Ridge Stories Page 4

  Ida

  “One of these mornings,” Gramp said, “Idie is going to wake up with a log up her butt!”

  Ida and her husband lived in one of those classic Wisconsin farmhouses shaped like a T, with the kitchen attached to a two-story main section. An old log house had been incorporated into the downstairs, the interior of the logs concealed by plaster and the exterior siding, like a family secret. Nowadays, a trendy young couple might expose the logs for their rustic charm, but the people of Gramp’s generation considered an old log building a sign of poverty, like carrying home-rendered lard sandwiches for your school lunch.

  Gramp disapproved of Ida in general, as she was my grandmother’s niece, not his. “Idie would drive any man crazy,” he’d mutter. When her husband was plowing a field, Gramp said, Ida would walk along the furrow behind him, wringing her hands and worrying.

  But I liked Ida and I loved her house, although the precarious state of the logs hidden within its bowels made me nervous. But in my memory, it is always a house of summer, comfortably settled onto an expansive green lawn under the shade of venerable white pines. The asphalt siding with its faux-brick pattern seemed clever and exotic to me, much superior to our little house with the peeling white paint on lap siding.

  Inside, cool, smooth linoleum covered the wood floors, lacy curtains billowed in the breeze that breathed through the open windows, and painted dishes were displayed in a glass-fronted whatnot cabinet. All was silent as a museum except for the mellow ticking of a clock. Ida and Barney had children, but both were long grown and leading lives of their own, the middle-aged couple living a quiet existence on their small dairy farm. Ida loved children and always seemed eager to have my younger sister and me come for an afternoon visit when we were youngsters.

  My mother would call Ida first to see if she would like some company, and Ida always said yes. “One hour,” my mother would tell us. “You can stay for one hour only, and then you have to come home. You do not want to wear out your welcome!”

  My little sister and I, her eight-year-old brother, walked down the hill holding hands, keeping to the left-hand side of the road as we had been taught. After our journey of a quarter mile, we would arrive at Ida’s house, solemnly knock on the door, and listen for her voice.

  “Come in, come in!” she’d greet us, laughing in delight, and give each of us a breath-squeezing hug. “I’m so glad you’ve come to see me!” Basking in the warmth of her welcome, I would feel like a lost child who had been found.

  “We can only stay an hour,” I’d remind her, speaking as the responsible older child.

  And she’d laugh, and say, “I know, I know. Let’s set the timer on the stove so we don’t lose track of time and upset your mother!”

  We’d follow her into the kitchen with its old-fashioned cook-stove and pale-green wooden cabinets. She was a tall, gaunt woman with shoulder-length iron-gray hair and ruddy skin from her time spent gardening in the sun. She often wore soft, baggy slacks pulled up above her natural waist, a faded print blouse, and a grandma apron.

  “Well,” she’d say, rubbing her hands together after she had finished setting the timer, “what would you like to do this afternoon? Would you like to look at Barney’s arrowheads?”

  We’d nod solemnly and follow her through the dining room and into the living room, past framed sepia-toned photos of Ida’s children at various stages of their lives hanging from the floral-papered walls. A door at the far corner opened into Ida and Barney’s bedroom, and if the door was ajar, I tried to inconspicuously peek into it, hoping to see a trace of one of the errant logs that threatened to injure Ida during the night. But at most, all I ever saw was a patch of flowered wallpaper, never a bulge of a timber waiting to burst through the plaster.

  Barney’s Indian arrowhead collection was housed in a cabinet with wide, shallow drawers, which must have been designed for storing maps. At the time, I assumed that furniture of this sort had been designed for collections of American Indian stone projectile points. We had seen the display several times but never tired of looking at it, always feeling awe in its presence.

  The arrowheads, some of them spear tips, were sorted by size and arranged in artful patterns on velvet cloth in the drawers, as if the work of a museum curator. Judiciously, Ida would select two of them, letting my sister and me each hold one and examine it carefully. We fingered the flint as if it were eggshell china while she’d tell us again that collectors had offered Barney a fortune for his arrowhead collection, but he wouldn’t sell it. Ever.

