Coop_ A Year Of Poultry, Pigs, And Parenting Part 2

Sure now that she was emitting cartoon smoke from both nostrils, I made one last valiant sprint straight for the fence. She was at my heels and gaining when I launched into a full-out dive. Grazing the top row of barbed wire, I performed a credible tuck-and-roll and hit the soft ground on the other side. After a nice little rest, I went off to find Dad, and not long after that, Belinda went to market.

Back in the day, most farmers kept a bull on the farm for the obvious purpose. We all knew a few stories of goring, trampling, and death. What Dad had instead was a cabinet mounted just inside the milk-house door. The cabinet door-which folded down to serve as a miniature desk-was imprinted with a silhouette of a fine bull, the words EVERY SIRE PROVEN GREAT EVERY SIRE PROVEN GREAT, and the logo ABS, for American Breeders Service. Within the cabinet were a few stubby pencils, a few bright tags that read BREED THIS COW BREED THIS COW, and the American Breeders Service bull catalog.

The AB ABS catalog was basically Playgirl Playgirl for cows. It was filled with page after page of photographs of the ultimate bulls. These were the Greek G.o.ds of the bovine world. They were posed with their front hooves on a small mound of clean sawdust, and their tails hung long and were fluffed to a voluminous switch. The bulls were ornately named. One of the stars of my childhood was Fultonway Ivanhoe Belshazzar-one-third landed gentry, one-third literature, and one-third Old Testament. I always thought it would be fun to be the guy coming up with names for the bulls. I figure you'd want something relevant but exotic, say, Golden Turkish Alfalfa Rocket. for cows. It was filled with page after page of photographs of the ultimate bulls. These were the Greek G.o.ds of the bovine world. They were posed with their front hooves on a small mound of clean sawdust, and their tails hung long and were fluffed to a voluminous switch. The bulls were ornately named. One of the stars of my childhood was Fultonway Ivanhoe Belshazzar-one-third landed gentry, one-third literature, and one-third Old Testament. I always thought it would be fun to be the guy coming up with names for the bulls. I figure you'd want something relevant but exotic, say, Golden Turkish Alfalfa Rocket.

When a cow was in heat (we learned early to listen for the urgent, high-pitched mooing and cows "riding" each other), we kids would go through the catalog page by page, studying each portrait closely. In addition to the photographs, each bull's page included a chart delineating their specific genetic attributes relevant to the qualities they caused to arise in their female off-spring-which, after all, was where the farmer's prime interest lay. Among the categories you might review were body depth, foot angle, thurl width, rump angle, teat placement, and udder cleft. We'd pore over the photographs, review all the data, and then finally pick our favorite. Dad, we'd say, this one here-Spanky Tango Cremora Blaster-he's the one!

Knowing now what I didn't know then about my parents' financial situation, I have come to realize Dad probably just went to the back of the catalog, to the discount section ("Bull in a Bucket"), and ordered the cheapest product available. And then, sometime within the next eight hours, the artificial inseminator would arrive, and he would walk into the barn and commit astounding acts.

When you're a kid growing up on a rural Wisconsin dairy farm with no television, the artificial inseminator is a combination science exhibit and freak show on wheels.

We never missed it.

The inseminator (we called him "the breeder man") would roll into the yard in his pickup truck, and in the back he would have this stainless steel canister about the size of a beer pony. The canister was filled with liquid nitrogen, which kept the s.e.m.e.n frozen at321 degrees Fahrenheit. The ampoules were suspended on a rack. When he popped the lid on the canister, mysterious wisps of fog would boil up and spill down the sides, evaporating halfway down to the truck bed. Sometimes he would allow us to dip a length of string into the nitrogen. When we pulled it out, it was frozen solid and could be snapped like a twig.

After extracting the s.e.m.e.n, the inseminator placed it into a short syringe, which he then attached to a long, slender pipette. Next-and I'm not sure if this was standard procedure, or just our guy's particular personal flair-he would place the pipette crossways in his mouth and grip it in his teeth in a sort of grimace. I remember this very clearly because we would be waiting inside the barn on the walkway and the inseminator would step through the barn door all backlit by the sun, and he would be wearing those tall rubber boots and holding that straw in his teeth, and I was always reminded of a pirate boarding a s.h.i.+p.

I a.s.sume the cows had a similar reaction.

Dad would hang a paper tag from the rafter behind the cow he wanted serviced. After locating the tag, the inseminator stopped behind the cow, drew on a shoulder-length plastic glove, and stepped across the gutter. After patting the cow to calm her, he grabbed her tail, hoisted it, and from then on the whole deal was very personal.

I can't say the cows ever appeared overly distressed by what certainly had to be a disruption in their day. They would pause in chewing their cud, kinda freezing in a "hunh?" sorta pose, and their eyes would bulge a tad, about like yours would at the point of realizing your taxes were due yesterday. Occasionally one would engage in a little do-si-do (who wouldn't?), but all things considered, their reaction to having a stranger's arm elbow-deep up the r.e.c.t.u.m was positively restrained.

I have met a great number of artificial inseminators over the years, and they are nearly always cheery about their profession. Apparently a career spent operating at less than arm's length from the place where the miracle of life and its base by-products intersect engenders a certain jocular pragmatism. One of our inseminators was pleasant enough, but at the feed mill there were rumors of his drinking. Perhaps so, said Dad, who abhorred alcohol in all its forms. But we had also just come through a stretch in which the allegedly drunken inseminator settled twenty-four cows on the first try, and twenty-three of those cows had heifer calves. If that man was was drinking, Dad said, paraphrasing the apocrypha of Lincoln on Grant, we better find out drinking, Dad said, paraphrasing the apocrypha of Lincoln on Grant, we better find out what what and get him some more. and get him some more.

