Ridge Stories Read online

  One familiar number usually provided the opportunity to eavesdrop on what passed for phone sex on the ridge. Ancient blue-haired widow Belle had an equally geriatric boyfriend, Pearlie, who would call her during the afternoon. They would giggle and whisper to one another like teenagers and make affectionate kissing sounds, all to the delighted disgust of those rubbering—the term for listening in on a party line.

  Sometimes the information gained by listening in on a conversation proved faulty, just as in the old childhood game of telephone in which a whispered sentence becomes garbled in the passing, as when Minnie, after listening in on and mishearing a conversation between my mother and her best friend Dorothy, sprayed her raspberry patch with the herbicide 2, 4-D.

  Hankie was a developmentally disabled adult who continued to live with his mother. When he became bored, the telephone was a source of amusement. If Ma was chatting on the phone with Dorothy and heard strange noises on the line, she’d automatically shout, “Hankie! You hang up right now!”

  Some rubbered stories that neighbors repeated for laughs were probably apocryphal. The elderly maiden lady Fanny, who lived with her also unmarried sister, supposedly called the county agent to ask, “How long does a rooster have to be penned with the hens before the eggs will hatch?”

  The agent, who wanted to double check in a reference book, replied, “Just a minute.”

  “Thank you, John!” she replied, hanging up.

  On another occasion, Fanny supposedly called the doctor because her sister was not feeling well and said, “I’ll bring in a sample of her pee.”

  “You mean urine,” the doctor told her.

  “Oh, no,” she answered. “It’ll be Martha’s.”

  The telephone was especially important in the lives of farm-wives who wanted to stay connected with other women, as they led relatively isolated lives. One young wife was obviously very lonely when she first left her family and friends behind to join her husband on his farm on Pleasant Ridge. As phoning her mother was an expensive long-distance call, she kept in touch by sending penny postcards, filling them with tiny writing in order to share as much of her life as possible, and then looking forward to the replies.

  But like most farmwives, she adjusted to her new life and soon memorized the long-short telephone combinations that not only unlocked hours of entertainment but also introduced her to the community.

  Men folk joked about the penchant of their wives for gabbing and gossiping. My father laughed that my mother and her friend Dorothy talked at the same time on the telephone so that they could say twice as much.

  Jokes and gender generalizations aside, sociological studies have shown that men have always tended to talk more in general. While women may have dominated the party line, farmers did their talking leaning against tractors or pickup trucks, at feed mills or general stores, on Saturday nights at taverns, and certainly at public meetings.

  Conversations have traveled a long distance since my mother’s three longs and two shorts, through rotary dials, push buttons, plug-in car phones, cordless phones the size of bricks, flip-tops, and the now omnipresent smartphones. If Ma had been able to put a tiny telephone in her pocket, whether she was at the clothesline or in the henhouse, picking raspberries or hoeing garden, washing milk machines or dumping kitchen scraps over the fence to the hogs, she could have avoided those hundred-yard dashes and stayed connected while she picked peas or gathered eggs, even if her physical fitness might have suffered as a consequence.

  Ain't That Pretty

  “Oh, ain’t that pretty, Aunt Nory!” we’d yell, hurrying through the evening milking, a chore that needed to be done even on a national holiday. We had to finish and get to town before dark, or we’d miss the first part of the fireworks display on the ballfields in Richland Center’s Krouskop Park.

  I never knew Nora’s niece, who uttered those memorable words of appreciation at viewing her first Independence Day fireworks display. For that matter, I never knew the late Nora either, but I knew Si Breese, her husband, who during my childhood was an old man living at the end of the lane adjacent to our farm.

  But my family has always been quick to seize a phrase that was filled with a bit of offbeat humor or that particularly characterized some individual and then hang on to it like a dog with a bone. If a medium conducted a séance as the next Fourth neared and successfully conjured the spirit of my father, after all these years, we’d probably still hear him mutter to himself, “Oh, ain’t that pretty, Aunt Nory.”

