On the farm, I trundled along beside my father on his tractor or in his truck, rolling cigarettes for him as he drove. When I turned eight, he started letting me ride my bike to the store on Main Street with a note for the shopkeeper and a dollar to buy him rolling papers and tobacco.
During the evening milking, Buck would crouch beside our muddy Holsteins, who were lowing and locked into their rusty stanchions. Cigarette dangling from his lips, he would attach the milkers to their teats and hop, crouching, from cow to cow. He swore prodigiously at the cows, calling them “the Girls” or “Goddam Filthy Bitches” as they shifted their bovine weight and switched their powerful tails into his face. My job was to hold their manure-encrusted tails as my brother and two older sisters carried full pails into the milk house. In between chores, my sisters and I sang to the rhythm of the milking machines and practiced being cheerleaders or baton twirlers on the long concrete floor of the barn, until Buck barked at us to cut it out, god-damn it.
My father seemed blind to both his behavior and the tough luck consequences that always followed. Every skirmish he waged was lost, but it was somehow always the other guy’s fault. The people running the milk plant didn’t know what they were doing. The superintendent on his latest construction job was an idiot. Our neighbor didn’t know where the property line was and needed a solid punching in the nose.
Buck insisted on seeing himself as a winner, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. When the latest of our broken-down cars finally quit for good and Jane drove us to school events in a dump truck, he pointed out that this goddamn truck was more expensive than a limousine.
Buck expressed contempt for professionals and intellectuals, who he referred to as “eggheads.” He hated the government in every form. His way of expressing affection toward his children was to declare that we were better-looking and smarter than everyone we knew.
Even as I gained a growing awareness that our father was a bigoted gasbag, I was still fascinated by him. He moved through the world with the ease and optimism of someone who knew he would simply move on if things didn’t work out.
Our way of life ended when I was twelve years old, when Buck suddenly moved on from us. He took a construction job up north and only came home on weekends. Charlie, then sixteen, kept milking the cows, along with Walt, our hired man. During the slurry season of a dismal March, Buck simply stopped coming home. We later learned that he had taken up with a local waitress and was living with her in a sad town on the Black River.
Without telling my mother, Buck sold our herd of fifty cows to a nearby dairy. One day I got off the school bus to see the dairy’s cattle trucks pulled up to the barn. They were taking the Girls away. Like all farm kids, I had a complicated relationship with our livestock. I both loved and loathed our Holsteins fiercely, and I knew I would miss them.
My childhood changed in that moment. I was the daughter of someone who’d convinced me that everyone not connected to him was a loser. By leaving, he put us in that category. Jane, always the grounded center of our home life, spent the warming evenings that spring sitting on our front stoop, listening to the peepers on the creek and smoking, as she played a Seals and Crofts record over and over on our stereo. She was quiet and sad. Her sisters—my aunts Lena, Millie, and Jean—pulled in close. I would hear them talking at the kitchen table. I suspected they were giving her money. Buck had taken our mother’s inherited farm and mortgaged it without telling her. Jane was forced to sell everything in our barn—all of the equipment, the milkers and milk pails, and even the leftover hay—in an auction held in our driveway.
I watched from the house as our neighbors and some Amish farmers from Pennsylvania bid on our belongings. Jane told me to go ahead and run into the barn and bring out anything I wanted to keep. I found an old Victrola record player in the barn’s granary and put it in my room. I still have it.
Up until the time my father left her, Jane had been a full-time farm wife and had never held a paying job (after her teenage years). Now she went to work as a typist in an office at nearby Cornell University. My father charged my mother with “cruel and inhuman treatment” as a way to get a quick divorce, but he said he didn’t mean it—it was just the only way to get the goddamn thing done.
Buck mainly kept his distance after that, although from time to time in high school I’d hear that he was surfacing locally. When I was sixteen and performing in a community production of The Music Man, I learned from some of the adult cast members that Buck was drinking with them at the local bowling alley. “He’s a riot!” they said. I just nodded. He was a riot, all right.
My father married Joan, the woman he left my mother for, adopted her children, and then left them three years later. He picked apples in Nova Scotia. He started a business making cattle harnesses. He sold silos. He moved around, eventually establishing himself in a dying factory town on the Allegheny River in Pennsylvania. After Jane and Joan, he married Jeanne, and then Jean, and then Pat. He met women at church, or the community center, and also through mail-order dating services found in the back of farming magazines.
My mother graduated from her role as the passive witness to Buck’s failed ventures. The out-of-focus face in our family photo gained definition. The utility bills got paid. She bought a working car. Being separated from my father’s chaos became her liberation. The year I graduated high school and went to college, Jane quit her typing job and got her undergraduate and graduate degrees at Cornell, later becoming a professor there before retiring from teaching at Ithaca College.
Jane was eventually able to leave our farm, when she unexpectedly inherited a house from our neighbor, John Sager. It happened in 1982, when I was twenty-two. The small Greek Revival style house was 500 yards up the road from our broken-down dairy farm, with its rambling, drafty house and enormous barn, which was in the process of falling down. John was a bachelor farmer. He had never married or had children. He grew his own food and cut his own wood and made a small living as a local “dowser” (also known as a “water witch”), finding wells with forked divining rods. John was well over six feet tall and had huge hands, like a smithy.
When we were growing up, my sisters and I would walk or ride our bikes past John’s house on our way to Main Street several times a day. If he was outside working, he would welcome us into his small, crude kitchen to let us splash water into our cupped hands and drink from his big metal hand pump. John’s house had no indoor plumbing, and he heated it with a wood-burning stove. We were particularly fascinated by his one-hole outhouse, which stood next to his small barn.
