Our First Night in the Country

By Detlef W. Wieck

I was five and a half, my sister Margaret, seven, when our father died. Our mother, Mary, at forty-four, was afraid of the prospects of raising two children without a husband to share the burden and to earn a living. After a proper mourning period, she set out to find another man. She married Frederick, whom she’d met dancing at the Marigold Ball Room. Their courtship was short.

He was a pastry chef working for a big hotel in Minneapolis. His dream, however, was to live in the country though he had never done anything related to farming. Mary, as a widow, had inherited her late husband’s property and home. Although this provided a modest income, Frederick convinced her to sell it so they could purchase a farm where my sister and I could grow up “free from the evil influences of the big city.”

Mary was easy to persuade. She had been raised in a sod house on the prairie. With only a sixth grade education in a one room country school, she was simple in her beliefs and God fearing. For her, the city was a fearful, sophisticated place where she felt unequal to its challenges. Since she was thirteen years old, until after her mother died, she had been handling horses, gardening, harvesting crops and taking care of animals. These activities from her youth seemed so safe and familiar that she readily agreed to the move.

The property they chose was in the lake country of northern Minnesota. It was an abandoned hundred- and twenty-acre homestead farm with a few decrepit buildings. These included a log barn with a collapsed roof and a three hole outdoor privy attached at one end, the only bathroom. A corn crib, supported on posts with chipped blue granite pans upside down on the tops, to keep rats from getting into the corn, stood a short distance from the barn. A woodshed with an adjoining workshop and a small smoke house sat apart from the other buildings. There was a chicken coop, the only insulated building, down close to the lake to the west of the house.

The rough plank floors, darkened by decades of use worn into the surface, were the first thing that caught my eye, as I entered the house.  Nail heads stood proud through the doorways; the wood around them, worn down by the family of nine who, for many years, walked with rough boots clogged with soil from the frontier work that had occupied them. There lingered, throughout, a strong odor of long cold wood smoke.

Only the walls separating the rooms were finished. There was no insulation in the outer walls, only the framing studs to which the sheathing of diagonal planks and the shiplap siding were attached on the outside. There was no running water. A well, a short distance from the house, was dry. Electricity had not yet been brought to that northern region. 

Two woodland lakes adjoined the property. Acres of meadows and hay fields, cleared of trees and stones by the previous family, were surrounded by forests filled with Red and White Oaks, Hickory and Sugar Maples. Huge stone piles testified to the hard life of those original homesteaders.

Pines and birches grew, in many areas, near the shores of the lakes. Only a couple of fruit trees, in an ancient apple orchard, still bore fruit; one a Crab Apple, the other a Pear Apple. Others, dead or decrepit, their trunks pocked with rows of Sap Sucker holes, exposed bare limbs with few leaves or fruit. 

The farm had been abandoned for many years before we arrived. Mary and Frederick bought it, I suppose, because of its history and romantic beauty rather than for practical reasons. For her, though, it harkened back to the kind of farming that she had grown up with and was used to.

Before we moved, Frederick purchased a new 1946 Willy’s Jeep. This was a wonderful machine. It looked a lot like the jeeps I’d seen in news reels during the war except to me, it was prettier. It was shiny pea green and had orange wheel rims circled with thin black pin stripes. It proved itself on our first family trip to the old homestead. 

Towing a two wheeled trailer, loaded with all of our possessions, we drove north from Minneapolis about a hundred and fifty miles. My sister and I sat in the back of the jeep, on top of piles of blankets and pillows. Stirring up clouds of dust which settled on everything and got in our eyes, noses and gritted between our teeth, we drove miles over unpaved county roads, the last of which terminated at a neighbor’s farm, about three quarters of a mile from our final destination. The old homestead road was a muddy double rut in some places and for a large distance, completely under water around the edge of a lake still flooded after the spring thaw. 

Frederick shifted into four-wheel drive, “low range,” let out the clutch and stepped on the gas. Unsure of what was going to happen as we drove into the water, I was gratefully relieved when the jeep climbed out of the water and mud on the other side. The lurid rotten smell the tires stirred up as we drove along the muddy shore whispered to me that there were mysterious, possibly hideous and dangerous, life forms lurking so close to me in the jeep. 

