SECURITY

  It was a fine clear day for the Fair this year, and I went up early to see how the Ferris wheel was doing and to take a ride. It pays to check up on Ferris wheels these days: by noting the volume of business one can get some idea which side is ahead in the world—whether the airborne freemen outnumber the earthbound slaves. It was encouraging to discover that there were still quite a few people at the Fair who preferred a feeling of high, breezy insecurity to one of solid support. My friend Healy surprised me by declining to go aloft; he is an unusually cautious man, however—even his hat was insured.

  I like to watch the faces of people who are trying to get up their nerve to take to the air. You see them at the ticket booths in amusement parks, in the waiting room at the airport. Within them two irreconcilables are at war—the desire for safety, the yearning for a dizzy release. My Britannica tells nothing about Mr. G. W. G. Ferris, but he belongs with the immortals. From the top of the wheel, seated beside a small boy, windswept and fancy free, I looked down on the Fair and for a moment was alive. Below us the old harness drivers pushed their trotters round the dirt track, old men with their legs still sticking out stiffly round the rumps of horses. And from the cluster of loud speakers atop the judges’ stand came the “Indian Love Call,” bathing heaven and earth in jumbo tenderness.

  This silvery wheel, revolving slowly in the cause of freedom, was only just holding its own, I soon discovered; for farther along in the midway, in a sideshow tent, a tattoo artist was doing a land-office business, not with anchors, flags, and pretty mermaids, but with Social Security Numbers, neatly pricked on your forearm with the electric needle. He had plenty of customers, mild-mannered pale men asking glumly for the sort of indelible ignominy that was once reserved for prisoners and beef cattle. Drab times these, when the bravado and the exhibitionism are gone from tattooing and it becomes simply a branding operation. I hope the art that produced the bird’s eye view of Sydney will not be forever lost in the routine business of putting serial numbers on people who are worried about growing old.

  The sight would have depressed me had I not soon won a cane by knocking over three cats with three balls. There is no other moment when a man so surely has the world by the tail as when he strolls down the midway swinging a prize cane.

  Secretary Wallace thinks the farm income this year will be about seven and a half billion dollars, which is about twice what it was in 1932 but which will hardly pay me for my time even so. Since coming to live on the land I am concerned with all such reports. From a limited experience with farm operation, I should call seven and a half billion dollars scarcely enough to pay off the farmers in a dozen States. I should estimate that the farm income, with or without crop control, would have to be about a hundred times greater than it is to make it worth any man’s while to work the land.

  For example, let us consider my one remaining turkey. She is all that is left of a brood of six. Three were victims of a liver disorder, two were foully struck down by a weasel. This surviving bird, in order for me to turn her over at a profit, would have to be sold for somewhere in the neighborhood of four hundred and fifty dollars. This is a conservative figure that I shall itemize presently. I have been keeping books on the bird and know what I am talking about. Of course my turkey and I constitute a branch of farming the Secretary of Agriculture does not necessarily take into consideration, either in his national planning or in his cost accounting. Yet we are part of the rural scene these days; our ilk is increasing and must eventually be taken into account. I suppose Mr. Wallace looks upon my sort not as farmers but as middle-aged eccentrics; but here we are. By no means all of America’s soil today is tilled by practical people doing things in a sensible way.

  Hatched June 19th, the turkey is a Bourbon Red, one of those beautiful, cocoa-colored birds with white tail feathers and a fine sense of catastrophe. This one is rather pindling for her age, for I’ve been busy this summer and haven’t pushed her along. Her account figures up about as follows:

  Cost of egg $  .30

  Cost of gas to place where I got egg 1.20

  Remodeling chimneys of dwelling house on property, $800.00 Share chargeable to turkey 1/10th 80.00

  Corn for broody hen .25

  Growing mash 1.25

  Scratch 1.30

  Hired man’s time feeding, watering, etc. 20.00

  My time, puttering, reading bulletins, vacillating, whipping off dog, spreading oilcloth over pen, rearranging hopper, setting skunk trap, at estimated hour basis of what I might have earned by putting my time to better advantage 168.40

