THE BEAN-FIELD |
MEANWHILE MY beans, the length of whose
rows, added together, was seven miles already planted, were impatient
to be hoed, for the earliest had grown considerably before the latest
were in the ground; indeed they were not easily to be put off. What
was the meaning of this so steady and self-respecting, this small
Herculean labor, I knew not. I came to love my rows, my beans, though
so many more than I wanted. They attached me to the earth, and so I
got strength like Antaeus. But why should I raise them? Only Heaven
knows. This was my curious labor all summer- to make this portion of
the earth's surface, which had yielded only cinquefoil, blackberries,
johnswort, and the like, before, sweet wild fruits and pleasant
flowers, produce instead this pulse. What shall I learn of beans or
beans of me? I cherish them, I hoe them, early and late I have an eye
to them; and this is my day's work. It is a fine broad leaf to look
on. My auxiliaries are the dews and rains which water this dry soil,
and what fertility is in the soil itself, which for the most part is
lean and effete. My enemies are worms, cool days, and most of all
woodchucks. The last have nibbled for me a quarter of an acre clean.
But what right had I to oust johnswort and the rest, and break up
their ancient herb garden? Soon, however, the remaining beans will be
too tough for them, and go forward to meet new foes.
When I
was four years old, as I well remember, I was brought from Boston to
this my native town, through these very woods and this field, to the
pond. It is one of the oldest seenes stamped on my memory. And now
tonight my flute has waked the echoes over that very water. The pines
still stand here older than I; or, if some have fallen, I have cooked
my supper with their stumps, and a new growth is rising all around,
preparing another aspect for new infant eyes. Almost the same
johnswort springs from the same perennial root in this pasture, and
even I have at length helped to clothe that fabulous landscape of my
infant dreams, and one of the results of my presence and influence is
seen in these bean leaves, corn blades, and potato vines.
I
planted about two acres and a half of upland; and as it was only
about fifteen years since the land was cleared, and I myself had got
out two or three cords of stumps, I did not give it any manure; but
in the course of the summer it appeared by the arrowheads which I
turned up in hoeing, that an extinct nation had anciently dwelt here
and planted corn and beans ere white men came to clear the land, and
so, to some extent, had exhausted the soil for this very
crop.
Before yet any woodchuck or squirrel had run across the
road, or the sun had got above the shrub oaks, while all the dew was
on, though the farmers warned me against it- I would advise you to do
all your work if possible while the dew is on- I began to level the
ranks of haughty weeds in my bean-field and throw dust upon their
heads. Early in the morning I worked barefooted, dabbling like a
plastic artist in the dewy and crumbling sand, but later in the day
the sun blistered my feet. There the sun lighted me to hoe beans,
pacing slowly backward and forward over that yellow gravelly upland,
between the long green rows, fifteen rods, the one end terminating in
a shrub oak copse where I could rest in the shade, the other in a
blackberry field where the green berries deepened their tints by the
time I had made another bout. Removing the weeds, putting fresh soil
about the bean stems, and encouraging this weed which I had sown,
making the yellow soil express its summer thought in bean leaves and
blossoms rather than in wormwood and piper and millet grass, making
the earth say beans instead of grass- this was my daily work. As I
had little aid from horses or cattle, or hired men or boys, or
improved implements of husbandry, I was much slower, and became much
more intimate with my beans than usual. But labor of the hands, even
when pursued to the verge of drudgery, is perhaps never the worst
form of idleness. It has a constant and imperishable moral, and to
the scholar it yields a classic result. A very agricola laboriosus
was I to travellers bound westward through Lincoln and Wayland to
nobody knows where; they sitting at their ease in gigs, with elbows
on knees, and reins loosely hanging in festoons; I the home-staying,
laborious native of the soil. But soon my homestead was out of their
sight and thought. It was the only open and cultivated field for a
great distance on either side of the road, so they made the most of
it; and sometimes the man in the field heard more of travellers'
gossip and comment than was meant for his ear: "Beans so late!
peas so late!"- for I continued to plant when others had begun
to hoe- the ministerial husbandman had not suspected it. "Corn,
my boy, for fodder; corn for fodder." "Does he live there?"