  The Fourth of July was the high point of the summers of my childhood. It was not because I was filled with patriotic fervor but rather because I was delighted by the spectacle of the fireworks.

  During the days leading up to the big event, Paw would sometimes set off a few illicit firecrackers, technically breaking the law but increasing our excitement.

  Sometimes Paw placed an empty tin can over a lighted firecracker. The explosion sent it skyrocketing into the air, our dog yelping in alarm from behind the porch. We kids stood with our hands over our ears in mock dismay as each firecracker went off. And yet, with the paradoxical nature of children, we begged our father to set off still another.

  Many people traditionally picnic on the Fourth, but not us. If the sun shone, we made hay; if the weather was too wet for haying, it was, unfortunately, too damp to picnic. So, with the exception of Paw’s firecrackers, our celebrating waited until sundown.

  On the evening of the fireworks exhibition, I hurried the last cow to be milked into the night pasture and closed the gate behind her. I kept a watchful eye on the progress of the setting sun, fretting that we’d get to town too late. Finally, Paw and I had fed the barn cats, rinsed the milkers, and hefted the milk cans into the water tank.

  Quickly, we cleaned up and changed our clothes, grabbed a blanket to sit on, threw sweaters over our arms (the park was on a river and cooled off at night), picked up the brown paper grocery bag of warm popcorn, put the two-quart jar of iced well water in another bag to keep it cold, and drove down the road, we kids bouncing on the back seat with excitement.

  The throng of people awaiting us in town was intimidating. Usually, Richland Center was a sleepy little burgh, fiercely temperate and doggedly conservative, but on the evening of the fireworks, it came alive, like a maiden aunt taken unaware by a glass of elderberry wine.

  Because of our lateness, we’d usually find a parking space at the far end of the park, and then hike the distance to the baseball diamond where the display was set up. All about us stragglers chattered as they hurried along, not only townspeople, but folks from all over the county. Someone in each group was the designated blanket carrier.

  Unlike patrons of big-city fireworks, none of these spectators carried intoxicating beverages. Town law strictly forbade consumption of alcohol in public. And no one brought a Frisbee, as they had not yet been invented.

  Soon we found a spot to spread our blanket and settled down to eat popcorn and wait for the spectacle to begin. The sun had slipped over the hills west of town, dew was misting the grass, and from the river came the calls of frogs and other night creatures. Occasionally, from some dark corner of the park, the bang of an illegal firecracker rang through the air.

  At last the fireworks began. We kids stretched out on the blanket to have a better view. The Kiwanis Club, which sponsored the event, never purchased a large assortment, so they frugally parceled out their offerings, one at a time, waiting until the oohing and ahhing had completely subsided before sending up another.

  We lay in suspense, waiting for each burst to materialize. Would it emit a burp and shoot sparkling cascades of reds, blues, and yellows? Ooh! Ahh! Or would it be the surprise bang of an artillery shell, sending faces burrowing into a blanket, toddlers screaming, and babies crying?

  All too soon, the display ended for another year, and we’d trudge back to the car. Around us, automobile engines were starting and headlights flashing. Horns honked as auxiliary sheriff’s deputies directed traffic slowl
y emerging from the park, and we turned north on Highway 80, homeward bound.

  By the time we had driven back up the ridge, we kids were sound asleep in the backseat of the car. “We’re home. Wake up,” my mother called to us.

  “Oh, ain’t that pretty, Aunt Nory,” my father teased us. Drowsily, my father, brother, and I lined up to pee outside by the lilac bush while my mother and sister took turns inside, and then we all stumbled off to bed, content that another Fourth of July had been well observed.

  Foods of the Ridge

  Many people these days are interested in ethnic and grassroots cooking. As I hale from Pleasant Ridge, the haven of some genuine honest-to-God hill people, my roots are about as grassy as any other fellow’s. In general, the women I knew were excellent folk cooks. But a few of them have enjoyed a sort of dubious fame over the years for some of their culinary catastrophes.

