Mere Beans

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Title:     Mere Beans
Author: Dallas Lore Sharp [More Titles by Sharp]

"God himself that formed the earth and made it;
he hath established it; he created it not in vain,
he formed it to be inhabited."---Isaiah.

"A farmer," said my neighbor, Joel Moore, with considerable finality, "has got to get all he can, and keep all he gets, or die."

"Yes," I replied with a fine platitude; "but he's got to give if he's going to get."

"Just so," he answered, his eye a-glitter with wrath as it traveled the trail of the fox across the dooryard; "just so, and I 'll go halves with the soil; but I never signed a lease to run this farm on shares with the varmints."

"Well," said I, "I 've come out from the city to run my farm on shares with the whole universe--fox and hawk, dry weather and wet, summer and winter. I believe there is a great deal more to farming than mere beans. I 'm going to raise birds and beasts as well. I 'm going to cultivate everything, from my stone-piles up to the stars."

He looked me over. I had not been long out from the city. Then he said, thinking doubtless of my stone-piles:--

"Professor, you 've bought a mighty rich piece of land. And it's just as you say; there's more to farmin' than beans. But, as I see it, beans are beans anyway you cook 'em; and I think, if I was you, I would hang on a while yet to my talkin' job in the city."

It was sound advice. I have a rich farm. I have raised beans that were beans, and I have raised birds, besides, and beasts,--a perfectly enormous crop of woodchucks; I have cultivated everything up to the stars; but I find it necessary to hang on a while yet to my talkin' job in the city.

Nevertheless, Joel is fundamentally wrong about the beans, for beans are not necessarily beans any way you cook them, nor are beans mere beans any way you grow them--not if I remember Thoreau and my extensive ministerial experience with bean suppers.

As for growing mere beans--listen to Thoreau. He is out in his patch at Walden.

"When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woods and the sky, and was an accompaniment to my labor which yielded an instant and immeasurable crop. It was no longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed beans."

Who was it, do you suppose, that hoed? And, if not beans, what was it that he hoed? Well, poems for one thing, prose poems. If there is a more delightful chapter in American literature than that one in Walden on the bean-patch, I don't know which chapter it is. That patch was made to yield more than beans. The very stones were made to tinkle till their music sounded on the sky.

"As _I_ see it, beans are beans," said Joel. And so they are, as he sees them.

Is not the commonplaceness, the humdrumness, the dead-levelness, of life largely a matter of individual vision, "as I see it"?

Take farm life, for instance, and how it is typified in my neighbor! how it is epitomized, too, and really explained in his "beans are beans"! He raises beans; she cooks beans; they eat beans. Life is pretty much all beans. If "beans are beans," why, how much more is life?

He runs his farm on halves with the soil, and there the sharing stops, and consequently there the returns stop. He gives to the soil and the soil gives back, thirty, sixty, an hundredfold. What if he should give to the skies as well?--to the wild life that dwells with him on his land?--to the wild flowers that bank his meadow brook?--to the trees that cover his pasture slopes? Would they, like the soil, give anything back?

Off against the sky to the south a succession of his rounded slopes shoulder their way from the woods out to where the road and the brook wind through. They cannot be tilled; the soil is too scant and gravelly; but they are lovely in their gentle forms, and still lovelier in their clumps of mingled cedars and gray birches, scattered dark and sharply pointed on the blue of the sky, and diffuse, and soft, and gleaming white against the hillside's green. I cannot help seeing them from my windows, cannot help lingering over them--could not, rather; for recently my neighbor (and there never was a better neighbor) sent a man over those hills with an axe, and piled the birches into cords of snowy firewood.

It was done. I could not help it, but in my grief I went over and spoke to him about it. He was sorry, and explained the case by saying,--

"Well, if there's one kind of tree I hate more than another, it's a gray birch."

We certainly need a rural uplift. We need an urban uplift, too, no doubt, for I suppose "beans are beans" in Boston, just as they are here in Hingham. But it does seem the more astonishing that in the country, where the very environment is poetry, where companionship with living things is constant, where even the labor of one's hands is cooeperation with the divine forces of nature--the more astonishing, I say, that under these conditions life should so often be but bare existence, mere beans.

There are many causes for this, one of them being an unwillingness to share largely with the whole of nature. "I 'll go halves with the soil," said my neighbor; but he did not sign a lease to run his farm on shares with the "varmints," the fox, which stole his fine rooster, on this particular occasion.

