Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm (12 page)

I find the whetstone in another drawer, spit on it, and make circles with the flat side against the blade. It’s just surface rust and it falls away like dust. I head for the woodpile. The boys stop what they are doing and watch me go to town on a couple of logs. Chips of wood fly for several minutes, and the boys take a couple quick steps back but say nothing.

I am not a delicate woman. I am tall and strong. My arms are still freckled like they were when I was a young girl, but they’re not stick-thin anymore. I have good muscle, and my middle son didn’t get his facility with tools from his father, he got that from me.

“Lumberjack Mom!” Luke cheers, half-smiling now.

His fist is raised and his foot is perched on a big stump. Will copies his brother’s stance and repeats the pronouncement.

Behind them, a corkscrew of smoke curls up from the woodstove’s chimney. I hack on, and soon sweat from all that chopping makes the hatchet slippery in my hand.

“Here,” I say, wiping the rubber handle on my jeans and passing it to Luke. “Careful, it’s pretty sharp.”

With measured strokes far more efficient than the ones produced by my hacking tantrum, Luke cuts up the kindling, then moves on to the larger pieces. It’s late afternoon, and in an hour the sky turns darker and the sleet the weather forecast promised starts coming down, but he’s cut up quite a bit of firewood. Enough to
fill Will’s outstretched arms and Owen’s, too. Enough, at least, for our indoor campfire.

You can tell just by looking at it that the fireplace in our house wasn’t an afterthought, but was built at the same time the house was. That it is part of the original design. The opening is wider and taller than that of any fireplace I can remember seeing in anyone else’s house. The interior bricks that line the sooty cavity are old and chipped and carbonized black with a century’s worth of fires. These bricks are big too, closer to the size of a cement block than to a regular brick.

The deed on our farmhouse reads, “Year built: 1900, + or –,” and I can picture a circa-1900 family gathered around it before the glass doors or the decorative green-tile surround were added. In my mind, this family would be stirring something aromatic bubbling inside a cast-iron stewpot, warming their hands, drying their darned-over wool socks, and maybe their hand-knit mittens, too.

I cannot picture them roasting marshmallows here, however. Even if marshmallows were invented and readily available to farm families in the Midwest’s northern hinterlands at the turn of the century, I’d like to think that the early inhabitants of my house would have known better.

Because as it turns out, building a great big fire in the fireplace and suggesting to the kids that they roast marshmallows over it is not the best idea I’ve ever had.

I’ve pulled my chair near the fireplace so I can watch my sons and so I can pass out the marshmallows. Owen does okay, because he is a perfectionist and slowly turns his single marshmallow until it is a yummy gold. He waits until it cools, then eats it straight
from the stick in one bite. But Will is short on patience and long on sugar craving, and his fingertips are burnt. Luke has holes in his jeans from sparks popping out of the fireplace and landing on his pant legs.

Every one of our roasting sticks is toast, and those big firebricks I was so proud of are now overlaid with strings of scorched marshmallow fluff.

There’s also the smell. What comes out of the bag when you tear open a fresh package of marshmallows may be a puff of air that smells remarkably like sunshine. And even burnt marshmallows may smell fine and dandy when you’re sitting around a bonfire outside under an evening sky.

But inside the house, burnt marshmallows smell like a chemical plant fire. Sulfur and burning hair mixed with flaming cotton candy. Be advised also that this kind of scorched-sugar snafu is going to set off your smoke detectors. Which will then, in turn, completely wreck any ambience you tried to create for yourself and your sons by building the fire in the first place.

“Mobe, an I aff a ass a ilk?” Will is standing in front of me, his fingers are stuck to his burnt-black roasting stick with marshmallow goo, his lips are moving around a glob of more marshmallow goo, and his freckled face is smeared with ashes and what can only be tears. Between the shrieking smoke detector and the sugar glue in his mouth, it takes me a minute to realize that he’s just said, “Mom, can I have a glass of milk?”

I look around at my boys and feel their burns and see the black streaks of char on their faces and smell the marshmallow goo all over everything and mentally take down the score.
Happy family activity—zero
, I think to myself.
Powers that be—one
. No, scratch that. We’re out of milk.
Powers that be—two
.

