Chapter Two

It was a tough few months for the family.  For Olive and Mary-Anne, it meant doing things they’d never imagined themselves doing, to keep the farm going.  For the farm, it meant a step back, because Olive was more certain than before that she would not have her daughter anywhere NEAR the infernal monster that had taken her husband’s wedding ring and his finger with it.  They would finish the plowing that year with horses.  For Jeremiah, it meant watching.  For Chuck, it meant hearing of his father’s injury but as he was sailing in the North Pacific, he too was powerless to help.  He tried to send home as much money as he could.

Predictably, Jeremiah had trouble holding back.  Nevertheless, his missing finger cost  him- both pain and awkwardness.  Perhaps his lack of patience that kept reopening the wound explained why it was having such a hard time healing.  It could also go some distance to explain how he eventually got an infection that nearly took his life later that month.

Olive had expected it.  You just can’t take a man who works every day of his life and tell him ‘today you sit and watch others work’.  Not Jeremiah, anyway.  He didn’t have the patience.  He was a good man.  A very good man, in his way.  But he didn’t have the strength of character to sit and watch others work.  He was a horrible manager, in that sense.  Chuck would occasionally tell stories for the rest of his life about how poor Jeremiah Book had been at telling others what he wanted or needed when it came to running the farm.  How hard he’d worked to please his father and how rarely he’d succeeded.  About the way it drove him away from the farm and into the sea.

There were a few important lessons Mary-Anne learned that month.  The first was that horses need to be warmed up to the work that they’re doing for the day.  Like people, she learned, they will work for hours and hours, but need to ease into the work gradually.  Mary-Anne learned patience in this way that she would treasure for the rest of her life. 

Many were the school reports or outings with friends that she missed because of those horses.  Those horses who had somehow sensed the urgency and run so fast when her father had lost his finger, did not seem to pick up on her own urgent needs.  Especially when they happened in the morning.  She could yell, she could plead, or do whatever else came into her head to do, but they would do the work at the speed they chose.  Jeremiah gave her advice.  He talked and talked and talked.  But when she got out there behind the horses, they seemed to sense that their true master was not with them, and moved along however they chose.  It developed patience, an ability to wait that she would need in the life that was to be hers.  But as a sort of ironic side-effect, it also grew a love of machines that no one would have ever predicted from her.  Though her mother steadfastly “protected” her, via the horses, Mary-Anne wanted nothing more than to get rid of them once and for good.  She loved the tractor from afar for the way it had simply done its work without the moodiness of the horses.  Turn it on, it worked until you turned it off.  Had it taken her father’s finger?  Yes, but it was simply because he’d put it in the wrong place.  The machine wasn’t mean tempered, hadn’t meant anything by it.  A horse would’ve.

Secondly, she learned how to grow things.  Her family’s year depended on it.  And that year, along with its felt need, taught her all that she would ever need to know about growing plants.  Give them plenty of water, plenty of sun, keep away the pests, and they’ll grow, alright.  She and Olive grew the garden that gave them a large part of their food.  They grew the corn and wheat that would put money in the bank that autumn.  In a way, they also grew the chicken, pigs, and cows, though of course they needed more than sunlight and water.  Mary-Anne didn’t realize she was learning, didn’t think about how much she was focusing on what happened that year, but for the rest of her life, she would watch people fail at their little gardens and think, “How hard can it be to figure out?  We did!”  It puzzled her when friends’ household plants died.  Wasn’t it obvious?

But the greatest thing she learned through the loss of the finger was about germs and infection.  Jeremiah’s finger didn’t seem to be healing very well, but what did any of them know about such a major injury?  Who other than doctors has experience with such things?

“Finger’s hurting something terrible,” Jeremiah said one day at dinner.  It was uncharacteristic of him to admit to his pain, thought Olive.  He went on eating and said no more about it.  But in the middle of the night, he woke her up coughing.  He coughed until it seemed he wouldn’t be able to get a breath.  Coughed until he retched.  Olive patiently cleaned it up and soothed him with a glass of warm milk.  He drifted off, and they all went back to bed.

But in the morning, Jeremiah’s condition hadn’t improved, and throughout the day, it worsened.  He began to run a slight fever.  Olive sent her daughter off to school after the early chores were done, but she never got to her own that day.  She wiped the sweat off of his forehead as the fever grew.  She tried to feed him soup, which he got down a few spoonfuls of.  She even sang him to sleep- something she hadn’t done since just after they were married.

