Why do certain days lie dormant in our memories, ready to arise so vividly that we live them again, no matter how much they make our hearts ache? So it is with that cold, gray morning in early spring when Dad drove the two of us out to the farm. It was thirty years ago, the last year of his life, and I was visiting Kentucky from California, where I taught American history at a prep school. It was my spring break, and I had come alone. My wife, a real estate agent, had several active listings and couldn’t take time off. A native Californian, she never liked visiting Kentucky anyway.
A month later the countryside would be verdant, but as Dad drove toward the farm, the land looked lifeless and bleak. Trees had yet to leaf out, and fields were unplowed. His eyes on the road ahead, Dad squinted, a habit he had when deep in thought. He did not always say what he was thinking. Trying to make conversation, I asked if his tobacco beds had been planted yet.
“No,” he said. “It’s been too cold and wet.”
Dad was wearing a coat and tie, as he did every working day. A lawyer in town, he dressed well—not flashy, but with dedicated respect for how a professional man should look. On this morning we were going to visit the farm and then see my grandmother, recently moved into a nursing home after a fall in her kitchen.
Dad’s car, a land barge of a Chrysler New Yorker, was new since my last visit, and I complimented him on how nice it was. I didn’t always say what I was thinking, either.
“Fabulous car,” he said. “Drives real smooth.”
He cleared his throat.
“The farm will be yours one day,” he said. “What you do with it is up to you.”
His lower jaw jutted forward. “Maybe you’ll just want to sell it.”
I thought he was going to say something more, but he just shrugged. I noticed the space between his shirt collar and his neck, and I felt a pinch of fear. Mother had told me the night before that she was worried about Dad. He was not always finishing his meals. He had seen Dr. Stuart a couple of times and would not tell her why. One morning she walked in on him while he was shaving and he grabbed a towel to cover his chest.
“But I saw,” she said. “Two large lumps. The size of peaches.” She curled her fingers and pressed her knuckles to her mouth.
“Did you ask him about it?”
“Yes, and he told me it was nothing. I asked if he was sure, and he told me to get off his back. You know your father.”
Well, I knew him and I didn’t. Reading him was an art. I was only fair at it; Mother was better. But he’d said, “Maybe you’ll just want to sell it.” Why just? Did that mean selling it would be the easy way out, throwing in the towel, as in “maybe you should just quit?”
Dad had inherited the farm from his father fifteen years earlier, and he employed three men who did the work. Pete and Shorty lived in the two tenant houses. Pete was in semi-retirement after 50 years as herdsman for the dairy cows. Shorty did most of that work, and Moose, who lived with his mother a few miles down the road, farmed the crops—tobacco and feed grains.
As we drove through the dreary morning, I stole glances at Dad. He looked thin, and his face was as gray as the sky. Three months later he would be in the ground.
We parked in my grandmother’s driveway as we always had, and Dad lifted his businessman’s hat from the backseat and fit it on his head. For the first time ever, my grandmother was not there to open her back door, the smell of warm cinnamon rolls wafting from the kitchen. Instead, we walked past her empty house and down the lane, dodging muddy puddles, to the tenant house where Pete and his wife Blanche lived. The house had three rooms—a kitchen, a sitting room, and a bedroom. When my father took over the farm, he had a bathroom built just off of the kitchen, the first indoor bathroom Pete and Blanche ever had. He said it was worth the cost of a bathroom to keep a herdsman as solid as Pete.
The cows were gathered in clumps in the pasture, chewing their cuds and watching us, the only moving objects in their sight. The dank cold seeped through my flimsy California jacket. We stepped onto the small wooden porch, the boards wet from the damp air, and knocked on the door.
Blanche, in baggy blue jeans and an orange sweatshirt, greeted us. Dad removed his hat and we stepped inside. I hadn’t seen Pete in years, and on this morning, sitting in his chair, a horse blanket wrapped around his shoulders, he seemed reserved, even embarrassed—by his frail state, maybe—and he hardly looked at me. In spite of a coal oil stove in the corner, the room was cold. I kept my jacket on.
