Coop Page 3
In winter the day began with the sounds of Dad building the fire. From our beds upstairs we’d hear the hinge-squeak of the firebox door and the clank of the lids and center plate as he lifted and set them aside. Next came the rolling rumble of the grates as he shook them free of ash. The grates were rotated by means of a detachable cast iron handle fitted over a stub of square shaft protruding from just above the draft door, and were concave on one side and convex on the other; each time Dad twisted the shaft, a nickel-plated indicator countersunk on the front of the stove slid back and forth, alternately reading WOOD or COAL. When the grates were clear and returned to the WOOD position, he detached the handle and stowed it in one of the warming ovens. Even this action had its own distinct sound: the tinny scrape of the handle sliding back in place and the clunk of the warming oven door stakes dropping into their pockets. If the ash pan was in need of emptying, we’d hear the gritty rasp of it being pulled from the square steel pouch where it nested beneath the grates. Then the front door would open and close and the house would go quiet while Dad walked to the garden and flung the ashes across the snow, where they left a skid mark like a miniature thundercloud run aground.
Then he was back inside, and even now I can summon the image of him downstairs alone, the day’s work in mind, the simple ceremony unfolding. The crumple of the newspaper as he packs it in above the grates. The careful placing of the kindling, and then a few larger sticks of wood to catch and grow the first flames. The lids nesting flush with the stovetop when he replaces them, fitting their receptacles with jigsaw-puzzle precision. The scratch of the match against the sooty interior of the firebox door, Dad ducking his head to light the tinder, the prayerful stance of it, him on one knee and blowing gently at the flame in the predawn darkness, and us his family still abed. Mom and Dad still use the Monarch. It sits right where it has since the day it came back upstairs, just feet from the dining room table. Even today, when we kids gather as adults, someone (or sometimes two of us, if personal dimensions allow) winds up perched on the woodstove door. We sit there even when the weather is warm and there is no fire. Something more than warmth draws us to the stove, something having to do with memory and the center of gravity.
When it comes to parenting tools, it’s tough to beat a woodstove. Pick up your room, we say, because…because…never mind what Daddy’s room looks like! Daddy is not the subject here! Daddy is a full-on poster boy of undiagnosed behavioral disorders! Be nice to everyone, we say, because…because…Yes, even that lady who “waved” at Daddy in the Wal-Mart parking lot…and the snotty little ingrate who stole your beach bucket…Why? Because…because…well, because passive-aggressive is the only way to roll, sweetheart. In other words, how does one convey cause and effect to a six-year-old?
By having her haul firewood, that’s how. You wanna lie around toasting your tootsies, darling daughter? Then get out there and lug some cellulose.
In a sense, my siblings and I lucked out. Dad logged every winter, which meant the sawmill came most summers, leaving behind a giant pile of slab wood, which didn’t need to be split—just sectioned up and stacked. We called these slabwood chunks schniblings—a word we learned from a neighbor up the road. I’m not really sure how you spell schniblings. Most of the time we shortened it to schnibs. Even now as I type this, I fear schniblings will turn out to have been some outrageous ethnic epithet. If so, forgive me. I Googled it and Babel Fish’d it and came up with nada.
The downside of our method was that most of the trees Dad harvested were white pine, which has a burn rate roughly equivalent to Kleenex, so it took a mountain of slabs to keep the house warm. When it was time to “make wood,” as the common phrase had it, Dad rounded up the troops and took us to whichever corner of the farm the sawmill had been set up in last. Sometimes we all climbed in the back of the pickup; sometimes we rode on a hay wagon to which Dad had attached side racks. A certain glumness prevailed when we were in the hay wagon because it was much larger than the pickup, and we were anticipating a marathon. While Dad was gassing up his saw, we kids began stacking slabs in a pair of sawbucks that cradled the wood in a bundle. With one side barky and one side rough-sawn, one end fat and one end knife-skinny (or thin in the middle so they snapped in two mid-lift), the slabs were splintery, unbalanced, and a hassle to handle. Yanking them from the every-which-way pile was like playing full-contact jackstraws. At Christmas, when we went to the city and stood on the carpet of Grandpa’s split-level ranch and watched him fill the fireplace with uniform cylinders of papery-smooth white birch, I remember feeling what can only be described as firewood envy.
