Seeing
By Pete Kauffman
Look down on Kentucky, which is what they have been doing all this time, and you can see a little ink blotch about south-central. This is the river country along the Cumberland River. My country, hardscrabble country, skinny hollows pushed out by enterprising settlers, the local economy foundered and behind in industry ever since the steamboaters quit in 1935. I’ve got a farm there that borders the river and rises from it in adjacent, sheltered fields. On moonlit nights, when I can’t sleep, I’ll walk over the hills and down onto the farm, down to the river that glitters black and wine-dark in the night.
Or up where the highest field meets the upland, there’s a little postage-stamp-sized tableland where the old man wanted to be buried. I see now why he wanted to be buried here. You can see his whole life from here, the boundary that goes down to the river, the trees along the river like a black ribbon, the hay silver in the moonlight. He said he wanted to be buried up on the hill, and the county would put in a road to any cemetery, that’s the policy of the county, and so we did put him up on the hill and the county sure enough came and put in a road up to one grave. I reckon that’s why there are so many graves hereabouts; you can’t drive anywhere up one of these Kentucky hollows without some John Gray buried beside his two wives who both died young, their tilted and mossy headstones reminders of harder days.
I was born a farmer, like Grandpa. Grandpa done it his whole life. He farmed back when everybody still kept a team of mules. They’d raise tobacco, and a little corn, pigs, who knows what. They’d take their mules down to the park come Fourth of July and pull them against each other, and Grandpa’s mules about always took home the award, which was just the pot of the entrance fees, maybe fifty dollars, and nothing but a bit of talking among the old people, which were a dying breed. The young people didn’t hardly watch, except me, they all had machines to recreate on and television people to talk about. But the old mules would lean into their harnesses and pull, pulling an old stone sled filled with cinder blocks around the ball park at the arena. Grandpa had a black and a gray, stood I’ll bet 18 hands. They weren’t a pretty pair but if you could have hooked them to the North Pole they could have pulled the earth off kilter.
I never learned mules. My dad played with them a bit, but he never was much a mule skinner, he did it to make Grandpa happy. Grandpa let Daddy pull them one Fourth of July and they never would pull for Daddy. Daddy was trying to drive to make Grandpa happy, and Grandpa was letting Daddy pull to make him happy, and the whole thing went sidewise and Grandpa got so mad he told Daddy to get off and let him drive. And then Grandpa set up on the seat and said their names. The mules’ ears swiveled around and they proceeded to pull the tires out of the arena. Never did figure out what Grandpa did different than Daddy, but whatever he did put it into the hearts of old Judas and Iscariot.
Daddy did the best he could, but his heart was never in it. And then I came along, and liked what Grandpa was doing, and this suited everybody just fine. We all lived on the home place, but Daddy took a job in town at the feed mill and I took up with Grandpa. Jerry, my brother, he never even tried. He’d help now and again, out of a sense of duty, like haying time or such, and Daddy would help too, but mostly it was me and Grandpa.
Grandpa had built his life here, and he knew all the old stuff. He would do it every year too, chickens, hog killing in the week before Christmas, and he did it all. Head cheese, brains, chitlins, scrapple. He’d cure the hams, but we’d always eat the one from the year before at Christmas because this year’s ham needed to do that sweat. He’d kill a beef too if he had extra. He knew to cut cedars when the moon was full so the bark would fall off. He always planted corn when the tulip poplars had buds the size of a mouse’s ear. He never really taught Daddy any of this, expected him to pick it up, but I think Daddy was mostly confused all this time about whether he should be like his friends, who had grown up and gone away to become plumbers and mechanics, or his Daddy. What happened is he half knew this old stuff. Then we came along and bacon from the store came neatly wrapped, and we never missed head cheese nor jowl meat, and weren’t that keen on learning the skills to get something we didn’t miss.
I got out and about, had friends, knew that the Louisville Cardinals were doing well, understood that a life existed outside the horizons of this hollow, but Grandpa could stay on his farm and not come out for a month at time, and when he did come out it was like he was blind to what was happening. All those tidy, weed-free farms weren’t even there if you looked through his eyes. He didn’t understand, either, that we didn’t see what he saw. All he saw was what went before, and it was as fully formed in his mind as the present. That’s what we thought about him.
“That’s the trouble with you boys,” he would say. “You can’t see a thing.” I see now that he meant that we couldn’t see, we didn’t have enough memory or imagination to see. We were scientific, awake to the future, on the Z-axis and heading up. Grandpa was on a plane of coordinates left over from the 1800s.