But such a contract is absolutely necessary if one is to get out of farm life--out of any life--its flowers and fragrance, as well as its pods and beans. And, first, one must be convinced, must acknowledge to one's self, that the flower and fragrance are needed in life, are as useful as pods and beans. A row of sweet peas is as necessary on the farm as a patch of the best wrinkled variety in the garden.

But to come back to the fox.

Now, I have lived long enough, and I have had that fox steal roosters enough, to understand, even feel, my neighbor's wrath perfectly. I fully sympathize with him. What, then, you ask, of my sympathy for the fox?

At times, I must admit, the strain has been very great. More than once (three times, to be exact) I have fired at that same fox to kill. I have lost many a rooster, but those I have not lost are many, many more. Browned to a turn, and garnished with parsley, a rooster is almost a poem. So was that wild fox, the other morning, almost a poem, standing on the bare knoll here near the house, his form half-shrouded in the early mist, his keen ears pricked, his pointed nose turned toward the yard where the hens were waking up.

Something primitive, something wild and free and stirring, something furtive, crafty, cunning--the shadow of the dark primeval forest, at sight of him, fell across the glaring common-placeness of that whole tame day.

I will not ask, Was it worth the rooster? For that is too gross, too cheap a price to pay for a glimpse of wild life that set the dead nerves of the cave man in me thrilling with new life. Rather I would ask, Are such sights and thrills worth the deliberate purpose to have a woodlot, as well as a beanpatch and a henyard, on the farm?

Our American farm life needs new and better machinery, better methods, better buildings, better roads, better schools, better stock; but given all of these, and farm life must still continue to be earthy, material, mere beans--only more of them--until the farm is run on shares with all the universe around, until the farmer learns not only to reap the sunshine, but also to harvest the snow; learns to get a real and rich crop out of his landscape, his shy, wild neighbors, his independence and liberty, his various, difficult, yet strangely poetical, tasks.

But, if farm life tends constantly to become earthy, so does business life, and professional life--beans, all of it.

The farmers educated for mere efficiency, the merchants, the preachers, doctors, lawyers, educated for mere efficiency, are educated for mere beans? A great fortune, a great congregation, a great practice, a great farm crop, are one and all mere beans? Efficiency is not a whole education, nor meat a whole living, nor the worker the whole man.

And I said as much to Joel.

"Beans," I said, "must be raised. Much of life must be spent hoeing the beans. But I am going to ask myself: 'Is it _mere_ beans that I am hoeing? And is it the _whole_ of me that is hoeing the beans?'"

"Well," he replied, "you settle down on that farm of yours as I settled on mine, and I 'll tell you what answer you 'll get to them questions. There ain't no po'try about farmin'. God did n't intend there should be--as I see it."

"Now, that is n't the way I see it at all. This is God's earth,--and there could n't be a better one."

"Of course there could n't, but there was one once."

"When?" I asked, astonished.

"In the beginning."

"You mean the Garden of Eden?"

"Just that."

"Why, man, this earth, this farm of yours, is the Garden of Eden."

"But it says God drove him out of the Garden and, what's more, it says He made him farm for a livin', don't it?"

"That's what it says," I replied.

"Well, then, as I see it, that settles it, don't it? God puts a man on a farm when he ain't fit for anything else. 'Least, that's the way I see it. That's how I got here, I s'pose, and I s'pose that's why I stay here."

"But," said I, "there's another version of that farm story."

"Not in the Bible?" he asked, now beginning to edge away, for it was not often that I could get him so near to books as this. Let me talk books with Joel Moore and the talk lags. Farming and neighboring are Joel's strong points, not books. He is a general farmer and a kind of universal neighbor (that being his specialty); on neighborhood and farm topics his mind is admirably full and clear.

"That other version is in the Bible, right along with the one you've been citing--just before it in Genesis."

He faced me squarely, a light of confidence in his eye, a ring of certainty, not to say triumph, in his tones:--

"You 're sure of that, Professor?"

"Reasonably."

"Well, I 'm not a college man, but I 've read the Bible. Let's go in and take a look at Holy Writ on farmin',"--leading the way with alacrity into the house.

"My father was a great Bible man down in Maine," he went on. "Let me raise a curtain. This was his," pointing to an immense family Bible, with hand-wrought clasps, that lay beneath the plush family album, also clasped, on a frail little table in the middle of the parlor floor.

