Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

  XXX

  Tuesday and Wednesday are the Time week-end. For eight years, more or less, I left Time every Monday night and took the train for Baltimore. There I changed to the train or bus for Westminster, Maryland. In Westminster, my family met me with the car or truck, or I found some other conveyance to take me the remaining six miles to our farm. Every Wednesday night I made the return trip to New York. For most of my term at Time magazine, I commuted to and from New York and our farm some four hundred miles a week. I tried all possible combinations of conveyance-train, bus, plane, car. I tried Pullman and day coach. I found that I slept no more (though more expensively) on a Pullman than on a day coach, and I finally settled for the latter. By trial and error, I found that I made my best connections by taking a 3:30 train on Tuesday morning from New York, which got me to Baltimore in time to make an early morning bus for Westminster.

  It would have been more convenient for me to have my wife drive to Baltimore to meet me. She is an excellent driver, but I almost never let her meet me. Though it cost me much hardship, I felt a vague, but overpowering presentiment. I can account for it only by the play of that sixth sense that Robert Stripling was to note in me during the Hiss Case. For when, under the troubles of that Case, I did let my wife meet me in Baltimore, tragedy followed.

  The hardest years of commutation were the war years. During the days of gas and tire rationing, I sometimes found myself tramping through the snow at five o’clock in the morning to make the last three miles to the farm. “How did we ever stand it?” my wife and I now sometimes ask each other. We stood it for the reason that people can stand almost anything: because it was necessary. “But is it worth it?” people used to ask me over the years. Some of them, when they visited the farm, answered their own question. “Yes,” they would say, “I see why you do it and why you are able to do it. This is peace.”

  We call our farm Pipe Creek Farm. It takes its name from the Big Pipe Creek, which winds in mirroring meanders, or rushes over shallow rapids, through a quarter-mile of our back pasture, on its way to the Monocacy and the Potomac Rivers. The somewhat drab word “Pipe” comes from the clay banks along the creek. In Indian days, the creek and its flood plain were neutral ground. Various tribes came there to gather the clay for their pipes and perhaps for other uses. Hereabouts they later died. Not far off, the last of the Susquehannocks were massacred and the remnant of the Tuscaroras made their last camp grounds, fleeing from Carolina.

  Pipe Creek Farm includes more than three hundred rolling acres. Some seventy-five acres are woodland, mostly rock oak and white oak, with some stands of white pine. Along the edges of the woodlands in the spring the dogwood and the shadblow bloom, interspersed with wilding peach and cherry ( and we know where to find the arbutus, the lady ferns and yellow violets). The rest of the farm is cropland and pasture. Originally, it was three farms. Each has its dwelling house, barns and outbuildings. We bought the home place first. Later, we bought the Creek Farm. In 1947, we bought Medfield, a small farm that connected our two properties and made them a unit.

  We needed so much acreage for two reasons. I hoped that both my children, after a necessary immersion in the outer world, would return to become farmers and marry farmers. I wished to leave each a workable farm. Moreover, I had always hoped to turn to farming before I died. But I am too old to farm with anything but power machines, and nothing less than three hundred acres justifies, in terms of investment and operating costs, the use of power machinery.

  Pipe Creek Farm is a dairy farm. In the fall months, when the volume of milk a farmer ships is the volume for which he will receive a first-class milk price during the rest of the year, we ship around ninety gallons of whole milk a day. We keep about fifty head of registered Guernsey cattle, big and little, cows, bulls, heifers and calves, of which we milk about twenty-five head. Our herd sire is Langwater Truant that was reserve junior champion at the 1948 Western Maryland Field Day and whose get won top place at the Montgomery County fair this year. After a brief experience with hired help during the war, we vowed never to hire barn help again. We decided to do all the barn work ourselves as a family; otherwise, we would disperse the herd. We have done our own barn work since 1945. The milking and the barn work, when done properly, is an eight-hour job, four hours in the morning, beginning at half past five; four hours in the evening. We also have sundry other chores.

