Jay Varner

Farm Machines

 

 

Howard Aungst said he had machines that would save my father’s life.  All he would need was a piece of hair or a fingernail clipping to exorcise the cancer from my father’s body.  Howard explained that his machines offered cures without a single incision or needle prick and my father would no longer be subjected to piecemeal chemotherapy treatments.  He told my mother this the autumn after my father was diagnosed with bone cancer.

            My father spent Christmas, 1989, three hours away in a Philadelphia hospital, recovering from a bone marrow transplant.  The doctors said the procedure would flush the cancer from the hollows of his bones, that he would live another twenty years.  For the first half of that year, he had spent one week a month in a hospital bed with an IV pumping chemotherapy into his veins.  His hair thinned and then disappeared.  His skin sallowed and his once thick muscles corded.  But the transplant, as one of his doctors had told me, would make him new again.

            I was eight then, in awe of those doctors, and sure that they would cure him.  Dr. Ricardo Carter, a tall and lean Nigerian, cared for my father.  I sometimes saw him when my mother and I visited the hospital.  When he strode into the private room, Dr. Carter’s stethoscope swung from his neck.  Once, he turned the television mounted on the wall in front of my father’s bed to an afternoon broadcast of Wimbledon and asked if I had ever played tennis.  When I said no, he asked what I did for fun.  I watched CHiPs every day at noon on TBS and then rode my bicycle or listened to my Beach Boys tapes on my Walkman.  I played on the swing set my father had built.  Sometimes I rode that swing and watched the Aungsts farm the fields near my house.

            I had grown up idolizing the Aungsts and their farm, falling in love with the massive John Deere tractors.  I could see the top of their two silos from my porch even though the farm was a quarter of a mile away.  I knew each piece of machinery: the hay wagons, the baler, the hay cutter, the fertilizer, the rake, and the liquid manure spreader, which I had called the stinky wagon.

            I watched them spray cow manure and fertilizer over the corn and alfalfa fields in the cloudy springtime.  Then, they planted corn and I watched it grow high in the filmy summer air, and when the green stalks turned brown and dried.

            Under the gray evening skies of that fall, Howard cleaved corn rows in his forage harvester.  Strings of brown stalks stuck like flesh in the machine’s jagged teeth. When the rumbling engine of the diesel tractor faded at night, I did homework at the kitchen table while my mother washed dishes.  The wind rustled the branches of the English walnut tree next to our house, a prelude to a lingering Pennsylvania winter, one in which my father would be largely absent.

            While my father recovered in Philadelphia, our pastor, Rev. Chapman, and one or two of the deacons from our church came to visit us each Tuesday night.  They sat on our couch and chatted about the weather or what was printed in the daily newspaper.  Then the serious business began.

            “I don’t know why he has to go through this,” my mother said.  “He’s so young.”

            “God has a plan for everything,” Rev. Chapman said.  “He has reasons too.  We have to put our faith in Him that these are the best things for us.  I know that might be hard, but He knows what is right for us.”

            I didn’t question what Rev. Chapman said.  My mother taught me to never question God’s way no matter how unfair His grand plan for us may seem.  One day, and maybe not on this earth, I was told that I would understand life’s hardships.

            “Right now, I believe that he will be healed in Philadelphia,” Rev. Chapman continued.  “I think that it is God’s will for him to be there.”

            Not long after that, Howard Aungst called my mother and told her about the machines.  He said the transplant was a waste of money.  Doctors can’t be trusted; they only want to get paid.  When my mother recounted all this, she told me that Howard Aungst was crazy.

 

***

 

My friend Ryan Aungst and I slowly stepped through the ankle-deep cow shit, careful not to scare any pigeons.  We ducked under the electric fence that kept the cattle out of the barn.  We propped ourselves against iron gates and slowly aimed our pellet guns as though we were preparing for a gun fight in the Old West.  The pigeons were lined up on the rafters inside one of the buildings where the cattle were fed.  I stared down the sights, aimed at the breast of one of the birds, and squeezed the trigger.  The roosting pigeons squawked and fluttered into the air, all of them except for the one I shot, which spiraled into the ground.  We did this each day after school, bagging pigeons just because we could, because we weren’t old enough to hunt deer like the men in our families.  I was eleven and my father had been dead for two years. 

