Abby, Her Farm

IT began insidiously, just a chance remark at the age of seven on a Sunday afternoon in the country. ‘When I grow up, I shall have a farm.’ Nothing ominous about it, no sinister alternatives threatened, no issues joined. Just a simple statement of fact. Her father and I smiled absently and went right on buying cider and picking out red apples — with the cosy little refrain running through our subconscious: ‘What a nice child we’ve got; she doesn’t want to be Shirley Temple.’

Even the next ultimatum delivered about a year later, on the way home from Florida, still seemed to us the perfectly legitimate though somewhat more startling expression of an individual. We had stopped for a hasty sandwich at one of those unsentimental roadside stands in Georgia when I noticed an aloof, almost a dowager expression settling about Abby’s nose. Her brief red pigtails sat out at right angles, her face was as freckled as a turkey egg, and her eyes, like two bad black currants in a bun, surveyed the general squalor.

‘Don’t you like your chicken?’ I asked hastily. For that which Abby is compelled to eat on automobile trips often has a way of returning to haunt us.

‘I don’t know,’ she said distantly; ‘I haven’t tasted it. But I do know that when I grow up I shall have a neat tearoom on the edge of my farm. Made of logs, with gingham curtains. I will get up early and count the silver. The maids will wear starched frills on their caps and I will box their ears if they are late.’ With a gasp and a hasty look at the offended proprietor, who already had that damn-Yankee expression in his eye, I herded Abby toward the car — and for the next hundred miles or so brooded on the problem of heredity. We had thought we had it licked by the simple expedient of moving to a rather valsparred suburb of New York. But evidently those solid ranks of Ohio and New England forbears were not going to be mowed down with one pea-shooting gesture. Abby was Retaliation.

By now vaguely disquieted, and remembering something I’d read about in sophomore year called the Substitute Response, I went forth and bought a thoroughbred mare, redheaded like Abby, and ensconced it in one of those Connecticut stables, all spit and polish, where you don’t even smell horse until it’s time to mount. Abby had been riding for two years and was already so good she had made a valance for her bedroom curtains out of red, white, and blue ribbons, blue predominating. Certainly a horse of her own was a very astute move on my part, especially since it was more horse than she could manage. It would take up the slack of these morbid rural yearnings.

And so it did — for about a week, during which time I had the pleasure of seeing those red pigtails run away with three times and thrown a half dozen more. But at least, I comforted myself, the groom is shoveling manure. At least she won’t be kicked to death. . . .

Then one day she led the mare up to me, accusing and triumphant. I thought that the last toss had been one too many. But, ‘Just see!’ she exclaimed. ‘Just look at this horse’s feet!’

I peered, and saw nothing except the customary stove blacking.

‘Cracked and shelly underneath! The shoes will hardly hold! All covered up with polish. Now if we had a farm . . . ‘

I groaned and looked away from those remorseless shoe-button eyes that bored right through my makeshift soul. ‘But darling, we can’t have a farm,’ I began for the hundredth time. ‘We have a lease. Your father works in Wall Street. Have you any idea what that means?’

But we compromised next day on a friendlier and less glacéed stable. Abby got into the stall at once. I closed my eyes while she inspected the bedding. ‘Peat moss will be better than straw,’ she announced. And the ancient Cockney taking her orders shook his head.

‘Habby,’ he muttered prophetically. ‘Habby, the hold ‘Orseman!’

‘Just so it stops at ‘Orseman,’ I thought.

But somehow during the next few weeks a large dog, two rabbits, and five cats were added unto us. Though extremely prudish in her attitude toward cocktails, poker, and run-of-the-mine adult conversation, Abby did not quail before the facts of reproduction. Kittens in the process of delivery were to be found anywhere from our best shoes to the kitchen sink. ‘That’s all right,’ she would reassure us. ‘The mother will clean it all up. But on the farm I may have to help the lambs get born.’

Something inside me suddenly snapped. I heard it, like a button. ‘ What farm, Abby, what farm? We’re not living on a farm! How many times . . . ?’

‘It would be nice if we had a pig — now,’ she said implacably.

Thoroughly frightened, I got away and consulted the real-estate restrictions for that particular section in which we lived. Very definitely pigs were not allowed.

