Maggie's Farm

by Sherry, John;

  Before a year had passed, I had left the agency, had a novel on the stocks and a publisher’s contract for it. (We too then sailed away for Europe.) It was during that year in New York that we became close friends with Kate. We also saw much of Darroch, who, prior to his departure for Europe, was living in a small flat in Chelsea, chasing the girls and trying also to establish himself as a writer.

  It was a good year and a key year; the slight success of grasping a tenuous professionalism helped make it so. But by far the most important thing about that year was a marriage which finally became a reality. Crooked wheel that it is, we nevertheless gambled on it and won. We discovered that we could make it together.

  CHAPTER IV

  The essential strategy of my search for a farming job had been derived from my kindly advisor, Dr. Black, of FAO in Rome. He had given me various letters to specific people in the area I was going to comb but he had also warned me that these would be, in the main, people connected with the academic aspect of farming, who, he hoped would pass me on to others more directly concerned with its practical aspects. Dr. Black had told me that the County Agent would probably turn out to be my most valuable avenue of approach and in this he was correct.

  For the benefit of those who, like myself a year earlier, do not know what a County Agent is, I had better provide a brief definition of his function. The County Agent is an employee of the United States Department of Agriculture who operates in an advisory capacity to the individual farmers of the county for which he is responsible. If he is a good County Agent, this means that he deals on a highly personal level with as many farmers as he can, encouraging a spirit of experiment and the adoption of modern farming techniques. At the time I set out on my farming quest, my attitude towards any manifestation of bureacracy was one of total disbelief and disdain. The limits of my experience stemmed from war, the advertising business and sitting around in barrooms; all, with the exception of the first, rather abstract pursuits to say the least. It had never really occurred to me, for example, that in the history of the world, my country was the first one of any size, scope and power to have cracked the fundamental case of feeding its citizens. The astonishing American agricultural success is due to numerous factors to be sure: the essential fecundity of the land, high incentives, mechanical sophistication and so on. However, it is also due in large measure to a functioning bureaucratic process which never loses sight of its objectives. Stated in the simplest possible way, its objectives are to produce the maximum amount of food using the minimum number of people who are getting paid the highest possible return for the labor in which they are engaged. I know nothing about the upper levels of that bureaucratic process; however, I do know from experience that it works very well at the grass-roots level. Which is to say, the level of the County Agent. In my travels around the South, I met many of these men and an astonishingly large percentage of them are enthusiastic, knowledgeable and energetic. And terribly helpful. It was one such who eventually put me onto my future employer, as strange a man as I have ever encountered.

  All in all, I must have roamed through my four chosen southern states for about three weeks. It was a largely unconscious but essentially accurate instinct that had made me choose the South as the area in which I intended to settle. The reason is a very simple one: the South is—or was—economically sub-marginal from an agricultural standpoint. It is open to invasion by the inexperienced, which highly evolved agricultural areas such as Iowa or Wisconsin are very definitely not. My ingrained knowledge of this fact left me, I now realize, in a curiously schizophrenic emotional position regarding the South. Because I was determined to settle there, I had to spend a good deal of time conning myself that I liked it. The truth is the exact opposite and I may as well set it down here and now: I hate the South. I hate its sloth, its weary cynicism, its hypocrisy, its stone age religious bias, its preoccupation with class distinction and, most of all, I hate the dreadful, ingrained guilt of the southerner which he does little or nothing to alleviate. I’ve never had to bother reading much Faulkner because I know he’s right. George Bernard Shaw’s remark when finally trapped into commenting on “Ulysses” works perfectly when applied to Faulkner: “It’s about the way it has always seemed to me” said Shaw, the seething love-hate he felt for the Irish, being one himself, bubbling furiously to the surface. It always takes one to catch one. And I have to admit with an exasperated sigh that I am, in some measure, a southerner. St. Louis is a peculiar, ingrown, strangely sophisticated city which has been fed from many different directions; but, in the last analysis, it is, psychologically, a southern city. I can understand perfectly the mysterious mixture of sadness and fierce joy with which Sherman put the land to the torch on his march south; and the contempt with which Ulysses S. Grant must have acccepted the surrender of Robert E. Lee’s gentlemanly sword. There is a passage in the Bible which has always typified the South to me psychologically. It is when Lot, that best of fellows ends up in a cave with his daughters after a lifetime of chasing after something for nothing. “Thus both daughters of Lot were with child by their father. The elder bore a son and called him Moab. He is the father of the Moabites of the present day.” That’s my South: the land of the Moabites of the present day.