  At Medfield, where I am writing these words, we run a half-dozen registered Angus cows and their calves, which we hope, slowly, over the years, to increase to a producing beef herd. We also use the barn as an overflow station for our dairy heifers.

  At the Creek Farm, we have a first-rate hog barn, in addition to a big bank barn (where we sometimes winter our dry cows). We used to keep forty or fifty Hampshire hogs. We now keep only three brood sows. But we are on the point of considerably increasing our hog herd again. We keep the hogs at the far back of the farm because of the ease with which brucellosis ( contagious abortion or Bang’s disease) is transmitted from hogs to cattle. Our dairy herd is accredited Bang’s negative.

  Our Number Two venture is our flock of registered Shropshire sheep. It was the championship flock at the last Maryland State Fair. Our flock sire is one of the outstanding individuals of the breed. Our plans call for continual expansion of our sheep project, and, possibly, an eventual shift from dairy to sheep farming. For my wife and I feel too old and too tired, especially after the beating of the last few years, to know how much longer we can stand up under the drudgery of dairying; and the children will soon be away at college or in the armed services.

  We grow most of our own feed and sell little but wheat off the farm. Our regular rotations include corn, wheat, barley, oats, soybeans, and, where we are too late in getting off the corn, sometimes rye (for hogs) in place of wheat. (We also use ground rye in place of corn or molasses in the silo.) We combine our small grains and pick our corn by machine. We put up from four to five thousand bales of hay a year. Most of this is alfalfa of which we make three cuttings a year Thus, hay harvest is almost continuous.

  When we went into sheep, I decided that we must learn to grow Korean lespedeza (a great lamb fattener). Lespedeza is broadcast in April in fall-seeded barley. Our first crop was a partial failure. But we found that by discarding Wong barley, which grows too rank, and going back to Tennessee barley, we could grow first-rate lespedeza, which now sometimes carries our hay harvest into the first week of October (lespedeza is cut late).

  For these operations, we use a model A and model H John Deere tractor; a Case forager (for silage) and blower; a New Holland hay baler (a one-man rig); a two-bottom power-trol plough (for the big tractor); a single-bottom, hand-throw plough for the small tractor; and necessary supplementary machines. For milking, we use long-tube vacuum milkers (we hand strip after them). We shear our own sheep. We truck our own cattle (with the children showing at five or six fairs a season, that is quite a chore, apart from the incidental trucking to sales and the stockyards). We put up our own hay; each of the four to five thousand bales of hay is lifted by our arms into the mows of the three barns. We also bale and put up our own straw. For combining and corn picking we hire service. But by next harvest we hope to own our rig. We also work two kitchen gardens and a truck patch and freeze all our own meat and vegetables. But that is catch as catch can.

  All these operations are carried on by one woman (my wife), one man, Mr. Pennington (about whom I shall presently have more to say), half a man (myself; for though I have done a surprising amount of work on this farm in view of the work I was doing elsewhere, I cannot rate my labors higher), and two children (my daughter Ellen, 17, and my son John, 15). I think I can hear a farmer say: it can’t be done. It is done, though, and has been for years. But only a farmer will know what I mean when I say that a lot of things never get done.

  Pipe Creek Farm is not a show place. It is a dirt farm, a working farm. It is a farm practically every foot of whose soil I know because at one season or another I have p
ersonally worked it. It is the farm that I labored at Time, like Jacob with Laban, to support until it could support itself, for a modem farm is a big investment. A visiting Time researcher, the urban Miss Essie Lee, once picked her way gingerly among the units of this enigmatic enterprise, seeking desperately to bridge the transition between it and the chrome and concrete simplifications of the Time and Life Building. At last she reached the cow barn and slid back the door of the milking stable. As eighteen munching Guernsey heads turned to look her over, she exclaimed: “What has Mr. Luce done!”

