Maggie's Farm

by Sherry, John;

  Besides his bulldozers, his family and his cattle in about that order, what interested Mist Case most in the world were Negroes. They were always referred to as “nigguhs” and they were, for him, the fundamental source of all material and spiritual well-being. The ability to function within the confines of that endless minstrel show which is the South, the ability to burgeon from their labors and still maintain the tenuous illusion of control; these were the requisites of manhood and reality to Mist Case. When he realized that I was not the master of these techniques and never could be, Mist Case conceived an essential contempt for me that he took little trouble to conceal. He regarded me more and more as something of a nigguh myself; albeit, a totally unsatisfactory one who was white, would not be worked like a dog, did not play the clown and used long words that he did not understand.

  The relationship between Mist Case and his Negroes was a delicate balance which had been worked out during centuries of impossibility. There was no conscious cruelty on his side of the scale just as there was no conscious contempt on theirs. He expected a certain amount of work from them and a certain amount of amusement and he was aware that he could only obtain the latter at the expense of the former. They, on the other hand, were content to use their great psychological expertise towards his diversion in order to keep their physical labours within reasonable limits.

  The natural leader among the group of hands that were usually under my supervision was a young man in his early twenties named Clem. He was a good looking fellow, strong as a bull and a tireless worker when he wished to be. Clem sensed immediately that I could be seduced by his idiom which was breezy and employed most often in discussions about the opposite sex. To Paul, a younger and less confidant colleague, Clem said one day, “Boy, how dat good lookin’ sistuh you got?” “She fine,” Paul said, bashfully. “Yo Pop, he still away up at de jailhoue?” “Yeah, he be away fo a while longuh.” “Well, you tell dat gal dat de sugah man be roun’ one a dese evenins, heah?” “Don’ you come messin’ roun’ wit no sistuh of mine, boy,” Paul said. Chuckling happily, Clem replied, “Oh yes, de sweet sugah man, he be roun’.”

  Near quitting time one Friday afternoon, Clem confided his intentions to me: “Jus’ one little ole half hour, Mist John, and Charlotte, heah I come. Them ole Charlotte gals bettuh watch out ’cause ole Clem, he comin’ to town. Fust, I goes home and puts on the pants to mah blue suit; not the coat, Mist John, ’cause if you puts on de whole suit they thinks you is jus’ some ole country boy; den I puts on mah new sportin’ shirt and Charlotte look out fo ole Clem.” Knowing that I could be lured into such conversations at will, my authority was slowly and steadily undermined.

  All in all, I must have worked for Casey Crawford for about three months. During this time, I became steadily more convinced that I was marking time and learning little of genuine value to me should I ever have a farm of my own. Which is the real reason I finally resigned. However, there always has to be a signal in matters of timing and Mist Case supplied one by instigating a comic ploy designed within the labrynthine passages of his Southern mind to test my metal.

  He had, as I have mentioned, an aged, rather recalcitrant horse about the place who dwelt in some equine elysium of plenty to eat and no work to do. Horse-preoccupation having been left out of my make-up at birth, this beast and I had little to do with each other. He was, however, fated to be instrumental in the final joust between Mist Case and me.

  Mist Case arrived at the farm one day bored and, as usual on the lookout for mischief. He interrupted me at some unimportant task and we chatted idly about various jobs he felt should be taken in hand. Finally, we hiked over to examine the forty acres which had been planted in corn. The young corn shoots were up only a few inches and Mist Case examined the field appreciatively. In truth, it was a fine stand of corn and I felt at peace with the day until I saw that sudden gleam appear in Mist Case’s eyes which invariably heralded some preposterous suggestion or command. In his best hick vein, he began to ruminate upon the value of old fashioned farming techniques.

  “Young stan of cohn lak that needs harrowin’ raht bout now,” he said, thoughtfully, “Thing is, young cohn lak that so tenduh that it needs nice slow, careful harrowin’.”

