Ridge Stories Read online

  They could brag about their tractors’ comparative horsepower and recall teams of horses they remembered from their younger days. They could show off their strength and demonstrate their fitness by standing in a round-bottomed metal bushel basket, lofting a gunnysack of oats onto their shoulders. They could boast of fistfights won, like the time one farmer at a tavern in Hub City punched an obnoxious drunken veterinarian in the nose (never mind that the assailant’s friends had to take up a collection to pay his fine when the vet brought charges).

  Like their wives, they gossiped about sexual matters, one guy laughing about the time he and his wife-to-be enjoyed alfresco intimate relations, only to learn later that they had bedded down in a patch of poison ivy. Another guy told of a farmer who had forgiven his unfaithful wife. “I wouldn’t take her back,” the gossiping farmer said, “if she’d board herself and drink at the creek!” And they could tell off-color jokes, usually one about a farmer’s daughter and a traveling salesman.

  In short, farmers enjoyed the novelty of a comfortable communal experience, a freedom to be as crude as they wanted without offending the ears of their womenfolk. Then again, maybe the women enjoyed their own chance to talk freely while preparing the meal inside.

  The pies were the first order of business. At least five or six were required, and of course, there must be at least two kinds. My grandmother, my mother’s best friend Dorothy, and Aunt JoAnn helped. Granny usually took charge of the lemon pies, her specialty.

  One of the women had to start peeling potatoes; it took ten to fifteen pounds for one meal. Someone had to chop the cabbage for slaw. Someone else dished up the jelly and jam and the pickles. The baked beans were already in the oven, and the dough for rolls had to be shaped into buns.

  As the men loved homemade noodles with chicken, Mother often made them. To produce a sufficient quantity, she used a dozen eggs and as many cups of flour and tablespoons of cream. The quickest way to cook the chicken was to brown it in frying pans and then finish it up in the pressure cooker, especially if it was served with noodles. Heating up the vegetable, usually canned corn, was last-minute work, as was starting the coffee in Dorothy Johnson’s huge percolator.

  Not all the work took place in the hot kitchen. The living room was transformed into a dining room, with the table extended to its maximum length. Mother’s best tablecloth and dishes were spread on it. The room, along with the entire house, was sparkling clean. Because a woman’s reputation as a homemaker was on the line at threshing time, the special housecleaning had begun weeks earlier.

  Outside by the pump, the washtub of water had been warming slowly in the sun. Before lunch, a teakettle of boiling water was added to raise it to a suitable temperature for washing grimy hands and faces. A new cake of Lava soap and fresh linen towels hung on the bottom rungs of the windmill awaited the first dusty, sweaty thresher.

  The men slowly crossed the road, many of them smoking, all of them talking, enjoying their leisure as much as the prospect of a meal. The splashes of water on their hands and faces invigorated them, and they laughed easily and loudly, their merriment alerting the women of their presence. The farmwives swung into action with the efficiency of a restaurant staff. One woman took charge of the children to keep them from underfoot.

  Another of the women worked to keep up with washing dishes, as there were neither enough seats nor enough plates for all twenty men to eat at the same time. The other two women waited on table, bringing in fresh platters of chicken and refilling the bowls of potatoes. My mother beamed as she watched the men wolfing down her good cooking. She smiled at their praise and laughed at their shy jokes.

  Finally, the last of the men had eaten and joined the others for a short rest on the lawn under the huge pine trees. Inevitably, a few of them would start playing the game mumblety-peg, tossing a jackknife into the air with both blades open, letting it fall and stick in the grass. It was a contest of chance and skill, as each possible landing was worth a number of points.

  The women also ate and rested before they began a repeat performance for the evening meal. This time it would be meatloaf, potato salad, Jell-O with fruit, and cake.

  Early in the evening the threshers would finish, and the next morning, as the dew was drying on the oat shocks at the next farm on Fred Pauls’s circuit, that largest of machines on Pleasant Ridge would begin its slow but inexorable rumble down the road. There, another anxious housewife would have risen at dawn to start the process all over again.

