Maggie's Farm

by Sherry, John;

  After finishing my chores at the barn, I walked back to the house and told Dorothy what had taken place. She listened in disbelief but had little real comment to offer. Nor, in truth, do I now. Perhaps O’Hara’s father had the right of it years ago when we were boys and he visited my father to enlist his cooperation in keeping the two of us apart. Unfortunately, I don’t believe it for a minute. That O’Hara wanted to destroy my farm seems clear; that, in like measure, he wanted to avert that destruction seems equally clear. As the Sailor said long ago in Spain, I can’t ride and I can’t drive.

  I drove O’Hara back to his house in Wytheville. When we arrived, he was still out cold. The front door was unlocked and I carried him into the drawing room. Kate was seated there, her eyes like obsidian as her knitting needles clicked away in undeviating rhythm. As I unloaded O’Hara into a chair, I said, “Well, here’s your home-loving man.” This perhaps unseemly jocularity failed to elicit either gleam of amusement or recognition.

  The O’Hara’s remained in Wytheville for perhaps another year. During that year, they engendered one or two ploys with a distinct ring of insanity which served to rigidify the breach. One, which mystifies me to this day, had to do with the money I had borrowed from Roger. I received in due course a post card from O’Hara saying that he had decided to assume my debt. This was followed by a peculiar legal document signed by O’Hara and Kate in which they formally indicated that they had paid my debt to Roger and that I now owed the same amount to them. With the grandiosity of true disconnection, O’Hara’s card informed that no coercion would be brought to make me pay but that, if and when I wished to pay, I could hand over the money to Lawyer Bean. I ignored this and eventually—and I must admit, after a dereliction of many years—paid off my debt to Roger.

  Also during that year, the O’Haras accomplished a much more peculiar, perhaps even tragic transaction which had nothing to do with us: the effective severance of Jane, Darroch’s child by Kate, from their immediate family. She was sent on a visit to Darroch’s mother, chose not to return and was eventually raised and educated by Kate’s own mother and her second husband from whom O’Hara and Kate remained rigidly and bitterly estranged.

  CHAPTER XII

  With the advent of spring that year, the tempo of farming activity naturally quickened. As the pastures were well out and the need to buy winter feed now hopefully behind us forever, the time had come to augment the herd. Buying a cow here and one there, we increased the herd to about twenty-one cattle. Of course we would not actually have that many on the milking line throughout the summer since most of our original eleven cows would have to be turned dry during late summer and early autumn for the two months preparatory to their having their next calves.

  In theory, a good dairy farmer aims to have as many of his cattle as possible producing during autumn and winter because it is during that period that his “base” is established. The larger the base, the larger the income, since milk produced up to the limits of the base brings a significant amount more than milk produced in excess of the base. There will always be excess during spring and early fall because the cows become more productive during those periods of maximum pasture growth. The ideal situation, for example, would be one in which a dairy farmer could breed all his cows during October or November so that they would be in full production throughout the “base building” months, and dry during July, August or early September preparatory to calving again in the fall and returning to full production for the next “base building” period. It goes without saying, however, that the ideal is extremely difficult to arrange. And the difficulty is greatly compounded if, as in our case, one is following a policy of doing all of one’s breeding by artificial insemination to the end of bettering the herd.

  The benefits of artificial insemination are as unquestionable as its difficulties are numerous. Understandably, nature prefers her own methods of procedure and a cow in heat turned in with a bull has an immeasurably better chance of conceiving than a cow bred artificially. I rather imagine that in the days since I was a farmer the artificial breeding techniques have improved somewhat, but at that time the difficulties were tacitly acknowledged by the fact that the price of breeding a cow artificially included three attempts. If, for example, as happened to me many times, the process does not succeed until the third attempt, it means that the cow is three months behind the desired schedule and will be wastefully standing dry during the “base building” months when one most needs her in production.

  It can readily be seen that the beef cattle breeder has a far easier road to hoe in respect to breeding than has the dairy farmer. The beef breeder wants his crop of calves to arrive as the pastures come out in the spring. Therefore he simply turns the bull in with his herd nine months earlier and leaves him there for a couple of months and nature arranges the rest. But with dairy cattle, one has to first keep careful watch every day so as not to miss the telltale signs of a cow’s being in estrus and, even then, face the fact that the chances are that the artificial insemination will not take on the first try. And there is always the heartbreaking possibility that a high-producing cow will turn out to be impossible to breed by any means and must eventually be sent to market as meat. I mention in passing that this happened to us with one of the most promising cows we owned. Eventually we got around to keeping a bull as a backstop to our artificial insemination program, but for the first two years we depended solely on the latter.

