Coop_ A Year Of Poultry, Pigs, And Parenting Part 9

In late June we drive across the state for a family wedding and a working vacation. The wedding reception is held in a beautifully preserved old barn, and it's fun to watch my dad and brothers standing at the edge of the dance floor scoping the timbers and speculating on how the barn was constructed. The next morning we drive up the Door County Peninsula and take a car ferry to Washington Island, where I am to give a talk and perform my first ever solo concert. I am nervous before the concert, as it is the first time I will have ever appeared with just my guitar and no one else to remember verses or play over my mistakes, but it's a pa.s.sable show and I enjoy it once I relax. Coincidentally, the show is held in a converted barn. Our hosts put us up in a log cabin beside Lake Michigan. There are sandhill cranes on the lawn and goslings at the dock. Our friend Dan comes by with a pink Washington Island sweatshirt for Jane, and we visit until after dark. I have a chance to write in the Red Cup Coffee Shop, and we take Amy to see the smooth stones of Schoolhouse Beach. It is a good couple of days, but there is also that jolt of realizing how much world there is to drink in, and how much I miss when I get stuck in the vortex of my own just-in-time commitments. At the concert Amy takes a picture of Jane sleeping on Anneliese's shoulder as I sing. Later when I look at it I see Anneliese is smiling, her eyes bright, the way I remember them from the very first days of our courtship. Here lately with the baby and the insomnia but even more with my constant deadline-pushing, I have seen much less of that smile.

On the way back off the island, we are the only family on the ferry and the captain allows Amy to stand at his position in the wheelhouse. She puts her hands on the wheel, and when I see the size of her smile I can tell it is good for her to get the attention. When the ferry gate lowers, we drive our loyal van up the ramp to solid ground and point for home. Within the first mile, Jane starts her bra.s.s-lung bawling. It is 290 miles from the tip of Door County to our farm in Fall Creek. A six-hour drive. With the exception of twenty minutes somewhere west of Green Bay and the times we stopped to check to see if her diaper was wet, or if she was hungry, or if her seat buckles were pinching her, or if she was just worked up over the subprime mortgage mess, she screeched nonstop until we took her out of van and into the house at home. Honestly, I don't know how she did it without the aid of an oxygen tank. Clearly circular breathing was involved. Amy spent most of the ride with her hands locked over her ears. The next time someone suggests we put her in the car and drive around when she won't sleep, I will hand them the keys and the car seat and the ear m.u.f.fs and tell them to have at it. Very early in the trip the air conditioner threw a belt, which was nice because it gave us reason to run with all the windows down, the siren sound of our bundle of joy pealing out across the countryside and scaring cows.

We've been holding off on getting the chicks from Billy and Margie until the Washington Island trip was out of the way, and now the big day has come. I spent the morning working with Mills, but since the coop is still nowhere near done, I used the time to build a chicken tractor. A chicken tractor is basically a portable enclosure with an open floor that allows the chickens to pick and scratch-you will want to read Joel Salatin for the definitive take, although this is the age when Google met chickens, so a profusion of examples are a split-second click away. Once they've worked the area over, you move the tractor, and they move with it. You can get as carried away as you like, but I kept mine simple. I built a wooden frame roughly the dimensions of a twin bed, incorporated a roost and a hinged door that doubled as a ramp, and even remembered to build a small shelf in the corner on which to place and secure the waterer. I put the whole works on two elevated skids and attached heavy rubber flaps along the bottom of either end. The skids allow it to be dragged from place to place, while the rubber flaps seal the gap at either end. The rubber is heavy enough to keep small chicks in and all but the most serious predators out, and because it can flap both ways, the tractor can be dragged from either end. Mills dug the rubber out of one of his Sanford and Son piles, smiling triumphantly. Nothing makes him happier than to put something he scavenged to good use. To finish off, I rigged hooks at either end of the skids so I could put loops in a rope and tow it either way.

I'm pleased with how it turned out. It's square and st.u.r.dy, and I managed to avoid idiot do-overs. In fact, with my sad record for building things, this went amazingly well, with only one head-knocking moment: because the pickup truck had been unavailable, I removed all the seats from the fambulance and took that. In a rare moment of prescience, I measured the inside width of the van's hatch and made sure to cut the chicken tractor cross-members a good inch narrower so it would fit in when it was done. Unfortunately, I overlooked the fact that the c.u.mulative width of the finished product would include the vertical supports, and when I tried to put the finished product in the van, it was exactly two inches wider than the interior of the vehicle. I took this in relatively good humor, mostly because Mills was right there, and among handymen it is considered impolite to throw another man's tools.

But I was kinda stuck. I needed that tractor for the chickens I was picking up on the way home.

Miller looked at what I'd done, hooted, and said, "SWEET MOTHER-OF-PEARL!" "SWEET MOTHER-OF-PEARL!" Then he brightened. "Say! I've got a trailer! I got it at a Then he brightened. "Say! I've got a trailer! I got it at a thrift sale thrift sale! I'm going to use it to haul wood behind my four-wheeler! It's right out back!"

