The Dog Says How (3 page)

taxidermy

When I was in the fifth grade
we moved to the country. I didn’t like it in the country. It was quiet and I didn’t trust the quiet. Mom said not to worry, it was only my imagination, but that seemed to make it worse. My imagination? Good Lord, then it could be anything. My brother loved the country. He had a bow and arrow and played a game in the front yard with the neighbor kids where he’d shoot an arrow up into the sky. Then while the arrow turned around in the air and sped back toward earth, we’d test who could stay in the yard the longest. One time, he shot an arrow over our heads, and we were all standing there, looking into each other’s eyes and pretending “there’s not an arrow over my head.”

“Well, there’s not one over mine.”

Finally, my spirit cracked and I ran for my life into the adjacent woods. The arrow came down right beside me and stuck in a woodpile.

“I got it,” I yelled out.

And when I went over and pulled out the arrow, there was a chipmunk stuck on the end.

I said, “Steven, look.”

He said, “Hey, I wasn’t even trying.”

As a kid, my brother, Steven, had the look of an angel; he carried the look of innocence. People refused to believe an evil genius walked among them. Except for that Halloween when he went as the devil, wearing one of those plastic masks and flammable suits they sold at the five-and-dime. After we got our candy he simply smiled and said, “See you in Hell.” Like “see ya later.” It was very disconcerting, like he had been given information.

Another time we were hunting with guns in the woods. Somehow we were given guns. Mine was on safety like it was in the five years I’d been hunting. And my brother, whose gun was definitely
not
on safety, was looking for an animal, something, anything to shoot at. All of a sudden this wood duck came flying through at fifty, sixty miles an hour, screaming through the woods. My brother caught it out of the corner of his eye, whirled, and fired from the hip, missing it by a mile. But the noise scared the duck. It swerved, hit a tree, and died! So we’d bring these animals home.

“Look, Ma! Look what we got today!” We were like cats.

Finally after a few years of this my mom said, “Oh, you boys. All right. I can’t stop things from dying around you. It’s going to happen. It’s a given. But I can give you an appreciation for these animals.” So she enrolled us in a . . . taxidermy class.

Taxidermy. Taught by Mr. Damyanovitch. Mr. Damyanovitch didn’t teach taxidermy through the technical know-how. No, Mr. Damyanovitch taught through a method called: love. He would tell us about the duck. He would take the duck and lay it on the table and pet it, and tell us how it lived, what it liked to eat, and where it came from. Then he would part the feathers, and he’d make a slight incision and open up the duck. Then he would say, “See boys, it’s just like taking a little man out of his suit.” Then he would take the Twenty Mule Team Borax and pour it inside.

“Liberally with the Borax, boys. Liberally with the Borax.”

Then he would put in a body and sew it shut, and preen the feathers back over the incision. Next he would put wires in the feet, then paint the feet and the bill, put in the eyes, set it on a log and say, “Now go to it, boys.”

So we’d dive into our practice chipmunks with all the love our little junior-high fingers could muster. But when we got done, our little chippers didn’t look quite as good as his duck had. But, after a while our chipmunks started to iron out okay. And over time they got better and better. And my brother seemed to have found a calling; he got really good. Steven started doing things with animals that the animals themselves would do in the wild if given the proper training. Incredible poses!

Now at the same time, we were in a Boy Scout troop. “Troop 584, good scouts are we.” And we would have this yearly competition called “The Brookdale Show.” The Brookdale Shopping Center would sponsor this show made up of Boy Scout displays. All the troops around the city would put on a different display and each of us would try to win the blue ribbon, and every year our troop won the blue ribbon with “winter camping.” We set up a pup tent and piled drifts of fake plastic snow and stacked some logs with a spinning lightbulb behind them, like a fire, except for the orange extension cord running to the nearest outlet. And every year this lame presentation won the blue ribbon. The Brookdale Show was two weeks away. My brother and I had been waiting for this day. I got up in front of the troop and said, “Well . . . men, we can do winter camping like we do every year—and probably win another blue ribbon. Or, if you’d rather, we could do . . . taxidermy.”

“Taxidermy? Taxidermy? Taxidermy, taxidermy, taxidermy, taxidermy, taxidermy!”

The kids were on their feet, shouting, “Taxidermy. Taxidermy.” A father leapt up and said, “I think we should do winter . . . ”—too late, my brother stepped in front of him and said, “Now go out and get those projects!” Zoom, the place was empty.

The next day in the woods you could hear guns calling out in the distance, “Pop, pop . . . pop.” Kids trying to get their “projects,” projects at any cost.

They’d shout in the car, “Swerve, Dad, a project!”

Finally, the next week, in the middle of the troop meeting room, was this big table full of animals, projects—one for each child. And Steven and I taught them how to stuff with love. And they went to it. But we forgot that when we started into taxidermy, we couldn’t turn out works of art either, and, of course their early projects were turning out kind of awful. We thought, “We don’t have time to train these kids. We’ve got to think of something.”