  In terms of pure, brute labour, that summer of 1957 was a tough one. Because we could not afford to buy certain complicated and expensive pieces of machinery such as a hay baler and a silage chopper, I had to arrange to have this work done by neighbors who did own such machinery. I paid for this partly with money, partly with a percentage of the hay being made on my own land, and partly by trading my own labour in getting in the crops of the farmer who helped me with mine. Thus it was a rare day that summer that I was not busy with haymaking, whether my own or that of the neighbor. In addition, of course, the cows had to be milked twice daily.

  I would be a terrible liar if I did not admit that certain seeds of discontent with my lot as a farmer were being sown. Unquestionably, there is dignity in manual labour but there is also drudgery and boredom. It was not long before any psychic rewards I may have enjoyed from heaving ninety-pound bales of hay onto a wagon for eight hours were outweighted by the resulting numb fatigue. The future seemed far from idyllic and I was already casting about in my mind for a way to expand the farm’s operations and lessen my own thrall to it simultaneously. In Herbert, the farmer with whom I traded labour and crops in return for custom work, I thought I could discern the possibilities of an answer. Like my friend Clyde, Herbert was one of that small minority among the hill people who sensed the need for keeping abreast of the times. Unlike Tiptree, alas, he was an essentially prosaic individual whom it was far easier to respect than like. He possessed in abundance all the virtues which fail to fascinate me: he was both good husbandman and good husband, kindly father and indefatigable church goer who believed every word in the Old and New Testaments was the precise and literal truth. Needless to say, he found me about as familiar as someone from Mars. Still, we got along quite well basically and during the course of the summer it began to occur to me that his farming operation and mine might be susceptible to a form of amalgamation.

  Although, he wanted desperately to install a Grade A dairy operation of his own, two things stood in the way of it: capital and land. What little capital he had was tied up in his machinery inventory which he paid for by doing custom work for other farmers. To augment the little land he owned himself, he sharecropped other men’s land or in some cases rented it outright. The heart of his farming operation was raising and feeding hogs on the corn he grew upon his own and other’s land. Generally speaking, he was quite adept at this, keeping a number of good Hampshire sows and a good boar so that the quality of pork he raised each year was high. However, unlike the price of Grade A milk, the price of pork is subject to
fluctuation and there were many years when the profit he enjoyed did not really justify the labour.

  The rough idea I began to toy with that summer was essentially very simple: that Herbert and I might become fifty-fifty partners in a farming operation in which he would be responsible for all the actual farming and I would be responsible for the care of the cattle. The more I thought of it the more feasible it seemed. If every acre of land I owned could be made available as improved pasture, my 165 acres could in time be made capable of supporting anywhere from seventy-five to a hundred milking cows. The feed for these cows could then be grown by Herbert on land owned, rented or share-cropped by him. And the young stock for replacement could be accommodated on pasture land owned by him—land basically unsuitable for cultivation because of rock outcroppings or excessive hilliness. Were we to enter in upon such an operation together, it did not seem too much to hope for that we could, in time, divide an annual income of anywhere from twenty-five to thirty-five thousand dollars and, even more we could, through artificial insemination, eventually breed our stock up to a genuinely superlative standard of production. In time, too, there would be the possibility of changing such an organization into a purebred operation whence additional income could be derived from the sale of high-quality dairy bloodstock. But though I stewed about these matters constantly, for the while I kept my own counsel; understandably, such a proposition would represent to Herbert an earthshaking decision which would have to be subjected to his own and the Lord’s most exhaustive scrutiny. But more and more, it occurred to me that Herbert would be a perfect partner in such a try; he was an essentially fine, honest and dependable man whose present position was narrowly circumscribed by lack of both money and imagination.

  Thus, as my farm took hold and showed signs of succeeding, so did my disquiet grow. Was I, after all, going to get hooked on the horns of the traditional American dilemma: belief in big, hope for bigger—and the poignant, hopeless longing for biggest? Not if I could help it, I told myself. I needed a tangential idea but it was not forthcoming. By tangential idea I mean precisely the proverbial eating and simultaneous having of the cake, the desire for which, in spite of being prohibited by damned near all our song and story, is still the driving wheel of the evolutionary appetite.

  In that realm of simultaneous cake consumption and possession, my young friend, Clyde made some disclosures to me that summer which provided room for some not entirely healthy thoughts. In attempting to live a life in which, no matter how ludicrous one’s attempts may be at times, moral seriousness represents a paramount value, the great booby trap is of course, self-interest. Up to this point, my relationship with young Clyde had been entirely pure for the very simple reason that I had not been able to conceive of him as a possible factor in furthering my own ends. Because he was a strange, lonely, secretive man who struck a responsive chord with my perhaps excessive abhorrence for the prosaic, I made myself available to him in the sense that I imparted what little I knew or felt without reservation. In the course of that summer of 1957, he returned the favor. It was an odd story he told me. Whether or not it is true is less important than the fact that I believed it. Like Pilate, my attitude towards truth is fundamentally quizzical. I tend to believe in a man’s statements more because of their poetical and psychological coherence than through fealty to blind, measurable fact. Even though I wonder now as I begin to tell it, Clyde’s story made sense to me then and it makes sense to me now. But, as I listened and believed, the subtle serpent of “where’s mine?” began to stir.

