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On Being a Farm Boy
Part of this essay appeared in The Iowan (Fall, 199
.
That material is used here with permission.
Back in the 1950s, when I was a tyke, farmers banded together to get their work done. My Ol' Man shared his equipment and labor with four of the neighbors, who shared theirs with him. Come time to bale hay or harvest oats, corn or soybeans, the five of them rushed their machinery from farm to farm and worked like crazies to get the crop out from under the weather. Each man's wife, when the crew worked her farm, had to provide a lunch. I'm here to tell you: those harvest lunches were fabulous.
Not to say that a good, solid lunch was anything out of the ordinary for us. At our place, on any late-summer day, a typical noon meal would be creamed chicken and biscuits, new potatoes and pearl onions browned in bacon fat, a side of sliced tomatoes, and a finale of hot peach cobbler swimming in cold yellow cream.
But that was measly stuff beside a harvest lunch, when Ma and Grandma conspired to lay out more and better food than the wife of any other crewman could show. At our place, a typical harvest lunch was fried chicken and roast ham, mashed potatoes with cream gravy, homemade egg noodles cooked in chicken broth, sliced tomatoes, green beans flavored with dill and bacon, corn-on-the-cob, cucumbers and onions in sour cream, and a hot cabbage slaw cooked tender-crisp with an egg-and-vinegar dressing. We mopped our plates with golden heaps of hot rolls and cornbread and butter. For dessert there was chocolate cake, gingerbread with whipped cream, two or three kinds of fruit pie and a special, only-for-harvest pie that Grandma called "sweet-cream custard."
Ma told me that her wonderful lunches were pale shadows of the meals she helped Grandma fix when she was a child. Ma recalled the horse-and-steam days, when feeding a giant, stationary engine and threshing machine demanded the labor of as many as 20 men who, in their turn, had to be fed by the women of the house.
The size of steam-power crews and the fact that she had no refrigeration forced Grandma to plan her harvest meals months in advance. Pork for Grandma's lunches was killed in February, Ma said. The hams and bacon soaked in brine for six weeks, then hung in smoke for another month. In early March, Grandma sat her first brooder hen on a clutch of 15 eggs, of which she expected about a dozen to hatch. Ideally those poults weighed two-and-a-half pounds by July, when she slaughtered them to feed the oat threshers. Two more planned hatches made fodder for two haying crews and a fourth hatch, biggest of all, filled the gang who came to fill the silo. Ma said, too, that she and Grandma had the crews in mind when they planned their kitchen gardens.
Though now I understand, as a boy I wasn't privy to the logistics behind the meals. What I liked then, aside from the simple splendor of the food, is that the prayers and formalities that irk little boys at a holiday dinner never showed up at harvest. The men rode in from the field on a wagon and sluiced some of the dust off themselves at the well. Then they clomped hastily into the kitchen, praising the smell of the food.
Ma opened her oven and loaded her table, and the men fell to. She flushed with embarrassed pleasure at compliments that flew like chaff from the feasting crew. As they ate, she moved 'round the table behind them, helped them to seconds, thirds, fourths, and teased that if they didn't eat everything they'd get leftovers next day. Of course they couldn't possibly eat it all, so Ma acted hurt but was bursting with pride when, one by one, the men finally had to stop.
Torpid from their huge meal, the men lazed by the well and smoked before going back to work. While they had cigarettes, Grandma fed a smaller crew at a plank table under a big, rattling cottonwood. Of that smaller crew, the eldest liked peach cobbler better than anything in this life. The youngest yelled for chocolate cake. But angels sang for the third one only when he tasted Grandma's sweet-cream custard pie. Seeing his rapture sparked Grandma's own, so she always made sure he got two pieces. Today, 50 years later, I know he'd be glad to have just one.
Naturally, the other crewmen's wives worked just as hard as Ma and Grandma. I remember once when Uncle Bob, lolling in shade by the well after one of those feasts, chuckled at how women's rivalry drove them to cook so much that eating lunch was a day's work all by itself. The other men groaned their agreement.
