Authors: Jonathan Raban
I cut straight across the river to Andalusia. Angry with Iowa, I felt that the climate in Illinois was healthier. Besides, shielded from the wind behind a long chain of islands, the still water of Andalusia Slough offered a manageable alternative route for another nine or ten miles downstream. I filled my spare gas tanks at Jack Tillia’s Harbor and told Mr. Tillia about my troubles in Buffalo. “You been over there?” he said. “Lucky all you lost was your hat.”
A big speedboat was circling in the slough. It came close in to the harbor.
“Hey!” shouted a man on board. “We’ve been looking out for you. Ain’t you coming to my daddy’s pig roast? He’s
expecting
you.”
I had forgotten Harvey Schwartz’ invitation in Frick’s Bar, two days before. Mr. Frick had said that Harvey was a hard man to refuse, but it had never occurred to me that he’d send out a search party. It was good to be rescued. My bags were bundled onto the speedboat. I joined the two men and a woman in the stern, and we went crashing through the slough and into the main river. I had never seen the Mississippi treated so casually. We skipped from wave to wave at twenty-five knots, with the bow of the boat pointing into the sky. We played in the wake of a tow, treating it like a ski jump. As I felt my stomach being left some yards behind, I hoped the river knew that I wasn’t doing the driving. It was going to have plenty of future opportunities to take its revenge.
Harvey’s white farmhouse stood on a neat rectangle of green which looked as if it had been gouged out with a chisel from the rolling sweep of high corn that surrounded it. Pickups and station wagons were parked fender to fender in a herringbone pattern up the driveway. On the roof of one truck, a transistor radio was broadcasting a college football game. Iowa State was at home to the University of Iowa, and as the State backfield sprinted for the line and scored, a great yodeling cheer went up from Harvey’s party to a sky of empty blue in which a crop-spraying light airplane showed as a distant twinkle in the sun.
All morning and afternoon the pig, harnessed to a generator by an ingenious system of pulleys and bicycle chains, had been turning on its spit above a trench of burning charcoal. Harvey stood over it like Abraham with a knife. Carving a pig was a serious business, and at these pig roasts the host, solemn and absorbed in his office, took on the role of celebrant priest. The flashing knife was ritually sharpened, the first incision made, and then the line of paper plates came out, the jokes, the napkins and the sense of being present at a boisterous social eucharist. The separate smells of corn dust, pork crackling and bruised grass got muddled up together to produce the distinctive, ceremonial odor of pig roast.
Someone should market “Pig Roast” and sell it to homesick Iowans in little crystal perfume vials. Had I been able to put it in a bottle, it would conjure up late summer in the Midwest with far more evocative precision than any photograph. It would bring back the barrels of beer on their cradles, long trestle tables, baseball caps, checked shirts, party dresses, lonely houses set a mile or two apart across the fields, pointed
spires of wooden churches, arrow-straight tracks of loose asphalt, and a humpy, treeless landscape looking like the yellow dunes of the Arabian desert. The smell would bring back voices, too—all talking with the loud vigor of farming people who spent most of their weekdays in industrious solitude and for whom these Saturday-afternoon bouts of partying with their neighbors, along with churchgoing on Sundays, made up the essential threads with which they knitted themselves into a cohesive and self-confident community.
I sprawled on the grass drinking beer from a Bavarian tankard with a lid, and talked to Harvey’s wife. Mrs. Schwartz worked as a seamstress in the bridal section of a Davenport department store. Her main job there was to take wedding dresses, manufactured in New York and designed to fit the anorexic East Coast figure, and make them big enough for the altogether heftier brides of the Midwest. She was an expert in fillets, gussets and secret panels.
“When you say big, how big do you mean?”
“Oh, some of them are forty-five, forty-six, forty-seven round the hips. And that’s when they’re young. What are they going to be like when they’re old?”
I elaborated my own theory of a fatness map of the United States. Areas where European immigration had been most recent, and ancestral memories of hunger closest, would correspond with the forty-seven hip; while states that had been settled before 1776 would register least in the way of excess fatty tissue. Girth would generally increase from east to west and from south to north. The flab capital of the U.S.A. should be located somewhere near here, in the triangle of Minnesota, Iowa and the Dakotas.
