We Have All Gone Away

12. Away

12. Awo/ The marriage of two brothers and two sisters, who shared their lives and children, created a penumbra of uniqueness which made each child feel his revealed destiny would demonstrate difference. I became the acknowledged future chronicler and composed tales in hot upstairs rooms during the long summers, fed gossip by everyone, for storytelling seemed as plausible a goal as my siblings' claims to concert pianist, airplane pilot, agronomist, and artist. Heavy with the burden of immortality I thought I carried for them, I tried to grasp the reality of our farm world in order to salvage it and leave. Something of this life should live, for in this way one could surmount the pain of promises glimpsed but not realized. Now we have all gone away. "You seem less like a farmer than anybody I've ever met," people would remark to me. I don't know how much I was trained to achieve this dubious compliment, ranking in my mind with "you don't seem American," which I'd occasionally hear in Iran or England in later years. In truth, I was a dumb farmer, rube, hick, hayseed. The illiterate junk dealer, the lowliest tradesman in town felt superior. His children mocked us because they lived under street lights and had a box at the post office, not R.F.D. Farmers seemed ludicrous to them, smelly 174 We Have All Gone Away and awkward, more familiar with animals than people, couldn't talk. And instead of countering with a pride of occupation, many farmers accepted the attitude, changed to "town clothes" when they had an errand at the bank or grocery store, removed work shoes and stepped into shiny oxfords, took off overalls and drew on trousers with a belt, put on a clean shirt and slicked down unruly hair with water. Towns imposed refinement on crude earth-life. God expected a man to wear his suit to church even in summer, though the fabric was heavy wool. At high school during noon hour, the farm scholars huddled in their cars to eat cold lunches out of tin boxes, while town classmates trudged home to hot meals and conversation with adults. These city children knew how to cut deep with the sharp edge of discrimination. Their parents-store salesmen, bankers, lawyers, filling-station operators-all lived off the economic creation of the farmer and were subtly contemptuous of him for allowing them to reap the middleman's profit. They used brains not muscle, were removed from the degrading physical sweat of body labor. They felt smart. My father, had he lived, might have joyously accepted rural life and passed it on to us, since he was the first-born son who'd willingly taken over Grandfather's land. But Uncle Jack regarded his lot as a sign of failure: he lingered here on the farm, when with a little education he might have become an engineer. Later, when he acquired two United States patents, one for a snowplow and the other for a device on a corn picker which enabled a man to release jammed ears from the rollers without reaching a hand down--endangering it-he had final proof of what his life's profession might have been. Sometimes we wondered, What will happen to the farm? Perhaps Cousin Lloyd, who died at eleven, might have carried it on; certainly his brother Don was never interested. Neither were any of Father's sons--except for my oldest brother, who, like Luther Burbank, was a specialist in plant breeding. He could graft an apple tree to produce five different varieties. Although absorbed by the growth processes of flowers and fruit trees, he wouldn't merely settle for the trade aspects of farming. Away 175 Science was his love. As a horticulturist, he'd pass far beyond his father's humble achievements. The Agricultural College at Ames was an ideal institution for the sons of this farm generation , long before anyone suspected that corporate agriculture was the future program for Middle West farmlands. The same process that produced trim Fords for not too outrageous a price-the mass creations of the assembly line--would eventually apply to farming as well: bigger and more expensive machinery working larger and larger tracts, and cattle feed lots containing a quarter million dollars "on the hoof' in borrowed money from the bank. The intellectual advance of the "ag" scholar...