Ridge Stories Read online

  First, the rooster: Julie had told each of her customers the story of the rooster who spent his evenings in the stockroom of the store, roosting on stacked wooden cases of empty soft drink bottles, and his days wandering the grounds. He was quite the cock of the walk, a majestic Rhode Island Red with long plumy tail feathers and a regal crown of a comb.

  Young Ed had done the evening milking for someone who, rather than paying him in cash, presented him with a live rooster for the family’s dining pleasure. But the following Thanksgiving, Julie explained, she and the Eds were invited to dinner by relatives, and again for Christmas, and even Easter. Subsequently, she had had no occasion to roast him. “But he’ll cook up in my pressure cooker!” she’d laugh whenever someone would suggest that he was getting to be a tough old bird.

  He had a tough-guy personality as well, frightening children and unsettling elderly ladies when he would aggressively approach his intended victim, crouched down, wings extended, and perform a tap dance with his claws on the gravel, as if he were about to mount a hen. Once, when I had ridden to Buck Creek with my mother to pick up some canning flats, Julie happened to be walking from her house to the store carrying a cardboard box. The rooster assumed the posture of his menacing war dance as Julie approached him. Obviously, this was not the first time that he had threatened her, because without breaking her stride, Julie punted him like a football, the rooster somersaulting across the gravel, ass over applecart, as the men on the ridge would say.

  I suspect that eventually the rooster died of old age rather than in Julie’s pressure cooker, because she seemed fond of the bird, despite his crotchety nature. She had no doubt become familiar with the routine, letting him out of the stockroom in the morning and then seeing him patrol the parking lot like a watchdog. The jolly threats were no doubt a cover for her tender sentiments.

  In every other respect, the Buck Creek Station was not a sentimental place. Julie faithfully planted a garden on the other side of the store every spring, across from the root cellar, but the busyness of the business kept her from tending it during the summer. She would direct Young Ed to cut the weeds between the rows with a lawnmower to buy her some time until she got around to hoeing, which unfortunately never happened.

  Julie had little time to tend herself either. She pulled frizzy iron-gray hair into a makeshift knot from which a waterfall of hair escaped about her face and shoulders. She would share her skin problem with anyone who would listen: she’d work up a sweat in the store and then hair would get in her eyes, and then she would get eczema from the soap she used, and then she’d forget if it was a pound or a pound and a half of hamburger you wanted her to grind for you.

  People said that Julie wore the same dress all week, wrong-side-out on weekdays so she could wear it clean, right-side-out, to church on Sunday. I’m pretty sure this story wasn’t true, but we all laughed at the idea. I think we felt about Julie the same way she did about her rooster.

  Old Ed was one of those elderly men who dodder about, wearing pants too big for him, a droopy cardigan sweater, and fishbowl glasses. While Young Ed primarily took care of pumping gas, checking oil, and doing garage work, and Julie sold groceries, taking items down from the shelves behind the counter for you and assembling them in one of the cardboard boxes saved beneath the counter for that purpose, Old Ed helped in smaller ways. He often sat in a rickety kitchen chair in the corner by the ice cream freezer and pop cooler. He’d make you an ice cream cone (as you tried not to look in the scummy water where the ice cream scoop was kept) or help you in your search for the bottle of strawberry pop hiding under the dark surface of the water in the cooler. And if you couldn’t find the fan belt, the fly swatter, the wrench hanging amid the clutter of merchandise on the outer walls of the store, he would immediately point to it from his chair.

  Sometimes, if Old Ed and Julie were in the house eating lunch, if Julie was fixing supper, or if Old Ed was lying down for a nap, Young Ed, unshaven and unwashed, would wait on customers in the store, wiping his oily hands on the legs of his coveralls before carefully cutting your hunk of cheese or chunk of big baloney, being extra careful not to actually touch it with his fingers. My mother would never buy any groceries at the store that weren’t canned or packaged, and she had learned to be wary of cereals, as

  one of her neighbors had found little worms in a box of outdated oatmeal.

