Growing Up Country: Memories of an Iowa Farm Girl Read online

  “That’d be great.” I perked up. I loved hot chocolate. At our house, we only had hot chocolate in the winter. This would be a treat. Maybe Tot would have marshmallows, too. Miniature marshmallows would be fun.

  Tot bustled around the kitchen making the hot chocolate. Meanwhile, I tilted from side to side on my chair, enjoying the feel of peeling the skin of one bare leg off the plastic seat and then rocking over to peel the other leg off the seat. I looked at Sue; she was doing the same thing. When we giggled, Mom put her hand on my shoulder. Behind her smile we heard meaning. We sat still.

  Pretty soon, Tot set a cup of steaming cocoa in front of each of us girls. I stifled a sigh. No marshmallows. “Thank you,” Sue and I said at the same time. We’d been taught well.

  I lifted the cup in both hands and brought it close to my lips. It was too hot to drink so I blew little puffs across the surface, just the way I saw Mom blow across a just-poured cup of coffee. Sue did the same thing. The liquid was dark brown and smelled deliciously chocolate.

  I took a little sip. And almost gagged. I glanced at Sue; she had a sick look on her face. I looked at Mom, who had seen our reaction. The look in her eyes said, “Don’t say anything.”

  Tentatively, I lifted the cup again. Maybe it got better as it cooled. But it didn’t. My throat locked closed as the bitter liquid crossed my tongue and headed toward my stomach. What was this stuff? And how was I going to drink it?

  Tot sat back down at the table and picked up her coffee cup. “How is it?” she asked, looking right at me. Perhaps I was not as green as I felt.

  What could I say? Panic rose in my throat along with bile from the sip of cocoa. “It’s good,” I squeaked, forcing a little smile. Mom nodded at me and visibly relaxed.

  Tot smiled and went on talking with Mom about gardens and canning. While they talked, I tried to figure out what had gone wrong with something as simple as hot cocoa. Sue nudged my leg with her toe. I peeked at her out of the corner of my eye, saw the panic in her wide, brown eyes, shrugged my shoulder a half-inch and looked back at my cup. We were trapped. I thought again about marshmallows. They might make it better. But I was afraid to ask. And what was I going to say? This cocoa is terrible and maybe marshmallows would save it?

  I took sip after painful sip from what had become a bottomless cup. Maybe I could say I wasn’t thirsty after all. Maybe I would throw up. Maybe I would get sick and die. But I couldn’t NOT drink the cocoa either. So I drank. And with each sip, my throat tightened, feeling more and more like the year I got the mumps and could barely swallow at all for two whole weeks.

  When I drained the last bit of cocoa from my cup, Tot asked, “Would you like more?” She was already on her feet heading for the stove.

  “NO, THANKS!” The words exploded from my mouth. Tot jumped. She whirled toward me with a puzzled look. “No.” I forced another smile. “Thanks. I’m full.”

  “I see Harvey coming,” Mom said out of the blue as she stood up and motioned us to the door. “Girls. Are you ready to go?” She didn’t need to ask twice. Sue and I were off our chairs and headed for the door. “Thanks for the coffee and hot chocolate, Tot,” Mom added. “You’ll have to come visit us soon.”

  Safe in the car, I complained, “Mom, that hot chocolate was awful. I don’t know what it was, but I thought I was going to get sick.”

  Holding her stomach, Sue rolled onto her side in the back seat, “Yeah, I thought I would throw up!”

  “Now I’m sure it wasn’t so bad,” Mom said.

  “It was, too,” I insisted. “It was disgusting! Don’t you think Tot would know how to make cocoa?” I ran my tongue across the top of my mouth and scraped it on my front teeth to destroy the lingering bitter taste.

  “I’m sure she does,” Mom said. “But I don’t think she had any milk in the house. That’s why she made it with hot water. And I saw her use cocoa powder. That’s not sweetened.”

  Hot water and cocoa powder? Not milk and Nestlés Quik!

  “I’m sure she didn’t know how that would taste,” Mom continued. “And she wanted to have something for you girls. It was nice of her to offer, and it was the right thing to drink it. I’m proud of you.”

