Maggie's Farm

by Sherry, John;

  Years ago when we lived in Spain, we were acquainted with a man we called, “Sailor”, a monster of crossed wires whose nickname we had given him in parody of all his mixed-up swash-buckling fancies. Sailor had a little red sports car in which O’Hara, Darroch and I set forth with him one evening for a night of carousing in Malaga. The Sailor had taken too much to drink before our departure and halfway along the road, he became ill and stopped the car on the side of the road. O’Hara said, “For God’s sake, Sailor, if you can’t drive the bloody car, get out from behind the wheel and let someone do it who can.” The Sailor’s reply was plaintive and, it has always seemed to me, curiously pertinent to the human condition: “I can’t ride and I can’t drive,” he moaned and then demanded more alcohol.

  Such was my state when my mystical experience overtook me. While I purposely make light of it, I believe it was genuine. I can’t ride and I can’t drive, said the Sailor and, indeed, in differing degree, so say every mother’s son of us from Jesus Christ to the tenement resident throwing the brick through the store window during the annual summer riots. This is, make no mistake, an agony, a true agony the inability of which to bear is common to all of us. Some of us may do it more frequently than others but we all crumple under that agony from time to time. In the final act of the most dramatic life ever devised, Christ speaks his famous words: My God, why hast though forsaken me? So, in one form or another, do we all. The agony of not being able to drive and not being able to ride becomes unbearable.

  But what if, for reasons manifold and strange, the agony is contained? Depending upon the motivation of such containment, the result can be either madness or vision of a hitherto unencountered clarity. This, it seems to me, is the ground of mystical experience. The mystic supports his agony in the light of some real or imagined positive aim; he allows the fires of ambivalence to roar unchecked within the confines of his own mind. Nothing goes on forever and those fires must exhaust themselves with the very ferocity of their own heat. That strange moment is when the mystical experience occurs; that is when the peace that passeth all understanding descends. It is neither more nor less than the complete and utter cessation of all doubt. It is therefore a momentary triumph of faith, a personal peak among the myriad quantum mechanics of the universe.

  This is what I believe happened to me that night as I sat by the window of our house in Mooresville quaking with fear. There is nothing noble about such an experience, nothing for which credit can be taken. I had simply—and for reasons I still do not wholly understand—contained an agony until the opposing forces which had created it had exhausted themselves, giving birth to a unity of purpose I had not possessed before. My fears vanished and the future, while far from clear, was open. The sensation I experienced that night was the furthest thing in the world from euphoria. It was simply a tremendous, all-enveloping sense of peace. I had made my offer on the Kegley farm and that was that. However it turned out, I would do the best I could. I returned to bed beside my wife and slept as I had not since offering to buy the farm.

  I was not such a fool as to believe that the feeling of peace and happiness would continue. Doubt can cease but doubt can be born again. But peace did persist for an astonishing amount of time. Until the matter was settled, I found myself able to function. I spent two rather happy weeks writing short stories and then the telephone finally rang and it was the real estate man saying that our offer had been accepted. We had bought the farm. I would be a liar if I did not confess that doubt was immediately born again.

  The usual minor delays of closing a property transaction followed. It was actually the end of October before we were able to take formal possession of our farm. The day we did so was a far cry from the placid, summer beauty of our first encounter with the place. A light snow—the first of the season—lay on the ground. Even the first fine flush of ownership could not conceal the dreariness of the prospect.

  Before our arrival, I had arranged that the coal cooking range be removed from the kitchen and replaced by an electric stove for cooking and a kerosene space heater for warmth. Those two things represented the sum total of improvements effected. For the rest, water was still obtained from the cistern via the hand pump in the kitchen; of hot water, there was none except that which was heated on the kitchen stove. The basic bodily functions were taken care of according to time of day or inclination, either by use of a pot or the crazily-tilted two hole privy located twenty-five yards up the hill behind the house. Our few belongings such as a pair of twin beds, the baby’s crib and a chair or two, I had transported to the farm the day before. For chairs, we used the three seats from the station wagon which I had removed from it in order to make room for transport. Oh, it was a charming sight which lay before us; the brothers Collier would have felt at home. We had no long term plan; only a general intention to rehabilitate the house. Thus, we confined our living space to two rooms: the kitchen and the room next to it which we thought of rather grandiosely as the “dining room”. In both rooms the plaster was badly cracked and our combined living and sleeping room was festooned with peeling strips of dreadful water-stained wall paper reminiscent in pattern of aged mattress ticking. But these factors of depression were nothing compared to the odor of the place. How is it possible to describe the smell of a hill-billy farmhouse in which home-cured and canned hog meat have been cooked three times daily since its construction? It is with me still; worse than unpleasant, it was tinged with a rich aroma of defeat. Mixed with it was another, genuinely nasty component which was, as yet, unidentifiable. It was all so unpalatable that for a moment I was tempted to weep. Dorothy, undaunted by dirt, and sensitive as always to my moods, took one look at me and said, “You get the kerosene stove going while I make out a list of groceries we’ll need from Wytheville. Then you go into town and do the shopping while I get this place straightened out a little bit.”

