To the God of Woods and Fields
creative nonfiction by Lisa McCormack
I am driving Dad’s red Ford pick-up along the blacktop highway that leads to a farm that has been in my family over 200 years. I squint and pretend it’s still a dusty country road with pastures of cattle and ponds on both sides, Queen Anne’s Lace growing wild by the roadside, honeysuckle vines clinging to barbed-wire fences. As I get closer, I brace myself for changes I know I will find but don’t want: the big brick entranceway and gate to an elite subdivision; a concrete retaining wall around one sharp curve; huge houses with five acre lots covering the hillsides; and this continuous blacktop, with double yellow lines down the middle like racing stripes.
On the seat beside me is my journal, in case I’m inspired to write a poem; a pair of gloves and a spade if I want to dig some of Grandma Polly’s buttercups to plant in my city yard; and a blueprint of the proposed land divide from our lawyer. I plan to walk the farm with the divide in hand to get a better idea of which property will stay in our family and which will go to the developer who bought my cousin’s half. (My sisters and I begged our cousin not to sell, but he had already distanced himself from the family and had no emotional attachment to the land.)
Now, I want to figure out exactly where the dividing line is drawn. Which side will get the farmhouse, the tobacco barn and corncrib? Who wins the creek-bed, the pond encircled by tall, brown cattails and the quiet woods with a mossy floor? I turn left off the main road and continue to our property. I realize I’m holding my breath and release a huge sigh as the white wooden house where my mother was born and my grandparent’s lived comes into view.
I park the truck in the circular gravel driveway in front of the house and sit for a minute as the engine ticks a cooldown. It’s spring. Forsythia bushes on each side of the front steps flaunt yellow branches reaching to the sky. They need trimming. Buttercups bloom yellow, white and orange along the fence row.
I can’t bear to lose an inch of this 100-acre property. It’s the stomping ground of childhood, the place that brings me happiness and inspiration, land I thought I’d always have in my life. I think of my newborn granddaughter, Maeve, and wish I could preserve the farm not just for me, but for her, for one more generation of children to ride ponies over the fences, chase feral kittens in the barn and catch frogs in muddy ponds. I wish Maeve could know the farm as I knew it. I wish I could bring it all to her, like it was back then.
I imagine Maeve as an eight-year-old, running through the hay fields and finding a hiding place for herself amid the tall summer corn. I imagine she would do the things I enjoyed and would embrace this farm with her whole heart. She would gather still-warm eggs from the henhouse and gently carry them to the kitchen. She would feed apples to the horses and delight at the rough scratch of their tongues on hands.
“Come with me Maeve,” I say, imagining myself taking the hand of that Maeve. “You need to know this place. It’s your family’s land and you’re going to love it.”
I wouldn’t have to point out the rolling meadows or the hills that are green and brown and yes, purple, like the song says. Maeve would soak in the lush landscape for herself and catch the scent of cedar trees, manure and clover, of rotting wood and sweet decay. A monarch butterfly would pause on a bramble, open and close his black and orange wings for us like a slow breath, while distant bullfrogs croak to an audience of just us. The rest of the world would feel far away.
“Everything on this side of the creek is ours,” I tell her. “That old tilting barn, those cows and the brown and white pony just your size for riding bareback. That’s our tool shed and smoke house, our chicken coop. The farmhouse with the glider on the sagging front porch, all ours. Grandma Polly will be waiting for us inside with cokes on ice and butter cookies.”
But no, that landscape has already eroded. Polly is gone. Surrounding farms have been developed into subdivisions. The once bucolic land across from us has been bulldozed, littered now with large yellow construction equipment, like hulking giant transformers. By the time Maeve is really eight, the farm will have long been divided and half of it developed into a subdivision. Who knows what other changes will have taken place.
I googled statistics about disappearing farms and learned that about 20 million acres of farmland in America vanished in the last five years. It seems more drastic and emotional to me than the numbers show, though. I sigh, gather my journal and the blue-lined divide and step out of the truck.
I’m a fiction writer, not a poet, but the urge is strong to compose a poem about the place from which I draw so much inspiration. My ancestors lived here. They were Confederates and preachers, yellow-dog-democrats and farmers. My great grandfather owned a country store. If the men before him were anything like my grandfather, they were hard-working, passionate and compassionate, they read Bibles and newspapers, spit tobacco and would argue a point just to win. They laughed easily. If the women were like my grandmother, they were resourceful, sweet and smart, could cook and sew and stand their ground.
I unfold the divide and begin walking the land. Does the blue ink line on the map fall on this side of the big rock on the creekbank or below? How much buffer exists between the farmhouse and yet another proposed new subdivision next door? Which side in the lawsuit – us or the developer – will win the row of blackberry brambles that grow along the barnyard fence?
I’ve heard about ancestral memory, a state in which you can
tap into the long-ago thoughts of your ancestors. I think it’s possible, but I’m not sure how to accomplish that state. Perhaps
it’s something bestowed on you, like a gift, a sixth sense, a superpower, or speaking in tongues.
My sisters and I used to pick berries on humid July mornings and eat them right off the vine. We’d return to the house with mosquito bites, scratches on our arms from the thorny bushes, and our fingertips and tongues stained black with sweet juice. Hum. I turn the map around to better get my bearings. Who gets the smokehouse and corncrib, the field where the garden used to be, which Grandfather plowed every year behind mules we named Mike and Toby?
