The Farm, Part I
Inheritance
a short story by
Brock Taylor
Neil stood in the gravel beside the highway, shouldering his duffle bag, as the Greyhound bus eased back onto the pavement. The driver, ex-army, had been good enough to make the unscheduled stop to save him a twenty mile hike out from town. It still left him five miles of gravel road running straight between dusty fields of soybeans to get where he was headed.
It was early October but the midday sun baked his scalp and perspiration rolled down his back and from under his arms to collect under the waistband of his blue jeans. It was harvest time and every half-hour or so a great mechanical harvester thundered past him, the sole operator, perched high in an air-conditioned cab waved to him with every pass. Neil returned the wave the first time, but after that he didn’t bother.
From two miles out he could see the trees standing like a green island in a sea of paler green. The only trees left within twenty miles, he figured. An oasis preserved by a stubborn old man, unable, or unwilling, to move with the times. As he grew nearer, the shape of the mass of green took on a familiar shape and his memory shifted to adapt to reality. There were the giant cottonwoods that had always loomed over the house from across the creek, and to the left the maples, almost as big. The three spires would be the Lombardy poplars that had been only saplings the last time he’d seen them. Closer now, the orchard in the foreground was bright with the red dots of apples and, just visible above them, the peak of the old barn. Exhausted though he was, he broke into a trot when he reached the high fence that bordered the orchard, already savoring the pool of shade he was about to plunge into.
He stopped, panting, at the head of the drive where the gate used to be, dropped his duffle bag into the weeds, and leaned heavily against a tilting fence post. A flutter in his chest marked the flight of hope, the hope that had been mounting steadily, against all reason, as the old farm had risen before him on the horizon, growing from a dark smudge to the green reality of his memory.
The orchard, seventy-two trees, apple, pear, and plum, laid out in a grid of six by twelve, yawned before him. Into the grass and brambles, that stood five feet tall, waving golden in the autumn breeze, hung broken and rotting limbs from every tree. A troupe of tired ballerinas, arms akimbo, skirts in tatters. Fully a third had toppled completely and were made evident only by branches dead and bare, rigidly breaking the weedy sea.
The driveway, once crushed gravel, now choked in green, still led to the garage, which gaped like a jack-o-lantern, it’s large door missing and the tracks on which it ran hanging like rills of spittle to the cluttered floor. Black holes, the glassless windows in the upper story, ached like tombs in the bright afternoon. No hint of white paint was discernable on the sun-bleached gray siding.
With his jaw set, Neil slowly pushed down the driveway until the rest of the farm buildings came into view, the house on his right with the cottage lost in the foliage beyond it, and the barn and chicken shed to his left. It was more of the same, the house perhaps worse than the rest. He stood for a minute taking it in, then returned for his duffle bag and made his way up to the house.
The sliding glass doors that had given onto the large cedar deck, he remembered his father’s pride and his mother’s pleasure when they had been installed, were missing, not broken, but removed, taken away, carted off, stolen, leaving the house wide open to the elements and whatever wildlife might take a fancy to the place. The fir floor was curled and cracked under his feet, and black with debris. And, it was not just the sliding doors, but everything; the whole house had been stripped. All the windows and doors, the kitchen sink, cabinets, and appliances, even the toilet was missing. Neil flipped the light switch on the kitchen wall, but, of course, the power had long been cut. A narrow staircase led to the attic which, when he was a teenager, had been his room. More of the same, smelling of urine and mice.
He went outside and walked around the house, pushing through blackberry and alder that had grown right up to the walls. The chimney looked to be still serviceable, as did the roof. In the garage he found a rusty machete and the stone from the old grinder. It took about fifteen minutes to give the blade a decent edge, but then he was able to hack his way to the other buildings to assure himself of the inevitable. He sat or stood in the cool gloom of each room appraising the extent of the destruction and decay, then methodically moved on to the next.
The barn roof, the herald of such joy from the road, had almost disintegrated, and countless tons of soaked and moldy hay had collapsed the floor of the hay loft, filling the old cow stalls beneath with a putrid and immovable mass now riddled with rodents and insects. He fought his way to the back of the barn and out through the back door into the calving shed. Under a pile of debris he found a smooth concrete slab and, kneeling down, he traced his fingers through ancient names and initials, their owners by now all in the grave, or nearly so. This was the holy of holies, his father’s shrine to labor and brotherhood.
The well shed had been completely destroyed by a falling maple tree, as had the bridge across the creek to the cottage. As the sun set in a magenta blaze through the trees, Neil wandered back to the house carrying an old cane chair and a scrap of plywood. The back of the chair was intact and the plywood would serve as a seat. On the front deck, overlooking what had once been the most beautiful garden in the county, now gone with barely a trace, he set up a single burner camp stove and heated a can of beans. It was dark by the time he realized that there was not a drop of water to wash up with, never mind to drink, but he decided it was too late to worry about. He pushed the chair towards the wall of the house, opened a fifth of Old Crow that he’d carefully packed that morning in the depths of his duffle bag, and, pushing his spine into the soft cane, lit up a cheroot.
