Manure Dreams

I am playing back my memories.

My two oldest brothers slog back from the barns manure tired, smelling of pigsty sludge and tractor exhaust. Straw from the bales they’ve pitched sticks to sleeve-rolled, sweat-stained t-shirts and dusty denim, pantlegs folded twice like the bikers in black-and-white films. Corn dust salts Brad’s curly brown hair and Langston’s light blond hair. Their thin faces look not so much dirty as clouded, their expressions the tone of the sky before a downpour. In 1960, they are fifteen and seventeen respectively.

Before they go inside the train car, they take off their engineer (or motorcycle) boots, what they call shitkickers when adults are not within hearing. Our mother ordered them from the telephone-book-thick, thin-paged Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalogue. My next eldest brother, Patrick, and I, also own shitkickers, but while we try to ornament ours as elegantly as Brad and Langston, we can only envy their decorations, awash with mud, muck, and pea-size gravel from filled potholes on the quarter mile of asphalt drive laid twenty years ago connecting farm outbuildings barns to the Pullman.

According to a local 1935 newspaper article, to transport the private Pullman train car, the Constitution, half a mile from the main tracks slicing through Plano (fifty miles southwest of Chicago) to a bluff overlooking Big Rock Creek, Langston, Sr., my mother’s father, hired William Tracy of Aurora, a professional mover, to remove the undercarriage and lift the car onto the backs of two tractor trailer trucks. After winding down the hill behind where, in seventeen years, the first plastic Plano tackle box would be molded, the trucks turtled through spring’s floodplain where soft, moist earth stopped them for so many days my grandfather believed he’d have to leave his car there, vulnerable to water that could rise more than a dozen feet. He was saved by the hired farmer whose barns and fields Langston, Sr. also bought, the massive tractors pulling the trucks free of the muck, allowing them to finish hauling their payload up the hill.

Ready for the rails in 1906, one of a metallic pack of “Mansions on Wheels” (as Lucius Beebe titled his 1959 book), the Constitution, originally framed in wood, was remodeled with steel vestibules the following year. Its interior, with inlaid wooden craftsmanship and Tiffany windows and wall lamps, could sleep twelve to fourteen, and be leased for a daily rate of $75.00, or $50.00 for two or more days. According to railroad historian Wayne Johnston, the charter came with a cook and two attendants. In addition to the pianist, composer, and prime minister of Poland after WWI, Ignace Paderewski, two United States presidents, Coolidge and Harding, rented it, their early 20^th century’s Air Force One.

The boots stand side-by-side next to cement stairs leading up to the Pullman’s back door. In white athletic socks, Brad and Langston go through the metallic screen door, its bottom screeching across worn, black tiles, through the small entry where a second refrigerator holds Cokes, ginger ales, and frozen chicken potpies, and past the heavy metallic door, hooked open, into the galley.

Or maybe with all its upgrades, today it’s a kitchen: built-in dishwasher and electric stove, freestanding refrigerator, white metal cabinets, and gray Formica countertops. Where an upper berth used to swing down at night for a crew member, one lone recessed nightlight hints at the berth’s removal, in its place an aluminum popcorn popper and shiny, mirrored toaster. Not all is lost: a brown-handled ax stands erect behind elongated, framed, glass, a crack running down its length. Another glassed-in box, barely big enough for a pair of women’s flats, attaches above a white wooden table the size of full-breakfast tray. Inside, tiny brass arrows indicate the source of service requested by passengers when pushing a button in staterooms A, B, C, or D, rear observation lounge, or dining room, prompting the gold arrow to swing from its sideways position upward, pointing to the inscribed destination desiring attention.

Langston stakes out the best of the four staterooms, A, and Brad the second best, D, both with full-size mattress beds that permanently replaced couches once facing each other. My grandfather added external bathrooms by cutting holes in the side of the car and building spaces large enough for a small sink, toilet, and walk-in shower—with barely enough room to towel off. A and D are no larger than a tiny fourth bedroom in a traditional colonial home, but each fits a heavy set of dark wooden drawers topped with felt and glass, above which a square, framed mirror reflects the built-in closet next to the door stamped with a gold-stenciled “A.” Above, two small Tiffany windows open with what looks like a wood-handled harpoon, its metal hook catching and pulling down a centered O ring. The same stick and claw can pull out and unroll over the bed a canvas cover protecting the sleeper from the locomotive’s soot sweeping in the windows.

Our parents sleep in the only truly comfortable bedroom, part of a living room, bathroom, and living room with fireplace, accessed from the galley. Because seniority counts in our family, my next older brother, Patrick, and I sleep in staterooms B and C with pulldown berths and, beneath, facing couches made into beds. Each room is outfitted with a Pullman green felt-padded seat cover that opens to a toilet, its copper handle pulled up to flush away the waste with swishing water. Perched above a tiny white porcelain sink that ran water with foot pedals is a built-in mirrored wooden cabinet barely large enough for toothpaste and toothbrushes. A nearly full-length mirror fills most of the wooden door that separates each stateroom, at least two or three shattering over the years with angry slamming.

