The Smallholding

Copyright 1985 David E. Cortesi

What was his vice would before long become his salvation.

Roger had by long practice trained himself to achieve a dual awareness with a continuity and consistency that a monk or yogin might envy. He truly walked in two worlds, one shared with us, the other created by his imagination.

Its heart was a farm, a smallholding of only five acres but perfectly suited to the kind of modern, self-sufficient homesteading that was tantalizingly sketched _The Whole Earth Catalog_ and heartily advocated in the books that Roger had ordered from its pages.

The farm's lower, southern boundary was a year-round stream bordered by a swampy meadow in which Roger had constructed a fish pond. Summer evenings, especially in the real world's winter, he liked to stroll around its bank. He'd watch the swallows as they swooped for insects, their wingtips just ruffling the still, sunset-painted water as they rose. Then, with a fishnet on a long pole, he would hoick out a fat carp for his dinner.

The land rose up gently from the water meadow, and he'd divided this two-acre slope into several grazing fields through which, month by month, he rotated his livestock, first the two Guernsey cows, then Walt, the horse, and last a trio of sheep, each animal cropping the grass nearer the ground. The hens and the geese ranged where they would.

The land levelled above the pastures, and there he had sited the farm buildings, the cottage standing close to the barn. Both were of gray stone with small windows. Their roofs were thatched with reeds he'd cut in the beds that grew in the shallows where the stream met a calm, unnamed sea.

Behind the house was a large garden. Beyond it was an orchard with a variety of fruit trees. Then came another gently rising pasture, fenced at the top by the dark woodland that ran unbroken as far as -- well, all the way around the compact sphere of his world, he would have supposed had he ever thought about it, so that the same forest bordered the opposite side of his stream.

His workaday world was relentlessly urban, but Roger's visionary world had only one town and he rarely visited it. From his farm he pictured it only as a sort of opening or weak spot in the world coat of forest. A track led from it, past his upper field, and on to -- somewhere else. (Roger couldn't spare much mental energy on filling in these outer margins.) When he permitted himself the need to go to town, it was an all-day excursion. As on any day, he'd wash his bearded head under the pump outside the cottage door while he shaved in a cluttered bathroom. As the Eastern sky turned pink he'd milk the cows, forehead pressed to a warm, breathing flank as he snuffled dry cereal and milk and ignored his son's babble about motorcycles. He'd make a quick round of the other stock as got out his car keys, and he'd swing off down the woodsy track as the sun's first light touched the treetops and he backed into the street.

Each time he had to stop his pickup at a traffic light, he'd slip off to catch up with his other self, who'd be crossing a stream on a mossy bridge or pausing to admire foxgloves by the roadside or sampling huckleberries growing from a rotted stump. So fine was his control of his vision that he'd have the truck in gear and moving while the tartness of the berries was still on his tongue.

Around ten o'clock, when the horn of the roach coach would play _Colonel Bogie_ in the alley behind the loading yard and the warehousemen would go out to buy sugared things in cellophane and weak coffee in cardboard, he would also be stopping at a tumbled stone wall on the brow of a hill to eat sharp homemade cheese and a crisp pickle (homegrown cucumber, dill picked beside the kitchen door). He'd slurp and stare at windblown newsprint; he'd crunch and look out over the gray stone town under its haze of blue woodsmoke. When break was over he'd crumple the paper cup and drop it, fold the polka-dot blue kerchief and tuck it in a pocket; trudge back to the loading dock, swing down through gardens to the marketplace.

Since he visited it so seldom, he didn't see the town and its inhabitants with the same bright detail that he saw his farm and animals. When he used the horse-drawn cultivator to weed his cabbages or corn, he could see every hair on Walt's backside, see each crumb of loam press up around his hooves. The buildings around the market square, by contrast, were vague windowed fronts on a raised board sidewalk. The merchandise in the stores was the acme of Victorian ironmongery -- fine plows and froes and mattocks and cheese presses and cream separators -- mixed with the best of artisan's work in leather and wood. But the peoples' faces were pink blurs and the storefronts anonymous.

