The Winter Room Read online

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  TUNING

  SPRING

  SUMMER

  FALL

  WINTER

  ALIDA

  ORUD THE TERRIBLE

  CRAZY ALEN

  THE WOODCUTTER

  AFTER WORDS™

  About the Author

  Q&A with Gary Paulsen

  America and the Natural World

  Norse Mythology

  Comic Books and Captain Marvel

  A Sneak Peek at The Voyage of the Frog

  COPYRIGHT

  If books could be more, could show more, could own more, this book would have smells….

  It would have the smells of old farms; the sweet smell of new-mown hay as it falls off the oiled sickle blade when the horses pull the mower through the field, and the sour smell of manure steaming in a winter barn. It would have the sticky-slick smell of birth when the calves come and they suck for the first time on the rich, new milk; the dusty smell of winter hay dried and stored in the loft waiting to be dropped down to the cattle; the pungent fermented smell of the chopped corn silage when it is brought into the manger on the silage fork. This book would have the smell of new potatoes sliced and frying in light pepper on a woodstove burning dry pine, the damp smell of leather mittens steaming on the back of the stovetop, and the acrid smell of the slop bucket by the door when the lid is lifted and the potato peelings are dumped in — but it can’t.

  Books can’t have smells.

  If books could be more and own more and give more, this book would have sound….

  It would have the high, keening sound of the six-foot bucksaws as the men pull them back and forth through the trees to cut pine for paper pulp; the grunting-gassy sounds of the work teams snorting and slapping as they hit the harness to jerk the stumps out of the ground. It would have the chewing sounds of cows in the barn working at their cuds on a long winter’s night; the solid thunking sound of the ax coming down to split stovewood, and the piercing scream of the pigs when the knife cuts their throats and they know death is at hand — but it can’t.

  Books can’t have sound.

  And finally if books could be more, give more, show more, this book would have light….

  Oh, it would have the soft gold light — gold with bits of hay dust floating in it — that slips through the crack in the barn wall; the light of the Coleman lantern hissing flat-white in the kitchen; the silver-gray light of a middle winter day, the splattered, white-night light of a full moon on snow, the new light of dawn at the eastern edge of the pasture behind the cows coming in to be milked on a summer morning — but it can’t.

  Books can’t have light.

  If books could have more, give more, be more, show more, they would still need readers, who bring to them sound and smell and light and all the rest that can’t be in books.

  The book needs you.

  G.P.

  In the spring everything is soft.

  Wayne is my older brother by two years and so he thinks he knows more than I can ever know. He said Miss Halverson, who teaches eighth grade, told him spring was a time of awakening, but I think she’s wrong. And Wayne is wrong too.

  Or maybe it’s just that Miss Halverson wants it to be that way. But she has never seen spring at our farm and if she did, if she would come out and see it, she would know it’s not a time of awakening at all. Unless she means awakening of smells.

  It’s a time for everything to get soft. And melty. And when it all starts to melt and get soft the smells come out. In northern Minnesota where we live, the deep cold of winter keeps things from smelling. When we clean the barn and throw the manure out back it just freezes in a pile. When chickens die or sheep die or even if a cow dies it is left out back on the manure pile because like Uncle David says we’re all fertilizer in the end.

  Uncle David is old. So old we don’t even know for sure how old he is. He says when he dies he wants to be thrown on the manure pile just like the dead animals, but he might be kidding.

  The main thing is that no matter what Miss Halverson tells Wayne, in the spring everything gets soft and it’s an awful mess. When the dead animals on the pile thaw out they bring early flies and that means maggots and that means stink that stops even my father, or Uncle David, or Nels when they open the back door of the barn to let the cows out.

  “Shooosh,” Father says when he opens the door of the barn on a spring morning to let the cows out after milking. The smell from the pile makes him sneeze.

  Just outside the door the cows sink in until their bellies are hung up in manure and slop and they have to skid and lunge to get to solid ground.

  Sometimes my father and Wayne and I have to get in the muck in back of the barn and heave on the cows to help them through. There’s not a part of it that can be called fun. I’m small for eleven, and the goop comes up to my crotch. When I bear down and push on some old cow’s leg and she comes loose I almost always fall on my face.

  That makes Wayne laugh. He’s always ready to laugh when I do something dumb. And when he laughs I get mad and take after him. Then Father has to grab me by the back of my coat and hold me until I cool down — hanging there dripping manure like some old sick cat — and I can’t think of any part of it that makes me come up with an awakening.

  It’s just soft. And stinky.

  We live on a farm on the edge of a forest that reaches from our door in Minnesota all the way up to Hudson’s Bay. Uncle David says the trees there are stunted and small, the people are short and round, and the polar bears have a taste for human flesh. That’s how Uncle David says it when he goes into his stories. He says he’s seen such things … but that’s for later.

  The farm has eighty-seven cleared acres. My father says each tree pulled to clear it was like pulling a tooth. I saw him use the team once to take out a popple stump that wasn’t too big and he had the veins sticking out on the horses’ necks so they looked like ropey cords before that stump let go.

