Monday, April 14, 2008

www.whiteville.com

By JEFFERSON WEAVER
Staff Writer

I wasn’t trespassing, but I doubt the ragged old sign cared.

The owner had given me permission some time before to wander his lands, and the day was the kind that cried out for wandering. There are days when time is too precious to waste, and then there are days when wasting time is a precious activity. This was one of the latter.

A flicker of color by one of the old barns caught my eye, reminding me of the falling-down homestead I’d been meaning to visit for years. The truck seemed too eager to stop in the tired old drive, and it took but a moment to lock the doors and be on my way.

The flicker of color turned out to be a winding flowering weed climbing toward the barn’s loft. Years before the vine would never have stood a chance; it grew from the rank weeds of a long-disused mule pen. I like mules, in personality, principle and practicality, and the ones I’ve known would never have allowed a tasty green shoot to get more than about hoof-high before cropping it into submission.

The last equine residents of this place died before I was born, yet evidence of their gnawing habits was still evident on the windowsill and gate post. Mules served three generations of farmers on this land. The current owner of the farm told me people laughed at his grandfather for buying a new tractor yet keeping the old mules as pets; those same people saw their laughter turned to embarrassment as the old plow mules were called out to pull cars, trucks, and yes, tractors out of the river’s lowlands. Mules can swim, of a fashion, but to my knowledge nobody has yet created a tractor capable of swimming.

The family home on this old farm was long gone; the barn, a couple of dependencies and a “modern” hoghouse are the only evidence of four generations of men and women who fought the ground and pests and disease and taxes and rain and floods and drought to wrest a living, if not a legacy, from the rich black loam. The home burned a few years after the mules were given a family funeral, but the farm kept operating.

Looking at the few blackened river-rock pillars still standing amongst grass grown rich on ash-fed soil, I was reminded of another farmer I interviewed years ago. His home burned, too, but the fire department managed to save his farm buildings.

“I have my wife, my family, and my farm,” he said, or words to that effect. “I can build another house.”
Such were the sentiments of this family’s earlier generations; about 20 acres of broomsedge and longleaf pine and marsh were drained and burned and cut; fields were chopped and plowed and disc-ed into a reluctant servitude. Some of the fields are now tended under contract, but most have slowly returned to the original state.

Like many farms from that period, this one alternated a little between cotton and tobacco; the Depression sent one sibling up north, and war sent another off to die for his country. Some of the younger children stayed on, expanding their own farms as Momma and Daddy kept the old place up and running.

But with the loss of the old home to a malfunctioning fireplace, the family also lost some of its cohesion. Maybe a farm can rebuild a family, but it can’t rebuild a home, and it was simpler to move an aging set of parents to higher ground and leave behind the beds of jonquils, iris and now-spindly peach trees.

The farm didn’t completely close down after the familial migration became a hemorrhage. Along the way someone tried a confinement operation for hogs, hoping to bring in a little more money. I don’t know if it worked or not, but the remains of the old hog house became a handy place to store building materials, twisted fence, bent fence posts, broken farm equipment, furniture – just about anything that needed to be out of the weather. One room was filled with wilted cardboard boxes and broken bottles of various and sundry types of hog medicine, and I was struck by the fact that the last hog farmer’s grandfather probably used little more than sulfur, Red Devil lye, turpentine and “hoof tar” for all his animal pharmaceutical needs.

Another room was festooned with wasp nests and old, rusting chains. Broken rubber belts of all shapes and sizes hung where they’d been stored whole, only to attract the attention of the rats and mice that drew the hawk watching me from a disused utility pole.

I wonder what impact the rural power company had on this farm when a jury-rigged truck pulled a heavy cable across the field to a tree trunk dropped into a posthole augured by a local well-driller. Did the lady of the house get a fancy new power range, or did she continue to make do with the old reliable wood- or kerosene-burner with the water heater on the side? Ironed shirts were probably few and far between on a hardscrabble farm, but Sunday clothes always needed to be neat and stiff; did she get a new electric steam iron, or keep using the old flat iron I found acting as a still-sturdy doorstop? Did the family sit around listening to the radio and marveling at the electric light? Did an electric pump replace the rusted-shut hand-pump I saw perched sadly over a broken brick wellhead?

Like so many family farms, this one died as children went this way and that, either improving on the old methods or abandoning farming for a more reliable, if not easier, way to make a living. The farm spent a few years as a hunting camp, but that too was shortlived, the music of baying hounds and camaraderie of their keepers joining the ghosts of the times when the farm worked for a living.

Occasionally, lovebirds or partygoers find their way down the tired old drive, but neighbors always notice headlights at inopportune times, so the old farm is left lonely until someone like me wanders through, generally on another errand. The no trespassing signs, despite showing the effects of a load or two of buckshot, still have the authority of the law, and a few people still respect the law.

For now those signs don’t just guard a treasure trove of scrap metal, or an old mule barn truly worthy of being reclaimed for its foot-thick timbers. The signs don’t just guard a fallow field where deer graze and turkeys strut.

They guard a tired old road that leads to a family’s legacy, a legacy of leather harness, Fordson tractors, hand-pumped drinking water and woodstove cornbread; a farm which once grew generations of family, but today offers a harvest of nothing but memories.

– Weaver is a staff writer at the News Reporter. He may be reached at 642-4104, ext. 227, or via email at jeffweaver@newsreporter.biz