There was no use denying it, life was hard on the farm, but it was a wonderful, real hardness, for it was engaged with wind and snow and tempest and floods, with droughts and storms.
“I remember when the river flooded,” he said to the listening man. “Lots of us got washed out; washed out the winter wheat and killed lots of the stock and filled our barns and houses with mud. But we all got together and built everything up; you could hear hammers and saws for miles around, and men workin’ in the sun and women bringing lunch baskets and pails of fresh milk and even the toddlers workin’ as hard as anyone else, sorting out and bringing nails and water. Everythin’ so bright after the storm and flood; the river had poured good fertile soil on the land and we never had such crops like we had that year. It was like a renewal. I remember. It was good.”
Then he laughed wryly. “You don’t see folks like mine any longer. Just fake people. Last summer, my grandson, Roger, the one I told you about, came to stay two months with me and we had a heck of a time. Roger set up one of them roadside stands, and we sold watermelons and squash and corn and cucumbers and fresh cold milk and some of young Missuz Trendall’s pies she made to sell—good pies like Beth made. And some of her real bread. We put a big price on ’em and sold every one, and she needs the money.
“Well, sir, up comes one of them big shiny station wagons they call ’em, with a woman in high heels and a big puffy lot of hair standing on end on her head and a tight short skirt that was a scandal, and two big fat boys older’n Roger, and a scaredy-cat of a husband. Out for a ride in the country, she says, in that hard impudent voice the women have these days, and the bad, greedy look in her eyes, all painted up—the eyes I mean. And she points to the milk and says, ‘Is that dairy?’
“Well, that kind of puzzles me. Where in hell would you get milk except out of a cow in a dairy? But that’s city folk now. Roger says as smooth as silk, ‘Why, ma’am, it’s pasteurized, of course.’ And she says, throwing her hand around at the wrist, ‘That’s not what I mean. Is it dairy?’ I scratched my head, but Roger was sober as a parson and he shakes his head and says, ‘No, ma’am, it was made in a factory.’ And she nods real fierce and knowin’ and says, ‘That’s what I thought. You can’t have it, boys.’
“Before I could say anythin’ she pounds on the watermelons and says are they clean, and Roger says, still sober as a parson, ‘Why, no, ma’am, they didn’t have a bowel movement today.’ And that’s the first time the scaredy-cat of a husband makes a sound. He busts out laughin’, cacklin’ like a hen, and his woman gets mad at Roger, and they all pile in that wagon of theirs and roar off with a stink.
“Fake people. They don’t even know how or where their food grows; maybe they think it grows in factories or on top of skyscrapers. They don’t even care where their water comes from, that precious water which keeps their worthless bodies alive and washed. They think it just comes out of faucets instead of hill streams and rivers and lakes, and it’s all polluted now with people—dirt and factory-dirt and it’s dangerous to drink it, not like my well that’s just like diamond water.
“When I was a boy half the people, or more, lived on the land, and even the city folk were near fields and forests and rivers and lakes and could walk out in the greenness and smell the good earth. But now I hear hardly anyone lives on the land; it’s farmin’-combines now, like factories, and as much real life on them as there is in cans. Farmin’-combines, like the Campbells have. Maybe that’s ‘efficient,’ as they call it. Maybe it’s true we couldn’t feed the country on family farms any longer. But I don’t believe that! We could.
“Anyway, what do city folk these days know about the country, the land? Nothin’. Most of them never saw a cow. One city woman, buying some of our stuff near the road, jumps real scared when she sees old Betsy, our queen cow, and asks me if Betsy’s tame, and I says, followin’ Roger, that no, she was a man-eater, and the fool screamed like a factory whistle and got in her car like a squirrel, and she a three-hundred pounder if I ever saw one. I tell you, Parson, a people that don’t know the land is a dangerous, bad people, a fake people, always ready to scream and panic and run like them lemmings you hear about—I read it in Reader’s Digest—every year a generation of ’em leaves Europe and they swim right out into the sea and drown.
