Ridge Stories Page 18

  My father and I sometimes made connections through literature, but the contact was tentative, like Michelangelo’s God and Adam pointing fingers at one another but not quite touching. While I earned graduate degrees in English, my father had quit school at the end of his eighth grade. Still, as a student, my father had been required to memorize poetry, and although he didn’t particularly care for verse, he was good at memorization. Sometimes when we were milking cows, he recited poems, and from him I learned the openings to Longfellow’s “Village Blacksmith” and Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!”

  But the connections were transitory; I feigned interest when he spoke of automotive mechanical failures, as did he when I waxed literary. And most of the time in the barn, we were ships passing in the night as we milked the cows.

  But the winter walks along Si Breese Lane were different than when my father and I milked cows or made hay. In the bleak midwinter when we hiked Si Breese Lane, figuratively speaking, our fingers touched.

  My father retold stories as we walked by houses no longer occupied, about Si Breese’s mother in Indiana harnessing a team of horses and loading her children into a wagon, after her husband died of cholera, and driving them to Pleasant Ridge for a new start.

  No buildings remain where John Pugh and his wife once lived on the road leading down into the valley, the roadbed now nearly hidden by the undergrowth of the woods. The grave of John’s baby was unmarked.

  Banjo Schaeffer cooled his coffee by slopping it over the brim of his cup and then slurping it from a saucer. He was a skinny man who wore bib overalls that were too big for him, unbuttoned at the sides, and once when he was milking cows, one coughed as she pooped, with predictable results.

  Don Armstrong and his wife, Tillie, were driving home from a winter afternoon visit to a tavern and found the Mick Hill slippery. She got out to push, he found traction, and in the fog of his libation, forgot her. “Oh,” he said much later when she walked in the front door, “I wondered who that old woman was I saw in the rear-view mirror walking up the hill!”

  I heard again the stories of Barney Mick and Chauncy Quackenbush and Frank Reed, farmers gone not only from Pleasant Ridge but from life itself. And when my father and I returned home, we were invigorated not only from the exercise and the crisp cold air but from the connections we had made over our shared stories on the ridge.

  I had, for a time, found my father, and I suspect that he might have found his son.

  Burying My Father

  Softly, like a child’s breath blowing out candles on a cake, a gentle breeze eased across the ridge on the day we buried my farmer father in the Pleasant Ridge Evangelical United Brethren Cemetery. The April sun warmed the graveyard, as if teasing roots of old roses and day lilies, lilacs and bridal wreaths, to send up early blooms. The grass was green on my mother’s plot, where she had been buried three years earlier.

  People had gathered in the cemetery with smiles on their faces. They exchanged greetings, happy to see one another, any expressions of sympathy already made at the visitation, life now moving on.

  At first, I didn’t recognize the short elderly man who approached me, hesitated, and then took my hand. I gave him an uncertain smile. “Darold,” he said. “Darold Fairbrother.”

  “Oh, I’m so pleased you came,” I said, taking his hand in both of mine. He had been my first-grade teacher at the Pleasant Ridge one-room grade school. The position had been his first after graduating from the county normal, and he was probably no older than nineteen or twenty at the time. Coincidentally, my mother had been his teacher.

  When he was mine, he had loomed large in my life, overwhelming me with his enthusiasm and zest for life. And he seemed worldly to farm kids; some of us had spotted a package of cigarettes only partially hidden on the front seat of his car.

  One evening, he visited my parents, and as he walked in the door, he called out, “Northern Lights! They’re beautiful!” And he gathered me up in his arms with an unexplained urgency and carried me outside in my pajamas to view the otherworldly frozen fireworks in the northern sky.

  In the cemetery he seemed small and old, as if he had been shriveled by time.

  But I immediately recognized my cousin Brian, a onetime city boy who had since moved to the country and taken up rural ways. He wore new bib overalls to the funeral, as if he were one of those men patiently smoking in a corner of the cemetery, waiting for the interment to conclude so they could refill the grave, collect their checks, and go home to their waiting families.

  When my wife and I had married, he was a precocious little boy who could recite nursery rhymes. Now he lived in a vintage mobile home with his waitress wife and their children, hoping to make his fortune as an inventor. He shook my hand, bear-hugged my wife, and with misty eyes exclaimed, “Gosh darn, I really liked Uncle Jim!”

  And the Motts, my old Youth Fellowship advisers at the Pleasant Ridge EUB Church, were there, too. They had been a young pair with a little boy at the time. Now with gray hair and glasses, one patted my hand while the other exclaimed, “We’re both so proud of you!”

  Their talk took me back to my youth, when as a student in Vacation Bible School I had played tag in the cemetery with the other budding “Christian soldiers.” While I was a teenager, the Youth Fellowship had taken on the Herculean task of mowing the cemetery as a fund-raising community-service project.