Back and forth we went between the sawbucks, alternately filling and emptying them as Dad ran the saw nonstop. We slung the chunks into the wagon or truck bed, stopping now and then to peer hopefully over the side racks. It seemed ages before Dad killed the saw, helped throw the last batch aboard and headed for the house. But the work had barely begun—the wood had yet to be unloaded and stacked in the basement. In later years Dad built a wood chute, but we used to just pull open a window and fling the wood through the opening. When we finished, the sill was battered and busted, and the window had to be held in place with a bent nail. Finally, we stacked the wood, often by increments after school. By the time the first snow fell, the basement was a warren of wooded corridors leading to the root cellar, chest freezer, and sump pump.
The penultimate step in the slab wood journey was the wood box—a large antique crate positioned directly adjacent to the solid Monarch. Once the wood had been stacked in the basement it came back upstairs one armload at a time over winter. By the time you made it upstairs, your biceps were aching and it was a relief to hear the noisy tumble of firewood spilling into the crate. It took a lot of trips to fill the wood box, but the following morning when we raced each other for the stove door, we had in some measure earned the warmth on our hindquarters.
Now that we have moved to the farm, poor Amy has come to understand this dynamic all too clearly. One of her daily wintertime tasks includes making the long trudge to the old granary across the yard where the dry wood is stored. Watching her load up her purple plastic sled and drag it slowly back to the house, I smile, remembering all the times Dad pried me from behind a Louis L’Amour cowboy book to do the same. More often than not, she goes willingly, if not gladly. If she sulks or fusses, I launch into an eye-glazing sermon, reminding her of how many times I have found her curled up in front of the stove with Dora the Explorer, and do you know where that warmth comes from, and let me tell you when I was little we had to go all the way out on the back forty to get wagonloads of wood, and, well, on and on it goes until Anneliese gives me the look normally delivered from the front pew by the wives of long-winded preachers, at which point I stalk off in a cloud of my own oration. Meanwhile, Anneliese explains to Amy that she is not just doing her chores, she is helping the family. Anneliese presents these lessons in terms any six-year-old can grasp, and sees no need to revise upward when—as is regularly required—she adjusts my own focus.
I recently stepped into the upstairs hallway just as Amy emerged from the bathroom cinched underarms to knees in a towel. As I watched, she dropped her head forward, wrapped her dangling wet hair in a second towel, twisted it turban-tight, and then—in a single unbroken motion—rose upright and flipped the tail of the towel back over one shoulder before scampering to her room. I stood stock-still, having just witnessed the future rocketing beyond my grasp. Of course I saw her mother in the movement, but I also detected a more universal womanliness, a posture of assurance. Were the moment to be rendered in neon, you would have this bright buzzing sign flashing See Ya Later, Old Man.
Amy is my given daughter. The term is not mine. A poet friend blessed me with it when I was trying to work my way around the word stepdaughter—a term I find serviceable by way of explaining the situation but utterly short of the mark when it comes to expressing the heart. Amy’s father Dan lives in Colorado, and I am grateful to say that we get on well. As a m
atter of fact, we have just returned from a visit with him, his wife Marie, and their two toddling sons. Amy relishes the chance to play big sister, and quite rightly calls the boys her brothers without qualification or prefix. As for the adults, we are nearly four years into a relationship that is in some respects highly unusual, but ultimately exactly as it should be. We are sometimes complimented on how we have managed to skirt the mire, but not a one of us takes the situation for granted, and if the subject is raised, each will point to the critical contribution of the other three. In these situations only one person is required to bring the whole deal down, so: Yay, team. I am reminded of a party trick I learned as a child in which you set four water glasses butt-up in a square pattern and then weave the blades of four butter knives in such a way that the handle of each knife rests on an upended glass and the blades form a self-supporting grid in the middle. Once the blades interlock they will support a fifth glass filled with water. Remove any one of the knives and the whole works collapses, dumping the water. Amy is the water in the glass. Amy’s father says we are “an anomaly relying on grace and friendship.” Unfortunately, he is eloquent and able to express himself without resorting to party tricks as allegory. Additionally, he stands six-foot-seven, has all his hair, and can make raspberry coulis from scratch.