In summer and on weekends, our father, an internationally renowned otolaryngologist, drives the two-hour trip (before expressways) to the Pullman. On Saturday nights he takes the family to the Friendly Tap on Plano’s Main Street for “a steak.” I never know what other options the bar offers because we never see a menu, our only choices between New York strip and ribeye. Dad has a beer with dinner, my mother a vodka on the rocks. After dinner, if something good is playing around the corner at the Plano Theater, we catch a movie like Cape Fear, the original, with Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum, that has me replaying with horror for years the scenes where Mitchum dispatches the lookouts. Or we go back to the train car and gather in the sunroom, a window-walled, three-season room perched over the bluff, its brick fireplace rivaling Charles Foster Kane’s marble monstrosity at Xanadu. In winter, built-in side fans blow barely enough warm air into the room to accommodate the watching on a black and white console TV’s iconic Saturday night lineup, Gunsmoke, Have Gun, Will Travel, and Perry Mason.

On Sundays, Langston and Brad do not walk up to the barns to work. Instead, my father directs us in jobs he wants done for free. In fall, we rake leaves down the long, steep bank into the creek so spring irises could grow. The four of us tramp behind my father through the woods until finding a dead or fallen tree to saw up or chop down, followed by propping the trunk and largest branches on sawhorses we use to lop off logs the length of the two-man saw we take turns pushing and pulling. Even with gloves on, splinters spear our hands, some large enough to pull out clean with fingernails. In early winter, on the garage windows, we change out screens for heavy, cobwebbed storms. In mid-spring, when very young, we mow lawns with a hand-pushed, squeaking, circular blade mower, only years later graduating to a pull-cord push gasoline rotary mower.

Across the crumbling driveway, the distance of an outfielder’s throw to home plate west of the train car, cattle range behind a five-foot fence topped with barbed wire. A decade later, in the late 60s or early 70s, they no longer graze there, corralled in barns and pens, less chance of breaking a leg when spooked or eating anything not charitable to the prices at meat markets. But before the fence comes down and the field develops into a manicured softball diamond surrounded by woods and cornfield, its tall grasses cut with a large rotary mower pulled by a John Deere tractor, we climb over the barrier and shoo the skittish, slow-moving black and brown-and-white cattle, their coarse furry coats caked with dried dung, out of the “infield” and “outfield” to play a game. Inevitably, rounding the bases (extra mitts, sweatshirts, or windfallen branches), we step in a cow pie, its yellow interior squeezing through its potpie crust, the horror of the occasion and resulting odor squelching fears of finding ourselves “safe” or “out.”

When not directing us in chores, my father putters. He builds birdhouses for which we’re occasionally roped into screwing in a screw, sawing a side or roof, or pounding in a nail. In spring he hangs them on branches, and in fall he takes them down, unscrews the floors, and cleans out the nesting. He erects a purple martin house at the edge of the cornfield in sight of the train car, its lighthouse height attracting nothing but housebreakers.

If not content with the bird population near the train car, he urges us to go on a walk through the floodplain. Starting down the hill on the asphalt road already breaking into shards, we cross the wooden bridge over the runoff creek from hundreds of acres of corn and soy fields half a mile away, and cross over the mill race where a rusting wheel once raised and lowered a blade to regulate water flow north a quarter mile to the mill, later renovated as Plano’s Town Hall. Climbing over the wooden gate beside the fence keeping cattle from wandering up the hill, we stop at the cement dam halting not water but cattle from walking upriver, its smooth overflow sloping down to a flat twelve-foot-long shelf eventually falling into the sand and pebble riverbed. When swimming there, we wear cutoff jeans and worn-out t-shirts, sidestepping carefully along the slippery top, water running over our worst sneakers, then sit down and push off, sliding down on our butts, the water splashing up when stopped at the bottom, our ragged swimwear green stained from long, sinewy seaweed.

Past the dam, we weave through the woods, the road no more than a grass and gravel path. Once part of a golf course, the first tee perched on top of the hill west of the mill, the floodplain could be taken in from one end to the other clearly as an Arizona desert. Hearing familiar bird calls, Dad looks up and spots the target immediately, naming it and chirping back. I never see what he sees. Whether it’s my Buddy Holly-thick glasses or just my displeasure with the sport of looking for nondescript birds, the winged felons evade my sight. Where my father and brothers spot songbirds and rat-a-tat-tatting woodpeckers, I find only a thick, green morass of impenetrable leaves in summer, and naked, anorexic black limbs in winter.

Unlike my father, my mother, Juniper, dislikes it here. Born and raised on Chicago’s Gold Coast in a condo overlooking Lake Shore Drive and the lake, she is accustomed to Society: lunch and bridge at the Women’s Athletic Club (“WAC”); dinner at the Casino (not a gambling joint, but the city’s most prestigious private club, where teenage cotillions are held for young women “coming out,” or “debuting”); swimming and tennis at the Saddle and Cycle Club. She serves as Junior League president and oversees the secretaries at my father’s Michigan Avenue medical office, often bringing to the dinner table complaints of how the women are not living up to her expectations.

