John and Melvin were the slowest men I ever knew,
though to say I knew them is not quite accurate. As a boy growing up on a farm near
Kenyon, Minnesota, I observed them and sometimes heard comments about these bachelor
brothers, usually accompanied with a wry grin to communicate that the boys were
not quite up to speed with the world.
I was curious about their lives.
They were always the last ones to
get into the fields for springs work, so the crops always lagged behind their
neighbors. Part of the reason was that their land was not good for farming. That was back in the time before everyone
starting tiling the fields to drain all the wetlands and sloughs and plant row
crops fence to fence. The large field in front of their buildings was marshy
and too wet to cultivate in early Spring. But
even when things dried out the brothers were late.
All the farmers in the neighborhood had dairy herds
and started the day at the crack of dawn. John and Melvin, not early risers, were
slow to get out to the barn in the morning.
Theirs was a fairly typical red barn we could see from the road. My guess is they milked about 15 cows by
hand, not with a milking machine as they likely did not have electricity in the barn until the 1950s, Maybe not even then. Definitely “pre-modern”.
Our community had been settled by Norwegian Lutherans. These brothers were literally “Norwegian
bachelor farmers”, in the vain of Garrison Keeler’s radio descriptions in “The
News from Lake Wobegon”. They grew up and lived their whole lives on that
farm about a mile up the road from ours, land that was no doubt homesteaded by
their grandparents in the 1860s.
The large two-storied, white farm house was stately
and classical, and was said to be full of antiques. They lived there with their sister, Julia,
who did the house cleaning and cooking in addition to caring for their elderly
father. I don’t remember ever seeing the parents, but do remember that Julia
was considered to be more sociable then her brothers. Mom sometimes mentioned that Julia had been
at Lady’s Aid. Or was that Ladies Aide,
I don’t remember.
They drove an old Ford or Chevy – about a 1932 model,
and we sometimes saw their car moving ever so slowly down the road as they went
for an evening ride to check out how the neighbors’ crops were doing. We held our breath as the car swerved
dangerously close to the ditch as John probably took his eyes off the road a
bit too long wondering why Joel’s corn was already knee high when they had just
gotten their seed in the ground.
John and Melvin were not often seen in church even
though they would have been de facto members as were about ninety
percent of those living in the neighborhood.
The one time I am sure all three of the siblings were in church was for
the funeral of their father. His death
had been announced by Melvin to Bud in the hardware store one morning. Bud greeted Melvin with the usual “how’s it
goin’ today, Melvin?”, and Melvin simply said, “Dad died today”. Not much else to say.
There were other bachelors in our neighborhood and
congregation. It seemed like each of the extended families had at least two or
three: the Floms, Voxlands, Jacobsons, Ramsteads, and Wrolstads filled at least
two pews with bachelors in the back rows of the sanctuary.
Why were there so many unmarried men in the
neighborhood? Were there not enough
eligible young ladies when they were growing up? Were they so shy that they never got up the
gumption to go courting? It is a bit of
a mystery as shyness and coyness didn’t keep many others from finding mates –
my own dad would have been considered quite shy, for example, and he found a
wonderful life partner and helpmate.
My best guess is that the natural process of taking
over the farm from the parents by one of the boys in the family sometimes meant
much time-consuming hard work and time just
slipped away. The girls were more likely
to prepare to be teachers or get jobs in town and there were not
many options left for the boys in the countryside as the years went by. It would take more of a sociologist then me
to explain it.
Some of the bachelors finally did marry in their
fifties. As they say, “late in life”. As
for John and Melvin, they never did, they were just too slow.
