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On Growing Up in a Small Town
Lisa J. Bigelow
When I lived in Francis, South Dakota, my family could see the sunset from our kitchen window as we ate dinner. The sun would drift slowly down what looked like twenty or thirty miles away, the land was so flat. Looking back, I think my parents timed it so that regardless of season we’d see those streams of pink and orange spilling over the horizon as we ate, so we’d have something to think about if the conversation stilled. At the time, though, the timing didn’t seem orchestrated. It had always been so to me, and I took it for granted.
My father rarely let the conversation stall for long, however. He always had some whimsical musing about how to rearrange our vegetable garden, about exciting new contests for the county fair, about evolution or reincarnation or the purpose of life.
“Cow Chip Palace,” he told my mother and me at dinner one night in early spring, the year I was fifteen. A dreamy look clouded his eyes. He held his forkful of macaroni and cheese suspended, forgotten. “Just imagine.”
I was caught off guard by the comment, which was even odder than usual for my father. All I could picture was a huge heap of cow dung, covered with flies and stinking to high heaven. Bemucked figures with crowns of hay wallowing in the stench. I snickered.
My mother shot me a look that wordlessly said, “Watch it, kid!” She wasn’t smiling. Did she actually know what my father was talking about, and did she take it seriously? Addressing my father, she asked mildly, “What are we supposed to imagine, dear?”
My father’s expression made the transition from gleeful to intense. His moustache quivered. “Surely you remember that we live just fifty miles west of the Corn Palace in Mitchell — Moorish architecture, covered in corn, lights up at night?”
My mother and I nodded. I barely restrained myself from rolling my eyes. We’d been to the Corn Palace once when I was about seven years old. My parents had told me, when I complained of boredom, that I was “too young to properly appreciate it.” Who hadn’t heard of it, though? Most of my schoolmates had been dragged there by their parents at one time or another, as if visiting the Corn Palace were a sign of culture, some sort of North Central pilgrimage.
“The Corn Palace,” my father informed us, “is a starred attraction of the Triple A. The folks that run it must be raking it in! They’re written up in every tour book of the North Central that’s worth anything. And really, I’m surprised they’re not sued for false advertising. The whole thing isn’t entirely made of corn, as you might expect from the name,” he added conspiratorially.
Dread entered me through my ears and dropped down to my stomach, and I forgot about my macaroni and cheese, too. Cow Chip Palace. Oh God.
“Cow dung, now, it’s got natural adhesive,” my father went on. “Think of wigwams! Think of adobe, think of log cabins! Mud holds everything together and fills in the cracks. Dung’s a step up from mud. And cow chips would make perfect bricks.” My father shoveled a forkful of macaroni into his mouth and chewed vigorously.
I poked my own pasta. It was already cool and rubbery.
My mother was silent for a moment, perhaps wondering if she’d ever be able to forgive my father for building a palace out of cow manure in our backyard. When she spoke, though, all she said was, “Do you think the neighbors would agree to help? Collecting the manure, I mean.”
My family didn’t own more than half a dozen cows, which we kept for milking. We made cheese and ice cream to sell at our restaurant in town. If my father was dreaming of a palace of great proportions — which he almost certainly was — it would take years to save enough dung.
“I’m sure I can convince a few folks to lend me their spare. I’d never ask for more than they could give,” my father replied charitably. Clearly he had already thought this through thoroughly. “I’m even prepared to walk the pastures,” he added. “I’d like to get this thing up and running within the year.”
“Well,” my mother said, “if nothing else it sounds like a great artistic venture. Just don’t get rid of the restaurant, okay?” She grinned at him, and he winked at her: my parents, miraculously still in love. I stared at my food, and that was the end of the conversation that night.
My father, like many people who live in small towns, was an entrepreneur. He had grown up in Des Moines and gone to college in St. Louis, but when his grandfather died and left him the farmhouse in Francis, he couldn’t resist the idea of cows and chickens and open air. It would be a sort of freedom, to do what he liked, to leave behind the bustle and nine-to-five work days of the city. By that time my parents were married, and my mother, infinitely patient woman that she was, decided that she could run a tailoring business in South Dakota as well as in Missouri. So Francis, South Dakota, population soon to be 733, it was.
My father’s entrepreneurial ventures, however, went far beyond farming or running a tailoring shop or even running a restaurant (which he did, when it occurred to him). My father had boldness, ingenuity, a nose for business, and a dreamer’s heart. And, when I was three years old, he was blessed with the birth of a two-headed goat.
The poor kid was the offspring of an ordinary billy and an ordinary nanny, and the two had previously produced half a dozen ordinary offspring. My father, who was well-read, named the oddball Cerberus, after the three-headed dog at the Gates of Hell. Hardly anyone in town could say the name properly, though, and before long the pathetic creature was christened Bud by the general populace. I remember discussions between my parents about whether Bud was one creature or two, given that he had two brains, and whether he should be given two names in accordance. But Bud (the collective Bud) was docile and stupid and never seemed to act of more than half a brain, much less two, so we stopped worrying about it.
The restaurant my father had opened after the move did good business, as Francis is not far off the freeway. He was able to hire on a full staff, giving him time for other pursuits, like the farm — which was more or less a hobby. But he was always a schemer, never content for long with any one means of good-enough. The seeming mundanity of his business began to dog him. So when Bud was born, he saw his chance.
He gambled his savings on advertising and a state-of-the-art goat pen, and soon enough the billboards — “See Cerberus, the Two-Headed Miracle Goat!” — drew in weary drivers and their stir-crazy children who were bored stiff by the empty landscape along the South Dakota freeway. The business had low overhead, and though it didn’t make my parents a mint, there was enough money to expand the restaurant, add a gift shop, and hire more staff. The restaurant he renamed The Two-Brain Billy Family Restaurant, but most people just called it The Goat.
In the back of his mind my father knew, of course, that a two-headed goat was not the basis of a business with great longevity. If the mutation didn’t cause Bud premature aging, my father could expect twelve years, give or take a couple, of good business. So he schemed and schemed, and Bud and the restaurant and gift shop and my mother’s tailoring business did not keep us rich but did keep us fed. It wasn’t until I was fifteen, however, nearly a year after Bud’s peaceful, natural death, that my father founded his next brilliant business venture: Cow Chip Palace.
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