Maggie's Farm

by Sherry, John;

  At any rate, we planned our change of houses sometime during the late spring or early summer. With the timber for the barns accumulating satisfactorily and the livestock dealer on the lookout for good cattle, the time had now come to give thought to the farmer’s ever-present cross: fencing. Looking ahead to this day, we had spent many fine days during the preceding winter and early spring in cutting and splitting Locust trees into proper lengths for fence posts. Fence posts are a staple need of any farmer; hardly a week will go by without the need for patching fence arising.

  In the rough plan which I had conceived for managing my future dairy herd, only one stretch of entirely new fence was immediately imperative. For the rest, matters could be handled by patching and making do. Roughly, the distance to be fenced was about 1000 feet. With this fence in place, I could devote the land to the west to growing alfalfa and have no problems in keeping the cattle out of it.

  As I look back now over the years we spent farming, my mind always goes straight to those weeks during the spring of 1965 that Dorothy and I spent building our stretch of fence. Like a happy child returning home to love and care, my mind returns to that time assured of benefice. The best of any project is its creative aspect, the doing of it. The day would come when our farm would produce enough milk to supply a small town but there would be less satisfaction—for me, at any rate—in that than in the memory of those lovely spring days. Whenever I feel the need to recapture happiness, I go back to that time. But I do not do so often; the clear view afforded by hindsight of the degree of hope in happiness is too sad.

  As fence builders, Dorothy and I were a reasonably efficient if somewhat comical pair. Trio, I suppose I should say because Linda, then at that splendid age of two and a half, tagged along happily enough. Dorothy was by then manifestly and magnificently pregnant. We evolved a system to take full advantage of her girth. Otis, a very generous neighbor, had lent us a posthole digger which fitted onto my Ford tractor and hooked up to its power take-off. Thus the truly back-breaking portion of fence building, the digging of the holes by hand, was by-passed. We soon found that we could make Otis’s digger work a great deal better if Dorothy stood on top of it as it bored its way into the ground. So, following the straight lines laid out by a string, we would dig our holes one by one. After each was dug, Dorothy and Linda would sit playing nearby whild I cleaned the bottom of the hole and then set the post and tamped it firm with the new earth. We did not hurry; we would break our day with long picnic lunches and, if the spirit moved us to stop altogether, we did so.

  My feed problems for the next winter would be tricky. The seven acre field immediately behind the Kegley house, I planned on plowing and putting into corn then and now. This corn, picked in the fall would give me a certain amount of supplementary feed for the nine or ten cows I expected to have on the line by fall. There was a sound corn crib on the Kegley place in which the corn could be stored and removed bit by bit to be ground and mixed with protein supplement at the local mill. For the rest, I knew I was going to be stuck with buying a certain amount of hay to get me through that first winter. The alfalfa which I planned to sow in August would, of course, provide no usable yield until the following spring. I could cut a certain amount of low grade hay from my unused pastures during the coming summer but there would not be enough nor would it be of high enough quality to see the cows through the winter. However, the purchase of hay for the relatively few cattle with which I was beginning was economically feasible for that first winter. If hay is bought when it is being made, the price is relatively low. It is when one seeks to buy hay during the winter that one finds the price has risen dramatically. By the summer after the one on which we were then embarking, I figured we could be reasonably self sufficient as far as feed went. By then, our planned fifteen acres of alfalfa should yield three or four cuttings during the summer and I would have a trench silo dug which could be filled with chopped corn silage.

  It was, frankly, an exciting time. While we waited for Tip-tree to begin building the two barns, we had our fence to build and our corn to plant. Later on in the summer, the ground would have to be plowed and prepared for putting in the alfalfa. My brother had written me that he would be arriving for the summer and the prospect of his help with the various tasks was a welcome one.

  By the end of spring, Bill and his wife and children had vacated the new house and departed for their new life in the west. Bit by bit, we moved our belongings across the creek to the new house but we were in no great hurry to take up formal residence. The fencing, plowing and planting which made up the greatest part of the work for which I was directly responsible still took place on the Kegley side of the farm and I still had to milk our current family cow twice a day on that side. Not to mention our kitchen garden on that side from which Dorothy was extracting an astonishing amount of provender for both canning and direct consumption.

