The Great Sand Fracas of Ames County (4 page)

“You're going to kill him,” Judy said. “Let him up. Let him up.”

Ambrose staggered to his feet, gagging and throwing up water as the boys who'd held him down stood laughing and pointing their fingers at him. Judy told the teacher what happened, and the teacher made the boys who nearly drowned Ambrose stay inside the schoolroom and miss recess for the rest of the week. But that was all the punishment they got.

Kids at school and people in the community all believed Ambrose was “slow”—mentally deficient. But his mother and father, Sophia and Clarence, knew better and they always supported him. Ambrose surely didn't consider himself “slow.” He liked reading and doing math. He liked writing. He liked school, but he didn't care for his fellow students, who couldn't move past teasing him every opportunity they got.

When he was in seventh grade, and well past five feet tall, husky and strong because of all the farm work he had been doing, an eighth grader pushed him to the limit one day. They were both carrying in wood for the woodstove in the school. “D . . . d . . . n't know you . . . you . . .” He didn't finish his mocking sentence. Ambrose took a piece of wood and whopped the eighth grader over the head. The eighth grader fell to the ground in a heap, the wood sticks he was carrying spilling on the ground in front of him.

For that little outburst of temper, Ambrose missed two weeks of recess. He never enjoyed recess anyway, so he spent his time in the schoolroom reading books.

Ambrose's parents didn't say much about the trouble he got into at school. But later that week his mother gave him a little notebook and a new number 2 lead pencil. “Why don't you write down things that are happening around the farm?” she suggested. And that's what he did. He wrote about the weather, especially about storms that rolled through that part of Ames County regularly. Fierce summer thunderstorms and wicked winter blizzards that made farm life challenging and left farm families isolated sometimes for days on end.

He wrote about what it was like to be different from other kids, and how their teasing and constant reminders of his inability to speak like other kids never ceased to make him feel inadequate, some days downright worthless. It was as if what was bothering him and causing him so much unhappiness had moved from his mind to the page in front of him.

He wrote about farm life, the crops his father planted and the livestock they raised. He wrote about harvesting hay, mostly by hand as their team of horses did only the heavy work such as pulling the hay mower and the hay wagon on which they pitched cured alfalfa and clover. Ambrose described in detail how to chop and split wood with an ax, which he and his pa did every fall.

He wrote about the coming of spring and how he looked forward to it after winter had dragged on and on, never wanting to give up its grip. And as strange as it may seem, after a long, hot summer of never-ending work, and an equally busy fall with the grain, potato, and corn harvests, he wrote about looking forward to winter when everything slowed down and life was more pleasant—until a blizzard blew in from the northwest and made the Ambrose family miserable for several days.

He wrote about the seasonal cycles on the farm and his reaction to them. Somewhere he had read that all of life is a circle and that people return to earlier places again and again as they live their lives. That was surely true for people who lived on farms. Each year you did the same thing: spring planting, summer caring for crops, fall harvesting, and winter resting and planning for the next year. It was the same each year, but it was always different too, as weather, markets, and a hundred other things added spice and challenge to farm life and made what might seem predictable quite unpredictable.

His stuttering continued, especially when he was in a group and the situation was stressful, such as when the teacher called on him. Ambrose discovered that if he relaxed and was speaking with but one person, he could string several words together in a sentence—the stuttering was still there, and it took a while for him to say the words, but it certainly was an improvement. Ambrose guessed the teacher figured that if he could communicate with one other person, he could communicate with several. Of course she was wrong.

Something else made Ambrose strange in the minds of many people who knew him; they believed he could talk to animals. Ambrose first discovered that he had this gift, and he truly believed it was a gift, when he was seven years old. Felix, the Adler's collie, would look at Ambrose as if he understood exactly what Ambrose was saying. And Ambrose noticed another strange thing; when he was alone with an animal and talking to it, he didn't stutter. One day Ambrose found a raccoon by the side of the road. Someone must have hit it with a car. It had a broken leg, but otherwise the animal seemed in reasonable shape. Ambrose named him George and put a little wooden splint on his leg wrapped tight with cloth and tape. Ambrose talked to George all the while he was fixing his leg, expecting any minute that the animal would bite him or try to run away. But George did neither. The injured raccoon seemed to understand what Ambrose was saying. Ambrose was afraid that the raccoon and Felix wouldn't get along, that they might try to kill each other. But the dog and the raccoon got along with each other just fine. In fact they became good buddies. What a threesome they were: a big collie dog, a limping raccoon, and a stuttering farm kid.

