Remembering (13 page)

“Do you breed your mares?”

“Those two have colts in the barn. This one” — the man patted the neck of the mare next to him — “she's the grandmother. She took the year off.” And then, seeing that Andy would like to come nearer, he said, “If you want to, step over the fence there at the post. That'll be all right.”

Andy did so, and spoke to the horses and came and stood beside them with the Amishman. He asked about each of the mares and the man told him her breeding and history. The mares were excellent, Andy saw that, and he felt their strength and their patience.

“When I was growing up, we worked horses at home,” he said. “Some horses, but mostly mules.”

The man looked at him and smiled. “Well, maybe you would like to try these a round or two.”

“Maybe you oughtn't to trust me,” Andy said. “You don't know me.”

“Oh, I see that you've been around horses. And these are gentle. Almost anybody can drive them.”

“Well, my name is Andrew Catlett. They call me Andy.” He put his hand out and the man took it.

“My name is Isaac Troyer.”

Andy got onto the seat of the plow and took the lines into his hands, surprised at how familiarly he received them back again. He spoke to the horses, Isaac watching him, and turned them, and the grandmother mare stepped into the furrow on the other side of the land.

As he drove the long curve of the plowland, watching the dark furrow open and turn, shining and fresh-smelling, beneath him, Andy could feel the good tilth of the ground all through his body. The gait of the team was steady and powerful, the three mares walked well together, and he could feel in his hands their readiness in their work. Except for the horses' muffled footfalls and the stutter of the plowshare in the roots of the sod, it was quiet. Andy heard the birds singing in the woods and along the creek. How long had it been since Meikelberger had heard the birds sing? Meikelberger had no birds, except for the English sparrows that lived from his wasted grain, and even if he had had them he could not have heard them over the noise of his machines.

“How do you like them?” Isaac asked, as Andy raised the share at the furrow's end.

“I like them,” Andy said.

“Well, drive them another round, if you want.”

Andy drove them another round. This time, more at ease, he remembered something that as a child he had heard about, but now saw:

Mat, his grandfather, as a little boy, was sitting on a board that Jack Beechum had nailed to his plowbeam to make him a seat. As Jack walked behind the plow, Mat sat on the beam, and they talked. They talked about the pair of mules that drew the plow, and about the plow and how it was running, but they talked too about everything that a small boy could think to ask about, who had nothing to do but look and think and ask, except maybe, up in the afternoon, go to the spring to bring back a fresh drink of water in the gourd.

Andy thought of his own young children, who had descended, in part, from that school on the plowbeam, and did not know it. The mares strode lightly with their burden, the birds sang, the furrow rolled off the
plow in a long, fluent motion, and a thrill grew in Andy at the recognition of something he wanted that he had forgotten.

At the end of the round, this time, Isaac Troyer took back his team. Andy, feeling awkward, said, “Look, I have an interest in farming. I like what I see of your place. Would you mind if I stay around a while?”

“Oh, well,” Isaac said. “Oh, sure.”

“Well, I thought I might like to walk around a little bit.”

“Oh, sure. That's all right.”

It was March, the air a little chilly, but the sun was warm. Andy walked along the creek to the end of the field, and then up along the fence through the band of woods on the steeper ground, the sprawled shadows of bare branches and the earliest flowers, and came out again on an upland, where he could see Isaac's house and barn and outbuildings.

He saw that the buildings were painted and in good repair. He saw the garden, newly worked and partly planted behind the house. He saw the martin boxes by the garden, and the small orchard with beehives under the trees. He saw fifteen guernsey cows and two more black mares in a pasture. He saw a stallion in a paddock beside the barn, and behind the barn a pen from which he could hear the sounds of pigs. He saw hens scratching in a poultry yard. Now and then he could hear the voices of children. On neighboring farms, he could see other teams plowing. He walked as with his father's hand on his shoulder, and his father's voice in his ear, saying, “Look! Look!” He walked and looked and thought and wondered, and then he walked back down to the field that Isaac was plowing.

Isaac was unhitching the team. “Well, did you look around?”

“I did.”

“Well, is this the kind of farm you're used to seeing?”

“It's not quite the kind I've been looking at. Would you mind if I asked you some questions about it?”

“Oh, I don't know.” He spoke, as before, out of some good cheer, some satisfaction, some confidence that Andy was having trouble accounting for.

This was not one of the Premier Farmers that Tommy Netherbough held in such esteem. He was apparently less worried, for one thing. Andy thought of Meikelberger and his farm, a way of agriculture as abstract as
a graph or a statute or an airport. And he thought of Isaac's place, which was, all of it, a home. It was a home to many lives, tame and wild, of which Isaac's was only one, and was so meant. There was something — Andy was trying for words — something cordial or congenial or convivial about it. Whatever it was, it said that a man could live with trees and animals and a bending little tree-lined stream; he could live with neighbors.

And with strangers who happened by, too, for Isaac had just said, “Would you want to come eat? We got plenty.”

“I'd hate to impose on you.”

Isaac smiled at him. “Maybe you won't like what we got. It'll be plain.”

“Plain will be lovely,” Andy said. “Thanks.”

And so he left the car by the road and walked beside Isaac, behind the team, up through the woods to the barn, and on the way he questioned him.

“How much land do you have, Isaac?”