*
The story was that when John McCormick got back from the war, the Great War, that is, having survived a year in the trenches and the disaster at the Marne, he found his intended had up and died on him in his absence. No one, not his parents nor hers, had seen fit to inform him, figuring, they said, that he had enough to deal with as it was. They reasoned that if it were the image of his beloved and his hopes and expectations of the coming nuptials and a happy life together that were keeping him going then they’d better keep it to themselves, since one young dead was better than two. But John McCormick never thanked them for their concern, nor admitted they were right, which they were, at least about the hope and expectations part, and when he got home and received this sorry news instead of the hugs and kisses he’d been imagining all those long and dreary months, he just lit out West as fast as the old Santa Fe could take him, and his family never saw nor heard from him again.
He finally decided on the land of dairy cows and apples and pulled his life savings out of a sock from the bottom of his suitcase and bought two sections of good flat land, partly cleared and part in timber, with a creek running through it and not much else. That would have been about 1920. He was a handy man of good stock and energy and he proceeded to build himself a house and a barn on the edge of the largest clearing and to begin a dairy herd, all of which he financed by selling the timber off the rest of his land, which served the secondary purpose of creating more pasturelands.
Some time later, four or five years, he married a Swedish woman named Hedvig and soon after there were children. About this same time a distant cousin he’d never heard of showed up with letters of introduction from John’s father and John’s father’s cousin. His name was Nils McCormick and, by coincidence, he had a Swedish mother and spoke some of the language. How his family had tracked him down John was never to discover. Nils, barely more than a boy, expected to work in return for room and board and John was not one to turn him away. Nils was good with the cows and the children and good at pulling stumps, so after a few seasons he moved into the newly constructed bunkhouse and began receiving wages.
Ten years passed, good followed by bad, and in 1935 when Nils was twenty-eight years old, it was time for him to marry. He’d chosen the daughter of one of Hedvig’s friends, an eighteen-year old with bright eyes and a good back, named Erika, and they married in the early spring. He bluntly asked his cousin John to give him the partly wooded forty acres on the rise at the back of the property. A married man needed his own home. John stewed over it for a week but then the two of them traveled over to the county seat to draw up the papers, after spending a long day in the rain with compass and crude means of measurement, agreeing on the boundary.
John McCormick had twelve-hundred-and-eighty acres of flat farmland. Over the years he had cleared off most of the timber and his dairy herd was one of the largest in the county. A good-size creek meandered across his land, its origin a pair of springs far up in the hills to the west. The northwest corner of his land swelled up over an ancient glacial esker, left by a retreating ice age, and there the soil was poorer and marred by a ravine where his creek, over millennia, had cut its way through the gravel. The timber there was of less value, being mostly cottonwood, poplar, maple, and cedar, as opposed to the fir that had populated the rest of his land, so he had not cut it. It was from this corner that Nils had requested his forty acres, and it was probably because John viewed it as almost useless, that he agreed to give it to him. Nils presumably knew his cousin after ten years, but family history credits him with more than shrewdness.
Nils was a hard worker and a penny pincher, he was part Swede after all, but he was also a dreamer and an idealist possessing an aesthetic unintelligible to his neighbors. In the few spare hours he’d had over the past decade he’d grown intimate with that shunned acreage and he knew every curve of the creek, every boulder and pool, and every tree that cast its dappled shade into the ravine. What his cousin dismissed as worthless Nils prized above all, for he saw the beauty in it. Land to him was more than a means to make a living, served a greater purpose than to be plowed and scraped and mined. Living land, land that sustained its natural, pre-human abundance of trees and ferns and wild grass and the countless creatures that lived there, was to be prized and treasured and preserved. So Nils viewed his ravine. The pasturelands, that comprised over half of his domain, would serve his cows.
Nils continued to work mornings for his cousin, receiving half wages for half time, and Erika shared his quarters in the bunkhouse. From noon until after sunset every day of the week he and Erika labored to turn their own forty acres into a dairy farm. They fenced the pastureland and bought a yearling and a cow fat with calf from John, agreeing to take them when they were off the winter hay, then staked out the footprint of the barn. Erika wanted the house to be first, but Nils said they needed a barn more. Come winter the cows would need shelter, something the two of them already had.
Two giant cedar trees and as many firs were felled and, with the help of a neighbor and his portable sawmill, beams, siding, joists, decking, and shakes were created. Tons of sand and gravel were extracted from the esker, one bucketful at a time, and mixed with Portland cement to pour the foundation, forty by fifty feet, and the first two feet of the walls. It was to be a barn for generations to come. Into the floor were molded feed-troughs at the head of the future stalls, and wide waterways to flood out the manure ran parallel, six feet behind. Seats for each of twenty-six stanchions were set to hold the cows’ heads when they were being milked.
It took every available moment to prepare for the summer solstice barn raising. At dawn that day forty men, mostly Swedes, but also Scots, Poles, and Irish, along with their wives and children showed up at dawn in wagons and tractors, on horseback and on foot, bearing tools and ropes and pulleys and hampers of food and drink. The ten-foot hip-walls with six-by-six verticals every six feet, which Nils and Erika had already framed, were hoisted onto the concrete walls and secured to the bolts embedded in the concrete, then plumbed, squared, nailed into place and finally tied together by a collar of two-by-six fir. The forty-foot width of the barn was broken on the ground floor by two rows of rough twelve-foot six-by-six fir posts, set in the concrete floor every six feet. Sub-joists connected the tops of these posts at exactly the height of the top of the walls and provided the supports for the forty-foot floor joists for the upper story. While one crew nailed down the wooden floor another raised the fifty-two half-trusses that together defined the gambrel roof, peaking at forty-eight feet above the ground. The trusses were raised in pairs, each bolted securely to a stud in the lower wall then joined at the top by a cross-piece twelve inches below the peak which would support the giant fifty foot eight by twelve fir beam that would serve as the spine of the roof.
