Ridge Stories Read online

  My great-grandfather’s hand-tinted photo hangs in the stairway of our city house, a crinkly-eyed patriarch with a wispy white Colonel Sanders beard. I think of him when I work in my country house garden, using the vintage hoe that I inherited from my mother-in-law. After a decade in Milwaukee where I tried to surreptitiously grow vegetables in my flower gardens, we moved to Door County where at last I had a garden of a size that would rival those of my mother.

  But I quickly learned that the gardening techniques that I had absorbed by watching my mother did not work well in northern Door County. Rather than deep, heavy clay-based soil, I planted in thin, rocky topsoil. My springs arrived late and cold, and the rains took a July hiatus, not resuming until mid-August. I worked the soil as little as possible when preparing my garden for the season, using a layered lasagna approach, as tilling quickly dried the soil. I had to adopt an incremental planting plan, putting in peas, for example, as soon as the soil could be worked, and not even thinking about corn until the second week of June. I laid soaker-hoses along the planted rows and mulched between them first with a layer of newspapers, then with a layer of straw. Once my garden was put in, I retired my hoe for the season.

  When I had finished, my fenced-in garden looked as if I had bedded it for horses. I can imagine my great-grandpa Isaac leaning over my picket fence and exclaiming, “What the hell?!”

  But as weeds pull easily in mulch, I seldom fret about my weedy garden. And like my mother, my wife and I can tomatoes and green beans; make pickles, jams, and jellies; and store squash and onions for the winter.

  When friends ask, I tell them that I have a good garden. But they know that I have kept the same wife for over fifty years.

  Uncle Jake

  He got up from the easy chair where he had been watching I Love Lucy, walked to the wall phone, picked up the receiver, and dialed zero. My little sister and I turned to watch him rather than the TV, frowning as we worried what he was about to do.

  When the operator came on the line, my uncle said, “Stop following me, or I’ll kill you.” He slammed the receiver back into place, and with a job-well-done look on his face, returned to his chair. He picked up the package of Camels from the small table beside him, shook out a cigarette, placed it between his lips, lit it, and exhaled a confident stream of smoke, returning to the comedy and canned laughter on the black and white television screen.

  My sister and I stared at one another, wide eyed in disbelief, and then I glanced at the clock, wondering how long before my parents would come in from milking the cows. About fifteen minutes, I figured, a long time to wait.

  Uncle Jake* was living with us temporarily until a solution could be found. My mother had told us that from the time he had been a child, her brother had never been “quite right”—a euphemism used to describe a variety of disabilities and mental health issues that people of her generation would have rather not talked about at all. After their father had died, Grandma had tried to keep the family of seven children together on a small farm on upper Little Willow, the kids helping with milking the two cows and tending a huge garden while she worked in the home of a well-to-do farmer and gratefully accepted the charity of others.

  My grandmother had her hands full regardless, but Jake was particularly prone to acting out. He used a straw to inflate frogs like balloons and watched them float down the Little Willow Creek. He smashed some glass canning jar liners that my mother had used as dishes for her dolls. And once when he and a cousin disappeared, the family heard mock war whoops and saw the pair running along the ridgetop, au naturel.

  Jake’s troubled life had been filled with false starts. He volunteered for the Army in 1942 but was discharged after three months. He worked at various times as a woodsman, a farmer, and a welder. He married and fathered two children but became estranged from that family. He moved from city to city, but his mental health ultimately compromised both his work and his personal relationships.

  Jake came to live with us after his girlfriend in Madison called my mother to tell her that Jake was in a bad way. He had lost his job and was not paying his rent, spending what little money he had left on liquor and cigarettes. My parents loaded my little sister and me in the car and drove to Madison to collect Jake and take him home.

  Years later, I thought of Jake when I read Robert Frost’s poem, “The Death of the Hired Man”: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

  We had taken Jake in even though he frightened all of us. My sister and I had our rooms upstairs, but during Uncle Jake’s visit, he was given my bed while Margaret Ann and I shared the safety of a three-quarter bed in my mother’s downstairs sewing room.

