Sparrow in the Wind Page 8

  After the forest was clear-cut and the work dried up, there was nothing around but miles of tree stumps. The logging companies divvied up the acreage and sold it cheap to unemployed loggers with very little money. Like Randal, they were hardworking men who were eager to become landowners and farmers, but the stony iron soil could scarcely grow cows, and the small plots weren’t enough to make a go at farming.

  Randal married a young Irish Protestant woman named Mary, the daughter of a poor farmer who was only too glad to give his consent and unload one of five daughters. In 1897, Reuben Parsons was born in the three-room log house—that his father, Randal, had built by hand—amidst a twenty-acre patch of pine stumps alongside the Stony River. The family home burned to the ground in 1909.

  The first time my father related the family history, he fast forwarded over the fire as if it were merely an unfortunate bump in the road, the particulars of which no one seemed to recollect. His tone and demeanor aroused suspicion in my six-year-old mind. I got the feeling that he mightn’t have mentioned it at all if it weren’t for the deep depression of rocky rubble that was once the old cellar; I had to be warned to avoid it lest I fall in and get hurt, which necessitated an explanation as to its origins. Over the years, rain had worn away the edges of the old cellar until it was half filled in with soil and rotted leaves and pine needles. The pit had also become a handy place to pitch household refuse; old tires, auto parts, broken cinderblocks, and the like could be seen peeking through blankets of organic debris. Dad said it took a good snowfall to cover the deep, festering scar in the earth and make the place look decent.

  After the fire destroyed Grandpa Reuben’s boyhood home, the family rebuilt, using most of the stones from the old cellar to lay a new foundation. For some reason, they set the house on higher ground, a few acres back from the river. It must have been a pretty good reason, because they moved the heavy quarry stones with only mules and simple levers made of logs.

  During the next twenty uneventful years, the family survived but did not prosper. They raised small lots of cattle on the few acres that would grow grass and kept a couple of milk cows and pigs, as well as the infamous chickens. They hunted and fished, more for their supper than for fun. Hunger made young Reuben develop a keen eye and a good shot; he could hit a squirrel twenty yards up a tree through the head.

  Reuben was almost thirty years old and still hadn’t married when his father suddenly died; his mother had gone the year before. I guess he was lonely, because shortly after they passed he met up with a young woman, newly emancipated from the state Industrial School for Girls, where she’d grown up an orphan.

  He married Vera a week later. The marriage must have imbued him with a new lease on life; he decided to quit subsistence farming and instead run a camp where hunters and fishermen could stay all year round. The couple slapped together some rough outbuildings on the property. They built a few portable ice-fishing shanties to rent out and stocked some extra gear, augers, fishing lines, snowshoes and such, and rented those out too.

  Parsons’ Lodge was never what you’d call a success, but Grandpa managed to eke out a living with it. He was still there when my father brought us back to stay in the very house where he’d been born, into the third generation of poverty made inevitable by the avarice and deception of a powerful few.

  My father’s father only attended school through the sixth grade, after which he was kept home to work; Reuben’s father never went to school at all. In consequence, or perhaps out of envy, Grandpa Reuben didn’t think much of formal education—said it was for rich people and grumbled that it was nothing more than an elaborate strategy to avoid honest labor. That made it tough for young George to stay in school, but he managed to stick with it and graduate from Blackstone High School in 1939. It was an impressive accomplishment, especially since he grew up during the thick of the Great Depression.

  When I asked him what it was like growing up, he said, “Well, before the depression hit, our family was poor as dirt. Afterward, we were still poor as dirt, only we didn’t stick out quite as bad.”

  It was the year after graduation that young George got into a misunderstanding with the law. My father maintained that all he did was to rent out one of the old cabins, an informal arrangement with no written lease. Mr. John Smith didn’t sleep in the cabin but only used it to store his belongings—in addition to the belongings of the people he robbed.

  The police traced the stolen goods when someone spotted a heavily-loaded pickup truck turning onto Highway 2 from the Parsons’ driveway. By the time they got there, Mr. Smith had packed up and disappeared with everything but a stolen meat freezer, half full of rotting meat because it overloaded the fuse box.

