Maggie's Farm

by Sherry, John;

  CHAPTER XV

  1958 was drawing to a close when I returned to Virginia from Barbados to make the attempt at getting back the farm I had so wilfully given away. I was by no means sure I could accomplish this but I was absolutely certain that if I failed to accomplish it, I had blown the whole game; that the preceding years would have been wasted in the sense that they could turn out to have been both meaningful and rich. There is, of course, nothing dishonorable about plain, good old fashioned failure; if one displays his wares for approval and to the best of his belief, they are not shoddily fashioned, one can—indeed, one must—live honorably with the accolade of their acceptance or the dolor of their rejection. The facts of either eventually become simply experience; they are incorporated into the clay of being, the totality of oneself. The only real failure is the rejection of experience—which is purely and simply the refusal to build the edifice of self. Perhaps the best existing example of a human being who wishes to reject meaning and render his own time meaningless is the junkie. Mr. William Burroughs (A St. Louisan also—I remember being taken to call upon him at his parents’ large house there by my friend David Kammerer, since dead of murder) has stated this with powerful succinctness in the preface to his book, THE NAKED LUNCH: “Nothing ever happens in the junk world”. Where nothing happens, no experience is possible. But there is another way of refusing experience and this was the method into whose camp I had thrust my foot: the insistence upon rigging the deck against oneself and the dishonorable failure which results from a refusal to recognize that the deck has been so rigged. Which was more or less my position on that grey winter day that my aircraft landed at Roanoke after the flight from Barbados. I wanted desperately to go on believing in my own pipe dream. And in spite of a thousand inner voices warning me of the truth, I was determined to go on playing the crooked hand I had dealt myself and—I now believe—dealt Clyde also.

  My thousand inner voices were immediately joined by two tangible outer ones: those of my mother and my brother. They were waiting for me as I came through the gate at the terminal. Apart from them and clearly at odds with them, Clyde waited also. The eighty-mile drive from Roanoke to the farm had to be made with either one party or the other. Perhaps the clearest indication of the deep ambivalence which had me in its grip regarding every future decision is the fact that I—whose memory is generally good—cannot remember with any degree of conviction as to accuracy what the choice was that I made. Nor can my brother or mother. I incline to the view that I got into the car with mother and Earl. Mother stated flatly she could not remember. My brother is wholly uncertain but remarked when I recently asked him about it, “You probably went with Clyde. It would be the best bet because he was the key to everything and you were terribly concerned about him.”

  At any rate, whether I made the ride from Roanoke to the farm that day with Clyde, or not, I certainly spoke with him long enough at the airport to have no doubts whatsoever that he was a man under dreadful, almost unbearable strain. He had, it turned out, gone through with his plan of moving our belongings into the lovely house lately owned by his parents. His manner of doing this had left a sour taste in everyone’s mouth. He had waited until my brother had driven to North Carolina to pay a visit to my mother and accomplished the move in my brother’s absence. Warned by the same feeling of impending disaster that we all shared at that point, mother had chosen to return to the farm with my brother where they found the furniture jumbled and stacked in any old way in the new house, and Ned, the hired man, in possession of our former dwelling. Upon discovering this, my mother elected to remain, await my return and provide both moral support and victuals; the former, alas, being of a much higher order than the latter; in the coming months, more TV dinners would disappear down my gullet than I would have thought existed in the world. So great, however, was my fear and worry that I could not extricate us from the impossible position I had placed us that plain bread and water would have struck me as being far beyond my just desserts.

  There is very little question in my mind that I arrived in the barest nick of time. I am convinced now that all of the musical chairs that Clyde was playing with the houses was being done in preparation for some sort of devious action designed to pull his chestnuts out of the fire. The most likely explanation is that he was considering the old and honorable hillbilly custom of arson. The Kegley house now stood empty and was insured for enough to provide the few thousand dollars that F. felt he needed to shore up his house of cards. But, if this was the idea with which he was flirting, it became psychologically difficult for him to carry it through once I was again physically present.

  The one factor which still remained constant in the midst of the chaos and suspicion which now surrounded all of us was the farm itself. One cannot destroy a soundly constructed edifice overnight and Clyde had only been at the financial helm for about three months. And I must stress again my firm belief that Clyde had no advertent intention or desire to destroy the farm. He saw it as a single aspect (and eventually, a very minor one) of his long-range financial plans. Our financial policy regarding the farm had been the traditional one which every farmer must follow: to re-invest every bit of income from the milk except the minimal amount needed for our actual living expenses, and at the same time to be extremely chary of making commitments which would be hard to meet. Clyde had, in effect, reversed that policy in that, not only was he milking away the actual cash income from the farm to increase his problematical stock holdings, but he had also contracted to buy on time several expensive items of machinery which the present state of the farm’s development could not actually justify.