  Beyond the late Vic Crary’s fields to the west, I could see the house where I had been raised, and I had the strange sensation that the spirits of my family in their younger years were still gathered in our kitchen, looking out the window at the activity in the church cemetery, wondering if they knew the person who had died and gone to rest in the country graveyard.

  The white frame church with its tall belfry and steeple was empty now, but my father’s grandparents had been among the early parishioners, and while my family was only casually Christian, we nonetheless had attended Easter and Children’s Day services, Christmas programs, Mother-Daughter and Father-Son banquets, and the annual Lord’s Acre Sale.

  The tolling of the church bell had been a reassuring sound for all of us across the ridge, not only the faithful group gathered to hear Reverend Matthews’s homespun sermons.

  Paw had gone to church only for special occasions, and then afterward made vulgar jokes about the clergyman conducting the service. But during his older years, he began attending more regularly with my mother and continued the custom after her passing.

  When the interment ceremony ended, people lingered in the graveyard, chatting, catching up, visiting graves, and retelling stories from the past. And in one corner of the cemetery, the gravediggers smoked as they waited, and the funeral home personnel hovered near the grave, visibly restless.

  Finally, one of the men in dark suits approached me and discreetly whispered in my ear, “Perhaps you could encourage people to move on to the luncheon.”

  I nodded. Uncle Vern, who lived only three miles away, was serving mourners food at his farm.

  As the eldest son, I assumed the role of host, moving about the group thanking them for attending the service and encouraging them to join us for lunch. They smiled and slowly, reluctantly, began drifting toward their parked cars.

  I waited until everyone had departed, the empty black hearse driving west toward Richland Center. In the deserted cemetery, the sun beamed brightly, beatifically burnishing the men in work shoes and overalls who shoveled a small field of clay over the late retired farmer, my father.

  We were the last mourners to leave, my wife and I, following the others who had gathered to celebrate a long life lived on the ridge.

  When my parents were still alive, when my children were restless babies in the back seat, we were coming up the Mick Hill when my young wife commented, “This is a long way from Milwaukee.” She wasn’t just speaking of the miles that we had traveled from the East Side, but a journey in time as well, back to the Pleasant Ridge of my boyhood.

  The death of someone t
hat you love inevitably evokes a sense of loss that extends beyond the person you leave at rest. Driving across the ridge, I passed farms where strangers now live. The landscape had changed, old buildings razed and new ones sprung up like weeds. Many of my schoolmates had departed, and those who survived had become senior citizens like me.

  I take consolation from the part of the family farm that remains with me, the company of relatives who still remember, and the artifacts I have collected: the teacher’s desk from my grade school, Granny’s round oak table, Gramp’s mission-style rocker, Ma’s good dishes, and Paw’s post-hole diggers.

  You can take the boy off the farm, but the farm remains, forever.

  Acknowledgments

  During the 1970s on Milwaukee’s East Side, around the time my wife and I had purchased our first house and had begun our family, I began publishing my ridge story recollections in the old Milwaukee Journal and Milwaukee Sentinel. On returns to the ridge to visit my parents when we were driving up the Mick Hill, my wife would say, “This is a long way from Milwaukee!”

  And perhaps that distance, along with the fact that with my children I was expanding a family tree with roots extending back to the American Revolution, brought those tales into a sharper focus.

  “You should publish your stories in a book,” my wife suggested from time to time. And at last, I have. Without her encouragement and help reading my drafts, perhaps Ridge Stories would never have become a reality.

  Also helpful in the writing of the book have been family patriarch Uncle Vern Jones, who has always been in my life, and my cousins, the Jones boys and the Johnson kids, who have been enthusiastic supporters of the project.

  I thank Press Director Kate Thompson, who offered the encouragement I needed to bring the book to fruition, and especially my editor Erika Wittekind, who has skillfully helped me coax these stories into sitting up on their hind legs and behaving nicely.

  About the Author

  PHOTO BY BEN JONES

  Gary Jones was raised on the farm purchased by his great-grandfather on a ridge in Willow Township in Richland County, where he attended the Pleasant Ridge grade school and Ithaca High School. The Joneses could see the Pleasant Ridge Evangelical United Brethren Church from their kitchen window.

  From an early age, Jones knew he wanted to be both a teacher and a writer. In pursuit of that goal, he earned a bachelor of science degree from UW–Platteville, a master’s from UW–Madison, and a PhD from UW–Milwaukee, all in English.

  Jones’s career in education began in 1966 at age twenty-one at Weston High School and ended at age seventy at UW–Platteville, where he taught the same freshman English class he had taken more than fifty years earlier. His writing avocation began as a freelance journalist for the Milwaukee newspapers in the 1970s, while teaching at St. Francis High School. Since then he has written for several Door County newspapers and published poetry, fiction, and plays.

  He met his wife, Lu, during their senior year at UW–Platteville, and the couple married following graduation, later becoming parents of a daughter and son. Now they spend winters in Platteville, an easy drive from Pleasant Ridge. Their home in Door County is now their summer place.