A little terror from a big brother ~ October 26, 1988

David Heiller

When was the last time you heard a scary story?

How about the latest presidential poll? (Just kidding, George.)

This newspaper recently ran a contest, soliciting scary stories from readers. We’ve got some good ones, and have printed several of the best on page seven in this edition. I hope you enjoy them.

The Heiller boys, before they started 
telling little brother, David, horror stories

I may be mistaken, but the best horror stories come from the minds of kids. As a member of the generation that grew up before axe-murder movies, I confess: I haven’t seen Friday the Thirteeth Part One yet, let alone Part Seven. And this Freddie guy doesn’t scare me—when I see those stainless steel finger nails, I think what a great job he could do working up our garden next spring. Wouldn’t even have to borrow a tiller. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre guy would be too tired for people after he finished cutting up the four-and-a-half cords of wood I bought from my neighbor last Saturday.

Yet 20 years ago, Lon Chaney would scare me for days if I sat up to watch him turn into a werewolf on Saturday night. Maybe it was staying up late that one night a week that did it. Maybe it was Earl Hinton. Maybe it was my brothers, who threatened to switch beds after I fell asleep and put me into Danny’s bed, the single bed—alone!—instead of the double bed where I slept with Glenn. (Glenn was nine years older than me, and always made me sleep next to the wall, but I didn’t mind after watching Lon Chaney turn into a werewolf.)

Back then, everybody knew a scary story or two. We took turns telling them at night at the school grounds. I think those stories had today’s butcher movies beat hands down. Danny had one of the best—or worst. I’ll share it here, with a warning—it came from the mind of a 12-year-old boy in 1962. Faint of heart and lovers of cats, stop reading now.

The story featured Danny (of course), and an old man, maybe Freddie’s grandfather. “This guy had only one good arm,” Danny would tell in an eager voice beneath the yellow streetlight at the school grounds. “The other he had lost in an accident. But for his other arm, the one that was missing, he bought a sickle attachment.”

“Where’d he get it, at the hardware store?” some older kid would crack. Danny ignored that, boring in on the younger kids with his quick eyes.

“And he didn’t use it to weed around the garden. He lived in this deserted house in the woods. One night a group of us got lost in the woods, and we came onto this house, see. A single kerosene lantern was all that shined through the windows.

“We crept up to a window, and slowly raised up to peek over the sill and into the room. Then we heard this noise—putt-ssss, putt-ssss, putt-ssss. Danny had this noise mastered from countless tellings, the sound of liquid dripping onto a hot surface. “Putt-ssss, putt-ssss.”

“It was dark in the room, so we leaned closer against the window. We could see something dripping onto the glass of the lantern. It was dripping from the ceiling above the room. Putt-ssss, putt-ssss.

“We didn’t know what to do, so I thought, “Well, I’m going to see what’s upstairs.” So I climbed in through the window, and there was a stairway in the corner, a steep stairway that went almost straight up. I could see a dim light there. So up I went, trying not to make a sound. I got_, to the top, and looked over.

“There, in a corner above the lantern we had seen downstairs, a man sat with his back to me. There was a gunny sack next to the man, and I could hear a strange noise. It was hard to figure at first, but then I recognized it, the sound of cats meowing all together, kind of crying and howling and moaning. Then this guy reached into the bag, and he pulled out a cat with his left hand, and he raised his right hand into the air, but he didn’t have a hand there at all. He had a sickle. And swoosh, that sickle sliced the air, and chopped that cat’s head off, and he raised it to his lips, and drank the blood, and tossed it in the corner. He was sitting in a pool of blood, so much that it was dripping through the floor, onto the lantern below, putt-ssss, putt-ssss.”