“I heard once, a story, that a scientist asked a lemming why lemmings do that, and the lemming said, ‘Why, sir, we often wonder why the human race don’t do that.’ He sure was right!
“Well, I’m glad for one thing: I lived my life in a world of real people and not fake people with rubber hearts and paper heads and loud noises in their mouths instead of common sense. I lived my life in a time of peace and good neighbors, and love and kindness, and hard work and thrift and firelight and lamplight, and the smell of apple butter cookin’ in big copper kettles under the oak trees, and the sound of church bells rollin’ over the hills and the sound of the river in the summer, singin’ to itself, and the sound of the wind when the winter snows were high. I lived my life with a good wife beside me, and the smell of her good bread bakin’ in the woodstove, and her hymns in the mornin’ and the way she laughed at the colts when they was playin’ in the fields. I lived my life with God and the earth, with livin’ roots in my hands and the winter wheat green as the snow melted, and the orchards full of pink flowers and bees. I lived my life with life and death, and it was all real and round and as full as a cup of milk. And just as sweet and just as life-givin’.
“You know somethin’, Parson? Jesus knew all about the land. Remember His stories about the sower and the seeds, and the lilies of the field, and the vineyards and olive groves, and the fig trees, and the hills and the waters? He was a Countryman, like me. He talked our language to us. We loved Him, in the country. It took the City to kill Him. What do they know about life or He Who was the Life? Nothin’. How could they understand Him and His ways? They couldn’t. They always kill the Life. That’s why they’re so damned dangerous, with their silky sluts they call modern women, and their stupid kids full of sin, and their frightened men. Maybe the government really does need to keep an eye on ’em. Any farmer can tell you that a scared cow is a mighty dangerous beast, worse than any bull or a poison snake. She gets to be a killer, once she’s scared. Just like most people; they’re mostly scared out of their feeble wits more often than not. So maybe the government has to watch them all the time, the way you’d watch crazy people escaped from the asylum.”
He shook his head over and over. “But it wasn’t like that, fifty years ago. It was good. I remember. A man was brave in his mind and his body. He was always, even in the cities, in the sight of grass and trees.
“Why, even death wasn’t so terrible when I was young. Now they call it passing-away, all their silly talk, their scared talk, not bein’ able to face the truth and callin’ truth by prancy words and mealy-mouthed words. We laid our dead next to their fathers and grandfathers, under the trees behind the church, and we knew in our hearts that they wasn’t lost to us. We knew it surely. Their love was all around us, forever, and one day we’d see their faces again and there’d be rejoicin’ in the Golden City. We knew that for sure. And we’d go to their graves with the flowers we grew in our own gardens, big red roses hot with sun, and bunches of daisies and heliotrope, and lilies-of-the-valley, and branches of apple blossoms. We’d sit by the graves and we’d talk to our dead, and the peaceful sun was all around us and the Eternal Love. The graves were our homes, just as our sound houses were; both sheltered us from storms. Oh, we cried all right. It was a parting, and the parting’d last for life. But it wouldn’t last forever. All things are born and bloom and give fruit, and then they die. A countryman knows that. It’s natural, even if it’s sad. We’d cry. But there were the strong arms of our neighbors around us, and the neighbors cryin’, too, and you’d feel comforted for you knew for sure that you were loved and that the dead were loved, too, and always remembered.
“It was that way with me when Beth died, sudden, t
en years ago, between one breath and another. But she smiled at me when I held her, and she kissed me, and then she slept just like a baby in its dad’s arms, at peace. It wasn’t ’til Beth died that things came apart in my mind, and I sort of looked around me and saw this new world for what it was, and I almost died, myself, sick in my heart and soul.”
