When I Was Young and In My Prime (15 page)

It takes him over a week to recover, and even then he doesn't fully. Not quite. Not ever. He trembles, can't will his legs sometimes to stand him up and walk him to the kitchen, so he sits in his chair just thinking about tea, just thinking. That summer there is only a half a row of radishes and no one notices.

In July he falls on his way up the stairs of the front porch to get the mail. He never uses the front door, always in and out by the side door near the back. Every couple of days he walks around the house up onto the front porch and fetches the mail from the mailbox. He trips and falls face-first, skins his knees and chin. He turns over, sits up and then sits there on the front porch, sobbing, his knees bleeding through his pants.
 

He falls again in August. Down the stairs this time, the stairs to the basement. He's carrying a jar of freshly pickled plum tomatoes, and all he can think as he's falling is,
I can't let the jar break.
He falls to the bottom. Nothing is broken, neither the jar nor his bones, but he is badly bruised and can barely breathe. He doesn't call anyone to tell them about the fall. Ruth shows up on the weekend to visit, sees the bruises, hears the story. When she goes downstairs to use the basement bathroom, she notices the jar of pickled tomatoes off to the side on the floor at the foot of the stairs, like a stone marking a grave or a well.
 

That autumn he gives in and decides to sell the house, his last crop of sugar snap peas already planted and harvested.

Johnny Schritt had a scow he used for fishing so when the Red River flooded that year he figured he was king of the mountain for a while, and a generous king at that. It was my first season as a hired man on Henry Lytle's farm but Johnny had been there for years. When the floods came he took us all for rides in his scow and didn't even charge us, grateful, I suppose, to be centre of attention for once cause no one (least of all women) had ever looked twice at Johnny Schritt, at least not since he was born with his toes attached like that to one another. He was the sort of fellow who couldn't follow a set of instructions to save his hide but who knew every type of useless trick you could think of. Like how to cheat at racehorse rummy or how to put a chicken to sleep by tucking her head under her wing and swinging her back and forth between your legs like a pendulum for a minute or two. Johnny would be on his way to feed the pigs and out of the blue he'd grab a chicken from the yard and put her to sleep like that, then climb up to the loft in the barn and set the chicken on the rafter beam so that when she woke up a minute later she'd find herself way up high there in the air. Jesus you should have heard the sounds those chickens made then.
 

Anyhow, a whole lot of neighbours were camping out with us—the Lytle place was one of the farms on high ground there. Johnny and I gave up our beds in the bunkhouse for the women and kids, and the men all slept in the barn. All the farmers were worried sick about when the rain would stop, the waters go down, land dry up enough for spring planting. They'd be up half the night figuring—you could hear them making figures together about the cost of buying new seed and how late they could push it and still get in a harvest before frost. And even when they weren't talking it over, it was on their minds. Round the clock. You could see it in their faces if you caught sight of one of them looking out over the fields of water—you could tell they were chewing it over inside their heads, figuring. You could almost hear them grinding their teeth, willing the water to disappear, wishing for a Moses to part it, or a Jesus to tame it, or wishing at the very least that a Noah had saved their livestock two by two.
 

Johnny and I slept up in the hayloft and let them talk. Johnny was a little thick and didn't give two hoots for anything but excitement, and to me nothing could be as bad as what I'd seen in the Old Country. Seemed to me hunger and blood were different when there was looting and bayonets to blame—unnatural you might say. So flood or no flood, this was the land of plenty to me and I wasn't going to waste time worrying.
 

In the days after the rain finally stopped but before the water started back to where it belonged, Johnny ran himself ragged taking us all for excursions in his leaky little scow. He and I went on our own the first trip. Had to take turns rowing and bailing. Took us a while to get there at first. We tried to follow the road to town but kept getting either lost or beached, so after a spell I talked Johnny into giving the current a go and we followed the river. Didn't have to row at all, all the way to town, just lean back and drift. I remember putting my hands up on either side of my face like horse blinkers, turning around until at one particular angle I got a glimpse of pure water almost as far as you could see, flat as a field of wheat only silver instead of gold and I tell you I was in my glory.
 

