Ridge Stories Page 7

  For my thirteenth birthday, Gramp presented me with a safety razor. I thanked him politely, as I had been taught, but I had nothing on my face to shave. True, I was about to start high school, but my mother had enrolled me in first grade when I was five, and I was not early to mature. I kept the razor on my dresser, waiting for the day when whiskers would finally begin sprouting on my chin.

  Gramp’s attempts to groom me for farming were no more successful than his attempt to groom me physically. He had encouraged me to cut weeds in the cow pasture, hoping to instill in me a love of the land, a less than successful approach to nurturing an agrarian sensibility. He lamented the fact that I didn’t enjoy farm machinery, that I at best tolerated milking time, and that in general, I showed little interest in farming.

  Once, when I closed a barbed wire gate (“bob” wire gate, as Gramp would say) by putting the top of the gatepost into the wire loop before the bottom, he made me start over, insisting that I put the post in bottom first. “That is the proper way to close a gate,” he announced, pointing an accusatory finger at me.

  When he used his all-purpose jackknife to cut tufts of hay missed by the mower, he returned my stare of incredulity with a look of smug self-righteousness. “Anything worth doing,” he proclaimed, “is worth doing well.”

  Gramp, who was a nonsmoker, ironically developed emphysema when he was in his early fifties, a time when the only treatment was rest and wintering in the Southwest. But during the summer, he put on appropriate farmer attire and left the flat that he and Granny rented in town to arrive at our house by seven in the morning to supervise farming operations during the day.

  He was generous with his advice as to when the weather was right for planting corn or cutting hay. He could spot-check to be certain that a cow had indeed been milked dry. He was quick to point out when a Sunday picnic should be canceled in favor of making hay because the following week might be rainy.

  Neither Gramp nor my father had attended school beyond the eighth grade, and Gramp remained unconvinced as to the value of my high school education. To persuade him otherwise, I attempted to explain negative numbers, a concept I was learning in freshman algebra. He dismissed algebra in general, and our discussion became heated to the point that Granny called me out of the room and scolded me not to argue with him.

  Slowly, though, he seemed to come to terms with the fact that I would choose my own path and that the path would take me far beyond Pleasant Ridge.

  “You’re not going to farm, are you?” he said to me one time when my family was visiting him and my grandmother.

  Silently, I shook my head.

  “I thought so,” he said, his voice grim with resignation.

  I shrugged and quietly left the room.

  After I came of age, I learned not to take Gramp too seriously. My family had let him rule the roost like a feisty banty rooster, but I came to realize that they might be making allowances for his poor health. And while he may have been an OCD personality, his mother-in-law had recognized his sense of responsibility and chose him rather than one of her shiftless sons to take over her late husband’s farm.

  The pattern of sons taking over their father’s land has for the most part come to an end on the ridge, because many of the sons, like me, left to earn a college degree in hopes of gaining a more affluent livelihood. Now the remaining dairy farmers survive by increasing their acreage, their herd size, and the sophistication of their machinery. When a farmer retires or dies, his land is generally purchased by another farmer and his house occupied either by someone who works in town or by a city person who uses it as a summer home in the country.

  My younger brother tried farming when he first graduated from high school, but he too left for the greener pastures of a job in the city. At that point, our father decided to sell the farm, and I found that even from my city digs, I still felt the pull of the land. I decided to buy half of the 180 acres on a fifteen-year land contract, explaining to my wife that I was making a double investment, one financial, as prices for farmland were low at the time, and the second, emotional. Gramp had already passed away, but if he were keeping his customary watchful eye on the farm from heaven, I knew he would be pleased that part of the land had remained in the family, even if I had chosen not to “pull tits and shovel shit” as a dairy farmer.

  And later, after my wife and I had become resigned to a life without grandchildren, our forty-year-old daughter announced that she was pregnant, and we became the grandparents of a sweet little girl. When my wife and I talked about what we wanted Julia to call us, I surprised myself by the name that immediately came to me. “I want her to call me Gramp,” I told my wife.

