The Winter Room Read online

  “I’ll let you read the Captain Marvel comic I got when we went to town Saturday.”

  “I already read it when you were sweeping the granary.”

  “I’ll give it to you.”

  “I don’t want to get into the pen with that calf.”

  “I’ll give you that Captain Marvel and buy you one of those wax-teeth harmonicas when we go in with milk next Saturday….”

  “Nope.”

  I answered fast but it wasn’t that easy a decision. Those orange wax teeth are something. You can play music on them for a while until you’re sick of the squeaking sound they make that always causes Foursons, the dog, to cock his head sideways and look like the RCA dog on the radio in the pictures in the Sears catalog. Then you eat the wax, which has some sugar in it, and chew on it for hours and hours. And when that’s done you give it to Foursons who eats it until he’s sick of it and gives it to the chickens, who always follow him around hoping he’ll drop something.

  To be honest I thought if I held out I could maybe get a Coca Cola and a bag of peanuts to pour into it. Which I like better than the orange wax teeth.

  Wayne was too tight and I didn’t get any of it. He went ahead with the calf on his own even though when he climbed into the pen to feed it we all stopped our work to watch him.

  On the same side of the barn as the calf pens, just at the end, is a separator room. All the milk has to have the cream taken out of it so the cream can be sold separately when we go in on Saturdays. Mother gets the cream money and egg money — and I guess all the money, come to think of it, because I saw Father turning over a check from the elevator for grain one fall, which is practically the only money we ever get. Milk and cream and egg and grain money.

  The separator has a bowl on the top where we pour the milk and a crank on the side to turn it and spin the cream out. The crank is hard to turn until it gets going and then it’s easy. But you have to keep turning it and turning it until all the milk’s been run through, and sometimes they run it through twice.

  Wayne and I have to turn the crank. He turns it one day and I turn it the next. We make marks on the wall with an old pencil stub to keep track of who’s supposed to do it. We don’t hate it, exactly, but like Wayne says if he had a choice between turning the separator or peeing on the weed-chopper electric fence he’d have to think about it a little and I agree with him.

  Parts of it are nice, the separator. It makes a high whine, like you might have with a steam engine running; you can imagine that while you turn. And it’s something to watch the cream come out one spigot, thick and rich, and the milk foam into the milk can out of the other one. It’s all grass, Uncle David says, grass and corn. Wayne and I spent one whole day working out how we planted alfalfa and the cows ate it and we planted corn and the cows ate it and came into the barn and gave us milk for it which we sold to buy more alfalfa and corn seed to plant more to give them….

  “It’s endless,” Wayne said. “It just goes on and on and never ends. Like the stars and the weather.”

  “Unless all the cows get sick and die,” I said, because I always disagree with Wayne and Wayne always disagrees with me.

  “No good, Eldon,” he said, shaking his head. “There’s other cows and other corn and other alfalfa and other milk.”

  “Well, if all the cows died in all the places where there are cows it would end. Then the corn would rot and that would be the end of it.”

  Wayne didn’t even answer. It was lame and I knew it, but it was all I could think of on short notice.

  Next to the separator room is the work horses’ stall. We have a team of two horses, Jim and Stacker, both geldings, so big Wayne and I have to climb their legs to help harness them. Their hooves are as large as pie plates. They stay in all winter except when they get used for hauling pulp wood on the big bobsleds or pull the stone-boat to clean the barn. Sometimes it’s like they aren’t real, Jim and Stacker — that’s what Wayne says.

  They are so big, so strong it’s like they can’t be just horses. Father says they weigh close on a ton each but that doesn’t mean much. It’s the tallness of them. Sometimes in the barn we’ll climb the stall sides and sit on the horses and talk because they are warm and gentle and somehow comfortable — like a living couch. One time we both got on Jim and sat on his rump, the two of us, and there was room to spare. It was like a huge fur table.

  * * *

  Come a late spring day maybe one, two years ago we went to town of a Saturday night so Father could have two beers — he always has two beers when he goes in with Mother to dance.

