Stuffed

My sister is the direct opposite of me. When I was a child, I hero-worshipped Donna and wanted to be just like her. She went to college the year I started first grade, so sadly, we didn't get many years together in my childhood. Maybe if we had more time together, I would be a scientist today. Instead, my daughter is a duplicate of my sister in so many ways. Here is one of my favorite Donna stories.

Donna lived between two worlds, away at college and home. The worlds were far apart in lifestyle, and the people around her. I don’t remember her talking about college much when she came home; I doubt she spoke of home at college. When she left, it seemed like it was forever until we saw her again; when she returned, it was as if she had never been gone.

One of Donna’s college courses was taxidermy. The Northern Minnesota college students were expected to find their own specimens. Luckily, we lived on 160 acres of swamp and woodland, surrounded by miles of "state land." Considered free land for hunting, fishing, and lumbering, the state land was home to an abundance of wildlife. Between the state land and our farm, Donna had access to a plentiful supply of specimens to stuff for college credit. In a short time, our house was adorned with numerous squirrels, chipmunks, and gophers, each with cotton balls for eyes and slightly dissipated grins on their faces.

Donna's skills in taxidermy advanced when she obtained a porcupine carcass. The animal had taken up residence in the trees surrounding the outhouse. Although unthreatening to us, the porcupine quills would cause significant harm to our dogs if they managed to catch it. Not to mention Mom’s proclamation, “I don’t like the idea of a wild animal watching me take a leak. It’s probably got rabies, and with my luck, the damn thing will bite me when I’m taking a leak!”

Dad took his rifle out and shot the porcupine. Suspicious of an illness making the porcupine weak enough to linger around humans, we didn’t eat the meat. Donna gutted and skinned the carcass, bringing it into the living room to practice taxidermy. Donna had commandeered a large part of the living room for her projects. There was no other appropriate heated space on the farm, so we lived around the skinned remains of her latest work.

This was an ambitious project for Donna, and I remember watching her progress intently. I received lessons from her on the anatomy of a porcupine and skinning and preserving the hide. Donna always educated me as she worked on any project or task. Due to her diligence in pointing out each curiosity while cleaning game or fish, I will never eat sushi. I am surprised I am still able to eat meat at all. I did get straight A’s in my Anatomy and Physiology classes, so there’s that.

A fat porcupine hide full of quills was hazardous. The black and cream-colored quills had a hooked barb on the end, nature making removal difficult and painful. The hide shed fishhook-barbed quills daily, dispersed throughout the house by regular living room traffic.   

Tubby was the targeted victim of the quills.  He would walk through the living room to his winter bed in the corner and yell while hopping on one bare foot, “God damn it, Donna!” The rest of us quickly learned to always keep our shoes on in the house. It was a landmine of porcupine quills. Whether out of stubbornness or forgetfulness, Tubby would be caught barefoot and unaware.  Frequently, he punctuated the air with his screams of “God damn it, Donna!”

It happened often enough that I wondered if he was looking for a reason to swear at our sister, whether she was home or not.  Mom would yell back, “Put your shoes on, you damn fool!” Sitting on the edge of his bed, he would twist and pull the quill out of his foot, “I don’t know how the fucking thing ain’t bald yet.” 

Once Donna had dried and preserved the porcupine hide, she stuffed it with cotton batting. Fat and realistically shaped again, its abundant remaining quills were smooth and shiny. Since Donna couldn’t afford realistic glass eyes, she used white cotton to fill the empty eye sockets. For years, I kept a stuffed red squirrel on my nightstand, which was also eyeless; my uneasiness over the eyes conflicted with my pride in my sister.

This project was impressive, a personal expression of Donna’s artistic abilities. Still, the noble porcupine went on to serve further purposes beyond display. Eddie Schmidt was a nervous fellow and easily startled. He had a particular loathing for porcupines because they could injure good dogs. Around the farm, they chew on brake lines to access the sweet brake fluid and gnaw on wood, mainly the wood handles of tools, with the salt from sweaty hands. To Eddie, porcupines ranked even lower than odorous skunks.

Donna took the beautiful Mr. Porcupine, tied a red ribbon around its neck, and left it on the steps of Eddie’s house. The next morning, as he left the house to visit, there was most likely some yelling, cussing, and jumping until he realized the porcupine wasn’t moving.   

In that neighborhood, who else could stuff a porcupine?  That narrowed the suspects down to one, known to be taking a taxidermy class and stuffing every dead animal in Bug Tussle Township.  He quickly identified the culprit.  

Eddie wasn't a man who angered easily, but when he did, his choice of words was quite something to behold. He didn’t hold grudges and wasn’t planning to stop visiting, but he made sure that Donna and Dad, who were doubled over in laughter, knew precisely what he thought of the early Christmas present. Eddie dumped the stuffed porcupine unceremoniously into the river.  I wish we had kept the porcupine; I would have used him for many future pranks.

Donna's taxidermy class involved all of us. Tubby and I ran a trap line for pocket gophers in the fields, searched roadsides for roadkill that could still be useful, and collected every dead animal we could find. One winter day, Tubby and I discovered a dead crow lying on a pile of snow. It had been dead and decaying for a while, and we decided it wasn’t suitable for stuffing. But it would make a good skeleton for Donna to preserve and mount. We bagged the bird in a paper bag to respect Mom's sensibilities (and wrath) and placed it in the meat freezer.  Buried within the venison and Northern Pike fish, it went unseen until Donna came home for a weekend. I rushed to tell her of our prize.

