Free Clear Springs by Bobbie Ann Mason Page A

found objections. He found other things to do. He didn’t want to go into debt, which he might have to do if he had to outfit his own farm and hire some hands. “I’d need boys to work it,” he told her. “All I’ve got is two little girls.” Then, his father, who had taught him what everything was worth, recoiled at the price. In the end, Mr. Coleman sold the land to another neighbor, who grew corn on it.
    This was the thirty acres that the chicken tower was built on eventually. In the 1940s, after the war, when America was on the threshold of prosperity, my family could have bought that land for what would now seem mere chicken feed. And where would the chicken tower be now? What if? It is frustrating, even now, to think of my father’s unwillingness to take the smallest risk after the war, except for the adventure of setting out some tobacco plants. If our family had bought that land, bringing our holdings to a total of eighty-three acres, maybe we would not have ultimately dispersed. Maybe the larger farm would have been enough to hold us there. But maybe it did depend on a speedy production of sons. I was supposed to be that first son, meant to carry on the farm; the name was ready and waiting to be slapped onto the firstborn, surely a boy. Were they so hopeful of a son they hadn’t even thought of a girl’s name?
    When another farm in the neighborhood came up for sale, Mama again urged Daddy to take a chance. From her view, this place was even better than Mr. Coleman’s acreage. It was a working farm, with a house and barn. And it was over half a mile away from her in-laws. She spoke of the place to Granny. “Wilburn needs to settle down to something and get a start,” she said. “He’s not doing anything.”
    Granny was patching some work pants, and her face froze in shock. She said, “But what if he was to get sick? Who would take care of him way off yonder?”
    Mama says this comment pierced her heart. Granny gave her no credit—not even for being able to nurse her husband if he caught cold. Looking back, I imagine that my grandparents were so desperate in clinging to their only son that they could not envision the second and third generation moving even a few furlongs off. Perhaps their own move from Clear Springs had been such a jolt that they could not abide this scattering. Who knew where it would end, once encouraged? After all, the Bradshaws, Granny’s maternal kin, had gone out to Texas in the 1880s and had never come back. Billy Bradshaw had been shot and killed out there, leaving three little children fatherless.
    Daddy dismissed Mama’s newest notion. He wouldn’t even discuss it. He simply proceeded—in stubborn silence—with what he had always done. Ingrained parsimony guided him like a divining rod. I suppose that close to the forefront of his mind was the awareness that his parents were often sickly. He may have imagined that he would inherit the farm in the not-too-distant future, so he probably thought it made no sense to gamble. He could get by where he was. It was what he knew. And he knew he wasn’t really tying himself down, because he could still get out of the fields and take little runs to town and the stockyards. Like his father, he had a flair for trading, which was integral to a thrifty farm. Granddaddy was often sick in bed with his chronic bronchitis, but he always got better by Third Monday, the monthly gathering of farmers and stock dealers. Daddy and Granddaddy would go to sales at the stockyard and bid on a cow and come within five dollars of buying it, but then not buy it. They did not bid foolishly. They would buy a pair of mules in the morning and sell them for a profit in the afternoon, before the mules had even had a chance to eat.
    At the end of the summer, Daddy enrolled in an agriculture course from the farm extension service. The textbook was
Animal Sanitation and Disease Control
. By October, he and Granddaddy were buying more and more cows, replenishing