A View from the Back Porch

A VIEW FROM THE PORCH

“Nothing impresses the mind with a deeper feeling of loneliness than to tread the silent and deserted scene of former throng and pageant.”

Washington Irving


While visiting my father and grandmother one Sunday afternoon in the late 1990s , I told my father that I wanted to leave the city and build a home near the Kasey House (more on this in a moment). I would make the daily one-hour commute to my job in Roanoke with WVTF Public Radio, raise a few head of cattle, have a big garden every year, and cut firewood for the stove I would have in my spacious basement. Patiently, my father would listen to me dream aloud while we sat at the kitchen table, and then he made what was for me a curious observation about my future:
“Just remember that when I=m gone, this place won=t mean the same to you.@
I couldn’t understand this sentiment because he spoke often and affectionately about the past. Besides, I loved this 98-acre farm in Bedford County, Virginia, and he knew it. I first thought he was trying to convince me yet again that little money was to be made on a small farm, but he had already made and lived that point well over the years: “Its too far to drive every day, and you’ll just wear out your car, and you can’t work in the city and raise cattle in the country, “ were refrains that he could have set to music.
I never learned how to be a farmer. I picked up knowledge by living on a farm, of course, but I never plowed a single row or baled one bale of hay in my lifetime. I never raised a single cow, pig or chicken. What I know about agriculture, I had observed. I had, though, fulfilled his biggest dream for him (and for me), by earning a college degree. I had a good job, too. So, he had no reason to be scared that I wanted to come back home, uneducated, and with no prospects,
to tend a small farm and live in poverty.
“When we left the Dabney Place (the farm where he and his siblings grew up), we never did go back,” he said.
“ Daddy, you didn’t have to go back! You can look out the kitchen window and see the Dabney Place from here!” I replied, nearly laughing aloud.
“ Just wait and see.”
I will never feel differently about this place, I said to myself. My father and I never mentioned the subject again. I would, though, often recall the conversation. My overambitious farm plans depended on my father being around to “watch over things,”or to make sure I knew what I was doing. He would, I thought, enjoy letting me take over the responsibility of the cattle and the land. While I was at work, he could “put out the fires” that would occasionally crop up. With his experience and his counsel, I would continue a tradition. With him still around, the farm would still feel like home.
However, I did not take into account that my father was no longer able nor had a desire to put out fires. Farming a roughly one hundred-acre farm is always part-time work but a full-time responsibility. Sometimes, cows get through fences and out onto the highway. I would not be able to leave my full-time job in Roanoke to go chase cows in Bedford County. Finally, my plans did not take into account that my wife, Kathy, reared in the Raleigh Court area of Roanoke City, had no desire to live on a farm.
Finally, my fathers’ death ended all of my plans.
On a chilly weekday October afternoon, two months after my father died, I traveled from Roanoke back to his home to meet with a contractor who would replace the decades-old furnace that had worried my father for years (more on that later, too). Soon, my grandmother would take ownership of my boyhood home. Though her own home had fallen into major disrepair since my grandfather died in 1983, her new one needed plenty of work, too.
After my meeting, I went into the living room and sat down. Although there was about an hour of daylight left, I had closed the curtains to give me an extra measure of privacy; there had been many welcome condolence calls and visits lately, but on this day, I craved solitude. But the silence that I encountered this day was foreign, peculiar and unwelcome. Although a huge void had been left in my family when my mother died in 1996, this place had still felt like home.
Just a few weeks ago, my father and I had sat in the kitchen and talked while my grandmother prepared dinner. Now, just a few weeks later, the house was completely empty. My grandmother, who had lived with my parents during the last two years of my mother’s life and almost a year after her death, was now back in her own home and she came over with me only on Sundays to visit with my father. On this afternoon, with her gone, too, though, this place that had once been home was empty for the first time. An odd, unsettling stillness had crept in here; it was the silence that death leaves behind.
A thin layer of dust that had settled on the furniture during the past few months was an odd sight. The familiar smell of the home and its resident had faded away. Almost overnight, it had become just an empty old house that needed a new furnace. I didn’t sit and ponder this silence and this strange place for too long after the contractor left. No sooner than I sat down, I had to get up and leave. Sometimes, silence is not golden.
I walked outside and crossed the field separating my father=s home from the Kasey House. This dilapidated dwelling, which was built in the late 1870's by John Kasey, a former Bedford County government official, has been in the Martin family since 1939, the year my father=s uncle Garland purchased the 98-acre tract of land. After my father became the owner in 1948, he named the farm the Kasey Seats, because in the late 1800's, worship services were held on the very spot he built his home in 1955. The services were held outside, and makeshift pews were
fashioned from old boards laid across blocks and tree stumps.