“Eighty acres.”

“Eighty acres. Is that enough?”

“Enough for what?”

“To make a living.”

“Well, we're living, aren't we?”

“How long have you been here?”

“Seventy-four years.”

“But you're not seventy-four?”

“No,” Isaac said, and laughed, “my father is seventy-four. We came here the year he was born.”

Isaac and his wife had five children, three in school and two little ones still at home, and Isaac's father and mother lived in a small house of their own a few steps from Isaac's.

“Do you have work for everybody?”

“Oh, yes, plenty of work.”

“For the old people and the little ones too?”

“Oh, yes, we need them all.”

“You stay busy all the time?”

“We don't work on Sunday. Or after supper. Sometimes there's a wedding, or we go fishing.”

Isaac watered his horses and fed them, and Andy went with him to
the house. He met Anna, Isaac's wife, and Susan and Caleb, their two youngest children. He bowed his head with them over the food at the kitchen table. It was a clear, clean room. The food was good. A large maple tree stood near the back porch, visible from the kitchen windows, and the wind quivered in the new grass at its foot. Beyond were the white barn and outbuildings. It was a pretty place, its prettiness not so much made as allowed. It was a place of work, but a place too of order and rest, where work was done in a condition of acknowledged blessedness and of gratitude. As they ate, they talked, making themselves known to each other.

“Oh,
Scientific Farming,
” Isaac said. “I've heard of that.”

“No,” Anna said. “You've seen it. Our neighbor gave us a copy once. I read it.”

“Did it give you any advice that you could take?” Andy asked.

“Some, maybe.” She laughed. “Not much.”

After dinner, taking Susan and Caleb along, Isaac and Andy walked over the little farm together, Andy questioning and, with Isaac's permission, writing down many of the answers. He learned about the various enterprises of the farm, about the exchanges of work within the neighborhood, about the portioning of work within the family, about the economies of household and homestead from which the family principally lived. Putting together what he heard and what he saw with what he knew already, Andy began to see that these people lived very well on their eighty acres and with their neighbors, whose farms were all more or less the same size, and finally, uneasy but unable to resist, he asked point-blank, “Do you owe any money, Isaac?”

“Not for a while.”

“Do you have any money saved?”

“Well, I'd better, hadn't I, with five children?”

“How much would you say you net in an average year?”

They looked at each other then, and both smiled in acknowledgment of the limit they were approaching.

“About half,” Isaac said.

“Are all the Amish good farmers?”

“Some better than others. All the Amish are human.”

By then Isaac was carrying Susan, who had gone to sleep as soon as he picked her up.

And then Andy told him about Meikelberger's farm. Had Isaac ever thought of buying more land — say, a neighbor's farm?

“Well, if I did I'd have to go in debt to buy it, and to farm it. It would take more time and help than I've got. And I'd lose my neighbor.”

“You'd rather have your neighbor?”

“We're supposed to love our neighbors as ourselves. We try. If you need them, it helps.”

“Have you ever thought of mechanizing the place you have?”

“What for? So my children can work in a factory?”

The horses were rested. It was time for Isaac to return to work and for Andy to be on his way. After taking the children to the house, they returned with the team to where they'd left the plow. They shook hands.

“Thanks,” Andy said. “Thank you very much. I hope we'll meet again.”

“That would be good,” Isaac said. “Maybe we will. I'll be here.”

In the middle of that afternoon, after Andy had been back on the main road a long time, all that he had learned in the last two days finally settled into place in his mind. He braked suddenly and again pulled over to the side of the road, for at last he had seen what was unmistakably the point: Twenty-five families like Isaac Troyer's could have farmed and thrived — could have made a healthy, comely, independent community — on the two thousand acres where Bill Meikelberger lived virtually alone with his ulcer, the best friend that the bank and the farm machinery business and the fertilizer business and the oil companies and the chemical companies ever had.

Andy sat for a long time then with his hands on top of the steering wheel and his head on his hands, and then he picked up a pad of paper from the seat beside him and outlined an article about Isaac Troyer. He would write it for his friend Rove Upperson, the only agricultural journalist he knew who would want to read it.

“Did you
really
think we could publish this?” Tommy Netherbough asked. He was sitting with one foot on the corner of his desk, holding the Isaac Troyer article with two fingers as if it were covered with mayonnaise.

Andy was sitting in a chair on the other side of the desk. He had understood that the dividing of ways had come when he received Tommy's
peremptory note: “See me.” Once in Tommy's office, he got the feeling that he was supposed to remain standing, as one who was outside the perquisites of friendship, and so he sat down.

“We're interested in successful farmers, aren't we?”

“I sent you to write on a successful farmer. Where the hell is the Meikelberger article?”

“If I wrote the truth about Meikelberger, you wouldn't publish that either.”

“Meikelberger's the future of American agriculture.”

“Meikelberger's the end of American agriculture — the end of the future. He's a success by way of a monstrous debt and a stomach ulcer and insomnia and the disappearance of a neighborhood. Isaac Troyer's the successful one of the pair, by any standard I know.”

“Isaac Troyer is over and done with. He's as obsolete as the outdoor toilet. His farm is history, Andy. It's a museum.”

“You mean you're against it.”

“I'm not against it or for it. I can see that it's finished. We're not going to farm that way.”