Crunching Gravel Read online

  I nagged Margie to walk faster. I listened intently for strange noises in the underbrush, knowing that no hooded men would jump forth to kidnap us. I imagined a hanged man swaying from a tree silhouetted against the sky, a few feet away in a marsh. Owl hoots were ominous. A deer, startled by us, crashed into the woods. Still holding Margie’s hand, I began to run. “Don’t, don’t,” she called. “’Fraidy cat.”

  In twenty minutes we were home regaling our parents with lurid details about the Klan. I could barely eat supper.

  Father

  Samuel Peters (1902-1969) was from a German-Irish family, traced by a Mormon cousin back to a Tunis Peters who emigrated to America in the eighteenth century. When Sam was two, his mother died of a ruptured appendix and German measles, and Sam was raised by an older sister in a North Dakota prairie sod house. His dad, Richard, scavenged mines for a living and was gone for days at a time. Five years later, the sister disappeared, and Sam was alone, isolated from neighbors. His only food was sourdough pancakes, which he would bake over a primitive cookstove using wood he himself gathered. All of his life, his breakfasts included these pancakes, made with bacon drippings and topped with sugar.

  His formal schooling consisted of two grades in a one-roomed prairie school. Eventually he became a carnival roustabout, worker on threshing crews, and mechanic. Though semiliterate, he believed in education. He taught himself electronics and to play musical instruments by ear—accordian, banjo, mandolin, fiddle, and guitar. He had a special gift for colorful verbal images and was popular in bars and at work.

  He built our house and outbuildings, fashioned a saw machine from an old Model T engine, managed our livestock and farm, fished and hunted, and provided us with much physical affection. He grew easily disgruntled with bosses and foremen and often quit jobs. In the 1960s he established his own blacksmith shop. He suffered lower back problems. He was over 6’ and always listed to accommodate his back. Despite the poverty, the bad teeth, the coughing, and the wrenched sacrum, he seldom complained. Perhaps since his own mother died when he was a babe, his Dorothy was both wife and mother to him. He often resembled a jolly, big child. In his fifties he contracted stomach cancer: All his life he had downed baking soda and drunk much beer. One morning at the Lincoln town dump, where he was the caretaker, he shot a stray dog, had a heart attack, fell into some flames, and died. He was only sixty.

  Lovers’ Plunge

  “Yes, there’s where it went in,” Dad said, pointing to the smashed wooden bridge. “Want a closer look?”

  He took our hands and we walked to the very spot where Rick Burns had lost control of his Chevy and plunged into the icy water. His high school sweetheart and fiancée, Marjorie Price, was with him. They were still both down there under the broken ice, in who knew how many feet of water. The ice was about two feet thick, normal for late November, even when the current was swift, as it was here. Black water roiled on to the junction with the Wisconsin River, beyond the bridge.

  “They slid on a patch of ice,” Dad said. “They say Burns wasn’t a drinker.”

  I had seen Marjorie Price a couple of times walking to town. She had lived with her parents just a few houses south of Sundsteen Road. What a harrowing death! Had she grasped Rick Burns to her as they drowned? Were they still locked in a lovers’ embrace?

  “The sheriffs coming with a tow truck.”

  “I don’t want to stay,” I said to Dad. “Take us home.”

  “Sure,” Dad said.

  A number of cars were parked now, waiting.

  Later, Dad saw the bodies in the car as hoists and winches raised the Chevy. Although there was no chance of reviving them, the deputies pumped their chests.

  The Farm Buildings

  Walk past the outhouse, a two-seater, with the ubiquitous Sears, Roebuck catalogue handy for wiping, toward two log buildings half buried in snow. One was the chicken coop. On warm days the hens and the single-combed white leghorn rooster ate grain scattered in the snow of a fenced-in yard. The rooster, who crowed incessantly, had trouble standing since all of his toes froze off during forty degree below zero weather. We called him “Crip.” He was a pet. He did his business well—most of our eggs produced chicks. The interior of the coop was dark but whitewashed, with nesting boxes. A triple set of roosts fashioned from birch poles accommodated thirty hens. In the very center, buried in the floor, was an old gas-tank heater.