Mills led me out behind the barn past several of his salvage piles and then pointed proudly at what appeared to be the remnants of a lawn-tractor accident in the weeds. Upon closer examination I identified the wreckage as a trailer because it had a hitch and two rubber tires, but the frame was bent, the plywood bed was delaminating, and the taillights were shattered. You could just envision the cop who pulled me over flipping his notebook open and getting comfortable before writing up all the violations embodied in this one little tangle.

But I didn't have much choice. We hooked the trailer to the van, strapped the chicken tractor to it, and I went on my way. Before I left, Mills and I came to an agreement on our story should I get stopped. I would tell the officer I had just purchased the trailer and was taking it home to make repairs. We actually rehea.r.s.ed our story and the price-$85. You know, in case I got pulled and the officer decided to check my story. Contingency planning, you know. I like to think I respect the law enough not to feed them some silly half-baked story. I also strapped and re-strapped. I call this the "I-tried" strapping method. Yah, it's a tenfold rolling violation, Officer, but I tried but I tried.

I kept checking my rearview. In Mondovi I stopped at the hardware store to buy a chicken waterer and a feeder designed to be screwed on the bottom of a mason jar. Outside, noticing a couple of big-rig truckers checking their loads, I did a little circle around mine, snugging and tw.a.n.ging at the straps and checking the tires. I appeared pathetic and responsible.

Despite the sc.r.a.p-yard trailer, the chicken tractor rode well, and soon I was at Billy's place. He was out back working on a chicken coop of his own. Several weeks ago Billy had bragged to me about his big score: just when he was trying to decide how to go about building a coop, someone whose kids had outgrown their backyard playhouse said he could have the structure. "It's free! free!" he said at the time. "All I gotta do is move it over here and drag it out back."

Well, yes. That was weeks ago. He decided to put it on a concrete pad. He decided to insulate. He decided to redo the roof. He decided he should repaint the siding. He and his wife painted the interior, then decided the color was chicken unfriendly and repainted it. When I get there today he is burying chicken wire in the dirt to prevent predators digging under. He is shirtless and pouring sweat. Billy is a big man and not well suited to heat. Since he got his "free" coop, he has made more trips to Menards than your average subdivision contractor and has had at least one nasty incident involving tin snips. Billy is one of the gentler friends of my acquaintance, but when I find him out back today, sweaty and sticky beside the free coop that has now easily cleared four figures, he looks at me and hisses, "I am ready to stop preparing preparing for chickens and just for chickens and just watch watch chickens!" I have abridged the quote, leaving out at least one contraband word. chickens!" I have abridged the quote, leaving out at least one contraband word.

He and Margie lead me to the garage, where the chicks-I'm not sure if you could still call them chicks; they are a month old, and mostly transitioned from fluff to feathers-are in the same plastic wading pool where I saw them with Amy, only they've grown and gotten more rambunctious and hard to keep in the pool. We transfer our dozen to a cardboard box lined with wood shavings. I load them in the back of the van and am on my way.

The trailer holds up fine, and I make it home without being arrested. Amy is visiting relatives and the baby is asleep, so it is just Anneliese who comes out for a look. It's late, so rather than try out the chicken tractor, we just transfer them to the old pump house (where I've rigged a temporary cage and roosts), give them feed and water, close the door, and leave them be for the night.

In the morning the fog is so thick I can hardly see the old granary across the yard. One by one I put the chickens into the tractor, then latch the trapdoor behind them. Leaning into the rope, I pull them onto a patch of green gra.s.s, and within seconds they are scratching and pecking like it's all they've ever done. Similar to the pigs-all their life in a plastic wading pool with wood shavings, and they know immediately what to do when put in contact with the earth. I lift some rocks and find a pair of angleworms. When I toss them in, the carnage is immediate. I go to the garden and pluck a couple of potato bugs-we've had a heavy infestation this year-but am disappointed when the chickens ignore them. We could use some potato-bug-eating chickens. Then one of the birds stretches, one leg and one wing back in the manner of a ballet dancer warming up before the barre, and I straighten and stand back just to watch for a while. It's dead calm here, the gra.s.s wet green, everything cottoned in stillness by the fog, nothing visible except a hazy semicircle of yard, half our house, and there in the middle of that yard, our chickens. When I return to the house, I meet Anneliese coming out.

We turn and stand together on the steps, looking at the scene. We have chickens chickens. I move behind and put my arms around my wife, beautiful in one of my old flannel shirts.

Baby, I tell her, another dream has come true.

I am joking mostly, but standing there on our little patch with Anneliese in my arms, I hear the snap of the flag we are flying beside the driveway on this, the fourth day of July, and I think we have been blessed with a lovely little dream indeed.

