Growing Up Country: Memories of an Iowa Farm Girl (3 page)

“Hurry up. You have to pluck those feathers before they get cold,” Mom said and dropped two more steaming birds into the pan in front of me.

“It’s too hot to touch,” I whined.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake. You’ll never get it done. Give it to me,” Grandma said. She took the chicken out of my hands and I watched in amazement as she stripped the bird bare of feathers in less than 30 seconds. It was a known fact that both Mom and Grandma could dip their hands in boiling water and never feel it at all.

“Thanks, Grandma,” I smiled and scooted away. “I’ll put on some music.” A big old console-sized record cabinet that once belonged to my other grandma—Grandma Denter—stood along the basement wall. I opened the lid and blew dust off the turntable before searching out a record. The old Edison was never cranked up and played except when we butchered chickens.

Pawing through the rack of records in the cabinet, I asked, “Which song do we want to hear?”

“
My Grandfather’s Clock
,” Jane suggested.

“Okay. I’ll look for it,” I said. Pulling out each heavy black quarter-inch thick disk to read the label, I found other songs we liked, songs like “
O! Dem Golden Slippers
,” “
Eleven Cent Cotton
” and “
Where is My Wandering Boy Tonight?
” The records were all the size of LPs but had just one song on each side.

These old songs were a hoot. The scratchy sound of banjos and harmonicas that came out of the console reminded me of black-and-white newsreel footage and the vaudeville shows we sometimes saw on TV. All the songs were sung by men, even the songs where it was a woman’s story, like “
I Wish I Was a Single Girl Again.
”

Settling the record on the turntable, I wound the crank on the side of the console until it was tight, released the brake on the turntable, and set the needle carefully at the edge of the record. The sound of a man singing about his grandfather’s clock filled the basement.

“Okay, Squirt,” Dad said. “Quit fartin’ around. Get a knife.”

While we had been out killing chickens, Mom and Grandma set up tables, filled tubs of cold water and assembled a stack of sharp knives.

Giving the crank a last turn, I looked at Dad with an innocent smile to confirm I really had not been wasting time, picked up a knife, grabbed a bare naked chicken from the pan of birds Mom had just run through a flame to singe off hair and pinfeathers, and fixed my eyes on Dad’s bird.

“Cut the skin by the neck and take out the crop,” he said, pointing to the spot on his bird, making a small slit and pulling the gullet out of the chicken’s neck. Stationed around the table like a troop of young surgeons, we followed Dad’s moves as closely as we could.

“Mine broke,” Sue lamented, looking at the mess created by the nicked crop. Pouring out of the crop was everything the chicken had eaten most recently—corn, oats, bits of sand, grass—all covered in slime.

Leaving off singeing pinfeathers for a moment, Mom stepped in at once. “That’s okay,” she said. “We can wash that off.”

Sliding my bird a few inches further away from Sue’s mess, I slipped my fingers through the incision, in under the crop and pulled the lumpy sack out all in one piece. Wiping my hair out of my eyes with the back of my arm, I looked up in triumph. “Got it!”

“Good,” Dad said. That was about the extent of approval we could expect from Dad, but that was enough. I grinned.

Without waiting, Dad flipped his chicken around and made cuts in the end ‘that goes over the fence last.’

When I’d made the same cuts in my chicken, I took a deep breath before I slid my hand inside the chicken carcass. Staring at the woodpile by the furnace, attempting to think of anything other than having my hand inside a chicken’s insides, I worked my fingers along and around the rib cage, loosening the squishy, still warm guts from the sides of the cavity. “Eewww,” I wrinkled my nose at Jane when I pulled a handful of blue-green intestines that felt like giant night crawler worms out of the bird. Her mouth a thin, tight line, Jane drew the innards out of her bird. Maybe this was worse than catching birds in the chicken house, worse than plucking stinky, wet feathers.

Before we pushed that mass of guts into a bucket by the table, we separated out the heart, liver and gizzard. His knife suspended in mid-stroke as though he could make our cuts for us, Dad’s eyes never left us while we searched for the organs.

“Don’t cut that green thing. It’ll ruin the meat,” Dad said as he watched me remove the liver from my bird. With trepidation, I cut away the little green gall sac. Cutting into the gall sac would release bitter bile and ruin any meat it touched. I loved the liver, so I was extra careful. We never butchered without Dad reminding us of the little green thing.