We observe our heroes and emulate accordingly. When my brother Jed was still in training pants, Mom found him with his arm wrapped in a plastic bread bag and jammed inside a roll of butcher paper. He had a green Tinkertoy rod crossways in his teeth and was patting the butcher paper to calm it before delivering the coup de grace.

There are chicken books in the bathroom, Backyard Poultry Backyard Poultry clippings on the bedside stand, and coop sketches scattered around my desk. Anneliese is in the spirit as well, quoting from clippings on the bedside stand, and coop sketches scattered around my desk. Anneliese is in the spirit as well, quoting from Chickens: Tending a Small-Scale Flock for Pleasure and Profit Chickens: Tending a Small-Scale Flock for Pleasure and Profit and referencing the chicken tractors of Joel Salatin. But I am also p.r.o.ne to nattering on about where we'll put the pigs, and how maybe we should fence off a patch for a pair of beef cows, and how I read in and referencing the chicken tractors of Joel Salatin. But I am also p.r.o.ne to nattering on about where we'll put the pigs, and how maybe we should fence off a patch for a pair of beef cows, and how I read in Countryside & Small Stock Journal Countryside & Small Stock Journal that goat meat is gaining popularity, and also wouldn't it be terrific to fence the yard for sheep and save the gas money? I know I said at the outset all I wanted was some eggs and perhaps a slice of homegrown ham, but here we are with thirty-seven fallow acres.... that goat meat is gaining popularity, and also wouldn't it be terrific to fence the yard for sheep and save the gas money? I know I said at the outset all I wanted was some eggs and perhaps a slice of homegrown ham, but here we are with thirty-seven fallow acres....

I keep trying to rein myself in. It's not far from champing at the bit and biting off more than you can chew. We have a smallish tractor here on the farm, and yesterday the battery went dead. No problem. I pulled the pickup truck beside it, hooked up the jumper cables, and-rather than rev the engine impatiently-went off to mult.i.task while the battery charged. When I returned ten minutes later, the interior of the shed was a haze of toxic smoke and the battery was fizzing like a junior high science project. There are only two ways to hook up a battery-the right way and the wrong way-and the right way is color coded color coded. So now I had to replace the battery. I couldn't find the correct wrench, and the one matching socket I located was stripped. That meant I had to pry the battery loose using cheap vise grips and a screwdriver. The cold morning air rang with curses.

I finally wrestled the battery loose and set off to trade it for a new one at Farm & Fleet. While there, I noticed a bin of cheap wrenches. No self-respecting handyman buys cheap wrenches, so naturally, I was interested. The wrench sets were in two separate bins, but the price was the same, so I just grabbed the nearest set. Back home, I was almost giddy at the idea of installing the battery now that I had the proper tools. I unrolled the bag of wrenches to select a half-inch, only to find every wrench marked with "mm" instead of "inches." Two bins of wrenches, and I managed to pick the metric metric. The battery bolts (and pretty much everything else on the farm) are standard American standard American.

Good news is, you can fling a metric wrench forty feet, no conversion necessary.

The dead tractor battery reinforces what experience has taught me over and over again: Don't overreach, farmer boy. It will be miracle enough if I can build a coop that will keep my chickens dry. Tonight as I stand and watch the sun go down above our barren spread, I am reminded that for all my talk and bathroom reading, what we've got here so far is thirty-seven s...o...b..und acres and a guinea pig.

I don't know if I was born again the night I read "The h.e.l.l-Bound Train." Three years would pa.s.s before I professed my faith before members of our church. But there in the bathroom that night, that was my come-to-Jesus moment. This was when it hit me that any little boy who hung out cussing with Hardy Biesterveld would never breach the Pearly Gates. For the first night in my sheltered life I desperately craved sanctuary-from the cackling devil and his h.e.l.lfire coals, sure, but also from myself. From the filth of my own weakness. I don't recall, but I can't imagine I strolled into school the next morning and told Hardy Biesterveld I was swearing off swearing. I do think I quit the cussing cold turkey, but as far as the rest of my scampitude, I reckon I just scaled back gradually. Didn't dig my heels in, but dragged my feet some. I know we stayed on friendly terms right into adulthood. I just didn't follow everywhere he led. And I'm glad I didn't write him off. In the first place, that would have been snotty. In the second place, as the decades have unfolded, I have found great wisdom in the company of sinners-wisdom not always available via pristine living. And as a guy who equates sin with furtiveness and great las.h.i.+ngs of guilt, I have always felt a certain awe for sinners who lay it all out there full-force.

On the twenty-fourth of May, 1974, I received a photocopied diploma affixed to a piece of green construction paper. Mrs. Kramschuster joined the two pieces of paper using rubber cement, and three decades later I can see the brush-swipe patterns where the cement seeped through, and the memories come flooding back. How the rubber cement swabbed on your skin with an evaporative coolness and slick like snot, but if you rubbed it together it dried out and became rubber, much as wet snot rubbed between the palms of your hands will become a serviceable booger. It reminds me of Hardy Biesterveld and how we would s...o...b..r rubber cement on our palm and then rub them together until we made our own off-kilter superb.a.l.l.s. How we'd sniff the open bottle, the fumes putting a cool burn in our nostrils. And of course it reminds me of how we treated Mrs. Kramschuster. "THIS CERTIFIES," the fancy script says, "Perry, Michael has completed the studies prescribed for the 3rd grade and is hereby promoted to the 4th grade."

