In the Middle of the Middle West: Literary Nonfiction from the Heartland
320
In the Middle of the Middle West: Literary Nonfiction from the Heartland
320Paperback
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253216571 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/06/2003 |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Read an Excerpt
In the Middle of the Middle West
Literary Nonfiction from the Heartland
By Becky Bradway
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2003 Indiana University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-34375-8
CHAPTER 1
Midwest
STUART DYBEK
A week after the ground has thawed enough to turn, Snyder, our landlord, knocks at the door.
"Got some bad news for you, Sturt," he says. "You're gonna have to pen up your chicken or get rid of him. He's scratchin' up the garden."
It's really more my wife's chicken than mine, as those things go — not that she brought it home or looks after it, but she's more inclined than I to see the chick' en's side of things. I worry she'll be angry when she comes home and finds it gone. She rides the school bus home each afternoon as it meanders from rural stop to rural stop, from her teacher's aide job at the middle school — not an arrangement that puts her in the best of humor.
But Snyder has an unassailable point. I've seen the chicken working over his newly seeded furrows myself. We're living on food stamps and grad student incomes, and Snyder is renting us the lopsided, drafty little farmhouse that's still haunted by the ghost of its former resident, Grandpa Snyder, for only $85 a month. So I go out with him into the fields.
I hang back watching Snyder's technique, figuring to learn the right way to catch a chicken. This one is wary. It's a rogue chicken, a chicken run amok that hit the road on its own. Beside whatever private demons it's run away from, it has since been made even more skittish by constant ambushes from Jumbi, our Siamese cat. The cat lives up to his name, Jumbi, the word for ghost on the Caribbean island where we acquired him, a beautiful island where for two years we both happily taught at the local high school before moving here to Iowa.
The chicken has been with us since the dead of winter, our first Iowa winter, and, according to the Des Moines Register, the coldest in twenty years. There were nights we huddled under so many covers it was difficult to budge: sheets, blankets, quilts, bedspreads, cat and child balled between us like a couple of hot water bags. We could hear the wind, tinged with Northern Lights, rushing across Canada and the Dakotas toward its first collision — our farm house. Each night, all night, wind clawed obsessively at the shredded, fogged plastic stapled over the windows. We could feel an arctic jet stream boring through the uninsulated walls. One night it dropped to thirty below. We stacked newspapers and dirty laundry between the walls and mattress, and went to bed wearing our coats, our feet bundled in gym socks, and lay shivering while waves of wind surged across the prairie and the house creaked as it lifted and settled like a wooden ship on a pitching sea.
Next morning, in the old stable Snyder had converted to a garage, the Chevy wouldn't even turn over. A service station truck driven by a hippie-looking kid with STAN on his coveralls, his acne pitted purple in the cold, finally made it out. When he connected the jumper cables, the frozen battery exploded in our faces. We staggered into the house to wash the acid out of our eyes. Then, for the rest of the morning, Stan and I sat sliding the whiskey bottle between us across the chipped enameled kitchen table Grandpa Snyder had left behind. I was able to pick up a station out of Chicago, not that it played anything different than the station in Des Moines, but Stan liked its station breaks better. He said he was going to try living in Chicago after a hitch in the Army. When the whiskey was gone, I put on a pot of tea and Stan pulled out a baggie full of homegrown dope.
Later, still a little buzzed, I walked across the frostbitten field. The verdant landscape of pasture and vegetable gardens heavy for harvest and towering cornfields with seductive, shady aisles that had beckoned us in September when we arrived in a U-Haul truck was now transformed into a lunar surface of nodules and craters under icy snow that crunched beneath boot soles like a mineral dust. It was a slow, head-down, wind-slashing trudge to Snyder's big house, a half mile away, the only other house on the horizon.
One of his dogs was lying dead next to the stairs. Another whimpered in the doghouse.
Snyder answered the door, invited me in.
The kitchen exhaled steam and the warm, sweet smell of baking bread. Huge pots of boiling corn rumbled on the stove. The kids were all sitting around the table, ready to eat. A&W root beer mugs of milk brimmed beside each plate. Enid, the oldest, who always flashed the peace sign at me from the back of the school bus, blushed as I stepped in.
"Cold enough for you, Sturt?" Snyder asked.
"I see it got one of your dogs."
He caught what was in my voice and looked at me. "Cold alone wouldn't kill 'em, Sturt. I always had dogs. Never brought 'em in no matter how cold. He got hit on the road and drug hisself back. I woulda put him in the basement had I knowed. Ailing dog ain't gonna make it through this kinda weather, that's for sure. How's the house?"
"Pretty cold."
"That's a good furnace in there."
"It's working all right but there's drafts everywhere."
"Yeah, well, Granpa Snyder used to complain every now and then." He laughed in the direction of his wife. "He was a tough old coot. Used to sleep in the bathroom when it really got bad. Said it was the warmest spot in the house."
"My car is dead. I wondered if I could borrow your truck just to get into town so I could buy an electric heater."
"Well, Sturt, I got a heater downstairs we don't use, except when we're playing ping-pong, be happy to let you borrow."
