Take the students to the farm, they said. It will be fun, they said.
Real close to Halloween, 20th Street Elementary School decided their third graders would go to the country. Get those kids out of that polluted city and let them breathe the fresh air of the real Wisconsin. Let those kids see what they are missing couped up in that big city.
Now my favorite thing to do in the world is to make fun of other people while simultaneously making fun of myself. All of us can laugh if we are all idiots, if we are all ignorant. Well folks, in third grade I was an idiot. And neither I, nor this farm, was ready for the clashing of the two worlds. There is an old story, a classic story about two mice, the Country Mouse and the City Mouse, and they are pulled into each other’s worlds when they decide to swap lives for a while.
Folks, I am a Street Rat. I ran streets, I got into fights, and I lived with a gang in my neighborhood. I was being groomed by that gang when I was six years old. And I was sooo excited when they told me I was going to a real farm. I would get to see animals and walk into a real log cabin and see what pioneer life was all about. The kicker is at the end, we all get to pick out our own pumpkins from an honest to goodness pumpkin patch.
Might even get to see The Great Pumpkin. If I was sincere enough.
The bus ride was pretty boring until we got to the trees. Once we had left the north side of Milwaukee and broke free into the country, you had twenty kids with their faces mashed up against the windows, watching fields and trees. We saw cows in these fields. We saw great flocks of birds in those trees.
Now this was not totally new to me. Mumble’s family owned what they called a farm up in northern Wisconsin, real close to the Canada border. But that farm was not a farm. At one time it had been, but not now. That farm was just a big forest of neatly planted Christmas trees that had grown wild, and wide open fields were there was nothing to do.
They said if we went out there we would get eaten by wolves and bears, so we stayed in that tiny house and saw nothing. So, you can imagine what happened when I stepped off the bus and into the mud of a misty rainy morning that was just saying goodbye to a misty rainy night. The farmer greeted us at the bus door and, before he could give us a hearty welcome, one boy shouted out, “What’s wrong with your roads?”
“Ah, excuse me, little fella?” the man in the hat said. “How’s that?”
“Your roads are terrible. No ground, just mud. Where is the road?”
The teacher looked at the farmer, and I wonder if that was when they realized what they had done. And if not, at what point when did they realize they had a group of inner-city street kids staring in disgust at the entire dirty, wet world they were looking at?
“Hey mister, where is our pumpkins?” a girl said.
The man tried to regroup. “Well, we are saving that for the end of the trip. First comes the good stuff. If you will all walk right this way, we will show you the barn.” We all walked towards that barn the way that farmer would have walked our neighborhoods. Only he would have been far too polite to say, “This barn needs new paint.”
“Yeah well, that is what happens around here. Your list of chores outweighs your time to do them.”
It was my time to speak up. “My mom painted my whole house in two days.”
“Well,” the man said through gritted teeth. “This barn is bigger than your house now, ain’t it?”
“I guess,” I said, looking at the structure with contempt.
“Here we go,” he said with a grunt as he opened the big swinging door.
“Does that door even have a doorknob?”
“Don’t use doorknobs around here, son. What we use is handles. They are better.”
“I guess.”
When the door was open, we could see a massive building cut up by stalls with cows in them. There was a wide deep long trough that stretched almost out of the building, and we looked at cows in those stalls, and they did not look like the cows on the fields on the side of the road. These cows were dirty. These cows were wet. Field cows never got dirty. Every time you saw them from the car, they were clean. They never got wet. Never.
“This place stinks,” a girl said.
“Anyone want to pet the cows?” the man said with a lifting voice of mock excitement.
The chipper question was answered to a choir of groans. “No…”
“Well they are something, aren’t they?”
“Why does it smell like that?” a boy asked
“Well,” the man pulled his hat off and he was bald. The sight of that bright white bald head made all of us laugh. He stuffed his hat back on and cursed under his breath. “Well, the cows live here. That is why it smells like that.”
“Yeah?”
