Moon Sauce

Moon Sauce

Marlene Jacobson

Copyright © 2019 Marlene Jacobson

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

New York, NY

First originally published by Page Publishing, Inc. 2019

Cover art by Jean-Guy Richard, a painting named Waiting for Marlene.

ISBN 978-1-64544-392-6 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64544-393-3 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Sprung Up on the Prairie

Early Flights

Farming

Getting the Cows from the Pasture

Violet Svenson and Violet Chicken

My Horse

The Barn

Baling Hay

Reproduction

Relatives

Schoolhouse and Wagon

The School Bus

Wednesdays Were Wampum Days

Food

Kongsvinger Lutheran Church

Swimming Lessons

Seventh Grade

Dating Begins

Still on the Prairie

Truth is not everybody’s reality.

Only my family’s real names are used, and all but a couple are dead. Everybody else still living, I protect with a pseudonym.

To my children, Zebulon and Alexis, whom I have loved unconditionally since I knew they existed in my womb and have done what I could with what I had to foster and nurture them in ways I wished I would have been.

Also to my husband, Jean-Guy, who has always brought out the best in me and encouraged me as no one else ever has.

Sprung Up on the Prairie

Shadows grew long in the woods. I hadn’t fed the chickens yet, and I needed to do so before dark or the boogeymen would get me. Surveying the granary, I spied a pail lying on its side and sprinted so fast, though I didn’t dare look down, my legs might have been spinning like a roadrunner’s wheels in a cartoon. I scooped up a bucket of corn and held on to the handle with both hands, dragging it across the ground to the chicken coop. I shoved it over and rolled the bucket to spill a row of grain for the fowl. I still had to fetch water. Clutching the pail, I dashed to the barn and used both hands and a jump to lift the pump handle. I had learned out of frustration to jump when I pulled on the pump handle. I wasn’t strong enough to pull it up with just my arms. I had to grab on, and leap up to provide enough force to raise the handle to turn on the pump. Water sputtered then gushed into the pail, almost knocking it over.

A cacophony of squawking erupted. Flapping wings rustled the air. Terror ran electric surges of adrenaline throughout my body, tingling in my limbs and knotting my stomach. I grabbed the water bucket and galloped lopsided with its weight. I didn’t stop to pour water into the chicken pans, but left the bucket in the coop and fled toward the house.

The geese hissed and stretched their necks toward me as if they were magnets and I were covered in metal sheeting. Would that I were! The geese nipped my ankles, shins, and buttocks, leaving bright pinch marks along my backside. I tore into the brush at the edge of the woods, deflecting them while I escaped into the trees. The geese never went into the darkening grove. They hissed and honked through my finish line into the backyard, around the house, and in through the door.

I made it into the house before dark, before the boogeymen, but I didn’t escape the geese that stood watch over the farmyard, guarding against all possibility that I would wander too far. I bent over, panting, my head pounding as blood gushed through my veins, and I could hear my heart beating, pulsing its rhythm in my ears. My legs and butt stung from the goose nips. It’s not true that you will die if you can hear your heartbeat. It happens to me all the time.

Go down into the cellar and get some sauce for supper, Milly hollered over her shoulder to me as she turned over the pork chops she was frying in a big, black cast-iron skillet.

Anker sighed and shook his head. I have a whole barn full of beef, and you’ve got a coop full of chickens, and you always cook pork chops that you buy in town.

He lifted the big linoleum-covered hatch from the kitchen floor. The boards underneath were dirty and splintered like the beams in the barn. He stuck one massive finger in the big ring to lift the cellar door. I could get my whole hand into that ring and couldn’t lift the hatch at all. I went down backward, climbing down the steep structure that was half ladder, half stairs. Anker leaned down and pulled the chain to turn on the light. My heart stopped pounding enough to see the shelves crammed together, leaning against each other to stay upright. I could see the black dirt walls behind the shelves. My breath swirled in front of my face, hot and steamy compared to the frost-lined dirt walls and frigid air in the cellar. I scanned the jars of sauce. I looked past the cobwebs, dust, bugs, and mice scurrying for cover. Pickled crab apples, strawberry jam, rhubarb jam, rhubarb sauce, dill pickles, watermelon pickles, beet pickles, chokecherry jam, cherry sauce. I lingered on those. The thought of tart cherries covered with whole, raw milk tingled my mouth now. I liked to spoon them up and spit the cherry pits back out into the spoon and line them up around my plate. There were the jars of canned peaches, halves, and slices. I grabbed a jar of peach halves and carefully climbed back up, set the quart jar up on the kitchen floor, and climbed up out of the cellar.