“That right there,” he would say, “is where old man Gadbury lived, and he ate taters and pork every day and he lived to be ninety year old.” Or, “I remember old Hambone, lived up in the booger woods. Hambone would come out and stand on this here bridge to fetch a ride into town now and then, and the youngsters would pick him up and go too fast and give him a hard time. Old Hambone. They say you could pass him in Burkesville of a Saturday night, thumbing a ride for Glasgow, and when you got to Glasgow he’d a-beat you there.”
When Grandpa went to town, it was an event. He’d shave and wax his mustache, and put on clean jeans and his white-turned-yellow, long-sleeve shirt with pearl-colored snaps down the front. It was only a ten-minute ride to town in a truck, even at forty miles an hour, but he still had it confused with when it was an hour’s ride on a horse and a big event.
He’d drive his truck at forty miles an hour, oblivious to the traffic washing up behind him while I chafed in the passenger seat. “Well,” I said to him once, embarrassed, “a man now and then ought to look rearwards and see all the good folks he’s inconveniencing.”
“Yep,” he agreed. “Folks nowadays don’t care about each other. You ever saw any neighbors stopping in to help with haying? Dadgum, but it is a bad world now, with all these fast people in it.” And we drove right on into town, forty miles an hour. He was prone to random pronouncements about the younger generation. “Them boys couldn’t tell the difference between a trace and a singletree. Look at ‘em. Long hair and all, don’t have the skill to make a life.”
I tried, I tried my best to become a good and savvy farmer. I’d go to all the association suppers and seminars, and I’d learn this or that about the new way to farm, and I’d come back and try and convince Grandpa. He’d not look at me, just look out across the field, then say, “I don’t know about all that.” And in an instant, all my training and knowledge became less useful than the manure we put on the fields. Once, I suggested to him that we take out the one fence on our biggest bottom pasture field and plant all that in corn because the future was in corn, anybody could see that, and it would go up to five or even six dollars a bushel.
Grandpa said nothing for a long time, but he was looking at that fence, I could feel it, and then I realized what I’d done. He’d told me how him and Lester—his son, my uncle, killed in Vietnam—had cut those cedar poles up top in the uplands and skidded them out with the mules. Lester was the one to take up the farming, he’d been harnessing the family dog with baling wire since before he could write his name. Everybody knew he would be the next one for the farm. He had the knack but never came back from those helicopters. That’s why Daddy got the farm and the ensuing confusion, and I guess if Lester hadn’t died over there I might not have had anything to do with it. But all that was before my time, and barely any of us saw the difference.
He said, finally, “Well.” It had two syllables, way-ll, with a rising inflection on the last, and it had not a comma after it, but a period. Well. Full stop. He looked at the fence. Then he started in on a story about how Tom Haskell down on Wrights Bottom had planted so much tobacco one year on ‘speculation of future’ because Tom Haskell was going to buy him a new house with one year’s pay, but had to hire help to get it in and the price of tobacco dropped and he made less that year than most other years, even with more acreage, which meant less pasture for his cows.
This is what got me about Grandpa. Everything was anecdotal, nothing scientific. We got tractors now, and could get more done in a day’s time. And Grandpa was almost superstitious, always sold his beef at the same time of year and didn’t bother about the prices. He didn’t even track prices, as if he was unable to hold for a month to see if the price went up. Farming was different now; I tried to show him but I couldn’t bring myself to tell him. One improvement we did make was buying a few tractors to do the field work, and Grandpa would, in a bit of grudging fascination, say, “Boy, those tractors can sure fetch it.” He kept those mules, regardless, till they died, even if they didn’t do a thing in the last five years of their life but eat the grass down away from the weaner calves. “A farm don’t look right with no horses,” he said.
I was going up to the big farm convention in Louisville, and it was haying time. I cut the two northwest fields on Saturday, and thought Daddy or Jerry or Grandpa or someone would take care of it. I wasn’t the boss, but I was supposed to run the farm. Figure that out. I got back on Thursday evening and nobody had done a thing to it. Grandpa had tried to tedder it with the Ford 3000, but the hitch pin bounced out and the PTO shaft came apart and he didn’t figure it out for a whole round. He never did learn how to look behind him when he started driving tractors. When he came around the corner and saw his tedder in front of him instead of behind him, he looked back and saw that his tedder was gone, and he drove right on up to the house with his PTO still spinning and the front piece of the shaft clattering against the hitch.