Several barns and tool sheds were added to the Kasey House plot in the 1950's but they, like the old clapboard home itself, are slowly falling down. Since I was a young boy, I have enjoyed walking over to this farmhouse to stand inside the doorway of the little side porch that leads into the kitchen. From here, I would admire the view of the surrounding countryside that had always been, for me a lovely, peaceful panorama of beautiful pasture and forest. As a teenager, I would dream of the world that lay beyond those trees and dream of the day when I go out to see it.
The Kasey House played a prominent role in several generations of Martins, including mine. My paternal grandparents lived here in the late 1940's before building a house about a mile away, on the same road. Afterwards, my father, his older brother, Willard and his first wife, Ann, lived here briefly. In the early 1960's, after my parents had married, my maternal grandparents moved to the home site and tore down the house’s crumbling front porch and placed a mobile home on the spot.
On this October afternoon, I came to my hideaway to think about my recent loss. Many times over the years I stood here and let my mind wander in all directions while I admired the beautiful landscape and enjoyed the country silence. Now, though, this place was no longer as silent as it was when I was a boy playing in what had once been a front yard, when far less cars traveled White House Road.
Just as my father=s home had been a few months ago, the Kasey Place had once been alive, too. I could almost see my uncle in his cattle truck, pulling up the driveway to unload a new purchase of livestock; my grandfather at work in his tool shed; my mother and grandmother hanging clothes on the line in front of the cherry tree, and my father mowing hay on his tractor. I remember coming home one afternoon from school to find my first bicycle, which was a gift from my Granddaddy Martin, resting on its kick stand in the front yard.
But I saw only death and decay on this October afternoon. Even the Kasey House and my view had lost its appeal. It was now just a ramshackle reminder of a different way of life, in a very different time. I knew nothing was going to bring me solace on this day because I was grieving over my loss, but I also knew my life, and my life here on this farm, had permanently changed.
I went into the house, passed through the kitchen into the parlor, and almost tripped over an old cardboard box. A few old kitchen chairs, an old vacuum cleaner, ironing board, broken cups and saucers, old books, records and toys had cluttered the floor for years. My first bicycle, with three decades of rust on it, was part of the pile, sharing a grave with old magazines, records, and other discarded items from my family’s past.
Of all the junk in the room, the bicycle caught my attention. I remember how excited I was and how much I loved it its bright red color and white stripes. I must have seen that old red bike here a hundred times over the years, but today I saw just a rusted, useless piece of metal, beyond repair and appropriate in its tomb, an old, abandoned farmhouse listing toward the pasture separating it from my fathers’ house. Both its purpose and its time were gone, just like the rest of the junk that littered the parlor floor.
So this is what my father meant when he said the home place would not mean the same to me when he was gone. The past is filled with lots of old things that you just cannot or do not want to keep. We cannot or should not want to relive our past, but instead we should desire to live for today.
I looked around the parlor of this old farmhouse and was struck by the contrast from the living room I had just left. My fathers’s house use needed some work before my grandmother could move in, but, compared to what I was looking at now, the thin layer of dust on the lamps and the television didn’t seem so bad after all. Yes, the furnace needed replacing, the floors needed some work and the bathroom needed a complete makeover, too, but at least it was not as bad as this! Furthermore, my grandmother’s new home had all its windows and was not listing to one side!
As I walked out back through the field to my car, I recalled some of the many times my father said that he had enough trouble paying for his own home over the years to even think about restoring the old Kasey House. With no insulation and only a few small fireplaces in its two bedrooms and a small, coal-fueled Warm Morning stove in the parlor, it wasn’t a cozy, warm and toasty place to be, he recalled. As a teenager, you slept with as many blankets under you as you did over you because the draft beneath the straw mattresses was unmerciful. Blankets were like gold to farmers. His Uncle Lynn, Granddaddy Martin’s brother, once half-jokingly remarked that in his day a smart man looking for a wife would want to know how many quilts she had and if she knew how to make them at all (which my Aunt Beulah did)!
No, my father would say, the Kasey House would keep the rain and the leaves off of you, but little more. Furthermore, life was not a story book tale for my father when he had lived at the Dabney Place, or even here. For him, unlike me, there were no picture book images or views in his mind. He had worked hard here. He and my mother, in his words, had “made their stand” here. But for me, this place had been just a pretty place to look at.
Several months later, at a personal property auction, I sold that old red bike in the Kasey House. In hindsight, I almost regret it because my grandchildren could have had one more memento from their grandfather’s boyhood. But there’s barely enough room in my shed for their own bikes and toys, much less an old rusted one.
My view from the porch was beginning to change.
As I walked back to the house, I looked out into the backyard and saw Jackie Tuck, a friend and neighbor who first took care of the farm after my father died, and one of his sons, Tracy, in the pasture behind my father=s house. Father and son had borrowed my father=s tractor. Jackie was using the front-end loader to lift his son high up into the apple tree to get the fruit near the top before it all fell to the ground and rotted. I looked longingly at what they were doing. Then, I drove back to my own home, and life, in the suburbs.