  Our cow, Lady, and her yearling occupied the other barn. Lady’s stall was nearest the door. Near the top of the wall was a trap door for light and for throwing out manure. By spring, the manure pile, which we stoneboated to the fields, was taller than the barn. The stoneboat was made of planks mounted on wide sled-runners, which was drawn by horses. A mound of hay, cut by my father in neighbors’ fields, along the public roads, and in the marshes, stood sheltered by some fir trees.

  Near the barn, on a path leading to Minnow Lake, was the pigsty. We kept three pigs, a sow and two of her last litter. Even on the coldest days, they rooted through snow and fussed and quarreled over their swill. Their floorless shelter, which we maintained with straw, was made of saplings, with a tar-paper roof The pigs were white with large black spots. They crowded together for warmth. Icicles hung from their mouths. Their eyes frosted over.

  Half of our forty was arable. The rest was given over to swamps. The frontage on Sundsteen Road adjoined my uncle Pete’s property and marshy state lands. Most of our farm was sandy. The rest was in trees. A creek choked with dead logs emptied into Minnow Lake, known for its thick muddy bottom. Leeches swarmed there. When we stocked the lake with bass and crappie fingerlings, the bloodsuckers disappeared and the scavenger perch diminished. We tried excavating lake mud with buckets and shovels but soon gave up on ever having a sandy place to swim. There were extensive cranberry marshes. Across the lake, hills led to my uncle’s farm. Beyond it lay the impeccable Ewald forty.

  Dad bought our farm through the Homeowners’ Loan Corporation, established by Franklin D. Roosevelt. The loan, arranged through the local First National Bank, was for $250. All $40-per-month payments were waived until Dad found work as a mechanic and could leave his job, which paid $10 per week.

  The Swedes

  “What’s he doin’ settin’ there? Waitin’ for roses to bloom?” George Jolly first noticed Lars the Swede, half covered with snow, sitting on the front stoop. His hands were stiff along his sides. Leaning back against the front door, he appeared to be sleeping.

  Lars and a friend, Carl, lived in the green tar-paper shanty a quarter of a mile from the Jolly farm. It was the last dwelling you passed before entering the forest leading to Columbus Lake. George, his brother Bill, and I were going to the woods to check muskrat traps.

  “He’s dead,” said George, peering into the man’s face. “He froze to death,” George looked in the front window, then pounded on the door. No response. Carl was not there—or was he inside, frozen too? No smoke came from the roof pipe. Since the men were heavy boozers, we guessed that Lars had come home drunk, had found the door locked, had no keys, and had fallen asleep sitting in the snow, waiting for Carl. The freezing would have been gradual. Lars’s lips were a purplish blue. His eyelids were covered with rime, as was his short sandy beard.

  “Come on,” Bill said. “Let’s go tell Dad.”

  “I’ll stay here and watch,” George said. “I don’t want no animal chewin’ on him.” He turned to me. “Bob, stay here.”

  The vigil seemed interminable. Death stained the surrounding air with a lethal dye. Earlier, standing on the bridge looking down at the hole in the ice where the lovers awaited rescue, I had felt something both frigid and sultry, something quasi-mystical. A filament of spun glass connected me to the Swede. The filament drew me toward death. I would not go! I did not want to go! Death was a patina of green decay, worms, and fatty exudations from the eyes, ears, and nose. I was ill-prepared for the strange blend of death and life in the Swede’s peaceful corpse.

  Kitchen

 
To enter the kitchen, you passed galvanized washtubs, a copper boiler, a clothes wringer, a rick of firewood, mackinaws, fur-lined caps, and mittens on spikes. Opposite were unpainted pine cabinets. We couldn’t afford paint. The cupboards had defective knotholes and flangings. Knobs on the doors were empty sewing-thread spools. Each door had a small Guernsey cow clipped from an evaporated milk can. There was also a thermometer, courtesy of Brandner’s Grocery where my father charged groceries.

  A counter held canisters of flour, sugar, salt, and an old blue roasting pan used for washing dishes. Dishrags hung from hooks. Below there were more cupboards. Near the door were two galvanized water pails. There was a dipper, which the entire family used for drinking. My sister and I took turns filling the pails. On the coldest days, once we had thawed the pump, we filled the wash boiler to be sure we didn’t run out before we could reprime the pump.

