Ridge Stories Read online

  My father’s barn secret was the fact that he had named his cows after the women on the ridge. While that might make him sound like a misogynist, he wasn’t; no insult to the ladies of the neighborhood was intended.

  One time, when I was feeling impish, I told my father’s first cousin Marjory that we had a cow named after her. Without missing a beat, she looked me in the eye and replied with all seriousness, “Really? Well, we have a pig named Gary.” Now, that insult was probably intended.

  When I was in high school, we kept a radio plugged into a light socket on an improvised shelf in the barn basement. When the lights were on, the radio played, not because we thought, like some dairy herdsmen, that music improved milk production, but because the tunes helped to relieve boredom. WRCO in Richland Center was our local station for news in the morning and for popular music in the evening. The night program accepted requests if they were submitted on a postcard. With my adolescent sense of humor, I requested a song—the tune now long forgotten—for twenty-two girls with whom I spent time before school in the morning and after supper at night.

  My boyish funny bone was tickled, too, when our barn cats experienced elimination problems. We used gauze filter pads in the large funnel-like strainer through which we filtered milk. When we finished milking, I’d toss the used filter pad to the barn cats, and the one that caught it would wolf it down for the residual milk. Unfortunately, the pad would sometimes not pass smoothly through the feline’s gastrointestinal tract. I would lend not a helping hand, but a foot, stepping on the part of the filter that had thus far emerged, and hissing, “Scat!”

  Less amusing were the times we’d come out to the barn in the morning and find that a cow had prematurely given birth to her calf while she was restrained by her stanchion and her newborn delivered into the “drop,” the gutter designed to catch and collect the cows’ waste until the daily barn cleaning. The calf would be coated with excrement, and the window for the cow’s instinct to lick her newborn clean would have closed. We’d wipe the pathetic wobbly legged youngster with gunnysacks, knowing it would never be clean until the eventual growth of a new coat of hair.

  And sometimes the cow would not let her calf suckle. Either my father or I would have to stand behind her holding her tail erect, as then she would not move, and her baby would be able to nurse. Eventually, she’d accept her newborn.

  Frightening were the times when we had summer storms before the haymow was full, and the empty barn would sway and creak like a ship without ballast in a hurricane at sea. But even more terrifying were the moments when one of us would look out the kitchen window toward the barn and think the building had caught fire, the heart palpitations finally subsiding with the realization that a light had been inadvertently left on inside the barn or that the glow was nothing but a reflected sunset.

  I came of age milking cows, eventually developing the strength to carry a full milk can out to the milk house and hoist it over the rim of the tank to cool in well water. I developed the skill and maturity to milk cows by myself, my father confident that I had done a good job. And I understood more clearly the delicate balance between the sensibilities of farmwives and the coarser nature of their husbands.

  But more important, I came to the realization that operating a dairy farm was not going to be my calling after I graduated from college. The time for me to milk was coming to an end.

  Making Hay While the Sun Shines

  Two of my earliest memories deal with making hay. One of them was riding down our hill sitting on the hayrack as the tractor pulled it along the road to the hundred acres during the haying season. With my legs dangling over the edge of the rack, my fingers laced in the grooves between the boards on the bed, and my head tipped back in the breeze, I felt as if I were flying when my father took the tractor out of gear and let gravity accelerate our trip.

  The other vivid image I have is of the daily summer picnics under the four pines on our front lawn during the haying season. As the hours were long on days we made hay, everyone stopped for a lunch midway between our noontime dinner and evening supper. My mother often made summer sausage sandwiches with chocolate chip cookies for dessert, a pitcher of iced tea for the grownups and Kool-Aid for the kids. Gramp and Uncle Vern joined my family sitting on a blanket in the shade, snacking and resting before returning to the hot fields and haymow.

  I loved haying when I was a boy, finding it almost as exciting as threshing. In addition to the fields over on the hundred, we had cropland both to the north of the house on one side of the road and to the south of the barn on the other. Farms that crested the spine of the ridge were of necessity broken up, separated by pastures and woodlots on hills and valleys too steep for tilling, the inevitable landscape of Driftless topography. The trips to the barn were tense as we worried that precarious loads of loose hay might slide off before we reached our destination, but the return trip to the field was one of joyous, rapid abandon.

  More than a half century has passed since I left the farm, and the machinery that we used during my childhood is now relegated to rural farm life museums. When I was very young, my family was transitioning from our horses to an 8N Ford tractor and subsequently continued to use the implements once drawn by draft horses, but now by tractor horsepower.

  Today on country roads, I see gigantic farm machinery that may have sold new for six figures, its purpose sometimes a mystery to me. With air-conditioned cabs, the equipment resembles set pieces for a remake of War of the Worlds rather than the simple hay mowers, rakes, and loaders of my childhood, their mechanism powered by gears connected to the movement of wheels as a horse or tractor pulled them.

