The Summer of Ordinary Ways A Memoir Nicole Lea Helget STATUS: Available October 2005 $19.95, cloth, ISBN 0-87351-543-9 192 pp. SUBJECT: Memoir Phone Orders: 1-800-621-2736

About the Book     |     About the Author     |     Reviews & Praise

BOOK EXCERPT

Stain You Red
(Summer 1983)

Dad crouched, slack knees to his chest, in front of the barn wall with his mitt and told me to pitch him a few. He punched a fist into his glove, pointed two fingers down, then opened his hand, wiped the sign away, and pointed just one finger down. A fastball.

"Put her right here," he said.

He had set down a beer can in front of him, home plate, and positioned a wooden bat in Annie Jo's hands, the fading name, William Helget, burned on the barrel of it. He pointed at a spot in the grass where she should stand and told her not to move, not to swing, and to hold the bat high. It almost toppled her.

"Choke up," he said.

I wound into a pitch and released the ball to him with all the force my fifty-pound frame could gather. The ball slapped his glove.

"Nice one."

He tossed it back in an easy way. I threw a few more. Strikes. Then a pitch missed, and flew up and outside the strike zone I'd mind-outlined above the beer can, bending in on Annie Jo's body, but Dad caught it without compromising his stance, pulled it quick into the center of him.

"That's how you get the strikes called. The umps look to where the ball sits when they make the calls. It's the catcher's job to pull 'em in."

I know, Dad.

I know, too, Dad, Annie Jo said. I do, Dad, I know.

"You just hold that bat up, Annie-Goat. Nice and high so Colie doesn't hit your elbows. She's wild sometimes."

I threw again. Annie Jo swung and foul-tipped the ball back into a barn window.

"Goddamn it," Dad said. "I told you not to swing." He stood, cast down his glove and grabbed the bat from Annie Jo, who cowered beneath him. She was four.

He pointed at the window with the bat. "Do you know how many fucking flies are going to get in there? Do you? Put this shit away. Hurry up now. And quit your goddamned crying. I can't stand it. It goes right through me."

He lobbed the bat at her feet. She knew not to move.

"Colie, you pick up that glass there and dig in the wood pile. Find a piece of plywood to cover that window. Fuck. Goddamn it. Useless, completely useless."

He turned from us and headed for the barn.

Dad was thirty-one. He was tall and lean with Bohemian, colored dark with Sioux Indian from his mother Alvina's side—a bunch of lost gypsies and buffalo eaters, he called them. His father, Leon Helget, was thick with German blood and passed on his tumbling speech and throaty voice to his seven sons, including Dad, who was just one up from the bottom, but bossy as an oldest child or an Indian chief. And that's the name Dad's brothers gave him—Chief. Dad's long legs bowed at the knees from his years crouching behind home plate and against a cow's belly for the milking. He walked with his hands on his hips like he was operating those loose legs from there.

Dad said three major league teams scouted him his senior year of high school at Sleepy Eye St. Mary's. In 1972, two Boston Red Sox agents, sipping coffee and eating slices of schmeirkuchen, pushed a creased stack of papers across Grandma's kitchen table at Dad. He signed to a Triple A contract while Grandpa, who mostly spoke Low German, sat silent and crossed his arms tight against his overalls. Grandpa had a farm place and land ready for Dad, and he didn't see the sense of his son running all over God's creation when there were perfectly good ballparks around here. But Grandma had warned him to keep his mouth shut and told him that baseball was Dad's chance.

You're an old fool, Grandma said, and I don't like that goat language in this house. Goat-herders, that's where you come from.

Goddamn gypsy, Grandpa spat.

Dad signed the contract and prepared to leave the following winter for spring training. He said no to the Cincinnati Reds and the Minnesota Twins and proposed to his girlfriend, Marie, after she graduated from high school, and in their Sleepy Eye Herald Dispatch wedding announcement it said, Marie Haala was Homecoming Queen at Sleepy Eye St. Mary's and William Helget catches for the Boston Red Sox organization, which is currently in spring training in Winter Haven, Florida. The couple will reside there.

