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The Stroke

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A rickety gray porch encircled the south and east side of the two-story 1890s farmhouse, put up in a rush when homesteading, sunk away from the gravel road that ran dusty north to south.  Straight out from the house, the kitchen on the south side, the dining room and parlor on the north, the planks of the porch projected like accordion keys on which once in a while grandpa played his accordion, one that became like detritus lost in the shuffle of families after his death.  Pillars, weathered pine and full of slivers, kept the roof fairly straight, but they caved like dominoes when the house was bulldozed.  Upon this porch grandchildren swung in a wooden swing, swung from the iron links until they were told not to, twirled around the pillars, chased chickens and each other down one side and the other, and jumped off the edges as if they were descending into caverns.  On the porch each with a bowl between their legs, a garden basket full of pods in the center, they podded peas quietly after being subdued with a soft injunction by the grandmother not to eat the peas, standing on the other side of the screen door  that opened to the porch on the east.

The Botna River slid through the farm’s bottom land like a rat snake  on a porch.  Their son  Wayne took a corn knife, berserk from serving in the Pacific, and sliced it into sections like a madman while grandchildren like sparrows watched from their perches in a tree in the yard, the corn knife a blur as it swirled and swirled in the air.  When he stopped, he shook off the fury and snuck like a dog back inside the house. Grandma took a shovel and picked up the pieces and burned them in the barrel. I remember my father and mother watching Wayne silently a distance away.  Later in bits of conversation between adults, we learned that Wayne found the swamps writhing with snakes too much for his mind. What else happened to him, I was never told.  But I was always afraid of him as a child, and grew to dislike him immensely as an adult.

Inside Grandpa and Grandma Snyder’s home, in the living room, in the summer time, an oil stove stood idle on the north wall.  In the spring of 1960, a teakettle hissed upon the pot-belly cast-iron wood stove that sat a little ways from the wall. A small little pot belly, but one that heated the entire house, almost, except for the corners of the bedrooms upstairs and the parlor in the northeast corner, whose door was always shut except when company came, sometimes on weekends to celebrate birthdays, on Christmas and holidays.

Grandpa and Grandma on some anniversary

Grandma and Grandpa called that room a parlor, not a living room. The other rooms in the house contained ordinary, everyday furniture, nothing new, all serviceable.  I don’t remember much about the table in the room with the two stoves around which we all sat if having dinner at Grandma’s place, and I don’t remember many times we all sat around that table.

My grandpa, Francis Snyder laid upon the bed in the one bedroom on the main floor, in the northwest corner.  In that bedroom in any time of year one could hear farm animals, especially the chickens that roamed freely around the yard most of the time.  In the summer time, the cackling of the chickens were comforting to Grandpa, I would think for those ten years that he lived mostly in that bed after his stroke.  Whenever any of us entered the house, from the time he had the stroke on the night of my oldest sister’s wedding, we first had to say hello to Grandpa.  Always the rule, not from Grandma, but from my mother.  Straight to the bedroom to say hello.  The stroke left him paralyzed on the right side, his arm dead weight.  Grandpa had some feeling in his face, for he jostled with us, teased us, asked us questions.  Often he would be sitting up when we came, or Grandma would follow us into his room and help him sit, or we would. Because of his stroke, the Grandpa’s nails would grow long and tough.  Cutting them with a clippers that seemed like one to use on pigs was we kids’ job; in fact mine most of the time.  From the time I was eight until he died, I cut his nails.  His right hand was stiff, but he could lift it out of the covers and hold it in front of my while I took the clippers and cut off the edges of his nails. The fingernails were easy; the toenails were tough.  When I was done, he often would squeeze my hands with his left one, and saw something like “Appreciate it.”

