Off to the Side: A Memoir Read online

What have I forgotten? Waking to the animal sounds that seem to comfort one, easing the soul into consciousness. There were no alarm clocks in the house. This ancient cycle was so embedded that no reminders were needed. The body’s clock sufficed and through the screen window and the skein of a mosquito or fly’s whine and buzz there was a sow’s untroubled grunt, the muffled squeal of a piglet, the neighbor’s dog, the milk truck two miles away, a cow lowing, a horse stomping a sleepy foot, and the long-awaited rooster’s crow which, though it might still be dark, dispelled the inevitable night demons.

  What else have I forgotten? My young aunt bathing in a tin tub in the kitchen. Old John telling me not to drop stones on the pigs from the granary roof. Pigs don’t forget. A farm boy lost his errant kicking foot to a sow. Some evenings they all read in silence, or there was the stink of the aunts doing each other’s hair with Toni Home Permanents. Or reading with a pillow on the floor next to the woodstove, or next to the kitchen range fueled by wood. On the floor when they played the card game pinochle for hours, smelling the spittoon, the raw cheap whiskey, Guckenheimer’s, they poured into their coffee with sugar. In the herring crock I favored the tail pieces. I collected the little wood boxes the salt cod came in. They fried with lard and put butter on everything. Salt-pork gravy. Churning sweet butter. The heaviness of the rye bread eaten with herring. The sip of my father’s beer, the wet straps of his undershirt when he plowed with horses wearing an old fedora for the sun. Old John’s cabled arms when he harnessed the horses. The long country funerals. The gush of blood at pig butchering. You could hear it.

  A poor farmer didn’t really want five daughters but that’s what John and Hulda got. It was sad for the daughters who felt his disappointment. They worked like men but that likely wasn’t enough in his autocratic mind. The only son died as an infant during the flu epidemic around World War I. This flu epidemic was unimaginable in that it killed millions, the majority of them children and the aged. On one of my frequent visits to Nebraska to research Dalva and The Road Home my friend Ted Kooser, a Nebraska poet, took me to a country graveyard that was beautifully overgrown with lilacs and roses and wildflowers in a grove of pines. One family lost six children within a month, all of the children they had. What was left for the parents? Not much, I’d guess. Forty years later I can still hear the voices of my father and sister, Judith, who died together in an auto accident when I was twenty-five. I’m sure the parents of the six at night while looking up at the moon and stars could hear the voices, or in the morning so many empty chairs must have driven them quite mad. Kooser told me that in the middle of this extended plague people took to burying their dead in the night. A night funeral does seem more appropriate when you are dealing with small caskets.

  My father’s side of the family could be even more lachrymose than the Swedes, but also more immediate. Once when I was about ten and rowing the boat while old John fished it began to sprinkle, then rain pretty steadily. After an hour or so of fairly good fishing while it rained and we became fully drenched, John finally said, “It’s raining, Yimmy.” I was always Yimmy rather than Jimmy.

  This kind of thing was out of the question in my father’s family. “It’s goddamned raining,” they’d say and pop another bottle of A&P two-dollar-a-case beer. If it was raining hard you might get something as extreme as, “It’s raining like a double-cunted cow pissing on a flat rock.” Of the five children, Lena, Winfield, David, Walter, and Arthur, only David was completely even-tempered. The father, Arthur, know as Carty, was said to have gotten in his last fistfight well into his sixties. He had been a farmer, logger, cook for other loggers, a rural mailman. Their farm pretty much went bust and the family moved near the village of Paris, Michigan, numbering a hundred or so people, to the ample house on a high riverbank. My grandma Amanda, or Mandy, was a melancholy soul of unsound health, and this seemed to color their family life so that the moods could alternate between morose Sundays and wild semi-drunken card games the night before.

  Naturally, both sides of the family seemed utterly normal to me at the time but a great deal less so in retrospect. Most of us have perceived that there are specific classes in this country though there is admittedly more mobility than France and England. Fate has never ladled out hardship very evenly, and this frequently trips our often infantile sense of justice. Symmetry, balance, ultimate fairness seem to be abstractions remote to our occasionally naked sense of reality, as startling as walking out of a crisp and idealized civics class at a country school and into a lavish party of congressmen and lobbyists. If you’ve just spent ten hours digging ditches on a hot summer day you don’t enter the tavern and begin to talk about the virtues of hard work and thrift, the beauty of Calvinism as a moral system. You want several mugs of beer.