  Barney had found all of the arrowheads while working in his fields. I used to wonder if Ida walked in the furrow behind the plow to pick up the ones he spotted and put them in her apron pocket to carry home for him. With the image Gramp had created in my mind, I pictured her wringing her hands over the responsibility of being in charge of something. At that young age, I didn’t realize she might have bigger worries on her mind. After a few minutes, Ida would take the arrowheads from us, return each one to its exact location, and then, as if she were dealing with religious relics, reverently close the drawers. We stood silent, as if a prayer had been offered.

  “Well,” she’d say, “would anyone like to play croquet?”

  We’d nod our heads and follow her through the dining room, across the kitchen, and out the back door onto the covered slippery-wood porch and into the back lawn where Barney had set up the croquet court in preparation for our visit. We never played croquet at home, and to me the game had an exotic quality, as if it might be the esoteric sport of rich city folks, like polo.

  Neither my sister nor I was very good at the game, and Ida laughed good-naturedly when we made mistakes, erroneously sending balls awry. “I think you can have another turn,” she’d whisper, fetching the ball and repositioning it for a second shot. Then she burst into spontaneous applause when we were successful.

  Sometimes Barney would join us, but only to watch, quietly grinning in his loose bib overalls and striped engineer’s hat, grizzled gray whiskers on his weathered clay face. Ida would announce that he needed a rest in the shade to escape the midday heat.

  After my sister or I had managed to win the game and Ida had come in last, we’d have a lunch. The first stop was the kitchen for a huge oatmeal cookie carefully removed from a blue crockery jar. “Barney likes them big,” Ida would announce, and he would nod and smile, chewing thoughtfully.

  Then we would sit in a row on a daybed under a maple tree eating a piece of watermelon, spitting seeds onto the lawn where New Hampshire Red hens clucked happily as they waited to gobble them up.

  “Do you have room for ice cream?” Ida would ask, and of course we always did. Ida kept her chest-style freezer on the roofed but open back porch, and she would make all four of us ice cream cones, piling high scoops of maple nut, mounds that would inevitably begin to drip before we had finished them.

  A snack with Ida and Barney was almost a meal. My mother would wonder why my sister and I weren’t very hungry at supper time.

  And then the timer would ding.

  “Oh, oh,” Ida would laugh. “We’ll finish up the cones before you go.”

  But then Ida’s phone would ring, two longs and two shorts: my nervous mother reminding us that it was time to come home.

  After wiping our hands clean with a damp washcloth, Ida took us around the east side of the house to her rose bed to pick a tea rose for us to take to my mother. She’d find a Peace rose in full bloom, snip it with pruning shears, and hand it to me, the oldest, to carry home, reminding me to be careful of the thorns and to keep the cut stem up so the sap wouldn’t run out and it would stay fresh for my mother.

  Ida seemed to have a great affinity for all things verdant or natural, hunting morel mushrooms in the spring and ginseng roots during the summer. She taught me to identify ginseng leaves and amazed me with the price per pound she received selling the roots at Pulvermacher’s Produce in town. And she transplanted wild-flowers, trilliums, bloodroot, jack-in-the-pulpit, a
nd mayapples from the woods to the shade of her lilac bushes.

  But her tea roses were more carefully cultivated. They reminded me of ladies in flowered hats wearing white gloves as they sipped tea and nibbled crust-free cucumber sandwiches on a terrace. Ida’s roses seemed to be a marker of a more genteel life than we lived up the hill on our farm, one that featured croquet and a small library of storybooks that had belonged to the couple’s son.

  As we walked up the hill toward home, I would intermittently bring the bloom of the rose to my face and press my nose into the cool soft petals, inhaling a scent as sweet and overwhelming as the Avon perfume my mother wore to her homemaker meetings. I bore it like a chalice, a reminder of the fleeting but valuable respite that Ida provided.