Grandpa has his stroke on the afternoon of my older sister’s wedding, but no one other than my grandmother knew.  Like all who farmed then, a wedding at night still meant that plowing had to be done when it needed to be done.  Grandpa farmed with horses, and so did my father much of the time throughout the years, until the team died, sometime in my sophomore year.  Grandpa also had a stallion that he kept in the barn.  My older sister has told me often that stallion was wild and mean, but I’m sure that Grandpa handled him adroitly.  There didn’t seem to be ever a question that Grandpa couldn’t do something, and do it in such a way that his actions were rather revered. The Grandparents’ kitchen was small, set by the door that went into the room with the pot belly stove. A cast iron stove was on the north wall, replaced in the later years with a gas one.  Grandma would take a stick of kindling and put it in the blazing fire, and not burn a tip of a finger.  I watched her and tried to imitate her whenever I could.  When I hired out in my sophomore year to a family for $10 a week for one week until my father said I couldn’t stay there no more.  Like my grandpa, my dad was a person of few words, never did explain the reason why to me, although I was uncomfortable with the man of the house.  I slept upstairs the week that I was there, but it was my job to get the fire going in the morning, and I could very well.  The man once said to me that a good woman needs to know how to make a fire.

At that table, Grandpa would drink his coffee, coffee made boiled on the stove. Not thin like some of the coffee I became used to in South Dakota but fairly robust, dark enough not to really see the bottom of the cup.  Grandma drank her green tea. Then he would stir in teaspoons of sugar, so many in fact that it seemed there was more sugar than coffee; then pour the coffee in the saucer and drink it from the saucer.  At that table, I often would play canasta while waiting for something or other to pick me up or to order me to do something.  Until I entered first grade, one of the farm places that we rented was right across the creek on the south side of Grandma and Grandpa’s.  Rather a gully that we crossed with a plank, a plank I remember that when I walked barefooted across it once, a sliver went from the ball of my foot to the pad of the heel.  It hurt a great deal.  On that place, my mother became pregnant with both my younger sister  and my oldest brother, and I was sent to stay with Grandma and Grandpa.

My oldest sister, Betty, was my half-sister, her father dead from tuberculosis when she was five.  Our mother married my father when Betty was eleven.

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Arlo Nordby

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The folks were tenant farmers, which means that we kept 3/5 of the crops we raised while the landlord received 2/5. Not fair at all, when one thinks of the all the hard work in grasshopper August days and in the blizzard  cold of Iowa winters, tough then, not so much now it seems.  I haven’t heard of 20′ drifts as there were when I was a teenager, drifts so high that when you walked on them, you could see the top of the grainery.  And we had to provide the machinery to harvest the corn and oats.  I’m not sure if we had to sell off the 2/5ths of the alfalfa and straw for the landlord.  I know that the profit from the runt pigs was Mom’s to keep. The livestock was our own–hogs, cattle, and chickens. Dad and Mom never owned a house until after Dad quit farming the first year I after taught high school. They bought a home in Manilla for what I remember as $5000, a home that once my brother leaves  will more than likely be destroyed, torn down, burnt.

The basement’s block, not poured, not that means a difference, but it’s dark, with a room off the side where my brother used to sleep occasionally when visiting.  The walls aren’t painted; the floor’s cement, and there are spiders. Daddy long legs and others; some hang from the ceilings until one takes a corn broom covered in an old tea towel and sweeps them away.  Some dregs of former living lay upon the cement shelf that goes part way under the living room.  There is no basement under most of the  kitchen or the bathroom, added on after.   Going down those rickety steep narrow stairs at any age, much less my mother in her later years, is an exercise in balancing, and negotiating around a cat or two that use those stairs to move back and forth between action and hiding causes one to step carefully, for they scream around one either way.  There is one handrail on the right, so if carrying something, like a quart jar of peaches or beans that one  might have been sent down for, you means caution or sweeping up glass and sopping up peaches and scrubbing clean sugar water off the cement.

Most of the windows are old, although the plate glass one in the living room that looks out to the north porch has lead in it.  The furnace some 20 years old or so. There’s an air conditioner that my brother won’t turn on because it costs too much. The kitchen floor leans towards the south, uneven enough that no linoleum or tile can be laid, even though both brothers say it can be done. So dirty now that I’m sure my mother haunts the place.

On one of those tenant farms, the Beh place, straight south of Manilla, but we kids went to Irwin after country school, the house was the second in which we lived, that all of us remember.  Fairly new for those days, a ranch, but not a ranch that one might find now.  A one-story is all, one story with three bedrooms, living room, kitchen, and a porch. The outhouse on the north no more than 15 yards or so; in two places there over the course of the years, but always on the north.  That outhouse I don’t remember as well as the one for the farmstead by Botna.  All I remember is that it was painted white, and I don’t think the door had anything cut out of it, like a crescent moon or something as did the Botna one, an opening like a crescent moon, although the outhouse in bare wood as was most outhouses then opened to the west.

