Most of the several dozen people interviewed for this story- cattle breeders, former Ames employees, fellow lawyers, business associates, state and local officials-declined to comment about Ames publicly, saying they feared being sued.
A few associates, however, defended him. "With John Ames, it's like this," said Tom Burke, a Midwest cattle auctioneer who is conducting a sale for Ames at Holly Hill Farm next month."If you do what you say you are going to do, and you don't take any shortcuts and you don't make excuses, then everything will be fine. But if you do take those shortcuts, well, then you are going to be in for a long afternoon."
Farm life, perhaps, offered a respite from those pressures.
"You can't sue a cow," said Saphir, the extension agent, who knew both men."They obey orders, and they don't challenge you.
"Now a bull, a bull is a different story," Saphir added. "A bull is untamable. If a bull wants to go somewhere, it'll go."That, he speculated, could be part of a deeper, psychological truth behind the shooting death of Perry Brooks. "Here [Ames] is, this hugely respected Angus breeder, and some guy's mangy old bull comes over and breeds with two or three of your heifers?… It's like your daughter got raped."
J. Benjamin Dick, Ames 's co-counsel in the upcoming murder trial, said people underestimate the threat that Perry Brooks posed. Brooks was old, Dick said, but don't be fooled. He was strong, with forearms "like Popeye."
"I think Perry Brooks was at the farm that morning to do great harm-there's no doubt in my mind," said Dick.
In the aftermath of the shooting, before lawyers and the county prosecutor had been allowed to examine the physical evidence in the case, Dick said that Brooks had gone to Holly Hill Farm on the morning of April 19 armed with an electric cattle prod. But after a preliminary hearing at which the rumored cattle prod turned out to be what Dick described later as a "half-broomstick," he seemed to backtrack.
"It's a tough case," he said. "No doubt about it, it's a tough case."
In Robert Frost's poem "Mending Wall," the narrator laments a farmer who wants to build a fence between the narrator's apple orchard and the farmer's stand of pine. A fence is hardly necessary, Frost's narrator thinks. After alclass="underline"
There where it is we do not need the walclass="underline"
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
But in the poem, the laconic New England farmer seems to know better:"He only says,'Good fences make good Neighbors.' " But fences create conflict, too.
"Fences, it's always fences," said Cora Jordan, a lawyer and author of an authoritative guide to the area of jurisprudence known as neighbor law. Complaints about noise are the most common problem between neighbors, she said, but fence conflicts are the most likely to spiral into physical violence. "Judges can't stand these cases," Jordan said. "Lawyers don't want to take them, and law enforcement doesn't want any part of it."
"I get lots of phone calls about fences," agreed Leon Geyer, a law professor specializing in agricultural law and environmental economics at Virginia Tech."It's a very hot subject." Since Brooks's death, Geyer has been in demand by farmers eager to educate themselves about the intricacies of Virginia 's fence law.
Most states require that cattle owners fence in their livestock. Virginia is one of only three states, with Arkansas and Oregon, where responsibility for fencing changes by county, Geyer said. In some rural counties in the commonwealth, the burden is on farmers to fence the neighbor's cattle out. Elsewhere, as in Caroline, cattle farmers bear the responsibility to fence their herds in. In both settings, however, the fence law, until recently, dictated that the cost of fencing would be shared. In January, Virginia 's General Assembly, chastened by the Brooks slaying, amended the fence law to exempt landowners without livestock from the burden of paying for a neighbor's cattle fence. The change would not have affected Brooks, a cattle owner.
(In most of Virginia 's suburban counties, the "pay half" provision is superseded by local regulations, Geyer said. But in other parts of the country, according to Jordan, even suburban neighbors often are liable for the construction and maintenance costs of their shared fence lines.) Some state legislatures have tried to head off problems by writing laws that dictate fence wire gauges and post diameters.Virginia's law does not do this.
Every neighbor dispute is different, Jordan said, but often the two principals in a long-running feud are "two extremely stubborn people," neither of whom is willing to take a first step that professional mediators call "unilateral deescalation."
Translation? "Choosing to do nothing when it is your turn to do something extremely nasty," Jordan said.
It was embryo-flushing day at Holly Hill Farm, and John Ames had agreed to let me on the property for a visit. Ames had declined all media contact since the shooting, but in a brief conversation about cattle breeding outside the courtroom before his preliminary hearing, his lead attorney, Richmond defense lawyer Craig S. Cooley, by his side, Ames had volunteered that he thought the cattle business was on the eve of a revolutionary leap forward, a day when cattle breeders might produce enough cattle, at a low enough price, to end world hunger. If there was one thing that bothered him, Ames added, it was the thought of children starving in a world of abundance.
He also had an unusual, wired energy that day. John Ames is small-boned, of medium height-five feet ten inches, according to court records-but he has the lean build of a marathon runner and appears younger than his sixty years. His skin that day was ruddy from outdoor work, and his salt-and-pepper hair was shorn close to the scalp. His bright blue eyes blazed with an expression both inquiring and imperious, and his voice had the mild twang of his native Tidewater.
With Cooley's blessing, Ames was willing to allow the visit, on one condition: There were to be no questions about the shooting, the feud, or Perry Brooks.
Holly Hill Farm is a big piece of real estate. Its rolling hills run alongside Route 207, just outside the town limits of Bowling Green, for a good mile and a half, until the property ends at the low-lying highway bridge that spans the Mattaponi River. The farm's main entrance is flanked by two formal brick pillars, and the long driveway-a half-mile or so-is paved in rough-cut gray gravel. The drive cuts through a sweeping bowl of open pasture. In the fields, large, ink-black rectangles of cattle stand motionless except for an occasional shake of a massive, ear-tagged head. Up at the house, the only sign of life is one red horse in a paddock and the sound of barking dogs coming from behind the house's tall front windows and thick white columns.
On the first of two visits, Ames appeared in a long-sleeved dress shirt and suit trousers, having come straight from his office in Richmond. He led a tour of the barn area, and talked about his love of farming. "Once it gets in your blood, it never leaves you. And you have to do it for love," he added, chuckling, "because there's no money in it." He opened a gate and called to four of his prize-winning cows. "Come on, girls," he said, and stopped to scratch one on the back.
Ames 's specialty is bankruptcy law, which tends to attract people who enjoy crunching numbers. During my visits, he displayed a keen command of the statistical side of his cattle operation, explaining the intricate spreadsheets by which serious breeders track data such as intramuscular fat ratios and weight gain. He rattled off his top cows' eight-digit identification numbers with the ease of a man reciting his phone number, and in a small workroom, he unscrewed liquid nitrogen tanks where bull semen was stored in plastic straws as narrow as swizzle sticks, each painted with tiny numbers.