31. The Past ... THE FARM EAST OF PINE VILLAGE

In 1956, the National Safety Council, working with automobile associations, reached agreement on a standard size of automobile license plate with mounting holes in the same places on all plates. Those plates issued in Indiana in 1955 complied with the new regulations. When Robert was in third grade, the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles began issuing plates with a one- or two-digit prefix assigned to each county alphabetically, with the large-population counties of Marion and Lake receiving additional prefixes. Robert’s home county, Warren, was 86. Letters of the alphabet after the prefixes represented further refinements in coding the locations, as in 86A or 86B.

When Robert was in the fourth grade, the postal service began recommending the use of two-letter abbreviations representing the various states, but most people continued to use “Ind.” The abbreviation “IN” was not in common use until sometime after the Zone Improvement Plan, or ZIP Codes, became mandatory for bulk mail in 1967. Robert did not like the two-letter abbreviation because he thought the way he formed his handwritten I looked confusing with his handwritten N. He resorted to printing the “IN”—which he thought looked strange when the rest of the address was written in his longhand, or cursive.

In the 1960s, dialing only numbers became the common method for using a telephone to call someone. The dialing was done, in fact, with a dial, which had holes to accept the fingertip used to spin the dial the correct length for each number. To accommodate more than one party on the same line, the ring pattern indicated which house was being called; for example, with two parties, the phone would ring with long rings in rhythmic succession to indicate one home and with two short rings followed by slight pauses to indicate the other home.

By the early 1970s, men’s hair had become long. In the early 1960s, the Beatles had begun to change attitudes about men’s haircuts, but it was not until 1971 and 1972 that the hairstyles of men in such rural communities as Pine Village had made the full transition into long hair. In the decade after Robert graduated from high school, the caboose would vanish from the train while the pump would switch to self-serve gasoline. 

Such changes as license plate sizes, license plate numbering, state abbreviations, ZIP Codes, dialing phone numbers, and men’s hairstyles were noticeable. Other changes were less so.

In the 1930s, metallic oxides, such as rust, were used by paint manufacturers to make a cheap—but poor quality—paint for barns and outbuildings. When Robert was small, several barns in rural Indiana were painted cheaply, and the color was nearly a dark orange with much of the wood grain showing through, as if the building were stained, rather than painted. Joe referred to the orange hue as “turkey blood” because, when the earliest painting of barns occurred, some milk-based paints had been mixed with blood to form a red color. Throughout the years that Robert was in the Pine Village School, fewer and fewer barns were coated with the rusty orange paint.

In 1900, when the U.S. population was a fraction of what it would become, more than twenty million gallons of sorghum were produced. Sorghum is a cereal grain that is harvested for human consumption in some parts of the world. Benjamin Franklin wrote about using sorghum straw for brooms, but not until a century later was sorghum widely cultivated in the U.S. The Fourteenth Annual Report of the Ohio State Board of Agriculture (1859, published in 1860) announced that the state fair had witnessed “many samples of syrup of the Sorgho, or Chinese Sugar Cane.” As late nineteenth-century homes had gallon containers of sorghum syrup (a.k.a. sorghum molasses) to pour on buckwheat pancakes, to sweeten baked beans, to make cookies, and to flavor bread, there was widespread interest in techniques for boiling the juice from the crushed sorghum stalks to transform into syrup. According to the Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture for the Year 1867, 6,698,181 gallons of sorghum molasses were recorded in the census for 1860. Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri were responsible for approximately half the total production in 1867. When Robert was small, fields of sorghum were not uncommon. By the time he was in high school, sorghum had virtually vanished. During his years in the Pine Village School, more and more farm families quit using molasses. Syrups were readily available in grocery stores.

Molasses could be added to livestock feed; for example, Joe often asked the Pine Village Feed Store to add molasses to the ground feed that he purchased to serve his Holsteins on Christmas Day. Joe wanted his cows to have a special treat. Ground feed was usually a light sandy color; the molasses feed looked like light brown sugar. Over the course of Robert’s childhood, farms were gradually becoming larger and less diversified; accordingly, fewer farms raised livestock. Incrementally, livestock fences were torn down, and fields of corn and soybeans were planted right up to the roadside ditches. Molasses and fields of sorghum became relics of the past.