But it’s not bugs, bats, or bedlam that keeps my mother from loving the place that to the men in the family is a halcyon sanctuary from city, school, and doctors’ appointments. Yes, she does have a phobia of snakes, and occasionally the barn cat we brought back from northern Wisconsin returns from hunting in the woods to show off a squirming garter or pine snake in his mouth. Rather, her mother and father divorced in their sixties, Langston having taken up with a much younger woman we four sons knew as “Aunt Lucille.” Apparently, Langston used the train car for his (somewhat) surreptitious rendezvous with Lucille, tainting for my mother the rustic charm of the Constitutionand its surrounding oaks, maples, and poplars; its deer, raccoon, and squirrels; and its iris, daffodils, and bluebells. What should have been a place of inclusion and family love, for her became a place of division and lust.

During those long summer weeks when Langston and Brad kick stones up to the barns where they earn a man’s hourly wage—or at least a teenager’s—riding horses rounding up cattle feeding on floodplain grasses, slopping out pig and sheep pens, throwing haybales, and other farm chores, Patrick and I work less glamorous jobs. Armed with thistle sticks (snake forked-tongue blades on the end of heavy, five-foot long wooden poles) and spades (a shovel with a supposedly sharpened blade and point), with the promise from our father half a penny for each thistle’s roots unearthed (not just broken off to grow again), we head down to the floodplain. At whatever stage the thistle grows, its strongest personality trait is its obstinacy, from its early numerous hairy, spiked, emerald leaves spreading over pale green grass, to a fully developed, three-to-five-foot thick, spiked, and feathery mint green stem protected by multiple daggered leaves topped off with an evil spiked bolus (reminding one of a knight’s vicious “morning star flail”) sprouting a lovely violet head of hair the Muppets’ Beaker would envy. A bull thistle’s roots are strong, deep, and stubborn. Thistle sticks work only on the few nascent plants not yet grounded some feet below. The spades need to either cut through roots seemingly thick as car pistons or dig so far out from the stem that the blade slips in more easily, but so much dirt comes up with the thistle that heaving up and turning over the load becomes a sweat-laden, arduous task. Either method makes the exercise tiring and monotonous. Sure, the feeding cattle eat better for our labor, the point of the endeavor, but when we finally drag ourselves back uphill, my hands have blistered through leather gloves, my glasses are smeared with sweat, and the soles of my shitkickers are caked yellow from stepping on the thousands of sunbaked, crusted cow pies, just as my Keds had been when worn for softball. Only a jet stream hose nozzle will clean the creamy custard filling.

My brothers and I pass rites of passage. When each of us turn twelve, my father takes us in turn to Plano’s hardware store where we pick out a B-B gun and our first cardboard tube of copper B-Bs. We shoot trees, rocks, and other enemies. When turning sixteen, we go with him to Chicago downtown’s VL&A (Abercrombie and Fitch), where we pick out our style of .22 rifle and a box of short rifle bullets. Langston chooses a bolt-action with clip; Brad a pump; Patrick a curved lever action; and I the classic straight lever action of the iconic Winchester 73. We take our rifles to the gravel pit and shoot cans and crudely drawn targets. From the bank beside the train car, we fire downhill into the creek at mud-wallowing carp as if we can hurt them, never once raising one to the surface, surely not smart enough to figure in refraction, their only response a flashbulb spark of a sideways thrust through stirred-up bottom mud.

To the west and south of the Constitution, a runoff creek, usually dry, its sandy bottom and tangled-root banks better a fort or trench than a moat, slices along the bottom of a woody ravine barb-wired with curled thorn bushes that can stab through denim. I spend hours climbing, exploring, and playing out scenarios while packing my tan Fanner 50 belt, holster, and metal silver pistol. Inevitably, a gang of outlaws have escaped, and I, the brave, lone, independent lawman, goes in search of the culprits. Always outnumbered, always invincible, I might get wounded (never in my shootin’ arm), even get shot off my horse (I can do a mean imitation of a galloping and walking stallion), but only to heighten suspense, inflate dramatic tension, and prepare for satisfying closure. Imagined characters and unfolding narratives are to me as palpable as the low stumps I trip over; years later, in graduate school, I understand Marianne Moore’s definition of poetry: “imaginary gardens with real toads.”

As I write today’s poems and fictions, I am playing back the memories.

I am playing the Constitution, its click-clacking back-and-forth motion charging along invisible tracks, hauling historic freight.

I am playing Big Rock Creek, its sunning mud turtles with shells larger than extra-large pizzas, and underwater snapping turtles sitting still as rocks, mouths open, tongues wriggling like seductive worms enticing smallmouth bass inside jaws set to crush their catch.

I am playing the woods, once pristine and uncluttered, easy to see deer through, over the decades obscured by invasive honeysuckle, autumn olive, oriental bittersweet, buckthorn, garlic mustard, and multiflora rose, some strangling trees with noose-thick vines or pushing out wildflowers and saplings with broad, shady stems.

And I am playing at writing the hikes, the pretend outlaws and heroes, the waters, the woods, the animals, and the traditions, the essential minutiae every early childhood holds. They are the past from which I make something more than memories. They are the manure caked on my shitkickers.