Book Excerpt from *Cream of the Crop* -- "The Mysterious Red
Coat"
The Mysterious Red Coat
from *Cream of the Crop* (trade paperback; 188 pages; Sept.
2005; ISBN 1591138205; http://ruralroute2.com)
Only one piece of clothing remained in the closet. I lifted the
hanger off the bar and struggled to hold up the weight of the
heavy coat. The red wool coat had been hanging in the closet in
the small hallway between the kitchen and the bathroom for as
long as I could remember. Mom and Dad's bedroom--which my mother
said used to be the living room before they built onto the
house--was on the opposite side of the hallway.
I could not picture Mom and Dad's bedroom as a living room. But
then, I also could not picture the house with only two rooms
downstairs (a kitchen and a living room). My mother said my
great-grandfather had built our house as a temporary place to
live. He had started to build a much larger house, she said, but
in the fall, a forest fire had burned it down, and with winter
coming, they needed shelter. As it turned out, he never did get
around to building another house.
I pulled the coat out of the closet and turned toward my mother.
"You can leave that where it is," Mom said. "Nobody will be
wearing it."
During all the years the coat had been in the closet, I had
never seen anyone wearing it, and in fact, the only time I saw
it out of the closet was when my mother cleaned.
Every spring and fall, my mother cleaned the closet and
rearranged the summer and winter clothing so it was easier to
find what she and Dad needed. Since the polio made it difficult
for my mother to get in and out of the closet, part of my job
involved removing the clothes and putting them on the bed.
I turned the hanger holding the red wool coat so I could get a
good look at the back of it. Then I hung the coat in the closet
again, seeing as my mother had I should leave it there.
"Mom? What's that coat for?"
My mother paused in wiping off shoe boxes. She was sitting on a
chair in the hallway next to a pail of water with pine cleaner
in it. When my mother cleaned, she sat on a chair to do the
work. Her legs were not strong enough to hold her up for very
long.
"What do you mean, what's it for?" Mom replied. "It's a coat."
"I know that," I said. "But I've never seen anybody wear it.
It's Dad's isn't it?" "Yes, it is."
"So how come Dad has a red coat?" I asked.
The most colorful thing I had ever seen my father wear was the
red bandanna handkerchief he kept in the pocket of the blue
denim overalls he wore when he worked around the farm. Dad did
not always carry a red handkerchief, though. Sometimes he
carried a blue one. And when he carried a blue handkerchief, he
was dressed all in blue: pants, blue chambray work shirt, denim
chore jacket, blue-and-white pin-striped cap.
Mom leaned forward to pull out more of the boxes that I had
moved toward the front where she could reach them. "That's a
hunting coat," she said, her voice sounding muffled.
I was almost certain my mother had said 'hunting coat,' but
since she was leaning forward, with her head inside the closet,
she must have said something else that only sounded like hunting
coat. Maybe she'd said--'morning coat' or 'evening coat' or
'special coat.'
"What did you say?" I asked. "I said," Mom replied, pulling
back out of the closet, "it's a hunting coat."
"A hunting coat?" I said.
"Yes, a hunting coat."
I stared at her in astonishment. "Like for deer hunting?"
She nodded.
"But Dad doesn't hunt!"
"Not now," she said.
"Not now? You mean he used to?"
Mom pulled another box out of the closet. "He did a long time
ago. Before you were born. Would you go out in the kitchen and
get another scrub pail ready? While I'm wiping off boxes, you
can be wiping down the walls inside the closet and scrubbing the
floor."
Ever since I was big enough to help with the cleaning, or
rather, from the time I was old enough to know what my mother
meant when she said things like, 'wipe down the walls, not like
that, use the whole cloth and go up and down and back and
forth--and be sure you dip the rag in the pail and wring it out
for each new section you're washing,' it had been my job to wipe
down the inside of the closet. Mom said it was easier for me to
get in the closet than it was for my big sister, seeing as she
was taller than me.
I had taken two steps toward the kitchen when Mom cleared her
throat.
"No, wait," she said. "I guess I wasn't thinking, was I. If
you're going to wash the walls, you might as well put that red
coat on the bed with everything else."
I pulled the red coat out of the closet, laid it on the bed, and
then I went to the kitchen.
I stood at the kitchen sink, filled a pail with water and
thought about Dad going hunting. My father said animals have
feelings like we have feelings and that they deserve to live
their lives the way we deserve to live ours. Could it really be
possible that he had gone hunting? He also did not like guns,
and as far as I knew, he had never owned one. The fathers of
some of my school friends went deer hunting, though, and after
Thanksgiving, some of the other kids talked about eating
venison.
I had never tasted venison, and one time when I had mentioned
that a few of the kids at school had been talking about venison
for supper, Dad said I hadn't missed much. "It's gamy," he said,
"bitter-tasting, from all the acorns the deer eat."
I turned off the faucet and carried the pail of warm water and
Pinesol to the closet and stepped inside. At least wiping down
the closet on the inside wasn't as bad as cleaning the little
storage space under the steps that we called the pantry. The
smell of pine cleaner became almost over-powering in the pantry.
Half an hour later, when I was finishing up the closet floor, my
father came in for his afternoon coffee break.
"Daddy, I never knew you went hunting," I said, as I dumped the
pail of dirty water down the drain in the kitchen sink.
