Over the years I've spoken to many Americans who come here and I sometimes mention that my father was a farmer. I've noticed that the more that time passes the more they stare at me like deer paralyzed by an arc light. They don't yet ask, "What's a farmer," but most of them have never met one.
To me, farming is more important than the simple sum of its parts. In some ways, it's like raising a child. You must work, and plan, and suffer the chances of what comes. You sow, you reap, and you keep a palm on the earth and an eye to the weather. Intellectuals tell me right off that my recollections of early life have been romanticized by time, but I remember many things that they could not possibly know, and I have full confidence in these things, because I have lived them.
Eventually, we were driven from our farm, and though times became increasingly difficult while we were there, it was the best life I can imagine. The closest I have seen to what I knew then is the existence of the coastal fishermen here. They go out on the sea day after day to pull in magnificent fighting fish that they sell or eat. Though they will never be rich, they will never be separated from the beauty of the sea. They practice an intricate craft in which reside secrets and lessons as old as the world. And the world can twist and turn as it wishes, while what they do remains.
We had seventy acres on a plateau above the Hudson north of Ossining. Flat land so close to the river was rare, and this was especially pretty land, with huge oaks standing in ravines between the fields, and views of the mountains and river. We grew corn, apples, vegetables, and hay for our twenty dairy cows. As a small child I rode with my father in his wagon to take our crops to the pier at Sparta, where we loaded them on sailing ships and side-wheelers. As I grew older we began to ship more and more by train, and then by motorized truck, but the city of New York, with its insatiable millions, was always our market.
We had been able to compete with the vastly more efficient farms of the Midwest and even California because our produce was fresh. But as shipping improved and the advent of more and more machinery changed the nature of agriculture, the huge farms in other parts of the country were able to offer food that was more attractive, and to drive down their marginal costs just as ours were going up.
From the time I was born, I watched my father fail. At first he didn't even know it, or would not admit to it. Then he allowed that he was having some bad years. When the bad years would not relent, he blamed himself and worked almost harder than was humanly possible. When that did not arrest our declining fortunes—I remember my lust for boiled potatoes and my sense of infinite well-being after consuming a small piece of meat—he tried new strategies. Suddenly we were growing all kinds of strange and delicate things, or trying to grow them: raspberries, endive, outlandish melons. His idea was to capitalize on the carriage trade. But these crops were fragile and you had to have harvest labor on the instant or they would spoil. We soon went back to the familiar, and then came the schemes—a resort, a clock factory, cutting ice, boarding horses. Perhaps some might have worked, but none was tried: he didn't think he had enough time left to start over, and anyway he wasn't the kind of man to do so. Like me, he understood the futility of success, and he had no heart for playing games.
So he failed, and the more he failed the more I loved him and the more I understood. At the age of nine and a half all I knew was love and shame, and as I myself had no powers, not yet even dormant powers, I did not even think of avenging him. I knew only the unparalleled affection one has for those who are loved and faltering.
Still, when I was eight I learned to guide a horse in front of a plow, and this I did with hidden joy and for long hard days, because my father needed me. The ground gives back more or less what you put into it. It was not the ground that had changed, or the substance of what we did, or the virtues, but everything else in the world. We understood that. Even I did. Even then.
The grand schemes were never tried, and my father continued to work the land. In winter he plowed snow, delivered for the druggist, painted interiors, and split wood. My mother took in sewing, and she would begin to stitch shirtwaists even before dawn, in the bitter cold, by lamplight.
My father and I also arose before the light. It takes a while to milk twenty cows if you have no milking machine, and then you have to feed them, clean their stalls, and turn them out on days when it isn't too cold.
After breakfast my father and I left—he to sell the milk and go to whatever work he had, and I to school. Other than walking two miles to shop in town, and walking back with the groceries, my mother labored at home all day, at cooking, housekeeping, and her piecework.
Except for study halls, the short time before dinner was all the time I had to learn what I had to learn. Dinner came at five and was over at five-thirty. While my mother did the dishes my father and I would attend to the cows. Then we would put more wood on the fire and turn up the kerosene lamp on the kitchen table.
Bent over a huge board covered with green felt, my father repaired clocks. He could fix any machine, and had been known for this since childhood. At first he had done it for free, but it soon became a business. He used two trays of tools and three trays of parts, and the lamp had to be burning bright.
My mother sewed, stacking her finished shirtwaists in a thin wood box with a red exterior, though, depending upon the store, sometimes the boxes were blue cardboard with gold lettering. Even in the early Fifties I could not pass the older department stores in New York and not feel love and sadness. As I looked in the lighted windows, my glimpse of warm interiors and golden logos would take me back to the time and people to which and to whom I was to become more and more loyal as years and miles came between us. For my mother, as well, the light had to be strong, for she did fine work and her stitches had to be perfectly spaced and absolutely straight.
