Leaving Rollingstone. Kevin Fenton
flesh, alcohol, infection, and flowers.
I would become bored, and they would set me free. I roamed and loitered. I walked the retreating perspectives of halls. I twitched from distraction to distraction like someone flipping channels. I moved amid flowers and holy water fonts and cheaply printed newsprint guides of what to do in Rochester. I darted across the street to the drug store to buy magazines and sandwiches.
Now that I am an adult, I can begin to appreciate the strain these visits must have put on my mother. Tired from working all day on her feet, taking care of a household with five children, and supervising a dairy farm, she drove the forty miles to Rochester down two-lane roads that dipped and rose through farmland and slowed for a half dozen small towns. The only time I remember my parents fighting was when Dad complained that Mom hadn’t visited him enough. Her retort to him was devastatingly simple: “I gave you everything I had.”
* * *
While I played and blathered and lived my toddler life, my brother and father worked on a faltering farm, and they were acutely aware of its modesty. Rollingstone did not have class differences in the sense of differences of education and values and experiences, but it did have status differences. These were measured by who had the newest tractors, the most silos, the largest farm. We had old implements. Besides the tractors, we had a plow, a disk, a hay wagon, a hay baler, and a manure spreader. Silage was kept in a feed bin. We never bought a new tractor. We always had a John Deere with an old-fashioned, perforated metal, pelvis-shaped seat. Our farm was small, and we had so few cows that we could name them. On the most prosperous farms, they milked over a hundred cows whom they identified with numbers, and concrete silos were supplemented with soaring blue silos. No one drove past our place to admire the skyline of silos; we collected no green and gold trophies of tractors.
Many of our more prosperous neighbors stored their milk in bulk tanks, which a truck from the creamery would empty every morning. But we still used milk cans, so every day, we hauled the milk into town. (In the first weeks back at the farm, we’d even milked by hand.) The cans were heavy, designed to be lifted by a healthy man, which is why Dennis often loaded and deposited the milk. But sometimes Dad and I did. I groaned and staggered under the cans; Dad winced.
I would hop into the back of the pickup. Out on the road, the jostling speed of the truck thrilled me: the road streamed under me, the air streamed over me, the landscape streamed past, my hair and clothes whipped in the wind. Standing in the open cab, I was vulnerable to bumps, to sliding unsecured containers. I gasped for breath; my stomach tickled. By the time we got to Rollingstone, and the pickup slowed, it would smell of gasoline and grease. We would enter the creamery, with its pale smell of unprocessed milk, and the benediction of the Land O’Lakes Indian maiden above the door and the glass block that made the light watery and beautiful.
Dad would visit his friend Bill Klinger, who owned Klinger’s Bar. I loved Klinger’s: the metal sash that advertised Squirt pop or some other antique brand on the screen door; the malty smell that hit you as you stepped inside; the way the light entering the windows mimicked the color of beer; the jukebox perky as a robot; the dark wood bar; the sand-weighted tartan ashtrays; the Minnesota Twins’ schedules; the gleaming, mantis-shaped, miraculously abundant taps; the brightnesses of neon beer logos and beer logo mirrors and the Hamm’s clock that featured a relentlessly full-color photograph of a stream rushing over rocks. Happiness condensed in things. I loved Klinger’s.
* * *
And I loved the farm in the way you love vulnerable things.
I had a pet cow whom I would feed Mounds bars and to whom I would recount The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. I named the cow Danny, oblivious to the fact that cows are females. (I’d never heard the name Danielle.) I repeated the body counts of soldiers killed in Vietnam to Danny and described the riots in Watts and Detroit and Newark. When Danny, perhaps depressed over the state of the nation, stopped giving milk, she was led into a trailer. I was locked into my room when the trailer drove away, but I rioted anyway and registered my body count of one. I didn’t quite get the basic thing every farmer has to get: cattle are not pets.
And yet I yearned to farm. Within the farm was a smaller farm, an homage to the green fields and red barn and tractors that surrounded us. I played with miniature farm equipment with Karl Herber, who lived down the road, in a square of dirt the size of an herb garden between the corncrib and the driveway. I knelt on one side of the mock farm. Karl hunched across from me. We both pushed toy John Deere tractors. His hauled a disk, an implement with little pizza-cutter-like blades that mince the ground. Mine hauled a plow, whose comma-shaped blades sliced and churned the earth. Both tractors gleamed green and yellow against the dustier green of the little hay, oat, and corn fields we planted. We left one rectangle of dirt fallow because it is good practice—it restores the nutrients—and because the scale-model government in our heads paid us to.
Our toy tractors were mute, so we made putt-putt-putt sounds for them. Godlike, we grabbed them and lifted them across the landscape. We imitated what men yelled to each other in the fields, lowering our voices, making our language technical and slangy and confident: “Yeah, my new 280’s been running pretty good.” We had no idea what this meant, if there even was a 280 model, but guys on farms said things like that. Karl and I played like children who admired adults and who couldn’t wait to join the world of their fathers.
While I played at my fantasy farm, I helped as much as I could on the actual farm. Feeding the calves meant hoisting and pouring from bags of feed as big as I was, so emptying them felt like trying to lift and pour a sleeping person. I mixed the calves’ formula in galvanized buckets with rubber teats at the bottom. As I carried the feed and the milk pails through the shadows in the center of the barn, the emerald eyes of rats peered from inside the walls. While the calves fed, the rats considered me. My pulse announced itself. As soon as the calves’ sucking turned to slurping, I sprinted away with the plausibly empty pails.
On the other hand, I enjoyed pulling hay and straw bales apart. The taut twine popped when I cut it, and the bales separated into segments. We fed the hay to the cows and spread the straw in the stanchions to absorb manure. We supplemented the hay with oats and ground corn, which we poured into the feed troughs. I helped clean the barn on Saturdays, pushing the straw and manure first into and then down the gutters with a pitchfork and then shoveling it into the manure spreader, which looked like a paddle-wheel boat that flung a wake of shit. I pumped water into five-gallon pails and hauled them—heavy enough to indent lines in my yellow work gloves and hands—in the chill fall air across the farmyard.
I loved working around the barn, especially on cold afternoons in late fall when dusk came early and my breath crystallized and I could crack the ice on the puddles with my green rubber boots. In the barn, bare light bulbs would illuminate the straw; the stanchions; the jostling, bellowing cows; the milking machines. My brother and sisters laughed as they dropped hay bales from the loft. Our place was like a city: people moved around me without much noticing me, occupied with their luminous tasks. Because a recent study had concluded that cows give more milk when they listen to music, a radio, set on a beam, would play. WDGY, which was then the Twin Cities’ Top 40 rock station, would play if my brother selected the channel, a country station if my father did. I smelled the ammonia of piss, raw milk, and dry hay, which was fragrant in ways that straw wasn’t. Shit was everywhere: splattered on the barn floor; covering the barnyard, where it was scalloped by hooves, like a second topsoil; land-mining the pasture; scattered like croutons on the fields to fertilize the crops; dropped and dripped in the working end of the driveway. The pig shit smelled even more pungent, and the chicken shit got in your nose like sawdust. It says something about how much I loved these people, this intact and industrious family, that I am nostalgic for the smell of crap.
Even I felt no nostalgia toward the killing of chickens. I felt no connection with the BBs of fear that were their eyes or the clumsy engines of loitering and escape that were their bodies. We held them to a tree stump, hacking their necks with a hatchet until the head detached and slackened like a dropped glove. When their heads dropped away, their bodies began to run—as if, in death, they were trying to get open for the game-winning pass they had missed in life—and ejaculate blood out of their necks across the dirt of the driveway. When they had expended their blood and