By sunset the roof was shaked, all forty-six hundred square feet of it, the floor of the second story nailed down and a staircase leading up to it had been built. It was time to party. While the fiddles were broken out, the saw-horse tables set up on the new fir floor and heaped with smoked salmon and ham, fried chicken, mashed potatoes, black bread, and butter fresh from the churn; bean salad, potato salad, and candied yams and beer; apple pie, cherry pie, whipped cream, and cheddar cheese. And for later, for the men, there was rye whiskey and a couple jars of white lightning. In the meantime Nils quietly mixed up an enormous load of concrete and poured a four-by-four slab in the back that would eventually be expanded into the calving shed. Then by lantern-light, with sticks or fingers, every member of the party wrote his or her name or initials in the wet cement and the children left their handprints around the perimeter. It was well after midnight when the last jig had been danced, the fiddles put away, and the teary-eyed, the blistered, and the drunk had all bid each other good-night and stumbled, and limped, and jostled their way up the rutted track and into the starry night. Erika, as exhausted as any of them, took the last lantern and walked the mile back to John McCormick’s bunkhouse, leaving her husband lying in the weeds gazing up at the outline of his gambrel roof silhouetted darkly against the rising moon, dreaming of a dynasty.
The summer and autumn were passed siding the barn, building and installing windows and doors, and digging a well. Erika was beginning to rag on him pretty hard about building a house, and come first snow he got down to it. He’d chosen a spot that backed up against the ravine so that from his bedroom window he’d be able to watch the creek through its seasons. There was an early freeze that year that killed off nearly a quarter of the county fruit trees, and by the time Nils was ready to get started on the foundation the ground was frozen too solid to dig, so he bucked up some cedar blocks, leveled them as best he could, and laid out six-by-six beams on them and started from there. He’d never have done that with the barn or the future shop, but this was just the house. All through the short winter afternoons he labored, usually with Erika beside him, and come spring they had it closed in and almost livable. When the ground thawed he was able to scrounge enough ten-pound stones from the esker to build a fireplace and chimney and he carted a two thousand lineal feet of fir one-by-six to a planer mill and had it planed and made into tongue and groove for the floor.
Erika was pregnant that winter, expecting in May, and Nils pushed hard to have the house ready for his first child, but it was not to be. He’d only laid half the floor and the septic had yet to be dug for the indoor commode he was set on, when a little daughter was stillborn just two weeks premature. The child was never named, and they buried her under the only oak tree on the property, across the creek from the house. A granite river stone with McC, 1936 scratched into it marked the grave.
In late May they moved into an unfinished house and Erika, she was still not twenty, worked out her grief trimming out the entire house with one-by-six fir that she sanded and varnished. She also completed the kitchen and bathroom cabinets, skirted the foundation to keep out the winter wind, and finished the maple furniture that her husband built in the evenings. For Nils it was spring, which meant planting time. Over the past few years as he’d been planning his orchard, he had selected from among his neighbors best fruit trees, grafted cuttings into hardy rootstock and nurtured them in his cousin’s greenhouse. Of the hundred little trees he’d started all but six had been killed the previous winter, so he shelled out hard cash, two dollars a tree, to get a total of seventy-four trees, all apple, plum, and pear, but for two Bing cherries which he planted on either side of the house. Planted too close, wanting to smell the fruit, feel their lacey blossoms on his face in the spring, so that twenty years later he had to cut them down before they pushed the house into the ravine. With the remaining starts he created his orchard, six rows of twelve, spread out over two acres of good pastureland, and all enclosed by a rough eight-foot cedar fence against the deer.
Nils had worked for ten years for his cousin John, and had saved every penny. His farm, to this point, had cost him less than five hundred dollars. That spring he spent most of his hoard on a herd of twenty Holstein cows, a single bull, and an old Ford tractor. He became his own man, a full-time dairyman.
That summer and fall he built the chicken shed, reasoning that even though times were bad everyone needed eggs and the occasional chicken dinner. The building was dimensioned twenty feet by sixty-eight and had the same foundation as the barn: a concrete slab with two-foot hip walls. Like the barn he hand mixed all the concrete and poured it in sections, but when he was done with the finishing no seams were visible and it looked like a single pour. The building lay east-west, and he reasoned that the south-facing roof should be bigger than that on the north, to gain as much heat from the sun as possible. He’d never heard of such a design, but once it had occurred to him, nothing could deter him from it. Nevertheless he wanted lots of glass on the south wall for light, so he built it six feet high, allowing for a string of four-foot windows its full length. The north wall he kept to three feet and set with four small windows for ventilation. From the six foot south wall the roof rose at the slight incline of ten percent, then after running fifteen of the twenty feet across the building it fell at about seventy-five degrees to meet the top of the back wall. It was an oddly shaped building and the cause of much scoffing, but it worked. Nils figured that the interior would get too hot in the summertime so he installed a vent in the ridge that ran the whole length of the building and could be opened and closed with a pole from inside.
