Coop Read online

  Dad put the clamp in place and snugged it down. Then he attached the milker, and the cow kicked it off immediately. He tightened the clamp a few more twists. She kicked the milker off again. I have never heard Dad cuss, but he must have been close. I will say that by the third time he gathered up the milker unit, he had developed a firm set to his jaw. Taking a deep breath, Dad gave the handle two more vigorous twists, at which point the cow collapsed in a heap atop the milker. The cow was fine, if flustered, but it took us the better part of ten minutes to tug that milker out from beneath her.

  Dad hung the clamp on the wall. It dangled there for a few months until the man came to pick it up, and we never did get that cow to stop kicking.

  When the milk thinned out and streaked through the clear main hose like white raindrops wisping across a windshield, you cut the vacuum by twisting a petcock and lugged the suddenly heavy milker to the walk. Occasionally a cow topped the pail, but Dad never went crazy pursuing production. He’d add a little salt and mineral to the cow feed, but beyond that, he said if we don’t grow it, they don’t eat it. Some of our cows produced a hundred pounds of milk per day, but they’d have to drop below forty pounds before Dad sent them down the road.

  In the beginning we shipped our milk in cans. The cans stood about three feet tall and weighed 100 pounds when full. I remember the warmth of them full with fresh milk inside the tiny stand-alone milk house, then Dad lowering the cans neck-deep into a concrete tank of cool water hidden beneath a heavy wooden lid. When Dad refreshed the water, the overflow traveled through a pipe to the stock tank in the barnyard. The pipe ran about three feet above the ground and was polished smooth; we often used it for gymnastics and tightrope walking. Every other day Gene the milkman would pull up with his cavernous steel truck and, in a rattle-bang exchange, trade us empty cans for full. Gene was sinew-skinny, but he kneed those full cans aboard the elevated truck deck like they were packed with cotton.

  In order to get a better rate for his milk, Dad eventually built a new milk house. This one was filled with fun doodads—a double stainless steel sink, liquid soap dispensers, a paper towel roller just like the one in public restrooms (it was required to make inspection; to save money, Dad never actually let us use any of the paper), a double-sided trapdoor in the wall to admit the hose that pumped the milk to the truck (we used the trapdoor to play mailman), a door that swung both ways between the barn and the milk house (it reminded us of the ones we saw in restaurants), and a shiny stainless-steel bulk tank the size of a hot tub. We loved to pull the tiny cymbal-like lids and watch the revolving paddle swirl the milk as it cooled, and on hot days we would go around the back of the tank and stick our hands elbow deep in the water reservoir to touch the cooling coils when they were fat and silky with ice.

  During construction, while the walls had yet to be enclosed, my sister Suzy was playing farmer, and my brother Jed was her cow. In need of a stanchion, Suzy had Jed stick his head in the gap between two studs. Later we were all seated at the dinner table when Mom noticed Jed was missing. “Oh,” said Suzy nonchalantly, “he’s in the milk house.” And so we found him, on hands and knees with his head jammed between a pair of two-by-fours. Having pushed his way in, he couldn’t back out. Dad levered the studs apart and freed him. I was always confused when city kids asked us how we had fun without a television.

  Dad ran two milking units with three buckets. We dumped the spare bucket while two more cows were being milked. He built the milk-house floor four feet lower than that of the barn, so when we stepped through the swinging door, we stood on a concrete landing with our feet at the same level as the bulk tank. Rather than having to lift and dump the milk, we just stepped across the gap, put one foot on the corner of the tank, and dumped from ankle height. The milk passed through a strainer, draining slowly away to leave a round cap of snow-white froth atop the disposable paper filter. Toward the end of milking the barn cats would start hanging around the door, waiting for the moment we tossed the filter in the gutter and they could lick it clean.

