Farmers are dreamers of the first order. The most romantic of dreamers. Feet in the soil, head in the clouds, backs bent even in today’s tractors. They are most wishful of all of those who have inherited the earth as their legacy and work with their bodies as well as their minds. Who else depends so strongly on the unknown and goodwill of the unexpected as a farmer does? The impending birth of calves inspires dreams of the calf being the right calf. And growing into being the right cow. The planting, the haying, even the milking all being controlled by forces within the realm of knowledge and experience and yet controlled by a force far stronger than one can even begin to imagine. There are years when only steadfast grim concentration can carry one’s step to the barn. And days when all goes so well that life is as close to perfection as is possible on this earth.
We are living in the center of a moment of great change. I’ve been reading history of late. With each such moment in history those living it believe that their moment is the most important and significant and dangerous. It then falls into place, along with all the others. As shall ours. There was an announcement a short time ago to expect another attack against our country. I called my children and my brother asking them to come here, in the hope that the countryside would be safe. They would not come. I told them how much I loved them. I played the Chopin piano sonatas that have been the only music that consoles me these days. Then I walked to the sink to wash dishes.
This could be my last day on earth, I thought. How many people in the passage of time have thought such a thought? And played their favorite music or sang their most favorite song while going about their appointed task. Because that was the only thing to do. And then faced their death. In all of the time that man has inhabited the earth, it has happened over and over again.
The rules for living are being rewritten on the farm. Some are new, but most are the same. Only now wearing quotation marks or exclamation points. Put the worst of the job to your back. Face only that which you have already accomplished. One cardinal rule: rather than shoveling the barn face forward, staring at the vast stretch before me, I turn my back to it and keep widening the place by the door, to see what is done rather than what is not.
And so I started cleaning the carriage house. In part, to rehouse the chickens for the winter. In part, to reorder the hay that was stacked in the loft. In part, in case I choose to use it for the new lambs when they outgrow the apple crate. The ground floor is awful. The loft, merely bad. With my back to the worst of it, I faced a wall and started stacking hay against it. I forked the loose hay into a manageable pile and bagged droppings from the chickens roosting on the rafters and the lambs and kid goats who shared the space from time to time. An hour, maybe two, away from being done. The chicken coop already has the nesting boxes clean and full of fluffy hay. Two Barred Plymouth Rocks have found their way back inside. Joy. Do I go so far as to clean the windows? I just might. I moved the pile of boards that I’ve been saving with which to make a box bed for the barn to sleep in when it is not possible to return to the house. And there were five eight-foot boards I don’t remember buying. Planed on one side, rough on the other. Ten inches wide. I have wanted, for six years now, another set of bookshelves in the library. Ten inches wide.
Their presence is not yet a reward for cleaning the carriage house, because the carriage house is not clean. Their presence is about something else. A statement of fact. Of presence. Of being. Not a lesson to be learned. Lessons do not appeal to me. They have an artificial significance that fails to impress me for very long. But those long boards planed on one side, ten inches wide, have their own meaning. That pleases this Yankee farmer to no end.
LADY AGATHA VAN DER HORN
ON A SCALE of one to ten, today measured a stout nine and three quarters on the misery quotient on the farm. Lady Agatha Van der Horn, red Jersey heifer, due to freshen this winter, pride of my heart, had disappeared, seemingly forever. Yesterday I realized I hadn’t seen her since the evening before, or had it been the evening before that? I knew she had been in my next-door neighbor’s cow path, a path unfrequented by any cow but mine for the past forty years. Nonetheless easily identifiable.
Time blends into itself, sometimes stretching to a vertical infinity in these hills and valleys. I started to keep an eye out for her. By late afternoon, I began to worry. She often turns up on the front lawn after breakfasting down the road. I went to the neighbor’s cow path and found evidence of her having been there by the gate next to the road for some time. I followed her tracks to the bridge across the brook and took the most logical and straightforward route, as cows have a tendency to a logic not too dissimilar from that of human beings, a nice mowed path to my next-but-one neighbor’s where she had been known to go. Drop apples on the lawn accounted for her predilection.
