The Farm
The tree of life also in the midst of the garden. –Genesis 2:9
So up until the night that Dad made his Big Announcement that he had gone and bought himself a farm, I had never once let the Forbidden Word, PONY, cross my lips. Then for two seconds I forgot, and Dad made it clear exactly what he meant by NEVER EVER. Now, oh lucky me, I had my very own farm and my very own barn and no hope of a You Know What to go in it.
In the merry month of May, when all the papers were signed and the deed of Dad’s fabulous marvelous p__y-less farm was in his hand, Mom and Dad and Evvie and Robbie and I had to drive Upstate for the weekend to stay at Dad’s new farmhouse and explore Dad’s uninhabited barn and forsaken pastures. I told Mom I didn’t want to go, what was the sense, but she said I had to.
I glared out the car window at nothing in particular, little towns just like ours, the Taconic Parkway, then green fields and barns and cows in pastures. I saw a girl on her p__y, riding across an open hill-top with the wind in her hair. I shut my eyes.
“Wake up, Ruthie. We’re in Bethel. Isn’t it a quaint little town?”
Silence.
We went through the town and out the other side; then we turned off onto a dirt road. The sign said Mitchell Hollow.
“This is our hollow.”
Who cared?
Robbie cared, for one. He sprang up and started yelping right in my ear.
“Quit it, willya? Down-stay!”
Then I smelled what Robbie had smelled.
We were passing a barnyard crowded with cows. I caught a sharp whiff of cow pee and manure. Then this other new smell rolled over me like a big green wave, a combination of sweet grass and apple blossoms and clover—and something wilder—spruce, pine, earth, rock, and running water. I knew it—I had smelled it on Dad on Sunday nights—it was The Smell of the Mountains.
I sat up and noticed where we were.
We were driving up a narrow valley, past a big mansion with pillars, a red barn with a sign on it, “Hunters Welcome, Bob Willett, Esq., Prop.” A handsome chestnut horse in the pasture. Some hay fields. The black skeleton of burned-out house, with a new trailer sitting on cinderblocks next to it. Rusty cars in the front yard, with chickens, dogs and skinny cats sitting on them. More fields.
Thick dark woods, the hillsides crowding in close to the road, then stepping back again to make room for two wide flat meadows. The left-hand meadow was grass, the one on the right was just plowed dirt. Above that meadow a green pasture tilted up towards a mountain, and the mountain tilted up toward the sky.
“Argue Mountain. Right here is where our land begins,” said Dad. There were deer in the dirt meadow; they lifted their heads and their white tails, wheeled around and bounded away, floating over the pasture fence and heading for the mountain.
“Look at those big fellas! Slap a saddle right on them!” said Dad.
“Dave, don’t stir up…” Mom whispered.
I wasn’t really listening. I was looking at the big silver-gray barn and the twelve black-and-white cows grazing out behind it. “Ed Pilcher’s heifers,” Dad said. “He’s renting the field and pasture rights from me. A dollar a year.”
When the car pulled into the drive Evvie and Robbie and I rolled out and hit the ground at a dead run, heading in the direction of the barn. We never even turned to look at the farmhouse with the sagging roof and rotting front porch and the outhouse in back. We ran right through the barn and into the pasture where the cows skittered out of our path, bucking and, I have to say it, farting. We ran where the deer had run, scrambling over a stone wall and up the rocky ledges into the trees. We found a narrow trail and followed it across a ledge until we came out into a little hollow. We stopped dead in our tracks.
The hollow was like a bowl scooped out of the mountainside. In that bowl was an orchard, all in bloom. Clouds of pink and white apple blossoms swayed gently above rough gray tree trunks. Birds fluttered among the flowers, and from all around came a low steady hum.
“It’s bees,” said Evvie. Millions of bees, drinking from the blossoms. We walked under the branches and the sweet scent of the flowers fell on us. The sky was blue and there were sky blue flowers in the grass. We lay down under the trees and looked up through the pink apple blossoms into the sky. Some of the petals fluttered down and landed on our faces. We didn’t say anything, we just breathed.
We lay there till we fell asleep.
When we arrived back at the house it was the blue hour of twilight and we were stiff and damp from sleeping on the ground; we were also sunburned, briar-scratched, tired, and happy. We had company; Ed Pilcher and his son Wayne had come over after milking their cows just to welcome us to Bethel.
“You girls enjoying yourselves up in there?” said Ed.
“It’s great! We saw deer! The orchard is all flowers and it smells so good!” Evvie and I were both talking and laughing at once. Ed Pilcher smiled at us and said ain’t they a cute pair of little country girls.
“You girls going to get yourselves a pony to fuss with?” was the next thing Ed Pilcher said.
Silence. My whole family stopped breathing.
“Well, I’d outright give you Wayne’s pony, but he ain’t reliable. The pony I mean, not Wayne. I’d say Wayne’s pretty reliable, he’s my right hand.”
Ed reached out and slapped Wayne’s shoulder. Then he rubbed the nape of Wayne’s neck and kept right on rubbing it. I ducked my head and looked at the floor. I had never seen a Dad pat his child before.
“But let me ask around a bit for a nice gentle pony,” said Ed. “Would you like that?”
Silence. I kept looking down and held my breath.
“What’sa matter, cat gotcher tongue suddenly? You must be the only girls in the world who ain’t crazy for horses. What do you think, Dave? Joan?”
Silence.
“Well. Ah. Hmm. We’ll have to think about it,” I heard my Dad’s voice say.
I let some air out of me, little by little so nobody would hear. We’ll have to think about it was the closest to p__y ownership that I had ever been.
The rest of the weekend I kept mum. I was not going to spoil everything again by saying p__y. I worked hard on my chores, like taking tons of cans and empty beer bottles and other junk out of the house and throwing them out at the town dump. Dad re-hung the doors and boarded up the broken windows. I helped Mom scrub the grease and dirt off the floors and walls. We had to heat up cans of beans and franks or Chef Boy-Ar-Dee on a Coleman camp stove because the house had no stove and no fridge. There was running water in the kitchen, but no shower or bath tub either.
Evvie and Robbie and I did one other important thing. We walked all around the whole Farm, following the fence line no matter where it went; up steep ledges, through birch woods and maple woods and over fields and through swamps and under brambles and across brooks. We touched every last fence post. Now the Farm was ours.
That Monday after school I got this book, “A Horse of Your Own, How to Select and Care for Your First Horse,” out of the library and re-re-read it just in case. I hid the book under my pillow like a baby tooth, and I dreamed that my p__y was already on the farm, grazing in the orchard grass under the apple blossoms, just waiting for me to come find him.