The Farm by Jere Hoar

The Farm
Jere Hoar

I was born on Black Tuesday before the stock market crashed. Like others in the Depression, my stepfather had to move his family wherever jobs or rumors of jobs existed. We lived in a forgettable number of places. I attended thirteen primary and secondary schools in nine states, was later stationed at five Air Force bases, and attended four universities. Such a moving-man is likely to long for a home.

We found this remnant of a farm -- 65 hill acres, a house, barn and abandoned smoke house, outhouse, and chicken house in the spring of 1962. We had two children, another on the way, and I was an associate professor at the University of Mississippi, paid $6,300 a year.

Quince and forsythia were flowering. Jonquils bloomed in beds, the yard and pastures. A heirloom red bush rose was budding. The largest yellow jasmine in North Mississippi climbed a broken trellis, and a snowball bush ten feet tall stood on the east side of the house. We picked asparagus sprouts, and there were other delights: a capacious barn with a hay loft; gnarled apple trees and tangles of grape vines on the sunny side of orchard hill; a hand-crank telephone on the kitchen wall; window panes of wavy glass; a big farm bell mounted on the stubbed limb of a cedar tree. Cotton scales and mule-drawn farm implements lay about.

The barn alleyway separated small, open-ended stalls for feeding animals, a huge corn crib with board and wire sides, and a feed room with old harness and horse shoes hanging on the walls. It had been a horse barn, not a cow barn. The sweet smell of the place told me that. Sunlight slanted down through nail holes in the tin roof. The loft could store six or seven hundred square hay bales. The breezeway was angled to catch any stir of air. This would be a fine place for children to play, and we already owned two horses. I could hardly wait to move them to this sweet smelling barn.

The oldest part of the farmhouse was built in 1884 with rectangular cut nails. Some of the beams perched on the spindly brick foundation looked hand-hewn, and were as thick as railroad ties. Each window seemed to be individually sized, not a door frame was squared up, and the floors slanted enough to roll a marble. Before I bought used floor furnaces and traded a registered colt for fiber glass insulation, the house was cold enough in winter to freeze water in a sink.

The farm had stories to tell. A door handle low enough for children to reach had been added to the swinging kitchen door, and on the door facing inside, pencil marks recorded their growth. Bits of pottery washed up after rain said Blue Willow had been a household china pattern.

In the barn, under a foot of dry manure, I found a five-foot stockman's crook made by bending and tying a young hickory tree in the way it should go, and harvesting it when it had grown to size and deformity. The big foundation stones that supported the barn were dug by men and hauled by mules. There was no useful native stone on the farm or nearby.

There was much we learned later. A respectable number of gentle ghosts are in residence. Sometimes at night I hear two voices quietly talking. My valiant American Bulldog "Zobie", now dead, would bristle and rumble when a ghost entered a room. Our ghosts habitually use doorways, to judge by the slow turn of Zobie's head and her stare.

But that spring day in 1962 we saw only the possibility of owning a home and land in the country. I signed a note backed by the G.I. Bill for what is now a ridiculously small sum. After 30 years of payments the place was deeded to us. But in a very real sense no one "owns" land. We are its custodians. We add to its story.