  With the stove lit, and warmth beginning to penetrate the icy rooms, I shamelessly made good my escape. It was all so awful that during the fifteen-minute ride into Wytheville, I had one genuinely serious moment of temptation when I thought of cutting and running. Anything was better than what we were faced with. I would be a gaunt, shame-ridden Somerset Maugham character drinking away his life somewhere east of Suez while people whispered the terrible story of the woman and child he had abandoned on a bleak Virginia hill farm. Junking this dream reluctantly, I proceeded gloomily instead to the local A & P, where I loaded up with many cans of flatulent, non-perishable foods. The purchase of one essential perishable item for the baby depressed me further: milk. How is it possible, I asked myself, for a man to think of himself as a farmer when he is carting home milk from the A & P? Even more morosely, I took the road home with my groceries. I knew it would all look even worse to me at second sight. The ride back to the farm was an even gloomier one than the ride to town.

  And then, when I parked the station wagon on the bend in front of the house and prepared to carry in the groceries, there was a surprise; I took on a small amount of hope. Dusk had come, and a soft light which emerged from the front window of the dining room cast its glow on the light coating of snow that covered the ground. When I pushed open the door leading from the front hall to the dining room, I could scarcely believe my eyes. At the most, I could not have been gone more than an hour and a half. And in that brief span of time, Dorothy, drawing on some mysterious fund of feminine energy and talent, had removed the curse from the Kegley house. To begin with, both kitchen and dining room were now as clean as soap and water and elbow grease could make them. Several cans of Airwick had been brought into play and the sour aroma of old, indifferent cooking was now held in check. The beds were made, some sort of curtains had been rigged and the room was now lighted by two shaded lamps. The baby was cooing away happily in her crib with a bottle, and even Gordo, the goofy Boxer, had assumed an expression of tenuous hope. Over this scene of domestic legerdemain floated the strains of La Traviata playing from the portable phonograph. Dorothy had given the lie to ol
d Edgar Guest in spades; unbelievable as it sounds, that sorry old house had been turned into some kind of home.

  We dined on canned pork and beans and, afterwards, smoked and discussed the priorities of our next day’s effort. The two most pressing were getting some sort of refrigerator and taking some steps toward installing a system of hot and cold running water to serve the kitchen. After determining upon those improvements, we took a flashlight and timidly prowled through the rest of the house. The two rooms in which we were dwelling were paradise compared to the others. In none of the rest was the plaster conceivably salvagable. And, in their cold, unlighted and unheated gloom, the dreadful acrid odor we had noticed earlier seemed more pronounced. We returned soon to the comparative warmth and comfort of our “apartment”; it did not seem wise to tempt the weakening of our spirits by remaining too long in those desolate chambers. But I knew we must make a start upon their rejuvenation without too much delay; their presence was too great a reminder of the impossibility with which we were surrounded. Finally we slept—feeling that if we had failed to triumph over the old house, we had, at least, stayed even with it. Dorothy’s transformation of the two habitable rooms had given me heart and, in the way of women, having given heart to me, she was able to take it back for herself. There was too much to be done to admit of moping; forward momentum had to be established immediately. The necessity within which I hoped to find freedom had pinned me down at last.

  During my school years, I had been a dedicatedly recalcitrant student—one who could be described in the present educational jargon as a “super non-achiever”. After having been dropped from both John Burroughs in St. Louis and my prep school in the east, I had, in fact, only managed to graduate from a St. Louis public high school because of the war’s advent. At the time the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, it was clear that, barring a miracle, I would fail my senior year for the second time. So certain of this was I that a month or so previously, I had taken the necessary exams to qualify for enlistment as an Aviation Cadet in the Army Air Corps. In the Japanese attack, I knew I had my miracle; it was less in the spirit of patriotism that I awaited notification of my acceptance as a cadet than in a spirit of counting on the patriotism of the educational authorities. I suspected that they would get themselves into such a fever of desire for carnage that the first few declared candidates for bloodshed would receive special dispensation. Such, happily enough, turned out to be the case; I was indeed accepted as a cadet and the school authorities allowed me to receive my diploma. In a class of 419 students, my ranking was 419th. In terms of the first shall be last and the last shall be first, I have always been tempted to claim Christian sanction. Fortunately for the position in which Dorothy and I found ourselves now, there had been one glaring inconsistency during my educational record of non-achievement: carpentry. At John Burroughs, we had been required to attend manual training courses for a couple of hours a week and I had found that the neat, unarguable logic of squaring boards and knocking them together had appealed to me. This in turn, had been augmented by hobnobbing with the resident carpenter at my grandfather’s place in Canada. Therefore, while out of the race with Chippendale, I was still a fair, if amateurish, hand with tools when Dorothy and I moved to our farm.