  The woods are tight all around the farm, come right down to the edge of it, but the fields are clean and my father says the soil is good, as good as any dirt in the world, and we get corn and oats and barley and flax and some wheat.

  There are six of us in the family. My mother and father and my brother, Wayne, and my uncle David, who isn’t really my uncle but sort of my great-uncle who is very old, and Nels, who is old like David.

  We all live in a wooden house with white board siding. Downstairs are four rooms. The kitchen, which is big and has a plank table in it and a wood stove with a shiny nickel top, is my favorite. It smells all the time of fresh baked bread because Mother always has rolls rising or cooking or cooling and the smell makes my mouth water.

  Next to the kitchen is a room with a table and a piano and four chairs around the table. In all my life and in all of Wayne’s life, and as near as we can figure in all my parents’ lives, nobody has ever sat at the table or played the old piano. Once a month, when the Farm Gazette comes with the pictures of Holsteins or work horses painted on the cover, my mother puts the magazine in the middle of the table in the dining room — that’s what she calls it — and the magazine stays there until the next month when the new one comes. Once I asked her why. “For color and decoration,” she said.

  Only one time did I ever see anybody take the magazine up. Father came in of a morning after chores and picked the magazine off the table and made a comment about the cow on the cover. Mother took it from him, as if he were a kid. She put it back on the table, postioned it just so, the way she always does, and I never saw anybody move the magazine again.

  Next to the room with the piano and table — we have never once dined in the room so I don’t know why Mother calls it the
dining room — is the winter room. Wayne says Miss Halverson showed him a picture of a house in a city and they had a room called a living room, and that’s what our winter room is — the living room. But that sounds stupid to me. We live everywhere in the house, except for the room with the table and piano, so why have any one place called the living room?

  We call it the winter room because we spend the winter there. In one corner is a wood stove with mica windows so you can see the flame. There are two chairs by the stove, wooden chairs with carved flowers on the back boards. They belong to Uncle David and Nels. Next to each chair is a coffee can for spitting snoose when they chew inside the house. Across from the stove is a large easy chair only a little worn, where Father sits in the winter. Next to the chair is an old horsehide couch with large, soft cushions where Mother sits and Wayne and I sometimes sit, though we usually sit on the floor in front of the stove where the heat can hit our faces and we can see the flames.

  Next to the winter room is the downstairs bedroom where Mother and Father sleep on an old iron bed with a feather mattress.

  Up a narrow wooden stairway there are two more rooms, built under the angle of the roof. One is for Wayne and me. We have bunk beds on one side and a board shelf on the other where Wayne keeps his baseball glove — he’s going to play professional ball when he grows up and leaves the farm — and I have a box of arrowheads I’ve found. Most of them are small black-stone heads with razor-sharp edges that Uncle David says come from ancient times and were used for hunting birds. But one head is large, a spearhead Uncle David says, made of gray flint. I have that one in a case that used to hold an Elgin turnip pocket watch. Sometimes I take the case out from under my mattress and just look at the spearhead and think what it must have been like to hunt with it, throw it and see it hit a deer or one of the large buffalo they used to have.

  The other room upstairs belongs to Uncle David and Nels. It is a little larger than our room and Wayne and I have only been in it a few times. They each have a bed, one on each side of the room back under the slant that comes down with the roof, and a small dresser with a kerosene lamp in the middle so they can blow it out from bed without having to get uncovered. In the winter there is no heat upstairs and you don’t want to get uncovered unless you have to go to the pee bucket in the hall. Even then sometimes we wrap in a quilt and take it with us.

  Uncle David and Nels have quilts on their beds, all-over pattern quilts made by my grandmother when she was old. The few times I’ve been in the room the beds were made all neat and square. Not like ours, which look like cattle have been jumping on them.

  All over the walls are calendars and pictures. On Nels’ side there are pictures of work horses in harness or just standing — big ones, Belgians and Percherons with their names written below them in pretty letters. There is also an old calendar from Norway, over twenty years old, with Norwegian writing on it that I can’t understand and Wayne can’t either. Though he sometimes says he can. Uncle David and Nels and Dad will talk Norwegian when they don’t want us to understand, but it makes Mother mad — she can’t speak Norwegian either — so they don’t do it much.

  It’s as if there is a line drawn through the middle of the room. On one side is Nels and on the other side — in almost a different world — is David. Where Nels has horses and cows and scenery, Uncle David has pictures of farm girls holding flowers and working in gardens, calendars with girls and horses on ranches out west — all of the girls blonde and pretty and smiling. Once I asked Father why Uncle David had so many pictures of girls and he said it was because he was once married to Alida but didn’t have any pictures of her. When I asked him why Nels had no pictures of girls he said it was because Nels was never married. I don’t know what he meant exactly, but many questions I ask Father are answered that way, with words around the edges.