  You may have read about Hattie Bryant’s “cat-turd pie,” concocted from leftover chunks of pot roast that she had shredded with a fork, or her “flint-rock pie” made from unpitted cherries.

  Or Julie’s irascible Rhode Island red rooster, a tough old bird that limped outside the Buck Creek Station like a watchdog but, according to Julie, would fix up just fine in her pressure cooker.

  But theirs were not the only food mishaps that live on in infamy.

  As a young man, my father worked for cousin Mel as a hired hand. One unusually warm fall afternoon Mel’s wife stopped Paw at the edge of the cornfield he was picking and offered him one of her by then locally famous treats: warm and runny pumpkin pie. Paw managed a couple of polite bites in Ella’s beaming presence, but the minute she disappeared back inside her kitchen, he decided to dispose of the pie without hurting her feelings. A gaunt coon hound that was locked up in a nearby corncrib looked as if he’d eat anything. The dog trotted eagerly to the discarded piece of pie, sniffed, and after turning around three times, lay back down again. Paw had to climb into the corncrib and scrape the ill-fated pie through the cracks of the floorboards with his shoe.

  Another kin, cousin Ruby, once concocted a notorious breakfast surprise. Apparently, she had never been able to make her pancakes nice and thick the way her husband Everett’s mother had. After suffering from this unfavorable comparison for a number of years, Ruby decided that she would indeed make him a nice thick pancake, just like her mother-in-law once had.

  To her inferior skinny pancake, she kept adding spoon after spoonful of batter until she had built up a substantial pancake nearly three inches thick and might have weighed as many pounds. She wryly presented the not-so-hot hotcake to her spouse, who was not amused. He flung it at her, she ducked, and the breakfast entrée thwacked against the kitchen wall, where it stuck for a few moments before plopping heavily to the floor.

  Down in the valley, neighbor Maybelle one day had the task of taking grist into town to be ground. She left instructions with her husband for his noon dinner, but he was busy building a fence and didn’t pay particular attention. The casserole he found on the table was cold and not too tasty, but Maybelle wasn’t celebrated for her cooking, so he ate it.

  Not until Maybelle got back from town did he learn that his lunch was in the refrigerator, and he had gulped down scraps destined for the dog’s supper.

  In defense of these less than exemplary cooks, the adage that proclaims a man may work from sun to sun, but a woman’s work is never done, rang especially true for farmwives. While farmers generally prided themselves in not being able to boil water in a kitchen much less prepare a meal, women not only had the sole responsibility for cooking, cleaning, washing, gardening, and other domestic chores, but they were oftentimes expected to help with milking, shocking oats, driving tractor on a hay wagon, tending chickens, and slopping hogs.

  And as penance for disparaging these ridge cooks, I have a confession of my own to make.

  My mother’s kitchen was inviolate. She did not want my father trying his hand at the range, and especially, she did not want me experimenting with recipes. Once, I took advantage of her absence to make one of my favorite snacks, sugar cookies.

  For my boyhood birthdays I had requested angel-food cake with frosting in blue, my favorite color. I decided to branch out from that dessert by making my own blue sugar cookies.

  Mixing up the cookies was simple: eggs, sugar, vanilla, flour, and butter. But I didn’t want to deplete my mother’s butter supply. She kept an empty coffee can on the stove to save bacon drippings for frying potatoes. I thought the substitution would be fine.

  My cookies were less than a success. First, the blue food coloring combined with yellow egg yolks in the cookie dough to make not a pretty sky blue but a sickly green color. And even worse, the bacon grease gave the cookies the flavor of leftover fried bacon that had been forgotten in the refrigerator.

  But Eve, our dog, thought they were the most delicious treat she had ever tasted. And that’s the thing about anyone’s cooking, isn’t it? It’s all a matter of catering to your entire family’s taste.

