Maggie's Farm

by Sherry, John;

  As I passed through Bluefield and began climbing the Appalachian range which would lead me to the valley between the Appalachians and the Blue Ridge Mountains, I was appalled at the dreadful misjudgment of the young man whose advice had led me there. To my mind, the country through which I had driven was, not fit for human habitation. It stank of inequality and bore the physical and psychological scars of all areas where wealth has been removed from the earth to the enrichment of the few and at the expense of many. Yet, as I drove across the last twenty-five miles of mountains, the feeling of dolor passed away. The defunct coal mines thinned out and then ceased altogether. The country was wild but it was clean and beautiful wildness. Then I emerged into Virginia and the valley, and my faith in my young man’s judgement was restored. It was August then and the fields on each side of the road undulated with ripening corn and small grain. The high mountains were now in the distance while the immediate country was hilly though still arable. But the brutal little secret rocky valleys of West Virginia did not persist beyond that final mountain range.

  The town of Wytheville was only a scant twenty miles further. I arrived there about dusk and got a room at the town’s major hostelry. The evening was spent walking about the town and chatting idly with whatever locals I could cause to fall into a conversation. I could force myself into no great raptures about the town of Wytheville itself. We have all seen fifty towns much like it. As is true of most Virginia towns, there were a few houses of genuine beauty, but in the main, the town was standard Americana, a scene reminiscent of those on the covers of the Saturday Evening Post during the Thirties and Forties.

  Wytheville was the county seat of Wythe County; George Wythe, the namesake of these quantities, had been a Virginia jurist and one of the architects of the Constitution. I was instructed in these matters by a gentleman in the lobby of the hotel; he also advised me about a real estate man I might contact if I were interested in buying property in the area.

  Bright and early the next morning, I presented myself at the real estate office. Having no money, I was bluffing shamefully but I was anxious to see just what was going in the way of farm land in the vicinity, and its approximate price. The realtor could not have been more pleasant. We set out in his car to have a look at various places he had listed. It was a discouraging quest; mountain people to whom the possession of the land is all important are a strange mixture of shyness and pride. The farms we visited that morning were of course for sale and the people were furtive and ashamed because of it.

  Late that morning, the real estate man stopped his car on the bend of a country road, saying “I doubt that this will interest you but we might as well take a look.” At first sight, I agreed with him. The house was set back from the bend in the road about 100 feet. It had once been white clapboard but was now so badly in need of paint that it had weathered to a dingy grey. The design was one encountered frequently in that area, a two-storey house built in the shape of an L with a long veranda running across the front. If one stood facing the house, the ground dropped away to the left at quite a sharp angle of descent for about 200 feet where a clear mountain stream gurgled busily by. A dirt drive ran from the main road down past the left of the house to a small patch of creek bottom about the size of a football field. Part of this was a small pasture; the rest was fenced off for a large vegetable garden. Adjacent to the garden was a tumbledown barn, its nucleus a log cabin which had been abandoned as a habitation when the main house had been built around the turn of the century. The pastures and fields of the farm were hilly and rose steeply to the right of the creek bottom land. Clearly, the land had not been worked for many years. It was rough land, covered with broom sage and cedar saplings. Another dirt track led off up a defile providing some sort of access to the fields for machinery. It was the last sort of place which should have interested me, but it did, immediately, for the simplest reason in the world: it was beautiful. Interior voices were whispering furiously that beauty was a damned silly basis for buying a farm; I listened only fitfully.

  When my interest remained alive after going through the house, I began to be seriously worried. The house was dreadful. In only two rooms the kitchen and the back bedroom above it, was the plaster sound enough to be saved; the remaining four rooms (living room and dining room below, two bedrooms above) would clearly have to be stripped down to the bare studs and re-covered with sheetrock. There was no bathroom and the only source of heat was a large coal and wood burning range in the kitchen. Even basic plumbing was lacking; the only water available was raised from a cistern beneath the kitchen by use of an old fashioned hand pump. About the best that could be said for the house was that it was sound. It was set upon a good solid stone foundation and showed no signs of sagging or structural collapse.

  I did not bother that day with any careful examination of the land. It was something which I wanted to do at my leisure and I made up my mind then to return the following day. As we drove away, I quizzed the real estate agent about the size and probable price of the place. Its total acreage was ninety and the price being asked by the owner was eleven thousand dollars. The real estate agent thought it could be bought for about eighty-five hundred dollars. I asked if it would be all right for me to return the following day in order to walk around the land and he replied that it would be; the family in residence were not the owners but related to the owner, a widow who lived some distance away.

  We spent the balance of the day looking at other farms but none struck me as possible. They were all either too small and poor or else beyond my reach financially. By the end of the day I had to face the fact that the Kegley place, as it was called, had lodged itself rather deeply in my mind.