Dad and Mom lived in Winter Haven while Dad practiced, played, and traveled with the team. Mom hated the heat and the cockroaches and the wives of the other players. A year into their marriage and Dad's baseball career, the doctors induced a labor and delivered Mom of a dead baby, which they whisked quickly away. Mom never thought to ask the sex of it, though Dad always said it was a son and his name would have been Nicholas because he liked the way "Nick" sounded over the loud speaker of a ball field. Nick Helget.

When she became pregnant with me, Mom insisted she be near her family in Minnesota. Grandpa Helget readied the farm place and Mom moved onto it and waited for Dad. She had me in March of 1976 and Dad made it to my birth but left the next day to go back to spring training. Grandma Helget said wives should be with their husbands, said the farm place could wait. She packed up Mom and me and drove us back to Florida, back to the heat and the cockroaches and the other player's wives and stayed with us until we were settled.

The Red Sox released Dad in 1977. They said he couldn't hit, though they liked that he was a switcher. They said his knees were bound to give soon. They patted him on the back and said he called good pitches, said they liked the way he signaled the outfielders, too. They liked how he knew which way the ball was going if the batter got a hold of it. Amazing. You've got good instinct for baseball, son. You should go home and coach your little girl's softball team when the time comes. You can turn in your uniform and keys at the field house. Here's your commemorative bat. Isn't that nice? It's got your name burned in it. Cost the outfit a buck or two. Keep the cap and send us your new address, why don't you. Keep in touch.

When each of their seven sons married, Grandpa and Grandma Helget gave the new couple a homestead with a house and outbuildings for livestock, grain, and machinery, eighty acres of tillable land for corn and soybeans, twenty cows, a bull, and a pick-up. After the Red Sox let Dad go, he came home to Minnesota to farm. Mom settled in. Dad woke in the dark mornings to the bellowing of cows playing chords in his ears. He knew the call of each one. Sometimes, Mom's noises from boiling water to heat the bottles for the five daughters that tagged after me roused Dad from his dreams of nick-of-time throw-outs at second and of blocking home plate from a barreling Pete Rose, who would never jar the ball loose from him the way he did from Ray Fosse in the 1970 All-Star game. Put it in your nut cup if you have to, goddamn it, but don't let 'em get the ball loose, he'd say to Fosse in those sleepy imaginings. He told Mom about the dreams over breakfast after the milking, after he romanced them and the game in his mind for hours in the barn with the cows, while pitching straw and cleaning gutters and salving infected teats and grinding corn and throwing hay bales down from the loft and spraying for the flies that bred, maggoted, morphed, and seemed to emerge from the very air in the barn, and while moving from cow to cow pumping milk from the beasts that trapped him in that place with their never-ending needs. Feeding, cleaning, doctoring, milking. A woman's job, really, he'd say of it, and Mom would look at him, set down the fry pan or a drooling baby and say he had to stop drinking brandy because that's when the dreams came racing and forced him fidgety and violent in his sleep, unsatisfied. You've got to be satisfied with what you've got, William. Thank God for it.

On Sundays, Dad caught for Stark, an amateur baseball team that played in the middle of a field, where lost baseballs, walloped over center field by local boys, became fertilizer for the worming roots of corn and soybeans. The red stitches wore away and surrendered the cow-hide leather, cotton string, wool winding, rubber covers, and cork centers to the black soil. Mom and my sisters and I watched the game from the grandstands with the other wives and children. Mom swapped recipes for jello salads and hot dish. I kept book. Dad wanted all the statistics. Errors. Sacrifices. Stolen bases. Runs batted in. Number of pitches thrown per inning. All of it. He went through the book at night after the evening milking and punch numbers into a calculator and scratch stats and strategies on the backs of envelopes, on our homework, in the white space of newspapers. He relived the game. "It's ninety percent mental, Colie. The game. It's ninety percent mental and ten percent physical," he'd say.

I know, Dad, but you're writing on my homework.

Dad gripped the chain fence behind me and called instructions. My thighs and hamstrings blazed with the strain of squatting under the weight of my body, the mask, the chest protector, and the leg guards. I had been holding out my arm receiving pitches into my catcher's mitt for an hour and we were only in the fourth inning. The Sleepy Eye St. Mary's varsity softball team pulled me up from B-squad in ninth grade to catch for Julie Schulmacher, who was fast, but wild. She was all over the place and threw more pitches per batter than I had ever seen.

