Maggie's Farm

by Sherry, John;

  By then, we had been on the farm for a little over a month. Our house was a shambles but it was slowly coming on. And our farm contained one cow, sixteen sheep and two hogs. We also possessed a second-hand Ford tractor and mowing machine which had been given us by my mother. All in all, it was quite a jump from washing down the cannelloni with Frank O’Connor at Ranieri in Rome less than a year before.

  CHAPTER VII

  For all my sixteen sheep, two hogs and one milk cow, the view of my function to which I still held firmly was that of a novelist. At this stage certainly—and it appeared, for a long time to come—the farm was going to be at best a way of life rather than a means of providing. To make progress, to improve the place little by little, was obviously going to expend more money than it would bring in. Convinced that I could write myself out of this financial bind, I now set to work furiously on a second novel, spending a few hours each morning on the task. The hope centered on the project was so great as to totally preclude objectivity, but on the whole I was pleased with it. My rough plan was to labor on with it until I had approximately 80,000 to 100,000 words down on paper and then send it off to Hiram Haydn at Random House and sit back and wait for a contract, an advance against royalties, and words of praise and encouragement.

  Our days assumed a pattern: rise early, milk the cow and slop the pigs and work on my novel until I ran out of steam. By then, Dorothy would have finished her household chores and we would work on the house the rest of the day, stopping to do the evening milking. After this, we would read or watch the television set for awhile and go early to bed. For people who were essentially sociable and used to some pretty rich social action, it was a curiously barren time. It was impossible to pretend that we were on the same intellectual wave length as the hill people among whom we lived. It would have been nice if our neighbor, Bill, had turned out to be congenial, but he did not. In truth, he drove me up the wall; he was a convert to Mormonism, a religion whose adherents practice prosyletizing as an essential part of the discipline of their odd convictions. Poor Bill; I now realize that he and his wife were probably as lonely as Dorothy and I; the difference being that, while Dorothy and I longed for concourse with O’Hara and Kate and Darroch and Frank O’Connor, Bill and his wife longed for the company of fellow Mormons. He came one day to visit me, loaded for bear in regard to my potential conversion. I fear he went away with a pretty serious flea in his ear. While I sat in a veritable fog of boredom, he told me some incredible story of how Mormonism was founded when Joseph Smith was visited by the angel, Moroni, a dismal and aptly named emissary from a better world, who instructed Brother Smith to dig under a tree at which place he found a bunch of dreary tablets prohibiting damned near everything. When I made it clear that I found the whole tale ill-constructed and lacking in both suspense and depth, Bill went away sadly shaking his head. He carried himself with that sad air of those who long, at bottom, for martyrdom. But he sensed in me a certain proclivity for metaphysical speculation and he frequently renewed his attack in spite of my irreverence. “Heard anything from the angel Moroni lately?” I would demand whenever I saw him, and he would advise me in return about the uselessness of casting pearls before swine. I did not, indeed could not have got to know Bill well, but there was an appealing quality of strangeness about him which stemmed from his having coupled himself and his family to a religion completely non-indigenous to the region. Later on, he would put his place up at auction and move to Utah.

  He had a younger brother, Clyde, who lived with his parents on the lovely estate which backed on my farm; he was an odd, lonely youth who would raise one arm in greeting as he rode by in his jeep. In time, my dealings with young Clyde would become profoundly complicated and hair-raising; he will be a major character in this account in fact. For the moment, however, we were unacquainted with each other beyond a friendly wave.

  With one very important exception, our other neighbors were kind, mannerly, exceedingly generous—and terribly, terribly dull. By urban standards, they were poor people; the average cash income of the families on our road could not have been much more than two thousand dollars a year. Most of them were what are known as “sundown farmers;” which is to say that they worked desultorily at some other job to augment the paltry return from their farms. Yet one could not really call them poor because their standards were so widely divergent from those of the prosperous nation in which they lived. As far as most of them were concerned, the world stopped twenty-five miles in any direction from their farms; a trip to Roanoke, the nearest metropolis, was something to be treasured for months if not years.

  The exception among our neighbors has since died. His name was Fred Cline and he was one of the first people to call upon us after we took up residence upon the farm. From the first, some Southern sensibility about class made him adopt a certain formality of address which he clung to throughout our years of friendship and interdependence. He impressed his own particular brand of gamesmanship and individuality by addressing me as “Mister Cherry.” I called him Fred always, and would have been delighted if he had reciprocated, but he preferred that formal variation upon my real name. There was never the slightest doubt that the variation was a perfectly conscious, if minor, ploy which gave him some degree of satisfaction.

  I would like to present Fred as having been a rural primitive pure of heart and free from greed and avarice but I believe he would be the first to break out laughing if it came to his attention. Although he was extremely cagey about his lack of ability to read and write, I am certain that his efforts in that direction did not go much beyond being able to sign his name. His age, when I first met him, was somewhere between fifty-five and sixty. Even then, he was subject to bouts of what he called “wind” and shortness of breath. From having observed my father prior to his first heart attack, I was extremely suspicious that Fred Cline was an incipient candidate for a coronary occlusion, but in spite of threats, warnings and cajolery, I could never convince him that he should curtail his activities or even see a doctor. He was not a tall man but he was solidly built and inclined toward overweight. Strong as a bull and a tireless worker when the task was to his liking, he was the sort of man who would have been a godsend to an infantry platoon in time of war.

