The Winter Room Read online

  They pull and their leg muscles snap and crack so hard sometimes on a warm day that the sweat sprays off those horses in a fine mist. The trace chains and doubletree creak and the stump hangs for a minute, then pop! like my old tooth in back when Mother used a string on it, pop! that old stump comes out in a shower of dirt and Stacker and Jim lunge forward a bit with the pull before they can stop.

  “Did you see their legs, boy?” Father says. “Like pistons, weren’t they? Like pistons on a big engine when they snap like that …”

  But they aren’t. They’re just strong meat. That’s what Wayne says. But he never says it in front of Father and besides, in the summer, Wayne is working so hard there isn’t time to say much of anything.

  Uncle David once said it was because there was so much light in the summer.

  “You work in light,” he said, sitting on a cream can by the barn door, spitting in the dust so the chickens came running to see what it was. “With all the summer light it makes us work harder. In winter it gets dark earlier and the days are short enough to rest. No rest in the summer.”

  And sometimes Uncle David is never wrong so that might be the way of it.

  I can’t work all the hard ways Father and Uncle David and Nels and even Wayne work because when I was small I had a time when I couldn’t quit coughing. I spit blood and was weak for what seemed forever, and now I’m supposed to take it easy until I get older. I can play hard with Wayne and it doesn’t seem to bother me. But Mother and Father won’t let me do the hard work like clean the barn or shovel grain or even carry wood, even though I do it when they aren’t watching.

  * * *

  First there is plowing, then dragging and harrowing and drilling the seed: wheat, oats, barley, corn — then potatoes; and the days don’t stop. Father leaves the milking to the rest of us, or I should say everybody but me, and takes Stacker and Jim out of the stalls before light. He leaves so far before light that Mother doesn’t even have a chance to get breakfast for him; he just eats some cold food from supper the night before. I got up one morning and went out in my shorts with rubber boots on and watched him when he didn’t see me. He talked so nice to Jim and Stacker in the dark that it was like they weren’t horses but good friends.

  “We got corn,” he said, his voice even and steady as he hooked them to the corn planter. “Got corn to put in and we got to lay those rows so straight they be like a die, straight as a die they got to be….” All the words ran together and you could hear the horses whicker to him in a kind of answer while he fastened the trace chains and raised the tongue between them to slip into the tongue ring. Then it was just the three of them as he climbed onto the planter and rode out of the yard, clucking to the team to keep them going. I thought then and still think that when he is with them working that way, Father loves those horses every bit as much as he loves Mother or Wayne or me or anything.

  “Work on work on work” — that’s how Uncle David says it.

  When the corn is planted and comes up it has to be cultivated three or four times to make sure the weeds don’t get a start. And about when the corn cultivating is done and the plants are standing alone and free of weeds it’s time to do hay.

  That’s when the neighbors, the Ransens, come, like they do in harvest time; when they hay, we go to help them. But it’s a lot of work, even with help. The hay has to be mowed, then raked into winrows and dried, then swept up with the sweeprakes and brought to the hay stackers that pull the piles of hay up and over the top again and again to make the stacks. I even get to do some work at haying time. When the hay comes up and over to fall on top of the stack, two of us — Wayne and I — have to use three-tined hay forks to smooth the hay and shape it so it sheds water down the outside of the stack. It also has to be packed, so we jump on it and bounce it down after the sweeprake teams bring in each new pile, until all the hay for winter is in stacks in the field looking like loaves of bread.

  Just about when haying is done it’s time to thrash. That’s Father’s favorite time if there’s been good rain and the oats and wheat are good, and his sad time if it’s been dry and the oats and wheat didn’t make right.

  We also thrash with the Ransens, except it’s different from haying. When we hay everybody works and when the day is done we all go home to finish work at home. But when we thrash we don’t go home right away. We cut the grain and use the shaulker to put it in bundles and feed it to the thrashing machine which is run by the F-12 and a long, slapping belt. Grain comes out a spout at the top and straw comes out the other end and dust, eye-dust, choke-dust, sneeze-dust, is all over the place so the men have to wear handkerchiefs over their noses just to breathe.

  When we’re done we wash in the water trough in back of the barn where you can also catch tadpoles if you want to put some in a jar. But instead of everybody going home, all the men and women stay and eat. There’s never food like there is at thrashing. At our house Mother cooks all of a day just on pies, then all of a night, it seems, on meat and potatoes and all of the next day on all the other things there are to eat. Everybody brings something as well, and a table is made outside with planks covered with clean sheets.

  I don’t know how men can eat like that. Old man Ransen, who they say is close on seventy, always comes — even though he doesn’t do any work except oil the thrasher now and then with an oil squirt can. That makes Uncle David mad because he thinks he should do it. Old man Ransen sets to and the gravy runs down his chin. He eats like six young men, even without teeth. I watched him last year during thrashing finish off four plates of food, half an apple pie, and close on a quart of homemade ice cream that Wayne and I had spent hours cranking. And then he looked for more.

  It’s something to see. Wayne and I just eat and eat until we’re close to busting and there’s still so much food left the table almost creaks with it.