            Ryan was Howard’s grandson.  We were in the same fifth grade class and rode the same bus to school.  Ryan and his parents lived in a small house on the farm.  From their back porch I could see the manure pit where a front-end loader shoveled cow shit.  A fenced, concrete pad held the cattle, their feeding and water troughs, and those metallic sheet-metal buildings where Ryan and I shot pigeons.  The upstairs of the two-story barn held hay bales and sacks of ground corn used to feed the cattle.  Downstairs, the fifty or so milking stalls.

            Each day I changed into jeans and a sweatshirt and then walked down the hill past my grandparents’ house and crossed a two-lane highway to see Ryan once he finished helping milk the cattle.  If we weren’t killing pigeons, Ryan and I were holstering cap guns in our pockets and pretending we were cops.  We tracked a kidnapper named BJ English, the guy all the girls at school loved, especially Amber Hawbaker.  BJ always kidnapped Amber and I would rescue her.  Ryan, as my sidekick, watched my back and always stood in the shadows when I was hailed as her hero.

            My father had refused to let me step foot on the farm.  He told me the Aungsts didn’t watch their kids.  Ryan and his cousins roamed freely, running between the cows and machinery, so unsupervised that in 1983, when Jonathan Aungst was five-years-old, his arm was nearly lost in an accident.  Ryan’s father, Dan, drove a rusting John Deere tractor that pulled a forage wagon full of freshly cut alfalfa.  He parked the wagon next to one of the silos.  Sometime during the next few minutes, Jonathan’s right arm was snagged by the moving apron on the floor of the wagon that rotated like a bicycle chain and fed the chopped alfalfa towards the front of the wagon where it was unloaded into the silo.  The arm was ripped from his body by the chain and pulled into the machine.

            A helicopter flew him and the arm to Geisinger Medical Center in Danville where it was reattached.  The arm failed to grow with the rest of Jonathan’s body and, by the time I met him, a white brace held the child-size arm tight against his chest.  His wrist was contorted into what looked like a claw, pointing his fingers towards the ground.

            One soupy summer night, when Ryan and I played tag with Jonathan and his siblings, he invited me into his room.  Jonathan lived with his parents in a house a hundred yards from the farm.  Baltimore Orioles posters and baseball cards decorated the room along with a baseball that was protected inside a plastic case.  He explained that the Orioles gave him this ball.  I saw the autographs of Mike Boddicker, Cal Ripken Jr., and Eddie Murray.

            “How did they just give that ball?” I asked.

            “I threw out the first pitch at a game,” he said.  “After my accident.”

            My mother and grandmother had told me what happened to Jonathan’s arm.  No one on the farm ever spoke of it.  This was the only time Jonathan ever mentioned it to me.

            “You know, your dad was there that day,” he said.  “I don’t remember him but people told me that he was the first one to come.  Because of him I was able to keep my arm.”

            My father had been the town’s fire chief.  He was always the first person on the scene.  The year before he got cancer, my father was the first one to rush to their barn when it caught fire and burned to the ground.  The next Saturday, we sat in my grandparents’ front yard and watched our Mennonite and Amish neighbors build the new barn in a single day.

            I handed Jonathan the baseball and he placed it on his dresser next to cologne and deodorant.  I glanced at the reed-thin arm that was held in the brace and wondered why it had never grown or why they had even bothered to re-attach it.  I wondered if his grandfather offered to help with his machines.

 

***

 

That summer when I was thirteen, I went along with the Aungsts to vacation Bible school.  We sang hymns, memorized Bible verses, and were told that Jesus Christ was our one and only salvation in life.  My mother and I still went to church each Sunday.  I had begun to dread the spectacle—the nice clothes, the smiles, and handshake hellos.  I had begun to see that there was something more to Sunday mornings than just worship, there were appearances to keep.

            Howard drove Ryan and me to the church one evening.  He drove a golden-brown Chevy Nova and used arm gestures to signal a coming turn because none of the car’s lights worked.  Howard ignored the blaring air horn of an eighteen-wheeler as he pulled off the road and towards the church.  For the first time I was close to him and saw that he was short, with leathery skin aged by summers farming under the sun, and white-haired.

            “You boys learning a lot at Bible school?” Howard asked.

            “Yeah,” we both answered.

            “That’s good,” he said.  “The Lord is a powerful man.  He can give you everything and then take it all away.  He can cure you or kill you.”

            Or do nothing, I thought, like He had done for my father.  As the teachers in Bible school talked about miracles and a merciful God, I wondered why my father had seen none of this.  But, as Rev. Chapman had said, I hoped that one day I would understand.