Mrs. Kramschuster's signature is Palmer-penmans.h.i.+p neat. We can imagine her relief.

In the winter, darkness fell well before supper. By the time I followed Dad out for the evening's milking, Orion was climbing from his kiva in the woodlot behind the barn, and the clear night air was tin-pail cold against my nose. The barn windows glowed an opaque yellow, and during the walk I antic.i.p.ated the bare-bulb interior, bright with all the naked incandescence reflecting off the whitewashed walls and rafters. When I pushed through the milk-house door and into the light, the warmth-a thick sachet of alfalfa and manure-rolled around me with such fullness I felt I could tug it to my shoulders like a quilt.

Eighteen Holsteins and a pa.s.sel of calves easily generate a barnload of body heat, especially when it's all concentrated beneath a low ceiling insulated by hay bales stacked twenty feet deep. Sometimes during the day when the cows were settled we kids went to the barn and lay lengthwise along the backs of the tamer animals to absorb their warmth. Because of the way she tucks her hindquarters, a cow at rest tilts off-kilter, allowing you to nestle rump to withers against the ridge of the backbone while draping your limbs across a hemisphere of abdomen. You rise and fall with each bovine breath, and if you hold especially still you will feel the subterranean thump of a five-pound heart. At regular intervals the cow will lurch softly and summon a cud. The dewlap ripples, and a wad of ruminated forage rises visibly up the throat. Rolling the bolus to her tongue, she'll work her jaw forty or so times, swallow, wait a patient moment, then raise another. It's hard to imagine regurgitation as a form of meditation, but for cows, it is so. If you feel the animal rock forward, it is time to bail. She is working up the momentum to rise, and it is critical to get clear before she heaves to her feet, hooves scrabbling on the concrete or perhaps your toes.

Barn cats also covet the warmth of cows, but their approach was the reverse of ours; they waited until a cow stood, at which point the cat cruised in to curl up in the warm straw where the cow's belly had rested. Fine and dandy, until the cow decided to lie down again. A cow does not lower itself gently to earth but rather shuffles about a bit and then pulls the rip cord. The older cats were usually wise to this, but now and then a youngster got caught. When a cow parks on a cat, the cat shape-s.h.i.+fts. In short, there is an increase in square footage. We called them pancake kitties.

All those years ago I already knew I didn't want to milk cows for a living, and yet those winter nights in that barn remain in my memory as sanctuary. I can see Dad down on one knee, head bent to the black-and-white flank, watching the milk course through the clear tube from the udder to the pail. The very provision of his family, pa.s.sing before his eyes. I was a kid, so it never occurred to me to wonder what was in his head-if he was running the math on this month's groceries, or preparing a ruling regarding the latest bad news from school, or just longing for a full night's sleep-but I absorbed a deep rea.s.surance from his posture. Once when I was still a small grade-schooler but old enough to help with the ch.o.r.es, a traveling salesman drove into the yard, jumped from the car, strode up too close, and patted me on the head. I remember his knee bouncing behind creased polyester pants, and then, hearing the sound of the vacuum pump, he said, "Where's your daddy? Pullin' t.i.ts?" "He's milking cows milking cows," I said, as coldly as a grade-schooler could, quietly furious that this s.h.i.+ny-shoed stranger would barge up our driveway and profane my father's work.

Lest I create the impression that every milking session was a hushed ritual of patriarchal ceremony, I should add that between cows Dad dangled upside down from a bar bolted to the whitewashed beams and taught us how to do skin-the-cat and the monkey-hang, and sometimes led us in chinning contests (he was an agile farmer-we often rushed to the kitchen window after supper to watch as he stepped off the porch, kicked up his heels, and walked all the way to the barn on his hands). We'd see who could pitch the milk rag into the soapwater bucket from the farthest distance. He taught us to squirt milk straight from the cow's teat into the gaping mouth of a barn cat, which was entertaining for everyone involved except the cow. He told us Ole and Lena jokes, and we laughed whenever one of us got smacked in the face by a cow tail freshly swabbed through the festering gutter. Some nights we got to talking and the conversation ran all evening long, moving from cow to cow with breaks to dump the milk. The discussions were omnivorous, covering fis.h.i.+ng, the price of corn, and once-I have no idea why, as Dad didn't talk sports, but the scene persists with absurd clarity-Green Bay Packers running back Terdell Middleton. On another night, Dad looked up from where he was kneeling beside the big Holstein and in a quiet voice advised me to beware the study of philosophy because I would wind up questioning everything including my own faith, and over time and in essence he would be proven correct, although a half-read secondhand copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra Thus Spoke Zarathustra does not a philosophy major make. does not a philosophy major make.

When the last milk was poured, Dad rinsed the milkers and hung them for the morning while I busted hay bales and kicked flakes the length of the mangers. After feeding the calves, I shook out fresh forkfuls of straw beneath each cow. Then I killed the lights and listened for a moment as the cows nosed through the hay and prepared to bed down.

We left the barn together then, pausing a moment to turn and check Orion's progress. He was above the barn now, just clearing the roofline, halfway through another all-night cosmic hurdle. Satisfied by the sight, we turned for the lights of the house.

Down here at our new place, I work in an office above the garage. While stumping the short distance across the yard to the house after writing late into the night, I often stop and study the silent structure, knowing my wife and daughter and the unknown unborn one are in there slumbering under the a.s.sumption that I have somehow been using the time to provide. Spinning a living from typing and talking and traveling is all well and good, but I can tell you the project does not bear up under scrutiny at 2:00 a.m. and ten below. Especially if you've just burned six hours and two pots of coffee tweaking a sentence fragment that holds together like cheese crumbles. Calvin Coolidge notwithstanding, sometimes persistence is just a batty cat slapping at a mirror.

