It’s July 4, 2005, and Clay and Tammy are having their annual hog roast. It’s an occasion to be happy and to remember that life is indeed good, if only people would take the time to eat well and drink a little bit and enjoy one another’s company. Gathered in small groups in the backyard beneath a looming eighty-year-old live oak, city employees from the water company mingle with bartenders and high school teachers, waiting for Tammy to give the word that a 250-pound pig provided by the local UPS driver is, after six hours, finally done roasting. Clay’s twin brother, Charlie, is here, along with his wife. They’ve brought with them another friend, a Chilean expatriate who works as a translator at a windowpane plant down in Cedar Rapids.
While the UPS man stands beside his custom-made hog oven, a submarine-shaped barbecue so large it had to be towed behind a pickup, the Hallberg twins hold forth on their latest gig, which took place last night in a bar in Wadena, Iowa, where the hundred or so listeners twice asked them to reprise Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird,” a crowd favorite for a quarter century. Meanwhile, Tammy advises a group of women on the finer points of her famed beer-can chicken recipe, the gist of which is to insert an open, full Bud Light into the gutted cavity of a homegrown broiler, then to stand the chicken, legs down, on the grate of a charcoal grill. For the best results, says Tammy, use a medium-hot fire. And if your M.D. husband isn’t looking, brush that sucker every fifteen minutes with a warm bath of salt, melted butter, and—as ever—more beer. After an hour of that, she concludes in her thick drawl, you’ll never eat so good.
What unites the partygoers beyond the obvious bond of community is that Clay, all the while with Tammy working as his receptionist, delivered most of the guests’ children. As the children grew (many of them were now adults themselves), he was their pediatrician, even as he treated their parents for problems ranging from skin cancer to gout. During his tenure as assistant county medical examiner, Dr. Clay made official the pronouncements of their parents’ deaths. Oelwein itself is a crossroads in northeast Iowa, and Clay’s and Tammy’s lives together serve as a point of intersection of Oelwein’s socioeconomic and cultural axes, the coordinates of which remain unchanged, even as Oelwein’s demographics have shifted further and further toward a baseline of poverty. Oelwein, with its familiar and often complex social circuitry, is much like a family, and Clay and Tammy are in many ways at the center of it. Regardless of the trends in community health in the last thirty years, and in the corresponding changes in the chief medical complaint (it had once been sore muscles and broken bones; now it is depression and meth), if you have a problem or a reason to celebrate, you go to see the Hallbergs.
The Chilean translator, whose name is Jorge and who goes by George, is at once the party’s most curious guest and its most affable curiosity. He left Santiago de Chile when General Augusto Pinochet took over the country from Dr. Salvador Allende, the socialist pediatrician who’d been elected president in 1970; had given over the vast holdings of Chile’s elite to the underclasses; and had been killed three years later (while barricaded in his office at the Chilean White House) at the hand of Pinochet’s coup. In a sea of Levi’s, Dockers, and short-sleeved polo shirts, George stands out in his Wranglers, denim shirt, and shiny black cowboy boots. His wire-rim glasses and instinctive command of Marxist economics brand him a left-wing, idealist intellectual of a certain era in Latin American history, one heretofore unknown in Fayette County. The nephew of Salvador Allende’s secretary of education, George (by far) defines the furthest edge of the gathering’s largely centrist political agenda, which hinges on keeping taxes moderate and crop prices high; putting more money in the public education system; and keeping God in your life, but out of the government. By his mere presence, George also embodies the party’s, and the town’s, intuitively inclusionist sensibility.
Nonetheless, most people think George is Mexican. In a place where everyone has a grandfather whose native language was Norwegian or German or Italian, George represents the latest in the history of American immigration, complete with its unexpected quirks and hard-to-understand accents.
George, once he’d been exiled by Pinochet under the threat of death, had somehow ended up in Minneapolis, Minnesota. From there, a marriage took him to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, by way of Memphis, Tennessee. Divorced now, he spends his weekends playing music in local jazz ensembles. By day, he registers workers’ injuries to management at the windowpane factory on behalf of the mostly Mexican and mostly illegal labor force, a job he likens to selling Bibles in Kabul. Tammy Hallberg allows how all of that is “pretty darned interesting.” What she wants to know, though, is why more Mexicans can’t learn English. Even the Amish, she says, can do that.
Clay, seeing an opening, offers his explanation in terms of Hegelian dialectic and Whorfian hypothesis. Basically it amounts to this: If you’re not allowed to integrate into society (i.e., if you move from abusive job to abusive job, with no standardized manner of tracking your movements), then your choice of language will reflect this. It is a response with which George agrees so vehemently that only his native language can provide the right word to express his enthusiasm.
“Claro,” says George, nodding. “Claro.”
Tammy, too, relies on her native skills of communication, which are hammer-blunt. “Clay,” she says, “stop talking—right now.” And Dr. Clay does.
The food, excluding the hog, is potluck. When the UPS man is done carving the pork and heaping it on platters, he takes the platters to the kitchen. Tammy goes to the deck above the yard and rings a brass dinner bell. Surrounding the platters of pork are every manner of dish and container—Tupperware and Ziploc and microwaveable glass. What the containers lack in continuity, the foods make up for in their consistent use of corn as an ingredient and an equally consistent use of the loosest definition regarding the word “salad.” There is corn on the cob and corn that has been boiled and then shaved from the cob and mixed with butter and salt; corn bread with jalapeños; and roasted corn tossed with onions and chives. There is Idaho Red potato salad, and next to that, an enormous bowl of the same dish, this one made with baby Yukon Golds. There’s Jell-O salad, and bean salad, and a pot of boiled collard greens. For dessert, there is more Jell-O, this time molded like a wheel and resting on a seashell-shaped dish, and slices of warm, thick-crusted rhubarb pie with homemade vanilla ice cream.
When it’s all gone, except for the unending mounds of pork, the women stay inside, smoking in the kitchen or helping with dishes while Tammy divvies up twenty or so pounds of leftover hog meat into large bags, to be handed out to the guests when they leave, like door prizes. Meanwhile, the men retire to the yard. There, the drinking, in the finest Lutheran tradition, becomes steady and workmanlike as they sit in their chairs and smoke cigarettes and tell jokes, their voices hushed in the still night.
George the Chilean sits next to Charlie and listens while Clay tells the one about Earl and Maynard down at the VFW.
“Maynard,” begins Clay in his smoke-scarred voice, “is drunk as usual, sitting on his stool at the bar with Earl. And the next thing you know, Maynard pukes on himself.”
“I love this one,” says Charlie, leaning back in his camp chair. “This is a good one.”
“So Maynard says to Earl, ‘My wife just bought me this shirt. She’ll kill me.’
“Earl says, ‘Don’t worry. Just tell her I did it.’
“Earl reaches in his wallet, takes out a twenty, and puts it in Maynard’s chest pocket. ‘Tell her,’ he says, ‘that I gave you twenty dollars for a new shirt.’”
Clay reaches out his hand and acts out the exchange by pretending to put something in the breast pocket of George’s cowboy shirt.
“So,” Clay continues, “Maynard goes home, and his wife gives him hell. ‘But, honey, Earl did it!’ says Maynard. ‘And he gave me twenty dollars for a new shirt.’
“Maynard reaches in the pocket, pulls out the money, and hands it to his wife.
“She says, ‘There’s forty dollars here.’
“‘Right,’ says Maynard. ‘That’s because Earl pooped in my pants, too.’”