C Hribal - The Company Car

“One time was too many,” they answered.

The next year the pumpkins were gone, at least as a cash crop.

“We were putting too much emphasis on the summer growing season anyway,” said our father the next spring. “We need a year-round crop. And what grows year-round?” asked our father. “Animals,” he said, not giving us a chance to answer. “Chickens, sheep, cattle. Also mushrooms. We have moisture in the basement anyway. We may as well take advantage of it.”

Our father was nothing if not an optimist. Often his chest pocket—which held a pocket protector filled with mechanical pencils and pens and a palm-size circular slide rule—was decorated with a button that said “Accentuate the Positive” or “Ask Me Why I’m Smiling” (we had our own theories, none of which would have reflected well on our merit reviews). To his credit, he did not let our family’s failures in agriculture get him down.

He also didn’t always explain his intentions. His first experiment with beef cattle was a calf we named Molly. We assumed it was a pet. We fed it supplements, let it suck on our fingers, groomed it like a dog. Come September it was gone. Our parents exchanged looks when we asked what happened to Molly but didn’t say anything. Later that month we had a cookout. Our father was doing up a big stack of hamburgers. He also had a few pounds of hot dogs and some Polish sausage, each sausage linked to its compatriots with a little twist of intestine, though we didn’t know that at the time. One by one we were served. Clutching our paper plates and our hamburger buns, trying to keep the potato chips from flying off in the breeze, we were suddenly seized with dread as it dawned on us what our father might be serving us.

It was Peg Leg Meg who voiced the question on our lips. “Is… is that Molly?” she asked, her head nodding at the burgers sizzling on the grill, their juices spittering the coals below. Our father exchanged a look with our mother, who was stirring potato salad. “You may as well tell them, Wally,” she said. He nodded. “It’s time you knew where your food comes from,” said our father, not at all unkindly. “We raise animals so they can feed us. It’s okay. It’s what nature and God intended.” Our father leaned down farther, his round face slightly obscured by smoke. “Yes, honey, this is Molly. And it’s okay for you to eat him.” (We were, it turned out, shaky on cow gender.)

Meg’s lower lip quivered and her mouth opened and her jaw worked, but no words came out. Then she managed a quavering “I-I-I-I-I’ll have a… a… a… ho-ho-hot do-o-og.”

One by one we echoed her. Our father was left with a good ten pounds of thawed hamburger patties that were drawing flies and a clutch of kids all sitting as far away from the scene of the crime as possible.

“The pig your hot dogs are made out of, the pig’s name was Rupert,” called our father to us disgustedly. “You didn’t know him, but his name was Rupert.”

The black walnuts were in some ways our father’s deepest disappointment. He had the idea that a black walnut, started from a seedling, would in twenty or thirty years, be ready for harvest, and given what black walnut was going for on the open market once it was sized and cut for lumber, a mature tree was, he had read somewhere, worth a good twenty thousand dollars. That was per tree, he liked to point out. “When you kids are ready for college and tuition is due,” he said, “we’ll just go out to the woods and harvest one of those black walnuts. Presto, four years of college paid for in one stroke of an ax.” It was a lovely thought, but like most lovely thoughts, it ignored the facts. The trees would be mature closer to our children’s college years, not our own; inflation would make his idea of how much a college education cost quaint if not laughable; and we were not miniature Paul Bunyans, felling trees with one stroke of an ax. We would use a chain saw, like normal people. Although for all those black walnuts grew, an ax, and one stroke at that, would have been plenty. Two other things our father didn’t take into account: soil that was too acidic for black walnuts, and a deer population that seemed to love the black walnut seedlings as though they were champagne and caviar. Our father had us plant four hundred black walnut seedlings. In a few years less than than thirty were left, and most of the ones that made it to maturity were too misshapen to use for lumber.

But should one be judged on one’s success, or on the size of one’s dreams? Our father’s plan was to start out small and end up big. In actuality, he started out too big and things ended up small. He wanted to be an entrepreneur, he wanted the farm to be his monument, but he wasn’t around enough to make his dreams a reality. He couldn’t be there for the day-to-day of it that might have kept things humming. And we blamed him for it.

There was also that fact that he was not a robber baron like his idols. He was not driven like that. He was driven to dream, not driven to succeed. He was no Al Capone, hiding out in the Wisconsin north woods, and unlike Dillinger, he would never shoot it out with police. He was too nice a guy for that. He didn’t cut corners. He played by the rules—a quaint, almost outmoded way of thinking.

I remember being taken to the Dog Out once. It was a Saturday afternoon, the time of day when men in bars, if they aren’t pathetic, take on a kind of heroic stature. Especially if you’re still a kid. While our father jawed with Mike the bartender and a couple customers, I became fascinated by a cardboard sign that jutted from a metal clip above the cash register. Like the Hamm’s beer signs of a few years before, the sign pulled me into its universe:

Y.C.H.J.C.Y.A.Q.F.T.J.B.

T.Y.

What did it mean? I wanted, needed to know. It was a code of some kind, the deciphering of it the entrance requirement for some secret society, and only the elect would be admitted. I wanted to be among the elect.

But I couldn’t make hide nor hair of it. Meanwhile our father had been lured into a game of pool by a sharpie, a stocky guy with a pencil-thin mustache and wavy black hair combed tight to his skull. He wore a polo shirt under a gray suit coat. When he smiled you could see the gaps between his teeth, and he smiled a lot. He looked like a gangster on holiday. I paid only fleeting attention to the game. I wanted my father to win, but I’d seen The Hustler. This guy looked like a professional who went town to town, setting guys up for big falls. My father was an earnest mark. And besides, I was trying to figure out what those initials stood for. But twice during the game I happened to look over after my father had scratched and the sharpie was putting the cue ball down at the wrong end of the table. “We broke here, right?” he asked my father, but it came out sounding like a statement, not a question. And you could see why he wanted the break there. He’d have an easy shot. The man, I realized, was a fraud. If you were a really good player, you didn’t need to change ends of the table like that. My father’s scratch should have been all the help he needed. He was no sharpie. He was a guy who liked to dress like a sharpie and pretend he was a sharpie, but he lacked a sharpie’s skills. So he resorted to tricks like pretending he didn’t know what side of the table the break was on.

“Dad,” I stage-whispered. “He’s cheating.”

“I know,” said my father. “He’s going to lose anyway.”

I don’t think I had ever seen my father so confident before. He let the guy switch sides of the break so he could put the cue ball down where he wanted, and he acknowledged the guy was cheating, and he didn’t seem bothered by it at all.

“But, Dad,” I stage-whispered again. “He’s cheating. ”