[Well, this is called "Tim's Book and Miscellaneous Blog", so here's a posting that falls under the "Miscellaneous" category. Click on the pictures above to see a larger version - they're just pictures of pictures, so the quality is pretty bad.]
When I was twelve years old, my mother received a telephone call from her sister, Dorothy Brainard, of North Leeds, Maine. Dorothy and her husband, Leon (pronounced Lee-un), were elderly farmers, and they had been unable to find a boy to work on the farm the coming summer (1960, I believe). So Dorothy was calling to see if one of my brothers or I would be willing to leave Louisville, where we were then living, to come work on the farm for the summer. I jumped at the chance, and spent the next four summers as a farm boy.
Dorothy had led quite a life. Born in 1892, she was seventeen years older than my mother, and I think had always seemed more like an aunt to Mom than like a sister – my mother was actually closer in age to some of Dorothy’s children, and had a more sisterly relationship with them than with their mother. Dorothy attended a one-room schoolhouse in Vermont, with children from grades one through twelve all being taught in the same classroom. The day after she graduated from the school, she became the one and only teacher for that very same school! That must have been quite a challenge, but if anyone was up to such a challenge, it would have been Dorothy. She was absolutely tough as nails and downright scary smart. She married a man named Waldo Munn and had five or six children with him. However, their marriage was unhappy, although she stayed with him for many years.
Some time in the 1940s, I believe, she was elected to the Vermont House of Representatives. While serving in the legislature, she met and fell in love with a very powerful member of that body, Leon Brainard. Leon owned the largest farm in the state of Vermont, and was the State Highway Commissioner, a post held by virtue of his being the Chairperson of the legislative Highway Committee. He was in line to become the Republican nominee for Governor, and would inevitably have been elected to that position had his relationship with Dorothy not intervened. Because Leon was also in an unhappy marriage, also having five or six children, Dorothy and Leon decided that they both were willing to give up everything that they had worked for their whole lives to be together. So Leon turned the farm over to his children, with the stipulation that their mother would live on the farm and be supported for the rest of her life. Dorothy walked away from her husband, and Dorothy and Leon married and moved to Maine where they purchased a small farm in North Leeds. They were quite devoted to each other for the remainder of their lives.
Dorothy was short and stocky, with a bull neck and a belligerent, though kindly, face. She was a typical New England farm wife, used to hard work and long hours. While her tasks were mostly in the house, in a pinch she did not hesitate to come out into the fields to work alongside the men, despite the fact that she was in her late 60s. I can remember her clambering up onto the hay wagon as we rushed to beat a thunderstorm one day. She was a corker!
North Leeds was not really a town at all, at least not at that time. North Leeds was a rural area, and basically consisted of a small Post Office window in the rear of a small general store. The population of North Leeds was, as I recall, 67 people, virtually all living on farms. The Brainard farm was on something called “The Old North Road” (which was only paved in sections, being gravel for long stretches) – there were no street address numbers; mail sent to the farm was simply addressed to Leon and Dorothy Brainard, North Leeds, Maine. There was a small village several miles distant called Leeds Center, which is where the church that we attended was located – more about that later. Dorothy was the local reporter for the Lewiston newspaper, and sent in weekly news items like, “Tim Hawley has arrived to spend the summer with his aunt and uncle, Leon and Dorothy Brainard.” I always got a kick out of seeing my name in the paper that way.
The language in Maine in those days was still the classic mix of accents and colloquialisms that have now largely disappeared. Everyone I came into contact with always answered in the affirmative by saying “Ayah,” for instance. The bird that we in the south called a woodpecker was called a peckerwood in Maine, and that term was also used derisively to be applied to a doltish or stupid person. The term that I had the hardest time with was the common euphemism for a man’s penis. Where I came from, the term was “dick” – in Maine, it was “dink.” I could never find it in myself to use the term “dink” to describe that intimate part of my anatomy. I always felt like saying, “Well, yours might be dinky, but mine sure isn’t!” Of course, people in Louisville at this time also spoke with a decidedly southern accent, although having grown up in northern Ohio, I did not develop the southern twang. It seems as though most of these regional accents and speech patterns have either become much less pronounced or have disappeared altogether, what with the omnipresent TV and radio blasting away at us with a more standard American speech.
The farm that Dorothy and Leon had purchased was quite tiny. Although it technically had 160 acres, about 100 acres of that total was bog, which was inaccessible during the summer, and not “workable” as farm land. Of the remaining 60 acres, probably 35 acres or so was forested. The rest of the land was made up of hay fields – there was the “Cemetery Field”, so named because an ancient family cemetery was located in it, the “Well Field”, next to the barn where the shallow dug well that provided our water was located, the largest, the “Lower Field”, which was at the rear of the property on the edge of the bog, and a small field with no name that was directly behind the house, and in which we had a vegetable garden. Some land was simply pasture land, neither forested nor cultivated.
The house was a charming circa 1790 frame 1-1/2 story farmhouse. In the main part of the house was a central hall and staircase (with a remarkable barrel ceiling), a bedroom to the right, a living room to the left, a small dining room and sewing room in the back, and three tiny bedrooms upstairs, with an attic portion as well. The kitchen was located in a one-story wing to the left of the living room, and to the left of that was an attached “shed”, typical of old farmhouses. The house had no central heat. In the kitchen was a huge old woodstove that Dorothy was a master at using, making yeast rolls that were out of this world – of course, the woodstove also provided most of the heat for the house during the long and bitter Maine winters. They also had a small pot-belly wood stove that was on wheels that would be moved from the living room in the daytime to the bedroom at night, where it would be hooked up to a flue in each room. So other than the kitchen, the living room and the one bedroom on the first floor, the rest of the house was closed off throughout the winter.
The house did have running water that was pumped from the well, which was all of about fourteen feet deep, with never more than about six feet of water in the bottom – of course, the well would run dry in late July of each summer, so I would have to go across the road to the Newton farm to get water after that – again, more about the Newtons later. (An amusing aside – Dorothy was a “water-witch”. She genuinely believed that she could find where to dig or drill for water using a divining rod made of a willow branch. During the course of her life, neighbors had come to her to have her identify locations on their farms to dig wells, and she was apparently usually successful.)
Our barn was a wonderful place, with numerous cats living in a semi-wild state and complicated lofts where both loose and baled hay would be stored for the winter. Leon was fearless in walking along the narrow beams of the barn several stories up, and always made fun of the fact that I wasn’t willing to do so, and would crawl, my stomach tied in knots. The cats were a dilapidated bunch, several of them having been maimed by getting caught in farm machinery, missing eyes, tails and legs. The main floor opened with a large door to the level of the road, while the ground dropped away toward the rear of the barn, making the basement the level of egress at the rear. In the basement were the stalls for the cows, and I spent many, many hours down in that low-ceilinged basement section of the barn, doing the chores expected of a farm boy. A sort of lean-to shed was built onto the back of the barn, which was where the horse was stabled. Leon had no power equipment other than a chainsaw. All the work was done with the horse, and the cows were milked by hand.
Dorothy and Leon had purchased this farm in the early to mid 1950s – I’m not sure the exact date – and for the house, barn, land and all farming equipment, they had paid only $1200. Even by the early 1960s, the farms in this part of Maine (in the south-central part of the state, just south of Augusta) were selling for astonishingly low prices. The prices were so low, in fact, that a number of the farms were being purchased as summer getaways for city folks. The farm on one side of ours was owned by Mr. Unold, a New York City resident who came up occasionally for weekends. The farm on the other side had been purchased by an African-American family from Boston. (They showed up at church one Sunday morning, and a little girl, upon seeing them, burst into tears and asked her mother what had happened to them to make their skin so dark – she had never seen an African-American person before! Needless to say, diversity was not commonplace in Leeds.) This family also only came for brief stays a couple of times a year – the rest of the time, the homes sat empty.
Across the road from our farm was that of the Newtons (not their real name). The Newtons were, to say the least, an odd lot. They didn’t actually farm the land, but rented their land to other farmers who planted and harvested crops, mostly hay. The Newton clan was headed by an old man who rarely, if ever, left the house. He actually slept on a mattress on the floor in the kitchen. He had several sons who lived there. One was a “village idiot” type who they kept locked in an upstairs bedroom – in the four summers that I was there, a full year’s time, I never saw this man. His twin brother, on the other hand, I knew very well. His name was Don, and he – like his father – was an alcoholic ne’er-do-well. He would get drunked up and drive his car at breakneck speed up and down the road in front of our farmhouse, waking us up in the middle of the night – sometimes the police would show up over there, but we never knew what they were investigating. Don would periodically stop by and do a little day labor for my uncle, always eager for some of the hard cider that Leon made every year. Don had one accomplishment in life, and he loved to share it – he could yodel. I have no idea how or why he learned this skill, but he was actually pretty good at it. We would be out working in the field harvesting hay, and he would break into some of his yodeling - it was quite picturesque, I must say.
In addition to the immediate family members, there were a number of women and many of their children who also lived in the Newton household. It was unclear to me what connection these people had to the Newtons. I think that the old man slept with one or more of them, as did Don and other mysterious men who seemed to be frequently on the premises. I couldn’t tell you how many children there were, but it was more than a dozen.
When our well went dry each year, I would have to harness up the horse – a huge black draw horse of nearly two thousand pounds named King – hitch him to the dumpcart, load milk jugs into this wagon and drive over to the Newton farm to fill the jugs with water from their artesian well, which didn’t ever dry up. The first time I did this, I got quite a jolt. I pulled up to the door of the barn and went inside to get the hose. When I walked into the barn, I was amazed by what I saw – it looked as though it had snowed in the barn, as the entire floor was covered with something white. I stared for a moment and then leaned down to get a closer look at what it was. It was toilet paper. The motley clan of people living in the house used the barn as a giant outhouse, simply going out and squatting down in the middle of the cavernous barn floor to do their business.
Now, anyone who has worked on a farm, particularly one where livestock is a prime component of the farming activities, is very used to dealing with poop. But this was a bit too much for me. I shoveled cow manure every single day that I was on the farm, as well as horse manure, and occasionally pig manure – I even had to occasionally clean out our own outhouse, human feces being by far the worst in terms of the smell. I periodically had the unenviable task of spreading, by hand, the manure out in the fields, backing the dumpcart up to the manure pile, filling it using a dung fork (similar to a pitchfork, but with six tines instead of the three typical on a pitchfork), hauling the manure to the field and spreading it with the dung fork. In the process I would literally get covered with manure, it raining down on my head as I heaved it into the cart – by the end of the day, I was myself a miniature walking manure pile. But even this indignity did not prepare me for seeing that sea of toilet paper in the Newton’s barn.
Still, hygiene was not high on the priority list on the farm. I never got my hair cut during the entire summers that I was there, since barbers were a luxury that we could ill afford. (We lived unbelievably modestly – when I needed a pair of boots, for instance, instead of going to a shoe store, we went to a shoe repair shop where we purchased for a few dollars a pair of boots that had been brought in for a repair but never picked up. These boots, which lasted me for several years, were a pair of motorcycle boots that had been brought in by a biker who wanted some leather added to the tops to make the boots higher and keep him from getting his legs burned on the motorcycle muffler. They were hot as blazes, which was fine in the cold early mornings, but cooked my feet later in the day.) Similarly, when the well went dry, bathing pretty much ceased. Over the course of the final six weeks or so of the summer, I would usually be taken to a nearby lake about two times to bathe – that was about it. Otherwise I just steeped in dirt and filth. The lake was treacherous due to being filled with clams whose shells had knife-sharp edges. I once cut the bottom of my foot so deeply that the wound didn’t heal for weeks, and caused me exquisite pain throughout every day. Plus the water in the lake was freezing cold. So it didn’t bother me a bit that I was allowed to go without bathing for lengthy periods of time.
Of course, times were certainly different in those days. For instance, how many parents today would be willing to put their 12-year old son on a Greyhound bus by himself for a 36 hour ride across the country? I had to change buses in Cincinnati, Columbus, Pittsburgh, New York City and Boston, each time retrieving my luggage and re-checking it for the next leg of the trip. The first year I took the trip, I was accosted by a child molester who tried to grope me in my bus seat and attempted to lure me into going home with him in Cincinnati – I managed to get away from him. I arrived in New York City, at the old Port Authority bus station, a block from Times Square in Manhattan, at around midnight of that first day’s ride, only to find that my luggage was nowhere to be found. I sat and waited in the station all night long, witnessing the theft of a woman’s purse (the perpetrator warned me to keep my mouth shut) and various other frightening occurrences. In the morning, they found my luggage at another bus station there in Manhattan – no explanation for how it had gone astray – and I had to go out on the sidewalk and catch a taxi to the other station, where I had to re-arrange my itinerary to try to arrive in Winthrop, Maine at the expected time. All this at twelve years old. Compared to this, becoming intimate with animal feces didn’t seem like such a big deal.
Dorothy and Leon were quite a pair. Leon was short and resembled Harry Truman, a politician that he vehemently hated. Leon loved to tell me the story, repeated many times, of how he had attended school in Middletown, Connecticut with Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, and how he was standing in the outhouse at school one day pissing against the door when Acheson ill-timedly opened the door and caught a stream of piss in the face. Leon loved to gloat over that. (He also had been acquainted with Calvin Coolidge, who he thought had been the best President in the history of the country – Leon may have been alone in his level of admiration for the mediocre Coolidge.) Leon ended his schooling after the 8th grade (not unusual in that time, which would have been during the 1890s; he was, as I recall, 72 years old in 1960).