  When my parents drove Uncle Jake to the VA Hospital in Tomah to visit a psychiatrist, my sister and I sat on chairs in the back of the office, as my folks and Jake hovered beside the doctor’s desk. The psychiatrist and Uncle Jake smoked cigarettes and talked, laughing at the jokes they told each other, Jake chatting away with the syrupy demeanor of a door-to-door salesman.

  “He’s fine,” the physician said, stubbing out a cigarette and rising to his feet. “Jake just needs some hot meals and a few nights’ sound sleep, and he’ll be as good as new, as long as he stays away from the bottle.” He grinned and wagged a warning finger at Uncle Jake, who shut his eyes and nodded his head sheepishly.

  We returned to our farm on the ridge, no one talking as we drove home, windows cracked to let some of Uncle Jake’s smoke escape.

  Once we were back on the ridge, Uncle Jake turned on the television and settled into his chair. Ordinarily we kids were not allowed to watch daytime TV, but during our uncle’s visit, the set was on from the moment he came downstairs in the morning until he went back upstairs at night. He chain-smoked cigarettes and never left his chair, other than to get another cup of coffee, if the pot wasn’t empty, and to go to the bathroom. My parents usually kept some beer at the foot of the basement stairs, but during Jake’s visit my father hid it at the bottom of the potato bin.

  Uncle Jake never spoke to any of us but came immediately to the table when called for a meal and ate silently the food my mother had prepared while standing at the stove, tears of frustration welling in her eyes. Then he returned to the TV at meal’s end.

  If he made additional anonymous threatening telephone calls, I hadn’t witnessed them. But I could hear my parents talking in their bedroom with the door closed, the sound of the TV muffling their muted angry voices.

  And then my mother called her city brother and enlisted his support. He came to the farm right away. I learned through overhearing adult conversations that apparently the only way Uncle Jake would receive the psychiatric help he needed was if he voluntarily committed himself to a mental institution. Even at a young age, I knew that was unlikely.

  Around the kitchen table the adults drank coffee and everyone but my mother smoked, the room filling with a tavern-like blue haze. My father and Uncle Jake were quiet for the most part while my mother and her brother tried to convince Jake to sign the paperwork.

  At last he relented, and once again, holding our collective breath, we drove Uncle Jake to Tomah. After a long day filled with questions and answers and the completion of seemingly endless forms, he officially became a patient at the US Department of Veterans Affairs, where he remained under that agency’s care until his death.

  My mother, as the eldest of seven siblings, assumed legal responsibility for Jake, and subsequently felt emotionally responsible as well. Periodically my family would visit my uncle. He sat in a chair, restlessly tapping his toes on the floor, continually holding a lit cigarette, three watches on his wrist (none of them working). As he stared blankly into the distance, we waited while my mother attempted to make small talk with him, but his interest in us sharply declined once we had delivered the gift of cigarettes.

  Occasionally she would feel guilty about her brother’s isolation at the hospital and send my father to collect him with a day pass to be a part of a h
oliday meal. He was never a problem on these occasions, as I suspect his medication had been increased for the visit. He sat quietly and smoked until he was asked to the table, and then he sat quietly and ate, as if he were a displaced person who did not speak the language.

  Uncle Jake may not have thrived at the institution, but he endured nearly fifty years, living until he was eighty. My mother took charge of the funeral, asking a preacher brother-in-law to deliver the eulogy, and her sister, the preacher’s wife, to sing. She dutifully called distant cousins to browbeat them into attending the service and then invited everyone to the Richland Center apartment where she and my father lived after their retirement from the farm on the ridge.

  My wife and I arrived the evening before the funeral and accepted my mother’s invitation to meet our relatives for supper at the local Country Kitchen, where we filled two large booths, the men in one and the women in the other.

