My Extraordinary Ordinary Life (36 page)

Even our farm has a connection to “Mr. Jefferson,” as he is still known around here. It was part of a much larger land grant given to Dr. Thomas Walker, a physician and explorer, who was Jefferson’s guardian after his father died. Dr. Walker was a pioneer who loved living on “the edge of the wilderness.” But he is most fondly remembered in our neighborhood for bringing some of the first foxhounds—now known as Walker hounds—from England to America.

Not long after we arrived, Jack was off working on a film when I was invited to a dance at the local hunt club. The party was held in a humble wood frame clubhouse surrounded by porches at the end of a leafy gravel road behind the railroad tracks. A young man named Barclay introduced himself and asked me to dance. We spent the next hour dancing and talking. Barclay came from one of the oldest families in Virginia, which only meant that he had more pedigree than money. He introduced himself to me as “a blacksmith, tinsmith, and wordsmith.” He had graduated from Harvard, was a wonderful writer, and made his living installing metal roofs on houses and barns. Barclay had a handsome, angular face, impeccable manners, and was one of the most accomplished horsemen in the area, which was saying a lot. He seemed to have stepped out of an earlier century.

When I got home that evening, I called Jack, breathless with excitement.

“Jack, you won’t believe the night I just had!” I told him. “We’re gonna love it here. I was dancing with someone who was just like a … a …” I looked for the word to describe an erudite fox hunter with a scratchy voice and calloused hands. “He was like a prospector!”

Jack and I don’t go out very often, but we were invited to join the hunt club and started attending some of their events. One of the most interesting was a buffet dinner of game meat in its various forms, from braised venison to Brunswick stew to roasted partridge, sometimes served with shotgun pellets.

“It’s perfectly all right to spit them on your plate,” Winkie told us. “Even the Queen of England does it.” And she would know. The queen had visited the area in the past.

Every March, at the end of hunting season, the hunt club puts on a formal ball in the same rustic clubhouse. Male guests traditionally wear tuxedos and women black evening wear—which is right up my alley. I prefer black suits and reasonable heels. I always want to be ready to run if I need to. Some gentlemen of the hunt who have been awarded their colors wear “evening scarlet” tailcoats while we all enjoy cocktails by the massive stone fireplace. The meal is sometimes served by candlelight. It always amazes me, getting all dressed up for an elegant evening out in the woods in the middle of nowhere, without a camera anywhere in sight.

We were often entertained by stories of some of the club’s previous members, the most colorful of which was probably John Armstrong “Archie” Chanler, an heir to the Astor fortune and also a madman. At least that’s what the State of New York declared when he was sent to an asylum. Archie escaped and returned to Merry Mills, his farm in Virginia, where the head of the hunt club helped organize a new trial to certify him sane. He was famous for throwing huge parties for everyone in the county, and would toss his drunken guests into a jail he had on the property if they got too rowdy. One evening, while defending the wife of his farm manager from a beating by her husband, he shot dead the offender. (Or, as rumor has it, he ordered his black butler to do the deed.) The next morning, Archie was found wearing leather pajamas, calmly eating a breakfast of roast duck and ice cream, while the corpse lay undisturbed a few feet away. Archie confessed to the shooting, but was absolved of any crime. When we visited the farm in recent years, the new owner pulled back the dining room rug and showed us the spot where the killing took place. Archie had marked it with a copper star.

We enjoyed the wonderful variety of people in our county. One of my favorites was Blue, proprietor of a filling station and garage at a fork in the road that leads to our farm. I would sometimes stop for gas when I didn’t need it, just to talk to Blue while he topped off the tank. Schuyler and Madison (our second daughter) would run inside the store to buy gum and candy, like I had done at Mr. Butler’s store when I was little. Blue was a good neighbor, too. One time Gerri’s car got stuck in the mud on the farm, after she and I and the girls decided to drive to the chicken house to feed the chickens and gather some eggs. We had just come back from a shopping trip in town and were wearing our brand-new shoes. We’d had several big snows over that past week, but things had warmed up considerably, so when we pulled off our farm road to get closer to the chicken house, we could feel the car sinking down into the mushy earth underneath the melting snow. We were stuck. So we called Blue from the car and he came right over and pulled us out. He saved our new shoes, and he even fed our chickens.

