Bachelors

 

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.