My Dad is farm folk. He has thick, calloused hands from decades of hard work, and each of his fingers is a double-wide leathery tube from the various smashes that ploughs or hammers or shovels inflicted upon him over the years. He grew up on a one-hundred-acre farm in Dias Creek, Cape May County, New Jersey. That’s the very bottom bump in the bottom south part of the state. Oh, and if you are from there, or if you are farm folk from another place, you would call it Dias Crick. There were five brothers, a sister and his parents who ran this farm. You will hear or read characterizations of farm folk such as these as hard, or cold or some synonym like that. Yes and no. My dad, his siblings, Warren, Irvin, Herbert, Beverly, Lucky (the baby brother) and his mother, Laura, were all sweet, kind and generous. Just tough. Only Maurice, my grandfather, was hard in the cutthroat way.
Here is an example: There was a time I stayed on Grandpop’s farm for a couple of days without my parents. I don’t remember where they went or why. I was seven years old. It was early AM slop-the-hogs feeding time, and Grandpop took me out to the barnyard to “help” him. Since I didn’t know how to act, how to be, or what to do, he directed me to the slop-buckets (wordlessly) and had me scoop slop (remember, I was only seven, but apparently that’s a fine age for manual labor on the farm) into the buckets so they could be splashed into the troughs with this gigantic, splintery, rusted-over shovel that was so old, I was sure my dad had used it when he was a kid.
I was overmatched, but I kept trying. My hands were blistering up, but whatever, Grandpop was watching, and I was trying to impress. That pipe dream ended quickly. Behind me, I heard a horrible snort, and then I wheeled around and saw what had to be a one-ton hog tearing toward me. I froze, ready to be mauled, ready to die, but then, out of nowhere, Grandpop threw a cantaloupe at the hog’s head. The hog was stunned. Then Grandpop hit him with a shovel and told me to get out of the pen. I was petrified still (I am not farm folk…did I mention that yet? No? No, I am not), so he yanked my little seven-year-old body out of the way and threw me up against the wood pen fence topped by barbed wire. I ran to the gate and unlatched it to escape (I left it open, of course).
Grandpop came seething after me. Yelling about why didn’t I close the gate and why did I let the one-ton hog scare me. I started crying hard. I was terrified and in shock. Grandpop didn’t care. He lit into me about how I was acting like a sissy and an idiot. As if a suburban-raised kid who visits a farm four times a year should possess all the tools to navigate all barnyard situations. He just kept at it, too, making me feel worse and cry more and more. It is one of the worst days of my life. So, that’s Grandpop. A hard-ass. You need to know about him for this telling.
Here is why my father is different: When my dad was around twelve years old, he had a paper route that he delivered on his horse. This was not a young horse; I think it may have even been a retired-to-pasture plow horse. Either way, my dad loved this horse. He really loves horses in general. Whenever we drove by a field with horses in it he would talk to the horses or say, horses are smart. Horses were and are some of his favorite things in the world.
One day, his brothers convinced him that it would be fun to jump his horse over a wooden split-rail fence with the two top rails missing (there are only three horizontal rails in each fence segment). The horse made it over a couple times. The horse got tired (remember, it was an old horse). The horse then missed, tripped and broke its leg. In the 1940’s, when a horse broke its leg, the horse was then useless. Grandpop shot the horse because it was useless. And because he was farm folk. That’s what they do with useless.
I have seen my father cry twice: Once after my Uncle Lucky died young from cancer, and once at my sister Jenny’s wedding (she was the youngest of his three daughters getting married, and he was “giving away” his baby girl, so I think he gets a pass). However, to this day, when he tells the story of losing his favorite paper-route pet horse to a broken leg and eventual death by grandpop assassination, I can tell he is right there on the brink of crying for a third time. See? My father is farm folk because he was “country” enough to deliver newspapers on a horse, but not so farm-folk country that he went cold when his horse was shot because it had become useless.
We had a hound dog named Leon when I was a kid. He was white and light brown. I loved Leon. Since it was the 1970’s, poor Leon was chained to his doghouse in the far backyard. I mean, he had room to move around, but there was a defined area where he stayed. It wasn’t like nowadays. Most people nowadays treat their dogs like favorite children and feed them chicken and rice and egg and etc. Dogs nowadays have the run of the yard, the house—all that. There is a hilarious, family-famous picture of me at five years old dressed as an urban cowboy sheriff. I was wearing shiny black embroidered cowboy boots, a red embroidered cowboy hat, a brown embroidered cowboy vest with a shiny sheriff’s badge and a holster belt holding two cap guns. I was standing just outside the perimeter of Leon’s little dog house area, and Leon was as close to the edge of the perimeter as his chain would allow. And you can tell Leon was barking his head off. Next to me was our little gray cat, Gregory, and Leon was barking at Gregory but couldn’t reach him because Gregory was outside that perimeter, too. Gregory knew this, but he still had his little back arched like those scary Halloween cats they always have in Halloween cartoon pictures or stickers. That’s everybody’s favorite pic. I would spend lot of time playing sheriff near Leon’s area like that. I loved Leon. He was my bestie.
