slept with Everett, five years younger, under a heavy quilt made of colored worsted scraps. Since the quilt was too heavy to wash by hand, it accumulated much boy-soil. The pillows were bleached flour sacks crammed with hen feathers.

On an orange crate beside the bed sat a single-wick glass kerosene lamp on a crocheted doily. In the crate were a book of Lutheran prayers and a much-thumbed King James Bible. I read from the Bible night and morning. I intended to read the entire Bible aloud, including the genealogical names. I loved the Doré illustrations, especially the one of Daniel in the lion's den. In recurring dreams Daniel visited me.

 

At 6
A.M
. the ice was ablaze in sunshine. Ice-covered birches bent to the ground. Lakes were smothered with freshly fallen snow.

My father and I were driving in the County Welfare truck to the Lac du Flambeau Indian reservation for a truckload of cotton comforters sewn by Flambeau women, as a U.S. government relief project. The reservation was eighty miles from Eagle River. For months the women had met daily at the Community Hall to sew quilts of cotton batting and flowered cloth supplied by the government. Dad would distribute them to needy families.

Some Indians lived on the outskirts of Eagle River and in nearby Clearwater. The largest Indian family had our name, Peters. We were not as impoverished as they, and we shared many of the overt prejudices of whites then against Indians. We were sure we bathed more, drank less alcohol, avoided knife fights, and rarely beat our wives and kids. The girls from the “other” Peters clan were regarded as unteachable and usually left high school pregnant. Indian yards swarmed with dirty kids, straggly hens, and mangy hounds (we even believed that they made stew of their dogs). Junked cars completed the scene. A white man marrying an Indian woman was ostracized as a “squaw man.” One white lumberjack, George Petts, married an Indian and lived on the highway to Rhinelander. He joked about his squaw's fertility—she “squirted” forth a “papoose” a year. At last count, there were eight kids. Petts was a notorious poacher. Apprehended, he pleaded poverty, saying that if the county jailed him, they'd have to feed his family. The authorities usually let him go.

Lac du Flambeau was located at a confluence of lakes and rivers, with much virgin timber nearby. The town itself was home to three hundred souls, most of whom lived in bark shanties. Tourists avoided the town, preferring not to be distressed by the obvious and extreme want. The Works Progress Administration, as an employment project, built weather-sealed outhouses—one per family. These were of first-quality lumber, painted in bright colors, and far superior to any of the houses they graced. We joked that the Indians would be far more comfortable in their outhouses than in their shacks and wigwams.

A huge squaw wearing a cheap gingham dress, with a bib apron of a clashing flower pattern, met us. Her graying hair hung full about her chubby face. With a meaty hand she gestured us into the hall where a dozen or so women sat around plank tables working. The odor was a mix of skunk and human sweat.

We loaded the truck. As we worked, Dad joshed with the squaws. He preferred delivering welfare to these people than to needy whites.

By mid-afternoon, back in town, we unloaded the truck. At home, I scrubbed myself trying to efface the odor. We hung our clothes outside in the icy air, but the smell persisted.

 

The Sundsteen School was a white clapboard single-room affair, without basement, situated on bare land at a juncture of roads. Sundsteen Road veered west here and wound on, meeting Highway 17, which led eventually to Rhinelander, the largest town. The road past the school was little more than a two-mile service road ending near swamps leading to Columbus Lake. Several of the poorest families lived along this road, far from town.

At the front of the schoolroom were the teacher's desk, a blackboard, and a large wood stove enclosed in corrugated tin ineptly stamped with metal flowers and grapes. Twenty movable desks were arrayed before the teacher, the first-graders to the front, the eighth-graders to the rear. On cold days, we pulled chairs as close to the stove as possible. The “library” was a bookcase roughly six feet high and six feet wide holding a scattering of much-abused books and a set of Compton's Encyclopedia. Beside the bookcase sat what we called a “sandbox,” a long mahogany-stained pine case standing on what appeared to be piano legs and filled with sand. Here we built relief maps of the area, complete with glass for lakes and twigs for trees. Occasionally, some enterprising student drew an approximation of Wisconsin. In spring the box held quarts of frogs' eggs, which we observed hatching. If the tadpoles did not die, we returned them to the swamps where we had found the eggs.