  Pair strap hinges .15

  Installing low-pressure steam heat in dwelling house so we can survive in this climate on Thanksgiving Day, $1300.00. Turkey’s share 1/10th 130.00

  Total $402.85

  Now there is my bird in black and white. The figures of course are open to question, and there would be plenty of people (dreamers like Henry Tetlow, for instance) who might quibble with them. I am attributing one-tenth of my heating and remodeling expenses to this turkey, which is just a guess. It would seem conservative, for the bird certainly had a great deal to do with my settling down here. The item of $168.40 is also part guesswork, as there is nothing harder to estimate than a writer’s time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments—moments of sustained creation—when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer’s time isn’t worth the paper he is not writing anything on.

  This turkey, although a mediocre and backward bird, is of profound interest to me and a highly significant thing in my life. She runs with some young bantams and will presumably develop blackhead before Thanksgiving if the government pamphlets are correct, but she is my bid for security. The world being in an unusually disturbed condition, the desire for security, whether we respect it or despise it, has grown quietly in all of us, even in the young. I read the other day of a meeting of Youth—I forget where—and “security” was a dominant note in the resolutions that were passed. This is a new thing and I fear unpromising. Young people have never bothered much about security, they have traditionally gone after adventure, romance, and derring-do. Now they are holding out their arm for the branding iron, surrendering their free selves to an illusive certainty. I must have been groping toward this disreputable end when I bought a few turkey eggs last May. Somewhere in the back of a man’s head there lingers the conventional picture of the harvest home of the early colonists—a Puritan with a gun on his arm, a wild turkey being brought in from the red-and-gold woods for the feast day, the abundant and natural life of our stern and rock-bound coast. No doubt when I carve up this four hundred and fifty dollar fowl I shall enjoy a momentary glow of self-sufficiency and thrift and certainty, as treacherous as the hopes of a daffy old Californian dreaming his dreams of thirty dollars every Thursday.

  The young girls of this village used to choose nursing for a career, many of them. But one of the teachers in the high school tells me that this year most of her girl graduates aimed to become hostesses for an air line. (Or even for a bus line: some of the large cross-country busses now carry hostesses.) Here again are security and adventure locked in a death grip. To a young girt in a small town the inside of a passenger plane is the glamorous corridor to life, with marriage (safety through danger, strength through joy) at the end of the voyage. Statistics show that virginal hostesses, the ministering angels of the sub-stratosphere, last only a scant few months, then they marry an Eastern branch manager en route to his branch through the sky.

  While the old wars rage and new ones hang like hawks above the world, we, the unholy innocents, study the bulb catalogue and order one dozen paper-white Grandiflora Narcissus (60 cents) to be grown in a bowl of pebbles. To the list that my wife made out I have added one large root of bleeding heart, to remind us daily of wounded soldiers and tortured Jews.

  My thirty-six pullets are ready to go into the laying house, and all the pamphlets say I must cull them rigidly. It strikes me the Federal pamphleteers are strangely out of date in their terminology: isn’t “purge” the word they are groping for?

  Incidentally, this is one farm on which there will be no purge. I’m putting the whole flock into the laying house. Those that like to lay eggs can do that; the others can sit around the groaning board, singing and whoring.

  [ October 1938 ]

  CLEAR DAYS

  “You take it after a rain,” said Henry …

  Henry and I were sunning on the steps of the store. I was waiting for my wife to come along in the car and pick me up; Henry, being without attachments, was waiting for the end of time. For a brief spell we were as sensible as two cats, on the warm boards.

  “You take it after a rain,” said Henry, “a fox hasn’t fed all night, because it’s been rainin’, and he’ll be lookin’ to feed in the morning. That’s the time you got to be there with your gun.”

  I nodded wisely, wondering what the Meadow Brook Hunt would make of this kind of goings-on.

