Stone Rows Are Never Straight

    His heavy German accent got in the way of his words. He uttered things as he tossed hay with a pitchfork, and his breaths muffled his accent as crudely as his accent muffled his words.
    “You’ve got a lot of things to learn, boy.”
    Without my years of practice it would have been impossible to decipher what he was saying through his heavy Pennsylvania Dutch inflection. But I’d learned to hear what he wasn’t saying, and I offer here the translation of my grandfather’s amusing vocal mirth.
    “A lot to learn. A lot to learn.”
    With a grumble he tossed another pitchfork of hay from the loft. It fell to the barn floor in a spate of sparkling gold. The early-morning sun stabbed through slats on the east side of the barn creating shafts of light that drilled through the falling sprinkles. He didn’t like when I lazed while he worked, but his lecture had fetched me away from the task at hand.
    He was old for seventy-three, weathered by the work that molded his sinewy stature. His face was creased with the years he spent in the field under the unforgiving West Virginia sun. When he and my grandmother bought the farm some five decades before it had been a rocky expanse of untillable land. But the two of them—they believed in something that had been bigger than they were. He’d been explaining to me that morning about his early difficulties culling anything worthwhile from the stubborn Appalachian soil.
    “There were some days I just wanted to give up, Jim,” he said. “There were lots of those days, really. She didn’t always treat me right, you know. And I didn’t always know how to deal. Sometimes I just got grabbed the bottle. Sometimes I lost my mind and ran out into the field screaming mad things at the sky. I didn’t always know how to give her the space she needed, and I certainly didn’t know how to deal with random things life threw our way. But I worked with her and learned to be more patient, and she eventually returned my efforts—tenfold, I’d say.”
    He always talked about the farm using feminine pronouns, and it was sometimes difficult to figure out whether he was talking about the farm or my grandmother. Anyway, he used to talk about the years he’d spent hitching his horse, Daphne, up to stones in the field and dragging them to the edges of the woods where the stones eventually piled up into long fence rows like I’d seen up north in Gettysburg when I went on a trip years back. The long lines of stones were still there in the fields, monuments to the years he spent clearing the way for tillable soil, soil that now produced handsome rills of alfalfa and sweet corn—knee high by the Fourth of July, usually sooner on his farm.
    Something in his story that morning prompted a question that had been brewing in me for some time. Perhaps it was the way he’d persevered through so much toil to make the farm work. Maybe it was just that the question finally curdled in the churn of my imagination.
    “And here you want to know about the difference between intention and reality,” he said. “I don’t know how you leverage yourself into these isoterical questions, but how do you intend for me to be real on that sort of thing? You are what you do, Jim. Your actions define you, but there are some tricks to that you’d do well to pay attention to.”
    He took another stab at the hay and tossed it to the dirt floor, which was probably some forty feet below. The stalls where the horses lived lined the south side of the barn. He’d put them there so the animals could enjoy the warm winter sun when it slanted in a low arc over the fields to the south. There was a tack room where saddles, bridles, blankets and such were stored on the northeast side of the barn, the side closest the house, which was about a hundred and fifty feet across the yard. A neigh came from below, then the stomp of an impatient hoof. The horses always got frisky when it was near time to be let out for the day.
    “You ever made a list of something?” he asked. He paused and then proceeded without my answer. “Of course, of course—lists. Lists, my boy, are the difference between intention and reality. A list of something—say, groceries—includes things you intend to buy. What you buy might be another matter, but committing your thoughts to a scrap of paper shows intention, establishes a goal. Without that you might not go to the store in the first place.”
    He paused from his work and asked if I’d help some more. I recognized his request as a polite but firm order and so grabbed my own pitchfork and dug back into the formidable pile of hay.
    “How about you, Jim? How about all them words you spend time putting in those journals your mother gives you. What do you make of them? Could you call them intention, like a list?”
    I wasn’t sure what to make of his question. I’d written about a lot of things. I’d jotted down stories of things that had happened, like the potluck supper we had down at the community center the week before. But I also wrote about things I wanted to happen, and things I didn’t want to happen. That morning I’d written that I hoped my cat, Beowolf, would return from his four days absence. I guessed aloud that writing it down showed I intended to be happy when he returned. But that might not change the fact that he might not return. That’s what I told my grandfather.