  I scraped my tongue across my teeth again. In all the times I had seen Mom offer food and watched guests eat that food, in all the times neighbors had offered us food and we’d eaten that food, it had never occurred to me that the food might not be good. And that people would still eat it. And then say, “Thanks.” I had just never imagined that this, too, was a part of hospitality.

  Sunday Dinner

  “Why do we have chicken for dinner every Sunday?” I asked Mom one Sunday morning.

  She glanced at me with a look that suggested I might be daft and said, “Because we have them.” Then she slipped another chicken leg into the hot grease. When she looked back to find me still looking up at her, she said, “Now go get ready for church. Dad will be ready to go and we don’t want to keep him waiting.”

  I stared at her for a second more, then headed for the bedroom, pulling off my shirt on the way. Well of course we have chickens, I thought. How could a farm exist without chickens?

  Eating fried chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy marked our Sundays as certainly as did sitting in the fourth pew on the left side of the aisle at Salem Lutheran Church in Spragueville, Iowa.

  We filed into that pew because every Sunday morning after Dad put on his suit, straightened his tie and donned his gray fedora, he strode without hesitation to the car, proclaiming so we would all hear: “The bus is leaving! Get a move on. We don’t want to be sitting in the preacher’s lap.” Dressed in our go-to-church dresses and the black patent leather shoes bought new each year for Easter Sunday, we hustled out to the car before he had a chance to lay on the horn.

  We had fried chicken every single Sunday except for Thanksgiving or Christmas or Easter, when we had turkey or ham.

  We ate eggs for breakfast every day, except Sunday when we had cold cereal. On every other day, eggs—fried, scrambled, poached or boiled—followed oatmeal and accompanied pancakes.

  Mom used eggs to bake cakes, cookies, dumplings dropped by the spoonful into tomato soup, noodles that hung in even rows like pieces of twine on the backs of chairs—to bake, well, just everything.

  We ate eggs, we ate chicken. Of course we had chickens.

  It always amazed me that you could go to a feed store and buy little living balls of yellow fluff baby chicks just the same as you could buy onion sets and sweet corn seed when it was time to plant the garden. But you could, and each spring Dad brought home boxes of baby chicks from the feed store in Preston. As he unloaded the boxes from the truck seat and carried them in the house, we heard the anxious ‘cheep, cheep, cheeps’ and saw little beaks poking through the air holes punched all around the box.

  In a small pen in a corner of the basement, Dad rigged up a heat lamp to keep their tiny bodies warm. Mom dug out the quart jar waterer and a tray of feed. Crouching shoulder to shoulder between the box and the pen, we kids gathered each bitty, cheeping fluff ball out of the box, cradling it carefully in our hands, giggling as their feet tickled our palms.

  We dipped each chick’s beak in the water so it would know to drink, then set it under the heat lamp. The chicks huddled together under the warm circle of light, one or two breaking off every little while to run for a drink and then returning to the warmth and safety of the wriggling, yellow mass. Each morning, we raced to the basement to refresh the water and add feed to the tray.

  Chicks grow very quickly so we only had them in the basement for a week or so before white feathers replaced yellow down. Then we moved them to the chicken coop where they joined the hens from last year’s box of chicks. Within a couple of weeks, we could begin to see which birds would be pullets and which roosters. Within six to eight weeks, roosters were ready to be eaten and pullets to lay eggs.

  In each ‘straight run’ box of 100 Leghorn chicks, there were about 70 roosters and 30 hens
. As they grew up, it was easier to spot which was which. The roosters developed bright red combs on their heads, strutted around like they knew something important, and crowed as they scratched the ground and ate. The pullets with their neat little combs, clucked and scratched, all business as they set about laying eggs, eggs that were at first half the size of a regular egg. These miniature-sized pullet eggs seemed like they should be used to feed our dolls.

  We raised the chickens, we collected the eggs, we ate eggs and sold the surplus, and we butchered the chickens to eat.

  As I mentioned, Mom fried a chicken every Sunday for dinner.

  On Saturday night as soon as the supper dishes were done, Mom took a frozen chicken from the basement deep freeze and set it to thaw in the kitchen sink. (This was before anyone counseled against thawing meat at room temperature. Since none of us ever got sick, this caution is one I would only half pay attention to myself when I was grown.)

