But it was the fact that change came so slowly to the hills, that made our chances at successful expansion just barely operable. Along the entire ten or twelve-mile length of our road, there was not one single Grade A dairy farm. Milk was sold by all of our neighbors but it was the casual excess milk from their family cattle. Each morning, an unrefrigerated truck picked this milk up, a can here, half a can there, and delivered it to a cheese factory twenty miles away. Such milk, called Grade C, cannot by law be sold for direct consumption but only as the raw material for the manufacture of cheese. The price paid for such milk is of course a pittance compared to the price paid for milk produced under the stringent conditions required under law for direct consumption. The rub is that a considerable investment in buildings and machinery is required in order to meet those requirements.
In our case, the primary question upon which all others depended was, could we get the extra land? After talking it over, we decided that, contingent upon our ability to get the extra land, we would go ahead and plan the creation of a Grade A dairy set-up.
The news that my neighbor Bill’s land would be coming on the market had one very important negative effect. When I had believed that Luther’s land to the southwest of mine was, in effect, the only land available to me, I had been preparing to make the same mistake as the proverbial gambler who plays on the crooked wheel because it is the only one in town. The manifold advantages of Bill’s land made it clear just how woeful the deficiencies of the other had been. If we owned Bill’s land, we would have a farm bisected by the creek, a fact of inestimable advantage for the proper flow of cattle to the water which they require. Luther’s land to the southwest, conversely, would have been useless forever as pasture because of its being without water. There were many, many other factors which made Bill’s land favorable: we would take over a rather charming house complete with all the amenities thus leaving our present house free to shelter the hand we would surely need within a year or two; there was ample timber available on Bill’s place which could be milled to put up the new buildings we would need; the topography of Bill’s place would enable us to place our dairy barn close to the road and thus preclude the enormous expense of building access roads sturdy enough to take the daily traffic of heavy milk-hauling trucks. These were just a few of the advantages which immediately occurred to us. So vastly preferable in fact was Bill’s farm to Luther’s that our eventual decision was to give up the idea of expansion if Bill’s farm proved to be beyond our reach.
It seemed to me that from Bill’s standpoint and certainly from mine, the sensible plan would be to forestall the auction. Accordingly, I went to him with what I believed to be a fair offer. But he was determined to have his auction and he refused. In retrospect, I have always had a sneaking feeling of gladness that he did refuse. In the long run, the price the farm brought at auction was not significantly different than the one I had offered and there was the fun of buying it that way. It did not, alas, seem like much fun at the time because it meant a wait of over a month before we could find out what was going to happen to us. However, it was time badly needed. I, who had never attempted an organizational effort on any sort of major scale in my life, was now faced with the serious consideration of just what the priorities would be in setting up a Grade A dairy farm and how I would go about setting them in motion.
At this point, it will probably seem a rather odd time to describe a barroom. However, it is necessary; the place which, with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek, I now describe as my “pub” became my office, my haven and my observation post for discovering the means of solving the various problems with which I would eventually be faced. It will be remembered that, in the glorious state of Old Virginia, there are no bars; only gas stations which sell beer. The gas station which I refer to as my pub and in which I fought, argued, listened, learned and taught throughout my years in Virginia was a place which possessed a curiously perverse sort of Southern gothic appeal. An idea of what I mean can be gathered by the fact that the name of its owner and operator was, so help me God, Lucifer Wrenchum, a man who, not unreasonably, considering the fact that his entire life had been lived within the confines of a Faulkner novel, was a walking laboratory for anyone interested in the Snopes-type soul. Wrenchum’s, as it was commonly called, was physically rather like a stage setting for one of those plays which take place in a roadside cafe. A certain note of individuality greeted a visitor to Wrenchum’s the moment he walked in the door. Above the small bar which faced the door was a large facsimile of the front page of a newspaper whose glaring headline read simply: “Lucifer Wrenchum, World’s Biggest Bullshipper.” In a sort of frieze below this strange artifact were a row of jagged-edged plaques posing various maddeningly cogent and wholly unanswerable American questions. One which remains in my memory as an ever-present thorn of the time asked simply: “If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?” Lucifer Wrenchum’s mind had an appealing and terrifyingly tawdry complexity. Not for him, wall decorations such as: “If you cain’t put your (here a drawing of a heart) in America then get your (here a drawing of a horse’s ass) out”. No, Wrenchum’s advices and admonishments were never prosaic; they contained paradox and a certain rude poetry.