We continued through a mysterious landscape of ancient oak trees with long overhanging limbs. Spindly Sumac bushes grew around them and green shoots pierced matted brown grass, soggy and flattened from lying under the winter snow.  For a boy used to sidewalks and mowed lawns, this wild country was frightening and inviting. The jeep was all the more special for it gave me a safe vantage point from which to view it all. 

When Frederick left to go back to Minneapolis, that first evening, Mother opened a couple of cans for supper. With the meal over, and the sun below the western horizon, my sister and I sat facing each other across a weathered round oak table, sheltering in the only light in the entire house; a kerosene lamp that sat in the center of the table.   

As the twilight deepened, an earsplitting roar of high pitched voices rose from thousands of frogs inhabiting the cattails surrounding a small lake a hundred or so feet to the west of the house. In the increasing darkness, this high pitched chorus was punctuated by the droning buzz of huge beetles as they flew toward the light of the lamp and crashed headlong, with a twang, into the screen door. They fell, stunned, with a clatter on to the floor of the porch. 

In the background, and in droning harmony to the frogs and the beetles, thousands of mosquitoes, each hum so small but in their multitudes ominously loud, added to the symphony of wild sounds. Hundreds of them had landed on the screen-door. They were so thick in places that the lamp light reflected dimly off their collected bodies through the screen. Only when a beetle slammed into the screen, did they all, momentarily, take flight to re-alight almost instantly.

 For a couple of city kids used to the security of street lights, concrete and the sound of streetcars on their tracks, there were no points of reference to anything we had experienced.

Smoke filled the air as Mother fired up an ancient rusty wood burning cook range, to heat water which, earlier, she had bailed out of the lake. When she had come back into the kitchen, she found blood suckers stuck to her muddy ankles. In a panic, she poured salt on them, then retched as she pinched them off, leaving the sucker parts stuck to her flesh. Blood, thinned by the lake water on her still wet feet, streamed thinly from the wounds and mixed with the remaining mud. 

When the water was hot, she poured it out of the grey Granite Ware, mineral encrusted, teakettle that came with the house into a chipped graniteware dishpan, also left in the house. A bat flew out of the unilluminated living room, into the kitchen, and back into the dark. We all saw it. I ducked as it flew close to the table.

Mother was sure that the bat would tangle itself in her hair. She wasn’t about to let that happen. Hastily pulling a pillow slip out of one of the many boxes stacked on the kitchen floor, she put it on her head to cover her hair. She grabbed the broom and charged into the living room.  Afraid to move beyond the safety of the light of the lamp, my sister and I sat across the table from each other, her round, wide eyed face looked at me as we listened to the wild sounds coming through the screen door and the commotion in the living room.

I sat facing the door to the living room so could vaguely see what was going on. The wildly flying white pillow slip and broom reflected the little light that penetrated the darkness. Mother was frenziedly dancing in circles, swinging the broom as she did so, shrieking as the bat dodged close to her to outmaneuver her swings. The pillow slip slipped down over her eyes. With quick and futile movements, she readjusted it then continued swinging wildly, only to have it fall again. 

When she finally hit the bat, knocking it to the floor, she stepped on it before it could get air-borne. It crunched faintly under her foot. She screamed again. Sobbing, she ran back into the kitchen to fetch a dustpan. She didn’t dare throw it out the door, for to do so would have let in hundreds of mosquitoes. Lifting off a stove lid, she shuddered as she shook the dustpan, sliding the crushed bat on to the burning coals. A sizzle like that of bacon, with the odor of burning fur, added to the drama in that brief moment.

We all spent a restless night on a mattress on the kitchen floor. The kerosene lamp stayed lit on the table all night.  

At 84 years old, Detlef W. Wieck looks to the past and see further than he see into the future. This story, though written as fiction, is in fact a true experience from when he was about six years old. He has been a prospector, boat builder, commercial fisherman, an artist, park ranger, furniture maker, and now writer, though he has been at this for quite a few years while working at a paying profession and producing water color paintings.