3. Parts of a Pie: The meal finally

For sweet pizza:

Inside the barn, I stepped onto a floor made from several thousand neatly stacked haybales. At this midpoint of summer the hayloft contained only half its fill. Through late summer, my father baled hay and the rest of us slung it into place until our heads hit the rafters and even then we kept going. Deep August saw us pushing haybales around while standing on our knees, heads tucked to our chest. Not a task for a claustraphobic person. The loft held a temperature that ranged ten to fifteen degrees hotter than outside. We relied on natural light for our work, but the sun only angled through the doorframes at the front and back of the barn.

I stood leaning against the cool gunwales of the elevator and waited for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. Dust reigned in the loft. My asthmatic father stayed below waiting to feed bales of hay onto the moving teeth of the elevator. I watched him and the bales from my perch. After him I was the first to touch the hay. I guarded the fractious juncture between the vertical elevator I had just climbed and the separate elevator running horizontal along the length of the loft. This used to be my brother’s job. I’d sat and observed him many times. Now he was big enough to sling bales at the end of the line.

A chain of shouts started. My father yelled “ok!” to my mother, brother and sister who stood around the electrical outlet waiting to plug in the power cords for the elevators. “Ok?” my mother shouted back to confirm I was safely off the elevator. He gave back a sharp yep and she plugged in the first cord. The horizontal elevator came to life and commenced its rattling trundle. The second electrical cord connected and I watched my father adjust out of his resting state where elbows rested on knees that he propped on the bottom gunwales of the elevator. He looked up to the loft with a crinkle in his nose from bad eyesight. I knew he couldn’t see me. I heard my mother and siblings mount the wall-ladder built at the back of the loft. I listened to the way the haybales separating us muffled their voices.

The first bale off the wagon headed towards me. I touched it only slightly as it moved from one elevator to the next. The fifth bale bobbed on the track, nodding off side to side. Its shape had an upward curl that promised a challenge to the rafter at the apex of the first elevator. Refereeing all charged interactions between a wayward haybale and thisrafter constituted 90% of my job. I took the front and back of the bale and pressed it down onto the track as hard as I could. The bale’s front end almost made the awkward drop onto the next elevator, but at the last moment, the little remainder of u-curve shape caught the rafter at the bale’s rear. This was my moment to get physical. In a few seconds the next bale coming up the track would also need to move through the juncture. Each passing tooth of the track tried to push the bale forward as it hung stuck. Suddenly the dusty, noisy air took on a full charge. Unless I found the strength to force the reluctant bale forward, it promised to burst between the pressures of the unyielding rafter and the relentless forward cluck of the elevator chain. Popping baling twine can be a horrible sound. But silence was worse. In these moments, I hustled because I must prevent the stuck bale from shorting the electrical-mechanical relationship of the elevator. That was a problem my father did not know how to fix.

I yelled to my father to stop putting haybales on the elevator. Next I shoved the bale, already on its way, off the track, but I didn’t push hard enough. Instead of falling neatly to the side inside the loft, the bale jumped onto the gunwales. It was perpendicular to the track, but moving, and in a snap the bale skidded down the elevator so fast it almost knocked my father over. Now he looked mad.

Protecting my hands as best I could, I again laid them at the front and back of the bale and pushed down with all my nine year old strength, flattening the bale’s curve and willing it to propel forward free. When I heard the pop I knew I hadn’t succeeded. The twine released and books of hay cascaded off the sides of the elevator. Some of it slipped down to where my father stood peering up to see how I fared. I could see the small disappointment on his face. I pushed the rest of the burst bale off the track and made sure no baling twine caught in the chain.

I climbed back atop the stack of bales positioned at the juncture of the elevators. Guerilla-like down below, my father turned around and picked out the next bales to send up. I stamped my feet back and forth and waited. He fussed with another misshapen bale, pressing it with his knee and dropping it hard onto the tines of the elevator track. He placed his hands flat on the bale and leaned into it quickly like he was doing pushups with handclaps inbetween dips. I watched the next misfit come up the elevator into my hands and directed it firmly. 

Less than an hour later I saw my brother throw the last bale to my sister who nestled it into place with a final shove from her knee. My father jumped down to the ground. The elevators stilled and the muffled quiet of the loft popped. I heard my mother, already downstairs, talking with my father and I picked out the difference in sound between my sister and brother’s descent down the barn loft ladder. I followed, taking the elevator in a backwards climb.

We all met in front of the barn. I sat on the wagon tongue and listened to my parents. My father said he would bring in the day’s last wagon of hay straight away. And what about dinner my mother asked. I don’t feel like cooking he said. It’s too hot.  My chest started to get warm. Maybe, maybe, maybe, yes! My mother suggested we get a pizza. I tried to look serious. And when my father seemed to hesitate I willed my face to look tired and unexcited. Oh, pizza, humdrum. We should have a salad with it he said. They agreed; while he collected the last wagon we were to gather greens and vegetables from the garden around the house.

I don’t know exactly where my siblings wandered off to, but my mother ended up in one of her flower beds, weeding. I hauled a basket into the asparagus field. I tried disappearing in the fronds of asparagus plants gone to seed. I didn’t want get assigned to weeding or mulching. I searched for late season asparagus shoots until I heard the tractor. I saw grandness in its entrance to our driveway; the day’s last piece of work coming up to the barn.

I already had the table set for dinner in my head. I placed five of the enameled camping plates—mostly only used for pizza nights—onto placemats left from lunch. I didn’t change the napkins even though they were soiled from eating chicken last night. Something told me it was wrong to launder them after less than a day’s use. The table always looked empty on a pizza night. No serving bowls or cast iron skillet hot off the stove to dominate the table’s center.

Climbing into the hayloft for the last time, I encountered the day’s heat fully realized and trapped in the organized mountains of hay. An oven. I hoped my mother would volunteer to pick up the pizza. I would sit next to her on the bench seat of the Ford Ranger pickup. The wood booth I waited in while my mother paid for the pizza would feel extra flat and hard after the car upholstery. I could smell the fat sourness of cheese and tomatoes cooking into each other. The air in the dining room of Cubbers Pizza Restaurant tickled with suspended flour. The same lady helped us every time. She had a perm and dyed her hair my mother said. I worried the lady would stab herself on the giant needle that impaled our receipt. I liked the crisp sound of the sharp needle top breaking through the paper. The receipt settled on top of orders for calzones and pepperoni pizzas without the lady hurting herself.

As the first bale came off the wagon and headed towards me, I lifted my arms and saw them grabbing two boxes of pizza off the restaurant counter. One small cheese and a large pie split down the middle, sausage on one side, green peppers on the other. My mother settled the strap of her purse on her shoulder. She held the restaurant’s screen door open for me. It snapped shut behind us. I set the stacked boxes on my lap. The burgundy colored seats of the truck were still warm from the sun beating on them. My sweat-sticky skin grabbed and then glued to the vinyl ridges of the upholstery.

The pizza started to tease. The crust and its cloak of sauce and cheese pressed their oven warmth through the cardboard box onto my thighs. My mother started the car and backed out of the parking space. The fast spread of smells had me looking at her, silently asking if we really had to wait until we got home to eat. The work of sharing could be avoided I thought. Maybe I could have as much I wanted? But my mother looked straight ahead, her torso tilted forward. We drove the speed limit home in silence. By home I felt lucky. I would carry the pizzas inside and present them with gusto, peeling the cardboard tops back, tucking them under the bottom of the box and making a serving platter. Or would I be told to set them on the cold wood cookstove and wait until someone dressed the salad?

I heard a consistent knocking sound that refocused my eyes. My hands were back at my sides. A bale pulsed upon the track of the hay elevator, jamming its head against that low barn rafter. I stopped breathing and jumped a little, raising my arms up to wrangle down the bale.