  When the thrashing is done there’s a mountain of straw out in back of the barn where the thrashing machine blows it; Wayne and I sometimes spend a whole day jumping off the barn roof onto the straw pile, even though there’s the second cutting of hay to get in and the corn silage to chop. I think Father knows how much we still like to jump in the straw and just lets us have the day for it. Once I saw him and Mother watching us from the side of the granary as we jumped, and they were both laughing and looked like they wanted to jump with us. I think you could jump from the clouds and it wouldn’t hurt if you landed in a straw pile. You just sink and sink and sink….

  Then hay again, and corn to fill the silo to feed the cattle all winter — and how hard it is. Maybe I wouldn’t have known, except that last year at the end of summer I came around the end of the barn and saw Father sitting on the block of oak we use for splitting wood and killing chickens. He was just sitting looking at the ground with his hands and arms hanging down between his legs. His eyes weren’t blinking and he wasn’t smiling. Mother was standing in back of him rubbing his shoulders and neck, just rubbing and rubbing.

  “The days are long,” she said, in a kind of song like she used to sing to me when the coughing was bad and I couldn’t sleep. “The days are long and the nights are short, the days are long and the nights are short….”

  Many times we eat supper after ten, when it is dark, the Coleman lantern hissing and nobody talking, nobody saying anything, even Wayne and me, just eating and chewing and eating until we’re done and then we go up to fall in our beds for the next day.

  Summer work.

  You swear it will never end until one day, one hot day in September Father will head out in the morning and harness Jim and Stacker to the hayrack and look at us and say, “Pile on, we’re going to the lake.”

  Then you know it’s fall.

  I hate fall.

  Mother says it’s her favorite time and Nels and Uncle David like it because the air starts to dry out and they don’t ache so much. Father seems to walk lighter. All the grain is up and the barn is full of hay and the fields are tucked in with haystacks waiting to be used and everythi
ng is done. Almost everything.

  Going to the lake starts it off better than it ends. I like that part. Three miles away over a logging road is a small lake called Jenny’s Lake because a girl was supposed to have killed herself there when the man she was going to marry died in the war. I don’t know which war it was, but it’s supposed to be true. Wayne says her ghost walks on the water in the dark sometimes, but he’s never been there in the dark and neither have I, so there’s no way to know for sure.

  It’s a pretty lake. Almost perfectly round with a small beach and a grassy place at one end where Father long ago — when he came there with Mother while they were courting — made a rock fireplace. In a tree at the edge of the clearing he carved their initials in a heart. They are still there, the bark grown around them so they look old and deep. Once I saw Mother go over to the tree, two, three falls ago, and put her fingers on the heart and smile and look at Father who was making a fire to cook the steaks.

  We always make a fire and he lets it burn down to coals and cooks steaks on a grill. Or pork chops. Mother brings pies and potato salad and jars of raspberry drink she makes from the raspberry syrup she saves when she cans. We eat until we can’t hold any more. Then Wayne and I get in the water at the beach and spend the afternoon swimming and splashing while Mother and Father and Nels and Uncle David sit on the grass and look across the lake and burp and smile and talk about silly things that don’t go together….

  “Was a time when you couldn’t move in this country,” Uncle David might say. “Trees so thick you couldn’t move at all …”

  “Sure good food,” Father would answer, looking straight at Mother who would blush and blush. “For somebody so pretty. I didn’t think pretty women could cook that good.”

  “I had a mare once,” Nels might say, “that every time you slapped her she peed straight back like a bullet. Got Hans — you remember Hans, don’t you, the one that got killed when the tree hit him? Got him straight in the ear and he was so mad he hit me with a peavy…. But he never got earaches again as long as he lived.”

  … Until it’s close to evening and we eat warm apple pie and drink milk thick with cream and barely make it home in time to milk and do chores. That’s how fall starts.

  Not so bad a start.

  But when all the grain is up and all the silage in and the hay stacked and the barn and yard cleaned it is time to kill.

  And I don’t like the killing part.

  We have a dog named Rex that’s been here longer than Wayne. He’s got hair in lumps and likes to help bring the cows in, but he’s so old he mostly just sits and stinks on the porch and thumps his tail if you say his name or hand him a pork-chop bone. Father says Rex stopped a bear that was chasing Mother from the garden before we were born and that’s why he only has to sit on the porch and eat.

  But come fall he goes crazy. It’s the blood, Father says. As soon as Father walks out of the house and takes the little .22 rifle down from the old deer horns on the porch to shoot the steer, Rex gets to jumping and wheezing so hard he almost chokes.

  I think he’s the only one on the place that likes the killing.

  It’s the way of it, Father says. Something has to die so we can live. Mother nods but she doesn’t come out to the barn, only when the killing is done and the skinning and cutting start.

  It’s one of those things I wish I didn’t watch but I do. Wayne says that makes me two-faced but I can’t help it. Father goes into the barn with the little rifle and holds it to the steer’s head and pops it once and the steer goes down, just flumps down, and then Father cuts the throat with the curved knife and catches the blood in a large pan for mother to make blood sausage out of. I can’t eat it, ever, but that’s not the worst.