Once Coach pulled me up there to catch, Dad came to all our practices and games. The older girls would toss sunflower seeds at him and grab for his cap. Jessie Heiderschiet, our senior right fielder, asked Dad about his stops at Meyer's Bar in Sleepy Eye where her mom worked and told the team about the time she had to give him a ride home because he was too drunk on Five Star to drive. They shushed and half-smiled when I came in earshot, but I knew all of it already and had heard other stories besides. Coach finally asked him to stop coming to practice, said he was a distraction. But Dad still stood behind home plate for every game I caught and called me back after each inning for pointers.

"Pull 'em in, Colie. Some of those are close. If you'd get 'em into you quicker, the ump would give her some of those outside ones," he said.

Shit, Dad. She's everywhere. She's throwing like a million pitches an inning and I'm chasing all the fouls because she won't get off the mound. I'm tired and I'm on deck. I gotta get this stuff off.

"Well, pull it together. You look like hell back here, for Christ's sakes. It's a goddamned embarrassment."

I quit as catcher after that game even though it meant I went back to B-squad.

After I quit catching, Dad never came to another softball game. Not mine, or Annie Jo's, or Natty's, or Lila's, or Dakota's, or Mia's. Not one.

Humidity fogged the barn. Straw dust stuck in my hair and under my arms in a sweaty film that attracted the flies, the biting kind with black bodies and iridescent green heads. It was time to wean the calf from the cow. Newborn calves and their mothers settle together in the nursing pen of the barn for a few days after the birth so the calf can nurse from its mother and ingest antibodies that saturate the thin milk, colostrum, in those few days. When the cow's marketable milk lets down later, the calf is pulled from its mother and bottle-fed a supplement. The cow returns to the milking population. Her rich product improves the quality of the whole supply.

This cow, Big Jenny, just days before a heifer—a cow who had never birthed—stood like granite in front of her calf in the nursing pen. I had been spreading protein pellets on the feed for the cows locked in their milking stanchions, the cows who had birthed, weaned, and separated from their calves before and who were used to milking.

Dad called me over.

He pushed against Big Jenny's haunch with his upper arm and shoulder. The calf danced under its mother and around her legs.

"Pull that calf away now, Colie. I've got the rope around his neck. Just pull it a bit. He'll come."

The calf stamped backwards against my pulling and I didn't want to hurt him, so I didn't tug hard.

"Try luring him with the bottle."

He's not coming, Dad. Can't he just stay with his mom?

Dad pushed on the cow's backside. "Come on now, bossy. You're done with this business. No more. You've got to get back with the girls. He'll be fine here. Nothing to worry about."

Big Jenny didn't go.

"Get me that pitchfork there."

I believed he meant just to tap her as I'd seen him do before. A little poke to keep the herd moving in and out of the barn, like a parent placing a soft swat on the bottom of a lagging child. I handed him the pitchfork.

He used the curved end of the prongs to thump her behind a few times. The fork dropped against the black fur and sent flies up into the barn air like dust particles released from the rugs Mom beat on the clothes line.

"Come on, now. Get." He hit her again. Her flank muscles twitched, sending ripples into the fat and fur along her belly.

"Move." He pushed her again with his shoulder. He heaved himself against her loin, but still she wouldn't budge. She flicked flies off her ears and swatted ones on her back with her tail. Dad grabbed the calf by the rope and pulled him off into the corner, tied him to a post. Big Jenny followed and sniffed her calf between his legs.

"You're coming out of here. I've had enough of this. We don't have time for this shit. Colie, come stand between them."

I did, though I was scared of Big Jenny's girth and her mood. I had been kicked before and a scar, tanless and half-moon shaped, stretched the skin on my ankle.

A halogen bulb hung from a rusty chain, hovered above the cow's head. He picked up the pitchfork again and started swinging at the cow's backside. Once. Twice. The whiff of the swings sent the lone bulb waving. Slap, Slap, like my pitches hitting Dad's glove. Again and again, but she still wouldn't leave the calf.

"Goddamn it." Dad slammed the pitchfork into the hay at the cow's hoof. It punched through the straw and rang against the floor, metal against concrete, and when it bounced back, Dad hit there again.