Once Mary-Anne got home from school, she was quickly dispatched to deliver a message to the village doctor about her father.  She returned after a few hours, reporting that he would be by the next morning, and that Olive should try to get her husband to drink water and sleep as much as possible.  He passed another rough night, waking often but without the coughing of the night before.

After a lengthy examination the next morning, the doctor took Olive aside. 

“Has Jeremiah been changing the bandages like they told him?”, he asked.  Olive admitted that she doubted he had. 

“Not often as they said, no,” she said, “He tells me we can’t afford that many bandages.  I’ve been trying to clean them with boiling water and lye when I can…”,  she trailed off.

“Well, he should’ve.  He Should have,” the doctor repeated slowly, perhaps ominously.  “The stubborn old man.  Got himself an infection now.  Pretty serious one.”  Olive nodded her head, uncomprehending.  They’d taken him to the hospital, he’d been treated.  He kept a bandage on it.  What more could he do?

“No, you’re not understanding,” said the doctor, slowly and patiently.  He was beginning to understand who he was talking to.  “Jeremiah is in quite a bit of danger, Olive.  He’s not out of the woods yet,” and he proceeded to try to educate the woman simply yet deeply about germs and bacteria and their effects.  As he spoke on, Olive grew a decidedly lighter shade of pink.  Jeremiah had done none of the things the doctor spoke in favor of, and very many of those he spoke against.  In fact, it sounded to her like the only thing that either of them had done right was when she had boiled the bandages.  And she had only done that trying to loosen the dirt and get them cleaner looking.  A whole new world was opening up before her that morning.  There was dirt beneath the dirt.  Dirt you couldn’t see that persisted even when things looked clean.  It affected her deeply while she thought about the stain of sin, only washable with the blood of Jesus.

The patriarch avoided coma, but only barely.  And it was practically a matter of semantics.  He wasn’t able to talk very long, but he did wake up off and on throughout the day, and was able to take in some small bit of food.  He lost the weight he’d started to gain, and it was lucky for him that he had it to lose that month.

Predictably, discovering the world of germs brought out in Olive a mania of cleaning that wouldn’t really, truly go away for three generations.  Clean was never clean enough, because of course, there was dirt you couldn’t see.  Unfortunately, the doctor hadn’t the time that morning to tell Olive more about the signs of germs.  Especially about the ways you could kill them, or tell when they’d been killed.  It would have saved the women (later the men, too) a lot of trouble over the years if he’d just taken a few minutes on that morning.  A pity.

Jeremiah, for his part, took things quite seriously, though it wasn’t until weeks later, after he’d gotten better, that he understood at all what was really happening.  “Take care of Mary-Anne,” he told Olive when they spoke about the matter of his belongings, in a particularly morbid, but he thought necessary, conversation.  “Chuck will get the farm and whatever he really wants, but give Mary-Anne some property….” And his voice trailed off along with his strength, but Olive knew what he was trying to tell her.  The firstborn would be taken care of, of course.  But he wanted his daughter to have something of her own.  To not have to depend on a man with everything, for everything.  To have some tiny bit of her own.  And she loved Jeremiah like she had the day she’d married him.  If only her father had been so thoughtful, she mused.

Olive was manic with cleaning, it was undeniable.  She had germs and dirt and sin so mixed up within her by the end of that month that they’d never be fully untangled.  But Mary-Anne took on the notion with equal vigor, but in her own way.  And considering she was already in the eleventh grade, her way was considerably more scientific.  She stayed after school on the days she could, to use the library.  She wrote reports on the subject when research projects were due.  Suffice to say she devoted her considerable brainpower to comprehending what precisely was happening to her father.  And considering the times she was living in, she did a very respectable job.  Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928, remember.  Mary-Anne wasn’t in the running for that honor, but neither was she particularly shocked when she heard of the discovery.  She would be both the savior and the bane of her children and grandchildren because of these months of study.  Many were the little ones who later bemoaned these studies, as they had their wounds bathed in alcohol and scrubbed vigorously.

If she didn’t make a major deciding difference in the recovery of her father, she certainly wasn’t detrimental.  Her humble hints to Olive about antiseptic procedures were short and quiet but who knows how much they really changed the balance of power within his body?

