Limbo by A. Manette Ansay Read Free Book Online Page B

lonely weekend indeed. And you always showed up with room in your stomach—there was no point in protesting that you’d just eaten.
    Grandma Krier’s cavernous refrigerator was crowded with bottles and tins, stacks of wrapped platters, Tupperware containers of all sizes, mysterious lumps of foil, soft cheeses, bean salads, jars of raw whole milk with the cream thick at the top, and—in summer—zucchini breads and cakes, not to mention raw zucchinis, which always seemed to multiply in the crisper. A pungent, not wholly unpleasant odor rose from the racks when you opened the refrigerator door. Sometimes, my mother would have me lure my grandmother out of the house, and then she’d sneak into the kitchen and throw out what she called the questionables . The basement root cellar was overflowing as well, the bins filled with onions, apples, pears, potatoes with sprouts as long as my arms. Once, on a shelf behind the old wringer-style washer, I found a box of murky preserves dated 1955.
    For years, Grandma Krier worked as head cook at thecommunity center in Belgium, supervising wedding suppers and graduation banquets, funeral receptions and family reunion brunches. Before that, she’d cooked for her family of nine children, plus whichever of the “city cousins”—an assortment of relatives from Milwaukee—happened to be visiting. Summers, these numbers swelled further with the “trashers,” threshing crews made up of local farmers who took turns working one another’s fields, cultivating in spring, bringing in the harvest at summer’s end.
    â€œI don’t cook small,” she’d say, “because it just looks wrong in the pan.”
    My mother was the baby of the family, the youngest of seven sisters and a much awaited brother who’d arrived next-to-last— just as we’d given up hope , according to family lore. All had married and were busy raising children of their own within a twenty-mile radius of my grandmother’s farm. I had sixty-odd cousins and over a hundred second cousins, and it seemed that I saw at least a third of them every weekend on the farm. When the house got too full, we kids were sent out to the barn. Winters, we played hide-and-seek on the upper level where the heavy machinery was stored, or else we climbed the ladder to the hay mow, where we swung on the rope swing, or hunted for mouse nests, or stacked hay bales into spectacular, multiroomed forts. Outside, we sledded on my grandmother’s dead-endroad, which had two hills: one good, one better. Summers, we moved out into the surrounding fields, building forbidden forts in the corn, hunting for arrowheads between the rows of soybeans. We picked cherries and mulberries, asparagus and rhubarb, and when the spray-trucks came by to douse the apple orchard with pesticide, we concealed ourselves in the branches, weathering each blast, a game we called Hurricane . On rainy days, we set up dominoes in the sour-smelling milk house, played crazy eights or slapjack beneath the shelter of the porch awning. My grandmother would have happily provided us with a midafternoon snack, but my brother and I preferred to sneak into the basement through the root cellar door and raid the apple bin, the pantry—just as our mother had done.
    Our mother had loved farming as much as our father had hated it. (In junior high, when I asked for horseback-riding lessons, he refused, saying, “Don’t you see I work like I do so you won’t ever need to mess with things like that?”) Though she’d graduated from a Catholic women’s college, and now taught fifth grade, her arms were still thickly muscled from fieldwork, her shoulders broad from lugging buckets of milk, bales of hay, sacks of feed. Her father, my Grandpa Krier, had died in a farming accident when she was two, and my grandmother had managed to keep the family’s one hundred acres intact with only the help of her