Ridge Stories Page 13

  I remember one family who moved onto the farm east of us. Eddie had left a job as a mechanic in Chicago for the new job of farming. While his agricultural skills were seriously limited, he used his mechanical skills to combine the parts of an old corn-binder and silo-filler to successfully create a hybrid corn chopper.

  His wife was still a city woman, even though she lived in a farmhouse. If someone knocked on her door, she wouldn’t answer it until she had fixed her hair and applied her makeup, maintaining those standards she had refused to leave behind. She had a tighter budget in the country for maintaining her household, but she was resourceful. As her husband was a heavy drinker of hard liquor (local farmers preferred beer), she saved the more decorative bottles and filled them with colored water, lovely accents in her living room.

  Their young daughter Faith went to our one-room school wearing frilly dresses, hair ribbons, and sausage curls, unlike the other little girls who were attired like the boys, appropriately for rigorous outdoor recesses.

  Her reluctant mother was pressed into service helping with farmwork. Sometimes we’d hear Eddie’s voice shrieking across the ridge, “Easy, Alice, easy!” as she attempted to back up a tractor while he held an implement tongue in place ready to be hooked to it.

  Eddie didn’t know that a farmer avoided driving across a field once it had been established, as the wheel tracks would remain visible for the entire season.

  And he complained about the outrageous fees charged by country vets. He did his own cow doctoring, he boasted.

  After his two-year adventure in farming, Eddie returned to Chicago. Then we realized the limitation of his veterinarian skills, finding the ravine of his woods littered with the skeletons of his deceased dairy animals that he had left for an open-air burial. He either didn’t know about or couldn’t afford the “rendering works,” as other farmers did when a cow died.

  (One of my country cousins tells the story of bringing her city boyfriend home to meet her parents only to have him see a dead cow left in the driveway, a check clothes-pinned to its ear, awaiting the arrival of the truck.)

  Another city farmer tried his agrarian skills on a farm down the road from my uncle’s place. Ray, too, was from Chicago and had come to the country in part because his young son was already showing signs of being out of control. The boy was in my grade at our one-room school, and while all of the other boys knew basic birds-and-bees information from watching animals on the farm, he filled us in on details, sometimes adding his own imaginative touches.

  Like Eddie, Ray was a heavy drinker filled with bravado, a neo-agrarian more interested in hiding his shortcomings than asking seasoned farmers for advice. His farming career came to an end one morning while he was screaming at his son for taking too much time fetching the cows. In the midst of his rage, he dropped dead from a heart attack.

  His widow returned to Chicago with her two children. Later, we learned that the son died during a fistfight at a reformatory.

  During the 1970s, Richland County experienced an influx of city dwellers looking for the good life in the country. Empty houses, abandoned when farmers retired or expired and their farmland was taken over by neighbors, beckoned to them. Some of the new residents were older established transplants looking for a summer place, as was one of my city uncles, hoping to live close to nature and recapture his boyhood.

  Others were younger, part of a neo-hippy movement, young couples fleeing urban congestion for a back-to-basics country life. One of them published the Ocooch Mountain News, writing of their challenges and successes as they attempted to live off the land with big gardens and a few animals and to master the skills necessary for sustainable agriculture and food preservation.

  These later transplants seemed to experience fewer of the dramatic tragedies of the two city farmers who settled on the ridge in the 1950s. Some were even successful and ultimately became organic gardeners or developed dairy goat herds. However, many returned to the city after the novelty of their experiment in country living had lost its charm.

  Steve Bryant, the Storyteller

  Other parts of the country might have had a Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill, but on Pleasant Ridge, we had Steve Bryant. He was the sort of guy that my Uncle Virg would say was “fuller a shit than a baby robin.” In short, he was a storyteller, and though he had gone to meet his maker long before I was born, his tales lived on.

  My father had pointed out to me the spot where Steve and his family once lived, off double D near where a road descended from the ridge down the Dicks Hill to the south branch of Buck Creek. The buildings had been removed, only a handpump remaining in a field of hay.