  As the summer began, Tiptree’s two sons returned from VPI and the three of them began work on the two new barns. The calm competence with which Tiptree set to work could not have been more reassuring. By then, the lumbering operation (with its attendant thievery) was reaching an end. Tip-tree began with the Milking parlour which was mainly a masonry project, being constructed almost entirely of cinder block and needing only a minimum of timber for rafters, roof-sheathing, plates etc. At the day’s end, he would occasionally stop over for a drink with me and we would talk over the progress of the barns and various other matters. It was during one such talk that he explained to me the system whereby he and his sons cooperated in order that the burden of their college education could be handled. To this day, their modus operandi strikes me as having been conceived and carried out with truly Lincolnesque simplicity. Tiptree provided the basic cash for their tuition and they, of course, worked while going to school in order to take up the slack. Each fall and winter term, he sent the boys off to school loaded down with the edible portions of a home-killed and cured hog which they would use as the nucleus of their physical subsistence till the end of term, cooking and eating their way through the preserved hog meat in their rented accommodations. There was a basic love and rapport between the various members of Tiptree’s family that I have encountered rarely in my life. His sons never lost sight of what a vast physical and psychological reach it was for a backwoods farmer to try for a college education for his progeny. And the last thing Tiptree expected from them was undue gratitude. As builders, the three of them worked together smoothly and efficiently; neither of the sons was as skilled as his father at construction work but they were both good rough carpenters and tireless workers. During the month of June, the milking parlour slowly began to take shape. Although, it was the smallest of the two buildings, it was also by far the most complicated, needing drains and much masonry work which the hay feeding barn would not.

  As the summer wore on and work on our project continued to bear fruit, Dorothy and I saw less and less of O’Hara and Kate. Once or twice, it crossed my mind that this might be happening as a result of some conscious design on O’Hara’s part but I dismissed the idea as wholly preposterous. He was, after all, my oldest and closest friend. It did not make much sense that he would brutally decide to end a friendship of such duration.

  Then, one day during the summer, I had a curious encounter with O’Hara on the street in Wytheville which made me begin to wonder again if my suspicions were entirely imaginary. Walking along the street in town that day, I caught sight of O’Hara approaching in the distance. At the best of times, he was inclined to be a vastly preoccupied man and this day he appeared to be in a blue study, marching along looking from neither right to left. While he was still more than a block away, I thought I saw him glance up briefly and take notice of my approach. But he immediately resumed his look of concentration and continued on towards me unseeing. I was not absolutely certain he had seen me but I had a sudden and strong suspicion that he not only had taken notice of my approach but that he was going to pretend deliberately that he had not. This st
ruck me as such a preposterous possibility that I decided to act as if I had not seen him until the precise moment of our passing each other; at which time, if he had not greeted me, I was going to brace him and ask him what the hell he thought he was about. As we drew abreast, he continued to stare straight ahead and said nothing. Finally, at the last moment, I said, “What in the world is this?” He looked up then, of course, and we exchanged greetings. Jokingly, I asked him if he was trying to give me the cut direct? He laughed but I seemed to sense a certain false heartiness in his laughter and, what was a much rarer thing as far as O’Hara was concerned, a definite loss of composure. Once we began talking, he could not have been more pleasant and, as I recall, we went into a restaurant and had a cup of coffee together. At parting, my suspicions were laid at rest and I felt slightly paranoid at having had them in the first place. Later on, I recounted the incident to Dorothy and she pooh-poohed my fears, saying that he had probably been simply lost in thought. However, a nagging sense of worry and wonder persisted. Certainly, the concourse between our two families persisted in becoming more sparse that summer. However, it was easy to ascribe this to our preoccupation with the magnitude of turning our farm into a paying proposition and, once again, I dismissed the whole business from my mind.

  Early that summer of 1956, Luther, the livestock dealer telephoned to say that he had a line on nine Holstein heifers due to come fresh with their first calves during late summer. I went with him to look at the cattle and was suitably impressed. I should mention that by now I was beginning to develop a certain “feel” for cattle. During the preceding months, I had not only spent a great deal of time reading everything I could get my hands on about the management of a dairy farm, I had also ranged far and wide talking to various progressive dairy farmers and trying to assimilate as much knowledge as possible. As a result, when I went with Luther to look at his nine Holstein heifers, I had a pretty good idea of the sort of cattle I was looking for. These, while far from cheap, struck me as being an ideal group of heifers to form the nucleus of my future herd. They were large heifers and had clearly been allowed to gain their maximum growth before being bred. Furthermore, they came from a dairy farm where records had been kept on the cattle from which they stemmed and the records of milk production on that farm were impressive. In buying heifers which have not yet thrown their first calves, one is able to judge conformation much less satisfactorily than in the case of cows which have had calves previously. The udder of a first calf heifer has not yet taken shape for one thing and the proper shape and placement of a cow’s udder is of great importance as a clue to her future ability to produce. Then too, first calf heifers are still ungainly and long-legged; they have not yet assumed that wedge-shaped, rather bony conformation which is the indication of a good, high-producing cow. Perhaps, most important of all was the fact that Luther, the livestock dealer felt strongly that these were potentially valuable cattle and definitely worth purchasing. By then, we had had a number of dealings and he had never let me down. I also took Tiptree along to have a look at the heifers and he too was strongly impressed and advised their purchase.