  When I awoke the next morning, it was still firmly entrenched there. I lay for a while in bed letting my imagination have free reign as to what lay ahead of us should we actually succeed in finding the money to buy the place. It was a dangerous process; my imagination is vivid and the potential trials and tribulations of owning and caring for that much land made me sweat with apprehension. I was still Ernest Hemingway’s child but the festival at Pamplona and the Nobel Prize seemed to be receding from my grasp at an alarming rate. And what was replacing them with frightening rapidity and urgency was a mode of life which was largely unknown and correspondingly terrifying. Lying in bed that morning, my ambivalence towards the entire project assumed such staggering proportions that I examined my basic sanity with care. Biting off more than I could chew or swallow seemed a pale phrase to describe what I was contemplating. Still, driven by God knows what devils of pride or stubbornness, I finally climbed out of bed and drove to the Kegley place for an extended walk over its land.

  A few months earler, I had plodded the streets of Rome amusing myself with an entrely theoretical view of being a farmer. Now I was actually walking upon land which might possibly be my own. In Rome, I had known nothing; now, in all truth, I knew very little more. But a little bit more is better than no more. The talking, the reading, and the few months working for Casy Crawford had alerted me to the truly definitive mistakes I might make. These, it seemed to me, came under three headings. The first was simply the quality of the land itself. Properly treated, could it be brought back? Could the poor land growth be choked out by the application of suitable top dressings? Judging by the appearance of the neighboring fields under cultivation, the land seemed basically all right. This, however, was a question I could seek help in answering. the local county agent would advise me I knew, and I could also obtain through him a chemical analysis of the land’s potentiality. The next point of real importance was the question of whether or not the land was too steep to be worked by machinery. If and when I ever made an all-out commitment to farming on a professional scale, I would have to grow both alfalfa hay and corn for silage and there must be enough reasonably level land to allow the use of a hay baler and a silage chopping machine. On Crawford’s farm, I had fiddled around with machinery enough to be fairly certain that the Kegley place was feasible fr
om that standpoint. The final question seemed wholly ludicrous at this point, but I knew it was not. It was simply: could the farm be expanded? If you buy a suit of clothes that is too big, something can be done about it. But if the suit is too small and the seams cannot be let out, it has to go to the rummage sale.

  I had quizzed the real estate man about this extensively the previous day. There were, in fact, two possible avenues of expansion for the Kegley place. The adjoining farm across the creek was for sale and comprised about seventy-five acres. That farm was not being worked but it also was not in bad shape, the pastures having been better cared for than those of the Kegley place. It was owned and occupied by a young man about my own age and his wife who were not, strictly speaking, rural people at all. The young man, Bill, worked in a Wytheville store of which his father was part owner and qualified both economically and by background as a member of the Wytheville upper middle class. Bill’s mother and father and younger brother lived on a piece of land which backed up on his. Their place was not a farm at all but an astonishingly charming small country house complete with beautifully laid out gardens and a swimming place created by damming up the creek. It was an extremely strange show to find tucked away up that valley where, to a man, the families subsisted on food of their own growing and meat of their own killing.

  On my rounds with the real estate man the previous day, I had considered Bill’s place as a possible purchase but had decided against it because the price was too steep for me. Bill and his wife had made numerous improvements in their house. Its nucleus was an old log cabin which they had expanded to make a place of considerable charm. Needless to say, it possessed all the amenities in which the Kegley place was so sadly lacking. The important thing to me was that it was available. In the unlikely eventuality that I should ever want to expand, I could either buy his land or make some arrangement with him whereby I could rent it. There was also another possibility of future expansion to the north of the Kegley place in a piece of land of about seventy-five acres which joined on the Kegley farm. In spite of the fact, that, at that point, expansion seemed problematical to say the least, it was reassuring to know the basic situation was amenable to it.

  All in all, I must have trudged and pondered over the Kegley place for about four hours that day. Having not a dime towards its purchase at that moment, I could not help feeling a little foolish and I frequently laughed at myself as I would assume some time-honoured agricultural ritual such as squatting and letting the soil run through my fingers. But by the time I left that day, I had made up my mind to bring Dorothy to see the place as soon as possible, and if she concurred, to move heaven and earth in order to buy it.

  In the private recesses of my own mind, however, I must confess that I had made no real commitment to farming the place on a professional scale. I saw it still as a haven where, safe in the possession of a few chickens, some hogs and perhaps a cow, I could make a last ditch stand with my typewriter and bring fame and fortune to bay on my own terms. Am I alone I wonder, or is it a common human characteristic to back into action with one’s eyes fixed in a mesmerized stare upon some steadily receding goal? So, perhaps, do we con ourselves into trying.

  It was a couple of weeks before we were able to return en famille to examine the Kegley farm. Dorothy packed a picnic lunch and she and I and our baby daughter Linda, set out in high spirits. It was not much more than seventy miles from our place in North Carolina up to Wytheville and it was a fine late summer day for the outing. The Kegley place was at its best that day, hiding its many fearful flaws behind the benefice of a fine season. I fully expected that my wife might question my sanity when she saw the place I had in mind to condemn her to live. But she was not fazed; the same qualities of peace and beauty which had gripped my fancy gripped hers also. We ate our picnic by the softly bubbling creek and decided we would try to buy the place.

