The Farm in the Green Mountains

by Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer

  Since he could also cook quite well himself, he brought variety to these solid one-dish meals with additions of grilled meat, omelets, scrambled eggs, etc., and lived during these days like a man in a hunting shack, demonstrating that he can get along without female help.

  In America intellectual worth and manly strength are not proved by avoiding the work of everyday living. It is thought neither honorable nor lovable for a man to behave like a helpless child. On the other hand, it is not regarded as a sign of slavery and unhappy domination by women when American men are able to do every kind of housework and sometimes even know something about the care of infants.

  In this independence of the men lies a danger for the women. Since the men no longer need to be taken care of and waited on by women, a marriage can scarcely be founded on the popular idea that a man will never want to leave his wife because in the course of time she becomes his indispensable nursemaid and customary cook.

  We came to an agreement about housework that represented a mixture of the European and the American.

  On my return from the library, I found the kitchen and house in perfect order, the dishes washed, the floors swept, everything picked up. I could throw myself with renewed strength and fresh spirit into the housework, from which Zuck was once again freed.

  After cooking ahead came a thorough checking of the lists. I dared not forget anything, especially in the time of gasoline rationing when the gas would cover only one trip a week to the nearest town and one trip every three weeks to the nearest university town.

  Over the kitchen table, along the wall like a fresco, ran a list on which was written down everything that we needed for the kitchen. On the door to the garage hung the list of all the feeds. On another door was fastened a slip of paper on which needed repairs were noted.

  On it were: check roof; kitchen door squeaks; ball in the toilet is broken; geese’s water trough leaks; kitchen table leg is loose.

  These notes in no way meant that a handyman should be called to fix these things, but only that we needed to get the materials to repair them ourselves.

  Besides these orderly lists that looked down on us with stern injunctions like the tablets of the law from all the walls, there was a blackboard on which current wishes and demands of individual family members were written, in colored chalk, in disconnected, irregular fashion.

  When the children were home, the blackboard was especially confused.

  For example, there stood in Michi’s handwriting (and she loved to write her wishes on the board with yellow chalk): nail polish, chocolate, Rilke’s poems, vanilla, blue wool, cinnamon sticks, stockings.

  Winnetou used blue chalk for: corn feed for the chicks, castor oil for the cats, Mozart’s sonatas for piano, cigarettes, beef steaks.

  Zuck’s list, in white chalk, looked something like this: typewriter ribbon, a heart for the dogs, liver for the cats, adhesive tape, tobacco, Grimm’s Legal Antiquities, look up material on Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed, don’t forget Barbara Blomberg, whiskey, shoulder of lamb, knife sharpener, rat poison.

  My list was uninteresting and ran like this: pack up six dozen eggs, something to prevent clogged drains, onion salt, tuna, beer, wine, peppercorns, etc. This monotony was because I made a special list for the books I wanted to borrow from the library, and so never mixed the Saints of the Merovingians with paprika, or set Charlemagne next to bay leaves, and never had the Germanic kings following soap powder. Everything on those lists had to be copied carefully onto note-paper and organized by the three or four different towns in which I could find the separate articles.

  Then I packed the eggs in special aluminum crates that were divided into layers of cartons. In each individual section was placed an egg wrapped in paper, because this kind of packing protected the egg during transportation, even if bounced around wildly.

  Often I also took slaughtered chickens, ducks, or geese with me to sell.

  But the heaviest part of the load I carried was the books that I was bringing back to the library. They usually numbered at least a full dozen.

  After packing up and copying lists, I did an extra thorough cleaning of the house, to leave it in good condition for Zuck. Finally I went to the barn, checked the animals, and told them to behave themselves and not to get a disease of any sort while I was away.

  After all these intensive preparations, there was still the most important matter—the telephone conversation with Harry. Everything depended on this conversation, because on it I based my decision whether or not to use my own car. I called Harry in the evening.

  Harry knows everything, can do everything, understands everything.

