Growing Up Country: Memories of an Iowa Farm Girl (17 page)

I shaded my eyes, squinting into the sun, to see the men work. Their muscles rippled and sweat streamed down their faces and arms. They wore leather gloves but the young men often stripped off their shirts and their bodies glistened strong and hard in the afternoon sun. They were doing important work and when we brought lunch to the field, I felt I was doing something important, too.

One of the men drove the tractor and another walked alongside, picking up bales and throwing them up onto the hayrack. Dad grabbed hold of the twine binding each 70-pound bale and fitted the bales tight onto the stack. Each bale had to be in the right place so the load held together as the wagon rocked back and forth over the rolling hills. Finishing the field would have gone faster except one of the men had left at noon.

As they slowed to a stop, Mom began pulling the food out of the truck. The men climbed down, wiping sweat from their heads and necks. I was ready with the water they always wanted first. Dad took the jar from my hands and drank in big gulps.

“Thanks, Squirt,” he said. “That hit the spot.” He handed the jar on to the hired men, picked up a sandwich and sat down on the ground in the shade of the tractor. The hired men lounged on the hayrack, grateful for the shade cast by the half load of sweet-smelling hay bales.

“We’ll finish this field today and then we’ll just have that piece over behind Millers for tomorrow,” he said, nodding toward the southeast. “It’s slow going since Tom left.” He took off his cap and wiped the sweat off his head before settling his cap firmly back on his head. “Hand me a piece of that cake, Squirt,” he said.

I grabbed the cake pan and took it to Dad. If I put my feet down just right, I could slide my bare soles between most of the stubble. Still I must have looked comical as I tottered in a bowlegged roll between the truck, tractor and hayrack.

As Dad took a big piece of cake, he said, “Squirt, suppose you can drive the tractor for the rest of this round?”

My head jerked up and a thrill ran straight through my stomach. Jane had driven the tractor already, but Dad had never let me.

“Sure,” I said, and it was all I could do to keep from hopping up onto the tractor seat right that minute. It took a moment for me to remember that I didn’t know how to drive the tractor but I wasn’t going to say anything about that little detail.

When the last bit of cake was gone followed by a last swallow of coffee, the men lumbered to their feet, thanked Mom for the lunch and stretched to loosen their sore backs. Then Dad looked at me and said, “Ready?”

I sure was. In a second, I’d stepped from the toolbar up to the torn, sweat-stained, padded tractor seat. With the wheel of the Farmall H firmly in my grasp, I realized I had only the vaguest notion what to do next. Dad had held me on his lap while he’d driven the tractors, but I’d never done more than put my tiny hands on the wheel next to his. My stomach flipped. Would Dad make me get down?

If Dad sensed my hesitation, he didn’t let on. He stood on the toolbar, his left arm on the back of the seat. “See if it’s in neutral,” he said wiggling the stick shift between my knees. “The brake is set, so step on the clutch. Push it all the way in,” he directed. I grabbed hold of the wheel with both hands and put my whole 70 pounds into pushing the clutch all the way forward. My butt rose up off the seat as I pulled back on the wheel to get enough leverage to push the pedal down. Sweat broke out on my neck. I was unsure how long I could hold the pedal down.

“Now push the starter,” Dad said. I didn’t know that letting go of the wheel long enough to push the starter was such a hot idea, but I couldn’t say so. I let go with my right hand and reached down, pressing the starter with my thumb. The tractor sputtered to life and I could feel the engine strain against my arms and legs like a cow pulling against a halter.

“We’ll put it in first,” he said, maneuvering the stick into gear. “Now, let the pedal out easy. Don’t jerk it or you’ll kill it.”

I eased back on the pedal. The tractor jerked. I killed it. I was mortified.

Grabbing the steering wheel so tight my fingers hurt, I strained to push the clutch pedal down again. With Dad’s hand over mine, I moved the stick into neutral and pushed the starter again. The old tractor coughed to life and Dad shifted into first.

“We’ll give it a little gas,” Dad said as he pulled the throttle a couple notches toward me. “Now let the pedal out.”

The tractor lurched but kept running. “Now just keep her going straight.”

“But what about stopping,” I asked, thinking already that stopping on my own was going to be tougher than starting with Dad by my side.