It is lovely there on the far side of the brook. I walked on to the back of Nina’s yard. It is a glade of sorts, beautifully balanced plantings and nicely mowed lawn. No signs of the heifer having been recently in the vicinity. Evidences of cows’ presences are usually unmistakable. The walk back was beautiful. The leaves are gone from the trees and I could see across the pond the white house next door as well as my farm from a fresh perspective.
Looking for a missing cow is, classically, one of a farmer’s most deeply felt experiences. Looking for sheep is another matter entirely. Cows are a serious find. Sheep, well, sheep flock; therefore they are usually too numerous to miss. A single cow can sometimes blend into the landscape with the inherited instinct and inbred knowledge of the hunted. A missing cow usually wants to be a missing cow.
Barn boots have a distinctive sound. They have three separate notes as they hit the ground twice with each step and the foot once. The sound has been described as kar rum ph. Kar rum ph. My boots don’t say kar rum ph. They say something else. What that something else is, exactly, eludes me. But speak they do, and so, while looking for Lady Agatha was making me feel increasingly sick at heart, the sound of those boots made me feel a part of a long line of people who have walked these hills for miles looking for a missing cow. I was in good company. It helped. But the sick feeling became increasingly overwhelming.
By the time evening was descending, I gave up and returned home. I was in a state I had experienced only when my first cows, Lady Francesca Cavadish and Dame Millicent Fallansbee, both wandering together, had disappeared. It is a special and distinctive kind of misery that extends from the center of the throat to the pit of the stomach. Dull. Insistent. As wide as it is deep. Despair tinged with hopelessness coated with guilt. Why, oh why, didn’t I bring her in when I saw her last? Why did I think she’d come home by herself? The fact that she always did no longer mattered. This very special kind of misery is a heavy one. No tossing or turning all night here. No restless walking and falling back to sleep, just a heavy weight on the neck, chest, and stomach. It took hours of motionless staring into the darkness to fall asleep.
I woke up late, fully intending first to make the fires and have breakfast before going out to look once more for the cow, and proceeded instead to pull on a jacket and immediately run outside. I looked everywhere. In the barnyard, Lady Annabella Pilkingston, lead cow, was bellowing insistently. There was no answering bellow. Not that Lady Agatha ever answers. She is the least vocal cow I have ever owned.
Ernest pulled into the driveway. I jumped into the truck. We drove up and down the roads stopping at every farm that has cows. “Have you seen my cow?” Our eyes searched the hillsides. No manure to be seen on the roads. No errant heifer under an apple tree. Ernest looked to the left. I looked to the right. No sign of a cow.
“She couldn’t have gone this far,” he kept saying.
“My other cows have,” I replied, my voice straining to find its way past the choking feeling around my throat.
We pulled into Buel’s farm. I asked Ralph Buel had he seen my Jersey heifer. Ernest rolled down the window. “It isn’t a Jersey. It’s a red cow,” he said.
“What are you talking ab
out?” I shrieked above the sound of the radio, the static, and the truck’s engine.
“It doesn’t look like any Jersey I’ve ever seen,” pronounced seventy years of cowmanship. “Jerseys are brown. This is a red cow you want. If you tell it is a Jersey, no one will know what you’re talking about.”
“She came from Wayne Bryden’s farm. He had Jerseys, only Jerseys. With papers!” I yelled. All sense of the proper courtesy between myself and the people who work for me was thrust aside by fear and frustration. I didn’t even try to score on the sore point of the distinction between heifers and cows. I’ve often been derided for referring to my animals by the incorrect designation. Ernest will always admonish me when I call Lady Agatha, all thousand pounds of her, equipped with horns big enough to defeat a tank, a cow. “She’s a heifer until she freshens,” he’ll say. “And then she’s a first-calf heifer. There’s some who will still call her a heifer, even then. A second-calf heifer. Why, there’s some that never even get a chance to be a called cow. They just stay on being a heifer. A third-calf heifer.”
I insisted we drive the roads. “Just keep on going,” I said.
“She isn’t here,” he replied. “If she were around she’d of come home,” he said comfortingly, as all helping hands are wont to do.
