The Attic: A Memoir

Mulberries

54 MULBERRIES H ere was a Remsen Bell-Enterprise, carefully saved; was one of us in it? Extra copies of an issue containing a family obituary were often laid away in their brown wrappers by way of reverent memorial. I can seldom resist poring over an old newspaper, but it would be a timeconsuming diversion leading me away from the task at hand. The editor of the Belloccasionally revealed a coarse, frontierstyle humor. He planted one-liners between news stories such as: "In the spring the busy housewife sits among her cabbages and peas." He relished a court case involving a woman who owned a purebred boar for stud purposes. The woman was sued for damages by a neighbor whose sow was impregnated after the boar crashed through a fence. In the trial the woman testified that her fence was sound; the neighbor should not have had his sow, who was in heat, running around loose if he expected to control her breeding. "How do you know the sow was in heat?" asked the judge. The woman replied: "When a sow's rear end is red as the sun going down, anythingwill jump the fence." She won the case. Now I tilted the yellowing front page of a Bell to catch the cobwebby light through the attic window. "What have you found?" Lois asked. "Ah ... here it is." I began to read aloud: William Milfs, 54, Takes Own Life William Milfs, 54, lifelong Remsen resident, was found dead ill the basement of his mother's home about 8 a.m. Monday by Kenneth Portz, a mechanic at the Ross Motor Co. Sheriff Frank Scholer and County Coroner S. H. Lucken investigated and tenned the death suicide by strangulation. Mr. Milfs hanged himself with a plastic clothesline from a basement pipe. . .. When he did not show up for work Monday morning, Mr. Portz went to the Milfs home, noticed a light burning in the basement and discovered the body. Unmarried, Milfs had made his home with his mother ... MULBERRIES 55 I stopped. "But I seem to remember a wife and children." "You're thinking ofthe brother, MilfMilfs. Hewas the one used to drive out to see Dad." Scanning the list ofsurvivors, I note four brothers, among them Milf, living in California. "Milf Milfs; so he really didhave a name like that!" A comic-strip character's moniker-like Moon Mullins. "Wasn't Milf Milfs a friend of Jack's?" I said, remembering a Milfs girl exactly Lloyd's age-and that Lizzie had been in the hospital giving birth to him when Mrs. Milfs was lying in. We often heard how wintercame exceptionallyearly in 1924, the roads shut by a blizzard just when Lizzie needed to be off to the hospital in Le Mars. With a team pulling a sled, she and Jack made it to the Remsen depot, where they caught a train. After Lloyd's birth, November25, it was bitterly cold; Jack and Lizzie worried about the infant's safety on the sled ride home. They asked the doctor's advice on how they should manage it, for wouldn't the baby suffocate if covered up completely? Yet if Lloyd weren't wrapped securely, he wouldn't survive the extreme cold. nOh, the baby won't smother," the doctor said, "ifyou arrange the blanket so there's a hole right above the nose. Then put your fingerdown through the opening and touch his nose. That'll keep out the cold but give him enough space to breathe." The whole way home, baby Lloyd had a finger touching his nose-connected to his mother no longer with an umbilical cord but something just as good. "Didn't MilfMilfs and his family used to pick our mulberries?" 56 TIIEATTIC I asked. "Mulberries!" Lois said. "Yes, we never bothered with them." Taste and smells have the longest, surest hold on memory, and I could never forget the flat, insipid taste of the despised berry. It brought back a midsummernight oflong ago-perhaps a composite ofsummerevenings on the farm in the thirties, when nestled together as a family on the big screened-in porch, we felt protected from whatever threatened in the outside world. Therhythmiccreak ofthe porch swing, suspended by two strong chains from the ceiling, maintained a beat through a lull in the talk, almost like a heart. Kept on going and going as if it would never stop. "Look...