If there was any lingering alpha male tinder smoldering between Dan and me, I trust it was snuffed on the third night of this most recent visit. Thinking I heard a call from Amy’s bedroom, I ran upstairs to check on her and found that she had taken ill. Based on her sad puppy eyes and chalky countenance, I determined she was shortly due to hurl. Grabbing a towel from the doorknob, I scooped her up just as the first blast blew. I caught most of it in the towel and hustled to the bathroom, where I wrapped a steadying arm around her and used my free hand to keep her hair from her face while the poor kid heaved in the toilet.
During the first false lull, she raised a plaintive cry: “What is HAP-pen-ing?”
And I realized: this was her first-ever upchuck session. Of course she’d spit up as an infant, but carried no memory of it. This was the first real deal.
“You’re throwing up, baby,” I said, projecting calm reassurance. “It’s because you’re sick. It’s no fun. But it’s OK. You’ll feel better.” She barfed again.
During the next lull, through tears she said, “This is a really bad day!”
When the vomiting stopped for good, I stood at the sink, running a cool rag over Amy’s face. By now Dan had come to help. When I looked up into the mirror I saw him reflected behind me, dipping the towel up and down in the toilet while simultaneously flushing away the throw-up. “Little trick my mother taught me,” he said when our eyes met, and I remember thinking, What are the odds of this moment?
Yay, team.
Amy is growing so fast. You think you hear that all the time, but I mean growing. She is six years old and the top of her head comes to the middle of my chest. No guarantees, but it would appear she is headed for the far side of six feet. Not only is Dan six-seven, he is the shortest of three brothers. His mother is an elegant woman of six feet. His sister—who looks just like Amy in her baby pictures—is six-two. Being so tall can be tough on a little one—even we sometimes grow impatient with her based on the age projected by her height as opposed to her actual chronological stature. And because we are homeschooling, we often forget how tall she is until she goes to dance class or swimming lessons and stands beside her peers. Still, we’re taking the straight approach. We just tell her, Yes, it looks as if you will be tall—just like your beautiful grandma, and your lovely auntie. Sometimes in rehearsal for the future I lift Amy up and stand her on a kitchen chair. I am five-eight at my most optimistic, so I tip my head back, shake my finger at her from below, and say, “Go clean your room!” And then in unison we both say, “Just practicing!” and she always laughs.
Shortly after we return from Colorado, she gets chicken pox. Poor kid, this makes three times she’s been sick since Christmas, when she broke out in red spots all over. It looked like measles. Being self-insured, we made the diagnosis using Google and my twenty-five-year-old nursing textbooks. I was up at 2:00 a.m., going back and forth between text and screen. Everything matched up, with the exception of some spots in her mouth. I dug a little deeper, and there in the text discovered scarlatina, which is potentially less hassle than measles. The buccal cavity lesions matched up, and so we called it.
The thing that caught me off guard was how helpless I felt when she was sick. Over the years my parents have taken care of many severely ill children, some of them terminal. So I’ve seen far worse than flu and scarlatina. But this would be the first time it was a child for whom I was responsible. Early indications are that I respond by going weak-kneed and turning everything over to Anneliese. In theory I support her in her determination to not be medically overaggressive, and I am even open to certain alternative therapies, but the minute the kid is symptomatic, I’m ready to run for the drops and pills. In this case, Anneliese held the line, and soon Amy was better. I tell you though, the next time I heard Greg Brown’s song “Say a Little Prayer,” it sat me right down.