  He and his wife, a beautiful, weatherbeaten woman whom Andrew Wyeth would long to paint, lived alone on a small farm which marched with mine for a short distance. Their manner of life could not have been much different from that of the forebears from whom their land had been inherited. They kept some chickens and a milk cow or two which were always milked by Mrs. Cline. The staple of their diet was home-cured and canned pork; each year, Fred would raise and slaughter a few hogs, hanging the carcasses to cool from the bough of the same tree his ancestors had, and scraping bristles from hides with the same old tools. They owned an aging team of horses which Fred used to plow the ground for his annual crop of potatoes—but he had no automobile. Though later on they acquired one, they owned no television set when we first met. In fine weather, Fred spent the days tramping his own fields and those of his neighbors; he had that common burning primitive desire to be in the know about everything that was happening in and around his bailiwick. (Once, when Dorothy and I were building a stretch of new fence, we were amused each morning when we went to our work to find Fred’s footprints by each new fence post where he had stood in order to wiggle each post in judgment of the strength and durability of the job we were doing; when I kidded him about his nocturnal inspections of our work, he blandly denied the whole thing.)

  In a way, Fred Cline was a hangover from that cultural past of the hill country about which certain novelists long to wax sentimental: hunting and fishing and making white whiskey, and spending the nights sociably by a fire with other men while they listened to their hounds cry as they put up a fox. But, sad to say, these things which I had expected to find still an integral part of the life of the area no longer existed. To some extent, of course, the change resulted from such diversions as television; w
ho, after all, wants to sit by a fire listening to foxhounds when he can watch “Gunsmoke?” But more than that, it was somehow a loss of heart on the part of our neighbors towards their backwoods past—they were slowly being corrupted by the encroachments of a complex society, but the complexities of the society brought with them no balancing factor, no alleviation of sophistication. The secondhand cars they bought were doomed to end as rusty ruins in their farmyards and be replaced by other second-hand cars which would become still more rusty ruins. They were people on the verge of extinction. The encroachment of complexity did not produce a desire for more and better but instead a lack of real desire for anything. Oh, there were exceptions, of course; men who were trying to work their land in a modern manner and thinking about the education of their children. But the majority were in the first stages of a state of apathy.

  Far from being one of nature’s nobleman, Fred Cline did not share the essential apathy of most of our neighbors. He was interested in himself and he was interested in other people. Much of this interest was of the good old-fashioned back-fence snoop variety, but there was also a certain depth to the man. His pleasure in the animal life of the woods, for example, was profound and genuine. He had been a great hunter in his life but in all the time I knew him, the only occasions on which I saw him handle a firearm was when he took down his rifle to slaughter his hogs. Just how he had come to his decision to hunt and kill no more was difficult to fathom, but I am certain his was a conscious, intellectual position. An occasional casual anecdote would sometimes throw light on the cruelty of his nature as a boy and as a young man. Once he told me how he had deliberately thrown gasoline on a dog and set him afire. Another time, he described how, as a young man, he and his friends would spend whole nights with their dogs, attempting—sometimes successfully—to harass a deer into running off a cliff. But his manner of reference to such incidents was not prideful—nor was it unduly regretful. It was as if he were saying: I did those things and they were not good things but I thought about them and now I don’t do them any more.

  In the matter of religion also did Fred differ from our other neighbors. They were, to a family, strong fundamentalist Bible pounders possessed by a powerful and constant sense of being watched by a jealous and angry God. It takes a certain amount of bravery for a primitive man to deny the mores of the tribe and I never saw Fred or his wife go near a church in the time I knew them. Nor was he at all given to the commonly encountered sanctimonious references to the Deity. Once again, this seemed on his part to be a conscious decision which had been arrived at by thought. And any attempt to draw him out on such matters brought forth only a sly and rather mischievous grin which seemed to say: I’ve thought about all that and decided that it’s none of my business. Primitive and unlettered though he was, Fred Cline was nevertheless a fundamentally intellectual man and I think this was the basis of my great liking for him. Once, later on, when we were working on some job together, he became very shifty in the way he did whenever he was about to risk himself by enquiring about some weighty matter. We were good friends by then and I let him hem and haw, knowing he would come to the point sooner or later. His question, when it came, was a beauty. It was just after he and his wife had finally acquired a TV set, a major milestone which had brought the world into the kitchen of their farmhouse with a vengeance. “Mr. Cherry,” he said, “you know when they shoot them fellers on the TV?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Well, my wife and them say that when they shoot them fellers, they really dead.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Fred,” I said, “you know better than that.”

  He grinned and said, “Yes, I do, Mr. Cherry, but they bound and determined to believe it.”

  We both burst out laughing then and I said, “Listen, Fred, you tell them that that thing is just a big box full of wires.”

  “All right,” he said, laughing.

