The Farm in the Green Mountains

by Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer

  “Rupert Morton states that he has seen a blackbird, and Leslie Sawyer thinks she heard a frog croak . . .”

  Or:

  “It has been reported that a few hardy souls and optimists have fought their way through the snow to the maple trees, have begun to tap the trees already, and believe that the maple sap will soon run into the pails.”

  This announcement means that soon bright sunny days will follow frosty nights, the maple sap will drip into the metal pails, the smoke stacks of the sugar houses in the woods will smoke day and night, and we will sit in the kitchen until two or three in the morning and watch the sap boil down.

  Then at the end of March comes this brief note:

  “The snow that fell from the 2nd of November to the 16th of March amounted to fifteen feet altogether. The spring thaw has set in suddenly and fills this reporter with the hope that snow and cold are disappearing.”

  The thaw lasts only three days. Then comes sleet, and we creep on all fours over glare ice to the barns, and Zuck spends his days spreading ashes on all the paths. The animals’ drinking water has to be changed every three hours, because it freezes in the drinking troughs, and we freeze with it to the marrow of our bones. Even the news, “On Easter morning Mrs. Harold Stillwell found a snowdrop blooming in her garden and saw on the same day a great group of wild geese flying northward . . . ,” cannot raise our spirits because we have to read this good news in the dark. At this time the windows of our first floor rooms are still covered with snow, some entirely, some four fifths, some a third, depending on location. It gives us the feeling that we have been covered by an avalanche. That is the time when the telephone, if it is not out of order, is kept constantly in use.

  We complain over all the nine lines, and we give voice to our impatience and despair. We can’t bear to look at the snow anymore. We are sure that it will never stop snowing again, and we no longer believe that spring can ever come.

  In the course of these comforting conversations we slide suddenly without noticing into “mud season.” That is the beginning of spring, when everywhere the ice breaks up suddenly, and the roads become impassable swamps.

  Then every year it becomes obvious overnight how small the number of paved highways is in the country, and how long the roads are that lead to them.

  Now life and motion come to our village. The tow trucks from the garage are constantly called out to rescue cars that have sunk into the mud. You telephone home: “I am just leaving town now. If I’m not there in an hour, don’t worry. I’ll be stuck in the mud.”

  The cars move like turtles and lizards through the swamp. At many places the mud looks like bubbling lava, and then there are ruts in which the wheels stick fast as though in sinkholes. In other places running brooks flow across the road. Then the brown-black swamp appears again. Yet the wet dirt, which splashes over the roof of the car, smells like spring.

  You arrive home shaking all over from the effort that it takes to steer the wheels against the mud. You rail at the impossible, miserable state of the roads. You demand that finally a concrete road should be built between the sizable villages, a road from which the snow water would simply roll off, and which would make the traffic independent of the weather.

  You tell of the colorful curses of the travelers you have met, and of the immense difficulty of pulling them out. Then you run to the telephone to hear how the others are doing, and at the same time get news about which spots in the roads are the very worst.

  But through all these excited conversations rings the joy that we have once more survived the ice and the snowdrifts, and that we can now get out into the mud.

  Spring is short, and soon summer comes, and with it the animals from the woods.

  That is the time when one must empty the garbage can carefully because a skunk might be sitting in it. The skunk is a beautiful and friendly animal, but when it is frightened or disturbed it uses its scent glands. In just a few minutes the entire house is enveloped in a gas cloud whose stench is greater than that of a stink bomb.

  Then the woodchuck emerges. He is a kind of large marmot, harmless to people but causing great damage in the fields.

  In the early spring he is the “groundhog” of legend, who predicts the duration of winter. If he comes out on a specific day in early spring and sees his own shadow, he goes back in and has six more weeks of hibernation. However, if there is hazy, dreary weather on that day, his shadow cannot frighten him—he has slept out, and spring will come soon.

  One evening we heard a panting and rattling, as though someone were trying to sweep off wood with a steel broom. Zuck went out to the double toilet in the shed—every old farmhouse has one—and turned the beam of his pocket flashlight on one of the seats. It revealed a porcupine, who was poking its head up through the opening and rubbing its neck comfortably around the rim. From then on we avoided the two-seater in the evening.

  Then came the time when Zuck came home beaming and told how he had met a mother bear with cubs in the woods. She had stood up on her hind legs and growled angrily, and he had had trouble keeping the dogs on their leashes.

  In the same week I found in the Standard the amazing story of Bear 1902, Bear 1944:

  “Mrs. and Mrs. Lamontaine are astonished about the bear coincidence. When they were married in 1902, they went on their wedding trip through the woods with horse and wagon, and there stood a bear in the middle of the road in front of them. Last Thursday they drove through the woods by car on their 42nd anniversary. There was a bear standing in the middle of the road in front of them.”

  The panther stories, however, seemed much more serious to me, though we were constantly assured that panthers had long since died out here in the East.

  In the woods about ten minutes from our house is a large light-colored granite boulder quite near the path. Under it, they say, a huge treasure of gold is hidden.