He got a feel for the rebounding effect and moved all around Big Jenny stabbing near her hooves. The cow lifted her legs, contracted her muscles, and puffed from her nostrils. Saliva hit my arm. She stayed at her calf, though. And I stood between the two. There was a sort of comedy then with Dad poking around the straw, Big Jenny lazily swatting flies, the calf pushing my bottom to reach its mother, and me, stifling nervous giggles.

Dad moved next to me, planted his feet, and lifted the pitchfork. He stabbed Big Jenny in the nose and cracked metal against her bones. A sound snapped the thick air.

Like eggs dropped on the wooden floor of the chicken coop. Or metal bats whacking leather-covered baseballs. There was something of a wooden ruler slapping naughty palms. Something of thunder breaking against the sky. Only more primal, more rooted. I recognized it immediately. For eight years it drummed under my feet and echoed in my breath. It was the sound of girls splitting wish-bones, of Mom dividing chicken breasts, and of shovels crushing black rats breeding in the granary. It was the sound of field stones hitting the loader bucket or hay wagon or rock box. It was the sound of a cottonwood tree, lifted from the lawn, twisted, and sailed into the drying bin by a tornado, the sound of the collision and explosion of wood and metal and the rush of millions of soybean grains winding in a golden vein, breaking through the gape, and flying off into a grey heaven. It was the sound of Adam's rib breaking to build Eve. It was bone.

He hesitated. Dad brought the pitchfork back and tapped at the air, gaining inches and conviction each time. Years of carrying, loading, throwing, pushing, and pulling the elements of that farm had fashioned his back and arms into rolling furrows and knolls. His bottom lip folded over his top and touched the coarse hairs of his moustache. Maybe in that pause, he thought about caring for these animals all his life, for that one especially. He had pulled that calf from Big Jenny three days before. He reached into her body, sought two front hooves delicate as soil clumps, and drew them from her womb in a flood of amniotic fluid. The calf emerged and landed against Dad's body, felt the warmth of his bare chest and the strength of his arms. The calf heard the bass of Dad's voice when he said to his daughters, sitting quietly on a straw bale, "Well, there he is. A keeper, I guess."

But maybe he didn't think of this. Maybe he only thought about how dumb and tired and indifferent this cow was, how she defied him. Dad pierced her again, along the cheek and under her eye and harder this time. She threw up her back legs and bawled against the assault. He let down a rage on her neck. This blow stuck into her fur, through her skin, and into the muscle. It was a clumsy strike. He struggled to release the pitchfork from her. Blood pooled in the four holes, shaped droplets that pulled crimson threads down her white fur, and finally fell to the floor. The routes established, her neck freed life in steady pulses.

Measure it against something. A wood splinter, a thumb tack, a vaccination, an imbedded nail. Who can say what sensations an animal suffers? How can it feel to be impaled with the dull, dirty prongs of a pitchfork? How far does the skin dent before it yields finally and breaks under the pressure? Does Jesus weep for this animal the way Sister Gertrude, your Religion teacher, said He wept for the ants you crushed at recess while you danced around their mounds and kicked up your skirt before God and everybody and offended Jesus with your shamelessness? Does He weep because you stand there and watch your dad bring the pitchfork to the poor creature again and again and you don't remind your dad that he's a Christian, a Catholic? Does Jesus weep because you want to push that calf, the one whose wet breath pants on your thighs, in front of you and hide in the shadow of his body quivering with fear, and hunger, and newness?

And the fork goes in again. Slow it. Consider the four points invading vessels, tendons, and muscle and leaving rust and manure and straw. And what of the nerves? Do they buzz with consciousness? What messages do they send to the beast's brain? Do they bring shock and resistance against the pain? Or do they simply spring back and forth trying to bridge the connection on the other side of the puncture wounds and send down the hurt that keeps her conscious, the hurt that reminds her animal mind to run or escape or protect herself? Where are her instincts? Or is that what keeps her here? She's a mother. Just days a mother. Her insides still churn, returning to their proper place. The organs are shifting as the pitchfork invades them, the spikes stop their progress. She'll die with her lungs not quite in the right place, her stomachs still pressed small, her intestines entwined, her heart pushed too far into her throat. Her organs weren't ready. They were still feeling for the baby that had rooted and grown there and were adjusting, trying to remember their place in the void.

