A Garlic Testament: Seasons On A Small New Mexico Farm by Stanley Crawford (review)

146 Western American Literature It is precisely this moral anesthesia that Kittredge fights: his grandfather’s harrowing numbness to pain of any sort, his family’s mutual alienation and destructiveness, the drunken lurch of Manifest Destiny in the present tense. The Western myth, in all its bloody splendor, is one that doesn’t work out well in living flesh. If we don’t know that yet, we should. So Kittredge tracks the immense disquiet that subtends the myth. His West is like L’Amour’s in its violence, but lacks the quick redemption of a gunshot. It’s a place—like any place—in which we must continue, in which we have relatives, friends, homes, and histories. As he sums up, in the final chapter: We must define a story which encourages us to make use of the place where we live without killing it, and we must understand that the living world cannot be replicated. There will never be another setup like the one in which we have thrived. Ruin it and we will have lost ourselves, and that is craziness. l^erL . RAWLINS Boulder, Wyoming A Garlic Testament: Seasons On A Small New Mexico Farm. By Stanley Crawford. (New York: HarperCollins, 1992. 241 pages, $20.00.) Until I read Stanley Crawford, my knowledge of garlic was purely culinary, a necessary flavoring for some salads and casseroles. Horticulturally I didn’t know a bulbil from a root node. But now, after two hundred and twenty-nine pages of A Garlic Testament: Seasons On A Small New MexicoFarm, I feel I know more about the anatomy and worth of that vegetable than any other of the field. The author, as a bachelor-Californian, educated at two American universi­ ties and the Sorbonne, casually went to the movies one day in the early 1960s and immediately changed his lifestyle. The film was Never On Sunday, about, he writes, “fringe benefits for prostitutes, though the music was lively.” It inspired him to travel to Greece, where he wrote two novels, and on Crete he met and married an Australian girl—Rose Mary. Later, back in San Francisco, together they viewed the film Easy Rider, its message—HEAD FOR THE HILLS. The hills they found were northern New Mexico’s highest altitudes, the Sangre de Cristo range, peaks almost Tibetan in their spiritual purity. In a small watered canyon at 6500 feet, they bought two acres which grew to six—and one day a neighbor brought them a gift of a bucket of garlic bulbs dug from an orchard. There the “seasons” began. The story is one of a man’s love of the soil—“The earth,”writes Crawford, “that sea.”And the sea he found was alien to standard Anglo-American life and living, purely Spanish-New Mexican, folk with a heritage four hundred years in Reviews 147 the making. To them the earth is everything, the foods they grow, the adobe bricks that build their houses, fuels that heat their earthen sculptured fire­ places, their speech, an idiom mountain-made. And a reverence for the life-vein that runs through every rural New Mexican community—that with the Spanish Arabic name, acequia, the irrigation ditch. Page by page he seems to talk to you, this literary truck farmer. He tells of his acre-and-a-half of garlic, his most ardent love, its planting, hoeing, care from sown clove to harvested bulb; the acre of statice flowers, Rose Mary’s depart­ ment; and the two acres of common vegetables, summer squash among them, the sweetest of onions and basil to be made into leafy bunches. There is little mention of money. He writes of growing things with fondness and humility, even the weeds he calls his “companions.” You feel his pride in selling the display of his labor off the tailgate of his pickup truck at the Farmers’Markets of Santa Fe, Española, Taos—and at Los Alamos, where Scientists and men of genius reside. But he has chilling words for the heavily-fenced, closely-guarded Plutonium Facility, dedicated to “the inventing of diabolical machinery”— where, he writes, . . if some scientist or engineer or janitor presses the wrong button in...