I'm not trying to become the farmer my father was. I'm not even trying to become my father, although the parallels are lately multiplying. But I reconnoiter with his example constantly. Tonight I stand in the cold and study Orion for a long time. The first day I set foot on this place, I became one quarter-twist dis...o...b..bulated and got it in my head that west was north. I know better now, but still encounter a fuzzy two-second delay when verifying my bearings. So it's good to see something familiar in the firmament. From Orion I pivot to locate the Big Dipper, which never leaves the sky. This too is a comfort. Tracing a line from the base of the dipper to the lip and beyond, I locate the North Star. Dropping straight down to the horizon, I s.h.i.+ft my gaze a few degrees west, where forty miles north my father is asleep, his children gone about their business in the world.

CHAPTER 3.

I am in the office working after supper when Anneliese calls. She is having contractions. "I think they're just Braxton-Hicks," she says, using the term coined for the nineteenth-century physician who left his name to false labor, "but they're coming pretty steadily." She is just over six months along, and I am immediately light in the chest. When I get to the house she is breathing through a contraction that has lasted over a minute. I go into full Evelyn Woods mode on the stack of birthing books I was supposed to have read months ago, fingertipping the indexes and speed-scanning everything I can on premature labor. Ten quiet minutes pa.s.s, then Anneliese says, "Here's another one." Another follows five minutes later. And yet another forty-five seconds later. Then another five-minute gap. Even as I'm reading pertinent sections aloud to Anneliese, I'm trying to convince myself that it is nothing, but I am not feeling brave at all. Then the cycles slowly subside. By bedtime nothing is happening. I am a worry champ, and pull the stethoscope from my emergency medical kit to double-check the baby's heartbeat. It's there, but I check it three more times before we are asleep. working after supper when Anneliese calls. She is having contractions. "I think they're just Braxton-Hicks," she says, using the term coined for the nineteenth-century physician who left his name to false labor, "but they're coming pretty steadily." She is just over six months along, and I am immediately light in the chest. When I get to the house she is breathing through a contraction that has lasted over a minute. I go into full Evelyn Woods mode on the stack of birthing books I was supposed to have read months ago, fingertipping the indexes and speed-scanning everything I can on premature labor. Ten quiet minutes pa.s.s, then Anneliese says, "Here's another one." Another follows five minutes later. And yet another forty-five seconds later. Then another five-minute gap. Even as I'm reading pertinent sections aloud to Anneliese, I'm trying to convince myself that it is nothing, but I am not feeling brave at all. Then the cycles slowly subside. By bedtime nothing is happening. I am a worry champ, and pull the stethoscope from my emergency medical kit to double-check the baby's heartbeat. It's there, but I check it three more times before we are asleep.

I was raised in an obscure fundamentalist Christian sect. Our ministers (we called them "workers") divested themselves of all possessions and went forth two by two, spreading G.o.d's Word by means of gospel meetings held in village halls, bank bas.e.m.e.nts, and American Legion posts. If you came as a stranger you would notice the quietness as the people gathered, removing their caps and hanging their coats without conversation before seating themselves in the neat rows of folding chairs the workers had set beforehand. Just inside the door one of the workers would pa.s.s you a copy of Hymns Old and New Hymns Old and New from an open briefcase at the back of the room. The loaner hymnals were the size of a thin from an open briefcase at the back of the room. The loaner hymnals were the size of a thin Reader's Digest Reader's Digest and bound in brown plastic, and they were lyrics only-no notes. Still, it wasn't tough to sing along. We took things slow and kept a lid on it. If there was a piano available, someone might play it, but soberly. One night a tough old farm lady named Florence took a seat on the bench before the aged upright piano in the Prairie Lake Town Hall. Florence wore orthopedic shoes and horn-rimmed bifocals and kept a hanky tucked in her bosom, but when she leaned into that first verse she laid a left-handed barrelhouse rumble beneath the praise such as we had never heard before. Our eyebrows shot up and we swung right along, delighting in the spirit of it. Afterward the older brother worker had a quiet word with her and sadly Florence cut the honky-tonk. Another time an itinerant evangelist showed up late for gospel meeting and crept into the back row with a tambourine, which is like showing up for a Gregorian chant armed with a pink kazoo. I stole glances over my shoulder every time I heard a m.u.f.fled tinkle. and bound in brown plastic, and they were lyrics only-no notes. Still, it wasn't tough to sing along. We took things slow and kept a lid on it. If there was a piano available, someone might play it, but soberly. One night a tough old farm lady named Florence took a seat on the bench before the aged upright piano in the Prairie Lake Town Hall. Florence wore orthopedic shoes and horn-rimmed bifocals and kept a hanky tucked in her bosom, but when she leaned into that first verse she laid a left-handed barrelhouse rumble beneath the praise such as we had never heard before. Our eyebrows shot up and we swung right along, delighting in the spirit of it. Afterward the older brother worker had a quiet word with her and sadly Florence cut the honky-tonk. Another time an itinerant evangelist showed up late for gospel meeting and crept into the back row with a tambourine, which is like showing up for a Gregorian chant armed with a pink kazoo. I stole glances over my shoulder every time I heard a m.u.f.fled tinkle.

