Hey again. Thanks for tuning in to you’re listening to radio revel. This week I’ve got another story from the 1990s, a continuation from the last episode, this one called A visit to the Midwest — Part two. Yeah, not a very inspired title that one, but it will do. Enjoy the listen!
Besides that chance to visit with Margaret, who I hadn’t seen for years, probably nearly a decade, my mate and I were lucky enough to find out that she’d taken the week off to spend with us and she had a car. So we had transportation to get to our next destination, which was Aunt Maxine’s farm in Southern Wisconsin.
Before we’d even driven half-an-hour, a Dairy Queen presented itself on the right side of the highway, and I decided that we’d have to introduce my Spanish mate to that smooth substance any American would call soft-serve. I ordered a large banana / strawberry shake, my mate as well, Margaret had her own favorite, I think with pineapple. Margaret and I finished up that half-gallon cup of ice cream and fruit but my mate found it impossible. In any case, we were all sugared up and excited about the several-hour drive we had ahead of us.
At one point we drove across a bridge over the Mississippi river so that my mate could say he had been as far west as Iowa. We crossed back over to Illinois at the next bridge.
My Aunt Maxine and Uncle Corky were excellent hosts. Margaret was about ten years older than me and she and Aunt Maxine hit it off right away. It helped that Margaret was a wonderful, easy person to meet and find common ground with, and Aunt Maxine was an exquisite conversationalist. Margaret slept in the big room upstairs while my mate and I shared a bed in the smaller room to the right.
The farm was always a place with a lot of activity. There was a small grain storage outhouse down the lane that needed painting and Margaret immediately volunteered. The outhouse was a basic clapboard structure covered totally with corrugated tin and the paint job was to cover it with aluminum paint. That which actually got covered with aluminum paint was Margaret.
My mate and I got caught up in another project that involved pulling out the rail-road tie-sized beams that made up the ramp leading into the barn. The barn had been built almost against the side of a hill, so the back entrance into the hay loft was on the same level as the top of the hill, but there was a space between the hill and that door. The ramp was almost like a drawbridge over a moat. These beams were rotted and needed to be replaced.
My mate also got to mow his second lawn, this time on a miniature tractor with a grass cutting attachment. Later on, he’d get a chance to actually drive that tractor on the country highway to take it over to the other farm where my cousin Verlin Jr. had his house. There we got to plant a couple of trees in front of his house and help him try to catch a grown pig to clip its ears as part of some kind of identification for the state fair or a 4-H project for one of his kids.
After two or three days, Margaret finally had to be on her way. She was not very good with goodbyes, it took her nearly two hours to finally get into her car and begin to drive up the driveway that led to the country highway. My mate and I sighed with a bit of relief, Margaret was a wonderful person but also just a little demanding. And just to prove how demanding she was, before we’d even got another cup of coffee to enjoy on the porch swing, we heard a car come down the driveway, Margaret pulled up to the house, she’d remembered something she wanted to say to me but had forgotten to mention.
That evening, as we had dinner, trying out some venison sausage my Aunt Maxine had cured herself from a deer she’d hit with her truck one night, she told us that either one of us could now move into the room that Margaret had occupied, she’d changed the sheets for us. I remembered Aunt Floy’s question about what terminology to use when talking about me with her friends and wondered if maybe I’d been too discreet with Aunt Maxine. I don’t think she approved when I told her that we were fine just as we were, that is, sharing a bed in the smaller room to the right, didn’t want to put her to more bother. But, again, Aunt Maxine avoided confrontation as a feature, not a bug.
Another day there was a bit of haying to be done. Now, I hadn’t done a haying for decades. It was never one of my favorite activities on the farm. It mainly involved very long days, sweating liters, controlling and stacking bales of hay in that hayloft in that barn. Yeah, I think I’ll explain the process as I best remember it.
Back when Aunt Maxine and Uncle Corky bought the farm, they managed it all by themselves. Jr. was studying agriculture at university and they had no one else to help them. I think even if Linda Sue had been around she wouldn’t have been of much help. So, they invested in machines that would help out with the work. Of course, a tractor or two were needed, a hay mower, a hay rake, a baler, a hay wagon and an elevator. That was the basic material, as well as four or five people, one to drive the tractor with the mower, probably the same one to drive the tractor with the rake, making windrows for another on the tractor with the baler.
Then you’d need someone on the tractor pulling the wagon while one or two people tossed bales of hay up to at least one person on the wagon who would stack it neatly until the wagon was full and drawn to the barn for storage. There one person would toss a bale down to another who would put it on the elevator which would raise it up to a window over the door, dropping the bale into the loft where one or two people would grab the bale and stack it firmly in place.
