Their faces looked tired.
I found their photo in a pile of debris created when their Hoosier cabinet collapsed onto their rotten kitchen floor. A china berry tree had ripped open the roof during one storm or another, and since no one cared about the old house, the tin was never repaired, allowing nature to take everything back with its slow, steady vengeance.
The picture was typical sepia-color of those taken using the old Kodak Brownie box cameras; I was somewhat surprised not to find any others during my half-hearted plundering of the forgotten farmhouse.
The new owners of the property had asked me to solve their coyote problem. They bought the farm at a discount, and set about turning it into their private hunting ground. The old house and its attendant buildings, like a bedraggled hen and her chicks, had no part in the plan.
“See if there’s anything any good in there,” the owner told me. “If you want it, you can have it, unless it’s really valuable.”
I don’t know the name of the man and the woman, nor even when the picture was taken. Model T trucks were still in use around that neck of the woods after World War II, so the angular frame of the Lizzy in the background gave no real clues. The couple stared at the camera in an image ironically similar to Grant Wood’s American Gothic, except the woman’s apron is likely white, and the man is holding a hoe, not a pitchfork. He wore overalls (of course) and a battered, shapeless, but comfortable and practical hat. I strongly suspected the collarless shirt peeking out from the overalls was actually the top of a union suit. The house in the background was the same Southeastern North Carolina Victorian shotgun I was now inside, rather than Wood’s stylized architectural prize.
The house lay off a dirt road that was in itself a spur of another dirt road; with no other homes along either, it was a mystery to me why the state even bothered to occasionally and rather lackadaisically send a motor grader that way. I didn’t spend a lot of time in the old house, save to check a few details that made me guesstimate its construction occurred after Reconstruction, but before the invention of the automobile. It could have been the Tired Man built the house for his bride, when she was young and fresh and he was not yet so tired.
Most of the rooms had been emptied at some point, save for a few odds and ends – dusty drink bottles and ancient beer cans (both the kind opened with pop-tops and the kind you poked a hole in), broken chairs, a three-legged table that was built with four, a dry-rotted pillow smelling of possum. A single foot showed that the family had actually enjoyed the luxury of indoor plumbing at one point, complete with a clawfoot bathtub. Visible from the bathroom window was a four-foot brick square filled in with concrete; it made me suspect the indoor privy had an outdoor ancestor.
Many of the windows of the old house were broken, either through the house’s settling or by the sharp eye of a rock- or rifle-wielding maker of mischief. The curtains were faded, but had been colorful, a cheap print to bring a little life and pleasure to the Tired Woman’s home.
The barns and sheds had long since been raided by antique thieves and scrap metal hunters, but here and there were broken tool handles, pieces of metal that had once served a purpose, a lovely, but badly rusted axe (it went home with me). In one corner was the foundation for a Delco power unit, and the broken glass in the sugar sand might have come from the batteries which once provided the home with the luxury of electric lights and a radio. The Tired Woman had apparently used a wood stove or maybe a kerosene burner for cooking, since I found pieces of both in the fallen kitchen floor, but there was no sign of an electric range in the house.
The chicken coop was surrounded by rusted wire still doing its best to guard birds long since devoured at a Sunday table or by a thievin’ fox. The roosting ladder was made of powder-dry tobacco sticks, still bearing the discoloration that results from chickens earning a living by eating bugs and grain in a barnyard.
A wellhead and a broken pitcher pump handle mourned the rusted-through water trough between the coop and the two-stall stable. I regret to this day not grabbing the stretched, worn, half-rotten reins and plowlines that snaked around two tired and mouse-chewed mule collars. I half-hoped someone in the family would want those relics to remind them what their father and mother had gone through to make things better for the next generation, so I left them hanging.
Most old farms have two or three generations of broken tractor attachments laying around waiting to stub the toes of the unwary voyeur, but this place had a notable lack of anything designed for use by John Deere, Minneapolis Moline, McCormick or Massey Harris. A faded calendar from a fertilizer dealer hung on the sagging door, but sadly, the years and months were long since turned to dust, while the bird dog in the picture on the top was still honoring his partner’s point. There were scrawled notes on the edges of the picture, including what could have been a telephone number that included two letters and three numbers, but time had long since left the pencil marks illegible as an Anasazi stone-etching.
