Leaving Rollingstone. Kevin Fenton
once, at Sheila’s insistence, painted themselves with mud and presented themselves to Mom. (The girls are a yin-yang duo, with Sheila being the troublemaker.)
My parents’ backstory was exuberantly sketched in:
Your mom studied nursing in Winona and then Rochester because, while she wanted to attend the University of Minnesota and study journalism, her father thought there were too many Communists there and forbade it.
Your dad announced to your mom on their second date that he was going to marry her.
When your mother was pregnant with Dennis, diabetes swelled her waist to sixty inches, and Dad joked that he could just “roll her down the hill.” When your mom was on bed rest with you, bed rest meant that she didn’t iron the starched shirts your dad wore in the field.
Mom and Dad used to go dancing at the Altura Fire Hall on Saturday nights in the fifties. Mom was a timid, tentative dancer because, when she was a little girl, the priest told her that dancing at non-Catholic events was a mortal sin. So the whole evening, Dad would hold her by the waist and carry her around the floor, reassuring her, “It’s okay, Holly. I’ve got you.”
The moral of these anecdotes? We suffer but shine.
These stories mixed with darker ones. Dad’s problems with his hip and his health, in remission for much of the fifties, resurfaced. Surgeries failed. He might not have been able to continue farming. So your mother pushed herself even harder than a farm wife and working mother of the fifties normally would. For a time, with four children under ten at home, she worked graveyard shifts (eleven at night until seven in the morning) until, unable to sleep during the day, her mind fraying from exhaustion, Dad insisted she take a more humane shift. Her diabetes jeopardized her pregnancies, and in the years she bore five living children, she also miscarried three times. Once Dad had to carry her while she hemorrhaged between her legs, into the hospital, past the protesting admissions desk, to Winona’s overmatched facilities. In the ambulance speeding toward Rochester, Mom’s blood pressure sank, her self drifted away from her body, and she negotiated with God, asking him to save her because she had four children to take care of.
I was her fifth child, delivered a month early, via C-section.
This occasioned more stories: Your birth was announced on the intercom at Holy Trinity School. When you were a baby, we would carry you around on a blanket and sing “Hail, Hail to the King.”
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In a sense, I was also born into cinematography. My image of the years before my birth takes its tints from the silver of movies, the grey of TV shows, the halftones of newspapers, and the monochrome of family photographs. I know better now but I still visualize the world before my birth as black and white. Then, when I was born, by the evidence of the family photographs and the culture at large, color flooded the world.
No wonder they announced my birth over the intercom. I have a powerful sense of being born lucky. I wish I could say the same for my parents.
Trash cans were my first anthologies. I toddled amid backyard ones that stood like burnt altars, crusted with carbon and pocked with holes. The trash cans held exploded egg shells, the doughy cardboard of egg packaging, greased butter wrappers, and bloody butcher paper. They held language that I could not yet decode: manic cereal boxes, stylized cake mixes, and the balloony colors of bread wrappers. Once the trash can got too full, we would ignite the contents. The grease in the bacon and butter packaging would hiss; the bread wrappers would shiver and melt; the paper would fare; the heat would shimmer; the smoke would waft; and then the fire would subside, and our trash would become ashes.
Flame was much more with us than it is now: businesses gave out matchbooks decorated with their logos. The world was more fragrant then: my parents’ friends smoked cigarettes in stores and living rooms; Dad indulged in Dutch Masters cigars; in autumn, people burned leaves.
EXILES ON CREAMERY STREET
1962. The village of Rollingstone had just had a picnic when a cloudburst pummeled us, soaked our clothing, and saturated the green of the grass. Everyone else ran for the pavilion or their cars. But because the wind had gusted and blown the yellow plasticware from the tables, my siblings and I suddenly had a job to do. We swarmed after the escaping utensils as they collected under the merry-go-round, flew under the swings, sprayed up against the tennis court. Maybe because I was three, this invasion felt giddy, like being tickled by the sky; the utensils became exclamation marks. Five kids pursued five hundred things. Plucking forks and knives from the ground, we glimpsed the shiny leaves of broadleaf plantain and a frizzy, yellow-flowered grass. But we had to keep running and lunging and grabbing and screaming. The hysterical sky let us act hysterically.
The memory is innocent, but something shivers beneath it. It isn’t the giddy freedom that has caused me to remember it; it is the color scheme. The green of the grass and the yellow of the forks scattered in the park suggest the green and yellow of tractors, the green and yellow of corn, and, thus, the farm we abandoned. We moved into Rollingstone because one of Dad’s surgeries had gone particularly badly. We sold the farm to an in-law who rented it to our old neighbors, the Herbers, while they built a new house on their farm. Our family talked about the farm all the time. If families had mission statements back then, “regain the farm” would have been ours. Dennis, who had followed Dad everywhere, spent his summer working on the farm of another family on the ridge above Rollingstone.
Here, in Rollingstone, we hosted the picnic because the town had given Dad part-time work taking care of the park. Dennis and the girls helped Dad. He couldn’t sprint after forks; he couldn’t howl and dart and dive.
My memories of town are of motion as cheerful and alarming as an amusement park. Children scurried around me, playing “Annie, Annie, Over.” Colleen and Sheila and their friends propelled bikes, sprinted to tag each other, lofted kickballs, and squealed and refused to be called home for dinner. Mrs. Rinn across the street yelled, “Fran-cis! Fra-a-a-n-cis!,” but Franny Rinn, who was five, didn’t come home when he was supposed to. Why should he? I’ve never seen so much fun in one city block.
From where we lived, on this street as comfortable as a driveway, I could waddle the hundred feet to the creamery and “charge” ice cream. I could venture a block and try to buy candy from Mr. Arnoldy. I could mount a little expedition out our backyard, across the street and schoolyard, past the convent, and into the church during Mass—Colleen was supposed to be watching me but wasn’t—in a tie and diaper combo I’d improvised for the occasion. Father Majures would halt his Latin. The parishioners would suppress laughter as my parents, startled in their pew, whisked me home.
Our family mourned the farm, and as a three-year-old, I absorbed their mourning. The family myth—also told over pop and popcorn—was that Sheila loved it here in Rollingstone. It suited whatever was in her that thrived in the noisiness of towns, in their near lives and bright commerce. But while I shared the loss I could feel in my dad and my brother, I also loved this town.
Sometimes we would ride out of town in our Ford Falcon that smelled like plastic and dust and sunlight to the border of my three-year-old world, toward the Kendricks’ and Literskis’, toward the horizon where my mother worked and where we shopped, and I would see the town dump, a mound filled with mattresses softened with use, with radios that had once channeled Roosevelt, with wringer washers and irreparable cars and senile farm equipment and worn-out clothes and libraries of forties and fifties magazines and busted toys.
As part of his deal with the town—which I now realize was a jobs program of one, an act of tactful charity on the part of the goddamnLuxembourgers—Dad worked at the dump a couple of hours a day. Refuse needed to be sorted into salable metals and parts, piles untangled, the oldest remnants buried. Dad wasn’t given to metaphor, which was a good thing, but the place and what it represented couldn’t help but seep into his thoughts. Dumps aren’t subtle. By the time we’d moved into the village, Dad had gone through