So, one man (or woman) could do the mowing, raking and baling jobs, one after another, but traditionally you’d need at least three people to load the bales onto the wagon and then unload and stack them into the loft. Mowing was done one day, raking, baling a few days later, and usually the same day would come the loading / unloading tasks.
But again, Aunt Maxine and Uncle Corky were only two. So, they bought an automatic hay wagon. That meant that loading could be handled by one person and unloading by just two. Perfect. Their automatic hay wagon was the first of its kind, the envy of all the farmers in their neighborhood.
Those neighbors wouldn’t have envied so much if they knew just what a break-down-tending machine it was. Imagine a huge wagon that picked up a bale of hay, moved it on spiked chains along to the right of the wagon, picked up another bale, move that one next to the previous, then when there were four, pushed them back until there were four horizontal rows accumulated, then lift that horizontal batch into a vertical wall, push it back one row and start on the next. Just the chains and ball bearings needed to make the thing work blows my mind, then the hydraulics and the sensor levers that told the machine when a row was ready to move or slide or be tilted up 90º from horizontal to vertical until the wagon was full. Though the wagon meant you only needed one person for the three-person loading job, it also meant that the smallest error would make the machine not work and we’d all get to hear Uncle Corky curse in rhythm to banging on the thing with a big crescent wrench. He always got it to work, though. He actually probably had more trouble with the baler not tying knots in the twine, that was a tricky machine as well.
Anyway, this time wasn’t a full-fledged haying, Jr. had brought a small wagon with bales over from his farm and we were going to get them up into the loft. I tossed them down from the wagon, Aunt Maxine loaded them onto the elevator and my mate looked on. I was probably way out of shape and rhythm for this job I’d done summer after summer as a kid. I threw a bale at Aunt Maxine, it hit her in the upper body and face, she fell back onto her butt, she got up brushed herself off and we continued. Once the wagon was unloaded, my mate and I got to stack the bales in the loft while Aunt Maxine filmed us with her video camera.
Later that evening Aunt Maxine handed her glasses to Uncle Corky and asked him if he couldn’t bend them back into shape. She then told me and my mate that we’d have to do the washing up because her lower back was bothering her. She explained that only a few years back she’d fallen off of a grain silo and broken her back and was in a full body cast for nearly a year. She’d be okay in the morning she assured us. No one knew at the time just how old Aunt Maxine was, she kept her age a secret because she was a couple of years older than her husband, something kind of looked down upon in her generation. She was 67 the year I threw that bale of hay at her.
After the haying mishap I kind of let Aunt Maxine know that we were actually on vacation and that we hadn’t really come to be put to work. She was okay with that, though it did go against her idea that the fun part of a visit was helping out on the farm. My mate and I took little excursions around the hilly, rocky land that surrounded the farm, all of which belonged to Aunt Maxine and Uncle Corky. “Everything you see from the kitchen window now is ours.” she proudly told us. They basically had a hundreds-of-acres natural park all to themselves.
On our first walk we found the caves I’d played in as a kid. They weren’t actually caves, they were spaces between massive rocks that had been dragged from up north during the glacial period long before I had been born. We ate massive blackberries and collected bunches to make pie.
One of the days during our stay, we all went to a big, fat family picnic hosted by the sports-clothes factory where Aunt Maxine worked. Before the picnic she took us on a tour of the massive complex, showed us the computerized embroidery machine she operated, the employee lounge with the juice bar, the employee gym with static bike machines and other equipment. She quipped that the only time she’d used the gym she was the only one there, she’d never seen anyone pedal one of those bikes.
Which didn’t need explanation once we headed out to the large, grassy area where a huge tent had been erected, along with a small attraction park and a raised summer stage where Up With People, yes, Up With People were performing some exciting, hand-clapping patriotic songs for the around 1000 employees and their families. Aunt Maxine took us to the tent, which is where the food was, long picnic tables covered with summer picnic food, tons of potato salad, watermelon, hamburgers, fries, baked potatoes, sweet corn, hotdogs. In a long, lumbering line were thousands of massive people filling paper plates with as much food as they could, piles of food that ended up, mostly, in the trash cans at the exit on other end of the tent. Drinks were soft, Coke, maybe Kool-Aid, I mentioned that my mate and I would like a beer to go with our meal, European habit of ours, Aunt Maxine pointed to a sign in the corner with an arrow.
