Chopper Mittens

I will be out of the country for much of the next two weeks and will not publish another update from the shack until I return. That’s a first. I’ve given you a long post, or a short story, about the farm to make up for my absence. Hope you like it.

I don’t know why I think of my parents now, or what triggers those thoughts. My Dad would be 105 this December and passed away in 1988. My Mom would have turned 103 this past New Year’s Day, having lived till 1996. It’s been a long time. I think of them often yet. Sometimes every day.

Monday afternoon I was scooping the driveway, again, bundled up in many layers of clothing. I refused to start until I found my mittens, which disappeared over the weekend. Turns out I left them at my local grocery store. I recovered them from their lost and found. These are double mittens my Dad called choppers. You can find them on line marketed as such. Choppers are a thick wool inner mitten which slips into a soft leather mitten, usually deer or elk hide. Mittens alone are so much warmer than gloves, and these double mittens are the absolute warmest. My Dad was wearing choppers on the day when he told me this story.

We were standing in his little shop, crammed with tools from throughout the life of our old farm. One wall, up to the roof peak, was a sort of history of local farming from God knows when; leather pads with a metal hook you strapped to your palm to shuck corn by hand, lanterns, buggy wrenches, sickle bar guards, planter plates, calf weaners, hand scythes, untold contraptions and tools. The longer you looked at the wall the more you saw. It was a terribly cold day. Wind was rattling the windows. We could see our breath.

“Did I tell you about your grandfather falling into the pond when they were chopping ice?” My father’s father, another grandfather I never met, was the son of the Irishman who came over on the boat from Antrim and managed to buy land.

“He was twelve years old when his father let him work at the pond for the first time. It was dangerous work. In weather like this, when it was the coldest in January and the ice was frozen the thickest, the farmers in the neighborhood would work together to cut and store ice for the summer. They had an ice house they shared, stacked blocks of ice there and covered them with sawdust. You’d be amazed how long it lasted.”

“There was a spring fed pond that produced nice clear ice two miles from their farm where they gathered with their horses and hand saws. Hard work. And in taking the ice, they created an open pool of freezing water. It was easy to slip and slide into the hole. If you went in and got under the ice, and couldn’t find your way back up, you could die quickly. Most those people didn’t know how to swim then. To let a kid work the ice cutting meant he was grown up. As he talked I was looking at the wall of tools.

“Is that one of those ice saws Dad?” I pointed to a curbed serrated blade with a stub handle on one side and a handle at the rear.

“No, that’s a hay knife. We used that to parcel out hay when we put it up loose in the mow, before there were hay balers.” He scanned the wall.

“I don’t think we have any of those saws anymore. No one has cut ice for forty years.”
“So what happened?”

“My grandpa the Irishman sent my Dad Willie up to the pond with the hired man. They took off with the team and wagon. All the farmers put their teams and wagons together to get it done as quickly as possible. It was a day like this. Windy and terribly cold. Grandpa, as Dad tells it, was helping a cow deliver a calf that was breach. He came later on his little gelding named Jack.. They used that gelding mostly for a small buggy but the Irishman loved to ride him single with a saddle. The Irishman was amazed he was able to even own horses, what with being so poor back in the old country. To have a good fast horse to ride to saddle, that was for rich men in Ireland. So anyway, my Dad and the hired man got to the pond and had been working about an hour when the Irishman rides up on his gelding. Called him Jack. Tied him to a fence post, put a blanket over him, and pitched in with the rest.”

“When you cut ice you started in the middle of the pond and worked back to shore till it was shallow. Trouble was the ice blocks were slippery. You could shove them to the edge of the pond all right, push them on the ice, but when you carried them up out of the pond they were damned heavy. You used two sets of tongs to balance yourself out, one in each hand, and carried two blocks up and heaved them on a wagon, where they stacked them. So there were cutters at the edge of the hole, those who pulled the blocks out of the water and slid them to the edge of the pond, those that lugged them up the bank to the wagons, and those that stacked them. Plus men drove teams of horses, hauling wagons full of blocks to the ice house, where other men were packing them away with the sawdust. When the roads were snow packed they put the box wagons on runners, making sledges. It took a lot of men. Hard work.” My Dad smoked Camels, short with no filters. He took off his mittens, lit a cigarette with a wooden match he struck by dragging it quickly on the leg of his overalls, and paused, blowing out smoke and the match as he scanned the wall of tools, one eye squinted shut.

“Look there,” he said walking to the wall and standing on the carpenter’s chest to reach up and remove a set of iron tongs. “Here are the ice tongs we used to use.” He spread out the tongs. As the jaws got wider the handles at the top got closer together. “They cut the blocks just the right size so when you got these jaws on either side you could grip the handle and swing that ice block up and tote it. Like I said, you put one in each hand for balance.” He looked around and put the jaws on a metal milk crate filled with scrap iron. As he lifted up the jaws closed around the crate and he lifted it off the ground.

“Try that,” he said, handing it to me. It was heavy. “The ice blocks were every bit that heavy. After a day cutting ice you know you’d worked a full day.”

