Jo Dereske

ALL OF US AT THE SAME TIME

©Jo Dereske, 2014

Chapter 14

We Become Spies

The day after what we would later refer to as, “Mike’s first episode,” my brother Ray and I spent an hour on the phone discussing our options. He and I spoke at least once a day, keeping each other up to date, sharing news, opinions and bad jokes. I considered him a good friend as well as a good brother. “They don’t have to talk to each other every day,” Barbara told Kipling, teasing, “as long as they plan for it.”

Ray and Kipling went shopping at Radio Shack, where they bought an intercom and 150 feet of wire, and in the early morning light before Louise and Mike were awake the two of them strung the wire out the kitchen window of the little house, looped and threaded it up into the pine trees and along branches across the driveway into the main house. They hid the intercom on top of Louise’s refrigerator, pushed far back with a light dishtowel covering it.

Working an intercom was beyond Louise and Mike’s understanding and although this was not exactly an ethical enterprise and we didn’t feel totally comfortable with it, Ray and Barbara and Kipling and I agreed that leaving the intercom turned on was mandatory for their safety. We heard them clearly from the little house and it wasn't long before we tuned out their conversations but were alerted by angry or frantic tones of their voices or sudden unusual noises. Then, we timed our arrivals "coincidentally" to forestall worse problems.

The intercom granted us new peace of mind. We now heard their voices and movements when they awoke so we could deliver meals in a timely fashion and not leave food cooling on their table. We were able to defuse arguments and be there in an instant at the first signs of Mike’s episodes or Louise’s obsessions.

I was a light sleeper so I was awakened by their nighttime movements and was dismayed at how one or the other appeared to be up and roaming the house nearly all night long.

“Sounds like poltergeists,” Kipling said, waking up in the night and finding me in the living room wrapped in an afghan and gazing out the window at their closed and dark house, while on the intercom behind us we heard drawers opening, silverware rattling, chairs being moved, the toilet flushing.


1931 Bill came back to the farm. I don’t know what happened in Chicago but we can’t afford to live there anyway.


Every day, on my first pass around my trail I held my arms up in front of me as if I were being threatened by robbers. If I didn’t, the fine threads of spider webs clung to my face and hair, tickling like invisible feathers. The strands of web crisscrossed between trees and bushes, dewy in the morning light

Over a several day period I watched a small metamorphosis transpire that no one was able to explain. At the first curve of my trail into the woods I spied a translucent white three-inch by two-inch "medallion" about four feet off the ground on the trunk of an oak tree. It was 3/4 of an inch thick and it bubbled, actually visibly bubbled, as if it were doing a slow boil. I cautiously touched it my fingertip to it and found it pliant, pulsing as if it were alive, with a translucent purity like pearls.

In a couple of days the medallion turned hard and traded its translucence for chalkiness. After about a week, it faded to a dull leathery color covered with tiny puncture holes. When I lightly tapped it, puffs of goldy-green spores shot out, like puff ball spores. Two days later the cover had disintegrated and fallen to the ground and it was impossible to tell where it had been adhered to the tree.

An eerie stillness preceded the worst thunderstorms, as if they were trying to
sneak up undetected. No breezes, limp leaves and an oppressive breathlessness. Sounds were amplified in the quiet as the day ominously darkened.

It was eighty-four degrees and sticky with humidity and along my trail, the light was failing at one o’clock in the afternoon

I entered my prairies where I had a long view of the skies and fields across the road. Dark clouds already roiled across the southwestern sky and a single splat of a raindrop landed on my shoulder. It was enough of a warning.

I ran toward the little house, reaching the door as heavy rain pelted the earth behind me. Thunder rumbled and growled in the distance, closer with every clap. “One-thousand-one, one-thousand-two, one-thousand-three” I counted after a flash of lightning. Five seconds between a flash and its accompanying peal of thunder for every mile of distance, I remembered. The yard light, operated on a photo cell, blinked on.

Kipling had gone to town and when I looked at Louise’s house, I saw her standing in the window holding the telephone receiver to her ear.

I grabbed a jacket, draped it over my head and ran to her house through the rain, which had been joined by pounding hail that bounced on the driveway like popcorn. Lightning flashed off to my left.

“Hello,” I sang out as I entered.

Louise dropped the receiver. Her voice was rough with excitement. “I was trying to call you. There’s going to be a tornado.” Neither the television nor the radio was on and I flicked on her TV. There was no telltale tornado warning sign in the corner of the screen.