Besides the basic salt and flour staples of a small country store, Wrenchum’s wares ran a strange gamut. No salesman of any novelty, no matter how hopeless, had ever failed to make a sale in Wrenchum’s. The place was literally awash in punch boards, squirrel tales to adorn car radiators, plastic baby shoes to hang from rear vision mirrors and artifacts of varying but gentle pornographic content.
The bar was the undisputed center of the action at Wrenchum’s. Behind it, Lucifer Wrenchum stood dispensing 3.2 beer. Anyone who was hungry could apply for a 10 cent fried pie (known as a frahed pah), a hot, pickled sausage of throat-burning strength, or a hard-boiled egg. If he were acquainted with the customer, Lucifer Wrenchum would also provide a drink of bootleg whiskey or, if needed, a French letter.
Besides the bar behind which Wrenchum stood, the place had two other departments: One was, in effect, a secondhand store; Wrenchum was a man totally addicted to trading. I have seen poor farmers come into Wrenchum’s carrying everything from a broken banjo to a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The prices Wrenchum paid were modest but he always made a deal. The final area in Wrenchum’s was one which provided the overtone of violence and grotesquerie which one can never escape in southern hill country. A passionate gun trader and collector, one whole wall of his place was taken up by an enormous rack of rifles and shotguns. Amidst this bizarre and contrapuntal collection of objects, it was my wont to sit and drink and ponder or to exchange ideas and pleasantries with Lucifer Wrenchum or other present company.
Lucifer himself was a man psychologically ruled and tortured by a need for the baroque. If one has ever wondered about the sort of mind behind one of those roadside enterprises which sells pink plastic Flamingoes designed to bring beauty to the lawns of the trusting, one would have an indication of such in the texture of Wrenchum’s mind. But only an indication; Wrenchum was no clod. He adored metaphysical speculation, of the sort which made most of his clientele as nervous as your Uncle Hart Crane. At that particular period, William Blake’s Nobodaddy was fighting a losing battle for survival within the purlieus of my mind and Wrenchum soon found he could depend upon me for remarks shocking to the religious sensibilities of hillbillies less evolved than himself. Wrenchum also had an abiding faith in my erudition. “Jown”, he would frequently say, mangling my Christian name in a way I cannot reproduce, “some a them wuhds you use, ah cain’t even find in the dictionary.” Above the Mason-Dixon line, his sense of place and distance was shaky. Once, some years ago, the telephone rang one evening at my house on eastern Long Island.
“Jown, that you?” said a well-remembered voice, “This Lucifer Wrenchum talkin’.”
“Why hello, Lucifer. Where are you?”
“Ahm heah in New Yawk City, Jown. Wonduhed iff’n you care to come out
for a drink this evenin’.”
I explained that I was 120 miles away. After chatting for a while, I hung up with regret. It would have been edifying to have spent an evening on the tiles in New York City with Lucifer Wrenchum.
I saw Lucifer once just three or four years ago. Driving through Wytheville, I had stopped in to see my friend, Lawyer Bean. Lucifer’s name came up and Lawyer Bean smiled the deeply satisfied smile of a southerner for whom some formal expression of life has turned out as he had expected. He gave me directions to Lucifer’s new place of business and insisted that I stop by and see what he was up to. It pleased me as it had Lawyer Bean to find that Lucifer was the proprietor of the biggest pink plastic Flamingo emporium I have ever seen. But the real Wrenchum touch lay in a crudely lettered sign leaning against a row of fake ducks of diminishing size. It read: “Two day old bread—a nickel a loaf.”
