Remembering (14 page)

“You mean you don't
want
anybody to farm that way.”

“I mean I don't want anybody to farm that way. You're letting nostalgia overrule your judgment. You've lost your sense of reality. What do you want, a job with
The Draft Horse Gazette
?”

“
The Draft Horse Gazette
— I'll have to find out about that.”

“You should.”

“I will.”

The dividing of ways had come, but Andy made no move to get up. He was not arguing for himself now.

“What is this magazine trying to do — improve farming and help farmers, or sell agri-industrial products?”

Tommy sat looking at him, slowly nodding his head. He was angry now, Andy saw, and he did not care. He was angry himself. He was going to go. He had known it ever since the afternoon after his visit with the Troyers. He knew he was going; he did not yet know where.

Tommy said, “What you are, you know, is some kind of anarchist.”

And then Andy knew what he was. He was not an anarchist. He was a throwback to that hope and dream of membership that had held together his lineage of friends and kin from Ben Feltner to himself. He
was not arguing for himself, and not just for Isaac and Anna Troyer. He was arguing his father's argument. He was arguing for the cattle coming to the spring in the cool of the day, for the man with his hand on his boy's shoulder, saying, “Look. See what it is. Always remember.” He was arguing for his grandparents, for the Coulters and the Penns and the Rowanberrys. And now he had seen that hope and dream again in Isaac Troyer and his people, who had understood it better and longer, and had gauged the threat to it more accurately, than anybody in Port William.

“Well,” he said, looking at Tommy, trying to make his voice steady, “you do have to take an interest in your subscription list, don't you? You will have to consider, won't you, that more Meikelbergers will mean fewer farmers?”

After he spoke, he could hear the pleading reasonableness of his voice, and he regretted it.

Tommy looked at him in silence, still angry, as Andy was glad to see, and he let his own anger sound again in his voice. “Don't you have subscribers, for God's sake, whose interest is finally the same as your own? Don't you have a responsibility to your clients?”

“To hell with the subscribers! Listen! Let me give you a little lesson in reality. I don't know where you've been hiding your head. It's not subscribers that support this business — as you know damned well. It's advertisers. Our ‘clients' are not farmers. They're the corporations that make the products that they pay us to advertise. We're not thinking in terms of people here. We're thinking in terms of blocks of economic power. If there are fewer farmers, so what? The ones that are left will buy on a bigger scale. The economic power will stay the same. A lot of farmers will buy little machines; a few farmers will buy big machines. What's the difference?”

Andy wanted to hit him. They were not even in the same argument that Andy had thought they were in. It was not an argument about right and wrong ways of farming. It was an argument about the way things were going to be for the foreseeable future. And he was losing that argument. He was now on the side that was losing it, and he was furious. He felt his fury singling him out. And he was exultant. He stood, to discover that he was shaking.

For the foreseeable future, then, no argument would be effective against the blocks of economic power. Farmers were going to fail, taking
the advice of Netherbough and his kind. And Netherbough and his kind were going to thrive, giving bad advice. And that was merely what was going to happen until the logical consequences of that course of success became intolerable. And then something else would happen. And who knew what?

But that an argument was losing did not mean that it should not be made. It had already been made and it would be made again, not because he would make it, but because it existed, it always had, and he belonged to it. He would stand up on it here, in Tommy Netherbough's office, in Tommy Netherbough's face. That it was losing did not mean it was beaten.

“We have a difference,” he said. “You don't think Isaac Troyer represents anything that you and your readers ought even to consider?”

“I don't think he's even considerable.”

“Do you know whose side I'm on, between you and Isaac Troyer?”

“I don't think you have such a choice.”

“Well, I choose Isaac Troyer's side.”

“Do you know what that choice will cost you?”

He knew. He was shaken, and shaking, but he knew. “It won't cost anything I can't pay.”

He knew then where he was going. As he was leaving Tommy's office, it came to mind, all of a piece, a place familiar as if both dreamed and known: the stone house above the wooded bluff, the spring in its rocky cleft, the ridges, the patches of old woods, the smell of bruised bee balm in the heat of the day, the field sparrow's song spiraling suddenly up into the light on the ridgetop, the towhee calling “Sweet!” in the tangle.

He asked a secretary to get word to Flora that he had been called out of town and would be back tomorrow. And then he drove to the airport.

He is in the limousine, swinging in the curves of the freeway, heading south out of San Francisco toward the airport. His bag is under his feet, the other passengers are looking straight ahead, nobody has said a word. He is thinking of himself driving out of Chicago toward the airport, twelve years ago, his anger at Tommy Netherbough grown to a kind of elation, lifting his thoughts, and he was thinking of the Harford Place.

