Four Tales from Winesburg, Indiana

 The County Extension Agency's Experimental Bamboo Plot

We knew right away we should not have done it, planted the bamboo. It grows by leaps and bounds. Blame the rhizomes, the threading roots that root and knit together beneath the skin, underground so that you can't mulch it to mute its growth. It spreads and spreads. Look at it, a great green cloud, a graphic depiction of climate change, bamboo absorbing all that excess carbon infused in the air, a great green cough. We thought this grass, the largest grass, could supplant that mutant one we call corn. Bamboo makes a fine pickle. A relish. It can be eaten whole. Flooring. Biomass. But it didn't catch on. The cat was out of the bag, and the stuff just spread. We can't stop it, though we make gestures to. The burns. The chemicals. The harvests every other day. Secretly, we are much amazed by bamboo. Bamboozled by bamboo, in fact. How it succeeds as all our agricultural experiments fail, a crop of unintended consequences. The other day, I found a sprout of it, a golden spike, slicing through the concrete there. I look out the window and I swear the grove has taken two steps closer to envelope our little station here in this now perennial shade.

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My Flat Top

Don Cofelt, my barber, has a level he keeps under the ultraviolet light back there, a level with little bubbles inside clear tubes that bounce back and forth between scored marks. I watch them in the mirror as they percolate back and forth. "Got it," Don says when we've got it–my hair clipped in a smiling chevron that scallops into the dome of noggin–horizontal. I like to say to anyone who'll listen that I've had my ears lowered. Don has a sign taped to the mirror that says, "Many men think they are being cultivated when they are only being trimmed." It is cold in winter. I travel, hatless with my new hair, though the streets of Winesburg. The wind skids over my scalp. "Flat Top" is also something they call an aircraft carrier; and as I navigate my way home, I imagine launching and recovering my thoughts. Whole wings of thinking circling, flying in formation on patrol around my head, alert, dauntless, searching for what is out there just beyond that endless horizon up ahead.

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Ron's Lawn Roller

He wants us to borrow it. It is an ungainly thing, the lawn roller, but Ron insists. He rolls his roller over to our lawn to demonstrate the proper technique of how to roll a lawn. "It is as easy as that," he says after he has gone back and forth over the lawn. The lawn, after he is done, looks like it has been painted two shades of green–green and greener. It doesn't look all that easy–the roller is concrete, for goodness sake–and old Ron, he's huffing and puffing after pushing that stone back and forth. We know Ron's heart is in the right place. He just wants the lawns of greater Winesburg to look nice. Who doesn't? Ron sits on our front stoop, recovering from his recent exertion, intent on us rolling our lawn with his lawn roller. We know what you are thinking. How hard can it be when the whole landscape, from here to the horizon, seems leveled to within an inch of its life, flat as flat can be? But when we are wrangling the roller across our lawns, believe us: slight declivities, slopes, and inclines are transmitted through the wooden handles. Here, it inches upward. There on the edge of running away down hill. We admit it takes our breath away, our sense of things all flattened, the subtle-seeming but really gigantic disruptions of degree, the thickness of a blade of grass, differences in altitude between here and here.

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A Deep Fat Fried Breaded Pork Tenderloin from John's Awful Awful (Awful Good, Awful Big)

It takes a while to tenderize the meat. We use the peen end of a ball-peen hammer, a hammer I inherited from my grandfather who was a coppersmith, to tenderize the meat in a manner not unlike the forging of the famous samurai swords of Japan, or so I am told, hammering the cut of meat and then folding it back on itself and hammering it flat again and again before it is inserted in the sleeve of the breading, the flour of which I grind myself with a marble mortar and pestle I inherited from my other grandfather, a pharmacist at Blister's Drug in downtown Winesburg, and then the whole concoction is lowered into the deep fat fryer, the basket of which was constructed from a salvaged shopping cart from the abandoned Roger's Market, but most importantly, you need to know about the hog itself, which, in its demise, gives up its chop, shoulder, and butt for all the manipulation I have already described, and I do spend weeks wandering the flat Indiana landscape, as flat as a map as big as the thing it represents, as flat as the sandwich that itself, a product of two dimensions, lacking depth, no height, no thickness as it spreads, a sheet of meat that expands to fill this vacuum, this slice so thin it is on the edge of pure nothing, searching for the wild boars of Northern Indiana as they flatten, an optical illusion generated by their camouflage that confuses the foreground from the background, making it difficult, if not impossible, to predate the wily but delicious prey.

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Michael Martone's newest book is The Complete Writings of Art Smith, the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Edited by Michael Martone. After forty years, he retired from teaching. He lives in Tuscaloosa where he continues to write postcards and putters in his garden.