  Which is not to say that Moabites are not fascinating or likeable; they are both. It is not southerners but the south which fills me with such a desperate desire to escape. The job I finally found threw me right into the midst of as fine a nest of Moabites as the original gang in the cave. The patriarch of the clan could have been taken directly from the pages of T. S. Stribling.

  Towards the end of my three weeks’ jaunt, I came to the city of Statesville in North Carolina. I was, to put it mildly, beginning to loose heart; many County Agents had presented me to numbers of farmers but I was too odd a duck for them. The combination of inexperience and a background as a writer required more imagination to bet on than most possessed. It was, I think, a penchant for mischief on the part of my future employer which eventually brought about my hiring. And a penchant for mischief is certainly a product of imagination.

  In Statesville, I sought out the county agent and presented my spiel; it had become pretty pat by then. The county agent was a pleasant young man about the same age as I. He ruminated for a few minutes and then said with decision, “Let’s us get in my car and go out and see a man I know named Casey Crawford.” The way he spoke, our destination seemed only a hop, skip and jump away but it turned out to be a drive of nearly an hour to the neighboring town of Mooresville, an undistinguished Southern milltown upon which the hand of change lay lightly. During the ride, I had been roughly briefed by the agent as to the nature of Casey Crawford’s farming operation. It was, to say the least, atypical. Crawford, it seemed, was a road building contractor in a small enough way of business so that he still took on jobs such as building fishponds for farmers. His inventory of machinery consisted of three or four bulldozers, some ramshackle dump trucks and a small drag line. His labor force was a group of about ten Negroes augmented, occasionally by other Negroes which he took on for bigger jobs. He also ran a beef cattle farm; it was this farm which was the object of our visit.

  We found him sitting on a nail keg in front of the machine shop where his machines were serviced and repaired. He was, so help me God, whittling on a stick. I always called him Mr. Crawford but I will refer to him here as “Mist Case,” the title bestowed on him by his Negro employees and most of the other people in the town. Mist Case was a tasty dish: He was a small, rotund but very powerful man of an age somewhere between fifty-five and sixty. His unvarying costume was khaki shirt and trousers all surmounted by an odd little hat turned up both in front and back, which he wore tilted forward on the front of his head. It was a comedian’s hat; Mist Case was a fairly straight Mack Sennett turn with some complicated Southern overtones. His eyes, when they suddenly darted at one from beneath the comedian’s hat, were very shrewd. When not in the company of his Negro laborers, he was usually bored, I lat
er found out. (In the flatland South, the Negroes do everything; they not only do the work but provide the jokes and the music and generally shore up the culture of a very shaky scene.) Such was the state of Mist Case that day we first met; his hands were all away on a job and he sat lonely and bored upon his nail keg whittling. His eyes began to gleam as the County Agent made his pitch for me. Mist Case was fundamentally amused by life and open to experience; life had brought him a writer of books who wanted to be a farmer and he sensed immediately the opportunity for practically unlimited fields of fun. I might add that I never took a round off him—well, maybe one, but I shall come to that later on.

  When the County Agent had finished describing my quest, Mist Case looked me over, his eyes twinkling happily.

  “So you one of them book writuhs. Goodness gracious me, beats me how a feller goes about writin’ one of them books.” His tone made it clear that he regarded such a pursuit as a complete waste of time but was nevertheless pleased to be faced with a fellow so foolish as to have carried through such an outlandish project.

  He came rapidly to brass tacks: “Got me a little farm outchere with a few cattle on it. Caint tend to it propuhly myself. You think you’d lahk to take a crack at it, eh?” I said I would and he got up off his nail keg, saying, “Less jus take us a drive on out theah an’ look things ovuh.”

