Читать книгу Leaving Rollingstone - Kevin Fenton - Страница 11

Farms are violent places: animals are killed and castrated; machines regularly maim their operators; hail ravages crops; pigs jostle and chomp; dogs eviscerate gophers; watching a cow calving, you realize even birth is violent. And perhaps no domesticated creature is as violent as a bull. Dad reluctantly bought one when we returned to the farm—even though a few years earlier, he had found the Fabers’ hired man, who lived down the road, lying lifeless, his skeleton crushed, his body bruised and drained of blood, a human being leaking like a plum. He had been stomped to death by their bull.

The bull would eventually charge. Dad was plowing near the barnyard, floating above the field on the tractor seat, when the new bull threatened Dennis. Dad saw what was happening, leapt off the tractor onto the plowed ground, and sprinted to help him. Dennis was fine; he scrambled away. But when Dad jumped down from the tractor, the metal bone in his hip thrust into its surrounding soft tissue. It was one of many small jostlings that happen on farms—with their rocky, manure-slicked ground; their nervous herds; their elephant-sized machines—and which, in this case, put Dad back in the hospital.

*

So we spent a lot of time visiting Dad at Saint Mary’s Hospital in Rochester. Dad’s face would ripen with happiness when we entered. I would sit with Mom and whoever else accompanied us in that room that was both sterile and regal. Sterile because of the white sheets, the chrome rails, the bolted TV, the steel urinal. Regal because my dad sat, graciously, in his raised bed, surrounded by his family in what could be mistaken for leisure. Nurses liked him. He would pretend to hook their legs with his cane. But Dad’s jauntiness couldn’t quite cover the strangeness of the place. Saint Mary’s smelled like flesh, alcohol, infection, and flowers.

I would become bored, and they would set me free. I roamed and loitered. I walked the retreating perspectives of halls. I twitched from distraction to distraction like someone flipping channels. I moved amid flowers and holy water fonts and cheaply printed newsprint guides of what to do in Rochester. I darted across the street to the drug store to buy magazines and sandwiches.

Now that I am an adult, I can begin to appreciate the strain these visits must have put on my mother. Tired from working all day on her feet, taking care of a household with five children, and supervising a dairy farm, she drove the forty miles to Rochester down two-lane roads that dipped and rose through farmland and slowed for a half dozen small towns. The only time I remember my parents fighting was when Dad complained that Mom hadn’t visited him enough. Her retort to him was devastatingly simple: “I gave you everything I had.”

* * *

While I played and blathered and lived my toddler life, my brother and father worked on a faltering farm, and they were acutely aware of its modesty. Rollingstone did not have class differences in the sense of differences of education and values and experiences, but it did have status differences. These were measured by who had the newest tractors, the most silos, the largest farm. We had old implements. Besides the tractors, we had a plow, a disk, a hay wagon, a hay baler, and a manure spreader. Silage was kept in a feed bin. We never bought a new tractor. We always had a John Deere with an old-fashioned, perforated metal, pelvis-shaped seat. Our farm was small, and we had so few cows that we could name them. On the most prosperous farms, they milked over a hundred cows whom they identified with numbers, and concrete silos were supplemented with soaring blue silos. No one drove past our place to admire the skyline of silos; we collected no green and gold trophies of tractors.

Many of our more prosperous neighbors stored their milk in bulk tanks, which a truck from the creamery would empty every morning. But we still used milk cans, so every day, we hauled the milk into town. (In the first weeks back at the farm, we’d even milked by hand.) The cans were heavy, designed to be lifted by a healthy man, which is why Dennis often loaded and deposited the milk. But sometimes Dad and I did. I groaned and staggered under the cans; Dad winced.

I would hop into the back of the pickup. Out on the road, the jostling speed of the truck thrilled me: the road streamed under me, the air streamed over me, the landscape streamed past, my hair and clothes whipped in the wind. Standing in the open cab, I was vulnerable to bumps, to sliding unsecured containers. I gasped for breath; my stomach tickled. By the time we got to Rollingstone, and the pickup slowed, it would smell of gasoline and grease. We would enter the creamery, with its pale smell of unprocessed milk, and the benediction of the Land O’Lakes Indian maiden above the door and the glass block that made the light watery and beautiful.

