Prologue: The second week end of August I revisited the farm I had once
lived on for almost 4 years from 1951 to early '55 These ruminations
proceeded. I don't know why I did this except perhaps to conclude an
important part of my life. Have no guilt about deleting it.
After the war, the one we won, six of my seven uncles, four of whom had
battled the Krauts and two the Japs ended up living with us in Memphis for
various amounts of time from '46 through '48, (and that's not counting my
mother's parents -- god only knows when they came to live with us or why)
and all because my dad hadn't done the deed he shoulda-oughta and gone off
to war like all good Americans did, preferring to stay home and make bullets
for Dupont (for which he was draft deferred) rather than dodge bullets made
by the Axis' Dupont counterparts -- or maybe Dupont was making bullets for
both sides -- who knows? business gets messy in wars. But the upshot of
all this is that having stayed at home, Mom and Dad owned a house, and thus
we became the stopping off place for all demobilized family members. It was
very, very crowded in our house for a while, but that was OK because we were
very, very Irish at the time (much less so now). I was only 2 through 4
then, so my memory is a bit hazy at best. But I remember with amazing
clarity the morning I woke up fascinated by fire. My younger brother Tom, a
year and a half younger than me -- a surprise child, no doubt -- shared my
small upstairs bedroom and was still sleeping in a crib. I can still see
him fretting over the flames. He's never had much of an aesthetic bent,
more the engineering type, which means that though he's understood stuff
I've never known existed, still I know the beauty of fire and he knows only
the properties. I tell myself that anyway. Helps deal with the envy at his
success. I remember, or I think I do, waking that morning and lying in bed,
imagining the flames and how exciting that would be. I know I remember
sneaking into my parents' bedroom next to ours and taking a book of matches
from the nightstand while they both slept soundly on a Saturday morning.
Returning to our room, I sat down on the floor, struck a match and set fire
to my bed sheet. I remember sitting there, amazed at how beautiful it was.
I remember him -- brother Tom -- screaming and jumping up an down in his
crib -- apparently upset by the unfamiliar sight of a bed on fire. I
remember watching him, thinking: what's your problem? My next memory is of
great commotion. My older brother had been sent by my grandmother to wake
my mom and dad for breakfast, he had to cross our bedroom to get to mom and
dad's and walked in just as the flames were started to get dramatic. No
friend of theater, he lost it and went screaming through the house that the
house was on fire. Suddenly there was Uncle Mike and Uncle Harvey and my
father all pounding on the mattress with whatever they could find and
throwing the mattress out the window. It was all quite exciting. I
remember looking out the window and seeing the mattress smoldering on the
ground, sadly exhausted as though post-coital. A great debate ensued about
what should be done with me, I'm given to understand and I've been told I
received a royal whipping for that, but I don't remember it. Pleasure takes
precedence over pain.
Then came grade one. The only person I remember from that whole wretched
experience is Betty Bucannani. She had buck teeth. I remember that. Maybe
that's why I remember her, except that I also remember that I wanted so, so,
so badly to be her friend, I don't know why, it may have only been her name,
those dancing dactyls, whatever, she ignored me. In fact, I can't remember
us ever speaking to one another. Some loves are too intense for words.
Having successfully completed grade one and believing myself pretty much in
control of my life, I was suddenly and rudely told that we were moving to a
farm outside Pocahontas, Arkansas. Goodbye, Betty Buccananni, my darling,
my love, my life! Had I been consulted about this, I'd never have assented,
nor would any of us four kids. So much for democracy and the noble
sacrifices of my six uncles trying to make the world safe for such. 40
million dead but that meant nothing to my parents. We were moving and that
was that. I remember the morning we packed up the rented truck -- not the
closed van types you see today, this was an open bed truck with wooden fence
type sides. That was early summer 1951. It was the beginning of our new
family philosophy: the simple life -- a philosophy not yet communicated to
the rank and file. My parents were a full eighteen years ahead of the rest
of country in returning to the earth. I should have told my parents that
"the desire to be primitive is a disease of civilization", but I wouldn't
come across that quote from Santayana for another twenty years or so --
nevertheless, I suspected as much. That should count for something. Hadn't
my own dear father scoffed at the idea of barbecuing on an outside grill
saying, "It took mankind a million years to learn how to cook indoors. I'll
be damned if I'll turn my back of that achievement." I agree with him now,
but at the time I wanted him to fit it. To be like Ward Cleaver, exemplar
of white, upper-middle-class American values. As I look back on it though,
Dad was exactly like Ward Cleaver, well, minus the wardrobe and the
certitude that Ward exuded. But both were equally unflappable. Where Ward
was certain of his beliefs, my father was certain he had no beliefs. Where
Ward was bemused by his children's misreadings of life, my father was
bemused by all readings of life. And whereas one could never imagine Ward
getting June to undress, my father could regularly get my mother to shout
success. He had his talents.