In these hours I did piecework, too. With my mother's help I had bid for and won a contract, at the age of seven, to provide sealing-wax medallions for an elegant men's haberdashery that has long since vanished from Union Square. Above their mahogany doors was a gold-plated cameo of two lithe dolphins. This was most pleasing to look at, and always caught the attention of passersby. I think the beautiful carved form of the two dolphins, bulging with smooth and perfect gold, actually made people want to go into the store and come out with something in a deep blue box.
Over a covering of glossy blue paper, gold ribbons intersected beneath a thick sealing-wax medallion of the dolphins. For many years I was the exclusive purveyor of these oval sculptures the size of large cookies, and I worked every day, year-round, to make the minimum order of five thousand. In a good season I would double it.
I started off in primitive fashion, but by the time I was nine my production techniques were extremely efficient. Our stove had four rounds, upon which I set four cast-iron pots with long straight handles shielded in ebony. These were not cooking implements but a metallurgist's vessels. As each round was a different temperature, I kept the wax at various levels of liquification. The process demanded that the fire remain at a steady temper, and to achieve this I tended it continually and fed it wood that I had precut. I had three sizes of log (I actually measured with a rule when I cut and split), all of the same density, age, and moisture content. With the help of an accurate clock, and thermometers in the wax pots, I could keep the wax in any stage to within two degrees Fahrenheit of the perfect temperature—something that had taken months of experimen tation to determine. When a vessel was empty, I filled it with gold-colored wax bricks and rotated the pots. After I tended the fire and cleaned my tools and surfaces, a supply of hot wax would be ready for another round.
I would sprinkle talc from a fine sifter onto a highly polished piece of slate the size of an open newspaper, turning it white as if by magic. On one section of the coated slate I set down a row of five stainless steel oval bands—each half an inch high and each with a line engraved two-thirds of the way up the inner wall. Then I used a ladle to pour the wax into the ovals. To flatten out and rise exactly to
the line, the wax had to be molten, though if it were too hot it would stick to the metal. By the time I returned the pot to the stove, the first oval would almost be ready for stamping.
If you used any kind of oil or powder on the stamp itself it would change the surface characteristics and, sometimes, the color of the medallion. The only effective lubricant that left no trace was the sweat of the palm, and this I would produce by heating the stamp to a fairly high temperature and placing it against my hand, but not too high a temperature, because that would ruin the surface completely, and spoil the fine engraving.
Absent a thermometer embedded in the wax, the only way you could tell it was ready to receive the impression was to judge the quality of the surface. Were it too hot, pieces of wax would stick to the stamp. Picking them off after hardening them by immersion in cold water was difficult and time consuming. Meanwhile, you would have to yank the ovals lest the wax stick to them, too. If, on the other hand, you waited too long, the stamp would stick to the seal or the wax would not even take an impression. Ridding the stamp of wax was always a nightmare, because you could not simply melt it off, for fear of carbonizing it.
When all went smoothly, as it did when I had the hang of it, I would make my impressions, remove the ovals, and there before me would rest five golden medallions with dolphins leaping gracefully, faint smiles upon their faces, the curve of their backs clashing only slightly with the curve of the oval seals.
I was happier working at a hard, even pace for relatively little money, than I was later, hardly working at all for so much money that money lost its meaning. And it was there, in the warmth of the fire that heated my pots of wax and in the light of the lamp turned up full, that I came to know my mother and father—their histories, together and alone, their beliefs, and their dreams. Although most children who lived on farms had chores, I had become a pieceworker, and I knew my parents' gratitude for my industry, their sorrow that I had to work as I did, and that the source and union of these two emotions were nothing more or less than their love for me.
I sit in the garden in Niterói, looking down upon the sea, reconstructing my memories. The satisfaction I feel in recalling them is like that of a kiss. Except in those kisses freighted with sex you tend to close your eyes, as if you want it to last forever. When you kiss someone with real love it is as if this is the last thing you will ever do, after which you will disappear into infinite darkness. So that may be why you hold your breath imperceptibly, or perhaps even longer, and it is why when I remember simple things from my childhood I inhale slightly with satisfaction, close my eyes for an instant, and feel a smile so subtle it probably cannot be seen.
And then I open my eyes and they are filled by the sea, and I remember that in summer and on weekends throughout the year, I, too, was a fisherman. It was not sport, and I didn't have equipment worth a hundred times what I might have realized in a day had I sold my catch, which sometimes I did when the fish were running strongly or the crabs attending a convention in my traps. Usually, though, I stopped when we had a full meal.
I spent many hours on the small beaches of Croton Bay. If I wanted to fish in the channel, where the water was deeper and the fish had their main highway, I walked five miles to the tip of Teller's Point. In those days, the world was my fish store, and I brought home bass, shad, salmon, crab, oysters, and clams. From freshwater ponds I took catfish, perch, sunnies, and crawfish. And there were seasons for blackberries, raspberries, wild strawberries, and mulberries. I wouldn't touch a mushroom, and my father did the hunting, something for which, as a child who loved animals, I had no stomach, and then, later, as an older boy whose parents had been murdered, I could not even bear to contemplate.