I got some moon sauce.

Milly jerked her head from the frying pan and looked at Anker. Her mouth opened, but she didn’t say anything. Anker looked at me with his eyes wide. His mouth opened, too, but didn’t say anything. Then they stared at me.

Are the full moons okay? Or, should I get the crescent moons, or maybe cherries instead?

I missed the joke while I was in the cellar. Even though my parents could never fathom why I had to look at everything in a peculiar way, the whole family always called canned peaches moon sauce after that. I just never saw things the way anybody else did. Most of the time, parents, Sunday school teachers, aunts, uncles, even cousins rolled their eyes, threw up their arms, or just stared at me, shaking their heads. I still marvel at coming from the same gene pool as the rest of my family. I didn’t even call my parents Mom and Dad. I called them Anker and Milly because everybody else did. I’m not sure if my siblings called them by their first names like I did, but they were much older than me and thus had little influence. I think I called them by their given names instead of familial relationship names because I was observant enough to pick up on what their names were and observe them as other humans rather than blindly accept they were my parents. I often thought I must be adopted anyway. I wished I had been adopted. It would have explained a lot.

Yet I saw moons, full and in crescents, not just peaches. Peaches tasted of sunshine and tropical paradises. Paradises that lived in my imagination. Sweet, tart, smooth, tantalizing peaches, exotic glimpses of indulgence. I filled my jars with adventure, dreams, fantasy, and hope. I read stories long before I attended school full-time. I ran the stories over in my mind like movies and starred as the heroine.

I placed the moon sauce on the table. Anker opened the jar for me, and I scooped peaches and poured the peach syrup out of the jar into bowls on the table, being careful to give everyone the same amount of moon sauce.

We only got oranges once a year. My aunt Ruthie would ship a case from Florida, and my mom’s brothers and sisters would divide it up. We would each get one orange, but it was always huge and sweet. I feared getting scurvy or beriberi like sailors who couldn’t get fresh fruit. Except we ate fruit that we grew. We had an apple orchard, so we had apples in the basement, kind of crinkly by the time new ones replaced them in the fall. Applesauce, apple pie, apple crisp. We had other fruit trees, too, that provided chokecherry wine, chokecherry sauce, cherry sauce, and strawberries from the vegetable garden. Rhubarb sauce and rhubarb pie and rhubarb desserts were pretty mainstay as sugar delivery systems too.

Peach season was the most dramatic. The only fruit we did not grow were peaches. Milly would buy crates of peaches, stacked up in the back seat with me to lean on them to keep them from falling over when she turned corners. I would dream about what we would make out of the white rough pine of the boxes, stamped with indigo and red letters and exotic drawings. I hoped for doll beds, doll surgery tables for when I played doctor, not in the naughty way, but play that I was a doctor and my dolls were my patients in need of dramatic surgeries and treatments. Reality usually prevailed, and the boxes held machine parts, tools, sewing materials, and all sorts of practical uses for a ready-made drawer. Each peach came individually wrapped in pink paper. Those made many a doll skirt and playhouse napkin. My oldest brother liked peach season because he used the peach wrappers for toilet paper in the outhouse; it was much softer than pages from the Sears catalog. I didn’t do that because I was the baby of the family and viewed by my older siblings as spoiled rotten because I had an indoor bathroom with a bathtub, sink, and flush toilet my whole life. I still used the outhouse, especially in spring, summer, and fall. Winter was too cold. The thought of using an outhouse in winter strengthened my bladder and bowels to wait my turn of six people inside with modern plumbing. When I used the outhouse, I brought tissue with me or went without.

My mother told me that when she was pregnant with me, she thought I was a tumor. I think she was serious. Maybe she was trying to be funny and I just didn’t get the humor; however, I heard no other version about what my arrival was actually like until my fifty-sixth birthday. Milly had always told me she thought she was going to die; it was so horrible and painful. She thought I was going to die, too, because I had the cord around my neck, was blue, cold, and mad. She told me that a tumor could have just been cut out, but instead, she had to put up with me. On my fifty-sixth birthday, I got a card from my sister, detailing my arrival, a story I had never heard even though my parents had been gone for a decade and a half by that time.