  By the time he continued, I was braced for what was to come; “Tell you whut,” he said, “you jus’ git that good ole hoss of mine an hahness him up to them ole spike harrows; you’ll find some hahness an a singletree ovuh to the bahn.”

  I was tempted to protest but some foolish devil of pride made me keep silent. Then too, there was not much time in which to protest; it was Mist Case’s practice to leave the scene quickly after he had conceived what he felt to be a good joke. A moment later, he drove off in his pick-up truck and I was left drearily contemplating the prospect of catching an animal I feared and distrusted, dressing him in some apparatus I did not understand and plodding wearily behind him for what seemed it would be weeks. Let all those who operate within the limits of suburban perspective be warned that forty acres of corn is a hell of a lot of corn.

  Somehow, I caught the beast, diagnosed the proper placement of his harness and, filled with mutual distrust and antipathy, we advanced upon the vast expanse of cornfield. The sun was well up in the heavens by then and the heat of the late spring North Carolina sun is no joke. By the time the horse and I had done two rows, I was drenched with sweat. The horse, predictably enough, performed as if he had been given private instructions by Mist Case. He either went too slow or too fast and I floundered in his wake idiotically, shouting gee and haw with little or no result. Every now and then, he would come to a full stop to examine me contemptuously. I kept it up for an hour before thoughts of revolt began to stir. To quit, was an idea I did not seriously consider; I was taking his money and it was clear that I owed it to Mist Case to harrow his cornfield. What rankled was the horse and all that pure poppycock about the need for the horse’s use. If the keys were still in the tractor (and Mist Case was perfectly capable of having removed them), I could somehow manage to rig the rusty old harrows behind it and complete the field in a few comparatively comfortably seated hours instead of the days of torture which lay ahead.

  The keys were still in the tractor and, moments after making that discovery, the horse was back in retirement and I was proceeding with my task in the proper manner of 20th century man. By the end of the working day the job was done and well done; the nascent weeds uprooted and the young corn untouched. Childishly, I could not resist stopping by Mist Case’s machine shop on the way home. Enthroned upon his nail keg, he eyed me happily. “Git yuah cohn done?” he asked, fully aware that one man walking behind that dreadful horse would need at least a week to complete such a task.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Whut?” he said, looking startled.

  “I used the tractor.”

  “Bet you done rooined that purty young cohn.”

  “Go take a look,” I said, enjoying myself.

  “By Gawd, I jus’ will. Come on.”

  We drove out to the farm together, Mist Case clucking away like a frustrated hen about his ruined corn; I, benign and imperturbable. So impertuable, in fact, that Mist Case had lost all hope of finding his corn damaged when we arrived. Nevertheless, he walked the rows carefully searching for bent or broken plants. There were some, of course; but no more than he would have found had the job been done using his damnable horse. When he finished his inspection, he muttered something about, “Looks all raht but t’woulda been a bettuh job if you’d used that ole hoss”.

  However, he was cheerful as we rode back to town; that joke had not worked out but, no matter; there would be another joke along soon.

  Shortly after that, Mist Case and I parted company. We did so on the best of terms and I continued to rent his house on Main Street. It was only a week or so later that I went to St. Louis on my ill-fated quest for funds to purchase a farm.

  CHAPTER V

  In a play of mine, a scene occurs in which the members of an
upper-middle class family are attempting to dodge discussion of the subject which interests them most: money. The mother puts a stop to this by saying simply, “Money is always interesting.” In my experience, her remark is true; money must be interesting in order for me to have spent as much time thinking about as I have during my life. It is a process which has given me much pain and much pleasure.