Consider the man who does this. A man who can be so lovely sometimes that you and your sisters collect under the wonder of him and take turns clinging to his legs while he strides in the lawn. A man who fries eggs and potatoes in an iron skillet for his wife because she loves them while she watches the ten o'clock news and who won't be upset when the scent draws you from your beds and who will fry more potatoes and eggs and then send you back to bed with the treat settling in your stomachs. A man who will quarter, core, and salt green apples until your eyes pucker with the brack and sour. A man who hits you pop flies as high as the barn turret. A man who teaches you to change a tire, drive a stick shift, change oil, test the moisture of soybeans, shoot a rifle, drink beer, and throw like a boy. A man who comes home from bowling loaded with cigarette smoke and brandy and trips over your bodies, sleeping on the living room floor because of the heat, and falls and laughs and says, Colie. Annie-Goat. Natty. What are you doing down here? Did the devil deliver you? I'm thinking about buying a horse. Would you like a horse? And of course you would and you fall back to sleep relieved but knowing that there will be no horse and the morning will be quiet and you will have to play outside all day while he recovers and you will help your mom milk the loaded cows so that the mastitis doesn't infect the herd while your dad fumes against his head, the ache and the thoughts. The straw bales, heavy and cumbersome, demand the strength of two of you and the five-gallon pails can only be filled halfway with feed because you're small, you Helget girls, and thin. But your muscles tone like sad smiles on your arms because of days like this and you will bed and feed the cows as well as anyone's sons. He has something terrible waking in him, your mother whispers into the phone. The priest will come and talk to your dad and tell him to pray for healing and your dad will tell the priest to get the fuck off his property. Your mom will have a black eye once for singing in the car. Shut up, he'll say, and strike her in the face. Another time, he'll come home and drag her out of bed by the hair and say, Make me some bacon and eggs, and she will but she won't fry the eggs in the bacon grease the way he likes them and he'll take the fry pan off the burner and throw it at her and scorch a grease burn the size of a softball on her arm and splatter fire marks like stars down it to her hand and she will call to you, Come and help me. Hurry, please. Splash water on my hand. My God. My hand. Oh Jesus. Oh shit. It burns. It burns. Colder water. Get some ice. And the hand spots with red blisters and you will say, But Mom the skin is peeling from your arm. And it is peeling. Her skin falls in leaves from her arm. It singes back, curls, and releases. Just like leaves or scales or feathers or potato peelings. Oh Mom. Your arm. Look at your arm. I can't feel that, she'll say. And it's true. She can't feel it because it's burned past the nerves, down three degrees of medical terminology. The nerves are dead and thank God for it. Put some butter on it, your dad will say before he's gone again out the door and off to town. And then the grandparents will come and take your mom to the emergency room and she'll stay there for days and she'll go back often. The doctors will take pieces from her thigh and patch them on her arm. And you will think your mom's burn looks like a map of rivers and lakes and places you'd like to go. And your mom will say, Stop it, and she will never wear short sleeves again. But you will always know the scar is there and will listen for your mom's lie when people in July say, Oh Marie, aren't you hot in that long-sleeved shirt? It must be ninety degrees out here. For heaven's sakes, put something cool on. No. No. I'm not hot, just prone to sunburn.

And you will learn to lie. She doesn't sing, she doesn't wear short sleeves. And there are other things.

But there are beautiful moments, too.

Sister Gertrude's flapping black habit heralded our march to the altar on First Holy Communion Day in second grade. Dad and Mom flanked me as my sixty-three classmates, their parents, and we processed into St. Mary's Church in Sleepy Eye.

Dad bent over me. "That old bat was probably at the Last Supper. She was teaching when I went to school here."

William, shhh, said Mom. But she smiled.

"Well she was. She pulled our ears and twisted the girls' hair. Do you remember that, Marie? She'd get it from me if she ever did that to you, Colie. The old battle ax. She'd get it all right."

I pressed my rosary-wrapped hands to my curling mouth and let the veil fall across my cheek to cover my sin. Giggling on First Holy Communion Day was blasphemous.

"Now don't drink too much wine. I don't want you getting goofy."

Dad, that's Jesus' blood, I whispered.

"Sure, Colie. That's right."