  In the main room of the beer hall Harrin Olsen plays the accordion and does waltzes and polkas all night Saturday night. Harrin was kicked by a horse and can’t talk or think much but he plays the accordion so wonderfully that people come from other towns just to hear him. And Mother and Father dance and dance. This one night he had his sleeves rolled up and clean overalls on and she was wearing a pretty flowered dress, and before you knew it everybody else had stopped to watch them twirl and twirl around the rough board floors of the beer hall. We watched till it was boring and I left to go drink a Coca Cola with peanuts in it and almost got in a fight with Evan Peterson when he tried to take my Coca Cola.

  That night, in the back room, Wayne found a Zane Grey western in a dusty pile. Guns Along the Powder River. The cover was all in color and showed a cowboy with a roaring six-gun in each hand kind of shooting at you out of the picture. So we sat down with that book and read it and don’t you know, we had to be cowboys. We asked old man Engstrom, who owns the beer hall, if we could borrow the book and he said yes so we took it home.

  It didn’t happen all at once. We would read a couple of pages and then we would pretend. We had some sticks we used for blazing six-guns and we would try to do whatever the cowboys in the book were doing, and that was where Wayne finally got into trouble. It was all right as long as they were just shooting each other or galloping around. But we came to a scene where the hero — he was named Jed — was being held in the upstairs room in a ranch house by a gang of rustlers who were stealing cattle. Jed had set out to stop them, which he did with some pretty good shooting, but that isn’t so important. What matters is that for a while they captured him and held him in the upstairs room and the bad men were downstairs. So he whistled for Black Ranger, his horse, and Black Ranger came and stood under the back upstairs window and Jed jumped out of it and landed on Black Ranger and rode away and left the rustlers. Wayne thought it was quite the fancy thing to do.

  “Why, I think it would be quite the fancy thing to do.” That’s how he said it.

  But I was thinking more of the horse and what it must be like to have somebody jump out of an upstairs window and land on your back.

  A few mornings later, Father and Mother went to Orvisons’ for coffee because it was too soon to plant and they wanted to visit. Nels and Uncle David were in the house in their room and Wayne motioned for me to come with him to the barn.

  “I want you to hold Stacker for me,” he said, whispering so Uncle David and Nels wouldn’t hear upstairs. “Underneath the hayloft door …”

  I knew without being told what Wayne was going to do and I knew it was wrong but it didn’t matter. I had to see him do it. Like the time he made wings out of some sticks and two feed sacks and tried to fly off the granary roof. A fool would know it wouldn’t work, but I had to see it anyway and later, when they took the cast off his arm he was even kind of proud. He claimed he’d flown, but I thought and still think he came down like a rock with some rags tied to it.

  The thing with Stacker was the same. The cowboy book had been chewing at him over a week so I followed him to the barn.

  “I picked Stacker because he looks most like Black Ranger,” he said as we went in. “To make it look right.”

  “The only thing that looks the same is that Stacker is a horse and kind of brown,” I said. “He’s got a leg that weighs more than Black Ranger….”

  Last year when
Mother’s cousin Betty was visiting with her daughter — this three-year-old girl who I guess would be my second cousin or something — anyway when they were visiting, the little girl got away from them while they were drinking coffee and talking. Everybody was frightened that she had wandered into the hog pen and the pigs had eaten her, which Nels and Uncle David said had happened once when they were young. But we finally found the little girl in the pasture standing under Stacker. She was right between his front legs, holding onto the long hair around his hoofs, and when he’d step forward to move to a different piece of grass to eat — those feet as big as tree stumps swinging out so carefully to miss the little girl — she just moved with him, hanging onto his legs.

  When we untied him and led him out of the stall — neither one of us coming up to his nose — he was just as easy and gentle as he’d been with the little girl.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” I asked. But I really wanted to see it and that came through in my voice. Like when Wayne tried to fly.