  While very young, Clyde had taken his first few faltering steps towards achieving a form of synthesis between his passion for fire engines and his abiding interest in money. His approach was simple: he simply saved his pennies until they turned into dollars and his dollars until they had multiplied to a point where he was able to seek out a stockbroker and purchase a tiny number of shares of common stock. The company whose stock he chose to buy was, of course, one engaged in the manufacture of fire engines. It also proved to be an old, conservative and extremely solvent firm whose market had been steady and dependable and whose total number of outstanding shares of common stock was not, by contemporary standards, vast. Clyde had, since boyhood, continued to buy the stock, using the traditional technique of putting each new bit he acquired into hock in order to acquire more. This painfully slow process had, he informed me during that summer of 1957, resulted in his titular ownership of an amount of stock in the company with a then current market value of approximately $120,000.00. He made no bones about the fact that the structure he had created was a complete house of cards. Whatever the margin requirements were at a given moment, he employed them to the maximum extent commensurate with the minimum standard of safety. He would occasionally suffer a setback and be forced to sell off some of his stock to meet a rise in the margin requirements, but his overall progress had followed a rising curve. The company involved was sound and the market value of the stock continued to enjoy a steady, if unspectacular, rise.

  As one who, rightly or wrongly, has always had a strong desire for life to be more interesting and surprising than it tends to be in actuality, I could not have found Clyde’s description of his life as a junior tycoon more pleasing. That a wiry T-shirt-clad youth who spent the days riding the backwoods roads in a battered jeep could begin buying stock in a fire engine manufacturer simply because he liked fire engines, and eventually reach the point where he entertained serious hopes for someday assuming control of the entire company, struck me as having so much poetical pizzazz that it never occurred seriously to me to disbelieve Clyde’s tale. The techniques he was employing were, after all, the same old ones with which that particular game is played. In my mind, I could see no reason to assume that Clyde was any less intelligent or single-minded than, say, Louis Wolfson. In fact, for the so-called “stock raiders” such as Wolfson, Clyde had the bitterest of hate, contempt and fear. By the time our friendship began, Clyde was understandably, expertly-versed in the workings of what he had thought of for many years as “his” fire engine company. And his fear of so-called stock raiders was perfectly legitimate. The company was both solvent and sound: a combination which makes those financial predators wheel and circle for the kill. Clyde’s greatest worry was that some such gentleman or group would smell blood, institute a proxy fight, take control and milk the corporate edifice dry as is so often done. Clyde’s intentions or dream or whatever you want to call it was the precise opposite. Could he, in time, accomplish his design, his intention was to make the company thrive more abundantly rather than to reduce it to a hollow shell. His aspirations seemed to me to be on the side of the angels.

  Dorothy also was temperamentally disposed towards believing completely in Clyde’s bizarre disclosures. Perhaps this stemmed in both our cases from an undue dollop of romanticism in our natures, but no matter. Certainly an insistence upon prosaic circumstances can reduce life to a prosaic level, and not the least factor in the enduring quality of our marriage has been a commonly-held, fervent belief that such a fate is worse than death.

  Equally certain was the fact that Clyde’s disclosure of his cards had no immediate, dramatic effect upon our lives. It simply inculcated a stronger sense of mutality. As the summer drew to a close, Clyde interested himself more and more in the workings of the farm and, more and more, he and I tended to use the word “we.” “We ought to get a new tractor,” he would say, or “we still need a few more cows.”

  We did indeed need more cows and, equally important, the feed situation was now such that we could handle them. We ended the summer with our large hay-feeding barn comfortably full of high-quality alfalfa hay. In addition, we had a trench silo dug, and filled it with fifty or sixty tons of chopped corn silage. For those completely unversed in farming lore, I suppose I should explain that a trench silo is nothing more than a giant trench scooped out of a gentle hillside by bulldozer. Ours was perhaps 20 feet wide, 100 feet long, and at its deepest point, about 15 feet deep. Into this tren
ch load after load of freshly chopped corn stalks and ears is placed layer by layer while one tractor is driven back and forth along the top to compress the silage tightly enough so that the optimum conditions exist for healthy fermentation. When the trench is completely filled and packed, sheets of Polyethylene are placed over the top; these in turn are sealed by a heavy layer of straw. A fence is then placed around the trench to keep the cattle out. The silage within preserves itself through a process of fermentation until it is needed for feed later on in the fall. At that point, it is opened and the cows are allowed to eat their way into the trench for a certain period of time each day.