Maggie's Farm

by Sherry, John;

  Early that spring, my brother Earl arrived for a prolonged stay with us at the farm. It was one of several such prolonged stays he would make with us during the years. If I sound a bit wry when I say he tended to arrive with the good weather and depart with the bad, it is only the truth and frankly struck me as rather sensible on his part; it was not, after all, his farm. But it was properly a haven for him and a place to retire to when he would tire of Florida or California or Europe. And, when with us on the farm, he was always a help, pitching in with whatever task was at hand, whether house-remodelling or work in the fields.

  Up till now, I have little to say about my brother except that I have always been and always will be deeply fond of him. Before coming to us at the farm this time, he had been for some months on the West Coast where he has since told me, he had for the first time received an inkling of insight into his alcoholism and had started to think about entering AA. Eventually he would do just that. But, at the time of which I write, only he had begun to suspect that he was among those many human beings for whom drink is a categoric disaster. Fond of drink then as I am now, I was aware that there was such a sickness as alcoholism, but it had not yet occurred to me that such close friends as my brother and Darroch would fall prey to it.

  It was shortly after my brother’s arrival that spring when the incident took place which finally led to a decisive plan of action regarding our attic full of bats. My mother also was spending a few days with us, having driven up from North Carolina. By that time, the remodelling of the house was approximately two-thirds done. The ceilings and walls had been replaced except for one patch above the small room upstairs which we planned to turn into a bathroom. There I had purposely left a section of the ceiling open to allow passage through the attic of any electrical wiring we might want to do. Even though it was clearly possible for the bats to invade the house proper by descending through this piece of open ceiling, Fred Cline’s counsel concerning the live-and-let-live nature of the beasts had proven accurate enough so that my mind was more or less at rest.

  By that time, our living room was completed and had become the central point of orientation for our leisure time. We were proud of this room; the possibility which it had revealed only dimly at first sight had now been realized. Utilizing the space occupied by an old stove flue, we had installed a new chimney and an open fireplace which worked beautifully and supplied pleasant and adequate heat for the room. To alleviate the gloom of the room, we had let a line of windows into the outside wall which faced the creek so that the water moving by about fifty feet below the house provided both cheerful sight and sound. In the recesses on each side of the fireplace, I had built bookshelves and cabinets. These and the rest of the woodwork were painted white and the walls a soft grey. All in all, it was an attractive room.

  It was in this room that we sat tranquilly that evening in early spring. We were grouped around the fire; my brother, Dorothy and I reading, and my mother’s knitting needles clicking away quietly. The bat entered the room silently and may indeed have circled the room once or twice before a flicker of movement caught my eye. So deep was my panic when it dawned on me that a bat was actually upon us that I feared I might somehow communicate that panic to the bat, causing it to attack. Speaking as quietly as I could, I said, “There’s a bat in the room.”

  In one swift motion, my mother disappeared beneath a lap robe which had been covering her knees; from this frail refuge, she continued to offer muffled and indecipherable advice. The bat continued to circle the room as Dorothy, my brother and I discussed the situation. We carefully refrained from looking either at each other or the bat, keeping track of its progress out of the corners of our eyes in the manner with which one observes a person on the street who is indulging in dangerously eccentric behavior. Both hirsute and non-hirsute members of the company sat tensely expecting momentary savage attack upon his or her pate. Sotto voce, we exchanged conspiritorial advice about the bat’s whereabouts; eyeballs rolling wildly, bodies held in motionless tension, the air was full of such whispers as: “Watch out, he’s heading your way,” “Oh, my God, I felt him go by,” “Careful, careful.” Unremitting but meaningless sounds of terror issued steadily from beneath my mother’s blanket. Communicating in this manner, we decided on a rough plan of action which would grant us respite. Sooner or later, we decided, the bat would fly back into the hall; at which moment my brother, being nearest to the door, was delegated to leap up and slam the door, shutting the bat into the hall. Several times the bat approached the door and Earl tensed himself for his task but each time the bat wheeled and re-entered the living room. Finally, the bat disappeared into the hall long enough for my brother to close the barricade. My mother re-appeared from beneath her blanket and we all sat pale and trembling as we allowed the sweat to dry on our foreheads.