  He just nodded and when we had Stacker out in front of the barn, under the hayloft door, he lined the horse up. That took some doing because Stacker had no idea what he was supposed to be there for, standing waiting for a make-believe cowboy to jump out of the sky onto his back, so he kept trying to move. We’d stop him just right, then he’d take a step to eat the thistles at the edge of the barn and ruin it. We went back and forth until finally Stacker seemed to get the idea and he stood.

  “You hold him right here,” Wayne said, “and I’ll get up in the hayloft” — as if I would be the one to get in the hayloft.

  He ran into the barn and I heard him thumping up the hayloft ladder and in a few seconds he opened the loft door over Stacker.

  He looked down for a moment and held back. “It’s pretty far….”

  The truth is I kind of agreed with him, but I didn’t say anything. My job was to hold Stacker. Period.

  Finally he shrugged. “Well, if Jed could do it …”

  Then Wayne turned around and said back into the empty barn, “Don’t worry. I’ll be back with the posse,” like Jed to his sidekick.

  And he jumped.

  I’m not sure how he figured the drop from the hayloft to Stacker. I know that when Jed did it in the book he jumped out of the window and landed perfectly in the saddle and rode away just as clean and nice as you could hope for and not a rustler knew he was leaving.

  It didn’t work out that way for Wayne. Of course Stacker wasn’t wearing a saddle, but even if he had been, Wayne wouldn’t have come anywhere close to it. Wayne had judged the distance all wrong and Stacker’s front end was way out from the barn. That put his rear end directly under the hayloft opening.

  Wayne hit with a sound kind of like smacking a potato with a hammer.

  Chunnkks.

  It must have hurt because when I looked up at his eyes all that showed were the whites, and he slowly rolled off the side of Stacker and plopped into the manure and muck on the ground and didn’t move but just lay still holding himself down there making a kind of whistling sound through his nose.

  Stacker is a soft and slow-moving old horse. Many times I’ve seen Father take a carrot and hold it in his mouth and Stacker will pluck it out without hurting a hair on Father’s head. But Stacker had never had anybody jump out of a hayloft and land on his rump, and when Wayne hit him Stacker jumped forward. He moved really fast for a big horse. The jump took him into the side of the pig fence, which knocked the boards down. All the pigs — about four months old — saw the hole and went for it, which took them right across Wayne, who was still down on the ground whistling.

  I couldn’t help him at first because I’d been trying to hold Stacker by his halter, which was about the same as trying to hold a train. He didn’t even feel me when he jumped forward. Then I looked back and saw Wayne on the ground with the little pigs running over him, holding himself and his eyes all white and the wind whistling out of his nose, and I started laughing so hard I couldn’t stop. It just got worse and worse until I was hanging on the side of the hog fence and I guess I’d be hanging there still if Wayne hadn’t gotten better and come after me with an old board.

  He’s still sore about it. All I’ve got to do to get his eyes glowing is look at him and say, “Don’t worry. I’ll be back with the posse.”

  Summer starts slow. You don’t really see the work coming. One day it’s spring, soft and sticky and stinking and the hard part of winter is done and you walk around looking for something to do. The next day Father is taking the plowshares to town. The soil on the back forty is rocky and dulls the cutting edge of the plow — the shares — and every year the blacksmith has to hammer them out to a sharp edge again.

  Plowing is the only time Father uses the F-12. That’s our tractor and it’s quite a sight, with steel lug wheels and a crank start, and so ornery only Father can get it going. Even with him it’s mean. Two summers ago he had the spark from the magneto too far advanced and the crank kicked back and broke his wrist. He had to wear a cast half of a summer.

  Father used to use the team for plowing, riding the one-bottom plow and letting them make their own speed. But on a warm day he would have to stop and water them and let them rest at each end of the field. When he had a chance to swap two Jerseys for the tractor he did it. Mother was upset though because she liked the milk from the Jerseys better than from the Holsteins. It had more cream to it, she said, and it tasted better.

  I like taking the plowshares into town with Father because I’m still young enough to go. Wayne has crossed the line now and has to work around the farm when he isn’t going to school. Unless it’s Saturday night in the spring, Wayne has to stay home. But I still get to climb into the old Ford truck with the cable brakes and ride with Father to town.

