Tamarack River Ghost (16 page)

“About what?” Fred put down his coffee and looked at is old friend.

“About the meeting the other night?”

“What am I supposed to think about it?”

“Hell, I don’t know what you’re supposed to think about it, I wanna know what you do think about it,” said Oscar.

“Well, to tell you the truth, I was a little surprised that you stood up and shot off your mouth.”

Oscar smiled. “Sometimes you gotta do that, Fred. Sometimes you gotta stand up and say what you think. Let folks know where you stand.”

“Oscar, you can’t hardly stand without a cane. Ain’t you a little too old to be saying what you think?”

“Old? No, I’m not too old to say what I think. More old people ought to do that: let the younger folks know that we old timers got experience, that we’ve been around the tree a couple times and have learned a few things because of it.”

Fred took another drink of his coffee, contemplating what Oscar had just said.

Oscar continued, “It’s one of the things wrong in our society these days—everybody thinks the young people have got all the ideas, have figured out where things are headed, and wanna let you believe they know how to move into the future. I’m not sayin’ we shouldn’t listen to these young folks; we should. But they ought to listen to us, too. There ought to be a mix of ideas comin’ from all directions.”

“So whaddya think of what old Shotgun had to say about not eatin’ meat?”

“I think he’s got a point. Yes, I do. And by golly, he’s got a right to express it too. You notice that reporter guy, that Josh somebody, picked up on what Shotgun said and wrote about it in the newspaper today?”

“Yup, I did see that,” said Fred. “Can’t see it happenin’ though. People been eating meat since they lived in caves.”

“How do you know that?”

“Know what?”

“That people ate meat when they lived in caves.”

“I just do. Read it in a book when I was in second grade.”

“You could read when you were in second grade?”

“You damn betcha I could, and I remembered stuff too.” Fred touched the side of his head as he spoke.

“So where do you come down on the idea of a big hog farmer comin’ into our valley?”

“Ain’t thought about it much.”

“Why not?” asked Oscar.

“Why not what?”

“Why haven’t you thought about it?”

“Other things to think about. Lots of other things to consider,” said Fred.

“Like what?”

“Well, my arthritis has been kicking up lately. Been thinkin’ about that. Been thinkin’ about getting old—been thinkin’ about that a lot.”

“Good God, Fred, you gotta get your mind away from arthritis and worrying about gettin’ old. You should think about something else. Something important.”

“Arthritis and gettin’ old are pretty damn important to me.”

Oscar sipped his coffee and didn’t say anything for a half minute or so.

Fred broke the silence. “So you agree with me that I got other things more important to think about than a bunch of smelly hogs comin’ into the valley.”

“I didn’t say that,” said Oscar, picking up his coffee cup.

“So what are sayin’, then? Just what are you sayin’?” Fred raised his voice a little.

“You don’t have to yell. I ain’t deaf,” Oscar said quietly.

“I ain’t yellin’, I’m just wondering what you’re drivin’ at.”

Oscar put down his coffee cup and looked Fred straight in the eye. “Are you for or against this big hog operation comin’ into our valley?”

“I figure it ain’t none of my business,” said Fred.

“None of your business?” Now Oscar raised his voice.

“That’s what I said. Now if I was to stand up and say what I think, people are gonna call me and write to me and put my name in the paper. I don’t need that kind of attention, I just wanna live what I got left of my life by myself, without anybody botherin’ me. I don’t want anybody messin’ in my business, and I figure I shouldn’t be messin’ in anybody else’s.”

“So you don’t care that when you wake up in the morning all you can smell is pig manure? You don’t care about that, huh?”

“I don’t wanna smell pig manure when I wake up in the morning.”

“So, you do have an opinion on the matter.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Sounded like you said that.”

“Well I didn’t.”

“Know what, Fred?” Oscar hesitated for a moment before he continued. He didn’t want to criticize his friend, but then he thought,
Why not
, and he continued.

“Do you know that you are a middle-of-the-roader?” said Oscar.

“What does that mean?”

“It means you sit right in the middle of road, trying not to take on a position on either side.”

“Expect that’s right.”

“Know what happens to middle-of-the-roaders?”

“What?” asked Fred. He took another sip of coffee.

“They get run over by traffic goin’ in both directions.”

Fred laughed. “I ain’t been run over yet.”

“Know what else?”

“What else?”

“People who don’t stand up and say their piece when decisions are being made have no right to shoot off their mouths when they don’t like what happens.”

“Why not?”

“’Cause they didn’t have guts enough to stand up and say what they thought when the idea was bein’ discussed.”

Fred drained the last drop from his coffee cup, stood up, and put on his John Deere cap.

“I gotta be goin’,” he said. “See you around.” He walked toward the door of Christo’s, leaving Oscar alone with a half cup of cold coffee.

Josh Wittmore was working at his office computer when Bert Schmid stuck his head through the open door. He carried a copy of the latest issue of their paper, which had the Nathan West informational meeting story on the front page.

“Looks like we got ourselves an issue,” said Bert.

“You bet we do—and we should make the most of it,” said Josh as he turned from his computer to face his boss.

“This story will give our paper a chance to tell folks what’s going on in agriculture and at the same time let them know a little more about this quiet river valley here in Ames County,” said Bert.

“Sure wasn’t quiet the other night,” said Josh, smiling.

“What’s next?” Bert asked.

“Well, I’d like to visit one of Nathan West’s farms over in Iowa, see firsthand how they operate. Check on the smell. Talk with some of the locals to see what they think about having a big hog farm in their midst.”

“That’s a good idea. You want me to set up something? I’ll call their head office in Dubuque.”

“Appreciate it,” Josh said. A half hour later Bert was back in Josh’s office.

