Empty Silo

Me and Skippy c. 1968. Don't remember the broken leg.

When I was a kid, we used to take the family dog, Skippy, on trips with us. We usually alternated summers between Iron Mountain, Michigan where my father’s family lived, and Pender, Nebraska, where my mother’s lived. I would imagine that Skippy was already up in years by the time I was three, the only time I remember taking him to Nebraska. We still had the purple station wagon at that time. I say purple, but it was probably more of a burgundy color, come to think of it. I can distinctly remember three different station wagons during my childhood. The burgundy one, the gold one, and the last one we had–the green one with the fake wood panel siding.

My father always preferred to drive at night so that the three youngest boys could sleep in the back of the wagon and he could make good time on highways, hiding in the shadows of the speeding truckers hauling loads across the Midwest. We arrived in Council Bluffs, Iowa in the morning, giving my father time to take a nap while my mother caught up with her sister Mabel, and Mabel’s husband Guy. We stayed through lunch, and then took off in the middle of the afternoon for the two hour drive up to Pender. Skippy was good in the car. He was a cocker spaniel, and not very big, so he slept with us in the back all night, and during the daytime, he just sat in the back seat just like us, watching the fields roll by.

This was our summer vacation–a Fourth of July trip to Pender Nebraska to see my mother’s family. The air was stifling hot, and the station wagon didn’t have air conditioning. My brother Danny stuck his arm out the window trying to direct the passing air onto his face to cool off. About an hour into the trip, Skippy’s breathing became irregular. He was panting as if he couldn’t get enough air. “Give him one of my heart pills,” my father told my mother. The look on my mother’s face said that it probably wasn’t a good idea, but we could all see that Skippy wasn’t doing too well on his own.

Danny lifted Skippy off the back seat and passed him up to the front so that my mother could administer the pill. Within minutes, Skippy stopped panting. A minute later he stopped breathing altogether, and collapsed in my mother’s lap. My father kept driving.

My mother implored him to stop the car at the next farm so that we could bury Skippy, but my father insisted that it could wait the hour or it would take to get to Pender. “The boys,” my mother hushed at him.

My father stopped at the next farm and we all walked up the house behind my father who was carrying Skippy in his arms. When the farmer answered the door, my father explained that Skippy had died in the car and asked to bury him. The farmer got a shovel and took us over to a strip of land that sat between the fence and the road. Later in life I would learn that this is known as a swale.

My father started digging. He knew to dig deep enough so that wild animals would not uncover Skippy’s body, but didn’t want to spend any more time here than he had to. He jabbed the shovel into the ground next to the hole to show that he was finished digging, then he picked up Skippy placed him in the grave. “You should say a few words, Larry,” my mother said. “For the boys.”

As my father started to talk, you could tell that he really loved that dog. It seemed as if he didn’t want to stop talking because he knew that when the talking was done, his dog would be dead. I think that my brother Pat was the first to see Skippy’s leg twitch. Then Danny saw it. Then we watched Skippy’s head come up and look around as if to ask us “what gives?” He popped to his feet and began clawing the sides of his grave trying to get out, and Danny dropped down and scooped him up out of the hole and held him as if he were a newborn. My father and mother looked at each other in shock. My father looked over at the farmer and shrugged his shoulders, then grabbed the shovel and started filling in the hole.

My father swallowed watermelon seeds and told me that they would make his amputated leg grow back. He sat in his wheel chair on the front porch with my brothers and me, and several of the neighbor kids and we all ate watermelon. He laughed as we all spit seeds over the wrought iron porch railing, over the pricker bushes, and out into the yard. He even spit a few himself, but mostly he swallowed them as if he believed his own story.

I don’t remember a time when my father had both of his legs, although I know that there was such a time. I remember riding in the station wagon up to the V.A. Hospital in Madison with my mom and him. Every time we went I would ask why Dad had to go to the veterinarian hospital and my parents would laugh, every time. My father had suffered severe frostbite while fighting in the Forest of Ardennes during the Battle of the Bulge. The doctors at the Army hospital wanted to take his foot, but he talked them out of it.  They came back for that foot and more twenty some odd years later—cutting off his leg just above the knee.

My father was also a type 1 diabetic. I used to eat his sugar-free candy and he would yell at me like he was really mad about it, but I know that he really didn’t care. I especially liked the hard candy. Round discs that were flat on the bottom, coated with a dry, powdery sugar substitute, and they came in several flavors all of which tasted watered down, almost flat, but in a good kind of way—a comforting softness to the flavor as if the candy wanted you to fall asleep while you were sucking on it.

He had hardening of the arteries too. Because he was allergic to everything, including the plaster that put on the walls of people’s homes to make his living, he received regular cortisone shots to alleviate the symptoms. When he was forty-eight years old, the doctors told him he had the heart and arteries of a seventy-year-old man. He died when he was barely forty-nine.

My father's workshop

So, here’s a happy story about my father. I remember the first day he came home from the hospital with his new prosthesis. My mother nagged him about using the crutches until he got used to walking on his new leg, but he wouldn’t listen. My father had a workshop in our basement where he made decorative swans out coat hangers, nylon netting and sequins, and candle holders out of old tin cans, and nativity scenes out of Styrofoam and macaroni. That first night home with his new leg my father started down the stairs without his crutches. I followed close behind. As he tumbled down the stairs I heard words come from his mouth that I had never heard before, and as he lay at the bottom of the stairs in a heap, he looked over to see that he had broken his new leg and began to laugh.