Leon was about as conservative and bigoted as anyone I had ever met at that time. He didn’t hate blacks, because he had never come in contact with any blacks in Vermont or Maine – he never had an opportunity to develop such an antipathy. (I, on the other hand, had experienced segregation and prejudice first-hand in the south.) He did, however, hate Jews, and particularly hated “Jew college professors” and “Jew lawyers,” whom he frequently berated for all the ills of the world. If Dorothy overheard him spouting anti-semitic sentiments, she would take him to task. “Now, that’s just foolishness,” she would say. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’ve never even met a Jew!” He would cower and mutter, “I know what I’m saying,” and Dorothy would go on about her business, knowing that it was a waste of time to argue with him. His anti-semitism always simply puzzled me. The only Jews that I knew were a kindly couple who were concentration camp survivors who owned and ran a small neighborhood dime store around the corner from our house in Louisville - I knew that he couldn't possibly mean these people when he talked about Jews ruining the country. So I just smiled and nodded and ignored this part of his running monologue each day.
He hated “city folk”, and bragged about how he had successfully directed road funds to rural areas during his tenure as Vermont Road Commissioner, ignoring the needs of the cities (although there are precious few cities in Vermont to begin with). He always said that people go to college to “learn to be stupid”. I always listened without comment to his rantings, although they were never in any way persuasive to me. Oddly enough, his prejudices were almost always very abstract. If he actually was personally acquainted with someone with a college education, his prejudice against college always immediately became irrelevant. One of Dorothy’s daughters was married to a college professor, and Leon thought that he hung the moon – he came once and helped us paint the house, and Leon absolutely thought the world of him. The fact that he was a college professor somehow was overlooked. A farmer who lived nearby and did some work for us, Ted Pulsifer, had a college degree in agriculture, and Leon and Dorothy both constantly talked about how knowledgeable Ted was as a result of this education. Nevertheless, Leon consistently urged me to not attend college and to instead become…a farmer! In fact, he frequently expressed the hope that I would come and take over this very farm when I became an adult. Leon and Dorothy both constantly lamented the fact that so many young people growing up on farms were moving to cities and towns to “work in the mills.” They wondered who would be left to work the small farms, and believed that the day of the small family farm was rapidly coming to an end.
Ted Pulsifer told me a funny story once upon learning that I lived in Louisville. He had been in the army, and had been stationed at Fort Knox, which is just outside Louisville. He said that one Friday afternoon some of the other soldiers asked him if he’d like to come with them to do some “coon knockin’” that evening. Thinking that doing some raccoon hunting might be an enjoyable diversion, he agreed to accompany them. He was taken aback when, instead of driving to the woods, they drove into an African-American neighborhood in Louisville and passed out baseball bats that they had brought along in the trunk. Ted had misunderstood their intentions. He immediately asked to be dropped off at the bus station, and took a bus back to the base.
Leon loved his Boston Red Sox, and we watched the games on television whenever possible. This was during the heyday of the great Carl Yastremski, who truly was a joy to watch and an incredible athlete. Leon also loved Friday night wrestling, which we never missed, and he would become extremely riled up during the matches, jumping up and standing in front of the TV, cursing the villains, swinging his fists, and generally making a spectacle of himself. He had no insight into the fact that it was all just a show, and truly believed that it was a legitimate athletic contest. Friday night wrestling was second in popularity in that household, though, to the Lawrence Welk show on Saturday evening, which Dorothy and Leon would never, ever miss. How many times I heard Dorothy speculate about whether or not Norma Zimmer had had her teeth capped – she believed so, but was never absolutely certain. Dorothy and Leon just loved it when Lawrence would stride into the audience to dance with some of the adoring ladies, who would snatch at him and jostle for an opportunity to dance with him, just like he was Elvis.
And then there was the cider. Leon was a local legend for his hard apple cider. He made 150 gallons a year, in three 50-gallon barrels which sat on the granite slab floor of the dug-out cellar beneath the house. The cider had a solid alcohol content – probably in the neighborhood of 12% - and Leon and I would split a quart of this cider every morning at around 10:00 or 10:30 and another in the mid-afternoon. He had a green ceramic pitcher that he would take down to the cellar and fill, and we would sit at the kitchen table with large tumblers filled with this wine and drink it like it was water. I don’t think that it ever occurred to Leon that giving this much wine to a twelve-year-old might not be such a great idea (not that alchohol was new to me – I had already surreptitiously started drinking alcohol at home by this age). But he believed in treating me like an adult, I suppose, because he expected me to work like one. I was smoking a couple of packs of cigarettes a day by then as well, which he fully supported (he smoked cigars, which he had started smoking when he was five years old!). It was several years before Leon started trusting me to draw the cider from the barrels – the technique for doing so was crucial, because carelessly leaving even a slight space for air to enter the barrel when closing the tap would be death for the cider, turning it into vinegar within a matter of hours. There was always a steady stream of neighbors who would stop by in hopes of being offered a drink, which Leon generally accommodated. Even Don Newton would usually be able to talk Leon into giving him an occasional glassfull, despite the fact that he knew that Don was an alcoholic.
When Leon and I would go into town – usually Livermore Falls, but sometimes Lisbon Falls (which is where Stephen King was growing up at the time) – to buy grain for the cows, Leon would always stop at a liquor store and buy two cold 16-ounce cans of Ballantine Ale. When we got out of town, he would pull into a little country lane somewhere and stop the car, and we would sit there and drink the ale as a special treat. Leon didn’t want Dorothy to know that we were doing this, because he knew that she would disapprove. Trips to town also always included Leon’s lewd comments about all the women that he would see walking along the street. If a woman was wide in the hips, he would always say, “Look at that one – she’s rugged where the strain comes,” and he would then laugh uproariously. Any attractive woman coming within his range of vision would prompt him to say, “I’d love to see you on top of her!”, again accompanied with profligate laughter.
When he had the big farm in Vermont, Leon had made much more than a mere 150 gallons of cider, and he would always reserve at least one barrel for applejack. He would set this barrel outside when the weather turned cold, and would wait until it had frozen solid. He would then drill a hole into the center of the frozen cider, where a pocket of about 12 gallons of almost pure alcohol would be, since alchohol has a much lower freezing point than the rest of the cider. He would drain out this liquid, and drink it as a liquor. I never had any of this stuff, but I have a feeling that it would probably have dissolved the enamel from my teeth.
Speaking of teeth, Leon’s were abysmal. When he was a young man, the fad was to have all of one’s upper teeth gold-capped, and Leon had done so. When this had gone out of style, he had had the caps removed, but he didn’t replace them with ceramic caps or with anything else. Leon’s upper lip tended to cover his upper teeth when he talked, but when he laughed, his upper teeth would be exposed, and it would make you want to turn and run – they were black and rotten stubs, nothing more. I have to think that they pained him, but he was not willing to have anything done about them. He also had a double scrotal hernia, for which he wore a complicated truss. Every day – two or three times every single day – something would happen, a slip or mis-step, to cause his intestines to slip through the tears in the muscle wall of his abdomen, and he would have to go to the house, lie down, and manually push the loops of intestine back into his abdominal cavity and replace the truss to hold them in. He would not consider having the hernias surgically repaired – I’m sure that he didn’t have any medical insurance, and this was before Medicare – so he just suffered through it. He wore a pair of glasses that he had found lying in the street some dozen years before – he didn’t want to spend the money to get prescription glasses, and these orphan glasses helped enough, or so he thought.
What I’ve written here could be interpreted in such a way as to lead some people to conclude that Leon was a disreputable, unpleasant, ignorant or negative person. Nothing could be further from the truth. Leon was a caring man who had worked hard – very, very hard – all his life, and who felt a connection to the land, to his livestock, to his family and his country that was deep and sincere. He was certainly quirky and in some ways quite old-fashioned, but he was not so very atypical of rural residents of America during the first half of the 20th Century. He was a down-east Yankee, and proud of it. He was universally beloved by his family and by everyone in Leeds, and was well deserving of this affection – generous as the day is long, his prejudices and unfortunate attitudes never seemed to find their way into his actual day-to-day life and his relationships with people.
Leon was immensely proud of the fact that he had only owned Ford automobiles for his entire life. Of course, his first vehicle was a horse and buggy, which he got when he was about ten years old. But when he started buying automobiles, they were always Fords. For a stretch of over twenty years, he drove Model T’s, which he traded in for a new one every year – he said that with the trade in of the old Model T, the new Model T would cost just an additional $100. So for an annual outlay of $100, he got a new car every year.
He and Dorothy (my mother called her “Dot”, but I never heard anyone else do so) drove an old Ford sedan, but they drove it like it was a tractor. It has been many years since I drove a tractor, but back in those days you almost never used first gear with a tractor. The gear ratios were so low that if you started out in first gear, you would be going so slowly by the time that you needed to shift into second gear that in the time it took you to depress the clutch and shift, the tractor would have come to a halt. So you always started out in second or third gear – perhaps that is still the way that tractors are driven, but I don’t know. So apparently extrapolating from this, both Leon and Dorothy believed that you should always start the car from a dead stop in second gear. Of course, this would usually cause the car to buck until it got up to the normal speed for second gear, but they refused to consider that perhaps the rules had changed, and that they should be starting in first gear. They would invariably say, “What is wrong with this thing?” as the car would lurch and bounce – they didn’t seem capable of learning this new way of doing things.
My days on the farm were both unchanging and also infinitely variable, oxymoronic as that may sound. There were certain things that we did every day, without exception, certain tasks that needed to be done during certain parts of the summer, and other duties that arose at the spur of the moment – Leon always said that the wonderful thing about working a farm was that you weren’t stuck doing the same thing day in and day out, and for the most part that was true.
My days always started out exactly the same, though (no rest on Saturdays or Sundays – on a dairy farm, the work doesn’t stop for any reason). At about 4:30 a.m., Dorothy would call up the stairs to awaken me – I slept in a small bedroom at the top of the stairs, the ceiling so low that I could barely stand up, and sitting up suddenly in bed meant a bang of the head against the sloping wall beneath the roof. Even during the hottest days in August, with the temperatures topping 100 degrees during the afternoon, it would be so cold at night that I would sleep under heavy blankets, and would have to wear a heavy coat for most of the morning. I always slept with the window open – the window faced the pig pen, so depending on the direction of the wind, the smell was…well, farmlike.
I would quickly arise and head to the barn, where Leon would have usually already put grain in the feedbins and let the cows in, chaining them in their stalls and letting them eat their grain before we began milking. Leon usually didn’t need to call the cows in the morning – they would be waiting at the gate at the end of the lane leading to the barn between the well field and the field behind the house.
We would immediately start milking. Milking a cow by hand is a skill requiring a great deal of strength in the hands and lower arms. At the beginning of each summer, I would not have the requisite strength, so my milking was always quite a struggle. Watching Leon milk always fascinated me. The muscles in his lower arms were so developed that as he milked, it looked like mice were running around under the skin of his arms, the muscles flexed so. Leon and I would both start milking at the same time. He would usually milk about twice as many cows as I did in the same amount of time, but during the first few weeks of the summer, it was not unusual for me to only be able to milk one or two cows before he had finished milking all the others. We never milked more than about 8 or 9 cows, though, and in later years, fewer. Leon would have the radio going (for some reason I have a distinct recollection of listening to the song Wolverton Mountain while milking), and the cats would be lurking around hoping for a squirt of milk, which I usually obliged.
Milking a cow by hand can be quite a challenging task. One has to sit on the right side of the cow (always the right side) on a very low three-legged stool, holding the large stainless steel milking bucket between your knees. You can’t put the bucket on the floor, because that makes it too susceptible to getting kicked over. So you plop yourself down on the stool, and scoot yourself close to and under the cow. Then you must wrestle the cow into the necessary position, which means having their right rear leg set back so that you can get to the udders. The cow may or may not feel like putting their leg where you need it to be, so sometimes you have to put your arm in front of the right leg and grab the left leg. You then use this leverage to force the cow’s right leg back – she often kicks, sometimes pretty vehemently, and I got kicked right out of the stall on more than one occasion. (Once a cow had jumped a barbed-wire fence overnight and had ripped one of her teats its full length on a barb. Unaware of the injury, I grabbed that teat the next morning and squeezed, and she unceremoniously deposited me on the floor behind her in the blink of an eye.)
Once the cow’s legs are in position, you have to corral the tail. A cow’s tail can be a lethal weapon, and she will switch almost continuously. When the hairy end of the tail is soaked in urine, it is very unpleasant to have her strongly switch the tail, the end of which wraps around your head and slaps you in the eye. So to prevent this particular form of torture, you have to grab the tail, pull it between her legs, and pinch the hair at the end of the tail between your knee and the milking bucket. She will attempt to pull the tail loose through constant switching, but good strong pressure will hold it captive and protect your eyes.
Throughout the process of milking, the flies – bluebottle flies, deerflies, horseflies – are constantly swarming around, often biting. I would daily spray the cows to try to reduce the swarm, but the bugspray was minimally effective, and a constant slapping of flies was a regular complement to the work of milking.
Of course, the cow may have spent the night lying in a pool of urine or a nice fresh cowpie of feces, so as you press your head against the side of the cow to begin milking, you rub the urine and feces into your hair and onto your forehead. You must get used to this, as it is unavoidable – delicate sensibilities have no place on the farm.
The milking process is pretty straightforward. You grab two teats – usually caddy-corner to each other (the right front and left rear, or left front and right rear) and begin a squeezing process where you pinch off the top of the teat in the gap between your thumb and forefinger, and then squeeze the milk out of the teat with the remaining fingers. The cow will take a minute to start “letting down” the milk from the udder into the teat, and then the milk will start to flow. When her udders are nearly empty, you must reach up and pinch off the upper part of each of the four sections of the udders and continue to squeeze the remaining milk to empty her out.
