1. Hubris? Karma? Or “Stuff Happens?”
SUMMER 1972
The table was set for lunch, although they called it “supper.” I never understood that. To me the word “supper” was interchangeable with the word “dinner.” But I didn’t care what they called it. After a long, hot morning of hauling hay bales with my brother Bob and our friend Eric, I was hungry. And whatever what they called it, there sure was a lot of it! Hot fresh baked rolls with honey to slather over them. A huge bowl of boiled potatoes mashed with the peels still on them. Corn on the cob drizzled with melted butter. A pitcher of Kool-Aid that, for some reason, they called “nectar.” And chicken! Heaping mounds of it. Hot, crispy, golden fried. Delicious!
A guy didn’t make much money hauling hay bales on the Bornemann farm. A nickel per bale got divided three ways, and by the time the week was over if you had a few bucks you considered yourself lucky. That wasn’t the point of the job anyway. The real purpose was to build up arm strength before football season. The little bit of money you got was just icing on the cake.
Oh, yeah. I forgot to mention the cake. A thick, two-layer yellow cake with vanilla frosting waited for dessert. We may have been working for slave wages. But we ate like lords.
“Boys. Get you some chicken meat,” Mrs. Bornemann said with a smile. She was a round, jolly woman with a large head covered in white curls. She loved to watch teenaged boys eat. “Put some gravy on them ‘taters,” she commanded, gravy boat in hand, smothering the potatoes on my plate with rich, creamy goodness.
Mr. Bornemann ate in silence. He rarely spoke, and when he did it was usually to yell at us for lollygagging, meaning we weren’t getting the bales from the field to the flatbed behind his trailer nearly fast enough. I believed Mr. Bornemann was deeply disappointed with the youth of the day. We clearly didn’t understand the value of a hard day’s work, accustomed as we were to sitting around on our candy asses watching the color TV and listening to our rock and roll records on our stereos that our daddies bought for us with their hard-earned money. I’m sure he feared for the future of the America he loved, and I have no doubt that he resented having to pay us – let alone feed us.
“Get you some more chicken meat,” Mrs. Bornemann said as I gnawed a drumstick to the cartilage. “Best meat’s on the breast,” she said and I wondered why such a grandmotherly woman had no kids of her own.
That question would be answered by a quick glance at her husband. A grim, thin man with a pointed nose and crooked neck, his eyes were small, set and mean. Sparse white hair covered the crest of his small head like an early winter snow flurry atop a grain silo. His tiny mouth was set in a concrete frown. He didn’t look like he had a drop of blood to spare for something so frivolous as making love to a woman when there were CHORES to be done and CROPS to be raised and a HERD to take care of. Dammit.
There was another thing about him, too. He shook. I thought at first it was because of that ramshackle tractor he rode all day up and down, around and between the neat rows of evenly spaced alfalfa bales. But he shook even when the tractor was still and silent. His head and neck twitched and craned as if he were always trying to get a better look at something. His right arm seemed to have a mind of its own, as if it were trying to break free from its disagreeable owner and find a more hospitable, friendlier body with which to cleave. The only way he could drink his coffee was to hold the cup on the table top with both hands, dip his face down to the cup, and slurp.
He caught me watching him.
“Tend to your business!” he barked. I fixed my gaze on the half-eaten chicken breast on my plate.
“Eat some of these ‘taters,” Mrs. Bornemann said as she dropped a generous dollop of the spuds onto my brother’s plate. “And you, Henry, stop barking at the boys.”
“I’ll bark at who I wanna,” he muttered as he dipped his face back to the coffee cup. Bob and Eric regarded me, smiling the way boys smile when someone’s in trouble and it’s not them.
My Little Town in North Dakota
Mr. Bornemann picked up his napkin and I noticed that when he used his hand, it didn’t shake. He dabbed at his lips and dropped the napkin back onto the table as his hand resumed its back and forth rhythm. He glared at Eric.
“You, boy. You said you can drive a tractor? When you’re done, the three of you get back to where we left off. I’m gonna lay down awhile. No lollygagging.”
But without him there to keep an eye on us, lollygag we did and how! As Eric drove the tractor, I grabbed bales and pitched them onto the flatbed at Bob who stacked them. And we laughed and laughed as we mocked Mr. Bornemann’s voice, his appearance, his attitude, and mostly – his affliction.
“I wonder if he taught his dog to shake,” I said. Bob laughed.
“That chicken we had today, ya think it was ‘Shake ‘n Bake’?” Eric guffawed and almost drove the tractor into a row of bales as he looked back.
“Betcha five bucks it was,” he said. “Wanna shake on it?”
We laughed and laughed and laughed. The job only lasted a couple weeks more, but our fun at the expense of Mr. Bornemann’s neurological condition lasted all summer.
FROM THE MERRIAM-WEBSTER ONLINE DICTIONARY
Main Entry:
kar•ma
Pronunciation:
\ˈkär-mə also ˈkər-\
Function:
noun
Etymology:
Sanskrit karma fate, work
Date:
1827
1. Often capitalized : the force generated by a person’s actions held in Hinduism and Buddhism to perpetuate transmigration and in its ethical consequences to determine the nature of the person’s next existence.