The daylight came darkly through the thick muslin draperies at the window and fell in a faint line across the floor. An oval frame of hair-flowers hung on the wall opposite me--a somber wreath of immortelles for the departed--_of_ the departed--black, brown, auburn, and grizzled-gray, with one touch (a calla lily, I think) of the reddest hair I ever beheld. In one corner of the room stood a closed cabinet organ; behind me, a tall base-burner, polished till it seemed to light the dimmest corners of the room. There was no fire in the stove; there was no air in the room, only the mingled breath of soot and the hair-flowers and the plush album and the stuffed blue jay under the bell-jar on the mantelpiece, and the heavy brass-clasped Bible. There was no coffin in the room; but Joel took up the Bible and handed it to me as if we were having a funeral.

"Read me that other account of Adam's farm," he said; "I can't see without my specs."

In spite of a certain restraint of manner and evident uneasiness at the situation, he had something of boldness, even the condescension of the victor toward me. He was standing and looking down at me; yet he stood ill at ease by the table.

"Sit down, Joel," I said, assuming an authority in his house that I saw he could not quite feel.

"I can't; I 've got my overhalls on."

"Let us do all things decently and in order, Joel," I continued, touching the great Book reverently.

"But I never set in this room. My chair's out there in the kitchen."

I moved over to the window to get what light I could, Joel following me with furtive, sidelong glances, as if he saw ghosts in the dark corners.

"We keep this room mostly for funerals," he volunteered, in order to stir up talk and lay what of the silence and the ghosts he could.

"I 'll read your story of Adam's farming first," I said, and began: "These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth"--going on with the account of the dry, rainless world, and with no man to till the soil; then to the forming of Adam out of the dust, and the planting of Eden; of the rivers, of God's mistake in trying Adam alone in the Garden, of the rib made into Eve, of the prohibited tree, the snake, the wormy apple, the fall, the curse, the thorns--and how, in order to crown the curse and make it real, God drove the sinful pair forth from the Garden and condemned them to farm for a living.

"That's it," Joel muttered with a mourner's groan. "That's Holy Writ on farmin' as _I_ understand it. Now, where's the other story?"

"Here it is," I answered, "but we 've got to have some fresh air and more light on it," rising as I spoke and reaching for the bolt on the front door. With a single quick jerk I had it back, and throwing myself forward, swung the door wide to the open sky, while Joel groaned again, and the big, rusty hinges thrice groaned at the surprise and shock of it. But the thing was done.

A flood of warm, sweet sunshine poured over us; a breeze, wild-rose-and-elder-laden, swept in out of the broad meadow that stretched from the very doorstep to a distant hill of pines, and through the air, like a shower in June, fell the notes of soaring, singing bobolinks.

Joel stood looking out over his farm with the eyes of a stark stranger. He had never seen it from the front door before. It was a new prospect.

"Let's sit here on the millstone step," I said, bringing the Bible out into the fresh air, "and I 'll read you something you never heard before," and I read,--laying the emphasis so as to render a new thing of the old story,--"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light; and there was light. And God saw the light that it was good. And God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light day, and the darkness he called night.

"And the evening and the morning were the first day."

Starting each new phase of the tale with "And God said," and bringing it to a close with "And God saw that it was good," I read on through the seas and dry land, the sun and stars, and all living things, to man and woman--"male and female created he them"--and in his own likeness, blessing them and crowning the blessing with saying, "Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and _subdue_ it,"--farm for a living; rounding out the whole marvelous story with the sweet refrain: "And God saw _everything_ that he had made, and behold it was _very_ good.

"And the evening and the morning were the sixth day."

"_Thus_, Joel," I concluded, glancing at him as with opened eyes he looked out for the first time over his new meadow,--"_thus_, according to my belief, and not as you have been reading it, were the heavens and the earth finished and all the host of them."

He took the old book in his lap and sat silent with me for a while on the step. Then he said:--

"Nobody has got to the bottom of that book yet, have they? And it's true; it's all true. It's just accordin' as you see it. Do ye know what I'm going to do? I 'm going to buy one of them double-seated red swings and put it right out here under this sassafras tree, and Hannah and I are going to set in, and swing in it, and listen a little to them bobolinks."

[The end]
Dallas Lore Sharp's essay: Mere Beans

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