By this time, I couldn’t breath. Danny would manage a grin, a sneer that Lon Chaney would have envied. “Then I moved my foot, and the stairs creaked. That old man turned around and spotted me. He raised his right arm in the air, and jumped to his feet, blood dripping from the sickle. I couldn’t move. He charged, and then I turned and ran, we all ran, and we didn’t stop running, we ran for hours it seemed, always looking back, and seeing something behind us, we didn’t know what. We finally made it back to town, and we never saw that house or that old man again.”

About that time, someone would give a whoop. We would all jump and laugh. Mom would call from down the street. The story would be over, that night’s version anyway, forgotten but certain to be told again, passed down with the same chilling effect, until I had heard it enough times to scare the younger kids too.

I don’t think I’d ever repeat that story again today though. Certainly not in a weekly newspaper. Too tame. Better stick to Friday the Thirteenth and Halloween.

Thank you, Mr. Stark ~ October 19, 2005

David Heiller

It was interesting visiting with Bob Stark last week. Or should I say Mr. Stark, That’s how I always thought of him at Caledonia High School.

I went to his house on October 13 and took a picture of him with an award he received from Winona State University.

Mr. Stark (old habits die hard) told me how much he liked my writing. He recalled my mother—she had red hair right?—back when my brother Glenn first signed up for football, probably in 1957. He reminisced about Johnny Winslow. He talked about how much he loves Caledonia, how good the city has been to him. 

Mr. Stark, from the 1971 yearbook
(Thank you for sending 
me this, Jane Palen)

I left with a hearty handshake and a pat on the back. “You take care!” he said. I felt like charging out of the house and onto a football field.

That’s the kind of guy Mr. Stark is, and was.

Allow me three trips down memory lane. I remember at the end of eighth grade, my first year at CHS, I told some friends that I wasn’t going to go out for football the next year. Mr. Stark was the football coach then. He tracked me down. It was in the gymnasium. I can remember where I was standing. He put his arm around my shoulder and asked if it was true, that I wasn’t going out for football in the fall.

I answered somewhat hesitantly. This was the head football coach talking to a measly eighth grader. I said yes, it was true, I wanted to go fishing and hunting instead. He told me that he thought I was a good football player, that I could help the team, be a part of the future. Then he said what I was doing was OK. I think he looked in my eyes and saw that that’s what I wanted to do, That’s what he wanted to see.

A couple years later I was standing in line outside the gymnasium—I remember the very spot—with other football players (I had returned to the fold.) We were all getting a mass physical. It must have been August of 1969. Mr. Stark came up to me again and put his arm around my shoulder and said he was sorry to hear that my sister Lynette had died. I was totally unprepared for the comment. A wave of grief came boiling out of those hidden places. I tried hard and failed to hold back the tears that I thought had dried up a month earlier. Guys around me looked away or down at the floor. It was a powerful moment, very emotional. I felt embarrassed and a little angry at the time. But it was one of those little things that really helped me process my sister’s death. Somehow knowing that good old Mr. Stark knew enough about me to say he was sorry really helped.

Then there was the time when he knocked on Miss Tweeten’s English class door—I remember the exact classroom—and asked to talk to me. There was a father-son banquet in town. Mr. Stark knew I didn’t have a dad. There was a good speaker I would like. Would I be interested in going with him?

I said no. Hey, teenagers do dumb things, and that registers right up there. But in a way it didn’t matter. What mattered was that he asked; he thought about me, he cared. That is a good teacher, and a good person.

So it was good to see Mr. Stark again last week after 34 years. Good to feel that handshake and slap on the back. Caledonia maybe has been good to him, like he said, but he’s been even better for Caledonia, and for all of us.

Of mice and flies ~ October 1, 1998

David Heiller

Warning: The following column contain graphic (but not salacious) material. And if that doesn’t get you reading it, nothing will!

Winter must be coming, because our house is filling up with mice and flies. It happens every year at this time.

I can understand the mice. They feel temperature changes, so they head for a warmer home, which happens to be my home.

But flies? Are flies that smart?

I don’t like living with either one. I love my wife and two kids and two dogs and one cat. But mice and flies are not welcome.