  Having agreed in principal, we returned to Mooresville to work out the means. Waiting for us when we got back was a letter from Kate in St. Louis which contained a rather interesting surprise. The return address on the back read Kate O’Hara. Inside, she had written, “As you will see from the envelope, some changes have been made.” She and O’Hara had gotten married. They were planning to go to Scotland for inadequately explained reasons. It seemed that they were removing themselves pretty definitely from our orbit. Nothing, as it eventually turned out, could have been further from the truth.

  CHAPTER VI

  On the subject of money, the last chapter began and on the same subject shall this one continue.

  At the point where I now found myself, I had chosen a course of action calculated according to my lights to maintain a momentum of growth. However, without a capital sum of money, I could not possibly implement that course of action. With my aunt disqualified, there remained only one possible source: my mother.

  After leaving us in Rome, she had gone to England to tour the West Country with friends and to spend the remainder of the winter and spring in London. Now she had returned to America and taken up residence in a curious community near Asheville, North Carolina, called Montreat. A thoroughly metaphysically oriented woman, she had chosen, not surprisingly, to settle down in a thoroughly metaphysically oriented community. Headquarters of the southern synod of the Presbyterian church, Montreat is a lovely but dead little town ruled by a jealous Presbyterian God. To call it square would be a total understatement. Its psychological aura is that mixture of sincerity and impertinence best expressed by the character of its most celebrated resident, the Reverend Billy Graham. It was a place which gave me the absolute, thoroughgoing blues but it suited my mother to a T. Widowed then for five years, she lived in Montreat in a huge old hotel which was owned by the Presbyterian Church and which operated as a resort hotel during those months when it was not being used as a site for ecclesiastical conferences. There, in her own way, my mother enjoyed herself; in meditation, in driving about the countryside in her car, and in having many conversations with fellow residents whose subject matter was entirely predictable.

  One of the reasons she had chosen Montreat was that it was within striking distance of the place Dorothy, the baby, and I lived in Mooresville, and likely to be within striking distance of wherever we might eventually settle. Thus there was a certain amount of intermittent concourse between us. Dorothy and I would sometimes drive to Montreat to see her, or vice versa. Occasionally we would meet half way between and picnic along the roadside in the mountains.

  My mother, knew and approved of my farming aims. I had reported my aunt’s refusal to advance me funds and Mother had received that news with disgruntlement. There was little love between my mother and my aunt and there had been even less between Mother and my father’s eldest sister. The eldest sister had predeceased my father by a relatively short period of time. One third of her estate had passed to my father and this passed in turn to my mother upon his death a year later. My mother had no illusions about her possession of this money; she knew that, had my father predeceased his eldest sister instead of the reverse, my mother would have been cut immediately from the succession and the money would have gone directly to my brother and me upon the death of my father’s eldest sister. Thus, in a very real way, my mother considered my brother and me to be the rightful owners of that inheritance. Legally, the money was entirely hers. Morally, she believed, it was ours.

  After Dorothy’s and my visit to the Kegley farm near Wytheville, I told my mother that I had found a place that I would like to buy. She was curious to see the place and we made a date to drive to Wytheville together. Surprisingly enough, she was as taken with the Kegley place as were Dorothy and I. There was not even any need for me to ask her for the money to buy it. She volunteered it immediately, with a bit more thrown in to get us started. On our way back to Mooresville, I stopped at the real estate man’s office and instructed him to offer eighty-five hundred dollars for the Kegley farm.

  Having the actual wherewithal to buy the farm and having made the offer, t
he real fingernail-biting now began. It would be nice if I could report complacently that my apprehension had to do solely with the possibility that my offer would not be accepted. The truth is that my anxiety stemmed in equal measure from the fear that my offer would be accepted. Dichotomy, ambivalence and all the other words coined to describe the cleft within human intentions were directly applicable to my state of mind. Ninety acres of worn-out, grown-over land; a frame house in an appalling state of disrepair; neither livestock nor machinery; I asked myself over and over in hollow tones whether, in all honesty, I was completely sane. The blind circumstance to which I had so cockily refused to abandon my life now seemed awfully warm and appealing. My doubts were so profound as to be nearly unbearable. I longed to voice them to my wife, but again a peculiar atavistic sense of manhood bade me be silent and told me it would be wrong to infect others with my fear. Night after night, I would wait until my wife’s even breathing assured me that she was asleep and then creep from bed to sit by the window and wrestle with my confusion through the long, soft southern night. And there by the window one night, I was rewarded by undergoing something that I can only describe as a mystical experience. I write those two words now with a slight smile of embarrassment and self-derision, for time has worn away all tendency to believe in things supernatural or seek fundamental causes in metaphysical speculation. Yet, strangely enough, while my tendency to believe or disbelieve in God has waned steadily, the fervency of my belief in faith itself has grown. Although I do not proselytize about it much, it seems clear and sensible to me that God is not, should not, and cannot be an operative component of faith. The very idea that faith has a conscious, external source is a contradiction in terms; faith is the absolute, and the ability to maintain it in the face of growing consciousness is the evolutionary test.