Dad would visit his friend Bill Klinger, who owned Klinger’s Bar. I loved Klinger’s: the metal sash that advertised Squirt pop or some other antique brand on the screen door; the malty smell that hit you as you stepped inside; the way the light entering the windows mimicked the color of beer; the jukebox perky as a robot; the dark wood bar; the sand-weighted tartan ashtrays; the Minnesota Twins’ schedules; the gleaming, mantis-shaped, miraculously abundant taps; the brightnesses of neon beer logos and beer logo mirrors and the Hamm’s clock that featured a relentlessly full-color photograph of a stream rushing over rocks. Happiness condensed in things. I loved Klinger’s.

* * *

And I loved the farm in the way you love vulnerable things.

I had a pet cow whom I would feed Mounds bars and to whom I would recount The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. I named the cow Danny, oblivious to the fact that cows are females. (I’d never heard the name Danielle.) I repeated the body counts of soldiers killed in Vietnam to Danny and described the riots in Watts and Detroit and Newark. When Danny, perhaps depressed over the state of the nation, stopped giving milk, she was led into a trailer. I was locked into my room when the trailer drove away, but I rioted anyway and registered my body count of one. I didn’t quite get the basic thing every farmer has to get: cattle are not pets.

And yet I yearned to farm. Within the farm was a smaller farm, an homage to the green fields and red barn and tractors that surrounded us. I played with miniature farm equipment with Karl Herber, who lived down the road, in a square of dirt the size of an herb garden between the corncrib and the driveway. I knelt on one side of the mock farm. Karl hunched across from me. We both pushed toy John Deere tractors. His hauled a disk, an implement with little pizza-cutter-like blades that mince the ground. Mine hauled a plow, whose comma-shaped blades sliced and churned the earth. Both tractors gleamed green and yellow against the dustier green of the little hay, oat, and corn fields we planted. We left one rectangle of dirt fallow because it is good practice—it restores the nutrients—and because the scale-model government in our heads paid us to.

Our toy tractors were mute, so we made putt-putt-putt sounds for them. Godlike, we grabbed them and lifted them across the landscape. We imitated what men yelled to each other in the fields, lowering our voices, making our language technical and slangy and confident: “Yeah, my new 280’s been running pretty good.” We had no idea what this meant, if there even was a 280 model, but guys on farms said things like that. Karl and I played like children who admired adults and who couldn’t wait to join the world of their fathers.

While I played at my fantasy farm, I helped as much as I could on the actual farm. Feeding the calves meant hoisting and pouring from bags of feed as big as I was, so emptying them felt like trying to lift and pour a sleeping person. I mixed the calves’ formula in galvanized buckets with rubber teats at the bottom. As I carried the feed and the milk pails through the shadows in the center of the barn, the emerald eyes of rats peered from inside the walls. While the calves fed, the rats considered me. My pulse announced itself. As soon as the calves’ sucking turned to slurping, I sprinted away with the plausibly empty pails.

On the other hand, I enjoyed pulling hay and straw bales apart. The taut twine popped when I cut it, and the bales separated into segments. We fed the hay to the cows and spread the straw in the stanchions to absorb manure. We supplemented the hay with oats and ground corn, which we poured into the feed troughs. I helped clean the barn on Saturdays, pushing the straw and manure first into and then down the gutters with a pitchfork and then shoveling it into the manure spreader, which looked like a paddle-wheel boat that flung a wake of shit. I pumped water into five-gallon pails and hauled them—heavy enough to indent lines in my yellow work gloves and hands—in the chill fall air across the farmyard.

I loved working around the barn, especially on cold afternoons in late fall when dusk came early and my breath crystallized and I could crack the ice on the puddles with my green rubber boots. In the barn, bare light bulbs would illuminate the straw; the stanchions; the jostling, bellowing cows; the milking machines. My brother and sisters laughed as they dropped hay bales from the loft. Our place was like a city: people moved around me without much noticing me, occupied with their luminous tasks. Because a recent study had concluded that cows give more milk when they listen to music, a radio, set on a beam, would play. WDGY, which was then the Twin Cities’ Top 40 rock station, would play if my brother selected the channel, a country station if my father did. I smelled the ammonia of piss, raw milk, and dry hay, which was fragrant in ways that straw wasn’t. Shit was everywhere: splattered on the barn floor; covering the barnyard, where it was scalloped by hooves, like a second topsoil; land-mining the pasture; scattered like croutons on the fields to fertilize the crops; dropped and dripped in the working end of the driveway. The pig shit smelled even more pungent, and the chicken shit got in your nose like sawdust. It says something about how much I loved these people, this intact and industrious family, that I am nostalgic for the smell of crap.