  He milks his cows at 6:00 in the morning and feeds his pigs. At 7:15 he collects the mail and drives the school bus to the next town. At 8:30 he is a salesman in a meat store. At 3:30 in the afternoon he brings the mail and the school children back from town to the village. At 6:00 he milks his cows and feeds his pigs. He is a farmer, postman, and salesman, but above all he understands and loves cars, and they flourish under his care.

  Often in winter, when I went off the road into the ditch in deep snow and couldn’t get my car back onto the icy pavement again, I stopped a motorist and asked him to tell Harry that I was sitting in the ditch at one of the four places where you could expect to slide into the ditch in winter.

  Then Harry came to the indicated spot, pleasant, untroubled, cheerful, and it seemed to me as though my car pricked up its ears and nickered softly at the sight of him.

  Then Harry sat down behind the steering wheel, and the car jumped out of the ditch, panting and trembling in its flanks, and slid and danced on the icy road until Harry brought it into strict control. Then it ran as though it had never been in the ditch.

  That is Harry, the auto trainer. We left the car with him in the winter. He protected and cared for it, and every morning he let it run so that the motor wouldn’t freeze. That is Harry, whom I had to call on the evening before my expedition to ask him how my car was doing and whether he believed it would be happy to run the next morning. He couldn’t be sure, Harry would answer. It still started this morning, but the temperature was beginning to drop, and it would probably be a cold night. (Whenever I wanted to go to the library, the temperature always sank far below zero, or it climbed for a snowstorm.)

  Each time he told me to call him again early in the morning, and then we would see.

  In the nights before these trips I was restless, getting up to look at the thermometer, or opening the window to sniff and see whether a snowstorm was on the way.

  At 5:30 the alarm clock rang, and I got up. It was pitch black, but Zuck had already built roaring fires in all the stoves, and it was warm in the house.

  We ate breakfast half asleep in the warm kitchen.

  At 6:30 I called up Harry.

  “Will it start?” I asked.

  “Not yet,” answered Harry, “but maybe soon.”

  “Call me when it’s running,” I told Harry.

  “All right,” said Harry.

  After a quarter of an hour our ring sounded.

  “It’s running,” said Harry.

  That was the clear, simple sentence for which I had been waiting, restless but resigned.

  The answer, “It won’t start,” meant that I had to take the school bus to the next town to wait there for an hour for a bus that would go over the snow-covered mountains but was usually late and brought me only to the nearest town that had a railway station. There I had to wait two hours for another bus that would take me in less than a quarter hour to the university town.

  In short, the trip without my own car meant waiting and carrying heavy packages. That took a quantity of patience and meekness which I could not always bring forth cheerfully.

  I can well remember one certain winter morning.

  At seven o’clock sharp I left the house with a heavy backpack on my back, the aluminum crates of eggs in one hand and a ski pole in my right hand. I had to go alone, since it was time for
milking and feeding, the time when Zuck couldn’t get away. When we had a hired boy, he would go with me.

  But usually I plodded alone through the dark woods, equipped as though for a Lapland expedition: thick wool stockings, inner and outer ski pants, two pairs of socks in felt shoes with felt soles shoved into thigh-high rubber boots, flannel shirt, wool sweater, sheepskin vest, and over it all a fur-lined trench coat with a fur hat and fur gloves. When the northwest wind blew, I wore in addition a woolen helmet over my face that had only slits for my eyes, and I looked in this costume like the Ku Klux Klan incarnate going through the woods.

  At the beginning of the path I often had to use a flashlight.

  I was afraid of the dark and of the stillness, of the snow which damped all sounds and concealed life and movement alike. I didn’t like at all hearing only my own footsteps, the creaking crunch of the rubber boots in the deep holes in the snow. When a tree branch broke under its weight of snow, I was frightened to death.

  I was also afraid of the animals in the woods.