“When we get to the end of the row, step on the clutch and brake pedals at the same time,” Dad said as he stepped from the toolbar onto the tongue of the wagon and back to the hayrack.

Anxious, I looked ahead. With relief I saw the end of the row was a long ways away.

I could not believe it. I looked at Mom standing by the truck. She smiled and waved. I looked back at Dad balancing on the hayrack. “Give it a little more gas,” he yelled. I reached forward and eased the throttle lever toward me two more notches. I looked back again. Dad was grabbing bales from two men now and the load was filling fast. He was not at all concerned about me.

A moment like this, experiencing such power, I wondered if I looked as different as I felt.

The steering wheel fought against me with each bump we hit and my hands ached from holding on tight. I did not care. Dad entrusted me with this great responsibility. Struggling to keep the tractor headed perfectly straight, I moved from the world of dreaming, of pretending, to the real world. Just like that, I was working with the men.

Ashes

In all the years I was growing up, I can count on three fingers the times we took a vacation that didn’t involve going to stay with relatives. One of those was the trip to Stone City, a trip burned into my memory not so much for itself as for our return home and the losses that followed.

The day of the trip, the alarm jangled and I awoke, my pajamas tangled around my arms and legs. I’d kicked the sheets off the end of the bed in the night in a fitful effort to find a cool place for my feet. Faint breaths of warm air carrying the sweet scent of new-mown hay drifted through the screen of the bedroom window. Rubbing sleepers out of my eyes, I got up, pulled on my shorts and buttoned up a sleeveless shirt as I slid my feet into the rubber thongs that had become my favorite footwear. They had the great advantage of going from dirty to clean under the faucet outside the back door. Mom bought them for me to wear to swimming lessons, but I now wore them anytime I couldn’t go barefoot. Except to church.

Sue rolled out of bed right behind me. After we’d pulled up the sheets and spread, smoothing them over the pillows, we headed out to do the barn chores. The morning sun glared red on the horizon, promising another hot July day. As we shuffled down the hill toward the barn, dew on the grass was chilly wet on my toes. “No rain today,” I observed. Dad always said if there was dew, it meant no rain; if there was no dew, it very likely would rain.

Dad watched the weather signs every day, particularly when he had hay to put up. “Got that last cutting in without a drop of rain on it,” he’d comment in an off-handed way to a neighbor, as though it didn’t mean particularly much. “Yup. That’ll be good hay,” the neighbor would respond.

In an unspoken competition, Dad and the other farmers watched each other, noting who got crops in first, whose hay was cut but still in the field when it rained, who kept weeds mowed in pastures and who didn’t, who still had corn standing in the field when it snowed. Observations such as these were shared every night when we had supper and it wasn’t long before we kids were keeping an eye on our neighbors, too. The neighborhood was tight-knit. Through an unbroken grapevine of casual conversation at the feed store, at the gas station, after church let out, or by phone when it was urgent, they also knew who needed help. Then they offered that help quietly or they just showed up.

Dad and the hired men had finished putting up the second cutting of hay earlier in the week, the bales stacked high in the new barn south of the milking parlor. That meant there wouldn’t be hired men at dinner and so we’d be able to take the drive Mom had promised again last night.

“I want you girls to see some things,” she explained when we asked where we were going and why. “It will be a little vacation,” she added. Her words sent a thrill of anticipation rippling up my spine. A trip that had no useful purpose like getting groceries or a part for the tractor. A day devoted to just driving somewhere unknown. A few hours when who knows what might happen. I was ready.

Mom said that Grant Wood, a famous artist, had lived in Stone City. I fancied myself to have a future as an artist. After I finished my assignments at school, I went to the bookshelf and pulled down the “H” encyclopedia. It held pages of pictures of all different kinds of horses. Arabians. Quarter Horses. Palominos. And my favorite, Indian Ponies. Little Joe Cartwright rode an Indian pony on Bonanza. Horses were far and away my favorite thing to draw, and I drew them all the time.

I saw the ads in Dad’s Successful Farming magazine, the ads claiming I might have a real future as an artist. If I just drew the Pirate and sent it in, Real Professionals would assess my talent. I could not imagine quite how it worked, but I believed if I could re-create that exact Pirate, exactly as he appeared in the drawing, I would win. I would be judged a Talented Artist. In my bedroom, door closed from the prying eyes of my sisters, I drew the Pirate, spirited a stamp and envelope from Dad’s desk drawer in the kitchen, and ran my drawings to the mailbox. My sisters and Mom and Dad would be so surprised when I won.