It was one night towards the end of March while I was waiting for Bill’s auction to take place that Lucifer Wrenchum’s gas station paid me its richest dividend by bringing Tiptree into my life. I am as certain as I am of anything in this life that our farm could never have been brought to flower without him.
Although the idea would come to Tiptree as a distinct and disquieting surprise, he was, for me, some kind of father almost from the first moment I met him. Let me say at the outset that I find the entire idea of nature’s nobleman, the purity of the simple and the so-called natural man to be arrant cock. The best man is, I believe, the man who garners to himself the most available experience with the greatest joy and leaves that behind which he cannot have or handle with the least bitterness. The man who denies himself experience will tend to deny experience to his children and vice versa. The ignorant man is not the uneducated man; he is the man who refuses to be conscious of the fact that he is uneducated, The reason I took Tiptree into my head as a sort of father almost from the first moment I met him was that I was aware there was in him a fundamental generosity in regard to experience. By which I mean simply that he was a teacher. The best man can no more help being a force for enlightenment than the worst man can help being a force for obfuscation. The profound amount I did not know about the course of action I was contemplating matched the profound fear I felt in the face of my ignorance. I needed a teacher and let us not forget that a teacher is someone who understands both the subject being taught and the morale of the pupil who is attempting to learn. In Tiptree, I was fortunate to find someone who filled the bill.
Knowing nothing about him, I nevertheless liked him from the first moment we struck up a conversation that night at Wrenchum’s. He was dressed in the worn blue bib overalls, denim jacket and heavy work shoes of a farmer. It was, I later discovered, the proper costume for him; it gave his very real physical distinction full play. He was a tall and naturally lean man; Lincolnesque is the term that springs immediately to mind. It is apt, too, as his features had that same attractive asymmetry as did Lincoln’s. Tiptree’s nose was particularly memorable, a great aquiline beak which dominated his face. His eyes twinkled with unmistakable intelligence. There was nothing whatever of the oracle about him; nor was he diffident. Before he and I spoke to each other, I had been watching him make small talk with Wrenchum’s wife, Callie. He had a natural ease with her, the ease of a man who genuinely likes and is liked by women. I am old enough now to know that there is no greater indication of a fundamental generosity in regard to experience than the wholly natural attitude of a man towards a woman.
Tiptree and I got along together well from the first exchange of small talk that evening. The hill people I have known tend mainly to fall into two categories: worthy and dreadfully dull, hard working Bible pounders or outsiders like Fred Cline who are sometimes likeable but frequently untrustworthy, each, beneath a veneer of false humility, secretly believing that he is the smartest man in the world. Tiptree fell into no such easily classifiable vein. The obvious and primary human faults such as hypocrisy and cant were missing from his makeup and there was a very real modesty in his manner, the modesty of a man who knows what he knows very well and is perfectly prepared to admit what he does not know. I was interested in him from the start but, during the course of a long evening which ended up rather drunkenly at my house, I found out three things about Tiptree which made my interest in him strong and personal: He had two sons who were undergraduates at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, he was a Grade A dairy farmer with a small herd of twenty cows milking and, last but by no means least, he was a skilled carpenter who undertook occasional building contracts.
When I learned these things, I came clean with him about my intention to buy Bill’s place and set up in the Grade A dairy business. I also came clean about my inexperience and all my fears concerning the project. He gave me a great deal of encouragement that night and he also gave me the benefit of a good deal of knowledge which he’d had to learn the hard way. For example, he admitted that his dairy farm was too small; a twenty-cow herd just could not bring in enough money to handle things like the two boys at VPI. Tiptree was wholly in agreement that the thirty-cow herd I contemplated was economically viable. But he emphasized strongly that they must be thirty good cows and that I must strive constantly to improve the herd through breeding and replacement. By the time we parted at about three o’clock in the morning, he had agreed, contingent upon my purchase of Bill’s farm, to undertake the construction of whatever buildings I would need. I went to bed that night feeling that I had met my first evolutionary hillbilly. For, by then, I was certain that four out of five families in our section would, sooner or later, have to travel the hard road which led up through the midwestern cracker ghettoes where one or two generations would be sacrificed to the gods of economic assimilation.
