I introduced him to Brother Jobe, who gave a compressed version of how he and his followers had landed in Union Grove, but did not exactly disclose the purpose of our visit.
“Will you stay for lunch?” Bullock said. Without waiting for an answer, he told Roger Lippy to have Mrs. Bullock set two extra places. I could tell from the way Brother Jobe was craning his neck around that he was anxious to get a look at the operation, and Bullock, who was not modest, readily offered to give him a tour. He called the name “Kenneth” into the barn, and another man came out with grease on his hands to take Brother Jobe’s team over to where a great old stone watering trough stood in the shade. I did not recognize this Kenneth, but new people were added to Bullock’s rolls on a regular basis as life everywhere else grew more difficult, and people gave up on it.
For the two-hour duration of the tour, Brother Jobe goggled and gaped unself-consciously while entering notes in a little handmade book of folded foolscap that he carried. There were, first, the impressive workshops in the vicinity of the house, several of them new fieldstone buildings: the creamery, the smokehouse, the brewery, the harness shop, the glass shop, the smithy, the laundry. Brother Jobe took a particular interest in the brewery, where Bullock not only made beer, but distilled an annual supply of rye whiskey and applejack, some for trade and some for his own use, and some pure grain for running small engines on the place. Bullock’s farm was the only place I knew where you might still hear engines running. Not even Wayne Karp managed that. Back in the days when I had been building the teahouse, when it was still unclear which way the country would go, Bullock sometimes ran an English sports car around with the engine tricked up for alcohol. Then he broke a front axle over in Hebron going through a pothole the size of a bomb crater, and had to tow the car home behind a hired team of oxen. It took three days to go the twenty miles. The roads were much worse now.
Bullock poured us each a generous sample of his whiskey from a cask in the rear, where many barrels were racked, into jade green pony glasses made there on the premises too. Brother Jobe tossed his dram straight back, said it was “fit for all occasions and all weathers,” and Bullock refilled his glass. I had not been there for a while, but it seemed that everything was coming up at Bullock’s establishment whereas everything in our town was running down. You could understand the allure of the place.
We proceeded to the horse-breeding barn. Bullock was raising big Hanovers for the cart and saddle, and Percherons for freight loads. Brother Jobe said he favored a mule in the field, that it was the coming thing with all the hotter weather. Bullock said he hadn’t seen a jackass in Washington County that was worth breeding a mare to. Brother Jobe said he had just such a one and would lend it over.
“Have you tried oxen?” Bullock said. “They’re peachy in the woodlot and behind the plow.”
“I don’t know the first thing about an ox,” Brother Jobe said. “We’re all about mules where we come from.”
“I’ll tell you something about an ox,” Bullock said. “You can eat him when he’s past his prime for work.”
“That makes sense, I suppose,” BrotherJobe said. “I confess, I never tried to eat a mule either in or out of its prime.”
Bullock refilled our glasses. He said he admired Brother Jobe’s team of blacks, but the latter said that the sire had been left back in Virginia.
“We’re miserably short of new blood,” Bullock said.
“Your welcome to try our stallion. He’s a liver-chestnut, fifteen-and-a-half-hands Morgan. Maybe sometime we can swap out.”
They were in excellent spirits by the time we strolled through the orchard to the beginning of Bullock’s extensive fields. The corn seemed to go on forever, but we crossed a hedgerow over a stile and came to what Bullock really wanted to show.
“Why, iddin that sweet sorghum?” Brother Jobe said. It was not a crop that I recognized.
“You are correct, sir,” Bullock said. “With the maple borers killing our sugar trees, and mites on our bees, we’re a bit hard up for sweetening lately.”
“Is that a fact?”
“Well, it’s this heat, you know.”
“We always had sorghum syrup on Momma’s table.”
“It’ll be a new thing here, but our people will like it, won’t they Robert?”
“I suppose they will, Stephen,” I said, not really knowing.
“It beats heck out of blackstrap molasses, I’ll tell you,” Brother Jobe said. “Milder.”
“It’s got a flavor all its own,” Bullock said.
“My point,” Brother Jobe said.
The two of them seemed to be getting on like boon companions. It made me a little sick to see it, or maybe it was just the heat and the whiskey.
We made our way around the extensive property, down grassy lanes between fields of one crop and another. The corn was kneehigh and lush. The buckwheat was in flower. From his years in Japan, Bullock was fond of soba noodles made from the grain. He was particularly proud of his experiments with spelt, an antique precursor of our common wheats and apparently immune to the rust disease that lurked in our soils. It did not have the gluten content of modern wheat, he said, but it was better than rye. He hoped to expand production to a hundred acres next year, he said. The hillsides above his grain fields were dotted with brown and white cattle, some dairy and some steers for beef. Coyotes had been killing his calves lately. He’d had to post sharpshooters. There were ten acres alone in potatoes and as much in kitchen vegetables. He had mostly women and a few children chopping weeds among the crop rows out there, and men on construction and heavy labor jobs around the plantation. We saw a crew coming in from the woodlots with a load of red pine logs behind a team of massive oxen.
“There you are,” Bullock said. “Red and white Holsteins. Tractable, steady, strong. And not nearly as dumb as they say.”
“Maybe we’ll try some,” Brother Jobe said. “Holsteins,” he said to himself, scribbling in his little book.
Soon we got over to the new sorghum cane crushing mill and refinery that Bullock was building on a high bank beside the Battenkill River. It stood about a quarter mile above the place where that strewn runs into the Hudson, on a site that had been the Kiernan and Page cardboard box mill early in the last century, of which little remained but foundation stones and some giant pieces of iron machinery so rusted that their exact purpose was no longer identifiable. The men working around the new cane mill greeted Bullock enthusiastically. I recognized at least two of them from the old days: Jack Hellinger, who used to be the Rite Aid pharmacist in town, and Michael Delsen, who had a little insurance agency with his dad on Main Street. It was hard to tell whether the workmen’s enthusiasm on seeing their boss was that of free, happy men or of people who had to put on a face to authority. Bullock’s relations with the people who lived on the plantation was the subject of much speculation among us who lived back in town. Being a world of its own, there was no way we outsiders knew what his people had to say about how things worked there, except that it pretty obviously wasn’t a democracy.
Bullock’s new mill certainly was impressive. They were levering a great shallow iron evaporation pan into position over a rectangular stone hearth where the cane juice would be boiled into syrup. The building was all fieldstone, mortared up nicely. Bullock had a lime kiln up on the plateau above the river valley where he burned limestone to make the adhesive component of quicklime. Brother Jobe scribbled away. Altogether, the mill was a big new thing that looked like it was well thought out, well made, and would work. Nothing in town compared so well. We had built virtually nothing new there in years. It got me thinking about Loren’s idea to start a laundry, and that maybe I should show a little more enterprise and help him get something going.