All day I work in the office with a clear view to the chickens below. Up here in my swivel chair, I feel like a rancher of old, surveying my entire operation: two pigs, twelve chickens, one guinea pig (Amy puts him outside to graze). The fog burned off by mid-morning, and now it's a fine day, peppered by the sound of a few early starters shooting off fireworks. Anneliese and I watched the chickens for a good while this morning, and I have gone down several times to move the tractor and feed them bread crumbs from our pig bakery stash. I throw in some windfall apples, but after a few tentative pecks they ignore them as they did the potato bugs. Later I will learn that if I slice the apples in half, they'll eat them quite well. When Anneliese brings Jane out and parks her stroller beside the chicken tractor, Jane regards the birds gravely and at great length, her chin tucked so that a second chin pops out. This is a mix-and-match batch-Black Australorp, Buff Orpington, White Rock, Speckled Suss.e.x, Rhode Island Red, Partridge Rock, Barred Rock, Golden Laced Wyandotte-and they are relishing their relative freedom, every now and then exploding into short-lived but aggressive bursts of flight, and sometimes sprinting from one end of the pen to the other.

When evening comes with a storm threatening, I put the chicks back in the pump house. Amy's timothy is in there, boxed up and stacked for winter, and at the smell of it all my hay-making memories flood back. The sense of accomplishment when the hay was all baled, the wagons all emptied, the field all stubble. When I step outside into the lowering light, I remember how it felt to stack the last bale in the mow and to slide down the elevator rails, through the cool night air.

I hope I'm not working my poor daughter just to work her. I hold out hope that there are long-term benefits in a.s.signing a child tasks that don't pay off with an immediate Dilly Bar. And while this life we are trying for here is a far cry from real real farming, it does present opportunities for edification. This sort of thing can easily be overdone. I think of childhood friends who came to school only after several hours of choring, and how they were essentially unpaid help. And then there is the other lesson, the one that Anneliese is better at drawing out than I am-that not all tasks are completed on your own behalf. One late-summer evening I remember helping Dad and Mom push the year's last load of hay into the pole barn. The next day I would go back to school, and I remember how it was to stand there for a moment beside my parents, knowing that a winter's worth of forage was safely under roof, and that I had played a part in that. It wouldn't make me any cooler at school, but I had the sense that I had been an integral part of something worthwhile, something that paid an intangible dividend. farming, it does present opportunities for edification. This sort of thing can easily be overdone. I think of childhood friends who came to school only after several hours of choring, and how they were essentially unpaid help. And then there is the other lesson, the one that Anneliese is better at drawing out than I am-that not all tasks are completed on your own behalf. One late-summer evening I remember helping Dad and Mom push the year's last load of hay into the pole barn. The next day I would go back to school, and I remember how it was to stand there for a moment beside my parents, knowing that a winter's worth of forage was safely under roof, and that I had played a part in that. It wouldn't make me any cooler at school, but I had the sense that I had been an integral part of something worthwhile, something that paid an intangible dividend.

You won't find many hay-baling songs out there, but Fred Eaglesmith wrote a dandy called "Balin' Again," and there's a line in there about a man surveying his hayfields while having an imaginary conversation with his father. Sure could use your advice on how to raise a couple kids Sure could use your advice on how to raise a couple kids, he says, I'm tryin' to raise 'em just the way you did I'm tryin' to raise 'em just the way you did.

So I'm thinking of Fred as I watch my poor daughter again a week later, snipping more timothy and, yes, weeping. The things we do to the children.

Will it pay off?

I don't know. Looking at her there, I'm thinking maybe I'll write my own hay-making song, only call it "Wailin' Again." I am an imperfect father. This afternoon Anneliese asked if I could fold a batch of clothes before disappearing back into the office. I complied, but with slumpage.

CHAPTER 8.

At some point every Sunday evening of my childhood there would come from the kitchen a steely rapping as Mom knocked a clot of Crisco off a soupspoon and into the popcorn pan. Like an albino slug, the white gob rode a self-perpetuating slick across the scarred pan bottom until it lodged at the low spot and puddled out. Sometimes Mom let me roll the spoon against the side of the heated pan. The residual Crisco clarified and ran from the widening hot spot until the spoon bowl shone clean, a modest but potent magic trick. evening of my childhood there would come from the kitchen a steely rapping as Mom knocked a clot of Crisco off a soupspoon and into the popcorn pan. Like an albino slug, the white gob rode a self-perpetuating slick across the scarred pan bottom until it lodged at the low spot and puddled out. Sometimes Mom let me roll the spoon against the side of the heated pan. The residual Crisco clarified and ran from the widening hot spot until the spoon bowl shone clean, a modest but potent magic trick.

Mom kept the popcorn in a tin canister. Holding the canister against her body, she peeled back the plastic lid and-using a battered aluminum measuring spoon-dipped out a quarter-cup of kernels and poured them in the pot. They cascaded against the hot steel with the hiss of sleet pellets driven against a tin roof, sizzling electrically until Mom placed the lid, muting the spatter. Now and then we heard the abrasive scuff of the pan against the burner as she shook it to redistribute the kernels and oil. Eventually the first tentative pops came, and then a few more, and then like a metronome on a runaway came the frenetic firecracker rush like the whole string lit, miniature bull-snorts of steam escaping the lid until the expanding corn boosted it clear. Pressing the lid down with one hand and grabbing the handle with the other, Mom shook the pan again, coaxing a few more unspent kernels to blow. Then she dumped the contents into a stainless steel bowl big enough to bathe twin babies. The corn tumbled with a snowfall sound, an occasional old maid pinging the steel.

