Читать книгу Rightful Places - Kathleen PhD Livingston - Страница 2

The Cowpie

“My father warmed his feet in a cow pie. Do you know what a cow pie is?” I asked my daughter. She gave me a quizzical look, not sure how to answer.

“A cow pie is that nice, round circle of digested grass that a cow makes when it lifts its tail and lets fly. Imagine pumpkin pie without the crust coming steaming hot out of the oven and dropping to the floor in measured splats…splats…splats.” I smiled an evil grin. She rolled her eyes and moaned.

”Disgusting, mom.”

I always thought my dad was joking about warming his feet, even though he didn’t joke much, at least around his three daughters. But, perhaps, he was telling it like it was.

He was the 10^th of 17 children…of which 13 lived past infancy. Michael, John, Jewel, Margaret, Helen, Kathleen, Patricia, Albert, Buddy, Ben, Ida, Mary, Louella. Did I have all of them? I was always proud if I could name everyone, especially since most of the girls went by nicknames, all beginning with Mary. My dad was Albert but everyone called him Bud. The only children now surviving are my name sakes, Kathleen and Patricia…and Jewel…probably 100 by now, still living on her farm, still dyeing her long full hair pitch black.

My paternal grandmother, Mary Ellen O’Rourke Webb Livingston, was pregnant most of her adult life. My grandfather, Bert Livingston, showed up at regular intervals from the woods to throw some venison on the porch and perform his family duty before disappearing for another month or so. Catholics called that abstinence, I suppose. I have an old photo of Mary Ellen, or Grandma Livingston, as I called her, in the most elegant white dress with her infant first child, Helen. I trace the contours of her face in the photo sometimes…my father had her features…and I wonder about her life. I only knew her when she was wheelchair bound with Parkinson’s disease. She shook all of the time and, as a child, it scared me…but her voice was always kind and gentle. And her skin was soft and smelled sweet. I remember her hair being pure white, like cotton. I didn’t know her well. I wish I had.

My father warmed his feet in a cow pie.

The Livingston family lived on a big dairy farm, back in the wilderness of the western UP of Michigan. Big pine country…white pine…and copper mines and bitterly cold winters and snow that piled to the rooftops of the farmhouses. It was a hard life. Bert Livingston came from northern Minnesota to the UP. He worked as a lumberjack in the woods, farmed and manned the fire tower at Matchwood, a small community centered around the Matchwood match factory. Bert married an Irish beauty, Mary Ellen O’Rourke, my grandmother, and they homesteaded at the Norwich, adjacent to a working underground copper mine, also called the Norwich. The Ontonagon River flowed not far from their farmland, cutting blood red through the clay and rock. It was God’s country…beautiful, harsh and unforgiving. If you were lucky, you were able to make a living and feed your family. The land provided for those willing to work it and take from it. Male and female.

There is another photo my mother recently gave me of my father as a young man of 18 or so, sitting on a big moss covered slab rock at the Norwich with my grandfather, Bert, who was probably in his late 40’s at that time. Both are facing the camera with squinted eyes and serious stares. Their legs are splayed out in front of them. It is the only picture I have of both of them together. They were dark, handsome men, I thought. The photo shows my father’s feet clad in worn boots, probably handed down from brother to brother. He was no doubt happy to have them.

Father Bud Livingston and Grandfather Bert Livingston

Matchwood, Michigan

It was late autumn when the photo was taken. A few short weeks before the snow would start piling up in the pines, the wind howling across the open pastures, squeezing between the boards of the two room farmhouse warmed only by a big wood stove, the mercury dipping regularly to 20 below zero or more. Colder than cold. The cows would be waiting impatiently at the barn doors, their muzzles crystallized from their breath colliding with the frigid air, their udders swollen full and teats dripping milk, steaming on the cold ground. I can see my father as a young boy herding the animals into their stanchions for milking, his shoulders hunched into his plaid woolen jacket, hands buried deep in his pockets and his cap pulled down tight over his ears.

He could warm his body against the Holstein he was milking, squatting under her big belly, pushing his shoulder and cheek into her soft flanks. The heat off her udder would keep his bare fingers from freezing. You couldn’t strip milk with gloves on. No way. But his toes, squeezed into boots fit for someone else, they were always cold, always numb, aching numb. Colder than cold.

My father warmed his feet in a cow pie.