At even intervals along the north wall the concrete was interrupted by small doors that gave the flock access to the yard when they were opened, and also served as drains for the water that was monthly used to hose the place clean. To the north of the chicken shed Nils sacrificed another acre of pasture, fencing it in as a chicken-yard, using six-foot chicken wire to keep out the raccoons and foxes. Nils figured to get into the chicken and egg business slowly, so he divided the building in half with a wooden partition and installed five-hundred square wooden nests stacked two deep in three rows of three each and the following spring bought six-hundred chicks that were all guaranteed to be female, and ended up with two-hundred roosters to slaughter the following year.
In the summer of 1937 Erika produced a second stillborn daughter, and a second little granite gravestone marked her place under the oak tree. After that Erika returned to her parents’ house, just five miles from her husband’s farm, and Nils began courting her all over again, buying a horse to facilitate his twice-weekly commute. It took him a year to win her back and it wasn’t until 1940 that their third child, Eva, was born, alive and apparently healthy. In the summer of 1942 it was Erika’s mother who, with all the kindness she could muster, pointed out the obvious, that the clinging, uncommunicative child was simple in the head.
During the second, interminable courtship of his wife Nils built his shop. He poured the usual slab foundation, twenty-five feet by forty, but this time without the short concrete walls. Instead he took on the masochistic chore of making solid concrete bricks, four inches by eight inches by twelve, twenty-five hundred of them. To do this he fashioned a six-brick mold, placed it on a wooden drying rack under a temporary shed roof over the foundation, then hand-mixed a wheelbarrow of concrete and shoveled it into the mold. He’d let it sit just long enough to set up, then he’d remove the mold and make another batch. Nils never said, but the rumor has it that he spent every evening for two solid months just making bricks. Nils had time on his hands.
When the snow was off the ground Nils built his shop walls, eight feet high, solid concrete brick. Center posts ran down the middle of the shop floor, and from the top of the walls he ran heavy rafters then above those he stood the joists for a second story. The chicken shed roof had worked so well he used the same technique again, but this time with regular height interior walls. By the time he got his wife back he was trimming it out.
*
In 1939 the second European war broke out and Nils followed it more closely than most of his neighbors. He was all for America jumping into it and putting a stop to the Nazi scourge. His cousin John, however, argued against it, saying no foreign war was justified. They argued over it for many evenings, John contending that foreign wars were, by definition, imperialism, and the United States had already had enough of that. Nils countered that a war to liberate Europe from a despot was not imperialism, but a just and humanitarian cause. John reminded Nils that he had seen war first hand and knew it for what it was. He had a lot of respect for the Russians, he said, and Stalin would beat Hitler. When Nils finally realized that his cousin favored the Communist system over the American he stalked out of his house calling him a commie red traitor, and they didn’t speak again until after the war. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor at the end of 1941 and his country entered the war Nils strode out immediately and enlisted. He didn’t return until mid-1944, a year before Germany’s capitulation. He had marched off to war an idealistic fool and returned a cynic, wiser but bitter.
Erika, in the meantime, had been unable to cope with the farm. He had sent her most of his monthly pay, encouraging her to hire help, and she had tried, but help was hard to find during wartime, and in the end she had sold off all but two of the cows and slaughtered the chickens, keeping a few to provide her with eggs. She wasn’t a frivolous woman, and she saved all the money from the animals and a good portion of what he sent her, but she couldn’t bring herself to tell him about it, so in her monthly letters she lied to him about the state of the farm. And she kept from him the awful news of their daughter’s mental deficiencies.
In a way Nils’ return from war resembled his cousin John’s. He listened in silence to Erika’s tearful delivery of the news, grimly stalked about the buildings and fields to confirm the facts, then doggedly began to rebuild his herd and his farm. The war economy was booming and to replace the cows cost five times what Erika had got for them, so he started with a dozen, looking long and hard for those. And a hundred chickens. In the fall there were tons of fruit, but small because the trees had not been pruned for two winters, but he hauled them to the wholesaler and took the discounted price. That winter Erika’s father died of a stroke. Her brothers got the farm and Erika got her mother, who moved in with them, sharing the second bedroom with Eva. Erika was pregnant again, so Nils spent the winter building the cottage across the creek for his mother-in-law, and a stout bridge to provide easy access. It was a square building with three rooms, and Nils built it out of fieldstones, which he gathered from around his property and from the edges of his cousin’s place, John being glad to be rid of them.
Yes, Nils and John were speaking again, the long absence and the war having ground down their differences and eroded the sharp edge of Nils’ opinion. Neither spoke much about their war experiences, not even to each other, but they shared a new understanding, and they saw it in each other’s eyes; something to be respected but left alone. So, instead of talking about the rage and disappointment that joined them at the gut, they discussed cows and the price of milk, like every other pair of dairymen in the county.
The next spring Erika produced a son whom they named Nils Junior and the sparkle she had almost forgotten returned to her husband’s eyes, and he laughed again and bounced his heir and hope-made-manifest upon his knee, squealing in glee at every burp and fart. Milk and egg prices rose and so did the size of herd and flock. One good year followed another. The war was won, the soldiers returned, and the economy boomed.