Harvest lunches and sweet-cream custard are just two of the good things I remember about growing up on a farm in Iowa. We kids ran wild on 140 acres. Forty of those acres were heavily wooded. Huge oak and hickory and maple trees shaded ground that was thickly padded with leafy compost and overgrown with blackberry brambles, clumps of elder, and hazel brush. A creek trickled through the bottom of the woods. With the help of a big collie dog, we chased frogs and minnows and every manner of swimming, crawling, jumping critter up and down that creek, ducking and dodging as we ran through the 40 head of Angus cattle that watered there. We shot squirrels in the woods, chased raccoons out of the sweet-corn patch and trapped gophers in the hayfields. Birds and frogs and insects taught us to sing.
There were 30-odd cats in the barn, so tunnels we built in the hay loft were usually crawling with kittens. There was a pigeon loft above the corn crib. The crib itself was our gymnasium, but we didn't really need it because there were trees all over the place and pieces of junk machinery lay rusting here and there, and we climbed like a tribe of monkeys over everything in sight. There was even an old, sleepy, broken-down horse that we tried to ride whenever he stood up -- which didn't happen often.
We went hiking and fishing in the summer. We hurled clods of dirt at each other from savage ambushes laid in fields of 7-foot corn, where visibility was sometimes measured in inches. In the fall we had hayrides and bonfires, and after harvest we burrowed into huge piles of corn shucks. In the winter we hunted rabbits, built snow forts, and raced our sleds down long, snowy hills. Spring found us hunting mushrooms and wildflowers. Year 'round, Ma had a roomful of books for us to read and the Ol' Man could always find work for us whenever we got in his way or griped (as spoiled kids will) that we were bored.
The beginning of the end came in 1961, when I was 12 years old. The Ol' Man got killed in an auto accident on a gravel road three miles from home. He died intestate. Ma was a farm wife and had never been anything else. She knew as much about legal affairs and the ways of the world as she knew about the dark side of the moon. She took advice from people she should not have heeded. Nobody stole from us, mind, but by the time all was done our affairs were so tangled that we never made another crop.
Ma rented our land to a neighbor and took a job in town. I joined the Marines in 1968. Grandma died in '71. Her recipe for sweet-cream custard died with her. I didn't get Ma's letter until two weeks after the funeral. In '72 I finished my hitch, grew hair, and went on the bum out west.
When Ma finally sold our land in '74, I was too crazy and too drunk to care much about it. Having discovered West Coast counterculture, I thought I was done with rural Iowa. How little I knew then. Today I understand that I can't shake it.
At about one o'clock in the morning a few weeks ago, I sat in the back yard next to a small fire. Clio was there with me, basking in the night, crouched and purring serenely on the ground beneath my chair. The sky was clear. The stars were big but were dwarfed by a harvest moon that cast its stark, golden light over all of creation.
I saw something ambling slowly in our direction across the hayfield to the east. I threw the beam of my flashlight at it. Its eyes glowed fiery red, but I couldn't identify it at such a distance. I turned off my light and watched while the thing moved closer. Long minutes later, in the firelight, I saw it was a large opossum. I knew it was sick because it was close enough to see, hear, and smell us and yet it did not hesitate but walked directly toward us, stumbling now and then as it came.
The animal was three or four yards away and still coming when I pulled the pistol from my pocket and shot it. My little .40 barked like Kerberos and rang the welkin mightily. The noise felt good. Just for the hell of it, I held my bead on the animal and pulled the trigger eight more times -- the shots spaced about two seconds apart.
Clio fled from the first shot. When echoes of the ninth shot died, silence returned and found me alone. I stood up and played my flashlight over the ground. The 'possum was rags strewn among ragged shadows cast by clumps of grass. I picked up the biggest piece by its tail and threw it on the fire. Then I looked back, toward the houses behind me.
Thirty yards away, the nearest neighbor's home was still dark. After nine thunderous shots, the village of 200 people seemed oblivious. There were no lights, no voices, no doors slamming, no sirens. Next day, nobody came to ask about the noise. In rural Iowa, people who hear shots at night assume that kids are playing with firecrackers or somebody is hunting raccoons.
I had to come back because I can't be anywhere else. Understand?
