The Farm in the Green Mountains

by Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer

  Each time, before he answered one of my questions, he stopped working and squatted down—whether he was balancing on a roof rafter or standing on the ladder—pushed his spectacles down almost to his mouth, gave me a searching look, and then explained everything I had asked understandably and wisely through his spectacles while he moved them gently with his lips.

  Meanwhile another man worked on the construction of goat and pig stalls in an existing barn. There was nothing leisurely about him.

  He was called “Wodan” because he was missing an eye, and his hair fell down wildly over that side.

  He came racing up the mountain in his truck and took the curve around the house in a way that made us afraid that a corner of the house would be taken off.

  He roared like a hurricane over the house.

  Once, when he was roofing our house, the old shingles rattled down in our vegetable garden like hailstones. He tore young birches out of the earth roots and all to use for fence posts, and he mixed cement like an angry demon.

  The story was told about him that he could eat sixteen servings of ice cream and drink beer on top of that without bursting. He was the Paul Bunyan of the East, a match for the legendary giant wood-cutter of the West who can do anything.

  At first he couldn’t stand us and grumbled: why the devil had these damned foreigners found themselves such a cursed spot, when they would have done better to go to the city.

  Gradually I learned to understand his cursing. One day, however, when he stamped across my freshly washed kitchen floor with his gigantic shoes covered with manure, cement, and lime, I blew up, and from that time on we became friends. After that our conversations took on an honest, open form, and I used to say to him clearly, “Fix the roof, but perhaps you should try not to break off the chimney and throw it through my kitchen window.”

  Or I would say to him, “Clean up the pond, but be careful that you don’t send the overflow through our house—I don’t like trout in the living room.”

  He remained a veritable Niagara, but with time we managed to channel him somewhat with a few dams.

  Sometimes he brought his wife with him.

  She stayed in the truck and would not come into the house, and she read: She was dressed elegantly; her hair and fingernails were beautifully cared for, and she always read the latest works of American literature.

  Wodan used to put a cushion behind his wife’s back before he started work, and this leather pillow at her back made her posture even more severe and formal.

  On those days Wodan worked quietly and behaved like an eagle with clipped wings.

  In four weeks the stalls were done.

  The most splendid buildings were the brand-new chicken houses, which stood two hundred feet from the house in the middle of lovely fields and hills, and from whose windows you had a beautiful view of the mountains. I must confess that I secretly played with the idea of moving into the new outbuildings instead of the chickens, and leaving the big house to the children and guests, but we soberly resisted the temptation.

  The chicken houses stood on enormous stones, so that if we should ever want to move them and set them on another place, we just needed to replace the stone feet with wheels and so turn a chicken house into a circus wagon that could be pulled by horses or tractors. The chicken houses were built according to all the rules developed from collective experience (not ours but the USDA’s). The windows were on the south. They were casement windows that could be opened and shut. They were equipped with screens, and over each was a ventilation flap. The window wall was seven feet high, but the opposite wall only five feet, so that the roof fell off steeply from the front wall to slide the snow off in winter. We often forgot the steep ceiling when we were cleaning the hen houses and bumped our heads so that we fell, saw stars, and looked like the knocked-out prize fighter who sinks to his knees in a film.

  On the back wall was a kind of large, open drawer with perches over it where the chickens sat and slept at night.

  Three times a week we could conveniently and quickly gather the considerable supply of chicken manure from the drawer with a broom and shovel, take it away, and deposit it on our future compost heap.

  On the side wall across from the door were hung the nests. They were sent already assembled from Sears and Roebuck and looked like little tin houses, with ten round openings, five in the first floor and five in the second floor, and in front of each a perch on which the hens could walk and look for a nest to lay their eggs. The nests had to stand about twenty inches off the floor, because hens want to jump or flutter up to take care of every important piece of business in their lives, probably in memory of their inheritance from the bird world.

  Once, when the wall hooks had become loose and had to be repaired, we placed the laying nests on the floor for two days. During the entire time, the ground floor nests remained unused, while the hens argued and fought over the nests on the second floor.

  The long feed troughs in the middle of the chicken houses also stood on iron feet. They looked like the tables and benches in forest cafes or in front of mountain huts: in the middle was the long feed trough, to the right and left of it were two narrow boards on which the chickens could sit for eating. The feed trough was covered with iron bars through which the chickens could stick their heads. Without these bars they loved to walk up and down in their feed, to scratch in it and to dirty it.

  The floors of the houses were covered with sawdust. We added some hay to the sawdust in the nests—although hay was not really prescribed—but the chickens obviously liked it.

  Then there were drinking water containers, little tanks with floats that lay on the water like a ring and kept the water in the bowl at a certain level.

  Providing water for the poultry was difficult on hot summer days, since we had no water pipes to the chicken houses and had to carry the water from our house. But in winter, providing water for the animals became one of the most horrible plagues and catastrophes in our farm experience.

  When the chicken houses and stalls were done, I waited for the arrival of Winnetou, who was coming home for spring vacation, to go with me to get the animals we had ordered.