*
The cheroot long out and the bottle almost empty, Neil pulled his bedroll from the duffle bag and spread it out on the deck. There was no building he was willing to sleep in and it didn’t look like rain. His father had been happy with his birth and he felt a flush of warmth for the old man as he always did with the memory of that story. His birth had turned things around for a while, and put some pleasure into the lives of those few. He lay there on his back staring up at the stars and he felt at home. This was his home and it felt right. The same gravity that had slid him from his mother’s womb now cradled him beneath the starry order, his father’s cedar deck serving to give him rest, as it had served so many other wholesome purposes. With his birth the farm had been completed, every building had found its place and it occupied it still.
Neil hadn’t given the farm or his family much thought over his many years away. His occasional letters and rarer visits had been the result of a remote sense of obligation rather than any feeling of love. In his youth the farm had been his prison and his father the warder. Exhilaration and relief had been his overriding emotions when he’d escaped, and so his feeling of the rightness of his homecoming, as unconscious as it was, surprised him. His father had been strict with him, some would say brutal, using his open hand or fist or belt to punish any infraction of the rules, or ‘code of conduct’ as these strictures were euphemistically called. Promptness, attention to detail, politeness, and speaking the truth were the four pillars of the regime, and the smallest deviance from these or any of the countless sub-rules that were to be inferred from them, brought swift punishment. Five minutes late to milk the cows brought sharp blows to his ears; bruised apples during harvest time, an extra two hours of chores; rudeness to his mother meant the belt; swearing at his sister, the belt; a poor report card, the belt; drinking his fathers whiskey, the fist and the belt, and so it went. When Neil was an adult remembering the tight grip his father kept on him, it amazed him that he hadn’t hated him more. Somehow he had understood, or believed, that this was all for his own good, or at least that his father thought so. It wasn’t until he was free from it that the anger came.
They say that violence begets violence, but Neil had not been a bully, nor much bullied. He could hold his own in a schoolyard scrap and seem not to be cowed by pain. It was later, in the Navy, when he learned what real power was, and real abuse, that he put a name to his father’s petty tyranny, and thought he saw him for what he was.
Neil realized that there had been a marked change in his father after the war. He had not been born yet, had not been there to witness it, but it was evident, nonetheless, beneath the surface of the family history.
Before the war Nils had been expansive, building his farm, his family, his business. He had believed in America and growth and destiny. He believed that with hard work and dedication one could forge a dynasty. The farm was that belief made manifest. But as he’d crawled up the boot of Italy with the American forces and they had destroyed everything in their path, he had come to see the futility of it. He had marched into the rubble of Naples and seen a millennium’s worth of such ambition and dedication laid waste. He had crouched behind broken walls and fired round after round of mortar at the villas and mansions of an ancient nobility and watched the granite and marble edifices, that had taken centuries to construct, crumble before his eyes. He returned from the war knowing in his gut that it was all for nothing, that there was no permanence, that his little effort was straw in the wind. And so he clung to what he had and lived out his life with little expectation of anything outlasting him.
Nils had not returned to the farm after he’d left it, and Neil now understood why. He knew what he’d find. Buried in the heart of every brick and cornerstone, every truss and giant, hand-hewn beam, was the worm of its own destruction. Nils had turned into himself, become the solitary, pensive man that Neil had always known as his father, who, even in the joyful days of the birth of his heirs, knew, with chilling certainty, the futility of it. Behind the reality of all of his creations he saw the shadow of the larger reality of their decay and destruction. Neil sat up and in the moonlight looked across at the huge mass of black against the night sky that was the gambrel roof of the barn. This was just how it had looked fifty years before, in its heyday, but he understood that even then his father saw it, in his mind’s eye, as Neil had found it this afternoon, and empty husk, used and polluted.
Neil took another hit from his bottle and lay down again. Even so, his father had stressed work as the ultimate good. Work, work, work, the only joy in life. Work, just to keep your head above water and your mind on the living instead of the dead.
Through his reverie Neil could hear the heavy machinery still working the fields. Even though it was well after midnight a mechanical roar rose and fell then steadily increased until it was deafeningly near. Suddenly the whole farm, the house, the barn, the dilapidated orchard, were ablaze in light as the giant harvester with its stadium lights made a sweeping turn just fifty yards from where Neil lay.
He awoke sore and dying for water, the night’s whiskey thick in his head and tongue. A cold glow in the east provided enough light for him to find the demolished well shed and by tossing aside splintered beams and branches he was able to find the well. The stout wooden lid that his father, in despair and self-pity, had bolted across it had been cracked by the falling tree, and with a rope and a plastic bucket that he found in the old shop Neil was able to tease up enough water to quench his thirst. Disgusting water. Undrinkable, except that he was desperate.
*
It was on Eva’s seventh birthday, June 4, 1947 that Clara was born. Eva seemed to understand what was happening with her mother, a similar condition the previous year had produced her brother Nils Junior. But that morning, when Erika went into labor and Eva was told that her birthday party had to be postponed for a week, she was disconsolate. Her father’s cheerful explanation that this was a doubly special day, a double birthday, hers and her new brother or sister’s, deepened her sulk. In the evening when Nils brought her to Erika’s bedside to see her new sister she poked roughly at the baby then struggled to escape. Nils let her go. At dinnertime she was not to be found and after a playful hunt that soon turned frantic, a search of the house and outbuildings by Nils and his mother-in-law, he called on his neighbors to organize a search party. With lanterns and a couple of dogs twenty people combed the ravine and surrounding woods until after midnight.