“Are you saying someone took her?” I shouted.
“No, I am not saying anything,” he replied.
“Right. Keep on driving. My other cows went here, once, up this road and around the bend.”
I made him drive me everywhere a cow of mine has been known to go, except for Pete Hamilton’s farm. I knew I’d never be believed that my cows had turned up there, eight miles from my farm as the crow flies.
We arrived home after an hour’s search to hear Lady Annabella still bellowing in the barnyard. She had been locked in last night with her calf and all the sheep and the buck goat. I lock the barn door and latch the barnyard gates every evening after bringing the flock in for the night. Most of the sheep and both cows were in the barnyard eating hay. The only ones on pasture were the twenty or so who figured out how to scale a wall where once was a gate. My handyman kept repeating if she were around she’d have turned up by now. “Do you mean someone’s taken her or that the coyotes have gotten her?” I asked.
“No, I’m not saying that.”
“Then what are you saying?”
“I’m not saying anything.”
I started to look for the tire tracks near the gate where I had last seen her, tried to remember if I had seen any cattle trucks come by that day, and broke down and asked what days were the sale days at the local auction. “Friday for calves and beefers. Monday’s for heifers and cows.” It was Saturday. She’d been last seen on Thursday evening. It became harder and harder to breathe. I tried to remember how long it took me to get over losing the last cow, the one that became blended into Tom Connelly’s herd next door. No comfort there. I thought of calling the sheriff to ask if there could be a lookout for my heifer in the sale barn on Monday.
Ernest was to stay and work for another hour or two. It was hard to remember what else I needed done on this farm. All I could think of was the cow. But the cow getting out reminded me of what else is in the habit of getting out, and I asked him to fix the holes in the indoor chicken coop upstairs in the carriage house. The escape hatches they had made for themselves last spring had best be fixed before I enclose the chickens for the winter. He went out to the carriage house and on upstairs. I went down to the barn and opened the north side door to let the sheep out for the afternoon. I looked inside on the off chance Lady Agatha was there. No cow, only sheep. I went on through. Only Lady Annabella and her unnamed veal calf in the barnyard. I returned to the carriage house. Ernest said, “Look out the window. There’s something unfamiliar in the barnyard.” I looked. I counted. Three cows: Lady Annabella, the unnamed calf, and the bred heifer, Lady Agatha. She had come home. “She was always in there,” said the voice of authority.
“Impossible. Not for three days. How could she have stayed in all of this time without me seeing her?”
He repeated, “She was always in there.”
“Cows can open latches but they can’t shut them behind themselves,” I said.
I returned to the carriage house to witness the chicken coop being reinforced against the inevitable eventuality of an unarmed, or should I say unwinged, escape and looked out of the window. On the far hillside I saw the forward advance of a great line of sheep, marching single file on the diagonal up the hilltop, the farthest corner where my woodlot meets the pasture, at the juncture of a lovely old apple tree still boasting of a score or more of yellow apples and a red-berry-covered barberry bush. Between the tree and the bush, visually obscured by the latter, was a break in the wall. The line fence. Easily breached.
“Come on,” I said, or rather shouted from the carriage house window with all of the newly found power from being able to breathe once more. The lead sheep stopped and looked toward me. The others, immediately behind, turned their heads and stopped, unanimous in indecision. The rear guard approached, single file, narrowing the ranks. And then, as one, they turned their faces from me and continued on their way up the hill to the line fence. They knew I was too far away to exert any serious influence on them. Suddenly, the calf appeared to join the end of the procession. Next came my donkey, Giuseppe Patrick Nunzio MacGuire, followed by a red exclamation mark, last in line, none other than Lady Agatha Van der Horn, bred heifer, soon to be first-calf heifer.
I tore down the carriage house steps, raced across the pastures, not even stopping to latch the gates, calling, “Cahm ahn, cahm ahn” as I ran. They didn’t even glance in my direction. The calf, donkey, and heifer quickened their pace. Lady Annabella was the only one left behind. I stumbled across the stone bridgeway crossing the brook, and ran up the side hill. They disappeared from view. Ninety-nine sheep, one donkey, one calf, and Lady Agatha Van der Horn. I called my neighbors, the ones with the apples on their lawn. “Seen any sheep?” I asked.