  Also on Uncle David’s side of the room there are books. Not just the Bible. They both have the Bible by their beds. Father says they each read one verse to the other in Norwegian before they go to sleep. But on Uncle David’s side there are four other books — only I don’t know what they are because the titles and the writing are all in Norwegian. I know they’re thick. Big books. Sometimes Uncle David will bring one of them down and read it in the kitchen at night because that’s the only room with enough light. The Coleman lantern hangs in the middle of the room and hisses and gives off a flat light so bright you have to squint when you come in from the barn at night. Uncle David sits at the kitchen table and reads silently, his lips moving, sometimes for an hour and more. Once Wayne asked him what he was reading but he just shook his head and didn’t answer. We knew it wouldn’t do any good to ask after that. So we don’t know what’s in the books.

  * * *

  The rest of the farm is two granaries and a barn. The granaries are made of rough sawn wood polished smooth by all the oats and barley poured in and shoveled out for the stock. They sit one on each side of the farmyard to keep the wind from ripping through in the winter.

  The barn is a large log building at the end of the yard. It has two floors, the upstairs being the hayloft, and is made of logs so big there aren’t trees that large anymore. The bottom logs are so huge Wayne and I would have to link arms to get around one of them. The logs get smaller as the barn walls go up, because they had to be lifted, but the corners are linked and cut with wedge cuts so that as they settle they get tighter.

  Wayne says the barn and house and granaries were built before any of us came, even before Father’s father came from the old country and died in the woods. I can’t say it isn’t so. Once I asked Father about it while we were waiting for hog water to heat for butchering which is the slowest of all times except Christmas Eve, waiting to fall asleep so you can get up and come down to see what’s been left under the tree.

  Father didn’t know how old the farm was either, and when I asked Uncle David he just smiled and nodded and Nels didn’t seem to hear me.

  So the farm is old. Sometimes Wayne and I sit in the hayloft and wonder about the logs, about how old they are. You can see where the axes made marks when they were chopped and where the long drawknives made flat cuts when they were peeled, and in one log, near the end of the barn and down out of sight where you can barely see it, there is a name carved.

  KARL, it says, in letters cut deep and so far under it had to have been done right after the tree was cut down. I asked Father and Nels and Uncle David and Mother and even Wayne, but none of them knew a Karl with a K, only several Carls that started with C. Somehow that made the name ancient. I saw Wayne sitting alone near the name touching it once with one finger and when I asked him what he was doing he just smiled.

  That was the time, that spring, when Wayne and I went out in the woods near the backyard and found a large tree and carved our names in it. Wayne carved his in all large letters, using a wood chisel and a hammer, but I used a knife and didn’t get mine so deep. I felt bad, until that winter Father cut the tree for pulp and sent it off to the paper mills where it would be shredded anyway….

  Inside the barn, the ground floor is laid out with a long aisle down the middle, where the cows are milked; on the right of that is a manger that runs the full length of the barn. The cows come in and put their heads through wooden slots called stanchions and Father or one of us goes down the line and closes them in with a locking board to hold their heads while we milk. Except in winter. In winter they stay in all the time because the deep cold is too much for them and they would die.

  At the end of the manger area there is a little door cut in the wall that leads outside to a large covered pit full of silage. Silage is chopped corn and corn plants put up in the fall and fed to the cattle all winter. It is supposed to be good for them, and they love it and push against the stanchions and bellow when the small door is opened and they see Father come in with the silage fork. Uncle David says they do that because silage ferments and they get drunk on it. Either way, they eat every bit of it and lick the wood of the little silage box
in front of each stanchion until the wood is shiny and as glass smooth as the salt block in the south pasture that they lick in the summer.

  Across from the cows, on the other side of the barn, there is a row of calf pens. Each cow has to have a calf or it won’t freshen and give milk. But the cow gives way more milk than even ten calves could drink so the calves are kept in a pen and fed milk with a bucket. The extra milk we keep for selling or drinking. There are three pens of calves and in the spring when they’re born and put in the pens the barn is filled with the warm dampness of them. Uncle David calls it the best time there is, when the young come in the early spring. Sometimes he’ll fill his lower lip with snoose and just stand by the pen, sucking on the tobacco and watching the calves quietly as they try to play and fall all over each other.

  When the calves are brand-new, they don’t know how to drink out of a bucket and they run around the pen trying to suck on anything to get milk. They get each others’ ears, or tails, or noses, or pieces of wood on the side of the barn. I saw one once get hold of a new kitten’s tail and suck on it until the whole kitten was goobered with spit.

  Wayne and I are the ones who get them to drink because our hands are smaller than the grown men’s. When the milking is almost done we each take a small bucket of milk and climb into a calf pen. They’re on you right away, sucking at your clothes or elbows and you have to get your fingers in their mouths and while each one is sucking on your fingers you pull your hand gently down into the warm milk and pretty soon they’re sucking right at the milk and drinking it like they’ve known how all along. Unless they’re dumb. Some of them are dumber than others and don’t get it. Wayne had a calf two springs ago that never did learn, even when he got nearly big enough to be weaned. It was a sight, watching Wayne get into the pen with that huge calf. He would run over to Wayne and grab his hand and jerk it down into the bucket so he could get milk. It got so Wayne was half afraid to get into the pen and every morning when we came near to feeding calves he would start bargaining with me to take his calf.