asks the black bonnet of the gray coat; and the hard-featured farmer
reins up his grateful dobbin to inquire what you are doing where he
sees no manure in the furrow, and recommends a little chip dirt, or
any little waste stuff, or it may be ashes or plaster. But here were
two acres and a half of furrows, and only a hoe for cart and two
hands to draw it- there being an aversion to other carts and horses-
and chip dirt far away. Fellow-travellers as they rattled by compared
it aloud with the fields which they had passed, so that I came to
know how I stood in the agricultural world. This was one field not in
Mr. Colman's report. And, by the way, who estimates the value of the
crop which nature yields in the still wilder fields unimproved by
man? The crop of English hay is carefully weighed, the moisture
calculated, the silicates and the potash; but in all dells and
pond-holes in the woods and pastures and swamps grows a rich and
various crop only unreaped by man. Mine was, as it were, the
connecting link between wild and cultivated fields; as some states
are civilized, and others half-civilized, and others savage or
barbarous, so my field was, though not in a bad sense, a
half-cultivated field. They were beans cheerfully returning to their
wild and primitive state that I cultivated, and my hoe played the
Ranz des Vaches for them.
Near at hand, upon the topmost spray
of a birch, sings the brown thrasher- or red mavis, as some love to
call him- all the morning, glad of your society, that would find out
another farmer's field if yours were not here. While you are planting
the seed, he cries- "Drop it, drop it- cover it up, cover it up-
pull it up, pull it up, pull it up." But this was not corn, and
so it was safe from such enemies as he. You may wonder what his
rigmarole, his amateur Paganini performances on one string or on
twenty, have to do with your planting, and yet prefer it to leached
ashes or plaster. It was a cheap sort of top dressing in which I had
entire faith.
As I drew a still fresher soil about the rows
with my hoe, I disturbed the ashes of unchronicled nations who in
primeval years lived under these heavens, and their small implements
of war and hunting were brought to the light of this modern day. They
lay mingled with other natural stones, some of which bore the marks
of having been burned by Indian fires, and some by the sun, and also
bits of pottery and glass brought hither by the recent cultivators of
the soil. 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; and I remembered with as much pity as
pride, if I remembered at all, my acquaintances who had gone to the
city to attend the oratorios. The nighthawk circled overhead in the
sunny afternoons- for I sometimes made a day of it- like a mote in
the eye, or in heaven's eye, falling from time to time with a swoop
and a sound as if the heavens were rent, torn at last to very rags
and tatters, and yet a seamless cope remained; small imps that fill
the air and lay their eggs on the ground on bare sand or rocks on the
tops of hills, where few have found them; graceful and slender like
ripples caught up from the pond, as leaves are raised by the wind to
float in the heavens; such kindredship is in nature. The hawk is
aerial brother of the wave which he sails over and surveys, those his
perfect air- inflated wings answering to the elemental unfledged
pinions of the sea. Or sometimes I watched a pair of hen- hawks
circling high in the sky, alternately soaring and descending,
approaching, and leaving one another, as if they were the embodiment
of my own thoughts, Or I was attracted by the passage of wild pigeons
from this wood to that, with a slight quivering winnowing sound and
carrier haste; or from under a rotten stump my hoe turned up a
sluggish portentous and outlandish spotted salamander, a trace of
Egypt and the Nile, yet our contemporary. When I paused to lean on my
hoe, these sounds and sights I heard and saw anywhere in the row, a
part of the inexhaustible entertainment which the country offers.
On
gala days the town fires its great guns, which echo like popguns to
these woods, and some waifs of martial music occasionally penetrate
thus far. To me, away there in my bean-field at the other end of the
town, the big guns sounded as if a puffball had burst; and when there
was a military turnout of which I was ignorant, I have sometimes had
a vague sense all the day of some sort of itching and disease in the
horizon, as if some eruption would break out there soon, either
scarlatina or canker-rash, until at length some more favorable puff
of wind, making haste over the fields and up the Wayland road,
brought me information of the "trainers." It seemed by the
distant hum as if somebody's bees had swarmed, and that the
neighbors, according to Virgil's advice, by a faint tintinnabulum
upon the most sonorous of their domestic utensils, were endeavoring
to call them down into the hive again. And when the sound died quite
away, and the hum had ceased, and the most favorable breezes told no
tale, I knew that they had got the last drone of them all safely into
the Middlesex hive, and that now their minds were bent on the honey
with which it was smeared.
I felt proud to know that the
liberties of Massachusetts and of our fatherland were in such safe
keeping; and as I turned to my hoeing again I was filled with an
inexpressible confidence, and pursued my labor cheerfully with a calm
trust in the future.
