Reading Township, Illinois
I discovered Reading Township contains a village called Reading. The village stands on the banks of Moon Creek and along the railroad tracks. I resisted the urge to drive into downtown Reading. I would have found nothing retail awaiting customers in the heart of a collection of houses. I looked from the sky, thank you Google Maps, and counted a few long buildings with metal roofs. I wondered if Reading has chicken or cattle farms? Now I do have to pay a visit to discover what kind of buildings are revealed by the satellite. Could they be buildings for storing grain? The trains couldn’t stop in Reading to take on grain nowadays, could they?
The trains stopped in Cohoctah, Michigan on the rail line that passed through Byron and Howell. In Cohoctah, Lott Elevator weighed the corn and wheat delivered by neighborhood farmers and loaded the grain to await a train in one of five silos. I looked at the silos on Google street view and counted them for the first time just now. I had passed that elevator hundreds of times since 1969 and it was the first time I thought to count the silos. Sadly, I never saw the train pull up and stop. A funnel would have filled car after car with golden grain to go to a mill.
I used to walk over to see Mike and Pat McGuire, who worked constantly. If I wanted to hang out, I had to look busy. I would do what they were doing, ride along on a tractor or stand on the hay wagon and move bales into place. Field rocks that cropped up after a cold winter had to be picked up by hand and thrown into a wagon. Huge rock piles had accumulated in the fields after years of this spring work.
The two had to handle the day to day work on the farm while their father, Bob McGuire, drove an eighteen wheeler truck for his primary job. Pat didn’t mind. He said he didn’t get a check. “I’ll benefit directly”, he said more than once. He said “directly” with a firm t sound.
The McGuires planted winter wheat, seeded in fall to germinate and go dormant in winter. The cold helped the grain to flower when spring arrived. In the summer, the McGuire boys proved that they could drive anything, including the huge combine that could mow down corn or wheat and separate the grain from the chaff.
Luke Skywalker could drive anything, even a landspeeder, because he was a farm boy on Tatooine. The McGuire boys could probably hold their own in a landspeeder race with Skywalker.
When the combine was full, beautiful wheat kernels gushed out of an unloader pipe into the bed of their father’s eighteen wheeler. When it was full, we climbed onto the bed of grain, laid on our backs and looked up to the partly cloudy sky as night fell. Few scents could be more satisfying than the fragrance of freshly harvested wheat. I’ve not forgotten the earthy, basic scent reminiscent of baking bread or brewing beer.
Father McGuire invited Matt and I to stay up on that bed of grain and ride along to the Cohoctah elevator. He had a job for us. We rolled south on Vernon Road to Lovejoy Road and Lovejoy Road to Fleming Road and Fleming Road to Bruff Road. I felt as if I were riding high on one of Hannibal’s war elephants. “Duck!” yelled Patrick. “Where?”, I called. “No, stupid, get your head down!” Bruff Road passed through a forest of oaks with branches hanging out over the road. We kept our heads down and we all made it to Lott’s elevator with all limbs attached.
Our job was simple. Father McGuire raised the bed of his truck as high as it would go, and most of the grain came out. All four of us climbed up on the remaining grain and slid down the heap again and again until all the grain emptied into the intake bin, a rectangular hole in the cement floor.
A screw beneath the floor moved the grain toward the elevator that loaded a silo. We swept out the last grains and Bob pulled the truck out and got a receipt for the delivery. “It’s all over but the shouting,” he declared. So we shouted really, really loudly. Now the McGuire boys had to bale all the wheat straw. It never ended for the two, who still work that farmland in the early Twenty-First Century. Buy land, hustle, and never sell.
Cohoctah boasted two country stores in those days, and Bob bought us a cold soda for helping out. We rode on the bed of the now empty truck, drank deeply from our sweating bottles of Coca Cola and looked up at the rectangle of night sky above us. He delivered us to our farmhouse nearby. I just wonder what my mother thought as she watched her two sons step out of the back of a gravel hauler? She grew up on a farm, so she hadn’t asked for details.
At age sixteen, Patrick bought a Chevy Nova with his father’s help. That fast car couldn’t have been a more direct benefit. I remember we roared north on Vernon Road one night, a dirt road, at one hundred miles an hour, going airborne when we drove over Kanause Lake Drain. He didn’t lose control. We didn’t die. The Force was strong in Patrick. We made it to all the Homecoming Float construction sites that night with ease.
Ah, but what Force has protected Patrick? I was driving with my mother, Joan Elizabeth, to see my brother Ed at the Children's Hospital in Ann Arbor. We stopped at the Northfield Church Rest Area, which has a view of Old Saint Patrick's Church and an adjacent cemetery. She looked at the beautiful steeple and told me a story. She had heard it while having coffee with Patrick's mother, Marianne.
"Mrs. McGuire told me that she was holding baby Patrick on her lap. I don't know if she was waiting for his baptism or not. Suddenly, the pew broke and the two fell to the floor and Patrick cried. Neither were hurt but the congregation laughed". I never had the courage to ask Patrick or his mother the truth of the story.
If you knew Marianne, you knew she had God on speed dial!
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