Jeremiah’s recovery was not without its pitfalls and dashed hopes, but he gradually returned to health over the coming year.  His farm-worked body was not foreign to the dirt, and neither was it foreign to him.  It was probably because of this that he had an immune system strong enough to survive the ordeal.  He had come close.  Dodged a bullet.  And it changed him.  For better.  And for worse.

Chapter One

“You can always tell a ______, but you can’t tell him much”.  That phrase went through X’s head as he drank his last drop of water.  He was lost in the woods.  Not lost exactly, but at the end of a trail that didn’t seem to continue.  He should turn around.  He knew he should.  But it just gnawed at him to cover ground he’d already covered.  He turned anyway.  After a short, half-hearted walk back up the trail, he turned again, and soon was back where he had started.  He sat down on a horizontal rock and as he considered his (limited) options, his mind began to drift.  Where was that trail?  Where was that trail….where was that Tr…

Where was that tractor?  He had just gone into the trees to do his business, and now he couldn’t find it anywhere?  How could that even be?  Jeremiah looked back the direction he’d come, looked forward to where it would be if it had somehow jumped into gear.  Nothing.  He sat down to think.  To retrace his steps in his mind.  He’d just walked over, done his business, and walked back to here.  There had to be an explanation.  These things didn’t move very fast.  Especially when they hadn’t had a chance to build up a head of steam.  He decided to walk to the dead center of the field, to the top of a slight rise, so that he could look all around.  He slowly followed his footprints, hard to see in the hard ground he hadn’t yet plowed.  And just as he came to the top of the little rise, there it was.  He wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it himself.  Wouldn’t have thought such a small hill could hide something so big.  But he hadn’t been able to find it, and there it was.  Hmph- who’d a thought?

            Jeremiah Book was 45 years old, but to look at him that day, you would’ve sworn he was over 60.  A lifetime in the sun was what had done it.  Working on his father’s farm, now working on his own.  Seemed like he’d been throwing hay up onto wagons since the day he was born.  Maybe he had.  He certainly hadn’t spent his time playing like others his age that he’d heard of.  When he was a younger child, he’d been put out to pasture, to watch the sheep or the cows.  Make sure they didn’t wander into trouble or get attacked by a wolf or bear.  There hadn’t been coyotes around the area back then, although they were starting to make inroads now.  Jeremiah had heard their obscene howls at night while he sat on the porch.  He’d seen a few deer that they felled.  Not like wolves, not like bears.  With their pesky little bites out of everywhere.  And they never finished an animal like a wolf.  That was what Jeremiah hated about them the most.  The waste.  When he shot a deer, he was sure to use as much of it as he could.  He didn’t claim to be a native.  Now those people could really use up every last bit.  But he tanned the hide, and smoked the meat.  There wasn’t a whole lot left at the end, and that he fed most of to the animals.  It showed some sort of moral failing in an animal when it wasted.

            He got back onto the tractor and went through the rather complicated motions that got it started moving again.  The tractor had been a major investment for him, and one he prayed would pay off for his farm and his family.  Chuck was already gone off to the Navy, but Mary-Anne was about to graduate high school, and Jeremiah wanted her to go to one of those new Junior College for Women, if she could pass the tests to get in.  Well, Olive wanted her to.  Jeremiah was too busy working the fields to be able to think about such things.  Though, when he got right down to it, he couldn’t really figure out why, since he sat behind the wheel of first a team of horses and then the tractor all day long.  But that was just the way they did things.  And Olive wanted Mary-Anne to get an education.

            It was a new idea.  And frankly, Jeremiah Book wasn’t quite sure what to make of it.  It wasn’t that he didn’t love Mary-Anne.  Oh, no.  He loved her with every fiber of his being.  But was that what women should be learning? 

Thoughts?  Is that the kind of life the world would give them?  A life of thinking important things?  Maybe one or two women, like Louisa May Alcott or that woman poet from Massachusetts.  Hell, maybe they all thought big thoughts in Massachusetts.  But what about Pennsylvania?  What about Mary-Anne?  The life she likely looked forward to was a life of endless repetition, of cooking breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with cleaning in between, and raising children all through.  Oh, Mary-Anne said she wanted two children now, but what would marriage say?  What would a husband say about having a family so small?  And she’d likely be marrying a farmer just like him.  She and Olive both knew what would most likely be in store for her.  And yet, they persisted in this Jr. College for Women plan!  Ah, well.  What harm was there in dreaming, eh?  He wiped his forehead and shifted the tractor into gear, now that it had a full head of steam ready.  He glanced to his right to follow the line of unplowed grass and dirt, and remembered why he didn’t have time to think thoughts all day- he had to focus.