  While Dad milked the final cow, I fed the calves. Originally Dad used a powdered milk replacer we mixed up in a bucket, but over time he took to putting air quotes around the word “replacer” and went back to the real stuff. The calf bottles were roughly the size of a milk carton and capped with a rubber nipple. The calves wriggled their tails and sucked with such frantic exuberance that if you didn’t hold the nipple tightly, it burst off and the milk hit the concrete in a big white splash. You also learned not to stand directly behind the bottle, as calves have an innate tendency to pause in their suckling in order to deliver a vicious head butt originally intended to get Ma to let her milk down. If you’re a little kid with a bottle in your solar plexus, the only thing let down is tears. If you’re a little boy holding the bottle even lower, you find yourself gasping wordlessly in the gutter. The bottle was empty when you heard the squinch-squinch of the calf sucking air. You had to give a mighty tug to get the nipple free, and the calf didn’t want to stop. Sometimes we let them nurse our fingers, and I remember warm slobber, the ridged roof of the mouth, and the scratchy scrub of the tongue.

  When you heard the vacuum pump power down, you knew Dad had thrown the switch, and the milking was done. In summer we’d walk the mangers, unsnapping each cow from her neck chain. They’d back half out of their stalls and, like a tugboat in an undersize boat slip, make a ponderous turn followed by a teeter-totter lunge sufficient to clear the gutter, then head for the door. They’d go to the pasture, and we’d go to the house.

  I got religion in the third grade, and jeepers, did I need it. The devil was in me, and Hardy Biesterveld wasn’t helping. Through second grade, I had been a precocious model of good behavior, with fine marks and a talent for reading two grades ahead. Hardy was a year ahead of me, but then he was held back a year, and when I crossed the hall we became classmates.

  I do not know what might have spawned my recalcitrance—I recall no particular psychological trigger point other than the fact that Mrs. Zipstrow, the second-grade teacher, was known to fling staplers—but one day there I was, sitting in the hall with Hardy Biesterveld, taking turns to see who could string together the longest unbroken run of swear words. We had been banished to the hallway for disruptive behavior, and indeed, we had taken to hanging out in the classroom as if it were a street corner. Mrs. Kramschuster was in her rookie year, and we threw sand in her gears at every opportunity. Hardy once proposed that we conceive of her as a ball of rubber cement. Holding one hand about a foot from our eyeballs, we pinched her image between our thumb and forefinger, mimed rolling her between our palms until she was the size of a marble, and then played catch with her. We bounced her off the blackboard, and we stuck her to the ceiling. When she told us to behave, we generally complied, but smirked, rolled our eyes, and insulted her beneath our breath. We sometimes cast her in the composition of indecent rhymes. We were a pair of impudent slyboots.

  My moral decline was exacerbated by Mrs. Lovelace, a teacher’s aide. Bountiful is the only word that will do. Young, blond, and newlywed, she elicited within us a naive friskiness. One day she came through the classroom door clad in a black velveteen top with a neckline that appeared to have been cut around the prow of a galleon. Suddenly we were eager swots in search of constant tutoring. Again and again we lugged our geography workbooks to her table. Mimicking Hardy, I leered knowingly, but inside I was trembly with prepubescent wonderment. That profound mammate cleft, framed in a breathtaking swoop of embroidered décolletage—the vision pressed itself warmly into my young brain. Hardy and I marked the occasion by composing crude boob jokes, at least one of which incorporated an internal rhyme scheme. I was being drawn down the path of wickedness. Here is Mrs. Kramschuster, writing in my first-quarter report card, under section II, Student Attitude to Date: “Mike is a polite boy in class and displays a mature ability to get along with his classmates. Cooperative and responsive…. He is prone to visiting recently, which is affecting his studies and
progress.”

  Mrs. Kramschuster, second quarter: “Mike achieves more success when not distracted by Hardy Biesterveld. Mike is becoming more sensitive to others but I am afraid his friendship with Hardy may affect this…. Appears to have developed better self-control, with the elimination of moodiness.”

  Mrs. Kramschuster, third quarter: “Continues to waste time. Mike appears belligerent when asked to get to work…. Appears more moody.”

  Sounds like a boy who needs to get right with Jesus.