“Keith is visiting from California,” Dad said. Blanche nodded suspiciously. I wondered if they suspected Dad was ill.
When I was a boy, Pete taught me to milk a cow. He stood by the ladder to the hayloft in case I fell, hosed the manure from my boots, and set me on his knee and let me hold the steering wheel while he drove the tractor. My grandfather was taciturn, stingy, and cold. He would no more have lifted me into his lap that he would have built Pete and Blanche an indoor bathroom. Dad had resisted the worst of his father’s qualities. Each generation makes what progress it can.
Blanche told Dad how Pete had spent two hours that morning using the bush hog. Even semi-retired, he worked harder than the other hands, she said. Pete looked sheepishly at the floor.
Dad turned to Pete. “I don’t want you to do any more than you feel like doing,” he said. “You deserve some rest. This farm would not be what it is without you.”
“Well…” Pete said.
“You’ve always got this place. I’ve told you that.”
“We earn our keep,” Blanche said. “You look behind the calving barn. He done all that hisself with the bush hog.”
“Like I said, don’t do too much,” Dad said.
“I bet he done a quarter acre,” Blanche said.
“How’s the herd?” Dad asked. “What’s the story on the mastitis?”
“Six of ‘em got it,” Pete said.
“Six? Last week it was four,” Dad said.
“It’s Shorty,” Blanche said. “He don’t wash the teats good like Pete always done.”
“Did you tell him?” Dad asked Pete.
Blanche answered, “He don’t listen to Pete.”
“Well, I’ll talk to him,” Dad said.
“Shorty oughta done that bush-hogging hisself,” Blanche said.
Dad bounced his hat on his knee. “Been a right cold spring, hasn’t it?” he said.
“Dogwood winter. I feel it in my bones,” Blanche said, rubbing her kneecaps. “He does, too,” she said, lifting her chin at Pete.
The four of us sat in uncomfortable silence for a few minutes. Dad said, “Well, we’d better get going. We’re going to visit Mother.”
“She coming home soon?” Blanche asked.
“No, she can’t stay by herself.”
“We’d look after her,” Blanche said. “It don’t discommode us none.”
“I know,” Dad said, “but she’s better off there. She can’t get around on her own.”
“Don’t she want to be here on the place?” Blanche asked.
Dad pressed his lips together and then said, “She can’t be home, Blanche. I just told you that.”
“I bet she wants to come home.”
Dad stood up and put on his hat. Pete pushed down on the arms of his chair and struggled to stand.
Blanche helped him up and said, “He’s got stiff from all that bush-hogging.”
Lady, a regal-looking collie, was lying outside the door to the milk house. Seeing us approach, she stood up and barked twice, pointing her slender muzzle to the sky. When we got closer, she wagged her tail. The milk company truck had just left, and Shorty was hosing out the tank. The rich, sweet-sour smell of Jersey cow’s milk hung in the air.
Dad mentioned the mastitis and reminded Shorty to wash the udders well. Dad looked at the clipboard hanging on a nail and remarked that if the bacteria count got any higher, they’d have to start dumping the milk.
“That’s what the driver done told me,” Shorty said.
“When is Doc Riley coming again?” Dad asked.
“He said he’d try to make it this afternoon.”
“I might call you this evening, then.” Shaking his head, Dad said, “It’s always something on a farm.”
I wondered if he said that for me to hear.
The three of us walked through the cattle barn to look at the new calves in their pens. They backed away as we passed, their heads low and their eyes shiny and wide. Lady lay down and alertly pressed her chin to the ground, as if daring one of the calves to jump out of its pen. At the end of the row stood the bull pen, built strong with four by sixes. Sam, the gentle old bull, lifted his massive head over the top board, a copper ring in his nose, his moist eyes gleaming. Sam was black through his head and massively muscled neck, lightening to tan just behind his front shoulders. I never visited my grandmother without strolling through the barn, and I never walked the barn without a long visit with Sam. He was over ten years old. With both hands, I scratched the sides of his large face. He met my efforts by moving his head like a giant dog. His eyes rolled upward, and I felt his wet, heaving breath on my arm. He licked my wrist with his sandpaper tongue.
