From the Top (12 page)

The other day I was feeding the chickens and thinking about the blues. Chickens never seem to get the blues. They get the flapping cackles, and the goggle-eyed blinkies, and now and then they get the worm, but you can't really say they get the blues. But you and I, we can get the blues. It should follow, then, that if we are capable of gettin' the blues, of feelin' the blues, we ought to be able to
sing
the blues.

But most of us (I am raising my own hand here) are not. Not only are not, but should not. We've all had our moments alone at the stoplight with Ray Charles, where Ray is singing every single sad note of intangible, inexpressible longing we've ever felt, and he's nailing it, every teensy blue note twist and gutbucket moan so dead-on it's like they were cut from your own heart, and you think,
Yes, Ray, yes, that's it, that's exactly how I feel, and here, let me help you with that a little bit, lemme take a verse …
and what follows may feel good but it is the musical equivalent of strangling a chicken.

I heard Ray Wylie Hubbard talking about the late Lightnin' Hopkins the other day, and how Lightnin' played the twelve-bar blues … and the thirteen-bar blues … and the thirteen-and-a-half-bar blues, Ray Wylie's point being, Lightnin' went to that next chord when Lightnin' was good and ready, and right there is why with just one single
uh-huh
Lightnin' Hopkins can put me on my knees. It's why Hound Dog Taylor can make me feel like a hound dog. It's why he can sing “my baby's gone” and I know
he's really talkin' about
my
baby. It's why when he runs that slide up and down the fretboard he might as well be running it up and down my spine. It's why Koko Taylor can make me—a stoic post-Calvinist stiff-upper-lip Scandihoovian paint-by-the-numbers three-chord roots-rock mumbler—squeeze my eyes shut, throw my hands to the sky, do a little altar dance, and say,
Yes, Sister Koko! PREACH, Sister Koko!

And right there is the most glorious mystery of the blues: how deeply we can feel them as opposed to how poorly we can express them. Sometimes we don't even know that stuff is in us until it comes out of someone else's mouth. You've forgot about how wrong you was done until a man like Charlie Parr or W.C. Clark bends just one note and bends it just so and suddenly you are all amen and hallelujah. You're feeling those blues to your bones. And yet, if you say,
Here, W.C., gimme that microphone, lemme back you up on that,
well, everybody involved is in for a big disappointment.

It's a sad truth: for most of us mere mortals, there's really only one blues song we're qualified to sing, and I'm already working on it. It's a twelve-bar number, maybe twelve and a half, a little thing I like to call “I Got the I Can't Sing the Blues Blues.” So far I've got half a verse and the chorus. I figured I'd test it out the other morning when I was feeding the chickens. “Listen here, you birds,” I said, “lemme sing you the blues,” and then I laid it on 'em blue as I could blow it. When it was over, half of 'em got the flappin' cackles and the other half just stood there giving me the ol' goggle-eyed blinkies. As pretty much any audience would.

“Well, that's farmin',” my farmer father would say whenever things went wrong. In fact, in our family all of us—even the nonfarmers—still use that phrase in the context of bad news. But sometimes when the corn sprouts on time or the chickens really fill the egg basket or I catch my daughter slopping hogs while wearing a ballerina outfit, I say, “Well, that's farmin'.”

And I say it with a smile.

Back home on the farm the last of the asparagus has been picked and the remainders are going all frazzled. Lilacs come and go pretty fast, but once the asparagus calls it a day you know summer is running full bore and spring is filed solidly under “Memories.”

I cherish that asparagus patch—for the asparagus, sure, because I like asparagus. If you'd have told me when I was fourteen that I would like asparagus, I'd have said you needed to get your brain recalibrated. I used to view it with suspicion when it appeared each spring between the two silos out behind the barn, and with low-level dismay when it appeared in a bowl on the kitchen table. But now I can't wait for that first shoot to break through. I like to study the emergent green fuse knowing in a matter of twenty-four to forty-eight hours it will be pickable and edible, a sign that the subterranean frost has given up its grip. And the greenness of an asparagus spear when steamed! It is a flat-out rebuke to winter, even if the poor little guy was poking up through snow.

