Crunching Gravel (8 page)

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.

 

By traversing Ewald's forty and our own, we reached Perch Lake, the best of all nearby lakes for swimming. Minnow, nearer our house, was thick with bloodsuckers. And wading was impossible—you were soon up to your knees in muck. Perch Lake had a wide sandy shore and a sandy bottom. To get to the beach you had to cross a large potato field owned by a bad-tempered bachelor, John Simon, the town grave digger, whose house was invisible from the lake.

A grassy bluff with scrub Norway pines overlooked the beach. By getting a good run, you propelled yourself into the water. We had contests to see who could jump the farthest. For a swimsuit I wore old jeans cut off above the knees. My sisters had one-piece suits from Sears. Nell, only four, rarely went with us. My cousin Grace's breasts had already formed. George Jolly delighted in flashing his rear at Grace—“mooning,” he called it.

I enjoyed going to Perch Lake with the Jollys. George was my age, Bill a year older. They lived at the opposite end of Sundsteen, a mile and a half past the school. I thought nothing of walking the distance to meet them, and since there were no telephones, there was no way of knowing whether they would be home or not. They came from a huge family of ten children. Bill and George loved fishing and often went to Columbus Lake.

The Jolly house was a two-storey affair covered with gray shingles. It had the usual spread of outbuildings—a barn with lofts for hay, a henhouse, a pigsty, and corrals for cows. The father and the oldest son worked for the Wisconsin-Michigan Lumber Company. Mrs. Jolly was an ebullient woman with huge breasts who wore the same dress for months, until it turned to shreds. All of her dresses were of the same magenta Rit tint, the hue rubbed dull by grease and child-soil.