Authors: Bobbie Ann Mason
The tower is a tall, gray concrete structure, without windows. It’s a hundred and fifty-six feet high. If you see it at dawn, it’s hard not to think about a space-shuttle launch. Adjoining the chicken tower are six cylindrical towers, attached like booster rockets. The architecture is unrelievedly functional. The word “Soviet” comes to mind. The tower has a framework of pipes crawling over it, and the six cylinders have
earned the nickname “the concrete six-pack.” These silos are a hundred and ten feet high. The mill hums, and big trucks come and go. It’s like a huge refrigerator running. The chicken feed smells a bit like the mash of a whiskey distillery. The chicken industry, proliferating throughout the South, extravagantly promises prosperity, and many local farmers have grabbed the chance to raise chickens for Seaboard. The plant hatches the eggs and makes the feed, and the farmers raise the chicks in houses built at their own expense. Then low-wage workers cut up and package “poultry products” when the birds are six weeks old and sporting their first full plumage.
Beyond the chicken tower is the site where the Lyon quintuplets were born in 1896, and beyond that there’s the feed mill where my mother’s soybeans go, and beyond that is town. And then there’s the wide world I eventually left home to see.
It’s summer now. I am back again. With Oscar, the family dog, I’m visiting the pond on a warm evening, feeding fish. I’m flinging pellets of fish food out onto the water, trying to get it beyond the pondweed, which extends out all around the banks of the pond, except for the clearings I’ve made. When I pick up the empty fish-chow bucket—a plastic ice-cream tub—I find three crickets caught in it. They can’t jump more than two or three inches straight up. There are two small ones and one large one. The smalls have striped backs like lightning bugs. They have feathery arms and legs and feathery feet. The large one has a long antenna it loops toward itself, then extends out tentatively, searching. The other antenna is grossly shortened—cut off by some vicious fighter-bug? Or did it come like that? Suddenly I realize that looking at crickets this way is the essence of what it was like to be a child here, immersed in the strange particulars of nature.
From the pond, in the green lushness of early summer, in three directions you see only fields of soybeans and corn, with thick fencerows and washed skies. A movie could be filmed here, a historical drama set in 1825, and it would seem authentic—except for the soundtrack: the noises of the highway, the air, the feed mill; the blare and thud of music from cars whizzing past. If you turned the camera in the other direction, toward the road, you’d get all the visual cues of the present day—the wires and poles, the asphalt, the Detroit metal, the discarded junk-food wrappers and beer cans thrown from cars that have “twentieth century” written all over them. You would also see a
brown farmhouse with two rickety outbuildings, a red stable, and a small white house in a lovely woods that is mowed and trimmed like a park. And you would see the chicken tower, lord of the landscape.
Late September. The soybeans aren’t quite ready to harvest. Some of the leaves are still green, but the pods are fuzzy and brown. The crop this year is full of weeds from outer space because the strongest herbicides have been banned. Something short of Agent Orange has been used this year, and the path to the pond is bordered with weeds, some a good ten feet tall.
Mama and I walk down this path to the pond. She uses her fishing rod to fight the weeds and snakes. Oscar trots along, thrilled to go with us. Miraculously, he never goes near the road.
“That’s Johnsongrass,” Mama says, pointing her rod at a clump of what looks like a trendy ornamental grass. “You can’t ever get rid of that. Your Daddy used to cut it off and dig it up and dump it in the creek.”
“What’s that one?”
“Hogweed? Horseweed? I can’t remember. But at the joint sometimes there’s a big knot and inside is a worm that’s good to fish with.”
“It’s horseweed,” she says presently. “Not hogweed. Hogweed is what you call presley—pig presley I always called it. The hogs like it real well. It’s got real tender leaves.”
“Pig presley?”
“When we raised hogs I’d pull it up and give it to them, and Lord, they’d go crazy.”
“What does it look like?”
“It grows along on the ground on a stem and has tender leaves. It looks rubbery.”
“Purslane? Parsley?”
“I always called it pig presley.”
“Is that one of your weeds that will take the place?”
“No, pig presley’s all right. It’s good.”
We reach the pond just as a small heron escapes in a slow-motion flight over the creek. The pondweed has died back a lot, and the reflections in the pond are clear and still. The main house, inside its army of old oak and maple trees, is reflected in the pond. The chicken tower rises above the trees. The tableau is upside-down and innocently beautiful and abstract.