I ignored the tiny detail that I had drawn the pirate and the cowboy in a similar ad and sent them in several times before and heard nothing. I figured the Real Professionals were busy with their own art, or I hadn’t made my copy exact enough, or my letter got lost, or their letter to me got lost. Nowhere in my thinking did it occur to me they thought I had no talent. Of course I had talent. My teacher Miss Fowler said so and so did Mom when I showed her the horses I drew.

One year I positioned a card table by my bedroom window intent on sketching the hills, trees and fields north of our house. I imagined myself painting stunning landscapes with my eight-color watercolor set and the leftover paints from my last paint-by-number project. The results were more akin to cave drawings. Nothing I drew looked remotely like anything I saw in the magazines Mom stacked away in the crawl space of the attic. I abandoned my studio after a few days, discouraged. Then in a little while the idea would flit through my mind again, like a migrating bird in the spring, and I’d pull out pencils and paints and crayons to try once more.

But now, NOW, I was going to get to see where a real artist painted. By seeing where he worked, by seeing what he saw when he painted, I could figure out how to paint like a real artist.

On the day of our trip to Stone City, Mom finished packing a lunch and Grandma Jensen put away the last of the breakfast dishes as we girls changed into clean shorts and shirts. The sun was up full in the sky, the heat undeterred by the least wisp of cloud. Sweat beads collected under my bangs, trickling between my shoulder blades as we piled into our black Chevrolet sedan. Jane sat in front between Mom and Grandma because she always got carsick, leaving the back seat to Sue and me.

Earlier that morning, Dad filled the car up from the barrel of gas he used to fill the tractors. Gas was 24 cents a gallon in town; it was cheaper bought in bulk. Plus, Mom wouldn’t have to stop for gas on the trip.

“We’ll be back in time for milking,” Mom said to Dad as she stowed a picnic lunch in the trunk, climbed into the front seat and turned the ignition. Sue and I knelt on the back seat, waving out the window at Dad who disappeared in the cloud of dust stirred up as we motored up the lane.

Mom drove often enough—to town for groceries, to 4-H meetings on neighboring farms, to Sunday school activities. But driving was, for the most part, Dad’s job, a man’s job. Some of the neighbor women didn’t drive at all. When Mom got behind the steering wheel, she gripped the wheel with both hands and never let go. Her back was ramrod straight and she leaned slightly forward to better see the road and anything that might be on it. She held this at-attention position until we arrived at our destination, whether 15 minutes or two hours later, all the while chewing vigorously on a stick of gum.

As Mom negotiated the two-lane highway and rolling hills of eastern Iowa, we entertained ourselves with car games, most of which depended on one of us being the first to spot something. We competed to be the first to see Burma Shave signs—words of wisdom on boards nailed to successive fence posts. We read in unison. “Big mistake … Many make … Rely on horn … Instead of break … Burma Shave.” Each completed sequence resulted in giggles and groans and a frantic effort to write down the words to tell Dad when we got back home.

We also kept a list of cars from other counties. Grandma had a prodigious memory for lists and could recite all 99 Iowa counties by name and number. She knew that Adair County was Number 1 as well as she knew that Jackson County was 49, all the way up to Wright County at 99. So each time we spied a new number, the only county designation on license plates at that time, she told us the county name.

As we rolled over the last hills before the slow descent into the valley to Stone City, Sue and I pushed forward, craning to see everything as soon as humanly possible. Before long, our heads were fully in the front seat even though our bodies were technically still in the back. Bathed in the dusty golden sun, the valley was, I would come to learn, just as Grant Wood painted it—hilly corn and hay fields, trees in the fence rows—the ideal scene people visualize when they think of rural America.

When we finally arrived, I was vaguely disappointed in a way I couldn’t quite define. Stone City was only a few buildings really, all made of big yellow limestone blocks from a local quarry. Billowing limestone dust followed us along the gravel roads and when Mom pulled into the churchyard at the top of a hill, yellow grit filtered out of the air and settled silent on the car. Dust already on the grass and the leaves of the huge, old oak trees surrounding the church made it seem as though we saw everything through a warm, amber filter. In the penetrating July sun, dust stuck to our sweaty bodies.

