The Jonathan Papers Part 7

And a New England Sunday always is different. Whatever changes may have come or may be coming elsewhere, in New England Sunday has its own atmosphere. Over the fields and woods and rocks there is a sense of poise between reminiscence and expectancy. The stir of the morning church-going brightens but does not mar this. It adds the human note--rather not a note, but a quiet chord of many tones. And after it comes a hush. The early afternoon of a New England Sunday is the most absolutely quiet thing imaginable. It is the precise middle of the wave crest, the moment when motion ceases.

From that point time begins to stir again. Life resumes. There is a certain amount of desultory intercourse between farm and farm. If people are engaged, or mean to be, they drive out together; if they are married, they go home to "his folks" or "her folks." Friends walk together, farmers saunter along the road or back on the farms to "take a look" at things. Consciously or not, and usually not, there is a kind of synthesis taking place, a gathering together of the scattered threads of many interests, a vague sense of the wholeness of life.

At five o'clock the cows turn towards home, and graze their leisurely way along the barnyard lanes. And with the cows come duties,-- ch.o.r.e-time,--then the simple, cold supper, then the short, quiet evening, and off we swing into the night that sweeps us away from the crest down into the long, blind hollow of the week.

VII

The Grooming of the Farm

There is a story about an artist who espied a picturesque old man and wished to paint him. At the time appointed the model arrived--new-shaven, new-washed, freshly attired, with all the delicious and incommunicable flavor of the years irretrievably lost! Doubtless there are many such stories; doubtless the thing has happened many, many times. And I am sorrier for the artist now than I used to be, because it is happening to me.

Only it is not an old man--it is the farm, the blessed old farm, unkempt, unshorn, out at the elbows. In spite of itself, in spite of me, in spite of everybody, the farm is being groomed.

It is n.o.body's fault, of course. Like most hopelessly disastrous things, it has all been done with the best possible intentions, perhaps it has even been necessary, but it is none the less deplorable.

It began, I think, with the sheds. They had in ages past been added one after another by a method of almost unconscious accretion, as the chambered nautilus makes his sh.e.l.l. They looked as if they had been, not exactly built, but rather laid together in the desultory, provisional fashion of the farmer, and held by an occasional nail, or the natural adhesion of the boards themselves. They leaned confidingly against the great barn and settled comfortably among the bare faces of rock in the barnyard, as if they had always been there, as, indeed, they had been there longer than any one now living can remember. Neither they nor the barn had ever been painted, and they had all weathered to a silver-gray--not the gray of any paint or stain ever made, but the gray that comes only to certain kinds of wood when it has lived out in the rain and the sunshine for fifty, seventy, a hundred years. It is to an old building what white hair is to an old lady. And as not all white hair is beautiful, so not all gray buildings are beautiful. But these were beautiful. When it rained, they grew dark and every knot-hole showed. When the sun came out and baked them dry, they paled to silver, and the smooth, rain-worn grooves and hollows of the boards glistened like a rifle barrel.

The sheds were, I am afraid, not very useful. One, they said, had been built to hold ploughs, another for turkeys, another for ducks. One, the only one that was hen-tight, we used for the incarceration of confirmed "setters," and it thus gained the t.i.tle of "Durance Vile." The rest were nameless, the abode of cobwebs and rats and old grain-bags and stolen nests and surprise broods of chickens, who dropped through cracks between loose boards and had to be extracted by Jonathan with much difficulty. Perhaps it was this that set him against them. At all events, he decided that they must go. I protested faintly, trying to think of some really sensible argument.

"But Durance Vile," I said. "We need that. Where shall we put the setters?"

"No, we don't. That isn't the way to treat setters, anyway. They should be cooped and fed on meat."

"I suppose you read that in one of those agricultural experiment station pamphlets," I said.

Many things that I consider disasters on the farm can be traced to one or another of these little pamphlets, and when a new one arrives I regard it with resignation but without cordiality.

The sheds went, and I missed them. Possibly the hens missed them too.

They wandered thoughtfully about the barnyard, stepping rather higher than usual, c.o.c.king their heads and regarding me with their red-rimmed eyes as if they were cluckfully conjuring up old a.s.sociations. Did they remember Durance Vile? Perhaps, but probably not. For all their philosophic airs and their att.i.tudinizing, I know n.o.body who thinks less than a hen, or, at all events, their thinking is contemplative rather than practical.

Jonathan also surveyed the raw spot. But Jonathan's mind is practical rather than contemplative.

"Just the place for a carriage-house," he remarked.

And the carriage-house was perpetrated. Perhaps a hundred years from now it will have been a.s.similated, but at present it stands out absolutely undigested in all its uncompromising newness of line and color. Its ridgepole, its roof edges, its corners, look as if they had been drawn with a ruler, where those of the old barn were sketched freehand. The barn and the sheds had settled into the landscape, the carriage-house cut into it.

Even Jonathan saw it. "We'll paint it the old-fashioned red to make it more in keeping," he said apologetically.

But old-fashioned red is apparently not to be had in new-fashioned cans.