‘But how would they know?’ Abby argued reasonably. ‘The cops never look in. They don’t even catch kidnappers. How would they catch a pig?’

‘By smell, if nothing else,’ I muttered. ‘Now for heaven’s sake keep still about it! Pigs are out.’

But alas, Providence was pitching on her side. Scarcely were the words out of my mouth before the P. T. A. had announced its annual party with a greased pig to be given away to that male parent lucky enough to catch it barehanded.

Now, under normal circumstances, Abby’s father would no more think of attending a P. T. A. function than he would of joining a Temperance Union. I can only explain his sudden and perverse decision to attend this P. T. A. function by the fact that he is a gambler and that the odds of two-hundred-toone against his catching the pig must have challenged his handicapper’s spirit. Anyway, when the time came for the creature to be loosed upon the school lawn, he had organized what he announced at the top of his lungs to be a Pig Circle, with all the two hundred fathers holding hands, like ring-arounda-rosy. Someone sprang the box lid, the poor frenzied shoat made a beeline for the strongest link in the chain, and Abby’s next-to-fondest dream came true. She had a pig.

Burning with excitement and mother love, she husbanded the poor broken creature back into its box, then had it carried to our car, and shut the doors. ‘You and Pop can go back to the party now,’ she said firmly. ‘ You aren’t enough like other parents as it is.’

‘But that pig is covered with some foul kind of grease! He’ll get out of his box all over the upholstery! Besides that, he’s hurt — he’s groaning. He should be killed at once!’ Then, even more crossly, ‘What do you mean, I’m not like other mothers?’

‘We-ell.’ It was the first time I had ever seen her hesitate, but her eyes never left the box full of pig. ‘Well, you aren’t. You don’t knit, you never make cookies, and you haven’t any bosom.’

‘What on earth has that to do with it?’ I shouted. ‘We’ll go back for a minute, but that pig had better not get out of that box. Do you understand, Abby?’

Muttering, I allowed myself to be led away by her ribald father, but it was a costly sacrifice on the altar of community spirit. When we got back the pig had been freed. ‘It had claustro — claustra — that thing you always say you get in the subway,’ Abby explained. ‘Anyway — pigs are very nervous.’

Stricken, we stared inside the car. It had indeed been very nervous — all over the upholstery. We considered the blend of mobiloil and nervousness that we were about to get in with and sit down on; we considered the poor panting creature at bay on the back seat; then we considered Abby. ‘I think,’said her father heavily, ‘it would be cheaper to trade her in and get something civilized.’

Christmas came and went with only one wistful request for a female goat — ungranted. ‘But we could drink the milk and save money,’ she protested. And it was this terrifying blend of logic and economy that finally began to take its toll of our resistance. Every time the market went down or the price of liquor up, her father would turn his brooding gaze upon her at the dinner table and say, ‘Abby, tell me about the farm. Could we live on ensilage? ‘

But even his wavering support was plucked from me by New Year’s. He was sent west on a long business trip and I was left alone with Abby and the Rotation of Crops. Every evening she worked on a patchwork quilt before the fire, or jotted down statistics on wheat out of the Book of Knowledge: —

Redfife — a very hard strong spring wheat
Preston — not a very good wheat, but still grown
Marquis — plump grains, good straw
Burgoyne’s Fife — a very strong, wellyielding wheat

And so on through preposterous names like Prelund, Ruby, and Redbob, up to and including Rivet, ‘an extraordinarily week wheat,’ but lovingly included all the same.

‘What is that book you seem to be making?’ I asked one night.

‘My farm book.’ Hesitantly, but with controlled excitement, she got up and brought it to me. It was an unassuming book, thin, made out of cardboard and tied with green yarn. Inside, it was illustrated with beautiful pink and black water colors of the Poland China hog in all his suavity.

Fascinated — almost electrified — by the premonition that this slim volume was going to mean plenty in the lives of her parents, I stared at the front page until the words finally took on meaning. ‘In the beginning of the twentieth century,’ it read, ‘Mr. Aaron Aaronsohn discovered a wild wheat growing on the dry and rocky slopes of Mt. Herman.’

Twentieth century? Mr. Aaron Aaronsohn? I said the name over doubtfully; it didn’t sound like wheat. . . . Then all at once I saw him: in a derby, standing like stout Cortez with a hand shielding his eyes and a foot advanced to the very edge of a gigantic mountain from which one lone stalk of wheat did wave and beckon in the name of posterity.