“I thought I told you to take Sam to the stockyard,” Dad said.
Shorty chuckled. “Pete told me to ask you again. He don’t want to let that bull go.”
“He’s not the one not feeding him twenty-five pounds of hay a day.”
I turned my back to Dad and massaged the insides of Sam’s ears. Sighing loudly, he leaned forward with the look of a beast who could hardly believe his luck.
Shorty lifted a foil pouch from his shirt pocket, took a pinch of chewing tobacco and pushed it into his mouth.
“Sam sired a lot of this here herd,” Shorty said.
“I know that. But he’s been out of service for over a year. You take him next week on stock day.”
Shorty rubbed his chin. “Pete says he remembers the night he had to pull Sam out of his mother with a chain. Didn’t think he was going make it. Went on to be one of our best breeders. Big bull like that, had a sweeter temper than most cows. Never even dehorned him—there weren’t no need. Followed Pete around like a dog.”
“Hell’s bells, Shorty. This is a farm, not a petting zoo. I’m trying to turn a profit here. I don’t want to see him when I come out next week, you hear me?”
“All right, then,” Shorty said, looking at the ground. “He won’t bring much.”
“He’ll bring something. And he won’t keep eating my hay.”
I hung back a minute to scratch Sam’s head at the base of his horns, full of regret at what I had just heard.
As Shorty slid the barn door closed, Dad asked him if Moose was around.
“Naw. Had to take the tractor to town to get the clutch worked on.”
That’s when I realized Dad’s unspoken agenda for the morning was to reintroduce me to his three workers. It’s also when I realized that Dad was dying and knew it.
Shorty leaned over from the waist to spit tobacco juice on the ground. “I reckon I’ll take old Sam in, then.”
“You do that,” Dad said.
On the drive to the nursing home Dad was silent for a while, and then he snorted and said, “Hell, I can’t keep feeding that bull. Shorty and Pete are good workers, but they don’t know a damn thing about the business end of a farm.” Then he added, “You know what I mean?”
“Yeah,” I said. Trying to sound agreeable, I added, “You’ve been using artificial insemination anyway, right?”
“Yes. It’s more economical in the long run, and you don’t have to worry about injuries during the breeding. It’s better all around.”
I knew he was stewing. Inwardly, Dad suffered conflict like cuts that stung and were slow to heal. That’s why I outwardly agreed with him. But inside, I was having a fantasy of having Sam shipped to an animal sanctuary where he could live out his days in a pasture.
“It’s hard for medium-sized farms these days,” Dad said. “Milk prices aren’t good, and tobacco prices have been falling since they started letting imports in.”
Maybe Dad was suggesting that my selling the farm would be prudent, not a defeat.
As we drove, I remembered what visits to my grandmother on the farm had been like. After cinnamon rolls in the kitchen and a glass of fresh milk from the dairy to “wash them down,” she’d ask us to “sit a spell.” In the summer we sat on the front porch where there was usually a soft breeze, even on the hottest days, and in the winter we sat in the parlor where she would toss a couple lumps of coal on the fire and stab them with the poker to bring up the flames. As soon as there was a lull in the conversation, she would start a story.
One of her stories was about the house burning down. It happened during World War II when Dad was in the army. Cleaning out the upstairs attic one afternoon, she smelled something burning. When she made her way out of the attic, the house was full of smoke. The furnace in the basement had started leaking coal oil, which caught fire, and the flames had moved up the wooden stairs and were roaring into the kitchen. “I grabbed the silver chest and the family bible and ran like a deer,” she laughed. Smoke brought my grandfather and the workers running from the fields, and they carried what furniture they could onto the lawn. Everything else burned up. By the time the volunteer fire department arrived, the burning walls had sunk into a heap. My grandfather vowed that its replacement would be brick. “And so it was,” my grandmother said with a sharp nod. “We’re sitting in it.” She liked to give her stories endings.