  And so I became Gramp. I not only wore his shoes to my eighth-grade graduation, but in a familial sense, I still do. And just as Gramp pampered my little sister, I am devoted to Julia, indulging her shamelessly.

  While I am still irritated when I remember our prior interactions, I understand him better. From his time as a World War I soldier through his long siege with emphysema, he carried with him a sense of his own mortality and a belief that only through family and land does a farmer endure. Gramp may have been a sonofabitch, but I see more and more of him in myself.

  After all, he was my grandfather.

  Farm Forecasts

  Back on the farm, we didn’t need a TV weather forecaster to tell us when it was going to rain. Pleasant Ridge folks knew to look for all sorts of signs the weather was going to change.

  Animals seemed to sense an incoming storm, and an observant farmer became privy to their insight. Dark clouds were sure to appear if starlings flew in circles, or if frogs down in the valley crossed the road, or if dogs and cats ate grass. And whenever a bobwhite chirped to his flock, his call may have sounded like bobwhite, bobwhite to the untrained, but to the ridge farmers he warned, “More wet, more wet.”

  Natural clues abound, all certain signs of approaching precipitation. No overnight dew on the grass meant rain the next day. Gramp Jones maintained that leaves turned out or upside down on a tree announced showers were on their way. A circle around the moon indicated a storm, and a count of the stars within that halo determined the number of days before the first drops fell. And old-timers recognized a “rainy moon,” a new moon tipped up allowing water to run out, a sign of a wet month.

  You might know the rhyme, “Red sky in the morning, farmer’s fair warning; red sky at night, farmer’s delight.” While ridge dwellers paid special heed to this admonition, they supplemented it with other conditional forecasts. For example, when the fog went up, the rain without question would come down. If the sun set clear on Friday night, then it would rain three days out of the coming week. A rainstorm on Easter meant rain on the following seven Sundays.

  And then Paw claimed he was a rainmaker who could bring on precipitation any time he chose. All he had to do was mow hay.

  Farmwives have their signs of coming changes in the weather, too. Potatoes often boiled dry when rain was in the air. Moisture beaded on pipes and water tanks. Both the radio and the telephone crackled before a storm. And, of course, Granny Jones’s arthritis suddenly flared up, the surest sign of all.

  My mother vowed that she could outdo my father as a rainmaker. If hanging the wash outside on a clothesline didn’t bring rain, inviting company for Sunday dinner certainly would.

  Ridge folks had a number of ways to predict dry weather, too. For instance, if we woke up to rain, we’d automatically recite, “Rain before seven, quit before eleven.” On some hot summer nights, heat lightning flashed in the sky. “Forked lightning at night, next day bright,” Paw asserted. And dusty whirlwinds, Cousin Verne insisted, were a sign of a coming dry season, as were “spotty rains,” cloudbursts that fell on localized areas.

  As a conversation opener, old Otto Fry would mourn after church, “I wish it’d rain. We sure could use rain.” Paw never agreed. “Dry weather will scare a farmer to death, but wet weather will starve him to death,” he said, remembering those yea
rs when rain kept him out of the fields. During a rainy spell, Paw would storm about, slipping through mud in the barnyard, cursing and bellowing, “I hope Otto Fry is sucking this mud up his—” er, never mind.

  Perhaps my father’s petulant vulgarity might be partially excused by his dependence on good weather for successful farming. Crops couldn’t be planted in muddy fields if a spring was too wet. Corn couldn’t be cultivated during a rainy summer, nor hay cut. And mowed hay needed to dry for a few days in the sun before it was brought into the barn. Likewise, oats were shocked and again left in the field until threshing time. And corn couldn’t be picked during wet fall seasons.

  Maybe folk forecasts on the ridge weren’t always accurate. But they were certainly more colorful than those of a scientist working with dry data and pointing at computer mockups projected on a screen. And even with today’s marvels of advanced meteorological technology, sometimes professionals have to eat humble pie.

  As the son of a farmer, I still maintain a wary eye for signs of changing weather. When I step outside the front door of my summer place in Door County, if I feel a breeze coming out of the east over Lake Michigan, I nod sagely and tell myself, “Rain is on the way.”