We took our modest filled paper plates with us and followed the arrow to another sign in the grass with another arrow that pointed off there in the distance where there was a small truck with a local beer logo on the side. It was surrounded by those bicycle-stand barriers you know, with just a slight opening. In the side of the truck was a line of taps, you picked up a plastic glass and filled it yourself. A sign warned anyone in this segregated area that beer could only be consumed within the barriers. So, my mate and I joined a half-dozen other men, all men, had our beer, finished our food at one of two or three picnic tables installed within the barrier and headed back to the tent to see if we could locate Aunt Maxine among all of her huge, fat, overfed workmates and their huge, fat, overfed wives and kids. Up With People continued singing, competing with the attraction park’s piped melodies.
Aunt Maxine was driving us over to Jr’s another morning, and as we passed by one of her fields that was fallowing, she pointed out the six-foot high vegetation and asked me if I knew what that was. I didn’t, and she told me that it was, gasp, marijuana. Well, there was no gasp, she told me this in the same tone of voice as if it had been soybeans or comfrey. Turns out that she knew of farmers who grew marijuana among their corn crops to make some extra money, and the seeds had just kind of strayed all over the county. This marijuana was pretty much just hemp (we smoked some of it and it didn’t do all that much beyond burn our throats!) and she wasn’t worried about the law taking her away in handcuffs.
We finally came to the end of our stay in Wisconsin. We said goodbye to Uncle Corky, who was eagerly waiting for us to leave as when Aunt Maxine left him alone on the farm he’d be able to drink all the beer he wanted without her disapproving looks and sharp comments. I drove my Aunt Maxine’s car for her to Chicago where she was going to spend a day or two with an elderly woman that she took care of.
There was another mystery, who was that elderly woman? She wasn’t a relative, and the most I could get out of Aunt Maxine was that the woman had been a tax client, Aunt Maxine was helping her manage her estate or something like that, they had become friends. She’d gone off to see that elderly woman back when I was working on the farm, I don’t know, 15 years earlier? That elderly woman must be at least 102 years old now! I sometimes wonder if that “elderly woman” was actually her daughter, Linda Sue, and that Aunt Maxine made these mysterious visits to see her grandchildren. But that might just be imaginings on my part.
That ride from southern Wisconsin to Chicago led to a couple of revelations on both sides of the front seat. I learned that my mother had had a drinking problem while carrying me, something about at least a glass of wine every day during the pregnancy. I’d never seen wine in our home, so was surprised by this. Then another revelation, my mom didn’t call anyone the night my dad passed away because it wasn’t unusual for him to not sleep at home from time to time, hint, hint, there was another woman. Aunt Maxine had suspected but got a little frustrated when she learned how my parents had spent the Social Security and Veteran’s orphan benefits, she blamed both my mom and Mike for not saving some of that money for my and my siblings’ education. She told me that I should have reached out to her when I finished high school hell, she’d have helped me out. Too late.
Aunt Maxine dropped us off at the trailer that my Aunt Mary shared with her then partner, I think he was a policeman. Aunt Mary invited Aunt Maxine in for a cup of coffee, but the invitation was politely turned down, Aunt Maxine standing at the bottom of the stairs leading into the trailer. She still couldn’t set aside her somewhat moralistic disapproval of my mom’s siblings and their way of life, but she kept the word “trailer trash” to herself. She had to get on on her own trip to visit that elderly woman.
As Mary was patting up some juicy hamburgers for all of us for dinner, she was bursting with family dirt, juicy gossip. Seems that Christopher, that cousin of mine with limited Spanish and a criminal record, that misunderstood kid-turned-man who had survived the seance at 504 12th Street thanks to my Bible laid next to him, who had grown up to commit a violent crime that landed him in jail to later be released to his mother’s and some tranquilizing drug’s custody, well Christopher had decided to repeat his violent crime during the period that my mate and I had been visiting Mom and Mike. He was back in prison and seemed like this time around there was little chance of his getting out again. Years later an appeal his public defender made ended up setting a precedent in local jurisprudence. That’s a legacy.
Mary’s boyfriend drove us to the bus station the next morning and we reversed the 16-hour trip from Chicago to New York City. Before getting on the bus we had a cup of coffee and bought a couple of bran muffins. One of those muffins lasted us the entire journey to New York, it was that big. Everything was bigger in the States.
Thanks for listening. Wow, I’ve only managed to get us to the end of the summer of ’92 with this one. Another eight years of adventure before the end of the century.
Cheers,
revel.
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