“Don’t run in the church,” Mom called, as we kids rushed inside while she and Grandma walked at a pace suited to the heat. Inside, the thick limestone walls provided cool darkness and a brief escape from the heat and glare of the sun. Golden light filtered through the tall, stained glass windows, creating a soft glow on the worn pews. We tiptoed down the aisle, dragging our fingers along the top of each pew. I gazed up at Christ on the cross. The light, the feel, it was a place I might have painted if I’d known how. It did not occur to me to wonder about Grant Wood.

In truth there was not much to see since Stone City was not a functioning town. There was an occupied house or two, no museum, no real store although there was a Coca-Cola machine into which we each slid a dime and pulled out a bottle of pop drenched at once in beads of moisture. While Mom and Grandma sat in the shade on a limestone bench, my sisters and I chased around under the trees, in and out of the buildings, threw sticks into the stream that ran through the valley. We were unimpressed by the few faded prints of Wood’s paintings Mom discovered hanging on the dusty walls in the dark, cobwebby recesses of one of the buildings.

Within a short while, Mom got us all back into the car and we drove to Anamosa to the Grant Wood School, a one-room schoolhouse not at all dissimilar to our own. Nonetheless, we looked at everything, found desks that fit us, imagined for one second being painters because Mom suggested we should. How to become a painter was still a puzzle to me. The hills Grant Wood painted were our hills. His schoolhouse was like our school. His life—at least as much of it as I could see on this trip—seemed like my life.

As we tried one desk and then another, laughing at the strange familiarity of another country school—though one that turned out someone famous—how could we have known what was happening at home? We live our lives unaware of events happening around us that are destined to shape us.

By the time we came out of the school, Mom had unpacked our picnic lunch. We ate sitting on the dry grass in the shade of the car. All the car doors stood open to let the breeze—the only air conditioning we had available—blow through. The last syrupy sweet sips of my Coke bordered on being as hot as the sun reflecting off the car, but as I rolled the thick, green glass bottle between my hands I decided I liked it that way. I leaned back against the car, closed my eyes and breathed in the warm, dusty air, enjoying a day that was not so different from every day on the farm but that was, at the same time, very different.

In no time, Mom packed everything back up and we headed home. Sue and I lay down, head to head, our bare feet on opposite window frames, the wind whipping through the open windows warming and cooling us at the same time. We’d be home in time for milking at 5:00. Grandma could easily have supper on the table by 6:00.

Lying on the seat, my feet up against the window, I watched the sky cloud over and thought about the dew on the grass that morning. Maybe it would rain anyway; sometimes it did in spite of the signs. The closer we got to the farm, the heavier the clouds became until they were so thick and the sky so dark, it seemed like night.

“There sure are a lot of cars,” Grandma observed when we were only a mile or so from the farm. Sue and I sat up as Grandma kept a running total of the cars we met.

“There are,” Mom agreed. “I wonder if there’s a fire somewhere?” she added idly.

Her comment set all of us to scanning the horizon for smoke. I recalled the recent fire on a neighbor’s farm that burned the house down in the middle of the night. The family had kids our age and we’d listened in open-mouthed awe as they described escaping the house in the middle of the night wearing only their pajamas, scooting down the stairs on their butts because the stairs were too hot for their bare feet. They got out okay, but after that, everyone talked about keeping hard-soled shoes by your bed just in case.

The closer we got to our farm, the more cars there were. Grandma could barely keep up with her count. This many cars in late afternoon in rural Iowa was truly an uncommon thing. Mom gripped the steering wheel even more tightly in the face of this unexpected rural rush hour.

As we drew closer to our lane, we realized many of those cars were turning in, driving up the hill to our farm.

“Oh, no!” Mom exclaimed, her back and shoulders radiated anxiety as she edged forward into the steering wheel. Because it was so overcast, we had not seen smoke. Nor had we seen flames. Still, my skin crawled with snakes of fear at the sound in Mom’s voice. I wanted her to propel us immediately and directly home by her will, something I know she’d have done if she could.

We made it up the lane to see our yard full of cars. All our neighbors crowded the yard along with many people I didn’t know.