“Well, when animals get wet, they have a certain aroma to ’em.”
“I guess.”
“I got a real treat for you kids. Why don’t you guys come over and meet the prettiest girl in the area?” He was stomping now.
He was stomping.
He took us deep into the barn and I looked at his back and said, “They sell paint at the store.”
“I know they do, ya little…” he said through grit teeth. “Here is some fun for you. You guys are going to love this beauty queen right here.” The beauty queen had to be behind the cow he had taken us to. I walked around him, and the cow, looking for her.
“Where is she?” I said.
He slapped the cow on the side with a gentle pat and said, “This is her right here. Ain’t she a beaut?”
“I guess.”
“Now you kids bend down real low, and you will see this part right here.” He pointed to a big pink trash bag hanging from under the cow. The trash bag had fingers, but no fingernails poking out, and pointing straight at the ground.
“You kids like the cow, right?” the teacher said. Mrs. Sherman was really trying to fix this problem before it got started, but a little boy pointed at the big pink trash bag and said. “What’s wrong with her? The cows on the side of the road don’t have those.”
“Yes, they do. Now listen up and keep the questions down so we can have some fun,” he said. He looked at all of us with a rictus grin and said, “No more questions. Let’s get to milking. And damn it, those cows in the fields by the roads have these. These are udders.”
A girl stuttered out, “Ut-ut-utters.”
All of us laughed. The teacher turned away for a moment and the farmer clenched his fist in silence for a long time before he pointed at the girl, then at the stool he had sitting right up next to the ut-ut-utters.
“You sit,” he snapped.
She sat quick. She dropped her head and started to cry.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said angrily. “I’m trying to show you how to have fun on the farm.”
She kept crying and staring at the barn floor.
“Don’t be scared,” he snapped. “Damn it, it’s time to have fun on the farm. Now grab one of the udders real slow, and real gentle.”
She sobbed. “I don’t want to!”
“Well then, you can just, well that is just fine. Now, you don’t have to touch the udder if you don’t want to.”
Giggle.
“Udder is not a funny word,” he snapped. “Damn it. Get up and let another kid try.”
She stood and ran to the teacher, who wrapped her arm around her and looked at the farmer at a loss.
“You there!” he said, stabbing a finger at me. “You sit on this stool and grab this udder, and nobody laugh.”
I sat. The stool was uncomfortable. I could tell right away why that girl was really crying. It was not that the farmer had snapped at her. Parents yelled at us all the time. I was seeing the true horror of what she had seen. That big pink trash bag was so much bigger down here.
“Now, see that bucket?” he said.
I looked at it in horror.
“Do I have to get in it?” I said, purely terrified. It was too small to get in for sure, but the true horror of the idea was that I would be perched in a bucket directly under the ut-ut-utters.
“Now listen, kid. I want you to do exactly what I tell you to right now.”
I bit my lip, focused on the most horrifying thing anyone would ever say to me, and he said, “Just wrap your little hand around one of those udders and just hold it. Don’t squeeze it, don’t pull it. Just hold it.”
I held it. It was rubbery and had no bones. The udders were terrible fingers.
“Now, squeeze your top finger, then the next one, then the next one, then the next one. Like this right here, see this? What I am doing with my hand? Just do that.” The farmer watched as I did exactly what he did. “No dammit, you have to do it a little tighter, and you should pull too.”
I pulled and the cow moaned.
“Not that tight, damn, you’re gonna bring the whole girl down on your damn head.”
I threw myself backward and hit the ground. Mud up the back of my coat. Mud on my pants. I scurried away before the cow landed on me. I got out of there so fast she didn’t even have time to fall on me. I got to my feet. And looked at the farmer.
“Good thing I’m fast, huh?” I said.
“Yeah, kid.” Something was broken in this man now. “Good thing you’re fast. Now I’ll just show you. You do like this, see?”
“You pulled harder than me.”
“Well, I know what I am doing.”
“Then why did you have me do it?”