  We felt sorry for Young Ed, who seemed doomed to live the life of a perpetual bachelor due to his circumstances. He was grubby from the moment he began work early in the morning until the store closed late in the evening, and his obligations to the family business seemed to leave him with little time for a social life.

  But time heals all wounds, the ridge folk liked to say, and the ticking of the clock eventually rescued Young Ed. When Highway 80 was widened at Buck Creek, the house, business, and tumbledown outbuildings were all purchased by the State Highway Department for demolition. Now the only visible evidence of the former Buck Creek Station is the door to a root cellar carved into a bluff where the Pine River crosses the road. Julie and Old Ed moved into the Pine Valley Manor retirement facility, and Young Ed, although the “young” at this point was a matter of relativity, became free as the breeze once he had received his part of the sale profit. People joked that they didn’t recognize him in clean clothes, with a smooth-shaven face and unstained hands. At the funeral of an old Army buddy, he met the widow whom, after a nontraditional courtship, he married. Both were past the years when they might have produced an even younger Ed, but they traveled and eventually bought a house in the South.

  Like the rooster that Young Ed had received as payment for milking cows for a friend, he, too, escaped the pressure cooker, the business and the family that he had devoted himself to for much of his life.

  Silas Breese

  Si Breese was an old man and a widower from the time that I remember him, his wife, Nora, having passed away before I was born. His house at the end of the lane was gray and rundown, most of the paint long flaked off, the trim rotting, the roof leaking.

  A woodpile leaned against his house, fuel for an old wood-burning cookstove. In winter, he kept a fire going in it, a coffeepot on a back burner, and then sat with his feet up on the edge of the opened oven door.

  Silas had quit farming by the time that I knew him, no longer milking cows, only renting out his cropland. While he didn’t keep livestock, he had a dog, one that had gained a reputation on the lane for fierceness. My father told of a time when he had driven his tractor and corn-picker over to Si’s to harvest the old man’s crop, but the dog snarled and menaced him when he tried to dismount the tractor and open the gate.

  Finally, Paw picked up the biggest crescent wrench he had in his toolbox and snarled back at the dog, “You just try and bite me, you mangy sonofabitch!” He opened the gate, drove through, and closed it, the dog warily growling from a safe distance.

  The aging Silas had some fight left in him, as well. The Rural Free Delivery mailman (they were all men in those days) deposited mail in a row of boxes set on posts at the end of the lane. With the aid of his cane, old Si limped the distance from his house, collected his mail, and then hobbled back.

  One day Si was about a quarter mile from the junction of Si Breese Lane and County D when he saw the mailman’s automobile approaching in the distance, according to another of my father’s stories. As he had a letter that he wanted to go out in that day’s mail, “He ran like a deer, whirling his cane over his head like a helicopter!” Paw exclaimed.

  Whoever was listening to the tale was expected to ask, “Did he make it?”

  And Paw’s reply was, “You bet your ass he did. And then he limped home leaning on his cane.”

  Not until I was an adult did I hear the story of young Silas’s family migration to Pleasant Ridge.* His father, Balemas Breese, was planning to move his wife and children from Indiana to the Wisconsin farm he had purchased, a homestead located at the end of the lane. But an epidemic broke out before he
could leave, and as he lay in bed dying, neighboring farmers dug his grave. After he was buried, his wife, Hannah, loaded a wagon, settled her children, including the boy Silas, atop it, hitched up the team, and leaving in the night made the several-days-long drive to Pleasant Ridge in Wisconsin for a fresh start with her young family.

  Si Breese remained on his mother’s farm until he was the only one left. And now he, too, is gone, and while his father rests somewhere in Indiana, Silas sleeps in the Pleasant Ridge Cemetery.

  The lane took its name at that time from Si Breese, whose eighty-acre farm marked its end, the last of a string of similarly sized homesteads that began with those of Charlie Mick and Chauncey Quackenbush near the start of the lane and continued with that of Banjo Schaefer. A hike along the lane was like taking a walk back in time, as each homestead featured a small barn that sheltered no more than a dozen cows once milked by hand and a modest farmhouse with a big garden. Horses had tilled no more than half of Si Breese’s eighty acres, the steep remainder of this Driftless topography serving as pasture and woodlot.

