Breaking Clean Read online

  While the coming of electricity fell short of some night-today miracle in the south country, it did inspire a rash of indoor improvements and brought us within sight of the twentieth century. With electric pumps at the well, pressure tanks and hot-water heaters began to appear, which led to the advent of kitchen sinks and bathtubs connected to hot and cold water. Then septic tanks. And eventually toilets. For women, the largest single change occurred in the laundry chores. By 1960, electrical appliances were everywhere around us and the ranch wives still boiling shirts and cranking them through a hand wringer.knew it. No one mourned the death of the scrub board, drying rack and flatiron less than the women who used them. Sheets that had once frozen dry on the clothesline could be hauled warm from the clothes dryer in January. Steam irons and sewing machines turned the drudgery of ironing and mending into a morning's work. As electrical appliances followed the power lines to our community, the old things found a new use. I remember flatirons acting as doorstops or used to weigh down the lid of the small coop where setting hens growled and sulked until the urge to brood passed. Tin washtubs held a summer's worth of geraniums or a week's stash of kindling. Come midnight, the dance crowds at the First Creek Community Hall ate sandwiches and cake washed down with gallons of coffee cooked up in an oblong copper wash boiler.

  The coming of electricity made little impression on me, and of the issues surrounding its arrival, I recall only what affected me directly. For instance, I don't recall the exact moment we installed an indoor toilet, but I will never forget my unholy terror of the outhouse. I spent my young childhood the victim of an irrational, entirely impossible, yet firmly held belief that a mouse was going to run upside down, spiderlike, across my bare bottom as I sat there, feet dangling and unable to run. I don't know if this scenario had been suggested to me by a perverse sibling or if I invented it, but it needed little reinforcement to bloom. Add to this an early and fairly generalized fear of the dark, and it's a wonder Mom managed to wean us off the potty chair at all. Margaret hated the chore of escorting the twins and me to the outhouse before bedtime. She would march us, coats over pajamas, down the path in the frigid winter dark, get us settled, then encourage us to hurry by clicking off the flashlight for a few seconds at a time, or by flicking the beam off into the bushes to highlight the beasts lurking there. We learned to hold our water like camels.

  And I recall one day shortly after the power came, when I carefully latched the bathroom door and climbed up on a chair next to the old washing machine. The washer had two tubs, with a powerful wringer mounted between them. The wringer looked like two wide white rolling pins pressed tightly together, and it worked just like that, too. Shirts had to be fed through carefully so the wringer didn't pop off the buttons, and heavy items like towels and jeans were sent through more than once to squeeze all the water out. As a safety feature, a stop-bar ran along the bottom of the wringer, and when something got jammed up, a blow to the bar would pop the jaws of the wringer apart and stop them from turning.

  I soon had the wringer running, and was mesmerized by the hum of the rollers and the splash and trickle of water. I fed dripping socks and washcloths in with my left hand and caught them with my right as they emerged from the rollers flat and damp-dry. I did this with a feeling of great maturity, for while I'd been allowed to feed socks and smaller items into the wringer before, I was not allowed to reach around the wringer as my mother did, and catch them. I was set to surprise her with my proficiency, when one of the socks stuck to the roller, as they sometimes did, going around and around instead of exiting the other side. When this happened to Mom, she loosened it with a flick of her fingers, and I reached to do the same, not thinking which side I was reaching toward, which side ate the socks, which side spit them out.

  The rollers caught my fingertips and steadily, mindlessly ate their way up my hand, squeezing my flesh flat as I hung back with all my strength, trying to pull free. Though I'd been shown how to use it, I never once thought to hit the stop-bar. And though I didn't think to call for help either, by the time the rollers were grinding past my wrist and up my arm I managed to produce a guttural squawk, the sort of noise that lifts the hair on a mother's neck two rooms away. The door seemed to explode before my eyes. The hook-and-eye latch flew apart, my mother charged through, and in one leap had hit the bar with the heel of her hand and dragged me back from the jaws of the wringer. While my pride suffered a devastating blow, my arm did not. Mom held me on her lap as I sniffled, and within a few minutes my poor flat, white arm had gotten back its blood and the feeling in its fingers, and was none the worse for wear.

  The most profound changes brought by the electrical lines occurred outside the house, where darkness had always ended the workday and shop tools all came with handles instead of cords. Arc welders, power tools and air compressors made some repairs possible for the first time, and cut time and effort on the rest. Yard and shop lights extended the workday by allowing maintenance and repairs to be done after dark. Overhead lights in barns replaced the dangerous, fickle glow of lanterns on the straw for the predawn and after-dark rituals of milking and calving.

  A more visceral change occurred as the community plugged in to the outside world. In one sense, we were simply catching up. Televisions and flush toilets, dial phones to replace the battery crank phones—every new gadget brought our lifestyles closer to those of our small-town neighbors. Modernization was touted as good business, a sign of progressive thinking, of success. But the exchange was more complex than the simple money-for-service contract offered by the REA. The old system implied a personal contract with nature, rather than an outside agency. Breakdowns affected one ranch only so long as it took one cursing rancher to climb the wind charger or tinker with the generator. All he needed was wind to turn the enormous fan blades of the chargers—this in a region blessed with four seasons of wind.