  When in the first winter a bear chose to make his winter quarters in a fallen tree trunk very near our house, Zuck said that there was nothing to be afraid of—the bear would sleep there peacefully all winter. But I distrusted its sleep and feared its awakening. For my cold comfort I found a fellow in fear in a meter reader from the company that brought electric power to our house. When he found the bear tracks he didn’t come back again, and from that hour on he sent a postcard on which we could report our usage ourselves.

  When I went through the woods alone and unprotected, and the loneliness pressed heavily on me, I liked to call up a certain picture to my mind.

  In it I saw Zuck going ahead of me on the path through the woods, with a lynx on his right and a skunk on his left. Behind him came a whole procession of raccoons, beavers, porcupines, weasels, and snakes, and then a bear came up to him and laid his paw on his shoulder in a friendly fashion . . .

  Zuck loved all animals and was not afraid of them. He could share his room with a poisonous spider and a scorpion and live with them in peace. Perhaps this friendly unconcern stemmed from the time in his early youth when he wanted to start out as a tiger trainer and ended up with a mixed group of rabbits and bears.

  Even in the first years of our marriage he tried to smuggle snakes into the house, and one time he came home with an Aesculapius adder which had wrapped itself comfortably around his neck. But at that time I didn’t want to share our house with snakes and pests, and no suspicion crossed my mind that I would one day have to live with pigs, poultry, rats, and spiders, and with wild animals around the house.

  At the corner where the road through the woods came out on the highway, Harry was waiting for me. Rather, I always waited for him. When Harry arrived with predictable lateness, I climbed quickly into my warm car, put all my bundles on the back seat, and changed my rubber boots and felt shoes for lighter footwear, since the gas pedal, clutch, and brakes of my Oldsmobile form a fine-tuned keyboard that doesn’t tolerate a heavy touch. A light pressure on these sensitive instruments is enough to speed the car up to sixty miles an hour, a not unhazardous speed on snow and ice.

  When, however, my car would not start or keep running, I caught the school bus on the same corner, and it was often driven by Harry’s wife. The school bus was a standard station wagon that also served to deliver the mail. This made the trip from our place to town take three to four times longer than it would if traveling unhindered and without stops.

  When I climbed into the school bus I found a number of school-children already in it. They were going to high school, a higher continuation of the village school that could be a way to the university.

  The boys and girls between thirteen and eighteen years old chattered, quacked, cackled, and crowed like our poultry at feeding time. Many sang and whistled popular tunes, and in between they used exclamations and expressions that the school speech of all lands and dialects use and depend on. There were words like: solid, oh fine, mean, crazy, gosh, first rate, splendid, etc., words that do not sound really original when used singly, but apparently have the effect of covering the uncertainty and awkwardness of young people protectively by perpetual, rhythmic repetition.

  Above this noise, surrounded by this constant, bubbling movement of pushing, thumping, jumping up, and throwing themselves back on the seats, Harry’s wife Naoma reigned, broad, powerful, and with indomitable good humor. Along the entire way stood countless mailboxes by the highway. They looked like metal nests for laying hens. Where the highway went through the woods again, there were many lonely mailboxes, as far away from the farms they belonged to as our mailbox at the end of the road through the woods on the corner of the highway, almost a mile and a half from our house.

  Only after we returned to Europe did it occur to me how unusual it was that nothing was stolen from these widely separated mailboxes standing by the open highway. At our mailbox treasures such as whiskey, tobacco, meat, coffee, etc., were often deposited by the letter carrier, and in all the years we were there we always found everything just as it had been left.

  Europeans would explain this amazing phenomenon by saying that the American people are too well-off to need to bother with such petty thefts.

  This inappropriate explanation is surely not the right one. Rather, there is a conviction that petty thievery, useless lies, and intentional distrust are basically antisocial, and they are condemned as an aggravation and burden to daily life.

  Indeed, you can sometimes find among the noteworthy items in the newspaper a pointed invitation like this: “Would the person who took the things from the Maple Farm shed without permission please return them and put them on the veranda behind the kitchen to avoid unpleasantness.”