Different breeds of cows present different challenges. A Holstein may have an enormous amount of milk, and teats that amply fill even the largest hands. But a Jersey, who gives only a small amount of milk, has teats so small that a person with normal-sized hands will have to milk using only two or three fingers, as the teat is so short that the ring finger and pinky don’t even close on the end of the teat. So while the amount of milk is less, the effort is actually greater. Milking a cow with large teats is much easier than milking one with tiny teats. Interestingly enough, the amount of butterfat obtained differs very little. The Holstein gives a large amount of milk, but the milk has a low butterfat content. The Jersey’s small amount of milk is offset by the richness of the breed’s butterfat content. So for a farm whose product is butter, there isn’t much point in having the large breed cows, because you get about the same amount of cream from the smaller breeds. We mostly milked Jerseys and Guernseys.
When you are finished milking, then comes the potentially hazardous process of extricating yourself. You may have a very full bucket of milk to negotiate, while you’re halfway under the cow on a stool that is so low that your knees are up under your chin. As you are trying to move away, the cow now is in a position to re-position her feet, so she will tend to step towards you just as you’re trying to stand up. Assuming that you succeed in not dumping the bucket of milk out by this time, you now have a split-second of danger as you walk behind the cow to move to the cream separator. When cows defecate, they lift their tales and the feces drop to the ground. However, it occasionally happens that the cow coughs violently just as they are defecating. When this occurs, the feces shoot out horizontally like a rocket. Nothing is more aggravating than to milk a cow until your hands and forearms are exhausted, only to have the cow launch a nice pile of poop into the bucket as you walk behind her.
Once I had navigated this bovine minefield, I would take the bucket of milk to the cream separator, where the milk would be poured through a strainer and then spun by the separator, the cream coming out one spigot and the skim milk out the other (skim milk is so named because before the development of the separator, milk would be allowed to sit until the heavy cream had risen to the surface of the bucket, when it would be skimmed off the top – the remaining milk, less the cream, would be “skimmed” milk).
The milking would be repeated in the evening, after dinner, which we would usually eat at around 5:00. I would have called the cows from the pasture and put them into their stalls before dinner, and they would eat while we ate. Leon and I would then go out and complete the milking, turning the cows out to pasture for the night when we were done.
I would set the bucket of cream aside, and the skim milk would be combined with table scraps and other inedible vegetables, which I would carry along a path behind the house to the pig pen. Every summer that I was on the farm, the pigs would be managed differently. The first year, the pigs were kept in a pen that was about 30 by 50 feet in size, including an old shed that had once housed the horse. The next summer, a much larger pen was used, which was mostly filled with low shrubs. The following year only a couple of hogs were kept in a small pen, and the final summer I was there, only one pig was kept in a stall in the horse barn. In each case, though, I would dump the feed into a trough, and the pigs would pig out. If the pigs were not waiting at the trough when I got there, I would call them. However, the call was very different from that used to call the cows. The pig call that we used was simply a rapid repeating of the word, “pig, pig, pig, pig”, spoken in a low guttural voice. I suppose that you could sing an aria from La Traviata and they would learn to come when they heard it.
I detested the pigs most of the time. If you got in the pen with them, they immediately tried to bite you. They frequently escaped from their enclosure, and we would have to chase them around to get them back in. When caught, you would lift them by their rear legs and walk them back to the pen like a wheelbarrow. Once there, one of us would hold their hind legs while the other would grab them by the ears, and we’d just heave them over the fence. When we had the pig pen in the horse barn, it was right next to the outhouse that I had to use when the well ran low (or dry). I’d be sitting there on the old one-holer, and the pig would put his nose through a big knothole and grunt at me like I was interfering with his daily schedule. Cleaning out this pen was really awful – it would just be a wet mess, and there was no place to put the pig while I tried to get the pen clean (it was only about 4 by 8 feet in size).
Anyway, I digress. After feeding the pigs, Leon and I would go into the house and have breakfast. For me, this usually meant dry breakfast cereal. We would have a pitcher of fresh milk in the refrigerator, which would have a thick layer of cream on top from sitting all night. I would pour this over my cereal, with thick globs of cream gleaming on top of the corn flakes or whatever I was eating that day – it was so good.
At that time in Maine, the laws governing milk did not extend to butter, at least not as we prepared it. So the milk and cream that we used was not pasteurized or homogenized. Were we selling milk commercially, the whole operation would have had to have been much more elaborate. I remember visiting Ted Pulsifer’s farm, where he had a large herd of Holsteins that he milked in a pristine stable with much stainless steel, fancy milking machines, etc. I remember once being there when he had just had to dump some thousands of gallons of milk because one cow – one cow – had an infection that had raised the level of bacteria in the milk to a level that it couldn’t be sold, and the entire tank had to be dumped. We never faced such problems. Hygienic would not be an adjective to be used in describing our operation. Urine-soaked sawdust routinely fell into the bucket while we milked, and while the sawdust would be filtered out before separating, the urine and God knows what other impurities would just be an added undertaste to be included in the butter. But our butter was so good that people would drive weekly from Connecticut and Massachusetts to buy it at a very exorbitant price, hygienic or not. Never before or since have I eaten such butter, and I probably never will – it just can’t be made that way any more. Unfortunately, the income from the butter was so essential to our survival that I usually had to eat store-bought margarine – we couldn’t afford for me to eat the good stuff.
There were a couple of secrets to the quality of this butter, in addition to the fact that it was absolutely fresh and untreated in any way. First was the diet that we fed to the cows every day. Leon had a special recipe for grain – one scoop of this, a half-scoop of that, a handful of this – that we carefully measured out for each cow twice a day. The various grasses and plants in the hay also contributed to the butter’s wonderful taste. Leon always wanted a lot of clover mixed in with the hay, because it added a sweetness to the butter. The biggest determinant of the flavor of the butter was this choice of grains and hay. The second secret was salt – Dorothy added an amazing quantity of salt to the butter as she worked it manually after churning. I suppose that such a high salt content wasn’t very healthy, but it helped to bring out the wonderful flavor of the butter. The butter was churned in a motorized churn which consisted of a small barrel that turned on a spit – that was all there was to it. A little window at one end of the barrel would allow you to see when the cream had turned into butter, because as long as it was cream, the window was coated with the cream and appeared white – when the cream had turned to butter, the glass would be clear. Dorothy would pull the sweet butter out of the churn and put it on a special table with a fluted mangle, and she would run the butter repeatedly through this mangle to squeeze out any remaining buttermilk that was trapped in it, adding salt as she worked the butter. When it was ready, she would mold the butter with a wooden mold and wrap the butter in special waxed paper that they had printed for this purpose.
Dorothy churned about twice a week, each time producing about 25-30 pounds of butter. Some of it we took to a small grocery store in Lewiston. The rest was sold directly from the house. This butter sold for several times what typical mass-produced butter sold for, but there was no shortage of customers because it was so very special.
Another special treat was the maple syrup that Leon’s son produced on Leon’s old farm in Vermont. We would get a couple of gallons of it every year. People who only know maple syrup from the product that they buy in the supermarket have no idea what pure unadulterated maple syrup is really like. It is clear, like water, and not nearly as thick as the grocery store variety. But it was so light and tasty that when we ate it, we usually each had a small bowl of it for dessert, and we would just eat it with a spoon all by itself. It was unbelievably good. A tiny amount drizzled on ice cream was just about orgasmic. Once Dorothy invited Mr. Unold, the New Yorker who owned the farm next door, to dinner, and after the meal was eaten she brought out small bowls of this wonderful syrup. Mr. Unold, having never had the experience of eating real maple syrup, immediately dipped his fingers into the bowl, thinking that the liquid was water for cleaning his hands – he thought that Dorothy was just being elegant by giving him a finger bowl. We all had a good laugh at that.
After breakfast, I would do one of several typical tasks, depending on the weather and the season. The first order of the day was always to go clean up the barn. The cows would have been turned out to pasture after they had been milked, but they would have left their calling cards in the barn while they were there, so I had to go clean it up. This involved first sweeping the walkway that ran behind the stalls. Leon was very persnickety about sweeping, as he was about most things. He believed that every task had a right way of doing, and even something as mundane as sweeping should be done according to correct technique. This meant always walking backwards (“Get your ass behind you,” he would always say) and sweeping steadily in the same direction. I would sweep the sawdust that had been tracked on the walkway by the cows, use a hoe to clean any manure that had fallen in the stalls, pulling it into the trough behind the stalls, getting a wheelbarrow and shoveling out the manure, and finally hauling it out onto the manure pile. I would cover the surfaces of the stalls with sawdust for bedding for the cows.
Often, my next task would be to go out and check my traps. Our fields were overrun with groundhog holes, and it was very hard on the horse when he stepped into one of these holes, or when the wheel of a wagon, rake or mowing machine dropped into a hole in the middle of work. So I did a lot of trapping to try to rid the fields of as many of the groundhogs as I could. It was probably futile, as I’m sure that they reproduced a lot faster than I could trap them, but I made the effort anyway. I used typical traps that I would set and place at the entrance to the groundhog hole, covering the trap with grass to obscure it a little. When the groundhog stepped on the trigger, the trap would snap shut on his leg, holding him until I came. We didn’t have a gun, so when I found a groundhog in a trap, I clubbed it to death. This sounds cruel, and it no doubt was, but life on the farm was often cruel. I remember once when we had a yearling bull that was nursing some of the cows, thus reducing the milk production. To prevent this, Leon decided to put a ring in the bull’s nose, which would block his ability to get the cow’s udder into his mouth. The bull was chained in his stall, and Leon just walked up to his head with a pocket knife, grabbed him by the nose and stabbed a hole between the nostrils, inserting a heavy brass ring into the bleeding hole. He then tied a rope to the ring, unchained the bull, and told me to lead the bull out of the barn with the rope that was attached to the ring. I was certain that the bull would kill me, but he didn’t. I was horrified at this whole undertaking, but it was just another day on the farm for Leon.
Another horrifying scene was when the cows were artificially inseminated. Every year we would make a trip to the Bull Farm up in Augusta. This was a farm that kept prize bulls for the sole purpose of producing semen for farmers. I remember being astonished at the size of some of these animals – they looked like elephants, they were so huge! I didn’t know that cattle could grow so big! Leon would look around and choose which bulls he wanted to father some calves. A few weeks later, a guy would show up with the semen to inseminate a cow. He would put on long rubber gloves that went all the way up to his armpits. With one hand, he would start pulling manure out of the cow’s anus, and pushing his hand and arm into the poor cow’s rectum until his arm was fully in the cow up to his shoulder! Once again, I was astonished that this was physiologically possible, but it was. He would then insert a long thin tube with a bulb on the end into the cow’s vagina, and using his hand that was up the cow’s anus to get the tube into the correct position, he would squeeze the bulb, which was full of the chosen bull semen, thereby inseminating the cow – of course, this had to be done when the cow was in heat, at which time it was fertile. Animal husbandry indeed!
Apparently my predecessor as a farm boy had his own ideas about animal husbandry. My second cousin, Tommy, was visiting the farm once several years before, and he told me about the adolescent youngster that had worked with Leon before I came along. They were in the barn one day when the boy said to Tommy, “Hey, watch this.” He proceeded to get a metal bushel basket and set it upside down behind one of the cows. Standing up on the bucket, he pulled his penis out and shoved it into the cow. Tommy said that when he was finished and pulled out, he looked down at his penis and it was covered with feces. “Oops, hit the wrong hole,” was all he said as he cleaned himself off.
During the early part of the summer, after taking care of barn duties I would then go and harness up King. This was quite a task for a small boy like me, since it was a stretch to apply the harness to such a large horse. The harness itself was a complicated set of parts, including the bridle with a split bit, the huge collar, the hames, and a bewildering confusion of leather straps that wrapped around his huge body. Once fitted with the harness, I would take him out and hitch him to the dumpcart, load axes, the chain saw and other lumbering equipment into the cart, and Leon and I would head down into the woods. Every summer we had to cut enough wood to heat the house all winter, as well as enough to fuel the wood cook stove year round. This was a lot of wood, I don’t mind telling you. Leon would usually have a section of forest in mind, and we would head there where he would choose some trees to cut down. The first year I was there, Leon did all the chainsaw work; in later years, I assumed the chainsaw work. We cut down a lot of elm and white birch, usually avoiding pine because it burned too fast and hot for use in the stoves.
The first year that I was there, Leon had decided that he wanted to make a little extra money by cutting some white birch to sell to the furniture mill in Livermore Falls. So that year we would go into the woods and cut down one after another of the white birch trees, which were everywhere, cutting the trunks into four-foot lengths and hauling these to an area that was accessible to a truck to pick them up. We spent all summer cutting these trees, and when the truck came to pick up the wood, the workers were simply astounded that a 72-year-old man and a 12-year-old boy had been able to cut that much lumber. Leon gave me a $100 bonus from the proceeds of the sale of that lumber, which was quite a lot, given the fact that my usual wages were just $5.00 a week (at twelve hours a day, seven days a week, I figured that I was making a munificent six cents an hour! Of course, I also received room and board, but I’d have gotten that for free if I’d have stayed home.).