  “I killed five foxes one fall, just half a mile from here, still-huntin’. No dog nor nuthin’. I outwitted ‘em. You know where McKee’s shop is, well right there, where the woods comes clean to the road in a point. I knew that’s where he’d have to cross the road, to git to where the rabbits were thick. I just set there behind the wall and waited. Only you got to be mighty quiet and nice. A fox has awful good eyes.”

  It was the first chance Henry had ever had to tell me confidentially about himself, and it seemed significant that he had plunged without preliminaries into his triumphant chapter. From his dull galaxy of days he had picked out these five bright mornings. Every man has his memory of achievement. It is something to have known where a fox was going to cross the road.

  The burning question around here now is what I am going to do about my deer. They always speak of it as “my” deer, and it has come to seem just that. I often think of this not impossible animal, walking statelily through the forest paths and wearing a studded collar with “E. B. White, phone Waterlot 40 Ring 3” engraved on it.

  “You goin’ to get your deer?” I am asked by every man I meet—and they all wait for an answer. My deer-slaying program is a matter of considerable local concern, much to my surprise. It is plain that I now reside in a friendly community of killers, and that until I open fire myself they cannot call me brother.

  The truth is I have never given serious thought to the question of gunning. My exploits have been few. Once I shot a woodchuck my dog had already begun to take apart; and once, in the interests of science, I erased a domestic turkey—crouching silently on a log six feet from the bird’s head, as cool as though I were aiming at my own grandmother. But by and large my hunting has been with a .22 rifle and a mechanical duck, with dusk falling in gold and purple splendor in the penny arcades along Sixth Avenue. I imagine I would feel mighty awkward discharging a gun that wasn’t fastened to a counter by a small chain.

  This business of going after some deer meat is a solemn matter hereabouts. My noncommittal attitude has marked me as a person of doubtful character, who will bear watching. There seems to be some question of masculinity involved: until I slay my dragon I am still in short pants, as far as my fellow-countrymen are concerned. As for my own feelings in the matter, it’s not that I fear buck fever, it’s more that I can’t seem to work up a decent feeling of enmity toward a deer. Toward my deer, I mean. I think I’d rather catch it alive and break it to harness.

  Besides, I don’t really trust myself alone in the woods with a gun. The woods are changing. I see by the papers that our Eastern forests this season are full of artists engaged in making pencil sketches of suitable backgrounds for Walt Disney’s proposed picture “Bambi”—which is about a deer. My eyesight isn’t anything exceptional; it is quite within the bounds of probability that I would march into the woods after my deer and come home with a free-hand artist draped across my running board, a tiny crimson drop trickling from one nostril.

  Long before the coming of the cold I was on the barn roof, laying clear cedar shingles, five inches to the weather. My neighbors’ roofs all showed signs of activity, so I built some staging and mounted my own beanstalk to see what I could see. It seems a long while ago that I was up there, hanging on by the seat of my pants: those clear days at the edge of frost, with a view of pasture, woods, sea, hills, and my pumpkin patch stretched out below in serene abundance. I stayed on the barn, steadily laying shingles, all during the days when Mr. Chamberlain, M. Daladier, the Duce, and the Führer were arranging their horse trade. It seemed a queer place to be during a world crisis, an odd thing to be doing—there was no particular reason for making my roof tight, as the barn contained nothing but a croquet set, some swallows’ nests, and a stuffed moosehead. In my trance-like condition, waiting for the negotiations to end, I added a cupola to the roof, to hold a vane that would show which way the wind blew.

  In some respects, though, a barn is the best place anybody could pick for sitting out a dance with a prime minister and a demigod. There is a certain clarity on a high roof, a singleness of design in the orderly work of laying shingles: snapping the chalk line, laying the butts to the line, picking the proper width shingle to give an adequate lap. One’s perspective, at that altitude, is unusually good. Who has the longer view of things, anyway, a prime minister in a closet or a man on a barn roof?

