On Growing Up in a Small Town
(continued)
That spring and summer were a flurry of activity for my father, if anything that involves several tons of fresh manure can be called a flurry. My father dutifully looked after the restaurant and gift shop during the afternoons when the cattle — ours and our neighbors — grazed and wandered the prairie. In the cool of the morning and evening, he went out with the tractor and filled a trailer with all the chips he could. In a corner of our back field, the pile steadily grew. My father got fresh dumps from our own cows and stored it in barrels, to use as the cement between the cow chip bricks.
Sometimes he asked me if I wanted to help — to go collecting just after dinner when the sky was still streaked pink and evening blue, or to do a little brick laying. Just him and me. “It would be fun,” he offered. Then, soberly, “It’s been a long time since we’ve hung out, Jen.”
I remembered times when I was a little kid and Bud was still frisky, and my father and I would take him out for a walk in the fields after dinner. That was when I was too young to be properly embarrassed by taking a two-headed goat for an evening stroll, much less by having a father whose business pampered two-headed goats. Me, his only child. Him, my only pop. He’d been a hero to me then, and with everything I did I wanted to make him proud. I wanted to help him. I wanted to talk with him. It hadn’t been hard back then. It had been fun.
If it weren’t for the fact that I had to contend with real life — as real as it got in Francis, South Dakota, anyway — then maybe I’d help build Cow Chip Palace. Then maybe it would be fun.
But how could I encourage my father when he was humiliating me as never before? Our back field stunk as if Babe the Blue Ox and his twenty cousins used it as their personal toilet. My father promised me that after the dung dried no one would smell a thing. But it was a humid summer, and the flies were having a blast. It was murder to walk among them. My father wore gallons of repellant on his exposed skin. My mother and I didn’t dare walk unprotected to the construction site to call my father in for meals; we bought an air horn for that purpose.
The other kids, familiar, of course, with my father’s past antics with Bud, continually asked after the project with a derisive curiosity. I couldn’t even laugh scornfully with them — “Ha-ha, my dad’s a kook, all right, he’s building a castle out of shit!” — because he’d sworn me to secrecy. I, embarrassed and angry though I was, couldn’t break my word.
“Cow Chip Palace could be my crowning success,” he said, chuckling at his pun. “Besides, soon enough it’ll be clear what I’m doing. No need to spoil the surprise so soon, right?”
I was miserable.
I couldn’t suffer in complete silence, however. I finally told my best friend Sarah, who could be trusted not to laugh at me and not to breathe a word of what I said to anyone else. After school one day in September, after we had bought ice cream cones at Molly’s Confections and wandered into the woods on Sarah’s family’s land, I confessed my father’s dream to make Cow Chip Palace the most successful tourist attraction in eastern South Dakota.
Even she turned pink and looked about to laugh when she heard this, but quickly she composed her gentle face and said, “You poor thing, no wonder you’ve been so edgy lately.”
“Tell me about it,” I said. “School’s a nightmare because of the other kids, and home’s even worse. Because that’s where the real problem is. My dad keeps nagging me to collect cow chips with him.”
“I think all parents are an embarrassment,” Sarah offered. “I won’t go so far as to say it’s senility — I guess they’re not that old yet — but they definitely belong to another time. That whole generation gap thing. I mean, just last week, my mother — .”
I cut her off, too upset to be a friend in return. “Thanks, Sarah, but I don’t think anything your parents have done recently can even compete with my dad and his so-called career. I mean, this isn’t ugly neck ties or an out-of-date perm.”
She fell silent. We walked in the cool green of the woods, not saying a word. The crunching of our ice cream cones matched the crunch of twigs and dry leaves under our feet. I could be anywhere right now, I thought. These woods could be in Minnesota, or Maine, or even Germany. There’s no reason for this to be South Dakota.
As if reading my thoughts, Sarah finally said, “Only two more years of school, and then you can get out of here, go to college.”
“Ha!” I returned grumpily. “When’s the last time you saw my family go on vacation? We don’t have that kind of money. That’s what happens when your father makes a living off of mutant goats and cow dung.”
“You could get a scholarship,” Sarah persisted. “You’re plenty smart.”
