Jayber Crow (27 page)

Della kept as busy in and about the house as Athey in the fields and barns—cleaning and washing, cooking, laying up food, feeding hands at
harvesttime. Between them they kept the cellar and smokehouse well stocked and more always coming in from the garden and barnyard and fields.

“Hard work makes for a good appetite,” Doc Markman said learnedly in my shop one day.

“What helps my appetite,” said Athey, “is knowing I got something to eat.”

They were a sight to see, Della and Athey were, in their vigorous years. They had about them a sort of intimation of abundance, as though, like magicians, they might suddenly fill the room with potatoes, onions, turnips, summer squashes, and ears of corn drawn from their pockets. Their place had about it that quality of bottomless fecundity, its richness both in evidence and in reserve.

It was because of what he had in reserve that most people called Athey “Mr. Keith.” Even Uncle Othy called him “Mr. Keith,” though he had known him as a boy. When we would pass the Keith place on our longish buggy ride to church on Sunday mornings, Uncle Othy would always say something complimentary: “Well, I see Mr. Keith has got a good crop of corn, as usual”; “I see Mr. Keith has got a fine pair of young mules.”

Burley called him “Athey” by the same privilege by which he hunted his woods: Athey liked Burley; they were neighbors. I call him “Athey” because, after he and Della moved into Port William and he began coming almost every day to sit a while with me in my shop, he told me to do so, acknowledging, I think, his decline in the world from host to guest.

 

For (and, you might say, of course) that is where Athey was going to end up: in town. He and Troy were different, almost opposite, kinds of men.

Athey said, “Wherever I look, I want to see more than I need.” Troy said, in effect, “Whatever I see, I want.” What he asked of the land was all it had. He had hardly got his first crop in the ground before he began to say things critical of Athey and his ways. “Why
hell!”
he would say, “it's hard to tell what that old place would produce if he would just plow it.” Or: “Why the hell would a man plow just forty acres of a farm he could plow all of?” He would say these things leaning back in his chair,
his ankle crossed over his knee, his foot twitching. He was speaking as a young man of the modern age coming now into his hour, held back only by the outmoded ways of his elders. This was the substance of his talking at town, where mostly he was looked at and listened to without comment. He was not yet ready to present his case to Athey. So far, he was just propping himself up, asserting his superiority perhaps just by habit; nothing had required him to suspect that the reference point or measure of what he did or said might not be himself.

In coming to the Keith place, he had come into an order that perhaps he did not even recognize. Over a long time, the coming and passing of several generations, the old farm had settled into its patterns and cycles of work—its annual plowing moving from field to field; its animals arriving by birth or purchase, feeding and growing, thriving and departing. Its patterns and cycles were virtually the farm's own understanding of what it was doing, of what it could do without diminishment. This order was not unintelligent or rigid. It tightened and slackened, shifted and changed in response to the markets and the weather. The Depression had changed it somewhat, and so had the war. But through all changes so far, the farm had endured. Its cycles of cropping and grazing, thought and work, were articulations of its wish to cohere and to last. The farm, so to speak, desired all of its lives to flourish.

Athey was not exactly, or not only, what is called a “landowner.” He was the farm's farmer, but also its creature and belonging. He lived its life, and it lived his; he knew that, of the two lives, his was meant to be the smaller and the shorter.

Of all this Troy had no idea, not a suspicion. He thought the farm existed to serve and enlarge him. And it seemed that this was the way it was going to be. In that first year of 1946, because of the newness of his situation and Athey's enforcement of the farm's restraints and demands—by working much and spending little, and by Mattie's savings and skills learned from her mother—Troy did well. He contracted little debt, easily paid out of the year's earnings, with a good sum of money left over. All he had to do was learn and keep on, work and be patient.

In the fall of that year, Mattie and Troy had their first child—Della Elizabeth, named for her grandmothers, and called Liddie. Later, just before Christmas, after he had sold his crop, Troy bought a tractor and
several implements, using a considerable portion of his year's profit as a down payment and borrowing the rest from the Independent Farmers Bank. In town—but not, or not yet, in Athey's hearing—he said that in the spring we were going to see him “cut loose.”

 

Buying a tractor at that time was not unusual. A lot of people were doing it. The young men who had been in the war were used to motor-driven machinery. The government was teaching a new way of farming in night courses for the veterans. Tractors and other farm machines were all of a sudden available as never before, and farmhands were scarcer than before. And so we began a process of cause-and-effect that is hard to understand clearly, even looking back. Did the machines displace the people from the farms, or were the machines drawn onto the farms because the people already were leaving to take up wage work in factories and the building trades and such? Both, I think.

You couldn't see, back then, that this process would build up and go ever faster, until finally it would ravel out the entire old fabric of family work and exchanges of work among neighbors. The new way of farming was a way of dependence, not on land and creatures and neighbors but on machines and fuel and chemicals of all sorts,
bought
things, and on the sellers of bought things—which made it finally a dependence on credit. The odd thing was, people just assumed that all the purchasing and borrowing would merely make life easier and better on all the little farms. Most people didn't dream, then, that before long a lot of little farmers would buy and borrow their way out of farming, and bigger and bigger farmers would be competing with their neighbors (or with doctors from the city) for the available land. The time was going to come—it is clear enough now—when there would not be enough farmers left and the farms of Port William would be as dependent as the farms of California on the seasonal labor of migrant workers.

It is hard, too, to say that anybody was exactly blamable for this—or anybody in particular.

