Classic and Contemporary Poetry
MARSHALL WASHER, by HAYDEN CARRUTH Poet Analysis Poet's Biography First Line: They are cowshit farmers, these new englanders Last Line: "and flagged aisles saturated with a century’s Subject(s): Cows; Farm Life; New England; Agriculture; Farmers | ||||||||
1 They are cowshit farmers, these New Englanders who built our red barns so admired as emblems, in photograph, in paint, of America's imagined past (backward utopians that we've become). But let me tell how it is inside those barns. Warm. Even in dead of winter, even in the dark night solid with thirty below, thanks to huge bodies breathing heat and grain sacks stuffed under doors and in broken windows, warm, and heaped with reeking, steaming manure, running with urine that reeks even more, the wooden channels and flagged aisles saturated with a century's excreta. In dim light, with scraper and shovel, the manure is lifted into a barrow or a trolley (suspended from a ceiling track), and moved to the spreader -- half a ton at a time. Grain and hay are distributed in the mangers, bedding of sawdust strewn on the floor. The young cattle and horses, separately stabled, are tended. The cows are milked; the milk is strained and poured in the bulk tank; the machines and all utensils are washed with disinfectant. This, which is called the "evening chores," takes about three hours. Next morning, do it again. Then after breakfast hitch the manure spreader to the old Ferguson and draw it to the meadows, where the manure is kicked by mechanical beaters onto the snow. When the snow becomes too deep for the tractor, often about mid-January, then load the manure on a horse-drawn sled and pitch it out by hand. When the snow becomes too deep for the horses make your dung heap behind the barn. Yes, a good winter means no dung heap; but a bad one may mean a heap as big as a house. And so, so, night and morning and day, 365 days a year until you are dead; this is part of what you must do. Notice how many times I have said "manure?" It is serious business. It breaks the farmers' backs. It makes their land. It is the link eternal, binding man and beast and earth. Yet our farmers still sometimes say of themselves, derogatively, that they are "cowshit farmers." 2 I see a man with a low-bent back driving a tractor in stinging rain, or just as he enters a doorway in his sheepskin and enormous mittens, stomping snow from his boots, raising his fogged glasses. I see a man in bib overalls and rubber boots kneeling in cowshit to smear ointment on a sore teat, a man with a hayfork, a dungfork, an axe, a 20-pound maul for driving posts, a canthook, a grease gun. I see a man notching a cedar post with a double-blade axe, rolling the post under his foot in the grass: quick strokes and there is a ringed groove one inch across, as clean as if cut with the router blade down at the mill. I see a man who drags a dead calf or watches a barn roaring with fire and thirteen heifers inside, I see his helpless eyes. He has stood helpless often, of course: when his wife died from congenital heart disease a few months before open-heart surgery came to Vermont, when his sons departed, caring little for the farm because he had educated them -- he who left school in 1931 to work by his father's side on an impoverished farm in an impoverished time. I see a man who studied by lamplight, the journals and bulletins, new methods, struggling to buy equipment, forty years to make his farm a good one; alone now, his farm the last on Clay Hill, where I myself remember ten. He says "I didn't mind it" for "I didn't notice it," "dreened" for "drained," "climb" (pronounced climm) for "climbed," "stanchel" for "stanchion," and many other unfamiliar locutions; but I have looked them up, they are in the dictionary, standard speech of lost times. He is rooted in history as in the land, the only man I know who lives in the house where he was born. I see a man alone walking his fields and woods, knowing every useful thing about them, moving in a texture of memory that sustains his lifetime and his father's lifetime. I see a man falling asleep at night with thoughts and dreams I could not infer -- and would not if I could -- in his chair in front of his television. 3 I have written of Marshall often, for his presence is in my poems as in my life, so familiar that it is not named; yet I have named him sometimes too, in writing as in life, gratefully. We are friends. Our friendship began when I came here years ago, seeking what I had once known in southern New England, now destroyed. I found it in Marshall, among others. He is friend and neighbor both, an important distinction. His farm is one-hundred-eighty acres (plus a separate woodlot of forty more), and one of the best-looking farms I know, sloping smooth pastures, elm-shaded knolls, a brook, a pond, his woods of spruce and pine, with maples and oaks along the road -- not a showplace, not by any means, but a working farm with fences of old barbed wire; no pickets, no post-and-rail. His cows are Jerseys. My place, no farm at all, is a country laborer's holding, fourteen acres "more or less" (as the deed says), but we adjoin. We have no fence. Marshall's cows graze in my pasture; I cut my fuel in his woods. That's neighborliness. And when I came here Marshall taught me . . . I don't know, it seems like everything: how to run a barn, make hay, build a wall, make maple syrup without a trace of bitterness, a thousand things. (Though I thought I wasn't ignorant when I came, and I wasn't -- just three-quarters informed. You know how good a calf is, born three-legged.) In fact half my life now, I mean literally half, is spent in actions I could not perform without his teaching. Yet it wasn't teaching; he showed me. Which is what makes all the difference. In return I gave a hand, helped in the fields, started frozen engines, mended fence, searched for lost calves, picked apples for the cider mill, and so on. And Marshall, now alone, often shared my table. This too is neighborliness. 