Hard Scrabble by John Graves

Author:John Graves [Graves, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781477309599
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2002-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

11

Helpers

I have only scant understanding of the quirk that has made me need to find out so many things in life the hardest way, by doing them or being done to by them, myself alone. Wherever it came from, in terms of Hard Scrabble this attitude has meant making a lot of mistakes, for I grew up only a part-time country boy and much nonrural life had intervened since then, so that there was much to learn. It has also meant long days and weeks and even months together of working hard by myself, and thus of squandering time. For it is an axiom that two men teamed on country tasks do not just halve the time one man requires, but divide it by four or six or so.

Notwithstanding these things, though, I doubt if I had another chance to start work on the place that I would much change the way I went about it. The learning was needful, and if the manner of it led to some errors and wasted some time, it also kept me in fair health through my forties and gave me an intimacy with the land that no other approach would have afforded. And, as all us Old Farts know, it is only through intimacy that you can own a thing. Because ownership dwells not in courthouse files but inside the stubborn, hard-way human head.

Nevertheless, there do come times when you see things slightly otherwise. Times when having learned what there is to know about a given kind of work you would just as soon be able to get through a piece of it faster. Times when country things need doing and noncountry things have a prior claim on you and need doing worse. Times when your aging joints and muscles—which improve not at all in the forties but do well to hold their own—stage a mutiny at such prospects as tangling with three or four miles of new fence all by themselves. And times also, if you are of that ilk for whom understanding or the effort toward it is a main point in life, when you wish desolately that there were more leisure in which to squat down in the shade and hear birds sing and ponder what a country place and your work on it may mean. And it is at such times as all these that you begin to think of Help.

Through most of history, nearly all men who have interested themselves thoughtfully in country life—the improvers of tools or techniques or livestock or plants, the pleasant long line of writers on nature and the soil and the soil’s people, the pleasant longer line of contemplative dwellers on the land—have had a comfortable toehold on one of the middle or upper ledges of a stratified society and have not had to strain their sweat glands much. Thus Vergil and Columella, thus those sturdy and obsessed eighteenth-century squires like Bakewell and Tull and Lord Charles “Turnip” Townshend, and their American disciples like Washington and Jefferson.

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