Authors: Angela Palm
My father tried to convince us that this rural home, with only one neighbor in sight, was a good thing. I liked the house, but I didn’t buy his reasons. The move was a reflection of his personal improvement, his success.
Maybe things will be better
. Maybe a new place would make us into new people, better people. By the initial changes, it seemed to be true. We ditched the Sox and became Cubs fans. The law office my mother worked at provided third-base-line tickets, and we went to games as a family.
Our new road had only numbers for a name—an intersection of directional coordinates that was not like the attractive names of the roads in the subdivisions closer to town, where my would-be friends lived and where I wanted to live. Names like Michelle Drive, Poppy Lane, and Daisy Street suggested a place where life was beautiful and sanguine. Where families were knit close, and mothers and fathers stayed up late laughing and drinking Manhattans and popping maraschino cherries into one another’s mouths after their children were tucked into bed. Pies cooling on kitchen tables on Saturday mornings, casseroles for after-school supper, and such. A place where teenagers weren’t privately grieving the loss of a friend to a prison sentence. Did moving slightly closer to town bring us closer to that ideal?
I had no real love for the cornfields, no appreciation for the systematic coordinates of their gridded, numbered roads. The fields bore no marks of the land’s history, like the riverbed had. A sense of the origins of my surroundings had been constant at the river—where clam shells sprouted from the dirt and arrowheads were readily unearthed with my fingertips. To recreate that reassurance here—place as lifeline—I had to go two miles down the road to Aukiki, a preserved portion of wetland that lay beyond the shoulder of a state road. Marked with only a brown-and-white state park sign and a narrow gravel road, the land opened up beyond the first bend: water-filled gravel pits for fishing, wildlife preserve, and protected forest. I felt at peace when I visited it, removed from the agricultural fair of progress we had moved into, thrust into an authentic representation of the land where blue herons stood long-legged in the shallow water as they had for eons.
The fields that surrounded my new home were laden with a history that I could not yet unpack. They were neither romantic nor scary. They were nothing but flat strips of earth, dotted with the occasional rise of silo or telephone pole, barn or irrigation machinery. I felt nothing about those fields, or those human-made structures, until later. Our new house did, however, have three stories to it, and that was a palpable difference. The old farmhouse sat on an acre of grass that was plunked down in a gigantic cornfield. It was supposed to be part of the larger surrounding farm, a mother-in-law’s residence, I was told, but it wasn’t anymore. It had been sold off, piecemeal, like so much else in that town. And now it was ours—tacked onto an operating farm.
The world, of course, was bigger than us and our new little plot of land. In 1997, Bill Clinton was president and times were good, in general. The country was not at war, for one thing. Farmers in the Corn Belt, where I lived, were reaping benefits from the Freedom to Farm Act that granted them windfall subsidies in 1996 and 1997. These monies were given in addition to the regular Farm Bill subsidies that meant, basically, that no matter what happened, the farmers would be guaranteed profits. Fields previously kept idle to meet subsidy requirements were now abundant with soy, corn, or wheat, depending on each field’s stage of the soil rotation. Some years, the fields seemed to be filled with mostly corn, which reached high above our heads and enveloped the property. In 1997, whoever owned agriculturally zoned land was raking in dough. Farmers bought expensive new equipment and repainted their barns. They bought condos in Florida for their mothers. The heartland was new and shiny and colorful. A place, much like a family, could reinvent itself, distance itself from the past. So could a government, or a nation.
Most everyone who owned huge tracts of land in our town was Dutch, and by Dutch, I mean many of them had parents or grandparents or other extensions of family still living in the Netherlands. People of Dutch descent owned not only most of the land, but also most of the local businesses. Their collective identity defined the town. They were the teachers and coaches in our school district. Their children constituted most of the varsity sports teams, their last names emblazoned on plaques and pendants above the basketball court. They were the handful of professionals the town boasted, as well as the school board. They took annual family vacations to Disneyland and to see national landmarks like the Grand Canyon and Yosemite National Park. I had never myself seen a national park. I used the Dutch as an association to help me pass my high school history test: they were the rural American bourgeois, rich people who had everything and could decide things; river people, who had nothing and held no power, were the working class proletariat. Bourgeois equaled them, proletariat equaled me. Easy A. I broke down meaning in this way a lot, because history, as it was taught in high school textbooks, made no sense to me. It was a half truth, a culled record of facts.