We each had our favorite chicken part. Mine really was the liver, though I would also fight for the heart. Fortunately we didn’t all like the same thing. Jane liked the gizzard. I will grant you that the gizzard presented an interesting butchering challenge but I never wanted to eat one of those hard, rubbery balls. Grandma was the only one to like chicken feet. If Grandma wasn’t around when we butchered, chicken feet followed the guts into the bucket. If she was around, Mom boiled up a big pot of chicken feet and Grandma contented herself gnawing on those scrawny bones. I can only assume this interest in chicken feet had something to do with the Great Depression. I never asked her.

When I finished drawing the innards out of my chicken, I gave the bird a satisfied pat and handed him off to Mom. She and Grandma took each carcass and reduced it to parts—wings, legs, thighs, back, breasts—placing each piece into a big washtub of cold water.

Cutting up a chicken took about as long as it took for a record to play all the way through. Between birds, I picked out other records, wound the crank tight again, and reset the needle.

As another gravelly voice blared from the console, we sang along. Since we played the same dozen records every time we butchered chickens, we knew the words by heart. On any other day, we preferred the country & western tunes we heard at the Saturday night wedding dances in town or on the radio while we milked cows. Over the years, we fell in love with Buddy Holly and the Temptations, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. Our cousin Betty, the first of us to reach high school, taught us to do the Swing. We picked up the Twist on our own. But while we butchered, we sang along to these old songs.

“How do you remember those words?” Mom asked, shaking her head in disbelief and I also think with a bit of dismay. Mom liked the house quiet. Left to her own devices, she never turned on a radio or the TV, preferring to spend time wrapped in her own thoughts.

Dad grinned as we mugged our way through songs like “
Breakfast in My Bed on Sunday Morning
” and “
When Irish Eyes are Smiling
.” Dad’s smiles caused us to launch into the next song with even greater enthusiasm. For the most part, Dad reserved jokes and laughing for friends and neighbors. So on occasions like butchering, when we could get him laughing with us, we did.

After the first bird, I got over being grossed out by the guts, came to tolerate the smell, and got into seeing how quickly I could finish off each chicken. When there were no more feathers to pluck, no more crops to remove, no more chickens to gut, no more gizzards to clean out or gall sacs to remove, we all turned our knives to cutting up chickens. About that time, Dad generally found a reason to go outside. Following him out of the house was not an option. Not while there were chickens yet to cut up. After Dad left, Mom took over teaching us the fine art of separating chicken leg from chicken thigh, wing from breast, breast from back. At that point, it became a competition to see who could cut up a chicken fastest, who could make the cleanest cuts between bones.

As I worked, I looked over to the corner of the basement where we had housed these very same chickens as baby chicks only a couple of months ago. It was amazing to think how fast they’d grown.

With six people working on the task, we butchered 70 chickens before it was time to start afternoon milking chores. When all the chickens were cut up, Mom released us kids and she and Grandma handled cleaning up the basement. They also washed the chicken parts a final time, picking over each piece for any overlooked pinfeather before they re-sorted all those mixed-up chicken parts into bags headed for the freezer. By the time they finished, each bag contained all the parts of one whole chicken, so we could have one whole chicken for dinner every Sunday.

“Mmm, smell that chicken,” I sighed when we trooped back into the house after church. “When are we going to eat?” Why I asked when we would eat, I don’t know. We always ate at noon.

Mom looked up at the clock. “We’ll eat at noon,” she said, slipping her apron over her dress as she turned on the heat under the kettle of potatoes. “Get busy and set the table. Aunt Joyce’s will be here soon.”

“Can we change our clothes?” Sue asked, hope in her voice. Why Sue asked if we could change our clothes, I don’t know. When we had company, we kept our church clothes on until after we ate.

“No. You can stay dressed up until after we eat. Now don’t look at me like that,” Mom said when Sue groaned. “Get out the good silverware.”

At ten minutes to noon, Mom waved to me, “Go tell the men dinner is on the table.”

The men were no more than 15 feet away in the living room, the same place they would park themselves after we ate—in front of the TV, watching a baseball game. After we ate, however, their snores would echo through the house.
Enough to wake the dead
, Mom would say.
We’re just resting our eyes
, they would say. They did love their baseball. And their naps.