Mike napped unawares on the sleeping porch and I fixed cups of green tea for Louise and me to sip in the living room while we watched the storm. The winds whipped the trees, the thunder and lightning played nonstop as the hail passed and the rain carried on, falling straight from the sky as if it were too heavy to be slanted by the wind. I turned on the table lamps and the room filled with warm luminescence.

“Your grandmother burned a slice of palm frond from Palm Sunday when the storms came,” Louise told me, “to keep the house safe.”

Fire: the farmer’s most dreaded enemy. A row of multicolored glass balls on ornate iron spikes had marched across my grandparents’ roof peak. Lightning rods.

A particularly close clap of thunder boomed and Louise blinked. The lamps stuttered and went out. “The electricity’s off,” she commented. “Do you think Johnny and the boys are all right?” She meant Ray, and I let her reference to my father pass.

“I’m sure they are. He watches the weather.”

“He was a trickster,” she said, thinking of my father again. “He bedeviled Stella because she had the best screech of any of us.” She shook her head, her eyes looking into three quarters of a century ago. “He peed in the drinking water bucket once and didn’t tell us until after we drank it.” She slipped away into her memory as the storm hammered around us.

After a half hour the sky began to lighten and the wind dropped. A few heavy drops plinked against the metal chairs outside “There will be a rainbow to the east,” Louise said. “I want to see it.”

She took my arm and we walked outside to the patio, standing at the border of her rock creation and gazing to the east. She was correct: a brilliant rainbow arched over the sky, visible from end to end, and within moments, it was joined by a second, fainter rainbow. “Get ready for a spate of good luck,” she advised me.

I’d hoped the rain would wash away the dense humidity, but the air actually felt stickier. It steamed. My clothes were damp with perspiration; In Louise’s kitchen I stuck to the varnished wooden chair.

“I’m sweaty,” I told Louise, pulling my shirt away from my skin.

“Women don’t ‘sweat,’” she corrected. “Horses sweat, men perspire, but women glow.”

“Then I’m a hundred watter.”


With the humidity came the dreaded deer flies. We’d already suffered through swarms of gnats that flew up noses, into eyes and ears and open mouths. Next were clouds of mosquitos, whining as they prospected for unprotected flesh. By some anomaly, neither Louise nor I were bitten much, and Mike didn’t notice. To the flimsy insects, Kipling was pure gourmet. They poxed his arms, legs, and face with bites. I found three old bottles of the now-banned repellent, 6-12, under Louise’s sink and Kipling doused himself in the oily stuff, growing redolent in the smells of my childhood.

Large-winged and black, deer flies didn’t buzz, they attacked in silence, dive bombing into hair, biting with mad-dog ferocity. They had a relentless fondness for shoulders and the backs of necks and arms. Their one vulnerability was their dense slowness once they landed, making them irresistible targets.

Like the mosquitos, only the females bit. Their unexpected nips stung like electric shocks. When they were particularly ferocious I carried a hand towel and slapped it against my legs and across my neck like a Penitent with a whip.

They provoked Kipling, into obsessed vengeance. The man who petted bees gleefully swatted, crushed and executed deer flies with abandon, the messier and grosser their demise the better. Their existence became a personal challenge. ”You can’t tell me there’s no way to keep them off,” he accused Ray and me as if we were guilty of not sharing some obscure Michigan secret with him.

He tried every deterrent he read about, heard rumors of, or imagined. 6-12 was useless. He buttered himself with Avon Skin so Soft he bought from a man selling it out of his trunk in the grocery store parking lot, sprayed on Deet from the sports store, rubbed mysterious concoctions smelling of camphor, lemon, tallow, dish soap, vinegar, and worse, on his exposed skin.

So armored, he’d head out to do battle wearing a grim and hopeful expression on his face. Moments later I’d spy him in the garden, slapping at his neck and arms in maniacal dance steps.

“Maybe they’re looking for the deer you keep chasing away,” I suggested, in jest. “They are called deer files.”

He considered the idea and for a few days stopped chasing the deer out of the orchard and the greening-up garden. But it made no difference. The deer flies stubbornly stalked human flesh, particularly his.