It soaked around the holes, then spread, staining Big Jenny's white fur first red then dirty orange, like food coloring stretching in water. Deep in the middle, lighter on the periphery. He came down on her over and over in passionate eruption, in her neck, in her cheek and breaking through the bones, and in her neck again. She still stood in a striped coat of blood like a strange hybrid of pansies Mom planted once, dark and white and red. He stabbed at her flank and then near her ribs where the pitchfork sank in deepest as it found the cavity of her lungs and ripped through them. The pen opened up to a dank scent, like the odor released when a pile of rotting leaves is lifted and the dead grass wants for fresh air. She collapsed. Her head and front legs first. I backed up again against the calf to keep Big Jenny's head off my toes. She dripped blood and fluid from her nostrils and the holes and the holes and the holes. Dad kept at it. He aimed for organs. Her back finally lowered onto her bended hind legs. When her entire weight was down, she tipped to the side and lay like a sleeping dog, legs reached out, chest huffing gently. I didn't look at Dad. I didn't want to fasten his eye or his mind or his memory to me. I ran from there silent to get Mom and left the calf to try reaching past the rope for its mother.

The evening was heavy with heat and seemed to drop several shades in the seconds it took to run from the barn to the house.

He's pitchforking her, I said. Mom picked up the baby from the high chair and left the potatoes boiling over and said, Oh shit, as she opened the screen door. She lugged Baby Natty on her hip and jogged to the barn. Annie Jo and I tagged behind.

What happened? What happened? Annie Jo asked. She pulled my sleeve.

Shhh, I said. Dad's killing Big Jenny.

Big Jenny gasped for breath though her lungs, collapsed by the prongs of the pitchfork, couldn't fill and her calf, the knob-legged creature, called from the corner but nobody moved to answer him. We stood there and watched Dad pant with the exhaustion of stabbing the cow so many times, watched the cow suffocate in her own blood. Her ears shuddered flies off and the black pests swarmed around the discharge of her eyes and nose. Mom handed Natty to me, told me to take my sisters back up to the house. I wound Natty around my hip and told Annie Jo to come on.

What have you done? Mom said to Dad. What in Christ's name have you done? I looked over my shoulder at them before we left the barn. Dad clasped his hands on the handle of the pitchfork and laid his forehead on them, and Mom raised her arms, lifted them as if to catch something falling from the loft, but nothing fell.

"Get out, Goddamn you. Get out," Dad said. He pulled the pitchfork back over his shoulder, aimed at the swaying bulb, and darkened the pen with a blow.

xxx

Mom stopped coming to Dad's amateur games at Stark after my third sister was born in 1984. Mom told Dad that she thought the baby was coming today and that he should probably skip his game.

"I can't. It's Leavenworth and those bastards play smart ball. They need me. You'll be fine. Ma delivered us at home, for Christ's sakes."

Labor came on while Dad played in the game and when the guy running the concession stand told me to run and tell Dad that it was Mom's time, I snuck into the fence that curled around the diamond, stepped down into the dugout, sat beside Dad, and whispered that the baby was coming. He told me to just wait and to get out. I did. After the game, the players gathered around Dad to listen to him tell stories of the Red Sox's famed catcher, Carleton Fisk, hitting that homerun in the bottom of the twelfth inning in the 1975 series and how he had been on stand-by, ready to jump in and take Fisk's place behind the plate that whole season if that knee of his roared with pain one more time and how Dad had played one game in the majors and caught for Luis Tiant. The stories became more detailed and elaborate as the years passed and the beers spilled and the faces changed and sometimes I saw the players look at each other and smirk and then I took my sisters away from there to play hotbox or catch poppers on the empty field. After Dad's exhaustion of stories, we went home.

That day, Mom stood in the kitchen with the phone held to her ear with one hand and the other around her belly. Her feet stood wide apart and a pink pool of water spread at them. Colie, watch the girls until Grandma gets here. We've got to go. Dad, still in his uniform, drove her to the hospital and Lila, his fourth daughter, burst through Mom thirty minutes later.

Grandma went to all of Dad's games, but she never got out of her brown Chevy Impala to sit in the grandstands with the rest of the fans. She cross-stitched roosters on flour-sack dish towels and honked the horn whenever Dad trapped a dusty pitch in his glove, the same glove he used those years playing for the Sox. He only switched years later when Terry Steinbach-fellow southern Minnesotan, catcher for the Oakland Athletics, and friend of Dad's-sent him one of his. Then he used that. Terry Steinbach's name stitched in gold letters shone against the black leather.