  The single thing that worried me the most about the cattle was that some sort of mistake might have been made in the records kept of when they had been bred and that they would begin having their calves before the milking parlour was completed. I could imagine no more terrifying prospect than suddenly finding myself stuck with nine wild and unbroken Holstein heifers in need of twice-a-day milking and no facilities for dealing with them. However, Tiptree set my mind at rest; the milking parlour was far enough along in its construction by then for him to be able to assure me that it would be completely operative well before the heifers began coming fresh. Accordingly, I unlimbered my check book and a few days later, the heifers were delivered and installed on the new side of the farm. Having been ungrazed throughout the spring, the pastures were lush and they foraged happily. As always, Tiptree had given me a wise piece of advice: to spend a portion of each day walking around them and among them so that they would become accustomed to my presence. I did so and I have no doubt that it helped; but I viewed the coming day when I would have to break them to the dairy barn with grave misgivings. They were big strong animals and wild as March hares. I would be an awful liar if I said I was not frightened to death of the prospect of dealing with them at close quarters.

  The balance of the summer passed in dealing with the various tasks which had to be done: the new fence was finished and the various pieces of old fence patched up adequately; the corn crop needed to be cultivated several times and the pastures had to be mowed before the weeds went to seed. In August, my brother and I began the plowing for the alfalfa crop. I would usually work on it in the mornings and he would replace me in the afternoons. It was rough ground we were plowing which had not been worked for many years. And the sowing of alfalfa is a tricky business; unless the ground is well-plowed and worked over and over with disk and harrow until the earth is finely pulverized, the chances are that the stand of alfalfa obtained will be poor. In late August, the ground was finally in good shape and I hired a neighbor who owned a seed drill to put in the alfalfa. After it was in, I borrowed a machine known as a cultipacker and went over it, packing the earth down in grooves so that it would have the maximum chance to retain moisture. After that, there was nothing to do about the alfalfa except await the following spring; we would not really know until then whether or not we had achieved a satisfactory stand. Which was no small question; the success of our feeding program depending to a great extent upon the yield of our alfalfa.

  Around the first of September, we finally completed our move to the new house, leaving my brother in sole possession of the Kegley place. In time, I would install a hired hand and his family in the old house but we would never live there again. My brother would be going south before long but he planned to remain to lend his moral and physical support until our cattle had begun calving and our dairy barn was actually in operation.

  Although a great deal smaller than the old one, the new house was an unqualified joy. It had been so long since we had enjoyed such fundamental American rights as central heating and truly operative plumbing that we had to get used to them all over again. No matter how honorable a position the two-hole outdoor privy may enjoy in song and story, as far as I am concerned, nothing became ours like its abandonment. The new house was not without charm; it sat back from the road on a slight rise facing down the hill towards the creek, a view of which was afforded by a large picture window in the living room. Besides a long living room with a dining alcove at one end, the house had on the ground floor a modern kitchen, bath and large master bedroom. The house was an old one and its fundamental construction was that of a log cabin, albeit thoroughly modernized with whitewashed cement filling in the chinks between the logs. At the rear, the house looked out at the pastures which rose gently behind it and towards the nearby barnyard. From the back door, it was a walk of about sixty yards to the new milking parlour. In addition to the new hay feeding barn which was still only half done, there was an old, rather tumbledown log barn which I planned to use as a calving barn and whose loft contained whatever hay we had managed to accumulate.

  As August drew to a close, the finishing touches were put on the milking parlour and the machinery was installed. I was keeping one eye on that process and one wary eye on the nine new heifers. It was, of course, impossible to tell exactly when they would begin dropping their calves but it was an event which was obviously imminent. By that time, Vacca had dropped her second calf so that I actually had two cows to milk already. On Tiptree’s advice, I started penning the heifers and the other two cows up in the holding pen at least once a day and putting them through the milking stalls in a series of dry runs. As a little incentive, I would give each a scoopful of supplemental feed in order to implant the idea in their heads that pleasure of a sort awaited them within that mysterious building. As soon as the machinery was installed, and I had been well rehearsed in it
s use by the manufacturer’s representative, I used it on Vacca and the other Holstein cow already in milk so that I could become accustomed to its operation and the new heifers could become more or less accustomed to the noise of the vacuum pump and the pulsating hiss of the milkers. The behavior of the heifers during the dry runs through the milking parlor boded nothing but disaster for the day when they would actually have to be broken to the milking machines. They were a wild-eyed, unruly lot at best who tended to shy at the slightest movement as well as to hang back and refuse entry to the milking stalls. Occasionally, one would panic completely and attempt to turn around in the narrow passageway and, several times, the situation got so far out of hand that I had to drive a cow down through the operator’s pit in order to get the traffic pattern under control.

  Thank God for those two weeks of dry runs with the heifers and actual practice with trustworthy old Vacca. For when the heifers actually began to drop their calves, it was sheer pandemonium. By then, I was keeping a very close eye on the cattle indeed, walking to the pasture three and four times a day to see if there had been any developments. The first sign of trouble was one morning when I counted the cattle and discovered I was two short. It turned out, of course, that the first two heifers to calve had not only done so but they had broken out of the pasture to have their calves in a dense wooded area bordering the creek.