On the farm to the east of us, one with a new home, indoor plumbing and all, immense home for two people, were Mr. and Mrs Arlo Nordby. Arlo’s gravestone says that he had children, but I never saw them around.  More than likely they went to town school or left home early.  Arlo’s wife was a fairly tall thin woman with black hair streaked with gray. She didn’t say much.  I don’t remember if she ever smiled or joked or anything.  I do remember going down there with my father for some reason or another but I don’t know why.  On that farmstead many years ago I was told once lived my mother’s family, her mother, Grandma Bargenquast who died as a Hodder, her father, and ten children, but that house was no longer there.  When we moved there, sometime when I was in first grade, the house was new.  The garage jutted out from underneath the house, not a tuck under, but one that sat in front of the house.  On top of it, on the cement room, one could, if one wanted to, lie out in the sun to read, not that I saw anyone reading there or in any other place on any farm around us.

That house contrasted sharply to ours.  Sometime after we moved in, the landlady, the only owner, no landlord at the time, must have had dirt pushed around the house, for I remember a time when the house seemed up on sticks.   I think that was when a basement was put underneath.  But other than the fact that the house was small, with bedrooms the size of today’s bathrooms, a living room almost the size of two bedrooms, and a kitchen larger than the living room, most of the time we lived there contained good memories.  In the center of the kitchen stood a cast iron stove  on which Mom cooked, one that overheated us in summer time, for Mom still baked bread and deserts then.  In the winter time, Dad hooked up the potbelly stove in the living room.   On the east side of the cast iron stove was  a table. When I was younger, the table was rectangle, about the size of a trunk.  Sometime prior to my sophomore year, a round table, almost like the one that my niece inherited from the folks.

The oven door to that cast iron stove was often kept open, especially towards the evening when the nights turned chilly.  It was one of those early afternoon evenings, chores not started yet, although the cows had been brought into the stanchions, waiting to be milked.  That job of making sure the cows were in the barn was usually one or the other of us kids.  I assume that it was me most of the time until my brother became the one that Dad relied on for chores.  But it’s one of those tasks that one did so often on the farm that remembering specifically doing one or two would be difficult.

Dad came into the kitchen. He had on his denim jacket, and was putting on a second one to begin feeding the cattle, milking, whatever chores we kids could not do.  Mom was at the sink, a porcelain one that was in the northeast corner.  We didn’t have hot water, just cold; the hot water was heated on the stove.  There was also a pump outside, and I remember using that pump when I was younger, but after the basement was put in, or the house raised up it seemed, then we had water in the house.

Father had been away part of the afternoon, so his coming back was often an event.  Not sure where he was.  If it was Friday, he might have gone to town to play cards and shoot some pool, but the trip was short. I remember standing by the stove, not sure if I had been ordered to do something, like put in some wood or take hot water out of the tank, a storage unit next to the fire that heated water.  Dad was putting on a second jacket and said to Mom who was deep in something at the sink, more than likely peeling something or other for dinner.  The final touches for dinner were started when chores started, timing essential for meal time was rather sacrosanct.  As Dad was putting on the second jacket, he said to Mom, “I saw Arlo Nordby’s wife naked, slopping hogs.”  Whatever Mom was doing, she did not do anymore.  She turned around, her hands wet with a paring knife in her hand.  The silence in that room seemed spiritual to me, for my father had said naked, and my mother might shush him, and that I didn’t want.  She said in what I thought could have been considered a normal voice, but now I know that it had an edge to it:  “What did you say?” Dad continued, but you have to know my father’s method of storytelling.  What he said he  understated, inserting a phrase here and there that might seem at first out of place, but once one thought about it, his wry sense of humor displaced caught up with us later, sometimes as late as adulthood.