So yah, I like asparagus. But I like that asparagus patch even more, because it is one of multitudinous reasons I love my wife. When we moved to the farm Anneliese said she wanted to get an asparagus patch going right away, because it takes three years before the asparagus really comes on. I was busy running off to do one thing or another and didn't really get after it. Part of the problem is that I am the king of instant gratification and just
couldn't imagine planting something today so we could enjoy it three years down the road. You will understand now why I am not in the orchard or wine business, and possibly also why my retirement fund could use some attention.

Sometime after she asked, I did see some six-by-sixes (the kind used in landscaping) advertised on Craigslist not so far away, and I headed over to pick them up. My idea was they'd make a good raised bed for the asparagus over along the side of the old granary. But then I had to hit the road again, so a buddy of mine framed them up and put in the raised bed, and my wife started the asparagus while I was gone.

And then
whammo
three years were gone, and then six, and each spring through the rebirthing earth the asparagus comes up plump as Jolly Green Giant fingers. We steam it, we sauté it, we pickle it, we make it into soup, and we even had to wait for our premiere batch this year because the six-year-old got there first and ate the very first arrivals raw, right there in the patch. I caught her at it and didn't say a word. Why would I? She was eating chlorophyll beneath the open sky, a sure-fire long-term antidote to all things electronic and stuffy. On the other hand, when my wife caught the chickens in there the other day, they were lucky to escape with their giblets.

It's miraculous stuff, asparagus. Most miraculous is the apparently impossible rate at which it grows. Take a nap, turn your back, and you've got another batch. And I suppose we appreciate it even more for its cyclic spirit, expressed through brief presence and extended absence. By the time it comes back, we're hungry for it with more than our stomachs.

This year the steamer basket was full from late April through late June, and every single time I snapped off a fistful of spears on my way back from the morning chicken coop chores I considered my wife and how sometimes the best thing she does for me is press ahead on her own so that later I may have the joy of catching up and rejoining her.

Because I have written about pigs and posed for pictures while holding chickens, I am often introduced as a farmer. Out of respect to the farmers who raised me and those still struggling to pay the banker, let me say that calling me a farmer is like calling a guy who hits himself in the head with a hammer a brain surgeon. We do have a bunch of chickens, and I have been in the hog business for a few years now. First year I had two pigs. Second year I doubled the size of the operation. Got four. Economy of scale, that's where yer profit lies.

I shall never forget the day I got my first pair of feeder pigs. While the farmer and I were lifting the first one into the pickup, I detected a profound pain in my left rear buttock. Upon closer examination I discovered that the farmer's gigantic coon dog—no doubt assuming I was stealing the pigs—had gone stark raving bonkers and was actively masticating a Double-Whopper's worth of my backside.

I'll say this for that dog: he was profoundly dedicated to his task. By the time he turned me loose I felt like my backside had been run through a laundry mangler. Later when I got home I went into the bathroom and dropped my drawers to view the damage in the mirror, and what I saw on my hinder was a hematoma the size of a personal pan pizza, framed by four angry red fang marks. First thing I thought was,
Man, I gotta show somebody!
So I hollered for my wife and told her to bring the camera. You
get festooned up with an injury of this caliber, you want some documentation for the grandkids.

It hurt to sit and it hurt to walk, but I wanted to get those pigs turned out before the rabies hit, so I backed the pickup over to the paddock I'd set up and turned them loose. I took them out of the back of the pickup, and it was really neat to see them hit the dirt. They started snuffling and snorting and rolling around. My daughter Amy, seven at the time, was watching them and then all of a sudden she said, “Oh, Daddy, they're so cute! I'm calling that one Wilbur and that one Cocklebur!” I said, “Well, honey, that's okay, but you have to understand that in October we're going to turn the pigs into food.” I wasn't sure if she really got it. But a few weeks later we had some cousins visit from the city. Amy took them down to see the pigs while I fetched the slop bucket, so I got there a little late. Just as I walked up she was pointing at the pigs. “That one over there is Wilbur and that one's Cocklebur,” she said, “but in October that one's Ham and that one's Bacon.”