  On both sides of the family no job was too lowly when connected to survival. My mother and her two older sisters worked as servant girls in the town of Big Rapids, a dozen miles from the farm, otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to attend high school. My father camped out in a tent for two years, including winter, digging on a pipeline in order to go to college. It is easy for some to romanticize plowing with horses, or the ritual of autumn hog butchering, but with the latter I don’t recall meeting anyone who actually enjoyed killing a pig. It was simply a necessity to get pork on the table. I’m unsure if it built my character in my early teens to dig a well pit for five bucks but I wanted the five bucks and it only took a long day’s work. Early in high school I worked as a night janitor and rather than thinking it was demeaning I recall the quiet that allowed me to think of the books I had been reading, whether Erskine Caldwell or Sherwood Anderson or the very confusing Stendhal, The Red and the Black. With five children in our family and my father’s relatively low-paying job as a government agriculturist it was readily assumed that you had to earn your own spending money.

  Of course in the evolutionary curve we tend to remember the hard lessons more clearly than the pleasant experiences, a simple fact of life that allows you to learn survival. If it was unpleasant seeing a favorite pig get its throat cut, then gutted and scalded, it was wonderful when the whole extended family got together for the sausage and sauerkraut making. It was wonderful to fish in every spare moment and later to hunt. When older you come to understand that you were very lucky that your father began taking you fishing at the age of five, and at seven after you lost your left eye it was unthinkable ever to be left behind. I’ve said elsewhere that I had never heard any comment from my father or uncles in regard to fishing and hunting as “manly” sports. They were simply a part of life. The value judgments about “manly” preoccupations seemed to come later when the country became predominantly urban and semi-urban and people became quite remote from the sources of their food. However, I’ll readily admit that a great deal of savage stupidity and rank behavior have attached themselves to hunting and fishing whether at game farms or tournament killing, the mechanization of hunting by all-terrain vehicles, or the sheer hoggery of fishing tourists returning from Mexico with hundreds of pounds of fillets. Man has an inexhaustible ability to beshit his environment, with politicians well in the lead.

  If I ever had golden years it was in Reed City from the recoverable ages of five to twelve, though my brainpan recoils at the word “golden.” I suspect the repellency I feel for the banalities of our usage comes from my father who would go to strenuous lengths to avoid saying the same thing the same way, but then this was a time when verbal wit in ordinary situations was prized rather than viewed with suspicion except in television comedians. People not otherwise diverted added color to their speech in order to rise above flatness and be heard. I was amazed a few years ago while hunting on the property of a Hutterite colony in northern Montana to hear how developed and playful the speech patterns of the Hutterite children were without the dubious benefits of radio and television. If everything becomes a diversion what is left at the center? Maybe my grandfather when he put the Christmas-present television out in the cold pump shed was being presci
ent. I have closely noted that people who watch a great deal of TV never again seem able to adjust to the actual pace of life. The speed of the passing images apparently becomes the speed they aspire to and they seem to develop an impatience and boredom with anything else. Children become so saturated with TV and video games that Ritalin becomes the alternative, or so I’ve read.

  Recently out a windowpane about the size of a TV screen at my studio at the Hard Luck Ranch in Arizona the leaves of the pyrocanthus tree moved in a slight wind with the birds having nearly finished the last of the wizened red berries on this, the first day of spring. In the distance beyond the bed of a dry arroyo the far bank facing the sun was quite solid with yellow Mexican poppies. Offscreen cow dogs were drinking water from a tub in the yard. Two grayish butterflies fluttered past from left to right. Five minutes later a female vermilion flycatcher landed on a phone pole. Ten minutes later a green hummingbird acted irritated with a group of sparrows. A few weeks before something dramatic actually happened. Through the bushes surrounding the screened porch I could see the rancher Bob Bergier in his white pickup dragging a dead cow from the corral up to the boneyard on the side of a rock-strewn hill. Twelve cow dogs followed, all firm disciples of cow death. The dogs pranced in delight, a truly big meal in the offing.