So that night and the rest of the month until the cold spell broke, we slept with the electric heater on a chair pointed at the bed, its coils grilling on and off in the dark, our faces the color of fast-food french fries under a light. It stayed subzero for nearly three weeks, and during that time the chicken showed up.
My wife saw it one day, approaching our house across a field, a flurry of sparrows twittering around it. At first we thought they were attacking, that things were so bad the sparrows were after live meat. But it became clear that the chicken was scrabbling through the snow and must have been turning up something to eat. I went out and threw it some popcorn kernels and it moved in.
There was a scooped depression on the lee side of our house where a sunken sill half-buried in dead leaves and festooned with sooty webs framed a small cellar window. The pane was smoked from the oily heat escaping the cellar, and it must have made for a warm nook. Snow melted before it could accumulate there. Drifts scalloped around the house like paralyzed white waves pocked with chicken tracks. In the mornings we'd always check, and the chicken would be there pointing east like a weathercock, staring sidelong across the fields, perfectly still — meditating, my wife insisted.
We concocted stories about how it was a soul in transmigration — a seeker on a pilgrimage who'd stopped to pray through winter. We felt it was superior to other, sedentary chickens, tucked in their coops, sitting on their little nest eggs. Our chicken had renounced the constricts of such comforts the way that Hindu writing distinguishes between wandering monks and householders, the latter being not up to the former.
The only thing that distracted the chicken's meditation was the cat. The bird would remain perfectly still, bunched and fiercely meditating while the cat stalked along the side of the house. When the cat crept close enough to pounce, the chicken would explode into a undignified fit of squawks and flapping, racing in crazed circles on its scaly yellow legs across the snow.
And that's what happens when Snyder tries to catch it. I'd thought there was some finesse way to catch a chicken that every farm boy learned. But Snyder is after it as if he's in a pig-calling contest, waving his thick, stubby arms over his head, yelling Whooooeee Whooooeeee as the chicken bolts from its nook, feathers flying.
We give chase across the newly plowed field, our feet sinking in, leaving footprints as if we're running across a freshly painted floor. The chicken jukes back toward the house, across the yard, under the clothesline, and we trap it for an instant against a rusted skeleton of a reaper. But when Snyder reaches for it, he gets a pecked hand instead, and the chicken squirts between his legs.
"Almost had the sonnabitch, Sturt!"
The bird is putting up a good fight, and I begin to admire it again. As soon as Snyder suggested getting rid of the chicken, I realized how down I was on it — that, for me, the chicken had become emblematic of all that seemed wrong about having moved from the islands back to the Midwest just to pursue degrees. Snyder keeps calling it him, and for all I know he might be right. When it first showed up we'd had a vision of fresh eggs, some small promise from the countryside of the bountifulness people must endure such winters for. But it's eaten its way through two plastic bags of Jiffy popcorn and is on its third drum of Quaker Oats, and not one egg. I've been out every morning for the last month scattering feed into the nook, then carefully checking the nest of flattened leaves against the sooty windowpane, but nothing, no token of gratitude.
When I complained the chicken wasn't laying, my wife said she'd mentioned that at school and was told by the farm kids that one could test for eggs by insert' ing a finger into the chicken.
"If that's what you're suggesting, no way. I'll knock down yellow jacket nests, I'll clean the decaying mice out of Grandpa Snyder's stove, but I draw the line when it comes to feeling in a chicken for an egg." It wasn't squeamishness; I was afraid of hurting the chicken. That kind of intimacy wasn't something a city boy should be attempting without guidance.
I'd begun to suspect that the chicken was no free spirit at all, but rather some drone driven from the coop for its lack of productivity.
"Whoooeee! We got him now, Sturt!"
With the entire horizon in which to escape, the chicken circles the garage three times and darts inside.
We swing the doors shut. The chicken almost blends into the gleams slatting in through the warped wooden siding. We can make it out, banded in a sunbeam, like a trembling mop head beside a barricade of boxes.
The garage is full of boxes I've learned by moving to save for future moves. I select one of my prized beer cartons — its handholds and solid construction make it great for hauling books — and I flap it open. It's Snyder doing the watching now. The chicken doesn't even struggle as I fold its wings to the side and set it in the box.
"Why don't you butcher him, Sturt? Get some good outa feeding it."
"Nah."
"Want me to wring its neck for you? That's an authentic what they're calling free-range chicken you got there."
Instead I'm driving the dirt back roads with the chicken clucking next to me in the Pabst Blue Ribbon box. I'm looking for a farmer who wants it. First I try a place down the road, but they don't keep chickens anymore, the lady tells me.
When I tell her it's just one chicken that needs a home and won't be any work, she insists on taking me out back, through their empty coops. Whitewash bright droppings crust weathered wood. Speckled feathers float up as we swing through the doors. It's odd how an empty chicken coop throws a kind of silence.
"Used to keep hens, hundreds — Leghorns, Andalusians, Rhode Island Reds, Sussex, you name it. Don't pay anymore with this economy."
"No money in chickens?" I ask, just trying to make small talk.
"You sure ain't from around here," she says.
The next two places don't want it either, and I don't bother with a sales pitch.
