Maggie's Farm

by Sherry, John;

  I was beginning now to be very worried indeed and a letter from my brother did nothing to alleviate things. Even accounting for the fact that there was no particular love lost between him and Clyde, his letter described some very peculiar goings-on. Clyde, he reported, was carrying himself like a man on the edge of a serious emotional breakdown. According to Earl, he was doing senseless things like cutting down an apple tree in the yard of our house with his chain saw. Worst of all, he had intimated to Earl that he had plans which definitely did not fit the letter or spirit of our agreement. His parents’ handsome house on the creek a few miles from ours had been vacated by them a few months before when they had decided to move back into Wytheville. Now, he told Earl, he planned to give that house to us and to move Ned, the hired man, into our house. Admittedly the house which Clyde wanted to give us was better appointed and more palatial in every way than ours, but nevertheless I was appalled at the thought of Ned and his hillbilly brood living in our house.

  Then, in the nick of time when nagging worry was about to turn to throbbing fear, a letter arrived from Clyde which contained both money and what seemed at first sight to be reasonable explanations for many things. The delay in sending the money, he explained, had been due to a straightening of circumstances forced by the purchase of a new tractor and some other equipment—items all, I knew, the farm needed badly. The apparently senseless act of cutting down the apple tree was explained as having been forced upon him by some serious blight which gripped the tree. The business about moving Ned and his family into our house he went into at considerable length. His parents’ house had—he did not make it absolutely clear which—either been given to him or sold to him for a nominal sum. As it was unquestionably the most suitable house for us in the environs of the farm, he had decided that it should be made available to us on the same terms as our farmhouse had been: we would not legally own the house but it would be our house in that it would be available to us for as long as we lived. Moving Ned and his family into our farmhouse was justified on the ground that it would facilitate Ned’s care of the cattle through greater proximity to them. All of the points in his letter were defendable from a standpoint of both generosity and function and I accepted them in the spirit in which they were offered. But the sum of money he had sent was less than that agreed upon. He promised quick delivery of the remainder, however, and I shoved what reservations I still possessed into the back of my mind on the basis of that promise.

  The reservations did not remain quiescent, of course. There now began for Dorothy and me the single greatest point of strain that our marriage had undergone to date. Incessantly I delivered great long pep-talks on how everything was going to turn out exactly as planned, and Dorothy answered in kind, vehemently reaffirming her faith in my insane decision of having given away everything we possessed in the world.

  When quite a young man, I read in some more or less trustworthy academic study of prison inmates that some ninety per cent of the male persons incarcerated in American prisons claimed that a woman had been the direct agent of their imprisonment. Assuming even a segment of statistical truth in such a claim, leads one to a consideration of the profound implications in such a state of affairs. Personally, it led me to an undying fascination with the mysterious role women play in life with regard to judgment. The negative aspects of those judgments do not interest me much. That ladies sat in the bleachers and turned their thumbs down on gladiators, or that there is in fact a tendency among women to castrate men psychologically, are both only facts as the cutting edge of a sword is a fact. It has always been the force behind the sword which interests me. In a play of mine, the following interchange takes place between two old ladies both nearing the end of their lives. As they contemptuously scoff at the male-fostered contemporary concept of the female’s desire to castrate the male, they speak thus:

  JULIA

  Well, we try, I suppose. But the truth is that it’s easier said than done.

  (Pause)

  We try because we must. But the only real joy we ever experience is in failing.

  SARAH

  Why is it such a well-kept secret?

  JULIA

  Oh, I think we want it that way. Indeed, perhaps it has to be that way. The men might be too frightened otherwise. All the real judgments are made by women. The symbol for justice is, after all, a woman. Oh, men play at making judgments with their trials and courtrooms but it’s a formality. The real dock where a man stands to be judged is a woman’s heart and mind.

  (She pauses, smiling)

  And bed, I suppose.