It was wonderful to work in the woods every morning. It would be cold, and I would have to wear a heavy coat, which I would take off as the noon hour approached and the temperature rose. Leon would reconnoiter each tree, figuring where he wanted it to fall and how it would need to be cut to accomplish this. We would cut into the trunk and then cut out a notch. Going around to the other side of the tree, we would carefully saw opposite the original cut, frequently stopping to insert wedges with a sledgehammer to nudge the tree in one directly or another. Cutting all the way through the trunk on one side while leaving a bit of wood on the other would cause the tree to fall in the direction away from the complete cut, and there was quite a science to getting the tree to fall where we wanted it. Of course, we were not always successful, and trees would sometimes fall into other trees and get hung up. When this happened, we would have to try one of several strategies to get the tree down. If the trunk was sawed clean through, we might unharness King and hitch him to a chain that we would then attach to the trunk, and he would just pull the tree away from the other trees to allow it to fall completely to the ground. On other occasions, when the tree had fallen far enough that the slope of the trunk was not too steep, Leon would send me up the trunk with the chainsaw, where I would start sawing off limbs until the tree was freed and would fall, and I would ride it down. Leon always said, “Be sure to turn off the saw when the tree starts to fall.” Like I wanted to leave it on and saw my leg off! I did actually saw the end of one of my boots off with the chainsaw once, exposing my toes that had narrowly avoided the spinning chain. Chainsaws are very dangerous, particularly when being used in the woods with ever increasing piles of limbs and branches building up around where you are working. A kid my age would not be allowed to do this kind of work today, but those were different times, as I’ve mentioned before.
Once the tree was felled, we would use the chainsaw to cut off the larger limbs, and axes to trim the smaller limbs and branches. We would use a Johnson bar to lever the tree trunks around, and a cant-hook to turn the heavy trunks as needed. We would then cut both the trunk and the larger limbs into stove-lengths (about 16 inches or so), and pile the wood into the dump truck. The wood would then be hauled up and dumped at the end of the shed, where we would split it with our axes and then stack it in several areas – one of the lofts in the barn would be filled with wood, and we would fill the basement area under the shed, floor to ceiling, right up to the door.
Splitting wood is an art in and of itself. Most people simply set up the chunk of wood on a splitting block and smack it with the ax as hard as they can, thereby embedding the ax into the wood, where it must be laboriously extricated, only to be whacked again. This is not the way to do it, as Leon carefully taught me. The secret to splitting wood is to add a twisting motion to the ax just as it hits the wood, so that instead of the ax-head sticking in the wood, it bounces back out. With practice, a 16-inch length of tree trunk can be split into sections very quickly with repeated blows of this sort. Leon used a double-sided ax, sharpened with a narrow edge on one side for chopping limbs, and sharpened on the other side with a wide-angled edge that resisted getting stuck into wood when splitting. My ax was a single-edged one, with a kind of middle-of-the-road edge, neither very narrow nor very blunt. I spent many hours cranking the grindstone while Leon sharpened these axes, as well as scythes and the cutter bars on the hay mowing machine – fortunately, with just one horse to pull it, the hay mower had just a four-foot cutter bar with a serrated edge, so it could be sharpened in a fairly short period of time – a half-hour or less, probably. But just try cranking a heavy grinding wheel for a half hour with someone exerting pressure on the stone with the implement being sharpened and see how your arm feels!
Sometimes we were cutting trees in an area where we could not get the dumpcart, so we had to trig the tree trunks out of the woods to a more accessible location. To do this, we would hitch King to a chain and he would pull the logs out of the woods. King was a master at doing this, as he had originally been trained to do this kind of work. When pulling the first log or two, I would lead him by his bridle, jumping out of the way to keep from getting stepped on. (Once King stepped right on my foot and placed every bit of his weight on it as he was trigging a large log out from the bog. Fortunately the ground was very soft, so it drove my boot down into the ground about six inches, where I remained stuck as King kept right on walking.) After a couple of logs, the ground would have been dug up where the logs had been pulled, creating a faint path. From here on, King would follow the path on his own and didn’t need to be led – I could just say “giddap” and he would take the log to the area where the other logs had been left. If the log bumped up against a stump or other barrier that stopped his progress, King would simply move to left or right and pull until he pulled the log loose, and he would proceed on. Leon said that King had been trained to respond to “gee” and “haw” to turn left or right, but I was never able to give these commands in an effective manner. That horse was quite a smart old fellow, though. When harnessed and working, he would always walk at the same slow pace, never deviating. On those occasions when we would remove his bridle and harness and turn him out, it was amazing to see this gigantic animal kick up his heels and run, flopping down on the ground and rolling, his huge feet flailing away in the air.
The biggest tree we ever cut down wasn’t even on our property. It was actually over the fence on Mr. Unold’s property. But Leon, rightly, figured that Mr. Unold would never miss it, or even be aware of its existence in the first place. Leon wanted to get some wide pine boards cut for siding for the barn, and this tree fit the bill. It was a pine tree, and was so large at the foot that Leon stood on one side of the tree and I stood on the other and we could not touch hands around the trunk. It was probably slightly insane of us to be attempting to fell such a mighty tree with a small chainsaw with just a 16-inch cutter bar, and just the two of us to bring it down. It took us most of a full day to get it down, but we were finally successful. We cut off a nice straight section about 18 feet long, but it was much, much too heavy for King to pull out, so we just left it lying there – later that winter Leon got Ted Pulsifer to bring over his huge tractor to pull the log out of the woods over the snow, which made the pulling a bit easier.
I can’t even begin to describe how many times I got hurt doing this work in the woods. Fortunately, I never received a really serious injury. But cuts, scrapes, splinters and bruises were a daily occurrence. Thrashing around in the midst of a bunch of undergrowth, with sticks and branches everywhere, lugging a chainsaw while trying to trim small limbs off a downed tree, is inherently an accident waiting to happen. It’s really a kind of miracle that no serious injury ever occurred to either Leon or to me. In the fall of one year, after I had returned to Louisville to go to school, Leon had hired old Mr. Norton, a mentally disabled man who lived in a tiny shack one road over and made a living doing day labor and hauling stuff with his pickup truck. They were working in the woods, and Leon was cutting down a tree. He couldn’t see, due to moss overgrowth, that the stump of the tree had grown up against a stone. He hit the stone with the chainsaw, and a piece of the chain broke off and flew into one of Norton’s eyes, which he lost as a result. Norton was already missing the middle finger of one hand that he had lost in a table saw accident. This was all just a part of it.
While Leon never received a serious injury during the years that I was there, he had been almost mortally injured on several occasions earlier in his life. When he owned the big farm in Vermont, he had a portable sawmill that he would set up in the woods to saw needed lumber. The sawmill operated with a large motor with a chain attached to the large round blade. On one occasion, he told me, he was standing near the mill when that chain broke, and slapped him, splitting open his thigh from knee to hip. Miraculously, it didn't tear his femoral artery, or he would have died. A few years before I started going to the farm there in Maine, Leon had nearly been killed by a bull. It was during the winter, when the cows all stayed in the barn around the clock. There were some calves in a small pen, and this bull had broken his chain in the middle of the night and was wandering around the barn. He started playing with the calves, hooking them with his horns, and eventually ended up killing them. When Leon arrived in the morning, the bull had the scent of blood in his nose, and was extremely dangerous. Leon tried to chain him back up, but the bull swung around on him, knocking him to the floor with his horns and breaking several ribs and one of his arms. Leon was able to cower underneath a cow until the bull moved away, thus escaping with his life. Hurts on the farm are sometimes no joke.
Working in the woods was the typical morning activity throughout the summer, although we always found time around 10:30 or so to return to the house for some cider. Around noon we would have lunch, and then a brief period of rest. After lunch, a variety of activities might be on the agenda. During the earlier part of the summer, I would have to go weed in the garden, one of the only tasks that I really hated. As the summer progressed and the vegetable plants steadily grew larger, the need for weeding waned, and finally the task changed from weeding to harvesting, which was much better. We grew corn, peas, green beans, potatoes, squash, cucumbers, cabbage, pumpkins, and others that I can’t remember. We also had three cherry trees, although we had to fight the birds for the cherries, and usually lost the battle. When they were ripe, we would go out and pick blueberries, which are a giant pain in the neck to pick, since the plants grow so low to the ground, and it takes a good hour to pick a pint or so of these tiny berries. Our best picking area was a swath of public land that had been cut through the forest to allow for high power electric lines to be strung. For some reason, the blueberry plants thrived in this swath, and we were able to pick to our heart’s content.
As the summer progressed, the haying season would be upon us. The first year that I was there, Leon had planted about half of the lower field in oats, and the crop had grown in magnificently – the oats were tall and thick, and harvesting them was a massive task. We cut hay in the well field, the cemetery field, and the lower field, and we did it the old-fashioned way - loose.
The process would begin with me hitching King to the hay mower. This was a one-horse mower with a four-foot cutter bar which extended out to the right of where the driver sat. Because the blade was to one side of the horse and driver, it of course pulled the horse to that side, so driving King in the mower was a constant struggle to keep him going straight – Leon always did the driving. I would walk behind the cutter bar with a pitchfork, pulling the hay off of the cutter bar blade with the fork to keep it from getting jammed with too much hay. When the hay was very heavy, such as with that incredible field of oats, this was quite a task. When the hay was light, the task mostly consisted in walking and watching for jams, which rarely occurred.
Once the hay was cut, it would be allowed to lie in the field to dry. At this time, we always worried inordinately about rain. Several days of rain occurring right after the hay had been cut would make the hay unusable, because it would simply decompose before it got dry enough to bring into the barn. Hay that is too green, if put into a hayloft in the barn, will spontaneously combust, and can easily start a fire and burn the barn down. On more than one occasion I went to move some hay in the barn, only to find pockets of ashes where the hay had burned itself up due to the chemical reactions that take place with green hay. So it was important to allow the hay to dry.
After the hay had lain in the field drying for a day, it had to be turned over to dry for another day. Leon and I would go to the field with pitchforks, and simply walk down the rows of cut hay, turning it over so that the underside could dry. This was tedious work indeed. But I was always entertained because Leon would talk pretty much the whole time, reminiscing about his childhood, his time in the Vermont legislature, his former wife (who he talked about incessantly, negatively), and he would tell jokes – the same tired jokes day in and day out, which never ceased to amuse him. I can remember a few. He told about the young man who took his girlfriend out early one morning, and as they sat down on the wet grass, he said, “Some dew.” She immediately answered, “Yes, but I don’t.” He told about taking a journey by train during the early years of the 20th century, and having a layover in St. Louis, which was the busiest train station in the country at that time. The area across Market Street from Union Station in St. Louis was one of the largest, shall we say, adult entertainment districts in the world. Leon wandered over and went into a burlesque house where he viewed some amazing feats of anatomical control – he said that one stripper came out on stage, removed all of her clothes, and proceeded to magically produce, one at a time, six ping-pong balls that had been cleverly concealed in an intimate location in her body. He also heard what was to become his very favorite joke, which I must have heard at least 500 times. Two burlesque girls came out on stage. One said, “I’m bad.” The other responded, “I’m good.” The other, in turn, commented, “It must be hard to be good.” The other retorted, “Oh, it has to be hard to be good!” Hearty laughter invariably ensued after this one was told and retold and retold. Leon would usually follow up by saying that if he ever got hard, he’d run for the house and take Dorothy to bed, no matter the time of day or what else might be going on.
Leon actually felt fortunate that he had been able to father children at all. When he was a teenager, he had taken a girl out on a date, and when he took her home, they stood on her front porch, flirting. Apparently in the course of this horseplay, Leon grabbed a handkerchief from her hand and made as if to swat her with it. Unfortunately, her dog was on the porch with them, and when Leon appeared to be moving aggressively toward the girl, although just in play, the dog jumped on him and bit him right in the testicles, crushing one of them. He said that he went home with blood streaming down his pants-legs, and laid down in his bed where he stayed for about two week, his scrotum swelling up to many times its normal size. The doctor expressed doubt about his future fertility, but apparently the injury was not serious enough as to cause him to be sterile.
Oddly enough, despite being a farmer, Leon was pretty uninformed about human reproduction. He told me that when he first got married, to the daughter of the farmer whose farm later became the nucleus of his own much larger farm in Vermont, he and his wife immediately had three children, and his wife barred him from her bedroom because she didn’t want to keep having children. After some fifteen years, she relented, and he returned to her bed, only to immediately father three more children in short order. Following this, he was permanently barred from the marriage bed, and he vowed that he would leave his wife when the children were grown, which he did. What was odd about this was that Leon didn’t understand anything about birth control. It wasn’t that he wanted to have all of those children – he didn’t know what to do to prevent it. He believed that women were fertile when they were menstruating, and urged me to always avoid having intercourse with a girl during her period, because that was when she could get pregnant. (I can’t imagine that he thought that I was sexually active, which I wasn’t, but that didn’t stop him from advising me.) Of course, this is exactly backward. He also believed that twins were conceived when a pubic hair crossed over the opening in the end of a man’s penis and “split” the semen as he ejaculated. He said that Japanese women’s vaginal lips went from side to side, rather than from front to back, and that their pubic hair hung below their knees. He believed that masturbation caused blindness, insanity, and hair to grow on the palms of your hands. Some of these were common beliefs of the time, but others were just plain wacky.
After the hay was dry enough to bring into the barn, it would have to be raked into windrows. We used an old dump rake – exactly like the one that Judy Garland leaned on when she sang “Over the Rainbow” in The Wizard of Oz. We only had one set of reins for the horse, and they were quite long to accommodate driving the hay wagon and the dump cart, in which the driver sometimes drove from a position much further back from the horse. But the horse’s rump was just nearly in the driver’s face when hitched to the rake, meaning that the reins were much too long. I usually pushed the ends of the reins under my butt when I was raking, but they would invariably come loose periodically and fall into the tines of the rake, thereby suddenly yanking the reins and causing King to come to a halt and start backing up. Very aggravating it was. Also aggravating was having King’s rear end right in my face, because, like all horses, he was very flatulent – enough said.