  Then he and Uncle David and Nels use a pulley and rope to pull the steer up to the ceiling in the barn and cut the belly open, the knife sliding through it like butter, and all the guts drop down in blue coils with steam off them, but that’s not the worst.

  Even when Rex jumps in and starts to eat the guts and gets them all over his head, and the cats come down from the hayloft and eat at them with the funny sideways grin they have when they eat guts, and the smell makes me a little sick and I have to go outside and breathe on the sides of my tongue — that’s not the worst.

  The pigs are the worst.

  When I was sick and couldn’t play hard and coughed blood, I sometimes got hot at night, so hot I couldn’t stand it and I would have dreams.

  Because of the blood I coughed up I dreamt of blood. And my throat. And the dream has never really gone away, because sometimes I wake up even now and my eyes will be wide open and Mother will have to come in and put her hand on my head.

  Blood and throats.

  When Father kills a pig he doesn’t shoot it like he does with a steer because he says pigs have to bleed out better.

  He uses the curved knife, and the men put the pig in the same pen they used for the steer. Then they flip the pig on his back and Nels and Uncle David hold him while Father sticks the curved knife into the pig’s throat. And the throat seems to jump at it, seems to pull the knife in and up in a curve to cut its big vein. And the pig screams and screams while it dies and bleeds out. The smell, the smell of the blood and the screams and the throat bleeding out is so much, so thick that I can’t stand it.

  There is more killing in the fall: The chickens have to be killed and canned for winter — killed with the ax so their heads lop off and the beaks open and close even though the heads aren’t on the bodies and the bodies jump around and around with Rex chasing them as they splatter blood on the barn wall from their jumping — bright specks of new blood on the walls of the barn that looks like the blood I coughed up. And there’s the stink of their feathers as they are dipped in hot water and plucked, Wayne and Mother and me plucking them, pulling the damp, stinking feathers out, even working close around the stump of the neck.

  Then the two geese we get from Hemings every year to smoke and save for Christmas have to be killed and plucked and waxed and smoked and they stink and there is blood and blood and blood and more blood and I hate fall.

  By the end of it, by the end of fall, all I know is blood and if it weren’t for school to think about I couldn’t stand it. I know it has to be done, and every year Mother explains it to me again, though she doesn’t come to the barn when the killing happens. I can’t help thinking it’s wrong, though Wayne doesn’t think so. Sometimes he seems to get a light in his eyes like Rex gets when Father kills. But the men don’t like it, Uncle David and Nels don’t like it because when Father kills the steer and it goes down and when he cuts the hog and it screams and bleeds to death, when that is done Nels and Uncle David always stand silently, take their caps off and stand silently until it is done.

  And Father always turns away and spits after he has done it. Nobody says anything for a time while the animals or chickens are dying. Nothing. No sound and I hate fall.

  Wayne says there aren’t any divisions in things. We had a big fight one time over whether or not there was a place between days when it wasn’t the day before and it wasn’t tomorrow yet. I said there were places, divisions in things so you could tell one from the next but he said no there wasn’t and we set to it. By the time we were done I had a bloody nose and he had a swollen ear from where I hit him with a board and we still didn’t know.

  But there is a place where winter comes, a place to see it isn’t fall any longer and know winter is here.

  When the killing is done and the meat is up and the crops are in and the leaves have all gone to color and dropped off the trees and the gray limbs stick up like ugly fingers; when the barn is scraped clean inside and straw is laid for the first cold-weather bedding and the stock tank in back of the barn has ice on it that has to be broken in the mornings so the horses can drink; when you have to put choppers on your hands to fork hay down from the loft to the cows and the end of your nose gets cold and Rex moves into the barn to sleep and Father drains all the water o
ut of all the radiators in the tractors and the old town truck and sometimes you suck a quick breath in the early morning that is so cold it makes your front teeth ache; when the chickens are walking around all fluffed up like white balls and the pigs burrow into the straw to sleep in the corner of their pen, and Mother goes to Hemings for the quilting bee they do each year that lasts a full day — when all that happens, fall is over.

  But it still isn’t winter.

  When all the fall things are done there is the place between that Wayne says isn’t so but is. There is something there and when we come out of the barn sometimes I can feel it. A sort of quiet. Once I stopped Wayne just as we were walking to the barn and it was getting dark and the clouds were sailing over our heads heading south and there was a north wind so you had to hold your head over into your collar to keep your ear warm; once then I stopped Wayne and asked him if he could feel it.

  “Feel what?”

  “Feel the place between,” I said, and he looked at me and said he thought maybe I was crazy like those natives we read about in National Geographic who would predict weather and fall down.

  But I didn’t care and don’t care now because I know the place is there. The place when fall is gone and winter hasn’t come yet. It is a short time, in one night.

  And then it snows.

  First time.

  You go to bed after chores and when you wake up and go downstairs and the sun starts to come up there is a new light to it, a brighter light; you look out the window and there is new snow all over everything.

  First snow.

  Soft and curved and white covering the yard and dirt and manure and grass and old leaves, the barns and granaries and machines out by the small tool shed, so that they don’t look like buildings and machines at all but animals. White animals in the new light.