She relayed that my mother sat down at the kitchen table with my three older siblings. They had supper ready and were awaiting my father who was washing up before the meal. She said Milly’s face was red and she was all giggly. She said that we were going to have an addition to the family. My brother, who was six at that time, asked, Do we have enough potatoes? After supper, Milly and Anker left and a neighbor woman came to stay for the next week. Milly had said that she was sure it was a girl and that her name would be Marlene Joy. Anker called the hospital the following day, learned he had fathered a girl, inquired when he should pick up his baby and wife, and resumed his farming for the next week. He did not bring my older siblings to visit Milly and me at the hospital. He did not visit Milly and me at the hospital. He farmed and went to town to bring us home a week or so later. What point would there be to go see a baby girl! If I had been a son, it would have been worth a gander.

I grew up in a tiny farmhouse until we built a new ranch-style rambler when I was in fifth grade. We built a new barn when I was five years old. I can’t remember or imagine how we milked the cows while we tore down the old one and built the new one. All I remember is spending hour upon hour carrying a bucket and picking up the used nails, filling bucket after bucket so that we wouldn’t drive over the nails and get flat tires on our car, tractors, trailers, and farm implements. The carpenters were drunks. Milly would stomp around and sputter all day when they didn’t show up to work on the barn, but it finally got built and painted dark barn red with white trim.

The original farmhouse in which Anker was born had four rooms on the ground floor and two lean-tos that were added on. One add-on was a small porch, the only entrance and exit to the house, unless you counted going out an upstairs window and climbing down the pole that held the TV antenna, but that exit was pretty much reserved for my brother Wayne when he needed to escape getting beaten up by my sister. The TV antenna pole wasn’t a good exit, besides the obvious navigation challenge, because every year bees built a hive on it. He got stung once so badly he had to go to the hospital. Most of the bees that crept inside were half dead, and you just had to be careful not to touch them or step on them. Once a year, Milly would call a beekeeper, and he would come and take the hive away and leave us a couple of jars of honey. The porch had a small closet with a curtain to hide manure-crusted overalls, boots, and a box of my brothers’ old toys. We had a deep freeze and an old warped desk that Anker used for his seed corn records and sales when he sold Pioneer Seed Corn in the spring. This was all that miniscule porch could hold. Only one person could come in at a time through that porch, but it was too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer to spend much time greeting and bidding goodbyes anyway. Glass jars lined the windowsills. My brother trapped pocket gophers and striped gophers and put the gopher tails and feet in jars with salt. This kept the tails and feet from rotting and smelling until he took them to town and the county paid him a bounty for trapping them. One year, the Sunday school superintendent reported the offering money total we had collected during the year to help poor children in Africa. We children brought pennies, nickels, dimes to put in the offering plate each Sunday. On our birthdays, we got to put a penny for each year into a little bank that looked like a miniature church. As we inserted each penny into the coin slot, a light lit in the belfry. Standing in front of the Sunday school inserting pennies into that church bank was the highlight of my birthdays. That year, the total included dollars, cents, gopher tails, and gopher feet. I knew who donated those!

I used to play in this porch sometimes, going through my brothers’ toys, driving the metal tractor through the DDT dusted on the floor, making tracks around the mouse trails and dead crickets. My favorite, and the only toy absconded from the porch, was my brother Wayne’s Roy Rogers cap pistols and the holster that held them. I used the guns and holsters wearing Wayne’s outgrown suede fringed Davey Crocket jacket. I stalked the woods surrounding our farmstead, ready to shoot bears. I didn’t worry too much about renegade Indians because we didn’t see them around anymore, and I knew they would be friendly. Anker told me that when he was a little boy, the Lakota used to travel through their farm. His mother, my grandmother who died long before I was born, would invite them in for a meal, as was customary for rural Minnesota farm folk. He had been fascinated that they didn’t put butter on their bread but took some on their plates and when they were done eating would smear it on their moccasins. Anker’s mother thought that was kind of funny, but my dad thought it made a lot of sense. I did too. Of course, my mom just sniffed. I don’t know if it was because she didn’t have a special story like that or because she thought they were dumb like she thought everybody else was dumb.