Then Mom gouged another k.n.o.b of Crisco from the can and repeated the process. Between batches, she sliced apples and cheese, requisitioned one of us kids to move a stack of bowls to the table, and dumped sugar into the Kool-Aid pitcher. Whoever helped mix the Kool-Aid got to pick the flavor and lick the inside of the packet-a face-twisting treat that stained your tongue some fraudulent primary color. As ever, Mom was trying to do sixteen things at once, so the kitchen was often stratified with smoke from the inevitable burned batches. Anything short of cinders went in the bowl, and perhaps as a result to this day I fancy browned popcorn; the partial incineration imparts a malty nuttiness. When the stainless steel bowl was overflowing, Mom salted the whole works down, hollered, "Popcorn's ready!" and there was your supper.

The other delightful part of the Sunday night tradition was that everyone was allowed to bring a book to the table. The idea of being able to read while eating was delicious in every sense. My brother John read Jack London books and Rascal Rascal by Sterling North-you will not be surprised to learn he once fashioned a hat from the skin of a skunk and currently resides in a homemade log cabin. Dad usually read by Sterling North-you will not be surprised to learn he once fashioned a hat from the skin of a skunk and currently resides in a homemade log cabin. Dad usually read Farm Journal Farm Journal or or Successful Farming Successful Farming or or The Agriculturalist The Agriculturalist. The younger siblings brought picture books, and during his tenure Jud flipped through his omnipresent JC Penney Christmas catalog. I read my usual Tarzan and cowboy books, but I also remember holding The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn open with one hand while I shoveled popcorn into my face with the other. It was a broken-spined hardcover. There were ill.u.s.trations within, so I wonder if it might have been an abridged version. Whenever I smell scorched Crisco, I think of Mark Twain. open with one hand while I shoveled popcorn into my face with the other. It was a broken-spined hardcover. There were ill.u.s.trations within, so I wonder if it might have been an abridged version. Whenever I smell scorched Crisco, I think of Mark Twain.

It must have been a sight: eight to twelve of us packed around the dinner table, heads bowed over books splayed flat (somewhere a librarian cringes), the pages held open with one hand while the other dipped in and out of the corn, back and forth from bowl to mouth, the rhythm interrupted only when someone refilled a bowl or took a pull at their Kool-Aid. When your eyes are fixed on text, you tend to fish around with your free hand, and nearly every week someone upended their Kool-Aid. The minute the gla.s.s. .h.i.t, Dad jumped up to make a dam with his hands in an attempt to keep the spill from leaking through the low spot in the table where the leaves met. For her part, Mom grabbed a spoon and sc.r.a.ped madly at the spreading slick, ladling the juice back in the gla.s.s one flat teaspoon at a time so it could be drunk. The same thing happened if someone spilled their milk. Sometimes when I wonder how my parents managed financially, I think of Mom going after those spoonfuls of Kool-Aid like an environmentalist trailing the Exxon Valdez Exxon Valdez with a soup ladle, and there's your answer. with a soup ladle, and there's your answer.

Now that we kids have grown and have kids of our own, "popcorn Sunday" has become the unofficial get-together night. There is no formal planning, you just drop in. Sometimes it's just a handful, sometimes the crowd is big enough that an additional table is required. Often it's brothers and sisters, but our friends and some of the neighbors also show up. For a decade after I moved back to New Auburn I lived six miles from my parents and rarely made it to popcorn Sunday. After I met Anneliese and introduced her to the tradition, she became the one who pushed for us to go more regularly. Now that we have moved farther away she is even more avid about keeping the date, and at least once a month she asks, "Are we planning on going to popcorn?" It makes me feel good, because I take it as a sign we have become quite solidly married.

Today the answer is yes, and Amy is tickled. She knows she'll likely see her cousin Sienna, and they will race toward each other on the sidewalk to hug with such aggression you fear they'll knock teeth loose. If her cousin Sidrock is there, she and Sienna will do their best to doll him up in clothes from Grandma's dress-up box, and then they'll all sit down at the play table and fight over who gets the green bowl and who gets the purple bowl.

We smell the popcorn as soon as we hit the porch, and when we step through the kitchen door it's a relatively full house. Mom and Dad and Tagg are there, and a little girl named Gloria Mom is caring for on a temporary basis. Gloria has severe epilepsy syndrome and is sitting strapped in her rolling chair beside the Monarch woodstove with her feeding tube hung from a hook on the wall. Mark and Kathleen are sitting on the piano bench, and Sidrock is charging around with a plastic dinosaur. John and Barbara are seated on the bench by the window beside Jed and his wife, Leanne. Amy and Sienna are already clacking around in high heels and tiaras, and just as we are dishing up the corn, our neighbors Roger and Debbie drop in. They have a truck farm down the road, and Roger and Jed share fieldwork. Roger is a John Deere man to the bone, and he sees to it that Jed's little boy Jake-currently roaring in and out of the kitchen with a plastic tractor-has plenty of green toys.