And his had been a life of focus on work.  Not schoolwork; work work!  Meaning, work done with his hands.  Like an animal, he thought with a touch of bitterness.  Work meant not doing that school stuff that amounted to nothing, but getting something done.  Moving that hay from one end of the barn to the other.  Moving those cows from the field into the barn, and then getting the milk out of them.  Taking a room full of pigs, and turning them into pounds of bacon, pork, and ham.  Salted and smoked so they’d keep through the winter.  That was work.  That was what he had known. 

Still, there was a part of Jeremiah that wanted to rise above drudgery.  There was a part of him that spoke to his mind after supper, when he would sit on the porch and look off into the distance while it was growing dark.  These days it sometimes spoke to him when he read Chuck’s letters from the Navy.  This was why he had taken the chance and bought the tractor.  He was following some distant, whispering hope that there was something more to life than work.  Maybe the tractor would save him and hour every day that he could use to write Chuck a letter back.  Or read a book like Olive always encouraged him to do.  Maybe.  But first he had to learn how to use the dang thing, and for now, that was taking up more of his time than the horses ever had.

As he plowed along, he thought of his father’s farm.  Now that had been a place of work.  No wonder he’d asked Jeremiah to drop out of school.  When Jeremiah thought back to that place with his mature eyes, it was a wonder to him that Pa had let young Jeremiah attend school at all, let alone until the 6^th grade!  He unwittingly let out a small sigh thinking of it.  He was unaware that he echoed almost exactly the one produced by the steam of the tractor.

Olive watched him out the kitchen window as she cooked up roast and fried the potatoes.  She had seen his confused moment, but would never tell him that.  It would only make him mad for her to have seen him so vulnerable.  She too spent a moment thinking about the tractor, and what a risk it had been for them.  But unlike Jeremiah, she saw it as a stepping stone.  To a better future.  Whereas her husband saw it saving time and getting the necessary work done faster, Olive Book pictured it increasing their harvest.  And when there was more in the corn-crib, there was more in the wallet, as her father had always said.  Chuck was already out at sea both literally and figuratively.  He had gone off to the Navy and he was on his own.  He didn’t need them.  But Mary-Anne was another story, and a woman’s story that Olive could relate to better.

She was a smart girl.  Olive could see that.  And she knew Jeremiah could see it too.  A girl who deserved better than the life of a farm wife.  Better than constant cooking and cleaning.  Child-raising was non-negotiable.  She couldn’t get away from that.  But a girl with an education could at least escape into her mind.  Or so Olive imagined.  She herself had only made it to the fifth grade.  Enough to learn reading and writing.  She’d read a few nice stories, learned to do multiplication.   It got by on the farm.  But she wanted more for her daughter.

For the early part of Mary-Anne’s life, Olive hadn’t known what to think about the girl.  From the point of view of her mind, anyway.  Women simply didn’t go to school after high school.  It just wasn’t done.  But in the last few years, these new Junior Colleges had been popping up around the state.  Colleges for women, they called them.  A girl could go there and learn how to take care of the farm better, learn some science to understand how seeds grow and how cows mate.  She could learn about what good foods were, too.  And maybe she could also read some of those stories Olive’s friends sometimes talked about- those stories by women from Massachusetts who actually made a living for themselves.  Without a husband!  She couldn’t ever remember the names, but was taken by the notion.  Also, perhaps that way, Mary-Anne wouldn’t be trapped at home quite as much.  A college-educated girl would be likely to be invited to many sewing circles around the county to talk about what she’d learned.

But how could she get Jeremiah to agree to it?  She was well aware of how tight money was.  Well aware of how much they really needed the girl right here on the farm, needed the extra pair of hands.  But was it Mary-Anne’s hands they really needed?  She couldn’t lift heavy things.  She certainly didn’t know how to run the new tractor and from what Jeremiah had told her, Olive didn’t want her daughter going anywhere near the thing.  What they needed was another man around the place.  Someone to help Jeremiah so that he could concentrate on plowing and planting and harvesting.