“I saw Arlo Nordby’s wife naked, slopping hogs.” Then I could see her too, her long dark hair streaked with gray that streamed down her back, she feeding the hogs in the barn, for that’s where they feed them in the trough in the barn, light streaming in from the opening to the south into the hog pen.  I saw her as I peeked over the bottom half of the barn door, the top half latched open as they often are except in winter.  I was almost as tall as the bottom half; perhaps if she was looking she could see the top of my hair.  I put my hands on the door and stood on my tiptoes and saw Arlo Nordby’s wife naked.  She wasn’t hard to imagine, for she  dressed in jeans, something that most farm women did not.  Most farm women wore dresses as my mom did, with an apron that they changed most every day of the week, even on Sunday.  Mom’s was always something white or solid with ruffles around the edges.  The farm women who didn’t have to work outside, they wore dresses and once in a while put on an apron, for when they were preparing meals or baking; but Mom’s always was on, most of the even in the evening when she crocheted.

Now if anything was every going to get Mom upset it was nakedness or even the mention of nakedness.  Mom was not prudish, far from it, but she didn’t like public mention of something.

“Oh, Dale, you did not,” were the words that came out of her mouth.  More than likely that’s what she said, for she often said something like that to Dad. I should have figured out then that something was up.

“I’m standing here, aren’t I,” Dad could have said.  He always reinforced his statement with something that one couldn’t argue with.

“She was slopping hogs, stark naked.” And then my father told my mother that he had to get out of there as fast as he could, before Arlo came home.  And with that, if I remember right, Dad had his heavy coat on as was going out the door.

Usually if something like this occurs in our home, there’s commotion after, and as a kid one has to be prepared for that.  But it was, whatever it was, was not nearly as perfect as that image of Arlo Nordby’s wife naked slopping hogs.”

During my teaching years, I often told that story about my father telling my mother.  I told that story when I was teaching high school, when we were talking about family stories.  I told it when I taught college, when we talked about the use of dialogue.  I told it just to get a rise out of my students.  I don’t think I told it to my children. They never listened to me much then.  And the nature of sitting around telling family tales left with my generation for the most part.

In 1994, my mother could no longer take care of my father.  He was unable to clean himself, make it to the bathroom on time, and he was in pain, and the constant care that my mother did for him at her age was too much for her.   In the nursing home, Dad’s roommate for much of the time was an Alzheimer’s patient who never slept at night. The man’s rapid pacing around the room at night was another kind of torture for my father, in addition to the constant pain that he experienced in his hips. One day I had gone to Manilla to see my father. Others were there too; three or four of us sitting around on those hard chairs rustled in from other places. Dad had been placed on antidepressants by that time and combined with the pain pills, he became more talkative as his body grew weaker. I wanted him to talk about times in the past. It’s always too late to ask for stories, I felt then, when parents are dying. I should have asked for more stories when he was vibrant.

In a nursing home in a small town, almost everyone who’s there knows quite a few of the others, especially if the town is an aging, dying town. I don’t remember how we got on the subject of neighbors, but here I was with the perfect opportunity to ask and I did. “Dad, tell us about the time that you saw Arlo Nordby’s wife naked.”

Dad looked at me, puzzled; and of course I repeated the same request, but in a different way. “Remember, Dad, the day you came home from Nordby’s and you told mom that you saw Arlo Nordby’s wife naked.”

“Oh, I did no such thing he said.”

I said, “Yes, you did. You did say that.”

“I said it all right,” he said, “but I never saw her naked.”

“You never saw her naked?”

“No. I was  joshing your mother.”

I think about the over 50 years at that time that I had believed that Dad, like me in my imagination, saw Arlo Nordby’s wife naked. I think about all the times I’ve told that story, more than likely to each and every new class I taught that had something to do with telling stories; and it was totally false. Now, when I tell the story, I use it to talk about  the plausibility of fiction.

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Studebaker

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The last time I saw Denny, he drove up to Sioux Falls in my junior college year at Augustana  to see me. His wife and child had died, killed in an automobile accident, if I remember down Hwy. 59, down that curved road south of Denison. I hadn’t seen him since my high school graduation, when I noticed him sitting towards the back of the auditorium. He came to graduation, I thought for me; but I found out after, he and another female classmate, another graduate, were riding around together.  Somebody told me, somebody I don’t remember but someone I felt she said as a dig.  I was devastated, felt betrayed.  But my parents took me to graduation and I had to leave with them, and I didn’t drive.  In fact, my father refused to teach me to drive.  I wound up teaching myself the year after I graduated from college when I bought a Ford for $150, one that sucked more oil than used gas.