When they wanted to be very specific about it, they called it the Riley Harford Place. Riley Harford had died there in 1903, and his neighbor, Griffith Merchant, Ben Feltner's first cousin, had bought the hundred acres. In 1903 Griffith Merchant was on his last legs himself, but buying land was his habit, and when he got the chance he bought Riley Harford's. After Griffith's death in 1906, the Harford Place, along with the rest of the Merchant land, was jointly inherited by Roger, Griffith's son, and Griffith's daughter, Violet, who was living in Paducah. From 1906, the Harford Place, along with the rest of the Merchant land, declined until 1945 when Mat Feltner assumed guardianship of Roger, who had by then become
non compos mentis
by the agency of drink, silliness, idleness, and age. Mat kept it, at least, from declining any further until 1948 when Roger died and it fell into the managerial powers of a Louisville law firm hired by Violet, and then, after Violet's death, by her daughter, Angela, who lived in Memphis. And now Angela was dead, and her children had moved to sell the land, most of it to be divided for that purpose into its original tracts. Henry Catlett, Andy's brother, had been hired by the Louisville firm to oversee the sale of it.

Andy had known the place all his life. He had hunted over it many times, and had worked over it almost as many, for, in the 1950s, after the house had been vacated by its last tenants, Wheeler and Elton had rented it, plowed the whole arable surface of it, and sowed it all in alfalfa and bluegrass. They made hay and pastured cattle there for five or six years, until the heirs refused to rebuild the fence. After that, as far as Andy knew, the place had lain idle, growing weeds and bushes.

By the time he flew to Cincinnati, rented a car, and drove to Hargrave, it was long past dark. He ate a sandwich in Hargrave, and then drove up through Port William and turned onto the Katy's Branch road. At the mouth of the lane going up Harford Run, he hesitated. It had been a long time, he imagined, since anybody had been up that lane with a tractor, let alone an automobile. But the momentum that had carried him out of Tommy Netherbough's office was still upon him, and he did not let the car come all the way to a stop. He turned, and as he entered the lane immediately saw that he could not see. The lane was choked with tree
sprouts, the tall dead stems of last year's weeds, vines, raspberry briars, and, underneath the rest, a thatching of dead grass. The headlights penetrated the tangle to about the length of his arm, but they showed him at least the hill slope on the right-hand side, cut back to accommodate the little ledge of the road.

“Come on,” he said to the car, accelerating a little to keep it boring in, while the brush rattled and scraped around it. He was just trusting the road to be there, and it kept on being there, approaching him as anxiety, passing beneath him as relief.

“Come on,” he said. It seemed to him that the little car was surprised, not having been brought up to such work. And then he saw abruptly the trunk of a tree fallen across the lane at the height of the windshield, and he jammed the car to a stop.

He pushed in the light switch and killed the engine, and sat still while the violence of his entry subsided around him. He heard silence, and then the peepers shrilling along Harford Run. After a time he got out and began to walk.

He wished for a flashlight, but he had not brought one. He had brought nothing but himself. But there was light from the moon, and he knew the place. He knew it day and night, for he had walked and worked over it in the daytime, and had hunted over it at night with Elton and Burley Coulter and the Rowanberrys. He would be all right except for the briars, which he found only by walking into them; he would have to put up with that. He was hurrying. He wanted to see if the old house was still standing. He wanted to see if its roof still covered it.

He followed the lane up over a rise and then down again, and through the three little tree-ringed meadows that lay along Harford Run, the peepers falling silent as he passed. He could hear the creek tumbling in the riffles. The woods stood dark on the bluff above the creek. The meadows were weedy, but he could see his way, for the night shone and shone upon them. And then there was an opening among the trees on the bluff, and he followed the road up through it to where the road went level again. From there he could see the top of the great spreading white oak that stood by the house. And then he could see the house.

It was a low stone house, thick walled, with an ell — four rooms downstairs, and upstairs two low, dormered ones with sloped ceilings. He
walked through the shadow of the tree and up onto the porch. The door, when he pressed it, did not resist at all, the latch broken. He went in and walked, feeling his way through the dark, damp, mouse-smelling air, to the back door and came out again. It was sound, he knew then; after all the years of use and misuse and abandonment, not a board had creaked.

He went and looked at the barn, which had swayed off its footings along one side, but was still roofed and probably salvageable. He walked into the driveway, smelling the must of old hay and manure, old use. He stood in the barn in the dark, looking out into the bright night through fallen-open doors at each end. Many had worked there, some he knew, some he had heard of, some he would never hear of. He had worked there himself — work that he had thought he had left behind him forever, and now saw ahead of him again.

He had begun to dream his life. As never before, he felt it ahead of him, not maybe, not surely, as it was going to be, but as it
might
be. He thought of it, longing for it, as he might have thought of a beloved woman, known and dreamed. He dreamed, waking, of a man entering a barn to feed his stock in the dark of a winter morning before breakfast. Outside, it was dark and bitter cold, the stars glittering. Inside, the animals were awaiting him, cattle getting up and stretching, sheep bleating, horses nickering. He could smell the breath and warmth of the animals; he could smell feed, hay, and manure. The man was himself.

He went out. He went past the house and under the tree again. Following only a path now through a fallen gate, he went farther along the slope, crossed a little draw, and slanted down through the still sheen of the moonlight to where a shadowed notch opened in the hillside beneath another white oak as large and spreading as the one by the house. Again feeling his way, he went into the shadow and up into the notch. When the shadow seemed to hover and close around him, he felt with his hands for the cleft in the rock, and found it, and felt the cold water flowing out and the flat stone edging the water. He knelt and drank.