Cindy alerted me to this fall’s mouse invasion about a month ago, when she found shredded toilet paper in the bottom of the bathroom vanity, where she stores things like toilet paper.

She figured mice were using it for something other than its intended purpose. She figured they were using it to make a nest. You know what that means. More mice!

A battle plan was needed, so she called on me. I’m Chief Mouse Catcher in our house. I’ve been refining the job ever since we bought our house in 1981.

Last year the mice came in through a hole in the pantry floor. I plugged it with a cork, so they have found a new entrance into the vanity. It’s harder to stop this invasion, because it means pulling the vanity away from the wall and disconnecting the drain and two water lines. I’ll get around to it eventually.

Mouse noses are a small thing...
unless that is all you find. Eeks!

At about the same time that Cindy found evidence of mice bedding, we found a partially devoured mouse on the rug beneath the kitchen table. Cindy pointed it out to me discreetly, because it was lying at the feet of Cindy’s mother, Lorely, who was visiting.

Lorely was inches away from stepping on it. That would not have been pretty. You would have seen this headline:

Woman steps on mouse, kills 
son-in-law in fit of rage and terror

I picked up the mouse part—all that was left was the nose and whiskers—with a paper towel and threw it outside. Finding half a mouse on the floor is kind of like biting into an apple and finding half a worm. It’s not a very pleasant encounter.

Miss Emma, the mouser.

Our cat, Miss Emma, must have caught that mouse and eaten as much as she pleased. Emma used to be a good mouser, but she is 16 years old now, and has lost her appetite for catching mice.

I found an old mouse trap, baited it with peanut butter, and set it in the vanity. The bait disappeared, but the trap didn’t spring, and the toilet paper kept getting shredded. I checked the trap after a week and found that it wasn’t working. I could barely trip it myself.

This turned out to be a good trick on my part, because word spread far and wide about the free peanut butter in the Heiller vanity and I have been catching mice ever since in the new trap. I have to empty it almost daily.

Mice might be smart enough to find their way into a house, but they aren’t smart enough to figure out why all their friends and relatives never come out after they enter.

I was telling Red Hansen about our mouse invasion, and he reported a similar movement at his home. He baits his traps with flour. That made me wonder what other people use for mouse bait. If you would like to share that secret with Askov American readers, send it to me at P.O. Box 275, Askov, MN 55704. I’ll pass the information on to Tammy Olson. She might want to include it in her column, The Practical Pantry.

Flies are the other nuisance we have this time of year. I was working on the computer on Sunday in the office, and noticed  a lot of them on the floor. A lot-lot. There was a whole windrow of flies on the floor. I didn’t know whether to sweep them or bale them. I took the vacuum cleaner after them, and then the broom, and when I was done, there were already a few more on the floor. The air must be full of flies that are coasting to a dead stop.

So many flies, Asian lady beetles,
and throw in a few boxelder
bugs for good measure.

Flies flies flies! They walk groggily on the floor. They lie in the light fixtures. get ground into the bathroom rug. ARRGGHH!

I imagine there are some people reading this column who are repulsed by the thought of a mouse or even a fly in their house. But I bet there are a few readers who are saying, “I guess we aren’t the only ones with this problem.” That’s life in the country.

If roads could talk ~ October 29, 2003

David Heiller

It’s funny how a road can hold so many memories A road is, after all, just a road: But people do have their favorites, and that applies to roads as well as grandkids.

A good walk down the road.

The road to Freeburg—State Highway 249—from Highway 26 is one of those. Cindy and I used to pipe-dream about buying the farm from Florence Sheriff back when we were first married, We still say, “There’s our house,” when we go by.

Going past the Freeburg church is special too, and better yet, stopping to say hello to all those relatives that I never knew. I wish they could talk back,.

I like to look down the road and across Crooked Creek to where Grandma Heiller was born.