I am sitting with two of Stark's most famous sons, Darrell and Duane Helget. They have five other brothers and many more cousins—I'm given the names of seventeen Helgets in all—and they all love baseball . . .

Oh, they were good. William Helget caught in the Red Sox organization for several years and Vic Helget was a fantastic pitcher . . .

And dedicated? Whew. The Helgets were dairy farmers, which is about the most demanding, unforgiving job there is. Those cows must be milked twice a day, every day, no matter what, and, by God, the Helgets milked them by hand!
   -Jim Caple, ESPN "Baseball the Way it Ought to Be," August 12, 2002.

Dad didn't go to Stark the night of Jim Caple's visit. He said he wasn't interested in it anymore. Years had passed in a succession of daughters, crops, and seasons and when he realized he was playing with kids half his age, he quit baseball. Other players from other teams came to visit our farm, stopped and asked him if he would coach them, and he said no to all, said he was done with and tired of it. He said he was going to focus on farming and watch a few of his daughters' softball games.

Grandma said it was a regular tragedy that Mom couldn't get at least one son for Dad and said they should've kept trying for the Helget boy that would wear the name, the face, the legs, the voice, and play the game. It's not the same in a girl, she said when she looked at me. But my last sister, born in 1993, almost killed Mom and the doctors closed her womb forever. Six daughters would be the legacy of a man with six brothers.

When I reached the house with Baby Natty on my hip and Annie Jo tailing behind crying for poor Big Jenny, I set them up at the table. I turned off the potatoes, gray from cooking without water all that time, and pulled the roast from the oven. They ate. I called Grandma.

Grandma, I think you should come over and help Mom. Dad killed Big Jenny.

What do you mean, now?

He was trying to get her out of the pen but she wouldn't leave the calf, and Dad killed her with the pitchfork.

There was a long pause.

Now, listen here. You just mind your business and don't say a word about it. It's just a cow. You hear me? Those cows can drive any man to madness. Run down there and tell your dad to let the blood out before she rots. Save the meat of her. Not a word about it, though. Tell your ma to call the butcher over in LaSalle. He's decent.

Okay, Grandma.

Okay, then.

Cruelty is close to curiosity. What happens when you zip kittens into a duffel bag and leave them bake on the deck in August? How does it feel to stretch the neck of a chicken and slice head from body while the orange legs claw at the air? How peculiar will it be when you pull the innards from that chicken, still warm, and the heart seems to beat even as the head, feet, and feathers are gone and scattered about the yard? If you throw a cat from the hay loft, will it land on its feet? What about from the top of the drying bin? Can a kitten get out of a bucket of oil as fast as it scrambles out of sink full of water? If you crack a hen's egg, past eating stage but before hatching, what will be inside? How long will spray paint stay on the dog's coat? How far can you poke a stick up the nose of the stillborn calf? And will you dare touch the glassy eye with your bare finger? How many pellets does it take to kill a pigeon? Just once if you get it in the head, ten in the breast? If you clasp a pliers hard on the dog's ear, how long before he bites you and you run off to tell your dad and your dad swings at that dog with a baseball bat? How many pellets for a sparrow? And will your aim be good enough for them, the fast and flighty things that soil all over your dad's machinery? How much insecticide will it take to kill the grinding, burrowing, eating maggots erasing the decomposing favorite cat of your sister? And will you drag her behind the door in the feed room to see it and force her head close to this cat, her favorite, the one she named Mousey, by pushing your hand on the back of her neck until her long hair coils into one perfect curl on the belly of the dead thing pulsating with larval chaos? Will you tell your sister that the white worms will climb her hair and make a home on her head and in her ears? Will you make her pet the tail and hold her hand there until the maggots feel her palm? You will learn. So many things will be at your mercy.

I sat on an upside down, five-gallon insecticide pail while I waited for Dad to drive the loader tractor in. Dad drove slow over the gravel, and Big Jenny, dangling from a chain wound around her back legs from the loader's stretched bucket, dragged a dead resistance against the ground with her two front hooves. She left a bloody route from the barn to the machine shed, where we would bleed her completely. Dad killed the engine of the tractor and stepped down to the dirt floor. He patted the cow's back and poked her belly to see if she was toughening. Already her body firmed with the stopped blood in her veins and threatened rotting the muscle, the meat. Her udder, so full, still leaked milky diamonds. Dad walked behind me and fumbled around on his work bench until he found a hunting knife in a Folger's coffee can filled with scalpels, cutters, and blades for opening seed bags and slicing wires.