  Of course these changes in cultural behavior and the invention of diversions are part of an economic system far beyond my ken. I think of it as a matter of swimming in an anemic, sterile, and crowded swimming pool stinking of chlorine compared to swimming in a lake back in the woods, the lake’s edge rimmed with flowering lily pads upon which small turtles sit, a heron or two in tall pines or in the shallows, a few water snakes in the reed beds, and when you dive down you see fish resting motionless under upraised logs. Even the black depths look attractive compared to a swimming pool, like a rainy spring walk in the woods compared to a serial where people in New York or L.A. are shot or pummeled to the tune of witty quips.

  * * *

  I suppose antic verbal propensities passed from father to son are best thought of as learned rather than transmitted genetically, at least until such a far-fetched idea as the latter can be proven, though I find it impossible not to believe that there’s something in Irish blood that favors their power with words. Notions of genealogy have always filled me with torpor but the idea of the genome is stupefying. We Americans are trained to think big, talk big, act big, love big, admire bigness but then the essential mystery is in the small. Even in botanical terms with trees it’s not so much the stalwart roots which are but a vehicle for the thousands of tiny root hairs that draw in nutrition and moisture that ensure life. With humans, in terms of what is thought of high society, it is always sadly comic to see some layabout princeling talking about his ancestors. This is as obviously ludicrous as a young writer thinking that there could be some meaningful earned credential other than his writing, pure and simple.

  What we think of our hometown is our first substantial map of the world. In a city it’s the neighborhood. Reed City was containable with clear borders of fields and woods. Two blocks from our five-bedroom house (which cost $3,500) was the courthouse where my father had his office. Across from the courthouse was the Congregational Church where we were members, and from where I mainly remember the gloom of the message, the anxious boredom of sitting there to hear about things quite remote from any of my concerns.

  Filling in the total map of where you live never stops. At one friend’s house, Glenn “Icky” Preston, we would eat catsup sandwiches, and at another’s, people who had come up all the way from Louisiana for our modest oil boom, supper was mostly a plate of beans. I was slow to learn that this was poverty. Our class took up a collection to buy the dump-picker’s daughter, Gertie, shoes and socks when cold weather came. And one friend was called “Purple” because he had a heart defect that gave his skin a purplish cast. This was during the war years and immediately afterwards and the postdepression prosperity hadn’t reached the hinterlands, though many men would drive south to Grand Rapids, rent a room, take a factory job, returning on weekends. And there were several middle-aged, tattered men in town who hadn’t fully survived the mustard and other gas attacks during World War I. They were indigent, living in shacks, mowing lawns and shoveling snow, but this was considered a better life than being confined to a VA hospital. People also tended not to sequester their retarded and otherwise dysfunctional. My first real girlfriend, Mary Cooper, had a mentally impaired aunt named Josephine, a big lumbering woman who tagged along with us. I recall it only as a fact of life. Josephine would pick literal bushels of wildflowers and sometimes secrete small frogs down in her bra. Her toilet habits were those of a farm animal but then I was used to that.

  The fact of World War II pervaded our lives. Some evenings there were air-raid alarms and when our fire chief, Percy Conrad, would start the siren all of the lights in town had to be turned off, presumably to make Reed City a less obvious target for bombers from Germany and Japan. The question of why these mortal enemies would select us as a target was never asked in my earshot. Only my brother John claimed to hear approaching bombers while the rest of us merely sat there on the front porch listening to the radio through the living room window.

  The hardest part was when we drove over from Reed City to Paris to visit my father’s parents and would sit there in a circle around their radio listening to the war news from Gabriel Heater who had a raw voice of doom that equaled Edward Murrow’s. Since my uncles Arthur and Walter were in the Pacific I didn’t pay attention to anything going on in Europe. You wonder what a child truly draws in in such circumstances other than the fear of those around him: old Carty stone-faced, but Mandy with eyes brimming with tears, Winfield and David straining to hear. (Lena lived with her husband, Bernard, way down in Detroit.) Even now names can own an unpleasant resonance from the memory of Gabriel Heater’s voice, especially Guadalcanal, the Philippines. One war would have been more than enough for a child’s imagination but two in different hemispheres fractionated the mind. My mother’s carefully preserved Life magazines and our world globe helped but only modestly. Fear is deeper than knowledge and overwhelms our rationality. What if Walter and Arthur had their heads chopped off by a Japanese officer? How would we even have a funeral? What would become of their girlfriends, Audrey and Babe? People are killing each other like we do pigs, cows, and chickens. You chop a chicken’s head off and it runs in circles for longer than you expect and then it flops over. Do people do this? Then the mind stopped here, the head buried against the sofa or mother. In this darkness that fails to be comforting there is the question, “What if we lose the war?” Reed City will be blown apart and we will be captives.