“I don’t know about that,” said Mrs. Schwartz, “but folks around here sure eat too much. I think it’s real sad. You know, I rip those pretty gowns from New York right apart, and I feel sorry for the guys that are marrying those girls.”
“Well, the guys themselves aren’t exactly willowy.”
“Yeah, but it’s different for a man. A woman can feel proud of a big husband. It means she’s fed him good.”
Her own husband joined us. Harvey had a healthy solidity to him, but must have been a disappointment to Mrs. Schwartz. He was chasing up another truant guest. Bill, his nearest neighbor, hadn’t shown up, so Harvey was driving out to his farm to fetch him. “Bill’s a workaholic. You have to dig the guy out of that farm of his like a coon.”
Harvey and I rode off in a pickup to retrieve the malingerer. Bill’s
house was three long fields away, across a shallow valley and a muddy creek. Bill himself was tinkering with a combine harvester in his barn. “We was just coming,” he said. “I heard that one before,” said Harvey. “Still, you ain’t the worst this time. This guy here, he had to be fetched in off the Mississippi in a boat.”
Having extracted a sworn promise that everyone would return to his pig roast within the half hour, Harvey left me with Bill to be shown over the farm. In the fine house with its fenced drive, the new grain silo, the expensive farm machinery, the dryers, cattle pens and pig battery, there were the ingredients of a modern Horatio Alger story. Bill had been born in Germany, and his father had come to Davenport to work as a carpenter. Bill still looked more German than Iowan. Serious-faced, blond-haired, he spoke with a slightly over-emphatic precision which gave away the fact that he’d acquired English as his second language. After high school in Davenport, he had served an apprenticeship as a carpet layer, but had always ached for a job on a farm. He had saved and borrowed and built up his holding acre by acre. To start with, he had gone on laying carpets, working the little ground he’d bought in the evenings and on weekends. Gradually his farm had become big enough to just support him. Now it was an empire, and Bill was one of the new Midwestern millionaires, on paper at least. Ten years ago he was buying his land at $450 an acre; now it was worth around $4,000, and he had nearly 850 acres of it in piecemeal lots scattered over several miles of eastern Iowa.
“See this little gizmo? That measures the exact moisture of the grain as I’m cutting it. Once we had to do it by the feel of the thing. Now you just look at the needle, and you know for sure what you’re doing. I’m a believer in technology. Every new gizmo that comes out, I’ll try it. You know my motto? If you can do it by electricity or hydraulics, don’t do it manual.”
He took me to the edge of the field of corn he had started to harvest that morning and broke off a big, glistening cob from its stalk. He turned it gently in his hands. His baby. I’d never guessed that there were so many fine points to admire in an ear of corn: the slight dent in each grain which showed that it had begun to dry out and was ready for harvest; the even number of rows; the dark dot at the top of the cob; the black silk in which it was encased—one strand for every grain, these hairs pollinated the corn and were dangerously vulnerable to all sorts of blight and disease.
“And that’s a perfect ear?” I asked.
“Near enough. You won’t find one much better in this state.”
“You must be a happy man.”
“I guess,” he said gravely. “Yeah, if I get to thinking of it, I am a happy man.”
He was his own builder, carpenter and engineer. He fixed his machines for himself; every shed and stall on his farm was an example of his craftsmanship. He let his age slip out by accident; at thirty-seven he was exactly as old as I was. Wanting, perhaps, to excuse a life so much more casual and ramshackle than his, I had taken him for a man in his fifties. Side by side with Bill, gazing into the smelly recesses of his pig battery, I felt like a green and irresponsible adolescent. When I talked about what I did for a living, I could see the unspoken reproach in his face: why
had
I idled my time away in words when I could have spent it building up something really solid and rewarding like this farm?
His wife and children had gone on to the pig roast. As we got into the car, Bill kept on sneaking wistful glances back to the farm, his head full of undone jobs, his eye on the hour or two of daylight still left to him. Every lost minute seemed to sting him like a flagellant’s scourge. Then, as we recrossed the creek, his manner suddenly changed. Partying too was a serious duty, and Bill was a good neighbor. At the pig roast he partied with almost exactly the same degree of single-mindedness he brought to farming. As a Horatio Alger hero should, Bill made me feel that I was one of society’s natural inadequates. I had never been equipped to follow the alpine, German path of his example.