My sister Tricie rode with mom in the Plymouth that was crammed with our
more fragile stuff. Uncle Joe rode in the truck cab with Dad and us three
boys were assigned to a small space in the back left for us like were pieces
of furniture. But we didn't mind. We made a game of snaking through voids
in the load, with the challenge of making it to rear. Boxes always stopped
us, alas, but it was a fun challenge for the two hour trip from Memphis, fun
despite the recriminations over the rocking chair lost somewhere on Highway
69 when my older brother whom we called "Brother", tried to rearrange a box
that blocked his way, inadvertently sending the rocking chair over board.
About a mile from the farm, at the top of Sand Hill, we stopped on our
virgin trip to the farm to buy some emergency provisions. Mrs Butler, a
stereotypical big-bosomed, ample-fleshed, loudly gregarious country woman
accompanied us out to the truck. Seeing it, she laughed heartily. "You're
carrying it in on a truck," she said all jovial-like, "but you'll be
carrying out on your backs." Then she laughed with an abandon that through
the years I've come to believe springs from tragedy. And true to her words,
three years later, we did just as she had prophesied -- moved back to
Memphis in our black 1950 Plymouth sedan whose hood and roof and trunk now
bore a thousand little dings from sheep hoofs. Our clothes were about all
we took back to Memphis with us -- that and one new brother, Pete, kid
number 5. But the first year on the farm had been good. The rains came as
needed The clover, the fescue, the alfalfa, all grew as green as God ever
dreamed they could. And ranchers from Texas, suffering a severe drought
there, were scouring the countryside trying to find farmers who would
contract with them for pastures to fatten their cattle before market. That
was right up our alley, since sheep graze closer to the ground than cows,
we'd let cows into a pasture first and our sheep would follow, none the
wiser.
The Texas drought was a heaven send my mother believed. It was God's way of
blessing their commitment to simplicity and of giving her some extra cash to
glamour-up the house. And it needed clamoring, believe me. It was as old
as Arkansas and was a real, honest-to-god log cabin, stuccoed over outside,
plastered on the inside. There were four rooms. Two "large" ones across the
front of the house, the living room and the bed room (for us 3 boys and my
parents, though they often slept on a pallet in the living room. I can't
imagine why). Across the back of the house was a small kitchen and a small
bedroom (my older sister's -- I've never understood how she merited that).
The roof was corrugated tin on which the rain drummed a million fingers and
under which the wind wailed like uulating women. In the living room was a
large pot bellied stove that heated half that room to eight hundred degrees,
but left the rest of the house in a deep chill. The walls in winter were
wells of condensation, and if you accidentally leaned against it, you'd have
to change your shirt, it would immediately wick wet all through. Speaking
of wells, we didn't have one. We depended on a cistern for water. A gutter
carried rainwater from the room to the cistern that adjoined the side of the
kitchen. It was housed in a slap-dash, shed-type construction. The cistern
itself resembled a concrete bottle of Guinness Extra Stout buried some
two-thirds in the ground. Our family doctor recommended we have typhoid
inoculations if we were going to drink from it. We did. Both.