  Two townships straddle Si Breese Lane: Willow to the east and Rockbridge to the west. The original eighty-acre home place settled by my great-grandfather Isaac Johnson is in Willow, and the hundred-acre addition purchased by my grandfather Charlie Jones, in Rockbridge.

  The barns and two of the houses along the lane are gone now, the other houses serving as summer homes for seasonal residents who come to the ridge for a solitary respite from the city, a taste of the good life. Three new houses have lately been built there. And now I own ninety of the hundred acres originally purchased by my grandfather—actually ninety-two, two of them a gift from the county, land abandoned along the Mick Hill when County D was moved to the south side of the ravine. No land could remain an orphan, I was told by county officials; taxes must be collected in Richland County as well as in Bethlehem.

  The little house on the one hundred is gone, moved up to the home place and ineptly remodeled when the original Johnson homestead was razed. The indentations in the ground for the foundations of both houses are still visible. And down in the valley along County D, traces remain of the original homestead, that of a man who, according to legend, traded his rifle for land.

  And now I have become an old-man day-tripper to Pleasant Ridge, walking along the access road through my cropland to look for morels and check on my renter’s fields, or walking the old logging trail in the woods to look at the growth of my hardwoods, or walking to the crest of the bluff with its fabled rattlesnake dens to admire the view down the valley, a setting my son maintains is as beautiful as a state park.

  At times, I’ve considered building a simple house on the ninety-two acres, but even a small house needs a hard-surface drive, a septic field, a well, and electric utility lines. And when I broach the subject of a house on the ridge to my wife, she gets that look on her face that wives during the nineteenth century must have gotten when their husbands announced that they were going to be taking a wagon train west and homesteading land.

  Thomas Wolfe wrote, “You can’t go home again.” I’ll probably take his advice.

  * Census records do not support all the details of Si’s accounting of his mother’s heroic and life-affirming journey from Indiana to Pleasant Ridge. Nonetheless, Si’s tale became a part of the mythology of the ridge and deserves to be told. And maybe it is mostly true! homesteads that began with those ofCharlie Mick and Chauncey Quackenbush near the start of the lane and continued with that of Banjo Schaefer. A hike along the lane was like taking a walk back in time, as each homestead featured a small barn that sheltered no more than a dozen cows once milked by hand and a modest farmhouse with a big garden. Horses had tilled no more than half of Si Breese’s eighty acres, the steep remainder of this Driftless topography serving as pasture and woodlot.

  Cursing Like a Farmwife

  When I wish to express contempt for something, I turn to my wife, raise my eyebrows, and mutter the single word, “Sawmill.”

  “I know, I know,” she’ll reply, rolling her eyes and quickly cutting me off before I expand upon Granny Jones’s crudely dismissive figure of speech. My wife’s sensibilities are offended by what she calls bathroom humor. But I grew up on Pleasant Ridge with a family that enjoyed poetic vulgar language, taking no more offense at crudity than I would at a platter of crudités fresh from the garden with a dill and sour cream dipping sauce.

  Granny used to say of my other grandmother, a devout churchgoing lady, that she was so pious she wouldn’t say shit if she were up to her elbows in it. If you are like Grandma Buckta in that respect, I advise you to read no further.

  But if you have a bit of the salty sailor in you, fasten your seatbelt.

  If Granny wished to express her disgust at something, she’d grunt dismissively and announce, “I wouldn’t have that up my ass if I had room for a sawmill!” and those of us around her would chuckle and nod our heads in agreement.

  A more moderate expression of disapproval was her familiar saying, “That’s enough to give a dog’s ass heartburn!” Anatomically, the figure of speech doesn’t hold up well, but we all laughed anyway, as we knew what she meant.

  Another of Granny’s favorite tropes described something that vibrates or shakes: “shivering like a dog shitting fish hooks,” she’d declare.

