Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [3]
Three miles is not so far as the crow flies, but it is a fair distance when you are towing a Holstein behind a Ford Falcon full of jabbering rug rats. Dad rode the clutch and kept one eye on the mirror. The cow stubbed along reluctantly at first, all straight-necked and flat-eared, but eventually she calmed and found her road gear. For the balance of the journey she shambled along easy, following her nose through a faint blue haze. That Falcon burned a little oil.
As we neared home that night, John and I bailed off the tailgate to run alongside. The other kids hung out the windows, hair in the wind, arms dangling, all eyes on the cow. We tripped along through the lowering salt marsh mist, that sweet-brine scent still imprinted on my consciousness to a depth that zips me back to the far western corner of Sampson Township at first whiff. How happily and goofily we skipped, the scratch and scuff of the Holstein’s hooves echoing among the roadside pines. Mom was in the house at the sink when we broke into the open, the blue station wagon rolling turtle-slow and trolling a lumbering milk cow through the lowering light and fireflies rising, John and I cavorting like redneck leprechauns, our father up there at the wheel thinking who knows what but proving that even the humblest man is capable of spectacle.
Lately—when we are driving to piano lessons, or washing dishes, or stacking firewood—Amy has taken to saying, “Tell me a story from your child-hood.” She consistently uses the same formal phrasing (clearly enunciating “child” and “hood”), and I am tickled and troubled by the idea that to her mind my “child-hood” has achieved epoch status. Of course I remember asking my parents the same question, and I remember my fascination at their stories of boxing matches on the radio, ice delivered to the house in sawdusted blocks, and ladies who cooked with lard. To a child whose first retrievable memories are pegged just prior to the Summer of Love, it seemed remarkable that my parents were born into a black-and-white newsreel world, with still shots provided by my mother’s Brownie box camera, still stored in a long narrow closet upstairs at the farm.
“Tell me a story from your childhood,” says my daughter, and because I remember nothing before the farm, I tell her the first image I see when I think of spring is yellow dandelions in green grass beside a red barn. Ours was a classic Wisconsin homestead: white house, the red barn, a handful of simple outbuildings. All constructed from jack pine by second-generation Norwegian immigrants in the wake of the lumbering boom. The farm stood at the southern edge of what historians refer to as the cutover region. At one time the cutover was thick with century-old white pines, but by the 1900s they were long gone down the nearest river. As a short-term fix for the suddenly finite lumber supply, the loggers further stripped the land of lower-grade hemlock, cedar, and hardwoods. After the lumberjacks departed, the government encouraged farmers to settle the area, but the denuded sandy soil of the cutover was poorly suited to farming. Although there were many successful operations scattered throughout northwestern Wisconsin during my childhood, I came of age thinking of farming as a tough gig in which folks scrabbled and hung on—I was surprised in later life when I spent time in the Coulee Region to the southwest and discovered that farm families numbered among the prominent and well-to-do.
“Tell me a story from your childhood,” she says, and I tell her of waking on summer mornings so socked with fog I could make myself believe the world had fallen away to leave our isolated farmstead floating through space—and how that illusion was gently undone by disembodied voices drifting in through