  Getting Up Wood

  Robert Frost wrote many words waxing poetic about the great outdoors, but the poem that sticks most in my mind is “Out, Out—,” in which a boy loses a hand to an errant buzz saw, which

  Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap—

  He must have given the hand. However it was,

  Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!

  The boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh,

  As he swung toward them holding up the hand

  Half in appeal, but half as if to keep

  The life from spilling.

  I was a college student the first time I read these words, and they immediately brought to mind my father’s accident.

  On the day it happened, I arrived unknowingly from school, and as a responsible thirteen-year-old eighth grader, went out to the barn to begin the pre-milking chores even though my parents weren’t home. I assembled the two milking machines and threw down silage and fed it with a topping of ground feed to the cows. At that point, Uncle Vern slid open the barn door on its track, stepped in, and then closed it behind him, interrupting my work. He stood under a light bulb, obviously disturbed, and I went over to him to find out what was wrong.

  “Your dad had an accident in the woods,” he said, and as I could see he was trying not to cry, my heart raced in fear. “But he’s okay,” my uncle assured me.

  And then he explained. He and my father had been getting up wood, and as Paw was cutting a tree limb into stove lengths with the buzz saw, he slipped in the snow. As he tried to regain his balance, he inadvertently thrust his hand into the shrieking saw blade.

  What Uncle Vern did not tell me was that he himself was so distraught by the accident that my father picked up his own severed finger. Holding his bleeding hand against his chest, he drove himself out of the woods and up to the house, pulling behind him the manure spreader that served as an all-purpose trailer on the farm. Back at the house, he stood while my mother wrapped his hand in a bath towel and then drove him the ten miles to the doctor’s office in Richland Center, my father encouraging her all the way to drive faster, faster, faster.

  The buzz saw had lopped off my father’s right index finger and cut into the adjacent middle finger. Because the thick teeth of the saw had made a ragged cut, the finger could not have been reattached even if our small-town doctor had had the skill. But the middle finger was saved.

  My uncle and I milked the cows that first night, but for the next several days, my mother and I handled the milking together, getting up early in the morning to complete the task in time for me to go to school, and milking again in the evening, finishing when it was almost my bedtime.

  My father worried about the work he couldn’t do, the pain pills not as effective as we had hoped, and when he went back to the doctor’s office for a checkup, we learned that the stump of his finger was not healing properly. The physician had tried to save as much of the remaining finger as possible, but that portion ultimately required a second amputation, delaying my father’s recovery.

  My mother and I milked twice daily and managed the other chores as best we could, but I was a small thirteen-year-old; when I took my football physical for high school in the fall, I weighed 102 pounds. When I became ill from exhaustion, my father returned to chores even though his hand hadn’t completely healed. He worked as best he could using only his left hand, his bandaged right hand protected by a plastic bread wrapper.

  Paw’s hand eventually did heal, although phantom p
ains continued for weeks. He frequently spilled cups of coffee when he picked up a mug, gripping the handle from habit only to remember the missing finger when coffee ran across the table top.

  The stub of my father’s missing finger resembled miniature buttocks. This helped to soften the alarm his grandchildren felt years later when they looked at his hand. When he laughed, so did they.

  Getting up wood was a universal activity when I was growing up. Natural gas, propane, and fuel oil were not options, and coal was an expensive alternative. Every Driftless Area farm on the ridge had forested land too steep or rugged to be tilled, and trees not only could be sold for lumber, contributing to the economic diversity on farms, but also were a ready source of fuel. Tree limbs were a by-product of lumber sales, and fallen trees could not be sold for timber. Subsequently, a winter’s fuel was in effect free for the taking if a farmer was willing to bring the muscle power to the task.

  Some rural families worked up a season’s firewood in the fall, stacking stove wood near the house to stoke the furnace or the parlor stove. We were not that kind of family, as our falls were taken up with picking corn, not only our own but for others as custom work. My father tended to work up enough wood to throw in a basement window and heat our house for a week or two, and after it was gone, he’d return to the woods for more.

