The Haunt of Home

A Journey through America's Heartland

Zachary Michael Jack

• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501751806
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Gothic, Romance, & Horror Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

What does it mean to deeply love a home place that haunts us still? From Mark Twain to Grant Wood to Garrison Keillor, regionalists from the Gilded Age to the Digital Age have explored the American Gothic and the homegrown fatalism that flourish in many of the nation's most far-flung and forgotten places. The Haunt of Home introduces us to a cast of real-life Midwestern characters grappling with the Gothic in their own lives, from promising young professionals debating the perennial "Should I stay or should I go" dilemma, to recent émigrés and entrepreneurs seeking personal reinvention, to faithful boosters determined to keep their communities alive despite the odds. In The Haunt of Home Zachary Michael Jack considers the many ways a region's abiding spirit shapes the ethos of a land and its people, offering portraits of others who, like himself, are determined to live out the unique promise and predicament of the Gothic.

Part I

Legacies

1

LIFE IN SUNNIER CLIMES

The first of two auctions of our Midwest family farm occurred on March 3, 1987, one day before my mom’s thirty-seventh birthday. “Mike has rented the farm and will pursue other interests,” the oversized advertisement in the Cedar Rapids Gazette read. “He is a perfectionist, and has been an innovator in ridge till and soil conservation for many years. His equipment is highly specialized, and not for everyone. However, if you’re fussy about the equipment you own, you can buy with confidence at this sale. All the equipment is immaculately clean and well maintained. Feel free to stop by the farm prior to the sale and view this fine line!”

By the time of the second auction, twenty-two years later, my father was downsizing further after the loss of both parents to cancer and his own failing health. This time the auction ad was smaller, belying the cataclysmic events happening in our long-grounded family. “The Jack trust along with Michael Jack have selected Wear’s Auctioneering to conduct a public auction.” The top item on the list, our immaculate John Deere 4720 tractor with loader had 440 hours on it but looked, the auctioneer avowed, “like new.”

Later that same fall I had an inkling that my father, who had auctioned many of his personal effects along with the farm equipment and had purchased a trailer to pull behind the pickup truck he’d inherited from my grandfather, was bringing his own story, and ours, to what he always called its “inevitable denouement.” He had begun to divest himself of little things—even the hand tools that our ancestors had used to wrest a living since before the Civil War.

Now he e-mails to say he will be leaving for the South before a predicted record cold snap insinuates itself into the uninsulated camper-trailer he’s purchased with the auction proceeds. He won’t say exactly where he is going, only that he’ll be making a beeline for the Mason-Dixon before the heavy snows set in. I have my bets on Florida, the place my grandparents took the family nearly every February from the time my father was old enough to ride a bicycle. Growing up I had heard countless stories of these dramatic overland treks—how magically lush Florida had been for a boy arriving from the frozen Midwest, how it felt like life after death. At times my father’s early enchantments, relayed to me vicariously a generation later, had grown so large in my mind as to become my own.

I realize as soon as I read his missive that Dad’s hastily planned trip in my grandfather’s pickup truck represents his attempt to close up circles, to touch again the thing that had enthralled him as a child. Who among us wouldn’t reach for such a peace if it were within our grasp? More than that I am convinced that this is to be his farewell tour—his swan song. A year earlier, deep in his cups, he had confessed that he was sick, that the same thing that “got Grampy”—cancer—was likewise getting him. I mustn’t tell anyone, he warned me, if I wanted to keep his trust. There would be no hospital trips, no treatment plans. Did I understand?

What was I to make of this, the latest in a series of my father’s grave admissions; my mother had always insisted that my father was a hypochondriac, that he had claimed to be ill even in his twenties, in the early days of their marriage. Maybe it was his way of making other people care about him, she had theorized, or a behavior learned from his own fatalistic father, who famously declared each autumn that he would not live to see another harvest with the same morbid fascination cowboys contemplated their last roundup.

The future my father sketched out wasn’t the conventional narrative farmers’ sons like me had been taught to expect since the time we were old enough to drive a tractor. The standard narrative went something more like this: Farm Father grows old gradually and cantankerously, doted on by loving family members despite his prideful protestations. To avoid becoming housebound in his old age Farm Father develops hobbies—small engine repair or furniture refinishing in his workshop maybe—and gradually turns the farm operation over to his son or daughter. Eventually and inevitably, a dread disease strikes him in his eighties—cancer if the pattern holds—and he fights it gamely, Farm Son taking Farm Father in for radiation and chemo appointments in a long-overdue gesture of tenderness and care. Farm Father is buoyed at first by this familial show of support, by the powerful cocktail of drugs he receives at the hospital in the nearest high-tech metropolis, and by the passel of beautiful and healthy grandchildren arrived at his bedside to tell him how loved and needed he is. He fights the malignancy for months or for years, fights it tooth and nail until one day in December or January—the kind of day Farm Father hated in his previous life as a husband to the land—he succumbs, his tenure on earth a robust fourscore years or more in sum.