When I got home I walked up to the house and he was in his chair with his ball cap down over his eyes and I said, “What, you just leave it in the field when you’re through with it?” He said, “I thought you’d like to fix that.” I went out and hit the ignition on the little Ford tractor and the PTO was engaged. He was eighty-six then, bless his heart. That Saturday I needed to cut more hay but Robert down at the bait shop said the crappie were biting good, and I said, if it don’t matter to them, it don’t matter to me, and I went fishing. I brought a few back to Grandpa and that fixed everything.
But I was still mad. I’d seen all the folks my age up there at the convention, doing well. Some of them had become managers of farms, and drove around in nice trucks, and were building new houses. Anyway, they were financially solvent, and we were not, stuck here in the past.
When Grandpa came out after I had the hay up, to inspect—he was the manager, and not in the modern sense—he pulled a plug of hay out of a bale of hay setting there on the barn floor. I was mad, sweaty, mad: Here I was, forty year old and still stacking bales of hay into the loft by hand while all my old school friends bought second homes and had the weekends off. Grandpa pulled out the hay and sniffed it, let it fall from his hand, and shook his head. He didn’t know I was watching him.
Now I was real mad. I stacked hay bales until I was exhausted and I made up my mind right there that I’d had enough. I was tired of being held up to the old man’s expectations that were outdated and no longer viable, left over from beyond my time and economy. I had frittered away my best working years trying to do honor to Grandpa, which meant I was turning against all my contemporaries and modern ways of doing. It might have been sweat glistening on my face.
I came down out of the mow, and said, “What about the hay,” and Grandpa said, “I’ve seen better.” I was sitting on a bale that had fallen from the side of the elevator to the floor, and I looked up under the wagon; tunnel vision: rubber tire, sitting on concrete, round red taillights with the light gone out of them, green flaking paint. Late afternoon sun came in the cracks between the barn siding and lit on the filtering hay dust. It was silent, silent as only a river-bottom farm in July can be in the hottest part of the day.
“Grandpa,” I said. “I think I’m done.”
“You still got the bottom field and the one over agin’ the road,” he said.
“No,” I said. “Understand me. I think I’m done. Maybe this fall yet.”
He was leaning with his hand on the trailer, his thin skin resting on the stubble of hay fodder. He was looking out the back door and into the pasture and on up the hill, and I knew him well enough he was seeing not overgrazed pastures with buttercups, but a lush spring pasture with two fine mules in it, circa 1950.
“I suppose it was that convention,” he said.
“I suppose it was,” I said.
“Never been to one of them,” he said. “But I guess there ain’t no mules there.”
That’s when he told me about being buried up there. He never prefaced it nor epilogued his wish, just one or two sentences. “Up yonder on the hill,” Grandpa said, “where that big maple leans in the corner of the property, there I want you to bury me when I dig in. The county will put a road up there for free, it won’t cost you a thing.”
And then he turned and walked away. And I wept. Grandpa was betrayed and I poor. When he died a year or two later, I was the only one that knew this, and all the family were shocked when I told them. Oh, well, they said, if that’s what he wanted, we’ll do it for him. And now that I remember it, all through my boyhood, when I came up here to go squirrel hunting or was along this flank of woods for some reason, there was always an old stump setting right there, and never a tree for it to come from. And some years it would be a fresh one.
Now, I sit on the stump myself, and watch the moon drift free of its moorings on the edge of the world, and think of the old man. He gave me the farm when he died, and I modernized it soon after, and then fell prey to a steady job and pay in town. I leased the farm to a traveling farmer who loves my land as much as he loves his ex-wife. He sees no mules on my land, he doesn’t even see what little I can see, and Grandpa forgot more than I’ll ever see. I can’t bear to see it farmed this way. But I can’t farm it like Grandpa, either, there’s no future in it. I can’t farm it with equipment, in the modern way, and carve out a life here. The education I spent my life gathering from Grandpa has no trade for it to service.
The new farmer comes in the spring and looks through the plate glass of his equipment, and into the screens of his devices, and can’t see the soil because he is looking into the soul of the world backlit by LCD. The world distilled glows in the palm of every modern, not a portal to see but a funnel to be seen by. Vision is tough to acquire when there’s no market for it.
“Grandpa,” I said to his grave in the darkness late one night. “We’ve been pushed out by people who see different things, and all we see is the future.”
Pete Kauffman lives in Alaska with his wife and daughters. He writes more at petekauffman.org.
Artwork: Pierre Adolphe Valette 1876-1942 Under Windsor Bridge on the Irwell, Manchester