01/06/01

You can laugh all you want about my old head to head stanchion barn and weathered wooden silos— I don’t have a lien against a thing. And at least I can say I kept the two ancestral houses up fairly well. Not that I own the Colonial I grew up in anymore, or not that I’m welcome anymore in the Victorian where Phebe grew up, but still. Ol’ Porch Rot is up to his eyes in debt right now after the roof of his big modern barn collapsed in a heavy snow and he had to lower himself to using his old barn same as me. The fucker. What’s left of his pole barn lays out there like a half-rotted dinosaur laying down on its back with it’s rib cage exposed. He’s not been quick to do anything about rebuilding it or tearing the vestiges down.

Guess now Hiram’s in Chapter 11 bankruptcy trying to stave off Chapter 7. Hard to believe with 150 acres some 65 miles north of midtown Manhattan you could owe as much as the land is worth in today’s day, but that’s apparently what’s being argued. These attorneys and bankers see a depressed man all alone sitting on a piece of distressed real estate like that, they start circling around him like vultures. Judge could force the place to be sold off. Someone said if Hiram had been able to keep the number of cows up the barn was built for the barn would have withstood the storm as there would have been enough warmth to keep the roof clean of snow. Earlier that Winter he lost a whole shit load of cows to bad silage. Talk about cursed. It sure is hard to keep those big barns stocked, turnover can get so high. Anyway, Porch Rot can keep his foul manure management system and massive machinery with the price tag of a house. I was never envious of that stuff, but he always acted like I should have been. Bigger really isn’t better in this business, just makes for more stench and more headaches as far as I’m concerned. Big debt kills too. The bigger they come, the harder they fall.

Orange County has seen it all before for generations now---all the attempts to farm livestock on a large scale, whether it be horses or cows, have all failed. All the big fancy Orange County stock farms have all gone the way of the mastodon by now. Hardly any trace left of them.

Now Mexican Mike’s family is suing Porch Rot for wrongful death to heap on more trouble.

The nerve of those people, Porch Rot says, he wasn’t even in this country legally.

Yeah, but you fucking hired him---you stole him from my employment, in fact---and he slipped into an open manhole to your manure management system in the pitch darkness and drowned in foul ungodliness. Why wouldn’t you get fucking sued? People sue nowadays for hurt feelings!

I am not Miguel, I am Mike. Please call me Mike. He says to me the day I first met him.

That’s fantastic! I say to him exuberantly. You hear all these stories about these little Mexican fellas who come and work in the USA for 15 - 20 years and don’t learn a lick of English, and here you are taking on the English language right off the bat! That’s wonderful that you want to go by the name Mike. What better way to show your commitment to learning the English language!

I no understan’, Senor. He says back to me after all that.

Hiram wasn’t sure what to do with Mike’s widow, Milady at first, thinking she might turn around and sue him or something. Turns out Milady wasn’t even Mike’s wife. She was just a consort, I guess you would say. Nineteen years old she says she is. The real wife is back in Mexico. Real Wife got an attorney here somehow to take on the case for her. Hiram must be on the lawyer’s shit list really. He’s the same attorney who represented the young couple who bought raw milk from Hiram straight out of the bulk tank a few years ago, thinking that would be the healthiest milk for their baby.

By law I have to tell you you can only use this raw milk to feed your dog, Hiram was quoted in the case as saying, but this is the best milk meant for dogs you can give to a new baby.

Baby got sick and died from e .coli infection. The terms of the settlement were not disclosed, but I understand they were whopping.

Two weeks after Mike is dead, Hiram’s going to Town Hall to marry Milady. Hiram says it’s nothing sexual---the only way to keep her from being deported she had to be married to a citizen. Don’t know if that so true, but that’s what he said. And then almost in the same breath he says it wouldn’t be so bad to make another son to help out with the place.

Break out that fabled turkey baster I guess.

Can hardly imagine what their conversations at dinner would be like. Probably would become pros at charades. Then again, maybe Porch Rot’s on to something. Maybe his way makes for a peaceful home. Come to think of it, maybe I’d get along a lot better with Phebe if we didn’t have language in common. . .

When you really get down to it, for all his advancements, Porch Rot’s prospects in farming right now are worse than mine, and I‘m doing nothing more than selling orchard grass hay at this point. And what does Hiram live in but a rotted shit hole of a house. Maybe it’s par with this trailer, I don’t know. Maybe Milady’s picked it up some by now.

I expect Phebe will try to grab everything that she can from me. Been in a standoff with her for almost two months now. Our only truce was at Christmas when we took Moo-Shoo up to Wallkill prison to visit Rocky. If things were up to Phebe she’d have every bit of the place signed over to the land trust or something. Like I said, she’s taken over the Victorian, and I’m down in the wilderness along the edge of Purgatory Swamp freezing my ass in Mexican Mike’s old trailer. Well, I should say it was originally Percy’s trailer. Call us empty nesters in the throes of mid-life crisis acting out our life’s disappointments and resentments while a banjo is strummed in the background. No divorce lawyers have been called in yet. You know once that happens it’ll be like Armageddon, or, as Clean Phil wrote in one of his songs: A Coup D’etat in Shangri La.

Paradise lost at the edge of Purgatory Swamp.

Yeah, as far as this Thoreau is concerned, Fuck Walden Pond.