The stable still smelled of manure and mule sweat, although everything was stale, not rich and vibrant and alive. The ground was now nothing more than fertile, black earth, and the only sign that it had ever been occupied was a single shoe hanging from the entryway. The walls of the stalls were well-chewed by bored draft animals, and birds had nested in the simple wooden troughs where the mules had once chomped corn and silage and maybe, on a special occasion, some sweet feed or an apple.
The door to a room off the stable resisted my urgent requests for entry, but finally the old wood gave way wearily and the door came off in my hand. I nearly fell as I stumbled into a room redolent with the smells of mice, old chemicals, pine rosin, and fine quality guano once shipped from South America to Wilmington, then by train to the farm dealer just a few miles across the swamp. There were evil-smelling buckets, rotten boxes, a termite-chewed nail keg, and a few other odds and ends, but nothing really interesting – until I turned around.
Hanging on a nail beside the door was a four-pocket denim coat – the kind called a “barn coat” and most often worn by those attempting to appear countrified – and a ragged, stiff and fragile pair of Key Imperial overalls. The hems were frayed and the fabric faded, but I had to wonder if they were the same pair worn by the Tired Man in the old photo.
Behind the barn coat (its army blanket lining was now but a pleasant memory for generations of hungry moths) hung a plain brown Sunday suit, also moth-eaten, dusty and moldy. It came from Sears at some point, before I was born, likely ordered out of the famous catalog and maybe paid for with fall tobacco money or possibly even as a Christmas present from the Tired Woman.
I could see leaving a pair of overalls in the barn – Miss Rhonda has made me do the same plenty of times – but I had to wonder why the Tired Man’s good suit was out there where it would have been exposed to mice and the elements, even before the ragged old barn moaned in a late afternoon breeze. It seemed likely that his best suit of clothes would have been in the house, where the Tired Woman could keep it pressed and brushed for church, funerals and other special events. If, as I was told, the farmer had died, then his wife had been bundled off to live with children in town a long way off – then why wasn’t the Tired Man buried in his suit? It’s possible he had another Sunday suit, I guess, but mens couture seemed very low on his priority list.
With dust motes dancing in the dank air, I stood in the little room and fingered the lapels of the old suit. I touched one of the sturdy bone buttons of the barn coat, and tried to unbutton the so-called “frog pocket” on the bib of the overalls.
I tried to imagine how they lived; few of us could make it nowadays, what with our dependence on all things electrical. Even those of us who hunt and garden still are far from the level achieved by our grandparents and great-grandparents, for whom raising one’s own food was a daily necessity, not a nod to self-sufficiency.
Did the Tired Man ever stand in this doorway and look over the fields he plowed – apparently with a mule – and wonder what would happen to the earth he so carefully, lovingly and sometimes, yes, angrily worked? Did the Tired Woman ever stop to enjoy the simple beauty of sunlight coming through her colorful dime-a-yard curtains?
The new owner promised to make contact with the people he bought the land from – second or third-generation heirs decades removed from the feel of the earth – and see if they wanted the photo, or any of the other things I found. Failing that, he said, he’d get up with someone from one of the local historical societies.
I hope he did; the farm was burned and razed that next spring, about the time the mules would have been let out for some early grazing, and the Tired Woman would have opened the windows to let out the stale air of winter. It took but a few minutes with a bulldozer to erase the farmhouse and buildings from the landscape they had governed for more than a century. Even the china berry tree went down, to be returned to the earth along with everything else earned by the sweat and toil of two people who pulled a farm and a home out of a field along an old dirt road that someday no one would remember.
Their faces looked tired in the old photograph, but I do believe they earned their rest.
Weaver is a staff writer with the News Reporter. Call him at 642-4104, ext. 227; email him at jeffweaver@whiteville.com, or catch up with him on facebook.com.
About Author