‘Abby,’ I said, shaking off this disturbing vision, ‘who was Mr. Aaron Aaronsohn?’

‘Why, the man who discovered wheat.’

‘I know. But what else was he?’

Abby shrugged. ‘Oh, one of those people Hitler wouldn’t like, I guess.’

‘But ihe twentieth century? Wheat was discovered ages before then!’

‘Wheat was discovered by Mr. Aaron Aaronsohn on the slopes of Mt. Herman,’ Abby repeated unperturbed. ‘If it says the twentieth century, then that’s when it was.’

She resumed her quilting, and I helplessly turned to page two. It was a solid column of statistics about the number of grains per pound and per bushel one may reasonably expect from an acre of corn.

The next page, in a fine spirit of non sequitur, bore only this avowal: ‘Nothing Will Be Bought From A Store. I Shall Weave My Clothes And Wear Long Hair.'

I pounced. Here at last was something antisocial, something definitely beyond the pale of normalcy. ‘Abby!’ I cried. ‘Is this why you won’t have your hair cut? Is this why I have to go through hell and high water every day with those pigtails wrapping themselves around the brush like a horsetail? Is it?’ Breaking off, I peered sharply at the offending braids. Yes, they really did look as if they were under cultivation. I remembered how she measured their weekly progress every Sunday with a piece of string. Perhaps the poor child hoped that those red cornsilk tassels on the end would make for finer coverlets, woven in with the wool. ‘Will you have spring shearings with the sheep?’ I asked.

But she had suffered too long to be touched by clumsy sarcasm. ‘If you’ll turn to the end of the book,’ she said, unmoved, ‘you’ll see what the farm’s going to be like. Then you won’t worry so.’

Rebuked by her dignity and spurred by my own curiosity, I flipped over to the last page. Probably her conception of a farm would be a cross between a sampler and a State Fair, with hundreds of blue-ribboned beasts cooling their fetlocks under one weeping willow. But I might as well make sure before looking up the child psychologists. . . . I turned to a sort of prose-poem, entitled simply ‘My Farm.’

I want the kind of farm where chickens run loose in the front yard, and about a dozen Ayreshire cows walk lazely along in a long pasture. A timid long-laged colt pokes his inquisartive nose out from his mother’s safe and protecting back to stare at you in surprise, then kick up his heels and go flying across the fild.

I will hear the tinkling of bells made by the big brony Merion sheep as they drift slowly along, following their leader.

I will see the big fat mother sow and her recent family grunting for food and enjoying themselves in the cool inviting mud.

Then I will turn and go slowly through my folds of waveing corn to a low rambling farmhouse nestled among the lilac trees.

I will enter. There will be a smell of good things in the air.

I will see sausage broiling on the stove, and the plad gingham curtains fluttering in the windows.

The sunbeams will find their way across the thick planked oaken floors to the pewter plates on the mantell. The flowers on the old wooden table will match the crazy patchwork quilt on my high wooden bed. The sheets will be old and fine; there will be a rag rug on the floor.

Yea, though I walk through the valley . . . my mind subconsciously went on in the rhythm of those paragraphs. Then I closed the Farm Book and laid it down gently.

‘I see I was wrong about those pigtails,’ I said. ‘They’ll be very proper — if we can keep them out of the churn!’

With a wild whoop she was upon me, her eyes snapping, her freckles glowing, and the guerrilla warfare of two long years was wiped out with one tremendous hug. ‘Will you wire Pop right away — will you tell him to buy a farm?’ she shrieked.

But, still clinging to reason with one enfeebled hand, I managed to push her on toward bed without that final incriminating Yes.

An empty victory. Next morning I found, left on my desk to be stamped, this conclusive document: —

Dept. of Agriculture, Washington, D. C.
dear sirs,
My father is going to by a farm so I wish to be prepared to whatever might follow. Could you send me instructions for the care of theese certen domesticate animals.
a few cows of Guernsey breed, a few of the harder things about horses, goats (the best breed) sheep and where to by the best stock.
Abby Selby, Northport, Ct. p.s. right away.

I stamped it and picked up the phone. ‘Western Union. And hurry,' I said.