Sparrow in the Wind Page 10

  The houses came to an abrupt end by a fallow field of dry, brown stubble. In the blink of an eye, you were on Highway 2, which ran through a long stretch of woodlands. On my first trip to town, I noticed little outbuildings along the way, similar to the shacks at Grandpa’s place but standing alone without any houses nearby. Some were set just off the side of the road, while others were tucked way back amongst the trees. I wondered what they were for. I was about to ask, when I saw a clothesline stretched between two trees with some stiff looking denim overalls and a couple pairs of men’s one-piece underdrawers flapping in the breeze.

  “Mom, do people actually live in those shacks?” I pointed out the window.

  “I suppose they do,” she answered.

  “Then . . . those are their houses?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “They look just awful. Like a woodshed or an outhouse.”

  “Well, you’re used to better; but you mustn’t say anything like that when you get to school. You never know who might live in those woods . . . you wouldn’t want to make enemies, or embarrass some poor child.”

  “Oh, gosh no,” I said, glad that she’d kept me from appearing stuck-up and alienating my new classmates when I finally got to school.

  The Blackstone Community School stood across the athletic fields behind the high school, and housed kindergarten through grade eight. Mom tried to get me registered right away, but the office wouldn’t open until mid-August. It was an imposing, three-story brick building constructed in 1890 when the town’s population burgeoned due to an influx of laborers. As the only public school in town it had to serve everyone, so it was bigger than Nelson Dewy Elementary, which only went through grade six. Maybe it was because I was used to a smaller school, but there was something ominous about the old place. It reminded me of a reformatory we used to pass when we drove out to Milwaukee.

  Blackstone High School was built in 1912 and was the first public high school for many miles around. The only other school in town was private and Catholic. All Saints Academy went from first through twelfth grade. Before Blackstone High School was established, the children of Protestants who couldn’t afford tuition for a boarding school couldn’t earn a high school diploma. The locals were justifiably proud of it. The handsome building shared the block with the town hall, and the façade was cut from the same deep brown granite.

  We stopped at the town hall, which had a massive stone tablet out front engraved with the Ten Commandments and matching pair of stately old oak trees planted symmetrically on either side. On the lawn was a bronze statue of some old dead guy, one of Blackstone’s founding fathers.

  Inside there was a row of framed black-and-white photographs depicting the heyday of the logging industry, which provided the financial underpinnings for building the town. Most were scenes of men sawing down trees and hauling them to the road with teams of draft horses. I saw a picture of a fat man with a handlebar moustache shaking hands with an Indian. There were plaques commemorating the major milestones of the town’s development. I didn’t read it all, but the overall impression I got was one of glorification: these fine industrious men brought civilization, education, and prosperity to the region, making our wonderful town possible. I’d soon learn that’s what they taught us in school, but it wasn’t the whole truth. It rarely is.

  Given my limited life experience up until that time, it was difficult to fully appreciate the history of the Blackstone; like any other story, it depended mightily upon who was doing the telling. After I’d lived there a while amongst poor whites and displaced Ojibwe, I settled upon a less flattering version than the one on display at town hall.

  In short: Blackstone was founded by a handful of greedy men who got rich by laying waste to the primal forests that grew in the region, after they’d stolen it from the Chippewa—the ones that hadn’t already been killed outright. The logging corporations clear-cut hundreds of miles across the region, a rapacious practice that destroyed the hunting grounds of the local Indians. I don’t believe any of them understood what lay in store when they sold tribal lands for five cents an acre. An Indian could no more contrive to destroy God’s earth than he would scalp his wife and children.

  Most of the actual logging was accomplished by poor men trying to supplement farm income or penniless immigrants in a desperate attempt to scrape together some cash and make a start in the new country. They were shamelessly exploited and lost life and limb laboring throughout the brutal winters with little financial gain. Those few at the top with money to invest became wealthy, veritable lumber barons.

  After the virgin wilderness was reduced to miles of stumps, the industry went bust. The handful of powerful men who grew rich by cheating the Chippewa divvied up the ravaged acreage and sold it cheap. Out-of-work loggers bought parcels of land with everything they’d managed to put aside. Often it was no more than five or ten acres, hardly enough to make a go at farming even if the soil were fertile instead of stony, iron-red clay full of pine roots.

  Fifty years later, the woods were still peppered with sinewy old men, some of them missing a hand or a foot, proudly clinging to their patch in the forest. Even if the loggers themselves had passed, their descendants remained, hunkered down amongst the scrubby pines, often living in tarpaper shacks with no plumbing or central heat. Their scrappy children had developed a culture of subsistence: hunting and fishing, chicken runs and plain dirt farming, scratching a living from the stingy soil and supplemented by government checks. Public schoolteachers struggled to instill in their hardscrabble grandchildren something of the larger world, of music and art, architecture and commerce, with little success. Generations of isolation and poverty had made them mistrustful of outsiders and wary of anything within the confines of city limits. Their way of life mightn’t look like much, but it was their legacy. The land belonged to the children of the men who felled the trees, and they belonged to the land. The teachers and town’s people could puzzle and point their fingers, call them lazy and tsk-tsk all they wanted, but they missed the whole point. The inheritance of cold and poverty went hand in hand with hunting and fishing, and something else money couldn’t buy, something far too precious to lock in a safe. It was the fiercely guarded spirit of freedom, big and wild as the American Northwoods.

