CHAPTER 1
BOY ON THE FARM
It was late summer in 1955, when the corn tassels have stoppedbeing erect and the impregnated ears are heavy with milk. I hadrecently graduated from seminary in new Jersey, and this visit to theMidwest of my youth was a kind of home-coming. Our automobilehad threaded its way on paved and graveled roads through alabyrinth of these cornfields, crossing the state line from Hardwickin southwest Minnesota into northwest Iowa. Aunt Tillie and UncleDatus were happy to hear the crunch on gravel as my parents' carturned into their driveway. We came to their farm near Boyden inorder to enjoy Sunday dinner with them: stuffed chicken with allthe trimmings and lemon meringue pie for dessert.
Their only daughter, Marilyn, now in her twenties, was offliving her own life. However, I still felt her presence everywhere onthe farmstead. In the parlor stood the baby grand piano to whichher mother used to press her, pouting, to play a piece for us afterdinner was completed and the dishes were washed and dried. It waslike a scene from a Jane Austin novel—a command performancefollowed by polite applause.
As a child Marilyn had been an adventurous daredevil. Once sheled my brothers and me up the hayloft ladder, which was attachedto one side of a chute in the middle of the barn's interior. It ledupward into the hay floor above. She challenged us to jump to thefarmyard outside from the small door opening outward from thehayloft floor. When we declined, she leaped, Icarus-like, with armsextended, hitting the ground with skeleton shaken but bones intact.She ran to the house, weeping. Her mother's first words were "Whopushed you?"
Can electricity travel up a poured stream of water? Marilyndared us to find out by peeing on the horizontal electric fence eightinches from the ground in the barnyard. The wire was meant toshock the pigs into knowing the boundary of their territory. It wasvery effective, and was supported by insulators nailed to woodenslats extending parallel to the ground from fenceposts. We boys werereluctant, knowing the sharp jolt delivered to your forefinger andthumb if you touched the fence with only a thin blade of greengrass. She boldly lifted her skirt (most girls didn't wear jeans then)and squatted to settle the experiment, but we were still afraid to try.
When my little brother nelson was visiting her for a week,they went to the middle of a cornfield, pushing the leaves asidewith upraised arms as they leapt from row to row. There theypulled down a large number of green cornstalks in order to builda substantial teepee as a base for playing hide and seek. When herfrugal father discovered the clearing, he was furious. Now, yearslater, he was able to look back and guffaw about it.
It was surely more than a whim which provoked me, afterdinner, to excuse myself and drive alone the five miles towardnearby Matlock. There I wanted to view the little house on theIowa prairie where I was born and had spent the first nine yearsof childhood during the Great Depression. Doesn't nearly everyonewant to go back to visit that first home which dwells in the mist ofmemory where it all began, for better or worse? Do we also hopethat such a pilgrimage will help us in our desire to come home tothe self?
As I approached the small house on the right of the gravel road,my initial feelings were nostalgia tinged with disappointment. It waslike looking at an old photograph in sepia. Clearly, the house andbuildings had been abandoned for fifteen years since the originalfarm of 160 acres was made part of a larger operation sometimeafter we moved away in early l940. The roof of the front porchfacing the road, supported by wooden posts, was sagging. Tall weedsand grass grown to seed had taken over the lawn. There were noflocks of pigeons alighting on the barn roof, or barn swallowsswooping down to taunt the cats.
Everything had become strangely smaller. The distance from thehouse eastward to the barn, which to a child had seemed immense,was no more than 40 yards. As children we had believed the talesabout pioneers being lost in a blizzard as they headed to the barn,lantern in hand, to tend their animals. The prudent ones connectedhouse and barn with a rope, we were told, so that in a whiteoutone could navigate with numb fingers. But surely no one couldlose their way on this short trek, no matter how blinding the snowstorm. Looking at the barn, I remembered the small wind turbinemy father once placed at the peak to generate electricity for thebatteries in the basement of the house which powered the radio.
Seeing the barn also ignited another memory of my cousinMarilyn's urge to fly. During haying, Uncle Datus had come tohelp my father at our farm near Matlock. The large hinged haydoor under the roof beam had been lowered so that slings of haycould be lifted from the hayrack by ropes attached to pulleys.A series of pulleys led to a small opening at the base of the barn.There the thick rope was attached to a "doubletree," so the Belgianscould pull the hay upward to the roofbeam and into the hayloft.Cousin Marilyn, who was three or four years old, announced thatshe wanted to fly out of that large upper door. The bottom ofthe opening was now level with the hay in the loft. We brothersencouraged her to begin at the back of the hayloft, where wewere sitting on fragrant piles of dry alfalfa. Her intent was to runtoward the opening and leap, beating her arms ever faster as she ran.Flap, flap, flap, flap, whee! My father and Uncle Datus looked upin disbelief as she plummeted to the ground below, her print dressrising to the level of her whirligig arms as she fell. This time she lostconsciousness and came awake only as her father turned into theirdriveway at the Boyden farm five miles away. Fortunately, she wasagain unharmed.
I walked to the open space where my brothers and I usedto play ball at the edge of the grove or shelter belt north of thehouse, near the small chicken coop. In those days, we used abroken pitchfork handle for a bat. That ball field, littered with deadbranches, was barely larger than the house, a two-story dwellingwhich was at most 25 feet by 30 feet.
Just north of the grove stood the traditional windmill whichsymbolizes the romance of the rural. I remembered my fatherrushing out during a thunderstorm to pull the long wooden leverwhich forced the vane to be parallel to the plane of the wheel offins so that it would not spin out of control in the fierce wind,...