  Due to a certain profligacy on the male side and a certain malfunction of the breeding mechanism on the distaff, my patrimony (or rather, my portion thereof) remained lodged in the viselike grip of a spinster aunt during most of my life. I have devised many a scheme in my time to jar it loose, but in the end, only death could turn the trick. The anatomy and history of that patrimony have always bemused me because, to my knowledge, neither contains even a suggestion of any creative act; buy low, sell high were the conditions of its birth, and preoccupation with chimerical rainy days the condition of its nurturing. When I say patrimony, I refer only to that derived from the paternal side. From the maternal side, I inherited opportunities for experience, openness and a sense of style and, as a result have never felt that I was owed anything further. Since youth, I have been convinced that I was owed much by the assorted mortgage-holders, penny-pinchers and Franklin D. Roosevelt-haters which made up the majority of the paternal side. From this group, I carefully except my own father who was much to my taste. It was his father who put together the nucleus of the rather large sum of money which was to drive me mad with rage during most of my young manhood. This gentleman’s name was Josiah Sherry and he died when my father was sixteen years old. He was a grain speculator who, I have been told, had grave ups and downs but managed to leave a goodly sum of money even though he perished at comparatively low ebb. This eventually filtered down to my father and his three sisters, each of whom received about one hundred thousand dollars upon the death of their mother, a much-admired lady who died before my memory began to function. Only one of the three sisters had issue; a daughter who died and a son, a cheerful chap who, where last I heard of him, was circumnavigating the earth in a trimaran of his own construction. The remaining two sisters did not breed. The elder was a nonentity who married and kept house for her husband and her younger sister all her life. Thus they lived in one of those commonplace, middle-class and thoroughly sexless menages a trois. And when I say sexless I mean sexless. Although it is the most dangerous thing a man can do, I would be willing to bet every cent I’ve got that the younger sister, Susan, died an intact virgin. Unlike her elder sister, however, she was no nonentity.

  Largely because she eventually became the repository of most of the money in my family, Susan was always of great interest to me. But, my fascination with her by no means stemmed completely from that. It stemmed also from the fact that she inspired in me as strange a combination of intense dislike and intense respect as I have ever experienced. She was an educated woman, an early graduate of Vassar and a brilliant teacher of mathematics who retired at 65 as assistant principal of a large metropolitan high school. At 70, she still had enough gas left to go to Japan where she taught mathamatics at Kobe College. This was during the period when we were living on 12th Street in New York while I was writing my first novel. Dorothy was doing her best as a breadwinner and I cannot lay claim to real penury. However, we sailed awfully close to the edge. When a medical problem drove us over the edge, I remember writing to my aunt with the suggestion that, since she was going to leave me some money some day, she might as well fork over a little now. Back from Japan came an extremely high-dudgeoned blast inquiring what possible right I had to make any assumption whatsoever regarding her testamentary intentions. Her objection was, I suppose, well-founded; nevertheless, it had the effect of strengthening my dislike. The measurement of any potential act of charity was, in her mind, rectitude rather than need. She belonged to that class of person who views all recipients of welfare as avaricious, slothful and dishonest.

  She did not believe in essential freedom. It was this aspect of her make-up whence my unchanging dislike stemmed. And by essential freedom, I mean simply a basic belief that freedom must be pursued by humankind within the confines of the terrifying paradox that it is unattainable. Essential freedom is an attempt not an attainment. Birds in the bush did not exist for Susan. And even those few brightly coloured birds in the hand which are available to human beings, struck her as being basically futile. The quality of her spirit was as poor as the quality of her rationality was high. As a teacher she was incomparable in her subject; when I was floundering helplessly with algebra as a boy, she drove with a few deft strokes a basic understanding of the subject into my head. So my savage dislike was always balanced by respect for her. And that respect was curiously tinged by nostalgia, an awareness of all she had missed in life and a knowledge of what she might have been. Once, on a whim, I sent her a copy of a fine book by Colin Wilson called, “The Outsider”. I received a letter in return which asked, “Do you think I have been anything but an outsider all my life?” She was like a piano sprinkled with dead keys, devoid, like most of her race, of any understanding of or need for the creative act.