 

            The main farmhouse, where Howard and his wife Diane lived, was haunted.  The old rumor was that the house had been a hotel during the last years of the nineteenth-century.  Travelers could stop for the night and get a meal, a bath, or a drink.  A man was murdered in front of a fireplace in one of the upstairs rooms.  The bloodstained hardwood floor had since been covered up with a rug, but Ryan insisted that the stain was still present.  One day, I talked Ryan into showing it to me.

            The house sat on a hill overlooking the entire farm.  It was fall now.  A cold breeze blew in the evenings and numbed our faces and hands.  We walked past an in-ground swimming pool with cracks extending down the sides.  Dead leaves and old tires covered the floor of the pool.

I followed Ryan into the house.  The kitchen was decorated with yellow wallpaper and what looked to be a week’s worth of dishes sat piled in the sink.

            “My grandmother must not be home,” he said.

            We climbed a flight of stairs and I noticed a cobwebbed chandelier hanging from the ceiling.  The house was cold and drafty.  I felt cool air ride my neck and sift under my collar and down my back.  Boxes rested along some of the walls, suggesting the family had never unpacked or was simply out of space.  Yet, as we walked down a hallway, I peered into some of the rooms and saw that they were empty.

            “This is it,” Ryan said.  He opened a door and I followed him inside.

            The gray dusk filtered through the lone window in the room.  Ryan flicked on a light switch.  He peeled back the carpet and I saw two faded black blots on the floor.

            “So that’s the blood?”

            “That’s what my grandmother says,” Ryan said.

            I stared at the stain a moment longer and wondered if the story was true.  The stains looked old, as if they could have been caused by anything—paint, coffee, grease, maybe blood.  Could a floor like this last one hundred years?  Could the stain?  I dismissed the questions and told myself that it was more fun to believe.

            Ryan turned off the light when we left and lead me back out the way we had come in.  We were ready to go back outside when Ryan stopped.

            “I have to ask my pap a question quick,” Ryan said.  “Follow me.”

            He opened a door to the basement and we creaked down the bowed wooden steps.  That’s when I saw the machines for the first time.  They lined the walls like an air traffic control tower.  LED lights flashed, needles wagged as wild as a dog’s tail, and red digital read-outs counted numbers.  I thought of the respirator that clicked and pumped my father alive those last days of his life.  Computer printouts rolled like carpet across the cement floor, reels of secret statistics.

            Howard Aungst stepped into the doorway of what looked like an office.  He wore green work paints, a white t-shirt, and a black and white train engineer’s cap.  People throughout the town talked about Howard and his machines yet none had ever seen them.  They heard that he claimed the machines could cure my father.  Most people thought that he was crazy while others said he practiced witchcraft.  But this was the man who had driven Ryan and me to vacation Bible school, and talked of God, miracles and faith. 

            Ryan asked his grandfather a question about milking and then we left.  Howard walked back into his office and never said a word to me.

            “What are those machines for,” I asked as we walked towards the barn.

            “Farming,” Ryan said.  “They compute how to help crops grow better.  But they can also help people.”

            “How can they help people?”

            “I’m not sure,” he said.  “But it’s got something to do with science, mathematics.”

 

***

 

In the spring of 1995, while I sat under the raining pink blossoms of my grandparents’ Cucumbertree Magnolia, I watched the front-end loader emerge from where the cows were kept.  I was too far away to see who was driving.  The loader sped across the highway and then bounced over the freshly cut alfalfa field. 

            The small and stiff legs of a cow stuck out of the loader’s bucket.  I saw the black hooves bounce with each bump and rut until the dead calf was dumped onto the ground.  And then I watched the burial.  I saw a man dig a shallow grave with the loader and then drag the small cow into the hole and cover it with dirt.  The Aungsts were struggling.

            “That’s illegal,” my grandmother said.  “You can’t just bury a cow in your field.”

            “What else do you do with it?” I asked.

            “There’s a crew of guys who come and pick up dead animals from farms.  Who knows what was wrong with it?  Probably malnutrition.  They can’t even take care of their cattle anymore.”

            Over the next few weeks more graves appeared—a dozen or so small mounds of dirt.  It was close to the end of May and the Aungsts hadn’t even planted their corn yet.  My grandmother always said the stalks should be knee high by the Fourth of July.  There was talk of legal trouble too, of foreclosure by the government because Howard owed back taxes.  And now their calves were dying.

            When summer did arrive, Howard Aungst drove his old Chevy Nova over the alfalfa fields and placed a machine nearly two-hundred yards from my grandparent’s house.  It was the size of a small television and emitted a constant whistle.