  “His “little farm turned out to be four hundred acres while his “few” cattle turned out to be a couple of hundred purebred whiteface cows and heifers. However, the place was far from being fancy; the only house I could see was derilect and unliveable and the barns were either falling down or leaning one way and another. The fences appeared new and good and there was a large new silo but, for the rest, the place was a mess. We walked around examining the cattle, I trying not to appear as ignorant as I felt. In his quick, decisive way, Mist Case made a proposition: two hundred a month and a house for me and my family. I asked him where the house was and he said, “Got me a little house in town do jus’ fine.”

  It was all about as far from anything I had envisioned as I could imagine; but then, reality usually is. Anyway, I jumped at it. We drove back into Mooresville and looked at the house. It was an appalling shack which backed up on the dolor of Mist Case’s machinery yard. There was no bathroom in it, a problem which he dismissed airily with a brisk, “Put you in a bathroom in a couple of days.”

  I balked. By that time, I was getting as interested in Mist Case as he was in me, even though I realized with a certain misgiving that my interest was that of a novelist rather than neophyte farmer. I suspected even then that I would learn precisely nothing about farming if I went to work for Mist Case. No matter; we needed a Benz chamber to make the transition from depth to surface and this looked as though it were going to be the only one that would offer itself. But I was damned if I wanted to live in a shack surrounded by rusting bulldozers. More important, I did not want to be that closely under Mist Case’s thumb. Even then I was instinctively alert to his capacity for mischief but I saw no reason to put myself in a position where he had me available for torture on a twenty-four hour a day basis. He gave in quickly, saying, “Got me anothuh little house ovuh on Main Street do you jus’ fine.”

  We looked at that one and it was not too bad; one half of a white frame two-family house in a nice shady yard well back from the street with a magnificent oak tree in the front yard. (Later on, that tree would save us serious injury, if not our lives: a noise like the crack of doom had awakened Dorothy and me one morning at about four o’clock; I found the driver of a trailer truck dazed and bleeding trying to ring our doorbell. He had left the road at full speed and only the tree kept his truck from plowing right into our bedroom. After we had got medical help for him, I wandered out to examine the wreck. Beneath it, almost hidden by the bulk of the trailer was an old jalopy with four dead Negroes in it.)

  Now, Mist Case and I struck our bargain. We arranged that I should return with my family four or five days hence. The County Agent and I drove back to Statesville; he, highly pleased with the success of his catalytic effort and I game but slightly apprehensive.

  Back in Maryland, I found my wife champing at the bit; while the three weeks with O’Hara and my brother had not been unpleasant for her, she was anxious to be gettting on with it. Both O’Hara and my brother were, for the moment, men without plans or a discernible future. My brother would soon return to Europe. O’Hara must have been thinking things over very carefully; inside a few months, he would hand us all an unexpected—and seemingly cheerful—surprise. Within a couple of days, Dorothy and I loaded the station wagon with our belongings and the baby and took the road south for Mooresville. With us still was our Boxer bitch Gordo. Poor Gordo; born in Spain, ex-citizen of Morocco and Italy, she was now thoroughly confused and suspicious of each new move.

  In Mooresville, we settled into our new house without much difficulty and I began my apprenticeship under Casy Crawford. It is clear now that it was more an apprenticeship in the mores of the flatland south than it was an apprenticeship in farming.