Little by little, the old ways were disappearing. Joe told Robert that Don Akers and he had once put a floor in a bridge over the dredge ditch on the Thomason place. Three trees, fourteen inches in diameter, served as beams, and planks were laid at right angles over the trees. “It was almost dark by the time we got those last planks in place,” Joe said. He and Don dipped 60-penny nails in a can of grease and pounded them down. A new moon came up. “If the old-timers are right,” Joe said to Don, “the nails will pop up.” ... and, sure enough, every month, the nails kept working up, according to Joe. Such a notion—even one unsupported by scientific inquiry—was a thing to be appreciated, as it contributed to the spice of life, if nothing else.

There were jobs to be done during a new moon, when the light of the moon was absent from the sky at night, and jobs to be done during a waxing moon. Activities for the new moon included planting root crops, such as potatoes, and making sauerkraut. Those for the waxing moon included planting vegetables that are harvested above ground and butchering hogs. Pork produced during a new moon would shrink and turn tough when cooked.

Ida warned Robert never to thank anyone for a plant because doing so would cause the plant to wither away and perish. A common occurrence in the spring and fall was the trading of plants among rural women. Mrs. Bowen would pull into the driveway, open the trunk of her car, and haul out a bucket full of daisies in the springtime or a bucket full of iris tubers in the late autumn. “I thought you’d want some of these,” she would say to Ida, and Ida would stop whatever she had been doing and would gleefully take the time to choose a location and to plant the contents of the bucket—while sharing the latest news with Mrs. Bowen. In turn, Ida would dig peonies or poppies or crown imperials to take to Mrs. Bowen, as well as other women in the community, and no one ever said so much as a “thank you.” Such superstitions lent charm to living. While some superstitions persisted, many others gradually disappeared.

 

30. The Corn ... THE FARM EAST OF PINE VILLAGE

In the spring, Robert was privileged to help his father plant corn, as well as soybeans. If the disking were finished, Robert waited beside the Chevrolet pickup until it was time to restock the four-row planter. From a bag, he poured corn—coated pink with captan—into the hoppers, which were covered with neat lids. When a bag was empty, he dropped it behind the planter and placed a heavy clod on the bag to hold it against the wind and not have to go chasing it across the field. He opened bags of fertilizer, which had a lightly acrid scent. Robert thought that, if a rock could rot, it would smell like that. The fertilizer was poured into the receptacles behind the corn hoppers.

Joe would start back through the field. He would pull the string that tripped the arm that dropped with a pleasant metallic sound to one side, so that the small disk at the end of the arm could spin and send up a little cloud of dust while it laid down a groove that would enable Joe to know exactly where the nose of his tractor should go for the return trip through the field.

The warm sky was bright azure. White clouds like cotton balls sailed along. Birds sang in the narrow thickets beside the field. The sunlight was vigorous. To be outdoors and breathing such fresh air was a joy. Spring planting days afforded pure contentment!

Next came the cultivating, which Robert tolerated—especially after he “got on the wrong rows” the first time and eradicated corn for a distance the length of two tractors before he managed to stop. Robert learned to cultivate. He had to! But cultivating corn was an acquired skill, analogous to an acquired taste. He had to be ever vigilant so as not to wipe out corn plants, and such attention to detail interfered with his preference for exercising his imagination while daydreaming.

In the fall—sometimes as late as Thanksgiving—Joe picked corn. On a cool day, wearing his boots—each with four buckles that looked like miniature furnace grates—his blue denim coat, and his warm corduroy cap with ear flaps, he first strode into the field among the cornstalks, pale yellow, tan, and dry. The stalks were spaced a few inches from one another, and the rows were fairly widely spaced—enough for Joe to pass between two rows without having to brush the leaves aside. Selecting an ear, he pulled back the husks to examine the corn. Through experience, he could detect whether the corn might be ready for harvesting. He tried another ear and another, holding between his elbow and his ribs those ears that he had already examined. Later, he broke the ears into thirds and gave the pieces as treats to the cows.