  I have an old photograph of Steve and his family standing in front of their modest cabin, a row of three or four upturned milk cans behind them. Steve looks scrawny with a short, shaggy beard; a battered brimmed hat; baggy bib overalls hanging from his thin shoulders; thick scuffed boots; and on his face, the wary look of a wild animal being offered a handful of shelled corn.

  His wife Hattie is short, a block of a woman nearly as wide as she was tall, a faded flour-sack dress she had no doubt made herself, the hem nearly to the ground, her wispy white hair caught up in but escaping from an untidy top knot, her eyes squinting into the sun, a suspicious look of curiosity on her face, too.

  And to the far right in the picture is their daughter, Kitty Mae, the height of her father and the width of her mother, her flour-sack dress a different print but the same design as Hattie’s. Her brown hair had been bobbed in the fashion of the time but obviously cut at home. Her smile is self-assured, her posture confident, a woman who knows she can take care of herself.

  Kitty Mae shared a short-lived marriage to my great-uncle Cal. He told her during their courtship that he wouldn’t drink milk, apparently suffering from lactose intolerance, though he probably didn’t know the clinical classification of his disorder at the time. After they were married, so the family story goes, she fixed a hot dish for his supper. When he had finished eating, polishing off a substantial portion of the casserole, she asked him how he liked it.

  “Pretty good,” he said, patting his stomach. “Pretty good!”

  “Ha!” she retorted. “It had milk in it! Lots of milk!”

  Cal reportedly threw her out on the spot, and she returned to her parents, where she lived semi-happily ever after. Her exhusband Cal fared less well. While working on a logging crew in northern Wisconsin, a tree fell on him, according to a farless-amusing family story. He thought he was okay when he was freed from it, but his stomach bothered him. Not realizing that he apparently had some internal bleeding, according to family tradition, he took a handful of aspirin tablets for the pain and subsequently bled to death.

  Cal is buried in the Pleasant Ridge Cemetery, beside the Pleasant Ridge Evangelical United Brethren Church, a nineteenth-century white-frame building with a steeple pointed up toward God. Steve, who is buried in the same graveyard, told people that when he was a young man and the church was being built, he and other men in the neighborhood scalloped wooden shingles with their jackknives to give the steeple a more decorative look. After the church was finished, he said, but before the lightning rod was installed at the apex of the steeple, he climbed up, and using the little square of flatness at the top, stood on his head to impress the men working below. No doubt he looked like a rustic inverted version of one of those stone statues that decorate the spires of European medieval cathedrals.

  But as no one took a picture at the time, ridge folk had to take Steve at his word.

  Steve, like his neighbors, farmed with a team of horses. Once, he was driving them along a fence row when suddenly a rattlesnake struck. Luckily, he was quick as a cat and dodged the fangs, the snake biting the end of the wagon tongue rather than his foot. No damage was done other than that the wooden tongue reportedly swelled up so much that when Steve got back to the barn, he couldn’t get the neck yoke off until the swelling had gone down.

  Another time, Steve was driving that same
team of horses and a wagon to Richland Center to buy groceries and supplies, an allday journey as it was a ten-mile trip. On the way home, coming up the Dicks Hill from the south branch of Buck Creek, a cloudburst drenched him as well as the leather traces on the harness. The wet harness stretched so that as the horses labored up the hill, the wagon, with Steve sitting on it, remained at the bottom. When the sun came out to dry the leather traces, they shrank to their regular size, and the wagon jingled up the road, with Steve at the reins, catching up to the horses as they reached the top.

  During the process, a bit of kerosene slopped out of a can with a loose cap and sprinkled on the hay that he had brought to feed the horses before their return trip. As Steve figured that most of the kerosene had probably evaporated by the time he had unhitched his team, rather than waste the hay, he forked it into their manger, where they ate it.

  But it made them a little gassy, Steve found out the hard way. When he lit his pipe as he walked into the barn the next morning, the explosion blew him out the door. Luckily, no harm was done otherwise.