That night, to find Denny, to see for sure if he was with another,  I snuck out of the house and into the shed that served as our garage. The trickiest part was sliding open the shed door without waking up my parents, for any night on an Iowa farm, the cherished quiet was the norm.  I started up the Studebaker, that I knew how to do, but didn’t turn on the headlights until after I had left the land and drove west a quarter of a mile.  After a mile I turned south and headed towards Manilla. About a mile north, I got cold feet, didn’t want to make a fool of myself, as I was often warned not to do by my parents, and tried to turn the car around and head back.  I knew my father would be quite upset.  In a farmer’s driveway, one whenever I drive by heading to Ridge Road on the way to and from Denison, I cringe, from shame more than likely the result of  my stupidity,  I hung up the car in a ditch.  The right wheel spinning in air on the side of the culvert.  I don’t remember how my father was notified, or if he was notified at all, but just happened to show up.   But if my parents were called  by the farmer, the quiet of that night betraying me then, it was because then everyone in that small community  knew which  car was  what family’s.  In a short time it seems,  my father came down with the tractor and pulled out the Studebaker. Nothing was said that night to me, nor the next day.  Nothing happened that night to me, nor the next day. And I don’t know how the car got back to the farm, but I know I didn’t drive it.

Three years later, Denny said on the phone  that he wanted to see if we could work it out, if he missed something.  I hung out with Augie theatre people then, and as we all know theatre people are pretty wild, and maybe we were then, wild as theatre people can get in a Christian college, which is not wild at all.  I lived off campus with two other girls in the basement of a home owned by a female real estate magnate, at least that is what she seemed to us.  She acted  pretty mysterious too.  We often joked about all her brothers who came to visit;  one in particular.  We drank a lot in that basement.  A huge furnace, one with thick stacks like an octopus, centered the apartment. We skirted around it to enter the one bedroom on the east with two huge beds. The room next to the bedroom on the north  and to the left of the furnace was a small living room in which we pilled empty  beer cars on top of one another against the walls as sort of decoration. In there, no television then, not much of anything to listen to at all in that place, a radio in the kitchen I remember, and a vinyl record player in the living room.  Barbra Streisand, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Janice Joplin, Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul, and Mary.   In that room we necked with our boyfriends.  At the bottom of the stairs that led in from the west,  a galley kitchen with a small white porcelain table and two chairs.  One day I counted over 70 visitors came in and out of the place, down the steps, slamming the door, getting something out of our refrigerator, to smoke a cigarette or drink a beer in the afternoon, some the same.  Grand Central Station across the street from Tuve Hall.  Needless to say, what studying we girls did was done on campus, which was less than a block away.  But we were all smart, remembering what we read and discussed what we remembered, synthesizing our information to make sense of the world.

Denny and I didn’t do anything that night either, although he tried, as all boys tried.  Not that I was virginal; I just didn’t want to anymore.  I think he married again, but I don’t know.  Someone much later told me that she saw Denny mowing the grass in front of this business in Denison.  I think he’s dead.

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Shotgun

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That guy from Earling and I never did anything more than neck–of course he tried, as all boys tried back then–but my father somehow would have found out, and there would have been hell to pay. Before, a guy who was dating someone I called a friend then, not now by any means, told her that he wanted to break up with her and date me. He was so tall, 6’7″, that at the Denison theater he had to drape his legs over the seat in front of him. Stretch, he was called. Mutt and Jeff, we were called. Never knew why that moniker stayed with us. That movie house was known then and now as the Donna Reed theatre. Denny bragged that he shook Donna Reed’s hand when she rode in a 4th of July parade. I only saw her on the Donna Reed show and in It’s a Wonderful Life.

I liked him, but I broke up with him when he tried to go too far. One night on the way to Manilla, Denny pulled over and opened some beer.  He wanted me to drink some, but I refused.

