Ridge Stories Read online

  My picture story would be entitled Preparing a Pig for the County Fair, and in my mind I quickly assembled the steps, thinking back to my own experience with Hilda. The first was training the pig for the show ring. In theory, the show pig was to be gently guided into the ring with soft taps of a wooden walking-style cane. The young 4-Her was to have practiced with his charge, accustoming her to the process, much as a dog is taught to heel on a leash. In reality, I made a last-minute purchase of the cane at the hardware store and entered the ring with Hilda, neither of us knowing what we were doing. Her eyes wide in alarm, she immediately pooped at the judge’s approach and hesitated as she searched for an opening in the fence.

  Margaret Ann emerged from the house, her hair teased and sprayed, her lips red, and her eyes blue-shadowed. I handed her the cane, and she walked to the hog lot as if she were carrying a scepter.

  None of Hilda’s daughters wanted anything to do with Margaret Ann. My one successful photo was of my sister and a pig on the horizon running at full tilt, Margaret Ann swinging the cane above her head as if she hoped to thrash it, and the trim, longlegged gilt comfortably loping along like a deer.

  The second photo was meant to show the bathing of the pig. This time we confined one of Hilda’s daughters in a pigpen. After checking and correcting her hair in a pocket mirror, Margaret Ann entered like a boxer’s manager carrying a bucket of warm soapy water and a scrub brush. She had taken off her shoes, as she and the pig were both ankle-deep in mud, but we needed a pen if she was to have any hope of approaching within arm’s length of her client. The photo looked as if this might have been a prelude to a greased pig wrestle, as my sister sloshed suds at her subject and swatted with a brush.

  Because Landrace hogs are white, a champion hog should resemble fresh snow or a daisy’s petals. As few possessed such natural beauty, the secret was to dust the show pig with talcum powder. While our pig air-dried and sulked in the pen, my sister resprayed her own hair, and I found an old sprinkling container of baby powder. This photo was more successful than the bathing scene, I thought, as the cloud of white dust that enveloped the sprinting pig obscured the blurriness of the picture and, even more important, the depth of the mud.

  I needed five photographs for the series and was at a loss for number four. Hilda had not been a high-maintenance hog when it came to grooming for her debut. In a pinch, I decided a well-manicured hog would probably need to have the long hairs on her tail trimmed. But even with our wary subject confined to the muddy pigpen, this tonsorial exercise could only occur with a general anesthetic. For art’s sake, I turned to a precursor of Photoshopping: in the machine shed I found a faded light gray length of rope that approximated the thickness of a pig’s tail and frayed it at one end. I had Margaret Ann assume a sitting position holding a frayed end of the rope in one hand and a pair of sewing scissors in the other. The viewer was to assume that the remainder of the pig was off-camera, as I carefully framed the photo while my sister posed motionless, flashing a beauty queen smile.

  The fifth photo was the finished product, a petulant pig in a starting block stance glaring at me from one corner of the muddy pen while I took the snapshot. Afterward, in the most colorful language that I then allowed myself, I told her what a bad pig she had been.

  My picture story did not win first prize at the fair. In retrospect, I try to imagine the thoughts of the judges as they viewed my photographs. Did they feel a sense of outrage at what might be construed as a mockery of the contest? Or did they struggle to keep from laughing out loud at the efforts of a naïve country boy?

  I never did get to travel the world as a photojournalist, but as a freelance writer, I’ve occasionally been called upon to provide photographs as well. I am more comfortable producing words than images, but still a point-and-shoot guy, I grudgingly consent. Fortunately, a digital camera helps to powder my pig, so to speak, and I’m a lot better about deadlines.

  Free-Range Chickens

  My mother was an early believer in free-range chickens, not because of a concern for their happiness or for a belief in organic food production. Rather, she was a pragmatist. If chickens spent their days in the wild, they foraged for bugs and whatever else they could eat rather than being fed a limited diet of expensive grain.