  After the breakfast dishes were done and before we took off for church, Mom put an apron over her Sunday dress, dredged each piece of chicken in flour and placed it in a half-inch of hot oil in the black cast-iron skillet. There it turned a rich, oaken color. After each piece was perfectly browned, she put all the chicken in a Dutch oven and slid it into the oven to cook on low heat. By that time the house was saturated in a smell so wonderful my stomach growled. I was hungry again, and it didn’t matter that I had just finished breakfast. When we returned from church, we were all truly hungry, and that falling-off-the-bone tender chicken was ready to put on a platter, the drippings ready to make gravy. The only thing we had to wait on was potatoes to boil. To a kid that was an intolerably long wait.

  A chicken every Sunday for our family of six, including Grandma, meant 50 to 52 chickens. Often we had company for dinner on Sunday—Aunt Joyce and Uncle Ed, plus our four cousins, or the Pastor and his wife, or on rarer occasions our relatives on Dad’s side from Wisconsin. On days when company joined us, fried chicken dinner took more than one chicken. Just do the math. Mom could easily have to retrieve 70 or more chickens in a year out of the freezer.

  If we ran out of chickens in the freezer, Mom would say to Dad, “We need a chicken for dinner.” Then—before he headed down the hill to do barn chores—Dad lifted an ax off the hook by his workbench in the garage, detoured to the coop, and dispatched a rooster in about one second on a block just outside the chicken coop door. Mom took over from there, scalding the chicken in a pot of boiling water on the gas stove in the basement, plucking the feathers, gutting, cleaning and cutting up the chicken to fry. Chicken house to table took a couple of hours. We were part of the Fresh Food Movement long before it became popular.

  When Dad wasn’t around, Mom could kill a chicken, and from time to time she did, but she wasn’t wild about it. Grandma Denter—Dad’s mom—had no such qualms. When she stayed with us in the fall after school started, she never hesitated to pick up the ax, grab the long wire hook and hook the first rooster leg to pass within snagging distance. So accustomed was she to the task that she seldom got a drop of blood on the apron that covered her ample figure.

  But usually, killing chickens was Dad’s job.

  Most chickens made it to the dinner table in that traditional way, but there was one exception.

  One Easter, someone gave a chick to my cousins who lived in Sabula, a small town on an island in the Mississippi River. Pretty quick the chick grew into a rooster and Aunt Joyce decided they couldn’t keep it in town any more so that rooster came to live on our farm. We could see right away why Aunt Joyce didn’t want it around. That bird was feisty.

  One day soon after the rooster arrived, Sue and I were out playing in the yard. My sister Sue was a tiny thing with big brown eyes and white blond hair. How that big white king-of-the-coop rooster could see Sue as a threat to his yard is beyond me, but he did. Out of nowhere he came, crowing and flapping his wings, heading straight at Sue.

  Sue screamed. I screamed. The rooster flew away and then came back again. He pecked at her head, jabbed her with his claws, beat her with his wings. Sue screamed and flailed her arms, succeeding only in making the rooster more angry. She was no match. And what did I do while my sister was being bloodied by the rooster? I did the only thing I could think to do; I ran for the house.

  “Dad! Mom! The rooster is killing Sue,” I shrieked, my heart thudding so loud I could hear it in my ears, my face whiter than the rooster’s feathers.

  Dad was out of the house in less time than I could take a breath. Mom was right behind him. Dad grabbed the rooster by the head and flung it around in a big loop, snapping the bird’s neck before he let it loose to tumble across the lawn. Mom scooped up Sue and whisked her into the house. We had that rooster for supper.

  Getting the new crop of roosters into the freezer each fall took all of us working at it for the better part of one full day.

  “We’re butchering chickens today,” Mom would announce one day as she pulled her largest kettles out of the cupboards, filled them with water and set them to boiling on the basement stove. “You girls go help Dad.”