For us the narrative never applied. The key characters in what Dad always called our rural “passion play” had never assumed their prescribed positions. The dramatis personae needed to perform first the healing, followed by the rite of passage, had gone missing—the brothers-in-law had died, divorced, or else taken jobs in town. The son-in-law too, had been a casualty of divorce, and the farmer’s son, me, had been an inconstant and ill-prepared understudy. Still, I had stayed close—set up shop on my own small farm a handful of miles away, just across the county line—close enough to step in when our already compromised narrative reached that inevitable denouement.

My father’s sudden flight from the farm that has been ours for seven generations had been precipitated by an unthinkable series of events—first an OWI in which he’d plowed my grandfather’s old Buick sedan into a ditch in a snowstorm on the way to check for frozen pipes at a neighboring property, followed by a swift and punitive intervention against my and my sister’s wishes. This, in turn, was followed by court-ordered outpatient treatment. Next came a brief redemption, followed by a relapse that precipitated a second intervention, this time to an in-patient facility in the nearest university town.

A well-trod path extends from the hinterlands into the nearest university hospital city. Any aging or ailing Farm Father can expect to follow it eventually, like an unwilling horse, pulling against the reigns. The irony turns the stomach; Farm Father has spent a life assiduously avoiding this distant Oz and Gomorrah, with its confederacy of specialists and technocrats. Often he has resented the city for its many enticements—the way it took his grandchildren, changed them, and never gave them back—and still he knows he will end up there at its flagship hospital someday at his weakest, warehoused and wearing a paper-thin gown while the talented specialists charged with taking care of him bustle in and out. The uninsured Farm Father knows the ugly bottom-line best—even paying for the smallest out-of-pocket procedure, or meeting the largest deductible, can cost him and his would-be heirs the equivalent of many acres. If he is uninsured, and not indigent, it will cost him the better part of the farm for which he has cared his entire life.

A few days after his intake, my uninsured father, summoning his characteristic agrarian stubbornness, simply walks out of the treatment facility, daring the staff to stop him. The story, of course, is more complicated than this—isn’t it always—but the upshot is that my father, aged sixty, confides in phone calls and e-mails to my sister and me that he now intends to slip away into the early dawn before the first snowstorm sweeps across the Heartland—a time when Mom will be in town and most of the rest of the family will be away or else hunkered down in advance of the coming blizzard. Like me, the only way Dad knows to overcome the gravity of seven generations is by flinging himself into oblivion without route or plan in an ill-fated attempt to achieve escape velocity. In his bon-voyage note he warns me not to wake up early for his departure, and for the first time in my adult life I quietly resolve to ignore him.

The next morning I arrive to his leave-taking in what half-blind Homer calls the rosy-fingered dawn, worried sick that I have already missed him, that once again I have played the role of the too-late-to-rise, too-late-to-help son. The door to the machine shop is locked tight, but a bank of fluorescent lights flickers when I peer inside. I knock and call, knock and call. A minute or two later, a dark shadow stirs. A lock clicks open, and I am in. We stand for a moment, boot-to-boot, neither of us completely ourselves. Dad looks older and younger all at once, his mane of raven-black hair buzzed as if shorn for a prison sentence or made sleek for a long flight.

A few short hours after he lets me inside I’m following his rig down the gravel road leading to the blacktop that leads to the highway that leads to the interstate that leads to ultimate freedom from his past, from the prying eyes of judgmental family members who have lately begun to see in his every move the dangerous unpredictability of a suffering and wounded animal. I have offered to escort him, citing the pretext that I can confirm that his brake lights are working on the pull-behind camper-trailer. In truth I need to be near him, his right-hand man. It’s a splitting of the atom, Dad’s abdication, like those that sometimes happen in families like ours when a patriarch or matriarch, measuring up their remaining days, up and does something strange, like taking up with a younger lover or buying a condo to overwinter in Maui.

Up ahead now he attempts to wave me back at the first left turn leading to the blacktop. I ignore him, strangely mesmerized in pursuit, his trailer kicking up an epic plume of gravel dust that chokes my little car. I need him to see me, flesh of his flesh, in his rearview mirror for a little while longer, determined that he experience the sweet feeling of someone you love following you on a difficult journey. When he reaches the highway I angle my car to watch him go as he banks south, solo, around the big bend in the county road famous for ditching drunks and snow-blind travelers. He rides into the rising sun in my grandfather’s cherry-red Chevy Silverado truck dulled with dust, the back of the pickup dipping precariously under the trailer’s weight. The whole rig looks impossible—a traveling circus—and to think that my father, who hasn’t driven more than two hundred miles from home in nearly a decade, is at the helm of it, slowed from too much vodka and wine the night before, his body laboring as hard as any engine bearing an impossible load. The sight fills me with equal parts joy and dread.