    “You’ve got it wrong, Jim—Come on, help out with this work, would you?—Point is, though, if you thought about it enough to write it down, why don’t you care enough to go looking for him? That’s the difference between intention and reality. You wrote down your thoughts, and that indicates intention. You just didn’t figure out the right thing to do—or maybe it is the right thing, but I’d say the right thing to do is get off your lazy cupcake and go look for that cat. You wrote your list and then did something else. It’s like saying you want to buy feed and then going to the J.C. Penny’s.”
    That was a curious way of looking at it. I guessed the catch was what the end result meant. If I ended up at J.C. Penny’s would that mean I really wanted to be there, that I really wanted to buy clothes rather than feed for Daphne IV, even if I’d written it down? (He always had to have a Daphne in the stables.) I asked my grandfather if my not looking for Beowolf meant I really didn’t want him to come back even though I’d bothered to write down that I hoped he would.
    “I don’t think that’s it. It’s true you are what you do, but what you do is also the function of the things around you,” he said. “For example, you could make that list of groceries, have every intention of buying every item on the list and then end up getting sick on the way to the store. It’s life, right? Things don’t always work out the way we want them to or think they should, and it’s not always as simple as intention. Intention often doesn’t become reality because of lots of things. But you ought not let one of those things be your lack of effort or poor decision making. That’s where you’ve got control.”
    He stabbed another fork full of hay and then tossed his pitchfork to the floor in a clatter.
    “Right now I intend to climb down that ladder, and I intend to let those horses out,” he said. “And I intend to see you helping me.”
    We climbed down the ladder, reaching the dusty floor, earth that had been trampled by hundreds of hoofs and soles over the decades. We made our way to the south end of the barn by the stalls, and just as he put one of his meaty, weathered hands on the latch to Daphne IV’s stall, a wicket gleam flashed across his eyes.
    “You want to help me do something for your grandmother?” he asked. “It’s her birthday. Sixty-five today.”
    I said something about needing to let the horses out, and he told me to never mind for a while.
    “They aren’t going nowhere,” he said, and I of course agreed to help him.
    My grandmother was a proud woman of a proper English lineage. She never let me set about my chores before my bed was made, and a table was never set until it was complete with a full compliment of silver fit for every dish under the sun. There were three forks, always set to the left of the plate, one each (from left to right) for salad, fish and meat. There were three knives, all the right of the plate(from right to left) for salad, fish and meat. The spoon went to the outside of the knives, and there was another fork and spoon that went above the plate for eating deserts, and another knife for spreading butter on her famous homemade bread. That was really just the beginning. There was fine china for normal meals, and then there was finer china for special guests, and then the finer fine china for super special guests. I came to learn the rules, but her quirks were things I never fully understood. Part of me guessed it was a part of her starchy upbringing, a sliver of the life she’d left behind that she wanted to somehow keep alive out in the rough country of West Virginia’s Appalachian Mountains.
    Anyway, my grandmother had a penchant for certain kind of schisms between her proper past and the rigors of living on a farm, and she appeared to relish both realities.
    It was also my grandmother who had taught my mother how to write proper English, and it was at my grandmother’s insistence that my mother had spent her high school days at a boarding school outside London. Early in her life mother had been forced by her proper mother—my grandmother—to sit down with pen and paper in hand and scrawl stiff sentences about a fantasy world that didn’t really exist. But as my grandmother became hardened by the work on the farm something in her approach to life softened. My mother told stories about how that evolution had been preserved in her own writing, since her own words had become a reflection of her own mother’s allowances for certain kinds of written communications. As my grandmother’s person softened, her rules also subdued.
    “Real life isn’t as pretty as we like to think,” mother had said. “Your own words, so long as you’re honest with yourself, will show you.”
    I didn’t know what mother had meant by that, but I knew words were a big part of her life, and that they’d been a big part of my grandmother’s life as well.
    My grandfather, on the other hand, was a paragon of practicality, and his words, though difficult to understand, rarely emerged in riddles. We sprouted that morning from the barn into the slant of sunlight, and he led me across the yard to a shed where he stored things like shovels and old extension cords. The door squealed open on old hinges, and the light he let in revealed piles of old dust-covered boxes. He pushed into a corner emerging with a curiously out-of-place package wrapped in brown paper.
    “You’re going to get a kick out of this,” he said, and then turned for the house. “You coming, Jim? Come on. Make yourself useful for something. Come on. Your grandmother’s turning sixty-five today.”