C Hribal - The Company Car

So we built a pond where we had a marsh. This was not quite Moses striking the rock to get the water to flow in the desert, but it was along the lines of Ponce de León searching for the Fountain of Youth, or any number of French voyagers seeking the famed Northwest Passage. Our father, like the King of Spain or France, had entrusted Wally and Ike, eager minions, boys young enough to thrill to the chase, to find the spring that he believed issued there. It would be a burbling beneath the marsh grass, he believed. He would have liked to have found it coming out in a pool surrounded by granite rocks, but there were no rocks in the marsh. So he told the boys, “Just look for the water under the grass,” and off they went in their Wellingtons, canteens on their backs, slathered in deet to keep away mosquitoes.

They never found a thing, but our father believed it was there anyway, and borrowing a backhoe and a bulldozer, he dug a small lake in the marsh’s middle. It kept turning back to marsh, but no matter. Someday there would be geese and ducks and walleye and northern pike and bass—largemouth and smallmouth—and bluegill and perch and sunfish and gar and maybe—who knew?—in the fullness of time we might be fishing for muskies, forty-eight-inch, sixty-four-pound fish we would land on treble hooks and deertail lures. It was all a matter of believing.

This was particularly true when our father lost his job. Without telling us, he’d changed companies, only it turned out the new company didn’t need him like he (and they) thought they might, and until our father could catch on with Dinkwater Chemical again, or with a more established competitor, things were going to be tight around our house. Things had always been tight anyway, nine people on a salesman’s salary, but it was worse now. How much worse we would find out soon enough, though our parents strove mightily to conceal it from us. The extent of the damage to our family’s finances, the resultant belt tightening, the blows to our father’s self-esteem, the hits our parents’ marriage took—we were told none of this. We were instead led to believe that our father was traveling less because of a “restructuring” of the company. We were also led to believe that casseroles, served six nights a week, were not an austerity measure but a move calculated to improve our diet.

At the risk of insulting the great chefs of Europe, there is no finer culinary art than that practiced in large midwestern families whereby the “chief cook and bottle washer” (our father’s phrase for our mother) makes one pound of beef or two cans of tuna serve nine people. And makes them believe they are eating something good and special and different every night. Casseroles. We ate thousands of them, in seemingly endless variations: tomato or cream of mushroom soup, elbow, flat, or spaghetti noodles, meat or fish (fish for the mushroom soup; the promiscuous burger went with anything).

It was belief that kept us eating those casseroles. Belief that what our parents told us was true. That everybody ate like this, glops of casserole mounded high on our plates. That our father wasn’t spending his time at the Dog Out, however glazed his eyes and addled his walk when he finally got home, late in the evenings, when the younger kids were already in bed. Belief that things between our parents weren’t getting worse, their “discussions” more heated, that our mother’s patience with our father wasn’t wearing thin even as she worried about him, about them, about us. We were better off not knowing that our father had lost his job. If we believed all was well, all was well.

I think Dorie is counting on this same culture of belief being present in me. Alas, she is right. My need to believe in Dorie is greater than my doubts. The diaphragm, the packed nightie—surely there’s an explanation. I am my father’s, my mother’s son. I am cursed with faith.

When things looked particularly bleak—the year I turned sixteen our father was out of work eleven months—our father was still trying to get us to believe. To stretch the family food budget, he announced, he was making stone soup. Ike had found a large, irregularly shaped hunk of granite that spring during the annual rock gleaning, and our father started to boil that in a huge soup kettle half-filled with water. “This is going to take a while,” he said. “Rocks take forever to cook. Go do your chores.”

We were suspicious, determined to find out what the trick was.

Our father added salt, pepper, cut up a few carrots, stirred. He read our minds. “There’s no trick,” he said. “It’s a rock.” He held up a stalk of celery. “I’ll add this and some garlic. You want to watch? Rocks don’t do anything exciting when they cook. They don’t turn red like lobsters or split open like clams. They don’t get bigger or much smaller.”

“So why are you cooking it?” asked Peg Leg Meg.

“Minerals,” said our father. “The minerals leach into the water and make the broth. It’ll be the main source of our vitamins and minerals tonight.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Come take a look.” Our father brought a kitchen chair up to the stove. We took turns peering over the side. There was a scummy froth on the surface and cloudy water beneath.

“Looks like it’s going to be a pretty thin soup,” said Ernie.

“Well, it’s all we’ve got. You know how it is in this family. We make do with what we’ve got. Now go do your chores unless you think watching a rock cook is interesting.”

We went outside. Sheep, the cattle, the horses. Ran water in the troughs, distributed hay, watched for a while to see if Pat and Mike would copulate. Mike’s doohickey (our mother preferred this word over dong, Tony Dederoff’s term) was amazing in its boa constrictor–like turgidity, and even though Pat was not interested, Mike’s interest rarely waned. A mating dance involving hooves and a snake that long deserved some attention.

We watched for a while—Pat shaking her head No way, Jose as Mike nuzzled her flanks—and wondered if this was how things were these days between our parents. Then Robert Aaron and I climbed up the aerial. We’d recently discovered that climbing the aerial got you on the roof. Up there we felt rather lordly, the rest of the household literally beneath us, and all the farm spread out before us. It was way cooler than the tree house, which we’d outgrown, and we got a thrill out of putting something so unremarkable as a roof to a new and almost magical use. We were hiding out in plain sight.

“You think size matters?” I asked Robert Aaron, pursuing a recent topic of debate in the locker room. The possessors of big doohickeys said size was the only thing that mattered; those of us on the short end of the stick, as it were, thought that wasn’t the case, but we owned no experiences that would allow us to mount a counterargument (nor much of anything else). Dorie by this time was dating Calvin Brodhaus, a wrestler who’d won sectionals and took third at state wrestling at one hundred and seventy-three pounds. He claimed he got down to weight by filling Dorie up with his jism. Even if it was just locker-room talk, and I wanted to believe that was all it was, I knew right then I didn’t stand a chance, would never stand a chance, with Dorie Braun.

“Ask Cinderella,” said Robert Aaron, who was flicking pebbles off the roof. “When she first started seeing Okie that was the word—that he was the owner of a big dong. See what she says now. How important a big dong is once you’re already knocked up.”

We would never ask Cinderella. Since her wedding she’d been walking around all hangdog, like getting married and carrying a child were the exact opposite of the greatest happiness she could experience, which was what our mother told us it should be. But it was an unhappy wedding, Cinderella’s. It was like she’d gotten to the doorway of the room where all the secrets are kept and what she’d found was a big empty sadness, and that sadness had seeped into the center of her being. The look on her face was that of someone who’d just taken a blow to the stomach, or eaten a bad bit of beef.