When there were several bands of
musicians, it sounded as if all the village was a vast bellows and
all the buildings expanded and collapsed alternately with a din. But
sometimes it was a really noble and inspiring strain that reached
these woods, and the trumpet that sings of fame, and I felt as if I
could spit a Mexican with a good relish- for why should we always
stand for trifles?- and looked round for a woodchuck or a skunk to
exercise my chivalry upon. These martial strains seemed as far away
as Palestine, and reminded me of a march of crusaders in the horizon,
with a slight tantivy and tremulous motion of the elm tree tops which
overhang the village. This was one of the great days; though the sky
had from my clearing only the same everlastingly great look that it
wears daily, and I saw no difference in it.
It was a singular
experience that long acquaintance which I cultivated with beans, what
with planting, and hoeing, and harvesting, and threshing, and picking
over and selling them- the last was the hardest of all- I might add
eating, for I did taste. I was determined to know beans. When they
were growing, I used to hoe from five o'clock in the morning till
noon, and commonly spent the rest of the day about other affairs.
Consider the intimate and curious acquaintance one makes with various
kinds of weeds- it will bear some iteration in the account, for there
was no little iteration in the labor- disturbing their delicate
organizations so ruthlessly, and making such invidious distinctions
with his hoe, levelling whole ranks of one species, and sedulously
cultivating another. That's Roman wormwood- that's pigweed- that's
sorrel- that's piper-grass- have at him, chop him up, turn his roots
upward to the sun, don't let him have a fibre in the shade, if you do
he'll turn himself t'other side up and be as green as a leek in two
days. A long war, not with cranes, but with weeds, those Trojans who
had sun and rain and dews on their side. Daily the beans saw me come
to their rescue armed with a hoe, and thin the ranks of their
enemies, filling up the trenches with weedy dead. Many a lusty crest-
waving Hector, that towered a whole foot above his crowding comrades,
fell before my weapon and rolled in the dust.
Those summer
days which some of my contemporaries devoted to the fine arts in
Boston or Rome, and others to contemplation in India, and others to
trade in London or New York, I thus, with the other farmers of New
England, devoted to husbandry. Not that I wanted beans to eat, for I
am by nature a Pythagorean, so far as beans are concerned, whether
they mean porridge or voting, and exchanged them for rice; but,
perchance, as some must work in fields if only for the sake of tropes
and expression, to serve a parable-maker one day. It was on the whole
a rare amusement, which, continued too long, might have become a
dissipation. Though I gave them no manure, and did not hoe them all
once, I hoed them unusualy well as far as I went, and was paid for it
in the end, "there being in truth," as Evelyn says, "no
compost or laetation whatsoever comparable to this continual motion,
repastination, and turning of the mould with the spade." "The
earth," he adds elsewhere, "especially if fresh, has a
certain magnetism in it, by which it attracts the salt, power, or
virtue (call it either) which gives it life, and is the logic of all
the labor and stir we keep about it, to sustain us; all dungings and
other sordid temperings being but the vicars succedaneous to this
improvement." Moreover, this being one of those "worn- out
and exhausted lay fields which enjoy their sabbath," had
perchance, as Sir Kenelm Digby thinks likely, attracted "vital
spirits" from the air. I harvested twelve bushels of beans.
But
to be more particular, for it is complained that Mr. Colman has
reported chiefly the expensive experiments of gentlemen farmers, my
outgoes were,
For a hoe.....................................$
0.54
Plowing, harrowing, and furrowing............. 7.50 (Too
much.)
Beans for seed................................ 3.12
1/2
Potatoes for seed............................. 1.33
Peas
for seed................................. 0.40
Turnip
seed................................... 0.06
White line for
crow fence..................... 0.02
Horse cultivator and boy
three hours.......... 1.00
Horse and cart to get
crop.................... 0.75
-----
In
all.......................................$ 14.72 1/2
My
income was (patremfamilias vendacem, non emacem esse oportet), from
Nine bushels and twelve quarts of beans sold..$ 16.94
Five
bushels large potatoes................... 2.50
Nine bushels
small potatoes...................
2.25
Grass.........................................
1.00
Stalks........................................
0.75
-----
In
all......................................$ 23.44
Leaving a
pecuniary profit,
as I have elsewhere said, of..............$
8.71 1/2
This is the result of my experience in raising
beans: Plant the common small white bush bean about the first of
June, in rows three feet by eighteen inches apart, being careful to
select fresh round and unmixed seed. First look out for worms, and
supply vacancies by planting anew. Then look out for woodchucks, if
it is an exposed place, for they will nibble off the earliest tender
leaves almost clean as they go; and again, when the young tendrils
make their appearance, they have notice of it, and will shear them
off with both buds and young pods, sitting erect like a squirrel. But
above all harvest as early as possible, if you would escape frosts
and have a fair and salable crop; you may save much loss by this
means.