The table is the same as it always was, the Formica of the center leaf brighter than the rest because it sat in a closet out of the sun the first few years until the family grew large. Over on one side of the aluminum trim you can still see the saw marks from the remodeling days when Dad used the table as a sawhorse. When we were kids Dad sat at the head of the table, but tonight he's sitting on the oven door of the woodstove holding Tagg, who grins and drools per usual and waves the back of his hand at everyone who enters. Occasionally he pauses to woof or bite Dad on the arm. Mom sets the giant bowl of popcorn at the center of the table and Jed starts dishing up, the bowls pa.s.sing around until everyone has one, the cheese and apple plate following, as well as a plate of vegetables. There is no Kool-Aid, but rather pop-the cheap stuff from IGA.

We don't read around the table anymore-too many grubbing little hands to manage that-but there is nonstop visiting. There is some discussion of current events and low-level nonmalignant gossip with careful circ.u.mventions around certain areas of politics, and a lot of stories from the past. Dad usually doesn't say much unless we convince him to get going. In my favorite moments someone will crack a good line and I'll look over and catch Dad with his head tipped down, his eyes closed, and his shoulders shaking silently. That's the full-on sign that you've caught his funny bone.

Jane is fussing, so I take her out through the porch and into the addition. Settling in the recliner, I cup her diapered b.u.t.t in one palm and tuck her head beneath my chin, and shortly she is asleep. This is one of those moments I'm trying to soak in, to remember what it is for her to fit my chest like this. In the other room I can hear my family talking and laughing, and in here it's just me with the baby asleep and Jed's boy Jake grinning at me from beside the coal bucket that still holds the blocks Dad glued together with soybean paste all those years ago. Jake's favorite movie is Cars Cars, and every now and then he says "Pang!" and tips his tractor back on its b.u.t.t, just like in the film. Now Sidrock comes roaring in, and shortly after him Amy and Sienna, but Jane snoozes through it all, the noise of her generation drowning out the sound of the previous generation around the popcorn bowl in the other room.

The chickens are growing quickly, and scoot back and forth from the tractor to the pump house like old pros. At first we had to reach inside the tractor and fish them out one by one, and reverse the procedure in the morning when we moved them from the pen into the tractor. But now when I pull the tractor up to the pump house door and drop the gangplank, they skid down it on their heels, then hightail it straight into the roost. One poor little chicken is always last. She is racked with constant tremors. They came on early and have persisted, so we call her Little Miss Shake-N-Bake. The tremors affect her gait, and it always takes her a few tries to hit the chicken tractor ramp straight on. But she's game. You can see her gather herself, resolutely struggle to point her wagging head at the door, and then, like the drunk choosing the one in the middle, dive for it. If she crashes into the side of the door, she simply gathers herself and tries it again. Sometimes I give Little Miss Shake-N-Bake a boost. As a result of watching her struggle, Amy has come to love Little Miss Shake-N-Bake as her favorite chicken.

The pigs are rapidly churning up their patch, upending cl.u.s.ters of quack, b.u.mping up rocks, and now and then-based on the occasional barking seal noise that floats up from the pen-testing the limits of the electric fence. They are beginning to lose some of their charm, grunting aggressively and nipping at my calves when I enter the pen to refill their feeder. Try lying down once and see what happens Try lying down once and see what happens, they seem to be saying. But it's still fun to grab the slop bucket and call out "PIG-PIG!" just to hear them woof and see them come bounding out from their excavations to press their snouts against the wire panels with their ears in the "What's up?" position. They quickly outgrew the rubber tub I bought at Farm & Fleet, so I have taken one of the many plastic barrels Mills scrounged from the dump and cut it in half lengthways to make a durable feeder. When I fill it with slop the pigs dive in feetfirst and fight for every morsel. Sometimes one of them slips and winds up sitting in the soup. Sometimes c.o.c.klebur nips Wilbur in the ear until little spots of blood appear, but so far she has stopped short of devouring him, and he chows on, smacking grotesquely and apparently unconcerned. Wilbur is bigger, but c.o.c.klebur runs the show.

I'm up in the office reviewing notes for a story, and Jane is propped in the green chair again. She's still a tiny little bean, and I can still balance her on my forearm, but she's fattening up some, getting a little marshmallowy in the legs, and rounder in the face. Lately she's been working on holding her head steady. She hasn't quite got her cranial gyro dialed in, and there is a lot of bob and weave. Sometimes she'll really get to wobbling, and you can't help but think of Little Miss Shake-N-Bake. She's also been working hard to summon her first laugh. We'll make faces and her eyes will crinkle and her mouth will twitch up, but then she just sputters and gacks and hacks. The other night when Anneliese was bathing her in the bathtub, I leaned over and asked Jane if she was happy and I swear she said "Uh-huh!" but then it was back to happy drooling and there has been nothing since.

