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By Root 357 0

shot himself in the basement, experiences that added a layer of psychological trouble to his preexisting problems. He was prone to fits of yelling and screaming, and occasionally ate his mittens. The day he arrived we celebrated with a rare stop at the A&W root beer stand in Chetek. We had a four-door Chevy Impala at the time and there were kids crammed front and back—Dad was at work, so Mom was driving. After the waitress fixed the tray to the window, Mom started passing out hot dogs, beginning with Jud, who was seated directly behind her. When all the dogs were in hand, Mom set to divvying up French fries. When she turned to hand Jud his portion, he was swallowing the last of his hot dog, napkin and all. Another time he devoured an entire bag of unpeeled oranges. For all his voracious eating, Jud was always thin as a rail, no doubt due to the fact that he never stopped moving. He wore out a series of wheelbarrows, and used to sit sidesaddle in a little red wagon and push himself round and round the driveway with the sides of his feet until his leather boots wore through. When given a book, he would page through it compulsively until it was shredded. Since he was so hard on books, every Christmas my grandmother wrapped the JC Penney catalog and gave it to him. It was his favorite present. He’d strip away the paper and start flipping through the pages, front to back. When he reached the end of the catalog, he’d flop the catalog over and start through again. My brother John and I shared a bedroom with Jud for a while, and we remember waking at 2:00 a.m. to the sound of the pages going flip, flip, flip in the dark. Flip, flip, flip…FLOP. Flip, flip, flip…FLOP… By the time next Christmas rolled around the catalog was in tatters.

In his teen years, Jud was tall and distinguished, with a shock of John Kennedy hair and a patrician jawline. When he was relaxed and his most obvious tics were suppressed, he projected an air of erudition. One evening a stranger drove into our driveway looking for directions to New Auburn. My brother Jed, then about ten years old, gave the man perfectly good directions. Just as he finished, Jud sidled up. “Go north. Two miles, take a right, then straight,” said Jud, in a fractured recitation of Jed’s directions. The result was utter nonsense—beginning with the fact that New Auburn lay to the south—but the way he rattled it off, it sounded believable.

Jed pointed up at Jud. “He’s retarded.”

“OK, little fella,” said the stranger, chuckling and patting Jed’s head. Then he climbed back in his truck, drove to the end of the driveway, and, exactly as Jud had instructed, turned north to nowhere.

During much of my childhood we double-, triple-, and occasionally quadruple-bunked. When my brother John and I slept in a converted closet at the top of the stairs, we could stand erect on only one side of the “room,” as the other half was transected by the roofline. Per John’s request (he now owns a dump truck and a sawmill and will deny this, but I can provide photos), Mom painted a butterfly on the slanted ceiling. It was an attempt to evoke spaciousness, but that just meant when you stood up, you smacked your head on a flat plaster butterfly.

With an eye to the expanding brood, Dad began to remodel the old three-bedroom farmhouse in the early 1970s and expects to finish the project any time now. There was always some wall being knocked out somewhere. Jed learned to climb ladders while still in diapers, and at one point when the ceiling was being reconstructed we amused ourselves by fishing for sandwiches through a hole cut in the upstairs floor. We’d set up an ice-fishing tip-up over the hole, lower the line, wait for the tug that released the flag, and then reel up a sandwich Baggie.

Eventually it became obvious that the house simply wasn’t big enough, and Dad hired my uncle to help him build an addition that exactly doubled the size of the house. John and I were so excited at the prospect of having our own rooms that we would drag our sleeping bags through the second-floor window into the partially constructed