So, if a chipmunk didn’t turn out quite right on one side, we’d have him lean against a log, so you couldn’t see the problematic side. Or, we would paint a rural scene and set the animal in it, hiding what had gone wrong. Or, if an animal turned out really off, we would have the log as the main part and a tail coming out from behind the log like “he’s behind there, somewhere.”

Meanwhile, my brother was kicking out incredible, beautiful projects. One day he brought in a squirrel who had met its end kind of bad on the right side. And then he brought in another squirrel who had met its end kind of bad on the left side. My brother took those two squirrels, put them together, and made what we called “the quilted squirrel.” Perfect. One stitch up the front, one down the back. It didn’t matter that one was male and one was female. They fit! We put that one in front. We were going to win for sure.

And then a kid named John Stoner came in. John Stoner had a plastic Hefty garbage bag over his project.

“What’s under the garbage bag, John Stoner?”

“You’ll see at the end of the meeting.”

“What do you mean?”

He said, “It’s an unveiling.”

We didn’t know what he was talking about, but we did know that it was going to be good. John Stoner had been coming in with these squirrels that had nothing visibly wrong with them—they looked like perfect squirrels. We found out later that he was catching them in a Have-a-Heart Trap—a live trap—putting them in his garage, shutting the garage door, starting his dad’s car, and asphyxiating the squirrels. One day his mother came in, saw her son in a running car in a closed garage and said, “John Stoner, what are you doing?”

And he couldn’t say he was asphyxiating squirrels, so he said, “Uh, nothing.” They sent him off for psychiatric care. But, before they shipped John Stoner out, he came into a meeting with this bag over his project. At the end of the meeting, he walked up, grabbed one corner and then another and . . . it was beautiful! John Stoner had taken four of those perfect squirrels and stuffed them to perfection. They were sitting around a log playing . . . poker. He even had visors on their heads and the skin of their arms rolled up like sleeves . . . with garters. They had cigarettes that smoked and the eyes on the squirrel with four aces were rolled back like, “Whoa! What a hand!” Oh, John Stoner.

We put his piece up front and with the help of Mr. Damyanovitch made a slide show presentation, “How to Stuff with Love.” We set the theme from
Dr. Zhivago
as background music. So, we had the slide show, the quilted squirrel, and John Stoner’s poker-playing critters. We were going to win for sure. We set up at the Brookdale Show and said to all the people walking by, “Look at this! Look at this!” Those people looked shocked, quickened their pace and averted their eyes; others blocked the eyes of children; some simply shook their heads and a few shouted in anger, “Look at that! Look at that! You kids should be ashamed of yourselves.”

So the next year we did winter camping . . . and won a blue ribbon.

lightning

I’ll never forget
the time my father and I got hit by lightning. We were working on an airplane, a plane called a Bonanza. My dad always had airplanes when I was growing up. In fact, when I was born, my father was putting wings on a Piper Cub, and when he heard I was being born, he rushed to the hospital and held me for the first time with airplane goop and dope dripping from his hands. But the time we got hit by lightning, we were working on a Bonanza.

I was fourteen years old, lying in this puddle of water under the fuselage and my dad had just asked for a screwdriver. So I reached over to get one. It was underneath the airplane in the same puddle of water. I handed him the screwdriver when this big cloud, one of these big thunderheads that we get in Minnesota, went right over our heads, and I thought, “Oh no, we’re going to get soaking wet,” when Bam! This bolt of lightning shot through the puddle and hit my body. I felt it shoot through my organs . . . my stomach hit my liver hit my spleen—and I thought, “I’ve been hit by lightning! I’ve been hit by lightning!” And then I thought, “The fact I know I’ve been hit means I’m still alive.”

I shout, “Dad, Dad, we’ve been hit by lightning!”

And he said, “Goddangit, that does it, let’s go home.” Farm boy. “Can’t stay out here all day, we’ll just keep getting hit by lightning.”

A FEW YEARS AGO,
my father passed away. I was at his funeral at this large table with my uncles, my brother, and my grandpa. We were talking about my dad, remembering him as vividly as possible because we knew we weren’t going to get any new memories. We were holding on to the old ones as tightly as we could. So I decided I would tell them the story about how Dad and I got hit by lightning. I started into it when my Uncle Don sitting next to me said, “Wait a second. Wait a second. I’ve been hit by lightning. I’ve been hit three times.”

He said, “Once you get hit by lightning, your chances of getting hit again increase by over fifty percent.” He told us being struck by lightning is more the symptom than the problem. Then my brother said, “Uh, oh.” He’d been hit by lightning. He’d been hit last summer at a gas station while pumping gasoline. Then my Grandpa says, “I’ve been hit by lightning.” He’d been coming in from the fields with his tool belt on when, Bam! Lightning hit right beside him and he went up in the air and formed a fountain with himself and his tools. Then my Uncle Byron suddenly chimed in and said, “Wait a second, I’ve been hit by lightning.” Uncle Byron said he’d been hit four times. Uncle Byron, who has a metal plate in his head from the war. He drives one of these metal Airstream trailers.

We said, “Byron, you’re beggin’ for it, pal.”