  I’m down now; the barn is tight, and the peace is preserved. It is the ugliest peace the earth has ever received for a Christmas present. Old England eating swastika for breakfast instead of kipper is a sight I had as lief not lived to see. And though I’m no warrior, I would gladly fight for the things Nazism seeks to destroy. (Living in a sanitary age, we are getting so we place too high a value on human life—which rightfully must always come second to human ideas.)

  The sacrifice Mr. Chamberlain made to preserve the Ideal of Peace reminded me of the strange case of Ada Leonard, the strip artist of superb proportion. Miss Leonard, if you remember, took sick of a ruptured appendix; but rather than have it out she risked her life in order to preserve, in unbroken loveliness, the smooth white groin the men of Chicago loved so well. Her suffering was great, and her courage admirable. But there comes a point beyond which you can’t push Beauty, on account of the lines it leaves in the face. Peace is the same. The peace we have with us today is as precarious and unsatisfactory as the form of a strip artist with peritonitis.

  It is not likely that a person who changes his pursuits will ever succeed in taking on the character or the appearance of the new man, however much he would like to. I am farming, to a small degree and for my own amusement, but it is a cheap imitation of the real thing. I have fitted myself out with standard equipment, dungarees and a cap; but I would think twice before I dared stand still in a field of new corn. In the minds of my friends and neighbors who really know what they are about and whose clothes really fit them, much of my activity has the quality of a little girl playing house. My routine is that of a husbandman, but my demeanor is that of a high school boy in a soft-drink parlor. This morning, carrying grain to my birds, I noticed that I was unconsciously imitating the young roosters—making a noise in my throat like a cock learning to crow. No farmer has the time or the temperament for vaudeville of this sort. He feeds his flock silently, sometimes attentively, sometimes absentmindedly, but never banteringly. He doesn’t go round his place making noises in his throat.

  Another time I caught myself carrying a paper napkin in my hand, as I wandered here and there. I have never seen a farmer carrying a paper napkin around his barnyard.

  For all its implausibility, however, my farming has the excitement, the calamities, and sometimes the nobility of the real thing. For sheer surprise there is nothing to beat this life. For example, I had read widely on the subject of lice and mites, had treated my flock diligently. The specter of infestation was with me constantly. Yet when trouble finally came to my farm, it was not my hens that developed lice, but my Victrola. The old machine, I discovered the other day, is fairly alive with parasites—in the seams where the old needles lodge, and running in and out of the little cup where old and new needles mingle in democratic equality. I use Black Leaf 40 (nicotine sulphate) for my hens, smearing it on the roosts according to directions on the bottle. But I’m damned if I know how to apply nicotine sulphate to a Victrola, and there is nothing in my agricultural bulletins that covers the subject. I suppose I could rub the stuff on a Benny Goodman record and let him swing it, but it sounds like a mess. It is this sort of thing that makes the land so richly exciting: you never know where the enemy is going to strike.

  [ November 1938 ]

  CHILDREN’S BOOKS

  Among the goat feathers that stick to us at this season of the year are some two hundred children’s books. They are review copies, sent to my wife by the publishers. They lie dormant in every room, like November flies.

  This inundation of juvenile literature is an annual emergency to which I have gradually become accustomed—the way the people of the Connecticut River valley get used to having the river come into their parlor. The books arrive in the mail by tens and twenties; we live with them for a few crowded, fever-laden weeks and then fumigate. Lacking shelf space, we pile them everywhere—on chairs, beds, davenports, ledges, stair landings. Some of them we tuck away in spidery cupboards, among the crocks and fragments of an older civilization. Turn over a birch log on my hearth and you won’t find a beetle, you’ll find Bumblebuzz, the chronicle of a bee. Throw open the door of our kitchen cabinet, out will fall The Story of Tea. Pick up a sofa cushion and there, mashed to a pulp, will be a definitive work on drums, tomtoms, and rattles. For the past three weeks I have shared my best armchair with the Boyhood Adventures of Our Presidents and a rather heavy book about the valley of the Euphrates. Mine is an uncomfortable, but not uninstructive, existence.