Here in the office now her face has begun to crumple. I switch the music from Tom T. Hall to Gnarls Barkley and turn it up. Her head bobbles in the direction of the speakers, and I have bought myself three more minutes.

Down beside the pigpen, the sweet corn is ta.s.seling. I weeded it just once, and it came on remarkably well. The soybeans, on the other hand, have been all but swamped by the quack. It is midmorning, and Amy and I have come down to feed the pigs zucchini. If you just chuck whole zucchini in there, they tend to ignore it, but we've found that if you chunk it up they'll have a go at it. Instead of using knives or even a spade, we slam the zucchini against the wire panels. If you do it hard enough, they dice themselves. It's a very satisfying transformation. c.o.c.klebur seems to be lagging behind Wilbur size wise. She's nice and healthy looking, just smaller. I haven't wormed the pigs, figuring that since they're the first pigs on this patch in twenty years if not forever, it's not necessary. Now I'm second-guessing myself, so I wait until c.o.c.klebur goes over into the bathroom corner (pigs tend to defecate in one corner of the pen only) to do her business, and then I crawl over the panel and study the p.o.o.p, kicking it apart with the toe of my boot. I don't see any worms. Maybe she's just smaller because she's a girl.

I send Amy up to the house to turn on the hose tap, and we fill the wallow. This has become our favorite activity of the day. The pigs revel in the water, sticking their snoots into the stream, closing their eyes, and letting the water play over their cheeks and face. Sometimes they chomp at the water, and oftentimes c.o.c.klebur gets so worked up she stampedes herself in tight stiff-legged circles, her chunky body teeter-tottering fore and aft. Then she flops at the rim of the wallow and slowly rolls until she goes over center and slides right in. When the sun is hot and the pigs are caked with dried mud, something about the water hitting their skin gives them the itches. They lean hard against the shelter and rub back and forth. Sometimes they back up to a steel post and wag their hindquarters back and forth to hit the right spot. Today I lean in with the gra.s.s whip and sc.r.a.pe it back and forth across each pig. The dust flies off their bristly hides, and they grunt happily. With Wilbur, if you hit just the right spot he groans and his knees give out.

On the way back to the house I notice the hose connection is leaking. The bra.s.s fitting is squashed to an oval. Apparently it got run over. I'm making a trip to town later today-I add a hose repair kit to the shopping list. Amy and I make sandwiches and eat them on the deck. We've had a great morning of being pals. After lunch, I grab a shovel and we go out to the compost pile to dig angleworms. When we've got a nice couple of handfuls, we take them over and drop them in the chicken tractor just to watch the chickens fight over them. In between bites of worm, they clean their beaks by swiping them back and forth in the gra.s.s. Next we raid the pigs' bakery stash for a bag of English m.u.f.fins and scrub them across the poultry wire. This has a cheese grater effect. The crumbs shower down, and the chickens peck crazily.

Like the legendary bullet unheard, the worst bad news rarely gives warning, but rather drops on your head without so much as a shadow to announce it. Think of a feed bag filled with lead shot and allowed to achieve terminal velocity before the dead thump, the impact so echoless and mundane that for one dumb moment we fail to recognize the devastation for what it is.

When the cell phone rang the first time, I did not hear it because I was wandering around the home improvement store and had left the phone in the cluttered front seat of my car. When it rang the second time, I had just departed the lot and was merging to the frontage road. I fished it out, flipped it open, and put it to my ear. Anneliese, her voice dreadfully calm: "You need to go to the hospital. Jake had an accident. He's coming on the chopper."

Over twenty years now I have responded to emergencies in the instant, and for the first time ever I went dead blank. I remember the car moving silently down the road while I tried to put the name in context ( Jake...Jake? Jake...Jake?), tried to get a fix on the message, tried to know what to do, and then the familiar cold focus cleared my brain. I flipped the turn signal and turned right opposite of the way I had been headed.

My brother Jed knew he wanted to be a farmer from the time he was in diapers. He was still in them when he climbed aboard the Ferguson tractor and managed to punch the starter and get it lurching forward, although thankfully the key was off so he didn't go far. When he was a preschooler I built him a haymow on the doghouse and rigged a pulley system so he could pull up the miniature hay bales that Dad made for him by hand-tripping the baler knotter. When he got older, my folks had a tough time getting Jed to maintain decent grades in school-not because he lacked the apt.i.tude, but because he simply didn't see the need for any lessons not available on the farm. In high school they homeschooled him for a while, mainly to prevent him languishing in a cla.s.sroom. Mom taught him to make bread, how to cook and can, and how to patch his own jeans. Dad a.s.signed him farmbased math problems and lined him up with a work-study job at the feed mill in Chetek. He pushed railcars, unloaded feed, and learned some agribusiness.