“What a bunch of cautious people. They’re scared to death of animal rights activists. I had to convince them that you weren’t gonna do a hatchet job on them.”

“Well, did you convince them enough so I can visit?”

“After three phone calls, I talked with one of their vice presidents, who finally agreed you could visit.”

“So, when do I go?”

“Not until March. The veep’s gonna set up a visit with what they call their 435 unit—they give each location a number. It’s near Decker, Iowa. By the way, Josh, here’s what we’ve gotten so far in our request for community contributions. I haven’t opened anything yet.”

Josh returned to his office, sat down, and slit open the envelopes Bert had just handed him. The first contained several handwritten pages, a story titled “Horses I Have Known” by Clyde Emersol, with a Waupaca return address. Josh began reading:

Josh chuckled occasionally as he continued reading, enjoying Emersol’s down-home way of writing. When he finished the piece, he decided to recommend they publish it—just the way it was, no editing, no correcting of grammatical errors.

The next envelope he opened had no return address; the postmark was Link Lake. He found two neatly typed sheets of paper with a poem written on each of them. At the bottom of each were the initials “M.D.” He’d tried to think of someone around Link Lake with those initials and came up blank. But he’d been away for a decade, and he knew several new families
had moved into the community, maybe one of them had the initials M.D. He’d have to check the phone book.

He read the first poem:

Josh read the poem a second time, then put the paper down and sat back.

I’m not much of a poet
, he thought,
but there’s something here that might cause people to think a little more about the big hog farm that’s headed for the Tamarack River Valley. M.D. surely has a point of view. I wonder if M.D. lives in the Tamarack River Valley and not near Link Lake? Who in the valley might write like this?
He couldn’t come up with a name. He tried to recall some of the people who had spoken up at the meeting back in January; he wondered if it could be one of them. This writer surely was on the side of small farms and the river.

Josh took the story and poem into Bert’s office. “Well, anything worth running in the paper?” Bert asked when he looked up from the ledger in front of him.

“I think so,” said Josh. “Got a nice nostalgic piece about horses that I think many of our readers will like. Also got a poem, maybe not a poem, but just ideas strung together to look like a poem.”

“Here, let me have a look.”

He read through the poem, then read it a second time.

“Who is this M.D.?” he asked when he looked up, still holding the poem in his hand.

“I have no idea. No return address, but a Link Lake postmark.”

“Person has a point of view,” said Bert. “Definite point of view. I think we’ll run it. Might tick some people off, might get some others thinking. Poem fits right in with the discussion about the big new hog farm in the Tamarack River Valley. Wish we had some more material from M.D. Need a little controversy; might gain us a few more subscribers. Might lose us a few too,” he said with a chuckle.

The Tamarack River Winter Festival began in 1910 when several farmers in the area who worked in the logging camps during the winter months gathered to show off their lumbering skills and tell tall tales of life in the winter woods. Those early festivals mostly consisted of competitions between teams of woodcutters and individual contests, such as what team of two could saw a log fastest, who could shinny up a pine tree quickest, who could toss an axe and hit the center of a target, that sort of thing. Considerable drinking and partying went on into the dark winter nights of the first weekend in February. The festival was always held on that same weekend, no matter what—even if it was a fierce blizzard or thirty below zero. The competitions took place on the banks of the Tamarack River—in the old days, all out in the open. Today, the local organizers erected a big tent, fully enclosed and even partially heated, in Tamarack River Park. The old timers scoffed at the tent, especially the heaters. “Don’t know about this present generation. Gotten pretty soft,” one old timer was heard to say.

Everyone looked forward to the event with more than a passing interest; the festival had long ago become a tradition. The locals seemed to understand, although few people put it in words, that traditions are what make a community, tie people together, give them a common purpose. The festival attracted people from throughout Ames County and the neighboring counties, but people also came from Madison, Milwaukee, and the Fox River Valley, and even a few snowmobilers from Chicago came to participate in the races held on the frozen river on Sunday afternoon.

Josh planned to attend both days of the event and had asked Natalie to accompany him.

“I can’t go on Saturday, but I can on Sunday,” Natalie had said.

Wanting to get a broader picture of the Tamarack River Valley and its various activities, Josh drove alone to the festival on Saturday, but he was thinking about Sunday, when Natalie would be with him, which would be more fun.

Saturday dawned partly cloudy and not especially cold. Thermometers in the valley read twenty-five degrees above zero, mild for early February, which was the heart of a northern winter, when the temperatures usually reached their lowest levels. One longtime resident recalled a year—he was a little fuzzy on whether it was 1939 or 1942—that the temperature dropped to thirty below on the opening day of the festival.

“Went right ahead with it,” he said. “People in those days didn’t let a little cold weather get in the way of a good time.”

Earlier in the week, it had snowed nearly a foot, but county crews had done a good job clearing the parking lot at the park and removing the snow from the place where the tent went each year. Volunteers had put up the tent, which held about a hundred people, on Wednesday, pounding the metal tent pegs into frozen ground, laying out the canvas and ropes, and then pulling the structure into place.

The Saturday-morning sun struggled to break through the smoky gray clouds as people, Josh included, found chairs in the heated tent. They came prepared. Almost all wore down-filled parkas of some kind, and most wore heavy felt-lined boots. The opener for the festival, scheduled to start at ten, featured “An Ode to the Tamarack River Ghost,” recited by Oscar Anderson. Oscar had recited the piece every year for more than twenty. With a new haircut and wearing freshly washed overalls and a red-and-black-checked shirt, he stood when this year’s festival chair, Alexis Christo, introduced him. Oscar, using his cane, walked slowly to the podium as people clapped—a rather strange, subdued “whomp, whomp” sound, as everyone wore either thick gloves or down mittens.