  Unfortunately, while our position had improved immeasurably, the problem was far from solved. We held the living room but the bat was in undisputed possession of the hall. My own feeling (shared, I believe by my brother) was: the hell with it; let’s just spend the night here in the living room and sort it all out in the morning. Alas, the distaff were now casting in our direction those glances of supplication and contempt employed by the female of the species during moments of peril or inconvenience. After exchanging one despairing glance, my brother and I knew we were expected to dispatch the bat. Being four years younger than he, I felt it only fair that he should take the leading role. He could not quite see the logic of this but, grumbling, he finally armed himself with the fireplace broom and took up a stance by the door.

  “Now, listen,” he said, “you open the door quickly and then we’ll both duck out into the hall after the bat while you shut the door so he can’t get past us back into the living room.”

  I could not see the sense in this. “After all, Earl, there’s only one broom and you’ve got it. There’s really no point in both of us going out there.”

  His demurer was succinct and profane; the sum of its meaning being: either both of us go or none of us goes. He was too obdurate to recognize the injustice of this so I agreed, chalking up several black marks against him for lack of generosity.

  Breathing hard and burning furious quantities of adrenalin, we arrayed ourselves before the door preparing for our sortie into the bat’s territory. It was agreed that on a given signal I would throw open the door and we would charge furiously into the hall, Earl wielding the broom and I providing what still seemed to me to be supernumerary and largely extraneous moral support. The furious charge did not materialize. I gave the signal and we both poked our noses into the hall like timid moles, each of us trying with subtle nudges to push the other into a position of precedence. The bat was hovering indecisively around a lighting fixture at the far end of the hall. We edged towards the beast, Earl raising his broom to a striking position. It seemed that the issue was about to be decisively joined when the bat suddenly decided to take offensive action and darted straight for us. Any pretext of being my brother’s keeper vanished immediately; I panicked completely.

  I had always been aware of a certain element of sauve qui peut in my character but my actions now were disgraceful. As the bat flew towards us, we went into full retreat. Not having been in the lead during the charge, I had a head start in the ensuing retreat. In four gazelle-like leaps, I reached the living room door, bounded through, and slammed it shut in my brother’s face, leaving him in the hall with the bat. Through the closed door, I heard the frantic swish of the broom being wielded accompanied by small whimpering cries of rage. Finally gaining a moment of respite in his battle with the bat, Earl began pounding on the door for admittance and shouting imprecations. By then I had faced the inherent depravity in what I had done; but I still wanted nothing to do with the bat. In response to Earl’s profane demands for sanctuary, I inquired softly through the closed door as to the bat’s whereabouts. Understandably, this question drove my poor brother to new heights of berserk rage and he shouted, “It’s down at the o
ther end of the hall you son-of-a-bitch, will you open up this Goddamned door?”

  “Are you sure?” I asked, keeping the door firmly closed.

  I was answered only by incoherent snufflings of rage and fear. It began to occur to me that I was now in greater danger from my brother than I was from the bat. I opened the door to find the reddest, angriest face I have ever seen inches from my own. Its mouth opened and vehemently pronounced judgment: “You shit. You unutterable shit.” He came through the door like Sam Huff, pausing only to make sure the door was firmly closed against the bat before starting for me to wreak vengeance. In the way of women during moments of slapstick male crisis, Dorothy and my mother were by this time reeling with laughter to the extent of being forced to clutch furniture for physical support. At that point, the humour of the situation overtook my brother and me simultaneously and his charge was interrupted by a fit of laughter. We both collapsed helplessly. Eventually, we recovered enough to venture forth again and after several more hilarious false starts, we managed to dispatch the bat. I have never enjoyed an evening more.

  Fun and games apart, it was now clear that something had to be done about the bats. A few days later, I summoned the local representative of a nation-wide firm of exterminators. Full of jaunty assurance and an air of I’ll-handle-everything when he arrived, his spirit broke when he shone his flashlight into our attic. Clearly, the job of exterminating our bats was a contract he did not want. I gave him a drink of whiskey to bolster his spirit and made vague threatening references to the honor of the firm whose franchise he held. Finally he agreed reluctantly to take on the job.