We dated during my junior year and senior year. In the summer, he would come and pick me up in his ’57 Chevy. One hot, humid, sultry night, a night with little breeze, we came back to the farm before curfew and started necking right there in the lane under the yard light, the kind of necking where heads do not rise about a rolled-down window. Funny thing about memories, some images last forever. I remember hearing the shotgun before I saw my father, the click, click to put the shell in the chamber. A hot night, and through the window, hot and heavy on the seat, I heard it in that quiet night. Denny raised up and said, “I best be going.” Then I did too, and saw my father standing in front of the screen door, the shotgun in his hands. I don’t think I kissed Denny before I left the car. I remember that still, the raised head right after the sound, my seeing my father with the gun in his arms ready to be shot.

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Five-mile House

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South of Westside, Iowa, on bloody Highway 30, and north of Manning stands a lone building, at least that is what I remember, called the Five Mile House. If not a dance at Manilla, sometimes in addition to a dance at Manilla, the Five Mile House would be rocking. It was sort of off limits, my parents not wanting any of us kids to go there. It was wilder, tougher, fights were known to break out. And there was Rock ‘n’ Roll, and lots of hard liquor. My folks would go once in a while, but we could never tag along. But one summer when I came home for a time from college, a guy I was dating took me there, and, yes, he fought over me. Apparently someone was flirting with me, or I was flirting with him, and my date pummeled the guy. Today I still remember the booth, towards the back on the east of the dance floor. It happened so fast, the guy who flirted I can’t even remember a feature, no grin, nothing, three punches and he was laid low. Later in my life after I read Joyce Carol Oates‘ “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” that scene comes to mind, but my date was Arnold Friend and Ellie all rolled into one. My date was short and stocky, like Ellie, and he had a funny laugh, like Ellie, but the eruption of violence, the threat of stepping out of line, he was Arnold. I remember my date reached across from me to hit him, sliding up at the same time, then over the side of the booth until all was quiet, at least in our little area. But nothing else surrounding us stopped. The band kept playing, the couples danced, conversations so loud that it seemed we were in the midst of cicadas. I dated him off and on over the next few months, until we had a flat tire in Earling, and I crawled in the door at 3 am. My father got me up at 4, ordering me to do chores, saying over his coffee the later I get in, the earlier I get up. I did date one of his friends later, that I regret a lot more.

I had been around violence before, for although my father was at heart gentle, he raised us tough, in much the same way that he was raised I assume, but I can’t believe that of my grandfather. I disliked and feared my father until in my 20s and feared and was timed around men for much of my life because I feared my father.

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Memorial Hall

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I am participating in Diane DeBella’s #iamsubject project http://www.iamsubject.com/the-iamsubject-project/. Here is my #iamsubject story.

In Iowa, up until I graduated from high school, our family lived on four different farmsteads, on one prior to my first memories when Dad had hired himself out to the Holloways, a man who always respected my father. I was born in a nursing home before my father came home from the service, conceived before they married: Foderberg’s Nursing Home. In fact, all three of us, the second batch of children, were born at Foderberg’s, a two-story clapboard house with pillars in front, modest and unassuming even in those times, I’m sure. Mother pointed it out to me once as I was driving her back from uptown. I remember thinking why I never knew before where it stood, and I had lived around this area up until I graduated from high school. My older sister’s father died when she was five from tuberculosis. I am not sure where she was born.

Foderberg’s is still standing. It is a little ways south of Main Street, or what surpasses as main street in that small town of Manilla. Then it was probably more livelier than the town is now with its three bars, mini-grocery store (I think Tiny’s is still there), two gas stations kitty-cornered from one another: one a mini-mart; the other, just gas. One gas station for conversation, ice cream cones, sundries on the weekends, and lottery; the other just gas. Both for cigarettes still, I assume. A seed company still exists down from Rocky’s I believe, although the last time I went home, I thought the place looked pretty bare. The doctor’s office is now gone. Mom always complained about the doctors that practiced there after Dr. Hennessey retired.

During my teenaged years, on the drag down the center of town, ’57 Fords and Chevys and others braked and squealed and rolled down windows and chatted and exchanged girls, from one back seat to another, that is if the girls pushed the seat forward and shoved the driver into the steering wheel to scoot out or if the boys in the other car enticed the girls from the other car. We knew we had to move, if the driver in the other car, opened the back seat so we could crawl in behind. I never learned the unwritten rule.