Sticking my head in the living room doorway, I yelled at my dad, uncle and cousins, “Come and get it before we throw it to the dogs!” Then I retreated laughing.

At exactly noon, we all sat down at the dinner table, to a big platter of fried chicken, with liver for me, a gizzard for Jane, and ‘the part that goes over the fence last’ for Dad.

Some things were always the same. Sunday dinner was one of them. And that was good.

A Cow Story

On most days, at around four o’clock in the afternoon, Dad opened the barnyard gate to let the cows in, cows that were standing in the lane, crowding against the gate, mooing. When it rolled around toward milking time, the cows usually came up from the pasture on their own. Their internal clocks and pulsing full udders told them it was milking time.

On other days, though, the cows lingered in the quiet, cool shade of the Back 40. Then Dad stood in the barnyard or in the yard in front of the house, cupped his hands around his mouth, and yelled in a deep voice that carried over the farm’s entire 180 acres: “Come boss! Come boss!” Our dog Butch sat by his side, calm but alert to Dad’s voice. After calling to the cows, Dad reached down and scratched behind Butch’s ears. “Let’s see if that does it,” he’d say, talking to Butch just as though Butch could understand. Actually I always figured Butch
could
understand because whenever Dad directed him to do something, like go to the house, or round up the cows, or get in the truck, or circle around the pigs, Butch did it.

I often stood by Dad’s side, too. I liked being with Dad about as much as anything. When I was with Dad, I got to do important things, learn important things. Those things often had to do with cows.

As Dad waited to see if the cows were making their way back up the lane, he pulled a crumpled, red handkerchief out of his hip pocket, took off the sweat-stained seed corn cap that covered his nearly bald head, and wiped beads of sweat from his deeply tanned face. Usually the cows came to his call. To urge them along, he called again, “Come boss. Come bossy.”

On those hot summer days when the cows decided that staying under the trees near the creek was more appealing than the trek back to the barnyard, Dad might look down at Butch and say, “Okay Butch, go get ’em.” He would wave his hand toward the pasture and say, “Go get the cows, boy.” At Dad’s urging, Butch took off like a shot, racing across the barnyard, scooting under fences, taking the most direct route to the pasture, earning his keep as an all-around great cow dog. Very shortly after Butch was gone from sight, we’d see the cows coming up the lane, Butch barking and nipping at their heels, moving them steadily toward the barn. Not running them. Just keeping them moving.

And on other days, for reasons that were never spoken to me, Dad didn’t send Butch for the cows but instead would motion me toward the truck. “Come on, Squirt,” he’d say. “Let’s go get the cows.”

Dad gave each of us kids a nickname the day we were born—Tooter, Squirt, Bugs. Mom was not at all happy to have her sweet little girls tagged with such unfeminine labels, but the nicknames stuck. I didn’t think much of it until I was a teenager and Dad called me Squirt at a pancake supper in the school cafeteria. I flushed as my classmates laughed and said
Squirt?,
looking at me with big question marks in their voices. It took weeks for them to let it die. Before that embarrassing incident, Squirt was Dad’s name for me and I was totally happy to hear him use it. When he called ‘Squirt,’ I was there, ready to take on whatever chore he threw my way.

One day when Dad said, “Come on, Squirt,” we climbed into the old blue Studebaker pickup truck with its worn-smooth, brown leather seats, AM radio that got only one scratchy station, and a coat of dust that smelled of summer, and headed on down the bumpy fence line lane toward the Back 40 pasture. Dad drove with a big right hand on the wheel, his left arm crooked out the open window. With the sleeves of his work shirt rolled up above his elbows every day when he left the house, Dad’s forearms tanned a deep red/brown under the summer sun. As we drove, dust as soft and fine as baby powder billowed behind the truck, filtered into the cab and coated the thick hair on his arms, making the dark hairs shimmer faintly gold. The strength in Dad’s arms and hands made me feel secure, and when I was older and looking for a husband, strong arms and hands were part of what I looked for.