On Being a Farm Boy
Part of this essay appeared in The Iowan (Fall, 199
.That material is used here with permission.
Back in the 1950s, when I was a tyke, farmers banded together to get their work done. My Ol' Man shared his equipment and labor with four of the neighbors, who shared theirs with him. Come time to bale hay or harvest oats, corn or soybeans, the five of them rushed their machinery from farm to farm and worked like crazies to get the crop out from under the weather. Each man's wife, when the crew worked her farm, had to provide a lunch. I'm here to tell you: those harvest lunches were fabulous.
Not to say that a good, solid lunch was anything out of the ordinary for us. At our place, on any late-summer day, a typical noon meal would be creamed chicken and biscuits, new potatoes and pearl onions browned in bacon fat, a side of sliced tomatoes, and a finale of hot peach cobbler swimming in cold yellow cream.
But that was measly stuff beside a harvest lunch, when Ma and Grandma conspired to lay out more and better food than the wife of any other crewman could show. At our place, a typical harvest lunch was fried chicken and roast ham, mashed potatoes with cream gravy, homemade egg noodles cooked in chicken broth, sliced tomatoes, green beans flavored with dill and bacon, corn-on-the-cob, cucumbers and onions in sour cream, and a hot cabbage slaw cooked tender-crisp with an egg-and-vinegar dressing. We mopped our plates with golden heaps of hot rolls and cornbread and butter. For dessert there was chocolate cake, gingerbread with whipped cream, two or three kinds of fruit pie and a special, only-for-harvest pie that Grandma called "sweet-cream custard."
Ma told me that her wonderful lunches were pale shadows of the meals she helped Grandma fix when she was a child. Ma recalled the horse-and-steam days, when feeding a giant, stationary engine and threshing machine demanded the labor of as many as 20 men who, in their turn, had to be fed by the women of the house.
The size of steam-power crews and the fact that she had no refrigeration forced Grandma to plan her harvest meals months in advance. Pork for Grandma's lunches was killed in February, Ma said. The hams and bacon soaked in brine for six weeks, then hung in smoke for another month. In early March, Grandma sat her first brooder hen on a clutch of 15 eggs, of which she expected about a dozen to hatch. Ideally those poults weighed two-and-a-half pounds by July, when she slaughtered them to feed the oat threshers. Two more planned hatches made fodder for two haying crews and a fourth hatch, biggest of all, filled the gang who came to fill the silo. Ma said, too, that she and Grandma had the crews in mind when they planned their kitchen gardens.
Though now I understand, as a boy I wasn't privy to the logistics behind the meals. What I liked then, aside from the simple splendor of the food, is that the prayers and formalities that irk little boys at a holiday dinner never showed up at harvest. The men rode in from the field on a wagon and sluiced some of the dust off themselves at the well. Then they clomped hastily into the kitchen, praising the smell of the food.
Ma opened her oven and loaded her table, and the men fell to. She flushed with embarrassed pleasure at compliments that flew like chaff from the feasting crew. As they ate, she moved 'round the table behind them, helped them to seconds, thirds, fourths, and teased that if they didn't eat everything they'd get leftovers next day. Of course they couldn't possibly eat it all, so Ma acted hurt but was bursting with pride when, one by one, the men finally had to stop.
Torpid from their huge meal, the men lazed by the well and smoked before going back to work. While they had cigarettes, Grandma fed a smaller crew at a plank table under a big, rattling cottonwood. Of that smaller crew, the eldest liked peach cobbler better than anything in this life. The youngest yelled for chocolate cake. But angels sang for the third one only when he tasted Grandma's sweet-cream custard pie. Seeing his rapture sparked Grandma's own, so she always made sure he got two pieces. Today, 50 years later, I know he'd be glad to have just one.
Naturally, the other crewmen's wives worked just as hard as Ma and Grandma. I remember once when Uncle Bob, lolling in shade by the well after one of those feasts, chuckled at how women's rivalry drove them to cook so much that eating lunch was a day's work all by itself. The other men groaned their agreement.