  Even clearer and more accommodating is this newspaper notice: “Would the girl who was seen taking a blue and white striped shawl from the bench in front of the house please return it to Jim Potwin? It would be appreciated, and no questions will be asked.”

  From the lonely mailboxes in the woods, that stood there dumb and silent, we came to the ones near farms, by which farm wives stood and waited for conversation and entertainment.

  They gave Naoma commissions and spoke about the events of the day, the weather, and sickness.

  In those places where no one was standing Naoma pulled the bags out of the mailboxes that stood on the left-hand side of the road, because she had the driver’s seat on the left.

  When I sat next to her in the front seat I was allowed to take the mailbags from all the boxes on the right-hand side of the road.

  It was done this way: Naoma drove up to within an inch of the mailbox. I reached my arm through the open window, opened the flap door of the mailbox and checked for bags as though I wanted to get an egg from the nest.

  Often there was also a slip of paper there with an order that could hardly be deciphered, but Naoma knew her customers and their misspellings.

  After that I had to shut the mailbox again and put down the flag that was fastened to the side of the box, a signal that told the owner: “Your mail has been picked up.”

  These little mail bags, about the size of a Christmas stocking, had shapes and appearances that represented their owners.

  There were colorful, friendly bags on which the family name was stitched. There were clean, strong ones in faded gray. There were cheerful, dusty bags with scrawled names, and some that were crushed, crumpled, and dirty, and smelled like moldy bread.

  The pauses by the mailboxes were short in comparison with the stops caused by snow and ice in the winter, by mud in the spring, and by storms in the summer.

  There was no greater pleasure for the children than to get stuck in the snow, to dance on the ice with the auto, or even to slide off into the ditch.

  But I also enjoyed seeing the change in Naoma when she turned from being a simple chauffeur into the helmsman of a ship and issued commands from the bridge to get her ship floating free of the sandbank again. I proposed to her on one
of these occasions that right after the end of the war I would send a practical and heart-moving letter to the army about the climate and road conditions of Vermont and suggest using tanks to transport schoolchildren and mail in winter and mud season, a project that should be earnestly considered for the New England states.

  In spite of all mishaps, we always got to town sooner or later, and I went from store to store to place the orders which I would pick up on the next day or the day after that.

  Eventually the bus came to take me to the train station at a railroad junction town with a main street and shops, a place where that hectic joylessness is found that pervades towns that exist only for getting off, getting on, or changing trains.

  In this joyless town, however, is a hotel that is managed by a cheerful, jovial Swiss couple where we establish our assembly point and base camp when we go on trips.

  On my trips to the library I made a stop there to rearrange myself, to indulge in a second breakfast, and to overcome the fatigue from the first part of the trip.

  The hotel owners kept a room and a bathroom ready for me, and there I could peel myself, layer by layer, like an onion. When I was again wearing normal underwear, skirt, and blouse, and no longer looked like a chestnut vendor in a snowstorm, I felt prepared inwardly and outwardly to enter the hallowed halls of the library.

  But every time I began to gather up the pieces of my North Pole outfit and pack it in a bag, the thought of the return journey came to me, and I imagined it in all its terror and had to remember and fear that there could be still more snow, more cold, perhaps even ice.

  I saw myself on the return trip, the car loaded down with supplies, with books, with food for the animals, and all the various other things.

  I saw Zuck standing on the corner, the big pack basket on his back, the dogs on a leash.

  I saw how we pulled all the things out of the car and piled them on the feed sacks and on the toboggan that stood under the mailbox, so that what I had brought would not be harmed by the snow.

  Then, when I had taken my own car, we had to drive down the highway to the village to leave the car in Harry’s garage. Then we had to walk back along the long highway on foot to the corner in the woods where the load carrying began. The goods were divided among backpacks, pockets, pack basket, and toboggan. I began to mutter softly about why couldn’t the wolfhounds be trained like arctic huskies, and why couldn’t we harness them to the sled, instead of trudging behind them loaded down like beasts of burden.