  Once I saw a powerful wildcat sitting on the rock in broad daylight. It spat, as though it had to defend the enchanted guardian of the treasure. On that same cliff a lynx was crouching one evening as Zuck came up the path. It gave that shrill, moaning cry that fills the brave with fear, the unsuspecting with horror, and makes the timid shudder.

  Whenever I went by this rock, I thought about the panthers that used to spring from the trees onto the backs of unsuspecting passersby, knocking them down and killing them.

  In America nothing is very long ago. The last Indian raid in our area took place in 1793, and the last panther was reported in 1883.

  Now appears this item:

  “The panther again. Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Stevens do not want to state outright that they have seen a panther, but they say that they have seen a wild animal quite near their house. They say that it has a long tail like a dog, but short legs and a cat head.”

  Now we go quickly to high summer. There are often hot days, but the nights are almost always cool.

  This is the time of guests.

  They pour in and stay for shorter or longer times. Sometimes they are only here for an evening.

  Once we had paying guests all summer. Since that time I have wished I could own a guest house. But I would like to have help with the dishwashing.

  In late summer the great butchering took place, a sad and ugly occasion, when it was a comfort and joy to have the house crowded with guests. After the pigs were killed came the great feast, where we supplied the sausages, and the guests the drinks.

  The kitchen was overrun with people.

  There stood a surgeon friend with Zuck at the sink cleaning up pig intestines. An artist stuffed sausages with me. A university professor ran liver and milt through a meat grinder, a publisher washed dishes on an assembly line. Michi prepared boiled dumplings with a friend from Vienna. Winnetou sorted the drinks people had brought, while a group of guests who were tired from the work made themselves cocktails in the cool cellar with telling results and called up to the kitchen that we should let the work be and enjoy life with them.

  This celebr
ation went happily through all its phases and ended in happiness and harmony just before the time for the morning milking.

  On another day, when no party was planned, but twenty-four chickens had to be slaughtered, plucked, and cleaned by four o’clock in the afternoon to be taken to the freeze locker in town, the translator-author from southern Vermont arrived like a gift from heaven with his wife.

  The men had to withdraw for serious conversation, while I stood with the translator’s wife in the kitchen in front of a mountain of plucked chickens. I really didn’t know how I could carry on an intellectual conversation while cleaning chickens. She was an intelligent, educated person, but I didn’t know how familiar she was with country life. But since she was a young American woman of the old school, she rolled up her sleeves, demanded an apron, and soon we stood together at the big table and picked out one chicken after another.

  When I had to spend three days after the pig slaughtering cutting up lard, rendering fat, smelling cracklings, and cooking soup, I protested with the Old Testament injunction that I could not see or touch pork for months—shortening the time from the original prohibition because I am particularly fond of pork.

  After plucking and cleaning the chickens—Zuck did the actual slaughtering—I was sure that the horror of it would linger all year.

  But this time it was different. The job itself and the smell were unchanged, but the time flew by with lively conversation. By the eighth chicken we had discussed the effects of bad pedagogy. By the twelfth chicken we were arguing the delicate question of theater and translation. Up to the sixteenth chicken we explored literature in general. It took only two chickens to describe the place of man in Europe, and with the remaining six we were scarcely able to establish the significance of woman in America.

  By exactly quarter past three the chickens were packed cleanly in my car, and I could deliver them on time to the deep freezer man in town.

  That same evening we marvelled in speechless wonder over our guest. He not only had a command of eight languages, but could also perform magic tricks on a scale far beyond home entertainment at the level of a professional artist.

  When it turned out that he had worked as a magician at one time, I gave up trying to classify people from that time on, or to place them in any kind of system.

  There are elegant, quiet old men who were once whalers, powerful lumberjacks who were tired of being lawyers, salesmen who have taught school for years, long-time housewives who have explored half the world on dangerous expeditions. Men who are the most amusing and worldly company turn out to be parsons. This means that you can find out in just a little time what kind of person you are dealing with, but his work and position seem to have played no decisive role and left no impression on him. His calling hasn’t poured him into a mold whose shape he has taken. This striking lack of structure bothered us at first. We were puzzled and amazed until we realized that here was a new pattern with new rules.

  In the fall the guests left, and flocks of birds on their flight south often set down on our pond.

  Fall appeared in advertisements:

  “Does anyone need Green Mountain potatoes? We have them. Come and get them.”

  “We have a cider press. Come and bring your apples with or without worms. We will press them out for you to the last drop.”

  And here is a man who hasn’t found himself a place for the winter:

  “Artist who understands farm work seeks a farm for the winter to buy or lease, condition not important.”

  The October days come, startling in their blazing color, warm and unsettling like spring. The wood is stored in the shed. Smoke rises straight up from the chimneys. The house is made snug. The bears go into hibernation. A good solitude and a winged peace enfold the house.

  DRUDE

  When I tell about the land and the people, the animals and the farm, I cannot keep quiet about a creature that lived in our house, hidden, invisible, only appearing occasionally.

  It is not that it particularly wanted to be with us or to live in our house.

  It is everywhere, in all houses, in all lands, in all parts of the world. We give it a hundred names and explain it a thousand ways.