Old farmers like Athey Keith, who understood or at least felt what was happening and what it would cost, were ignored, laughed off by young farmers like Troy Chatham. Young farmers who
ought
to have understood just didn't. People followed their own ideas of their own
advantage, and it was clear only later, and too late, that everybody's idea led off in a slightly different direction from everybody else's. After the Depression and the war and the years of work that they were now beginning to think of as slow and too hard, the country people were trying to get away from demanding circumstances. That was why I bought the Zephyr. We couldn't quite see at the time, or didn't want to know, that it was the demanding circumstances that had kept us together.

Troy went into debt and bought his new equipment because he didn't want to be held back by demanding circumstances. He was young and strong and ambitious. He wanted to be a star. The tractor greatly increased the power and speed of work. With it he could work more land. He could work longer. Because it had electric lights and did not get tired, he could work at night.

When it came time to plan for the next year, wishing them to be friends and eventual partners before Athey would die and Troy would become the farm's farmer, Athey walked Troy over the sod ground that was to be broken for row crops, showing him the outlines of the plow-lands and where the backfurrows were to run. And then he led him on to show him the next year's cropland, and then the next year's, laying the pattern before him. None of what I'm telling now is guesswork. Troy talked about himself in town as if he were the subject of a news broadcast. To not know what was going on, I would have had to be deaf and maybe also blind.

Such knowledge ought to have passed from Athey to Troy as a matter of course, in the process of daily work and talk. And it would have, if Troy had been willing to have Athey as a teacher, let alone a friend. But the connection between them was already strained. Troy wanted to go in his own direction—or so he thought, poor fellow. His way, even when he had to work with Athey, was to hold himself a little aside and keep quiet. It was the quietest he ever was, probably. He was protecting himself from knowing what he did not want to know, thinking that his silence signified his superiority. He did his talking in town, and Port William listened, nodded, scratched its ears, grunted, and kept its opinions mostly to itself.

Troy's sole response to that winter afternoon's walk with Athey was: “We need to grow more corn.”

This brought Athey to a stop. The law of the farm was in the balance between crops (including hay and pasture) and livestock. The farm would have no more livestock than it could carry without strain. No more land would be plowed for grain crops than could be fertilized with manure from the animals. No more grain would be grown than the animals could eat. Except in case of unexpected surpluses or deficiencies, the farm did not sell or buy livestock feed. “I mean my grain and hay to leave my place
on foot,”
Athey liked to say. This was a conserving principle; it strictly limited both the amount of land that would be plowed and the amount of supplies that would have to be bought. Athey did not save money at the expense of his farm or his family, but he looked upon spending it as a last resort; he spent no more than was necessary, and he hated debt. You can see where my sympathies were. He was, in his son-in-law's opinion, “tight” and unwilling to take the necessary risks. “Risk is necessary in this farming game,” Troy said. He meant extraordinary financial risk—as if the risk of hail, wind, flood, drouth, pests and diseases, injury and death were not enough. “You've got to spend money to make money.”

Troy's demand to grow more corn was a challenge, Athey knew, not only or even mainly to himself but to the farm and its established order; he felt a shudder fall through him, and he knew that he was being changed; he was being pushed toward something he had not imagined, let alone intended. He looked down at his feet and thought, his right wrist caught as usual in his left hand under the tail of his jacket. And then he looked away and thought.

“If you raise more corn,” he said, “you'll have to buy fertilizer.” He said “you,” for he had determined that he himself would not grow the corn or pay for the fertilizer, and he knew that Troy would have to borrow against the crop for the fertilizer.

“Hell,
I
don't mind buying fertilizer!” Troy said.

Athey agreed to let him grow ten extra acres. Which, Troy thought, was not enough. He arranged to grow thirty more acres, on the shares, on a neighboring farm. Pretty soon he would be working away from home, into the night, while Mattie, carrying the baby on her hip, went about doing his barn chores.

And so the farm came under the influence of a new pattern, and this was the pattern of a fundamental disagreement such as it had never seen before. It was a disagreement about time and money and the use of the world. The tractor seemed to have emanated directly from Troy's own mind, his need to go headlong, day or night, and perform heroic feats. But Athey and his tenant and his tenant's boys were still doing their work with teams of mules. Troy liked to climb on the tractor, open the throttle, and just go, whatever the time of day, his mind invested with the machine's indifference to weariness and to features of the landscape. A day, to Athey, was measured by daylight and by the endurance of living bodies; it was divided in two by dinnertime; it ended at suppertime. Athey worked at a gait that in his time some had found to be too swift, but which was now revealed as patient.

The conflicts were inescapable, were just there as part and parcel of the farm and what was happening on it. The work of the farm now went on at two different rates of speed and power and endurance. It became hard to cooperate, not because cooperation was impossible but because the tractor and the teams embodied two different kinds of will, almost two different intentions. It was a difference of character and history. At the time all this began, Troy was twenty-three years old and Athey sixty-seven. Athey belonged to that life that had, in fact, ended with the war; he could not imagine the life that was to come. Troy, who could not imagine the older life, was overflowing with the impatience of the new one.

And Troy felt also that he had a lot to prove. As it turned out, he would have more reason every year to feel so.

Year by year, he increased his rented acreage elsewhere, thereby increasing the pressure on Athey to give him more say-so over the Keith place. For Troy would one day farm that farm, and Athey wanted his interest there. Little by little, he began giving way to Troy's wants and ideas, and the old pattern of the farm began to give way.

Judging from what Troy repeated in town, conversations between him and Athey finally degenerated into one-sentence exchanges. Athey would tell what he had done in the last half day or day, and Troy, laughing or in anger, would repeat some version of his final judgment on all things slow and old: “Shit! I could've done that in two hours!” Part of
Troy's resentment came from knowing, without needing to be told, that “the old man” thought his work was too fast and too rough, that he lacked sympathy and was too hard on things. Athey had only to stand by and look and say nothing, and his point was made.