Irrigation Days
“like cottonwood seed from his father’s pocket”
— James Galvin, “Shadow-Casting”
Listening to BTO on an eight-track with my brother in my uncle Mark’s yellow Camaro. He showed us the Coors he kept in the glove compartment and talked into the CB radio. Riding without a helmet on the back of a motorcycle or snowmobiling up and down the ditches …
He was a surprise or blessing, arriving when my mom was the only kid left on the farm. Her brothers had finished school and left for the Navy or the west coast, becoming teachers. He basically grew up an only child.
Three or four Sundays a year we made the two hour drive to visit my grandparents, leaving after church and returning after supper. Mark was always there. He had the run of the place.
In the big barn the livestock were gone. Patches of straw washed up in corners on the concrete floor. One stall was a workshop and a table cluttered with his projects. Mark rigged up this gadget to zap the fat spiders in their webs and the thrashing horseflies. In the loft, up a rickety ladder, in a hazy wedge of sunlight stood a cracked wooden backboard and netless hoop. There was even a deflated ball, camouflaged with dust, if you knew where to look. I just left it. It had been there a while.
Not too far back the place had its own gas pump and repair shop. There were milk cows, hogs, a couple of horses to ride. They got their water from an artesian well. Mark dug a channel and dammed the overflow so there was a pond that lasted through the hottest summer.
The smaller barn was converted to a garage. He was always working on one car or another. The narrow stairway was lined with parts and coffee cans holding nuts, bolts, screws, washers, gaskets. Upstairs, through the hatch door, was the Starship Enterprise. Mark was Kirk, my brother was Spock, I was Scotty. We had real walkie-talkies for communicators. The hayloft window looked out on space over the shelterbelt, the half-collapsed outhouse and chicken coop, and the pasture where we played softball at family gatherings.
The front lawn ran two hundred yards down to the County Road and was planted with cherry trees. The three of us would chase each other around whipping the little berries as hard as we could. You had to get pretty close or the wind would blow your throw off course. On a winter morning my grandpa came back from the hospital after his latest heart attack. We set up a Welcome Home banner at the foot of the driveway. It was minus 30 thirty outside.
One night we were all eating supper when Mark had me and my brother leave the table early. He took us to his room where we could clearly hear the conversation downstairs. He had bugged the kitchen, in fact the whole house. We promised to keep it a secret.
Grandpa and Mark went hunting one fall day. I tagged along. I felt a dull thud, my windbreaker blown into an electric fence. The pheasants were so beautiful on the kitchen counter with their eyes like painted pins.
The family dog was a lab named Blackie. Everyone loved her. Her muzzle was white when I knew her. Once there was a bad accident. Grandpa hit her with the combine. Distraught, he sewed her belly shut with a needle and thread. That was one of our favorite stories. She lived to 20. Mark got one of her pups, named her Trixie, but she was nothing but trouble.
Watching the Oakes Irrigation Days Parade one summer — Mark was off from the State School of Science — he asked us if we knew the Golden Rule: He who has the gold make the rules. My brother and I both got into the back seat but he wouldn’t start the car till one of us moved up. My brother got into the front seat.
My grandpa used to butcher cows in the basement. Now he had workbench where he tied flies for the reservoir stocked with rainbow trout. The “cold room,” unheated in the winter and used as a freezer, became the master bedroom. A full bathroom was added. Shotguns no longer leaned in the corner by the front door. The only gun I ever shot was Mark’s .22 pistol. Of course I missed every can and bottle.
Mark caught his first wife cheating — there was even a detective involved, over from Fargo— and married his second wife right after the divorce. They were both named Tammy. “Nice” Tammy, everyone agreed, was a much better match. They moved down to Aberdeen and we didn’t see him as much after that.
I was away at college when my grandpa died. The ground was frozen so he was buried in the spring. The equipment was auctioned off, the house and land rented out. Grandma moved to an apartment in town. She was happy, making lots of new friends. For her 80th birthday we held a big bash. It was nice for later October, sunny with a warm wind. A bunch of us visited the farm, stopped for permission from the couple living in the house. The barns were gone. There was a new garage. The pond was still there, but that was two decades back.
To hear my mom tell it, they didn’t have indoor plumbing until she was in high school. Before that, she attended a one-room schoolhouse, reached by horse if the winter weather was bad. I never knew what to make of all that. Mark went into computers. He could build or fix anything. I never found out who played basketball in the barn. I forgot to ask.