Before Nils put his long ladder down the well at four in the morning he knew in his heart what he would find, and two days later a third stone stood beneath the oak tree. It had been years since anyone had drawn water from the well, not since the pump had been installed. There was no need for it to be open. It shouldn’t have been open. All these years waiting, waiting, a deathtrap for his poor, simple daughter. The day after he dragged her rigid little body from those black depths into the blackness of the night and the silence of his milling neighbors, he sealed the well shut with solid two-inch fir planks and ten-inch carriage bolts, damning himself with every stroke of his hammer, with every thrust of the saw. Clara was given Eva’s name, Clara Eve, in memory of her sister, and to mitigate her parents’ grief, but she took it as a curse when she was old enough to understand; cursing her for being born on that wretched day, in competition with her big sister who didn’t understand what was happening. Or perhaps she did.
But one day followed the next, and years passed. Another daughter came, Johanna, then there were no more. The children grew up farm kids, milking and gathering eggs, shoveling out the barn and the chicken shed, picking fruit, digging potatoes, and mending fences.
In 1956, when the USSR invaded Hungary to crush the new populist anti-Communist regime, John McCormick changed his views on Communism. In 1960 he turned sixty-five and his joints and back were begging for warmer climes. His nine children were grown and all but the oldest, Peter, had moved away to the city or married onto other farms. He subdivided his land into twelve eighty acre pieces, getting five-hundred an acre, gave the best two-hundred-and-eighty acres with the houses and barns to Peter, bought an orange grove in La Jolla, California, and moved south with his wife. Nils was sorry to lose his friend and the only family he’d known, but he approved. Small farms were better than big farms. Now there were thirteen families living off the land that for so long had supported only one.
When Nils Junior entered high school he told everyone to call him Neil and to drop the Junior. He bloodied the noses of those who didn’t. He struggled through the last few years of school, and the day he finally graduated he hitched into town and enlisted in the navy. He’d never seen the ocean, and the romance of it drew him. He had hinted to his parents about his intention and listened mutely as his father blustered against it and his mother kept a grim silence. He understood his father’s arguments, had heard them all his life, but it was all old fogy talk about trenches and murder, politics and foreign wars. The navy was about adventure and it was an escape from the inevitability of the farm. As far as his country was concerned the timing was perfect. President Johnson was ramping up the war effort in Vietnam and he would have been drafted if he hadn’t enlisted. The war didn’t bother Neil a bit, it was what he’d signed up for, and the beginning of a career that would long outlast this minor skirmish.
Clara Eve soon followed her big brother’s lead, skipping out to San Francisco with a vanload of youngsters before she had even finished her junior year in high school. Nils made his first airplane ride to fly down to bring her back, but he returned empty-handed. Johanna, the favorite, excelled at school and was awarded a scholarship at the state university two hundred miles away. By the fall of 1968 Nils and Erika were on their own again, and Nils hired a local boy to help with the daily workload.
They saw little of their children for many years, and Erica took up gardening, digging up the whole front lawn and replacing it with long arcing flowerbeds full of dahlias, gladiolas, cosmos, tulips, irises, crocuses, daffodils, roses, delphiniums, and many more; all kinds of flowering bushes, rhododendrons, and azaleas. Her substitute family. Nils Junior, they never called him Neil, wrote intermittent letters from Hawaii, Norfolk, Guam, then finally the Philippines, but rarely came home when he had leave. Clara Eve surfaced after ten years, calling herself Claire. She was unmarried, living with a man in Berkeley, and had two children by different men. She told them she was doing fine, getting by. Erika hugged and coddled and fussed over her grand-daughters for the entire two days they were with her, but Nils remained aloof, spending long hours up in the barn smoking his pipe. Johanna wrote religiously as she made her way through the PhD. program in Mathematics at Princeton, then became an associate professor at the University of British Columbia up in Canada. She never failed to visit over the Christmas holidays, and after a couple of years in Canada, she was bringing with her her new husband then a son and finally a daughter too.
In the late seventies Nils couldn’t keep up with the cows so he sold the herd. No longer needing grazing land and hay he saw no reason to keep the fields, and he reasoned it was selfish to do so, so he subdivided his forty acres into eight five acre pieces and sold off all but the one with his buildings and orchard. One of these five-acre plots contained a piece of his beloved ravine so he asked more for it and got it, selling it to a young couple who swore they’d preserve every precious tree. Within a year they’d cut half of them down to clear a place to build so they could live on the ravine but have a view of the distant mountains. Still, he rather liked having neighbors, watching them bring in trailers and pre-fabricated houses, and throwing up metal barns. Times were different.
Then, in 1981 he was presented with a petition from five of his immediate neighbors, those happy souls he’d sold his land to, as well as a number from as much as two miles away, demanding he eliminate the foul odor caused by his chickens. He visited with each one, telling them that he’d been raising chickens on that land since the depression, that the chickens pre-dated them, and their parents. They had smelled the smell when they bought the place, and besides, you got used to it. It made no difference, the chickens had to go. Nils called them all ingrates and ignored them. A few months later he was called before the county commissioners who hemmed and hawed and scratched their ears and mumbled on and on about this county ordinance and that state regulation. The law was the law. The rule of the majority. They had great sympathy for him, a founding member of the community, a pioneer and all. Nils drove home and slaughtered his twelve-hundred chickens and sold them cheap to the meat processor in the next county. Erika implored him to keep her favorite couple of layers, just for their own use. The law’s the law, he snapped as he wrung their necks.