For a child whose parents are taken from him in this way, the world becomes, if not permanently broken, then at least permanently bent. If, as in my case, the actual murderers are never brought to justice, then one is condemned to live one's life with the knowledge that they are out there; that they've ruined, bested, and beaten you; that they might come for you; that any man with whom you deal, anyone you meet, no matter how smiling or how likeable or how good, as long as he is of a certain age, may be the devil incarnate, and that therefore you cannot trust, or believe, or confide in anyone; that your life must become a contest of endurance so that you can live to a hundred, so that you can be sure the murderers will be dead before you, something that you imagine would be your parents' fondest wish and deepest need; and that when your parents died they did so in terror, fearing that their assailants would turn on you, the child for whom they would gladly die, but for whom at the very last they could do absolutely nothing.
On Friday, the fifth of June, 1914, the day after I had been compelled to chew three coffee beans, we were released from school two hours early. Teachers, students, and even—or perhaps especially—the headmaster had had enough of sack races, picnics, and capture the flag. Finals had ended at noon with a whoop from scores of geometry students in suits and dresses far too hot for the stifling gymnasium in which they had spent three hours that seemed no longer than three minutes, manipulating compasses and protractors with the desperate efficiency of a bomb squad. The desks upon which they worked were too small for what they had to do, so the hall had been filled with groans, sighs, and tense breathing.
Then, heads packed with theorems, they emptied the gym of furniture and waited for graduation a week later. I, being nine and a half, looked forward to my own graduation with the same awe I now feel for death.
Some of the seniors were going to be married within weeks, which meant that the boy and the girl were free to go into a room, lock the door, and take off their clothes. Even at nine and a half I thought this was reason enough to persevere through high school, and although I didn't know exactly what would happen after the door was locked, just the thought of it sent waves of slightly numb pleasure from tip to toe. A hundred years for each ankle and calf, two hundred for the lips, the shoulders.... And yet I knew nothing beyond that, no mechanics, no hydraulics, no biology, no geology, just love and adoration.
I made my way home through town, staring at razor blades and mustard plasters in the drugstore window and at cranks, jacks, and lanterns in the window of the hardware store. I ignored the clothing shops and groceries, glanced at the carved wood monkeys the barber had had on display forever (during which eternity they had not been dusted), and took the aqueduct bridge on my route to Eagle Bay.
My father was cultivating a field, and when I ran up beside him he hardly looked at me as he kept the rows straight. His chambray shirt was wet and he breathed heavily, but he looked as if he were enjoying himself as he shifted the plow and held the reins in a perpetual struggle of balance and strength. I remember our short conversation, because it was our last.
"Back?" he asked.
"Yup."
"That's it," he said, meaning, school's over.
I echoed his words: "That's it."
"What're you going to do?" From the way he said it, I knew he meant not for the summer but for the remainder of the day.
"Fish."
"I'll be here 'til eight," my father told me. "Be back for dinner."
"Okay."
"Don't fish from the tower."
I was already on my way when he said those—his last—words to me. Because I wanted to fish from the tower, I didn't answer. At least, though I turned my back on him, I hadn't lied.
My mother was upstairs in the house. Inside, I sensed her presence, I may even have heard her, but I wanted only to get my fishing tackle and run to the river. As I buckled the strap that held the shoulder bag to my waist so it wouldn't bang against my side as I ran, I did so quietly. And then I left, happy but uneasy that I had evaded my mother, for she had probably heard me, and would have wanted to embrace me, as she always did when I returned from school, as if to contain my fleeting childhood, but I gave this no further thought, for as soon as I hit the path to the river I began to fly, the two halves of my fishing rod pointing forward from
my outstretched arms like the wind-shattering spears on a fighter's wing tips.
My father wanted me to avoid the tower not because he was afraid I would take up bad ways—it is very hard for a boy of nine to sin even if he wants to—but because he wanted to keep me from familiarity with bad ways. What is necessary is not so much that parents set a good example for their children but that they fail to set a bad example. The important thing is not that you see your father, to consider the case of the town barber, industriously carving wooden monkeys, but rather that you do not see him smoking opium or kicking small animals. If, for example, parents did not familiarize their children with the drinking of coffee, the children would no sooner drink coffee than they would spend all their money on tattoos.
The town of Ossining in those days was publicly sinless, all vices and most virtues being learned and practiced, if at all, at home. Thus, by following the Ten Commandments and then some, my parents were getting me off to a good start. The tower, however, was the seat of dangers and petty sins of all descriptions.
The underlying condition there, something not a vice itself but in its way an anteroom to the world of vice, was that this place was open all night. As a switching station on the Hudson Line of the New York Central Railroad, it had to be. The lights were always on, the little bulbs on the trackboard flashed as trains drew close or moved away, the telephone rang at all hours, and, often, a Victrola would play long past the time that almost everyone else in town was asleep, its horn pointed out the window at the river, because the music was too loud when it echoed from the windows that overlooked the tracks.