The skies already hinted at the winter to come; it was a pale Turkish hue with cold-looking, vague streaks of cloud lacing them. The daylight seemed strained through thin silk. Joe tramped back to the barn and set down the ears of corn he had collected. He backed a tractor up to his two-row pull-type corn picker parked under the leafless hedge apples. After hitching up, Joe had returned to the seat of his tractor in a jiffy. All that remained was to hitch the tractor and picker to a wagon. Joe was excellent at backing up and often tried to explain the intricacies to Robert, who could not comprehend where the tongue of, say, a corn picker would go while the tractor reversed.

Then Joe went to the field with his tractor, corn picker, and wagon in procession.

With the air just cold enough to turn his cheeks rosy, Joe started into the field. Ears of corn began falling from the elevator of the corn picker into the wagon. Two rows at a time, Joe slowly passed through the field. The corn harvest was underway: the reward for the hard work and the expense of planting and cultivating.

Picking corn was a one-farmer job, so Joe picked corn alone. Robert could not help. Besides, corn picking was considered too dangerous for Robert. Although he could not help, Robert enjoyed coming to the field to watch his father and to chat with him for a few minutes. Robert thought the corn picker resembled a weird rocket with three noses.

As evening drew in, the sky turned yellow with a touch of chartreuse. Near the horizon, orange with traces of rose spread into pink haze above a mauve tree line far away. Indistinct gray masses of cloud hung motionless just above the distant farmhouses and barns.

Joe pulled the last wagon of the day toward the barn, where he would store it temporarily.

For the rest of his life, Robert would cherish the memory of his father picking corn as if Robert were looking at an old snapshot in a picture frame.    

29. The Ancient Ones ... THE FARM EAST OF PINE VILLAGE

Robert had only two more years to help his father with spring planting before Robert would be off to a university. As Robert preferred disking to plowing, Joe agreed to do any plowing that had not been done in the fall while Robert did as much of the disking as possible. This arrangement often meant that Robert and his father were not in the same field.

At the time when the family had moved to the new house, Joe had inherited a hundred-acre farm from his uncle Marshall. It was located a mile east of the Williams place. The field rose gently—almost imperceptibly—to the north and to the east from a lower area that had been a pond before the early settlers tiled the land. Often, Robert would be disking part of what Joe called “Uncle Marshall’s farm” (Great Uncle Marshall to Robert) while Joe was plowing or planting at the Williams place.

On one of the days when Robert was disking by himself with the International 560 at Uncle Marshall’s farm, he was writing stories in his imagination. The cloudless sky was cornflower blue at the horizon, shading to a rich azure at the zenith. The sun shone like an arc welder’s torch almost directly overhead. Red-winged blackbirds sang conk-la-reeeee! while brown thrashers flitted among the emerald green leaves of the thickets at the edge of a long and narrow ten-acre woods on the west side of the field. Various warblers trilled rapid arpeggios, showing off their virtuosic talents. The “chuffy” soil (Robert’s adjective) lay fluffed: the perfect bed for the kernels of corn to come. Robert spent many minutes going one direction before turning at the edge of the big field and going back, over and over again.

Suddenly, he wondered how the nose of his tractor could be pushing against the rusted wire of an old fence along the northern border of Uncle Marshall’s farm. Robert flew into action, stopping the tractor before it was damaged. He had fallen asleep, and the tractor had kept going straight when Robert should have been turning. By repeatedly backing up the short distance that his tractor could go before the drawbar of the disk would be turned too far to one side, Robert finally was able to make the turn with the corner of the disk missing the rusty fence by a whisker.

“Now, take a mental note,” Robert said aloud to himself. “You dare not fall asleep while operating a tractor. You must stay awake at all times.” He stopped the 560 and walked around to look at the nose. The paint was so strong in those days that there was not so much as a scratch from where the tractor had pushed against the wire. Robert felt relieved that he had done no damage.

When he regained the by-now hot black seat, he laughed at the sight of the last pass he had made, for it angled on a slight curve to the left from the moment when slumber had overtaken him. No harm done! He could go back over that part in reestablishing a straight line.

To keep himself awake, he watched for flint knives. Beginning in the Archaic Period and continuing through the Woodland Period, Native Americans had lived on the land of which Uncle Marshall’s farm was a small portion. A heavy sprinkling of flint chips in an arc surrounding the lower area of the field suggested that, from at least eight thousand years before Christ, knife makers had surrounded the pond. The Akers family had acquired the part of Uncle Marshall’s place to the south of the road. On that land and in the surrounding fields that had already belonged to the family, Bob, a veteran of World War II who had earned the distinction of having driven a car on the Alaska Highway and who epitomized what the noun “gentleman” means, had amassed a vast collection of artifacts including gorgets, bannerstones, pipes, mortars, pestles, axes, and seemingly countless flint pieces. Clearly, thousands of years of habitation had left their mark on the landscape across the road.