  XXXI

  Pipe Creek Farm is not simply a few hundred acres of dirt, some clusters of old barns and outbuildings, power machines, a herd of cattle, a few beeves and hogs or a flock of sheep.

  Our farm is our home. It is our altar. To it each day we bring our faith, our love for one another as a family, our working hands, our prayers. In its soil and the care of its creatures, we bury each day a part of our lives in the form of labor. The yield of our daily dying, from which each night in part restores us, springs around us in the seasons of harvest, in the produce of animals, in incalculable content.

  A farmer is not everyone who farms. A farmer is the man who, in a ploughed field, stoops without thinking to let its soil run through his fingers, to try its tilth. A farmer is always half buried in his soil. The farmer who is not is not a farmer; he is a businessman who farms. But the farmer who is completes the arc between the soil and God and joins their mighty impulses. We believe that laborare est orare-to labor is to pray.

  In that sense, the farm is our witness. It is a witness against the world. By deliberately choosing this life of hardship and immense satisfaction, we say in effect: The modern world has nothing better than this to give us. Its vision of comfort without effort, pleasure without the pain of creation, life sterilized against even the thought of death, rationalized so that every intrusion of mystery is felt as a betrayal of the mind, life mechanized and standardized—that is not for us. We do not believe that it makes for happiness from day to day. We fear that it means catastrophe in the end. We fear it if only because standardization leads to regimentation, and because the regimentation that men distrust in their politics is a reflection of the regimentation that they welcome unwittingly in their daily living.

  We make use of as much mechanization as we cannot escape, as suits our daily needs, but does not rule our lives. We are not going back to the grain cradle, the candle or the ox cart. We seek that life that will give us the greatest simplicity, freedom, fruitful work, closest to the earth and peaceful, slow-moving animals. We know that, at this hour of history, we cannot do this completely. We realize that we have undertaken this life late in our lives and under heavy handicaps of fixed habit and ignorance. But we were willing to offer our lives for the venture because it is a way of groping toward God and because we knew nothing better in life to give our children.

  We bought this farm in my second year at Time. We knew something of the hardships we must expect. Soon we knew more of them. But we had decided that our children must grow up close to the soil, familiar with labor, embedded in the nation by attending its public schools and taking spontaneous part in its routine work and play. Above all, we wanted to place them beyond the smog of the great cities, seeing few newspapers, seldom hearing the radio, seldom seeing motion pictures, untouched by the excitements by which the modern world daily stimulates its nervous crisis. We wished them never to hear the word Communism until they had developed against it, and the modem mind from which it springs, the immunity of a full and good life.

  The price was high. To a family as devoted as we are, it was doubly high. For years, it meant my separation from my family for five days a week. Five days a week I lived at my mother’s house on Long Island while my wife and children remained on the farm. For years our weekly torment came when my wife and children stood beside the bus in Westminster, looking up miserably at me while I looked back miserably at them. There was no other way to buy the farm and set it in motion; and we always looked forward to the time when it would not be necessary to drive me to the bus on Wednesday night ever again.

  Breathlessly we paid off our first mortgage by putting everything I earned into it, by depriving ourselves of whatever we could spare—even necessary clothes. When we bought the farm, it had no conveniences. It had not been lived in for five years. I could write a sizable book on what kind of farm not to buy. We put in heat, light, water. We remodeled the barn to meet the health requirements of the Baltimore milkshed. We began to assemble a registered herd. I could also write a book on whether registered cattle or grades make economic sense to the farmer of middling means—and many other things about that great game of chance, the cattle business. In all these things, and others, we made the usual mistakes, and some original ones of our own inspiration; and, of course, we paid for them, sometimes heavily, in money and lost time.

  When we took over, there was scarcely a field on the farm that was not gashed with deep erosion gutters. One gutter at the back of the farm extended for half an acre, and, when I stood in it, rose like a canyon above me. Another man and I spent a day, filling it with brush, tangles of old fence wire, and other trash. Then we drove slowly round and round, ploughing in the edges while the tractors tried to slew into the crater. When we had filled it level, we sowed the scar to grass and grain. The next day a rain washed the whole fill across the road. That is farming. We ploughed the gutter shut again. Today there is not an open gutter on the farm.