John showed us how he held his forked divining rods in his giant hands and how the point of the stick jammed toward the earth and vibrated when he found water. John said he had so much magnetism in his big body that he couldn’t wear a watch; its hands went hay-wire when strapped to his wrist.
Later, when John got very old, my mother would leave casseroles or pies on his porch or invite him down the road for supper. She was looking out for him, in the way that people do.
One night when I was sixteen, John walked down to our house through a blizzard and ate with my mother and me. Our farm had failed and all of my siblings were gone. It was just the two of us now, rattling around in our house. The blizzard was howling, and my mother offered to drive John the short way home after supper. As he was getting his coat and scarf, he said he had something important he wanted to talk to her about. I left the table but decided to eavesdrop from the next room. I heard John say that he had decided to leave his place to my mother when he died. She was stunned. She protested, naming other people she knew he was close to. John said that he wanted her to have his house because he knew she loved it and knew she would keep it.
Jane always told us that her friendship with John began when she was a young child, spending her summers on Main Street (like my daughter Emily, my mother grew up in DC and lived in Freeville during the summers). Jane said that, starting when she was about five, she had a habit of walking down Main S
treet in the mornings and visiting several households on her way to John’s house, which was always her final destination. She would sit with John and his spinster sister, Georgie, on the porch while they read the comics aloud to her. Georgie and John saved their newspapers all through the winter to read to my mother during the summers while they sat and drank their coffee together.
Fifty years later, John told my mother that he and Georgie had decided together to leave their place to her and that their decision was final. Georgie had been gone for decades; this fateful choice was made when Jane was in her twenties.
After John’s death, this inheritance was the lucky good fortune that enabled my mother to finally shed our hundred acres and its complicated memories of my father’s desertion, debt, and failure. She installed plumbing and heating in John’s house and undertook a passionate wallpapering and painting campaign. After surviving married life with Buck, where he kept her off kilter and moving sometimes twice a year (just ahead of the bounced rent check), Jane craved stability. She also seemed to love change—as long as it was confined to the small seven-room house.
Jane carved out a small back bedroom in the unheated upstairs of the house, and Emily and I would stay there, bundled under a thick layer of quilts during our Christmas visits. Even after I spent my divorce money on my own house on Main Street, Jane’s sweet house remained our daily destination.
Occasionally during my visits home from whatever city I was living in, my mother and I would see an unfamiliar vehicle cruising slowly down the street as we sat on her porch drinking coffee. Over the years my father drove through Freeville in a painted-over laundry van, an army jeep, a lime-green International pickup truck, and a Cadillac. If he saw my mother’s car in the driveway, Buck would pop in for a cup of coffee. I have a small collection of homemade business cards he presented over the years for his harness business, his silo selling, and his home-bottled honey. Jane’s house in Freeville seemed to be on the outer ring of his sales territory.
During his visits, Buck’s attention span lasted for the length of one cup of coffee. He would spill out his line of malarkey about whatever nonsense he was up to, and then he’d leap up suddenly and leave.
Jane often said that if Buck hadn’t left her, she would have landed in a trailer somewhere in the hills and would still be waiting for him to come home. I can only wonder about a parallel life with my father in it. I only know about the life without. Both of my parents provided stellar examples to me about what I wanted for my own life. I wanted to be the tolerant and forgiving mother Jane had been to me, and I wanted to avoid any Buck-like men at all costs.
READING GROUP GUIDE FOR THE MIGHTY QUEENS OF FREEVILLE
1. Amy writes with affection and a strong sense of place about her small hometown. What does “home” signify to her and how important is it to her sense of self? What does it signify to you?
2. Amy had a challenging relationship with her father. Men, in general, seem to have let her down. Were you disappointed that she never confronted the men who fell short of her expectations? Is it possible to have an authentic relationship with family members if you never confront them for bad behavior?
3. Dickinson describes wanting her husband, after she has separated from him, “to hurry up and get over leaving me and come back so that I could forgive him for leaving” (17). Why do you think she was so willing to forgive him? Have you ever been eager to forgive someone in a situation where you feel that you shouldn’t?
4. As soon as her divorce is complete, Amy decides to leave behind the cosmopolitan lifestyle she had been living in New York City, London, and Washington DC and move back to her small hometown of Freeville, New York, with her daughter. What attracts her to Freeville as an adult and as a mother? Does she find what she expects?
5. Amy devotes a chapter to her hometown church. Did her expression of her Christian faith surprise you? What role does faith play in the context of her story?
6. What does it mean to Dickinson to be a single mother? Do you think her approach to being a single mother is informed by her own mother and her two aunts—all of whom raised children on their own? How?
7. Amy’s chapter about the life (and death) of her enormous house cat, Pumpkin, is surprisingly moving. What does the relationship mean to Amy and why does Pumpkin’s death resonate so much for her?
8. Amy admits that she makes lots of mistakes. What are some of the mistakes and misadventures in her story? What role do these episodes have in her success?
9. Who are the Mighty Queens in Dickinson’s family, and what does Dickinson learn from them?
10. Reflecting on her divorce, Dickinson says it “clarified so much for me,” helping her to stop worrying about her career even as she started to achieve major career successes. Have you ever confronted a challenge that ended up helping you to realize your dreams as you overcame it?
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The Mighty Queens of Freeville Page 19