Harvest lunches and sweet-cream custard are just two of the good things I remember about growing up on a farm in Iowa. We kids ran wild on 140 acres. Forty of those acres were heavily wooded. Huge oak and hickory and maple trees shaded ground that was thickly padded with leafy compost and overgrown with blackberry brambles, clumps of elder, and hazel brush. A creek trickled through the bottom of the woods. With the help of a big collie dog, we chased frogs and minnows and every manner of swimming, crawling, jumping critter up and down that creek, ducking and dodging as we ran through the 40 head of Angus cattle that watered there. We shot squirrels in the woods, chased raccoons out of the sweet-corn patch and trapped gophers in the hayfields. Birds and frogs and insects taught us to sing.
There were 30-odd cats in the barn, so tunnels we built in the hay loft were usually crawling with kittens. There was a pigeon loft above the corn crib. The crib itself was our gymnasium, but we didn't really need it because there were trees all over the place and pieces of junk machinery lay rusting here and there, and we climbed like a tribe of monkeys over everything in sight. There was even an old, sleepy, broken-down horse that we tried to ride whenever he stood up -- which didn't happen often.
We went hiking and fishing in the summer. We hurled clods of dirt at each other from savage ambushes laid in fields of 7-foot corn, where visibility was sometimes measured in inches. In the fall we had hayrides and bonfires, and after harvest we burrowed into huge piles of corn shucks. In the winter we hunted rabbits, built snow forts, and raced our sleds down long, snowy hills. Spring found us hunting mushrooms and wildflowers. Year 'round, Ma had a roomful of books for us to read and the Ol' Man could always find work for us whenever we got in his way or griped (as spoiled kids will) that we were bored.
The beginning of the end came in 1961, when I was 12 years old. The Ol' Man got killed in an auto accident on a gravel road three miles from home. He died intestate. Ma was a farm wife and had never been anything else. She knew as much about legal affairs and the ways of the world as she knew about the dark side of the moon. She took advice from people she should not have heeded. Nobody stole from us, mind, but by the time all was done our affairs were so tangled that we never made another crop.
Ma rented our land to a neighbor and took a job in town. I joined the Marines in 1968. Grandma died in '71. Her recipe for sweet-cream custard died with her. I didn't get Ma's letter until two weeks after the funeral. In '72 I finished my hitch, grew hair, and went on the bum out west.
When Ma finally sold our land in '74, I was too crazy and too drunk to care much about it. Having discovered West Coast counterculture, I thought I was done with rural Iowa. How little I knew then. Today I understand that I can't shake it.
At about one o'clock in the morning a few weeks ago, I sat in the back yard next to a small fire. Clio was there with me, basking in the night, crouched and purring serenely on the ground beneath my chair. The sky was clear. The stars were big but were dwarfed by a harvest moon that cast its stark, golden light over all of creation.
I saw something ambling slowly in our direction across the hayfield to the east. I threw the beam of my flashlight at it. Its eyes glowed fiery red, but I couldn't identify it at such a distance. I turned off my light and watched while the thing moved closer. Long minutes later, in the firelight, I saw it was a large opossum. I knew it was sick because it was close enough to see, hear, and smell us and yet it did not hesitate but walked directly toward us, stumbling now and then as it came.
The animal was three or four yards away and still coming when I pulled the pistol from my pocket and shot it. My little .40 barked like Kerberos and rang the welkin mightily. The noise felt good. Just for the hell of it, I held my bead on the animal and pulled the trigger eight more times -- the shots spaced about two seconds apart.
Clio fled from the first shot. When echoes of the ninth shot died, silence returned and found me alone. I stood up and played my flashlight over the ground. The 'possum was rags strewn among ragged shadows cast by clumps of grass. I picked up the biggest piece by its tail and threw it on the fire. Then I looked back, toward the houses behind me.
Thirty yards away, the nearest neighbor's home was still dark. After nine thunderous shots, the village of 200 people seemed oblivious. There were no lights, no voices, no doors slamming, no sirens. Next day, nobody came to ask about the noise. In rural Iowa, people who hear shots at night assume that kids are playing with firecrackers or somebody is hunting raccoons.
I had to come back because I can't be anywhere else. Understand?