The weekend of the bird, the whole family came down with the flu, and Tubby and I were the sickest. Donna was the only healthy member of the family since she had not been home during the week. As Tubby and I lay on our beds in the living room, we were treated with the Vicks VapoRub steam vaporizer. This ancient device from the 1950s boiled water in a large glass cylinder, releasing steam mixed with melted Vicks VapoRub in a container beneath the steam opening.

The vaporizer was notorious for its tendency to spit out streams of boiling water instead of steam, which could cause scalding burns to anyone unfortunate enough to be nearby. Placed in the center of the living room, it created a dense cloud of steam and Vicks menthol oil while occasionally spewing scalding hot water.

Tubby and I lay in our misery, watching the fuzzy black-and-white television and listening to the winter winds blow against the plastic covering of the windows. The sounds of the scene included the spitting and sizzling of the vaporizer, boiling water, whooshing steam, the flapping of plastic, our coughing, and the honking of blown noses. It was a repetitive symphony of discomfort.

Meanwhile, the barrel stove was filled with hardwood, meant to "cook out the fever," creating a tropical menthol island of humid and hot misery. Our bodies were also slathered in Vicks VapoRub—on the chest, under the nose, and in the nose. Sticky, steamy, and miserable, we suffered, but not silently. Being my mother’s daughter meant I complained often and loudly.

It was mid-morning, and Mom and Dad were busy with their chores. During the winter, this meant carrying five-gallon buckets of water to the Holsteins, who could drink two or more buckets at a time. After watering the cows, they opened hay bales to feed them. Once the cows were fed, they cleaned the barn. Armed with shovels, Mom and Dad would scoop out the manure and urine from the gutters and walk to the end of the barn to toss it into the manure spreader. Then, they would turn around and walk back to the far end of the barn to shovel again. It was a tedious, odorous, and back-breaking task.

Tubby and I, being sick, enjoyed the luxury of not having to help with the mid-morning chores that Saturday. Donna stayed inside to “take care of the kids,” making sure we had aspirin, refilling the vaporizer, and fetching whatever we needed.

This was the perfect time to skeletonize a bird since nursing her siblings didn’t appeal to Donna. The bird was released from its paper body bag in the meat freezer and placed into one of Mom’s large cooking pots. Donna only needed enough water to create a slow, steady boil, which would remove the bird's feathers and skin, producing a bare skeleton. Perhaps someone should have mentioned to Donna that the bird was not gutted; as the youngest, I didn’t feel it was my responsibility; that task should have fallen to Tubby.

It didn’t take long for the stench of wet feathers and boiling bird guts to fill the house.  To her credit, Donna had a strong stomach and could comfortably sit at the kitchen table, reading and watching over the cooking pot.  Tubby and I were already miserable, but the horrifying stench cut through our stuffed nasal cavities and immediately kick-started our gag reflex.  The humidity in the house made the stench heavy, enveloped in thick clouds of menthol steam.  Retching and coughing, we complained to Donna, who said, “It’s not that bad.” 

We couldn’t open a window because the plastic was nailed to the window frames with wooden lathes. It was freezing outside, and we were too sick to go out in such conditions. All we could do was pull the blankets over our heads, moaning and gagging. Sympathy was not one of Donna’s strong suits, so she ignored our suffering. After all, as Mom had told all of us, “Look up sympathy in the dictionary; it’s somewhere between shit and syphilis.” I wasn’t sure what syphilis was, but if it was that close to shit, I didn’t want it.

We struggled to breathe through our mouths under the thick handmade quilts. Mom finished in the barn, and Dad left to spread manure in the field. He drove off while Mom headed to the house to prepare dinner. The word "dinner" is used instead of "lunch," which is typically a snack around 3 p.m. That 6 p.m. meal that came just before evening milking was called supper.

Mom’s nose was also stuffed up, and she sniffed and blew it as she entered the house. She didn’t notice her two youngest children gagging in a cloud of steam. Delighted, she saw the cooking pot on the stove. As Donna looked up from her book, Mom chirped, “Oh, how nice! You’re making dinner. What are you cooking?”

Before Donna could respond, Mom lifted the lid off the boiling pot and leaned her face into the steam, taking a deep breath. Despite her congestion, the pungent odor instantly cleared her sinuses. Mom gagged and began swearing, “Jesus Cah-rist,” which was the start of a stream of even worse blasphemies. She grabbed the pot and, flinging the door open, carried it outside. Halfway to the outhouse, she tossed the pot into a snowbank in the yard, where it remains to this day, with its bird entombed inside. The pot was not worth scouring; she could find another big cooking pot at a yard sale.

Mom came stomping back into the house, empty-handed. “What in the hell was that?”

Donna explained that Tubby and I had saved a bird for her. Tubby and I had been giggling at Mom's reaction, secretly enjoying the thought of Donna facing her wrath. However, we quickly sobered up when Donna threw us under the bus. This meant that all three of us received a lecture from Mom, complete with profanities woven into her sentences like one of her patchwork quilts.