“As you know, I’ve got no son of my own to leave the farm to. What I have got is one daughter still unmarried. As far as I’m concerned, she’s yours if you want her.”
“But she doesn’t like me.”
“What are you saying! Of course she likes you.”
“I don’t mean she dislikes me. But she doesn’t like me.”
“Don’t I know her? Do I know this old palm of mine? My own daughter? I know her better than she knows herself. I tell you she likes you.”
“Then she certainly doesn’t show it.”
“You don’t understand women. They’re supposed to play hard to get. Would you want one who threw herself at you? You appreciate them more if you have to overcome some resistance. They’re clever creatures and they know that. They’re like horses: they have to be broken. They shy from you at first and dash all over the lot, but their curiosity about you is aroused and in time they come to your whistle and nuzzle you as you slip the halter over their heads. To wear them down you have to keep after them. They’ll buck and throw you when you first try to mount them but they accept your weight after a while. Well, I took that a little further than I meant to, but my point is made. Keep after her, boy. Faint heart never won fair lady. Maybe you don’t like her enough?”
“Oh, yes, I do. She’s attractive. She’s bright. Educated. Has an agreeable disposition. Everything a man could want in a wife.”
“And with her comes the farm. Ten thousand trees! Three hundred and twenty acres! A kingdom all your own! And more than that: Molly and me. You have to think of that, too. Sometimes, you know, in-laws don’t get along so well—especially when they live under the same roof. In fact, there are people who, although they want their daughter to marry, resent the man who takes her from them. That’s contrary; still, it’s human nature for you. But we would welcome you into the family. You have my blessing. And I can speak for Molly, too. Now it’s up to you, son. She’s just waiting for you to make known your intentions. Take my word.”
One variety of apple, just one, the Cortland, consistently twinned: two stems from a common bud, the identical fruit hanging cheek by cheek. He and his Janet were a pair of Cortlands. Neither of them could think a thought without the other knowing it. She would understand what was expected of her now. Her sisters having married to their father’s disappointment, it was up to her to put things right. Child of her parents’ old age, plainly the last, she had been petted by all the family, given her own way in everything. She was deeply in their debt. The time had come for her to discharge that debt.
“Well, Janet, I suppose you’ll be thinking of getting married before long now.” Her sister Doris’s wedding was barely over before he said that to her.
“I’m not in any hurry,” she said.
But he was. He was still a long way from the finish line, but his face as he shaved every morning (this was before he broke his left arm) told him that he was in the home stretch. Janet must be spurred.
The tombstone cutter he went to was the son, maybe the grandson, of the one with whom he had last dealt. That occasion was the burial of his mother. The Bennetts were a long-lived clan. In their old family graveyard on the farm lay many who had lasted into their nineties. And that was before the miracles of modern medicine. An apple a day …
The stonecutter was putting the finishing touches to a job; be right with him. He wore goggles and over his nose and mouth a mask. Through a rubber stencil glued to the face of the stone he was carving the last digit in the date of some person’s death. He did it not with a hammer and chisel but with a jet of fine metal pellets propelled by an airbrush like the charge of a shotgun. To protect himself from their rebound he wore a blacksmith’s leather apron. He now finished his job, pushed up his goggles and pulled down his mask, peeled off the stencil, ran his forefinger over the engraving and gave a nod of approval.
When he learned that the stone his customer wanted to order was one for himself and his wife the mason commended his good sense and his consideration for his heirs. It was so right and yet so rare. Knowing his true motive, and protected by his heritage of longevity, he enjoyed the man’s misplaced admiration for what he took to be his foresight.
“I can’t think of a more important decision for people to make for themselves, nor one more personal. Yet most of them can’t bring themselves to do it. And that’s foolish because, let’s face it, the time is coming—which of us knows when?—and the sensible thing is to do it while you can, the way you want it done, not leave it to your survivors. I’ve seen them here almost come to blows over what Mom or Pop would have liked. Children all have different notions one from another about their parents, and nothing brings it out like that last decision. In the end, with the best intentions in the world, they may choose something you wouldn’t think suitable for you at all, and whatever it is you’re the one who’s going to have to live with it, so to speak, ‘in perpetuity,’ as we say.”
They were now outdoors where the firm’s wares were displayed, a selection of stones, clean-faced, innocent of inscription, like an orphanage standing at inspection for a choice of adoption and the bestowal of a name.
“What I want is simple,” he said. “A single stone for my wife and myself. Here. I’ve written it down. It’s to read, ‘Seth. Molly.’ Underneath each name the years of birth and death. Then this epitaph: ‘Comfort me with apples …’”
“With, of course, the family name. I mention that because we charge by the letter.”
“That won’t be necessary. Anyone who sees it will know.”
“Well, I’ll put your information, your vital statistics, as we say, on file, and the stone will be carved and put in place after the burial of whichever of you survives the other.”
“I’d like to have it in place by this time next week.”
“While both of you are still alive?”
“That’s why I’m buying it now.”
“Burial is difficult when the stone is already in place. The backhoe disturbs it.”
“In this case there will be little disturbance. We’re going to be cremated.”