So I found out right then and there that my uncles, my grandpa, my brother, my dad, and myself had all been hit by lightning. Or the day, as they put it, that I found out I was not adopted.

daddyland

This spring I’m driving
through the countryside in northern Iowa. The green is so vibrant, the new growth seems to hold every color in the spectrum. It’s almost too much for my rods and cones to bear. As evening approaches the rolling fields hold a softness like a Hopper painting. It’s so peaceful.

I’m visiting a local deejay at a radio station out in the country. He’s originally from the city and he says sometimes he’ll be delivering the news, playing rock and roll, and he’ll completely forget where he is. Then he goes to leave after his shift and he can’t because there’s a cow blocking the door.

I’m a first-generation off the farm. My dad grew up on a farm. We used to travel through his birthplace. He called it Daddyland. In Daddyland there was the ravine where he chased a badger with a two-by-four, the upside-down horse weather vane on top of the dilapidated barn, the one he had flipped over as a Halloween prank when he was ten—and to hear him describe Daddyland it was the most magic place on earth. You can have Pirates of the Caribbean. Take me to Daddyland.

I remember my grandpa, who farmed and could fix anything and always smelled like tractor grease, even in church. I loved that smell. He had a high laugh and always referred to our guinea pig as livestock. Could back up a car trailer into a thimble. At the State Fair we’d spend hours on Machinery Hill. We’d leave, he and my dad’s shirts and pants covered in grass stains from crawling under, over, and around all the implements.

Grampa taught me to always carry a pocket knife and a pair of pliers. He taught me to be good to your neighbors because there will be a day you will need them. Farm kids taught me to smoke in the hay loft and how to ride on the backs of calfs as they bucked.

My grandparents had this old Bantam rooster that would chase my brother and me and peck us. We’d cry and Grandmother would yell at us to stay clear of her prize rooster. Only thing Grandma loved more was my sister. One day that rooster made the bad decision to make a pecking motion at my sister. Didn’t even get her but we ate chicken that night. Toughest chicken I ever ate.

I learned from that rooster to be careful who you peck.

I’m driving through Iowa knowing this, too, is somebody else’s Daddyland. New life is beautiful. Hope for the future. To the outside world this is home of the World’s Largest Cheeto and the place where Buddy Holly’s airplane went down. But there’s plenty more to brag about. Kids here for the most part are happy. Lots of churches. With livelihoods relying on fickle weather, crop selection, and market values, you can see why faith plays a large role in farmers’ lives. At one time our country identified itself through agriculture, pride in working the land. Robert Bly once said our country suffers from a neurosis that developed when we stopped working with animals.

Two hundred years ago this was the land of the Dakota, Ojibwe, Winnebago, Meskwaki, and Sauk. As settlers pushed west, trading posts set up a credit system with the Native Americans and when the bill came due often times it was collected through land acquisitions. Or the land was simply taken.

Now the same thing is happening to the family farms. Large debt is common. It actually costs more to produce the crops than market prices will bring. Only farms with massive equipment and acreage can turn a profit. Corporate farms. About two-thirds of the farmhouses are empty. There is a concern that most of the owners live on the coasts and this disconnect to the land may lead to unhealthy farming practices. There’s a healthy mistrust of the outside world for good reason.

Now I drive along the high plain that runs through southern Minnesota. I’ve been told it’s the fourth-windiest spot in the world. It seems true. It is always windy and huge wind turbines dot the countryside. Hubert Humphrey, the senator and great filibuster, is from these parts.

My friend Dave’s a third-generation farmer. At the State Fair I see his name on the plaque commemorating farmers from families a hundred years or older. I remember the year of all the flooding. We stood next to his field and Dave turned to me and said, “Bet you never saw whitecaps on a cornfield before.” Nope. He quit trying to save his farm through farming, took a job in town, and now runs his farm in his spare time. He’s taken to calling farming his art. He says it’s the only way he could continue living there.

A few years ago, due to the declining population, the town processing plant threatened to close. Suddenly almost overnight there were people from Haiti, east Africa, Mexico, Thailand. The plant was saved and now the eclectic downtown restaurant scene rivals that of a city ten times its size.

Dave said he was listening to the radio the other day and he heard first-generation Americans talking about the struggles they face straddling two cultures. Suddenly his ninety-two-year-old grandmother came on the radio. He’d forgotten she was first-generation American. She was telling stories and laughing with the other guests in a way he said he’d never known. One girl was telling about going on a date and their car went into a ditch and when she arrived home late her father was hysterical. Yelling at this poor farm kid in Spanish. Dave’s grandmother burst into laughter. Same thing happened to her only it was a horse and buggy and her dad was cursing in Swedish.

Last year Dave planted a field of sunflowers. His neighbors thought he was crazy. No money in sunflowers. When they asked him why he would do something so foolhardy he replied, “Because I can’t afford a van Gogh.”

We are on this land such a short time. The seasons turn. And will turn long after we’re gone. There’s a Native American saying: “We inherit the earth from our children.” For my part I try to remember to carry a pocket knife and a pair of pliers, be good to my neighbors, and watch out who I peck.