“No,” he replied.
“Well, my whole farm has headed your way. Could you please call me when they get there and I’ll come and get them? Again.”
THE SIMPLE LIFE
THE BIRD, black, still, its red wings tucked neatly to its sides, rested on a branch of Michaelmas daisy. Ivory colored. Starlight in the afternoon. Its weight barely bending the tall stem. Silent. Motionless. I saw it. It heard me. It did not move. I waited. It stayed.
This morning, from the dining room windows, I saw another bird. Dark. Almost black. As large as the red-winged blackbird was small. It sat, quite comfortably, on the massive post supporting the fence around the marsh on the far side of the brook. I walked, with deliberate speed, toward it. Through the gate separating lawn from meadow. Across the pasture. Through still another gate. Across the little bridge. The vulture spread its wings and, slowly airborne, flew away. Soon others came. The air was laden with their massive wings. Beautiful, each one of them, separately and together, one by one finding, each a current on which to glide. Mysterious. Without apparent order. Even more of them covered the ground. Black shapes. Their majesty gone. They are the tidiers of the earth, the forest, the pasture. When they left, not even a drop of blood remained on the ribs of the sheep the coyotes had killed early this morning.
There is no reasonable balance to the life here. Sometimes there is harmony. And sometimes less than that. But rare is a balanced moment. Farming is the most intense thing I have ever done in a most intensely lived life. Sometimes I think I shall never stop crying. And sometimes the silence is so perfect it seems as if it shall last forever. When the day goes well, it holds the most peaceful silence of all, a stillness so absolute it can be touched only by God. And when it does not go well, disquietude fills the corners of the heart and turns the mind to shades of gray.
This is not the simple life. It is even more complex than I who live it can grasp. It includes the tiny insects that run across this page as I write. Near
ly invisible were it not for the lamp that shines down on them. Early evening. I kill some of them. I’m not certain what kind of insects they are but know I don’t want them here. And yet I somehow cannot touch the one that most tempts my hand, following the ink as it crosses the page.
Wind carrying rain makes sails of the enormous pines around the house. I wait for the coyotes across the valley to begin their evening call. They are silent still. Perhaps nothing shall die tonight. Except the tiny insects that I shall feed to the fluffy yellow baby chick that lives in a coffee can under the lamp on the kitchen table. I am teaching it to hunt. It knows, however, that I am not its mother. It sits reluctantly between my hands, chirping frantically to be released, and yet it will perch with enthusiasm on my shoulder. I bend to encourage it to walk back onto the kitchen table, but it doesn’t want to leave the soft flannel of my shirt. This is not the simple life.
THE SWEET TIME
IT IS A raw, nasty, gray, snow-blackened meltdown kind of miserable day that I have chosen to be my day of renewed hope. It is only on this kind of day that hope can truly be renewed, for why should one need even to consider searching for hope on other kinds of days?
A lamb sits in my lap. The nipple from a bottle of milk is in his mouth. He is only beginning to learn to drink from it, having been fed through a stomach tube for the first two days of his life. Lambs are enchanting creatures when new. This little one is destined to become a very big sheep. He is as tall and long and has a far bigger head than a two-week-old twin ram that also is in the kitchen. He is the kind I like the best. Or so I think at the moment. The kind that gives me the most pleasure to look at, square and chunky and curly of fleece. A blocky little thing and looks like a living, breathing, moving, and occasionally bottle-drinking doll. Relaxed and peaceful on my lap, he takes a sip or two from the bottle. He knows I am the source to assuage the empty rattling in the last of his four stomachs and scrambled around my feet as I entered the kitchen this morning. But while he has put his nose into the milk in the cat’s dish, he hasn’t begun to associate sucking on the bottle with filling his belly. He is a big lamb for his two days on earth, and I don’t want to risk tube feeding him again for fear of injuring him should he struggle. What to do?
Sylvia's Farm Page 21