  Wind was a fact of life. It swept from the slopes of the Rockies to the plains of Dakota without detour. It whipped down out of Canada in gusts and gales unhampered by mountains or trees. Wind blew for days on end, a relentless pushing at your back, a constant moan we listened around and shouted over without really hearing. Wind was dependable. Government agencies were not. With such a ready supply of one and such a chronic shortage of faith in the other, it seems odd now that the community changed over so quickly and completely. An entire community that had run for decades on muscle and wind fell silent now when the power lines went down. Nothing to be done but call in the outage and wait. Once wired in, there was no going back.

  That the new electric power would prove unreliable was a given, for the poles were strung with salvaged World War II-era lines and the county line crew burdened with the upkeep of hundreds of miles of such line. Lightning searching for a target on the flat land more often than not found a power pole. Wind in combination with ice buildup or brittle cold snapped the old lines like dry spaghetti. Moisture wormed its way beneath the cracked insulation, shorted out connections. As a rule, the same weather that put the power down kept the repair crews away, our roads a grim stretch of mud or snow.

  As a child I learned practical rules about electricity. One does not begin a baking project in a thunderstorm with an electric cookstove. When a lightning strike makes the phone jangle, don't answer. When black clouds boil over the horizon, unplug the television and fill the bathtub or a few buckets with water. No one depended on electricity for heat, and no one threw away the lanterns or tore down the outhouse when it arrived. For decades after real electricity came to the community the wind chargers remained in place, locked solid with rust or fanning loosely from one breeze to the next. Every farm kid I knew was forbidden to climb the wind charger, and the iron ladders leading up to the narrow platform on top always had the first section covered or removed to keep us off. We all got pretty good at it. Perhaps they were left in place because they filled a need in that relatively treeless landscape, some vertical element to balance the flat reach of prairie. More likely the huge angle-iron A
-frames remained like crossed arms, waiting for the newfangled electricity to fail for good. Call it practicality or pessimism, it was common sense to expect the worst. No rancher made his reputation on how he handled good fortune. It took a few well-handled disasters to earn respect. There were usually enough to go around.

  Anderson boasted of never losing a stalk of wheat to hail in all his years of farming that piece of prairie, but a creative combination of drought, grasshoppers and hail ravaged four of the first six crops my father planted. Dad picked up what work he could, leaving his own place to run a digger for the REA as the power poles marched south and the lines went up. A picture of the twins and me taken in '57 or '58 tells the story of those early years more frankly than any story told around the coffeepot. The three of us are posed on the front step of the house, a row of shapeless shirts and hand-me-down, hold-me-up pants clipped to suspenders. Our faces are clean, our hair clipped short and neatly combed. I am leaning forward, my shoulders hunched as if I am bashful or perhaps suspicious of this novelty of picture taking, my bare feet planted in the packed dirt of the dooryard. The twins face the camera intently, as though startled by the command to smile yet caught before they could fully obey. Gary sits solidly, the waist of his trousers nearly touching his armpits, the toes of his Buster Browns worn white. Gail's feet peek through gaps in her shoes where the soles have separated from the uppers. A stranger guessing the date of the photo would likely place it in the Great Depression rather than some thirty years later.

  Around the time this picture was taken, there had been the promise of a good year, one golden summer when the wheat stood high and ripe under clear skies, an August day my father whistled to the roar of the combine as he greased gears. His own crop hovered on the brink of ripeness, not quite ready, and this morning found him a few miles from home working in a neighbor's field. Nearly done with the maintenance chores, he was checking the tension of the belts that snaked along the pulleys when his right hand caught and fed itself to the steel. For a second, two seconds, the sharp groove of the pulley spun like a buzz saw, slicing through the web between thumb and forefinger, grinding through bone and gristle. Halfway through the palm it spit him out. Just like that, harvest was over.

  Dad braced his good hand against the side of the combine and drew the other against his stomach, taking in with a sort of numb detachment the rooster tail of blood and flesh spray-painted on gray galvanized metal. So fast. So hard to believe the look of this strong hand, the first two fingers severed deep behind the big knuckle, half a fist hanging limp across the other half. There was no thinking beyond the immediate need to remain upright, staggering weak-kneed around a machine he had no way of driving one-handed—not in the days of clutch and shift, stiff manual steering, gates to open and close—until he reached the front where he could shut it down.

  It was the absence of noise that would save him, a hired hand pausing in the midst of an errand, alerted by the silence as he parked within sight of the field. The man stepped out of his rig and stopped to study the distant combine that stood silent when it should have been twice around the field, and in the miracle of that clear, windless morning he heard my father shout.

  On that perfect harvest day, my parents drove fifty miles to the hospital in Malta. There, the doctor shook his head and administered morphine, while Mom called the local airport, one dirt strip at the edge of town. A small plane hauled my father to a medical center in Billings, where surgeons worked the puzzle of frayed nerves and tendons, cutting away mangled callus and muscle, arranging what was left into something near normal—a hand that would work for him some day, some year. Some other harvest.

