thefarm

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24-JAN-2002 11:39: The Farm

The Farm was a two-storied clapboard structure that had once housed people before it housed the crisp stiffened remains of flies, thousands of them, an inch thick in the upper bedrooms. It had been built by the grandfather of the wrinkled and ancient old man in town who we later learned would sharpen our skates for a quarter. The exterior paint was peeling, blistered, and completely missing in areas; several windows were broken. The back door was swollen so tight with age and rainwater that never once in our five years there could anyone open it. The only shabby dignity afforded the place was its clinging perch on a slight bluff that gave it the appearance of being above the rest of the homes in the area. It was, in short -- a dive. A dive in an island of muddy debris, nestled amidst a sea of wheat. But for forty dollars a month and all the milk we could drink, it would become "our" dive.

Friends of the family helped my parents shovel the dead flies out of the upper rooms. They replaced windows and boarded over the ones we couldn't afford to replace. They scrubbed and polished and brought in a load of coal to feed the monstrously sized furnace in the basement. They made it habitable, or at least, as habitable as it could be under the circumstances. We moved in the weekend before school was to start. That Sunday night was the second time I heard my mother cry as my father departed for his job in the city. She'd be on her own until the following Friday with five children in a tiny town where she knew no one and had no indoor plumbing or running water, save the pump in the pantry off the kitchen. That night, my sisters and I slept in a discarded cast-iron bed that had been left behind by the former resident, huddled together for warmth in the cool September dampness.

The next morning, I began school and my mother took me herself even though she allowed the older girls to take the bus. She drove warily through the back roads because she didn't have a license, and twice, we got lost, but she finally managed to get me to school on time. She held my hand all the way from the parking lot into the first-grade classroom, which was filled with other parents holding their children's hands. When she let go, I wanted to cry but another boy was already bawling loudly, his face pressed up against his mother's departing belly, and the other children were staring at him as if he were a road-side freak. I bit my lip instead and nodded my head when my mother said it was time for her to go.

I soon discovered that I loved school. I despised my teacher though -- Mrs. G. To this day, I'm convinced she served under Hitler before she became an elementary class teacher. She was cold. Stern. Harsh. She made fun of my lisp. The woman once kicked me square in the back. What kind of teacher pulls her leg back and kicks a first-grader in the back? Especially one who was as tiny as I? In fact, until fourth grade, I was the smallest student in the school.

Fortunately, there was plenty to make up for Mrs. G's lack of compassion, like the Dick and Jane readers I tore through at breakneck speed, and the hour-long bus route to the school every morning, where I, as a privileged first-grader, got to sit in the very front seat where the view was best. Indeed, I loved everything about school, with the exception of my teacher and the brown-bag lunches my mother packed. I'd nibble the crusts off the edge of the sandwich, suck the sweetness from the brown spots on the MacIntosh apples, and dump my rent-included milk down the sink in the back. No wonder I was tiny!

While I was away at school, my mother was busy at home. Every day, we'd walk into the house to the smell of fresh paint and baked cookies. She cleaned and decorated and polished, making a home for us. When she waxed the ancient hardwood floors, she'd let us put fresh socks on and run and slide across its wide expanse until it was polished to a high sheen of gleaming warmth.

We had other jobs too. For instance, every morning my sisters and I took turns emptying the "honey pot" that was used during the night, into the outhouse that was used during the day. It was a difficult task for the pot was large and we were small. What's more, if you walked too quickly, the side of the pot would bang up against your legs and the contents would splash over the top and onto our good school clothes. I would struggle to hold the pot away from me, my small arms straining with its weight as I berated myself to walk slow , walk slow, walk slow. Walking slowly was a hardship for just beyond the outhouse was the barn, and in the barn were the landlord's pigs. Every morning their grunts, snuffles, snorts, and squeals would rise into the frosty air as they bumped and shuffled against the boards of their pens.

"Those aren't pigs," Maureen confided to me one morning. "They're wild boars! Do you know what those are?" Wide-eyed with wonder I shook my head from side to side. "They're like pigs," she patiently explained, "but they have huge tusks on either side of their head and they're always hungry. They never get enough food! If they ever break out of that barn they'll rip you open with their tusks and eat you alive!" I digested this information readily for Maureen was two grades ahead of me and obviously, far wiser than I. As a result, I went to school with traces of shit and piss on my clothes a lot that first year.

Every day after school, we had a different sort of task. Each of us girls would take a gallon sized ice-cream pail from the mudroom out front and then fill it with broken glass from the muddy patch around the house. For god knows how long, the yards surrounding our home had been used to contain every conceivable piece of refuge the occupants of the house no longer wanted. We filled those buckets with broken glass every day that fall.

Christmas came soon thereafter and my father led us on a trek into the woods to cut down our very own tree. When it was later festooned with lights, tinsel, ornaments and fat strands of shiny garland, we'd lay on our backs beneath it and gaze up through the heavily laden branches, starry-eyed with wistful wonder. I have no idea what my father did for work in those days and now, there's no one left to ask, but never did we not wake Christmas morning to a stocking on our bed and presents beneath our tree.

After the presents, the family arrived: my grandmother, my aunt, uncles and all their assorted spouses and children. Sometimes, even my mother's father would come. As the family gathered around the table through the long afternoon, my father would stand guard over the turkey in the oven whilst my mother fussed over pots on the stove. Dad's turkey, dad's dressing, dad's gravy. Mom's potatoes, mom's peas, mom's carrots and turnips with brown sugar. Pickles, jams, jellies, buns, pies, tarts and cakes. Then, after the Christmas feast was finished, after the dishes were done, after the wee ones were tucked into bed, my mother's family would get out their guitars and they would sing. Country and western was their genre and it was no secret that my mom and baby Michael sang the best of the whole lot. I can hear them now, Michael's voice leading, Mom's blending in perfect harmony . . .

I'd sit and watch them, my eyes shining with the same pride of my grandmother's until I'd fall asleep and my sisters would wake me, tugging my sleepy form up the stairs to the discarded cot. Och. Life was good.

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