One more flip through the magic movie, and faster than it takes for the black-and-white broccoli to turn again into a sky-probing giant, the nine-year-old cuffed by his grandfather turns into a teen, falls in love with God, prays to God nightly but rarely successfully to keep from masturbating to visions of Shelly Harper, grows away from God and toward the guitar, gets busted for half a joint of pot, is sentenced to six months in a juvie scared-straight facility near Cedar Rapids, and there—sketching for hours at a shot everything he can see through his steel-webbed dorm room windows—realizes that he needs to spend his life making strange things.
He was sure the idea would be a hard sell. Hoels were farmers, feed store owners, and farm equipment salesmen like his father, violently practical people grounded in the logic of land and driven to work long, relentless days, year after year, without ever asking why. Nick prepared himself for a showdown, something out of the D. H. Lawrence novels that helped him survive high school. He practiced for weeks, choking on the absurdity of the request: Dad, I would very much like to plunge off the edge of commonsense existence, at your expense, and become certifiably unemployable.
He chose an early spring night. His father lay on a divan on the screened-in porch, as he did most nights, reading a biography of Douglas MacArthur. Nicholas sat in the recliner next to him. Sweet breezes blew in through the screen and uncombed his hair. “Dad? I need to go to art school.”
His father looked out over the top of his book, like he was gazing out on the ruins of his lineage. “I figured it would be something like that.” And Nick was gone, reeled out on a leash long enough to reach the Chicago Loop, with the freedom to test all the flaws inherent in his own desire.
At school in Chicago, he learned many things:
1. Human history was the story of increasingly disoriented hunger.
2. Art was nothing he thought it was.
3. People would make just about anything you can think to make. Intricate scrimshawed portraits on the tips of pencil leads. Polyurethane-coated dog shit. Earthworks that could pass for small nations.
4. Makes you think different about things, don’t it?
His cohort laughed at his little pencil sketches and hyperreal, trompe-l’oeil paintings. But he kept making them, season after season. And by his third year, he became notorious. Even cattily admired.
Winter night of senior year, in his rented broom closet in Rogers Park, he had a dream. A woman student he loved asked him, What is it that you really want to make? He bared his hands to the sky, shrugging. Tiny wells of blood pooled in the center of his palms. Up from those pools grew two branching spines. He thrashed in a panic, back up to consciousness. Half an hour passed before his heart slowed enough for him to realize where those spines came from: the time-lapse pictures of the chestnut his gypsy-Norwegian great-great-great-grandfather planted, one hundred and twenty years before, while self-enrolled in that correspondence school of primitive art, the plains of western Iowa.
Nick sits at the rolltop, flipping once more through the book. Last year he won the Stern Prize for Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute. This year, he’s a stock boy for a famous Chicago department store that has been dying a slow death for a quarter of a century. Granted, he has earned a degree that licenses him to make peculiar artifacts capable of embarrassing his friends and angering strangers. There’s a U-Stor-It in Oak Park crammed with papier-mâché costumes for street masques and surreal sets for a show that ran in a little theater near Andersonville and closed three nights later. But at twenty-five, the scion of a long line of farmers wants to believe that his best work might still be ahead of him.
It’s the day before Christmas Eve. Hoels will descend en masse tomorrow, but his grandmother is already in hog heaven. She lives for these days when the old, drafty house fills up with descendants. There’s no farm anymore, just the house on its island rise. All the Hoel land is long-term leased to outfits run from offices hundreds of miles away. The Iowa earth has been brought to its rationalized end. But for a while, for this holiday, the place will be all miracle births and saviors in mangers, as it was at Hoel Christmases for a hundred