Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [27]
Good news is, you can fling a metric wrench forty feet, no conversion necessary.
The dead tractor battery reinforces what experience has taught me over and over again: Don’t overreach, farmer boy. It will be miracle enough if I can build a coop that will keep my chickens dry. Tonight as I stand and watch the sun go down above our barren spread, I am reminded that for all my talk and bathroom reading, what we’ve got here so far is thirty-seven snowbound acres and a guinea pig.
I don’t know if I was born again the night I read “The Hell-Bound Train.” Three years would pass before I professed my faith before members of our church. But there in the bathroom that night, that was my come-to-Jesus moment. This was when it hit me that any little boy who hung out cussing with Hardy Biesterveld would never breach the Pearly Gates. For the first night in my sheltered life I desperately craved sanctuary—from the cackling devil and his hellfire coals, sure, but also from myself. From the filth of my own weakness. I don’t recall, but I can’t imagine I strolled into school the next morning and told Hardy Biesterveld I was swearing off swearing. I do think I quit the cussing cold turkey, but as far as the rest of my scampitude, I reckon I just scaled back gradually. Didn’t dig my heels in, but dragged my feet some. I know we stayed on friendly terms right into adulthood. I just didn’t follow everywhere he led. And I’m glad I didn’t write him off. In the first place, that would have been snotty. In the second place, as the decades have unfolded, I have found great wisdom in the company of sinners—wisdom not always available via pristine living. And as a guy who equates sin with furtiveness and great lashings of guilt, I have always felt a certain awe for sinners who lay it all out there full-force.
On the twenty-fourth of May, 1974, I received a photocopied diploma affixed to a piece of green construction paper. Mrs. Kramschuster joined the two pieces of paper using rubber cement, and three decades later I can see the brush-swipe patterns where the cement seeped through, and the memories come flooding back. How the rubber cement swabbed on your skin with an evaporative coolness and slick like snot, but if you rubbed it together it dried out and became rubber, much as wet snot rubbed between the palms of your hands will become a serviceable booger. It reminds me of Hardy Biesterveld and how we would slobber rubber cement on our palm and then rub them together until we made our own off-kilter superballs. How we’d sniff the open bottle, the fumes putting a cool burn in our nostrils. And of course it reminds me of how we treated Mrs. Kramschuster. “THIS CERTIFIES,” the fancy script says, “Perry, Michael has completed the studies prescribed for the 3rd grade and is hereby promoted to the 4th grade.”
Mrs. Kramschuster’s signature is Palmer-penmanship neat. We can imagine her relief.
In the winter, darkness fell well before supper. By the time I followed Dad out for the evening’s milking, Orion was climbing from his kiva in the woodlot behind the barn, and the clear night air was tin-pail cold against my nose. The barn windows glowed an opaque yellow, and during the walk I anticipated the bare-bulb interior, bright with all the naked incandescence reflecting off the whitewashed walls and rafters. When I pushed through the milk-house door and into the light, the warmth