  The Home Comfort kitchen range, of cast iron, had a myriad of uses. It was wood-burning, which meant that my mother needed ingenuity to bake bread. Warming ovens stored fry pans and kettles. Ornamental aluminum strips curved down the sides. A reservoir unit for holding warm water adjoined the firebox. Within easy reach sat a covered wooden crate for holding wood. Each day it was refilled from outside ricks. The oven had neither window nor thermometer. You inserted a hand to see when the oven was hot. On a window ledge nearby were cleaning powders, soap, and a straggly Christmas cactus.

  You were struck immediately by the unfinished nature of the living room. My father had never covered the studs, and had instead tacked up old newspapers and flattened boxes for insulation. Culled pine boards, considered too imperfect by the lumber company to sell, protected us from some of the cold. Nail ends securing tar-paper protruded from the roof

  Despite its limitations, the room was cozy. A round oak table with much-chipped and ill-matched chairs sat near the kitchen. White china plates, cups and saucers, glasses, and much-abused flatware, plus an array of condiments. Behind the heater were hooks for drying clothes. A pair of small windows facing the yard were curtained with flannel. Two varnished rocking chairs. A shelf with a radio. We were waiting for Kate Smith to sing “When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain.” A sky radiant with northern lights produced the best reception. On other nights, we could hear only by clustering near the speaker. Dad was taking a correspondence course from the De Forest electronic school. Mom studied with him, teaching him to pronounce and understand the words he didn’t know. He turned pages by first wetting his finger with his tongue. His hands were large. Car grease was embedded in the skin around his cuticles. He was excited when his papers earned A’s.

  Root-Cellar Rat

  To reach the cellar you raised a door in the center of the living room. A crudely fashioned ladder led down into a black stench of decaying potatoes, onions, and carrots blended with damp seepage from earthen walls. It was advisable to cast a light before you descended. Shelves filled with mason jars were crammed with string beans, peas, carrots, beets, rhubarb, strawberries, wild blueberries, juneberries, raspberries, pickles, and watermelon preserves. There were also jars of chicken, venison, and pork. Potatoes buried in sand had started to sprout, sending out long, anemic, serpentine roots. Onions hung in bags from nails. There was also a crock of sauerkraut and the last of Dad’s home brew. My parents did well at gauging the amount of food we’d need. The cellar hole, about seven feet deep, sat well below the frost line.

  We heard a rat thumping in the cellar. Finally, our flashlight spied him. Dad knocked a wooden box apart, trimming the boards, narrowing the trap. He tied the trap door with a buckskin string and inserted a chunk of Welfare cheese. When the creature ate, the string would snap the door shut.

  On the third morning Dad had just left for work driving the Vilas County Relief truck when Mom and I heard a terrific clatter. We’d caught him! I climbed into the pit and retrieved the box with its enraged prisoner. He was the largest rat I’d ever seen.

  Mom removed the stove lid. I positioned the trap over the fire, with the door toward the flames. The rat’s frantic movements shook the box. With a heated poker I beat his toes, forcing him into the flames. Screams, the smell of singed fur.

  Rooms

  From the living room, one ascended two steps to my parents’ bedroom. The double bed had a brown metal frame, a cotton mattress, sheets of bleached flour sacks, and two patchwork comforters. Above the bed were a newspaper photo of Jesus cradling a lamb, a photo of my grandmother, and my parents’ wedding picture in an oval metal frame with a cluster of metal flowers at the base. In this portrait, my mother wore her hair in bangs, as was the fashion in 1923, and a string of fake pearls. My father wore a dark suit with a white shirt and tie; his hair was cropped at the sides. He was twenty, my mother sixteen.

  On the floor was a hooked rug my mother had made. My parents’ clothes hung from a birch pole angled across a corner. Like the living room, this room was unfinished. There was an old stool covered with geraniums, now dormant, in metal cans. Near the door was my four-year-old sister Nell’s cot. Apple crates held her clothes, dolls, and coloring books.

  More rough-plank stairs led to an overhead bedroom. As you ascended you might scrape your skull on the vicious ends of tar-paper nails projecting through the roof There were crates for books and toys. Our play area was adjacent to a tin stovepipe. Well-worn linoleum protected our knees from wood slivers. Standing erect was possible only in the center of the room. The hip roof saved heat, but also induced claustrophobia. Small paned windows, askew, were in both ends of the room. Thin curtains on string covered the icy glass. No wall was finished, nor were the window frames and sills painted. A double bed occupied the far corner. Here I slept with Everett, five years younger, under a heavy quilt made of colored worsted scraps. Since the quilt was too heavy to wash by hand, it accumulated much boy-soil. The pillows were bleached flour sacks crammed with hen feathers.