“Owen, please go upstairs and take the battery out of the smoke detector. Get a chair or something to stand on. Luke, get your brother a glass of water—honey, we’re out of milk—don’t make that face. You do
not
hate water. No one hates water. Hold it, everyone. Show me your hands.”

They line up like a trio of singed nesting dolls and flash me their palms. Owen’s hands have a few black streaks, but Luke’s and Will’s hands are covered with ashes from their burnt roasting sticks, there’s melted marshmallow layered on top of the ashes, then dog hair and wood chips and just plain dirt stuck to that.

Will reaches into the front pocket of his jeans with a fuzzy paw, pulls out a raw marshmallow dredged with pocket lint, and pops it into his mouth.

Then, small, medium, and large, they file past me, heads down, hands up, heading toward soap and water like a three-pronged human dowsing rod. Owen sprints upstairs and the smoke detector’s wailing finally ceases.

While the other two are scrubbing themselves, I consider how to clean the fireplace. Even though the fire is out, the bricks are still so hot that heat radiates out from them in translucent waves. Put down a pat of butter and you really could fry an egg.

It’s evening now, colder and windier outside, but the living room faces straight west, and there’s a little of the setting sun breaking through the sleet, reflecting off the undulating heat, and making the hardwood floors look, if I squint, like overheated desert sand. But this is no mirage. The living room, the dining room, the whole downstairs isn’t just warm, it’s almost hot.

I check the outdoor thermometer at the kitchen window. Forty-five degrees. I check the thermostat on the living-room wall. Seventy-one degrees. I am a total moron.

That’s
why the farmers who built this house put in such a big fireplace. Not to cook over, not to dry socks and mittens in front of, and certainly not for ambience, which they could probably give a rip about in the middle of a Michigan winter. No, they made that fireplace big enough to heat this place.

This is so obvious in retrospect that I feel as dumb as a bag of hammers for not understanding the real function of this ancient hearth.

I got your gas bill, MichCon. I got your gas bill right here.

“There’s one!” Luke says from the backseat.

We pull over to the side of the road, Luke jumps out, clicks open the minivan’s back hatch, grabs the log he spotted from the window with two hands, and tosses it in. He’s back inside smirking at Will and we’re under way in less than ten seconds. Up front, Owen has disappeared into his iPod headphones.

“That’s six for me and only two for you,” Luke says to Will, clicking his seat belt back into place in one smooth motion as we accelerate into traffic. Safety first.

“So?” This has become Will’s standard response to his brothers’ relentless one-upping. In a year this will turn into “And I care because …?” But for now he sticks to this single-word defense. It usually works. Not much you can do to escalate your own perceived awesomeness when it’s received by your little brother with only a sigh, a bored sideways look, and a “So?”

I file this realization away for future use. Yes, I am the kind of woman who is not above using juvenile tactics in adult conflicts. Nor am I above driving around our township in search of
firewood that has fallen off someone else’s truck. And having my children get out of the minivan to retrieve it. That’s right, I will stoop that low. I am a stooper.

“Hey, Bickersons. Quit yakking and watch for wood,” I tell them, turning down a forested and potholed side road sure to have something for us. I call this recently devised family bonding activity “Watching for Wood.”

The day after the marshmallow fire, the boys and I spent the afternoon cutting up wood for the fireplace from our own property. We should have been doing this all summer, and I’m not sure how much wood we can amass before the snow flies, but we’re going to make a run at gathering as much as we can.

I hauled dead trees and downed branches up the hill from the valley, piled them next to the shop, and then the boys used various techniques to hack them into pieces that would fit inside our fireplace. Sometimes this involved the hatchet, but sometimes it just involved leaning the branch or rotted tree trunk up against the cement foundation of the Quonset hut, climbing up and standing on it, then bouncing up and down until it broke into an approximation of the proper size.

Kindling could be broken up by hand, snapped in half over a knee, or cut up with a couple swipes of the handsaw.