In 1985 Erika was sixty-eight. After making breakfast one fall morning she told her husband she was feeling poorly and returned to bed. Nils went out to pick apples and when he returned for lunch he found her lying on the floor of the bedroom stone dead. A stroke, the coroner said. For the first time in over twenty years Nils saw his three children together again as they put her in the ground in the Lutheran cemetery.
Back in the seventies some of the farmers in the county started doing well with soybeans, and by the eighties a company called Agricorp started buying up the small farms, combining them into a single, huge operation, and growing thousands of acres of the stuff. They were offering three thousand an acre, and one by one the locals saw the wisdom in short-term gain and sold out. By the time Erika died all of John McCormick’s original spread was owned by Agricorp excepting Nil’s place and the five acres of treeless ravine behind him. The company was offering only a thousand an acre for these small parcels, since most of it was unusable to them, being marred by the creek and cluttered with buildings and fruit-trees. When Erika died his children told him it was time to move on but Nils couldn’t see living anyplace else. He didn’t want to live in Vancouver, a big city in a foreign country, which is what Johanna was begging him to do. Besides, he didn’t see her husband, nice as he was, bubbling over with enthusiasm. Clara Eve and Nils Junior quietly favored Johanna’s offer and the only other option seemed to be the old folks home, the deathwatch station as Nils called it, in the county seat. No, he’d stay put.
But loneliness overwhelmed him. He’d always been solitary and self-sufficient, or so he’d thought, but with no neighbors except the conniving, prissy tree-cutters next door with whom he’d not exchanged a civil word in a decade, without Erika, whom he discovered he loved the memory of more than he’d ever shown in life, he found he just couldn’t cope. His mother-in-law moved into the house with him, taking the second bedroom, but this must made her more of a burden than ever, the cantankerous, dying old biddy. Just before Christmas when Johanna and her family arrived to bury the grandmother they saw immediately that something had to be done with the old man. They took him home with them and arranged to rent out the farm to a sincere looking couple with one child. He worked for Agricorp, so it was convenient to them.
Nils hated Vancouver. The setup was nice enough, with his own bedroom and a bathroom down the hall, but what was he supposed to do? A puny yard with a square of lawn, not a single tree or flower. Johanna explained that they were all so busy with their lives, their careers and kids, there was no time for gardening. She also explained that there could be no smoking in the house, and since there was no barn handy, no chair to lean back into the hay with a window overlooking a ravine of pools and maples, he stood under the eave, rain or shine, and smoked his pipe, even when he didn’t feel like it. The neighborhood was a good one, near campus, with quiet, tree-lined streets, but to Nils it was claustrophobic. Why would people live like this, in these little boxes crammed together with narrow exits that led to more hemmed-in, congestion? It reminded him of his chicken coop. He grew crankier and crankier until a serious confrontation ensued between Johanna and her husband, and Nils was delivered to the deathwatch station with tearful promises of many visits.
Nils didn’t care about the promises, about the visits. All his pride in his daughter had evaporated, seeing how she lived with never a moment for anything but hurry. Better to be a hayseed with no fancy education than a slave to the city, to some institution, to an invisible, insatiable need to posses more stuff than was reasonable for any single human being to have. Besides, he refused to consider any of the local places in Vancouver, insisted he be returned to his neighborhood deathwatch, to be near his non-existent friends. So five hundred miles would keep her visits down to a minimum.
In 1990 the tenants moved out, claiming the water was bad. Johanna had it tested the following year and found it to be badly contaminated with Agricorp’s herbicides and pesticides. At least that was what it looked like. Agricorp, in the most strenuous legal terms, denied the charge. Nevertheless the tree-cutting neighbors had the same problem and, after a few legal skirmishes, they gave up the fight and sold to Agricorp, getting a decent price due to the water issue. Johanna pressed her father to follow suit, but he refused.
*
Neil had boiled some of the well water to make coffee. It didn’t taste too bad, not with Nescafe stirred into it. He had forded the creek and checked out his grandmother’s cottage. Vacant the longest it was in the best shape. Probably because the windows were mostly intact. He bushwhacked out into the orchard to pick a couple apples and pears for breakfast then settled back into his chair. A bit of hair of the dog helped clear his head.
He had been stationed in The Philippines for ten years, married a local woman. There were no kids, he didn’t know why. Then, the year before his wife had run off with his messmate. They’d gone to Pearl Harbor where Jack had been re-assigned. Neil hadn’t chased her. When he got news of his father’s death he’d been given three weeks leave to bury him and settle his affairs.