  Good Gardens

  A couple of years after her husband, Steve, had died and gone to his rest in the Pleasant Ridge EUB Cemetery, a neighbor greeted Hattie Bryant in town by asking her, “Have you found a new husband yet?”

  “No,” she replied, squinting into the sun, a grin on her face. “But I got a good garden!”

  That non sequitur amused folks on the ridge, but it held a certain logic, considering what society expected of women at the time. Common wisdom dictated that a woman needed a good husband to be fulfilled, accepting as true the adage that love and marriage go together like a horse and—you know the rest. And just as a farmer had his fields, his helpmate must have a garden, and a good garden, if she were to be an exemplary wife.

  Hattie still had her hat in the ring so to speak; if she had a good garden, a good husband might appear in the not-so-distant future.

  My mother’s garden was a source of pride for her but also a constant concern. “Oh,” she’d fret when she found herself bogged down with housekeeping, laundry, and chickens. “I have to get down there and hoe that weedy garden!”

  She did not want to be burdened with a reputation for disreputable gardens, like Julia at the Buck Creek Station who would optimistically plant her seeds but, being too busy to tend the patch, in desperation would finally send her son to mow between the rows.

  Ma’s gardening year began in early spring when she sent me into the woods with a shovel and a bucket to dig topsoil for her. She’d roast a pan of dirt in the oven to kill the weed seeds and then fill three empty cottage cheese cartons that she had saved. In one, she’d plant tomato seeds; in another, bell peppers; and in a third, cabbages. On a sunny kitchen windowsill, the seeds would soon sprout, the tiny plants as thick as spears of grass in our lawn.

  When the seedlings were well established, she’d put them on the back steps for longer and longer periods of time until they became acclimatized. And about that time, she’d begin suggesting to my father that it was time for him to plow, disk, and drag her garden. Like most farmers, my father thought that his fields took priority over my mother’s garden. Ma knew she had to repeatedly make the request that he get to her garden before he eventually would.

  My mother dispensed with stakes and string lines to mark her rows. Instead, she had my father drive the tractor with the corn planter (fertilizer bins full but seed corn canisters empty) over her garden to fertilize it and mark the rows. And then she set out the seedlings she had started and the seeds she had ordered from the Jung Seed catalog.

  Some gardeners had a planting schedule rigidly determined by signs. Gramp wouldn’t plant corn until the oak tree buds were the size of a squirrel’s ear, and Uncle Vern always planted his potatoes on Good Friday. But after my mother stood outside, sniffed the air, and felt the sun’s warmth on her face, she would announce that it was time to plant. And once my father had prepared the soil, she did, beginning with an outside row and working across the plot. If she didn’t finish planti
ng that day, she did the next.

  Ma’s garden was standard fare with no time for exotic vegetables. She grew corn and potatoes, peas and carrots, beets and cucumbers, leaf lettuce and Swiss chard, squash and onions. According to a story she told, when I was four years old and she was planting while pregnant with my little sister, who would be born in July, she had me place onion sets in the shallow furrow she had made with her hoe. As I worked, I repeated as a mantra “Hairs down, tails up, hairs down, tails up,” to remember the proper placement of each bulb.

  My father, with his rudimentary carpenter skills, built shelves and bins in the basement, where Ma stored her summer canning of fruits and vegetables, jams, and pickles, later adding her autumn harvest of potatoes, onions, and squash.

  While farmers seldom helped their wives garden, I learned that my great-grandfather Isaac was fond of gardening, as was his grandson, my Uncle Vern. I inherited the green thumb as well. While I plant my peas early and my squash late, and other vegetables relative to the expected last frost date, I think of my mother’s planting style. Her gardens were certainly as successful as any of mine. Gardens seem to have an elastic nature, like babies, and a tendency not only to survive but to thrive. When pushing the seeds into the earth, a gardener plants not only hope but relative certainty.

  As a farm boy, I helped my mother tend her garden. Perhaps I took seriously her weedy garden lament and, with the protective concern that sons have for their mothers, hoed beside her.