He returned to school for his senior year because he wanted to graduate with his friends, and then as soon as the cap and gown were stowed, he began muscling out a living. By turns a farmer, a logger, an over-the-road trucker, and a laborer for any occasion, he supports his family doing whatever it takes as long as it's honest and borderline legal. For a while he did custom choring-milking cows and overseeing the operation for farmers who wanted to take a week off, or needed temporary help. He was good at it. A couple of farmers came back to find milk production had actually gone up in their absence. Word got out, and he got hired a lot. In the meantime, he was carving out his own living-running a joint milking operation with a friend for a while, doing custom fieldwork, and always the logging and truck driving. He saved up and bought the neighboring farm and took to raising crops and young stock. He got some pigs. And after years of bachelorhood, he found a blond country girl named Sarah and married her. They had been married seven weeks when Sarah was killed in a car accident. Jed answered the call as a member of the fire department and was the first on scene. He did as he was trained, but it wasn't enough.

The darkness was unimaginable. But he emerged, and married Leanne. She came to the marriage with Sienna, a beautiful three-year-old girl. It was good to see the new little family at popcorn Sunday nights, with Jed smiling again. In time, a baby came-Jake. Jakey, we called him, or sometimes Jaker. Jed will tell you that first year wasn't easy. That he second-guessed the whole idea of babies. But by that second year Jake was toddling, and he became Jed's constant companion and mimic. When he picked up even the lightest object he grunted comically, like Daddy did. When he took a swig off his bottle, he followed it with a breathy, overacted "Aaahhhh!" just the way Daddy taught him. In my favorite photo of the boy, he is in the back of Jed's truck, surrounded by chain saws, hard hats, a plastic tub of bar oil, scattered wrenches, and Jed's firefighting gear. His diaper is low-slung and dirt-scuffed, and his little hands are grease-lined as any mechanic's. He is hatching a grin like he has come to know the whole wide world, and in the shadowed background Jed is standing with the driver's door open, looking back at his boy, holding him steady in his gaze. I shot the photo on one of those cheapo disposable cameras. Somewhere along the line the camera wound up under the seat of my car, and it was a year or so before I found it again, covered in lint and fluorescent orange Cheetos crumbs. We shot up the rest of the roll and sent it in, and when the pictures came back, there was Jakey, only by that time Jakey was gone.

Jakey died, and there is no poetry in it. When Jed's wife died, I asked his permission before writing about it. This time I can't even bring myself to broach the subject. The night is scalded on our souls, and I am not going to tell much. Everyone tried so hard, beginning with Jed, who pulled Jakey from the farm pond just moments after the boy disappeared. There was still a heartbeat, and Jed and Leanne worked together to revive him. They are both members of the local fire department, and later they would say their training just kicked in. Soon they heard sirens, help coming the way it always has in rural settings-from friends and neighbors suddenly turned rescuers. Then the ambulance came, and then the chopper, and when it lifted away with Jakey inside, the fire chief put Jed and Leanne in his truck and drove them the forty-five miles to the hospital. I was waiting outside the emergency room when they arrived, and what I will remember forever is Leanne running to be with her little boy and the solid feel of my brother's muscles even as he sagged in my arms.

Everyone worked so hard, and we were in the little room with Jake for a long, long time. We knew there was little chance, and at the end there was none. In the hallway I saw firefighters, paramedics, nurses, the emergency room physician-everyone in tears. Mom and Dad had been traveling toward the middle of the state when they got the call, so we all gathered in the open air of the parking lot until they arrived, and Jed and Leanne got in the back of their car and everyone went home.

While I was driving to the hospital, Anneliese had called our neighbor Ginny to come and sit with Amy and Jane. Both of our vehicles were running on empty, so coming home from the hospital we stopped for gas. While the pump ran I was standing beside the car feeling the absolute weariness grief brings, and when I looked up across the fuel island to Anneliese, our eyes met and I saw the very same weariness in her. There was something in that moment-on the concrete under the false light, the anonymous cars coming and going all around but our eyes wordlessly speaking-that reminded me why I love her and how. In her weariness I saw compa.s.sion.

When we got back home the children were asleep and Ginny was at the kitchen table. We told her Jake was gone, thanked her, and she left quietly. Her husband Ed, the man who tilled our pig patch, had recently been diagnosed with cancer. She knows grief of her own.

Upstairs, we looked in on Amy, wrapped in her sheets. And then I went to the crib and bent down, listening close in the dark until I heard the silken thread of breath, in and out, in and out.

I wept then, my wife beside me.

In the morning we pull the chicken tractor out, fill the feeders, slop the hogs. I move the tractor a little too quickly and Little Miss Shake-N-Bake gets rolled out the back, squeezed between the cross-member and the ground, and then swept along by the rubber skirt for a few feet. I figure I have ruined her for good, but when Amy runs to pick her up the bird evades her for the first three pa.s.ses, a bona fide sign of life.

Even without me running her over, the bird's tremors have gotten worse. Amy picks her up several times a day, smoothing the feathers along her back and cooing in her little chicken ears. Little Miss Shake-N-Bake is a determined bird. Naturally she is always on the outside fighting her way in when it comes to dinnertime, and you can't help but root for her, lowering her head to slam into the wall of tail feathers before her and then bouncing back like the skinny kid hitting a blocking sled at football practice. She ricochets, shakes her head like a woozy prizefighter, and charges forward again. Her single-mindedness serves her well, if she's going to survive as the runt; when we throw table sc.r.a.ps into the tractor, the other birds tussle with each other and dart from sc.r.a.p to sc.r.a.p, seemingly more intent on coveting than eating. Meanwhile, Little Miss Shake-N-Bake gets herself a chunk of cuc.u.mber and just sticks with it. It takes her a while to get her beak dialed in, she shoots wide a lot, but she is indefatigable, and even though she bats about .250, the cuc.u.mber slowly disappears.