A man pays us to run his cattle on our land now. The grazing animals lift their heads and stare at me as I walk through the back yard and into the adjacent field that will take me to the creek. The cows have made a path for me, leading straight to the water. The grasses on either side of the path grow tall as my knees and brush against my blue jeans. I keep a slim eye out for snakes.
I’m too distracted to concentrate anymore on the divide or the poem, though. Too in love with looking at the land, soaking in its beauty. At the creek, I settle myself on a big flat rock where my grandfather used to sit while my sisters and I played in the water. A breeze picks up. I imagine it’s Grandfather whispering “don’t slip,” because he knows as soon as he says it, we will. And it won’t matter because then we will be drenched and can play in the water as much as we want.
I’ve heard about ancestral memory, a state in which you can tap into the long-ago thoughts of your ancestors. I think it’s possible, but I’m not sure how to accomplish that state. Perhaps it’s something bestowed on you, like a gift, a sixth sense, a superpower, or speaking in tongues. Or maybe it comes to you like a fictional character. Oh, Hello. I see you now! Welcome to this dimension.
I wonder if I sit here long enough can I conjure the thoughts of my long ago relative who first decided to purchase the land? His name was Sylvanias, a derivative of Sylvanus, Roman god of the woods and fields. Can I know how my great-grandmother, Madeline, felt when she sold these acres to her son for $10,000 and how that son, Herman, paid the debt with tobacco money? I sit still as stone and try to sense their spirits. Wind ripples the water and rattles the branches of the big hackberry, providing a voice of sorts, if a voice is what you want to hear.
“I’m trying to keep the land,” I say to the wind, to my grandfather, to my mother, to the god of woods and fields. Tears fill my eyes. “I know, wherever you are, you would want me to,” I say. “But it’s not easy. Just look around at the other farms, at what’s happening.”
No one answers back. But I feel my ancestors close. I imagine that wherever they are, they have a tenderness for the land, too. How, I wonder, did they hold on during the wars, the depression? If I can know how they felt walking the fields and creek banks, how they lived and loved and died here, I could share the memories with Maeve. Or she, perhaps could conjure the memories if she chooses, sitting here on this flat rock after I’m gone.
My practical sisters would roll their eyes and tell me to “get a grip,” that I’m not communicating with spirits on the farm. Why, they would ask, can’t I just report back the facts about the dividing line? Perhaps they are right. If we can just hold on to a part of this land, Maeve can choose to come back to it when she grows up. She could have a small family farm, at least, a place to seek ancestral memory if she wanted to try.
I glance through the tree line at the black top. When I squint, it becomes gravel again. The same dusty road I walked my seven-, ten- and twelve-year-old self along as I went on adventures to the creek, the pond or the woods.
When I began writing, this creek bank became my muse. This is where fictional Emmy got caught kissing a boy when her father and uncle drove by in a flatbed truck filled with cattle. This is where the character Leona threw a rock at a crow because she thought he knew her secrets. This very bank is where two children started a contest to see who could catch a crawfish and hold it the longest. They each grabbed a fat critter and held it right behind the head, between thumb and forefingers as they were taught. The contest had lasted five minutes when they realized neither was going to let go and decided to call a tie.
“We can’t stay here forever,” the boy said. “No, we can’t,” the girl answered. “We’d get eaten by chiggers and miss dinner.”
Perhaps my characters are wiser than me. We can’t stay anywhere forever. The childhood I once romped can’t remain the same. Maybe Maeve will someday see pieces of the farm in my stories and wonder what was real, and what was fiction. Then I would whisper to her in a breeze that everything is real, and she would wonder who said that, or if it was her own thought.
I flip open my journal and tap, tap, tap pen against paper. I want to write a poem. A poem for Maeve about the farm. A poem to my ancestors. But my heart is so full. Where to start?
I glance toward the trees and spot Leona’s crow. He calls out like he knows something about me. Chill bumps pop on my arms. And then I get it. I’m not writing a poem today. This farm is my poetry for now. Let me bask today in this place. A family farm that is ancient yet forever new, at once tactile and elusive, a victim of time, of capitalism and greed, of my cousin and the developers. It’s a piece of ever-changing America.
It’s all mine in my mind’s eye, but really, not mine at all except in memory. Memory I’m lucky to have. A place, a people, I’m fortunate to have known. A farm, or at least a remnant of one, that I’d still like to save.
If eight-year-old Maeve were here, I’d take her hand and suggest we head back to the farmhouse. “Let’s dig buttercups,” I’d say. “You can pick a bouquet for your mother.” The cool breeze of my grandfather’s breath lifts the hair off my shoulders as I head back. A handful of cattle stares at me as I journey though the field. Their eyes ask the question “Who are you and what are you doing in our field?”
At the house, imagined Maeve says she likes the yellow buttercups best.
“Those are my favorites, too,” I say. “Your great-great-grandmother planted those 100 years ago. Her name was Polly. She would adore you, and she would want you to have them.”
Lisa McCormack is an aspiring novelist and short story writer from Mt. Juliet, Tennessee. Her short fiction has appeared in Swing, Third Wednesday, Still: The Journal and other places. She has an MFA in Fiction from Spalding University and has attended for many years the Appalachian Writers Workshop in Hindman, Kentucky. She is currently seeking a publisher for her novels.