  There were, things. I could not do of course; both fine masonry work and plumbing were beyond me. Fortunately, one of our neighbors about a mile down the road was a jack of all trades who, along with a partner, undertook small contracting jobs ranging from remodelling to the building of houses from scratch. He was also unfailingly kind to Dorothy and me during the ensuing years. I called on him the day after our arrival and he accompanied me back to the farm to have a look at our plumbing problems. They were not excessively complicated. All that was needed was to dismantle the hand pump bringing up the water from the cistern, replace it with a small automatic electric pump and water tank for pressure and then lead the system through an electric water heater and across the kitchen where we would install the sink. He promised to take the job in hand for us just as soon as I had assembled the various needed components and he was as good as his word. Within three days, we had made the gigantic stride forward of having hot and cold running water in the kitchen.

  With that key advance, we had, in a manner of speaking, consolidated our position and were now ready to attack the house. The first step was sheer, simple destruction. Starting with the living room (or to be more precise, what we intended to be the living room), I took a pick axe and drove it into the wall to knock and pry loose the old plaster and lath. As I opened a hole in the wall, the peculiar acrid odor we had found so unpleasant became even more pronounced. Behind the plaster, to a height of about five feet from floor level, the walls were packed with a strange gritty substance rather like very coarse sand. Dorothy and I examined it carefully and came to the totally mistaken conviction that it was mouse guano. Relieved that we had found the source of the smell, we went back to work knocking down the walls. At first, there was in the work that element of satisfaction which accompanies the tearing down of anything old and worn out in order to make room for the new. In the face of the sheer physical unpleasantness of the task, that soon palled. The dust raised by the combination of “mouse” guano and old plaster made it impossible to swing the pick for more than half an hour at a time. We worked with handkerchiefs tied around our faces. After taking down a section of the walls, we would allow the dust to settle for a while and then go back and load the debris onto a wheelbarrow and carry it off. This went on day after day; our rate of progress was discouragingly slow. But it was a question of first things first; we could not proceed with our remodelling until all the rooms in which we were not actually living had been taken down to the bare studs. On warm, sunny days when we could no longer face the dust and stink of plaster removing, we would alternate our labours by chopping cedar saplings from the fields behind the house.

  As this seemingly endless task went on, the question of bringing home milk from the supermarket every two or three days continued to rankle. I forced myself to broach the question of getting a milk cow. Dorothy agreed that this was a sensible plan but she wondered if I knew how to milk a cow. I looked wise and mumbled something about how I thought I could figure it out from having watched the farmer on Amherst Island when I was a kid. She looked dubious but nowhere near as dubious as I felt. As I nerved myself to begin the search for a cow, I quietly began investigations towards getting my hands on some sort of do-it-yourself book about how to milk the animal. I soon discovered there was no such thing; it became crystal clear to me that I was thinking of bridging a gap across which society had thrown no guide lines. Obviously, one was expected either to know how to milk a cow or not milk a cow at all. The only other answer was to arrange for some sort of private tutorial sessions in cow milking, a plan which struck me as being both too ludicrous and too harmful to my pride to contemplate. Nevertheless, the need for a cow both as source of milk and as symbol of my earnestness regarding the farm persisted. Following my usual bent, I backed into the project.

  My casual enquiries finally led me to a very pleasant dealer in livestock. I visited him at his farm. He listened to my requirements and assumed a dubious look.

  “What you want is a family cow the way I see it.”

  “That’s right,” I replied, feeling reassurance at the coupling of the two words.

  “Good family cow’s hard to find,” he said.

  “Oh, I know that,” I said, fervently hoping that he would never manage to find one.

  “I don’t know as I can do much for you, Mr. Sherry, but I’ll surely keep my eye out for a good family cow.”

  I went away happy. Family cows were in short supply therefore honor had been satisfied. Thanking my lucky stars that it was all turning out so well, I stopped by the supermarket for another load of milk.

  To days later, our newly-installed phone, rang. It was the friendly livestock dealer.

  “Mr. Sherry, I got you the prettiest little Jersey cow you ever saw
in your life.”

  “Wonderful news,” I said, trying to conceal the tremor in my voice.

  “When you want I should bring her out to your place?” he asked enthusiastically.

  “Oh, any time that suits you,” I said, trying to match his tone. What I really wanted to say was, “About five years from now”.

  “Listen,” I said, trying to sound calm and casual, “This cow … what I mean to say … this cow … is she … has she …?”

  “You mean, has she come fresh yet?”

  “Yes, that’s what I mean.” I was not sure I really understood the term “fresh”. However, it sounded as if he had told me what I wanted to hear. Fortunately, he clarified his remark.

  “No, she ain’t had her calf yet. Appears to me to be about a week before she’ll come fresh.”

  A week! Quickly, I took heart. Anything could happen in a week:. Atomic war, flood, fire, tornadoes—anything. With a week of grace, surely I would be able to figure a way out of the situation.

  “How’d it be if I brought her out in the morning then?” the livestock dealer asked.

  “Fine,” I said heartily, “I’ll be waiting for you.”

  “What was all that about?” my wife wanted to know.

  “Cow,” I said, a shade paler than usual, “New cow. Coming in the morning.” Feeling very rural, I added, “She won’t come fresh for about a week though.”