They would have been even if the modern sanitary code had not prescribed it in cases of burial in private family graveyards. He had no intention of spending his last night aboveground on that marble slab in his son-in-law’s basement.
“Is it to go in the Protestant cemetery or the Catholic?”
“Neither.”
The family graveyard lay out of sight of the house at a distance from it of a hundred yards. In it were buried three generations of Bennetts—with space remaining for several more, descendants to come of that son-in-law, the orchardman, whom he was bent on having. All his life long he had laid flowers on those graves, had mowed and weeded and raked among them, had straightened their headstones after the heavings of the frost. He had lived to an age that made even those of his dead whom he remembered remote in time from him. Of the others he had forgotten just what the kinship to him of many of them was.
But the knowledge was comforting that all were his, Bennetts by birth or grafted onto the stock, tenants of his domain. Comforting, too, was the old-fashioned quaintness of their headstones: weather-worn, mossy tablets of white marble, some with inscriptions so effaced by time and the elements as to be nearly indecipherable, others with their stilted epitaphs and archaic spelling, they made death seem like something that used to happen to people.
The transaction was concluded with, “Mr. Bennett, sir, we appreciate your patronage, and” pointing with his pencil first to the blank space following the year of Seth’s birth, and the dash following that, then to Molly’s, “may it be a long time before I’m called on to fill in those.”
He could not resist saying, “Hold on, young fellow. When that time comes you may not be here yourself.”
“How well I know! But if I’m not somebody will be.”
The mason and his crew with their crane and backhoe arrived on the worksite after Janet went off to her job in the morning and w
ere finished and gone by the time she got home in the evening. Thus she never knew the stone was there until he showed it to her.
He was pleased with his production. The setting: soil sacred to her family, its shrine, its collective crypt. The cast: all her ancestors, born here, buried here, an unbroken line of succession, inheritance. She could not but feel their eloquent silence, their call, their claim on her. Each marble marker was the tablet of the law, proclaiming her identity, her duty. And now this latest one, her parents’, with its impending dates, its Biblical injunction, passed on the torch to her. From out of the corner of his eye he slyly studied its effect.
It was quick in coming.
“Oh, Father!” she cried, and burst into tears.
She had never called him “Father” before, always “Papa,” and the unaccustomed name distanced him from himself, made him feel as though he was being spoken of in the third person, posthumously.
She flung herself, sobbing, into his arms.
Shaken, shamed, he said, patting her back, “Now, now. I’m not under there yet,” although he could almost feel the weight upon him of that granite block, which stared at him over her heaving shoulder. It now seemed to him the worst of bad jokes at his own expense, and there it would sit to mock him with that blank space waiting to be filled in. “It’s just the sensible thing to do. Not leave it to you and your sisters. The three of you might not agree on what we would have wanted.”
She was supposed to have said that she would carry on her parents’ lives, marry Pete and keep the farm in the family. If not on the spot then soon afterwards. She did neither, despite her father’s urging Pete to “strike while the iron is hot.” If she noticed them at all, she found Pete’s timid attentions out of place at a time when she was saddened by the prospect of her parents’ deaths.
With the elasticity of youth, Janet recovered from the scare he had given her, and she cheered him by pointing out to him how long-lived their family was. So, while encouraging Pete in his slow suit, he plotted to help him with a different tack, a more immediate threat, a further variation upon the theme of “it’s later than you think.” Confident of winning, he was enjoying this game he and Janet were playing. He was pleased with himself and with her. She was calling his bluff. That baby girl of his, she was his match—almost.
The nearby town could expand in just three directions, for it was bounded on the west by the Hudson River. It was spreading rapidly as commuting distance to New York extended ever northward. The Hudson was tidal, and a tide of workers now flowed with it down to the city in the morning and back up in the evening. The local acreage was becoming too valuable to farm, the inducement to the natives to parcel and sell theirs too tempting to withstand. Dairy herds had been auctioned off, orchards uprooted, pastures paved over. What had been a land of milk and honey (bees were the orchardman’s best friends: they pollinated his blossoms) had been converted into shopping plazas and developments. Now it was like a game of Monopoly, houses on every square. In all the area the old Bennett place was the largest tract remaining in agriculture, and the neighbors wanted it kept that way. It had taken on a status somewhat akin to a preserve, a park, a public trust.
To get a permit to subdivide and develop his land application must be made to the village planning board for a variance in the zoning code. A public hearing would be held. It would be reported in the local paper. There was little doubt that he would get his permit; he could hardly be denied what so many had been granted. But just because so many had, and so few places remained unspoiled, there would be opposition. It would come mostly from the city people, recent transplants, keen on keeping things as they were. This he expected, but he was not prepared for the volume. On the night of the meeting there was such a turnout that the nearest parking place to the village hall he could find was three blocks away. Good! Let Janet see how widespread was the opposition to the move she was forcing him to consider.
He was not obliged to be present at the hearing. He wanted to be, to enjoy the hostility he had stirred up. He entered the hall feeling as unpopular as an out-of-town fighter about to enter the ring with the local champion. In the community where he was the fourth generation of his family he had become an outcast. What none of these people knew was that he had no intention of doing what he was there to get permission to do. On the contrary. Getting the permission was his way of keeping it from happening.