Up north on the home farm the phone will be ringing steady. Cars and trucks will be coming in the yard. Our place feels quiet and removed. There is the urge to just drop everything and head to my folks', but one thing we have learned is how friends and neighbors come in and fill these early days. I spoke to Mom earlier, told her to call if there is anything we can do, and I know she will, but in the meantime, there is life to be taken care of. Amy has swimming lessons, and after that, piano lessons. We go. We do. What else? In the chicken tractor Little Miss Shake-N-Bake has cornered another piece of cuc.u.mber, and when the other birds come after her she dives beak-first beneath the corner shelf that supports the waterer. Only her tail sticks out as resolutely she digs in.

On visitation day, I drive to Fall Creek to buy pig feed, and then I drive into Eau Claire to buy dress shoes for Jed, as he has none of his own. He called yesterday and asked if he might borrow mine, and I said yes, but then I got to looking at them. I bought them some years back in a fit of stylishness and they are square-toed verging on floppy-imagine a cross between a clown shoe and a pilgrim shoe. I won't put him through that. Instead I buy him the plainest sort of black shoe I could find. Then I go back home and feed the pigs.

Then we pack up the family and drive north.

It is a long, long day. We stand together just beside the casket and the line goes right out the door for hours. They arrive steadily-relatives, neighbors, distant cousins flown in, fire department members in uniform, church people I haven't seen since some Sunday meeting years ago, and many faces I just plain don't recognize. There are a lot of old farmers who can't bear to look in the casket, and you see these sunburned old dogs approach my brother and break down weeping as they take his hand or wrap him in their bearish arms, and maybe they are wearing big belt buckles or unmodish jeans or have their spa.r.s.e hair Brylcreemed in the style of a '60s trucker, but it strikes me again how much we miss if we rely wholly on poets to pa.r.s.e the tender center of the human heart. At times like this I am grateful I was not raised to be sleek. Behind us pictures of Jakey project on the wall, dissolving one into another, and beside the casket are all his green tractors from Debbie and Roger, his John Deere blanket, and the wooden biplane his Uncle John made for him by hand, because if it was possible Jakey loved anything more than a green tractor, it was airplanes. "Oh!" he'd say at the first sound of an engine overhead. "Wha.s.sat?" And then he'd stand stock-still, watching until the engine faded and the plane was gone. He came by that innately, because he certainly wasn't pointed to it by the ground-bound farmers who raised him. At one point John slips away, and I see him kneeling before the toys, carefully tipping the tractors over backward, one by one, until every single one is sitting nose in the air. Leanne remains at the casket, stroking Jakey's hair and greeting the mourners one by one. How thin and pale she looks, and yet she will not sit or turn away. A tall man leaves the line, approaching her with tears in his eyes, and I recognize him as her fire instructor. Just over two years ago he marveled when Leanne completed her firefighter's certification test in full turnout gear, Jake riding in her belly.

We stand there, brothers and sisters by blood and otherwise-Suzanne has come, and Don and Migena, and Kathleen. Donna and her husband Grant have come to care for Jane, allowing Anneliese to be by my side. I reach for her hand much of the day. And of course there are young ones everywhere, clambering in the pews, running in and out, hollering happily as they play tag beneath the churchyard swings.

That night Jed and I are on his lawn, talking quiet in a pair of canvas chairs, leaned way back to watch the sky all thick with stars. Now and then a big jet pa.s.ses above us, so far up as to be silent. When Jed worked late in the shop across the yard, Jake would hang out with him, dragging big wrenches across the concrete, riding his plastic tractor in circles, and just generally getting grubby. He'd stay happy at it so long Jed says time would get away and when they walked to the house it was dark and Jake would want to stop and say good night to the stars. He'd pick out those blinking lights, Jed said as we watched another silent airliner slide across the sky. You can imagine the two of them then, faces to the heavens, the little boy with his finger extended, tracing a light seven miles high.

"I was wondering if you could rewrite this," Jed says, digging a folded and refolded piece of paper from his jeans. "Kinda smooth it up." It's the eulogy. "I want to try to read it," he says. "Prob'ly won't make it, but I wanna try." I pocket it, tell him I will do.

We talk past midnight. Jakey was a little roughneck, and not at all retiring. But whenever they looked at the stars, Jed says, the boy spoke in a whisper. He'd point to the moon, Jed said, look up at me, and whisper, cookie cookie.

It is a short walk down the road to my father's farm in the dark, and beneath the stars I think of Jed and Jake hushed there in the yard, and I wonder, what does a child sense, that he would address the universe in a whisper?