  It was to be a full-scale attack. We would have to vacate the house for the day while he pumped the attic full of cyanide gas. Nothing, he assured me, could remain alive in the attic after this treatment had been administered.

  The day arrived and packing up child, dog and all living, breathing things, we departed for an outing in the mountains. Early that morning, the exterminator had moved in with many lethal looking pieces of apparatus and wearing a look of grim determination. He assured me that we would be batless by mid-afternoon. When I asked what would become of the bats, he got rather shifty and said that the cyanide would drive them from the house and that they would then fly around erratically for a while and finally die lonely—and to my mind deserving—deaths in the surrounding woods. What about the ones that don’t escape the house to die outside, I asked him? He replied that there might be a few such but that they would definitely be stone cold dead and harmless and would present no problem. His final remark struck me as rather ominous.

  “All you have to do,” he said, “is get yourself a bucket and pick up the few dead bats you’ll find in the attic.”

  My feelings about bats were strong enough to include a lack of desire to have truck with their corpses. I suggested to the exterminator that he include this service as part of the deal but he demured looking, I thought, even shiftier than before. We left on our day’s outing, happy in the knowledge that our bats’ hours were now numbered.

  We returned at about four o’clock, the hour that the house would be free from contamination. The exterminator had of course departed by then. A slight and not wholly unpleasant smell of the cyanide remained in the house. I was loathe to investigate the attic and so postponed that task until the next day. By then, I knew the opening through which the bats had gained ingress and egress to the attic, a louvered ventilation point under the peak of the roof facing the creek. Idly, I wandered outside to have a look at it. Something crunched under my foot. I lept back in revulsion, realizing it was a bat. Further investigation revealed the ground on that side of the house to be covered with dead bats. By that time, I had given the miserable beasts so much thought that a mild clinical interest had been built up. By that time also, I had read enough about them to know that my revulsion was not ill-founded. About the only good thing that can be said about bats is that they apparently consume vast numbers of night-flying insects. For the rest, they harbor every conceivable sort of parasite and are proven carriers of rabies. So virulent in fact is their toxicity in this respect that various animals tethered for a period of time in a bat-infested cave became infected with rabies, the supposition being that this had happened through exposure to the bats’ falling urine and excrement.

  Now I picked one of the bat corpses up gingerly and held it, wings outstretched, to examine it. I felt reasonably safe, presuming that the Great Divide now existed between us. Suddenly, the beast let out a chilling and most unmoribund squeak. I dropped it immediately and it fluttered weakly upon the’ ground. Although not yet dead, it was clearly in extremis. I felt emboldened to pick it up again by the wings and examine it. The reasons for the bat’s legendary association with evil were immediately apparent. Its tiny head was a strange combination of vulpine, simian and human. Clearly a predator, its little jaws worked open and shut to reveal rows of sharp, miniscule teeth. The fact that the bat was still alive made me decide even more firmly to give the attic a wide berth until the cyanide and its after-effects had had full opportunity to do its work. And sure enough, as I watched the louvered ventilation square that evening, an occasional bat emerged and fluttered weakly away into the dusk.

  A day or so later, I donned thick gloves and climbed into the attic with my bucket. It took me most of the day to clear the attic of their corpses. Fred Cline told me they would be back, saying, “Hell, Mister Cherry, they bound to be a few didn’t get killed and they been livin’ in that attic so long they’ll come back.” Fortunately, he was proven wrong. We never again were troubled with bats. The battle had been won.

  That Spring, we took another tiny trembling step toward expanding the self-supporting aspects of our farm. We bought about fifty white Leghorn chicks and installed them in the old chicken house up behind the house near the privy. Following the instructions in one of the many trustworthy Government pamphlets, I rigged up a sort of incubator heated by light bulbs, within which the chicks huddled during the cold hours. We lost a few, but in the beginning they seemed to thrive mightily. Like all young things (except bats) they were at first appealing. Later on, when they were half grown I came to detest them as filthy and disease-prone birds. We lost about a third of the chickens to a common disease called coccidiosis but the rest throve. It was not too long before the roosters went to work and we were gathering enough eggs beyond our own requirements to take the excess to market.