And of course Little Miami stands like a pot of gold at the end of a gravel rainbow. How many fine meals have we had there with Mom and Grandma and all the brothers and sisters and cousins and nephews and nieces?

County Road 3 holds many good memories for me too.

I traveled it to high school for five years, and before that to sporting events and concerts to watch my siblings.

Now, after a 30 year hiatus, I’m taking it to work every day:

I doubt that I’ll ever get tired of how beautiful the drive is. Those big farms with their Harvestore silos and contoured fields of alfalfa and corn. That interesting round barn.

You can see the lights of the football field from about five miles away. Seeing those lights when I was a kid going to watch my brother Glenn play was really exciting. Caledonia seemed like New York City to me.

The road used to have several sharp curves that could make the hair stand up on your neck if you took them too fast. They are gone now, thanks to some fantastic improvements. It’s not as exciting to drive, but I’m not complaining.

Rural roads hold lots of possibilities...
even some early spring kite-flying.

The best part of the road is when you are driving to Brownsville and come to the top of the hill. You look down that huge river valley and you swear you can see to Maryland. I never get tired of that sight, no matter what season.

One of my first memories on the road happened in about 1960. We were going to a school concert at the Caledonia Auditorium. My sister Sharon was driving the 1954 blue Chevrolet, and she hit a fox halfway up the hill. We all got out of the car and examined the beautiful animal, which was dead. Glenn, ever the frugal big brother, threw it in the trunk because he knew he could get a bounty for it. We proceeded on, with Glenn behind the wheel, and Sharon a quivering 17-year-old mess in the back seat.

And all those bus rides with good old Dale Besse behind the wheel. He would take us home after sports practices too. Sometimes he would stop and let Bill Quillen off above his house, and Bill would happily get out—he was always happy—and hike down the hill through the dark woods to his Cork Hollow Road. I admired Bill’s courage then, and later, when he went off to Vietnam.

If roads could talk, County Road 3 would have some fine tales, as would the road to Freeburg. I bet your favorite road does too.

Sports is just sports ~ October 12, 2000

David Heiller                                                                                                                                                                                     

“How did you sleep?” Cindy asked when I woke up on Tuesday morning.

“Great,” I replied. “I slept the sleep of a Vikings victory.”

And it was true. Monday nights I don’t often sleep well, as I ponder what the heck to put in the Askov American for that week.

But the Vikings had won, and I had drifted off to sleep with scenes of the, win playing through my smiling head.

Of course, there is another side of this coin.

I saw an old college friend, Scott, on Saturday. I hadn’t seen him for a couple years, so we tried to catch up on each other’s lives, which for guys means talking about sports. I was shocked to hear that he didn’t care to watch the Vikings, and hadn’t for several years. He said he was disgusted with their pampered egos and their silly antics. But he also said he couldn’t stand the roller coaster of emotions when they lose.

He didn’t use those words. Only newspaper editors use words like that. But translated from Martian, that’s what he meant.

My son and I watched the Vikings game on Monday night together. When they fell behind late in the game, I turned to him and said, “Now I know why Scott doesn’t watch the Vikings.”

Our smaller Vikings fan.

Yet they won, and I slept well, and that’s one reason why I do watch them.

Another reason I like sports is that it is something I can share with my son, who is 17. We don’t always have a lot to talk about, and the Vikings bridge that gap.

But dealing with losing is a big challenge, something that both children and adults have to deal with.

I remember last year, after the New York Mets lost in the playoffs. The final game ended at midnight. It was a tough loss. I knew my friend, Steve, who is a big Mets fan, would still be awake. So I called him at midnight, which is something that I would not do with anyone unless I was the bearer of bad news. In a sense, I was that grim messenger, although Steve already knew the score.

Steve was indeed awake. He was almost despondent. He said with some bitterness that his kids had gone to bed, had given up on his beloved Mets. He had told them the game wasn’t over, but they hadn’t believed. Maybe they were like Scott and didn’t want to have their hearts mauled.