There was a saying around town: “If you ain’t Dutch, you ain’t much.” Every time I heard it, it reminded me that this town wasn’t ever meant to have me in it. Nor them, since the land had been taken from Native Americans in the 1800s. But what did anyone care about that now? Kids who went to school in the towns bordering ours, which may as well have been foreign countries, called us “clickers.” It was meant as a derogatory term having to do with wooden shoes—a derivative of a Dutch cultural relic whose meaning and use was several generations removed from us. It grouped us all together. But how, I wondered, could I be a clicker if I was not Dutch? I had always thought that our community was a vestigial culture, the last remaining small part of something that existed before. We lived on land that was stolen. Our social mores were Dutch colonial holdovers. Our laws and penal system were adapted from English common law. Federal subsidies initiated by government officials who were no longer in office benefited the land-rich. The soil was hauled in from elsewhere, filling in the dune sand that had once been covered in wet marsh. I still had the river in me. Still had Corey on my mind. Yes. We were vestigial, at best.
My father’s first order of business at the new house was planting a garden. During the first weeks at our new house, my dad began tilling a rectangular section of the soil in our backyard. I helped him. I couldn’t wait to stop eating vegetables from cans, though it would take a while for my taste buds to recognize fresh produce as food at all. Our new neighbor, Amos, who owned the big house on the adjacent farm and whose family had leased the surrounding fields for generations, noticed my father working and walked over to us. He put his toes right up against the property line, which extended invisibly from a row of Italian cypresses that marked the eastern edge of our acre. It was probably strange for him, too. It was his mother who had lived in our house before, and he had lived in it as a boy. I knew how unsettling it was to watch other people inhabit a place that had been yours and begin to change it. I had met the new family that moved into our house by the river. Our emotional connections to property were more complex than the legal transactions that transferred it from one person to another.
“Putting a garden in?” Amos was a Deere man, which means a lot was fancy with him despite his being a third-generation farmer. He had gone to college, then come back to the fields, like many of the town’s wealthy farmers. They were educated laborers and small-business men.
My father was a member of a carpenters’ union local based near the South Side of Chicago, but on the Indiana side. He had no college education, which meant there was nothing fancy about him except for the things he built with his hands. You learned after a while that there were two kinds of workers in this town: union and nonunion. The union workers commuted to the politically Democratic cities in the more industrial northwestern corner of the state—Gary, Hammond, East Chicago—where union labor jobs were more common, while the nonunion workers were employed locally. It was the union job that had allowed our family to move away from the river. The pay was good, as were the benefits. If I kept my grades up, which was a sure bet, they would even provide a scholarship for my college education.
I stopped what I was doing, stabbed my hand shovel into the dirt next to where I was planting our freshly spliced hostas, transferred from our old yard to our new one along with our above-ground swimming pool. I got a fistful of black soil in my hand and moved it around slowly, sifting it through my fingers as I listened. We had had the dirt hauled in. If you dug down a bit past the topsoil, you’d find that the ground was largely still comprised of sand and clay, remnant of the Lake Michigan dunes to the north and the former marsh. I came across a white grub and sent it flailing across the grass with a flick of my index finger.
“You can’t put any corn in it,” Amos said, still on his side of the property line that he had once crossed freely.
My dad stopped tilling and stood up straight, squaring his shoulders. “Why’s that?”
Amos wiped sweat from his forehead with a faded handkerchief. “It’s a genetic test field. Federally funded.”