  The 1936 edition of The Best Loved Poems of the American People, selected by Hazel Felleman, is a 670-page brick. Ms. Felleman, a longtime editor of the Queries and Answers page of the New York Times Book Review, is hailed in the introduction by Edward Frank Allen as “the liaison officer who has coordinated the poetry preferences of the nation.” Our copy resided on a shelf beside the Monarch woodstove. Best Loved is arranged in twelve sections. I spent the majority of my time in section VIII, “Humor and Whimsey.” “The Animal Fair” and “How Paddy Stole the Rope” were favorites. But one night I stopped off in section III, “Poems That Tell a Story.” And, I came to a poem titled “The Hell-Bound Train.” It scared the bejesus out of me.

  It has been twenty years since I read “The Hell-Bound Train,” and over deer hunting season this year, when I was in my parents’ house, I had another look at it. I couldn’t remember much about the poem, just the idea of a locomotive steaming for hell. I recalled an image of the devil stoking the steam furnace.

  Turns out the poem’s main character is a cowboy. I had forgotten that:

  A Texas cowboy lay down on a barroom floor

  Having drunk so much he could drink no more;

  So he fell asleep with a troubled brain

  To dream that he rode on a hell-bound train.

  I remembered none of this. But there, in the second stanza, was the image that had scared me silly:

  The engine with murderous blood was damp

  And was brilliantly lit with a brimstone lamp;

  An imp, for fuel, was shoveling bones,

  While the furnace rang with a thousand groans.

  The lines hit my third-grade gut like an electric acid ball. Reading the next ten stanzas was like walking through a house of horror—the lost souls “all chained together,” the air becoming “hotter and hotter” until “the clothes were burned from each quivering frame.” There was shrieking and begging, there was the devil, capering and dancing for glee. “You have…mocked at God in your hell-born pride…so I’ll land you safe in the lake of fire…where your flesh will waste in the flames that roar.”

  In the last two stanzas, the cowboy startles and wakens with an anguished cry. In great desperation, he prays for salvation.

  And his prayers and his vows were not in vain

  For he never rode the hell-bound train.

  I ran to the bathroom.

  I stood between the toilet and the sink, teary with fear, praying that I might escape the hell-bound train. I stood there a long time. When I had finally composed myself, I cut quickly through the light of the dining room, up the stairs, and straight to bed. Dad was at the kitchen table, but I didn’t want to talk. Beneath my quilt and with quaking heart, I promised God I would do better. At some point in the supplication, I slept.

  When I checked out a copy of The Writer’s Market from the L. E. Phillips Memorial Library sometime in the late 1980s, I was gainfully employed as a registered nurse and had not the slightest conception that I might one day actually pay the rent by writing. I’ve been surviving at it in one form or another ever since, and so far so good, but as a freelance operator you never get clear of the sense that the current gig might be your last, and this is what drives me to hunt down magazine assignments and pitch the next book and hit the road for days on end with boxes of books in the trunk and my well-worn anecdotes at hand. We’re in good shape right now (it helps when I get my annual Social Security statement and see all those four-figure years in the not-so-distant past). Still, as I once heard someone put it, the secret to successful self-employment is to wake up scared every morning, and I usually do.

  In public, I am prone to saying freelance writing is a slightly less reliable way of making a living than farming. But when I think of all the hungry mouths circling the dinner table, and Dad out there in the barn trying to make a living with the milk of eighteen cows, I scale down the drama. Dad supplemented the milk check with some on-call work for a factory in Bloomer over the years, and Mom earned money from the county for providing foster care, but even with that in the equation, the family still qualified for government cheese. For years Mom refused the cheese, in part because she felt that she and my father—with their education and opportunities—had made what we now call “a lifestyle choice” and shouldn’t expect any help towing the barge. But when my sister Rya—dying of congenital heart and lung failure, her potassium levels depleted by diuretics—got to where she would drink only orange juice, Mom followed the urging of a county social worker and signed up for the program so she could buy OJ concentrate by the case. She did the same thing when my little brother Eric, on gastric tube feedings from infancy until the time of his death at ten, needed special formula. And sometimes the social workers just insisted that we take the cheese. I remember it in the fridge, pale yellow inside the cardboard box, more like a giant pencil eraser than cheese.