  Our chicken flock was composed of about half roosters, rapacious birds whose treatment of our little daughter, Linda deepened my dislike of them. Poor Linda, I have often wondered whether her indubitably strong character may not have had its birth in her continuing war with the roosters. She was old enough to walk by then and tottered around the house and outside it with only moderate supervision. She was particularly proud and fond of her expeditions to the outdoor privy, the route to which lay through the territory of the chickens. I don’t know whether the roosters thought she was some strange brand of hen or what, but they were prone to attack her in force as she made her journey. Most of the time, someone was close enough to rescue her but many times I was too far to get there in time and it was touching to watch from a distance her determination not to be bested by the roosters. She was a fearless little thing and she would continue on her way, bawling furiously, arms wrapped around her head to protect herself from the furious pecking roosters. Later on, whenever I had to face the odious task of decapitating a rooster for the pot, it helped alleviate the unpleasantness as I swung the axe to think that I was paying off an old score for Linda.

  By that time, the O’Hara’s were installed in their house in Wytheville. Their presence provided a profound and positive difference in our life. It is a deeply ingrained human need to warm one’s hands at the social fire and we had felt its lack keenly. Now we dined frequently back and forth at each other’s houses and the opportunity to laugh and talk with old friends after our long period of isolation was balm to our spirits and minds. I cannot now rec
all whether Kate was yet pregnant with the first of three children she and O’Hara would have together but, if not, her pegnancy was incipient. Kate’s two daughters by her previous marriages were pleasant, likeable girls who came frequently to the farm and delighted in playing with Linda. They were vastly different children. The eldest, the child of Kate’s first marriage, was both more physically sturdy and of a more prosaic turn of mind than her half sister, Jane. The elder was about twelve at the time and Jane nine or ten. Jane was not the name with which the child had been christened but one which O’Hara had given her shortly after he and Kate had been married. I gave it only passing thought at the time but it is now clear that O’Hara’s insistence on changing the child’s name was an indication of the depth of his strange preoccupation with Darroch, her real father. Both we and the O’Hara’s carried on a sporadic correspondence with Darroch, then in New York involved with the pre-publication rites of his first novel which was soon to be brought out by Random House. Darroch had announced his desire and intention to visit us all in Wytheville—and would do so after the close of the year.

  Even then, I now realize, O’Hara must have given birth to the train of thought which would later result in actions which would seem inexplicable for so many years. There was a hint of this in a remark he made to me one day. He used the phrase “Gordian knot,” saying that some day, somehow this Gordian knot which held us all together would have to be cut. When I asked him what he meant, he said, “We’re all too preoccupied with each other and people have got other people’s kids and it can’t work.” After saying that, he was loath to say more and quickly changed the subject.

  I must now make reference to a human being who would exercise a certain bizarre influence upon events of the next few years. I will call him, Roger. I only met him in the flesh once in my life when he paid a brief visit to the O’Haras during that fall of 1955. A St. Louisan like the rest of us, he had been dealt an exceedingly difficult and grotesque hand by life from the beginning, having been born to wealth and as a cerebral palsetic. Due to loving and extremely intelligent care as a child, his condition (which, fortunately, was never as extreme as that unlucky affliction can be) had been contained to a remarkable degree. Therefore, in spite of his cerebral palsy, his physical presence when I finally met him was much less of a shock to me than I had imagined it would be. Through training and will, he had achieved a remarkable degree of mastery over his errant body. One knew immediately that something was wrong with him physically, but unless one had been forewarned of his condition it would have been difficult to know exactly whence it stemmed. He moved slowly and spoke in the same manner; the net effect being that of a rather pompous and rigidly controlled drunk. Roger was a man of character and a distinctly unprosaic turn of mind. He did not come into control of his money until he had reached his thirties; prior to that time, he earned his living working, among other things, as a factory hand. When he finally did inherit, he had come to the philosophically-based decision that he would search for situations which he could influence by giving away portions of his money.