Then one day something intruded.

He had planned a town day, and he persisted with the plan even though he had been distracted from the jaunt down the hill by a sharp pain while moving his bowels. After recovering the vision, he was surprised to find that the town square had acquired a bank.

It had a fine plate-glass window with neat gold-leaf designs at the corners and "BANK" in gold-leaf Gothic letters at the top. The door had many small, bevelled-glass panes and an ornate brass handle. Surprised, offended, Roger stopped dead in the aisle of the freezer room and with his breath frosting the air before him, turned in the warmth of a spring afternoon to enter the bank. The floor was black tile; the walls had mahogany wainscoting to waist height and beige-painted plaster above. Halfway back was a mahogany desk centered on a green rug, with a gas fixture hung in the stamped-tin ceiling above it, a black-lacquered iron safe beside it -- and an elderly man in a squeaky roller chair behind it. And his face was clear: ruddy cheekbones and hollow cheeks, a neat white moustache and unruly white eyebrows, gold-rimmed glasses and cool, cool blue eyes.

"Mr. Schulz, I'm delighted to make your acquaintance," he said, and stood and leaned over the desk with his hand extended. Bewildered, Roger shook it (in the freezer room his gloved hand twitched on the steel cart).

"You come to town so rarely; I almost never see you. I hear you have a fine little spread out there." The banker was still shaking his hand, patting his shoulder. Roger mumbled something, syllables mixed from "Thanks" and "Uh, guess so."

"Good, good." Somehow, they were standing by the door. "Well, anytime we can be of service, don't hesitate to call. Your credit is certainly good with us." And he was outside, left shoulder and right hand still warm from contact, the door latch clicking solidly behind him. A clean beige blind now blocked the bank's window. The rest of the town was as vague as it had ever been.

Roger was suddenly taken with a wave of nausea where he stood shivering in the freezer room. Later, waiting patiently for the left-turn light at 240th and Airport Road, it was a relief to clear the forest margin and look down on his farmstead. At home, he raised the hood of the pickup and checked the oil, stealing an undisturbed minute to enjoy the way the evening light warmed the stones of his old cottage.

But the leaves of some of the potato plants in the garden were black and powdery.

The next day he fought that blight as best he could. He dug out the affected plants and hauled them in his wheelbarrow to the extreme edge of his land where he gathered sticks and started a fierce bonfire and burned them. But just beyond the fire he found a scatter of feathers and one forlorn wing; some predator had come out of the woods and eaten a hen. And when in the men's room a cramp doubled him up on the toilet seat and he slipped back to the farm for comfort, he found more blighted potatoes and gopher mounds all across the herb garden. And when he stood up, his stool in the toilet was black with blood.

The next day's trek to town was more of a forced march than a hike, and he trotted into the square only a little after arriving at work. He'd bought productive tools and implements before, but always under a vague barter arrangement, trading promises of cheese or produce for what he needed with a genial storekeeper with blurry face and a handlebar moustache. Today he needed a kind of merchandise his farm had never required before: gopher traps, fox traps, fungicide and a pump sprayer. Maybe a rifle.

Such things weren't to be had in the blurry general store, it turned out. The genial storekeeper only waved his hands ineffectually and pointed across the square, toward the bank. The bank? No. Crisply visible beside the bank there was now a True-Value Hardware store, precisely like the one in Foundry Plaza at 218th Ave.

Precisely like it inside, as well, from the stock to the cash register that beeped as each key was pressed. The clerk, who could have been a younger brother of the manager of the bank, bagged his purchases, the brown bottles of fungicide clinking on the canister of the sprayer. And rang them up.

"That's eighty-three forty-two, sir," he said, and smiled.

Roger could only look at him. He had no wallet.

He blushed, said "I," and stopped. Said "I usually," and stopped, looked hopefully at the clerk, out the window at the general store across the way. The clerk only smiled and waited.

