Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [20]
When you heard the vacuum pump power down, you knew Dad had thrown the switch, and the milking was done. In summer we’d walk the mangers, unsnapping each cow from her neck chain. They’d back half out of their stalls and, like a tugboat in an undersize boat slip, make a ponderous turn followed by a teeter-totter lunge sufficient to clear the gutter, then head for the door. They’d go to the pasture, and we’d go to the house.
I got religion in the third grade, and jeepers, did I need it. The devil was in me, and Hardy Biesterveld wasn’t helping. Through second grade, I had been a precocious model of good behavior, with fine marks and a talent for reading two grades ahead. Hardy was a year ahead of me, but then he was held back a year, and when I crossed the hall we became classmates.
I do not know what might have spawned my recalcitrance—I recall no particular psychological trigger point other than the fact that Mrs. Zipstrow, the second-grade teacher, was known to fling staplers—but one day there I was, sitting in the hall with Hardy Biesterveld, taking turns to see who could string together the longest unbroken run of swear words. We had been banished to the hallway for disruptive behavior, and indeed, we had taken to hanging out in the classroom as if it were a street corner. Mrs. Kramschuster was in her rookie year, and we threw sand in her gears at every opportunity. Hardy once proposed that we conceive of her as a ball of rubber cement. Holding one hand about a foot from our eyeballs, we pinched her image between our thumb and forefinger, mimed rolling her between our palms until she was the size of a marble, and then played catch with her. We bounced her off the blackboard, and we stuck her to the ceiling. When she told us to behave, we generally complied, but smirked, rolled our eyes, and insulted her beneath our breath. We sometimes cast her in the composition of indecent rhymes. We were a pair of impudent slyboots.
My moral decline was exacerbated by Mrs. Lovelace, a teacher’s aide. Bountiful is the only word that will do. Young, blond, and newlywed, she elicited within us a naive friskiness. One day she came through the classroom door clad in a black velveteen top with a neckline that appeared to have been cut around the prow of a galleon. Suddenly we were eager swots in search of constant tutoring. Again and again we lugged our geography workbooks to her table. Mimicking Hardy, I leered knowingly, but inside I was trembly with prepubescent wonderment. That profound mammate cleft, framed in a breathtaking swoop of embroidered décolletage—the vision pressed itself warmly into my young brain. Hardy and I marked the occasion by composing crude boob jokes, at least one of which incorporated an internal rhyme scheme. I was being drawn down the path of wickedness. Here is Mrs. Kramschuster, writing in my first-quarter report card, under section II, Student Attitude to Date: “Mike is a polite boy in class and displays a mature ability to get along with his classmates. Cooperative and responsive…. He is prone to visiting recently, which is affecting his studies and progress.”
Mrs. Kramschuster, second quarter: “Mike achieves more success when not distracted by Hardy Biesterveld. Mike is becoming more sensitive to others but I am afraid his friendship with Hardy may affect this…. Appears to have developed better self-control, with the elimination of moodiness.”
Mrs. Kramschuster, third quarter: “Continues to waste time. Mike appears belligerent when asked to get to work…. Appears more moody.”
Sounds like a boy who needs to get right with Jesus.
The 1936 edition of The Best Loved Poems of the American People, selected