As I mentioned previously, I would have to hold the reins in one hand because I was constantly manually dumping the rake with the other, which made driving rather difficult. (Leon would not allow me to use the automatic dump mechanism - this was a gizmo that engaged teeth in the wheels of the rake such that when you stomped down on a lever, the teeth would engage and the turning of the wheels would lift the tines of the rake automatically. Unfortunately, this added a good deal of strain to the horse with the weight it added to his pull, as well as causing a jolt to the horse every time it kicked in, so Leon felt that it was too hard on poor old King.) In the lower field, some tree branches hung over the edge of the fence surrounding the field, and when I drove under those branches, they would sometimes sweep me off the seat, and King would go merrily along with me on the ground behind shouting, “Whoa!”
When the raking was completed, I would hitch King to the large hay rack (wagon), and we would go out and load the hay onto the wagon. Bringing loose hay in on a wagon is tricky, particularly if you have to drive the loaded wagon over a rough road, which we often had to do. The process of putting the hay onto the wagon required having clumps of hay overlapping to tie the load together so that the hay wouldn’t just fall off. We would go to the windrow and fold the hay over from left and right, making a little pile of hay kind of like an omelet. Poking the pitchfork into the hay, it would be lifted and placed upside down onto the wagon, overlapping the previous fork-full. The hay would be built up like this until the wagon was so full that a person standing on the ground couldn’t reach the top of the hay to add any more.
I would then drive the wagon to the barn, and go straight into the barn floor with the load. We would then use a large hook that was installed inside of the barn at its peak to move the hay into one of the lofts. In years gone by, a horse had been used to haul the hay using this hook, but when I was there we always used the car for this purpose. The hook was like that used in those stupid machines that you see in the penny arcade where you maneuver the hook over little stuffed animals and drop it, hoping to snag the animal, lift it and drop it into a chute to get your prize. This hook traveled along a track that ran the length of the barn just under the peak, and was opened with a rope attached to it for that purpose. The hook would be lowered to the hay rack, opened and shoved into the hay, making sure not to grab so much hay that it might snap the rope that lifted the hook (worse yet was to accidentally hook the hay rack itself, which wa guaranteed to bring about disaster). Dorothy would then be signaled to pull the car up the driveway, with the rope attached to the bumper, which would pull the hook up to the top of the barn and along the track to the place where it was to be unloaded. (Leon was very wary of having me work with the hook, because he once had an employee who had caught his hand in the rope as the hook was being raised to the top of the barn, where his gloved hand was drawn into the pulley – when he dropped to the floor, he took off the glove, and one of his fingers didn’t come out with the rest of his hand.) Leon or I would then pull the rope on the hook, opening it and allowing the hay to drop. Sometimes we would then have to manually move the hay with a pitchfork from the loft into which it had been dropped to another loft. As you can see, this was a very laborious process, from mowing to raking to loading and unloading and finally placing the hay in the appropriate loft – when winter came and the cows could no longer graze in the pastures, this hay would then be used to feed them. Since King stayed in the barn year-round, he was always being fed hay, which we dropped down into his feed trough through a trap door over his stall.
With just Leon and me to bring in the hay, we simply didn’t have time to get it all in over the course of the brief harvesting season. So Leon would hire Ted Pulsifer to come over with his tractor and baler to harvest some of the hay. It was when I worked with other farmers (Ted would bring his own young farm boy to help, a guy about my age who had grown up doing farm work) that I realized how much stronger they were, and how much more stamina they had than did I. I did little physical labor during the school year, so I never built up strength and stamina the way that people did who worked on the farm year round. They would just flat wear me out! Hauling those heavy bales off the feeder of the baler and stacking them on the wagon was tough work indeed. We never wore gloves, and grabbing the bales by the twine that tied them up became acutely painful over the course of several days of such work. Of course, my hands became quite calloused during the summer, but this was still a bit much for my tender skin to handle.
The haying season was always one filled with anxiety about the weather, so I was always quite happy when it was over. Sometimes we would harvest the hay early enough in the year for Leon to plant and harvest a rowen crop, or second crop – however, this second crop was always harvested after I had returned to Louisville in the fall. One of the amazing things about cutting hay was to watch Leon cut hay with a scythe. He was so good at it that he could – and sometimes did – mow the lawn with his scythe. He would hold the handles on the long curved pole that was attached to the blade, and just start swinging that tool from side to side, inching forward as the hay fell. It was just amazing to me, because I was never able to get the hang of it. I would swing the scythe just the way Leon did, but instead of cutting the hay, it would just push it over. No matter how much I practiced, I was never able to get it to work. Leon told of early days on the farm when all of the farmers in the region would join together and go from farm to farm with their scythes, lining up next to each other and moving across the fields cutting the hay. That must have been something to see, and fulfilling to participate in - very Steinbeckian, or like a scene from a Frank Capra film.
It was always quite a production when the time came for Leon to shoe King. King’s feet were enormous – fully 8 inches across – and it took great skill to trim the hooves and attach the shoes. Things would always start out fairly quietly. Leon would grab a foot, and King would allow him to lift it and hold it between his knees, King’s leg bent at the knee and the bottom of the foot facing upwards. Leon would quickly remove the old nails and shoe and then move on to the next foot. No problem. Then would begin the process of trimming the hoof. Big problem. King was old, in his late teens, and tired easily. As this lengthier process of trimming the hoof and fitting the new shoe to the foot progressed, King would steadily get more and more weary, and would start to lean in the direction of where Leon was holding up the foot being shoed. Leon would find himself not only trying to work on the foot, but holding up an increasing burden of King’s weight on his back as he leaned over the upturned leg. This would, in turn, cause Leon’s temper to get very, very short, and he would start cursing and yelling at the poor old horse. Leon’s cursing was quite creative – not only did he use the standard terms that we are all familiar with, but as a young boy some Italians in his neighborhood had taught him a whole set of Italian curse-words, which he would sprinkle in amongst the English words as it suited him. It was like some sort of profane speaking in tongues, and often tickled me, although I had to hide my amusement as Leon would not have appreciated my laughter under the circumstances. When he had reached the end of his rope, Leon would drop the foot, spin around and whack King with the side of the hammer – which had to be counter-productive, I thought. But Leon’s temper just couldn’t be controlled.
Anyone who has experienced trying to do work with a horse can probably empathize, because horses can be very stubborn and frustrating. King was what Leon called “hard-bitten”. When driving him in a wagon, hayrake or mowing machine, he would sometimes simply turn his head when you pulled the rein on one side or the other to get him to turn, and keep right on walking straight. He didn’t always do this – indeed, most of the time he was amazingly responsive, and I often marveled at how I was able to drive him in the dumpcart through narrow openings in the woods, making sharp turns around trees and other obstacles with little difficulty. But when he got in a certain mood, you would just about have to pull the reins hard enough to lift him off his front feet to get him to turn. And since he always walked at the same slow pace, if you pulled too hard when he was being this way, he often took this as an order to stop and back up. So you’d be in the middle of the field raking up windrows of hay with the hay rake – which was a challenge to operate while also driving the horse – and he would get into a mood and start resisting your efforts to get him to turn. Pulling harder, he would start backing up, which is disastrous with a dump rake because it forces the tines of the rake backwards, lifting the poles on either side of the horse and causing him to fall on his butt, which happened frequently to me during long days of raking hay. At these times, I too yelled and cursed at the poor old horse (Dorothy would sometimes scold me when she heard me from a half-mile away cursing King), but hitting him didn’t seem like a very wise approach, so I kept my abuse verbal.
One aspect of my summers in Maine had nothing to do with farming. Dorothy was the regular organist for the tiny church that we attended, but during the summer, I assumed this role, as well as being a singer (and sometimes soloist) in the choir. Dorothy had a small parlor pump organ in the bedroom, and I practiced on it. The organ that I played in church was quite an instrument. It was a pipe organ that had been installed in the church sometime around 1790 or so. It was quite compact – perhaps eight feet square at the base, and extending up to and probably through the ceiling. The bellows had originally been pumped by hand, and the pump handle still stuck out the side of the organ cabinet. However, an electric motor had been added a few years earlier, so it no longer required pumping. The man who had pumped the organ for many years, though, continued to sit by the handle – I guess he had become comfortable in this spot and just didn’t want to go down and sit with the rest of the congregation.
The organ and choir loft sat at the back of the church, so the people’s back was to us. Additionally, the keyboard was on the front of the organ cabinet, so when I sat to play, my back was to the front of the church – a small mirror allowed me to view everyone’s backs as I played, as well as the pastor sitting at the front of the church.
The organ had only two short keyboards – I want to say that they were less than four octaves long, and there were two octaves of pedals. The organ had a small number of stops – perhaps a dozen - and the only volume control was a foot pedal that I would push down and hook under a piece of wood, the pedal opening a baffle to allow more sound to escape from the pipe chamber. There were only two volumes – not very loud and a little bit louder – although you could add volume by opening up more ranks of pipes. The swell (volume) pedal was purely mechanical, and required me to nearly stand up on the pedal to get it open because of the weight of the baffle. Similarly, the keys on the keyboard operated mechanically, moving lengths of wood that were attached to the pipes to open and close the hole where the air was blown in with the bellows – pushing the keys was hard physical labor. With such limited keyboards, the organ couldn’t accommodate very elaborate music, which was fine with me, because my playing would not be classified as being particularly expert. But I guess I was better than Dorothy, who must have learned to play as a child in her father’s church (her father – my grandfather – was a Congregationalist minister. His name was Abraham Lincoln Dunton, having been named after the newly-elected president when he was born in 1860). My mother also played piano and organ, and had actually been awarded a scholarship to study piano in college, which was quite unusual for a woman in the 1920s. But she instead got married and never attended college.
I also got drafted to sing some solos in the choir. I really hated this, as I didn’t have a very good singing voice, and I experienced a lot of anxiety when put into a position of performing this way. But I reluctantly agreed to sing a few solos each year, with Dorothy filling in as the organist at these times. What was most disconcerting was that the entire congregation would turn around and stare with the first note out of my mouth, having been sitting with their backs to the choir up to that point.
Leon begrudged my work at the church, particularly if we were in the midst of getting in hay and the weather threatened. He would have much preferred that I stayed home to work every Sunday morning instead of going off to church. He often made fun of churchgoers, ridiculing people who went to church “every time the preacher farts.” He almost never went to church himself, although Dorothy never gave up trying to get him to do so. I remember once he finally relented and agreed to attend. I had never seen him dressed in anything but work clothes, and I was taken aback when he came out of the bedroom dressed in a 20-year old double-breasted dark pinstripe suit. I impulsively commented, “Man, you look weird! You look like a gangster!” Dorothy was furious with me. “I finally get him to go to church, and you make fun of the way he looks!” she fumed.
One summer Dorothy and Leon decided to have a huge family get-together of all of their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Several score people were invited, most of whom, living in nearby Vermont, came. The day before the get-together, Leon and I drove to the Atlantic coast where we purchased 100 live 1-1/2 pound lobsters off the back of a lobster boat, bringing them home in great buckets set in the trunk and back seat of the car. At the far end of the Old North Road, where the road dead-ended at the banks of the Androscoggin River, lived Pete Knowlton, a friend and life-long restaurant chef from Long Island who had retired to this location where he raised frying chickens by the tens of thousands (he also had the biggest pig I ever saw, well in excess of 1,000 pounds – you could literally saddle this thing and ride it like a horse!). Pete came over to our house and proceeded to cook up all those lobsters as the family waited their turn to feast. We had set up sawhorses topped with wide planks on the floor of the barn to serve as a huge table, and we melted pounds of our incredible butter to slather on the succulent lobster. Of course, we also had home-grown potatoes, corn-on-the-cob, green beans, Dorothy’s fabulous yeast rolls – my God, that may have been the best meal that I ever had in my entire life. And there was enough lobster for everyone to eat their fill; I think that I may have eaten three or four whole lobsters myself. What an occasion!
Pete Knowlton and his wife were perhaps Dorothy and Leon’s best friends, and we socialized with them frequently. Leon rented land from Pete to do additional vegetable gardening (Pete had a tractor and could till the soil for a large garden, which was beyond the ability of our horse, King, to do. Plowing and harrowing with a horse is a very difficult task.). Leon also rented pasture land from Pete where we kept some beef cattle – cows, steers and a few bulls. We would periodically have to go to this land to give the animals salt and grain, and I dreaded this activity more than anything I did on the farm – which is saying a lot, because I participated in a lot of very dangerous activities. But Leon and I would drive down to the land and climb the fence with several buckets of salt and grain. We would stand in the large pasture and call the cattle – the call that Leon used, and that I learned to imitate, consisted of a high-pitched wail, “Come boss”, with the last word like a trumpet note, “booooooosssssss”. The cattle, who would all be in the woods, would soon emerge, and would come charging at us like the running of the bulls at Pamplona. I was always petrified with fear, as these huge animals ran straight for me, not slowing until they were just a few feet away. I was always sure that I was going to be gored or trampled as Leon had near tragically experienced a few years earlier. But the animals would always stop. The bulls were particularly frightening, as they were larger and more aggressive behaving.
