See that the ewe has milk, that her udder is all right, her teats open, and that the lambs get the milk.
That’s what my bulletin said. Stern advice for a city-bred man who came late to shepherd’s estate. The ewes and I went through a joint pregnancy: they carried the lambs, I carried the bulletin and the worry and the wonder. I was pretty sure that no matter how closely I watched I should finally be caught off my guard. On a Sunday morning in February, just at daylight, my hour came. The little boy burst into the bedroom and cried: “Wake up, you got a lamb!”
I pulled on some cold clothes and stumbled out toward the barnyard. Before I got down to the shed where the sheep were I could hear a lamb blaring. The sound seemed artificial, almost as though somebody were blowing short blasts on a cheap horn. I slowed my step and looked in at the door of the fold. On the frozen ground just over the threshold a lamb lay dead. A coating of frost had formed on its stiff yellow fleece. The ewe stood just beyond, her stern showing traces of blood, her eyes full of bewilderment. A few feet away there was another lamb, staggering about in small spasmodic jerks, its little dung-smeared body about the size of a turnip, its woeful voice strangely penetrating in the biting wind that blew in through the open door. Here was my lamb all right, waiting to be wrapped warmly in the nearest bulletin.
It lived through the morning, lying in a carton by the stove, but it was a weak lamb and never recovered from the first awful chill. Shortly after lunch, having nursed twice and received our blessings, it died. It was one of the briefest and most popular visitors we ever had, being loved by all and particularly by the dachshund, who showed a deep gripping appreciation of its lovely aromatic newness—the dung in its fleece warmed by the kitchen heat gave it a heavenly intensity quite in keeping with its Biblical connotation. There is something about a lamb you don’t get over in a hurry. It’s been gone quite a while now, and others are on the way, but the dachshund and I still tremble all over when we think of it.
The two big days of the month for me are the days when The Rural New Yorker arrives. I used to feel the same expectancy and excitement about The American Boy, during the first years of the century, when the pictures of pony carts and magic lanterns tortured my grasping little heart with life’s not impossible fulfillment. And there was a period, later, when I felt the same anticipatory emotion for the morning World, and those tense midnights when I would approach a newsstand on Broadway and squander a nickel on the early edition to turn with secret torment of suspense to the Conning Tower to discover whether some noble nubbin of poetry had achieved the decent fame I hoped it deserved. Those were nights! But I doubt if the boy’s dream of premiums, the youth’s dream of recognition, have anything on the baffled countryman’s dream of rural felicity as pictured in a farm journal. I don’t know what repressed corner of me is relieved by a study of the minute problems of poultry-house ventilation, or the reports of a sheep-shearing contest, or the account of a horse celebrating his twenty-sixth birthday; but I know that I can’t keep my hands off The Rural New Yorker when it comes, or my mind off it when it is due. (Geographically speaking, I should subscribe to the New England Homestead, but I somehow got started with the other paper and I don’t see how I can make the break now.)
I try hard to keep my mind and my sympathies abreast of world events by reading the newspapers; but the words of war correspondents often seem lifeless compared to the writings of persons who confide their troubles and their hopes to the editor of a country journal. Europe in tatters is something that ought to occupy an honest man’s attention, but lately it has seemed too big for me. I prefer to curl up in a comfortable chair with The Rural New Yorker and read: “I have a three-year-old colt that about once a month or so will throw out her stifle joint.” That is a catastrophe I can enter into. And I like the editor’s cryptic reply: “With rest and occasional application of a Spanish-fly blister the colt may tend to outgrow the ailment.” An item like Spanish-fly blister on a stifle joint can occupy my thoughts the better part of a whole evening.
I am not sure but that the menace and the mystery of country life are at the core of its charm. Much of what I read and hear is wholly beyond my comprehension, yet it holds me spellbound. Here is a letter from a subscriber (a Mrs. M. M.) giving a straightforward account of a tame hen that willfully tore a chick to pieces and then, crazed with remorse, went down cellar and committed suicide by eating moth balls. “The reason for writing about this,” Mrs. M. M. adds with inspired irrelevance, “is to show how easily eggs can be tainted by bad food.”
In addition to being fraught with menace, the life of the countryman has a beautiful natural balance everywhere discernible. These same moth balls that the hen gulped down to atone for her sin can be hung in an orchard to keep the deer away from the young trees. I read that in The Rural New Yorker, too, under the caption MOTH BALLS REPEL DEER.
For some months I have kept a file of clippings having to do with catastrophes. I find this a handy reference file when something breaks out on my own place, and I go through it frequently. One of my standbys is the case history of an abnormal heifer, reported by A. J. B. It is called “Trouble With Heifer.” “I have a heifer two years old last March which I raised myself. She comes of good stock and is in good health, but have never been able to breed her. This summer she has been in pasture with the other cows but has shown no sign of breeding. The only abnormal signs I can see is that she is fond of licking the coat of one of the horses, also likes to eat cardboard.”
Now, anyone can see from that report that the so-called simple life of the country is a myth. The poet’s dream of cattle winding slowly o’er the lea is a pleasant idyll, but the bald fact is that you suddenly find yourself with a heifer who shuns the bull, lavishes kisses on a horse, and eats cardboard.
There is something fascinating about the prose style of many of these correspondents. One of my favorite stylists is a lady who describes her chicken venture under the heading “A Living With Poultry.”
“When I see a hen shake her head,” she writes, “I pick her up, rub a little kerosene over her comb, nose, gills, and under her throat, also a few drops in her mouth. I use a small spoon for this. They usually respond to this.”