  The next forenoon the clergyman stumbled through his message as he did not know Jake well, and even if he had, little could be said to memorialize him. After all these years, Jake was finally put to rest, and so was some of my mother’s guilt regarding his condition. The funeral, we all knew, was mostly for the benefit of my mother, who had cared for him like a surrogate parent.

  In the years since, Uncle Jake has lived on in stories—some amusing, some unsettling—as well as the continuing concern that genetic mental illness and addiction tendencies could show up elsewhere in the family.

  At the same time, we have come to view his disability differently, recognizing it as an illness beyond his control. Now as we watch advertisements on television for bipolar medications, I can see how times have changed. While families still struggle with mental illness, most people understand now that the disorder isn’t a character flaw, and that simply trying harder to be normal isn’t the answer. Instead of hiding the illness away as a source of personal shame or family disgrace, more people have told their stories, lessening the stigma.

  Their experiences have helped me realize that while we felt confusion and frustration and anger and isolation dealing with Uncle Jake, we could have taken consolation in the fact that we were not the only people on Pleasant Ridge who were trying to keep the skeleton of mental illness in our closet.

  * In deference to the sensibilities of the past, I have not used his real name. to keep the family of seven children together on a small farm on upper Little Willow, the kids helping with milking the two cows and tending a huge garden while she worked in the home of a well-to-do farmer and gratefully accepted the charity of others.

  Raspberry Queen of the Ridge

  My mother was the unofficial raspberry queen on the Pleasant Ridge of my boyhood.

  She wasn’t the only one to grow the berries, but her patches were among the largest and had parented many other fledgling berry gardens on the ridge. Every year, we picked hundreds of quarts from her raspberry dominion.

  Ma tended three berry plots. The oldest, which was behind the henhouse, had been set out by Granny Jones in the 1930s. The next oldest ran from the apple tree by the pig lot toward the house, a child of the original patch. The newest and by far the largest, a sibling of the second, stretched along the edge of a field west of the clothesline.

  Many folks who thought Ma just had a way with raspberries were not aware of the work that went into their care and the time she had spent studying UW–Extension bulletins on berries.

  Every fall, she cut off the canes that had produced that year to allow room for the stalks that would bear fruit the following season. In early spring, Paw hauled a spreader of wet straw from around the stack, which they forked onto the patch. At the same time, they added nitrogen fertilizer. Late spring was the time to remove dead canes and prune the live ones to a height of three and a half feet. It also meant pulling weeds and periodic spraying to prevent bugs and disease.

  Finally, about the first part of July, the berries came on. We picked every other day, an all-day task. Ma and I started before breakfast while the air was still cool. On a hot July day, a berry patch could heat up like an oven.

  Paw didn’t enjoy picking berries and was relieved if he had hay to mow or fences to mend. Likewise, my sister would wash dishes and make beds as an alternative to setting foot in a berry patch. My brother was too little to fill his pail faster than his mouth and subsequently was excused from the task.

  Granny Jones helped during the peak of the season, driving up from town with Gramp, who immediately disappeared into the fields lest he be enlisted for picking. Granny plopped on a man’s straw hat and waded into the berry bushes with a lard pail. A heavyset, white-haired woman in a print house dress, she worked slowly but tirelessly throughout the day.

  Ma and I buckled our belts through the bails of our two-quart lard buckets, a technique that freed both hands for picking.

  On the kitchen table, the berry boxes were set on cookie sheets and cake pans. As we dumped our pails, we kept track of how many quarts each of us had picked. I was an earnest teenager, but the only way I could out-pick Ma was to start earlier and work longer.

  Berry picking was a slow, tedious process. Occasionally, we talked, but generally we picked silently, each alone with a pail and reveries. But once a bit of unexpected drama occurred in the patch. Ma’s best friend Dorothy was busily picking when suddenly her shriek pierced the air. Hidden by berry leaves, an unseen friendly tabby cat had brushed against her bare ankle.

