By JOSH PONS
Posted with permission from the author and publisher.
BOOKIES
Plaster dust flies from power saws as electricians rewire the old Rockland farmhouse. Most unsettling as it settles on Grandfather’s books, undisturbed for nine decades on bookshelves in hallways, in living rooms.
I peer behind the plaster to see once-white ceramic insulators blackened from a century of use, and thick copper wiring covered in cloth flecked with bits of insulating asphalt, the cloth now frayed and decayed. I sweep my hand across the dust on Uncle Johnny’s 1933 farm diary. It falls open at this entry: “Unloaded boxes of books today.” Have these books not moved since he wrote that?
I begin my quiet disturbance of the shelves, lowering books into see-through plastic storage bins—the books’ spine lines visible, facing out, for easy retrieval. But just because books are old does not mean they are valuable. Find the treasures first. In triplicate, three supple leather covers of James Ben Ali Haggin’s 1905 catalog of hundreds of horses on his California ranch.
Harry Payne Whitney’s 1926 index of his two hundred broodmares, and that of his father, W. C. Whitney, the old man’s two hundred mares in a leather-bound book dated 1902.
Here’s Belmont’s famous mare Beldame, a foal of 1901, in a Nursery Stud catalog. I put my hands on a 1920 letter from Kane imploring Grand- father to get Belmont’s permission to destroy the infirm old mare. Kane’s letters discourage my urge to romanticize the past.
Drowning in books, I call in an expert appraiser. Upon arrival, Brad Johnson, known as “The Book Guy from Baltimore” among estate auctioneers, appears inured to my excited introductions of Grandfather’s collection. For seventy-five dollars an hour, with blank indifference, he snatches down books untouched since 1933.
“I am looking for ‘books of antiquity,’” Johnson says flatly, fingers trailing over bound volumes of Dickens, Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson— collections, he says, mass-produced in the late 1800s, and these days “no one wants old brown furniture or old cracked books.”
Limited editions cause him to pause, as do books with distinctive illustration plates, or arcane subject matter, or author’s signatures. He stares at the first of Grandfather’s three copies of Diseases of the Horse—century-old 1923 editions, replete with Da Vinci–like drawings of elaborate braces for broken-legged horses. I pick up a copy and begin reading to him in windy Victorian prose.
Part 4
THE LANGUAGE OF GHOSTS
On my walk to work this morning, I startled a pair of deer in the woods by a spring. They soared over four-board fences, hard hooves thwacking the locust posts like gunfire. Minutes later, I flicked on the lights in the attic. Sleeping spirits startled but didn’t leap away. I sense that they regard me as a sort of custodian. I freshen the workplace, run a vacuum to scoop up bits of brittle letters.
“What can I do for you today?” I call out to the residents as a base- board heater ticks to life. They show me faces from the 1940s reversed out of negatives. White-washed fences appear tarred black. A white yearling being ridden by a white rider is in life a black yearling ridden by a Black rider: Gene Fisher, Grandfather’s top stallion groom, top exercise rider, toppled by drink in the 1960s.
A monotone mare pauses at a black salt block. Of course, the salt block is white. A gentleman in a white suit holds a dog treat waist high for a bouncing beagle. That’s Grandfather in his trademark three-piece. Dad’s glasses shine white. They weren’t. When I show the negatives to my family, they make out shapes of familiar faces, guess names out loud, like this is a game show.
No 1940s negative of the front field Uncle Johnny sold in the 1970s, so no painful pang of loss. If that beautiful bottom field were photographed today? A two-story, mixed-use office development, on whose long horizontal roofline I have always wanted to paint the words Old Grand-Dad— for the bourbon I blame for the loss of that lovely land.
Gene Fisher on a yearling in the 1940s.
SIGNS OF THE TIME
In the mid-1970s, manila envelopes bearing the return address of the financial firm Bert Walker founded are poured out onto the breakfast room table. You know it is a serious day on the farm when Dad carries around
G. H. Walker & Co. stationery. But as Ben Franklin said: “Pour your purse into your mind and no one can ever take it from you.” Dad pours his purse into our minds; he sold those stocks to pay for our education.
On a wainscoted wall in the garret, I push-pin tuition bills marked PAID from the University of Virginia, from The John Carroll High School, to remind me of what Dad sacrificed when he put his purse into my mind. Not easy times, the 1970s. Neither Dad nor Uncle Johnny had enlisted in AA yet. Uncle Johnny, majority owner of the stock of Country Life Farm, Inc., looked at the field at Route 1 and Old Joppa Road and saw dollar signs. This was the front field in which Grandfather put up the farm’s first sign, arcing the name “Country Life Farm” above the straight-line smaller letters of “Thoroughbred Nursery,” echoing his days as secretary of Nursery Stud. On a weekend home between college and law school, I am told by Uncle Johnny:
“Take down the sign tomorrow. The bulldozers are coming on Monday.”
High school friend Kevin Kellar drives the ancient Farmall tractor. We dig out locust posts set in the ground in 1933. We pry the venerable sign off the posts and ride with it in a wooden manure wagon, like it’s a family corpse journeying home in some dark Faulkner novel.