  No one could understand how Mr. Smith had managed to steal a heavy freezer and get it into the cabin by himself, but George insisted he knew nothing about it. He stood ragged and skinny before the county judge and pleaded his case. “Your honor, I’m thin as a rail and half-starved most of the time. Do you honestly think I’d’ve let meat go to waste if I’d known it was there?”

  They couldn’t make the charges stick, and the matter was legally dropped, but George Parsons was found guilty in the eyes of the community, especially the folks whose stuff went missing.

  America’s entry into World War II was welcome news for droves of young men with no foreseeable economic future. George Parsons had been eager to sign on, to escape both rural poverty and the long shadow of suspicion. For the first time in his life, he’d have a clear purpose and a steady paycheck. He went off to war with a spirit of adventure—he’d never been farther from home than Winnipeg and couldn’t wait to see something of the greater world.

  George was sent over to Europe in 1944. Prior to that, he was no stranger to hardship and strife, but the real trouble began after he saw more of the world than his God-given sensibilities could handle.

  I vaguely recalled the story of Randal the lumberjack, told to me on my first and only other visit. Otherwise, I knew little about my father’s side of the family; come to think of it, I didn’t know anything else about them. Grandpa Parsons certainly didn’t talk about his family the way some old timers do. He was so closemouthed that he made Morfar come off as chatty by comparison. I ultimately determined that this wasn’t so much a matter of natural introversion as it was deliberate avoidance. By the time Reuben had reached old age, there were so many things the man didn’t want to talk about that it was easier to keep his mouth shut.

  In consequence, my mother felt the need to waylay me my first morning on the place, before I even got out of bed. She wanted to give me the quick rundown on the rest of the Parsons’ tale, lest I inadvertently bring up that which ought not to be mentioned. Besides, Grandpa still hadn’t properly filled in the hole that was once the cellar of the original log house. My mother had to prepare me before I either stumbled upon the pit and fell in or opened my mouth and stuck my foot in.

  I was still rubbing the sleep from my eyes when I heard it for the first time: my dead paternal grandmother’s maiden name was Schimschack. No one had ever told me, and I’d never thought to ask. I was shocked to discover that my father was half German, although my mother was quick to qualify: Vera’s mother was Finnish, which is pretty close to Norwegian. Dad was only one quarter German—hardly enough to bother about. Besides, Great-Grandpa Ernst Schimschack had landed on American soil long before the start of World War II. I gathered from context that made him acceptable, since it was before the German nationals somehow went collectively bad, like a broken freezer full of rotten meat.

  Given my father’s sentiments, it’s not surprising that he hadn’t divulged the family lineage. Now, there was no avoiding the explanation. Sooner or later, I was bound to run into somebody or other in Blackstone who’d tell me, so I might as well hear it from them. That turned out to be the thesis statement of many explanations to follow.

  At this juncture, Mom explained that my father had a long stay in a VA hospital after the war, having fallen il
l with bleeding ulcers. He returned home to live with his folks and recover his health.

  That very same year, his mother disappeared—literally. My mother was clearly reluctant to speak of it and duly warned me never to bring it up. She tried to put it as delicately as possible and only alluded to the role alcohol played in Grandma Parsons’ accident, but the more she tried to cover up the truth, the more naked it became.

  The three Parsons had gone out ice fishing on Lake Gibwanaabaawe, that being the Ojibwe word for one who drowns. (You’d think the name ought to deter any sensible person.) From Parsons’ Lodge, the lake is about a two-mile hike through the woods as the crow flies, in the opposite direction of Stony River. To drive, you have to go about five miles out of the way, down a dirt road off Highway 2. For half the year it’s packed with snow, so people traveled either by snowmobile or a truck with chains on the tires—back in the days before they made good all-weather tires that didn’t need chains for snow.