A MAN OF THE LAND

“If a man owns a little property, that property is him, it’s part of him, and it’s like him. If he owns property only so he can walk on it and handle it and be sad when it isn’t doing well, and feel fine when the rain falls on it, that property is him, and some way he’s bigger because he owns it.”
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath


“This story begins some 63 years ago, approximately December 10, 1932. That’s when we moved over to the Dabney Place. I remember the day very well. Willard, Jack and me (my father’s brothers) got off the truck down here at my grandmother’s place at the foot of the hill here and the rest of them went over to the farm to start unpackin. We got so wild that along about 11 or 12 0'clock, our grandmother walked us through the woods up by what is now Jackie Tuck’s place over to the farm.
We lived there for 25 years and had a pretty good time there. We had plenty of food. We raised wheat and corn and pork. A fellow asked my brother, Willard, one time how we made it through the Depression. Willard said that we didn’t even know it was going on because we had this farm and plenty to eat and our daddy had a job at the American Viscose in Roanoke. That lasted until the late 1950s when the plant closed down.
Mr. Hurt and some different men lived on the farm and helped us. Finally, Aubrey Krantz came and stayed quite a few years. We lived a pretty normal life. Later on, Daddy got sick and had diabetes. He sold the farm and moved over to the Kasey Place.
The Kasey Place was sold two or three times. It seemed that all of the Martins owned it. Finally, me and Willard got it in the late 40s, then I bought it from him in 1948. We lived there about 5 years. I remember how his first wife, Ann, used to cry because she was from the city and had never lived in the country before, but she pulled through.
One of the things Mama Jirdie (my father’s paternal grandmother) told me was that where our house is now was once called the Kasey Seats. There were church services that went on here on Sunday evenings.”

The Audio Diary of Harold Martin



My father had, as all farmers do, reached down many times and grasped a clump of earth in his hands, held it, contemplated it, and felt a kinship with it. Whether the soil was dry because of drought or rich and fertile due to prayed-for rain, he was one with the land. At the end of his life, he was able to understand just how much he had loved it.
One summer afternoon in 1995, while sitting in the front yard under one of the willow trees, my father recorded a bare-bones account of his life on the Kasey Seats Farm. The steady pace of the July tourist traffic can be heard in the tape’s background. Since my father, unbeknownst to him, lived by the Shakespeare dictum in Henry V that men of few words are the best men, he left out a few details about his life.
During his lifetime, my father moved only about five three miles from his birthplace and he enjoyed only a few travels away from home. He took a seventh-grade class trip to Washington, DC in 1938 (with the requisite $5.00 in spending money); he traveled to Tennessee several times to visit his brother, Willard and while there visited parts of Kentucky. Once, with my mother, he took a bus trip through the Pennsylvania Dutch country. When he worked with my grandfather, who was a construction superintendent for a large firm, as a timekeeper and general laborer on various high school construction sites, he worked in Danville, Blacksburg and Culpeper, Virginia.
My father was a farmer, but not a rugged man in the image of a John Wayne or a Matt Dillon. Rather, he was a John-Boy Walton who did not pursue his college dream. He held education in the highest regard from his early teenage years until his graduation from Huddleston High School as Class Valedictorian in 1943. For my father, teaching was the most noble of all professions. He taught Sunday School for 30 years and spent hours each week preparing his lesson. He was an avid student of Thomas Jefferson’s life and the era of the antebellum South. He relished trips to Monticello, Appomattox and the Booker T. Washington National Monument.

