It is dangerous to try to save people — very dangerous indeed! I have never heard of a human being who was strong enough for it. Heaven is an inspiring goal, but what if on the way the soul is lost in hell?
When I reflect upon the years that I have spent in this American world of mine, I discover that against the quiet steady background of home and work, they divide into what I have done over and beyond my daily life. For example, our farm—
Twenty-one years ago — it is as long as that — when I first saw my house, postage stamp size on a real-estate folder, I scarcely realized its environment. I saw the sturdy thickset old stone building on the hillside, flanked by the tall black walnut tree on one end and the maple on the other, and across a grassy road the big red barn. Forty-eight acres of woodland and meadow went with the house, edged by the brook. They seemed then as wide as an empire. In China the average farm is less than five acres. At first I contended with what seemed rank wilderness. The land had not been tilled for seventeen years, and weeds and briars covered it like a blanket. I attempted the unattainable. I tried to make those woolly acres look like a Chinese farm, neat and green and fruitful. I coaxed the old apple trees, but they remained unresponsive, I tried to confine the brook, and it remained rebellious. An old neighbor looked doubtfully on, and said, “It’s a vild critter, that there run.” For a while I thought he meant “vile,” but then I discovered that it was Pennsylvania Dutch accent. Wild our brook was and wild it still is, as mild as milk in summer, but when the spring snows melt, or after a thunderstorm, it imitates the raging Yangtse. No retaining wall is strong enough. We built a dam fit to hold back a monster, and that alone compels it into a small lake where the children can boat and fish and skate in winter.
Eventually, of course, I realized that American land is rebellious, and, besides, our own land had been ill-treated. Generations of farmers had neglected to fertilize, and had further robbed the earth by planting nothing but corn, until the shale and clay pan that underlie our shallow topsoil emerged like skeletons from old graves.
I had been taught in my Chinese world that earth is a sacred possession and I was horrified at what I saw I had. How could I replace what had been lost before I came? I longed to buy cattle and treasure the manure for the land. But those were the days when no one was encouraged to farm, the incredible days when people were actually making a living by not farming the land upon which they lived. Government subsidy was for nonproduction, and my neighbors, all farmers, divided themselves into the good and the evil, the good men refusing to let their fields lie idle even when times were awry, and the evil, who had more cash than ever before, because they were only too ready not to work. It was no time to begin a farm, at any rate. Therefore I planted trees, thousands of them, upon our hillsides. After my brother died, I planted trees upon the land which he had left, and then, that our right flank might be protected against small bungalows, I bought still another farm as derelict as either of the others, and planted trees there, too.
This went on until the war came, and then I felt that the time had come really to farm, as I had been secretly longing to do. For another reason, the children were drinking quarts of milk every day, and I was not satisfied with the milk supply. To live in the country and drink pasteurized milk as one must in the city, seemed absurd. The precious vitamins of raw milk, so essential to children, are too often destroyed or all but, by pasteurization, especially if it is well done. If it is carelessly done as it may be, then such milk is more dangerous than raw milk, for the process gives the excuse for all sorts of milk to be poured into the vats, certainly not all of it clean. And I am prejudiced against dirt, dead or alive, in food. I wish that my countrymen were all clean, but the truth is we Americans are not a very clean people, not nearly so clean as the Japanese, for example, or the Swedish, or several others. Our farmers are content too often with dirty barns and dirty cows hastily swabbed around the udders before milking time. I did not at all like what I saw on farms, and this, too, moved me to have my own. Rejoicing when war directives urged the raising of food, I hastened to obey. It meant the buying of three more run-down farms adjoining our land. The average farm in our region is fifty acres. Each of the farms had on it a good stone house, though without modern conveniences, and a good-to-middling barn. One good stone barn remodeled would do for the herd, the other barns were left for storage.
I plunged into the job, deciding that I must learn myself before I could know what should be done, for this was the United States and not China. For two years I listened, read, observed and worked. My neighbors said, “Be you goin’ to do real farmin’ or book farmin’?” This, I discovered, meant was I going to try to have a Bangs-free herd? Our state requires herds to be free of tuberculosis but not yet of Bangs. Therefore if I wanted to have a clean herd I would have to work alone. None of my neighbors approved the effort. In kindliest spirit they warned me that one could lose a whole herd if he got the idea of not having any Bangs. Best thing, they said, was just to pay no heed to Bangs. There was no law against it. I listened and smiled and said nothing, determined for the children’s sake to have a clean herd, and so we began by being clean, and have so continued, tested constantly, unceasingly watchful, but successful. I look at my hearty brood of children now, much taller than I am, and reflect that all these years they have been drinking the best milk that can be produced, raw milk as fresh as the morning, all the vitamins intact, and rich with yellow cream. Through the war I made our own butter and we did not take our share of the nation’s supply. Last spring when there was a glut of milk on the market for a month or two and we could not sell all we had I made butter again, in quantities to last for months, and we raised extra pigs on the skim milk, and gave it to the chicks and they came through in prime shape. The price of our grade of milk is high enough so that usually it pays to sell it whole. Yet I am sufficiently irritated in true democratic fashion when I see the difference between what we get for our clean excellent milk wholesale and what the consumer has to pay for it bottled after the middlemen are through with it. The boys urge me to go into the retail milk business, and run a milk route, but that I refuse. My concern is for the children, and the land is showing a satisfactory return to what good land should be. The marginal acres we still keep in trees, and will always do so, replanting as we cut each year. The cows have done well enough. They take prizes at shows and so on, and I have more than my share of ribbons and silverware. But I am not much interested in such goings on. I feel that unless a cow can produce milk and manure, her good looks are useless. Pretty is as pretty does, my mother used to say. Unless the help wants very much to show a cow or bull we have bred and of which they are proud, my eyes remain upon the milk and crop records.
Farms with hired help are not, of course, for making money. Yet, all in all, I feel we have done well with our farm, better than we feared, and I refuse to count the money alone. Besides milk, the farm has given the children an endless source of interest and pocket money. There is always work to be done, free or for pay, and the boys have grown up farmwise. They know how to milk, they know the care and feeding of the herd, they understand the soil, they can use farm machinery and care for it as a capital possession. They know the urgency of harvesting and of work that has to be done long after hours because hay and grain will not wait upon a storm. The farm has given us family roots, not only in the community, but in the very earth itself. It has even sifted human beings for us. We have learned to know a rascal from an honest man, whether he be farm manager or hired hand. We have had both kinds, at all levels, and it has taught the children lessons they cannot learn in school. They have learned, too, that kindness to animals pays, as well as to human beings, not only spiritually but materially. It is true that a contented cow gives better milk and more milk than an unhappy one, and she is only contented when she is kindly treated. We have fired men because they pushed the cows around.