The Farm

• PEGGY MURRAY GRECO 

Whenever I go back home to visit, I always drive up to the old Chandler farm on the Nunda Road, park the car next to the spruce tree at the end of the driveway, and walk the side path down to the house. The front porch collapsed years ago and has since vanished under heaps of rotting leaves, but I like to go there at dusk and stand where the porch used to be. From that position, I can look west, straight through the barn whose front and back doors have blown away, and see the sun set. I feel sad when I am there and even sense a physical hurt in my chest, a kind of hollowness that seems to crash in on my heart.

            Sometimes I’m tempted to push aside the rusted lock on the front door and look through the house again. Although there is no one to see, I never do. I have an unreasonable fear that to do so would be to walk over someone’s grave.

            The man who bought the farm 35 years ago from the Chandlers still lives in town and sells real estate. “The land’s a good investment. I bought it for the land,” he said once in response to my father’s complaint about how he had allowed the house and barns to decay over the years.

            My father is still bitter that it is Frank Miller’s farm and not his.

            I remember the day, when I was seven years old, my father came running into the house, grabbed my sister and me and hugged us so hard, we were breathless.

            “Chandler’s selling the farm!” he announced, and then kissed my mother.

            My father wanted to make Mr. Chandler the first offer on the farm and we drove up that same afternoon to see him.

            “Let me show you and your family around before you decide, Carl,” he said.

            First he took us into a big red barn where his three sons sat on tiny wooden stools, milking cows. He stopped next to one of the metal cans and dipped a speckled enamel cup into the foamy white liquid and gave my sister and me a taste of the sweet warm milk. The odor of fresh manure filled the barn and my sister wrinkled her nose at the pungency of it. I took a deep breath, filling my lungs with the hot rich earth smell.

            Then we walked across the muddy barnyard and went into a small white building where he kept the calves. I reached my hand in the pen to touch one and it lifted its head and tried to suck on my fingers. Its tongue felt like sandpaper and I pulled my hand away quickly.

            “Now, don’t go getting attached to them,” Mr. Chandler said to my sister and me, “they’ll be slaughtered for veal in a few weeks.” I looked down the rows of stalls and saw a dozen pair of blue-brown eyes gazing at us in perfect trust.

            We left the small barn and walked through the orchard where Mr. Chandler picked a basket of ripe red Macintoshes for us to take home. When he finished, we headed toward the house, entering through the kitchen door. Mrs. Chandler was standing in front of an old-fashioned wood burning stove, stirring a bubbling kettle. The steam filled the room with the sweet smell of cinnamon and apples.

            My father and Mr. Chandler sat down at the round oak kitchen table to discuss money. “We’re anxious to sell,” he said. “We want to be out by the end of the month.”

            While they talked, we followed Mrs. Chandler up the curved white staircase to see the bedrooms. The four rooms were large, each having an enormous closet and, most important, every room had wide windows that looked out on the orchard or the fields.

            The west bedroom faced the barn and I could see a few cows still grazing on the hill beyond. This was to be my room. I knew when we lived there, I would have a horse and that when I woke up in the morning, I would be able to look out my window and see him running impatiently in the barnyard, waiting for me.

            We went back downstairs and Mrs. Chandler returned to the kitchen to stir her applesauce while my mother, sister and I sat on the front porch to wait for my father to finish the business with Mr. Chandler. Pretty soon, we heard their voices coming through the house and they walked out on the porch. They both looked pleased and, when we left, everyone shook hands and smiled.

            All the way home, my parents talked about the farm. My mother would have a big dining room, and a fireplace in the living room and master bedroom. My father would finally be able to farm – something he had always dreamed of doing. He told us that he was eight years old when the house was built and even then, he felt that someday he would live there. He had transferred his longing to me and his dream had become mine. While my mother chatted about the color she would paint the kitchen and the kind of curtains she would hang in the dining room, my sister and I whispered to each other about the animals we would have on the farm. Lambs, ponies, dogs. We would run through the fields surrounded by sheep dogs, and collies, and beagles, and shepherds.

            My mother put her head on my father’s shoulder and said softly, “It’s a dream house.”

            As far back as I could remember, the high point of every ride in the country was stopping on the Nunda Road to look down the evergreen-lined driveway at the white clapboard house and the red barns. In the summer, morning glories climbed the porch trellis, engulfing the house in flowers so blue that sometimes it looked as though a piece of the sky had fallen. In the winter, the sun would transform the snow laden pine trees into a shimmering crystal forest.

            Our house in the village was for sale and my mother and father waited impatiently for the bank loan to come through so we could make the Chandler farm ours. Even though I was just seven years old, I could sense the difference in my parents once they had made their decision. My mother hummed to herself as she cooked dinner and they didn’t argue with each other over silly things anymore. Instead, they talked of the farm.

            The following week, my father drove up to give Mr. Chandler a binder and to reassure him that the loan would soon come through. My mother and I were sitting on the front stoop when he came back. We both looked up and waited for him to get out of the car, but he sat there for what seemed hours to me, although I’m sure it was just minutes. Finally he opened the door, got out, and walked toward the house. I could see his eyes were red and my mother saw it too. She held her hand in front of her face as if to shield herself.

            “We lost it,” he said flatly. “Frank Miller offered him $700 more and he took it.”

            I never heard them talk about the farm again after that day. Much later, I remembered that it was then that my mother stopped humming to herself in the kitchen and my father didn’t whistle on his way home from work at night.

            One evening, a few weeks after we had lost the farm, I lay down on the living room rug to play with my sister’s cat. My mother was cooking in the kitchen and I could smell the sweet spicy applesauce simmering. I looked at the cat’s cold green eyes and suddenly thought about the little calf’s round wet eyes watching me through the slats of the stall in Mr. Chandler’s barn. I pushed the cat away from me and, startled by the unexpected roughness, she scratched my hand. After that I didn’t bother with the cat anymore and hardly ever thought about the farm. It wasn’t until I was much older and had left home for good that I could look back, separated by time and space, and see what the farm had meant to all of us.

            Now I see the farm, decayed beyond repair, like the brief dream we shared. I like to stand where morning glories once climbed the porch trellis and look toward the west, through the gutted barn, and watch the sun set behind the knoll. When the sun has gone and the barn disappears into the darkness of the landscape, I go back home.

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Peggy Murray Greco grew up in Mount Morris, NY, an historic village in Livingston County. Much of her writing reflects the influence of her small-town upbringing during the Great Depression and World War II. “The Farm” was inspired by an event she experienced as a child.

The Farm was first published in 2021 in Turning Points: Owl Light Literary No. 1. You can also listen to a reading of The Farm by Peggy’s husband, Joe Greco.