The porch had a door opposite of the outside door that opened into the kitchen. We could hardly move around in this room, either, because it was small and held so much stuff. We had an old cookstove. Some people call these a woodstove, but we mostly burned corncobs in it. We cooked on it, we kept a fire burning in it to help heat our house, and we had a kettle of water on it all the time in the winter to help humidify the dry air. We melted snow on it to wash our clothes and rinse our hair because water from the well was really rusty and hard. We had an electric stove too. We used that to fry bacon and eggs for breakfast and bake pies, cookies, cakes, and bars in its oven. The woodstove still worked best to make homemade stews, soups, and lefse. The cellar door was on the floor between the cookstove and a cupboard that held a few store-bought luxuries that we didn’t grow on our farm. I used to snitch little glass jars of shrimp cocktail when Milly was napping. That’s where she kept canned oysters and her little jars of baby food to eat when she was sick. We had a big jug of Watkins orange nectar on the bottom shelf, so I could reach it easily, set the pitcher on the floor, and pump the nectar syrup into the pitcher without lifting the jug out of the cupboard. All I had to do was add water, and we had a pitcher of orange drink, which we called nectar, a special treat from the usual whole, raw milk. Old, painted plywood kitchen cupboards filled the wall above and beside the stove. A little pantry nestled in the corner that had a small sink and a pump that pumped water from the cistern. We heated water from that on the cookstove, too, to wash dishes in dishpans on the kitchen table. We threw the dishwater out the front door. In the summer, we threw it on a snowball bush to kill the bugs that swarmed around it. In the winter, the water practically froze in midair and disappeared in the snow. In the corner opposite the sink and pump rested a mangle used to iron wrinkles out of clothes. My sister’s friends were fascinated by that mangle. They would iron their handkerchiefs over and over, amazed at the fabric revolving on a belt and steamed by the hood. A foot pedal set the belt in motion so it could be stopped and started with the press of a foot. Ironing my dad’s dress shirts and our dresses was pretty quick work once you got the hang of it. Ironing tablecloths, sheets, and cotton slips took no time at all. In the middle of the kitchen was a many-times-painted table and six chairs. At each place, we kept a small terry kitchen towel that we used instead of table napkins. We washed those once a week when we did laundry.

The kitchen opened into a lean-to on the back of the house, opposite of the porch. This room had a wringer washing machine and an electric clothes dryer. Clotheslines were strung across the room to hang clothes to dry when we couldn’t put them on the clotheslines outside when it was raining or in the winter. We had a big wooden clothes rack to dry clothes on that we often moved into the living room by a small oil burner, which was the only source of heat besides the cookstove in the kitchen. Makeshift shelving lined the walls. These shelves housed large cookware, old clothes, extra blankets, and junk. Milly never threw anything away.

The living room also held a table, but this one had a mahogany varnish and had leaves to add or take out depending on how many people needed to sit down to eat. When we had company, we ate in the living room at that table. The chairs had curlicues carved in the back that looked a lot like a music symbol. We had a couch, a mahogany coffee table to match the dining table, a desk to match the dining table, and a TV. I liked to hang a blanket over the front, move the chair out of the desk, and play in my own private house under the desk. Anker had a recliner in the corner next to the oil burner. That was the warmest spot in the house. I unlaced his Redwing boots every night and pulled them off his feet. Then I could climb up into his lap. I fell asleep in the comfort and warmth so often he called me Snoosie, which someone who didn’t have the Norwegian brogue that he had would pronounce Snoozie. I spent many evenings reading the Sears and Roebuck catalog behind the oil burner, circling toys I would like to get for Christmas, even though I never got any of the items I had marked. I think my optimism is innate.

A younger cousin had picked up a baby chick on the highway early one spring. It had fallen from a truck. He lived in town and couldn’t keep the chick, so they brought it out to our farm. We hadn’t hatched any baby chicks yet because it was still too cold, and we didn’t have electricity in the chicken coop to run a heat lamp. I named the chick Peckademus, and we put it in a cardboard box with straw behind the oil burner. I fed it grain in an empty sardine can and gave it water in an empty oyster can. As Peckademus grew, she started to fly out of the box and would roost on the back of the sofa. I tried to clean up chicken poop with toilet paper before Milly saw it to keep my mom quiet. Milly kept threatening to make chicken and dumpling soup out of her. When spring came, we had a difficult time convincing Peckademus that she should join the other chickens. She kept coming back to the house and kept sneaking in when somebody opened the door. When Milly took the storm windows off to replace them with screens for the spring, Peckademus kept flying in the window and alighting on the back of the couch. Eventually, Peckademus joined the flock that came to a final roost on our kitchen table, served to the family.

My parents’ bedroom was off the living room. That room barely held