  First we got six full-grown hens from a farm. They were light gray striped with black and looked like giant guinea fowl.

  The day when the first six arrived was a fine warm day. The sun shone through the sparkling windowpanes of the chicken houses. The sawdust smelled of fresh-cut wood, and the hay gave its fragrance from the nests.

  Elise the hen looked over the chicken house and decided that the feed for seven was there for her alone.

  Then we carried the boxes in which we had transported the chickens into the chicken house and opened the cage doors and waited. The chickens walked one after another out of the cages and surveyed their new home quietly and without excitement.

  Elise did not let their arrival disturb her eating, and the six newcomers soon hopped up on the shelf to enjoy their clean fresh food too.

  Winnetou and I stood for half the day at the window and watched our first chickens as they scratched, ate, and picked up grains of corn.

  It even happened that a hen looked for a nest and began to lay an egg, an unusual event when you think that chickens sometimes need from three days to a week to recover from the shock of moving and to return to the habit of laying eggs.

  Soon we could tell the six hens apart by their feathers, their movements, and their facial expressions. “They are the founders of our flock,” said Winnetou, and we named them: Michaela, Maria, Magdalena, Christina, Augusta, Agatha. All these names came from the rich treasure of names that our daughters had been given.

  A week later we had all the animals together: fifty-seven chickens, twenty ducks, five geese, four goats, two pigs, two dogs, and three cats. With these ninety-three animals our farm life began. The time of quiet contemplation and observation was past. Our animals kept us on our feet, at a trot, out of breath, and allowed us no more peaceful hours.

  THE FARM AN
IMALS

  The farm animals poured in, in groups, in pairs, and one at a time. The original chickens were followed by fifty eight-week-old Rhode Island Reds. These are red-feathered chickens of a breed that serves two purposes: they lay good eggs, and at the same time have tender meat. They are therefore called edible layers.

  Our original chickens belonged to another dual-purpose breed, the Barred Plymouth Rocks. This was a symbolic name for them, since they were our “rocks of strength” in the stormy, breaking waves of our chicken yard.

  We ordered the Rhode Island Reds from a farm that sold pullorum-free chickens. These are chickens that are free of a kind of bacteria that is transmitted by the mother hen to the egg and makes the chickens sick in the second week of their lives and ripe for an early death. The disease, also called chicken dysentery or white diarrhea, is a major cause of loss in raising chickens and can only be controlled by selecting the mother hens.

  To make this possible the USDA publishes a paper every year for the chicken-producing states that lists, with names and addresses, those chicken farms whose chickens have been checked and approved for the absence of the pullorum bacillus, just as they do for cattle that have been checked for tuberculosis or brucellosis.

  Winnetou and I drove over to a farm that had been checked for pullorum to pick up our healthy chickens.

  We had removed the rear seat of the car, covered the upholstery and the seat back with cloths, removed the carpets and laid newspapers on the floor.

  By taking these precautions, we made our car keep some of the elegance that belongs to a two-tone Oldsmobile in spite of years of carrying chickens, goats, and pigs.

  We wanted the chickens packed in chicken crates, but the farmer didn’t have any available. So he stuffed the stormily protesting poultry into ten oat sacks.

  I cannot describe the horror we felt when we saw the hopping, rolling sacks in our car, heard the piercing shrieks, and smelled the infernal stench that terrified birds give off.

  The trip lasted half an hour. We didn’t dare open the windows of the car because the day was cold and the young chickens had just come from warm houses.

  After a quarter of an hour, the sacks became quiet and motionless.

  “Feel them and see if they’re dead,” I said to Winnetou, and I stepped on the gas to get home more quickly.

  Winnetou knelt on the seat and leaned over to poke the sacks.

  “They’re still warm,” she said.

  When we arrived home, we carried the sacks to the chicken houses.

  The young hens went into the second chicken house. Only when they were full grown and approaching the time of egg-laying were the best behaved and fittest of them allowed to join the original hens in the first chicken house.

  The twenty-five roosters were put into two “ranges,” small coops that looked like scattered doghouses and were set in the chicken yard to serve as secure night quarters and as day shelters in bad weather.

  As we unpacked the young hens, they squawked and raged, ran frantically back and forth, shrieked and behaved like silly children on a school trip.

  But when we opened the sacks to let out the young roosters, we thought at first that we had released madmen and howling dervishes.

  They ran around in circles, without goal or direction, as if they had been suddenly struck blind. When we finally succeeded in driving them to the long feeding troughs, they ranged themselves along the feed, transformed into a still shrieking but compact mass. They looked like the totalitarian crowds we saw pictured in the press releases listening to their leaders.

  These young roosters were a great plague and filled me with a deep revulsion for all chickenkind. They often reminded me of a gang of neglected children, delinquents with criminal tendencies.

  They enjoyed nothing more than attacking the weak among them, and they employed most effective methods for the systematic terrorization of their victims.