Steve was about as sad as a person could be without involving a death in the family.

We talked about the game, about this player and that play. I let Steve do most of the talking. I think it helped him. At one point he even said something like, “I’m glad you understand.”

Sports is just sports, but in a way that’s like saying water is just water. They are both pretty important in our lives, as the fall season of sports reminds me every year.

They can keep you awake at night, and they can give you a good night’s sleep too.

Take cover, tomatoes, it’s cold tonight ~ September 11, 1986

David Heiller

The tomatoes are testing fate, and testing our patience, just as they have all summer.

All right, maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on them. Our first 24 transplants were cut down in their youth by a killer frost on June first. I discovered them at 3 a.m. gasping in the grips of that silent killer two months and 11 days ago. We put new transplants in that same week, and they’ve been testing fate ever since.

A tiny portion of the tomatoes
 I have processed.

Planting tomatoes in Birch Creek Township is always a gamble, not matter when the frost says goodbye in the spring, and says hello in the fall. You keep an ear cocked to the radio for frost warnings this time of year, the way British listened for the Luftwaffe in the fall of 1940.

Our first frost this fall came on August 27. I covered the tomatoes with every spare blanket and piece of plastic I could find. I even tried to take the quilt from the baby’s crib, but Cindy drew the line there. Even the tomatoes are not that important, she said. I guess she’s right.

Since then, we’ve had three more frosts, the latest coming on Saturday. The cold night left a quarter-inch skin of ice on the water in the wheelbarrow by the garden Sunday morning. But the tomatoes dozed through the ordeal, warm under their coverings.

I’m not sure all this covering and uncovering is worth the trouble. We must have a thousand tomatoes on those 24 plants. But their sizes range from a large chicken egg to a ping pong ball. They are hard, and very, very green. When we see a glimmer of flush, we snatch them up and carry them gently under our arms like baby chicks, into the house to ripen. Cindy checks them twice a day, but I’m not so fussy and go out only once.

The slugs seem to be checking them too, because every other one that starts to ripen has a hole bored into it. A lot of fat, smiling slugs are hanging out in the tomato beds, watching and waiting. The tomatoes might be too frightened to ripen.

Sometimes I wonder what it must be like to live in a climate that doesn’t get a frost in August, where you can actually see red tomatoes on the vine. When I went to my hometown in southeastern Minnesota three weeks ago, I saw some plants that I didn’t recognize at first. A lot of the leaves were gone, and they were drooping with red fruit. Quite a few lay on the ground even. At first I thought it was some exotic imported mango from the tropics. But looking closer, I saw that they were tomatoes. Then I remembered from my childhood, actually seeing tomatoes ripen, enough that they fall and rot on the ground. And the gardeners there have a more serene look. Their smile says, “What’s a few tomatoes?” It’s a self confidence you seldom find here. They’ve never heard of a frost warning. “Why would anybody be afraid of frost?” they ask, while eating a tomato.

Not all garden varieties are as nervous as tomatoes up here. Some do quite nicely, thank you. We pulled a beet from the ground Sunday that weighed one pound, 15 ounces. We ate the whole thing for supper at one sitting. Our three year old son ate a good portion of it, because he thinks it was a sugar beet, and anything with sugar in it has got to be good. I fear the day that he finds out how much iron and vitamin A beets have.

Carrots are gangbuster crops here too. We filled a wagon on Sunday. The broccoli is just coming into its own. It likes frosty nights, and dares Mother Nature to snow. The potatoes also thumb their nose—or eyes—at the cold. The green peppers are crispy and green, the size of your fist. Even the sweet corn, which was planted after the tomatoes, is ripening up enough for us to eat.