  But letting the chickens forage for themselves was not without its downsides. Given the freedom to choose where they ranged, the front lawn was a favorite stomping ground, and the front porch, a lounge of choice. And they made their presence known by the evidence they left behind. As my mother raised white Leghorn chickens, the lawn would look as if two armies had fought using pillows as weapons of mass destruction. Equally evident were the myriad piles of white goo that clung to the soles of shoes, loose feathers sticking to the foul fowl paste.

  Subsequently, my mother made use of the range house, which improved the appearance of our lawn but at the expense of the leisure of her eldest son, me.

  The range house was a low building with a peaked board roof, its sides and floor made of chicken wire, the interior filled with roosts. The structure was supported on runners, creating a mobile home for the chickens, as it could be dragged by tractor from one location to another, leaving the accumulation of chicken manure that had fallen through the wire floor behind. During summer, it was pulled to a far hayfield, a distance too daunting for the chickens to walk to the front porch but a reasonable trip for a young boy staggering with two buckets of water.

  Ma took her chickens seriously and had a rather detailed business plan for them, beginning in spring when she would buy chicks from Pulvermacher’s in Richland Center. She would order one hundred sorted female chicks destined to become her next flock of laying hens, producing eggs that she sold by the thirty-dozen case to Pulvermacher’s, and another fifty of unsorted chicks, the females joining the ranks of laying hens, and the roosters, who, after a carefree life on the range with admiring pullets everywhere, were destined to end their frisky short lives as fryers. The hens that had passed their prime as layers were ultimately sold as stewing chickens.

  My mother placed ads in the Richland Center Shopping News in midsummer, advertising young fryers at one dollar each or a dollar and a quarter dressed. Soon after the paper was distributed, the phone began to ring with orders. I was given the responsibility of choosing who would live and who would die among the rooster population. Sometimes I’d run down my victim and grab him by his legs, but the easiest method was to wait until the sun was setting and the flock was crowding along the ridge of the range house.

  The butchering of chickens was an unpleasant process for a child to observe. My father’s task was to cut off the rooster’s head with an ax. He had driven two nails in an upended section of log for the execution and would slip the bird’s neck between them, stretching it before he brought down the ax blade. Then he would toss the victim to one side, and, as expected, it would run like a chicken with its head cut off. (My Granny Jones had her own equally grim method. Holding the wingtips and legs of the fowl in one hand, she stepped gently on its head, and then severed its neck with a butcher knife.) Once the rooster had fallen into repose, my mother would appear with a bucket of boiling hot water, plunge the bird into it for loosening the feathers, and then pluck the creature naked, feathers falling where they may until blown away by the wind, before taking the carcass into her kitchen to complete the process of dressing it, an ironic turn of phrase, as a dressed chicken was a naked bird.

  Equally unsettling for a child was the smell of this undertaking, not only the unpleasant scent of wet feathers as the bird was plucked but also the odor of fresh, warm entrails being pulled from the body cavity and then the awful reek of pinfeathers being singed in a jar-lid flame of alcohol.

  I wouldn’t eat chicken when I was a kid. Not only did the butchering process disgust me, but I found live chickens off-putting as well. I liked the gentle, friendly bovine presence of our cattle, but chickens had nothing in their personalities to recommend their company. They were infinitely stup
id beings, giving credence to the epithet birdbrain. I was a kind and familiar presence in the henhouse when I brought water or gathered eggs, yet they would squawk and fly wildly about when I walked in, much like teenagers at a Friday the 13th movie.

  I couldn’t take their treatment of me personally, though, after observing how incredibly cruel they were to one another. If one of the chickens sustained an injury that drew even one drop of blood, its feathered friends and neighbors would gather around and peck it to death.

  And they had no sense of self-protection. Rather than safely bunking down for the night in the range house, the free-range chickens would crowd along the ridge of the roof, easy prey for the varmints that made the nearby woods their home. My final chicken chore of a summer day was to walk down to the range house as the sun was setting and grab protesting, squawking, wing-flapping chickens from the roof, toss them inside the range house, and lock the door.

  One night, apparently, I didn’t close the door to the range house securely, and in the morning when we went out to the barn to milk the cows, we could see a white trail of dead chickens leading from the range house down into the woods. When we followed it, we found that it ended at a fox den.

