Maggie's Farm

by Sherry, John;

  I have nothing against hicks—except when they get into high places—but I am very definitely not one myself. And in a social setting as arid as the hills of southwestern Virginia, I could see little possibility for myself and even less for my wife and daughters. But more important than that was the fact that the farm had served the purpose for which I had originally sought it. Putting aside for a moment the Calvinistic guilt which I felt at even entertaining the idea of getting rid of the farm, the truth was that I had wanted the farm as an aspect of necessity within a search for freedom. I had always believed that the decade of the Fifties which corresponded roughly with my own Thirties was a period for me of great moral possibility and grave moral danger, the key years of life among which sloth, conformity and self-indulgence lurk like assassins on a shadowy street. They were the years during which, unless dealt with and approached with circumspection, my character—frail reed that it is—could have been leaked away through drink and dishonesty. Instead, it had been contained and perhaps even strengthened. Unquestionably, my marriage had been the major weapon in the struggle; but, among the rest of the arsenal, the farm was the second biggest gun, even though the authorship of a couple of books had not been harmful. But now it was 1958. I was thirty-five and the decade had only two more years to run. The Eisenhower years seemed to have been designed by some master hand as the perfect time to cultivate one’s garden; certainly not much else was happening. But even then, in 1958, one would somehow smell the impending change and excitement of the Sixties. It was then that my generation would emerge and take power and I wanted to be present and perhaps to take part in the excitement rather than go on working my hill farm so crazy in my head that I couldn’t be trusted not to crash an automobile on a dry, clear night with no help from a living soul.

  And so, as we made the hay for the following winter’s feed, I faced the fact that I wanted to get out from under my farm and began to think about a possible plan for doing so. I saw no way it could be anything but a gradual process. I discarded immediately any question of putting the farm up for sale or auction. The chances of getting a fair price from someone who wanted to go on operating the farm as a unit were slim. And I found the idea of an auction extremely distasteful; the likelihood of all we had assembled being disassembled and sold as components was great. The best chance to achieve what I wanted seemed to me to be the idea of the partnership with Herbert that I had long considered. With Herbert’s wages deducted from my share in the profits from such an arrangement, I would, in effect, be supplying a pair of hands to replace my own and I would be free to take my family and roam wherever I wished, assuming, of course, that those wishes would be compatible with whatever income we had at the moment, whether from the farm or from other sources including writing. If in time, Herbert came to find the idea of having an inactive partner oppressive, some sort of arrangement could be arrived at whereby he could buy me out. I decided to broach the scheme to Herbert.

  He was surprisingly receptive to it. His face grew long as he listened and I knew he would need much time to weigh the pros and cons and pray over them, but he saw immediately that there was much to benefit him in the idea. In substance, he risked nothing but the three or four hundred dollars a year I had been paying him for custom work with his machinery and he gained a chance to be the boss man of a farming operation with the potential of very large profits when judged by the standards of the region. By the end of the summer, we were getting close to reaching a final agreement. Although I had no immediate plans for doing so, I warned him that sooner or later we would be moving on and that he would be stuck for all effective purposes, with an absentee landlord. This seemed to bother me more than it did Herbert. And, in truth, it did bother me; everything I had ever read tended to support the view that the practice of absentee landlordism is a pernicious one. Still, I was not displeased; a small chink of light had appeared in the iron door of my imprisonment by the farm. Then my young friend Clyde dropped his bombshell.

  His bombshell was so massive that it did away with the chink of light in the prison door by throwing the door wide open. The requirement which Clyde’s plan demanded of Dorothy and me was both simple and sublime: total faith in Clyde. Or, as some will decide immediately, total madness. Even from the present vantage point, I cannot say with any conviction that I know one or the other to be correct. Which brings me to a question for which now is as good a time as any to deal with: was Clyde a crook? The answer has a great deal to do with my friend Tiptree, the barn builder’s remark, when I told him certain reports had made me apprehensive about his honesty. He smiled, if you recall, and said, “Hell, Jown, you cain’t screw a friend.” Generally speaking, hill people tend to a highly personalized morality. Fred Cline believed with unshakable conviction, for example, that after paying the insurance premiums on his barn for a number of years, he had the absolute moral right to burn down the barn and collect the insurance. And my young friend Clyde was, despite his superimposed culture, a hill person to the core. So the social answer to the question of his crookery is: no in the hills of Virginia and a probable yes in Bronxville, N.Y. or Evanston, Illinois. My own personal answer to the question is a categoric no. I believe firmly that everything he tried to do stemmed from a deep desire to benefit me and an even deeper desire that the relationship which existed between us continue to grow and expand, to transcend the social, and eventually contain and use power. That the very relationship which he so cherished finally turned out to be the force that pushed him into over-extension and collapse is a very sad thing but I do not think it was wrong. If we are not given the grounds to examine our own identity in action, we remain faceless and unclaimed human beings. But if we make that examination, there is no guarantee that what we discover will be pleasing. Now, for reasons both selfish and philosophical, I begin to sweat at the very thought that life might ever demand of me again a choice such as the one I had to make in regard to Clyde.

