We, the Coronado Scribes, consist of both professional and amateur writers. We have in common a desire to learn, by sharing our efforts and listening to other writers. We hold pressure-less sessions every Wednesday, at the Coronado Library conference room, starting at 1:30. Often we have guests who wish to just listen. They are welcome, and so are you.
Each week on eCoronado, we feature a different piece of prose or poetry produced by one of our writers. Please feel free to comment or ask questions in the comment section below.
Windy MacKay and the Big Blue
As a fourteen-year-old kid, I never imagined living on the McKay farm for two entire summers. We have to start with my mother; she was kind, generous, and just simply wonderful. However, she was troubled. Mom would break down mentally just about every summer. She suffered from serious bouts with anxiety and depression. Her biggest fear was becoming addicted to those 50s anti-anxiety drugs like Milltown. On more than several occasion mom would ask me to dispose of these drugs out in our garden. My physician dad thought her condition was so severe that he sent her north to a Chicago suburban mental hospital for several months. Dad was busy with his practice. He had little time to take care of the Lavin five, so he shuffled each of us out to various relatives for a summer retreat. I drew the McKay card. I had visited the McKay farm for several weekends the year before which softened my typical family separation angst. Uncertainty remained pivotal and hinged.
Jim “Windy” (nicknamed because he talked too long and fast) and his wife, Ann, lived on a 600-acre farm in Woodford, County Illinois. Jim inherited that farm from his father but he loved most everything but farming. He failed to finish high school, and with choices limited, Jim had to rely on farming to make a living.
McKay’s passion however was to get-rich-quick and he spent days that turned to months working in his garage. His newest discoveries varied from a tractor to view TV while planting to a snow blower with a rear view mirror. Big Blue was his latest enterprise. Jim also loved gambling, drinking Old Style beer anywhere and anytime. “If you are a Chicago Cubs fan, you have to drink Old Style”, Jim would say, as he cracked open another. McKay’s weathered-gnawed presence matched his “farmer’s tan”, which wrapped around his elbow to his wrist, from his chin to his forehead. McKay’s eyes grabbed your attention quickly, glistening blue, and sparkling. His second-generation Irish wit plus his natural likeability encouraged you just to be around him knowing still that he was a rascal. Ann McKay, Windy’s wife, was a charmer, elegant, stylish, always smiling, great mother, good cook and gardener. She reminded me of Kate Hepburn in looks and poise. Why she married, Windy happens to be one of those mysteries right up there with the Holy Trinity. The McKay family had six kids; the youngest had Down’s syndrome.
The McKay farm home was perched on a hill, large, colonial, with many bedrooms and a huge kitchen. Surrounding the house was a large cattle barn, grain silo, chicken coup, combine, tractor and car garages, pigpen, and water pump with a windmill. John Deere farm implements were strewn everywhere in the yard which provided good shade-shelter for a lame goat, Collie dogs named Ruby and Puddles, and several stay cats.
I was just a kid that first summer, a chore-kid. I pulled weeds, fed the sows and chickens and the few livestock they owned, cleaned and primed the well, fed their Collie dogs and chopped wood. I even babysat with the McKay’s six kids. Can you believe that? I practiced driving the tractors and later in the summer cultivated a few rows until I accidentally took out several baby corn plants. I also helped detassle McKay’s corn. He did take me on several field trips and allowed me to drive the tractor to practice planting and cultivating. It was an apprentice summer.
The worst part about that first summer was Hoople, McKay’s hired hand. Hoople farmed and did odd jobs and drank cheap liquor after work. I had to share a room with Hoople who always came to bed blitzed filling the room with an impenetrable’ mist of booze odors. He snored like a cranky thunderstorm and whispered dream-talk regarding a horse named Seabiscuit and a woman named Gabor.
You picked up from the conversations that taking a Blue journey with McKay initiated a pathway toward adulthood. If you survived that trip, you could sit with the adults, laugh, share your jokes, drink beer anytime, and drive a stick-shift car into town. Most important, you would get your own bedroom bereft of Hooples traumatizing snores.
When Big Blue conversations came up at the adult end of the table, laughter erupted across the room and far out into the fields. I would ask Windy if I could come along. “Wait til next year, kid.” Big Blue, whatever its content, made less of a difference than actual trip itself. I kept rethinking that the Big Blue trip was not going to happen. I hated the thought of that summer.
Windy promised me, before I departed for home that summer, that if I were capable of flawlessly cultivating the north 70 acres, he would consider taking me on a Big Blue trip.
I was back again for another summer. I just completed cultivating the north 70 with McKay’s new 59 John Deere WD 4 row cultivator. I promised him, as part of the deal, that I would do it, and I did. I turned off the tractor’s engine in the centermost section of the cornfield. Dinner was not for an hour or so I decided to stay, parked, quietly reminiscing here in the warmth of the late afternoon Illinois sun. Endless rows of young field corn everywhere forward and backward, maybe a foot high, changing color as the sun moved the shade. I took out a Pall Mall cig from the tool compartment and lit it. I am fifteen and feeling fine, freewheeling, independent, and confident. Big Blue was in my reach and I felt so cool.
I arrived late for supper. The dinner table was huge since it had to accommodate Ann, the six kids, John McKay, Hoople, and Windy. I sat down across from John M. (Soapy) McKay, Jim’s brother, who was generally distant and laconic most dinners; the death, of his twin sister, Joan, hit while roller-skating out on the hard road years back, still weighed heavy. Hoople just ate and drank.
Jim Windy McKay’s banter dominated conversation. He talked and joked. Most of his conversations raced through religious and current political issues always with a few anti-English slurs. He liked Kennedy and made it known to all. Of course, we all liked Kennedy. If a bomb detonated under this dinner table, there would not be a Democrat in Woodford County. Jim would always ask embarrassing questions like “Mike, why in the hell does your father vote Eisenhower Republican, doesn’t he appreciate the fact he was a recipient of a Roosevelt sponsored medical school loan. Jim was always proud of his dinnertime yarns as well as the speed with which he could say them. He forewarned his kids that another raunchy McKay anecdote headed their way flagging them to leave the table out of earshot. Those youngsters marched in and out of the room as if they were on a continuous military drill.
When dinner ended, the kids ran off, and Windy turned table talk toward gambling and invention schemes. Conversation became louder and more interactive. This crowd loved chatting about the quick fix, the easy remedy. John McKay said his horse shampoo was coming along, and that it was not just for any horse, but for thoroughbreds only. Hoople was experimenting making liquor out of tractor grease. Windy harped about the Big Blue and announced that he would make another batch, with a few chemical adjustments, and then tomorrow hawk for the day. I immediately said: “Jim, I finished cultivating your last 70 acres and you promised that I could accompany you on the next Blue trip
– Michael Lavin