  As an adolescent, I would help get up wood on weekends, loading stove wood in the spreader and dragging small branches to a burning pile.

  Those of us who have been warmed by wood furnaces will insist that the heat is warmer than that from coal or fuel oil or natural gas. Standing next to a parlor stove or to the grill of a heat duct, home dwellers feel a warmth and security that will sustain them throughout the winter, even though they may scoff at the adage that a wood fire warms three times: from the effort of getting up the wood, from the satisfaction of a job well done, and, of course, from the heat of the burning wood.

  But the free heat could come at a cost far dearer than that of purchasing coal. Inspired by the dual warnings of Frost and real life, I penned my own poem, titled “Buzz”:

  No one spoke when we made wood

  because when the buzz saw talked everyone had to listen.

  The eighteen-inch round saw blade turned by the tractor’s power take-off

  whined and screamed and moaned like a demented fishwife as we fed it tree limbs.

  Someone watching from a far hill

  would have seen a silent movie

  the buzz saw dubbing for the piano

  and would have thrilled at the drama

  my father slipping in the snow

  falling redly

  his hand into the saw.

  Down on the Farm, TV Style

  On Pleasant Ridge we didn’t purchase a television set until I was ten years old. And what a source of amusement it was for us to sit in that eerie blue glow and view a black-and-white world beyond the ridge. But occasionally we’d find the TV a funhouse mirror reflecting a rural life that we had never experienced and suspected had never existed. It became a game with us to see who could first identify TV-land’s fantasies about country living.

  One of the earliest mistaken notions of farm life that I remember occurred on Lassie. We all delighted in the program, but to our disgust, Lassie was continually licking her masters in the face, and those people not only tolerated these sloppy dog kisses but actually seemed to enjoy them. Even as children, we were very much aware of a farm dog’s diet and personal hygiene. As much as we loved our farm dogs, we never exchanged kisses with them, nor did any other farm kids, as we knew all the nasty places that dog tongue had been.

  On countless programs ranging from Lassie to Gunsmoke, Hollywood farmers amused us as they moved hay with pitchforks. A man who certainly looked like a farmer would reveal himself as a sham when he grasped the fork near the end of the handle and inexpertly worried little tufts of hay about with it. My paw, on the other hand, used a pitchfork as it was intended. With his left hand as a fulcrum, he’d hold the handle near the tines and then apply leverage with his right hand nearer the end of the handle. Rapidly, he’d pitch bunches of hay into a good-sized mound, and then he’d jab into it with the fork, staggering off with a fork-load of hay weighing almost as much as he did.

  Now I’ve left the farm behind me, dogs and pitchforks included, but not the memories. And I still smile at the vision of rural life evoked by television producers. One year, I laughed as purported pioneers Samantha Eggar and Hal Holbrook chopped down trees to clear the land. They each grasped the middle of their ax handles and chipped away at their trees with the enthusiasm but hardly the efficiency of woodpeckers. I figure it would have taken them about a week to fell each tree. A real farmer-woodsman chokes up on the handle with his right hand, but then lets that hand slide back to join the other during the course of the swing, enabling him to add his weight along with his strength to the force of the blow as the ax flashes along its arc.

  On one TV program, Jason Robards showed his city grandson how to milk cows by hand. In his demonstration, he pulled two teats simultaneously. In real life, the cow would have looked around, eyes wide and ears perked, as if to ask, “What the hell?”

  Any dairy farmer knows that a good hand milker develops a rhythm by alternately squeezing and pulling with first one hand and then the other. To a listener in the barn, a continuous stream of frothing milk sings away in the pail, not dribbling patters followed by long pauses.