She loved to tell stories from her girlhood, like the time some local Klansmen rode up on horseback and called her father onto the front porch. He had refused their invitation to join, and now they threatened to beat him. One held a horse whip. When they began to drag him off the porch, the screen door flung open and out marched his wife—my great grandmother—with a small American flag in one hand and the Bible in the other. She accused the men of being un-Christian and un-American. She thrust her Bible at each man, calling him by his full name and then speaking the names of his wife, his parents, and his children. “What if they could see you now?” she fumed. Reduced to chastened schoolboys, the men climbed on their horses and rode off the place. “Whenever my mother saw one of them in town,” my grandmother laughed, “she starred them down until they dropped their heads.”
Dad grew visibly drowsy during these stories. In the summertime the buzzing of flies and in the winter the soft crackle of the warm fire had a soporific effect, and sometimes his chin would drop to his chest then jerk abruptly up. But for me, the stories were mesmerizing. I wondered if she would tell us a story today.
The nursing home was a big converted farmhouse with eight first floor rooms for the eight guests. A recently-built wheelchair ramp connected the sidewalk to the wrap-around porch.
“We call them guests,” Florence said to me when Dad introduced us. “Because that’s how we treat them.”
“How’s Mother doing?” Dad asked.
“She’s fine,” Florence said, “but she keeps asking when she’s going home.”
“Well, she can’t do that.”
“That’s what I tell her.”
We passed the dining room where a woman fastened in a wheel chair with a seat belt stared at a bowl of soggy cereal. She looked up at us and groaned. Medicinal odors mixed with the acrid smell of urine hung in the air.
As we walked back the dim hallway, Florence told me that they had given my grandmother the best room. “We got her dressed since I knew her grandson was visiting,” she said, winking at me.
We paused and Florence knocked on the frame of the open door. I had not seen my grandmother in a year, and it took me a moment to recognize the old woman sitting in a chair as her. She had lost weight, and she looked lifeless. “Dressed” was a beige housecoat. Dad gave her a peck on the cheek and I gave her a half hug. She put her arm around my waist and patted my back. Florence clicked off the TV and slipped from the room. Dad and I sat in two metal folding chairs.
“Look who I brought,” Dad said.
“I see,” my grandmother said brightly, looking at me and smiling. The smile made her look more like herself. Then she turned to Dad and the smile fell from her face. “Have you come to take me home?”
“No, Mother. And we’re not going to talk about that today.”
Her room was wallpapered in patterns of cardinals in trees. The once red birds had faded to a dusty rose. The linoleum floor was asparagus green.
“Honey, please take me home.”
“Now Mother, we’ve been over this. Don’t you remember how you fell and banged up your knee? What if you fell and broke a hip?”
The scab and bruises were visible on her knee. The doctor suspected a small stroke had made her gait unsteady.
“Well, what if I did?”
“Now don’t be silly. Keith, tell her about your new job.”
I told her I had been made head of the history department. On this morning, it could not have seemed less important.
Dad said, “Don’t you think that’s great?”
“Yes, t’is,” she said, smiling at me again. I sensed that her mind had dimmed and that she no longer had it in her to tell a story. She turned back toward Dad and said, “Please let me go home. It’s all I ask.”
It was not her words as much as her desperate, pleading tone that nearly unhinged me.
“I never thought I’d end up this way,” she said. “It’s like jail.”
“Now Mother, don’t talk like that,” Dad said. “Florence is real nice. Don’t be like this.”
“The food here is just terrible,” she added. “It’s all out of cans.” Her mouth turned down and she shivered.
Dad was right—she might fall and break a hip. She was also miserable here. She had lived on the farm for sixty-five years, the last fifteen of them by herself. She must feel like an animal snatched from its cozy den and locked in a cage. I imagined myself in her place. I would want to be home, too. If I broke a hip and shortened my life, so be it.
“Keith came all the way from California to see you. Aren’t you glad to see him?”
“Well, yes. But I want to see him in my own home. I want to bake him cinnamon rolls.” She started to cry softly. I swallowed hard.
Bouncing his hat on his knee, Dad looked around and said, “This is a nice room, Mother. You’ve got a TV and everything.”