  Whether financial chaos precedes psychological chaos is like the proverbial question about the chicken and the egg, a difficult one to answer. Certainly, I was now faced with both. Although there was little rancor on either side, the personal relationship between Clyde and me had been irreparably damaged. Herbert, the farmer, smelling chaos, had become disenchanted and wanted out of our arrangement for which he could not be blamed a bit. He had lost but he had risked little and was by nature inclined to be philosophical about the whole thing.

  It was certainly the financial chaos which took precedence among the immediate problems to be solved. I knew that even if I could manage to do it, the process of getting Clyde to return the farm to me legally was not going to be one accomplished overnight. In the meantime, the farm continued to pump out milk, and the check continued to arrive each month. But this check came of course to Clyde and was consumed immediately in partial support of his various schemes and adventures. I say partial because it was soon very obvious that he had spread himself catastrophically thin; the farm, almost from the moment of my return, was awash with angry gentlemen flourishing duns for payment which had not been made on various pieces of equipment. Clyde turned out to be a past master at making good his escape when these gentlemen appeared. They would invariably be directed to me by some neighbor who believed that I was still the actual owner of the farm, and I would explain to them that I was not and do my best to pacify them. I was thus in the strange position of having to try my best to protect Clyde in order to avert the beginnings of a series of chain-reaction legal actions which could have very easily resulted in the total loss of the farm. The final irony was that I no longer owned the farm and the prospect that I would ever do so again seemed at that point distinctly questionable.

  The long-range problem was whether or not and if and how I could get my farm back. The immediate, categoric one was money: cold hard cash to keep Dorothy and the children going on Barbados. I scraped up enough for her immediate needs and attempted to inject a suitable note of confidence regarding the future into my letter. There must have been a discernibly false ring to it for she immediately took certain steps on her own in the finest tradition of good soldiering. “White Sands”—our house on Barbados—being very large and well-staffed, Dorothy decided immediately upon going into business as a boarding-house keeper. The island was by then in the midst of its h
igh season and accommodations were at a premium. With an unerring feel for the off-beat, Dorothy chose two tenants so phantasmagorical that the children always spoke of them with giggles: a near-centenarian father and his caretaker-son, not all that much younger and totally dispirited from a lifetime of waiting around to get his hands on the cash in the face of his father’s growing selfishness, contempt and tyranny. Luckily, the father’s tyrannical proclivities were directed solely towards the son whose daily ration of torture was the old man’s major sport and diversion. For the rest, Dorothy has always claimed they were not bad to have around, a contention about which I remain as quizzical as I am grateful.

  With the breathing space thus afforded, I was able to hustle up the sums of money needed to keep us going and avert the dangerous incipient acts of foreclosure whose aura surrounded the farm. Oddly enough, it was not a wholly unhappy time. It never is when one has made a conscious attempt to face the facts of his own stupidity and undertake corrective measures. It is in flight from consciousness and reality that true unhappiness lies; I had experienced its apogee on Barbados, twice compounded by the lotus eating circumstances which I had not earned and did not need. But now, amidst the TV dinners and maternal homilies which were frequently cogent and always irritating, a sense of moral purpose began to reassert itself. Externally, the three of us in that house during that long winter must have presented a certain bizarreness of appearance—much like the characters in a play by Mr. Harold Pinter. Internally, I suspect there was a good deal more intellectual cohesion present than that puzzling artist’s creations actually contain. To the specific problems concerning the farm, we applied our combined intelligence and avoided each other as best we could, conducting, in our own manner, the continuing investigation of ourselves. My brother dwelt deep in a world of complex abstractions to hold at bay the realization that his final, winning battle with drink must soon be fought. My mother, in the way of mothers, made stern effort to withhold judgment on her sons and, for the rest, remained the good audience she has always been, displaying an interest in the show, a willingness to pay high prices for seats and vibrantly positive hopes for the outcome.

  For myself, I found my mind again becoming an efficient instrument of sorts after long lapse. In the midst of all that I had to do that winter, the creative urge appeared to spread its leavening solace. In an attempt to encompass all I knew and what I thought, I wrote a long essay that winter. It will never see the light of day but it has lent itself well to cannabalization throughout the years even though much fortifying flesh remains upon its carcass; and much, I must admit in honesty, went bad and had to be cut away.

  To end whatever suspense remains regarding my repossession of my farm, the answer is, yes. I did get it back. It was done without coercion and I do not believe there was any real rancor borne in Clyde’s mind or my own. Only sadness. It was a long, slow and difficult process persuading him that he should give it back. The primary reason he did not want to give it back was of course that such an act was an admission of failure on his part, something he longed for as little as the rest of us. But underneath all the philosophical implications, there was a deep, almost peasant hunger for the possession of land itself; for Clyde land was the ultimate value, the ultimate strength; not to farm, or use in any way but simply to own. In the face of such a primeval need, it is still something of a miracle to me that he gave it back. But more than that, it is a testament to the depth of his dedication to the idealistic meaning of the odd arrangement we had conceived. No, Clyde was not a crook.

