CASUAL
WINKLER, CLAUDIA
Casual DOWN ON THE FARM It's ten years exactly since Jim first took me to his farm in Casey County. I'd read about it often. A lot of Jim's columns in the paper we worked for, the Cincinnati Post,...
...The little gray pony had a bad foot, but Ebony and Major, the lovely palomino, graciously tolerated our token rides...
...Our little group came from miscellaneous backgrounds and races, six people thrown together in the transient fraternity of journalism...
...With the dormitory he'd added upstairs, it could sleep his family of six...
...It was an idyllic day, and a quin-tessentially American one—nailed in my memory by the next morning's brutal headlines of the Chinese massacre...
...That may have been the quietest spot I've ever been...
...But that early June when he first took me and a few of our colleagues there, Casey County was lush as Eden...
...His airy workshop occupied the ground floor, and out front in the grass sat a baby, playing on a blanket in the shade...
...Yet somehow what I'd read had given me the wrong idea...
...A lot of Jim's columns in the paper we worked for, the Cincinnati Post, were set on the farm where he'd grown up in Kentucky, in the foothills of the Cumberlands...
...The columns probably invited that view because Jim called himself a hillbilly and had grown up during the Depression...
...Jim said he was a registered Tennessee Walker...
...Out back was a weathered barn, and next to it, the horses...
...On our way, we passed cemeteries bright with flags and plastic wreaths left on Memorial Day, still known in those border parts as Decoration Day...
...Back at Jim's, we drank ice water from the well, and chatted with longtime neighbors, and helped with a few chores around the place...
...Eventually, Jim had gone off to Germany in World War II and later to Ohio State on the GI Bill...
...He told me the brilliant blue bird I'd seen from the car was an indigo bunting...
...It was dark by the time we stopped for that Kentucky rarity, commercially available home cook-ing—to wit, cornbread, country ham, and pinto beans...
...Jim told me once that his core beliefs had remained essentially unchanged since he was nine...
...It was dusk when we left...
...Ebony was sleek and superb...
...You don't have to know anything about horses to tell an aristocrat of the animal kingdom...
...the house, a shack out of Dogpatch...
...A Mennonite man in a torn straw hat came out to cut us our rhubarb...
...His family, he said, had lived there for generations...
...Coming back, we detoured to follow a hand-written sign that pointed down a dirt road and said "Rhubarb 2 miles...
...It's a world to which fewer and fewer of us have any exposure and that holds little sway over the habits and imaginations of city, suburb, and mall-reared generations...
...I'd pictured hardscrabble country, kids without shoes and an unforgiving environment...
...CLAUDIA...
...It took us to a farmhouse in a field...
...On the way, he took us through the county seat, known for the world's largest apple pie, baked there every last-week-of-September and movable only by forklift...
...His father, who scorned handouts, had plowed steep fields with mules...
...The little settlement—just a string of modest houses sparsely stretched along a crest, with a church high on a hill at one end— was called Bethelridge...
...The horses Jim told me he kept at the old place and left outside all winter I'd envisaged as bony nags...
...The name of the town—Liberty—made an impression on me because of the pictures all over the papers in recent days of the Chinese students holding aloft their Lady Liberty in Tiananmen Square...
...On the night ride back to Cincinnati, we listened to the radio, and I stashed away for keeps an endearing refrain: "Since my phone still ain't ringin' / I assume it still ain't you...
...WINKLER...
...The saddler lived deep in the country, in a bare, spacious wooden house on a hill under a giant tree...
...In Casey County, we glimpsed a simpler American world, predicated on freedom, where lean lives unfolded around essentials...
...Jim gave us a tour of the place, down by the stream and through the woods, then we piled back into the van and drove off toward South Fork Ridge to pick up a saddle he was having repaired by an Old Order Mennonite craftsman...
...The square wooden church with its corner steeple faced west, and it was flushed with light as we drove off...
...The frame house was small and, like the others, gleaming white...
...It was a balmy day, dappled with sun...
...Opposite Jim's place rose Rocky Knob, whose profile he loved...
...Reading the paper the morning after our trip, I felt a sharp hope that it would endure...
...Jim showed us the grave of a forebear, Silas Adams, who at 24 was elected to lead the First Kentucky Union Cavalry, succeeding an old Liberty attorney who had criticized President Lincoln for allowing blacks to fight...
...I've never forgotten the sweetness of the air or the general leafi-ness and the pervasive green...
Vol. 4 • June 1999 • No. 36