  Like many local families, the Parsons had a fishing shanty to shelter from the bitter cold. Fishing shanties range from elaborate portable buildings with amenities to a floorless shed. Theirs was a crude plywood box on metal runners that they dragged out onto the ice like a big sled. The late winter ice was barely four inches thick, and they argued over whether it was time to take it in for the season. People make that call every year, and every year a few shanties fall through the ice, sometimes taking their occupants down with them. In the end, they decided to sit one more night and haul it off the next morning.

  They chopped three holes spread out like a tripod and set out their stools to fish by the light of a kerosene lantern. They broke out the beef jerky and a bottle of whiskey. Apparently, all three Parsons had a taste for single malt, and Vera could hold her own with the men. They sat and waited. Hours passed. So did the bottle.

  The ice looked good enough on the surface but in some places it had gone soft and slushy—rotten ice, they call it. The heat of three bodies and a lantern under a shelter didn’t help matters. Apparently, George had just stepped outside to take a pee. When he ducked back into the shanty, his mother was gone.

  They think she hooked a sturgeon. Though neither of the Parsons actually saw it, Lake Gibwanaabaawe was home to giant lake sturgeon, an ancient fish that might easily weigh more than a man and could swim like a six-foot torpedo. Reuben only saw his wife suddenly jerked from her stool and belly flop onto the ice, still gripping the line. She hung on tight and hollered at her husband to bring the ice pick and widen the hole so she could bring up the fish. He was on his way when the ice opened up of its own, right under Vera. She flew nose first into the dark water, faster than Alice down the rabbit hole.

  I may have been sleepy when Mom started talking, but I was wide awake by that point. “That’s just awful. I feel sorry for Dad and Grandpa,” I said with genuine sympathy.

  “To make matters worse, I guess Grandpa was so dru . . . uh, surprised that he slipped and fell with the ice pick. It plunged into his leg, nearly to the bone.” She put her hand on her inner thigh, right near her crotch, to illustrate where he was wounded.

  “Ugh!”

  “That’s why he has that limp; Dad says it stiffens up on him in winter. Anyway, Daddy heard him hollering, and when he went inside, his father was spurting blood from an artery and his mother was nowhere in sight. There wasn’t anything he could do for her, but he had to tend Grandpa before he bled to death. Grandpa has a dreadful scar to this day . . . but don’t ask to see it.”

  “Don’t worry—I wouldn’t want to see Grandpa’s yucky old scar.”

  “It’s a tender topic, for sure. The Parsons don’t talk about, so don’t go asking questions.”

  “Okay,” I assured her.

  “Sweet Jesus!” My mother suddenly blurted a rare blasphemy. “Why would anyone want to sit in a freezing shack over a hole in the ice waiting for a stupid fish, when they could just go to the supermarket?”

  “I dunno.” I shrugged, not understanding that it was a rhetorical question.

  “It’s beyond me. What a life! There’s absolutely nothing to do up here. No wonder the poor woman drank.” She finished her rant on a despondent note. “But we’ll learn to make the best of it . . . things ’ll work out, you wait and see,” she added with false cheer.

  “Anything else I should not talk about?” I asked sarcastically, although I was half serious.

  “Well, your grandfather doesn’t like the local Indians . . . it’s an old feud, and I don’t know the details. Your father warned me not to get him started on that.”

  “Umph. Is there anything I can say to Grandpa?”

  “Lord, I don’t know . . . but there is something else. Your father’s mother had lots of brothers and sisters; there were nine of them in all.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “Most of them died . . . they were old, but some of them just sort of went off and were never heard from again. The rumor is that the Schimschacks all drank too much and tended to go kind of dotty as they aged. The ones who stayed around had families of their own . . . with lots of kids, and, uh, not all of them were . . .” Mom squirmed and grimaced like she was trying to hold in a big fart.

  “Were what?”

  “Uh . . . employed. Ya, that’s it. They drank like fish and didn’t work, and their kids were very poor. It’s a disgrace.”

  “Where do they all live now?”

  “Oh, I hear they’re still some around, scattered there and about. As your father puts it, ‘These woods are full of Schimschacks.’ He wants as little as possible to do with them, nothing at all if he can help it. Says they’re an embarrassment, a big pain in the . . . well, you know. I guess that’s why he moved down to Racine, to get away from his old life,” she mused absently, too worn out from yesterday’s wild ride to consider the implications of her words.