Ours was an invisible church-a church with no name, and a church that didn't believe in churches. We We were the church. As the New Testament instructed. When it was time for Sunday morning meeting, we convened in private homes. To raise a structure and call it a church was the worldly way. A church made of hands was soon cluttered with altars and crucifixes, and was thereupon idolatrous. These false churches, they were not walking in Truth. They were whistling off to Hades. This was a shame, because I knew some real nice Lutherans. In conversation we spoke of each other as the Friends, and sometimes said we were in the Truth, but there was no letterhead anywhere with "The Truth" stamped across the top. When we said we had no name, we meant it sincerely. Yes, but it has to have a were the church. As the New Testament instructed. When it was time for Sunday morning meeting, we convened in private homes. To raise a structure and call it a church was the worldly way. A church made of hands was soon cluttered with altars and crucifixes, and was thereupon idolatrous. These false churches, they were not walking in Truth. They were whistling off to Hades. This was a shame, because I knew some real nice Lutherans. In conversation we spoke of each other as the Friends, and sometimes said we were in the Truth, but there was no letterhead anywhere with "The Truth" stamped across the top. When we said we had no name, we meant it sincerely. Yes, but it has to have a name name, we would hear, again and again, as if we were playing a trick. Sometimes the outsiders called us names-the Two-by-Twos, the Dippers, the Black Stockings, the d.a.m.nation Army-but these were outsiders outsiders. Outsiders-as we were reminded at gospel meetings-were worldly worldly. Not worldly as in "sophisticated." Worldly as in "set to sizzle."

Gospel meeting opened with hymns and a prayer. Then the younger worker preached for twenty minutes or so. After we sang another hymn, the elder worker preached the longer second half, and then after one more hymn and prayer we were done. The workers rarely brought the brimstone; rather, they generally spoke in a narrow range of tones somewhere between astringent history teacher and gentle physician. After preaching a town for a few weeks, they might "test" the meeting on the closing night of the run. During the last verse of the final hymn, anyone who hadn't done so previously was invited to stand and profess their faith in Christ. This was a serious step-in short, it meant you were officially joining up. You were now walking in the Truth.

I admit there are times while traveling in certain circles that I take some perverse joy in letting slip that I was raised in an "obscure fundamentalist Christian sect" because for some disinclined folks the phrase conjures a wild-eyed tribe of charismatic Bible-wingers h.o.a.rding automatic weapons and diesel fuel within a walled compound. When I reveal that I am no longer a member, there is the underlying inference that I escaped under cover of darkness and must forevermore avoid Utah. Sadly for the sake of c.o.c.ktail talk, ours was a pretty low-key operation. No speaking in tongues, no Holy Rolling, and grape juice for communion. We kids went to public schools, our parents worked regular jobs, and at first glance the only thing you might notice was that our mothers wore dresses and stacked all their hair up in a bun. Mom did wear high-top construction boots with her maxi skirts, so that that was a little offbeat. was a little offbeat.

In what can now be seen as some sweet irony, my mother was known in her youth to repeatedly state that she didn't care who she married as long he wasn't a farmer-in fact she once declined a marriage proposal from a barge worker after he told her he had saved nearly enough money to buy his dream farm. Mission accomplished, then, when in 1963 she wed my dad-a freshly minted chemical engineer with job prospects in Minneapolis. They met via the alphabet, which placed them proximal on the Eau Claire Memorial High School homeroom seating chart: Perry, Peterson. He first caught her eye with his a.s.siduous study habits; every morning he'd take his seat, crack his books, and buckle down. She later found out that he was cramming for his first-hour Spanish cla.s.s.

Mom was smart, proper, and devout, having professed her faith in the Truth at a young age. Dad was smart too, but he was a worldly boy, and although he was pleasant and quick to grin, he sometimes comported himself as a potty-mouthed hotshot. Short, small, and quick, he was a champion wrestler. He wore his hair buzzed close to his scalp. This accentuated his ears, which were small but curled outward in the manner of Frito Scoops. In testament to his skills as a grappler, the vulnerable ears were not cauliflowered.

My mother was shy to the point of pathology, but she did possess reserves. Once-unbeknownst to Mom-her socially active cousin placed her on the ballot for cla.s.s secretary. Mortified when she learned of the conscription, my mother's immediate inclination was to decline, but then she decided she would just smile and say h.e.l.lo to everyone in the hall, and she was elected. My father claims this same proactive cousin attempted to set him and Mom up when they were freshmen, but Mom says she never knew of this.

All through high school then, my mother and father began the day together but never dated. On graduation night, they wound up at the same house, with a group of other students gathered for-as Mom once described it while rolling her eyes and shaking her head-"a learned learned discussion." When the colloquium concluded late in the evening, my father wanted to take a different girl home, but missed his chance when she left with another boy. Dad drove Mom home instead. Somewhere on a dark road, he ran out of gas. Oldest trick since the invention of the internal combustion engine, really, except that he honest-to-goodness did run out of gas. They walked the last three miles. The county had recently graveled the roads and Mom ruined her heels. The young couple reached my mother's house at 3:00 a.m., and she woke her father to ask if she could borrow his car and a can of gas. Grandpa said sure, fine. He trusted her. By the time she got back home again, it was 5:00 a.m. At around that same time my father was waking his parents to explain where he'd been. They accused him of lying. discussion." When the colloquium concluded late in the evening, my father wanted to take a different girl home, but missed his chance when she left with another boy. Dad drove Mom home instead. Somewhere on a dark road, he ran out of gas. Oldest trick since the invention of the internal combustion engine, really, except that he honest-to-goodness did run out of gas. They walked the last three miles. The county had recently graveled the roads and Mom ruined her heels. The young couple reached my mother's house at 3:00 a.m., and she woke her father to ask if she could borrow his car and a can of gas. Grandpa said sure, fine. He trusted her. By the time she got back home again, it was 5:00 a.m. At around that same time my father was waking his parents to explain where he'd been. They accused him of lying.