  When they had been with us scarcely a month, they did such a shameful thing that I had no pity for them when it was their turn to be slaughtered. One day they picked out a weaker rooster and, in the truest sense of the words, drove him into a corner. They chased him until he ran his head into the stone wall of the chicken yard. Now, losing his reason completely, he hid his head in a deep, dark hole in the wall. What sport for our roosters to peck at the headless bird, stuck in the wall beating its wings, and to transform his body into a bloody pulp.

  We heard the outcry, hurried out, and I drove in among the bloodthirsty roosters with the barn broom. They scattered as if the devil himself had come among them.

  Zuck tried to release the head of the martyred rooster from the stone wall. He scarcely moved any more, and his body hung from his neck like a heavy sack on a string. There was nothing we could do but behead him. Later we freed his head from the wall with a crowbar.

  How I hated my roosters!

  The young hens were less wild and cruel, but they showed an unspeakable stupidity which filled me with a solid contempt for the animal kingdom.

  Later, when we no longer bought young chickens, but let our own hens brood and the chicks hatch out of their eggs in our own yard, the picture changed substantially.

  The silly, distracted, always anxious chickens developed into busy, thoughtful mothers. The new chicks, protected by these mothers, grew into young fowl who had learned from birth how chickens should behave.

  The memory of the first weeks of their lives, when they were called to their feed by their mother’s clucking, when the food was broken up into small bits for them by a motherly bill, and the times when the hens sheltered them under their wings from rain, cold, night, and danger, gave the new chickens a sense of security from chickhood on, something that the incubator chickens lacked.

  The chicks that were raised in incubators behaved generally like a flock of restless orphans, always prepared for attack, always coming off badly, always defensive. With them we had to be prepared for anything.

  I don’t want to say anything against incubators. They are indispensable on large chicken farms, where they are set exclusively for mass production, and the good and bad instincts of the creatures can be regulated by mechanical devices to a certain extent.

  Our farm, however, was small and not planned for mass production. Also, more than half of our animals appeared to have decided from the start to show off their individualistic tendencies and personal peculiarities without restraint—and to make us share their lives with them.

  Often I had the impression that I lived in a colony of freakish personalities that demanded that we accept their special deviations and odd notions as the most natural and ordinary matters.

  When the chickens were settled, we went to get the goats. Keeping goats is unusual in America. It is not that you are looked down on for keeping “the poor man’s cow,” but there is something mysterious involved in it. It seems almost as though you had come into a secret society of like-minded brothers and sisters, or had joined a religious sect. The articles about goats and goat products sound a little like the work of fanatic pamphleteers, and an atmosphere of faith-healing pervades them.

  The simple facts are these: a goat needs one-fifth of the feed that a cow requires. It has enough room in a small stall. It is supposed to be easily satisfied (our goats were very demanding). A goat has only two teats instead of four, and is therefore faster to milk than a cow. The fat globules in goat’s milk are smaller and cream development takes longer, so goat’s milk is supposed to be more digestible than cow’s milk. For this reason it is used for infants and for people with ulcers, whose stomach walls have been damaged by drinking too much fruit juice, or perhaps too much whiskey and gin. Babies and people with stomach trouble are the most profitable consumers of goat’s milk. At a time when a liter of cow’s milk cost twelve cents, you could sell goat’s milk to hospitals for fifty cents a liter, or to private patients or infants for sixty-five cents a liter, so the milk of “the poor man’s cow” brought in a very nice profit.

&nb
sp; As for the much discussed flavor of goat’s milk, goat milk enthusiasts claim that it has an aroma of almonds mixed with the bittersweet taste of fresh nutmeat skins, and its snow-white color indicates its precious purity.

  The opponents of goat’s milk say that it has a frightfully penetrating taste, and that the color makes them uncomfortable.

  The people arguing for and against goat’s milk seem to forget that taste can’t be defined, is a product of what you are used to, and is closely connected to your individual imagination.

  As for the disagreeable smell that goats and their milk sometimes have, no friend of goats denies it. But every intelligent goat owner knows that you must either not have a billy goat, or that he must pass his lonely life in seclusion, far from the ewes, since he is the carrier of the penetrating smell that gets into the stall, the coats of the ewes, the milk, the owner’s clothing, the feed, and everything else it touches.

  We had ordered two goats from a farmer in a small town about an hour away from our farm.

  Waiting for us were an old pedigreed ewe, a Saanen with a long family tree—her grandfather’s name was Prince Franz of Switzerland—and a quite young Saanen whose pedigree papers had been lost.

  We had again removed the back seat of the car, hung the walls with white feed sacks, and covered the floor with layers of newspapers and sawdust, so that the car looked like a stall on wheels.

  The goat owner was a pleasant man with a friendly family. His principal occupation was postmaster. On the side he raised goats, and on Sundays he played the trumpet in a band.

  He led us to the meadow next to his house. There our future goats were tethered.

  Even from a distance we could hear the ceaseless, low bleating of a goat. The owner explained that he would sell us the older Saanen at half price, in spite of her long pedigree, because she was a “bleater,” and he had had run-ins with his neighbors on her account.

  Our bleating Saanen had a mighty beard, no horns, and was named Heidi.