  Farmers listened to weather reports and studied the sky, looking for signs of coming bad weather before mowing hay, as it had to lie in the sun and dry for a couple of days before it could be raked into windrows. If rain fell on the raked hay before it could be taken into the barn, then the hay was tedded, a raking process with the tines reversed to spread the hay until it had dried and could be re-raked.

  The hay-loader was a primitive elevator that was pulled behind the hay wagon. Loose hay dropped onto the flatbed where a farmer had the dusty job of stacking it with a three-tined hayfork, wading through and tramping on the hay as he worked. Many times, that man would ride atop the load as it was hauled to the barn. I treasure an old black-and-white photograph of my father as a young man standing atop a wagonload of hay, reins in his hands as he drives Dick and Ned to the barn in the background.

  If driving the load of hay to the barn was a precarious trip, raising it into the barn with a hayfork was even more of a challenge. High up in the peak of the barn rafters, an iron track ran from one end to the other. During haying, the bottom-hinged door at one end of the peak was lowered. A hemp hay rope was threaded through pulleys at both ends of the track, one end attached to the double-tined harpoon hayfork that was plunged into a pile of loose hay on the wagon, the other end attached to horses, or later, a tractor. I remember my mother sometimes being pressed into service to drive our 8N Ford when my grandfather wasn’t available.

  The pulley mechanism carried each load of hay up to the peak, where it traveled along the track until someone inside the haymow shouted for the trip rope to be pulled and the hay dropped into the appropriate mow.

  At least, that was how the process was supposed to work. Sometimes the forked hay would fall loose before it reached the peak of the barn, and the fork would be reloaded.

  The work of stacking the hay in the mow, again with a three-tined hayfork, was the most difficult work of all and usually fell to my father. Walking in loose hay was like wading through deep mud, and the summer temperatures soared in the haymow. When my father emerged from the mow once a load of hay had been stacked, chafe clung to his sweaty face, making him look like an actor in one of the tasteless minstrel shows that were popular at the time.

  Just as over time we transitioned from horses to mechanical horsepower, our tractors became larger and our machinery more comp
lex. My father purchased a used Allis-Chalmers baler that with a series of rotating belts was supposed to produce hay rolled into small round bales. Sometimes it worked efficiently, after my father had cursed and hammered and welded broken parts.

  By age twelve, I could drive tractor on the hay wagon while my father and uncle, wearing leather gloves and using hay hooks, loaded the bales. I would spot four-leaf clovers (as could my Granny Jones), and I would call to my uncle and point when I saw one. He would patiently pick it for me, and I’d hold the bouquet of four-leaf clovers until we returned to the house, where I’d put them in a jelly glass of water until I had time to press them in an encyclopedia and eventually tape them into a scrapbook.

  The round bales were fed into the haymow using an elevator operated with the power take-off of the tractor. My father still had to stack them in the barn.

  The used square baler that replaced the other was far less temperamental, and by the time it arrived on the scene, I was strong enough to load hay bales as they were popped onto the wagon flatbed. My parents praised my ability to efficiently load bales that invariably arrived safely stowed to the barn, where I lifted them onto the elevator and my father stacked them in the haymow. Not until I was much older did I realize that they were probably using flattery to keep me working during the hay season for a very modest weekly allowance.

  By the time I graduated from college and married, effectively retiring from making hay, my father used a baler that produced small square bales, pitching them into a basket-style hayrack. Because of their relatively small size, they were allowed to fall from the elevator into the haymow and were left where they lay with minimal stacking. In preparation for baling, a single machine mowed, crimped, and windrowed the hay, minimizing the drying time.

  And now the giant round bales, forklifted into sheds or wrapped in plastic to be left in the fields, are nearly as big as our first 8N Ford tractor.

  The barn, built at the turn of the twentieth century, no longer stands on the farm where I helped make hay. When my father stopped farming, he did not want the building to deteriorate until it tumbled to the ground and began decomposing. In a sense, he euthanized it. Before he pulled the whole thing down and burned the remains, my mother took a picture of the structure and saved one of the stones from the basement for me.

  These artifacts help preserve the barn in my memory, where it still looms large—especially the haymow. I remember milking cows during early summer storms before the hay season and hearing the empty haymow swaying and creaking dangerously in the wind. And I remember climbing up the ladder of the hay chute during the winter into an icy, cavernous, churchlike silence, occasionally interrupted by the cooing of pigeons roosting on the old hay track, and throwing down bales for the dairy herd. In the barn’s milking parlor, the heat generated by the bodies of the cows made the milking parlor seem toasty by contrast.

  And I remember my father climbing—I was astonished at his quiet courage. I could never climb the outside of the windmill to adjust the television antenna, scale the outside of the silo to attach the silage blower pipe, or creep up the ladder inside the empty haymow to thread the hemp rope through the hayfork pulley on the track under the roof peak.

  I didn’t realize until much later just how difficult this had been for him.

  After Paw had retired from farming and making hay, he and my mother visited my family in Door County, and I took him to climb the famous Peninsula State Park tower. Only a quarter of the way up the stairs, he stopped.

  “Are you tired?” I asked him.

  “No,” he said. “I’m afraid.”