There is an economy of effort here that has a telling effect. The literary device of allowing the reader to guess how the hens respond to having kerosene poured down their throats is worthy of Tantalus. A year ago I noticed that my pullets were all shaking their heads. For weeks I tried to discover what caused it. Nobody seemed to know. I am now of the opinion that all chickens just naturally shake their heads, and that, considering the modern high-pressure methods under which they are managed, they have a pretty good reason for doing so. But although this lady doesn’t know, any more than anybody else does, what makes a hen shake her head, she can’t help wanting to apply a few drops of kerosene.
I fill myself to the brim with items calculated to terrify me. Often these letters begin on a tranquil note and work up to bedlam. “This has been a banner year for clover all through Cortland County, N. Y.,” began one disarming story in The Rural New Yorker. “On our farm we had the best crop of clover ever raised, both mows and the barn floor were crammed full and we were rejoicing in the possession of so much good feed for the cows.” Suddenly the mood changes. “Now,” continues the writer, “the barn is gone and the clover too. It happened on September 29th. My son and the hired man were sorting potatoes in the basement of the barn and when my son started to go to the house little Phyllis, who is only two, ran to meet him and exclaimed, ‘Look, Daddy, smoke!’”
Such thumbnail accounts of life haunt me. My own mows still have some hay in them, and I wince every time my son comes to me on the run. “Look, Daddy, smoke!” I hear him calling.
One learns that the well-being of farm animals is extremely tenuous. All farm animals, particularly the hen, are hanging to life by the merest thread. “My hens have a fluid in their throat,” writes F. G. “My turkeys have the habit of pulling feathers from one another and eating them,” sobs T. J. M. “What is the cause of large crops on White Wyandottes?” asks E. S. with a stiff upper lip. These people are all terribly real to me. They are my brothers and sisters, dwellers in darkness.
I am not doing justice to The Rural New Yorker. It is one of the great papers. I guess it is best known for its crusading spirit and for the vigorous help it gives farmers who have been preyed on by rascals and agents. But I think its true genius is that in the course of interpreting modern scientific farming it somehow manages to preserve and transmit a feeling for the land—a sense of fruition and of people’s talent for earth and their fulfillment in the year’s cycle. Most farm journals I have seen lack this quality, although they usually provide a tutti-frutti substitute. In The Rural New Yorker one gets it straight—in the letters from subscribers and in the articles.
The ultimate survival of this mysterious relationship between the farmer and his fields sometimes seems doubtful. The last generation has seen it weakening, along with the exhaustion of the soil itself. The farm as a way of life has been subordinated to the farm as a device for making money. Somewhere along the line the thread has been lost; somewhere in the process of introducing vitamins and electric time-switches into his henhouse the farmer has missed the point of the egg; somewhere in the long tractor-turned furrow lie the moldering roots of an earlier content. Modern methods turn the farm into a business, the farmer into a promoter. Meanwhile the land passes out of his hands (I read the other day that less than half the farm real estate in the United States is actually owned by the farmers) and nobody knows what the end of that sad story will be.
I remember, some years ago after the crash, reading a book by Ralph Borsodi called Flight From the City. It was an account of the author’s experiment in returning to handicraft and the good life of goat’s milk, wherein his wife churned butter with one hand and spun him a woolen sports jacket with the other. It was an idyll of pressure cooking and vacuum cleaning. One of my friends, after reading the book, remarked: “It’s beautiful, only my wife isn’t Mrs. Borsodi.” (As I recall it, Mrs. Borsodi not only did all the spinning, dishwashing, milking, churning, caponizing, cooking, cleaning, cultivating, and baking, but she also kept her children home from school and instructed them herself rather than let them associate with the toughs of the village. Even at this late date it tires me just to think about Mrs. Borsodi.)
Yet the book, for all its extreme recommendations, was disturbing just the same. It stated the case for the escapist and it struck home to jobless urbanites who had been experiencing the baleful aspects of city life during a depression and also, I suspect, to farm owners who had been brooding on the derangements of high-powered large-scale one-crop agriculture. It suggested to an inquiring mind that somewhere between the two extremes there might be a rural existence that would be both satisfying and practical for the average man who neither wanted to spin his clothes nor run a wheat combine but who yearned for cheap light and air and a certain measure of security.
Many people are groping for this ideal all the time, moving restlessly back and forth between town and country. The land, even though it has been mistreated, can still support the population—that we know. The question is whether the population has the temperament and the ingenuity to support the land—that is, to return its goodness, not just sap it.
The test is whether a person has a feeling for fertility. This is as much a theosophical as an economical matter—whether one feels any mysterious obligation to put back into the soil the strength he took from it by his cultivation or by his buying the canned products of other people’s cultivation.
I have just got hold of a book called Bio-Dynamic Farming and Gardening by Ehrenfried Pfeiffer, which bids fair to shape my mystical course from now on. Although I have barely thumbed through it, I can see that it is my meat at last. The hero of the book is the common earthworm. At the bottom of the compost heap sits God. Already I am a convert to bio-dynamics. Here is the life beyond the test tube—the philosophy of chemistry. I feel it in my bones, as I would a spell of damp weather coming on. Of course a farmer can’t allow himself to become wholly an ascetic (specially during lambing time); but if he allows his agriculture to degenerate into mere profit-making, he is a man foredoomed. My goal is no longer a three-hundred-egg hen but to find peace through conversion of my table scraps into humus. God help my neighbor’s pig—I’m afraid he’ll miss the scraps.