  13

  FOR TWO WEEKS straight, I watched my mother run herself ragged, trying to keep up with my father’s increasingly frenetic pace. Dad was always lean and lanky, but he was doing so much so fast that he’d noticeably lost weight; between breakfast and suppertime, his bony heinie didn’t hit a chair.

  The only appreciable time I got to spend alone with my mother was when we went into town to pick up supplies. We made our trips take as long as possible, grateful for any excuse to get out of the woods. As we did our errands, we talked and laughed about little things, carefully avoiding any mention of our old home or her sister. Our relationship ripened as the summer wore on, the emotional color deepening like the wild Wisconsin blueberries that grew of their own accord, a sweet gift from God in the sub-dappled forests.

  I offered to help Mom with the endless drudgery, but she only let me do the breakfast dishes or fold my own laundry before insisting that I run along and play outside. She claimed that she didn’t want me to stay cooped up in the house during the brief Wisconsin summer, but I think there was more to it than that. I think she was ashamed. She had taken leave of her sister with her head held high and her nose in the air, only to find herself bent over double with her nose up against a grindstone. Mom looked like hell at the end of the day, but it wasn’t only the physical work that seemed to wring her out like an old washrag. Children are a lot smarter than most grownups credit. I could see that my mother was dreadfully worried and desperately, desperately lonely.

  Unless you happen to be a hermit, everybody needs friends, but it seems to me that some people are like schooling fish—they become anxious when separated from the group. I think it’s a matter of inborn temperament, because from what I’d heard, K
ristina Sigurdsson had been a social herring long before she became Mrs. Parsons. She was always at her best in the midst of an audience, calm and poised and in her element. Sometimes it seemed like she only came fully alive in the presence of others, as if the reflection of her smile multiplied in half-a-dozen pairs of eyes made her feel solid and real and worthy of being.

  As the dog days of summer wore on, it became increasingly obvious that my mother would never be happy living out in the woods, not even if she had her own house. She wouldn’t be happy in such isolation if her husband built her a palace.

  BY MID-JULY, the trash was cleared away, and my father had moved on to renovating the three cabins. Mom asserted herself at last; she declared that before she could be concerned with sprucing up guest lodgings, she had to make our living quarters habitable. In a moment of candor she told me quietly, “Don’t repeat this to Daddy, but Grandpa’s house isn’t fit for pigs.”

  Mom began scrubbing the rambling old house from the baseboards to the ceilings and then decided to give the interior a fresh coat of paint. The whole while, Grandpa Parsons looked over her shoulder and mumbled about all the uproar, although I noticed he didn’t complain when she did his laundry in addition to ours. He also parked his legs under the supper table at six o’clock sharp, apparently expecting his victuals. As soon as it was put in front of him, he hooked one arm around the plate and shoveled it in like someone might steal it—took about four minutes flat. He barely mumbled thanks as he walked away from the empty plate, apparently expecting someone to pick up after him, too.

  Grandpa tolerated my mother’s general cleaning, but when she started tearing everything out of his cupboards and closets, he tried to put his foot down.

  “All these years, I’ve lived just fine without your meddling,” he declared hotly. He changed his tone somewhat when she discovered an extended family of mice nesting at the back of the linen closet. The winter blankets were destroyed; the wool was chewed to shreds and everything stank of mouse urine. Feeling vindicated for her meddling, Mom called him over to display the mouse hotel.

  “Damn it. Filthy little bastards,” he groused, then yanked a blanket from the closet and threw it down in disgust. A litter of blind, pink baby mice tumbled onto the floor. The frantic mouse mother began to gather up her offspring in her mouth, one by one, to tuck them back into the fluffy wool nest. I’d never seen the like of it and was gazing tenderly upon the touching scene when Grandpa’s grimy black boot suddenly broke into my field of vision, intent upon stomping out their tiny lives.

  My mother screeched as I dove in like a linebacker to shield the little family with my body. Grandpa was caught off balance as he jerked his foot back to keep from stepping on me. He did an impromptu jig before falling flat on his ass, all the while swearing even more colorfully than Mr. O’Hara—something about what he was going to do with the mice and me both.

  Dad walked into the house just in time to hear the best of it and tore down the hall at a run. He said I could take as many mice as I could catch and let them go in the woods. After he hauled his old father up off the floor, they drove into town for mousetraps. Mom was left to scour the empty closet with bleach and wash all the salvageable bedding.

  EVEN THOUGH I was born here, it never ceases to amaze me: Wisconsin is as cold as Siberia for half the year but can be hot as the blazes in summer. July twenty-first was ninety-seven degrees in the shade. Undaunted by the heat, Dad was outside working hard on the cabins. I didn’t know anything about carpentry, but I could see they were pretty dilapidated. No matter how much work he did, they still looked like crap to me.

