Tane's Farm/Letter to Duke

One memorable Summer when I was a kid, my brother, Kenny, and I stayed on Taine's farm in Gordonsville, Va. Taine, a distant cousin of my Grandparents, was a tough old Southern lady that knew who her people were for many generations back and had buried several husbands on her journey to that spot. Duke, her grandson, lived with her in a huge colonial mansion at the end of a long driveway through neatly plowed fields . The gravel road circled in front of the house in a heart shape that was shaded by huge Oaks and lined with “Box bushes”. The cavernous house was well over 100 years old with no central heat or air. All but a few rooms on the first floor were closed off to conserve energy and opened on weekends for tourists who paid a small fee to get a glimpse of the “Old South”. I found Duke on the internet recently and wrote him a letter...

Hello Duke!

I guess it’s been about 55 years or so since Kenny & I stayed at Taine’s farm one summer. 1957 perhaps? If I was 9, Kenny was 12. You must have been 15 or 16. Something like that.

Taine always seemed so strong and self confident, much like her distant cousin who I knew better, Alice Clark. They both looked like they had been cured in the beef jerky factory, and were just as tough. I only remember Taine wearing slacks, mostly jodhpurs, more comfortable on horseback than on foot. She gave me cherry bombs to throw at the basset hounds to teach them to stay behind an imaginary Maginot line about 20 feet out from the screen porch. For some reason she didn't like the dogs to get too close to the house. The cherry bombs doubled as grenades to lob into the nests of sparrows that foolishly chose to raise their families in the eves of that red barn/garage. Taine had gotten a new car that summer and was determined to put an end to the bird-poop shower her car was subjected to while parked inside. She paid 25 cents for every pair of sparrow feet that I brought her.

I didn't really know Mr. Snow, your farm hand, but I was keenly aware that he was not like the business men in my white collar neighborhood back home. He really did have a farmer’s tan and I was shocked to see this ruggedly bronzed guy take off his shirt one hot afternoon to expose skin that was almost blue-white. Who were those women that lived in his house? His Mother and sister? Didn't they work? What did they do all day? Where had they come from and what happened to that family when the farm sold? It was very mysterious to me. One of the women would stand on the front porch and just look around, but didn't venture out beyond the porch. Long black hair to their knees and similar dresses to their ankles. Very haunted and gaunt. All that summer I never saw one of them leave the house. I wanted to look inside their place, see how they lived, what their furniture looked like, but of course that didn't happen. I never went into their house, or even went too close. I thought that they had secrets that were best left uncovered.

Mr. Snow was friendly enough though. Certainly he liked to watch “wrasslin” on TV and he came into the main house on Saturday nights to watch Haystacks Calhoun on that little black & white screen in the parlor. One time Mr. Snow let me walk out into the pig field with him and told me to be on my toes around the sow. He said that the pigs were half wild and that they could be nasty. Of course he had trained Watch, that wonderful German Sheppard, to “sick” on command, so I felt safe with him protecting us. Did Watch really pull the skin off of the curly tails of some of those pigs as he taught them a lesson? That was the story and I loved the idea of his savagery that was controlled by a single command.

Having been brought up in a sterile, structured home in the suburbs of New York City, that farm just amazed me. Mutant kittens nestled in the barn straw. The dogs were encouraged to root through and eat any they found. You and Mr. Snow cut the budding horns from young steers and the blood shot out of their heads as if their horns had been replaced with squirt guns. Deaf to their bellowing you rubbed big globs of some kind of caustic goo into the wounds to prevent any continued horn growth by burning the stump into an infertile scar. One afternoon while bailing hay, I got to ride along on top of the baler when it exposed a ground hog that started to scramble for cover. You ran up to it and kicked it under the jaw about ten feet back. Dead as a door-nail. You picked it up and joyfully gave it to one of the guys to fix for their dinner. At our own lunch and dinner Taine served milk in individual quart glasses. I never tried so hard to drink milk. Unpasteurized, raw milk, kept in the stainless steel container that was half submerged in the cool water of the spring house. Every meal seemed like a milk drinking challenge to me.

You often saved me from Kenny when he thought I would make a good BB gun target. You would grab the gun and pepper his ass yelling: “how do you like it?”. That was sweet. You were always laughing and joking too, especially with Taine. One afternoon she was sitting on a lawn chair in front of the porch under that huge Oak, lazy dogs scattered with the leaves on the ground. She said “I thought such and such was true…” You told her: “That’s what you get for thinking when you’re not used to it.” For a 9 or 10 year old kid, that was about the funniest quip I had ever heard.

My family rented the little cottage behind the main house a few times prior to that summer. We stayed there for Easter once. I was probably only 5 or 6 then. Some other kid was there too. I don’t remember who she was. One afternoon she was bathing and yelled out from the bathroom to Judy, “Has Hugh ever seen a naked girl before?” I guess Judy thought nothing of a girl about my age running out to get her clothes and told her “sure, it’s no big deal” Then that little girl slowly walked around the room with her eyes on mine and got her stuff, measuring her effect on me, before going back in to dress. I sat mesmerized. That was the first time I realized there were certain mysteries in life that I knew nothing about but certainly wanted to, if the paralysis ever left me.

As I said on the phone, I suspect you felt about that farm much the way I felt about my own Grandparent’s place in Charlottesville, Sheppard’s Hill Farm. When they sold their land it affected me deeply. I knew every valley, every stream, every hilltop on that farm and thought it would always be there. It was the one thing in my life that was stable and could never change. Route 64 came through though and blasted away the privacy. Silt from the raw, wounded mountain, filled the pond. Grandpa Maverick decided he couldn't keep the place up much longer and opted to move to a condo in town with Grandma. It all seemed like too much change that shouldn't happen. That was in the mid 1960’s and things started to change everywhere throughout the country then. I guess you went off to Viet Nam, and Kenny did too. That changed you both. As for me, my childhood was over and those times I spent in Virginia became much valued memories for me. I close my eyes and entertain them from time to time, like taking out a hidden jewelry box, I examine each memory, each jewel, a whimsical smile.