  I have mentioned previously that Casy Crawford’s farming operation was atypical. The reason is simple; it bore no relation to economic reality. It was, first of all, a hobby for Mist Case and, second, a tax dodge. But those things do not necessarily make a farm economically unreal; many such farms are beautifully run and incorporate interesting and experimental techniques. What made Mist Case’s farm a total Alice in Wonderland operation was that it was not self supporting in any department. In the David Harum sense of the word, Mist Case was an extremely cunning man; cunning and hopelessly out of touch with the times. If he has not come to grief by now with the U.S. Government, I should be surprised. For example, he paid absolutely no attention to the rules regarding the payment of withholding tax for his employees. I have heard his son, Shorty, warning him that this would lead to trouble but Mist Case simply shut him up with a brisk patriarchal hand, saying, “Pshaw, Ah don know nothin bout them damn fools in Washington; Ah jus pays off in good green money an that’s the end of that.” And he greatly enjoyed pay day, warning each Negro in jocular tones against misbehavior as he thumbed the bills off a large roll. He was not a mean man and the wages he paid were high by local standards. His view of Negroes was the prosaically southern one that they were incapable of taking care of themselves. Accordingly, he owned the mortgages upon nearly all the houses in which his hands lived; which meant, of course, that they paid for a certain protection against disaster with a sacrifice of their essential freedom. Thereby, helping to maintain the shaky Southern status quo.

  His unwritten bargain with his hands was to keep them steadily employed. From this fact stemmed the first reason for the unreality of his farming operation. On a given day, any hands not needed on whatever earth-moving contracts being fulfilled would be sent to work on the farm. Therefore, such time—and money-consuming tasks as the building of new fences were accomplished by use of a large gang of laborers and charged off against the contracting business. This, I soon found out, made me into the overseer of a group of Negro hands and led, inevitably, to my downfall for reasons I will presently explain.

  The other fact of unreality concerning Mist Case’s farm was that very little actual farming went on there. The cattle had to be looked after, of course, but this amounted to little more than feeding them, spraying them, and seeing to it that the calf crop was looked after. During the relatively short time I worked for Mist Case, the feeding part of the program was not necessary, we were far enough along into the spring so that the cattle were on grass. Mist Case did little actual farming because it was cheaper and more efficient for him to take payment in kind from the various farmers for whom he did earth-moving work. He would build a fish pond, for example, in return for which the farmer who wanted it would see to it that Mist Case’s silo was filled with corn. Other work of that sort would be paid for by the delivery of large loads of alfalfa hay. The spring that I went to work for Mist Case he had planted 40 acres of corn f
or silage, but even this would be harvested by a farmer who owed him money. The actual inventory of machinery on Mist Case’s place was pitifully small: a Ford tractor with a mower attachment and a wagon and some rusty old spike harrows. There was also a woebegone horse about the place whose virtues Mist Case never tired of extolling.

  The routine of my days varied according to how the Negro labor force was engaged on a given day. I would report in the morning to Mist Case’s machine shop exactly like all the other hands. If it was a day on which there were men to spare, I would load the ones assigned to me into a truck and we would repair to the farm and carry on with whatever large continuing project, such as fence building, was then in hand. If, as frequently was the case, there were no hands to spare, I would spend the day on the farm taking care of various minor projects that I could handle myself: building loading pens or keeping the pastures mowed back. Then there was the constant business of keeping track of the cattle and seeing to it that those cows about to calf were separated and put in a small calving pasture near the barns. It became increasingly clear to me during the time that I worked for Mist Case that any sort of beef cattle operation would forever be beyond me in scope; to be profitable, such an operation requires a great deal more land than I could ever get together the money to buy.

  The purpose of Mist Case’s farm was not the raising of beef for market but the breeding and raising of pure-bred Whiteface cattle to be sold as breeding stock. The bull calves were castrated shortly after birth with a hideous little machine which was the subject of much coarse joking among the hands. They were then weaned and sold off at the local market as veal or to be raised and fattened for later sale as prime beef. The heifers were all kept, raised and subsequently bred. The theory being that, over a long period of time, stern annual culling and the use and purchase of finer bulls would eventually result in a herd which would produce prize-winning animals at the local fairs and so attract potential blood stock purchasers to the farm. When I worked for Mist Case, such an ideal state was far, far in the future. Records had been poorly kept or not kept at all and the quality of the bulls used for breeding had not been high. However, shortly before my advent, Mist Case had invested an astonishingly large amount of money in a vast polled (hornless) Hereford bull, a dull-eyed lackadaisical beast with a long pompous name. To see him climb ponderously aboard some cow or heifer was a sight which gave Mist Case great pleasure. “Looky theah,” he would shout gleefully, “he gon poll them cows; he gon poll them cows for shuh.”