  I rely on Margaret's memory of those times, a child who came to my parents' union as an observer, old enough to remember the guided tour Anderson and his wife led through the house before the sale was complete, her excitement quashed by stern looks, clandestine signals, and when that didn't work, harsh words. Will this be my room? Is this where I will sleep? Our memories are separated by the eight years' difference in age, my own recall turning solid just as she left home, a shy, frail-looking child with thick glasses set adrift in Malta High School at age twelve, the sister who came home a visitor on weekends and vacations. She graduated from high school at sixteen, and then was off to college, working her summers away from home. Where our memories overlap, hers are balanced by the early years. She remembers parents I never knew—a mother whose dark eyes snapped with humor and play, girlish in her love for the dashing cowboy who wore his youth like a new hat, cocked over one ear, rakish and reckless. In the years to come, I knew that hat settled low over his eyes, sweat stains wicked up from the band like the layers of sunset, darkest at the brim, slowly bleeding out toward the crown. I knew the flash of my mother's eyes as a warning, like a flicker of lightning followed by the snap of fingers, a voice grown harsh and ragged as the skin on her hands. Don't push me another single step, those eyes are saying, but there are four of us clamoring for one lap, and we push.

  Although the luxuries of indoor plumbing and electricity improved our standard of living in one sense, it was a standard that required cash to maintain. In the years that followed, my parents' grim, dark-to-dark pace barely covered the essentials. A typical workday left my mother little patience for the self-centered inefficiencies of children, since every careless spill, torn shirt or clutter of toys produced by four preschoolers in a cramped house created yet another chore, another interruption, another mess.

  Some things were simply not allowed, and these included sassing an adult, making careless mistakes or questioning a direct order. To a child, these rules boiled down to "shut up, pay attention and do what you're told"; insofar as it showed on the exterior, we complied more frequently than not. Any lapse in judgment was dealt a swift flurry of open-handed slaps, twisted ears and the dreaded "shaking of sense" into the empty head, the hair being the most common handle for this wake-up call. It got to be a joke in later years when a parent eating dinner might suddenly raise a hand to bat at a fly, then stare in amazement at the answering wave along the table, the four of us ducking sideways with jet precision, the whole of it so automatic we never stopped chewing.

  Although my memories are real, my interpretation of them is less trustworthy. Mine is a child's view of the walk to the woodpile, the four of us sent to select our own sticks, coming back to form a queue by age, oldest first, in front of my father's chair. The interrogation is brief. Sometimes the guilty child steps forward, sparing the others. More often we deny in one voice, refusing to give up what we know. We are whipped by turns, then, and threatened with another round if we cry too long or too loudly. My memories retain the vivid details of the second in line, her dread that the stick she's chosen is too small and will lead to more or harder blows; the agony of volunteering her frozen body across the knees, knowing it's worse to wait, unthinkable to resist; the humiliation of the worst-case scenario, the bare-butt spanking reserved for felony offense. What have we done? What rules flung aside, how many eggs smashed against the chicken house wall, barn windows broken with dirt clods or BB guns aimed at blackbirds? That part is lost to me. I remember feeling anger so intense it chilled me for days, but I don't recall a bad deed or a second of remorse. That is the memory of a child.

  The less time our parents had to spend, the harder we fought for it, inevitably losing out to the demands of seasons and cycles. We turned on each other with explosions of rage I could never imagine in my own children—arguments over shares, turns or rules going silent in a frenzy of wild blows. By our middle years we had reached an uneasy truce, drawn together less by a sudden outpouring of sibling love than a set of pack rules. We stuck together to elude capture and avoid punishment, forming alliances based on mutual culpability, you don't tell on me, I won't tell on you pacts that came to include the unspoken clause no matter what. As we grew old enough to attend school, join 4-H and ride horseback crosscountry to visit cousins, we discovered this sort of understanding to be universal among preadole
scents. Our no-tell policy included preventative measures, such as posting lookouts to hang around the adults and keep track of their wandering while the rest of us puffed Pall Mall cigarettes and played strip poker in the loft of the horse barn—a thorny proposition if one is losing. Out of sight of authority, those neighborhood children who chose to do so experimented with impunity. We built campfires, made moonshine out of vanilla extract, aftershave and homemade wine, swapped sexual stories, rumors and show-me games and traded new dirty words and new combinations of old dirty words. We read and reread the porno paperbacks, skin magazines and True Confessions the luckier kids purloined from hired men and older siblings, then passed them down the line until the pages were soft and gray with wear.

  Oddly, our strict upbringing bore the sweetest fruit outside the family. In public we were neat, clean, well behaved and polite to adults, and were rewarded when they laughed at our antics, told us we were full of the devil and treated us with kindness. Teachers liked us. In a swarm of kids at a ball game or a dance at the community hall, we would have stayed in the car rather than act like one of the babies who clung to their mothers' arms all night, but we also knew better than to join the undisciplined few who raced from one end of the room to the other, chasing and shoving and screeching. My mother had a hard job to sit on her hands in the presence of ill-mannered children, and she was not above cornering the whole lot of them if their parents remained complacent.