The pig roast had divided in two. The under-thirties were out on the lawn playing volleyball, their leaping figures rising high over the top of the corn, in black outline against the low sun. The older parents and their small children had gathered around tables in the shadowy barn, which Harvey was rigging out with storm lanterns. As the sky dimmed, so the space around us seemed to stretch. Our small, companionable huddle of light and talk turned into a fragile ark afloat in the kind of enormous darkness which no European country is sufficiently big, or flat, or empty enough to contain. Some of the stars that I could see through the barn door must have been faraway farmhouses, but in the Iowa night it was impossible to tell what was five miles away and what a billion.
“Do people in England have a social life like we do?” Mrs. Schwartz asked.
“Well, yes; but.”
Mrs. Schwartz told me about the ordinary social round of Scott County: the wedding parties, winter dances, card tournaments, anniversary barbecues, June graduation parties, pig roasts and clambakes
which cemented the scattered farms into a neighborhood. “What about jokes?” said Bill. “Do the English play jokes on each other like the people here?”
The winter before, a cow had died on a local farmer. It had turned, like Bill’s giant snowblower, into a “community asset.” For weeks before the thaw, the cow’s corpse had made a festive tour from farmhouse to farmhouse. It had appeared outside Bill’s window one morning, knee-deep in the snow and covered in show rosettes from head to tail. A few days later it had been seen strung up between two tall barns on another farmer’s land. A banner hanging from its feet read:
THE COW THAT JUMPED OVER THE MOON
. Before it eventually defrosted, the cow paid a call on every house for miles around. It peered through girls’ bedroom windows, replaced cars in garages, climbed trees and telegraph poles, and stubbornly blocked driveways at their narrowest points. It was affectionately remembered and its decomposition sadly mourned.
The sense of being members of a real local community absorbed the people at the pig roast. Yet it also somehow absolved them from the responsibilities of American citizenship in the wider sphere. No one, for instance, had bothered to turn out to see President Carter when the
Delta Queen
had stopped at the Quad Cities. The general run of pig-roast opinion was that Carter was an honest man, a tryer, and a bore. His Mississippi trip had been an attempt to win the hearts of the heartland, but he had passed by Scott County without raising much more than a faint flicker of curiosity that an American President was out in the backyard. In two days’ time, Pope John Paul was due to arrive in Boston. Next week, he was going to celebrate Mass at Des Moines, a hundred and fifty miles away.
That
was something else. Already the
Des Moines Register
had conducted a statewide poll which had shown that there was a huge majority of people who agreed with the statement that the Pope’s visit was “the most important event ever in the history of Iowa.”
“When the Pope comes to Des Moines,” Bill said, “
everybody
will try to get to see him.”
“They’ll need telescopic sights,” said Bill’s wife in a chilling, if unintentional, allusion.
On Sunday morning in Andalusia, I loaded my boat, then went to church. Sitting on a cushioned pew at the back of the Community Baptist Church, I was struck by the hymn numbers that had been put up on the boards at the front. They were all in five and six figures.
Hymn 50620?
I had known that Baptists were strong on hymn singing,
but even so, to have more than fifty thousand of the things seemed a little excessive. How could anyone hope to remember the tunes? It took a while for me to realize that all the numbers I could see were not hymns but dollars, and the boards displayed today’s takings for various enterprises like the Building Fund and the Faith Mission. In place of an altar there was a backlit scene of what might have been Colorado: a misty lake, pines and snowcapped mountains. A furled American flag leaned against the whitewashed wall.
The pastor was of a piece with his church. His smart beige suit had been manufactured from some kind of petroleum extract. His manners were those of a successful brush salesman. He exuded an air of breezy well-being from every synthetic-fiber pore. Next Sunday, he said, we had a real treat coming to us: Brother Papadopoulos would be along, playing his trumpet, and we’d be looking to have a good time with the Lord.
“Okay, then, Brother Gary—let’s have a song!”