Mama gestures to the southeast and says, “If the wind is this way, I smell horse piss, and that way I smell cow mess, and over yonder it’s tobacco curing, and from the north it’s chicken feed.” Her rod follows her directions. She laughs: her big, loud laugh. “If that don’t beat a hen a-rootin’!” she says. Her laugh supposedly comes from her grandfather, “Jimmo” Lee, who had red hair and an Irish or Scottish burr in his voice. (Nobody remembers whether he was Irish or Scottish, but about half of the settlers were Scots-Irish, Protestants who came to America long before the Great Famine.) My mother uses idioms that are dying out with her generation, right along with the small family farms of America. Her way of talking is the most familiar thing I know, except maybe for the contours and textures of this land. Mama’s language comes from the borderlands of England and Scotland and from Ireland, with some other English dialects thrown in, and it is mingled with African-American speech patterns acquired along the way. It is much like Mark Twain’s language in
Huckleberry Finn
. It’s spoken, with variations, in a band of the upper South stretching from the mid-Atlantic states across the Appalachians to the Ozarks. In the Jackson Purchase, this old dialect rested in the farmlands and changed with the weather and the crops and the vicissitudes of history as news filtered in from other places. Today there’s a good chance you won’t hear many people under sixty say, “If that don’t beat a hen a-rootin’.” It’s an expression that comes from a deep knowledge of chicken behavior. Mama has contended with many a settin’ hen. On free-range chickens, she’s an expert.
Mama casts out a long rubber lure, a sort of Gummi Worm, and reels it in. She’s casting for bass. “I’d rather fish for bream because they bite like crazy,” she says.
The beanfields are leased out to a neighbor, and Mama frets about their proper cultivation. Dense growth from the creeks is creeping out into the fields. She hates weeds, insects, snakes, and bad weather. And she rails against the haphazard and violent methods of mechanized farming. A crop-spraying machine called a highboy straddles several rows, and the driver rides on tall wheels. One year, the combine missed so many soybeans that I imagine she was ready to go gather them up in a bucket and carry them to the mill herself. Another year, she chopped out all the pokeweed that had infiltrated a soybean field. She was afraid the pokeberries would stain the feed. “Them beans would have been purple by the time they went through the mill!” she said. “I don’t know if hogs would appreciate purple feed. And pokeberries is poison.”
Now it’s winter. A tree is down, blocking the path across the creek. It has split, rotten at the center. I remember when that little tree hollow was a good hiding place for secret messages in fantasy girl-sleuth games—forty years ago. At the creek, a jumble of memories rushes out, memories of a period in my own lifetime which links straight back to a century ago, and even further: hog killing; breaking new-ground; gathering dried corn in the fall; herding cows with a dog; churning; quilting. I have a snapshot of myself as a child, sitting on a mule. I know the textures of all of these experiences.
What happened to me and my generation? What made us leave home and abandon the old ways? Why did we lose our knowledge of nature? Why wasn’t it satisfying? Why would only rock-and-roll music do? What did we want?
With my family, the break started in 1920, when Granddaddy moved away from Clear Springs to find land, and we ended up living right on the edge of town. The stores around the courthouse square were tantalizingly near. Who wouldn’t rather go shopping than hoe peas? And the radio told us that we weren’t quite so isolated: we were in Radioland! The highway called us, too. Our ancestors had been lured over the ocean to America by false advertising—here was the promised land, literally—but once arrived, they had to clear rocks and stumps and learn to raise hogs. We inherited their gullibility. We wanted to go places, find out what was out there. My sisters and I didn’t want to marry farmers; we were more interested in the traveling salesmen. By the time my brother—the youngest of us four, born too late—came of age, a family farm seemed to require more land and machinery than it once had in order to prosper. So again it was time to move on.
We didn’t want to be slaves to nature. Maintaining the Garden of Eden was too much work—endless hoeing, fences to fix, hay to bale, and cows to milk, come rain or come shine. My mother, who knows more about wind and weather and soil and raising chickens than I ever will, approves of progress, even though she finds much of it scary and empty. The old ways were just too hard, she says wearily. She and my father expected better lives for their children. They knew we’d leave.