As Charles was attending Indiana University, Robert discovered that he could conveniently take artifacts to be identified by Dr. James H. Kellar, the first director of the Glen Black Laboratory of Archaeology on the Bloomington campus and an expert on Angel Mounds near Evansville. Robert could not have foreseen that, in the future, he would take fifteen hours of anthropology courses, including Dr. Kellar’s upper-division archaeology course, and that, when Robert was finishing his undergraduate degree, Dr. Kellar would offer Robert the opportunity to take a graduate student position at the laboratory—an opportunity that Robert would forgo to pursue a master’s degree in creative writing, instead. While Robert was yet in high school, he decided he could examine farmers’ collections of artifacts, draw sketches of them, and have Dr. Kellar review the sketches, thereby making it unnecessary to transport heavy collections to Bloomington for identification. Robert sketched many pieces in a large collection that Pete Thurman had made and that Louise Thurman, a sister of Robert’s Great Aunt Margaret and a former teacher who had taught Joe, let Robert peruse for the several days that were required to make the drawings. Robert also sketched a number of Bob’s exquisite pieces from his farms and from the portion of Great Uncle Marshall’s land that Bob had acquired.

When Professor Kellar paged through Robert’s sketches, he said, “Until I met you, I had no idea there were artifacts in Warren County, let alone such a concentration of them.” Dr. Kellar began sharing his findings with archaeologists at other universities.

Immediately, Bob took a keen interest in learning all he could learn about the cultures that had produced such masterful utilitarian pieces and such artistically fashioned stonework. Within a few years, Bob had attended archaeological digs and had taken part in workshops and classes offered by faculty representing several universities. Bob was responsible for an eventual scholarly exploration of an earthen mound on Don Akers’ farm northwest of Pine Village. Bob became a familiar figure in the study of the ancient cultures of Warren County.

While Robert was in his junior and senior years of high school, he and Bob had many discussions about artifacts. Quite often while tilling the soil, Bob would discover another piece, and, at his earliest opportunity, he would show it to Robert, who might share a fact that he had learned from Dr. Kellar. “Is that right?” Bob would ask, adding, “I thought this piece looked to be a good one.”

Ever kind and considerate, Bob would ask Robert, “Do you suppose the people were becoming less nomadic even earlier than was thought? That might account for why there are so many of these artifacts here.” Then Bob and Robert would spend a happy hour conversing about the possibilities to be deduced from the kinds of materials that had turned up.

Robert and Bob soon learned that one of the best times to find flint knives and other pieces was in the spring soon after rain had washed the surface of fields that had been recently plowed and disked. Both became adept at stopping tractors in the nick of time to hop down and pick up a beautifully shaped knife just before the disk would have run over it. Frequently, only the edge of the knife was revealed above the soil. Keeping a sharp lookout became a goal, especially when disking.

Robert’s imagination continually roamed over what the ponds and marshes must have looked like before European descendants began to tile the soil for farmland. He tried to picture bison finding their way between wallows in the pockets of prairie grass like islands amid bogs. The land must have been good for hunting.

Once, during a full moon, Robert wondered if flint knives could be seen by moonlight, so he drove his 1953 Packard to Uncle Marshall’s farm. He walked slowly along the slight ridges left by the disk, but he soon realized that the light was not strong enough. A fog was forming in a thin blanket near the ground in the lower area where the pond had once been located. Robert stood watching the fog slowly swirl. He could easily picture the fog as water. Before long, he envisioned the people who were living along the edge of the pond. They had eaten their dinner and were settling down for conversation and story-telling. A man turned, saw Robert, and beckoned to him.

At that instant, Robert’s hair stood on end. He knew that everything he had pictured was nothing more than a product of his imagination, yet he felt a time-defying presence in the land. Jogging over the ground, he jumped into his car, started the motor, turned on the headlights, backed into the road, and drove home, vowing that he would never again risk returning to that farm at night.