  Perhaps the most incredible vision of farm family life appeared on an episode of Little House on the Prairie, a show that bore only a passing resemblance to its source material but provided endless amusement in its attempts to portray pioneer life. In one especially egregious example, the Ingalls family, living in the 1870s or ’80s, decided to relax by going on a family camping trip! Cheerfully, they “roughed it,” enjoying the novelty of sleeping in tents, Pa fishing while Ma blissfully dragged her long skirts in the dirt preparing meals over a campfire.

  Remember that in reality the Ingalls family would have spent years living in covered wagons and crude cabins with no plumbing or electricity. In actuality, they had been “camping” all of their pioneer lives by necessity. Recreational camping would have had only slightly less appeal for them than riding stationary exercise bicycles.

  On another episode of Little House, Michael Landon busted one hundred acres of prairie sod in only three or four days’ time. According to my own paw, old-timers claimed a man had to walk seven miles behind a horse-drawn plow to turn over one acre of land. Pa Ingalls’s heroic feat of cultivation would have required him to walk seven hundred miles, making him the envy of Kenyan marathoners. Imagine, if you will, plodding along behind oxen as you plow your way from Madison to Little Rock, Arkansas—in less than four days—and then you can appreciate the absurdity of Farmer Landon’s accomplishment.

  The role of farmwife was also misrepresented on numerous occasions. On both The Waltons and Family, I’ve watched womenfolk make pumpkin pie from scratch, using the huge watery ornamental variety, not the little ones raised for pies. I reckon you’d get about ten to twelve pies out of one large Halloween-style pumpkin, and not a one of them fit to eat. The pie prepared on Family was especially unusual; in a couple hours’ time, a pumpkin almost the size of a bushel basket reappeared on the table as a pie. California chroniclers of the good rural life would be indeed amazed at the length of time required to cook pumpkin down to a proper pie consistency.

  On the same Family episode, a supposedly modern California farmwife fed her chickens by casting the grain to her hens as they scurried about on the ground pecking up the kernels. My grandmother confirmed my suspicion that farmwives stopped feeding their chickens that way before the end of the nineteenth century. When I was a boy, grain was ground, nutrients artificially added, and the product fed from special chicken feeders to birds that many times never left the confines of the henhouse until their demise.

  During the years of my young manhood, an increasing number of city f
olks sought the good life on a farm, attempting to pick up the tried-and-true old ways of doing things. Since many of those modern homesteaders may have learned about farm techniques from television, they probably encountered a number of unpleasant surprises when they actually found themselves down on the farm coping with dogs, pitchforks, axes, plows, pumpkins, hens, and most of all, former farmers like myself, smirking at their efforts.

  Television, at least, has learned a few lessons since the airing of the original Lassie, Little House on the Prairie, and The Waltons. In addition to writers and filmmakers, producers often enlist the help of consultants to avoid anachronisms. But as small dairy farms have been replaced by mega-farms on the one hand and small specialty farms on the other—hobby, organic, dairy goat— fewer and fewer of us are left to fact-check their work.

  Memorial Day on Pleasant Ridge

  When I die, I reckon I’d as soon be buried on Pleasant Ridge as anywhere. There, a small cemetery flanks an empty tall-steepled white country church. From the kitchen window of the house where I was raised as a boy, we had a distant view of this bucolic setting.

  In the older part of the graveyard, white crumbly headstones sit at angles under sleepy pines. Clumps of orange lilies, peonies, and lilacs dot the marker-studded lawn, with an occasional old garden rose scenting the air. Blackberry bushes, black-eyed Susans, and goldenrod stand sentinel along the fence rows that separate the cemetery from the adjoining fields.

  My father and two others from the community acted as cemetery trustees, parceling out lots and overseeing the care of the graves. Under their supervision, grass was neatly mowed and trimmed, a part of the perpetual care provision included in the purchase of a cemetery plot.

  Every Memorial Day, my mother sent me into the woods and meadows to find wildflowers. Depending on seasonal conditions, I picked wild geraniums and violets, ferns and mayflowers. Our lawn yielded tulips, lilacs, peonies, and mock orange blossoms.