  On an orange crate beside the bed sat a single-wick glass kerosene lamp on a crocheted doily. In the crate were a book of Lutheran prayers and a much-thumbed King James Bible. I read from the Bible night and morning. I intended to read the entire Bible aloud, including the genealogical names. I loved the Doré illustrations, especially the one of Daniel in the lion’s den. In recurring dreams Daniel visited me.

  Indians

  At 6 A.M. the ice was ablaze in sunshine. Ice-covered birches bent to the ground. Lakes were smothered with freshly fallen snow.

  My father and I were driving in the County Welfare truck to the Lac du Flambeau Indian reservation for a truckload of cotton comforters sewn by Flambeau women, as a U.S. government relief project. The reservation was eighty miles from Eagle River. For months the women had met daily at the Community Hall to sew quilts of cotton batting and flowered cloth supplied by the government. Dad would distribute them to needy families.

  Some Indians lived on the outskirts of Eagle River and in nearby Clearwater. The largest Indian family had our name, Peters. We were not as impoverished as they, and we shared many of the overt prejudices of whites then against Indians. We were sure we bathed more, drank less alcohol, avoided knife fights, and rarely beat our wives and kids. The girls from the “other” Peters clan were regarded as unteachable and usually left high school pregnant. Indian yards swarmed with dirty kids, straggly hens, and mangy hounds (we even believed that they made stew of their dogs). Junked cars completed the scene. A white man marrying an Indian woman was ostracized as a “squaw man.” One white lumberjack, George Petts, married an Indian and lived on the highway to Rhinelander. He joked about his squaw’s fertility—she “squirted” forth a “papoose” a year. At last count, there were eight kids. Petts was a notorious poacher. Apprehended, he pleaded poverty, saying that if the county jailed him, they’d have to feed his family. The authorities usually let him go.

  Lac du Flambeau was located at a confluence of lakes and rivers, with much virgin timber nearby. The town itself was home to three hundred souls, most of whom lived in bark shanties. Tourists avoided
the town, preferring not to be distressed by the obvious and extreme want. The Works Progress Administration, as an employment project, built weather-sealed outhouses—one per family. These were of first-quality lumber, painted in bright colors, and far superior to any of the houses they graced. We joked that the Indians would be far more comfortable in their outhouses than in their shacks and wigwams.

  A huge squaw wearing a cheap gingham dress, with a bib apron of a clashing flower pattern, met us. Her graying hair hung full about her chubby face. With a meaty hand she gestured us into the hall where a dozen or so women sat around plank tables working. The odor was a mix of skunk and human sweat.

  We loaded the truck. As we worked, Dad joshed with the squaws. He preferred delivering welfare to these people than to needy whites.

  By mid-afternoon, back in town, we unloaded the truck. At home, I scrubbed myself trying to efface the odor. We hung our clothes outside in the icy air, but the smell persisted.

  School

  The Sundsteen School was a white clapboard single-room affair, without basement, situated on bare land at a juncture of roads. Sundsteen Road veered west here and wound on, meeting Highway 17, which led eventually to Rhinelander, the largest town. The road past the school was little more than a two-mile service road ending near swamps leading to Columbus Lake. Several of the poorest families lived along this road, far from town.

  At the front of the schoolroom were the teacher’s desk, a blackboard, and a large wood stove enclosed in corrugated tin ineptly stamped with metal flowers and grapes. Twenty movable desks were arrayed before the teacher, the first-graders to the front, the eighth-graders to the rear. On cold days, we pulled chairs as close to the stove as possible. The “library” was a bookcase roughly six feet high and six feet wide holding a scattering of much-abused books and a set of Compton’s Encyclopedia. Beside the bookcase sat what we called a “sandbox,” a long mahogany-stained pine case standing on what appeared to be piano legs and filled with sand. Here we built relief maps of the area, complete with glass for lakes and twigs for trees. Occasionally, some enterprising student drew an approximation of Wisconsin. In spring the box held quarts of frogs’ eggs, which we observed hatching. If the tadpoles did not die, we returned them to the swamps where we had found the eggs.