He proceeded to explain the detasseling process, which sounded a lot like sex to me. The female stalks had openings into which the male stalks’ seeds would blow and seep to begin the fertilization process. That kind of thing. I turned red and rocked nervously on my feet, which were tucked under me in a way that would leave a wild, itchy pattern of grass marks on my skin once I stood up. But nobody was watching me. They didn’t even notice that detasseling was about corn vaginas and corn sperm. More than that, though, I couldn’t believe that corn could be manipulated at the gene level. The most I could figure out was that it must have been like making blue eyes brown with the fine tip of a needle.
“If you plant corn in your garden, it’ll cross-pollinate with these test rows after detasseling and muck up the whole harvest.” Amos didn’t like cursing. “We can’t have that.”
“Which ones are the test rows?” my dad asked, crossing his arms.
Amos moved his hand in a circular fashion above his head.
“All of it? You gotta be shittin’ me.” My dad loved cursing. He worked a
goddamn son of a bitch
into most sentences, even when the emotional tenor of a conversation didn’t necessitate expletives.
“All of it along this stretch of road anyway. Every fifth row’s a male. In between are female. Different test strain every nine rows. I lease these fields to a breeder. That’s the corn of the future right there.” His hand glided through the air, gesturing at the perimeter of our yard as if he were Vanna White. Looking more closely, I saw the wooden posts marked with a numbered code, indicating each strain.
“No wonder they call it Millionaire’s Mile,” my dad said, and shook his head. “I’ll be a son of a bitch.” But I didn’t understand why this would equate to wealth.
Amos snorted. “You can pick whatever you want to eat once it’s grown. It’s all sweet corn. Won’t nobody miss a few here and there.”
My dad nodded by way of agreement and returned to tilling. He didn’t like being told what to do, especially on his own property. It was odd the way people ruled their tiny plots of land like kings. Were people who lived in cities the same way? Did people in downtown Chicago or in New York behave like that? It seemed a universally American tendency—to subordinate those who threatened your personal property, especially land and buildings. We were wonderful at fencing ourselves in, moating our little kingdoms. But from what? And to what end? The actual Dutch weren’t like that. Many years later, on a trip to Amsterdam, I would be astounded at the vast differences between the “Dutch” I’d known in Indiana and the Dutch in today’s Holland. Communal space and neighborly communion seemed to be core values, dictating both building and land design as well as social interactions. Despite the issues of strict dominion over the garden at the new house, we crossed the property line to pick corn from the test rows every night for dinner that summer. We found stringy, shucked hairs in strange places long into the fall.
When we moved, Latino immigrants seemed to have become as populous in town as the non-Dutch. With more land producing crops and more money to spend on production, more workers were needed, and the Latinos provided that labor. Our town now had three kinds of workers: union, nonunion, and migrant. There were plenty of field jobs available in our county, and the only people who worked them were teenagers and migrants. Occasionally a teacher who needed to make extra money over the summer would sign up. But there were no other able-bodied adults in line for these wages. I had heard that some of the migrant workers lived in rows of bunks in outbuildings scattered among the fields and farms. Hidden away. With their new faces, their dark hair contrasting with so much Dutch blond, came an inexplicable buzz of fear. “If they’re gonna live here, they best speak English,” my dad said, as if playing a stock character or caricatured bigot. His prejudice was one of the worst kinds, citing patriotism as the reason he held his beliefs and claiming that’s the way he grew up. I was to stay away from the goddamn bunkhouses if I ran across one that summer, because there was no telling what could happen. I ought not single him out, though. To be fair, this attitude was representative of the majority of adults with whom I was acquainted. My father’s voice was simply one that I heard loudly and often.
I thought his beliefs—this unilateral dismissal—were flawed, and I told him so. I could not understand our differences, where they had come from, or how it was possible to hold on to beliefs that were, to me, so obviously uninformed and unkind at their core. Before I was sent to my room for having an unpopular opinion, my mother piped up. She cited a Hispanic-on-white rape incident she claimed to have seen on the Chicago-based news, which is the only news we got. “But I’m not racist,” she added. “I’m only saying you have to watch out.” They were always trying to protect me from the wrong threats.