  Scampering out of the house, we trailed Dad to the chicken house. “Tooter, you and Squirt snag them and hand them out,” he said as he handed my sister Jane and me long wires with the ends bent into hooks. “Bugs, you hold ’em.” Even though Sue was only six, she could hold a chicken to the ground

  Jane and I slipped into the coop, closed the door behind us and set about trying to snag roosters. Not hens, just roosters. The coop was a storm of hens and roosters, cackling, flying, dodging. The roosters ran behind the hens, under the roosts, into corners, under and on top of each other, anywhere to avoid us. Chicken feathers along with the acrid smell of chicken manure dust filled the air. I clamped my mouth tight shut, trying not to breathe as I crouched low and duck-waddled as far under the roost as possible, jabbing my wire into the swarming mass of birds, shielding my face against the errant chicken that flew straight at us in a frantic attempt to escape. In such a small space, you would have thought it would be easier.

  “Got one,” Jane yelped, pulling the wire toward her, grabbing the rooster by its leg and handing it out to Dad.

  The competition was on. Ignoring the dust and smell and noise, I forced my way toward the swirling mass of feathers and snagged a rooster of my own. “I got one, too,” I crowed.

  “Finally,” Jane mocked me.

  I stuck out my tongue at her and rapidly pulled it back in my mouth. “Yuck!” I spit out dust. Jane laughed. I laughed.

  “Stop fartin around in there,” Dad barked.

  We turned our efforts to the roosters.

  We either became more skilled in our efforts or the roosters got tired because we succeeded in handing a steady stream of birds out the door.

  As Dad took each rooster, he gathered both its legs and the ends of each wing in one hand. Held upside down like this, the bird became quiet. Then Dad laid the rooster, its head extended between two spikes sticking up from a stump, and in one decisive stroke separated head from body.

  Even after it loses its head, a chicken has a good deal of nerve energy and will, if let loose, flap its wings and run around just as if it is still alive. This is no doubt where the phrase ‘running around like a chicken with its head cut off’ comes from. That is one messy way to kill chickens.

  To avoid the mess and to avoid having to chase dead chickens all over the yard, Dad handed decapitated birds to Sue. Using both hands, Sue took the chicken from Dad, doing her best to keep the wings and legs contained, as she thrust the chicken’s neck to the ground for the few seconds it took until the bird stopped kicking and bleeding.

  Growing up on a farm, I never gave a second thought to killing an animal to eat. I don’t think any of us did. Chickens, cows and pigs were our livelihood. We raised them, we ate them or we sold them. That was just that.

  We could catch chickens and Dad could behead them faster and in greater quantities than Sue could hold, so eventually, either Jane or I—whomev
er was having less success catching—joined Sue in holding dead birds. It was a point of pride to keep the chicken feathers as clean as possible, so we put the headless birds in the dishpan so their necks all came together in the center, their wrinkly, yellow feet sticking over the edge of the pan. In short order, we had a dishpan full and Mom materialized at our side to cart the dishpan away, leaving an empty pan in its place.

  Mom and Grandma Jensen took each dishpan heaped with chickens to the basement where Mom had a pot of water boiling on the gas stove. Taking one chicken in each hand, she dipped the carcasses into the hot water—in-out, in-out, in-out. Three times. Then she tugged at the feathers to test how easily they pulled out of the carcass. Too little time in the hot water and the feathers wouldn’t come out. Too long in the hot water and the skin scalded and came off along with the feathers. When each bird was dipped just right, she handed it to Grandma who stripped the feathers off in big handfuls.

  Hot, wet chicken feathers stink. When we finished killing chickens—a task done in the clean, open air—and lugged the last dishpan full of dead birds to the basement, we were met by that wet chicken feather smell, an assault to the senses I managed to forget about from year to year. The manure dust in the chicken house was bad; this was worse. “Oh, ick!” I howled, wrinkling my face in disgust.

  “Get over here and help,” Mom locked me in place with a determined eye as she pulled a chicken out of the pot of hot water and handed it to me. Pulling off feathers was the worst job.

  “Ouch, ouch, ouch,” I yipped, picking at the tips of scalding feathers with two fingertips.

  “Hurry up. You have to pluck those feathers before they get cold,” Mom said and dropped two more steaming birds into the pan in front of me.

  “It’s too hot to touch,” I whined.

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake. You’ll never get it done. Give it to me,” Grandma said. She took the chicken out of my hands and I watched in amazement as she stripped the bird bare of feathers in less than 30 seconds. It was a known fact that both Mom and Grandma could dip their hands in boiling water and never feel it at all.