  We grew up poor but not wanting. Our clothes were nearly all secondhand and came packed in cardboard boxes, but I remember the arrival of the boxes as an occasion for excitement rather than shame. We clustered around as Mom sorted the booty, hoping somewhere in there was a cool T-shirt our size. When we pulled the shirts over our heads, they were already broken in, but the scent of unfamiliar detergent made them seem new. Once a year at the end of summer we went to Chippewa Falls to buy school shoes from a store owned by a man named Ed, who kept seconds and overstocks in the back for families just like ours. When we got home with our shoes, we’d bail out of the car and rip around the yard, convinced that this year’s tennies were the speediest ever. “These have good treads,” I’d say, cutting sharply like a running back.

  Mom pinched pennies wherever possible, perhaps nowhere more than in the area of food. But we never went to bed hungry. Back before the big-box buying clubs of the present, there was a dingy warehouse in Eau Claire with great racks of off-brand and damaged goods. Rarely did we open a can of beans that didn’t look like it had been backed over by the truck that delivered it. And the Great Generic Craze that struck in the mid-1970s was right up Mom’s alley. The pantry was stacked with white cans labeled BEANS and white bags marked MACARONI. I am not a picky fellow, but I am not opening a white can that says TUNA. In later years, after I left the farm, my brothers provided harrowing details of meals comprised entirely of frozen leftovers from the county jail, but I am not going to pursue this story, as I’m not sure who Mom knew on the inside, and I’d hate to land her smack in the middle of a scandal at this late stage.

  The savings began with breakfast. Five days a week we got oatmeal. Plain, gray, factory-grade oatmeal possibly useful as masonry mortar. In fairness to Mom, there were occasional deviations into decadence—farina with raisins! cornmeal with molasses!—and on Fridays she would indulge her profligate inner hedonist by stirring fourteen generic chocolate chips into a pot of oatmeal the size of your head. (In fairness to Mom, she has recently produced a breakfast schedule written on a recipe card that seems to indicate there was less oatmeal than I remember, but for all I know she made that card up a week ago, and I’m sticking with my story the way that oatmeal stuck to my ribs.) During a particularly impecunious stretch we cut back on oatmeal and ate boiled wheat, because the neighboring farmer let Mom scoop it straight from the grain wagon into a garbage can, thus qualifying her for the wholesale rate. Some of it we ground into flour. On Saturday we got pancakes, but I was legal to vote before I realized you do not make maple syrup by dissolving two tablespoons of brown sugar in a pan of hot water. Botto
m line: if you had breakfast at our house on a weekday, odds are it originated from a twenty-five-pound bag or a thirty-two-gallon plastic trash can.

  But Sunday…on Sunday we ate cereal from a box. Boughten cereal, we called it. Cereal like all the other kids ate. All the other kids, that is, whose mothers bought discounted off-brand raisin bran in damaged packaging and never went shopping until she had attacked the Chetek Alert coupon section like D’Artagnan on a bender. When she finally paused to let her scissors cool, the newspaper looked as though it had been caught in the cross fire of a street fight conducted with X-Acto knives and a confetti cannon. Upshot being, if we got cereal, it was either on sale, a two-for-one special, or one of those “replica” knockoffs in a plastic bag (so much for cereal in a box). How I longed for Apple Jacks. Still, on Sunday there was no oatmeal, and that was enough.

  Sunday’s “boughten” cereal represented a rare concession to expedience. When you are struggling to get six or eight kids ready to leave for church by 9:30 a.m., and some of those kids are developmentally disabled or run-of-the-mill recalcitrant grumps (Your Author), you are happy and wise to line up the cereal boxes like books on a shelf, toss out spoons and a stack of bowls, and let the rug rats have at ’er. And man, we could get through some grain. One time we were watching television at Grandma’s house and a Total cereal ad came on, the one where comically stacked bowls of competitor’s cereal are juxtaposed with a single bowl of Total cereal, and the announcer says something along the lines of, “You’d have to eat fourteen bowls of Frooty-Os to equal the nutrition in one bowl of Total,” at which point my brother John turned to me with resolve and said, “I’ll take the fourteen bowls.”