Leaving Rollingstone. Kevin Fenton
But Dad was jaunty about the operations. He gave one of the spikes that had been taken out of his hip to a hospital roommate, a kid who’d been injured in a motorcycle accident. The kid used the spike as the shift on his cycle. It’s quite possible that even today, somewhere, someone looks at a vintage Harley, notices the stick shift, and says, “What the hell?”
There must have been times when the powerlessness brought on by his infirmities overwhelmed him. One day when it was just Dad and me at home, I hid his cane while he napped. He yelled at me from the bed but couldn’t leave it. He was trapped until Mom got home, an exile from his own house.
* * *
In the fall of 1963, after the harvest, we moved back to the farm. But before we reclaimed the house, the Herbers let us revisit it. The presence of the Herbers disturbed me. Looking up at their kitchen table, dodging and darting with their unfamiliar kids, hearing the too-easy talk of the adults, I knew that I’d been here before, and I felt as if the Herbers were trespassers.
I felt as if I’d returned from the dead to find my room occupied, my life forgotten. It was a feeling I’d re-experience every time I returned to clean an apartment I’d vacated: the relentless forgetfulness of places.
* * *
Then, a few weeks later, we left our house in town, heading north on the two-lane county road that passed the Lehnertzes’ and the Speltzes’ places and their staring cows. Then we turned west and chugged up the hill, threading the inside of Devil’s Curve, passing the Herbers’ new house on the right. But we were not looking at the Herbers’ new house. To our left, at the end of the harvested fields, was our farmstead, the highest point in Winona County. The house was obscured by the apple orchard, a mound just big enough for sledding, a walnut tree, the corner of the machine shed and blue spruce trees. But my eyes naturally sought the house.
To the west, tall pines and lilac bushes had been organized into a windbreak. Beyond the windbreak were more fields. As Dad parked the car, we glimpsed the barn at the end of the driveway, and beyond that, the pasture fell away. If I got out of the car and ran around, I would have noticed that the apple orchard was bumpy with fallen fruit and that the soil in the windbreak was dry and shadowed and scattered with pine needles. This was home. For years, when we reached the summit of the wooded hill, we would see that white, two-story house behind those apple trees and pines. A house is a promise kept, again and again, kept every time you return, and it is there on the horizon; but it is such a subtle promise, you never think about it. We simply felt the pleasure of homecoming.
In the years before I entered the first grade—Rollingstone did not have a kindergarten—I would spend much of the day in the pasture. It was maybe forty acres, which dipped and rose (so it couldn’t be cultivated). I was small enough to duck under the electric fence, and when I did, the pasture became a kingdom. I would collect milkweed pods, bits of birch bark, dandelions, kidney-shaped pebbles, crepes of moss with moist dirt clinging to their undersides, glitterings of mica, purple flowers from thistles. The gooseberries resembled the irises of eyes. I would follow the pasture’s trails and walk its nibbled, cow pie–punctuated grass.
I would spend entire mornings there. I have heard of people raised by wolves; I sometimes feel that, at least for that small portion of my childhood, I was raised by the little filaments in milkweed pods, disciplined by raspberry bushes, socialized by lichen.
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A HISSING TODDLER
Something else was happening in those first years. One of my first memories—and perhaps my first thought—was brand awareness. Short as a fire hydrant, waddling through Rollingstone, I marveled at litter and logos—the barbed crowns of Grape Nehi and Squirt bottle caps, the pale imprints of Mallo Cup cards, the discarded cylinders and spears of Orange Push-Ups.
Once while we were living in the house in town, I was eager to get somewhere—probably the creamery next door. I tripped over a ridge in the sidewalk, pitched forward, and shattered my teeth. This happened just as speech would otherwise have become second nature to me. To this day, I don’t speak well, and when I hear myself on tape, I cringe at the way words slosh in my mouth, and I can hear, in my hesitations, thoughts sparking and failing in my brain. I also now suspect that when my teeth shattered, language scurried back into my brain and a fissure opened between me and the world. I became slightly untethered.
But my shattered teeth and windy speech had an upside: I started to seek out printed matter. We weren’t a literary family, so what I sought out wasn’t even a toddler’s idea of literature. To the best of my knowledge, I was read no stories. Mom was too busy; Dad had other problems. Dad bragged about reading only one book in high school—Huckleberry Finn—and giving four book reports on it. The only book I remember in the house in those days was the Bible. Because we were Catholics, we didn’t read the Bible, trusting the priest to interpret it for us. Ours was as heavy as an anvil.
Outside of litter, the first legible things that beckoned to me were the packages that lined supermarket shelves. As my mom piloted me through National Foods or A&P in Winona, I felt as if I’d encountered a menagerie filled with red and green roosters, friendly tigers, perky rabbits, bears in porkpie hats, impish creatures who devoted their lives to cereal or cookies, reassuring Quakers, serene chefs. As soon as I could recognize words, I realized that print is always fluent.
Sometime in the sixties. The living room was still nesty with Christmas—with bits of wrapping paper, with the artificial tree decorated with blue lights, with the toys that hadn’t yet migrated to my room. The house smelled of hot metal, warmed plastic, and pocketbook cookies. I was intent as a surgeon on my favorite Christmas acquisition, Fright Factory. I had poured two colors of Plastigoop into a mold, warmed it in a “heating unit,” and immersed it, hissing, in water. Now, as I pulled loose the face I had created, the skin stretched. The face’s skin was discolored, its musculature exposed, its surface stitched. My interest in Fright Factory was more fascination than enthusiasm; something dark swam in that pretend flesh.
FLOWERS, ALCOHOL, INFECTION, AND FLESH
Farms are violent places: animals are killed and castrated; machines regularly maim their operators; hail ravages crops; pigs jostle and chomp; dogs eviscerate gophers; watching a cow calving, you realize even birth is violent. And perhaps no domesticated creature is as violent as a bull. Dad reluctantly bought one when we returned to the farm—even though a few years earlier, he had found the Fabers’ hired man, who lived down the road, lying lifeless, his skeleton crushed, his body bruised and drained of blood, a human being leaking like a plum. He had been stomped to death by their bull.
The bull would eventually charge. Dad was plowing near the barnyard, floating above the field on the tractor seat, when the new bull threatened Dennis. Dad saw what was happening, leapt off the tractor onto the plowed ground, and sprinted to help him. Dennis was fine; he scrambled away. But when Dad jumped down from the tractor, the metal bone in his hip thrust into its surrounding soft tissue. It was one of many small jostlings that happen on farms—with their rocky, manure-slicked ground; their nervous herds; their elephant-sized machines—and which, in this case, put Dad back in the hospital.
*
So we spent a lot of time visiting Dad at Saint Mary’s Hospital in Rochester. Dad’s face would ripen with happiness when we entered. I would sit with Mom and whoever else accompanied us in that room that was both sterile and regal. Sterile because of the white sheets, the chrome rails, the bolted TV, the steel urinal. Regal because my dad sat, graciously, in his raised bed, surrounded by his family in what could be mistaken for leisure. Nurses liked him. He would pretend to hook their legs with his cane. But Dad’s jauntiness couldn’t quite cover