On one occasion – one only, thank God – Pete asked Leon to lend me to him for a day to help clean out the chicken house after the 20,000 or so fryers had been hauled away in trucks for slaughter. I was happy to help out until I set foot into that dark building that had housed the chickens. The smell was overpowering – unbelievable. I had never been very sensitive to smell, and a little bad odor never bothered me that much. This was different - much different. It was nearly intolerable. I honestly thought that I could not survive this smell. When I got home at the end of the day, I begged Leon to not ever again make me go down there to help out with this horrendous task.
During the process of helping Pete that day, I learned the origin of the term “pecking party,” which is used to describe a social situation where everyone takes verbal gibes against each other. I had asked Pete why it was kept so dark in the barn, and he explained that it was to prevent pecking parties. It appears that chickens – who are just about the least intelligent farm livestock that there are – instinctively peck at dots or spots, which they interpret as potential food. When you see a farm worker go out into the yard to feed a flock of chickens, you will see them sow bits of grain around, and the chickens will automatically run up and peck at the grains to eat them. Pecking parties in chicken barns occur when one of the chickens becomes injured in some way, and the injury causes the chicken to have red spots of blood on their feathers. The other chickens will immediately run to this chicken and instinctively start pecking at the red spots. They will eventually peck this chicken to death. But in the process, spots of blood will splatter on the chickens that attacked the first, so more chickens will attack these chickens. Eventually the chickens will all kill each other as more and more of them become spotted with the blood of earlier victims. This process is called a pecking party, and one can see the parallels when humans start trading attacks in a social setting (think Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf). By keeping the chicken barn dark, it prevents the chickens from seeing spots on each other. Were the barn kept lit up, a pecking party could produce thousands of dead chickens in a very short span of time.
A myriad of special projects were always bubbling to the surface on the farm. The first summer that I was there, Leon decided that we needed to replace some of the roofing paper on the barn roof. The pitch of the barn roof was quite steep, so what he decided to do was to tie a rope around my waist, throw the other end of the rope over the peak of the roof and down to the ground below, where he would hold onto it to keep me from tumbling off the roof and breaking my neck. I climbed out on the roof – some 40 feet above the ground, I would guess – and nailed down sheets of roofing material while Leon held the rope. In the middle of the job, I suddenly heard Leon start screaming, “Grab ahold of something, grab ahold of something.” Then the rope went slack for a minute, as I hunkered down and waited. A minute later the rope went taut again, and I proceeded. When I got down, Leon explained that he had been holding the rope tightly with his arms above his head when a wasp flew into his shirt and started stinging him, and he was helpless to do anything about it without letting go of the rope, which is why he yelled.
I got my turn to be stung one day as I was carrying a couple of buckets of slop to the pig pen. A little path led behind the house, and as I passed an old stump, I suddenly found myself covered with honey bees, who proceeded to sting me with great enthusiasm. I had not seen that there was a hive in the stump, and that the hive was swarming – I had walked directly into the swarm. My arms and neck were covered with stings, and the slop ended up on the ground as I ran for cover.
Farm kids get to see many things that city kids don’t, and one of these things is the process of birth. Watching a cow giving birth to a calf was quite an eye-opening experience for me. Later on, teaching the calf to drink from a bucket was an interesting experience as well. To do this, you stand with your back to the calf and pull it’s head between your legs, holding it tight with your knees. You then take a bucket with milk in it (the first milk that the cow gives for a few days after the calf is born is thick and brown and is called colostrum – the calf needs to nurse directly for this special substance, and for some weeks later as well) and hold it beneath the calf’s head. You then reach down and put one of your fingers into the calf’s mouth, holding its nose with your hand, and pushing the calf’s head into the milk with the other hand. If done right, the calf will instinctively start sucking on your finger, and in the process will pull milk into its mouth from the bucket. You periodically pull the finger out of the calf’s mouth and reinsert it, and eventually the calf learns to keep sucking even when the finger is not in its mouth, thereby learning to drink from the bucket. It was frightening at first, because I feared getting bitten by the calf, but that fear was unfounded.
Periodically we would have to go out and do some fence mending and repairing. Sometimes this was nothing more than tightening the barbed wire that was already existing, just adding the large staples that we hammered into the cedar fenceposts. Sometimes, though, we had to replace fenceposts, and this was a bigger production. First, the cedar logs had to be split to make the posts. This was a tedious job, involving using a sledgehammer and wedges to split the logs lengthwise – we used posts that were about six feet long, so this was about the length of the logs to be split. I remember once splitting open a log, only to discover a large nest of baby mice - pinkies – in the middle of the log. I immediately ran into the barn and grabbed a couple of cats, bringing them out and letting them feed on the mice. After that, I couldn’t get rid of the cats whenever I went out there to work.
When we put up fence-posts, Leon always had one hard-and-fast rule – the dirt that we dug out of the hole had to all fit back into the hole, despite the fact that the fence-post filled up most of the hole once it had been put into place. In other words, we needed to pack the dirt very tightly into the hole around the fence-post to hold it fast. These fences were mostly ceremonial, of course. Any of the animals could have broken through the fences with little effort, but there wasn’t any particular reason for them to do so – the fence presented enough of a barrier to be a deterrent. Our fences didn’t deter the moose, though. I was down in the lower field early one morning and saw a moose who had come out of the bog to feed in the field – when he saw me, he just calmly and effortlessly stepped over the fence and disappeared. Moose have really long legs.
One of the big deal repair tasks was necessitated by my impatience. We were down below the lower field bringing in some wood, and I had filled the dumpcart quite full. The ground sloped steeply down from the edge of the field, and so as I started driving King, he faced a challenging demand on his strength. To complicate matters, we were close to the fence, and were facing directly toward the fence, heading uphill with no place to go. So I had to turn King sharply. Well, the bottom line is that the turn was too sharp and the load too heavy, and the force of his pulling twisted the cart and snapped the spine of the cart, a large plank that ran down the middle of the cart to which the axles were attached, the body of the cart sitting atop this plank. We spent the next several days repairing the cart. This plank was probably fourteen inches wide and a good three inches thick. It had heavy bolts running through the plank itself, which meant that we had to drill holes through fourteen inches of plank, and we didn’t have any drill bits long enough to reach all the way through (we were using a hand-operated brace-and-bit, since we had no power tools). So what we had to do was to drill halfway through on one side, and then drill through from the other side, hoping that the holes would meet in the middle. And by some miracle, the holes did just about meet, although they were offset from each other slightly. So Leon heated up a bolt red-hot, and we drove it through the hole, burning our way through to make the ends of the holes meet. Dismantling the cart, manufacturing a new spine, and re-assembling the cart was a tedious and difficult chore, but one that was necessary – these kinds of things happen on the farm constantly, and add to the variety of work that keeps farmers from getting bored with what they do.
One of the few things that I did other than work was to go fishing. I could walk to the Little Androscoggin River, and occasionally would do so with a fishing pole. I have always been the worst fisherman who ever lived, but even I could catch some white and yellow perch in this river, that seemed to be teeming with fish. The first time that I cut through one particular field that led to a fishing hole, I learned about electric fences the hard way. I was climbing up an embankment, at the top of which was a barbed wire fence. As I approached the top of the embankment, I reached up and grabbed the fence to pull myself up. The current surged through my hand, making the muscles clench, and I found myself unable to open my hand to let go of the wire that was sending this painful shock through my arm and hand. It took quite an effort to get loose, and that was a lesson that stuck with me.
By the fourth summer that I spent on the farm, I was getting restless. I had a girlfriend back in Louisville, and I was feeling the pull of social relationships with my peers that all my friends were enjoying and I was missing out on. I was fifteen years old, and ready to rumble. A pair of twins from another farm who were a few years older than I set me up on a blind date to go with them and their girlfriends to a midget car race somewhere out in the middle of nowhere. I was game, but was taken aback when my date turned out to be a 22-year old woman – I lied and said that I was eighteen, but she surely knew better. Things got worse as we sat together in the stands and a rough-looking biker type walked by and waved at her. She waved back. I asked her who he was. She answered, “My husband.” I figured that it was time to start planning my funeral, but nothing untoward happened, and I got back home alive. I think that the plan was for me to sleep with this woman, but I was too naïve to cooperate. After we dropped her off at her home and were headed back, the twins suddenly made some lame excuse for needing to go back. They sent me to her door with something that they said she left in the car – I can’t remember what it was – and she answered the door in a robe. In retrospect, I think that I was supposed to invite myself in and have a tryst, but I just turned and walked back to the car, being quite the innocent. I probably could have lost my virginity that night, but that had to wait for another day.
By the time the next summer rolled around, I was sixteen years old, with a driver’s license and no interest in spending another summer laboring on a farm. I think that Dorothy and Leon had realized at the end of the previous summer that I probably wasn’t coming back. I never saw Leon again. When I was a sophomore in college, my mother called to tell me that Dorothy had found Leon lying dead in the middle of the barn floor – she had carried his body into the house and laid it on the couch where it stayed a full day before arrangements could be made to have the body taken to a funeral home – typical of the hardy, self-sufficient New England mentality, Dorothy just gutted it out.
She sold the farm to a young couple for $12,000 (this was in 1967, so the property had increased in value by 1000% in the fifteen or so years that they owned it.) The couple who bought the place didn’t farm it, and about five years later when I had occasion to stop by on vacation, the land was all grown up and uncared for. Dorothy moved to Bradenton, Florida where her sister, my Aunt Katy, lived in a tiny house that she had shared with their mother for many years before her death a few years earlier (their mother was the “Birdie” that was written about in my book Mrs. Ira Gale Tompkins’ Journal and Record of Events, Contre Coup Press, 1984). I visited with Dorothy and Katy a year or two later, and they seemed quite settled and satisfied. A few years later, Dorothy got cancer and finally died, I think at nearly eighty years of age.
My experience on the farm was very unusual, even for that time, as the manner of farming that we carried out was little changed from that of the previous century. I don’t think that Leon and Dorothy actually had any net income from farming – they lived on modest social security checks, while the farm just produced enough income to cover its own expenses. But that didn’t matter. The last thing that either one of them wanted to do was to be idle. The notion of retirement was completely foreign to their way of thinking, and they took great joy in the small accomplishments of their everyday life on the farm. I don’t think that it would be possible today to live the way that they did, at least in this country.
When my own sons were small, I would occasionally tell them anecdotes about my work on the farm, often telling them about the many minor injuries that I received doing one task or another. They started saying “Hurts on the farm” when they wanted me to tell them some more stories, as it must have seemed to them that all that ever happened was my injuring myself repeatedly. Perhaps that is what stuck in my mind, although hopefully this little narrative will put my hurts on the farm into some context.
Working in the woods was the typical morning activity throughout the summer, although we always found time around 10:30 or so to return to the house for some cider. Around noon we would have lunch, and then a brief period of rest. After lunch, a variety of activities might be on the agenda. During the earlier part of the summer, I would have to go weed in the garden, one of the only tasks that I really hated. As the summer progressed and the vegetable plants steadily grew larger, the need for weeding waned, and finally the task changed from weeding to harvesting, which was much better. We grew corn, peas, green beans, potatoes, squash, cucumbers, cabbage, pumpkins, and others that I can’t remember. We also had three cherry trees, although we had to fight the birds for the cherries, and usually lost the battle. When they were ripe, we would go out and pick blueberries, which are a giant pain in the neck to pick, since the plants grow so low to the ground, and it takes a good hour to pick a pint or so of these tiny berries. Our best picking area was a swath of public land that had been cut through the forest to allow for high power electric lines to be strung. For some reason, the blueberry plants thrived in this swath, and we were able to pick to our heart’s content.
As the summer progressed, the haying season would be upon us. The first year that I was there, Leon had planted about half of the lower field in oats, and the crop had grown in magnificently – the oats were tall and thick, and harvesting them was a massive task. We cut hay in the well field, the cemetery field, and the lower field, and we did it the old-fashioned way - loose.
The process would begin with me hitching King to the hay mower. This was a one-horse mower with a four-foot cutter bar which extended out to the right of where the driver sat. Because the blade was to one side of the horse and driver, it of course pulled the horse to that side, so driving King in the mower was a constant struggle to keep him going straight – Leon always did the driving. I would walk behind the cutter bar with a pitchfork, pulling the hay off of the cutter bar blade with the fork to keep it from getting jammed with too much hay. When the hay was very heavy, such as with that incredible field of oats, this was quite a task. When the hay was light, the task mostly consisted in walking and watching for jams, which rarely occurred.
Once the hay was cut, it would be allowed to lie in the field to dry. At this time, we always worried inordinately about rain. Several days of rain occurring right after the hay had been cut would make the hay unusable, because it would simply decompose before it got dry enough to bring into the barn. Hay that is too green, if put into a hayloft in the barn, will spontaneously combust, and can easily start a fire and burn the barn down. On more than one occasion I went to move some hay in the barn, only to find pockets of ashes where the hay had burned itself up due to the chemical reactions that take place with green hay. So it was important to allow the hay to dry.
After the hay had lain in the field drying for a day, it had to be turned over to dry for another day. Leon and I would go to the field with pitchforks, and simply walk down the rows of cut hay, turning it over so that the underside could dry. This was tedious work indeed. But I was always entertained because Leon would talk pretty much the whole time, reminiscing about his childhood, his time in the Vermont legislature, his former wife (who he talked about incessantly, negatively), and he would tell jokes – the same tired jokes day in and day out, which never ceased to amuse him. I can remember a few. He told about the young man who took his girlfriend out early one morning, and as they sat down on the wet grass, he said, “Some dew.” She immediately answered, “Yes, but I don’t.” He told about taking a journey by train during the early years of the 20th century, and having a layover in St. Louis, which was the busiest train station in the country at that time. The area across Market Street from Union Station in St. Louis was one of the largest, shall we say, adult entertainment districts in the world. Leon wandered over and went into a burlesque house where he viewed some amazing feats of anatomical control – he said that one stripper came out on stage, removed all of her clothes, and proceeded to magically produce, one at a time, six ping-pong balls that had been cleverly concealed in an intimate location in her body. He also heard what was to become his very favorite joke, which I must have heard at least 500 times. Two burlesque girls came out on stage. One said, “I’m bad.” The other responded, “I’m good.” The other, in turn, commented, “It must be hard to be good.” The other retorted, “Oh, it has to be hard to be good!” Hearty laughter invariably ensued after this one was told and retold and retold. Leon would usually follow up by saying that if he ever got hard, he’d run for the house and take Dorothy to bed, no matter the time of day or what else might be going on.