Leon was a howler, and it got to be a problem because we lived in the parsonage next to my dad’s church (my father had left the farm and become a preacher—don’t get me wrong, he always had a huge garden, you can’t take the farmer out of the farm folk). Leon didn’t really bark at the parishioners, but he had this one bad howling habit that sealed his fate.
There was only a long, lot-length driveway separating my dad’s church from our house and yard, and Leon’s doghouse was located below and just across the driveway from a window that was to the left of the pulpit and alter part the church. This was South Jersey, near Philadelphia, so summers were hot, and the church windows were open during morning and evening service. And every time the ladies who sang solos for “special music” performances for church services sang particular notes, Leon would howl. Ooooooo-owhoooo!!! Ooooooooooooo-whoooo-whooooooo!! I mean, it was kinda funny, but it was ultimately too distracting to keep happening during services. So, Leon had to go, and it was decided that Leon would go stay on Grandpop’s farm. This was not a bad idea, in theory. Leon would be able to run free all over the place (the farm was a hundred acres, after all), and I would get to visit him several times a year.
I did get to see Leon for a while. Grandpop’s farm had a circular dirt driveway that nudged up against the yard of his white clapboard house, and most of it was lined with very old Walnut trees that grew thousands of those walnuts with that tennis ball-like covering on them. The tennis ball walnuts were in the trees and on the ground all around them. I would get out of the car, and Leon would run at me. We were very happy to see each other. I would throw tennis ball-covered walnuts for Leon to fetch for hours. After about a year, Grandpop told me that Leon had run away, and I was sad for a good long while every time we visited the farm. Then, we moved to California with our new dog, Heidi, and I forgot about Leon like every kid who grows up and forgets.
Twenty years later, my parents and I were driving to St. Helena where my father’s new church was, and we passed fields and fields of vineyards (this was Northern California wine country). It was early August, so lush grapevines with plump, purple Pinot Noir and Merlot grapes, ready to be harvested, crowded row after row after row in the fields. My head went to Grandpop’s farm, and then, to Leon for some reason. I hadn’t had a dog since Heidi died, and, getting on with my life, had not had time to get one or spend time with one. It was a warm memory from childhood that surprised you as an adult, something you hadn’t thought of in years.
I said, out-loud, to the car, I miss Leon, it’s too bad he ran away.
My dad answered, He didn’t run away. Your Grandpop shot him so he wouldn’t have to feed him.
My dad looked back at me through the rear-view mirror. I think what he saw was his own face in his son’s face, which carried the same almost-about-to-cry-for-only-the-third-time-in-his-life flush that he got when he talked about his own favorite pet paper-route horse that broke its leg and had to be assassinated by Grandpop.
I didn’t tell you back then because I knew you’d be sore about it.
Row after row of leafy, plump, ready-to-harvest grape vineyards whizzed by my window, and my bitterness zeroed in on that hardness that embedded itself in Grandpop. And how unnecessary that hardness was. You could say that farm folk live a hard life, and that Grandpop shot Leon, because of course he shot Leon. It was a hassle to care (with minimum effort at best) and feed a dog that belonged to his grandson. That grandson was a scary city-boy anyway. Everything is in service to the farm’s efficiency. That’s what farm folk do, that’s how they live. I could picture him thinking, And, what the heck, that scary city-boy grandson isn’t even around to feed his own dog, why should I take time out of my day to feed it?
But. My dad is farm-folk ilk, too. And you can make him almost cry when you get him to talk about his pet paper-route horse that Grandpop assassinated, because a horse with a broken leg was disposable and inconvenient and an asset not worth having. Grandpop is not off the hook. There’s farm-folk tough, which is an absolutely accurate description of my father, because he can still chop a tree down in no time at eighty-five years old. Farm-folk hard? That was Maurice. And his brand of farm-folk hard characterizes the soullessness it takes to put a cap in my beautiful Leon and go on with his day like nothing happened.