Her mouth formed a child’s pout. “I want my own things.”
“What do you want to have, Mother?” Dad said sharply. “Just tell me and I’ll bring it over. Don’t I do everything for you?”
That remark defeated her. She heaved a sign that seemed to expel from her chest the very will to live. I tried to think of something diverting to say, but I couldn’t come up with a single thing. We sat for a while longer. Dad told her some news about people in town. When we stood up to leave, I squeezed her hands in mine. They were ice-cold.
That morning has slept like a seed in my memory for thirty years. Two days later I flew back to California, where I was swept up in the frenetic pace leading to the end of the school year. Dad declined rapidly and died just after our graduation. My grandmother passed away in her sleep two weeks after that, never knowing that her son had died. When I flew back for the second funeral, I stopped by the farm. Sam’s pen was empty.
I surrendered to the impossibility of managing a dairy farm from 2400 miles away and put the farm up for sale. My wife called it a “no-thinker.” When I contacted the real estate man, he said, “Your dad told me you’d probably sell it.” I wondered how Dad had said it—with approval, disappointment, or neutral resignation? Some months later a buyer was found. Mother kept active with some of her friends who were widows, and she enjoyed a good decade before her own death.
Last June I retired after thirty-five years at my school. I enjoyed the summer, but my first September without a classroom to return to left me feeling at loose ends. When I received an invitation from my college fraternity to attend October homecoming activities in Kentucky, I jumped at the chance. I got a cheaper flight by going a day early.
So now it is a Friday morning in October and I am driving toward the farm I have not seen in twenty-five years. Though today is sunny and crisp, and the autumn leaves are blazing yellow and red, I am reliving that cold spring morning lodged in my memory like a stone—the cold wet fields, my forlorn grandmother, and Dad with his thinning neck.
A new highway has been built, and only when I turn onto the county road to the farm does the landscape look familiar. At the junction, the country store with a single gas pump in front has been abandoned. Coming to the crest of the hill, I recognize the big maples in the front yard and the red brick house with two dormers, familiar as a family face.
I pull into the drive, ready for the car to bounce over the cattle guard, but that has been replaced by gravel on solid ground. I step out of the car, sniffing the air for the smell of cinnamon rolls. I knock on the door and introduce myself to a stout young woman holding a baby. I ask if I can look around.
“Help yourself,” she answers. She does not know of my grandparents; the property has passed through several owners over the years.
“No more dairy?” I ask. There are no cows to be seen.
“There are hardly any dairy farmers left in the whole county,” she says. “They can’t make a go of it. Milk companies won’t pick up from a small dairy.”
The lot where the cows grazed after milking is overgrown with weeds—Queen Ann’s Lace, Pigweed, Johnson grass, and Jimson weed. The gate I used to swing on is tangled in brambles so I worm my way through the second and third wires of the fence. I tramp through the weeds, with each step seeing more clearly the dairy’s state of ruin. It’s like a slow-motion kick in the stomach.
The milking barn looks smaller. Its sliding wooden door, large enough for a pickup truck, is missing, so I walk in. The cattle stanchions hang empty and still. Some of the windows are broken, others are translucent with dirt. On the walls, peeling paint curls like dry leaves. Abandoned wasp and hornet nests hang from the ceiling. A section of the roof is missing, revealing a triangle of blue sky. Shoots of dead grass lie matted against the concrete floor.
It feels like an abandoned church. I sit cross-legged on the floor, rest my chin on my fists. I am again a boy, and every day is sunny and warm. Tan Jersey cows stand in their stanchions munching silage from the mangers. My grandfather in his khaki work clothes and straw hat checks the tubes that carry milk to the tank. Pete kneels beside each cow, his cheek pressed to her smooth flank, with a rag and a bucket of soapy water washing her udder, a partnership of animal and man. He attaches the cups of the milking machine to her teats and flips the switch. I hear the gentle, rhythmic pumping of the machine, the scraping of the cows’ hooves on the concrete, the plop of their manure hitting the floor, the sound of their teeth grinding their grain. I see my boyhood self, tow-headed and skinny in short pants, pushing the grain cart on its squeaky wheels. Each cow gets one scoop.