  The Grasshopper

  Ostensibly, my father bought Frank Brewer’s Farmall F-12 for me to use cultivating corn. I was a young teenager with an extremely modest mechanical aptitude. In retrospect, I suspect that the tractor was to serve as my training wheels before I was allowed to operate more complex machinery. If I remember correctly, my father paid seventy-five dollars for the tractor; if I had wrecked it, we wouldn’t have been out much money.

  My father decided that I would drive the tractor up the Dicks Hill from Frank’s place on Double D to where it junctioned with County D and then continue on to our farm, a total distance of about a mile and a half. With coaching, Frank standing on one side of me and my father on the other, I started the tractor, no small feat, as it had a crank at the front like a Model T.

  As I mounted and sat in the hole-dotted tin seat, Frank gave me instructions on braking and shifting, my father observing the lesson. I knew how to drive our family’s tractor, so I was fairly confident that I could manage this antique version. All seemed to be going well as I drove along the edge of the fence row toward the gate that opened onto the gravel road—when without warning, as if it had a mind of its own, the F-12 veered sharply to the left, crashing through the brush and plummeting over the bank into the ditch.

  Frank and Paw ran to survey the damage I had caused while I remained seated on the F-12, overcome with guilt at my ineptness in maneuvering it. I felt only slightly better when an investigation revealed that sheared bolts in the linkage connecting the steering wheel with the front wheels had caused the accident, not my driving incompetence.

  The two men soon replaced the bolts and extricated the tractor from the ditch, set the brake, and left it out of gear on the road, the motor running. Like a cowboy who dutifully remounts the horse that had thrown him, I climbed back on the F-12 and began my maiden journey up the Dicks Hill.

  The ancient tractor had metal rear wheels with cleats that made the vehicle vibrate like a Magic Fingers mattress on the gravel road, a bone-jarring, tooth-rattling ride, but I made the trip home with no further complications. By the time I pulled into our driveway, I had named the steel exhaust-breathing beast the Grasshopper.

  We had an uneasy alliance that summer, the Grasshopper and I, following countless rows of field corn back and forth. The turns were challenging, and inevitably I’d plow out a few plants, climb down, and reset them, crossing my fingers and hoping for the best. On the tedious straightaways, I’d pull a dime-store harmonica from my pocket and practice tunes I could play by ear: “Red River Valley,” “Oh, Susanna,” and “My Old Kentucky Home.”

  I took off my shirt, envisioning the healthy tan of the beachcombing bullies who kicked sand in the eyes of the ninety-pound weaklings like me, scrawny kids who had not yet signed up for the mail-order Charles Atlas bodybuilding course advertised in comic books.

  By the day’s end, my back would be seared a bright red and I’d have to climb into bed carefully that night and sleep only on my stomach, my back uncovered. A few days later, I would pull translucent patches of skin off my back, secure in the folk wisdom of the time that peeling skin was a necessary step on the way to a healthy dark tan. The specter of skin cancer didn’t rear its fearsome head until I was no longer a barefoot boy with cheeks of tan but an old man with suspicious spots on my back that a dermatologist spritzed with liquid nitrogen.

  Despite my on-the-job training on the Grasshopper, I was never asked to bale hay or plow fields, to plant corn or sow oats, or even to spread manure. I was the Miniver Cheevy of farm life, born too late and in the wrong place. I would no doubt have been happy on one of those eighty-acre farmsteads located on Si Breese Lane, on a first name basis with a team of work horses, Dick and Ned, and a cart horse, Maud.

  Perhaps my father sensed the obsolete temperament in me when he purchased that bit of farming antiquity, the F-12, as a compromise. But despite his attempt to entice me into an agrarian way of life, I counted the days until I could leave the farm behind me, like the sunburns that peeled my skin.

  And the Grasshopper stayed behind, too, moved back behind the corn crib after I left for college, its presence soon obscured in a grove of saplings. My father had planned to restore the F-12 as a retirement project, but when he sold the home place and moved to town, he took with him only his maul. As far as I know, the Grasshopper still rusts in peace on Pleasant Ridge in the obscurity of a second-growth grove of trees.