We drove down the dirt path along the east property line, stirring up more dust. Butch ran ahead. His barking caused the neighbor dog Berle to race to the same fence. The fence ended at the mailboxes where the lane divided to send one branch to our house and one to our neighbor’s house, so the dogs could have gone at it for real if they really wanted to. But they didn’t. They just ran back and forth for a couple of pointless minutes, barking as though they meant to tear each other to pieces.

The dogs repeated this pseudo fight every single time a vehicle came to either farm, so Butch had worn a path from our house up to the fence and Berle had worn a similar path from the Miller’s house to his side of the fence. Butch’s path even showed up on the aerial photos taken of our farm over the years. Many things changed about our farm—buildings and fences and crops; but Butch’s path to the fence was there as long as he lived. As soon as we passed this section of fence, Butch broke off and ran with the truck.

Dad checked the fences as we passed, noting any that needed repair, and as we drove he told me about the crops, which hay field was ready to cut, how the corn was growing. We had a hammer and a few staples in the truck to make minor fence repairs if needed.

When we reached the Back 40, I hopped out to open the gate. Dad drove through, parked the truck at the top of a hill overlooking the pasture, climbed out and stood leaning against the truck, arms folded across his chest. From this vantage point, he could see from one end of the pasture to the other.

The Back 40 was pasture and timber, never planted to crops. Most farmers in our area had an area they called the Back 40, whether or not it was 40 acres, but in fact ours was about 40 acres along the south end of our farm. A small creek ran the length of the pasture, from the west property line to the east. South of the creek were steep tree-covered hills where we went mushroom hunting in the spring and squirrel hunting in the fall.

I latched the gate and came to stand silent by Dad’s side, waiting for him to say what we did next. Many of the cows were still lying in the shade, chewing their cuds, acting for all the world as though they hadn’t heard any of the previous calls.

Finally Dad yelled again, “Come, bosses. Get up there. Come on.” This time the edge in his voice was sharper. The cows and we kids knew not to ignore this tone. Reluctantly, the cows got up—they couldn’t dally any longer—and headed for the barn. Dad watched them intently. “I don’t see 24,” he said after some time.

Every cow had a number. Dad could tell them all. He could identify each cow if he could only see its head. He could tell you who she was if he could only see her udder. Over time I came to recognize many of the cows myself—Number 18, the one with the Roman nose; Number 12, the one with the white spot on her side that always made me think of a mountain; Number 6, the one we had to be careful of because she chased us. Dad gave a pleased little smile and nod whenever I pointed out a cow by number, and I swelled with pride. Even though Mom worked with the cows every day, she never knew one from another. She didn’t like the cows and she never acknowledged them as individuals. The cows were necessary and it was necessary for her to work with them. She did what was required, but she never enjoyed it.

Number 24 was ready to calve and Dad had been watching her. He wanted cows to calve in the barn where he could help if they needed it. But sometimes a cow calved earlier than he expected, before he got her into a calving stall.

“Where is she? Do you think she’s okay?” I looked up at Dad. Number 24 was ‘my’ cow. Well, she wasn’t really my cow, but she was gentle and I liked her best and when she was in the barn, I always gave her a little pat on the side when I walked by.

“Shit,” Dad grumbled to himself. I bit my lip to hide a grin. Dad used barnyard swear words as often as he used any other words in his vocabulary. Mom always said, “
Oh, Harvey,
” with a tone of dismay and reproach that did absolutely no good other than to let us kids know that we were not to swear any time, ever.

The one time I slipped and swore out loud is written in my memory with permanent ink. Lunch box in hand, I was edging across the top of a snowdrift west of the garage, seeing just how far I could get without breaking through the crust. Dad stood watching. Just at that moment I broke through the crust, sinking to my waist in the deep snow.

“Oh, shit,” slipped past my lips so quickly, I wondered if I’d actually said it out loud. I looked back at Dad. The look of surprise that flashed across his face let me know he had heard and I waited, not even daring to try to climb out of the hole into which I’d sunk. I waited to be struck dead by the hand of God or just as bad, by Dad’s hand.

For what seemed like minutes, I waited. Dad looked at me and then said in a conspiratorial tone only I could hear, “Don’t let Ma hear you say that.” In that moment, through that one little slip of the tongue, and even though I was only about six years old, I grew closer to Dad and took a step toward adulthood.