The other stop we teenagers made at that time was the bowling alley, especially after football. I played in the marching band, piccolo or cymbals, the oboe too fragile for kicking up clods in the turf. In the girls’ bathroom at the bowling alley, cheerleaders sprayed themselves stinky with perfume to hide the sweat from doing the splits high in the air. I remember a couple of them dousing themselves with perfume, squirting their blue felt skirts front and back, suffocating the rest of us who were smashed in that bathroom like sardines.

The dark-haired cheerleader was the first to call it whore juice in my presence. Linda, the cheerleader in my class, laughed. My mother would have slapped my mouth if I said such a thing. Those two had a reputation, at least that is what I was told, having been at this new school since March of my junior year, a tough time for a teenager not skinny as a rail.

I didn’t smoke then, at least openly, although I would sneak one of my mother’s sometimes when I did chores, slopping the hogs especially, for I could hide it while carrying a slop bucket up the hill from the barn to the hog pen; the five-gallon slop bucket on my left side and a lit cigarette between my fingers on my right, the side away from the bay window, just in case she peeked out. A five-gallon bucket full of slop is heavy; one usually has to balance the weight with the other arm raised like pump handle and that was tough to do with a lit cigarette between the fingers. From the slop to the troughs at top of the hill, as long as I was in sight, I never put the cigarette to my mouth, and kept it hidden, that is until my aunt nudged my mother with a notion that I was smoking a cigarette, for she saw smoke trailing behind me like a pendant. At the top of the hill, out of sight from the bay window, I put the cigarette in my mouth while both hands lifted the bucket over the fence and sloshed the dregs from milking, the potato peels, leftovers, if there were any, into the hog trough.

And then there was the Memorial Hall. Almost every week, especially in the summer, dances with live bands who made the circuit throughout the small southwestern towns stretching out of Omaha, Nebraska, up through to Carroll, Iowa, and back, playing polkas and waltzes. Once in a blue moon, a rock and roll song excited us teenagers. We went because our parents went. Dad glided around the sanded floor waltzing with Mom, with this neighbor lady, with that, with me or my sister. I learned to waltz following the rhythm of my father’s shoes; polka still is beyond me.

The dance hall was on the upper level; beer and sandwiches in the lower level, all ran by the Legion. Two sets of stairs on either side led from the hall down to beer and sandwiches. Mom served sandwiches along with the others in the Auxiliary, and Dad tended bar along with the Legionnaires. On the landing of the front set of stairs, a door opened directly to street level. If I mix myself in with others coming down the stairs, Mom wouldn’t see me and I could sneak out the side door that opened on street level and go for a ride with some other kids, in one of their cars. Once when I came back on a weekend from college, a handsome boy asked me if I could have a drink. I asked mom, and she said, “As long as you don’t act silly. Out the side door we went, and there we kissed. I still think about him today, almost 50 years later.

 

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Wine

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In the 1950s, the end of my childhood and my teen years,  my father would come home on a Friday night after playing cards with a few guys in the local pool room in the small town about four miles from our place, most often with a carton of Pall Malls that hopefully would last my parents a week, more if there was a blizzard or the roads muddy, and a gallon jug of whiskey, usually Windsor; and once in a while a gallon of Betty Anne Wine.  A sip of that would settle us kids down quickly, settle as meaning dead to the world.  I don’t remember the ritual of going to bed, but I do know that if we resisted, there would be hell to pay.  Usually after the night news at 10 pm, a quick undress, and under the stack of covers, if cold as a Witches’ teat as my father would say,  or a sheet, if hotter than Hades. I still remember the taste of that wine, sweet, almost like sherry, both of which I can’t drink now.

Other than an occasional small glass of wine, we kids were not allowed to drink, although once in a while we took a sip of Mom’s or Dad’s beer, Schlitz, if they had some.  We were quite poor; any type of imbibing would have to be few and far between.  Today I know that in my father’s later years, when the strength in his limbs was no longer there, that beers in the afternoon on the back porch was the only thing that he enjoyed, besides the Cubs, that is.  The Cubs kept my father hanging on, the tv on the porch blaring, disturbing my mother who sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee and writing letters to old friends and relatives, once in a while drinking a beer too.