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A Journey to the Skillet Fork
The
Skillet Fork is lazy and muddy in the humid days of June.
The box elder and cottonwood along its banks cast the few
weak shafts of shade afforded to field hands and farmers as
they work their crops toward harvest. This is wheat country,
tucked in the rolling prairie of southern Illinois, between
the young fields sprouting this autumn's crop of corn and
soybeans. Dust and bits of wheat chaff stirred up from the
fields linger in tonight's sunset sky. Folks who stop to
chat glow with an odd warm orange light.
I've
come a long journey to find Wayne County, to follow the
thicket banks of the Skillet Fork to its junction with Horse
Creek, to stand in the now-purple twilight of an isolated
country cemetery and look east through brambles and woods
toward what was once my family's farm. Among the grave
markers of my ancestors, the starlings and sparrows chatter
and dart. But the farm in the distance is fallow and silent,
its ground ripped and open to the sky. A small dust devil
whirls. It's been a hard spring in Wayne County.
At
this small graveyard, and at a second a mile or so to the
south, my mission has been fulfilled. I've been sent by my
aging father to locate the family grave plots and verify
their ownership. I will bring him back here someday. I must
learn the way.
My
eyes follow a faint line of a dirt road leading to a rotting
wooden bridge over Horse Creek and then deep into the farm.
A barn and a rickety lean-to remain where I imagine a house
once stood. I try to envision a family -- perhaps that of my
great-grandfather with his half-dozen siblings -- playing
around a friendly wooden house, maybe chasing fireflies like
the ones that slowly blink around me in the darkening
twilight.
When
I drive the 13 miles into Wayne County's main city of
Fairfield -- to search, in part, for people who might know
of my family -- I will be unprepared for what I will find.
The paradox of finding hungry people amid the rippling
fields of America's bread basket is unsettling. My
forefathers fled famines to settle along the Skillet Fork.
In the villages they once lived, their names are still
known. The embrace of a country community is firm. Wayne
County today has the second highest unemployment rate in
Illinois, hovering near 14 percent; the locals, however, say
it's closer to 30. Statisticians report that one adult in
six in America's rural heartland lives in poverty; for
children, it's one in four.
I
think of these things as I drive through comfortable
neighborhoods, past prim brick or clapboard houses, each
with a wide, fenceless lawn, most with children or a pet
outside, some with Saabs or Oldsmobiles parked in front. A
church will be nearby. Handmade quilts might drape lazily
over clotheslines. Neighbors gossip in their yards,
oblivious of my passing. Leninger Road winds through such a
neighborhood. I followed the road west, past the fire
station to where it narrows as it nears the Southern
Railroad tracks, then turns to gravel and dirt beyond. Most
country roads splay out like a grid over the land; some,
such as Leninger, dead end in railroad levees or circle back
around corn fields. It is here one finds rusty singlewide
mobile homes, leftover from the 1960s with their fins and
overhangs, or solitary cabins of unpainted wood and broken
porches. Often the homes will be tucked into a dark thicket,
nearly hidden, cool in the summer heat. Half-naked children,
smudged with dirt, emerge from behind a scattering of
inoperable cars and corn flowers and they stare boldly as I,
a stranger, drive by.
On
June 2, a funnel cloud darkened the skies above the small
village of Barnhill in southern Wayne County. When the
tornado had passed, half a dozen structures had been
destroyed and Kent Clevenger had had the ride of his
life.
Kent's
father, Tice, is telling me the story about the "miracle
man" four weeks later as we drive out one hot afternoon to
deliver government surplus food shipments to Wayne County's
poor. Just the previous day, Kent's cat, who had been asleep
at the foot of Kent's bed when the twister hit, had found
its way home, whiskers awry, tail bent, and, to his owners,
back from the dead. When the storm hit, Kent and his cat had
been napping. The two were whooshed through the air, both
clinging in their own fashion to the mattress as it rose
through the debris of the exploding trailer. That night,
while Kent sifted through the rubble of his home, a group of
Mennonites from Orchardville, a dirt-crossroad village in
the county's far-northwest end 20 miles away, came to offer
assistance. The deputy county clerk and other folks from the
city of Fairfield, 10 miles north, came with house-building
materials, window glass and wood. Others brought food.
All
strangers? I ask.
'This
is small-town America," the elder Clevenger says. "Everybody
knows everybody else's business."
Tice
Clevenger is a rail thin man with a tireless gait, fond of
Levi jeans and baseball caps and shouting loud "helloo"s
from the open door of his moving vehicle. Since 1974,
Clevenger has run the Wayne County office of Wabash Area
Development, Inc., a federally funded jack-of-all trades
agency which covers seven counties in eastern Illinois.
Wayne County lies 114 miles east of St. Louis, 60 miles west
of Evansville, Ind. Nearly every one of the 19,000 county
residents is Caucasian -- 99.3 percent; 51 percent of the
adult residents have not completed high school. Thirty
percent of the population is 55 years or older.
Clevenger
keeps a sprinter's pace; his office duties range from
weather-proofing substandard housing, to helping families
pay their utility bills, to running the county's main food
pantry. In coming days, Wayne County will be declared a
federal disaster area due to the tornado and preceding weeks
of torrential rain. Flooding has been so bad that back back
roads look like levee roads, crossing lakes of what should
be knee-high corn. The sight from the top perch of local
grain elevator resembles a sea of water dotted with
occasional clumps of trees.
Wayne
County is a "depressed" area and has been since the oil bust
of the mid-1980s. Once, it was the state's leading crude-oil
producing county. Idle pump jacks are a common sight,
standing like mechanical skeletons rising above crop fields.