  By late afternoon the temperature hit one-hundred degrees Fahrenheit in the sun, but the indomitable George Parsons was up on the roof of cabin number three with a bundle of asphalt shingles, pounding away with a will. He went at it like one possessed, his face and forearms burnt red raw and his shirt soaked with sweat. Mom came outside and tried to talk him off the roof for lunch, then gave up and went inside to make lemonade, to see if she could coax him down.

  I was sitting off in the shade, watching the hypnotic swing of the hammer when he stopped abruptly with his arm in the air, like a machine that got stuck. “Dad!” I hollered. “Do you need me to bring more nails?” He didn’t answer. “Why don’t you come down, and I’ll get you some lemonade . . . with ice,” I offered. That got his attention, and he looked at me a moment but said nothing. He almost seemed bewildered by the question. I watched in dismay as he got to his feet and stood on the rooftop with his hammer raised like Thor.

  My father turned slowly about and surveyed the property; the look on his face was something between astonishment and ecstasy. A wave of angst washed over me—I thought maybe the sun had cooked his brain. “Dad, what’s wrong?” Still no answer. “It’s too hot. Please come down and get a drink,” I pleaded. All at once he began to laugh. It started out a chuckle and swelled to a deep, belly laugh, until he was laughing so hard I was afraid he might tumble off the roof. I ran to get Mom, and when we came back, Dad was hard at work again, this time vigorously smashing out the cabin window. It was the only one of the three that hadn’t been cracked.

  “George! My God, what are you doing?” Mom cried, dropping the glass of lemonade she’d carried out for him.

  “Knocking down this shitty old shack!” he replied with a grimace, all the while huffing and puffing like the big bad wolf.

  “Why?”

  “I’ll tell ya why,” he declared, laying down the hammer. “We’ve been going about it all wrong. Look at this place!” He made a sweeping gesture toward the river.

  “What about it?”

  “It’s beautiful! It’s got great potential . . . Why waste it on a rough hunting lodge? If we take down that stand of scrubby pines, we could see sunsets. This spot is prime real estate for a resort.”

  “A resort?”

  “Sure! Why not? What we need is a chalet, right there on the rise overlooking the river.”

  “A chalet? But . . .”

  “It’ll be contemporary, with lots of glass . . . and a great stone hearth for cozying up in the winter. A marvelous juxtaposition of modern architecture and old-fashioned warmth.”

  “But . . . I don’t understand. We planned out a budget for fixing up. George, how on earth could we pay for such a thing?” she asked in dismay, but he didn’t acknowledge the question—he didn’t even appear to see her.

  My father was deaf to all but the symphony of triumph only he could hear—he couldn’t see anything past his wondrous plan, shining in his eyes like diamonds.

  “It’ll be grand, Tina! A woodland paradise, a virtual Valhalla in Iron County. Sportsman and their families will come from every corner of the country. Not to mention, Blackstone doesn’t have a fancy hall for functions. The Parsons’ Chalet will be the most magnificent event hall available for miles in any direction!” He swept his long arms in an arc for emphasis. “We can rent it out to locals for parties and such and make money all year round. We’ll be wealthy as lumber barons, local celebrities. Soon everyone’ll see that George Parsons is a man of stature and standing.”

  I LEARNED ANOTHER new vocabulary word to go along with bequeathed and intrusive: mortgage. My mother explained that by borrowing money from the bank, we could keep more cash on hand and do the job right. I was surprised that she shared the details with me and proud that she considered me old enough.

  “It must be a solid investment,” she assured me. “The payoff will be worth it, otherwise the bank wouldn’t agree to the loan, right?”

  “Uh, you’re asking me?”

  “No . . . of course not. I’m just saying, it makes perfect sense.”

  “So, if you build a fancy chalet with a sauna, people will pay a lot of money to visit. Then you can pay the bank back later?”

  “Exactly.”

  “That sure is nice of them.”

  “Who?”

  “The bank. It’s nice they let you use the money.”

  “Well,
it’s a loan, so there’s interest.”

  “Like they’re interested?”

  “Oh, they’re interested all right, but being charged interest means you have to give back more money than you borrowed in the first place.”

  “How much more?”

  “It’s a percentage.”

  “Is that a lot?”

  “I’m not really sure; Daddy says that Northern Mortgage and Trust had a good deal. Grandpa Reuben had to sign off on it since he owns the property, so he must think it’s a good deal, too. Daddy says you’ve got to spend money to make money. He says you never get anywhere working for someone else—people only get rich by going into business for themselves.”

  “Oh. Mom, do you want us to get rich?”

  “I . . . uh . . . sure, why not? Why shouldn’t we be rich as much as anyone else?” She smiled broadly.

  “How long will it take until we get rich?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Cassandra. I only hope that we get enough clientele—that’s the folks who come to stay—enough to pay all the bills.”

  “But . . . how do you know they’ll come at all?”

  “What? Why, of course they’ll come.”

  “But what if they don’t?” I asked in a small voice.