When Blue finally retired, his family threw a party for him in his service station garage. It was an evening I will never forget. When we drove up, we could see that twinkling Christmas lights had been strung up inside the building. The automotive equipment was pushed back and tables full of barbecue and biscuits and scrumptious cakes and pies had been set out right over the covered repair bays. The place was transformed into something magical, and the whole town came out to celebrate. The room was filled with Blue’s friends, black and white: horse trainers, investment bankers, teachers, store clerks, and school bus drivers. We were all there. It reminded me of why I loved the place so much.

It didn’t take us long to fit right in to the local scene. Maybe our neighbors thought we were characters ourselves (but without the firearms or leather pajamas). Mostly we’ve tried to keep a low profile and get in step with how things operate here. I got the best compliment of my life from a carpenter and builder who was a mainstay of the community. “Sissy Spacek?” he told our friend Barclay. “Why she’s just as ordinary as an old bar of homemade soap.” (At least I hope it was a compliment.)

Of course, rural living isn’t for everyone. And big farms require constant upkeep. I always say it’s cost me a fortune to give my girls the simple life I had as a kid. From the start, Jack loved working on the farm and did most of it himself. He spent many an hour hammering fence posts, painting trim, and renovating barns. For him, it was part of the big art project of life. But there were a few other newcomers in the neighborhood who didn’t last. We would watch them buy farms for what a tear-down house would cost in LA, thinking they had gotten such a great deal. Little did they realize that their expenses had only begun. The wife would remodel the house, and the husband would buy a new tractor. We would see him out in the fields mowing for a few weeks. Then we’d hear they were selling the place, getting a divorce, and heading back to the city.

Around the time we moved to Virginia, a famous musician bought himself a large farm through an old real estate firm in town that was owned by one of three brothers, all of whom slightly favored Ichabod Crane. The musician told the realtor, “Look, I’ve come here to be left alone. I just want to enjoy my land and I don’t want anybody coming around and bothering me.”

“Oh, no sir,” said the realtor. “That shouldn’t be any problem at all.”

A few months later the musician bumped into the realtor at the post office.

“Hey,” said the musician. “How do you meet people around here?”

He eventually put his farm on the market and moved back to New York.

When we moved to Virginia, Jack’s mother, Gerri, came with us and Jack fixed up a cottage for her on the farm. It was wonderful having Gerri living here full-time. She ran the farm, handled our business, and helped take care of Schuyler (and later Madison) while we juggled our work schedules. She gave us the freedom we needed. I don’t know how we would have managed without her, or without Alberta Mahanes. As soon as I met her, I knew I needed her help. There was something so patient and kind about her, I found myself following her around the house, trying to pick up nuggets of wisdom. I had recently lost my own mother, and I had so many questions about raising a child. Between Gerri and Alberta, I was covered. The three of us became great friends.

Alberta traveled everywhere with us. When Schuyler was still an infant, I had to attend an event in New York, and Alberta came along to take care of her. The plane left early in the morning, and we were late leaving the farm. So we decided to take a shortcut over the mountain. It was the dead of winter. As we pulled out of the driveway, it was still dark, and the clouds were threatening rain. The road kept getting narrower and steeper, and as we gained altitude, the rain turned to ice and snow. We were slipping and sliding, and Jack finally stopped the car at the top of a very steep hill, got out, and peered over the other side. It was a sharp drop covered by a sheet of ice, and we had to turn back. But it was too narrow to turn around, so Jack got out and manually spun the car around on the ice. Alberta and I suddenly realized how hazardous this was. I covered my eyes and said, “Berta, this is too dangerous! I think maybe we should get out!” Then I heard Jack get in and slam the door. He put two tires in the ditch to give us traction as we slowly skidded our way back to the bottom of the hill, the car complaining in low gear all the way. After it became clear that we would make it down safely, Jack said, “Wow, Berta, that was a close one, wasn’t it? I can’t believe we made it. Can you?” We heard nothing coming from the backseat. “Berta?” Berta?”