The concerns expressed by the citizens interested were civic-minded, concerns for the common good. They worried about the additional tax burden for schools and teachers and buses on the elderly, the pensionnaires, the young couples just starting out and having a hard enough time already making ends meet. They feared for the safety of children on the busier roads. Those roads would have to be patrolled more, perhaps widened as well, would certainly require more upkeep, and all that too would mean higher taxes for those least able to afford them. The county landfill was already full to overflowing. There was the threat to the purity of the aquifer with so many more septic systems. The added strain on the volunteer fire department, the rescue squad, the already overcrowded county hospital. Tourism would suffer from the reduction in the deer herd, still one of the area’s attractions. Hotel keepers, restaurant owners, sporting goods stores, filling stations, all would feel the pinch if the trend represented by this application for a variance in the zoning code were allowed to continue unchecked. A line must be drawn somewhere.
One person present took these community concerns and alarms seriously. He. Those who mouthed them were concerned for one thing: their pocketbooks, the devaluation of their properties. He didn’t blame them. He took it seriously too. If only they knew that he was their masked champion, fighting their fight! Let them raise every objection—the heavier the burden on Janet’s conscience. The courtship of that latter-day John Alden, Pete Jeffers, was being won for him in a town meeting, not by a denial of his future father-in-law’s petition to break up the family farm but by the granting of it. A weapon like a plastic pistol: harmless but scary-looking.
Throughout the meeting he sat silent. He could not take the floor and say, “I agree with everything you’ve said. Tell it to that daughter of mine.”
However, not all were against him that evening. There were two factions. Those against him, by far the more numerous of the two, were the ones who were there by virtue of other farmers’ having done what he was asking permission to do, subdivide and develop his land. These were the city people. They had been city people and to the natives they always would be city people. A stranger could have distinguished one side from the other on sight. The city people dressed country casual, the country folks in their city best for the occasion. The city people had moved to the country to escape the city. Now they were like immigrants who passed anti-immigration laws to keep out more like themselves. These new locals would have erected, running about down the middle of Poughkeepsie, a Berlin Wall if they could.
Those for him were the few remaining holdout farmers. The newcomers wanted to legislate that they go on being farmers and thus preserve for them the charm and tranquillity of the countryside. The farmers didn’t give a damn about the charm and tranquillity of the countryside. They wanted to go on being farmers, although it got harder all the time, and the reason it did was the steady invasion of these outsiders driving up the cost of everything, but be damned if they were going to be told what they could and could not do with their property by a bunch of Johnny-come-latelies from downstate.
After a period of delay sufficiently long to make it look as if consideration had been given to the opposition before a decision was reached, his application for a zoning variance was approved by the village planning board. Now Janet would come to her senses, marry Pete, and keep the farm in the family. It was not that he disbelieved in the power of love, or the power of the absence of it, it was rather that he could not understand how it could prevail over ten thousand apple trees and three hundred and twenty acres of land that had been her family’s for four generation
s, she the fifth.
“All right,” said the real estate agent, humoring the old fellow. “If you insist we’ll list it first as a farm. I can see how for sentimental reasons you might want to try to keep it intact. Been in the family for generations and all that. But it’s a good thing you’ve got that zoning variance up your sleeve because you know as well as I do what’s happening to farm acreage in this area.”
He winced, as he always did, at the expression “farm acreage.” It made land seem like something divisible into small parcels.
“And the young people don’t want to farm anymore.”
“My boy Pete here does.”
“Then he’s one of a kind.”
“You can say that again!”
“Has Pete got the wherewithal to buy you out? Like I say, we’ll offer it for a while as a farm. But, believe me, a developer is the only buyer you’re going to find—and you’ll have no trouble finding one of those. They’ve all had their eye on this property for years. Even had aerial photographs taken of it. Prime building land. Highly desirable homesites. Got a view of the Catskills from any plot on the place, once it’s cleared. I’ve had several ask me to approach you with an offer, and they’ve gone up with each and every one. You can cry all the way to the bank.”
It was just what he wanted to hear. Or wanted Janet to hear. Which was why he had invited the agent to stay for supper, unless his wife was expecting him. He was not married.
“And afterwards,” the man said, “you can move down to Florida and lie in the sun all day long. No more spraying bugs through the night. No more worries over the weather. You’ve earned your rest.”
“I don’t speak Spanish,” he said. “Or Yiddish.”
Janet refilled their guest’s plate. He had a bachelor’s appreciation of good home cooking, and he had walked up a hearty appetite today. She had shown him over the property, at her father’s request. The place had been surveyed, by link and chain, some 200 years ago. That had always been good enough, until now. Never in all that while had there been a dispute over the lines between the Bennetts and any of their adjoining neighbors. Having Janet pace off the boundaries would bring home to her as nothing else had the threat of losing it. Now the man attacked his second helpings no less enthusiastically than the first. But the elder Bennetts and Pete pushed away their unfinished plates.
September Song Page 4