I remember the morning the sheep were delivered. Dad had ordered one
hundred ewes and one ram. That lucky old ram. But the truck showed up with
two hundred ewes and two rams, someone had gone out of business before their
stock even arrived. Or so the driver said. He talked dad into accepting
the other hundred at half the cost. So the business suddenly doubled in
size. I think my parents would have objected to my use of "business" to
describe their enterprise. It was more a vocation to them. And most likely
of my mother's invention. She was the Romantic, dad, the Sardonicist.
Amazing how little they fought. But I remember one morning my mother was in
a fit, throwing silverware into the drawer, rattling dishes, slamming
drawers shut.
"Get out," she shouted at us boys, "get out. Go outside."
"But it's cold outside," I shouted back.
"I don't care," she screamed back. "Get out of here. Go clean up the
farm."
"Clean up the farm?" Brother, my older brother, sought clarification.
Mom was holding a sauce pan in her hand at that moment and she suddenly
went into a rage, banging it on the pot bellied stove like a maniac and
shouting, "Get out, get out, get out." We grabbed our coats and went
without further ado. It was bitter cold. Why didn't our sister Tricie have
to stand out in the cold? Life is so unfair. We made our way to the barn
where bales of hay were stored. In no time we were rearranging the bales to
create tunnels and secret rooms. The bales were heavy and took all three of
us to move them about. The work kept us warm, and having a mission that
required cooperation, we ceased the bickering and fighting we'd been engaged
in all morning. In fact, it was one of the best days ever spent on the
farm. Thanks, Mom.
The first year was good. But then the second year saw the Texas drought
move into Arkansas. The next two years of drought did us in. It was a
shoestring operation from the beginning, after all. Even if the first year
had been repeated ten times over, the eleventh would have undone it all.
The importance of capital in a capitalistic society -- Economics 101. Plus,
none of us kids were committed to simplicity, we'd have made demands. Would
have wanted running water and indoor plumbing. Would have wanted
television. Would have wanted air conditioning. Would have wanted stereos,
microwaves, washers and dryers, hair driers. Heat in every room. Toasters.
Blenders. Eventually even microwaves. There was no way we would have let
our parents live their vision of the simple life. In 1955 we moved back to
Memphis and dad returned to the dreary, meaningless industrial jobs he had
always known and that suck the joy out of most or our lives. But, hey, think
of all the things.
Fifty years later I returned to the farm. Actually it was my third trip in
fifty years. The first trip was 16 years after moving, away. My sister,
who had married her Pocahontas high school sweetheart, settled in
Pocahontas. I was there in 1971 for the funeral of her husband who died of
heart failure at 35. Death-minded, I visited the farm. Cows grazed in the
pastures and looked suspiciously at me, but there was no one living there.
The house was still standing, as were all the outbuildings, including the
outhouse. I was amazed that that hated, rickety, spider infested, mud
dauber domiciled, stink hole of a building could have endured the years, yet
there it was in all in ignominy. But I was most amazed that there were
magazines and newspapers in the house that dated from the time we had lived
there. It was being used as a second barn, we were the last people to know
those walls, hear rain drumming the roof, know the eerie whine of wind in
the attic. The last to love it and hate it and feel some bonding with it.
Using it to store hay seem a kind of desecration of my parents' one stab at
a meaningful life.
The second trip was sixteen years later (1987) when my father was dying in a
hospital not far from Pocahontas. He had retired to Cherokee Village, a
town located on the Trail of Tears, where dear old Andrew Jackson drove four
thousand Indians from Tennessee to their death and thousands more into exile
into that great garden oasis, Oklahoma. I once asked him didn't it bother
him to know such crimes had occurred on the very ground beneath his feet.
"I didn't invent Europeans," he said with a shrug. "Don't blame me." Again
it was death that brought me back to the farm. The house was gone, it had
burned. Lightning? Most likely. But I like to think it was from
spontaneous combustion -- from the stored hay. Nature's poetic-justice way
of stopping the desecration. I was surprised how deeply it saddened me,
even though it was a kind of desecration, still as long as it stood, well, I
apparently was taking solace in that.
