Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [53]
In winter the ditches that fed into Beaver Creek were frozen solid, and in the summer they clogged and went to sluggardly soup, but during the melt the water moved with a pristine chuckle. Once while we were down out of the wind and the sun grew hot on our backs, Ricky knelt and drank deeply from the ditchwater, telling me to do the same. “Go ahead,” he said. “This is how you survive.” The water ran so clear above the tan sand, you could spot the individual grains. It’s pure, Ricky said of the water. You can see it’s pure. And so I drank too, and deeply. Later, when my mother heard, she told me about giardia and protozoa. To say nothing of dead skunks and Atrazine.
Ricky had an army surplus shovel. He carried it everywhere. It had a stocky wooden handle like a billy club, and you could fold the spade back flat to make it even more compact. On the opposite side of the spade was a pick that folded out at a right angle. Ricky and I were forever digging forts and hideouts. I recall a buried culvert with a trapdoor, but surely this was one of Ricky’s dreams and not a reality. Although the memory is precise enough—I see it somewhere near the machine shed and up against a row of Norway pines—that if Ricky were here, perhaps he could tell me that indeed it was so.
Once Ricky invited me to lunch. I called Mom and she said it was OK. I remember two things: there was a partially assembled large-block engine on the floor in the living room, and we had runny eggs. The runny eggs were a novelty for me. No offense to my mother, but I had never seen a fried egg presented in any manner deviating very far from vulcanized. I remember now that Ricky’s brother Alan was at the table with us. Alan wore old army jackets. Several years later, he killed a man. I read about it in the Chippewa Herald-Telegram. There was trouble involving Alan’s and Ricky’s sister. Alan put four bullets in the man’s chest and went to prison.
I have always thought of my friendship with Ricky as spanning several years, but having gone back to look at photographs and having spoken with my mom, I realize the friendship was at its peak that single spring and was probably over by autumn. We never had a falling-out, and Ricky never told me to get lost. There was just a slow dissolve to other arrangements. I think it probably had to do with our age difference. Once the summer ended and we returned to school, Ricky was headed around the bend to high school, while I remained in the grade school wing. From his perspective I suspect the social gap was insupportable. My last memory of the young Ricky is sad. We were on the school bus, headed home. I was in the seat ahead of Ricky, sitting sideways so I could talk to him. One of the rough boys, a stocky football player, barged up the aisle and demanded that Ricky move from the window. When he didn’t move fast enough, the bigger boy dove into the seat and landed on him, heavily. Ricky was holding that army shovel on his lap, and when the lunkhead dropped on him, the metal edge of the blade drove into Ricky’s thigh. It didn’t break the skin, but it hurt terribly. So terribly that Ricky burst into tears, and the big boy laughed at him. I remember trembling angrily at the big boy but being too small to do anything about it, and ashamed that Ricky—my older friend, my hero from the ditches—should have to cry in front of me.
I work on the pigpen two days in a row. My brother John said I could have his old hog feeder, so I run up north to retrieve it, using the trip as an excuse to swing by Farm & Fleet, which, as a guy likes to say, is “right on the way.”
It usually is.
My favorite thing about Farm & Fleet has always been the smell of fresh tires, but the livestock corner holds its own with