Читать книгу Leaving Rollingstone - Kevin Fenton - Страница 9

1962. The village of Rollingstone had just had a picnic when a cloudburst pummeled us, soaked our clothing, and saturated the green of the grass. Everyone else ran for the pavilion or their cars. But because the wind had gusted and blown the yellow plasticware from the tables, my siblings and I suddenly had a job to do. We swarmed after the escaping utensils as they collected under the merry-go-round, flew under the swings, sprayed up against the tennis court. Maybe because I was three, this invasion felt giddy, like being tickled by the sky; the utensils became exclamation marks. Five kids pursued five hundred things. Plucking forks and knives from the ground, we glimpsed the shiny leaves of broadleaf plantain and a frizzy, yellow-flowered grass. But we had to keep running and lunging and grabbing and screaming. The hysterical sky let us act hysterically.

The memory is innocent, but something shivers beneath it. It isn’t the giddy freedom that has caused me to remember it; it is the color scheme. The green of the grass and the yellow of the forks scattered in the park suggest the green and yellow of tractors, the green and yellow of corn, and, thus, the farm we abandoned. We moved into Rollingstone because one of Dad’s surgeries had gone particularly badly. We sold the farm to an in-law who rented it to our old neighbors, the Herbers, while they built a new house on their farm. Our family talked about the farm all the time. If families had mission statements back then, “regain the farm” would have been ours. Dennis, who had followed Dad everywhere, spent his summer working on the farm of another family on the ridge above Rollingstone.

Here, in Rollingstone, we hosted the picnic because the town had given Dad part-time work taking care of the park. Dennis and the girls helped Dad. He couldn’t sprint after forks; he couldn’t howl and dart and dive.

My memories of town are of motion as cheerful and alarming as an amusement park. Children scurried around me, playing “Annie, Annie, Over.” Colleen and Sheila and their friends propelled bikes, sprinted to tag each other, lofted kickballs, and squealed and refused to be called home for dinner. Mrs. Rinn across the street yelled, “Fran-cis! Fra-a-a-n-cis!,” but Franny Rinn, who was five, didn’t come home when he was supposed to. Why should he? I’ve never seen so much fun in one city block.

From where we lived, on this street as comfortable as a driveway, I could waddle the hundred feet to the creamery and “charge” ice cream. I could venture a block and try to buy candy from Mr. Arnoldy. I could mount a little expedition out our backyard, across the street and schoolyard, past the convent, and into the church during Mass—Colleen was supposed to be watching me but wasn’t—in a tie and diaper combo I’d improvised for the occasion. Father Majures would halt his Latin. The parishioners would suppress laughter as my parents, startled in their pew, whisked me home.

Our family mourned the farm, and as a three-year-old, I absorbed their mourning. The family myth—also told over pop and popcorn—was that Sheila loved it here in Rollingstone. It suited whatever was in her that thrived in the noisiness of towns, in their near lives and bright commerce. But while I shared the loss I could feel in my dad and my brother, I also loved this town.

Sometimes we would ride out of town in our Ford Falcon that smelled like plastic and dust and sunlight to the border of my three-year-old world, toward the Kendricks’ and Literskis’, toward the horizon where my mother worked and where we shopped, and I would see the town dump, a mound filled with mattresses softened with use, with radios that had once channeled Roosevelt, with wringer washers and irreparable cars and senile farm equipment and worn-out clothes and libraries of forties and fifties magazines and busted toys.

As part of his deal with the town—which I now realize was a jobs program of one, an act of tactful charity on the part of the goddamnLuxembourgers—Dad worked at the dump a couple of hours a day. Refuse needed to be sorted into salable metals and parts, piles untangled, the oldest remnants buried. Dad wasn’t given to metaphor, which was a good thing, but the place and what it represented couldn’t help but seep into his thoughts. Dumps aren’t subtle. By the time we’d moved into the village, Dad had gone through several replacement hips, which meant that parts of his body had been thrown away.

But Dad was jaunty about the operations. He gave one of the spikes that had been taken out of his hip to a hospital roommate, a kid who’d been injured in a motorcycle accident. The kid used the spike as the shift on his cycle. It’s quite possible that even today, somewhere, someone looks at a vintage Harley, notices the stick shift, and says, “What the hell?”

There must have been times when the powerlessness brought on by his infirmities overwhelmed him. One day when it was just Dad and me at home, I hid his cane while he napped. He yelled at me from the bed but couldn’t leave it. He was trapped until Mom got home, an exile from his own house.

* * *

In the fall of 1963, after the harvest, we moved back to the farm. But before we reclaimed the house, the Herbers let us revisit it. The presence of the Herbers disturbed me. Looking up at their kitchen table, dodging and darting with their unfamiliar kids, hearing the too-easy talk of the adults, I knew that I’d been here before, and I felt as if the Herbers were trespassers.

I felt as if I’d returned from the dead to find my room occupied, my life forgotten. It was a feeling I’d re-experience every time I returned to clean an apartment I’d vacated: the relentless forgetfulness of places.

* * *

Then, a few weeks later, we left our house in town, heading north on the two-lane county road that passed the Lehnertzes’ and the Speltzes’ places and their staring cows. Then we turned west and chugged up the hill, threading the inside of Devil’s Curve, passing the Herbers’ new house on the right. But we were not looking at the Herbers’ new house. To our left, at the end of the harvested fields, was our farmstead, the highest point in Winona County. The house was obscured by the apple orchard, a mound just big enough for sledding, a walnut tree, the corner of the machine shed and blue spruce trees. But my eyes naturally sought the house.

To the west, tall pines and lilac bushes had been organized into a windbreak. Beyond the windbreak were more fields. As Dad parked the car, we glimpsed the barn at the end of the driveway, and beyond that, the pasture fell away. If I got out of the car and ran around, I would have noticed that the apple orchard was bumpy with fallen fruit and that the soil in the windbreak was dry and shadowed and scattered with pine needles. This was home. For years, when we reached the summit of the wooded hill, we would see that white, two-story house behind those apple trees and pines. A house is a promise kept, again and again, kept every time you return, and it is there on the horizon; but it is such a subtle promise, you never think about it. We simply felt the pleasure of homecoming.

In the years before I entered the first grade—Rollingstone did not have a kindergarten—I would spend much of the day in the pasture. It was maybe forty acres, which dipped and rose (so it couldn’t be cultivated). I was small enough to duck under the electric fence, and when I did, the pasture became a kingdom. I would collect milkweed pods, bits of birch bark, dandelions, kidney-shaped pebbles, crepes of moss with moist dirt clinging to their undersides, glitterings of mica, purple flowers from thistles. The gooseberries resembled the irises of eyes. I would follow the pasture’s trails and walk its nibbled, cow pie–punctuated grass.

I would spend entire mornings there. I have heard of people raised by wolves; I sometimes feel that, at least for that small portion of my childhood, I was raised by the little filaments in milkweed pods, disciplined by raspberry bushes, socialized by lichen.