  Steve fared less well when working on a threshing crew, and the belt on the power-take-off broke, slapping him in the groin so hard he ended up in the hospital. When Hattie visited him, Steve raised his gown to show her his bruised black-and-blue nether quarters. “Tee-hee!” she giggled. “Wouldn’t it be nice if the soreness went away and the swelling stayed?”

  Steve told a number of stories at his wife’s expense. One day, when she was walking along the sidewalk in town, an acquaintance pointed out to her that she had broken the heel from one of her shoes. “Tee-hee!” she laughed. “I thought there was holes in the sidewalk!”

  One time she made Steve a cherry pie, and at his first bite, he dubbed it her “flint-rock pie” after nearly breaking a tooth. She confessed that she had forgotten to pit the cherries. Another time, she made mincemeat pie, using leftover roast beef that she shredded with a fork; her “cat-turd pie,” he christened the confection.

  Not necessarily from her cooking, but for a personal challenge, Steve one time decided to see how many days he could wait before he had a bowel movement. He became more and more uncomfortable as the days accumulated, and finally, he had no choice but to answer that call of nature, the resultant stool of such a hardness and length that he was reluctant to part with it. Rather than letting it languish in the pit of his outhouse, he used it to replace one of the sixteen and one-half foot rails in his fence.

  Steve’s stories were like the ice that formed one very cold day at the Quackenbush place when he was helping thaw the pump, that is, generally defying the laws of nature. As Steve poured boiling water from a teakettle down the shaft, the air temperature was so low that ice formed as quickly as the water hit the iron. So fast, Steve claimed, “It was still warm when it froze!”

  Victor, the Pig-Cutter

  “What I couldn’t do if I had something like that!” Victor laughed, holding up two pig testicles by the cords. He tossed them to waiting sows, who grunted and squealed and jostled each other for the treats. The two successful recipients separated themselves from the others and chomped down their delicacies.

  Victor was our neighborhood pig-cutter, one who had learned his craft through a folk tradition rather than attending veterinarian school. His father had been a pig-cutter, too, and probably his grandfather, maybe a long line extending back to an ancestor who met the pigs disembarking from Noah’s Ark. After all that time at sea, I am relatively certain that more than two pigs got off the boat.

  Each pig-cutter had his own technique, depending upon the school of thought from which he had descended. Some made a horizontal slash across the pig’s scrotum while others made two vertical gashes. Victor was of this latter tradition, and like his father, used turpentine as a disinfectant, a choice that in retrospect does not seem medically sound. Rather than severing the cord attached to a testicle, Vic yanked until it detached itself from the about-to-be barrow’s body.

  His patients squealed their alarm during the procedure and walked even more stiff-leggedly during their recuperation period.

  But despite the barbarism of Vic’s technique, we never lost a pig to post-op trauma or infection.

  Farmers were surprisingly coy in language when they referred to the castration of swine. While the word castration was certainly in their vocabularies, I never once heard it used, even when I was a teenager and was regarded as old enough to hear language rated mature. Victor “cut” pigs. My grandfather referred to the procedure as “making little girl pigs out of little boy pigs,” a euphemism in many ways more disturbing that a blunt reference to the nature of the surgery. Sometimes male pigs were “trimmed, “fixed,” or “docked.” The story was once told of an elderly woman who took her dog to a country vet to be “docked,” and the old guy, assuming a euphemism, castrated her purebred canine, when in reality she had wanted his tail to be shortened.

  Maybe the use of castration euphemisms was in deference to the delicacy of women and children, but I doubt it. Life on a farm was filled with breeding, birthing, and butchering, all spectator events. Rural parents assumed that their children would learn about the birds and the bees firsthand, rendering unnecessary those uncomfortable discussions concerning human reproduction.

  One of Vic’s three daughters was named Victoria. I suspect that Vic had resigned himself to not having a son, and so his little girl became his namesake. I liked Vicki. Her father had rough edges in grooming, dress, and personality; no one would have been surprised to learn that pig-cutting was his sideline. But Vicki was delicate and finely featured, with pretty hair and a sweet smile. As a little boy, I felt that she was out of my league, even if her dad was a pig-cutter.

