Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [136]
Then it is just Anneliese and me at the island, cutting and talking and sealing. I have a chance to look at her in the light and consider us together, and there is much in the year that has gone off the rails or been pushed aside or lost in the hurry, but here we are, putting up stores for the winter. When the last bird is chopped apart and sealed, we carry the cardboard boxes of meat to the chest freezer in the garage. The freezer is already filled with bacon and pork chops and pork roasts and a pair of hams the size of a tortoise. Now as we work shoulder to shoulder finding spaces for all the chicken, it feels good, like we are yoked together not just in workaday dray but in fulfilled purpose. When the last bird is stashed, we step back and look at the freezer, lid up and full to the rim with meat—every bit of it raised within a hundred-yard radius. Standing there beside my wife, both of us in tattered flannel shirts and grubby jeans, tired and our noses wet with cold, I pull her close and for a long moment we just stare at the freezer, and later we both agree it was one of the most oddly happy moments of our marriage since the exchange of vows, because we did this together.
Nearly every evening around suppertime I am reminded that John Menard is worth $7.3 billion and I am not. The evidence comes hissing from the clouds in the form of one or the other of Mr. Menard’s Cessna Citation Bravo jets returning the managerial troops from their business at the multitudinous home improvement stores, lumberyards, and distribution centers he owns all across the land. Last I checked, a used Cessna Citation Bravo will run you well north of seven figures. Rather than be disturbed by the jets (in fact the fleet docks at an airport eleven miles distant, and although we’re frequently in the flight path, the craft are still at a relatively unobtrusive altitude), I find them a fine source of existential calibration. I pause in what I am doing, tip my head back, watch them slice the sky like barracudas on the wing as I ponder current rates of exchange, and then I ask myself: “So, Mike—how’d you do today?”
In taking my measure in this manner I am following in the footsteps of my father, who has a long tradition of fruitlessly competing against Great Men of Industry. For a while it was J. Paul Getty, and lately he says he’s closely shadowing Warren Buffett, but back in the 1970s it was shipping magnate Daniel Ludwig. “Gotta go catch Daniel Ludwig,” Dad would say as he pushed away from the dinner table for yet another round of chores. At the time, Ludwig was considered the richest man in the world. Dad pronounced his last name “Lewd-vig,” which always tickled us kids. When one of our milk cows gave birth to a scrawny bull calf, Dad named him Daniel Ludwig and announced that this was the calf that would finally let us get ahead. Given the price of bull calves, this would have been a joke in any case, but in an ironic twist not only did Daniel Ludwig the calf fail to thrive, he failed weirdly, remaining skinny and rickety and sprouting patches of creepily silky hair. By the time Dad shipped him, he had gained almost no weight but had grown a pair of gnarled mutant horns.
On better days when we hustled right till dark and got the last cornfield cultivated or one more load of hay in the mow before the thunderstorms hit, Dad would dismount the tractor or tamp the final bale down, then stand in his baggy overalls and cracked leather boots, and happily declare, “Now we’re catchin’ Daniel Lewd-vig!” The grin on his face was a wide-open acknowledgment that it wasn’t ever going to happen.
During the summer I promised Amy we would pitch a tent and sleep outside one night. Now we’re getting frost and I’m about to go on a book tour and play some band dates, and the