My father’s youthful ambition was to teach. My Grandma Martin and her sister, Sally, attended Radford State Teacher’s College, now Radford University, in 1921 for two six-week summer sessions to earn first-grade teaching certificates. Upon graduation, my Grandma Martin came home and taught at Ayers’ School, a typical one-room schoolhouse that was composed of the first seven grades. In my grandmother’s spare time, she and her sister taught their father, Bruce Thomas (B. T.) Huffman how to read and to write. My father loved to tell me this story because he thought it was an act of great love, and he kept my Grandma Martin’s teaching certificate until his death.
Often, my father would recall that his high school years included the chores of helping his siblings with homework and corresponding with their teachers when necessary. He would lull his sister, Sue, to sleep while studying, rocking her crib with his foot while he rocked himself back and forth in a rocking chair. In 1943, the erstwhile student, who dreamed of becoming a Latin teacher, set out with his high school diploma and valedictorian award to pursue his dream.
During his senior year at Huddleston High, my father said he wrote to “every college in the South” to obtain admission information. But, for a meek, sensitive farm boy, traveling out of state would have been akin to traveling out of the country. Instead, he opted for nearby National Business College in downtown Roanoke. He tried to commute from home, but the combination of a long drive on winding country roads, the farm work that awaited him when he got home, and a youthful lack of self-confidence overwhelmed him. Soon, he left school.
For the rest of his life, my father recalled his last day at National Business College. He had finished the withdrawal paperwork and was leaving when he encountered one of his professors on a stairwell. A few steps above my father, the teacher looked down and said, “Martin, you’re leaving us already? I’m sorry to hear it.”
“I should have turned around and stayed,” my father often said.

Granddaddy Martin, though, felt he had made the right decision. He had wanted his son to be at home on the farm like the other boys in the community. Now my father would be where he should be, “where he belonged.” With Granddaddy’s help, my father bought his farm, which was originally 140 acres, and he built a dairy barn. Soon, he was milking a herd twice a day, seven days each week.
But the Coble Milk Plant in Moneta (where Lake Christian Ministries is now located) eventually closed, and my father, like his father before him, had to find work off the farm to support his family. He joined the construction firm that employed my maternal grandfather and from the late 1950s through the early 1970s, they worked on elementary and high school job sites in southwest Virginia. When my grandfather was forced to retire due to work-related injuries in 1973, my father found work first at Rubatex Corporation in Bedford (he was laid off after three months) then at Klopman Industries in Bedford. It was his last job at a meat-packing facility in Evington, though, that changed all of our lives.
My Uncle Willard, my father’s oldest brother, had a successful surveying business in Knoxville, Tennessee. Soon after my father took the meat-packing job, Uncle Willard began the difficult task of convincing my father that he should go into business for himself by operating his own slaughterhouse. Uncle Willard even offered to finance the venture. My father, though, proved to be an initial hard sell. Yet, after friends and family helped to convince him that he should take a gamble, my father, after firmly but graciously refusing his brother’s kindness, decided at the age of 50 to roll the dice and give the business a try.
Martin’s Meat Processing opened in 1975. It became a success not only because it met the need of a large number of farming families that still butchered an animal for family consumption, but my father, just like his father before him, was an extrovert. His personality, combined with my mother’s own sociability, was tailor-made for the public, and their business prospered. In later years, as my father prepared to retire, he phased out custom slaughtering to sell retail cuts of meat to the Smith Mountain tourist trade, and both my parents and grandparents made new friends.

When he assumed the nicely fitting role of gentleman farmer and business owner during the last quarter of my father’s life, he finally became comfortable with the path his life had taken. He loved to talk about farming and farming techniques. He was fascinated by Thomas Jefferson’s farm at Monticello and how the President had made wise use of his resources. He made soap with beef fat and lye and sold it to customers in his store. He loved to explain to them how tobacco and corn was grown and harvested, how to raise cattle and when to plant certain vegetables for a garden. He loved to regal them with farming stories from the days before tractors and hay balers.
My father had taken a gamble when most of us have lost the energy to take one. He had taken a huge bet, though, and won. Armed with a strong religious faith, sustained by the help of a loving brother, family and wonderful customers, he had achieved a comfortable level of success. He would always regret not fulfilling his youthful ambitions, but he had been offered a second chance to make a living on the Kasey Seats farm and he did not waste it.
Farming, Dwight Eisenhower writes, looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from the corn field. My father dreamed of using a pencil instead of plow but he let his life take another turn. However, his sacrifice, fight and struggle on his land gave him a love for the land and, eventually, a love for the life that he chose. He was proud that he, too, like Jefferson, was a farmer. “I have done what I came here to do,” he told me several months before he died. He was telling me that his life’s work was over. But, he was also satisfied by his life. My father was satisfied, too, that his hard work had given his son the opportunity to use the pencil he did not get to use.