Leon actually felt fortunate that he had been able to father children at all. When he was a teenager, he had taken a girl out on a date, and when he took her home, they stood on her front porch, flirting. Apparently in the course of this horseplay, Leon grabbed a handkerchief from her hand and made as if to swat her with it. Unfortunately, her dog was on the porch with them, and when Leon appeared to be moving aggressively toward the girl, although just in play, the dog jumped on him and bit him right in the testicles, crushing one of them. He said that he went home with blood streaming down his pants-legs, and laid down in his bed where he stayed for about two week, his scrotum swelling up to many times its normal size. The doctor expressed doubt about his future fertility, but apparently the injury was not serious enough as to cause him to be sterile.
Oddly enough, despite being a farmer, Leon was pretty uninformed about human reproduction. He told me that when he first got married, to the daughter of the farmer whose farm later became the nucleus of his own much larger farm in Vermont, he and his wife immediately had three children, and his wife barred him from her bedroom because she didn’t want to keep having children. After some fifteen years, she relented, and he returned to her bed, only to immediately father three more children in short order. Following this, he was permanently barred from the marriage bed, and he vowed that he would leave his wife when the children were grown, which he did. What was odd about this was that Leon didn’t understand anything about birth control. It wasn’t that he wanted to have all of those children – he didn’t know what to do to prevent it. He believed that women were fertile when they were menstruating, and urged me to always avoid having intercourse with a girl during her period, because that was when she could get pregnant. (I can’t imagine that he thought that I was sexually active, which I wasn’t, but that didn’t stop him from advising me.) Of course, this is exactly backward. He also believed that twins were conceived when a pubic hair crossed over the opening in the end of a man’s penis and “split” the semen as he ejaculated. He said that Japanese women’s vaginal lips went from side to side, rather than from front to back, and that their pubic hair hung below their knees. He believed that masturbation caused blindness, insanity, and hair to grow on the palms of your hands. Some of these were common beliefs of the time, but others were just plain wacky.
After the hay was dry enough to bring into the barn, it would have to be raked into windrows. We used an old dump rake – exactly like the one that Judy Garland leaned on when she sang “Over the Rainbow” in The Wizard of Oz. We only had one set of reins for the horse, and they were quite long to accommodate driving the hay wagon and the dump cart, in which the driver sometimes drove from a position much further back from the horse. But the horse’s rump was just nearly in the driver’s face when hitched to the rake, meaning that the reins were much too long. I usually pushed the ends of the reins under my butt when I was raking, but they would invariably come loose periodically and fall into the tines of the rake, thereby suddenly yanking the reins and causing King to come to a halt and start backing up. Very aggravating it was. Also aggravating was having King’s rear end right in my face, because, like all horses, he was very flatulent – enough said.
As I mentioned previously, I would have to hold the reins in one hand because I was constantly manually dumping the rake with the other, which made driving rather difficult. (Leon would not allow me to use the automatic dump mechanism - this was a gizmo that engaged teeth in the wheels of the rake such that when you stomped down on a lever, the teeth would engage and the turning of the wheels would lift the tines of the rake automatically. Unfortunately, this added a good deal of strain to the horse with the weight it added to his pull, as well as causing a jolt to the horse every time it kicked in, so Leon felt that it was too hard on poor old King.) In the lower field, some tree branches hung over the edge of the fence surrounding the field, and when I drove under those branches, they would sometimes sweep me off the seat, and King would go merrily along with me on the ground behind shouting, “Whoa!”
When the raking was completed, I would hitch King to the large hay rack (wagon), and we would go out and load the hay onto the wagon. Bringing loose hay in on a wagon is tricky, particularly if you have to drive the loaded wagon over a rough road, which we often had to do. The process of putting the hay onto the wagon required having clumps of hay overlapping to tie the load together so that the hay wouldn’t just fall off. We would go to the windrow and fold the hay over from left and right, making a little pile of hay kind of like an omelet. Poking the pitchfork into the hay, it would be lifted and placed upside down onto the wagon, overlapping the previous fork-full. The hay would be built up like this until the wagon was so full that a person standing on the ground couldn’t reach the top of the hay to add any more.
I would then drive the wagon to the barn, and go straight into the barn floor with the load. We would then use a large hook that was installed inside of the barn at its peak to move the hay into one of the lofts. In years gone by, a horse had been used to haul the hay using this hook, but when I was there we always used the car for this purpose. The hook was like that used in those stupid machines that you see in the penny arcade where you maneuver the hook over little stuffed animals and drop it, hoping to snag the animal, lift it and drop it into a chute to get your prize. This hook traveled along a track that ran the length of the barn just under the peak, and was opened with a rope attached to it for that purpose. The hook would be lowered to the hay rack, opened and shoved into the hay, making sure not to grab so much hay that it might snap the rope that lifted the hook (worse yet was to accidentally hook the hay rack itself, which wa guaranteed to bring about disaster). Dorothy would then be signaled to pull the car up the driveway, with the rope attached to the bumper, which would pull the hook up to the top of the barn and along the track to the place where it was to be unloaded. (Leon was very wary of having me work with the hook, because he once had an employee who had caught his hand in the rope as the hook was being raised to the top of the barn, where his gloved hand was drawn into the pulley – when he dropped to the floor, he took off the glove, and one of his fingers didn’t come out with the rest of his hand.) Leon or I would then pull the rope on the hook, opening it and allowing the hay to drop. Sometimes we would then have to manually move the hay with a pitchfork from the loft into which it had been dropped to another loft. As you can see, this was a very laborious process, from mowing to raking to loading and unloading and finally placing the hay in the appropriate loft – when winter came and the cows could no longer graze in the pastures, this hay would then be used to feed them. Since King stayed in the barn year-round, he was always being fed hay, which we dropped down into his feed trough through a trap door over his stall.
With just Leon and me to bring in the hay, we simply didn’t have time to get it all in over the course of the brief harvesting season. So Leon would hire Ted Pulsifer to come over with his tractor and baler to harvest some of the hay. It was when I worked with other farmers (Ted would bring his own young farm boy to help, a guy about my age who had grown up doing farm work) that I realized how much stronger they were, and how much more stamina they had than did I. I did little physical labor during the school year, so I never built up strength and stamina the way that people did who worked on the farm year round. They would just flat wear me out! Hauling those heavy bales off the feeder of the baler and stacking them on the wagon was tough work indeed. We never wore gloves, and grabbing the bales by the twine that tied them up became acutely painful over the course of several days of such work. Of course, my hands became quite calloused during the summer, but this was still a bit much for my tender skin to handle.
The haying season was always one filled with anxiety about the weather, so I was always quite happy when it was over. Sometimes we would harvest the hay early enough in the year for Leon to plant and harvest a rowen crop, or second crop – however, this second crop was always harvested after I had returned to Louisville in the fall. One of the amazing things about cutting hay was to watch Leon cut hay with a scythe. He was so good at it that he could – and sometimes did – mow the lawn with his scythe. He would hold the handles on the long curved pole that was attached to the blade, and just start swinging that tool from side to side, inching forward as the hay fell. It was just amazing to me, because I was never able to get the hang of it. I would swing the scythe just the way Leon did, but instead of cutting the hay, it would just push it over. No matter how much I practiced, I was never able to get it to work. Leon told of early days on the farm when all of the farmers in the region would join together and go from farm to farm with their scythes, lining up next to each other and moving across the fields cutting the hay. That must have been something to see, and fulfilling to participate in - very Steinbeckian, or like a scene from a Frank Capra film.
It was always quite a production when the time came for Leon to shoe King. King’s feet were enormous – fully 8 inches across – and it took great skill to trim the hooves and attach the shoes. Things would always start out fairly quietly. Leon would grab a foot, and King would allow him to lift it and hold it between his knees, King’s leg bent at the knee and the bottom of the foot facing upwards. Leon would quickly remove the old nails and shoe and then move on to the next foot. No problem. Then would begin the process of trimming the hoof. Big problem. King was old, in his late teens, and tired easily. As this lengthier process of trimming the hoof and fitting the new shoe to the foot progressed, King would steadily get more and more weary, and would start to lean in the direction of where Leon was holding up the foot being shoed. Leon would find himself not only trying to work on the foot, but holding up an increasing burden of King’s weight on his back as he leaned over the upturned leg. This would, in turn, cause Leon’s temper to get very, very short, and he would start cursing and yelling at the poor old horse. Leon’s cursing was quite creative – not only did he use the standard terms that we are all familiar with, but as a young boy some Italians in his neighborhood had taught him a whole set of Italian curse-words, which he would sprinkle in amongst the English words as it suited him. It was like some sort of profane speaking in tongues, and often tickled me, although I had to hide my amusement as Leon would not have appreciated my laughter under the circumstances. When he had reached the end of his rope, Leon would drop the foot, spin around and whack King with the side of the hammer – which had to be counter-productive, I thought. But Leon’s temper just couldn’t be controlled.
Anyone who has experienced trying to do work with a horse can probably empathize, because horses can be very stubborn and frustrating. King was what Leon called “hard-bitten”. When driving him in a wagon, hayrake or mowing machine, he would sometimes simply turn his head when you pulled the rein on one side or the other to get him to turn, and keep right on walking straight. He didn’t always do this – indeed, most of the time he was amazingly responsive, and I often marveled at how I was able to drive him in the dumpcart through narrow openings in the woods, making sharp turns around trees and other obstacles with little difficulty. But when he got in a certain mood, you would just about have to pull the reins hard enough to lift him off his front feet to get him to turn. And since he always walked at the same slow pace, if you pulled too hard when he was being this way, he often took this as an order to stop and back up. So you’d be in the middle of the field raking up windrows of hay with the hay rake – which was a challenge to operate while also driving the horse – and he would get into a mood and start resisting your efforts to get him to turn. Pulling harder, he would start backing up, which is disastrous with a dump rake because it forces the tines of the rake backwards, lifting the poles on either side of the horse and causing him to fall on his butt, which happened frequently to me during long days of raking hay. At these times, I too yelled and cursed at the poor old horse (Dorothy would sometimes scold me when she heard me from a half-mile away cursing King), but hitting him didn’t seem like a very wise approach, so I kept my abuse verbal.
One aspect of my summers in Maine had nothing to do with farming. Dorothy was the regular organist for the tiny church that we attended, but during the summer, I assumed this role, as well as being a singer (and sometimes soloist) in the choir. Dorothy had a small parlor pump organ in the bedroom, and I practiced on it. The organ that I played in church was quite an instrument. It was a pipe organ that had been installed in the church sometime around 1790 or so. It was quite compact – perhaps eight feet square at the base, and extending up to and probably through the ceiling. The bellows had originally been pumped by hand, and the pump handle still stuck out the side of the organ cabinet. However, an electric motor had been added a few years earlier, so it no longer required pumping. The man who had pumped the organ for many years, though, continued to sit by the handle – I guess he had become comfortable in this spot and just didn’t want to go down and sit with the rest of the congregation.
The organ and choir loft sat at the back of the church, so the people’s back was to us. Additionally, the keyboard was on the front of the organ cabinet, so when I sat to play, my back was to the front of the church – a small mirror allowed me to view everyone’s backs as I played, as well as the pastor sitting at the front of the church.
The organ had only two short keyboards – I want to say that they were less than four octaves long, and there were two octaves of pedals. The organ had a small number of stops – perhaps a dozen - and the only volume control was a foot pedal that I would push down and hook under a piece of wood, the pedal opening a baffle to allow more sound to escape from the pipe chamber. There were only two volumes – not very loud and a little bit louder – although you could add volume by opening up more ranks of pipes. The swell (volume) pedal was purely mechanical, and required me to nearly stand up on the pedal to get it open because of the weight of the baffle. Similarly, the keys on the keyboard operated mechanically, moving lengths of wood that were attached to the pipes to open and close the hole where the air was blown in with the bellows – pushing the keys was hard physical labor. With such limited keyboards, the organ couldn’t accommodate very elaborate music, which was fine with me, because my playing would not be classified as being particularly expert. But I guess I was better than Dorothy, who must have learned to play as a child in her father’s church (her father – my grandfather – was a Congregationalist minister. His name was Abraham Lincoln Dunton, having been named after the newly-elected president when he was born in 1860). My mother also played piano and organ, and had actually been awarded a scholarship to study piano in college, which was quite unusual for a woman in the 1920s. But she instead got married and never attended college.
I also got drafted to sing some solos in the choir. I really hated this, as I didn’t have a very good singing voice, and I experienced a lot of anxiety when put into a position of performing this way. But I reluctantly agreed to sing a few solos each year, with Dorothy filling in as the organist at these times. What was most disconcerting was that the entire congregation would turn around and stare with the first note out of my mouth, having been sitting with their backs to the choir up to that point.