  When I grew older, I saved my allowance money to buy plastic packages of bare-root tea roses and made my own rose garden beside the garage. Ida showed me how she took cuttings from a tea rose, removing the bloom, sticking the stem into a large clay flowerpot of dirt, and then putting a two-quart glass fruit jar over it to improvise a greenhouse. I experimented with one of my own roses and successfully rooted it.

  When I was a senior in high school, I took photography as a 4-H project. Ida invited me to take a picture of her amaryllis that was in full bloom for Christmas. Barney, who had long suffered from mental illness, had ended his life by this time, and her house looked shabbier and older, as did she. Her son had come home to run the farm, and like his father, he was a man of few words, more cause for Ida to wring her hands.

  She pulled the window shade to provide a backdrop for my photo of the amaryllis. With my Kodak Brownie Instamatic and its flashbulb attachment, I took a snapshot of the flower, knowing as I did that it would never win a prize at the county fair. It was difficult to make the lens see the flower as I was seeing it at that moment.

  The plant stood before me like a somewhat awkward woman, the swanlike stem ending in the flushed face of a blossom, leaves folding like two hands nervously clasped together. The pulled window shade suggested something furtive, and I felt a vague sense of loss.

  I smiled and thanked Ida for thinking of me and ate one of her oatmeal cookies, made big the way Barney had liked them, and remembered summer ice cream cones and watermelon slices, and hens picking seeds in her back lawn.

  Putting Powder on a Pig

  Our monthly 4-H meetings took place at the redbrick Buck Creek schoolhouse down in the valley. First known as the Fogo Valley Badgers (until someone pointed out that the Fogos no longer lived in that valley) and later renamed the swashbuckling Buck Creek Buccaneers, we dutifully stood to pledge our heads to clearer thinking, our hearts to greater loyalty, our hands to larger service, and our health to better living, for our club, our community, and our country.

  And not only did we make this promise, we “pirates” on the banks of a shallow creek, but we offered tangible evidence by taking on 4-H projects, generally raising a pig or a heifer and then exhibiting the animal at the Richland County Fair. The county extension office supplied printed forms and a paper binder to keep them in, as we were expected to maintain meticulous records regarding each critter’s growth, training, feeding, and expenses.

  Parents volunteered to supervise the 4-Hers in their respective projects. After a brief general meeting consisting of the pledge and announcements, we subdivided into our respective project groups where the adult leader would ask, “Any questions?” And we would shake our heads: “Nope.” Then we’d be free to run around and play until it was time to eat the lunch that our mothers had brought.

  During the winter, we would enjoy 4-H-sponsored euchre card parties as a fundraiser, student desks shoved to the sides of the one-room school and folding card tables and chairs the parents had brought set up for the event. Four people sat at each table, partners facing each other. The winning pair moved on for the next game, switching partners as they did. At the evening’s end, small prizes were awarded to the top scorers, and of course everyone ate the lunch that the mothers had brought.

  The highlight of 4-H summers was the softball competition with other 4-H teams. A father or two served as coaches, and we’d have a couple of Sunday afternoon practices before the series of evening games began. But the practices were not as much to pick up skills—we all played softball at our respective schools—as to assess the skill levels of the individual players for assigning positions.

  In the abstract, playing softball appealed to me a great deal. In reality, my hand-eye coordination was severely compromised. I could not throw a ball fast and far, nor could I always catch one rapidly fired at me or as it fell from high up in the heavens. And throughout my entire history in the sport, I don’t think I ever hit more than a single. During my grade school years, I saw limited playing time as a right fielder, a position that allowed me to be a part of the team but one in which I would bring the smallest liability. By the time I was in high school, I was fairly secure as a first baseman, again, one of those positions that required a lesser skill level. I remember the ongoing embarrassment as a high schooler coming up to bat for the first time and having the fielders move farther back, but then, after a demonstration of my limited batting skill, watching everyone move slightly forward on my next at bat.