The only defense was to cover every bare bit of skin as heavily as bearable, and it wasn’t long before he surrendered to long pants and sleeves and caps, tying a bandanna around his neck that he sometimes raised over his face like a bandit. “They’ll be gone in two weeks,” Mike assured him.



1931 We are still in Michigan on the farm. The days are all the same. A very cold and snowy winter. We butchered two pigs today and who should come driving in just as all the work was finished but Tofelia and Gordon. I wonder for how long? None of us are happy about G being here but Mother says we have to be kind because he’s Tofelia’s husband. Hah.
Bill began to chew!! We went down to the woods and got into an awful fight. He said terrible things to me – and maybe I did to him, too. I can’t bear to have him chew. I won’t make up until he apologizes. A gloomy day. I’m lonesome for the city.


I feared Mike was on the verge of another episode. He walked through the garden with a kitchen pot in his hand. He meandered awkwardly through the fruit trees, trailed his hand along the fence rails, back to the garden and then through the old overgrown gardens behind the barn: blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, stopping occasionally to stroke a bush or lean down to examine a plant. He stooped over the asparagus bed and then continued to the edge of the woods, gazing blankly about him, standing stone-like for minutes.

Kipling and I stood in the window of our bedroom watching his progress. “Do you think this is the way he’ll be from now on?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, already mourning the loss of the Mike of even a few days ago. He still hadn’t fully recovered from the keys episode, remaining a bit more unworldly than before, more lost. We hadn’t accepted it yet, still hoping for a reprieve, a recovery at least to his previous state rather than a continual irrevocable decline.

Mike stepped from behind the barn and entered the old leaning chicken coop. When he emerged he no longer carried his kitchen pot. Slowly and dreamily he crossed the yard and tested the shed doors. He paused in bemusement beside the peanut butter log Kipling kept filled for the birds, made a stack of pinecones and carefully scooped it up and carried it to a spot beneath a different tree, then walked into the house.

After his wander through the garden, Mike spent the afternoon as if in a trance. He didn't answer when he was spoken to. He couldn't remember how to turn the door latch; he didn't zip his pants. I led him outside by the hand and he sat silently hunched on the rock apron on the patio, looking gray and other-worldly.

“Would you like to sit in the swing?” I asked him, pointing to the wooden swing he’d hung from a pine branch years ago, but he didn’t acknowledge me.

Finally, as I was carrying in dinner, he rose and wandered toward the barn.

"Where is he? Where did he go?" Louise fussed. "Is he sick? His supper will get cold. Go call him."

A few minutes later Mike entered the kitchen carrying two ragged sprigs of lilacs. They’d finished blooming weeks ago and the few remaining blossoms were brown, dropping from the stems with his every move. He held them out to Louise. "I found these for you, Weezy,"

She couldn’t release her worry and at dinner she asked him if he’d go to her doctor, “a nice female doctor.”

“No,” he told her.

“Would you go to me if I was a doctor?” she asked.

He thought for a few seconds, then struggled to say, “Well, I guess if you were a doctor, I sure wouldn’t know you.”

She laughed in delight and said, “You’re pretty sharp tonight, Mikey.”

Mike wiped a slice of bread across the gravy on his plate and dropped it into his glass of milk. “I’m going to lay down.”

“Are you sick?” she asked.

“Of course not,” he answered.

A crafty expression crossed her face. “You don’t feel any better yet, do you?”

“No, I don’t feel any better yet,” he mumbled as he passed her chair to the bedroom.

Louise immediately stood and refusing my help, carried two aspirin and a glass of water to the bedroom for him.

“I love you, Mikey,” I heard her say. “You’re the best thing in my life.”

“You and me,” he replied.

Kipling was preoccupied when I related Louise and Mike's conversation as I unpacked dirty dishes from the wicker basket. "What's up?" I asked.

"We committed to help Louise and Mike for six months," he quietly said, and my stomach dropped. "In three and a half weeks we'll have been here six months."


1931 Billy and I still sore at each other. I won’t make up until he apologizes. He and Frank went to Winslow’s to help cut wood.
Heavy snow and drifting. We went to Custer and the roads were slick and slicker. I’m always fighting with Tofelia. Gordon SAYS he’s looking for work. They’re sleeping in the parlor so when we come down or go up we have to pass their bed. What a show!
We all drove to Round Lake in two cars. Twenty-three fish shanties out on the ice.


Next Tuesday, Chapter 15: Raccoons and Decisions Read More