  In folklore it is a real being and closely related to the evil spirits the Germans call Alp or Mahr that slip through the keyhole at night and sit on a sleeper’s chest, choke him, steal his breath, and hold him captive in terrible dreams.

  An Alp can appear as a spirit, or he can come from far away over the water, like the “Mahr from England.” But he can also be sent out by people who have an Alp in themselves and “send the Alp to others by their thoughts when they are filled with anger or hatred.”

  The Alp goes out from the eyebrows of these “Alp-carriers,” as they are called, “like a little white butterfly, and sits down on the chest of the sleeper to whom he is sent.”

  But I want to tell about Drude, the sister of Alp and Mahr, and to try to personify in her the depressing waking dream and the condition that comes from the weather, especially from humid winds and the lack of ultraviolet rays of the sun, from an overfilled stomach, poor nutrition, or psychic disturbances, and which can be the forerunner of depression, melancholy, and dejection.

  In America they call her the “Blues,” as if Drude and the Alp dressed up in night hues.

  She is known everywhere, but especially on isolated farms. She has many shapes. To one person she appears as fog, to another as cobwebs. She can be a heavy stone or a dark cloud, an animal, seaweed, or an invisible, empty nothing. But however she appears, she has the characteristic that she is anxious about minor misfortunes, worries about petty difficulties, is burdened by small annoyances. She never permits an honest passion like pain or grief to appear. Her pendulum swings between gnawing dissatisfaction and suffocating anxiety. She soaks up secret cares and mixes trouble and worry to an unrecognizable mass of dust, whose gray particles eat into the cracks of daily life.

  She appears at night and often follows you into the daylight.

  You wake up at night, and the whole dark room is filled with calamity and misfortune.

  You try to close your eyes, but eyelids are no protection against the burning darkness. Your head seems to be a magnet, and the thoughts, which have scattered in all directions, turn into fantastic creatures and confused images as soon as they enter its field.

  You hear the apocalyptic riders. You see a procession of people that you recognize as individuals and as a group, but you don’t know who belongs to the living and who is already dead. You are far away and free, and at the same time trapped on a small island.

  You know you are no longer a foreigner, but have put down roots. You love the house, but in those nights you hate the work that is connected with it. The dust creeps back like the spiders in the rafters, to appear again and again. The piles of dishes lie like coral reefs where you could be shipwrecked. The mending basket grows like dough that has too much yeast in it. The stalls, the sheds, the workshop, the repairs—you will never find time to take care of them all!

  The expression “time lies heavy on my hands” takes on new meaning.

  It lies heavy on your feet, too. It is as if you were walking on the face of a great clock, in circles without beginning or end, and the clock hands describe the path, but no longer tell the time. Six, nine, twelve, three become road signs that you pass as you do the same thing over and over again, no longer aware that they refer to time. For time is probably the most incomprehensible of all measurements, and there can be days, weeks, and months when you feel as if you had lost all feeling, hearing, and vision of time.

  Everything that you do seems to have no more sense or goal. All that remains is worry about the future. The cold of winter makes such nights worse. It comes into the house through the walls and goes across your face as if you had come too close to an open fireplace.

  Never before had I experienced cold in such a visible, tangible form, never before realized how closely biting cold is related to scorching heat.<
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  I tried to think back to something definite, for as soon as you give a memory a solid form or think something through, Drude has to retire to a corner to wait there for another wave of disorder and confusion.

  I thought of the ten-year-old peasant boy whom I had taken to Salzburg with me once to treat to ice cream.

  He had never in his life before tasted it, and when he shoved a tremendous piece of chocolate ice cream into his mouth, he roared, spit it out in a wide arc, shook his arms and balled his fists as if he had been showered with ice water, and shouted with his mouth wide open, as if he had swallowed glowing coals, “hot, hot, hot, hot . . . !” This cold, smoldering, glowing, scorching cold we had come to know well in Vermont.

  It was a season of unendurable cold, more than we could deal with, and the wind’s whistling and howling made our eardrums hurt. Winter, the incubation period of Drude.

  When I got mired in a cloudbank of melancholy thoughts, help sometimes appeared.

  On the stroke of three at night, the door of the iron stove that stood in the upstairs hall and had to heat all the rooms was opened with a rattle. It had a mighty frame and needed nourishment every three hours. I heard the heavy logs being laid in one by one and the closing of the iron door. Then a soft crackling began, like machine gun fire. In between, there were explosions like the landing of heavy mortars. Then it turned into an irregular clicking. All these sounds showed the heating of the stove itself at the stage before it was warmed up and could itself radiate heat.

  It made me think of heat as one of the great Egyptian plagues in our winter life.

  During six months of the year Zuck had to put wood into the iron stove on the stroke of three at night, walking in his sleep, without waking up, and yet robbed of his best rest by the demon of necessity.

  That was our heat. I think we would all have frozen to death if Zuck had not been such a fanatic fire-tender. But it was not so much a matter of our well-being. The main thing was the water system that must be kept from freezing. We could no longer worry about whether we were cold or warm. We always had other things to think about.