  His proposition was a simple one: that we give him our farm. In return for throwing in our farm, Dorothy and I would become in effect his partners in any enterprise he entered in upon, whether fire engines or cashew nuts. The specific terms of his plan were simple enough: he would provide us with a monthly income whose floor would be five hundred dollars a month and whose ceiling was theoretically limitless. Should we wish to travel, he would also provide the wherewithal to pay for the costs of transportation. For the rest, he made no bones about his intention of adding the farm to his present financial house of cards once it was legally in his possession. This did not worry me too much because I believed then that the basic technique of acquiring vast fortunes is to borrow against what one owns in order to increase one’s holdings. (So basic do I believe that technique to be, in fact, that I have learned in the ensuing years to give it an extremely wide berth and indeed have never owned so much as a share of stock on margin. It is such a basic technique, that one has to have a nervous system capable of writing “Ode To a Nightingale” in the middle of a steel band in order to use it successfully.) The other reason it did not worry me much was that the farm was already mortgaged to the hilt of possibility, a fact which would provide sound checks and balances against the height, width and handsomeness of Clyde’s potential dealings.

  Clyde was, of course, familiar with the details of the loose partnership with Farmer Herbert which had been planned. Herbert was, by then, a factor which could not be ignored or abandoned, a fact with which Clyde was in hearty agreement. The last thing in the world he wanted was to be the working manager of a farm; he was not suited to it by virtue of either temperament or experience. Clyde’s intention was to be the financial eminence grise of the combined operation, using his financial legerdemain to make sums of money available for the planned expansion.

  Ignoring for the moment—now as I did then—the all-important factor of self-deception, Clyde’s proposition was one to which I was immediately and powerfully attracted. First of all, it contained a great deal of cast your bread upon the waters, a
nd I have always been as strongly inclined to accept the moral directions of Jesus Christ as I am disinclined to participate in ceremonies where his body is symbolically cannibalized in order to obfuscate his thought; that thought, of course, being total and absolute anathema to the bankers who occupy the front row seats at the feast. I was attracted to Clyde’s plan even more because—in theory, at least—it contained a strong triangular pragmatic base in terms of: from each according to his ability to each according to his need. It presented each of us with a blank canvas to be painted upon in a style and manner of our own choosing: for Farmer Herbert, farming; for me, art; and for Clyde, money. If theory could be turned successfuly into fact, I believed then as I believe now that a large step forward would have been taken.

  I listened to Clyde’s proposition, told him I was interested and that I would think about it and talk it over with Dorothy. I did so and found, just as I had expected, that she was as fascinated as I. It is hard for me to imagine what it would be like to be married in the dolorous sense that institution commonly enjoins. By which, I mean the prosaic joining together of two human beings in defense against the dark who fumblingly breed in search of tenuous meaning, receive the precious gift of life and then do their best to smash it up through almost religious adherence to the rigidity of their fear. The experiment which one’s life truly is, must be performed and the results accepted. In times of low spiritual tide, my wife has been wont to remark that she is a coward except in regard to my intentions; to which my only answer will always be that I too am a coward except in regard to her support for those intentions. The net result of our discussion regarding Clyde’s proposition was that we would give it a whirl if Farmer Herbert were amenable to accepting Clyde as his partner rather than me.

  Which proved to be the case. Farmer Herbert saw immediately that nothing was essentially changed; that he still had the chance to win much and risk little. Older than I by five or six years, Herbert was terribly bemused by the fact that young Clyde could possess the wherewithal to purchase my farm. Perhaps the lie which was the kernel of the mistake I made was the omissive lie of failing to tell him that the sum needed by Clyde to buy my farm was the single dollar bill required to make the gift of my farm a legal transaction.

  From my friend, Lawyer Bean, who would handle the legal details of the transaction, it was, of course, not possible to conceal such knowledge. I believed in Clyde and the fire engines and Herbert and the farm and myself and the playwriting because I wanted to believe in them. I knew that I could not justify that belief to Lawyer Bean even as I knew it was my bounden duty to do so. Therefore, I simply refused to attempt such a justification, watched his eyes grow wide with concern as I informed him of my intention, and then saw them narrow with sudden suspicion of my madness. He lectured me about the risk I was running according to the dictates of his legal conscience and I heard him out in the politeness based on the absolute conviction that my belief was a factor superior to his commonsense warnings. When he was finished, I instructed him to proceed with drawing up the legal documents. This he did and in due time they were executed by Clyde and me, the dollar bill changed hands and the farm, conceived in Rome as a dream and upon whose creation we had labored for the preceding five years, passed from our legal possession.

  The world was now theoretically our oyster. What I conceived of as an act of faith had been performed and it seemed only right and proper that one of the immediate rewards of that act was the possession of a magic carpet which would take us anywhere. Like everything viewed from hindsight, it is now clear in retrospect that the destination we chose was perfectly symbolic of the web of self-deception I had spun for myself. Did I, whose belief in his recently-completed play was so passionate, choose New York? Or London? No, not for a minute. After much excited pouring over of Atlases, we chose that world-famous theatrical capital of the Universe, the island of Barbados. But the chill of autumn was already upon us. For years we had battled those rural winters, often in primitive circumstances. The sun beckoned to us so irresistibly that we could not refuse. We’ll only stay six months or so, I told Dorothy, and I could use the time profitably writing, spurred on by the undoubted inspiration which would arise amidst strange circumstances. After six months in the sun, I assured her, we would be rested and rejuvenated and ready to take on New York, armed, I hoped, with still another string to the old literary bow.