This woodcutting went on for several afternoons. The boys would get off the school bus at the end of our driveway, run inside to hang up their jackets and put away their lunch boxes, then come back outside and go straight into Paul Bunyan Jr. mode.

With the industry shown in these after-school woodcutting sessions, it was only a couple of weeks before we ran out of dead trees small enough to cut up with a hatchet and a handsaw. I don’t
have a chain saw—and I don’t want one, either. There actually are a few things that I’m truly afraid of, and a chain saw is one of them.

Large, hairy spiders are another, and I’ve faced my share of those since we started carrying all this wood through the door and into the house. These arachnid dinosaurs are called wolf spiders and they are horror-flick big, NASCAR fast, and with their hairy legs they twang whatever chord connects my modern brain with its prehistoric cortex. If one gets on me, my fifty-yard dash breaks the sound barrier. I know this because of the silent scream that exits my mouth mid-run.

I can face these spiders if I have to, but I am not willing to face a bloody stump at the end of my wrist. And so, by chain saw–fearing necessity and after exhausting what we can cut with a handsaw, the boys and I take to driving around our township Watching for Wood.

“Pull over!” Will says from his seat directly behind me. He is already unbuckled and sliding open the van door before I’ve come to a full stop. In my rearview mirror I see his stocky little legs pumping, his bare hands balled into fists and urging him forward like pistons as he runs toward a whole bunch of logs scattered alongside the road. There must be fifteen or twenty of them. Pretty logs, too. Seasoned and split and fireplace ready.

Luke looks over his shoulder and out the back window. “Whoa,” he says, impressed with his little brother’s score in spite of himself. “The mother lode.”

We are stopped on a curve in the road. A curve that must have been too much arc for at least one truck that came through here recently, overloaded with firewood.

“Unbuckle,” I tell Luke. “He can’t carry all that by himself. Owen, you too.”

So far on today’s excursion, Owen has been incommunicado, his iPod functioning much like an invisibility cloak.

“What about you?” Owen asks.

Good question. What about me? And soon all four of us are stooping over the stray logs like a murder of crows at a fresh roadkill banquet. I guess I am no longer above jumping out of the van myself and picking up unclaimed firewood. I guess I am not too proud to log-pick after all.

For a moment then I see my family as a stranger driving past might see us through his car window. We are a tall, blond woman in a thin pink Goodwill sweatshirt that bears the slogan “Barbie Dumped Ken” in white stitched-on script. The dark roots in her hair have grown out too far—poverty or carelessness or both, but certainly not a fashion trend.

She loads her arms up with firewood, stacks it high until she’s holding the top log in place with her chin. Her eyes are wide; the whites big like a scared dog. This drive-by stranger couldn’t know that she’s scanning the top log for wolf spiders. But they couldn’t miss seeing that she is accompanied by three boys.

The smallest boy has a runny nose and his coat is unzipped. He has to run to keep up with the woman, which he does. This is an almost impossible task, since he is little and since he carries a big log under each arm, but somehow he manages.

The middle boy stays back at the pile and loads logs into the outstretched arms of the biggest boy. This middle boy is wearing a black hat, black T-shirt, and black gloves with holes in some of the fingers. There’s a quilted camouflage vest, too big for him,
snapped up over the T-shirt. He’s thin enough to be called skinny, and yet there are wiry muscles in his bare arms.

Once the biggest boy has taken on the largest load of logs, he walks with purpose toward the minivan, chin up, an intense gaze focused straight ahead. He’s appropriated all the accoutrements of a teenager: longish hair, acne, braces, an iPod, and an aura of mortification, imprisoned as he is by his present company.

One by one this foursome heaves their load into the back of a minivan, the biggest boy taking the time to steal a look around before he disappears inside. The woman and the little boy follow, but the middle boy adjusts the wood, shuts the van’s rear door, and is the last one to pull his own door closed. Then these vagabonds drive away, spewing gravel from bald back tires.

This is us. This is what we look like.

There is an old saying favored by people who live in cold climates and deem wood the superior heating source over all the others—fuel oil, electric, propane, even natural gas—because it is the only one of these that heats you twice: once when you cut it and again when you burn it.