The flooding has kept the farmers idle, too. By mid-June,
half the corn crop was unplanted; so were 70 percent of
soybeans. The winter wheat, that that survived an
unseasonable spring heat then sleet, was the worst quality
farmers had seen in years. Yields round were down as much as
25 percent.
"There's
a terrible lot of people Wayne County just barely getting
by," Clevenger says.
Clevenger
and his colleague, Charles Talbert, have recruited me to
work the "cheese" run. Every eight weeks, the two men load
their battered, white step-up van with government-issue
foods and make a blistering and rattling one-day run to the
far corners of this, Illinois's second largest county at 720
square miles. It's been two years since the federal
government had surplus cheese to distribute free to the
country's poor and elderly, but the name still sticks.
Peanut butter, canned pork, canned beans, raisins and butter
are the staples of the food program now, along with
five-pound sacks of wheat flour and corn meal. Wayne County
is the only county in southern Illinois to offer a roving
surplus-food delivery program. Clevenger gets $75 a month
from county coffers to cover his delivery costs. Most other
counties stockpile the food cartons in one location and the
eligible come to receive. Access to transportation is a
pesky rural problem, especially for the elderly, and
especially in Wayne County where there is no public bus
service besides Talbert's weekly shuttle for senior
citizens.
Wayne
County has about 2,255 residents receiving some kind of
public aid. In May, 190 new applications for stamps were
processed. To be eligible for government commodities, a
three-person family can earn no more than $1,100 a month,
$878 for two people, $654 for one. Most of the farm widows
along Clevenger's route receive about $350 a month. There's
a joke Clevenger tells, about these people wanting to forego
the commodities and just receive the maximum amount of the
minimum income. "Can you get me that much money and forget
about the damn cheese?" one woman reportedly asked Clevenger
years ago, a punch line which he happily retells.
Sims,
Wayne City, Keenes, Orchardville, Geff, Golden Gate, Cisne,
Mt. Erie, Johnsonville, Merriam, Enterprise, Barnhill,
Ellery, Boyleston, Rinard, and Fairfield -- these are the
settlements of Wayne County. Most are no more than a handful
of white clapboard houses along a gravel road. Usually
there's a church, maybe a school or a fire station.
Inevitably, an old cemetery will be in sight on a high roll
of land nearby. Most of these villages began as service
stops for the Southern Railroad and its trunk lines; tracks
crisscross the county, yet another grid, another
demarcation. Freight trains can be heard hooting in the
distance all times of the day, in most places in the county.
In some settlements, like Rinard and Golden Gate, the
wonderful old brick depots still stand. Their windows are
boarded, their cracked entry doors might be tacked with
auction notices, but the architecture still exudes an air of
romance and excitement.
The
village folks gather in anticipation of the food van's
scheduled arrival and they gossip -- news of petty crime,
hospital visits, new grandchildren and other people's
activities is provided in detail that the local biweekly
paper, the Wayne County Register, could never hope to beat.
Throughout the day, I would be amazed at the personal
details people tell Clevenger, the confessions they make,
the secrets they reveal.
"I
hear it all," Clevenger says. "But then I knew most the
people before I started out (in this job.)"
It's
only then that I realize that Clevenger is a lineman, in his
own way, working an invisible network of government
agencies, rural social customs and family ties. He hops the
borders people erect to protect their privacy, barriers
stationed like the trees I see loosely marking the
boundaries of farms. People don't seem to mind; Clevenger is
no gossiper. He listens, he remembers, he cares. In Rinard,
he learns that a young family will be without a home in a
week's time; he makes a note to check his rental listings
back in his office. Fred, a chubby, tow-headed teenager from
the village of Geff, comes up to the food van, waving a
paint brush. Clevenger found Fred this painter's job. The
older man jokes, telling the boy to get back to work.
There's the warm blush of friendship in the banter of their
taunts.
Clevenger
seems happy to have me along. He shouts encouragements to
Charlie Talbert and me as we shuffle around in the stifling
van on this scorching summer day, prying open cartons,
stacking cans and bracing leaning columns of flour packages.
Clevenger is my guide, my mentor. He will take me across the
lines, over the borders into people's lives where I, a
stranger, cannot go. I learn quickly to tell people of my
Skillet Fork roots. They smile and relax. Some recall the
Austins in their family histories. These stories should be
my stories, family tales recorded in an old Bible, maybe.
But I know none of them. And as I lean close to the
strangers gathered around Clevenger's van in the hot haze of
mid-morning, I wonder if any of their stories have anything
to do with me.
Clevenger
tells me he has no idea how many people will meet his van as
he makes his rounds. This makes his job of parceling out his
cargo difficult; he tries to be equitable. Even though he
submits order lists to the Department of Agriculture's
Temporary Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP), he is
never sure how much of what commodities he will receive.
Each run is different. TEFAP's golden days were in the early
1980s when federal officials were inundated with hefty
amounts of farm surplus, mostly dairy products. But last
year, the food run was cut from monthly service to once
every two months. Eligible recipients, based on income and
family size, not age, receive the same amount of food as
before, it just has to last twice as long. Many people meet
the van during its first few stops, hoping to receive better
variety of food than if they had waited for the van to reach
their home village.
"I
wish there was something I could do about that," Clevenger
says as we pull into the village of Sims to meet an
unusually large crowd of 51, already pushing and jostling
for position. "Oh, Lord, have mercy, here we go." He swings
out his open van door and hollers at those he recognizes in
the crowd, "Fairfield, Wayne City, isn't there anyone here
from Sims?"