And the farm remained implacable: it refused to digest the carriage-house. I felt rather proud of the farm for being so firm.

The next blow was a heavy one. In the middle of the cowyard there was a wonderful gray rock, shoulder high, with a flat top and three sides abrupt, the other sloping. I used to sit on this rock and feed the hens and watch the "critters" come into the yard at milking-time. I like "critters," but when there are more than two or three in the yard, including some irresponsible calves, I like to have some vantage-point from which to view them--and be viewed. Our cattle are always gentle, but some of them are, to use a colloquial word that seems to me richly descriptive, so "nose-y."

Of course a rock like this did not belong in a well-planned barnyard.

Nowhere, except in New England, or perhaps in Switzerland, would one occur. But in our part of New England they occur so thickly that they are hard to dodge, even in building a house. I remember an entry in an old ledger discovered in the attic: "To blasten rocks in my sollor--0 3 6."

Without doubt the rock was in the way. Jonathan used to speak about it in ungentle terms every time he drove in and turned around. But this gave me no anxiety, because I felt sure that it had survived much stronger language than his. I did not think about dynamite. Probably when the Psalmist wrote about the eternal hills he did not think about dynamite either.

And dynamite did the deed. It broke my pretty rock into little pieces as one might break up a chunk of maple sugar with a pair of scissors. It made a beautiful barnyard, but I missed my refuge, my stronghold.

But this was only the beginning. Back of the barns lay the farm itself--scores of acres, chiefly rocks and huckleberry bushes, with thistles and mullein and sumac. There were dry, warm slopes, where the birches grew; not the queenly paper birch of the North, but the girlish little gray birch with its veil of twinkling leaves and its glimmer of slender stems. There were rugged ledges, deep-shadowed with oak and chestnut; there were hot, open hillsides thick-set with cat-brier and blackberry canes, where one could never go without setting a brown rabbit scampering. It was a delectable farm, but not, in the ordinary sense, highly productive, and its appeal was rather to the contemplative than to the practical mind.

Jonathan was from the first infected with the desire of making the farm more productive--in the ordinary sense; and one day, when I wandered up to a distant corner, oh, dismay! There was a slope of twinkling birches--no longer twinkling--p.r.o.ne! Cut, dragged, and piled up in ma.s.ses of white stems and limp green leaf.a.ge and tangled red-brown twigs! It was a sorry sight. I walked about it much, perhaps, as my white hens had walked about the barnyard, and to as little purpose. For the contemplative mind is no match for the practical. I knew this, yet I could not forbear saying, later:--

"Jonathan, I was up near the long meadow to-day."

"Were you?"

"O Jonathan! Those birches!"

"What about them?"

"All cut!"

"Oh, yes. We need that piece for pasturage."

"Oh, dear! We might as well not have a farm if we cut down all the birches."

"We might as well not have a farm if we don't cut them down. They'll run us out in no time."

"They don't look as if they would run anybody out--the dears!"

"Why, I didn't know you felt that way about them. We'll let that other patch stand, if you like."

"_If_ I like!"

I saved the birches, but other things kept happening. I went out one day and found one of our prettiest fence lines reduced to bare bones, all its bushes and vines--clematis, elderberry, wild cherry, sweet-fern, bitter-sweet--all cut, hacked, torn away. It looked like a collie dog in the summer when his long yellow fur has been sheared off. And, another day, it was a company of red lilies escaped along a bank above the roadside. There were weeds mixed in, to be sure, and some bushes, a delightful tangle--and all snipped, shaved to the skin!

When I spoke about it, Jonathan said: "I'm sorry. I suppose Hiram was just making the place shipshape."

"Shipshape! This farm shipshape! You could no more make this farm shipshape than you could make a woodchuck look as though he had been groomed. The farm isn't a ship."

"I hope it isn't a woodchuck, either," said Jonathan.

During the haying season there was always a lull. The hand of the destroyer was stayed. Rather, every one was so busy cutting the hay that there was no time to cut anything else. One day in early August I took a pail and sauntered up the lane in the peaceful mood of the berry-picker--a state of mind as satisfactory as any I know. One is conscious of being useful--for what more useful than the acc.u.mulating of berries for pies? One has suitable ideals--the ideal of a happy home, since in attaining a happy home berry pies are demonstrably helpful. And one is also having a beautiful time. On my way I turned down the side lane to see how the blackberries were coming on. There lay my blackberry canes--lay, not stood--their long stems thick-set with fruit just turning from light red to dark. I do not love blackberries as I do birches; it was rather the practical than the contemplative part of me that protested that time, but it was with a lagging step that I went on, over the hill, to the berry patches. There another shock awaited me.

Where I expected to see green clumps of low huckleberries there were great blotches of black earth and gray ashy stems, and in the midst a heap of brush still sending up idle streamers and puffs of blue smoke.

Desolation of desolations! That they should do this thing to a harmless berry patch!

They were not all burned. Only the heart of the patch had been taken, and after the first shock I explored the edges to see what was left, but with no courage for picking. I came home with an empty pail and a mind severe.

"Jonathan," I said that night, "I thought you liked pies?"

"I do," he said expectantly.