            He knocked at my grandparent’s door and apologized for the noise.  The machine emitted sound waves that would help the crops grow, he explained.  It was a new and natural procedure, but the government didn’t want people to know about.  He left the machine to squeal and whistle in the field for three days.

            That was the year when Ryan and his parents moved away from the farm.  He would go on to the same high school as I did and take classes in the agriculture program while I took AP classes.  We still said hello in the hallways or cafeteria but the games of basketball and hide-and-seek stopped.

 

***

 

Just after noon on May 24, 1996, U.S. Marshals, Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms agents, and Pennsylvania State Troopers surrounded the Aungst farm.  The family was given one hour to gather as many belongings as possible; after that, whatever was left, fell under the ownership of the Internal Revenue Service.

            The newspaper printed a front page picture of the event.  The ATF agents wore black windbreakers with the yellow lettering of their agency’s acronym sprawled across the back.  They carried assault rifles.  The State Troopers stood guard.  The butts of shotguns rest against their hips, the barrels pointed into the sky.

            My family and I waited for the secrets of the basement to be revealed.  However, we were left just as clueless on that day the government evicted Howard Aungst as we had been for years.  His story became one of the area’s myths, a portrait of a distinctly American kind of insanity.  In the years that followed, people talked of Howard Aungst and his machines.  Some called them witchcraft, some said he poured his money into the machines and was too broke to pay his taxes.  Most agreed that he was crazy.  The entire town wanted to pull back the rug like Ryan and I had done and see the unmistakable stains of truth.  Instead, all my mother and I saw were men remove the machines from the basement on dollies.  The explanations and reasons became the missing pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, an unsatisfying end to our speculation.

            “Those must be his machines,” my mother said.  “I remember when he called me once and told me that he could cure your father.”

            “Would you have tried it?” I asked.

            “Why would I listen to him?”

            In a way, I thought then that believing in Howard Aungst’s machines might be no less futile than believing in what the doctors and Rev. Chapman had said.  My father did not live the twenty years the doctors had promised; he didn’t even make it twenty months.  The understanding that Rev. Chapman had assured me did not come.  Instead, I silently questioned why my father ever got cancer, why he left my mother and me alone, and why the medicine failed.  My mother and I sporadically attended Sunday morning services at our church but slowly we both stopped going.  The reason why we quit remained one of the many unspoken mysteries between us.

            By that night, the farm was vacant.  The lowing cows were loaded onto cattle trucks and driven to other farms and eventually auctioned off.  The farm machinery was hauled to auction as well.  No one ever found out what became of his machines.  A state trooper told my grandparents to call 911 if they saw anyone from the family step foot on the farm—they would be trespassing on  U.S. Government property.

 

***

 

My grandparents and my mother now tell me on the telephone of new houses being built on those fields which were once thick with corn or alfalfa.  The fields were eventually sectioned off into housing lots and put on the market.  I suspect that the next time I go home I’ll watch cars and kids on bicycles rather than tractors.  The old farmhouse was sold, first to a fifty-something couple who wanted to turn it into a bed and breakfast, and then to a younger couple who left the house in a state of remodeling as they attempted to repair their marriage.

            Howard Aungst is still alive.  The last time I saw him was a few years, at my old barber shop when I was home for a weekend from college.  He still wore a white t-shirt and green painters-pants.

            “Do they teach you about the government in college?” he asked.           

            “History,” I said.  “Politics, things like that.”

            “No, the real government.”  He stood from his chair and paced the barber shop.  “The government that tells you to use fertilizers on your crop just so all your fields will die and then they’ll have to trade with China or some other country; the government that says you have to pay taxes on land that you own and care for; the government that takes away farms so that they can rip it up into land plots.  Then we’ll all have to depend on chemicals, on these conglomerate farms owned by one person.”

            He stopped pacing and was looked out the window, towards traffic speeding past on the highway.

            “They can’t keep us down for long,” he said.  “I’ll get that farm back.  They can’t keep it from me.”

            After Howard Aungst left, my barber, like so many in town, said that the man was crazy.  I grinned into the large mirror on the wall and nodded that my four-dollar haircut looked fine.  I admired Howard Aungst’s faith in a way, maybe even envied it.  Despite a government seizure of his property and the unending rumors around town, he had allowed nothing to block his blind beliefs.  I knew then that my faith in doctors, medicine, or God might never rise again.  But I stayed a willing skeptic of his machines—I never had the chance to see them fail their promise.