  During the war my sister Judith was born and I remember having mixed feelings about the loss of attention from my mother. This sense of loss was vastly energized by a woeful accident where I lost the vision in my left eye in a quarrel with a neighbor girl near a cinder pile in a woodlot behind the town hospital. She had shoved a broken bottle in my face and my sight had leaked away with a lot of blood.

  The consequences of her simple, violent gesture were long-range, to use a euphemism. When this area is touched upon in quiet moments the aftereffects of the accident can arrive in comic profusion: since the left eye is skewed people are puzzled about whether or not I’m looking at them, I was 4-F and unable to fight for my country in Vietnam, I’d get blindsided in football, I knock over grocery displays in abrupt left turns, also run walking partners into buildings on left turns, tennis was finally out of the question, parking and shooting are complicated and somewhat impaired though most of the cues for depth perception were learned by the time of my accident at age seven.

  Trauma is trauma but much of the time for a child it can be leavened because there are fewer neurotic reasons to hold on to it. Quite suddenly the left side of my world vanished but the worst was the nearly monthlong stay in the hospital, that long because someone came down with whooping cough or scarlet fever and we were quara
ntined. It naturally was a children’s ward and a girl with bad bums had died after three days. No one mentioned it to us but a kid with two fractured legs had overheard nurses talking in the night. I think my mother and father spent a lot of time with me but I recall the fear of having both eyes totally covered for a week or so. Even now I can bring back this haunted time by closing my good eye and looking at a big moon on a summer night with my bad, something I would try in the months after the injury. It is a concentrated but foggy light, quite beautiful in its way, and the practice immediately emphasizes the sounds one might hear, nighthawks, coyotes, a whippoorwill, in the spring the eerie call of the loon, the mating call of a woodcock, river sounds. This is an odd habit, looking at the moon with an essentially blind eye. You have the idea you can actually hear color, and between hearing and smell you construct a world that is further decorated by tasting and touching the night air. The old Ch’an monk Yuan-Wu said a thousand years ago, “Throughout the body are hands and eyes.”

  The compensatory joys were my uncles coming home from the war, the gradual joy perceived by my brother and me of having a baby sister, a curious creature indeed who could be filled with simultaneous ebullience and anger, a shrewd girl who in a gifted sentence could perfectly marry joy and melancholy.

  Easily the biggest item of consolation was my father and his brothers building us a cabin on a remote lake fifteen miles from town where we were to spend most of our summers for the next half-dozen years. It was one thing to live in a town with a small river going through a close-by modest-sized wild area, and large wooded areas intermixed with farms bordering the town, but quite another thing to live in a cabin without electricity and plumbing, and the goodly-sized lake having only three or four cabins on it. Last year in order to check the accuracy of childhood memories I looked at a detailed county map and discovered the empty area behind the cabin was indeed fairly large, about twelve by fourteen miles with no human habitation; huge gulleys covered by bracken and the large stumps of white pines cut in the logging era, small bogs and lakes, some too shallow for fish, grand swamps, and ridges covered with birch, oak, maple, and beech. Whether alone or with my uncles in whom I sensed a communal woundedness, or with a friend, wandering in this grand emptiness allowed me to survive my blinding in reasonably good mental shape. I don’t in the least mean the purely idyllic. In northern Michigan it is frequently cold in the summer, or too hot with clouds of mosquitoes, blackflies, horseflies, deerflies, wasps, and hornets. But it was wild, crisscrossed by old logging roads, and properly used to adolescent exhaustion the natural world can draw away your poisons to the point that your curiosity takes over and “you,” the accumulation of wounds and concomitant despair, no longer exist. The immediate world for hours at a time becomes quite beyond self-consciousness. You are more purely the mammal beneath the clothing of the culture, the civilization. The reading will take place in the evening near the oil lamp on the roseate oilcloth covering the picnic table in the corner of the cabin. But now for the time being you are merely wandering with your five senses, which, without your usual self-absorptions, are uncannily alive. Decades later I wrote an odd poem about this state: