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Chapter Twelve
- Minnesota Historical Society Press
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104 will weaver disappeared under the wide- winged sprayers that misted Atrazine and Roundup. Uncle Jim modernized. He took out a loan for two new, blue, vacuum- sealed silos and a shiny, low, long dairy barn— all of which required more intensive farming and more equipment . His great leap forward also had an unsettling effect upon the larger family. My father and his brothers had always shared farm equipment and labor—and argued about the same—but now their disagreements became more complicated. Uncle Emery, the oldest brother, was against everything modern. He was slow- moving, slow- talking, slow to get his teeth fixed—but not slow- thinking when it came to dollars and cents and who owed what to whom. Uncle Emery was “tighter than a gnat’s ass stretched over a rain barrel,” as my father described him. Emery’s singular skill was returning a tractor with a bone- dry gas tank or a plow that after a couple of turns about the field suddenly needed all new lays. During my two years of active farming, Uncle Emery took me and my Stanford degree to the cleaners on every exchange; he was so good at being cheap—raised it to such an art form—that in the end I did not fully mind getting shortchanged. If Uncle Emery was dead set against modern farming practices, my father was dubious. “Bankers are not your friends,” he always told me; he was pretty sure that no good could come of Uncle Jim’s big loans. He (my father) further believed that Uncle Jim had fallen under the smooth- talking spell of their brother Curtis, who had sold him the fancy new silos. Curtis was the youngest of the brothers and the one who had traveled farthest from home. A Lyndon Johnson– the last hunter 105 like figure, he was tall, with a strong nose, silvery hair, a Stetson hat, and his own Cessna. His voice carried a hint of honey from his years in Illinois, where he farmed, sold silos, and at various times had implement dealerships and his fingers in Chicago commodities- exchange trading. He was greatly admired by the great- nephews and younger cousins for his style—a built- in sense of confidence not unlike a retired general or an old college quarterback. Back in the day, Uncle Curt had once stolen a girl from my father “just because he could,” my mother told me more than once (with some irony, this matter was a pebble in her shoe more so than in my father’s). He also liked, she grumbled, to “Lord it over” his brothers. She thought of him as the golden boy, the only brother to go off to college while my father had stayed home to milk the cows. Along in the 1980s, Uncle Curt’s charmed life took a hit. On the wrong side of some commodities trades and with a couple of bad decisions by a son- in- law in a tanking farm economy, he lost most of his fortune. He had enough money remaining to buy a lake estate and two hundred and some acres of land contiguous to my grandfather’s original farm— and so Uncle Curt, too, came home. Soon Curt’s place became the family’s center of gravity, a matter that further skewed the complicated arrangement of four brothers living in close proximity. My father had less and less mobility for hunting. Uncle Emery had knee problems (or so he said) and couldn’t walk much, plus he had vague problems with an ulcer. Uncle Jim had put off getting glasses and blamed his “damn rifle” for missed shots at deer. None of the four brothers’ necks turned like they used to. None of them could physically hunt sunup [3.235.76.155] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:04 GMT) 106 will weaver to sundown nine days straight, and they were not happy about that fact—and whatever personal issues they had, they made sure to take them out on one another. Our whole hunting dynamic had changed. Since I had “been gone for so many years” (it was not that long), there were unspoken questions about my commitment to the family . My cousin Gerry had had his fill of beating the brush for the older men and now mainly hunted with his own sons. In short, the extended family that once hunted with the efficiency of a pack of gray wolves—the Weaver Gang, as...