  My application to her for enough money to buy a farm was rejected without any hint of consideration. It came as no surprise to me to find that I had traveled to St. Louis in order to be fed a bad dinner and subjected to an evening of homilies about the aimlessness and futility of my life. Interspersed throughout as juxtapository warnings were anecdotes about various local losers among her acquaintances who were fighting sad and hopeless battles for survival. False teeth clicking happily, she recounted tales of spinster daughters supporting aging mothers by taking in laundry and men reduced to penury through sickness and infirmity; only those poor unfortunates who had been struck down and definitively mangled by life were examples of morally right and proper need. I listened quietly; my name was Sherry too and I understood the rules of the game: ask and ye shall be refused and listen to a lecture in the process just for good measure. Yet, oddly enough, it would be Sherry money which would buy my farm in the end. It came through no good offices of Susan, but it was Sherry money nevertheless.

  With that balloon definitely busted, I turned my head back towards specific farming information. There is in St. Louis, a rather interesting organization called the Doane Agricultural Service which deals in the management of large farms for absentee landlords. A person, for example, who inherited a large farm and who had no experience in farming could hire the Doane Service to provide personnel to run his farm subject to policy decisions made by the Doane office in St. Louis—which office would then carry out periodic inspections to see to it that those policy decisions were being carried out. My friend Dr. Black in Rome had spoken of this organization with respect and one of the things I had on my mind in going to St. Louis was to pay a call at their offices in the hope that I might find someone whose brains were both pickable and amenable to being picked. As luck would have it, I did, in fact, encounter such a fellow.

  His name has long since departed from my memory although his appearance remains clear. He had what I always think of as “Astronaut” good looks, crew cut, well-scrubbed and given to an idiom of speech which replaced the word “very” with the word “real”. For example, in Astronaut parlance the phrase “very good” is religiously replaced by the use of “real good”. My man was about my age and he struck me immediately as knowing his stuff. He was a graduate of a good agricultural school, had grown up on a farm and, even now, happily ensconced on a policy level with a good firm, he showed a hankering to return to actual farming himself. It was this quality which induced me to pay such careful attention to him. After we had talked for perhaps an hour and he had a fairly clear idea of my intentions, he got out a map of the southeast and spread it on his desk. He then placed his finger on a specific area and said, “If I were going to buy myself a cattle farm, I’d go somewhere right about here.”

  I looked down at the map and saw that his fingernail was resting on a town called Wytheville, the county seat
of Wythe County in the southwestern part of Virginia, quite close to the borders of North Carolina, West Virginia and Tennessee. So do our destinies make themselves manifest. I decided then and there to drive directly to Wytheville on my way back to North Carolina.

  The reasons for his choice seemed to me to be both sound and informed. The land in that area was natural blue-grass land which could be brought back by the proper use of fertilizer, even though it had been badly treated. It was also, relatively cheap land due to much of it having been badly farmed for crops instead of used for livestock as it should have been. Furthermore, it was an unsophisticated area in which most of the farms were too small to warrant the investment needed to make them pay even if the wherewithal for such an investment were forthcoming. Which, in most cases, it was not; cash is a scarce commodity in Southwestern Virginia.

  A day or so after my talk with the young man at the Doane Service, I drove back to North Carolina by way of Wytheville, Virginia. When I was still a hundred miles from Wytheville, it was hard for me to believe that I would find anything there which would strike my fancy. My approach was through the narrow valleys of the West Virginia coal country, which is, I imagine, the most depressed economic area in the United States. Even though the mines are now largely inactive, thick coal dust seems to lie over everything; the very air reeks of poverty, ignorance, despair and violence. The last city of any size which I passed through in West Virginia was the city of Bluefield, a curious microcosm of urban corruption with which, later on, I would become familiar with through our daily newspaper, the Bluefield Daily Telegraph, a journal which chronicled a world more strange to me than Mars. (One highly typical front-page story which sticks in my mind concerned an eighty year man who poisoned a family’s well and killed off the entire family out of pique because he could not induce a sixteen year old daughter of the family to sleep with him.)