  “Ya sure,” I agreed, “but why would he want to come back here now? Why would anyone in their right mind want to come back to a place like this?” I asked with the brutal ingenuousness of a ten year old.

  My mother was caught off guard by the deceptively simple yet brilliant question. Truth be told, she was no longer entirely sure why we’d come to Blackstone. My father’s recent brush with blue-blind drunken rage threw everything into question; whatever was going on was a lot more complicated than helping Grandpa renovate a hunting lodge.

  As it turned out, the morning we rolled down Elmwood Lane with the headlights off wasn’t the first time George Parsons slipped away in the dark. Fourteen years earlier, he’d left Blackstone nearly penniless, chased by rumors and derisive gossip like a pack of hounds and hell-bent to prove them all wrong. With the tenacity of a rat terrier, he hauled himself out of the muck by his bootstraps and seized the American dream.

  Problem was, he didn’t really believe he deserved any of it. His beautiful young bride and financial success became a two-edged sword, slicing away at his conscience until happiness died, killed by a thousand unseen cuts.

  My father didn’t know himself what pulled him back, helpless as a homing pigeon, to the very place where things had gone so horribly wrong, in a desperate mission to somehow set it right.

  11

  I HAD ARRIVED in the dark. In the stark light of day, I came to a speedy and incontrovertible conclusion: Parsons’ Lodge was a shithole.

  After a quick breakfast of cold cereal, I was told to run along outside and play, to stay out of the way so my parents could settle us in but not stray too from the grounds—“and don’t go near that old cellar.” I wandered about, circled the perimeter, and took stock of my surroundings. There was a bright summer sun with a perfect blue sky. Even that didn’t relieve the bleakness of the place.

  The house where Grandpa lived was a rambling one-story saltbox with various additions stuck here and there, growing like tumors with no discernable sense of order. The more recent the add-on, the more haphazardly it was made. The carpenter must have been tipsy when he worked on the last one: absolutely
nothing squared up. It reminded me of the picture of the house in a book of nursery rhymes—the one about thecrooked man.

  The roof sagged under a sticky blanket of pine needles, twigs, and even large branches because the trees grew close overhead. It’s a wonder the gutters stayed on the house; there were actually little sprouts growing inside, maple and pine along with ferns and a variety of mosses. The clapboard siding was stained a deep reddish brown, still in pretty good shape but for the strips closest to the ground that were rotted, most likely from having snow piled up against them all winter.

  It looked as though Grandpa had in mind to make repairs, but didn’t get far, as evidenced by the warped clapboards lying across a set of sawhorses, alongside bundles of asphalt shingles that never made it up onto the roof. There was an open five-gallon bucket of white paint, most of it dried up and gone to waste. The trim around the windows and doors used to be white but were now a weathered gray with bits of peeling paint clinging like curls of birch bark.

  That was the front view of the house and its most flattering presentation. Off to the side and out around back was an accumulation of artifacts worthy of an archeological dig. There were stashes of old tires, rusted chains, caches of cans, greasy black oil drums, and a bicycle frame. Grandpa had also apparently swiped a multitude of milk crates, still clearly stamped with the name of the dairy and a warning that it was illegal to steal the milk crates.

  I kicked a broken snowshoe. I jumped on top of a big piece of weathered plywood that was lying across something on the ground. It pitched like a seesaw, which was kind of fun, so I tried it again, but jumped too hard and cracked it.

  I turned slowly, three-hundred-and-sixty degrees, and spied a battered propane tank, an old wringer style washing machine, and a bent car fender. There was a doorless shed crammed with blackened tools that hadn’t known labor in a very long time. I drew closer and saw some rusted metal feed troughs and crumpled chicken wire, still crusted with ancient chicken poop, which made me shudder. That shed might have been the very place that my father had his accident. I studied the long-handled tools stacked against the walls. There were various rakes, some flat snow shovels with bent corners, and a garden spade. I didn’t see a pitchfork.