  I’m reminded of a story that was told of a fox and a henhouse. It seems that a farmer had been having trouble with a fox killing his wife’s chickens. When he heard frantic squawking during the night, he jumped out of bed, grabbed his shotgun, loaded it, and wearing nothing but his undershirt, stalked off to the henhouse, his farm dog at his heels.

  Slowly and cautiously, he opened the door to the chicken house, peering along the barrel of his gun, when unexpectedly the dog pressed its cold nose against his bare butt. Reflexively, he pulled the trigger, killing most of his wife’s flock.

  In real life, protecting the chickens was slightly more dignified—but only slightly.

  Once, when my aunt, uncle, and cousins were visiting us from the city, my mother reminded me, not for the first time, that I needed to carry water down to the chickens at the range house. “All right, all right!” I shouted. “I’ll water those puking chickens!” I stomped off to the pump, filled two buckets, and trudged out into the field.

  For some unfathomable reason, my aunt and uncle found my response funny, and for years after would quote me, “All right, all right, I’ll water those puking chickens!” and then laugh uproariously. City folks, it seemed, had no understanding of the trials a country boy faced in helping his mother put a chicken on their table.

  Charlotte

  She came into my life the summer after my first year in college. No, this was not a summer romance, although she played a starring role in my boyhood fantasies. Charlotte was the sheep of my dreams, or more accurately, the product of my ruminations while mowing the lawn. Reality was another matter.

  Ours was a country lawn that sprawled in all directions, and as the oldest boy in the family, I fell heir to its maintenance. Mowing was an all-day chore, especially as my mower was never state of the art. My father’s small dairy farm on Pleasant Ridge was a subsistence operation, 180 acres (a good part of it woods and hills) and twenty milk cows along with a few pigs and my mother’s laying hens. The machinery was vintage, some implements purchased secondhand, a few that were horse-drawn in an earlier life and passed down from my grandfather.

  As lawnmowers were a low priority, we put up with a series of them, all disreputable. Paw would buy a cheap used mower, convinced that with his mechanical skills, he could recondition it to like new. With the temperament of a poet, not a mechanic, I rarely could start the mower and would call my father for help. After much scattering of his tools and sputtering of his curses, the engine would cough like an inmate at a TB sanitarium, and I’d be in business.

  I walked along the section by the weeping willows, back and forth on the main lawn under the four ancient white pines, over the sunken foundation of the old house, across the portion under the giant elm, through the rugged terrain we called Granny’s duck pen in the locust grove, and then finally down the strip along the border of Chinese elms that Uncle Vern had planted as a windbreak. If the lawnmower was especially temperamental, the task would stretch into more than one day.

  I knew the golf course–sized lawn was largely my own fault; I had taken home improvement as a 4-H project two years earlier. In my enthusiasm, I had tamed grounds that previously had been home to towering weeds and nodding grasses, as if I were a homesteader landscape gardener. I tore down a dilapidated garage and built benches with salvaged lumber. I constructed rock gardens and planted flowerbeds. Now I was paying the price, maintaining my country estate.

  The noise of the engine and the Sisyphean task of trudging behind the mower gave me ample opportunity for reverie. And that was when I thought of Charlotte. Our neighbors down the road had had a flock of sheep when I was a little boy. The woolies were long gone, but the possibilities remained. They were excellent lawnmowers, I recalled, possessing unconditional fondness for anything green. If I had sheep, my lawn would be a smooth blanket of green, with the added Old English pastoral charm of grazing lambs. My balky lawnmower could sit in the machine shed sulking and rusting.

  To my surprise, Paw agreed to the suggestion, and at the stockyard in town, I found myself high bidder on a sheep. I paid the two dollars and brought my new lawnmower home, confident that Charlotte would always start.