These days most of the food in our freezer and the eggs in our skillet do come from our own little farm. But nope, I'm not really a farmer. I'm a self-employed storyteller with part-time pigs. And if I get home tomorrow and find out all they've all croaked, well, it's not the end of my career. It's just a bad weekend.

And one more story to tell.

I try to feed my pigs on the cheap. With the price of corn these days, that's a challenge. We do buy them a little hog feed, mainly because I like to hang out at the feed mill and pretend that I'm a farmer too. As if I owned five hundred pigs, not five. Right above the honor system candy box they've got a television monitor where the weather report always runs with the sound off. I like to stare at it mournfully, because that's what farmers do: they stare at the weather report mournfully. When the other farmers complain about the price of pork bellies, I nod in agreement, then as soon as I'm in the pickup I check my smartphone to figure out, what exactly are pork bellies again?

Mostly our pigs graze. People forget sometimes that pigs are grazers. They love to eat young nettles and fresh crabgrass. And most of all, of course, they love to root around. They're organic bulldozers. Mostly they go after roots, but I've also watched a two-hundred-pound pig tease out an angleworm using his almost prehensile lower lip. When the worm was balanced just right, he sucked it down like spaghetti.

But they won't be fat by October on worms and crabgrass alone, so we supplement wherever we can. They get our table scraps, of course. We collect them in a bucket. My poor daughters may be children of the digital age, but they are very familiar with the old analog phrase, “Slop the hogs.”

We plant patches of field peas and rape, the plant used to make canola oil (it's like cabbage that doesn't roll up), and feed it
to them by the wheelbarrowful. We also buy them expired baked goods at the local bakery outlet. Our neighbors who raise goats give us the leftover milk; we mix it in with the bakery castoffs and the pigs gobble it right down. We store the excess goat milk in plastic carboys. We don't refrigerate it, we just keep it right out by the pen. By the time you get to the bottom of the barrel, things are getting mighty cheesy. I get the gaggers, but it doesn't slow those pigs at all.

Unfortunately, the baked goods have lately become scarce. Back in the early days of my pig-raising career I could sometimes score an entire pickup truck bed full of hot dog, hamburger, and bratwurst buns, bagels, and the occasional crate of chocolate frosted mini-doughnuts, all for around twelve bucks. These days that's next to impossible. Part of the reason is that bear hunters buy up a lot of the sticky buns and doughnuts and such and use them for bait. Also, more and more people are raising their own pigs and chickens, so competition for the expired goods has increased. And finally, times are tough: although the expired goods are clearly labeled ANIMAL FEED ONLY, as a guy who has fished more than one mini-doughnut out of the pile I can tell you that expired or not, that food will still do a human just fine.

So we've had to expand our reach to scavenge free pig food. Last weekend I was able to swing a deal with a coffee shop that does a big high-end breakfast business on the weekends. Late Sunday afternoon, after the restaurant portion of the shop closed down, I pulled up with my pickup truck and the kitchen crew helped me carry out three bags of delicious food garbage. When I dumped the bags in the trough, what spilled out was a buffet: fresh diced vegetables, raisin bagels, rye bread, chunked fresh fruit, blueberry syrup, leftover three-cheese omelet, and—best of all—several lemon ricotta crepes.

Boy, those pigs dove right in, snout first, feet to follow. Every now and then they'd jostle around and trade places, wedging themselves into a new spot, perhaps hoping to get a scrap of blueberry buckwheat pancake or a scallion.

When it was over they retired to the pig hutch and flopped in a pile like a friendly cluster of overstuffed bratwurst. They looked so comfortable I felt I should offer each of them a double cappuccino. Happily, they are pigs, and pigs' tastes run on a sliding scale; as soon as the crepes wore off they went right back to eating worms.

I got done with work real late the other night—sometime after midnight—and when I walked across the yard toward the house I noticed a light coming from the open granary door.