“So what happened to Grandpa?”

“The Irishman hadn’t been there but an hour. He was sawing blocks. My Dad was working beside him, hauling the blocks out of the water and sliding them to the pond’s edge. It’s where most boys started. He was proud to be there, working beside his Dad and all. The Irishman had a block floating and had moved down to make another cut. Willie reached down to get his tongs around the block and his feet just went out from under him. He pitched forward head first. He tried to break his fall on the block just cut but it just went down under his weight and he went with it. The ice block bobbed back to the surface but my Dad didn’t. He was gone.”

“The Irishman ran to where the block was, pushed it into open water, reached down and swept his arm back and forth feeling for his son but there was nothing but water. He started to yell and the other men came running to his side.”

“Geeminy,” I said.

“How old are you David?”

“I’m twelve.”

“Can you imagine taking a swim in icy pond water on a day like this with all your clothes on? He didn’t know how to swim. Can you imagine how scared he would have been, my Dad? He was your age.”

“No I can’t.” I looked down at the floor, then back up at my Dad. “What happened then?”

“According to my Dad, Willie, he opened his eyes and the water looked brighter than he imagined. He could see sun shining through the ice and it looked beautiful. He continued to go down and thought he would just sink away, and he wasn’t scared. It was quiet and he thought he was going to die. But then he slowly stopped and ever so slow he started back up, floating to the surface. He said it took a long, long time and he wasn’t scared. His head hit the ice. And as it did, he felt a strong hand, the strongest hand he’d ever felt, on his arm. It was his Dad’s hand. The Irishman pulled him out from under the ice and put him on his back, back into the air of the world above, but not before Willie had swallowed a hatful of water.”

“I bet his Dad was so relieved.”

“Nope. As my Dad told it he was mad as hell. Willie looked up at the men around him but he couldn’t breathe and the Irishman pounded hard on his chest and said ‘Breathe god damn you. No son of mine is going to die.’ And Willie coughed up a bunch of water and breathed. And then he started crying. And the Irishman was still mad and said ‘There's no time for crying Willie’ and took him in his arms to where Jack the gelding was tied. He whipped the blanket off the horse, threw his son into the saddle, wrapped the blanket around him and said this to my Dad Willie, who was just a little boy after all.”

“He said, ‘Willie, you’ve got to make the ride of your life. You got to get warm fast or you’ll die, and the very fastest way for you get into warmth is to ride Jack here as fast as he can go, by yourself, to the home place. Jack wants to be back in his stall and he knows the way so all you got to do is hang on and kick him, he’ll do the rest. Don’t let him take you to the barn though. Make sure you pull the reins and bring him to the back door where you can yell for your mother. Your sister can put Jack in his stall and I’ll take care of him when I get home. I’m telling you don’t let him take you to the barn because you could be too cold to get from the barn to the house. Pull Jack up to the back door, yell for your mother, and she’ll take care of you from there. I follow soon enough.’

Willie said “Dad I’m scared.”

" 'You can do it Willie, I know you can,' the Irishman said."

"And with that he slapped Jack on the hind quarters and he and his son Willie went galloping down the road.”

Back in the shop I said “Why didn’t he go with him Dad?”

“Because Jack could ride faster with just a boy on his back than if he was carrying two people. He was a little gelding. With Willie on his back Jack would be faster than ever, like a racehorse with a little jockey. And the Irishman knew he had to get his son warm quick. He trusted both the horse and his son to make that ride.”

“So he really made him go alone?”

“Yes he did. He followed to make sure he didn’t fall off. They unhitched one of his draft horses from the team, the Irishman got on him bareback, and he headed off behind Willie. But he knew his son on that galloping gelding would be way ahead of him, and the faster he got to warmth the better chance he had of not freezing to death, or freezing his feet, losing his toes, whatever. I don’t know how much they knew about hypothermia and such back then, but they knew by god he was in big trouble. Let me finish the story David.”

“So as my Dad Willie tells it he hung on to the reins, kicked Jack in the withers like he was wearing spurs, and they flew down the road. Straight shot to their farm. He had to ride down the east side of the section, past a crossroads and another mile to their farm at the end of the next section. A two mile dash down a frozen dirt road. The Irishman had never let him gallop Jack before and he went like the wind. Only the faster they went the colder he got. He began to cry and his tears froze his eyelashes near shut. As he tells it, and he told this story over and over, he had lost his hat in the pond and was bare headed. His ears and his nose hurt terrible and he thought he would surely be frostbit. The blanket his Dad gave him flew out behind him like a cape and he couldn’t keep it on. Somewhere on the road he lost it. He just crouched up against Jack’s neck and hung on.”

“He’d never rode a galloping horse that long. He said that Jack got low to the ground, stretched out, took long strides, and settled into a rhythm of breathing in time with his stride. As he did plumes of white puffed sideways out his nostrils. My Dad said he felt so close to that horse, like the horse knew how important this ride was and wanted to help him get home fast. My Dad loved that horse ever since that day.”