  However, cats also figured into her repertoire of colorful vulgar language. If the road by her house was especially icy and slippery, it was “Slicker’n a greased cat turd.”

  Hens, too, provided metaphorical service. To express the futility of an endeavor, she’d sniff and declare, “I might as well get a tin bill and go pick shit with the chickens!”

  The sound of chickens eating oats out of a tin bucket, she found apt for describing the sound of someone who had hurried into the outhouse during ear corn season to answer an urgent call of nature.

  She characterized a disingenuous clergyman as someone whose “prayers rose no higher than the steam off a fresh goose turd.” And an effeminate physician of whom she disapproved, in all likelihood “squatted to pee.”

  Some of her off-color bon mots I may have forgotten, because like her, as I age, “I’d forget my ass if it wasn’t fastened on.” While we credited Granny as the author of these colorful figures of speech, I suspect she was merely the conduit for them, that the Johnsons and Davises and Stockwells who were her ancestors may have passed these phrases down through the generations. Whatever the case, like the oral tradition of folk songs, my father, during moments of emotional frustration and distress, could be heard mumbling about tin bills and sawmills, as could some of my cousins, and I confess, this writer, too.

  If Granny Jones were to be judged on her vulgar language alone, people might have dismissed her as a dirty old woman. But ironically, she was highly moral in many respects. She had no time for people who smoked cigarettes or drank alcoholic beverages. She found fault with those who violated their marriage vows or who were sexually promiscuous. She condemned those who lied, cheated, and thieved.

  A product of her time, she was also intolerant of those who were not white, were not protestant Christians, or were not heterosexual, attitudes shared by many in our family and neighborhood as well.

  While I laugh as I remember hearing Granny sputtering her vulgar figures of speech, I also recognize that she was unwittingly instrumental in nurturing my love of language. She never attended high school, and she spoke a substandard dialect. But she was my favorite grandparent, and maybe, just maybe, I can credit her colorful language for inspiring me to become an English major in college and a writer throughout my adult life.

  However, if I had ever told her of this positive influence, she probably would have laughed, patted my hand, and dismissed my praise with some comment about steaming goose droppings or canine rectal heartburn.

  The Longs and the Shorts of It

  Two longs and three shorts meant that someone on our party line wanted to talk to my mother. If she heard the jangling manual ri
ng of the wooden box telephone when she happened to be hanging the wash on the line or carrying water to her Leghorn hens, she dropped everything and sprinted for the house—faster than a speeding pullet, I once quipped.

  Ma was a student in high school long before the advent of competitive interscholastic sports for women, but she would certainly have excelled at the hundred-yard dash. However, rather than a starting pistol shot, she would have required the er-er-er ring of a crank-style wall telephone.

  Not long ago, my wife and I visited a small-town antique shop with wares that included an old-fashioned wall telephone, much like the ones we had each seen our mothers talking on when we were children. I turned to her and said, “Three longs and two shorts.” Lu replied, “One long and three shorts.”

  Those of us of a certain age may have forgotten the numbers of our first rotary telephones, but we certainly remember the longs and shorts of our wooden wall box phones. That early technology has remained vivid in our memories. The “long” required three turns of the crank; the short, a half turn. Several turns of the crank, followed by a pause, would summon the operator, not voice recognition technology that answers your clear enunciation of the word “Rochester” with a mechanical rendition of “Rumpel-stiltskin?” but a real live person who understood English and smoothly connected you with your long-distance party. Corporations back then did not try to conceal the phone numbers of people working at their desks as company secrets, nor did they outsource help-line calls to someone in the Philippines, who would answer in a heavily accented voice.

  The party line made a telephone clearly memorable. From six to ten customers shared the line, each with a personal combination of longs and shorts. In some respects, the party line was the precursor of social media, but in this instance, you were “friended” because of proximity to one another. My mother, at her three longs and two shorts, would hear and recognize the rings of everyone else and would know whether or not the call might be interesting before deciding to listen in, picking up the receiver as gently as possible to minimize the self-incriminating click.