So we have to be patient with tomatoes. I want to be a bully, shame them into action: “Come on, you panty-waisted loafers. What are you waiting for? Ripen, or I’ll feed you to the slugs one by one!” But I kept my words to myself, and cover them with blankets at night like children. Maybe they will thank me for it someday, by making a nice spaghetti sauce or casserole base. But don’t hold your breath. As the saying goes, “Don’t count your tomatoes before they ripen.” Or something like that.

Outhouses bring out the best in overnight guests ~ October 17,1985

David Heiller

There’s always a bit of adventure when friends and relatives come to visit at our house, often thanks to not having an indoor bathroom.

I’ve gotten used to the privvy, but city-dwellers especially seem to put the walk to the outhouse in the same category as a trip through the jungles of the Amazon.

The bane of many guests at our house
 in those days: The Outhouse.

Take this past weekend, for example. On Saturday morning, my mother-in-law arrived for a two-day visit. She sat down at the kitchen table and announced, “I have to go to the bathroom.”

Most 53-year-old women don’t proclaim such things at the kitchen table. But at our house such announcements are often made by guests, because our bathroom is a two-seater about 20 yards from the house. By stating her intentions, my mother-in-law was working up the courage to actually pay her visit.

An hour later, still sitting at the kitchen table and two cups of coffee further along, she announced again, “Well, I guess I’ll go to the bathroom.”

“I thought you said that an hour ago,” I said.

“Yes, I did,” she answered, not moving.

Sometime that afternoon—I never did see her leave—she made the trip, and survived. That’s a sidelight to the main story here. You see, for the weak of heart—or bladder—we have a chamber pot, one which my wife gives up for a night as an age-old gesture of hospitality when company dares sleep over. Cindy dutifully offered the chamber pot to her mother, who almost grabbed it out of her hands, as the thought of stumbling outside in 30-degree night darkness sank in.

These two are what got my mom to even consider 
a visit to our VERY humble abode.

I arose early Sunday morning at about 5 a.m. to get a bottle for our son, and walked past mom’s sleeping form, on the hide-a-bed in the living room. I heard the cat outside. She’s been catching a mouse nearly every morning in our living room, so I let her in.

An hour later, I got up again, to light a fire in the wood stove. As I entered the living room, there sat Lorely, at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette. Seeing her up on a Sunday morning at that hour is like seeing the sun rise at two in the afternoon. Darned near unheard of.

“What are you doing up?” I asked.

“That cat of yours caught a mouse.” She gestured to a dead mouse, in front of the stove, which the cat had proudly laid out for all to admire.

“That’s good,” I said. “When did she catch it?”

“Just now.”

“And it woke you up?” I asked.

“Woke me up?” she asked. “I was sitting on the chamber pot when it happened.”

Now I could understand why she was so wide awake.

My mother was not a cat person, but she and
 Miss Emma became the best of friends.

“I was just sitting there; and the cat crouched over there, and then this mouse ran in front of me, and...”

Her voice trailed off. She couldn’t finish. The outhouse was bad enough, and even inside, there was no safe haven for bodily functions.

That night, I asked Lorely if she felt up to the mouse challenge again. Cindy butted in: “Mom, maybe you’d like to sleep in our bed upstairs? We’ll sleep on the hide-a-bed. You wouldn’t mind, would you, David?”

I had slept on our hide-a-bed once before, and was still recovering from the back pain. “Well, we’ve had mice upstairs,” I said cautiously.

“When?” Cindy demanded.

“Why just the other day. In fact, it was so big, it might have been a rat, I’m not sure.”

Cindy’s mom looked at me, actually looked through me. Her eyes flashed back on a mouse in front of her as she squatted helplessly in dim morning light. “Do cats eat mice on beds?” she asked.

“Go ahead, sleep in our bed, I don’t mind,” I said.

Lorely slept a sound, mouse-less sleep on Sunday. I woke up feeling like a piece of rebar was holding my back in place.

People tell me I should put a toilet in our house. Maybe they’re right. But even a sore back is worth the adventure that comes with our outhouse.