“Because it’s fun, goddammit!”
Silence.
“I guess…”
So, according to this guy, that big pink trash bag hanging off that cow’s belly is where milk comes from. He said it right to my face, so if you don’t believe me you can talk to him about it. What we saw was a tiny little squirt, way too loud for how little it was, hit the metal of the bucket. He pulled on those boneless fingers for a while, getting his elbows going real fast, and when he had done it for about three minutes, he had white liquid on the bottom of the bucket. But just a tiny amount.
“You can just get milk at the corner store if you want to, mister. It’s just a dollar and a half,” I said. “You’ll get a lot more than that, I can tell you right now.”
“Let’s feed the pigs,” he said. He stood up, pulled his hat off, and slapped his legs. We laughed at his bald head and he covered it up.
He was stomping again.
“You really got to do something about all this dirt and mud, mister,” a boy said.
“Oh yeah, and what pray tell do you think I ought to do about it?” he snapped.
“Sweep it up or something. Maybe scrape away the mud till you get to street,” he said.
“Well kid, if things keep going like they are, that is exactly what you are going to be doing.”
“I’m good at sweeping,” a girl said. “I sweep the kitchen every night. I like it a lot. Do you have a broom? You can take the other kids to the rest of the farm. I’ll clean this place up for you.”
“Well,” he said, looking at the teacher.
Mrs. Sherman busted out laughing.
“Well, aren’t you just a helpful little girl.”
We left the barn and walked over to the most hideous spot of land that has ever been a spot on land. It was just filthy. It was mud just for mud’s sake. Just piles of it, and it was caked onto the pigs, and puddles had formed, and you guys would not believe it.
“Who wants to feed the pigs?” the man said.
Everyone looked at their feet and shuffled back.
“Well then I’ll feed them. You guys can just watch. How about that? You kids just stand right there in my dirt covered pavement and watch me feed these damn pigs.”
He opened a part of the fence that could not have been a gate and he stepped into the mud. He sank in to the middle of his shins and everyone, I mean all of us, yelled out, “Eww!”
“Can you take these little, these little, somethings to my wife in the log cabin?” he said, looking at our teacher. “Do you think you could-?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’ll take ’em. Let’s everyone say thanks to the farmer for showing us how to have fun on the farm.
“Thank you.” In unison. As we walked away trying not to slip. “I guess…”
Mrs. Sherman was having a blast on this trip, I knew that much for sure. She could not stop laughing. Which is scary as fuck. Teachers are not supposed to laugh. They are supposed to be mean and strict, because Mrs. Sherman works in one of the toughest schools in the country and she cannot just run around laughing at everything.
None of us knew how to handle it. Every time she laughed, we jumped. Which made her laugh harder.
The door swung open, and there was a woman dressed just like Little House on the Prairie.
“Welcome, kids. Come on in,” she said. I cannot remember anything about her face, her hair, or anything like that. There is no better way to distract a city kid than to bring them into a log cabin.
“What’s wrong with the door?”
“What happened to the floor?”
“Where are all the rooms?”
Mrs. Sherman looked at the farmer’s wife, and that wife planted her hands on her hips and said, “Oh, ok, I see what we did.”
Mrs. Sherman barked out a laugh.
“Well, this is what it was like in a farm house in the old days. This right here. Everything you see here, including the way I am dressed. So, welcome to the past.”
“Okay… I guess…”
“Here are the beds,” she said. “A big bed on the floor for the parents, and one in that loft up there for the kids.”
“They all slept here?” a little boy said.
“Yes, yes, they did. They all slept in the same room.”
“How did the parents fuck?” a cute little third grade girl asked this pioneer woman straight to her face.
Mrs. Sherman exploded with laughter for one split second before she came in hard and hot. “Prissy, that kind of language is not okay. We do not talk like that. Say sorry to the class, and say sorry to this woman right now!”
