Unit7b The Earth Poet Jesse Stuart
Nothing ever escaped my father, for he was an earth poet who loved the land and everything on it. He liked to watch things grow. From the time I was big enough for him to lead me by the hand, I went with him over the farm. If I couldn’t walk all the way in those early days, he’d carry me on his back. I learned to love many of the things he loved.
Sometime in the dim past of my boyhood, my father unloaded me from his back under some white-oak trees just beginning to leaf. “Look at this hill, son,” he said, gesturing broadly with a sweep of his hand. “Look up that steep hill toward the sky. See how pretty that new-ground corn is.”
This was the first field I can remember my father’s talking me to see. The row of corn curved like dark green rainbows around a high slope with a valley and its little tributaries running down through the center. The corn blades rustled in the wind, and my father said he could understand what the corn blades were saying. He told me they whispered to each other, and this was hard for me to believe. I reasoned that before anything could speak or make a sound it had to have a mouth. When my father said the corn could talk, I got down on my knees and looked a stalk over.
“This corn hasn’t got a mouth,” I told my father. “how can anything talk when doesn’t have a mouth?”
He laughed like the wind in the corn and hugged me to his knees, and we went on.
The one thing my father brought me to see that delighted him most was the pumpkins. I’d never seen so many pumpkins with long necks and small bodies. Pumpkins as big around as the bottom of a flour barrel were sitting in the furrows beneath the tall corn, immovable as rocks. There were pumpkins, and more pumpkins, of all colors – yellow and white, green and brown.
“Look at this, won’t you,” my father said. “Look what corn, what beans, what pumpkins. Corn ears so big they lean the cornstalks. Beans as thick as honey-locust beans on the honey-locust tree. And pumpkins thicker than the stumps in this new ground. I could walk all over this field on pumpkins and never step on the ground.”
He looked upon the beauty of this cove he had cleared and his three crops growing here. He rarely figured a field in dollars and cents. Although he never wasted a dollar; money didn’t mean everything to him. He liked to see the beauty of growing thins on the land. He carried this beauty in his mind.
Once, when we were talking between cornfields on a rainy Sunday afternoon, he pointed to a redbird on its nest in a locust tree, a redbird with shiny red feathers against the dark background of a nest. It was just another bird’s nest to me until he whispered, “ever see anything as pretty as what the raindrop do to that redbird sitting on her dark nest?” from this day on, I have liked to see birds, especially redbirds, sitting on their nests in the rain. But my father was the one to make me see the beauty.
“A blacksnake is a pretty thing,” he once said to me, “so shiny and black in the spring sun after he sheds his winter skin.”
He was the first man I ever heard say a snake was pretty. I never forgot his saying it. I can even remember the thicket where he saw the blacksnake.
He saw more beauty in trees than any man I have ever known. He would walk through a strange forest laying his hand upon the trees, saying this oak or that pine, that beech or poplar, was a beautiful tree. Then he would single out other trees and say they should be cut. He would always give his reasons for cutting a tree: too many trees on a root stool, too thick, one damaged by fire at the butt, one leaning against another, too many on the ground, or the soil not deep enough above a ledge of rocks to support them.
Then there were the hundreds of times my father took me to the hills to see wild flowers. I thought it was silly at first. He would sit on a dead log, maybe one covered with wild moss, somewhere under the tall beech trees, listening to the wind in the canopy of leaves above, looking at a clump of violets of percoon growing beside a rooted log. He could sit there enjoying himself indefinitely. Only when the sun went down would we get up and start for home. Father wouldn’t break the Sabbath by working, except in an emergency. He would follow a cow that was overdue to calve. He would watch over ewes in the same manner. He followed them to the high cliffs and helped them deliver their lambs, saving their lives. He would do such things on Sundays, and he would fight forest fires. But he always said he could make a living working six days in the week. Yet he was restless on Sundays. He had to walk around and look over his fields and enjoy them.
My father didn’t have to travel over the country searching for something beautiful to see. He didn’t have to go away to find beauty, for he found everywhere around him. He had eyes to find it. He had a mind to know it. He had a heart to appreciate it. He was an uneducated poet of this earth. And if anybody had told him that he was, he wouldn’t have understood. He would have understood. He would have turned and walked away without saying anything.
In winter, when snow was over the ground, and the stars glistened, he’d go to the barn to feed the livestock at four in the morning. I have seen him put corn in the feedboxes for the horses and mules, then go out and stand look at the morning moon. He once told me he always kept a horse with a flaxen mane and tail because he liked to see one run in the moonlight with his mane arched high and his tail floating on the wind.
When spring returned, he was always taking me someplace to show me a new tree he had found, or a pretty red mushroom growing on a rotting stump in some deep hollow. He found so many strange and beautiful things that I tried to rival him by making discoveries, too. I looked into the out-of-the-way and unexpected places to find the beautiful and the unusual.
I didn’t get the idea of dead leaves being golden ships on the sea from a storybook. And neither did my father, for he had never read a book in his life. He’d never had a book read to him either. I was in October, and we were sitting on the bank of W – Branch. We were watching the blue autumn water slide swiftly over the slate rocks. My father picked up leaves that were shaped like little ships and dropped them into the water.
“These are ships on swift water,” he told me, “going to far-off lands where strangers will see them.” He had a special love for autumn leaves, and he’d picked up leaves when we were out walking and ask me to identify them. He’d talk about how pretty each leaf was and how a leaf was prettier after it was dead than when it was alive and growing.
Many people thought my father was just a one-horse farmer who never got much out of life. They saw only a little man, dressed in clean, patched overalls, with callused and brier-scratched hands. They often saw the beard along his face. And they saw him go off and just stand in a field and look at something. They thought he was moody. Well, he was that all right, but when he was standing there and people thought he was looking into space, he was looking at a flower or a mushroom or a new bug he’d discovered for the first time. And when he looked up into a tree, he wasn’t searching for a hornet’s nest to burn a bird’s nest to rob. He wasn’t trying to find a bee tree. He was just looking closely at the beauty in a tree. And among the millions, he always found one different enough to excite him.
No one who really knew him ever felt sorry for my father. Any feeling of pity turned to envy. For my father had a world of his own, larger and richer than the vast earth that world travelers know. He found more beauty in his acres and square miles than poets who have written a half-dozen books. Only my father couldn’t write down the words to express his thoughts. He had no common symbols by which to share his wealth. He was a poet who lived his life upon this earth and never left a line of poetry – expect to those of us who lived with him.
Jesse Stuart(1907 – ) was born in the Kentucky hills and spent most of his life in Kentucky hill country, writing about the land and the people that he knew and loved. In this essay, he makes us see the unexpected genius of a poor farmer – his own father. |