  “Afraid?” I asked him incredulously.

  “Yeah,” he said, softly. “I don’t have to climb anymore.”

  Threshing on the Ridge

  “A barrel of salt and an extension table is all I need to feed threshers,” Hattie Bryant once claimed. If that doesn’t make any sense to you, don’t worry. A lot of what Hattie said wasn’t particularly cogent, but folks back on Pleasant Ridge liked her anyway. And coping with the challenge of feeding twenty-man threshing crews was something that all the farmwomen had in common.

  Fred Pauls owned the threshing machine. When farmers had cut and shocked their oats, usually between the end of July and the last part of August, the threshing season began.

  Fred charged four cents a bushel for use of the machine that separated grain from chaff and straw, and the men exchanged help along with the use of their tractors and wagons. Likewise, the wives assisted each other in preparing the tremendous meals required to feed the hungry crews.

  Early in the season, my mother began planning her menu. My father planted enough oats that she knew the threshers would be present for at least two meals. Each night when my father returned home from the day’s threshing, she asked what he had been served for dinner and supper and his best guess when the threshers would arrive at our farm.

  These were important questions, because a farmwife wanted to be certain not only that everything was ready for the threshers but also that she avoided duplicating an earlier menu. She would feel that she had disgraced herself if she learned that because of her inattention, the men had had roast beef and apple pie two days in a row.

  While feeding threshers was a challenging undertaking for the farmwives, it was also something to look forward to, a chance to get together with some neighbor women and to show off their homes and their culinary specialties.

  Timing the meal was always a problem. A woman couldn’t kill her chickens or get the frozen beef from the locker plant in town too far in advance. So many variables could alter the scheduled threshing date—the weather, mechanical breakdowns, or maybe Fred Pauls’s changes in plans.

  One day, many years ago, my grandmother’s afternoon rest in her rocker was disturbed by the sound of footsteps, and she awoke to find Fred on her porch, laughing ruefully at the last-minute imposition. “I guess you’re having threshers for supper,” he said.

  Granny did some fast thinking and even faster moving. She opened some jars of her home-canned beef, threw together some pies, and peeled a bucket of potatoes. The meal was ready on time.

  My mother liked to serve fried chicken, one of her specialties. Every spring she purchased baby chicks at Pulvermacher’s Produce in Richland Center, and the young roosters would be ready for slaughter by threshing time. If she chose a different meal option, Fred would protest, “Esther! Why didn’t you cook up some chicken?”

  Mother knew that the men always enjoyed eating her meals. One woman on the ridge, though, was a notoriously bad cook, and the crew tried to avoid eating at her place if at all possible. Her house was none too clean, the cream sometimes soured, and the meat sometimes tainted. Once she reportedly served an infamous meal of undercooked boiled chicken with kernels of corn from the bird’s craw floating in the broth.

  When the threshing day had been established with some degree of certainty, I was sent to the range house out in the field where the young fryers were kept to snatch Mother’s unsuspecting victims. Six or eight of the birds were required to make a threshing meal. As the sun sank, my father chopped off their heads, and my mother scalded them and plucked steaming handfuls of soggy feathers. By bedtime, the refrigerator was filled with cut-up chicken ready for frying.

  The next morning, our farm was electric with excitement. We kids found that for drama, threshing was an event surpassed only by the county fair. I helped knock down the shocks of oats so that the bundles could dry from the dew in the early morning sun. Soon, tractors and wagons began arriving on the road, our dog greeting each with hysterical yelping.

  Finally that behemoth, the grand old thresher, slowly lumbered into the barnyard, creaking and rattling, in retrospect looking like a robotic dinosaur. While the machine was being set up, the men began loading bundles of oats onto the basket racks of their wagons. Ordinarily, farming was a solitary occupation, the men finding rare opportunities to talk to each other while leaning against a pickup truck in a neighbor’s drivew
ay or during a chance encounter at the grist mill. My father used to joke that his only contact with the outside world was when the mailman made his delivery at the roadside mailbox. But during threshing, men could enjoy conversations as they worked, at least when they were not standing next to the factorylike roar of the thresher.

  Once a wagon was loaded with fork-pitched bundles of oats, a driver brought it to the thresher where the bundles were pitched into the machine. The oats were separated from the straw, which was blown into a crescent-shaped pile by the moving arm of the blower.

  My father was often the stacker, not only for our threshing but for that of our neighbors, work for which he was paid. Wading through the straw, he stacked it with a three-tined fork and packed it with his feet while perspiring profusely. Chaff and dust clung to his face as well as to his sweat-soaked shirt.

  From another pipe extending from the thresher, a stream of oats spewed into the bed of a pickup truck. At the granary, more men shoveled the oats into an elevator that dropped them into the building again to be shoveled into place.

  While threshing could be dirty and noisy work, for those out in the fields, the task was relatively relaxing—the bundles light, the summer air warm and pleasant, and the male camaraderie much appreciated. Far from the earshot of the women, the guys felt they could let their rough edges show.