That’s when we realized we’d left Alberta and Schuyler on the top of the mountain. She must have stepped out and closed the door just as Jack got in. Jack clambered back up the hill on foot, staying in the ditch to keep from sliding backward. He found Alberta by the side of the road, still holding Schuyler under that blanket, softly singing her favorite song.

I don’t know how she put up with us.

As the years went by, it got harder and harder for us to tear ourselves away from the farm. Especially for formal events. One year when Ronald Reagan was president, Jack and I were invited to a fancy event at the White House. We drove to Washington and checked into a nice hotel. I started putting on my evening clothes while Jack got into his tux. Then we looked at each other and one of us said, “I wish we were at home in our blue jeans.”

“Yeah, me too,” said the other.

“Do we really want to do this?”

“No, do you?”

“No, let’s go home!”

It wasn’t a political thing. We’d met President Reagan before and liked him. But we were supposed to meet with Schuyler’s kindergarten teacher in the morning, and that seemed more important.

Over the years, there were other White House functions that we managed to get it together to attend. The first time I met Bill Clinton, he and I had been chatting for a while when he said, “Wait, you’ve got to meet Hillary.” He beckoned to her from across the sea of faces. “Hillary!” he said. “C’mere and meet the only other person in the room who doesn’t have an accent.”

Not long after we arrived in Virginia, Jack and I went out riding with Barclay and his brother, Sandy, a U.S. Parks Service ranger who was also a whip, or outrider, for the hunt. Watching the brothers ride was to behold a thing of beauty. It was a gorgeous day in May, and the hills were lush with green grass. The four of us reached the top of a rise overlooking a gently sloping valley. Jack and I just looked at each other and said, “Yee-hah!” We went galloping down into the meadow and up the other hill at full speed. When we looked back, Barclay and Sandy were still on the other side of the valley, perfectly collected atop their Thoroughbreds, no doubt wondering what kind of rednecks they had let into the club.

I thought I was a long way from riding cows with Vickie Johns, but apparently I wasn’t.

Schuyler went to her first horse show when she was just a few weeks old. Little girls in riding clothes came running up to us and said, “Has she been on a horse yet?” She hadn’t, but that didn’t last long. The riders around here literally attach basinets to their saddles, so newborns can ride in their first lead line class and not be left behind in this world filled with horses and dogs. Most babies are sound asleep in the basket, so they don’t even know they’re on a horse. That basket has been passed around for years to many a tiny equestrian. Schuyler and Madison both became good riders; they rode in competitions and lined their bedrooms with ribbons. But at the farm they used the horses mostly for fun and transportation, like I did growing up in Texas.

There was a tiny general store less than a mile from our house, owned by a woman we all knew as Mrs. Smith—or as Schuyler would say, “Smizz Smisses.” One summer afternoon, I was away somewhere, probably in town running errands, while Jack was upstairs in the bedroom, recovering from hernia surgery he’d had the day before. Schuyler and her cousin Austin, both about eight years old, wanted to ride their ponies over to Mrs. Smith’s store to buy an ice cream as they often did. Somehow they talked Jack into letting them go but he told them, “Walk. Don’t take the ponies.” He gave them all kinds of instructions, including to stop and look both ways when they crossed the street, which was a two-lane country road, but the cars moved fast. Feeling very old and responsible, Schuyler and Austin set off on their excellent adventure, trailed by a couple of the farm dogs, Buster and Lucky.