  Despite my limited strength as a ball player, our team did well. Not only did we have boys on the team who were naturals, but we had the Thompsons, a ball-playing family with one son and two daughters, all of whom were outstanding players. When the Thompson girls came up to bat, the fielders moved forward only the first time. And when the older girl was a relief pitcher for her brother, the older boys lost their cocky grins when she hurled the ball across the plate.

  The county fair at the end of August was the culmination of the 4-H year. School had recently started, the softball games were at an end, and the record books were due. I remember sitting at the kitchen table with the blank pages of my record book, my irritated parents standing over me glowering, hands at their waists, helping me create “records” for my pig or my calf, my father pulling numbers out of the air for me and my mother scolding me for my irresponsibility.

  But the county fair was worth the anguish. We were excused from school to take our animals to the grounds before the weekend of the fair, and I would stay with Gramp and Granny Jones, who had retired from farming and lived in Richland Center. Gramp would drive me to the fairgrounds, where I was expected to watch over my animal. But after giving my project food and water, I explored the exotic world of the county fair, trying my skills at those games of chance (even though I never managed to win one of the big teddy bears that farm boys gave their girlfriends), feeling intimidated by the carnies with their tattoos and eyes squinting through cigarette smoke, and getting up the courage to feign nonchalance as I climbed aboard rides that flung me upside down through the air. The huge outdoor toilet, filled with strangers, a lengthy rain-gutter urinal, and an attendant with a suspicious stare, was a far cry from the private privies at the Pleasant Ridge Evangelical United Brethren Church and one-room school.

  For those of us 4-Hers who led relatively innocent lives throughout the year, the county fair provided us with our first exposure to the temptation of sin. We were farm kids, but we could affect a swagger as we walked down the midway, and while during the winter we might be content to hold a girl’s hand, here we might brazenly put an arm around her shoulder. Leaving our animals untended in the exhibit barns, we assumed the demeanor of city kids, the boys masking our barn smell with Mennen After Shave and the girls wearing makeup and taking pains with their hair. To discourage fairgoers from going too far off the moral path, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union dumped a shot glass of whiskey into a fishbowl every hour on the hour, bringing an unwitting goldfish belly-up—an impressive, if scientifically flawed, demonstration of the evils of alcohol.

  One year I chose photography as my project. Earlier I had raised a Landrace hog, and while I enjoyed the drama of taking an animal to the fair, I knew that I did not want to be a farmer.
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  But a photographer! That was a horse of a different color. Rather than the drudgery of milking cows morning and night, in all kinds of weather, and slopping hogs that spent their spare time conspiring to escape their pasture, I pictured myself traveling on assignment to exotic places taking landscape photographs for Look Magazine, maybe even National Geographic. I would exchange my overalls for sunglasses and a black T-shirt and look artsy in the fine arts exhibition hall. For my birthday, I had received a Brownie Kodak Instamatic with a flash attachment; I thought I was well on the road to success as a photojournalist.

  Most of the pictures required for the 4-H project were no problem—snapshot portraits of family members, landscapes, floral arrangements—and I thought I could easily point and shoot my way to victory. At the eleventh hour, I began shooting, but the one stumbling block was the picture story. The assignment: Take five photographs that imply a narrative. Recalling that writers are told to write what they know, I deduced that the same should hold true for photographers, and my mind turned to the pigs who had been my 24/7 project just a year before.

  Landrace hogs were a relatively new breed at the time, slim, long-legged, and as white as the driven snow, theoretically. Through the county extension office, a local farmer had given me a gilt with the understanding that I would pass along one of her offspring to another 4-H member, like a chain letter. Now our hog lot was populated with Hilda’s progeny.

  My sister, Margaret Ann, was of an age that she was beginning to take pride in her appearance, fussing with her hair and begging permission to wear makeup. I knew she would like nothing better than to be a photographer’s model, even if she was sharing the limelight with a hog. She readily consented.