For a while I just drive, thinking maybe I should pen it, should drive into town for sticks and chicken wire. But I know that's crazy, that as soon as it gets warm we'll move into town, closer to the university. We've learned the hard way that, even at $85 a month, students can't afford country life. We can't afford another winter like this last one. Our country dreams seem pastoral, naive, a version of the American Midwest learned from musicals: sheep in the meadow, com high as an elephant's eye ...
The roads wind into one another, bounce over railroad tracks, past endless stretches of bare fields. In hollows where snow is still melting, enormous quantities of waste paper emerge, yellowed, flying about, plastered everywhere, against barns, stuck on barb-wire fences, and in bare branches.
Finally, I'm lost. I reach a farm I know I'll never find again. A farmer in gray coveralls stands among grunting swine as I grind up his rutted driveway.
"Does she lay?" he asks suspiciously after grilling me as to just where I got this here chicken.
"No," I admit.
"Well, she's an old one. You can tell by them spurs," he says, grabbing it by the legs and slinging it over his shoulder. "She'll be tough."
I keep driving till I hit a highway. By the time I get back it's nearly twilight. The lights are on in the house, and my wife and daughter are home. I wonder if they've noticed it's gone. I pull the car in the garage where the chicken allowed Snyder and me to finally trap her. Looking at the spot, I notice how that ground is littered with dried white droppings, and above, in the comer, that the straw packing sticks over the lip of one of the cartons I keep for moving my stereo. Inside the stereo box, where the straw is scooped and flattened, a glow: three eggs.
CHAPTER 2That Glorious Time of Old
MARY SWANDER
Squeezed together on the hard wooden benches in the meeting room of the country schoolhouse, we sang Christmas carols, a slow, modal sound echoing off the plain pine walls. It came upon the midnight clear. Outside, the storm cocooned us in snow, the flakes swirling through the darkness, covering the horses at the hitching post. It was the night of the Christmas program in my neighborhood, a rural Iowa community where I am one of the few "English," or non-Amish. Several families were delayed, their sleighs inching over waist-high drifts. Mahlon, the minister, kept us singing, his hand moving up and down with a steady rhythm. That glorious song of old.
Then some older boys extinguished the kerosene lanterns hanging from ceiling hooks. Our voices hushed. A chorus of young voices arose from the basement steps, the notes pure and clear. Thirteen Amish children and their teacher — who couldn't have been more than eighteen years old — wound through the meeting room. Each child carried a single white candle, the light glowing in the darkness. With angels bending near the earth.
The candles were snuffed, the lanterns re-lit, and the children went into a singsong rhyming recitation of a poem dedicated to "Grandma." Just one grandma? I thought. There have to be others here. The room was packed with older women, their shawls draped over their shoulders, their white hair pulled back into buns. But when the poem was finished, just one grandma stood up and bowed. She was the ancestor of all the children, these siblings and cousins smiling out at us with the same grin that swept across the old woman's face.
Outside the window of this one-room schoolhouse, the wind swept across the pastures and cornfields where this same ancestry, this same sense of community, keeps the face of the land intact. Here, near Kalona, Iowa, the largest Amish settlement west of the Mississippi, the farms are small, averaging around a hundred and twenty acres, the houses nestled into the rolling hills, one close enough to another to hear the voices of children carried through the clear air from one farmstead to the next. The farmhouses are large, white boxy structures with wraparound porches and room for at least ten people at the dining room table. Most farmsteads have "Grandpa" houses, smaller structures that quarter elderly relatives; a loom or quilting frame is often set up in the main room. The well-kept bams are painted bright red, their lofts filled with hay, their stalls with Holsteins. Every Monday morning, clothes flap in the breeze: a chorus line of denim pant legs dancing in the wind.
When the snow melts, the gardens are tilled, their rich, composted soils planted with peas, lettuce, and spinach. Earthworms wiggle through the dirt dotted with plastic milk jugs, or mini-hothouses, encasing cabbage and broccoli seedlings. The manured fields are plowed under, teams of draft horses or old tractors preparing the land for a four-crop rotation of corn, beans, oats, and alfalfa. Hay is still baled in squares with binders dating back to the 1950s. The wagons wobbling down the road on their metal rims are piled high with their bounty. Oats are stacked to dry in shocks before threshing, and in mid-summer the play of light across the bundles creates a mirage of earth tones that rivals a Monet painting. During fall harvest, you can still find whole families picking com by hand or slaughtering their own hogs and canning the meat, the pressure cooker steaming on the stove.
During any season, one can immediately grasp the health and prosperity of the region. Bankruptcies from debts for purchases of large machinery and additional tracts of land are virtually nonexistent. No beer cans litter the ditches. No old cars or washing machines trash the creeks. Instead, the grid of gravel roads carries buggy, buckboard, and sleigh travel, the horses trotting along through dust, mud, and snow. The grid of human relationships carries a five-hundred-year-old agricultural way of life, its successes trotting through depressions and farm crises. The farms, like the families in this region, are tightly knit together by a set of spiritual beliefs that embrace the sustainability of the land and the importance of community.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from In the Middle of the Middle West by Becky Bradway. Copyright © 2003 Indiana University Press. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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