"Perhaps I could... Some eggs, pickles..." No. The words were wrong in these surroundings. He smelled cardboard coffee and jet fuel, and his stomach heaved. He pushed the brown paper bags a little toward the clerk. "Sorry, I don't have any money."

"Oh, that's all right, sir. They can help you at the bank next door, I'm sure. I'll just keep your purchases all ready right here. You step next door and they'll fix you right up."

And they did fix him up. That is, the pink and white man with the cool eyes, whose desk he hesitantly approached as he climbed the steps to the loading dock, welcomed him and explained that money was no problem.

"I, I'm not sure if I want a loan or, or what," said Roger.

"No, a loan wouldn't be practical, interest low income repayment schedule," said the bank manager, or that was how Roger heard him.

"It might be better portfolio-wise if instead you disposed of some surplus property," the manager smiled.

"Surplus property," Roger echoed blankly.

The bank manager waved expansively at the horizon. "Empty, unproductive forested lands. You're a very significant landholder hereabouts, really our only one. Yet."

"Oh. You mean I could, sell...?"

"Exactly. Shall we say, ten thousand acres?" A piece of paper was on the desk, and a fountain pen. "That should cover your hardware bill nicely."

Roger was suddenly aware of the warmth and the humidity in the air. It was perfect weather for a fungal blight to spread. The floor beneath his feet seemed yeasty with gophers. He signed, and fell to his knees on the loading dock, his head whirling and stomach cramping.

For long minutes he could see only this world, and that dimly, but when he was in the ambulance the cramps eased and he could resume the hike home, clasping the brown paper bags before him as he clutched his abdomen here. As he left the ridge above town the breeze carried to him the sound of a distant chainsaw, the snort of a distant bulldozer.

Roger could almost have enjoyed the hospital, had he not been so tired that he kept nodding off. Like all patients, most of his time was given up to waiting: on a table for a test to begin, on a gurney for someone to wheel him back from a test, for a doctor to tell him what the test revealed, for night to fall, for night to end. Unlike most patients, he had plenty to occupy him while he waited. He had a farm to save.

He dug out diseased plants and burned them. He sprayed the rest, walking up and down the rows with the heavy spray canister on his shoulder. He set gopher traps on some tunnels and flooded others. Another chicken had been taken; this time the feathers had been scattered near the barn door. He repaired the chicken coop and made a point of herding the birds into it at dusk.

One cow was down, coughing and heaving for air, and Walt the horse was drooping. He spent most of the night in the barn, helplessly attending first one of them, then the other. Deep in the night the geese set up an awful fuss of honking and wing-flapping. He stood in the door of the barn and looked down toward the pond and the stream, but could see nothing. He took the oil lantern and walked slowly, hesitantly, down the lane but found nothing.

At the first hint of light in the sky he started again for town. Half-way there he was interrupted; he had to take light anesthesia for a gastroenteroscopy. Coming up from that he saw that the stone wall on the ridge above town, the place where he'd stopped to eat his lunch each market day, had been bulldozed away into a heap of yellow earth. The entire ridge had been carved into terraced building pads. He could make out a street plan of intestinally curved cul-de-sacs, just like the streets of Foundry Dell.

"A vet?" said the bank manager. "Why, you're fortunate there. We've never had a vet in town before, but owing the vigorous growth of the area I believe a fine young fellow has recently moved in. In fact, his office is just there, other side of the hardware."

"Do you know what he charges?" whispered Roger.

"Oh, certainly not a great deal," smiled the bank manager.

"Not, uh, not payment in kind?"

"Oh, I don't think so; that's pretty old-fashioned." There was a paper on the desk. "But why consider it, when you have all that fine seafront property?"

The vet, who might have been the son of the hardware clerk, drove Roger back to his farm in a four-wheel drive pickup with immense, knobbed tires. It bucked and bounced sickeningly through the deep mud of the forest road. At one point there was a trumpet blast behind and the vet pulled aside between the trees, crushing ferns and trilliums, to let a logging truck howl down past them.