  After the picking was completed, Ma and I tidied up and drove to town to fill the raspberry orders she had taken over the telephone. Fifty cents a quart for delivered berries was considered good money in those days, and Ma saved it up to pay for something special—perhaps a day trip to the Wisconsin Dells, including a ride on the duck boats, an enjoyable respite from farm chores.

  But the best part of Ma’s berry business was the eating. We ate berries on our cereal for breakfast, berries with cream for lunch, and berries on ice cream for supper.

  Ma made raspberry pie—two at a time—and raspberry “fruzz,” a dessert combining fresh berries, set gelatin, and whipped cream that had been created by Granny Jones years earlier to stretch a slim picking. I had inelegantly named that confection fruzz when I was a little boy. And for the coming winter, Ma made jam and packed away boxes of berries in the freezer for winter pies.

  Ma Jones continued to tend berries after I had left home, but on a much smaller scale, only enough for Paw, her grown kids, and our families when we came home. But each time I go out in my back lawn and pick raspberries from my little patch, a descendant from Granny Jones’s original canes, I remember those days when my mother was the raspberry queen.

  Ma Jones’s Raspberry Pie

  1 quart fresh raspberries, divided 1 cup sugar

  2½ tablespoons cornstarch

  1 tablespoon butter

  1 baked 9-inch pie pastry

  whipped cream

  In a saucepan, crush 2 cups of the raspberries. In a bowl, blend the sugar and cornstarch, combine it with the crushed berries, and cook about 6 to 8 minutes over medium heat, stirring frequently until the mixture comes to a gentle boil and thickens. Remove from the heat, stir in the butter, and cool slightly.

  If desired, reserve a few berries for a garnish before arranging the remaining berries in the baked pastry shell. Pour the cooled, thickened berry mixture over the berries in the pastry, garnish with the reserved berries, and refrigerate at least two hours. Serve with a dollop of whipped cream on each piece.

  On the ridge, a pie was cut in six pieces, and many farmers found that they had room for a second piece; today, many cooks choose to cut eight servings.

  Granny Jones’s Raspberry Fruzz

  1 package (3 ounces) raspberry flavored gelatin 1 cup boiling water

  1 cup cold water

  ¾ cup whipping cream

  2 cups fresh raspberries

  In a 2½-quart bowl, prepare gelatin according to package directions using both boiling and cold water. Chill the mixture unt
il thickened but not jelled, about 1½ hours.

  Whip the cream and set it aside. Whip the gelatin, fold the whipped cream into it, and then gently fold in the berries. Chill at least two hours. Makes about six servings.

  A Life of Pie

  “Pie!” my mother called into the night, her voice as plaintive as that of a child. “Pie! I want to make pie!”

  Her shouts became more insistent, more demanding. She crawled toward the foot of her bed on her gnarled hands and steel knees, twisting her sheets around her. “I want to make pie!” The nurse who hurried into her room on softly cushioned shoes shushed and patted reassuringly, telling her patient that she was fine, that it was night, that she was in a hospital bed, and that people were looking after her.

  My mother’s life to that point had been one of pie, and subsequently, so became mine. As a college student, I had considered a degree in math, a life of pi, but I missed my mother’s version and found that I didn’t enjoy numbers as much as I thought I did. When I moved out of the dorm and into an apartment as an English major, I made pie, certainly nothing to compare with my mother’s, but pie nonetheless. I bought refrigerated sticks of pie dough, a can of blueberry pie filling, and an aluminum foil disposable pie pan. Using a wine bottle for a rolling pin, I flattened the pastry, assembled the pie, and baked it, the heavenly aroma masking the squalor of my run-down second-floor off-campus apartment.

  Many years later, I learned to make pie from scratch, if not as good as my mother’s, at least a respectable facsimile. My mother had built a considerable reputation for her pies.

  “I have sisters-in-law who have never made a pie!” she would sniff contemptuously. Whenever one of her brothers joined us for a meal on the farm, they knew pie would be the featured dessert, as it was whenever my mother hosted a holiday meal for my father’s extended family. For birthdays, she always made a ceremonial cake, but generally it would be supplemented with two pies.