Sure was a funny feeling floating over the town bridge instead of under. The water was murky as hell, but I can still remember to this day looking down over the edge of Johnny Schritt's scow that first trip into town after the rain stopped and seeing a row of automobiles like great big stones just under the surface of the water, parked all along Main Street as if nothing at all was amiss, just minding their own business. The dogwood had already turned red in front of the credit union and you could just barely make it out as you passed over, a red blur, waving like in the wind. 'Course downtown there were plenty of tall two-storey brick buildings so it was no problem to get your bearings there. On the way home it was hard going—upstream, you know. You had to take care not to get disoriented 'cause in some places for long stretches there were only rooftops showing by the river and one rooftop tends to look a hell of a lot like another whether you're rich or poor.
 

Johnny and I were tight friends so he took me on almost every excursion as first mate to his skipper. Wasn't so much fun after that first trip though. The water started to go down quickly so it wasn't as grand and we got beached more and more often and everyone was worrying over their houses, wanting to go visit their property, figure the damage. At the time I remember being impatient and all full of scorn, but looking back, who can blame them?
   

I never forgot that time. I slept at night in the Lytles' barn with my arms and back aching from rowing upstream and my dreams all fast and blurred and turned around. When I went to sleep I'd be caught right up in a current again, right where it left off. I remember the dreams went on for a spell even after the water was gone. They were full of things showing up in places they shouldn't be. The milking bucket turning up in Mrs. Lytle's china cabinet. The pipe organ from the church standing in the back pasture among the cattle. My sister Anne in the bow of the boat leaning back like Cleopatra even though she'd already gone east by then. And in one dream the pine box we made to bury Father—it was perched on the beams of the Lytle barn for all the world like one of Johnny Schritt's sleeping chickens.
 

This morning two workmen come to fix the plumbing in the apartment downstairs. One of them knocks on my door, wants to come up and turn on the water. I let him up, but I'm instantly aware that his nose won't be adjusted to the stink of out-of-control sauerkraut in the pantry where the sink is. So I go in and turn on the tap for him. He listens, says thanks, goes back downstairs. Of course when he leaves I'm finally motivated to deal with the stink, though James has been bugging me to deal with it for days. So I'm kneeling on the floor scooping scum off the sauerkraut with a teaspoon into a blue plastic cup, and through the floorboards I hear the one workman telling the other how my place stinks, how disgusting it is, how there's definitely something rotting up there.
Hurry up so we can get out of here,
the other one says.
 

So I start pacing and, even though I half-know they'll be gone before I get to them, I'm working up my courage to go down, knock on the door and explain that I heard them through the floorboards, up through the pipes—explain about the sauerkraut, how I hate the stink too, how I wish I could just dump the whole fucking crock into the compost except I don't have a compost so it would have to be the garbage, but that I can't, because, you see, because of my grandfather.
 

Because—how to explain—because of the small messages he leaves to himself on scraps of paper all over his house
(veterinarian appointment Tues 1 pm, that cat will be the death of me)
, and because of the shaky hand he writes them in.
 

Because his house is for sale and I'm guessing this was the last time we'll ever make sauerkraut together. Because his old cat Tigger died the day before I went over there to make the sauerkraut. Because Tigger is buried with an upside-down washbasin to mark his grave under the apple tree that Grandpa tried to splice with pear.
 

Because the man poured pickle juice on his fried rice when we ordered Chinese after making the sauerkraut. Because I tried it too. And it was good.
 

Because the first year I made sauerkraut with him I told everyone,
Did you know there's no vinegar in sauerkraut—only cabbage and salt, fermented.
Because no one knew. It was always news.
 

Because we have the same taste for vinegar. Because I don't speak Low German or German or Ukrainian or Russian or Dutch.
 

Because the lantern that used to light his way to the barn for morning chores now hangs unlit in my living room.
 

Because he bought thirty cabbages and bragged to the Mennonite woman who sold them that his granddaughter wanted to learn sauerkraut.
 

Because she was impressed.
 

Because he wouldn't tell me when I'd stomped enough juices out of the cabbage with the wooden cudgel. I had to guess for myself. Because he used to have Polish farmhands who made huge wooden kegs of sauerkraut. Because they'd walk on it in their bare feet. Like Mediterraneans walk on grapes. For wine.

And I'm crying now because I'm such a sad sorry sap and I'm about to get my period and I'm behind on my rent and I'm back in the pantry kneeling in front of the sauerkraut scooping the scum into a blue plastic cup holding my breath in the stink and my nose is running and I'm wiping it on my sleeve and trying not to sob too loudly as the plumbers gather up their tools below.
 

things buried with us

1
 

The clicking sound
 

her knees made
 

whenever she bent
 

or straightened.
 

2
 

One Saturday afternoon
 

in front of the general store
 

a starling swooped close,