Steve Katz - The Compleat Memoirrhoids - 137.n

Edith was the first spinster I had ever met, a genuine old maid who helped Alfred Partridge’s aged mother several times a week. She was thin, sallow faced, with bluish lips, a woman crooked into her fifties, who wore grey smocks with faded flowers. She rarely lifted her eyes to look at me, even when I spoke to her. It’s tough to imagine that this person, hardly present, could have had such an effect on me. I was young, on my way to college, Agriculture school at Cornell, Pre-Vet. Alfred Partridge was my farmer. I was a New York State farm cadet.

When I got to Alfred’s farm from New York City, I was a hopeless case of New York City boy. The Farm Cadet bureau manager who delivered me to Alfred felt my hands and said, “Soft. I’ll be back in a couple of weeks to see how they toughen up.” Alfred, a craggy faced, grey-eyed, even-tempered man, body bent into strength by hard work, immediately ordered me to jump onto a wagon of green hay and start pitching it into the loader that carried it up and dropped it down the silo. This was the first time I’d ever touched, or even seen, a pitchfork. I could figure out which end was the fork, so I gripped the long handle in the middle and sank the tines into the hay at my feet, pushing down with my sneaker, as if it was a shovel. I’d used a shovel before. I tried to lift. Nothing. No hay on the fork. I sank the fork again; again, no result. I was sweating like a little city pig. I had signed up for this work because of the requirement of the Ag school at Cornell, that city kids get farm practice, two or three credits maybe for pitching hay. The initiation was required for entry into the vet school too. At the time I wanted to study veterinary medicine as the lesser of several evils. I sure didn’t want to be a dentist, my mother’s ambition for me. Doctor was out of the question. Veterinarian seemed feasible, though the only pets my family ever kept were one white, one black and white rat, Eleanor and Franklin, raised by my sister for some abstruse fringe of the war effort.

After watching me struggle for what seemed like hours, Alfred finally approached, and said softly, “You can’t lift the same hay that you stand on, son.” I looked down at the pitchfork sunk into the green near my sneakers, and enlightenment struck. That was why the handle of the pitchfork was so long. This was the most profound teaching I had ever received. To this day, when I am hung up on something, I pause and listen to Alfred’s voice. “You can’t lift the same hay you stand on.” Within a short time I had moved the whole wagonload of green hay into the silo.

After that I got on great on this rocky hillside, Northern Catskill farm. Alfred milked Jersey cows, because they were nimble grazers on difficult land, because they produced what he thought was the best product, milk with butterfat pushing six percent, and Jerseys are the prettiest cows; in fact, I had a crush on one heifer, a tawny brown lovely with a black, dished face, named Jingle. She would greet me in the evening before chores, and lick my hand. It’s a strange coincidence that the woman I married out of college was nicknamed Jingle; Pat for real, family name Bell.

But we have to return to the spectral Edith, moving silently through doorways, keeping to your peripheral vision, so you were never sure if someone had passed by, or if you’d felt a ghost. She had no smell. She was like an empty wind.

I was learning old-fashioned skills, that would get me few farm practice credits; but I enjoyed them. I learned to harness and hitch a team of horses — Patsy, a Belgian, and Olaf, a Percheron. I could load a wagon of loose hay as well, Alfred said, as anyone he had ever seen. I helped him pour a new barn floor. I was good with the stock. Alfred and I got along really well. On his mantle he had a model of an ideal Jersey cow, and he liked to explain the fine points. He was an advocate for the small farm as a way of life, and I felt honored when he offered to give me forty acres above on his hillside, and four heifers (I don’t think Jingle was included) if I would give up the idea of school and commit to farming. I had never had such an affirmation before, and I was flattered and confused. I was young. This was an honor. I was sorely tempted to accept what would have been the oblivion of a small New York State farm.

What Edith did shocked me into focus. One morning in the bathroom, as I was attaching a roll of toilet paper to the roller, I slipped, and it fell into the toilet bowl. I retrieved it, half soaked, and laid it on the sink, then snuck out to the barn for chores. Then we climbed the hillside, to find a yearling black bull, and drive it down to the barn. Alfred loved Jerseys with a lot of black in them. I feared the bull, but this one was too young yet to get cranky. To my shock and humiliation, Edith had strung the toilet paper out along the clothesline. At least fifty feet of clothesline expressed the passionate frugality of this intense maiden. That someone might do this had never entered my mind. After dinner I squatted with my back against the barn across the road and watched the paper dry. A tender breeze rustled it slightly. The sweet smell of fresh hay and manure surrounded me. This was like the script of Edith’s convictions, her commitment to Alfred and his mother, written along the line between myself and the house. For some reason I could see my own life too, all my work that lay in the future, encrypted along that line of paper. I was a writer. I would always be one. I looked out across the road at the clothesline, the paper, the farm-house, the fenced hayfield backed against the rocky hillside where my forty acres might be, the sky deep evening blue with small cumulus scudding. I didn’t have to make up my mind, it was written there. I had to refuse Alfred’s offer.

Edith came out from around the back of the house and carefully rolled up the dry paper. She glanced at me once across the road and, as best as I can remember, this was the only time she ever smiled at me.

This car had been Hitler’s promise to the German people. Here was his “chicken in every pot.” It was a cunning design. The rear window was tiny. The turn signals were cute illuminated arms that flipped out of the doorposts to point left or right. This was the people’s wagon, one of the earliest VW bugs. I bought it on 55th Street and Broadway at the only VW dealership in New York City. It was my senior year at Cornell. The salesman was Mickey Shea. He was a phenomenon, always making three deals at once on three different telephones. This little bug cost me around $960 new. Filling stations around the Borscht belt sometimes refused to sell gas to Hitler’s car. I had to stop out of sight, fill a can at the station, pour it into the tank, and go a few more miles. In the high plains we were a curiosity. People stopped to check it out. This was no Studebaker, no Nash Metropolitan.

We had pulled into a town just east of The Little Bighorns. From here I saw my first range of western mountains. They were way too great for my east coast Manhattan Catskill state of mind. No Poconos these. They were too vast for the car I was driving. I couldn’t imagine the tiny air-cooled engine pushing us up the steep curves and through the country where Custer had met his destiny.

Before the interstates you hopped from town to town to cross the USA. That’s how we got over the endless Midwest in this tiny, noisy car. Each town was alive. Each provided some shelter by a river or lake, and fresh water, and bathroom facilities, and bushes where we could unroll our sleeping bags and pass the night in relative privacy. It had rained a half hour before we stopped and the air was laden with whiffs of sage and chaparral and juniper and pinon. The aromas of this arid land made me drunk. I had never felt before what it was like to be present in such an immense landscape. Was I really going to cross those massive mountains in this miniature automobile?