I woke up the next morning and reflected that there must, indeed, be a number of different ways of doing things other than mine. I got drunk in a gas station, met a total stranger whom I had invited back to my house and with whom I had sat in wine until the small hours pouring out my heart. Furthermore, I had reached a tentative agreement with him to build barns on a farm that I did not even own. And I had done that without any knowledge other than his own protestations that he was a skilled carpenter. To top it all off, I felt just fine about the entire evening and the entire arrangement. I remarked breezily to Dorothy that I had found the man over at Wrenchum’s who would build our barns and brought him home to drink some more and that he was a hell of a good guy. She replied that that was nice and scrambled me up some eggs for breakfast.
Later on in the day, my spirits were somewhat dampened. Encountering Fred Cline in one of my back pastures, I let it fall that I had met a splendid fellow named Tiptree the night before. Fred Cline’s face grew very long at this news and he said, “Tiptree’s a turrible man, Mister Cherry. Ah’ve known Tiptree all mah life and he’s a turrible man.”
“What the hell are you talking about, Fred?”
“Tiptree’d steal the pennies off’n a dead man’s eyes, Mister Cherry. Don’t have nothing to do with him whatever you do.”
I began to quiz him, asking for chapter and verse. Did he actually know of any specific case in which Tiptree had acted dishonestly? Well, no, he didn’t. But he’d heard things. But when I tried to find out what the things were that he’d heard, he grew vague. In the end, nothing was accomplished except that my peace of mind had been seriously disturbed. Fred and I parted, both rather miffed with each other. As a parting shot, he said, “Mister Cherry, you know that boy who delivers your paper every mornin’?”
“Yes,” I said sourly.
“Well, you just take a close look at him tomorrow mornin!”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean,” I shouted after him. But by then he was out of earshot.
For the rest of the day and throughout the night, I worried about what Fred had told me. Had I, perhaps, fallen into the hands of a crook? Was I such a poor judge of men? Was it, after all, wise to choose one’s contractor in a drinking gas station while three sheets to the wind?
Finally, I slept fitfully.
Curious as to what Fred had been mumbling about, I made it a point to be on hand the next morning when the paper was delivered. I had never looked very closely at the young man who delivered it. He had struck me as a pleasantly spoken young fellow of about eighteen and that was that. This morning, I looked at him very closely indeed and almost dropped the paper as a result. The resemblance to my new friend Tiptree was far too close to be coincidental. The boy did not just look like Tiptree, he was his spitting image. After the boy had gone, I pondered. Rather old womanishly, I found myself taking a high moral tone about having a cocksman contractor. Then I began to laugh at myself and I began to wonder if perhaps there had not been hanky panky between Tiptree and Fred Cline’s wife during some bygone springtime.
The auction was scheduled for May 5. During the remaining weeks before it, I made some inquiries about Tiptree. It was rather worrying that the answers I received in one or two cases were on the dubious side. However, the good testimonials were so glowing that they wiped the bad ones out. I clung to my determination to hire him as a contractor and enjoy him as a friend.
CHAPTER X
As we waited for the all-important date of Bill’s auction that spring, a curious, seemingly almost pointlessly cruel and malicious incident was engendered by my friend, O’Hara. Some months earlier, in response to his stepdaughter, Jane’s importuning, he had procured a dog for the child. This animal whose name now escapes me had turned out badly. It was not mean but simply feckless, given to chewing things up and senseless barking or howling. Since the O’Hara’s already possessed an aging Labrador Retriever of massive dignity, the presence of Jane’s mixed-up mongrel was undoubtably a bit of an overload. O’Hara’s solution to the disposal of the beast was redolently and secretly Machiavellian to the point that neither Dorothy nor I could quite fathom the benefits he intended to accrue from it.
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