I refused to be cheered up. “Even if I got money for tuition, we wouldn’t be able to afford the transportation to get me anywhere good. I’m not going to leave here just to go to Pierre or Des Moines, for God’s sake.”
Sarah just shrugged. “I still think you could get a job and make up the difference. There’s no reason you have to stay here.”
What she left unspoken was that she, unlike I — as she portrayed the situation, anyway — was not so free to leave. She was kind, and she was insightful, but school had never been easy for her and she’d be lucky to scrape through with her diploma. She already planned to be a successful farm wife and a good mother. It was true that she’d be terrific. But she’d be here.
“It’s not enough,” I mumbled. Then immediately I felt sorry about the way I was acting and said, “Oh, Sarah, what would I do if I went away and never saw you again?” I put my arm around her shoulder and squeezed.
She shrugged again and mumbled something that might have been, “Don’t be dumb.”
But I let it slide, and the conversation ended.
Throughout the fall, my father finished up the main building. In the winter, he created models and plaster molds of antique furniture and other relics he turned up at various yard sales in our half of the state — things that could be formed from dung and decorate the interior of Cow Chip Palace. He concocted dyes to color diluted manure which could be brushed on as paint. Once he asked me, “Want to make a gargoyle?” and I looked at the smelly bucket before him and his rubber gloves and sculpting tools and shook my head.
As the days grew shorter, my father’s hours grew longer. He spent less and less time at The Goat, but my mother didn’t say a word. The days grew longer again, and still my father slaved.
I withdrew from my school mates more and more, and my grades dropped. It didn’t bother me at the time. If I was staying in Francis, there wasn’t much point in over-exerting myself in school matters. Even English, my best subject, failed to engage me — or at least I chose not to let it. My parents asked me if I wanted help but didn’t push the issue when I refused to discuss it. Sarah just shook her head. A critical word never passed her lips.
In the last week of March, when I was sixteen years old, Cow Chip Palace was complete.
My father was an embarrassment, but he was also, without question, an artist. Cow Chip Palace towered in our backfield, three stories high — “Though the third is just for show, not structurally sound,” he warned my mother and me.
It was a perfect example of Gothic architecture. Grand abutments and almond-peaked arches, and delicately sculpted columns. A lantern tower peaking out from one corner. Lancet windows and oculi alternating to provide glimpses in or out. Period furnishings inside. And then the gargoyles leering over every corner: a sheep, a devil, a dog, and, of course, a two-headed goat.
The second story was, my father informed us, structurally sound. “I’ve tested it time and time again,” he said proudly. “One thousand pounds, and not a sign of stress. That’s as much as a good-sized elevator. Can’t have any accidents once the visitors start pouring in.” A gleeful smile at this.
He planned to open Cow Chip Palace to the public just after Easter, though of course the real business wouldn’t come until after Memorial Day. As the time drew nearer, he approached me. “Would you like to do the tickets, Jen? Sell them, take them, greet the guests, and so on?”
I was inextricably linked to Cow Chip Palace already, in the eyes of my school mates, but there was no reason to tie the knot tighter. “No thanks,” I said, avoiding his gaze. “I’d rather work at The Goat.” I’d begun waiting tables there over the winter, part time.
“I thought you might like a change of scenery. Get out in the fresh air.”
“Forget it,” I said, “I don’t call the smell of manure exactly fresh.”
“You know that cured dung doesn’t smell bad at all. Not exactly like a flower shop, but it’s nothing a little potpourri won’t help,” he said. He grinned at me encouragingly.
“Look, just forget about it, okay? I said I’d work at The Goat,” I answered angrily.
I saw defeat drop over his face, and regret struck me. To yell at my father, to shut him out, curdled my insides. But it wasn’t as bad as telling him that I’d rather work in a genuine business than in his tourist trap, was it? That would have really hurt his feelings. The Palace was a work of art and a dream come true for him. I couldn’t tell him how much I hated it.
On the day of Cow Chip Palace’s grand opening, I worked at The Goat, and it was boring as hell. Moreover, and as I had known in the back of my mind, it didn’t stop the kids from talking about the Palace, the most recent blight my father had brought to our town. More than ever, I wanted to get out, to go anywhere. Just away from Francis, South Dakota.