 

I would do anything for Osmo Makinnen, the school bully, although, since I was nearly three years behind my class in age, I was often the butt of his teasing. Provoking my tears was easy, and when I complained, the others called me “sissy” and “teacher's pet.” Miss Crocker could do little but comfort me. She was seldom with us on the playground, particularly in winter, when we donned our wool coats, hats, mufflers, and rubber boots and swirled around the school like insane starlings.

One winter, after the heaviest snowfall of the year had hardened into drifts, Osmo and his cohorts excavated an enormous tunnel in the snow the county plow had pushed back from the road—massive deposits of hard snow covered with an icy crust. The tunnel led to an igloo large enough for three persons.

Osmo began the excavations by explaining his plans for the room, which we would use as a clubroom. He delegated most of the digging but ignored my anxious wish to contribute. I should have known better. Showing his disregard, even contempt, for me, he passed the shovel over my head to my cousin Grace, who stuck out her tongue. I hung about, pathetically trying to catch his eye.

For the next week, until the digging was over, I stayed by myself, made snowmen, and followed fox-and-geese patterns, pretending that others were also playing the game.

I was surprised when Osmo said he wanted me to be the first to-enter. He insisted on an early start, to leave time for the others to visit before classes started again. I didn't even bother to eat my lunch.

He first removed the end of an old barrel blocking the entrance. “You'll have to crawl all the way back,” he said. “I'll be right behind.”

The passageway was barely wide enough for my shoulders. I negotiated a turn by squirming along on my belly. Osmo had warned me not to kick the tunnel sides. The roof of the igloo was built of snow blocks, each dovetailed and rounding to form a domed roof. Sunlight shimmered through the roof, a lovely iridescent green.

Osmo asked my opinion of the place. I said it was great. I imagined Eskimos safe inside from an arctic blizzard. Osmo took a handful of wood shavings and some twigs from his pocket, scooped out a spot in the floor, and struck a large wooden match to start a fire. He unwrapped a small packet of waxed paper, revealing two small strips of venison. “Your lunch,” he said, holding the meat over the flames. “Big hunter come from hunt.” The meat looked juicy. He took the first scrap for himself then handed me the second.

He ordered me to stay while he went for the others. I heard voices at the far end of the tunnel, then laughter. The igloo shook. I started toward the passageway and was horrified to find it blocked. They were crushing the whole thing in on me!

Fighting panic, I returned to the igloo, finding it hard to breathe. I was too short to reach the domed roof Would death be like this—ice-breath seeping through my skull?

I thought I heard Osmo's voice. I was wrong. They had returned to classes, leaving me there. I would not cry! Slowly, I began to dig with my hands where the entrance had been. I shoved snow in behind me. I cleared a few feet but realized I was getting nowhere. The compacted snow was too deep.

I found a block of frozen mud, scraped up by the snow-plow, which I flung against the roof It broke through! The tumbling snow formed a mound, which made it easier to reach the roof blocks, to push them by hand. I was free!

 

We used bacon grease for frying eggs, stirred it into bread batter and biscuits, and mixed it with Welfare peanut butter to make the spread go further. Peanut butter usually came wrapped in butcher paper. We filled lard pails half full, set them on the stove reservoir to warm, and then mixed in bacon drippings. The result was delicious—salty, smoky, and loaded with calories and cholesterol.

We churned our own butter from Lady's cream in a gallon-sized glass jar with screw-on top and wooden paddles and handle. It took half an hour of vigorous churning. We loved the buttermilk. When Lady's supply of cream didn't suffice, Dad bought oleomargarine, which in those days could not be colored since it would pass as butter, something prevented by the powerful Wisconsin dairy lobby. We dumped the pale oleo into a mixing bowl, opened up a bead of orange dye, and proceeded to color the oleo to resemble butter. It seemed more palatable that way. Colorless oleo resembled lard, something only truly destitute people ate on bread.

Twice a week we baked bread. The flour, from government surplus, came in fifty-pound cloth bags. None of these were wasted—all were bleached and sewn by my mother into dresses, shirts, sheets, towels, and handkerchiefs. We begged for bits of yeast cake to eat. Once the dough was kneaded, we turned the loaves out into heavily greased tins, black from use, and stuck them in the warming oven to rise. We stocked wood—pitch pine if we had it—until the stove was hot. Mom fried pieces of bread dough in deep grease. These “fritters” were delicious smothered in peanut butter and sugar!