He drew a deep breath, and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “Funny. I never saw what a terrible place the world’d become, until Beth died. She was like a tall tree trunk that shuts out the sight of a wild animal. And then I saw it. Yes, sir, it made me sick in my heart and soul. I couldn’t tell Al that; he wouldn’t understand. Now, he’s a good boy, a man, fifty-two years old now, and what they call successful, and he loved his parents, he still loves me, but he wouldn’t understand. Sometimes he calls livin’ a ‘rat race,’ and I guess he sometimes remembers the farm, but he never really had a feelin’ for it and that’s why we didn’t try to keep him on the land. He looks older, at fifty-two, than my father looked at eighty, and the look in his eyes is older than death.
“It’s that way with his wife, too, a good fine woman as city women go. She tells me they’re ‘trapped.’ Well, why don’t they get untrapped? Just give up their second house on the shore, and the three cars they have, and the big house in town and the maid, and their country clubs, and make less and live on less. And Clare, that’s her name, says, ‘It wouldn’t be fair to The Children. The Children need and deserve every advantage we can give ’em.’
“What I’d like to know,” said Adam Faith, his brown face flushing with exasperation and pain, “is what children need besides the love of their parents and learnin’ how to do a good day’s work, and havin’ self-respect, and the fear of God in ’em. And learnin’ to hate sin and debt. What do they need with country clubs and private schools, if they have good schools with the kind of teachers Beth was, who knew how to discipline kids and teach them and keep them in order? Why do they need cars, any of them? What’s the matter with their legs? Oh, I could talk about that all day—the kids they have now, the tired-looking, mean-looking, greedy-looking, kids they have. Little girls dressed up like street-sluts; little boys in long pants. Old before they’re even young. But then, they’re not young at all, any of them. And the mothers say, puttin’ their heads on one side and givin’ sweet smiles, ‘Well, the children these days.’ And who the hell made ‘these days’? That’s what I’d like to know. It was the parents! And it’s a black sin on their souls, this ugly, empty, stony, lifeless world, full of noises and fear.
“Now me, I remember how it was when I was young. It was wonderful.” He laughed a little. “Swimmin’ in the cold water, in the spring, when the river was as green as grass and frothin’ along the banks. Seein’ the sun come up, all afire at the edge of the east meadow, like that army with banners the Bible talks about. Hearin’ the silence. And seein’ the sun set over the western hills, so that it looked like bonfires on them, they all black below and the land quiet and shadowy. Gatherin’ the nuts in the fall, with the air all golden and smoky and full of spice near the house, where my mother would be makin’ ketchup. Ridin’ the hills on sleds in the winter, with everything black and white and steel-colored.”
He looked at the blue curtain with startled wonder. “Yes. I remember. It was wonderful. You made me think of all that, Parson, just listenin’ to me. You made me remember a poem Beth read to me, just the night before she died; she was always reading poetry. I don’t remember much of it rightly, just the end:
“‘I have had my world as in my time!’
“I didn’t know what it meant until right now, thanks to you, Parson! It means that I really lived—had a real world, and enjoyed it and loved it, every minute of it, every smell of it, every sound of it, even the grief and the droughts and the bitter work and the pain. ‘I have had my world as in my time.’ I did, a wonderful world, all peace and work and satisfaction. The world don’t owe me a thing. It gave me everything. God gave me everything, a strong body and love and neighbors and a good wife and a fine son—even if Al don’t like the land, he’s a fine boy, God help him.
“Maybe Beth knew she was goin’ to die, had a premonition. She was tryin’ to tell me that she, too, had had her world in her time, and it was complete, and nothin’ owed to her or from her. It was finished, like a careful quilt, patiently sewed, patiently patterned, with pieces gathered over a whole lifetime, red and yellow and green and white and blue, some flowered, some kind of shadowed, some with patterns you couldn’t tell, some from spring, summer, fall, and winter goods—a whole lifetime, put together and always useful, new or old. And every piece of that quilt had a story to tell, and a place to remember, whether it was joyful or full of pain or sadness.