  The namesake of Charlotte was a girl whom everyone knew at my college. The school of agriculture was populated by men except for one young woman, a capable girl who looked as if she could milk cows and plow fields, but sheep were her focus. Unfortunately, behind her back she was a figure of fun for male chauvinists who, believing in a rigid separation of gender roles, referred to her as Charlotte the Sheep Woman. Now that women are well represented in agricultural science, I blush at our intolerance and lack of imagination. While I was excited to put Charlotte the Actual Sheep to work, my mother was wary of the project. Her father had raised sheep when she was a girl, and in the flock was a hostile buck. When she glanced at my dimwitted ewe, she saw the shadowy menace of a potential assailant and kept her distance.

  I teased her about her phobia. Sheep have a reputation for vulnerability, timidity, and stupidity. Some sheep farmers even keep a llama in the flock as a watch guard. Reportedly, if a dog or some other predator wanders into the pasture, the llama bleats a warning to his intellectually challenged cousins, stamps a warning to the dog, and if the canine attacker does not heed the caution, proceeds to kick the crap out of him. I had read Thomas Hardy’s novel Far from the Madding Crowd and been shocked by the opening scene in which an ill-behaved stock dog chases Gabriel Oak’s entire flock over a cliff, all of the woolies plummeting to their deaths. Oh, if Gabriel Oak had only owned a llama, Far from the Madding Crowd might have ended happily ever after.

  But as to the intelligence of sheep, one shepherd pointed out that a sheep might be lassoed once, but unlike cattle, never twice. They catch on quickly and duck their heads to avoid the rope. Their problem, it seems, is that like so many of our own species, they tend to follow the crowd, sometimes voting against their own interests. The only one who had anything to fear from Charlotte was likely Charlotte herself.

  Shepherding a dull but stubborn ewe, however, turned out to be as difficult as starting a secondhand mower. While she would eat anything green, Charlotte did have her preferences; the canes of my mother’s raspberries were an especial favorite. I could leave her happily grazing under the elm tree, turn my back for a moment, and then hear my mother shriek, “That sheep is in my raspberry patch!”

  I solved the problem by tethering Charlotte, but then found that if I didn’t keep moving her, she chewed tight “crop circles” in the lawn and then punctuated them with sheep droppings. And no matter how well I drove her stake into the ground, I’d soon hear my mother shout, “That sheep is in my raspberry patch!” One time, my mother called me inside to take a telephone call while I was dealing with Charlotte. The 4-H agent had information for me reg
arding a butterfat milk testing demonstration that I was scheduled to give at the state fair, and as I hurried into the house, I didn’t notice that curious Charlotte followed me into the living room. “That sheep is in my house!” my mother shouted. “Be right back,” I told the curious agent on the phone. Overall, the sheep experiment was less than a success, but we had made a commitment, and what Charlotte lacked in wit she made up for in affection. And to my surprise, she had been with child when I bought her. I named her son Milford and felt like a father. Of sorts.

  While my mother liked Milford no more than she cared for Charlotte, my little brother found him an acceptable playmate. Larry would put on a football jersey and shoulder pads to watch football games on TV, and during commercials, he’d run outside with his toy football to enact instant replays with Milford, who found the game delightful. Larry would sprint across the lawn with the lamb in hot pursuit, throw the ball, and then run after Milford and make a flying tackle, throwing the delighted scrambling sheep to the ground.

  Unfortunately, Milford took such pleasure in the game that he wanted to play it with everyone. My father and I ignored the sports-minded wooly when he came galloping after us, but not my mother, who was convinced that Milford was the reincarnation of the threatening buck of her childhood.

  One day, as Ma was carrying a bucket of hot soapy water across the road from the house to the barn for washing the milking machines, Milford tried to entice her into playing with him. As he joyfully galloped behind her, Mother walked faster and faster, slopping sudsy water in her haste. When she felt her escape was futile, she turned, shouting at Milford, “Go away!” When he made his charge, expecting her to make a flying tackle and wrestle him to the ground, she instead threw the bucket of soapy water on him.

  Luckily, the water was not hot enough to cause Milford harm. Only his dignity was injured as he shook himself, looking like a dirty sweater pulled from a basin of Woolite, ready to be rinsed and spread on a towel.