Neil was sick of the navy routine, sick of the tropics, sick of his life. What a waste it had been! To find himself now, pushing hard on fifty, with nothing but a string of rental houses, rental friends, rental wives. The old man had been right on many counts. If only Neil had stayed… He tried to figure when the decline had begun. Was it the selling of the herd when the old man was too tired and frail to keep up with it? That was the main thing. Everything followed from that: the selling off of the land, the bitchy neighbors, their selling to Agricorp. If he had stayed… But there was no point thinking about it. He hadn’t stayed, and he couldn’t have stayed. It wasn’t in him. At eighteen he had done what had seemed right to him then. What more could be asked? The question was what to do now. Could the old place be resurrected? His sisters just wanted to dump it. It was he who had insisted on coming all the way out here for a look. In his heart he had hoped he would never leave, just hole up on whatever pension was his due and live out his life where he’d been born, where he was meant to be. The place was worth next to nothing, and his sisters wouldn’t fight him, he was confident of that. This was his if he wanted it, and he wanted to want it. Ever since he’d heard the news and begun the journey he had been thinking about it, hoping that there would be something here for him.
Only three days remained of his leave and he had two days of traveling to get back to Manila. The problem was the water. The water and the noise. The pollution. He could fight it in court and eventually win, but that took money. Probably a deeper well would tap into good water, water not affected by the runoff. Neil lit another cheroot and opened the whiskey bottle.
As God had created Adam, from the mud at hand, so his father had created this farm. From the forty acres itself, its trees, its sand and gravel, its water, he had made manifest all these buildings and shaped the fields. As God had blown breath into his creation to give it life, so had Nils, with his breath and sweat and vitality given life to the farm. Nils told him he had cut down only nine trees, four giant cedar, four giant fir, and one maple. The gravel pit had taken a generation to heal, but there was no trace of it now. All he’d brought in were a few tons of Portland cement, a couple hundredweight of nails, two crates of glass, a bit of hardware for the windows and doors, and a few hundred feet of pipe. Neil had been unable to keep his father alive, hadn’t even tried. Now he wondered if he owed it to him, to himself, to anyone, to keep his creation alive. Would it heal him to heal this land? Was it even possible? Had he the energy and will? He tried to convince himself that his father’s spirit was gone from the place, had died years before, but he knew it wasn’t true, even his eyes told him that. The cock-eyed, ingenious roofline of the outbuildings still held the old man’s rare smile; all those damned bricks, the shop walls still standing without a crack, were his dogged Swedish heart, his frustrated love for his absent wife. The orchard, still pushing out apple, pear, and plum, marched on with the orderliness of his mind.
But form has no permanence; that was really the issue. Impermanence was the way of the world. In fact, form is transience itself. Entropy, he knew that word, but that wasn’t it. Entropy is the universal tendency towards structureless uniformity. Transience is something different. Transience is the universal tendency to move on. When you grasp at something to keep it, to hold it dear, what do you find wrapped in your arms the next time you look? Dust. Air.
By noon it was hot. Not a cloud graced the sky. The machinery was now working some distant field. Neil pulled a quarter from his jeans and flipped it into the air. Tails. He tossed the empty bottle into the weeds and stuffed his bedroll into the duffle bag. He stood there, frozen, the duffle hanging loosely in his hand. This was it. Goodbye, forever. He dropped the bag and sat on it, then slid his butt onto the deck and lay down, using the bag as a pillow. What bothered him was his ambivalence. Heads or tails, he knew it would come to the same. He would walk away, he knew that. Within an hour, he’d be gone. It was like a non-event that should be more. He saw that he had a love for the old man, always had, but somehow it didn’t travel. The love seemed to live here, on the farm, in the trees and ravine, in the buildings, and it was only here that he could feel it. It as almost as if the old man and the farm were one. One entity fused in his heart. His father had built his own metaphor, and each had followed the other through the ascent and descent of living.
He’d not said goodbye to the old man. Hadn’t taken the time. Not once during that long slide had he visited or written. Death was never immanent enough. Johanna always seemed to be coping. Maybe the time was now. But how to wrap up the love and hate, the anger and the vast indifference that he realized were the cornerstones of his life, the very meat of his sorry existence? How to bundle everything his father was to him and to say, “This is it, for better or for worse. This is how we were.” How to give grudging thanks and how to put it all behind him? How to acknowledge the old man, to honor him without cringing at one’s own unworthiness? How, in spite of it all, to say, “I AM!” That was the crux of the matter. This was his father’s farm, not his. It was his father through and through.
Neil stood and shouldered his bag. He stepped off the deck into the knee-high lawn and made his way to the back of the barn. This is where his father had dragged him for his beatings, away from the house and his mother and sisters. Here, above the symbol of all that was good in the world, the sacred square of initialed concrete, he had been lectured about the imperative of work and the value of family and cooperation, then had welts raised on his back and buttocks until he couldn’t breathe. Here had also been his favorite place to urinate, as he damned all those helpful neighbors and their wholesome ethics. Neil ripped a half dozen pieces of warped cedar siding off the outside of the calving shed and broke them over his knee. With the machete blade he deftly split it all into kindling covering the sacred initials with a good pile of it. One strike of a match and they were ablaze. He heaped on the rest of the siding and watched as it quickly caught fire. Within minutes the walls of the calving shed and the back of the barn were engulfed in flame.
Neil waded into the orchard he picked a couple apples off the nearest tree then headed down the gravel road. He hadn’t gone a hundred yards when a great roar made him turn around. Red tongues of flame stood fifty feet above the barn roof and then the great cedar tree behind it went up like a Roman candle.
Taos
October, 2000
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