Pete calls them his girls: Rose, Jill, Bumble Bee, Lady Bug, Dancer, Hollyhocks, Crazy Sally, Jumping Bean, Sister Sue. He speaks to them in his own language: “get along now,” “ease up there,” “settle in.” Some of the words are just sounds—musical, strongly inflected, tonal. Hup-hup he says to one coming in late, trotting just ahead of the dog. He directs her into a stanchion, fastens it about her neck. To one he’s finished milking, he says Ee-ow, and she walks through the door to the lot. Outside, the farm has its own music: the lowing of cows, the clucking of chickens, the mesmerizing buzzing of flies and bees, the chirping of birds, the chattering of squirrels in the trees, the occasional tire-hum of a passing car. The rumble of afternoon thunder draws a worried whine from a dog.
I stand, breaking the spell of the past, and I walk through the barn to the brick milk house. The warped wooden door is stuck. I throw my shoulder into it and on the third try, the door pops open and I stumble into the room. I brush the whitewash from the shoulder of my jacket. The bulk tank still sits in the center, the once-gleaming stainless steel now chalked with dust, the temperature gauge clouded over. Against the far wall are the sink, hoses for cleaning the tank, and shelves for supplies. The air that always smelled of fresh milk is now pungent with the acrid smell of rodent urine. A shrunken rat carcass lies in one corner. The windows are filmed over with a grit that gives the sun a honeyed cast, a beatific light falling on the stillness.
A feed store calendar hangs on the wall. Its year is 1990, five years after I sold the farm. The faded photo shows a herd of Jerseys grazing a sunny meadow, tall green corn growing beyond a white wood fence. The month is June, and a number is written in red pen on every other day: 2432, 2340, 2419—the poundage of milk collected by the milk company truck. June 22 is last day with a number. Later that morning, a livestock truck must have pulled up to take the herd to a new farm where they would be milked that afternoon in a different barn. That’s what I want to believe. But maybe the girls were sold for slaughter.
When I leave the milk house, I look to the sky. Feeling disoriented, I realize that the silo is gone, the silo that stood like a visual marker, the first thing you saw driving down the road. The corn crib is missing, too. It must have been dismantled and sold for scrap. The calf barn, where I gave old Sam a face scratch that cold spring morning, has collapsed, its walls and roof folded atop one another like a fallen house of cards, burying memories beneath.
When I get back to the car, the woman reappears on the front porch, baby in her arms. She has thought of a couple of questions. What is the deep hole under her deck? What is that stone structure at the back corner of the yard? When was the house built? The hole would have been the cistern and the stone structure a smoke house where my grandfather cured hams. The house was built in 1943, and I tell her the story of the fire, from my grandmother cleaning in the attic to fleeing with the family Bible. That story has been told on this porch before. When she shifts the baby back and forth between arms, I realize I’ve been running off at the mouth, so I smile and thank her again. She steps back inside. I pull out of the driveway. My last look at the farm is a glimpse of the decrepit milking barn in the rearview mirror.
The next day I skip the homecoming events. That night, my seat at the fraternity dinner remains empty. When I return to California, I lie to my wife and tell her the homecoming events were fun. I could not explain that I flew across the country to spend an hour wandering a dairy farm in ruins. Besides, if I tell her about visiting the farm, I will not be able to express my feelings, to explain what it means—and that I cannot bear.
Since the visit, I’ve been having terrible recurring dreams about the farm. I have inherited the dairy, but I’ve forgotten about milking and the cows went dry. Or Dad returns as a ghost, and he weeps to see how the farm has sunk into ruins, or my grandmother is still trapped in the nursing home, but I’ve somehow forgotten and have failed to visit her in years.
The dank cold seeped through my flimsy California jacket.
*
This story originally appeared in Stories Must Be Told under the title “Remembering the Farm.”
Bill’s book, Conversations with Great Teachers, was published by Indiana University Press and is available here.
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- What We’ve Lost by Bill Smoot - May 16, 2025