Issues → March/April 2007 → Feature Stories →

Here in New England: Farm on Fire

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(page 2 of 3)

To pay the bills, Charles kept on at the neighbor's farm and Ruth did the milking and chores at Spooky View, hauling 50-pound pails of milk across the barn. She came to the farm with two small children and soon had two more. By then, Charles was staying here at Spooky View. They joined a milk co-op and checks came twice a month. "Always on the 5th and 20th," Ruth says. "That's when you sat down and paid bills. Some years were awful lean. We just had to cut back then. It was just so hard to keep going." But even while farmers all around them cashed in their land, they stayed. "I can't tell you how rewarding the farm life is," Ruth says. "Every kid had chores. Then they'd go off and play, and when dinner was ready, I'd get out in the middle of the road and yell and they'd come running."

They had only 14 acres of pasture, not enough to grow their own feed. Whenever they had a little money, they added to the herd, building up to 35 milkers. One night, Charles went to the Deerfield Fair to watch the horse pull. He was leaning on a fence and somehow he caught his finger up in a halter, and the horse snapped it right off. When the call came, Ruth gathered up the kids, they got the cows milked, and then they went to the hospital. "It's just the way it was," Ruth says. "The cows always had to come first."

Keith saw how hard his parents were working, how tight life was financially after all that time, and he went into welding, working a lot in high-rise construction. But he stayed a farm boy at heart and kept working here and there for other dairy farmers, all the while looking around for his own land. The farm he was meant to be on was right in front of him all along. Ruth took stock of her age and Charles's. She wanted the farm to stay in the family. "I said to Dad," Ruth recalls, "'We should see if we can sell the cows to Keith.' Dad asked Keith if he wanted to farm." Yes, he really did.

And that is why on this summer evening Keith has just finished milking and Charles is throwing the last bale onto the elevator, which is overheating, though nobody knows it. He looks up and sees the flames. "Fire!" he yells, and then everyone starts running for the animals. The next few minutes are gone from Keith's memory: "I don't remember nothing. I still don't and I don't know as I want to," he says.

What he doesn't remember is how the barn seemed to fill with people pulling and tugging at the cows until all but one were out, how the cows ambled about bewildered until they could be herded together in the pasture. Firemen from 13 towns came screaming up Center Hill Road, but the flames fed on that hay and tore through the woodwork until there was nothing left but mounds of ashes. Neighbors came running and carried to safety every scrap of belongings from the house, even Ruth's cookbooks, because it was touch and go for a while as to whether the house would also catch fire.

Ruth had been out visiting with Sarah; driving back, she saw the black smoke rising and she knew her life's work was burning down. "I kept saying, ‘Did I leave the stove on? Did I leave it on?'" The finances of a small family farm are always precarious, and Ruth and Charles and Keith had not increased their insurance over the years to keep up with what it would cost to rebuild. The animals were safe, but without the means to rebuild, surely they would have to be sold; Spooky View seemed destined to become one more small-print item in the papers announcing one more auction.