Even I felt no nostalgia toward the killing of chickens. I felt no connection with the BBs of fear that were their eyes or the clumsy engines of loitering and escape that were their bodies. We held them to a tree stump, hacking their necks with a hatchet until the head detached and slackened like a dropped glove. When their heads dropped away, their bodies began to run—as if, in death, they were trying to get open for the game-winning pass they had missed in life—and ejaculate blood out of their necks across the dirt of the driveway. When they had expended their blood and collapsed, we collected them and soaked them in white-freckled blue pans full of hot water until we could pull their feathers off, and then we eviscerated them, sticking our hands into their body cavities and pulling out everything that was not meat or bone.

There is a point at which chores become farming. I tried driving a tractor twice, sitting up on the high, vulnerable seat, coordinating the release of the clutch and the jabbing of the gearshift. But I never really got the hang of it, and I was, in effect, excused. The decision to not push me to learn farming was an act of kindness, because I wasn’t any good at it. I lived on a farm, yet I would never be a farmer. But it was also an act of despair. The family didn’t want me to apprentice for a job that wouldn’t exist.

By now, Dad had undergone several surgeries, and every surgery is a story. A product designer I would meet in 2000 who had devoted his professional life to building surgical tables would tell me, “There is no such thing as minor surgery.”

In this story, the hero is my father. He takes his luggage—which my mother packed—and is driven to the hospital. He walks on crutches or a cane, depending on how bad things have become. He answers questions on forms. He hobbles down the telescoping, fluorescent halls of a hospital. He has made this trip so often that the nurses know him, but this probably both comforts and disturbs him. Perhaps he is as sadly jaunty as a friend of mine who, spending weeks on the road launching a business, would announce as he entered hotel lobbies, “Honey, I’m home.”

Dad checks into a room with nothing but a bedside table and a TV. There’s a stranger in the other bed. The floors are linoleum. After Dad gets into his bed, a nurse pops up the rails on either side and gives him the call light that connects him to her. Mom unpacks his luggage and kisses him good-bye.

That next morning, Dad wakes up alone. He becomes an object. He is washed, and his body is shaved. He is wheeled—lying flat on his back, the halls of the hospital helplessly streaming by—to the operating room.

The next room is even brighter and cleaner than the rest of the hospital. People in green masks calm him, then speak to their peers as if he weren’t there. The story shifts to an even more impersonal third person, which I imagine hardens in him: “The patient is a forty-five-year-old male. He has an extensive history …” On his back, he feels disembodied, but all he can think of is how his body will be sliced. He looks up. He floats and thinks of death. The doctor’s masked face enters his field of vision. “We’re going to apply the anesthesia now,” he explains. A breathing mask clamps onto my dad’s face. He inhales, and soon the world disappears.

When Dad returned from the hospital, he displayed the discarded hip socket on the living room bureau beside other sockets from other operations. If you did not know their source, the metal objects on the mantel were beautiful. They shined; they lolled; they were made of the finest stainless steel; they had been made with great care for a serious purpose.

The whole living room was a festival of bad taste. A 3-D diorama of Christ hung on the living room wall. Look at the diorama one way, Christ suffered on the cross. Move your head: Christ ascended into heaven. A beige knitted cozy transformed a brandy bottle into a dog standing on its hind legs with buttons for eyes. Dad loved kitsch with the enthusiasm of a man who had never heard the word kitsch; he loved it without even bothering to ante up the toll that irony invariably pays to taste. He sang novelty songs to us: “May the Bird of Paradise Fly Up Your Nose,” “Tennessee Bird Walk,” stuff like that. He bought an Indian headdress made out of artificially red, yellow, and green feathers and talked my mom into photographing him in it.

Dad cared about style, and this had something to do with his sickness. Fashion covers up wounds; fashion asserts that the self is more than its scars and its sores. Of course, there were the starched shirts. Cuff links winked on his nightstand. When he went into Winona, he wore a tie and often a sport coat. As the sixties expanded the palette available to men, he started buying socks in Day-Glo pastels: lime, salmon. He wore pink shirts under tan sport coats. He scented himself with Old Spice, Hai Karate, or Brut. It wasn’t expensive cologne because we didn’t have access to those kinds of stores. He disciplined his hair with Brylcreem and his whiskers with Aqua Velva. He smoked cigars, which, as any man who has smoked one knows, are part experience, part accessory, and part fragrance. He was fighting the good fight against nakedness and sickness and entropy.