The same group of students gathered again the next night, but according to Mom the discussion wasn't as fun. That night Dad drove the other girl home.

The other girl didn't stick. Later that fall, when Mom was in her first year of nursing school and Dad was a freshman at the local state college, he asked her to homecoming.

In Mom's words, the date was "a great fiasco." She agreed to go to the football game, but as she was already a member of the Truth, which had strictures forbidding dancing, she refused to attend the dance. Furthermore, Dad had been drinking the night before, and was certain Mom could tell. She says he couldn't wait to get her home and off his hands. At the door, she invited him in for cocoa. I delight in the image of my dad blowing on that hot chocolate, his toes curled tight as a pipe clamp, sweating out the last of the previous evening's booze and just-I have to a.s.sume-dying for a real drink. He drank the cocoa and bolted.

One year later, they went on a second date. "This is getting serious serious," said Grandma Peterson. And despite the slow start, it was. Within a year Mom was on her way to being smitten. But she was troubled: in the Truth marriage to outsiders was forbidden. And she felt strongly that shared faith was the most critical bond of marriage. Dad was a discontented Methodist, but when he asked to attend Sunday meeting with her, Mom told him no. She thought worldly people were only allowed at gospel meetings. That spring, she went to Mexico to visit a pen pal in Guadalajara. She had begun writing to him when she was twelve and he was fifteen. The boy was now a medical student, and engaged to be married. She found him pompous. But she liked his sisters, and enjoyed her time with his family.

Mom had begun praying for a good husband when she was very young, and in Mexico her prayers continued. But now she was praying for the strength to tell my father that she could no longer countenance dating him when she had no intention of marrying outside her faith. On the way home, she rehea.r.s.ed her speech and redoubled her prayers.

Two surprises awaited her. The first was a letter from the Mexican medical student: he wrote that he had ditched his fiancee and intended to marry my mother. She could come to Guadalajara and be his wife, he said. She would also have to convert to Catholicism, but that was easily arranged.

The second surprise was more pleasant by a mile. With Mom away in Mexico, Dad went directly to her father and asked if he might come to Sunday morning meeting. Grandpa said sure. Moved by what he saw in the quiet gathering, Dad arranged to attend a gospel meeting. He was prepared in his heart: when the meeting was tested, he stood, committing himself to Christ, and, by default, to my mother. They were wed in September on my grandfather's front lawn against the backdrop of a trellis decorated by autumn leaves. Per Dad's request, the wedding cake was chocolate. In the portraits, Mom is a dark-haired beauty in a sheath dress, holding a spray of autumn mums. Dad looks like a spiffed-up little boy who won the pine box derby but could bolt the podium. Later it would be discovered that one of the attendants who signed as witness was underage, leading to the delightful possibility that despite their eminent respectability, my parents might officially qualify as shacked up. On those poignant occasions when someone hauls off and calls me a b.a.s.t.a.r.d, I peep furtively left and right, and then whisper, "Entirely possible."

The newlyweds honeymooned in a rented cabin up north near Danbury, Wisconsin. Dad went fis.h.i.+ng while Mom read books in the boat. Clearly there was dew on the rose-in the forty-two years since, I have never once seen my mother in a fis.h.i.+ng boat. Upon returning to Eau Claire, the couple took up housekeeping in a small downtown apartment, and my father began a job search. Within a month Dad was hired by Archer Daniels Midland to study alternative uses for soybeans, and the young couple moved to St. Paul, Minnesota. Apparently Dad's was the perfect gig for a science geek-among other things, he experimented with reconst.i.tuting soybeans in the form of cheese curls and glue. Throughout my childhood there was always a large tin coal pail in the playroom. It was filled with laminated blocks, and Mom still keeps it in the living room for the grandchildren. I only recently learned that the blocks were manufactured during one of Dad's experiments-the laminations were held together by soybean glue. I am ill-informed as to the current state of regard for soybeans in the fixatives industry, but I can report that after four decades of grubby mitts and s...o...b..r, those blocks are holding fast.

During their engagement, my parents had applied to the Peace Corps. Commonly enough, they wanted to help other people. Specifically, Mom hoped to provide maternal and child health care in Central or South America. Shortly after President Kennedy was killed, they received their call. Dad left his three-month-old soybean-squeezing career behind, and they moved to Northern Illinois University to undergo their initial training. Two and a half months later, they traveled to Hawaii for a final session in preparation for being deployed.

Hawaii was beautiful. They were given time to travel, and in a sense it was a second honeymoon. Then came a surprise. "They told us women the s.h.i.+ft to Hawaii would bollix up our menstrual cycles," Mom told me recently. "And sure enough, I missed one. Then, being an O.B. nurse, I noticed some other things. So I got a med tech friend to give me a pregnancy test."

And there I was.

And that was the end of the Peace Corps. They informed their group leader, and someone called Was.h.i.+ngton. Can't go if you're pregnant, said Was.h.i.+ngton. When Mom and Dad left home they said their good-byes, not expecting to see their friends and relatives for two years. They were back in four months.