  Milking Time

  “I love to go swimmin,’ with bow-legged women, and dive between their legs!” my father sang as we were doing the nightly milking. I was too innocent then to understand the double entendre and too young to do more than help with the chores, like washing the cows’ udders before they were milked. After my father had emptied the milking machine into a pail, it was my job to carry the bucket to the end of the center driveway to the milk cans I had brought in from the milk house. Carefully, I dumped the pail of milk through the milk strainer into a can.

  We milked at most twenty-two cows with two milking machines, a task that took a couple hours, including preparation and cleanup. The morning and evening chores were relentless, even when my father had succumbed to a morning malady my mother called idiot’s flu, the result of spending Saturday night at a tavern in the nearby village Hub City.

  Under the best of circumstances, mind-numbing repetition and endless waiting made the work boring. Paw and I sought diversion in any quarter that presented itself.

  One of our fantasies was to sell the cows and use the profit to buy a house trailer for wintering in Florida. But we couldn’t take Ma, Paw cautioned me, because “the bathing beauties would hurt her eyes.”

  Like playing cowboys and Indians with my friends, such fantasies seemed stimulating but harmless. I considered my father’s fanciful scenario—featuring bathing beauties but not my mother—with the quiet acceptance of a young boy. I knew from experience that Ma was deathly afraid of water, fearful that if she waded up to her waist, she might develop a cramp and drown; of course, she wouldn’t want to join us, but we would eventually return to her.

  When my father retired and sold his herd of milk cows, rather than traveling to Florida, he chose an over-fifty trailer park in south Texas, featuring a bevy of elderly women and an aboveground pool, neither of which seemed to bother my mother.

  When Paw was a student at Pleasant Ridge School, memorizing poetry was an integral part of the curriculum, and perhaps because he had not cluttered his mind with education beyond the eighth grade, the poems stayed with him. As he moved milking machines and I dumped buckets of milk, he’d recite Longfellow’s “The Village Blacksmith,” Edward R. Sill’s “Opportunity,” Walt Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!,” and a piece with so much internal rhyme that it was a challenge to recite:

  A
midst the mists and coldest frosts

  With stoutest wrists and loudest boasts

  He thrusts his fists against the post

  And still insists he sees the ghosts.

  Research offers no author for this verse, other than calling it a folk nursery rhyme and an old tongue-twister sometimes used as an articulation exercise.

  Ironically, while I, too, was required to memorize poems in grade school—an easy task for me—I remember none of them, but I can still recite fragments of the poems I learned by listening to my father while we were milking cows.

  However, Paw’s grade school poems were not the only pieces I committed to memory in the barn. As I fantasized about a future career as an actor, I auditioned for high school plays and competed in forensics. When I had a monologue or a role in a play to memorize, I took my script with me to the barn and recited the dialog as I washed cow udders and dumped pails of milk. My script always smelled of cow manure.

  After morning milking when I was getting ready for school, I’d take a “spit bath,” standing shirtless at the bathroom sink and wiping myself clean with a wet, soapy washcloth. Sometimes at school I’d notice the mingled smell of cow manure and grass silage on the inside of my wrist.

  But I didn’t hold that smell against the cows. The barn in winter was actually a pleasant environment. The body heat of our herd kept the barn basement relatively temperate, not T-shirt warm, but jacket warm. And I enjoyed the yeasty aroma of silage and the herbal scent of hay. Even the earthy odor of fresh cow dung, with its vegetable base, wasn’t an unpleasant smell, although admittedly it may have been an acquired appreciation.

  And while I disliked the monotonous routine of milking, I actually was fond of the cows. Because we spent a great deal of time with them, we became acquainted with their individual personalities, and those who were affectionate and cooperative were our favorites. Each one had a name. The most memorable was Mary Belle, a dairy animal that had long outlived her peak of milk production. If my father had been a more business-minded farmer, she would have long ago been sold, but truth be told, we loved her. She ambled slowly outside when released from her stanchion and walked even more slowly on her return. Her spot was adjacent to the walkway leading to the silo, and each time I passed her, I petted her shoulder and she would turn her head to look at me appreciatively.