“I tell you, Parson, you’ve made me ashamed! Comin’ here to you, whimperin’ and kind of lost, not knowin’ what to do. Why, I had a wonderful life, a free life! What is any life today compared with what I had? Nothin’ but dust and ashes, as the Good Book says. I tell you, I’m ashamed. Whinin’ about the hard work I did, as if man isn’t made for hard work, the muscles in the right places, the bones just right, the shoulders set and strong. You ought to kick me out, yes, sir.
“But you know what I’m goin’ to do?” He leaned toward the silent curtain eagerly. “I’m goin’ to keep my farm, where my grandfather lived and died and my father after him, and Beth. That’s what I’m goin’ to do, come hell or high water. Somehow I’ll get along. I’ll hire a hand; seems like I haven’t had the heart to work real hard lately, and it ain’t my age. My granddad’s father lived to be ninety-six, and every day in the field to the day he died. It’s just I got discouraged, and got to thinkin’ Al was right, and I should sell up and go to live with him and his family.
“But I’ll do a lot more for his family than that. I’ll keep the farm for my grandson, Roger. He loves it. He’s a countryman at heart, just like me. And it’ll be a place to run to, my farm, when the world gets black and red with death and terror, and I know as sure as God that that’s what’s goin’ to happen, and maybe sooner than most of us think. It’ll be a safe place to come, to hide, to be sheltered from the storm. No matter what man does, the earth remains. It can be burned and broken—but it lives, and then it is green again and full of life.
“No one’s goin’ to have my farm but me and my blood kin. It’s all the world for us. It always was, it always will be. I’ll get along, with the help of God. I remember what it said on that marble tablet in the other room: ‘I can do all things in Him Who strengthens me.’”
Adam Faith stood up, half-smiling, half-weeping, and nodding his head. “Yes, sir, that’s true. I’ll find a way. I’ll keep the land for the day of the abomination of desolation, as that prophet said long ago.
“Somewhere, a man in those days must have a real place to run to, and it won’t be any city or any housin’ development or big glassy government building. It’ll be farmhouses in the country, under the trees. It has to be an honest-to-God place, where men can learn to live again as God and nature intended, and not like those synthetic vegetables they cultivate in laboratories in artificially fertilized water. When that day comes, it won’t be a retreat. It’ll be a return. To where men should live.”
He picked up his hat from the floor near the white marble chair and hesitantly held it in his hands, and he smiled at the blue curtain.
“I wish, Parson, I could do somethin’ special for you, you bein’ so patient and listenin’ to me so long, and showin’ me just what I’ve got to do, and makin’ me remember all the wonderful things I’d forgotten. But I reckon you’ve got all you want. What I could give you wouldn’t be anythin’, would it?
“But you’ve given me back my real world and the sun and the fields again, and all the hope I ever had. Parson, all I can say is, God bless you.”
He did not touch the button which would have revealed the man to him, for he had not read the inscription above it, nor had he approached the curtain. Shyly, he bent his head in fare
well, then stood up as straight as a youth and went out of the room.
SOUL NINE
The Richest Man in Town
“Thou sayest, I am rich and increased
with goods, and have need of nothing;
but knowest not that thou art wretched,
and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked?”
Revelation 3:17
SOUL NINE
It was ridiculous, of course, for him to be here at all. He could not understand what had brought him to this absurd—what was it the proletariat called it?—Sanctuary. That was the name which had become very popular these last few years. Sanctuary! A man got enough “sanctuaries” all through his life, nice and cosy and at the last like a down-lined grave. A lovely, soothing cradle; the transition from cradle to comfortable grave—on a spring mattress, courtesy of expensive undertakers—was hardly perceptible, and hardly differed. From nothingness into nothingness, with “life’s fitful fever” in between, if life these days had any fitful fever at any time, or ever had, except in a few rare instances in history, or in the more frenetic novels. From sleep to sleep, with a few pleasant dreams and a little pleasant activity in between, but nothing disturbing to a well-bred man whose parents and grandparents had had the kindness to lay up a fortune for him.
No One Hears but Him Page 18