  That this continuing process of judgment regarding men by women takes place is something I believe implicitly. And these female judgments stem from an atavistic synthesis of intellect, emotion and sexuality so mysterious that we symbolize that mystery by placing a blindfold over the eyes of our female symbol of justice. Unfortunately, the negative aspect of these judgments tends to be both more interesting and more amenable to artistic treatment than the positive. For every fundamentally positive heroine such as Abraham’s wife, Sarah, we have among our cultural heritage a veritable host of fundamentally negative female protagonists running the gamut from Messalina, through Hedda Gabler, to the heroines of Mr. Tennessee Williams. But it is the force behind the female judgment which remains more interesting to me than the fact of it being positive or negative, precisely because the force is rooted in such a mysterious combination of the animal need to breed young, the intellectual pragmatism to achieve security for their nurturing, and the moral purpose to insure their growth.

  Beneath my wife’s vociferous agreement with my protestations that all would be well with the outcome of my late decision to give away our farm, I now began to sense a subtle smell of the force of female judgment being mustered. Behind her hopeful but questioning eyes, there were the beginnings of the same sharp gleam the losing gladiators must have spotted in the box seats. Apart and aside from our daily ritual sessions of mutual (and growingly false) reassurance, we began to avoid each other. The degree of reproach in her attitude grew more perceptible daily.

  To which, like all self-deceivers, I could make no answer but drink and avoidance. I clung desperately to my belief in my own actions with no more evidence than the fatuous insistence that they were mine, and so—as if by divine sanction—correct. The sand of Barbados was warm, beautiful and liberally sprinkled with rum. I continued to stick my head therein.

  Unquestionably, the imaginative pace of my moral disintegration was a great deal faster than the actual circumstances. Looking back, I tend to see myself as having been poised teetering on the brink of the Pit. However, it is closer to the truth to say simply that I was a badly worried, frightened man spending each and every waking hour in a desperate attempt to avoid coming face to face with my own stupidity and, more important, taking some sort of specific action to rectify my errors. Such a state of spiritual attrition acts like sandpaper on the nervous system; one’s ordinary sensitivity becomes so painfully acute that one feels as vulnerable as a newly-laid egg. As I sat late upon the barstools of Barbados, my red-faced, Scots-Irish look of impregnability hid a quaking heart as timorous as a fawn. In those circumstances, one tends to have some curious encounters.

  At about three o’clock in the morning of a fine tropical day, I was sitting idly at the bar of one of the Bridgetown beach hotels listening to the strains of a steel band playing in the distance. A man entered the bar and immediately captured my imagination as he walked the length of the room towards the place where I was sitting. He reminded me a great deal of Darroch. Like Darroch, he was a big man, strong-looking and formidably self-assured. As he walked towards me, I had one of those blind flashes of insight that so frequently turn out to be bull’s-eyes of accuracy; I knew suddenly and with absolute certainty that he was a professional con man. Having nothing else to do and being thoroughly bored with myself, I decided to inform him that my drink-heightened, X-ray vision had pierced his cover. As he passed, our eyes locked for
a moment and I said in a casual, conversational tone, “You’re on the con”. He paused almost imperceptibly for a moment and then continued on past me to a table looking out over the sea. I turned back to my drink absolutely certain that something was going to happen. Sure enough, about fifteen minutes later, a waiter came over to the bar, indicated the man sitting at the table and delivered the message that the gentleman would like me to join him for a drink. I joined the man and we introduced ourselves; for present purposes, I shall call him Brad. Brad immediately asked me if I did not think I was heading for trouble sitting in a barroom in the middle of the night making preposterous remarks to total strangers. There was such a total absence of anger in his question and such a strong underlying note of curiosity that I was even more certain that my flash of insight had been correct. So I agreed with him about the possibility of trouble in such unorthodox social procedures but repeated my complete conviction that he was a confidence man. He burst out laughing and told me I was crazy. We began to talk and, from the first, I found I was enjoying myself tremendously. I do not remember the stories he told me in detail but they were all delivered with consummate artistry and they invariably reached a peak of suspense which, in one way or another had alerted every aspect of my mind open to greed or larceny. On he went, telling stories which always hinged on some great business opportunity in some part of the world where easy pickings could be had for the asking. As these various tales came to an end, I would laugh and repeat my belief that he was a confidence man. He would laugh also and tell me I was out of my mind. So we chatted on in this manner for an hour or so and had several drinks. Then suddenly, as he finished one of his stories, his eyes turned very hard indeed. He leaned back in his chair, regarded me for a long moment with a level gaze and said, “O.K., kid, what’s your proposition? I won’t have anything to do with guns or women.” My insight had turned out to be absolutely correct, but even funnier was the fact that the only explanation he had been able to conceive for my conduct was that I was a con man also. I managed to disabuse him of that notion. We had another drink or so and parted in friendly fashion.