Some nights in the farmhouse after the cows were milked and the dishes drained, Mom and Dad would gather us in the dark and show slides of their abbreviated Peace Corps stint. For a rural Wisconsin kid, the images from Hawaii were tantalizing-volcanoes, gargantuan flowers, fields of sugarcane ablaze. Whereas all I remember of the Illinois photos was a handful of images showing tree limbs and power lines laden with ice. Mom said the ice storm was really something-it paralyzed De Kalb for days-but I'd witnessed the same thing in my own backyard and wasn't very impressed.

Then too, I came of age during a time when the finest thing your average frostbitten Midwesterner could imagine was a trip to Hawaii. How we envied those who ventured out pale from between the snow-banks only to return a week later looking like scorched beets in pineapple s.h.i.+rts. "We were in Hawaii Hawaii," they'd say, fis.h.i.+ng a tin can from the depths of a Naugahyde Aloha! Aloha! travel bag. "Have a macadamia nut!" Down at the cafe or the tavern or at family reunions, whenever conversation turned to wintertime vacation plans, Hawaii was sure to pop up. You always envied the ones who had made the trip. So over the years I worked up this bit: if someone asked me if travel bag. "Have a macadamia nut!" Down at the cafe or the tavern or at family reunions, whenever conversation turned to wintertime vacation plans, Hawaii was sure to pop up. You always envied the ones who had made the trip. So over the years I worked up this bit: if someone asked me if I I had ever been to Hawaii, I'd say not only have I had ever been to Hawaii, I'd say not only have I been been there, I was there, I was conceived conceived there. I told the story many times, often in the presence of my mother. In all my life I have never heard my mother indulge in even the most innocent double entendre or off-color comment (the fact that she says "bollix" doesn't count, as I can a.s.sure you she is utterly oblivious of the fact that it is derivative of the mild English expletive there. I told the story many times, often in the presence of my mother. In all my life I have never heard my mother indulge in even the most innocent double entendre or off-color comment (the fact that she says "bollix" doesn't count, as I can a.s.sure you she is utterly oblivious of the fact that it is derivative of the mild English expletive b.o.l.l.o.c.ks b.o.l.l.o.c.ks, and when she reads this she will be mortified mortified). Whenever I delivered the Hawaii punch line she would avert her gaze or pat her legs the way she does when she's uneasy. And then one day when I was well into my thirties, we were at a family get-together. Hawaii came up, and I reprised the bit yet another time. Mom motioned me into the hall.

"I know you enjoy telling that story," she said, patting her legs. "But it's not right."

Pat, pat, pat.

"I don't think it was Hawaii."

Pat, pat.

"I'm pretty sure it was during an ice storm in Illinois."

Back in Wisconsin, Mom and Dad bought a house and forty acres just outside the small town of Nekoosa, and Dad hired on at the Port Edwards paper mill. I was born at Riverview Hospital in Wisconsin Rapids at 1:42 a.m. on December 16, 1964. Before Mom returned from the hospital, Dad grabbed a swath of paper from the mill and made a sign that read WELCOME HOME MAMA AND MIKE WELCOME HOME MAMA AND MIKE. Right next to the word HOME HOME he did a pen-and-ink sketch of our house-a log cabin that had been tacked over with off-brown faux-brick tarpaper. Dad taped the welcome sign to the old upright piano in the living room and placed a couple of baby gifts on the bench. Mom took a snapshot of the arrangement and glued the photo into my baby book. Just to the right of the piano is the rocking chair where Mom nursed me and Dad lullabied me to sleep. Two Bibles are visible on the music rest, stacked atop each other, the gilt pages lapped over the edge within easy reach of the rocker. he did a pen-and-ink sketch of our house-a log cabin that had been tacked over with off-brown faux-brick tarpaper. Dad taped the welcome sign to the old upright piano in the living room and placed a couple of baby gifts on the bench. Mom took a snapshot of the arrangement and glued the photo into my baby book. Just to the right of the piano is the rocking chair where Mom nursed me and Dad lullabied me to sleep. Two Bibles are visible on the music rest, stacked atop each other, the gilt pages lapped over the edge within easy reach of the rocker.

For a brief couple of months, I was a treasured only child. Then the other kids started coming, and for the duration of my childhood they kept kept coming. Just inside the front door of my parents' current house you will find a row of ten wooden lockers stretching fifteen feet from the welcome mat to the kitchen. Dad constructed the lockers himself and may have been in a rush, as the pencil marks are still visible through the varnish. Each locker had an integrated bench seat and separate s.p.a.ces above and below the coat rack area for headgear, mittens, coats, and boots. Mom called the lockers "slots" and a.s.signed us one each, using a grease pencil to inscribe our names above the coat hooks. Despite the nifty setup, the slots were forever overflowing with winter clothes and ch.o.r.e clothes and whatever we dumped after school, and Mom was continually admonis.h.i.+ng us, "Clean up your slot!" which out of context sounds strangely personal. It was a losing battle. The porch nearly always looked like the back room of a Goodwill store under the inattentive management of compulsive ragpickers. coming. Just inside the front door of my parents' current house you will find a row of ten wooden lockers stretching fifteen feet from the welcome mat to the kitchen. Dad constructed the lockers himself and may have been in a rush, as the pencil marks are still visible through the varnish. Each locker had an integrated bench seat and separate s.p.a.ces above and below the coat rack area for headgear, mittens, coats, and boots. Mom called the lockers "slots" and a.s.signed us one each, using a grease pencil to inscribe our names above the coat hooks. Despite the nifty setup, the slots were forever overflowing with winter clothes and ch.o.r.e clothes and whatever we dumped after school, and Mom was continually admonis.h.i.+ng us, "Clean up your slot!" which out of context sounds strangely personal. It was a losing battle. The porch nearly always looked like the back room of a Goodwill store under the inattentive management of compulsive ragpickers.