Willie was scared he wasn’t going to make it. He could barely feel his feet. But he was wearing chopper mittens, the same kind I wear still, and said his hands were the only thing stayed warm. Did you know good wool keeps you warm even when it’s wet? It does.”

“By the time he got to the house, Willie said, he was shivering so bad he could barely yell out. Jack tried to go to the barn but he pulled him up to the back door like his Dad told him. His mother and sister finally heard him and came out, and when they saw him in the saddle, all covered with ice, they screamed and went to pull him off the horse, but his feet were frozen to the stirrups. Story goes that his Mom, my grandma, ran into her kitchen and fetched a kettle and poured boiling water on his boots, freeing them up, and that way got him down and in the house. In ten minutes or so the Irishman rode up on the draft horse, with the horse blanket he’d picked up along the way, and busted into the house. He was plenty wet himself, and still mad at Willie for being careless and falling in the pond. Grandma called her husband foolish, about the worst thing she ever said about him. And as soon as they got Willie warm again he was fine. Anyway, that’s the story.”

I remember the way I felt when my Dad was done with the story and how it made me feel. Emotional I guess. I could imagine how scared my grandpa must have been riding that horse in the freezing cold and it scared me all over again. I felt lucky not to live in those times, but at the same time had a strange yearning to be there with them all. A cold winter day, racing for your life down a snowy road on a fast horse, escaping death. What a story.

Years later I was sitting with my Dad at the kitchen table when he was old and I was in college. His chopper mittens were lying on the table. He had just returned from spreading manure, a daily chore on the dairy farm. It was another bitterly cold day and nothing was much colder than riding one of those Minneapolis Moline tractors with no cab and a steel seat down the road and spreading a load of cow shit on a cornfield. Dad had just come in, poured himself a cup of coffee, and added a small pour of Old Grand Dad whiskey. It was the sixties and our family had graduated from being one of the farmhouses that never kept liquor to one that at least had mixed drinks on Christmas Eve. Dad kept a bottle in the lower cupboard behind the shoe shine kit and Mom allowed it. She didn’t like it, but she allowed it. I guess it was the choppers that reminded me.

“Remember that story you told me about Great Grandpa and Grandpa cutting ice, and Grandpa fell in, and he rode a horse two miles home by himself to keep from freezing to death?”

“Yeah,” my Dad replied, taking a sip of coffee. When he added the whiskey he called it ‘coffee royale.’

“Do you suppose it is true?”

“I suppose it is as true as it can be. That story was told over and over. The Irishman told it for years, and your Grandpa Willie, who got his own farm and bought a threshing machine, he told that story at threshing dinners in the summer from here to damn near Iowa. Those threshing dinners were big to dos. And every day you got a new audience. After dinner it was all the talk to tell stories of things that happened on the farm. And they were Irishmen after all, like you and me, and they loved to spin a yarn. I mean no one’s ever written it down, so as you told it you could exaggerate one part, or downplay another, and no one would know the difference.”

“But is it true you ask? I think so. I know they cut ice, and I know it was dangerous, and from time to time people fell in the pond. Now did your Grandpa Willie go clear under the ice, and look up and see the sunlight, and think he was going to die? Well that’s hard to tell. He might have just fell in and got fished right out. And did the Irishman, your great grandpa, yell out that no son of his was going to die and pound him on the chest? Maybe so and maybe not. But does that really matter? Because they told that story we know what happened one day on a pond near Danvers, nearly a hundred years ago. By their ages I got that day pegged as happening about 1886. How many days do we have in our memory from that far back? Could be its not completely true. I mean it’s a story. But I’m figuring it is. And as an Irishman who likes a story that captures your heart, I’m damn glad we have it.”

“So did you add anything to the story Dad? Something you know is not exactly true?”

Dad paused before answering. He took a deep drag on his Camel, the cigarettes that would later give him emphysema.

“Yeah, to tell the truth I’m not sure my Dad loved that horse Jack. I’m not sure he didn’t feel about his farm animals like we feel about our tractors now, like they’re tools. But I was lucky enough to farm with horses, and I loved it. I loved them. Those draft horses would pull till their heart broke if you’d let them. Pull so hard they could hardly stand. And a galloping horse on a two mile run? There’s no reason a horse would run that hard that far if he didn’t sense you needed him to. So yeah, I guess I added that. I gave my own feelings to my Dad. But it helps the story.”

“You know the great thing about that story? When you’re a kid you identify with Willie, being put in a situation that scares the hell out of you. And when you’re a father you identify with the Irishman, being stern with your child for his own good and wondering if you’re doing right. It’s a story with heart for people of all ages. Try not to forget it.”

With that he drained his coffee royale, stubbed his Camel out in the ashtray on the table, and looked in my eyes as he put on his hat and stuffed his ears under the ear flaps.

“You know, if Willie would have drowned in that pond that day, or the Irishman would have made the wrong decision and let him die from the cold, we wouldn’t be here to talk about it. But because Willie lived and had me, and I had you, that’s the way our life has gone.”

He pulled on his chopper mittens and poked me softly in the chest. “So out of respect for your ancestors how about putting on some coveralls and boots and coming out to the barn to help your old man milk the cows?”