  I saw him a number of times after that; he was, of course, a very appealing concoction for any writer. Feeling fairly certain that life would never again hand me a professional confidence man to play around with, I tried my best to find out what made him tick. In all the externals, he was ultramagnificent; his wristwatch, for example, must have cost a good deal more than any automobile I had owned. He was certainly hot queer for most of the times I saw him he had a girl with him and they were always damned good-looking. I always wanted to get him to talk about his professional experiences but he very definitely shied away from that topic, remarking only that he was currently having a bit of a holiday after some sort of successful venture in Venezuela. It must have been very successful because he spent money prodigiously.

  While he was loath to talk about his business, Brad was completely open about his life which, like all the rest of us, he was interested in figuring out. His story was banal enough in its essentials: he had been born in the south somewhere, a cracker kid from the wrong side of the tracks with a lot of physical attractiveness, intuitive psychological sense about people and a high degree of athletic skill. Like an old-fashioned Cosmopolitan short story, the girl in the house on the hill had fallen for him in high school, they planned to marry but her family had broken it up because of his cracker background. He had then left the town to drift here and there, living off of various shady deals and picking up the social expertise he needed.

  At the same time he was likeable, Brad was a genuinely sick human being in that the fundamental weapon in his arsenal was a complete and utter refusal to accept any aspect of human possibility. His contempt for human beings was profound and unchallengeable; indeed, I believe the stirrings of a faint but real liking for me frightened him to death. Anything that worked in a human sense he wanted to stay wholly clear of; a number of times, I pressed him to come to our house for a meal and meet Dorothy and the children but he wanted nothing to do with such matters. Liking anybody would lead to a soft heart, and when you get right down to it, a softhearted confidence man would be about as effective as a onearmed baseball player. Because he could not allow himself to be a friend to anyone, he was not mine either; but he was phenomenologically interesting. He drifted away one day but he still flits through my mind occasionally.

  Perhaps it is true that life does tend to imitate art. Barbados is the only tropical island I have ever had any truck with, but for the most part, the cast of characters on Barbados were fairly interchangeable with those in a Somerset Maugham short story. About halfway along the mile walk between our house and the hotel where I did most of my drinking lived a rather pretty blond woman who was the daughter of that fabled, standard standby of the pre-war Sunday supplements, the White Rajah of Sarawak. I would drop in on her occasionally to talk over the ups and downs of White Rajahdom. The White Rajah himself was evidently in London, ungainfully employed and blowing in the family loot on chorus girls. His daughter and I compared notes on our upbringing and it was clear to me that there was a good deal of difference between growing up on Sarawak and at 415 North Hanley Road, St. Louis, Missouri. She had a cheerful Dutch boy friend named Joop around who lost no time in presenting Dorothy offers of consolation after my departure. For the rest, Sadie Thompson and the preacher must have been around somewhere.

  And depart, I did. Even mustering all my self-deceptive defenses, I could not indefinitely withhold from myself the realization that I must return and make some sort of an attempt to straighten out the muddle for which I was responsible. The gleam of imminent judgment in Dorothy’s eye was growing sharper. I knew I must now try to get my farm back. But I did not want Dorothy or the children with me as I made the attempt. For I was by no means sure I would succeed and I knew that if I failed, some gigantic, irreparable crack would appear in the entire fabric of our lives.