  And so the day finally came when, after many missed meetings and endless discussions frequently marked by rage on the part of all, Clyde appeared at Lawyer Bean’s office and formally signed the documents which returned the farm to my ownership. After that, during the relatively short period of time remaining to us on the farm, I would see him occasionally as he passed in his jeep and we would each extend an arm to wave in greeting as we had when I had come to live on the farm six years before. But that was all.

  Now, I shall jump ahead in time for a moment to reveal a barb—still lodged in my heart—which will always cause momentary pains of shame. In 1962, my old friend Pennebaker who owned a house near ours in Sag Harbor came to me with puzzlement, bearing a strange document. Penny knew Clyde, having met him years before when Penny paid a visit to our farm during a hegira around the United States making a film for the Brussels World’s Fair. Penny also had known O’Hara for many years. What he brought with him that day was a postcard written in an unknown hand postmarked New York City. It was addressed to him and bore only the numerical references to a certain chapter and verse of the Book of Isaiah. Penny told me he had looked up the reference and found that the verse said, in effect, “Intercede for me with my enemies.” Penny, knowing well the weight which then still pressed upon my mind regarding my shattered friendship with O’Hara, asked me if I thought it was from him. For reasons I will tell before I close this account, I knew it was not. Furthermore, it was not O’Hara’s handwriting. At first, I was as puzzled as Penny as to the postcard’s origins. In time it came to me that it must have come from Clyde. I hid behind my uncertainty but the fact remains that I did nothing about it.

  The farm returned to my possession sometime during March of 1959. Dorothy’s lease on the house at Barbados expired at the end of March and she and the children planned to return on the first of April. The extent of my anticipatory anxiety to see them all came as no surprise to me in the case of Dorothy, but in the case of the children, it was something of a shock to find how much I had missed them and how much I longed to see them. Fatherhood has always been for me a state whose joys lie in realization rather than anticipation. I have always received the news that a child was on the way with gloom and its actual arrival with elation. Now I had come to realize during our parting that I was actually a father; that the existence of my children was as necessary to me as mine is, presumably, to them. The hook was in and has never since managed to work loose.

  It was a splendid trio that came tumbling off the aircraft at Roanoke on that cold April morning. All three brown from the Barbados sun and glowing with health, they made those of us waiting at the gate seem like troglodytes. I wish that I had then owned a tape recorder and had the presence of mind to use it while their accents remained. Through association with the maids at “White Sands,” the children had managed to acquire splendid Barbadian. For the next few weeks, I never tired of overhearing instructions given by six-year-old Linda to her sister such as “Don’ speek dat word to me, you crazee mon?” It is better for their future, I suppose, but alas bad for my funny bone that these marvelous accents soon passed away forever.

  Having the farm back in my legal possession did not solve the problem of its eventual disposition. What Mr. John Updyke calls “the great northeastern megalopolis” still beckoned imperatively. No matter how problematical it may have seemed at the time, I was certain that whatever future I had lay in that direction. But the existence of the farm as a fact of direct, personal responsibility sat athwart that road as an insurmountable obstacle.

  By then, I had firmly faced the fact that as far as the farm was concerned, it was going to be impossible to have my cake and eat it. Partnerships, such as I had thought of with Herbert, were not going to work out. And clearly it would be madness to go off leaving the farm in the care of Ned, the hired man; without constant supervision, he would follow a minimal routine which would run the farm inexorably into the ground. No, the farm would have to go. But how? Whether out of simple vanity or some more noble motive I am not sure, but I did not want the farm to perish as an entity. But in order to continue as a functioning entity, the farm would have to be run by some person with a direct and heavy stake in its future.

  The other thing that had become clear to me by then was that barring the sort of grand plan for expansion at which I had failed, the farm was and would remain a family farm. By which I mean that the structure of any family which took it over would have to inclu
de sons who would provide an adequate labor force and whose interest in doing their best would be conditioned by the probability of eventually inheriting the farm. Had I been the father of sons, perhaps my decision to leave it might have been too difficult to make. If so, I am glad thrice-fold that my name stops with me; I have little doubt that, in such a case, I could have turned out to be the most reprehensible sort of Eugene O’Neil-type patriarch, passing on dissatisfaction with my own lot to my sons who would wait like a pack of growling dogs for my demise.

  During the months of negotiation to regain the farm, I had given this problem a great deal of thought. In the process, I had found my mind returning again and again to a family on our road which exactly suited the farm’s requirements. The father of the family Tugwell was in his mid-thirties and still in possession of that physical and psychic energy necessary to make a major move. His several sons were on the verge of emerging into young manhood. In his present status, Tugwell was a perfect example of what I have described as a sundown farmer; he owned one hundred or so acres of land on which he kept some cows and a few chickens but the major trade he followed was that of house painter. He had, in fact, painted our large hay-feeding barn a brilliant red.