Ever after that, I heard Dad swear with a mixture of horror and fascination and a vague awareness of forbidden pleasures. We never spoke of it. I never swore in his hearing again. Still, I understood something new that day.

“She probably went up the hill,” Dad said. “If she doesn’t come up in the morning, I’ll have to come back and find her.” Dad scanned the hillside, hoping she hadn’t gone far, hoping she would come up with the rest of the herd the next day. But now it was time to milk and he couldn’t take time to traipse all over the Back 40.

We climbed back in the truck and I asked, “Can I go along tomorrow? If you have to look for her?”

When he said yes, I almost hoped the cow didn’t show up in the morning, so strong was my desire to have an important chore to undertake with Dad.

Cows near to calving like to go off by themselves. Some cows calve easy and they can calve on their own. Some cows calve hard and giving birth could kill the calf and even the cow. Dad didn’t want to risk cow or calf.

I was eager to help look for the cow and calf, but Dad didn’t always let me. Cows can get protective and it may be dangerous to be around them. Dad wasn’t worried for himself but having one of us kids along was just one more thing to worry about. The next morning, I was eager for milking to be over and I didn’t let Dad out of my sight in case he forgot he said I could go along. He didn’t forget, and finally we were back in the truck headed for the pasture. Jane and Sue came along, too; Jane in the cab taking gate duty; Sue and I in the back.

With the truck bumping over ruts and rocks, Sue and I held tight to the side of its bed to keep from bouncing out, sometimes crouching on bent knees to keep from slamming our tailbones. When Dad stopped the truck by the creek, we piled out.

“We’ll start on the west end and work back,” he said. “They’re usually in this section.” We fanned out, moving in a wide swath up the hillside. It was the same pattern we took when we went squirrel hunting. “Keep your eyes open,” Dad ordered, as though he thought we thought we were there to play.

The hill was steep and we struggled up the grade, over fallen tree trunks, through blackberry brambles. The air was cool under the trees; it smelled fresh from dew that would not dry until nearly noon. The ground was springy soft under blankets of leaves. Sunlight filtered through the leaf canopy, making cow and calf hard to spot. I wanted to be the one to see them first. I figured it was my right since Number 24 was my cow.

But Sue claimed the honor, calling out, “I see her.”

“Stand still,” Dad commanded. “We don’t want to scare her.” We froze in place as Dad walked toward Sue, his footsteps muted on the soft woodland floor.

“There.” Sue pointed toward a secluded thicket of fallen tree trunks and young saplings and just like that we could all see the cow. I’ve seen paintings in which the artist has concealed all manner of faces and figures—horses or wolves or Indians—images that are virtually invisible until someone points them out. It was like that with this cow and calf. The calf was curled up in a nest of leaves, hidden in shadows. If it weren’t for the cow’s size and movements, we could have missed the calf. The cow stood licking the calf’s black-and-white coat, clearing the hair of birth remnants, stimulating her baby’s circulation. We must have arrived within minutes of her dropping the calf.

Even as we stood motionless, watching, the mother cow nudged the calf, urging it to stand. The calf pulled its front legs under its body, straightened its back legs, pushing up in an awkward effort to gain its feet. It stumbled as it rose but finally stood upright, tottering. Knowing the goal by instinct and directed along by a gentle nudge from its mama, the calf stumbled toward the cow’s udder, nosing around until it latched onto a teat. With neck extended, legs splayed for balance, the calf nursed with vigorous determination. A breeze blew through the trees and the sun flickered off the leaves, shining on the calf’s curly hair, damp from the cow’s licking. Right then, I wished I was an artist. I would have liked to capture this scene.

As we moved closer, the cow swung its head toward us and lowed softly. Some cows are aggressive after calving, intent on protecting their offspring from threats real or perceived. But Number 24 was gentle. Dad waited a few more minutes while the calf nursed and then stepped closer. He talked to the cow in low tones.

“Good girl,” he said, his voice familiar to her from countless sessions in the milk barn. “You did a good job.” Running his hands along the cow’s side, he noted she had already passed the afterbirth. As he quietly but firmly edged the calf away, he examined it, too. “Looks like we got a heifer,” he said, pleasure evident in his voice. He was glad to have a good cow like this one yield a female calf that would grow up and join the herd. “Let’s get her down to the truck.”