When Dad was in the hospital, Dennis was left to run the farm. The tractor often broke down. Dennis spent hours in the field trying desperately to fix it, and no neighbor ventured over to help. Would the son of a Speltz or a Kreidemacher have felt so isolated? Probably not. But were men who may not have even seen Dennis struggling and who had their own farms to run obliged to come to our family’s aid? Dad’s sense of grievance is hard to defend.

But the resentment was real. I am now much closer to my father in age. I understand adult anger—the anger of ongoing frustration, the anger of those not-allowed tantrums, the anger of resentment and politics and agendas. And I know that the source of my anger and the object of my anger are often two different things. When I wake up in the morning and I have a deadline that I am afraid of missing, I have rabid political thoughts until I meet the deadline, even though the task weighing on me has nothing to do with politics, even though I’m writing a brochure for office equipment. I’m not without self-knowledge, but I’m unable to stop this strange, savage refraction. And if my father was like me, his emotional metabolism transformed the fear he felt as he lay alone in his hospital bed into anger, because anger is a more desirable emotion. It is more justice-tinged, more active, more hopeful of change, more muscular and masculine. Anger always feels as if it is just about to accomplish something even though it’s largely futile. I’m not going to try and trace the precise fractals of my father’s emotions, but I’m not sure that he was really angry at the Luxembourgers who apparently thrived around him, and I’m not even sure that he was really angry. He had reason to feel guilty because, by insisting on farming when he was unable to do the work, he put his son in a desperate situation. Dad also had reason to be scared, not of his neighbors but of the destruction that his accident set in motion and that surgery after surgery couldn’t defuse.

When my father was convalescing from hip surgery, our family would gather around my parents’ bed and watch happy staccato shows filled with double takes and signature lines. On Laugh-In, a bikinied, graffitied Goldie Hawn gyrated to rock music, then stopped to say, “Sock it to me!” On Get Smart, Don Adams, an adenoidal parody of an international spy, emerged from rubble and smoke and announced, “Missed it by that much.”

Dad wore his purple robe over his underwear. His shins and the incision on his hip were purple, as if he had been permanently bruised. He had an ease with his body that only the extremely fit or the extremely sick are allowed. For whatever small consolation they gave him, he loved salves, unguents, and lotions. He greased his chest and throat with Vicks VapoRub. He would spoon it into a frying pan filled with water, then boil the water and inhale the vapors. It would float in slippery reconfiguring islands in the simmering water. He encouraged us to eat a spoonful now and then.^* If I remember correctly (no recordings of his voice survive), he talked like a salesman, with a voice as bright as a merry-go-round.

He cajoled us into rubbing cocoa butter on his feet. The cocoa butter smelled like chocolate but reminded me of hospitals. Maybe because we were farm kids—and had seen, say, a veterinarian thrust his arm into a cow’s vagina—we were not bothered by my father’s feet: his bunion-contoured toes, his amber nails, the inflamed skin that ringed the calluses. We held plaid-encased heating pads to his back, filled rubber hot water bottles, scratched his back or handed him his back scratcher, a plastic hand on a stick. These attentions reminded me of Christ on Holy Thursday, the shock as the priest removed his shoes.

One afternoon, Colleen and I watched TV with Dad on the bed. The recovery from his surgery—his seventh? his ninth?—was not going well. Dad told us something that I didn’t pay much attention to at the time, something that both then and now seems understandable: One day you will find me hanging from one of the trees in the pasture. I am amazed how parenthetical my father’s despair was. Despite his despairing talk, he never surrendered to it. The dominant chord of my childhood was this: All of us were trying as hard as we could. It just wasn’t enough.

When I was a toddler, words proliferated in my mind. But actually speaking was another matter entirely. Speech, in its gnashings and lubrications, its existential insistence and its panicky acknowledgment of the other, seems to have felt as shocking as sex. My speech was so incomprehensible that Mom often could not understand what I was trying to say, which only made me try harder and which made my attempts at words even more opaque with panic. Sometimes Mom and I would just have to wait for Colleen to come home from school. She would squat in front of me and look me in the face, calm me, and somehow decipher what I was saying so that I would not be locked inside myself.

*This is crazy. Don’t do it.