  “And I’ll tell you what: someday I’ll go up and get on the damned thing and when I do, the first thing I’ll do is wink at you.”

  Eventually I did precisely that. And, when I next saw Fred, I said, “Did you see me wink at you?”

  “Mr. Cherry,” he said happily, “I shore did.”

  Before I went to live in the hills of Virginia, I would not have believed it possible to find people in the twentieth century living in the United States of America who were so completely divorced from the economic and political currents of the times. Awareness of the two things, of course, goes hand in hand and the fundamental economic position of the hill people on their small, unproductive farms serves to keep them in ignorance of why and how they are governed. This is compounded by an almost conscious policy on the part of the Government of Virginia to provide as few avenues of enlightenment as possible. During the years we lived in Virginia, the state was governed in a bewilderingly autocratic manner by Senator Harry Byrd and, since his death, I cannot see that things have changed much. The Governorship of the state is handed contemptuously around by the Byrd machine among a small group of tried and true aristocrats who are, psychologically, not very far this side of believing in the divine right of kings. And, no matter how much or how often these men protest the purity of their paternalistic intentions, the net result of those intentions is that the few grow more rich and powerful at the expense of the many. When the late Harry Byrd went to his grave in such a fog of eulogy, one could not help marveling at the ability of the Virginian virus to penetrate even the non-Virginian mind. For Virginia is a virus and the deadly game played throughout the nation of assigning purity to anything Virginian serves to lend dignity to methods and means of protecting and promulgating class consciousness which are essentially tawdry.

  In the tidewater, in Richmond or in Charlottesville (which becomes ever more increasingly a haven for wealthy, politically right-minded outlanders), the quaint charade played by the governing class of the state may provide a certain amount of creaky charm. In the hill country, it provides only poverty, ignorance and despair. Hillbilly western Virginia and patrician Virginia make an awkward pair.

  However, these views which I now hold so strongly were not born overnight. For the present, my wife and I were satisfied. The beauty of our surroundings, the demands of the future, and the strange and new sociological pickings of our new life served to command both our interest and our concentration. But we did long for kindred companionship. Ask then, and ye shall receive. And wonder throughout your life whether you should have asked in the first place.

  One night the telephone rang. It was O’Hara. We had, of course, been in correspondence while he and Kate had been in Scotland. O’Hara had written that they were planning to return to the States but I had not known exactly when. Now, it seemed, they were back; I quizzed O’Hara about his plans but he was vague. In the course of our telephone conversation that night, it became clear that O’Hara wanted to pay us a visit on the farm. Both Dorothy and I were delighted; we were both ready for a respite from our social isolation. It was arranged that I should meet his train in Wytheville a couple of days later. Only O’Hara was coming; Kate and her two children would remain in their temporary accommodations near New York. There seemed no reason to inquire too deeply into O’Hara’s strong desire to visit our farm. We were, after all, the oldest and closest of friends and it was not unexpected that O’Hara should wish to have a look at the try we were making which seemed so far out of character.

  He arrived in due course. Both Dorothy and I were extremely interested to see what effect, if any, marriage to the woman with whom he had been preoccupied most of his life had had upon him. Although he seemed much the same at first sight, I soon began to realize that he was under great strain. I knew O’Hara as well as any man can know another and a sure sign on his part of tremendous inner turmoil was the maintenance of an almost supernatural calm. As he sat in a chair, I could very nearly measure his interior heat by the degree of willfully superimposed relaxation he managed to enforce upon his body. One of the major sources of my bem
usement with O’Hara throughout the years of our friendship had been the extent of pure willfulness in his control of himself. I knew the tenuousness of that control because, on at least two occasions, I had seen it crack and heard about a few more; there was always a very definite element of danger present at such moments.

  Early in his visit to the farm that winter, I realized that O’Hara’s interior torment had achieved a degree of heat which even I had not before encountered. The basic signs were unmistakable; his calm was that of a Mandarin. However, he had further embroidered his blanket of spurious calm with an act of willfulness both grotesque and appealing to my sense of humor. He had—not to put too fine a point upon it—made a conscious policy decision about farting.

  I confess at the outset to being hopelessly juvenile about the social contratemps afforded by an unauthorized and involuntary public fart; the anger, fear and confusion which result fill me with fierce glee.

  The first time such an occurrence took place, we were seated talking by the fire in our now re-modelled living room. O’Hara, unquestionably the best talker I have ever listened to, is in speech as precise as he is in his mind and, tends to punctuate his thoughts with aphorisms which are both funny and sustaining. As usual, I was listening spellbound when a loud fart rent the air. Feeling that he had perhaps made a simple mistake, I congratulated him in Italian, saying, “Auguri.” He ignored my congratulations and continued with his discourse, one leg draped negligently over the arm of his chair, his hand resting calmly on the back. I realized immediately that I was being presented with the fruits of a policy decision. I was expected to ignore this phenomenom as I might were the same thing to happen during a Papal audience. Soon, the same thing happened again. In spite of my determination to play the game, a muscle began to twitch near my mouth. The third time, I began to laugh, as did Dorothy, who was also present in the room. O’Hara looked at us pityingly for an instant and then continued with his discourse.