4 As for friendship, what can I say where words historically fail? It is something else, something more difficult. Not western affability, at any rate, that tells in ten minutes the accommodation of its wife's -- well, you know. Yankees are independent, meaning individual and strong-minded but also private; in fact private first of all. Marshall and I worked ten years together, and more than once in hardship. I remember the late January when his main gave out and we carried water, hundreds and thousands of gallons, to the heifers in the upper barn (the one that burned next summer), then worked inside the well to clear the line in temperatures that rose to ten below at noonday. We knew such times. Yet never did Marshall say the thought that was closest to him. Privacy is what this is; not reticence, not minding one's own business, but a positive sense of the secret inner man, the sacred identity. A man is his totem, the animal of his mind. Yet I was angered sometimes. How could friendship share a base so small of mutual substance? Unconsciously I had taken friendship's measure from artists elsewhere who had been close to me, people living for the minutest public dissection of emotion and belief. But more warmth was, and is, in Marshall's quiet "hello" than in all those others and their wordiest protestations, more warmth and far less vanity. 5 He sows his millet broadcast, swinging left to right, a half-acre for the cows' "fall tonic" before they go in the barn for good; an easy motion, slow swinging, a slow dance in the field, and just the opposite, right to left, for the scythe or the brush-hook. Yes, I have seen such dancing by a man alone in the slant of the afternoon. At his anvil with his big smith's hammer he can pound shape back in a wagon iron, or tap a butternut so it just lies open. When he skids a pine log out of the woods he stands in front of his horse and hollers, "Gee-up, goddamn it," "Back, you ornery son-of-a-bitch," and then when the chain rattles loose and the log settles on the stage, he slicks down the horse's sweaty neck and pulls his ears. In October he eases the potatoes out of the ground in their rows, gentle with the potato-hook, then leans and takes a big one in his hand, and rubs it clean with his thumbs, and smells it, and looks along the new-turned frosty earth to fields, to hills, to the mountain, forests in their color each fall no less awesome. And when in June the mowing time comes around and he fits the wicked cutter-bar to the Ferguson, he shuts the cats indoors, the dogs in the barn, and warns the neighbors too, because once years ago, many years, he cut off a cat's legs in the tall timothy. To this day you can see him squirm inside when he tells it, as he must tell it, obsessively, June after June. He is tall, a little gray, a little stooped, his eyes crinkled with smile-lines, both dog-teeth gone. He has worn his gold-rimmed spectacles so long he looks disfigured when they're broken. 6 No doubt Marshall's sorrow is the same as human sorrow generally, but there is this difference. To live in a doomed city, a doomed nation, a doomed world is desolating, and we all are desolated. But to live on a doomed farm is worse. It must be worse. There the exact point of connection, gate of conversion, is -- mind and life. The hilltop farms are going. Bottomland farms, mechanized, are all that survive. As more and more developers take over northern Vermont, values of land increase, taxes increase, farming is an obsolete vocation -- while half the world goes hungry. Marshall walks his fields and woods, knowing every useful thing about them, and knowing his knowledge useless. Bulldozers, at least of the imagination, are poised to level every knoll, to strip bare every pasture. Or maybe a rich man will buy it for a summer place. Either way the link of the manure, that had seemed eternal, is broken. Marshall is not young now. And though I am only six or seven years his junior, I wish somehow I could buy the place, merely to assure him that for these few added years it might continue -- drought, flood, or depression. But I am too ignorant, in spite of his teaching. This is more than a technocratic question. I cannot smile his quick sly Yankee smile in sorrow, nor harden my eyes with the true granitic resistance that shaped this land. How can I learn the things that are not transmissible? Marshall knows them. He possesses them, the remnant of human worth to admire in this world, and I think to envy. Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368-0271, www.cc.press.org | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...KICKING THE LEAVES by DONALD HALL THE FARMER'S BOY: WINTER by ROBERT BLOOMFIELD THE FARMER'S BOY: SPRING by ROBERT BLOOMFIELD THE FARMER'S BOY: SUMMER by ROBERT BLOOMFIELD THE FARMER'S BOY: AUTUMN by ROBERT BLOOMFIELD I'VE NEVER SEEN SUCH A REAL HARD TIME BEFORE' by HAYDEN CARRUTH THE WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION' by HAYDEN CARRUTH A POST-IMPRESSIONIST SUSURRATION FOR THE FIRST OF NOVEMBER by HAYDEN CARRUTH |
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