“Sorry,” she said, but Mrs. Sherman’s wrath and that apology did nothing to quell the power of the question. All of us still stared at that poor woman expecting an answer.
She looked out over the sea of curious faces, and she lifted her hands in the air and dropped them. “Families were closer back then, okay?”
“Ok… I guess…”
“Here is a new rule,” she said. “I will not answer any question with a curse word in it.” Her face was serious, but her eyes begged us to cuss, a lot. This woman was quickly realizing that questions were her enemy.
“Now everyone come over to the bed.” She walked to the side of the wooden bed, and we all just stared at it. Mrs. Sherman laughed.
“No families are here right now, come on, come to the bed.” We slowly gave up our ground and came to the bed.
“What’s wrong with the blankets?”
The woman breathed a sigh of relief. “This is a quilt. This was sewn by hand by the women back in those days. It took weeks, sometimes months, to get them done right.”
“You can buy a blanket better than that one at Kmart,” I said.
“There were no Kmarts back then.”
“Well, there is a corner store right up the block from my house called Ben Franklin’s and you can—”
“There were no Ben Franklin’s back in the old days,” she said
A hush fell on the room. She looked at all of us. We looked at her. We knew she was lying. Why was she lying?
It hit Mrs. Sherman first, and she bent over, howling in laughter.
“Ben Franklin wasn’t around back then,” the woman said.
Mrs. Sherman was slapping her thigh, unable to breathe. When she could get a breath, she cried out, “There was,” gasp for breath and more laughing, “a Ben Franklin…” Desperate for air but can’t stop laughing. “…back in those days.” She sat. Right on the floor, Mrs. Sherman sat.
The woman had no idea what our teacher was talking about for a long time. All she could do was stare at Mrs. Sherman.
“Tell her, kids,” Mrs. Sherman said.
“He flew the kite in the storm,” I said.
“You know, with the key,” a little boy said.
The woman turned around and clapped her hand across her mouth. We could see her shaking for a moment before she said, “Okay, let’s churn some butter.”
“This is butter,” she said, walking us to the corner of the room and pulling out a contraption that was very much not butter.
“That is wood.”
“Okay, I see,” the woman said. “Let’s just say, this is how they made butter back then. Before we go on, let me nip this in the bud. There were no stores to go buy butter. No way to get it but to make it. This right here is called a butter churn. This was the tool that they used to make butter.”
Blank stares, and Mrs. Sherman is getting herself together.
“We are going to make butter.” She opened the contraption, which looked like a terribly made barrel with a broom handle sticking out of it, and she poured thick milk into it. She showed us that the bottom of the broom handle was not a broom at all.
One of these little girls was sorely disappointed.
The end of the stick had a wooden X on it. She slammed the butter churn closed, grabbed the handle, lifted, and slowly pressed down.
“See, now we are making butter.”
We all walked over to this thing. This terrible barrel and shitty broom made butter. We were ready to see. This was the coolest thing any of us had seen on this trip.
“Your turn,” she said, handing the handle over to a little girl.
The girl picked up the handle and pushed, and the bottom slammed the bottom of the butter churn. We all looked at her.
“Well, it takes a while. You have to do that for a while to transform it into butter.”
“How long?”
Mrs. Sherman giggled.
“Well, your turn now,” she pointed to the next kid. “Well, the women would sit and do this until they got butter.”
“Yeah, but how long before the butter was done?”
“Hours.” The woman looked around defeated. “A lot of hours.”
“Okay… I guess…”
“Hey, were there Indians back in those days?” I asked, real excited. Looking around, I was starting to realize that this is the type of place where in the movies they had Indians.
“There were Indians back in those days.”
“Indians are cool. They have tomahawks and bows and arrows,” a boy said. Things were getting warmed up now.
“Yes, Indians are very cool.”
“Are there any Indians here?”
“No,” she said to a choir of groans. “No Indians here.”
“Ok… I guess…”
For more about the series Reality of the Unreal Mind, visit Amazon.
Jesse Teller 
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