Cattle Upon a Thousand Hills

Abstract

Cattle Upon a Thousand Hills Martha Grace Duncan (bio) I. Barn Burning Wood and hay kin burn. —William Faulkner I was two-and-a-half years-old when I stood at the living room window with my very pregnant mother, watching our barn burn down. "I think you kind of enjoyed it," she told me later. "The neighbors came and threw snowballs at the flames." [End Page 30] No firefighters ventured out to save the barn or the animals lodged therein—ten cows, a horse, and a cat. Perched at the top of a hill, on a long dirt road, our farm lay twenty miles from the nearest city, in the extreme northeast corner of Pennsylvania. We were isolated at all times but especially in winter, when snow and ice left our home beyond the reach of the outside world. Why we were living there is something of a mystery, for my parents had hardly any experience with country life. In their youth, they had flourished at Little Rock High School, then the largest high school in the country. In my mother's final year, she served as Vice President of her class, had the lead in the senior play and garnered the titles of "Most Popular," "Class Ideal," and "Everything a Girl Should Be." My father, too, was outgoing. Despite his family's limited means, he was accepted into Little Rock's high school elite, partying with kids from a prestigious neighborhood called The Heights—close relatives of the mayor of Little Rock and governor of the state. He also received accolades at graduation, the other students voting him "Wittiest" and "Most Entertaining" in a class of five hundred. After high school, my parents attended the University of Arkansas, where my mother earned a degree in home economics, and my father a degree in accounting followed by a law degree. So how did we end up on a dairy farm? The story is that while employed as an accountant in New York City, my father came to believe his desk job was making him sick. He stopped going to work and languished at home all day, anchorless and weary. Upon receiving an inheritance from his grandfather's estate, he suggested to my mother that they buy land in the country and try their hand at dairy farming. Had my mother foreseen that this move would be the first of many, perhaps she would have wondered whether the [End Page 31] problem really lay in his job. But this time, the first time, how could she have known? Optimistic by nature and deeply in love, my mother went along with his decision. Despite the gulf between their background and their new undertaking, both my parents were excited by the novelty of dairy farming. "Did I tell you we have ten cows," my mother wrote to her parents, "six of whom are milking—and more CREAM than we know what to do with. I've never tasted such rich milk!" My father had arisen before five that morning to install an electric milking machine; he saved ten dollars and three days' time by putting it in himself. Apparently, the neighbors and the dairy man were quite impressed. "Dick has been working soo hard and is so excited!" the letter concluded. "I really think this place will be beautiful in a couple of years." I have only two memories of my own from our brief years on the farm. In the first, I am sitting on the farmhouse steps, trying to whistle a tune like my father. I blow and blow but nothing comes out. Finally, after many attempts, a clear, musical sound pierces the air, and I run to tell my mother: "I can whistle!" In the second, there is no scene, only words—the names of five of our cows: Daisy, Pansy, Mama, Brownie, and Buttercup. "You probably named them," said Irene, our live-in babysitter of those years, when I told her this recollection. "I mean, your father was rather like a child himself." I guessed what she meant. Being so childlike, he would have understood that naming them would give me pleasure. My father and I were constant...