This further experience also I gained: I said to
myself, I will not plant beans and corn with so much industry another
summer, but such seeds, if the seed is not lost, as sincerity, truth,
simplicity, faith, innocence, and the like, and see if they will not
grow in this soil, even with less toil and manurance, and sustain me,
for surely it has not been exhausted for these crops. Alas! I said
this to myself; but now another summer is gone, and another, and
another, and I am obliged to say to you, Reader, that the seeds which
I planted, if indeed they were the seeds of those virtues, were
wormeaten or had lost their vitality, and so did not come up.
Commonly men will only be brave as their fathers were brave, or
timid. This generation is very sure to plant corn and beans each new
year precisely as the Indians did centuries ago and taught the first
settlers to do, as if there were a fate in it. I saw an old man the
other day, to my astonishment, making the holes with a hoe for the
seventieth time at least, and not for himself to lie down in! But why
should not the New Englander try new adventures, and not lay so much
stress on his grain, his potato and grass crop, and his orchards-
raise other crops than these? Why concern ourselves so much about our
beans for seed, and not be concerned at all about a new generation of
men? We should really be fed and cheered if when we met a man we were
sure to see that some of the qualities which I have named, which we
all prize more than those other productions, but which are for the
most part broadcast and floating in the air, had taken root and grown
in him. Here comes such a subtile and ineffable quality, for
instance, as truth or justice, though the slightest amount or new
variety of it, along the road. Our ambassadors should be instructed
to send home such seeds as these, and Congress help to distribute
them over all the land. We should never stand upon ceremony with
sincerity. We should never cheat and insult and banish one another by
our meanness, if there were present the kernel of worth and
friendliness. We should not meet thus in haste. Most men I do not
meet at all, for they seem not to have time; they are busy about
their beans. We would not deal with a man thus plodding ever, leaning
on a hoe or a spade as a staff between his work, not as a mushroom,
but partially risen out of the earth, something more than erect, like
swallows alighted and walking on the ground:
"And
as he spake, his mings would now and then
Spread, as he meant to
fly, then close again-"
so that we
should suspect that we might be conversing with an angel. Bread may
not always nourish us; but it always does us good, it even takes
stiffness out of our joints, and makes us supple and buoyant, when we
knew not what ailed us, to recognize any generosity in man or Nature,
to share any unmixed and heroic joy.
Ancient poetry and
mythology suggest, at least, that husbandry was once a sacred art;
but it is pursued with irreverent haste and heedlessness by us, our
object being to have large farms and large crops merely. We have no
festival, nor procession, nor ceremony, not excepting our
cattle-shows and so-called Thanksgivings, by which the farmer
expresses a sense of the sacredness of his calling, or is reminded of
its sacred origin. It is the premium and the feast which tempt him.
He sacrifices not to Ceres and the Terrestrial Jove, but to the
infernal Plutus rather. By avarice and selfishness, and a grovelling
habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as
property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape
is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the
meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber. Cato says that the
profits of agriculture are particularly pious or just (maximeque pius
quaestus), and according to Varro the old Romans "called the
same earth Mother and Ceres, and thought that they who cultivated it
led a pious and useful life, and that they alone were left of the
race of King Saturn."
We are wont to forget that the sun
looks on our cultivated fields and on the prairies and forests
without distinction. They all reflect and absorb his rays alike, and
the former make but a small part of the glorious picture which he
beholds in his daily course. In his view the earth is all equally
cultivated like a garden. Therefore we should receive the benefit of
his light and beat with a corresponding trust and magnanimity. What
though I value the seed of these beans, and harvest that in the fall
of the year? This broad field which I have looked at so long looks
not to me as the principal cultivator, but away from me to influences
more genial to it, which water and make it green. These beans have
results which are not harvested by me. Do they not grow for
woodchucks partly? The ear of wheat (in Latin spica, obsoletely
speca, from spe, hope) should not be the only hope of the husbandman;
its kernel or grain (granum from gerendo, bearing) is not all that it
bears. How, then, can our harvest fail? Shall I not rejoice also at
the abundance of the weeds whose seeds are the granary of the birds?
It matters little comparatively whether the fields fill the farmer's
barns. The true husbandman will cease from anxiety, as the squirrels
manifest no concern whether the woods will bear chestnuts this year
or not, and finish his labor with every day, relinquishing all claim
to the produce of his fields, and sacrificing in his mind not only
his first but his last fruits also.
THE
VILLAGE
Return
to North Glen or Reading
List
visitors since Jan 8th 1999