"Back up, now. She might splatter," he said to me.

He straddled the cow's head between his knees, held it in place steady with his legs, and opened up her neck with a slow separating of fur, skin, tendon, and muscle. He didn't rush. He cut her deep, but the ferocity was gone. The blood surged from her, and when the flow slowed, Dad told me to grab a hoof and hoist it as high as we could to get the blood to drain from the front legs, too. I got off the pail and stepped into the red-soaked gravel under her. Puddles of blood sat where the ground was too stubborn. Dad helped me get Big Jenny's leg up into the air, showed me to use my head to help hold the burden. We spread the cow's body. She would go to the meat locker in LaSalle, a tiny town south of us, because the guy knew Dad and surely had seen this sort of thing before. Probably, the butcher wouldn't ask questions when he saw the holes gaping the cow's face, in her nostrils, in her neck, in her side, and flank, and breast, and in the organs that he wouldn't be able to salvage for anything other than grinding into sausage because they were so mutilated with puncture wounds. The butcher knew what it was to get a feel for the slicing and penetrating and tearing of flesh.

Dad washed the blood from my shoes and feet with the garden hose.

"Gets sticky, doesn't it, Colie? Get between your toes."

Dad left this place and this life when I was eighteen and the youngest, Mia, was one. He disappeared somewhere suffering with himself, I imagine. In those years, he missed first days of kindergarten, Holy Communions, high school graduations, college days, weddings, and the births of five grandchildren, four of them boys. After he left, Mom stoked a fire that sent all Dad's clothes, his baseball uniforms, and his bats with the name William Helget burned on the barrels of them twirling into the air on an ascending veil of black smoke. What's left is a wide open grassy place where six sisters and their children stretch and play baseball.

Plant your feet, Mitchell, I say to my six-year-old. You can't be twirling like a ballerina there if you want to hit it.

I know, Mom, he says.

Well then stop doing it.

Come on, Mitchell, says Isabella. I'm bored to death out here. She wears her mitt on her head, picks at the grass. She's seven, the oldest, and queen of all things pink. But she's the one who looks Indian, and Gypsy, and German. She's dark and lean and has a storm brewing beneath her beauty. Her face is mine, is Dad's, is Grandma's.

You just get in your stance and get ready, I say. Mind your business.

Mitchell takes a practice swing. He tries to hit a dancing butterfly with his bat.

Get your head in it now, Mitchell. It's ninety percent mental. Picture how it should look getting whacked out there to center field. Then put your body behind it.

I'm gonna pretend it's Phillip's big head, he says.

No, you're not. He's two and you do not have fantasies about swinging bats at your brother's head. Got it?

I fix Phillip behind me, the place he should stand so he doesn't get hit. I pitch and Mitchell swings and he misses and there is no one to catch the ball and to pull it in and to say, Nice one, Colie. It just rolls away over the earth, getting lost in the old pasture.

Blood saturates this place, your home. From butchering the chickens, and gutting the deer, and shooting the puppies, and stabbing the cow, and feeding the dogs the fly-breeding flesh of dead animals dropped by the rendering truck, and exploding a rabid raccoon, and breaking birth on the kitchen floor, and thawing bleeding steaks on the counter, and beginning the bloody months six times, and rinsing bloody panties that expose first experiences with boys, and the collecting blood that bruises the skin under eyes or on arms from hits or swings or baseballs, and saying Amen for the priest whose white robe drips with the blood of history when he challenges you eye to eye and presents the chalice and says, Blood of Christ. Water to wine to blood. And you will drink it and hold his eye until the blood runs down your throat and spreads its strands around the Indian and the Gypsy and the German helixes that your dad built in you and that you have left on this place. It's a holy thing. You could pick up the ground here, let it run through your fingers, and it would stain you red.

Home    |    Books    |    News    |    About Us    |    How to Order    |    Shopping Cart

Copyright © 2004 Borealis Books  ·  Send questions to the Webmaster