He is light again, and I am light again with him, for a single sunrise. The impossible has happened—my ailing father, the man who always said he’d draw his last breath on our home ground and who set out a decade ago to inexorably make it so, has literally sold the farm, saddled up his own father’s dusty mount, and set off into the dawn, a dark angel on a fatally wounded wing. He leaves me, his middling only son, idling behind, contemplating the strange fissures that sometimes open up in winters so coldly beautiful they bring a lover’s tears to the eye.

What am I? The inheritor of his mantle? The prodigal? Or am I the unrequited lover fishtailing the gravel roads in an ill-fated attempt to call him back, make him reconsider, wondering what, if anything, I might have done to make him stay.

My grandmother Julia, a farm daughter whose dislike for car travel was trumped only by her absolute loathing for airplanes, was reluctant at the prospect of the family’s maiden Florida voyage scheduled for February 1955; my preschool-aged father, by contrast, was ecstatic. In the weeks leading up to departure, he ignored his homework in order to painstakingly construct his list of “Things I Am Taking to Florida.” Exactly four of eleven items listed were trucks. He would be sure to bring his dump truck, cement truck, and of course his moving truck on the roughly 1,300-mile journey. His fourth truck was the famous Marvelous Mike, a robot space tractor/bulldozer popular in the fifties with whom he shared a name.

In the winter of 1955 all roads south from the frozen Midwest led to the world-famous resort at Silver Springs, Florida. Among its endless stream of tourist brochures, the water attraction put out a map showing a great cascade of America’s north–south roads all funneling into the Great Dixie Highway on the way to the sister cities of Ocala and Silver Springs. Silver Springs promised otherworldly attractions, including scantily clad underwater mermaids, springs with legendary names like Bridal Chambers, and a reptile institute where a boy could see Ross Allen milk a viper with his bare hands.

Even within Florida, Silver Springs and Ocala were widely acknowledged as exceptional. The earliest promotional materials for the city marketed it as “a truly different Florida,” a land of “lakes and hills, forest and farmlands and thriving communities”—Florida’s “Region of Great Wonders,” its “Kingdom of the Sun.” Middle American snowbirds accustomed to the pure water drawn from deep aquifers of home could be assured that the waters of Marion County weren’t the hard, sulfurous kind found in much of the rest of the state, but “very pure and healthful”—so healthful, in fact, that tourists flocked to the mineral waters reputed to have “special health qualities.” The average annual mean high temperature, claimed the vital stats, was a perfect 70.2 degrees with average highs in winter nearing 60 degrees.

Like many other Northern snowbirds on the wing toward inviting and exotic lands my grandfather carried guidebooks with him as the family traveled—guidebooks like Norman Ford’s Florida: A Complete Guide to Finding What You Seek in Florida. For a mere $2, travelers in 1956 could purchase the comprehensive 140,000-word compendium. Ford, the honorary vice president of the Globe Trotters Club, headlined his popular travel book with a chapter entitled “Climate—the Key to Florida,” which began, “There is good reason why climate is the first subject discussed in this book. For in one way or another climate is responsible for every phase of the Florida scene.” In the pages that followed the author left no stone unturned in his argument for the state’s climatological supremacy, citing arguments ranging from the “percentage of possible sunshine” (the highest in the East during the winter months) to the unusually high degree of the sun itself (12 degrees higher than New York and 20 degrees higher than Seattle). A more direct hit from the sun’s life-giving rays meant less refraction, Ford claimed, and this, in turn, partly explained the state’s healthful “wine-clear” air.

Like much of the rest of Florida it was a heaven then fifty years in the making, cultivated for the simultaneous comfort and allurement of migrating Midwesterners like Michigan automobile magnate Henry Ford on whose tastes its economic fortunes depended. As early as 1908 the state created something it called the Florida Internal Improvement Fund to drain the low-lying malarial state to preference, contracting Ohioan James B. Hill and his patented Buckeye Traction Ditcher to dig, dredge, and tile the Everglades until they were livable for settled farmers. Hill had already used his enormous steam machine to drain much of the 1,500 square miles of Midwestern marshland where he had been born and raised, the Great Black and Limberlost Swamps his world-famous ditcher had been invented to wipe off the map.

What they didn’t understand about the magical southland Midwestern boys would attempt to fix with a combination of internal combustion, horsepower, and heavy machinery. Naturally, my boy-father filled the family’s Edsel station wagon with his dump trucks and bulldozers and tractors, playing farmer until the family arrived at Silver Springs on the morning of the fourth day and my father burst forth into the parking lot like the Tasmanian devil. This moment of annunciation, of arrival in the promised land, would linger with him the rest of his life, drawing him back and in, as if by gravity, assuming the power of only the best kind of haunts.

In 1930 Florida’s entire population numbered less than 1.5...