Well, who was she kidding?  They needed Chuck is who they needed.  There had been a gaping hole left when he went to the Service.  The Jeremiahe as when the coal miners over on the other side of the county used Nobel’s dynamite to blow the side of a hill off.  She knew he’d made the right choice.  Deep inside she knew.  But why did he want to go so far away?  The Navy?  To go on a ship?  To the other side of the world?  Every part of the thought process was foreign to her.  Olive had never been further outside of Pennsylvania than Ohio and didn’t see any reason at all to go even that far.  But maybe that’s what happened when children got further into school.  Chuck had graduated from high school and gone without hesitation into the Navy.  Had the plan in his mind the whole time.  But if that was true, how was he her son?  Her with no desire to go anywhere, and Chuck chomping at the bit to get as far away from home as the biggest warships could take him?  Was she making a mistake encouraging her daughter to get an education?

It was then that she saw him coming.  Saw Jeremiah running across the field faster than he was in the habit of running.  And yet, he turned sideways every twenty feet or so, as if to shield his hand.  Oh, Great God in Heaven- his hand!, she thought as she saw the blood beginning to seep through the fingers of his other hand.

He came flying through the door, flinging it open with his uninjured yet bloodsoaked hand, leaving behind so much blood on the screen door that despite all the scrubbing Olive applied to it over the years to come, she would never see it totally free of the stain.

“My finger!  That damned tractor took off my damned finger!” Jeremiah screamed, eyes wild.  “Get the wagon ready!”  Olive screamed for Mary-Anne and as Jeremiah washed off the initial blood, she saw there was no point in sending the girl to look for a severed digit.  It was there- sort of.  Crushed beyond recognition, exactly.  But enough… matter was there, that she could see there was nothing left in the field that could be reattached.  “You get the horses, I’ll get the straps ready!  Jeremiah, we’ll be waiting right outside the door.  We have to hurry, Honey!”

They quickly prepared the wagon, and by the time any of them knew what was happening, they were off at a quick gallop.  She didn’t want the horses to wear out before they got to the county hospital, but wanted to make haste at the Jeremiahe time.  Jeremiah laid in the back.  He was losing a bit of blood.  Enough that he would be weak for some time.  Certainly enough so that he was no help getting to the hospital that day.  No, Olive and Mary-Anne had to take care of it.  And so they did.

The doctors took their time about it, but they did what Olive had suspected from the moment at the kitchen sink next to the blood splashed roast and potatoes (which, needless to say, never did get eaten.  Not by the family, anyway.  The dogs loved it)- they simply cut the finger off cleanly and stitched up the end.  There was nothing else to be done.  The bones had been crushed and the skin couldn’t grow without a foundation on which to build.  It was the ring finger on  Jeremiah’s left hand.  His wedding ring had disappeared into the machine, never to be seen again.

In truth, the giant belt of the tractor that had done the damage had flung the ring far away into the plowed dirt of the field.  Many, many years later, it would be found by a hobbyist with a metal detector who didn’t suspect its history in the least, or even care.  It would be melted down for the gold it was made of.

What Is A Mule and What Is This Book?

We all know what the animal "Mule" is, but in this case, it refers to something else.  A "Mule", in the bike world, is a testing prototype that is not meant to look pretty or represent the brand in any way, but to test out physical concepts.  How the bike works.  This blog is intended as just such a thing- only in a literature sense.  A rough sketch, first draft, trying out the plot place for a new book I'm writing.  And the best part is that it can be interactive.

On to what I'm intending here, what I'm writing about.  One possible title was "Four Fathers" and that catches a small bit of what's going on.  I like books that cover generations, and I'd like to include that kind of sweep.  Another thought is to capture some family stories for my daughter's sake.  But- and it's a major BUT- I am not in any way trying to write history here.  This is not genealogy.  It isn't even strictly family history.  It is a fictional novel, foundationally about  my family (we all write about ourselves, why hide the truth) but the house that is built upon that foundation is in my mind only.  I am not in any way attempting to hold to the way events happened, or the order in which they happened, and in some cases- IF they happened at all.  One rule I do have for myself is that the characters won't violate the spirit of the person they're based on.

I guess what I'm trying to get across is that this book is really about ME in a way- my imagining and trying to piece together the stories I heard over the years which never were fit into a narrative for me.  My projection of what things MIGHT have been like.

But, finally, this is not about my family- it is about a fictional family whose name I haven't found out yet.  And I'm fully committed to letting them tell me about themselves- a goofy phrase I've heard from other novelists but strangely am already experiencing for myself.  As the subconscious does whatever writing IS, things do not happen as you, the author, expect them to.  I hope you enjoy.  Please comment on anything that moves you, and I'll try to have a thick skin.