Listen to the Story

I have a scar that starts at the top of my lip and runs vertically for about a half-inch through the cleft below my nose. I’m so used to it that most of the time I don’t even see it unless I’ve gotten a lot of sun. Scars have a way of just reappearing after a lot of sun.

I used to have a scar on the inside of my left forearm from getting spiked by a guy trying to steal second base during a game at Valparaiso University in my junior year of college. Actually, there were two scars. Two of his cleats caught my arm, tearing through my favorite long-sleeve undershirt and drawing a fair amount of blood. But the guy was out. I remember two other things about that game: it snowed that day; and I got the game winning RBI. I don’t really know when, but those scars faded away.

The scar on my lip, however, is still here. I think I was four years old. It was in the summer, and my dad was driving all of us somewhere in the old station wagon. We were out on one of the old country roads just outside of town. My brother Danny was in the front seat beside Dad, and Pat and I were in the back. Maybe I was three. If I could remember when Dad lost his leg, it might help. But then again, he drove without it too, so maybe not.

I know it was summer because it was hot. It was hot, and in the late ‘60s air conditioning in cars was unheard of (at least where I came from). Once we were on a trip up north to Iron Mountain and my brother Mark (the second oldest—he was probably about seventeen at the time) told us all to roll up our windows and pretend that we had air conditioning as we drove along the highway, smiling and waving at the cars we passed. My mom got a big kick out of it too, but pointed out that the people in the other cars probably could tell by all of the sweat running down our faces that we didn’t actually have air conditioning. So we rolled the windows back down, and someone cracked open some sodas from the cooler in the back of the wagon and we drank and had a good laugh. But that was a few years after I got the scar on my lip. My father wasn’t with us for that trip.

So it was summer and my dad was taking the three of us somewhere and it was hotter than blazes. The windows were rolled down in the front of the car so I was getting a good breeze in the back but the air wasn’t really flowing up front. Dad yelled back above the whir of the wind rushing in the front windows, telling Pat and me to roll down our windows. I reached over and pulled on the window crank and suddenly I was falling.

I fell quickly. So quickly that I didn’t realize that I was no longer in the car. Didn’t realize that I had grabbed the door handle instead. Didn’t realize anything until I looked up through the dust of the chip and seal road to see the back of the station wagon moving off in the distance.

There was no pain at all. Just fear. For an instant, I was afraid that they might not stop. Afraid that they might not even realize I was missing. And then I saw the brake lights. And then back up lights. And then the car was flying backward toward me at a speed that seemed at once to be both twice as fast as it had moved away, and yet still in slow motion. It was then that I started to cry.

Later that afternoon I sat on my mother’s lap while she held a damp wash cloth with ice in it over my lip. She comforted me as we sat in the big chair that Santa used when he came by our house on Christmas Eve every year to ask whether we had been good.

The chair with the matching ottoman. The ottoman I sat on that night the following spring—St. Patrick’s Day. Sat with my face buried in my hands, hiding my laughter. My laughter at my older brother Mark whom I’d never seen cry before. My brother Mark who was crying as our father lay dying behind the closed doors of the den not ten feet away.

Or perhaps it was the St. Patrick’s Day two springs after I split my lip. I don’t really remember. I only know that this scar above my lip is one of the few lasting memories of my father.

My father, c. 1942

My father put too much pepper on everything he cooked. Way too much pepper. “That’s how they taught me in the Army” he would say, as if during World War II the Army had sent him to culinary school instead of North Africa, instead of Ardennes to participate in the Battle of the Bulge where he received two Bronze Stars. As if he needed to provide his four-year-old son with a résumé in order to get him to eat the plate full of chipped beef on toast that sat in front of him. Perhaps if my father hadn’t called it “shit on a shingle,” I would not have been so skeptical of his culinary expertise.

But my father did know how to cook, and how to bake, which is probably more than most fathers in the 1960s. He knew how to make a piecrust. He used that skill to make pasties—a meat and potato pie that is a delicacy of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and not something readily available in Evansville, Wisconsin. When the neighbors would ask my father when he was planning to make pasties again, my father knew how to take a hint, and would set aside an entire Sunday afternoon to put together the pies, and then share a meal with the neighbors that evening.

For breakfast my father’s specialty was “Army Eggs.” The recipe is simple. Fry about half a pound of bacon in a skillet until it is so crisp that you can no longer stab it with a fork. Remove the cooked bacon from the skillet and place it on a paper towel until it cools enough so that you can handle it. While the bacon is cooling, mix up a half-dozen eggs with a little bit of milk, and then pour that into the skillet. Be sure not to drain the bacon grease from the skillet beforehand. That is what gives the eggs their flavor. That, and about four tablespoons of pepper. As the eggs first begin to firm (after there is a good base, but while they are still mostly runny), crumble the bacon into the egg mixture, and then slosh the pan around so that the hot bacon grease spill over the top of the eggs to help cook them from the top. You know that Army Eggs are done when there is no liquid of any kind left in the pan. Then you use the spatula to cut off a piece and serve it with toast and butter. Dry toast in which the butter just sits on top, like they served in the Army.

On Sunday afternoons during the summer, my father would grill steaks. Steaks with lots of pepper on them. He would also slice up potatoes and onions and put them into tinfoil, with slits of butter, and you guessed it, lots of salt and pepper.

It has been more than forty years since I have eaten Army Eggs. Not quite as long as that for chipped beef on toast because my mother continued to make that for us after my father’s death (although she backed off on the pepper). But to this day, I still make those potatoes on the grill, with slits of butter and as much salt and pepper as my wife will allow (and even a little bit more sometimes).