  The blacksmith is a tall, thin man smelling of burned steel and snoose spit. We leave the plowshares there to be worked on and Father takes me to the store where I get a nickel every time and spend it on candy that costs two for a penny. It’s rock-hard candy and I’m supposed to save some for Wayne. Sometimes I do, but usually I suck all of mine and some of Wayne’s before I get home, and to be honest the candy is mostly why I like to come to town.

  Once I asked Father why he didn’t take the shares in during the winter or even spring and do it then. He said it was because the steel would forget it was sharp if it wasn’t done right before early plowing. But he was smiling so I don’t know about it being true and I’m afraid to ask Wayne because he would laugh at me for sounding dumb.

  When the shares are heated red hot and pounded out to a new edge with the big hammer we take them home and Father bolts them onto the bottom edge of the plow to cut the soil. Then he hooks the plow to the tractor and heads for the fields.

  I have to wait for Mother and walk out with her when she brings lunch to him. She takes sandwiches in a covered bucket with a quart jar full of coffee wrapped in sacking to keep it hot and two or three pieces of cake and some large pickles from last year’s garden. We sit at the end of the field and wait for Father to finish his round, the tractor popping and snapping in the heat. Then he gets down and we sit in the shade to eat. Mother spreads one of the sacks from around the coffee on the ground as a tablecloth and puts out the sandwiches and cake and brushes the flies away with a hand while we eat. Father talks about how the soil is.

  “She’s butter,” he says sometimes. “Just a little moisture this spring and she’s cutting like butter. I’ve never seen the beat….”

  And when lunch is done, some days he’ll let me ride on the tractor with him and watch the plow. Father says that is the best part of farming — plowing in the early summer — and I can see why he thinks it. I think the same.

  The plow turns the soil, just peels it and turns it over so the bright green of the grass is folded and folded and folded under and the thick black of the soil turns up. I like to sit backward on the tractor seat and watch.

  Then the seagulls come. Father says they come from lar
ge lakes to the north and maybe from Hudson’s Bay which is north many hundreds of miles. He says that when he was young there were no gulls but they discovered the plowing one year and the next year they came and each year now they come.

  Hundreds of them. They come to float in back of the tractor and watch, and each time the plow turns over a worm they drop down to pick it up and eat it. They float in rows and piles and heaps in the air around the tractor and plow and you would think they’d fight but they don’t. No fighting. They take turns. They will hang on the air like thistledown, soft and easy, and when a worm turns up one will drop down and nail it and another will take his place, so that they seem to turn, gray and white gulls, as the soil turns over and over. It would be much prettier if they didn’t poop so much.

  It drops on your head and in your face and on the tractor and plow and the hot muffler on the engine. The stink burns and cuts back across the tractor seat in a thick cloud. Father says it is a rich smell, and he loves the gulls, but to me it just stinks. To Wayne it stinks. Nels and Uncle David won’t say if it stinks or smells nice when I ask them. And Mother just smiles when I ask her.

  Once the plowing is done, Father puts the tractor away and uses Stacker and Jim to pull the disc harrow to break the soil down still more. Then, when it is in small lumps, he drags the toothed drag with the team over it one more time and breaks it down further until it’s like cake batter. That’s how Father says it. He’ll feel the dirt and sometimes take a pinch up and taste it and smile at me if I’m sitting on the drag or harrow with him and say, “It’s smooth as cake batter.”

  Of course it isn’t. But he’s always doing that, saying things are like something else to make you think about them. Like Stacker and Jim pulling stumps when he’s clearing the forty down by the swamp. That’s something to see, almost to not believe — how strong they are and how they’ll still let me climb their legs like trees.

  Father backs them up to the stump so the doubletree — the joining bar you use on a two-horse team — is on the ground next to it. Then he wraps a short chain under the stump and hooks it to the doubletree and he says, ever so soft, “Jim. Stacker. Take it up.”