Now it is 2005, 18 years since my last visit. I decided it was time to do
it again. No connection to death this time, except perhaps intimations of
my own mortality. The road to the farm, Dalton Route, leaves Highway 90 at
an angle. When we lived there, Dalton Route was a narrow, gravel road,
poorly maintained and often deeply rutted. In summer, by July at least, the
trees that lined both sides of road were coated in a fine brown dust -- not
just the leaves, but the branches and trunks too -- it was other-worldly to
anyone not accustomed to such dust. I can only remember four farmhouses
between the highway and our farm gate when we lived there, even if my memory
is failing me, there were certainly no more than one or two others. But now
there were forty at least. And not farmhouses, thank you. These were all
wealth-bragging houses. Where Dalton Route split off from the highway, in
that slice of land there was a tree not far from the road with a claw-foot
bathtub lodged high in the branches, dropped off apparently by some passing
tornado that no one living there could remember. It had always seemed to me
a sacred icon, not of God's power but capricious Nature's. "See this
bathtub set in a tree? I"I'll place you in it if it pleases me." I looked
with much anticipation, but the tree was gone. In its place, a new
hospital. A trope of man's attempt to rule over nature? Don't you just
love all these tropes? Dalton Route was no longer called Dalton Route. It
was named Country Club Rd. And it was paved. And there was a factory that
factored something, I don't know what, opposite the hospital. And three or
four dozen new houses in the mile to the farm gate. The farm gate was now
opposite the Pocahontas Country Club. And just down the road was the
Country Club Estates development. I didn't go in there. Neither could I
drive on the to farm road. It was locked all stock and barrel. So I
climbed the fence and descended the hill. I probably haven't told you that
it is a very hilly farm. And I probably haven't told you that Mom named the
hills. There was St. Mary's Hill, St. Joseph's Hill, House Hill and
Copperhead Hill. The farm was named Te Deum. What amazes me is that
neither mom nor dad was particularly religious. I ascribe it to
ethnicity -- Irish bullshit. The lay of the land is absolutely gorgeous --
the prettiest I've ever seen in Arkansas. The hills are all wooded and the
vales all pasture. A creek cuts the farm in two. The farm road from Dalton
Route (Country Club Rd) wound around St. Joseph's Hill and Copperhead Hill
and down and across the creek and up House Hill -- a least three quarters of
a mile. God it was so beautiful. There were no buildings left on the land.
No cows either, that I saw. But it hadn't gone weed, someone still cared.
I suspect it was being held for development. Land to be divided into lots
for retirees from Chicago and Des Moines and St. Louis. I sat on a rock on
Copperhead Hill and guessed that this was my last visit to the farm. I
wanted to hate those people who would, as Joyce defines sentimentalists,
"enjoy with incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done." But what
the hell. Let this land be loved by more than cows -- a species-centric
statement I know and acknowledge that maybe cows love ten thousand times
more than any of us is capable of -- but I'm a human and I want humans to
know and love this place, which none really have for 50 years. I sat there
remembering how in the dusk, killdeer would sweep over the fields like
hot-shot pilots crying their plaintive call and scooping up insects by the
cropful. How when the sheep were dying in the fields, the vultures would
gather on the fence posts and circle the farm on wings that only an angel
could out grace. Such hideous, ugly birds -- such astonishing, incredible
beauty in the air. Vultures should be the icon of God, not the crucifix.
When I first sat down to absorb the farm. I was disappointed that none of
it seemed to remember my name. There were trees there that should have
remembered me, but then I couldn't remember their names either. Time heals,
it severs, it obliterates, it moves on. I wanted to be 7, 8, 9 years old
again, to feel the immediacy that I knew then, then when I knew without
introduction the names of the spirits of every tree and rock and weed and
wind that I encountered. But it wasn't that way. I was like seeing someone
you know you know but just can't remember the name or the context. You nod,
knowing that that person was once important in your life and had things been
different, well, then, you'd be different. I kissed the ground. Thanked it
for the secrets it told me and went home. Back to the land I belong to now.
Taking from my parents not the simple life, rather life, simply, whatever it
brings.
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