  Or we could return to the farm; one of the basic points of our agreement with Clyde was that our house would always be available to us, shut up and guarded by him for us during our absence. In point of fact, we now left it to my brother who needed a place to cogitate and hibernate throughout the winter. He would also take care of Gordo, the Boxer, whose passage to Barbados was prohibited by stringent British-oriented quarantine laws.

  Finally, the day of our departure arrived. We were like children before a picnic, filled with that sublime sense of expectation which precludes knowledge of the ants in the food. We were, after all, a family with an itchy foot which had not been scratched for a long time. So, it was in a spirit of excitement and impending holiday that we drove to the filling station in Wytheville where we were to meet Clyde on the morning of our departure. He would drive us to the airport at Roanoke in our Jeep station wagon of which he would then assume possession as part and parcel of the farm which we had given him.

  Clyde was late and harassed of appearance when he finally appeared. No matter, there was always a slight feeling of “knock twice and ask for Joe” in any dealings with Clyde. It was one of the things which, in my dangerous but alas unchanging abhorrence for the prosaic, I found attractive. So great was my trust in the future of our plans that I had not even bothered to cash a check, it having been agreed between Clyde and me that cash which he would provide, would be the best means of proceeding initially. I had, I think, ten dollars in my pocket, a few hundred more in my checking account which, according to agreement, would be replenished at monthly intervals. Now, there was a slight, almost imperceptible memory of a whorehouse as he proffered, and I hastily pocketed, an envelope stuffed with cash. It passed away immediately and we exuberantly took the road which would lead us to the air which would lead us to the sun and happiness.

  CHAPTER XIV

  I am sure that by now ample warning has been given of the fact that happiness is precisely what we did not find in Barbados. To travel in the opposite direction to that indicated by need and intention impelled by a total calculus which contains a giant error is not exactly the most efficient means of achieving happiness.

  However for a time, at least, the sun, sea and trade winds served to foster its illusion. The island itself was a charming place, a splendid mixture of an overwhelmingly British veneer applied to the basic noise, colour and excitement of an island with a long history of passion and violence. We loved the busy Bridgetown streets where, almost on the first day of our arrival, what must have been the biggest black whore in the world solicited my custom in a voice hardly lowered for the benefit of Dorothy and other passers-by, using an idiom that had me gasping with laughter. A sailboat fancer since childhood, it was sheer magic for me to find Bridgetown harbour filled with old Gloucester fishermen now employed in carrying nitrate from British Guiana. So beautiful carrying full sail in the distance, it was rather sad coming close to one to find her hogged and filthy. Even though we had no business in Barbados, we did not realize it during the first month and so were able to enjoy ourselves amidst the novelty. It was certainly about as far away from a Virginia hill farm as it is possible to get and I suppose we all needed that.

  While we looked for a house, we lived in a pleasant compound of small apartments which were hideously expensive. Then we found and rented a lovely big house on the St. Lawrence coast about a twenty-minute bus ride from Bridgetown. It was right smack on the beach, a huge, cool, high-ceilinged house through which the breeze from the trade winds blew incessantly. With the house came Norah, the black cook, and a colleague who did the laundry. Norah had the best
natural hand with children I have ever encountered and ours adored her. Little Sylvia called her “Nort” and trailed happily around in her wake all day long.

  For the first two or three weeks on the island, we made no attempt at seriousness and simply wallowed happily in the holiday atmosphere to which we were so unaccustomed. And I wallowed, I must admit, in the rum. Wonderful Barbados rum; there is no tipple quite like it in the world. I thought of rum as a harsh spirit fit only to be mixed with citrus juices but that which we encountered on Barbados was as mellow as aged Scotch. As a general rule, I am inclined to think it the better part of wisdom for Celtic Calvinists to eschew tropical islands with cheap drink until the safe seventies have been achieved. Our rum cost something like a dollar and a half a gallon and was delivered to the door much like the milk. I partook thereof. Yet it was all very healthy somehow; the sun and the sea and Norah’s wonderful cooking maintained a splendid, constant glow. What we were having was a holiday. But holidays were somehow not our style; they belong properly to people who do not believe that working nine-to-five is a living death. It goes without saying that my typewriter did not leave its case. It sat on a table beside some copies of my play, “Abraham’s House,” from which I guiltily averted my eyes as I walked past.

  The day came when we were supposed to receive money from Clyde. It did not arrive but it did not immediately occur to me to be seriously worried. I ascribed his dereliction to some technical cause such as delay in the mails and put it from my mind. A week went by and still it did not come; I was no longer able to tell myself or Dorothy that I was not worried. I wrote but there was no answer. Then a letter arrived and I was relieved; everything was going to be all right after all. But the letter contained no money; explanations of grandiose plans and a rosy future, but no money.