Dad poured a cup of coffee for himself and then reached into the
cookie canister for a handful of cookies. We usually had cookies
in the cookie canister. My sister liked to bake cookies, and her
favorites were chocolate chip, oatmeal and sugar cookies.
"Went hunting with Reuben and Gar," Dad replied. He sat down by
the table with his cup of coffee and cookies.
Reuben and Garfield were my mother's cousins. Mom was an only
child. Reuben and Garfield were older than Mom, but they had
grown up not far away and used to help my grandfather with his
farm work. Dad and Garfield often went fishing together.
Sometimes Reuben went with them. I had never heard of anyone
else named Garfield. His first name was Jens and his middle name
was Garfield, Mom said, but he preferred being called Garfield.
Sometimes Dad and Gar would let me go fishing with them.
Garfield would bait my hook for me, like Dad would, and then he
would tell me where to cast my line, also like Dad.
"Where did you go hunting with Reuben and Gar?" I asked.
"Oh," Dad said, "we went someplace up north."
'Up north' covered a big area. On several occasions we had gone
picking blueberries 'up north,' and the trip took a long time, a
couple of hours in the car. But Dad said there was much more 'up
north' north of that yet.
"When you went hunting, how come you wore that red coat and not
orange?" I asked.
Dad dipped a cookie into his coffee. "That's what everybody
wore," he said. "They didn't have orange hunting clothes back
then."
"Why don't you go hunting anymore?"
Dad finished chewing his bite of cookie and swallowed. "I only
went once," he said.
"Once? You never went again?"
Dad shook his head. "Nope. Just that one time. I didn't really
want to go, but they talked me into it."
He took a sip of coffee and reached for another cookie.
I pulled out a chair and sat down by the table.
"But Dad, it looks like a very nice coat."
My mother stood by the sink, rinsing out the scrub pail. "It is
a nice coat. Heavy. And it's made out of good wool, too."
I snitched a cookie off Dad's pile. "Just because you're not
going to wear it for hunting, you could still wear it. It's a
really pretty color."
My mother sat down at the other end of the table. "That's right,
Roy. You could still wear it. Kind of a shame to have that nice,
heavy wool coat but not get any use out of it."
Dad picked up his coffee cup and looked at me and then at Mom.
"Yes, it's a nice coat. Maybe I will wear it."
He took a sip of coffee and set the cup down on the table. "Of
course, you could wear it, too," he said to Mom.
"Me?" my mother asked, looking startled. "Why would I want to
wear it?"
"Why not?" Dad said.
"But where would I wear it?" Mom asked.
"When we go to town?" Dad replied. "Hah!" Mom said. "Can't you
see me wearing that bright red coat to the grocery store? People
stare at me enough as it is right now."
Whenever I went anywhere with my mother, I saw people staring at
her. Not everyone, of course. Not the people who knew her. But
people who did not know her would stare as she made her way
along, moving one crutch forward and swinging her leg out from
the hip, moving the other crutch forward and then swinging her
other leg out from the hip.
"Not everyone stares at you," I said.
"No," Mom agreed. "Not everyone."
"But they might if she was wearing that bright red coat," Dad
said.
My mother turned a hard-eyed stare in his direction, saw that he
was teasing and shook her head. "Oh--you!" she said.
For weeks after that, I waited to see if my father would wear
the red wool coat. But he did not. Not even to the barn.
Actually, I guess I wasn't surprised. I think I always knew red
just wasn't Dad's color.
Not that much red, anyway.
****************************
LeAnn R. Ralph is the author of the books "Cream of the Crop
(More True Stories from Wisconsin Farm)" (trade paperback, Sept.
2005); "Christmas in Dairyland (True Stories from a Wisconsin
Farm" (trade paperback 2003); "Give Me a Home Where the Dairy
Cows Roam" (trade paperback 2004); "Preserve Your Family History
(A Step-by-Step Guide for Interviewing Family Members and
Writing Oral Histories" (e-book 2004). You are invited to read
sample chapters, order books and sign up for the free
newsletter, Rural Route 2 News -- http://ruralroute2.com
************
Book Review: Twenty short but immensely entertaining stories,
December 3, 2005 Reviewer: Midwest Book Review; James A. Cox,
Editor-in-Chief (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviewsCream Of
The Crop: More True Stories Form A Wisconsin Farm is the third
anthology of biographical and anecdotal stories by LeAnn Ralph
about growing up on a Wisconsin dairy farm. In the 1960s there
were more than 60,000 dairy farms in Wisconsin, in May of 2004
the Wisconsin Agricultural Statistics Service recorded the
number of surviving dairy farms in the state at 15,591. The
number has dropped even lower since then. That dairy farming
reality is what helps to give LeAnn's deftly told stories their
nostalgia for a rural lifestyle that is not-so-slowly
disappearing in the Badger state. There are twenty short but
immensely entertaining stories in this simply superb anthology.
They range from "What's in a Name", to "She'll Be Comin' Round
the Cornfield", to "Gertrude and Heathcliff", to the title story
"cream Of The Crop". LeAnn continues to write with a remarkable
knack for making people and events come alive in the reader's
imagination. Also very highly recommended are LeAnn's two
earlier anthologies about life on the family farm in Wisconsin:
Give Me A Home Where The Dairy Cows Roam (1591135923, $13.95)
and Christmas In Dairyland: True Stories From A Wisconsin Farm
(1591133661, $13.95). ************