When you tell people you were raised in a large family, they come right back wanting a specific number, but we operated on a sliding scale. I have had a mult.i.tude of siblings; some born of the same womb, some adopted, some fostered, and some arrived in the nighttime absent formal affiliation of any sort. Some stayed for a weekend, others their entire lives. The last time my mother put a pencil to it, she calculated sixty or so children had come into her care. The one time we all sat for an official family portrait, in 1979, there were eight kids and two adults, so let's just say on average we were a family of ten. Or know that one night before supper in the early 1970s Dad put an extra leaf in the dinner table, and it never did come out. "Grab what you want the first time," he would say whenever we had guests at mealtime. "It ain't comin' around again." He replaced the chairs on one side of the table with a wooden bench upon which we sat shoulder to shoulder. Mom summoned us to supper by leaning out the porch door and rattling a cowbell, and we came from all corners.

I was five months old when Mom and Dad took in their first foster child, a five-week-old infant with microcephaly. Her name was Connie, and she was "pre-adoptive," meaning Mom and Dad were to care for her until the county arranged permanent placement. Some time later the social worker told her Connie lived just three months after leaving. Because Mom was a nurse, the county also began sending her "special needs" children. The first of these was a young boy named Larry. Larry was recovering from rheumatic fever, and per doctor's orders was supposed to remain confined to the couch. Today Larry would likely be diagnosed with some behavioral disorder or another, and his family simply couldn't manage him. He came with holes in his clothes, Mom says, and he was a handful, but full of fun.

Eventually as Larry regained his strength and was so allowed, he put me in a cardboard box and rolled me around the house on my Playskool Walker Wagon. Then one day he pulled me from the box, wrapped my fingers around the wagon handle, and turned me loose. When I flopped, he picked me up and relaunched me. Again and again we set out across the linoleum tiles, Larry hovering as I stumped along to the rattle-jingle of the b.a.l.l.s and bells bouncing in the cylindrical cage of painted dowels that spun between the wheels. Eventually he weaned me from the Walker Wagon and turned me loose without props. One step, a couple steps...again, every time I fell he would right me and relaunch me until one day I just kept going. On average, I have been toddling smoothly ever since.

I don't remember Larry, of course. In the photographs, he is a gangly kid with horn-rimmed gla.s.ses and a big grin. Mom says he would trap the cat under the sofa and then, employing the cardboard tube from a roll of wrapping paper as a megaphone, holler, "Come out, Kitty, with your hands up!" When he had recovered from the rheumatic fever, the county moved him back home. Years later my parents heard he was injured in a bicycle or motorcycle accident, but they know nothing more than that. It's something, though, to study that black-and-white photograph of me in the box, him with holes in both pant knees, and think, somewhere out there-if he survived-is the boy who taught me to walk walk.

For a short time, it appeared as if my parents had settled in Nekoosa. Dad went to work at the mill in the morning, and cut firewood out back in the evenings. They were content at home, but Dad was dissatisfied in his work. Hired as a "research scientist," he spent most of his days at a desk with nothing to do but watch trains come and go. As he looked out his window he began to formulate the idea that he would be happier in the northwest part of the state. He had pleasant memories of visiting his uncle Robert, a farmer up near Spooner, and his family still went deer hunting in the area every November. When a job matching his qualifications became available at a small factory in Bloomer, Wisconsin, he took it. This was a little farther south than he and Mom were hoping, but when a farm fifteen miles to the north came for sale, they decided to take the plunge, paying $14,900 for the buildings and 160 acres-80 of it tillable, the rest swamp and trees.

And so it was that in June of 1966, the three of us put the noxious stacks of the Port Edwards mill in the rearview mirror of our '56 Chevy wagon and headed across state for a new life in the northwestern corner of Chippewa County, Wisconsin. To this day both Dad and Mom claim the motivation behind the move was to raise their children in the country-there was never any plan to farm. In fact, when I ask him about it now, Dad says, "I don't think I even realized I had that particular defective gene." He went to work at the factory in Bloomer, making $2.20 an hour. But within a year he got a half-dozen sheep, and not terribly long after that he drove over to the neighbors and came back with the milk cow, and despite all the best-laid plans, my mom became a farmer's wife.

One of the reasons we're having a baby is that Anneliese felt Amy should be allowed to grow up in the same house as a sibling. When she asked my opinion, I didn't really know what to say, having never known any other way. The first sibling I can recall was a girl named Eve. She had blond hair and cat's-eye gla.s.ses. I remember her pulling me in a wagon beneath the yard light beside a wild rosebush, although there is a black-and-white photograph of that moment in my baby book, and I wonder if I have animated it for memory's sake. Eve was yet another "pre-adoptive" child, and she stayed with us for a year before the county placed her permanently. My father says her last night on the farm was one of the worst of his life. She cried and screamed that she didn't want to go. I would only see her two more times-once a decade later when we were teenagers and she came to a nearby Bible camp, and once at her wedding reception. Both times it was wonderful to catch up, but so much time and life had pa.s.sed that it was difficult to envision her as the sister I knew. In fact, while I can clearly remember her face from the days we played on the farm, I cannot summon it from either of the later two visits.

I don't know where Eve is now. Our last contact came fifteen years ago in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where I had heard she was serving as a police officer. During a trip to the public library I got caught up in the stacks and returned to find I had overstayed my parking meter. When I read the signature on the citation, I recognized Eve's name, and thought fourteen bucks was a fair price for the fun of getting a parking ticket from a long-lost sister.