Leon begrudged my work at the church, particularly if we were in the midst of getting in hay and the weather threatened. He would have much preferred that I stayed home to work every Sunday morning instead of going off to church. He often made fun of churchgoers, ridiculing people who went to church “every time the preacher farts.” He almost never went to church himself, although Dorothy never gave up trying to get him to do so. I remember once he finally relented and agreed to attend. I had never seen him dressed in anything but work clothes, and I was taken aback when he came out of the bedroom dressed in a 20-year old double-breasted dark pinstripe suit. I impulsively commented, “Man, you look weird! You look like a gangster!” Dorothy was furious with me. “I finally get him to go to church, and you make fun of the way he looks!” she fumed.
One summer Dorothy and Leon decided to have a huge family get-together of all of their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Several score people were invited, most of whom, living in nearby Vermont, came. The day before the get-together, Leon and I drove to the Atlantic coast where we purchased 100 live 1-1/2 pound lobsters off the back of a lobster boat, bringing them home in great buckets set in the trunk and back seat of the car. At the far end of the Old North Road, where the road dead-ended at the banks of the Androscoggin River, lived Pete Knowlton, a friend and life-long restaurant chef from Long Island who had retired to this location where he raised frying chickens by the tens of thousands (he also had the biggest pig I ever saw, well in excess of 1,000 pounds – you could literally saddle this thing and ride it like a horse!). Pete came over to our house and proceeded to cook up all those lobsters as the family waited their turn to feast. We had set up sawhorses topped with wide planks on the floor of the barn to serve as a huge table, and we melted pounds of our incredible butter to slather on the succulent lobster. Of course, we also had home-grown potatoes, corn-on-the-cob, green beans, Dorothy’s fabulous yeast rolls – my God, that may have been the best meal that I ever had in my entire life. And there was enough lobster for everyone to eat their fill; I think that I may have eaten three or four whole lobsters myself. What an occasion!
Pete Knowlton and his wife were perhaps Dorothy and Leon’s best friends, and we socialized with them frequently. Leon rented land from Pete to do additional vegetable gardening (Pete had a tractor and could till the soil for a large garden, which was beyond the ability of our horse, King, to do. Plowing and harrowing with a horse is a very difficult task.). Leon also rented pasture land from Pete where we kept some beef cattle – cows, steers and a few bulls. We would periodically have to go to this land to give the animals salt and grain, and I dreaded this activity more than anything I did on the farm – which is saying a lot, because I participated in a lot of very dangerous activities. But Leon and I would drive down to the land and climb the fence with several buckets of salt and grain. We would stand in the large pasture and call the cattle – the call that Leon used, and that I learned to imitate, consisted of a high-pitched wail, “Come boss”, with the last word like a trumpet note, “booooooosssssss”. The cattle, who would all be in the woods, would soon emerge, and would come charging at us like the running of the bulls at Pamplona. I was always petrified with fear, as these huge animals ran straight for me, not slowing until they were just a few feet away. I was always sure that I was going to be gored or trampled as Leon had near tragically experienced a few years earlier. But the animals would always stop. The bulls were particularly frightening, as they were larger and more aggressive behaving.
On one occasion – one only, thank God – Pete asked Leon to lend me to him for a day to help clean out the chicken house after the 20,000 or so fryers had been hauled away in trucks for slaughter. I was happy to help out until I set foot into that dark building that had housed the chickens. The smell was overpowering – unbelievable. I had never been very sensitive to smell, and a little bad odor never bothered me that much. This was different - much different. It was nearly intolerable. I honestly thought that I could not survive this smell. When I got home at the end of the day, I begged Leon to not ever again make me go down there to help out with this horrendous task.
During the process of helping Pete that day, I learned the origin of the term “pecking party,” which is used to describe a social situation where everyone takes verbal gibes against each other. I had asked Pete why it was kept so dark in the barn, and he explained that it was to prevent pecking parties. It appears that chickens – who are just about the least intelligent farm livestock that there are – instinctively peck at dots or spots, which they interpret as potential food. When you see a farm worker go out into the yard to feed a flock of chickens, you will see them sow bits of grain around, and the chickens will automatically run up and peck at the grains to eat them. Pecking parties in chicken barns occur when one of the chickens becomes injured in some way, and the injury causes the chicken to have red spots of blood on their feathers. The other chickens will immediately run to this chicken and instinctively start pecking at the red spots. They will eventually peck this chicken to death. But in the process, spots of blood will splatter on the chickens that attacked the first, so more chickens will attack these chickens. Eventually the chickens will all kill each other as more and more of them become spotted with the blood of earlier victims. This process is called a pecking party, and one can see the parallels when humans start trading attacks in a social setting (think Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf). By keeping the chicken barn dark, it prevents the chickens from seeing spots on each other. Were the barn kept lit up, a pecking party could produce thousands of dead chickens in a very short span of time.
A myriad of special projects were always bubbling to the surface on the farm. The first summer that I was there, Leon decided that we needed to replace some of the roofing paper on the barn roof. The pitch of the barn roof was quite steep, so what he decided to do was to tie a rope around my waist, throw the other end of the rope over the peak of the roof and down to the ground below, where he would hold onto it to keep me from tumbling off the roof and breaking my neck. I climbed out on the roof – some 40 feet above the ground, I would guess – and nailed down sheets of roofing material while Leon held the rope. In the middle of the job, I suddenly heard Leon start screaming, “Grab ahold of something, grab ahold of something.” Then the rope went slack for a minute, as I hunkered down and waited. A minute later the rope went taut again, and I proceeded. When I got down, Leon explained that he had been holding the rope tightly with his arms above his head when a wasp flew into his shirt and started stinging him, and he was helpless to do anything about it without letting go of the rope, which is why he yelled.
I got my turn to be stung one day as I was carrying a couple of buckets of slop to the pig pen. A little path led behind the house, and as I passed an old stump, I suddenly found myself covered with honey bees, who proceeded to sting me with great enthusiasm. I had not seen that there was a hive in the stump, and that the hive was swarming – I had walked directly into the swarm. My arms and neck were covered with stings, and the slop ended up on the ground as I ran for cover.
Farm kids get to see many things that city kids don’t, and one of these things is the process of birth. Watching a cow giving birth to a calf was quite an eye-opening experience for me. Later on, teaching the calf to drink from a bucket was an interesting experience as well. To do this, you stand with your back to the calf and pull it’s head between your legs, holding it tight with your knees. You then take a bucket with milk in it (the first milk that the cow gives for a few days after the calf is born is thick and brown and is called colostrum – the calf needs to nurse directly for this special substance, and for some weeks later as well) and hold it beneath the calf’s head. You then reach down and put one of your fingers into the calf’s mouth, holding its nose with your hand, and pushing the calf’s head into the milk with the other hand. If done right, the calf will instinctively start sucking on your finger, and in the process will pull milk into its mouth from the bucket. You periodically pull the finger out of the calf’s mouth and reinsert it, and eventually the calf learns to keep sucking even when the finger is not in its mouth, thereby learning to drink from the bucket. It was frightening at first, because I feared getting bitten by the calf, but that fear was unfounded.
Periodically we would have to go out and do some fence mending and repairing. Sometimes this was nothing more than tightening the barbed wire that was already existing, just adding the large staples that we hammered into the cedar fenceposts. Sometimes, though, we had to replace fenceposts, and this was a bigger production. First, the cedar logs had to be split to make the posts. This was a tedious job, involving using a sledgehammer and wedges to split the logs lengthwise – we used posts that were about six feet long, so this was about the length of the logs to be split. I remember once splitting open a log, only to discover a large nest of baby mice - pinkies – in the middle of the log. I immediately ran into the barn and grabbed a couple of cats, bringing them out and letting them feed on the mice. After that, I couldn’t get rid of the cats whenever I went out there to work.
When we put up fence-posts, Leon always had one hard-and-fast rule – the dirt that we dug out of the hole had to all fit back into the hole, despite the fact that the fence-post filled up most of the hole once it had been put into place. In other words, we needed to pack the dirt very tightly into the hole around the fence-post to hold it fast. These fences were mostly ceremonial, of course. Any of the animals could have broken through the fences with little effort, but there wasn’t any particular reason for them to do so – the fence presented enough of a barrier to be a deterrent. Our fences didn’t deter the moose, though. I was down in the lower field early one morning and saw a moose who had come out of the bog to feed in the field – when he saw me, he just calmly and effortlessly stepped over the fence and disappeared. Moose have really long legs.
One of the big deal repair tasks was necessitated by my impatience. We were down below the lower field bringing in some wood, and I had filled the dumpcart quite full. The ground sloped steeply down from the edge of the field, and so as I started driving King, he faced a challenging demand on his strength. To complicate matters, we were close to the fence, and were facing directly toward the fence, heading uphill with no place to go. So I had to turn King sharply. Well, the bottom line is that the turn was too sharp and the load too heavy, and the force of his pulling twisted the cart and snapped the spine of the cart, a large plank that ran down the middle of the cart to which the axles were attached, the body of the cart sitting atop this plank. We spent the next several days repairing the cart. This plank was probably fourteen inches wide and a good three inches thick. It had heavy bolts running through the plank itself, which meant that we had to drill holes through fourteen inches of plank, and we didn’t have any drill bits long enough to reach all the way through (we were using a hand-operated brace-and-bit, since we had no power tools). So what we had to do was to drill halfway through on one side, and then drill through from the other side, hoping that the holes would meet in the middle. And by some miracle, the holes did just about meet, although they were offset from each other slightly. So Leon heated up a bolt red-hot, and we drove it through the hole, burning our way through to make the ends of the holes meet. Dismantling the cart, manufacturing a new spine, and re-assembling the cart was a tedious and difficult chore, but one that was necessary – these kinds of things happen on the farm constantly, and add to the variety of work that keeps farmers from getting bored with what they do.
One of the few things that I did other than work was to go fishing. I could walk to the Little Androscoggin River, and occasionally would do so with a fishing pole. I have always been the worst fisherman who ever lived, but even I could catch some white and yellow perch in this river, that seemed to be teeming with fish. The first time that I cut through one particular field that led to a fishing hole, I learned about electric fences the hard way. I was climbing up an embankment, at the top of which was a barbed wire fence. As I approached the top of the embankment, I reached up and grabbed the fence to pull myself up. The current surged through my hand, making the muscles clench, and I found myself unable to open my hand to let go of the wire that was sending this painful shock through my arm and hand. It took quite an effort to get loose, and that was a lesson that stuck with me.
By the fourth summer that I spent on the farm, I was getting restless. I had a girlfriend back in Louisville, and I was feeling the pull of social relationships with my peers that all my friends were enjoying and I was missing out on. I was fifteen years old, and ready to rumble. A pair of twins from another farm who were a few years older than I set me up on a blind date to go with them and their girlfriends to a midget car race somewhere out in the middle of nowhere. I was game, but was taken aback when my date turned out to be a 22-year old woman – I lied and said that I was eighteen, but she surely knew better. Things got worse as we sat together in the stands and a rough-looking biker type walked by and waved at her. She waved back. I asked her who he was. She answered, “My husband.” I figured that it was time to start planning my funeral, but nothing untoward happened, and I got back home alive. I think that the plan was for me to sleep with this woman, but I was too naïve to cooperate. After we dropped her off at her home and were headed back, the twins suddenly made some lame excuse for needing to go back. They sent me to her door with something that they said she left in the car – I can’t remember what it was – and she answered the door in a robe. In retrospect, I think that I was supposed to invite myself in and have a tryst, but I just turned and walked back to the car, being quite the innocent. I probably could have lost my virginity that night, but that had to wait for another day.
By the time the next summer rolled around, I was sixteen years old, with a driver’s license and no interest in spending another summer laboring on a farm. I think that Dorothy and Leon had realized at the end of the previous summer that I probably wasn’t coming back. I never saw Leon again. When I was a sophomore in college, my mother called to tell me that Dorothy had found Leon lying dead in the middle of the barn floor – she had carried his body into the house and laid it on the couch where it stayed a full day before arrangements could be made to have the body taken to a funeral home – typical of the hardy, self-sufficient New England mentality, Dorothy just gutted it out.
She sold the farm to a young couple for $12,000 (this was in 1967, so the property had increased in value by 1000% in the fifteen or so years that they owned it.) The couple who bought the place didn’t farm it, and about five years later when I had occasion to stop by on vacation, the land was all grown up and uncared for. Dorothy moved to Bradenton, Florida where her sister, my Aunt Katy, lived in a tiny house that she had shared with their mother for many years before her death a few years earlier (their mother was the “Birdie” that was written about in my book Mrs. Ira Gale Tompkins’ Journal and Record of Events, Contre Coup Press, 1984). I visited with Dorothy and Katy a year or two later, and they seemed quite settled and satisfied. A few years later, Dorothy got cancer and finally died, I think at nearly eighty years of age.
My experience on the farm was very unusual, even for that time, as the manner of farming that we carried out was little changed from that of the previous century. I don’t think that Leon and Dorothy actually had any net income from farming – they lived on modest social security checks, while the farm just produced enough income to cover its own expenses. But that didn’t matter. The last thing that either one of them wanted to do was to be idle. The notion of retirement was completely foreign to their way of thinking, and they took great joy in the small accomplishments of their everyday life on the farm. I don’t think that it would be possible today to live the way that they did, at least in this country.
When my own sons were small, I would occasionally tell them anecdotes about my work on the farm, often telling them about the many minor injuries that I received doing one task or another. They started saying “Hurts on the farm” when they wanted me to tell them some more stories, as it must have seemed to them that all that ever happened was my injuring myself repeatedly. Perhaps that is what stuck in my mind, although hopefully this little narrative will put my hurts on the farm into some context.