But I keep looking back to see where I’ve been. I am angry that my father died before I could ask him all I wanted to know about the life
of a dairy farmer, because I think he knew all about the earth and the seasons.
The winter light is heavy and stark. Dim skies, silhouettes of black trees, mud. The pondweed lies dormant; the soybeans were recently harvested, and here and there stray beans have spilled out onto the soil. The dampness deepens these brown-and-black tones of the landscape. Oscar and I cross the creek and head out through the cornfield. The corn has been harvested by a big machine that gobbled up the stalks, moiled the shucks and spit them out, then glommed the kernels off the cob and spun them into a hopper. I recall the way dried corn comes off the cob when you do it by hand. You mash two cobs together hard and loosen a few of the kernels till they pop out like teeth. Then you can rub the cobs together more lightly and pop the rest of the kernels out of their sockets. I also recall shelling corn for the chickens with a corn sheller; it had a crank handle and an iron maw with teeth. Now I can hear corn being crumbled and gnashed in the tower.
The cedar trees on the fencerow along our western border have grown thick and tall and have lost their youthful prickliness. We always had a young, scraggly cedar from one of the fencerows for our Christmas tree. Now these are full of bluish berries and conelike cocoons made by some insect that shrouds itself with a dead cedar twig.
The chicken tower has a star on top for Christmas. From up there, you would see the lay of this farm, reduced in its significance, a small piece of the earth.
It is late afternoon, and the ominous winter light accents the trees. Then the harsh electric light of the chicken tower floods the area. It is never dark at night here the way it used to be, when there were just stars and moon.
There’s a loneliness about the homeplace now. But the family straggles home each Christmas to renew itself, and the place returns to life. In the way of rural families, Mama doesn’t invite us to come, but she expects us all to be there. And we always are. The family is small, only fifteen of us. Mama cooks a dinner for her four children, their three spouses, her five grandchildren, and two more spouses. She has turkey with cornbread dressing and giblet gravy, a ham, potato salad, dressed eggs, Jell-O salad, cranberry relish, her special Sunset Salad, broccoli casserole with cheese sauce, yeast-raised rolls. And from her freezer she may offer creamed corn, green beans, shelly beans, and brown field peas—all grown in her garden. Then she loads the table with fruit salad, boiled custard, her special uncooked fruitcake, coconut
cake, German chocolate cake, peanut bars, decorated refrigerator cookies. She makes all this food herself because we don’t really know how to do it and it is her joy to feed us amply. She makes enough for about thirty-six people. The feast seems always to be prepared for some imagined larger family.
This dinner defines the family and replenishes us for another year. We get here, regardless of what it costs us in money or trouble, or whatever difficulty with weather and flight delays. We’re far-flung. We have not scattered simply to Paducah or Nashville or Louisville, places within reasonable reach. We didn’t leave the farm for Pittsburgh or Hattiesburg or Racine. My sisters and I first headed to California, Florida, and New York—the meccas. One niece worked at Disney World; one sister works in special-effects computer graphics in Hollywood. The movies, Disney World, Manhattan. Those were the fishing lures that came over the airwaves and reeled us in. I stayed in the Northeast for many years, chasing literary dreams. Even my brother, who stayed closest to home, works for the quintessential American corporation, Coca-Cola.
We’ve been free to roam, because we’ve always known where home is.
Oscar and I turn back. As we approach the pond, a heron—a great blue one this time—takes off from the water, not far ahead of us. Its flight path cuts across the face of the chicken tower, which looms beyond the house and the bare winter trees. The dying pondweed is dissolving into the muddy murk of the pond. As I look into the reflections on the surface of the pond, I think about all the death on this soil: the oaks that Mama says were “barked up and skinned” by lightning; the hogs and cows and calves and chickens we’ve slaughtered for food; all the cats and dogs smashed on the road after it was paved; my grandparents; my father. Before my grandparents moved here, a farmer died of epilepsy, in the garden. I think about what a farmer knows up there on his tractor or walking along behind his mules—the slow, enduring pace of regular toil and the habit of mind that goes with it, the habit of knowing what is lasting and of noting every nuance of soil and water and season. What my father and my ancestors knew has gone, and their idioms linger like fragile relics. Soon my memories will be loosened from any tangible connection to this land.