  I remember the first day I took a tractor to plough a field. I felt like a man alone against an enemy. I had never ploughed a field before. I thought: “Well, the way to plough is to plough.” For my maiden effort, I had picked a field well out of sight of the road. But the discreetly smiling neighbor who appears universally on such occasions soon settled in to spend a fruitful (and for a long time perfectly silent) morning watching me. As I stopped at one furrow turn, he broke silence to observe, “You’re doing all right.” Then he added, “Do you always plough in low gear?”

  During my two days at home, I worked most of the time—ploughing, disking, harrowing, haying, milking—whatever operation need called for. I can remember ploughing by headlight until a few minutes of the time when I had to rush for the Time office. In my last years at Time, when I could spend more days at home, I took a much greater part in the farm activities. I am perfectly happy at such work. I only regret that I did not come to it when my strength was at its peak and I had enough years left to live so that I could plan in terms of the decades that farming requires.

  Two other people really made the farm possible. One was my wife. Without her, her faith, her vision and her hard work, we could never have succeeded. We could never even have begun. My wife was city bred. She was so much city bred that, when we were living in our barn at Glen Gardner, and young phoebes hatched in the nest over our door, she asked me one day, “Does the mother phoebe nurse the little ones?”

  Today she runs Pipe Creek Farm. She holds it all together, with her mind and with her hands. When we bought our first cow, she used to ask anyone she met how to get the milk out of the teats. Today she is the best hand milker in the family. Twice a day, she strips twenty-five cows. To release me while I wrote this book, she took over the entire morning milking herself.

  Her tenderness and patience with small animals and sick animals is extreme. The calves are like her children. The mention of blood makes her faint. But I have seen her release newborn pigs from cauls by ripping the membrane with her finger. When a cow recently suffered a breech birth, and, at two o’clock in the morning, the veterinary and I took turns sawing up the calf within the mother and removing it piecemeal, my wife quietly passed us the instruments. When we used our old Case baler, and the whole family had to man the rig, I have watched her sit through a sizzling afternoon, goggled against chaff, but defenseless against dust and raw fingers, tying the wires as the sticker pushed them through the bales. She is tireless, courageous, infinitely patient, devoted,
loving and loyal to the family for which she would unhesitatingly give her life as she gives the days of it. How curious she seemed to the newsmen when she testified in the Hiss Case, how different from the women who watched her from the courtroom. And how different she really was. For she is of the stuff of the pioneers. There are not many like her left in the world.

  The other force that made the farm possible was Stanley Pennington—“ Mr.” Pennington, as I have always called him, just as he has always called me “Mr.” Chambers, even after years of ploughing together, tractor behind tractor, or sweating together on how many hay loads. For Mr. Pennington has an instinctive respect for the dignity of the human substance; he believes that that respect should be fixed by courtesy. “We of the common people,” he has said to me once or twice; and we both knew that in the humble term, he was asserting a patent of nobility. I have known few men in whom tact was so instinctive, or a sense of rank based upon a sense of worth so real or so unassuming. I esteem him beyond most men whom I have known.

  The world would call Mr. Pennington a rough man. He went to work at the age of fifteen. He has worked ever since. He has worked at almost any job there is to do, and there is almost nothing that he cannot do well. Mechanically, he is ingenious; and though he is wiry, his strength is brutal. He begins work before dawn. He ends work after dark. He believes, as he has sometimes told me, that work is the highest human good, the source of all other goods. The rest of his philosophy is kindness. Who hesitates to call him at the peak of harvest to start a machine hopelessly stalled in a field? Who hesitates to wake him in the middle of the night to drive a sick man to the doctor? Who in need has not borrowed from him, and very often failed to repay?