We are still in the process of moving possessions from our New Auburn home, and with the real estate market in a funk, there is no sign of an imminent sale. I’ve already caused Amy to move thrice between the age of three and seven. When we met, she and Anneliese had finally settled into a home of their own after living in more temporary conditions in Colorado and Wisconsin. After Anneliese and I married, we sold their house, and they moved to mine. Now we’re moving again. As a kid allowed to grow up in only one place, I wonder what effect all this moving will have on Amy. Sometimes she gets teary and says she will miss her New Auburn bunk bed. Sometimes she gets teary about what she calls her “Talmadge house” (she and Anneliese lived on Talmadge Street). So I am second-guessing our move when we take time from a hectic day to stop by the New Auburn house for another load of boxes, but as Amy waits for me to unlock the door, she looks up cheerily and says, “This is one of my hometowns!” She says it like more than one hometown is a good thing, and this lightens my heart.
Somewhere along my patrilineage—I think it may have begun with my great-grandfather Wyman—our family developed the habit of responding to childish or unrealistic demands with the phrase “One, two, three, want!” “I want a new wagon!” I might say, to which my father would respond, “One, two, three, want!” Translated, the phrase means “fat chance.” Of course when Amy came into my life, I was eager to pass it forward. So now we are in Farm & Fleet, and as we pass the toy section she peels away from me. I turn to find her transfixed before a horrifying blister-packed horse-with-princess set. “Ohhh, it’s beautiful,” she says, turning her eyes up to me in that wide-open way that puts a lump straight in my throat. “I really, really want it!” She is heartbreaking in her sincerity. We adults work overtime to mask our desires, but a child just comes right out and tells you, and even when it’s a horrific piece of plastic crapola—or perhaps because it’s a horrific piece of plastic crapola—a child’s willingness to so nakedly admit they really, really want it literally brings tears to my eyes. Unfortunately for Amy, the tears do not wash away my resolve. “One, two, three, want!” I say, and depart for the checkout line.
When I get there, I turn and realize she hasn’t followed me. She is back there before the horse and princess, and she has her fists squeezed tight at her sides and her eyes shut and her little brow is furrowed with focus, and she is saying, over and over, “One, two, three, want! One, two, three, want!”
The poor kid thinks it’s an incantation.
It is hard for me sometimes, to watch this girl—the one who loves to go rambling in my old pickup truck, the one who happily cuts up dead deer on the kitchen table, the one who lugs firewood—stare all googly-eyed at blond plastic princesses, but there you are. Sometimes all the academic feminism in the world can’t compete with a chintzy tiara. And truth be told, her interest in the princess worrie
s me less than her interest in the horse. The first thing Amy showed me the day I met her was her collection of plastic horses, and her fascination with everything equine has only grown since then.
I fear my daughter is Horse People.
You know Horse People. I am not talking about those loftily behatted julep-sippers of the Triple Crown circuit. Those are horsey people. Whereas horse people are generally solid citizens with day jobs. You see them behind the counter at the bank, or working reception at the doctor’s office, or hanging your drywall, and you don’t suspect a thing. But their closets are full of Wranglers and pearl snap shirts, and their backyards are circumscribed with electrified white poly tape, and they will sometimes lapse into talk of snaffles and gymkhana, and somewhere out back is a round-nosed trailer with green windows. These are otherwise rational folks who nonetheless devote an unbalanced preponderance of resources to keep in their possession a large four-legged animal whose one big trick is the ability to transform overpriced hay bales into road apples. I understand I am treading in dangerous territory here, similar to offending cat people (let’s skip right over ferret people, shall we?), but where I was raised, superfluous horses were known as “hayburners.” I also admit I once had a bad experience on a horse named Warts.
I didn’t give in there at Farm & Fleet. I may get the emotional sniffles, but I do not surrender. Having said that, I am aware that under the right circumstances a horse can serve as the intersection where joy and responsibility meet. In short, it is highly likely that I will one day own a dang horse.
In the meantime, she can have a guinea pig.
We have told Amy that the guinea pig will be her responsibility, and that how she executes her commitments specific to the pending Cavia porcellus will have a direct reflection on the possible future expansion of animal husbandry commitments up to and possibly including the acquisition of an equine division. We didn’t put it in those exact words. Actually, I did, but Anneliese sent me off to sort socks before I really got rolling.