  I confessed my attraction to her in the hearing of an older boy who encouraged me to press my suit, assuring me that she liked me, too, and it was my responsibility to initiate the relationship.

  Nervously, I took pencil in hand and, on a sheet of paper I had ripped out of my Roy Rogers tablet, pledged my troth to her.

  She wrote back: “You sure wrote a mushy letter, but I have gotten mushier. I do not like you and do not write to me again!”

  Afterward, I learned that I had been set up; the older boy had known I’d be rejected and thought my embarrassment would be hilarious. Because my announced affection for Vicki was more theoretical than deep-seated, I quickly recovered. Still, I felt wounded, and I remembered the gobbling sows while Vic the Pig-Cutter was completing his work.

  After I had left home for college, my younger brother did the evening milking for Vic on occasions when he and his family traveled to Lone Rock and wouldn’t be getting home until late. As was often the case in such arrangements, Vic bartered for my brother’s pay, giving him a runt pig rather than cash. At that time, my father had no community of hogs for the orphan to join. The lone piglet slept in the unfinished basement of our house.

  While pigs suffer from a bad reputation, in reality they are neither dirty nor stupid. Arnold (as my family called him, after the pig in TV’s Green Acres) housebroke himself, waiting until morning when someone opened the door outside to answer his call of nature. Perhaps because he lacked porcine role models, Arnold seemed to think he was a dog. When my father and brother went out to the barn for the morning milking, he tagged along with them like a hound and hung out in a manger on a bed of hay as they worked. After the evening milking, he followed them back to the house and bedded down for the night on a pile of old gunnysacks not far from the furnace for warmth.

  Every time my father spread manure on fields or took the empty spreader down in the valley to work up wood, the pig loped along beside the tractor like a dog, happy for the adventure and the exercise.

  Arnold grew to a size that stressed both the basement steps and my mother’s sense of propriety; a dog in the basement was one thing, but a full-grown hog was another. It was a sad day for my father and brother when Arnold the Pig was taken to the auction barn, but with his manhood intact.

  One day Vic
was squirrel hunting on his land, years after his pig-cutting career had come to an end and with no son to carry on the tradition. One of the local landmarks, Tunnel Rock, was located down the valley in his pasture. The Driftless sandstone outcropping looked something like the prow of an ocean liner emerging from the ridge but took its name from a crevice that pierced the ship from fore to aft, thirty-some feet back from the prow. The tunnel was more of an open crack, but people had called it a tunnel for as long as anyone could remember.

  Vic, who was hunting from the “deck” of the ship, shot a squirrel high up in a birch tree. Unfortunately, the dead squirrel lodged itself in a forked branch, and Vic was forced to climb the tree to retrieve his game. A branch broke, and Vic the Pig-Cutter fell many feet to the ground below, tumbling down the hill until he came to rest against a tree, no doubt feeling even more pain than had his long list of male porcine victims. Unable to get up, much less walk, he had no choice but to wait until someone finally came looking for him.

  Perhaps some patron saint of the pigs (we’re thinking Lord of the Flies here) was seeking retribution against Vic for his crimes against hogkind.

  The Pressure Cooker

  “Oh, he’ll cook up in my pressure cooker!”

  That’s what Julie would say whenever one of her customers at the Buck Creek Station pointed out that the rooster who seemed to rule the roost there wasn’t getting any younger. And her comment became a conversational catchphrase for ridge folk: “He’ll cook up in my pressure cooker!”

  Julie, along with her husband Old Ed and her son Young Ed, lived next door to their combination gas station and mom-and-pop grocery store, a faux log-cabin storefront with a cement block garage adjacent to it, a precursor of today’s convenience stores. Customers could buy gas for their cars, have their flat tire repaired, order an ice cream cone for the kiddies, or pick up freshly cut cheese and bologna for sandwiches. It was one-stop shopping if your standards were not too elevated, but more on that later.