  The silent reproach emanating from the script of my play was also instrumental in making me return. My oath concerning its future was still mighty and still flawed. But it was also still the beacon on which I knew I must home.

  It was a strange, sad trip. Once the decision to go back had been taken, I felt a certain measure of relief. Then too, I am one of those who feel exuberant at the start of any trip; were I setting out with Virgil for a walk around the Inferno, I suspect I would be lighthearted at the beginning.

  For the first part of the journey, my seat-mate was a young British Army Doctor, returning home to be discharged after several years’ service in various parts of the British West Indies. He was an ex-public schoolboy and a Londoner who felt that his years in the islands had been a bonanza from the Gods but who was more than a little apprehensive about his professional future in England. (Having since lived in England, I now understand his fears a little better. The ordinary run-of-the-mill English doctor tends to lack the esprit de corps of his sleek, well-paid American counterpart. The American medical profession seems to surround itself with a protective sense of its own mystery and importance. The British National Health Service not only provides care for many who would not otherwise have it but also seems to prick the balloon of self importance which one finds so often among American physicians. Once, in England, I petitioned our local doctor—who was also a social acquaintance—for medicine to induce the removal of some uncomfortable proturberances on my foot called Plantar warts which had been hacked at with knives and prayed over but had steadfastly refused to depart. The local doctor casually gave me a bottle of some kind of acid which had the look of something which might be found in the medicine cabinet of an indigent recluse. I applied it, and lo and behold, the things went away. When I gratefully praised the doctor to his wife, she said in surprise, “You mean he actually cured something like a real doctor”.)

  At any rate, my young traveling companion was lacking in confidence in his own abilities. On the ever-sound basis that the best way to strengthen one’s low spirits is
to try raising someone else’s, I asked him about his past experiences and his future hopes. As the aircraft hopped from island to island, we drank gin and tonics together and discussed the state of man and the universe. I remember, at one point, kidding him that some day he might be faced with a terrible professional decision which would literally require the wielding of a knife to cut into the unknown. For some years after that, I received a Christmas card each year from him inscribed with the notation: “I haven’t cut it yet”.

  We parted as the aircraft landed at some island where he would make a connection for Bermuda and thence to London. In view of the lugubrious purpose of my journey, it seemed somehow improper to go on drinking alone, and after the young doctor left, I sat staring out of the window at the darkening sky as the aircraft plowed on to Puerto Rico. By the time we reached that island at about ten o’clock at night, my spirits had sunk to a very low ebb indeed.

  At Puerto Rico we were informed that there would be a delay due to some malfunction in the aircraft and led to a dreary waiting room where we sat dispiritedly in that gritty-eyed condition of fatigue which travel inspires. There I had an encounter which restored to me some slight sense of balance regarding the importance of my own troubles.

  I was awakened from my despairing half-doze by an employee of the airline depositing a person upon the empty chair next to my own. It was a little Puerto Rican boy not more than nine years old. From what disease or condition I do not know, but he was horribly crippled and horribly frightened. I tried to close my eyes for a moment and heard a short, soft sob. When I looked down at him, he looked back, eyes white and frightened and coursing with tears. We stared at each other for a moment and then, mustering a few words of rusty Spanish and a gesture, I asked him if he would like to sit on my lap. He nodded his head with great shyness and I gently picked him up and held him. His tears did not stop and, after a moment, I knew that I was going to begin weeping also. So to save us both embarrassment, I carried him outside the building and we walked up and down for a time, both weeping. After a while, that seemed to make us feel better and we were able to stop. In my pidgin Spanish, we tried to talk and he told me that he came from the interior of the island and was being sent to New York for treatment of his condition. We conversed thus until the employee of the airline appeared to carry him away to his flight. Shortly after that, my own flight resumed also.