As the compression growl of the log truck's diesel faded, Roger took a moment to attend, bleakly, to his doctor.

"Well, Mr. Schulz, we took a peek inside you today, and we hoped to find a simple ulcer, which, though it's no fun to have, is not hard to manage."

"You didn't," Roger said. He knew it wasn't a simple blight.

"Well, that's right, we didn't. I'm afraid we found something quite a bit more serious, a growth in the lower third of your stomach. We snipped a bit for a biopsy, and I'm sorry to say that it is malignant, and a type that moves fairly fast."

The pickup was idling on the slope above the farm. Roger could see through the mud-splashed windshield that the vet was no longer needed. The stable doors had been burst open. Below the barn, the fishpond wall had been broken, and from the break a muddy trail lead to the barnyard. At its end, a toothy, pink lizard nuzzled the open carcass of the horse. Its skin was filmed with a rainbow sheen. It was immense; it could rear above the peak of the barn roof and search the slope for prey with its bulging, blind, white eyes.

"We can have it out without too much trouble," said the doctor, "and you won't miss that much stomach. The danger is that the growth might have metastasized."

The barnyard was littered with huge eggs and broken eggshells. Smaller pink lizards were quarrelling over the detached head of a Guernsey cow. "You mean multiplied," Roger said. "It has."

"Now, you have to keep a positive attitude," said the doctor. "We'll hope for the best."

"You need an exterminator," said the vet.

"Yes," said Roger, and the vet backed the truck around and started back up the asphalted road to town.

"Out of the question, I'm afraid," said the bank manager, after he'd tapped the keys of his terminal and peered into the screen. "These people use special equipment. You simply don't have enough assets to pay for it. Your farm's in pretty poor shape, I understand."

"What I was thinking," Roger said carefully, "was that if you owned the whole place, as property owner you might do the extermination yourself. To protect your investment."

"Well, that might be true," said the bank manager. A new paper appeared on the marble counter between them. "If we owned it all."

Roger spent the night at the new Howard Johnson's outside the village, and at dawn, as they wheeled him down the hall to the operating theater, he waited in the parking lot as a sparkling blue and white helicopter set down. The exterminator, who might have been the teenage son of the vet, waved through the bubble, and Roger ran through the gale of the blades to clamber over the high sill. He was still trying to work out how to latch the seat belt when the chopper lifted with a swoop. He had barely oriented himself to the trend of the coastline (fringed with docks and white beach houses) and of the highway (a black ribbon that clipped over forest gulches on new white bridges) when the machine stooped like a hawk over his farm.

The largest lizard, tail lashing and belly heaving, climbed half onto the barn roof to hiss at them. Its right front foot tore through the thatch just as the exterminator thumbed a switch to release a flight of rockets. Two went down the creature's throat and exploded inside it; its death struggles completed the demolition of the barn. The pilot hopped the machine higher and released a bomb that fell through the thatch of the cottage; the cottage walls fell outward in four directions and the roof dropped into the center, blazing. Small lizards scattered. The pilot sought them out with machine-gun fire. Afterward, he stitched over the farm like a dragonfly, dropped incendiary bombs on caches of eggs. At last he yanked them up and away.

"That's about it," he shouted over the roar. "How 'bout I drop you off there?" and dived down at a cluster of buildings in a tangle of streets.

"Why not," said Roger, and climbed out. He was in the parking lot of a hospital identical to the one in which he lay. Briefly he wondered what he'd find if he walked in and asked to visit himself, but then the vision hazed over.

Lately, at break times, sitting on the edge of the loading dock, old habit makes Roger try to slip into his old vision. He used to have a trick of the ocular muscles, a defocusing, that helped move from one mode of seeing to the other. The feeling in his eyelids is still the same, but it makes no difference to what he sees.