Ambrose was afraid that his father would make him turn George lose once he healed. But his father never said a word, and while the little raccoon could have run off anytime he wanted, he never did.

When Ambrose finished high school in 1951, most folks didn't think he was smart enough to graduate, except his father and mother, who always believed he was “destined for great things,” as Ma said. After high school Ambrose turned to full-time farming with his father, helping him take care of the twenty milk cows, growing fifteen acres of corn, fifteen acres of oats, ten acres of potatoes, and tending a large vegetable garden that provided much of the food for their table.

George was Ambrose's pet for almost twenty years, but one morning the raccoon didn't greet Ambrose when he went out to the barn to help with the morning milking. Ambrose crawled the ladder to the haymow and found George's body; sometime during the night he must have died. Ambrose figured in human terms George would have been eighty or even ninety years old.

Only a few days after George died, Ambrose heard a neighbor telling his father that he had shot a big female raccoon that had been raiding his sweet corn patch.

“That old coon had little ones; I could tell she was nursing,” the neighbor said. “Probably got rid of a half a dozen of them raiding bastards,” he concluded proudly.

Overhearing this, Ambrose immediately decided to go looking for the raccoon's den, likely in a hollow tree in a woodlot near the neighbor's sweet corn patch. Every evening, when the chores were done, he went searching for the raccoon's den, knowing that if he didn't find it in a couple days the little ones would all die of starvation.

On his third foray into the neighbor's woodlot, Ambrose found the den tree. Only one little raccoon in the litter was alive, and just barely. Ambrose fed the weak little fellow with milk that he dripped into his mouth with an eyedropper. After a couple weeks, the baby raccoon was drinking out of a bowl and growing like everything. Ambrose named him George II. And of course he and the little raccoon talked to each other every day. Felix had died several years earlier, and Ambrose's father had replaced him with another collie named Fanny. Fanny and George had never much liked each other, but Fanny and George II became great buddies, and together with Ambrose they often had a three-way conversation: Ambrose sharing his thoughts, Fanny making a little whining noise, and George II making a purring sound. Ambrose couldn't understand what Fanny and George II were saying, but from the way they looked at Ambrose, they seemed to know exactly the meaning of what was coming out of his mouth.

Ambrose had grown accustomed to not being able to speak well when he was with people. He enjoyed farm work, appreciated having a chance to work with his father, who never once lost his patience when Ambrose had trouble trying to tell him something. About the only social contact Ambrose had was when he went to Link Lake for supplies, driving their trusty team and tying them up behind the Mercantile in a parking lot that still had a place to tie a team of horses, a hitching post left over from an earlier era. When he finished his brief shopping, using a list his mother provided, he often stopped at the Link Lake Library, where he spent an hour or so reading or deciding on a book or two that he would check out and take home with him. While at the library, he read several newspapers including the
New York Times
and the
Wall Street Journal
. He especially enjoyed reading books about nature—Emerson and Thoreau had become favorite authors of his.

He also generally planned his trips to town to coincide with the meetings of the Link Lake Historical Society. He sat in back of the room at the meetings, not saying a word but taking in every nuance of what went on. Some members of the historical society ignored Ambrose because they knew of his strange ways and his difficulty speaking. But not Emily Higgins. She made a point of talking with Ambrose each time he attended a meeting and tried to make him feel welcome.

6

A
s Marilyn Jones waited for a phone call from La Crosse on this cool April day, she read Stony Field's newest column, becoming more agitated by the minute.

Marilyn slammed the paper down on her desk. She thought,
The audacity of this jerk, Stony Field. What right does he have to shoot off his mouth about something that shouldn't concern him?
She wondered if he had somehow gotten inside information about what was being proposed for Link Lake—the subject of the phone call that she was patiently waiting for.

The phone on her desk rang loudly. “Link Lake Supper Club, this is Marilyn.” She already knew from the caller ID that this was the call she was waiting for.

“This is Emerson Evans with the Alstage Sand Mining Company. How are you this morning?”

“I'm just fine. I've been waiting for your call.”