It’s ten years exactly since Jim first took me to his farm in Casey Country. I’d read about it often. A lot of Jim’s columns in the paper we worked for, the Cincinnati Post, were set on the farm where he’d grown up in Kentucky, in the foothills of the Cumberlands. Yet somehow what I’d read had given me the wrong idea.
I’d pictured hardscrabble country, kids without shoes and an unforgiving environment. The horses Jim told me he kept at the old place and left outside all winter I’d envisaged as bony nags; the house, a shack out of Dogpatch.
The columns probably invited that view because Jim called himself a hillbilly and had grown up during the Depression. His father, who scorned handouts, had plowed steep fields with mules. Eventually, Jim had gone off to Germany in World War II and later to Ohio State on the GI Bill. But that early June when he first took me and a few of our colleagues there, Casey County was lush as Eden.
It was a balmy day, dappled with sun. I’ve never forgotten the sweetness of the air or the general leafiness and the pervasive green.
The little settlement — just a string of modest houses sparsely stretched along a crest, with a church high on a hill at one end — was called Bethelridge. Opposite Jim’s place rose Rocky Knob, whose profile he loved. The frame house was small and, like the others, gleaming white. With the dormitory he’d added upstairs, it could sleep his family of six. Out back was a weathered barn, and next to it, the horses.
You don’t have to know anything about horses to tell an aristocrat of the animal kingdom. Ebony was sleek and superb. Jim said he was a registered Tennessee Walker. The little gray pony had a bad foot, but Ebony and Major, the lovely palomino, graciously tolerated our token rides.
Jim gave us a tour of the place, down by the stream and through the woods, then we piled back into the van and drove off toward South Fork Ridge to pick up a saddle he was having repaired by an Old Order Mennonite craftsman. On the way, he took us through the country seat, known for the world’s largest apple pie, backed there every last-week-of-September and movable only by forklift. The name of the town — Liberty — made an impression on me because of the pictures all over the papers in recent days of the Chinese students holding aloft their Lady Liberty in Tiananmen Square.
On our way, we passed cemeteries bright with flags and plastic wreaths left on Memorial Day, still known in those border parts as Decoration Day. Jim showed us the grave of a forebear, Silas Adams, who at 24 was elected to lead the First Kentucky Union Cavalry, succeeding an old Liberty attorney who had criticized President Lincoln for allowing blacks to fight.
The saddler lived deep in the country, in a bare, spacious wooden house on a hill under a giant tree. His airy workshop occupied the ground floor, and out front in the grass sat a baby, playing on a blanket in the shade.
Coming back, we detoured to follow a hand-written sign that pointed down a dirt road and said “Rhubarb 2 miles.” It took us to a farmhouse in a field. A Mennonite man in a torn straw hat came out to cut us our rhubarb. His family, he said, had lived there for generations. He told me the brilliant blue bird I’d seen from the car was an indigo bunting. That may have been the quietest spot I’ve ever been.
Back at Jim’s, we drank ice water from the well, and chatted with longtime neighbors, and helped with a few chores around the place. It was dusk when we left. The square wooden church with its corner steeple faced west, and it was flushed with light as we drove off. Jim told me once that his core beliefs had remained essentially unchanged since he was nine.
It was dark by the time we stopped for that Kentucky rarity, commercially available home cooking — to wit, cornbread, country ham, and pinto beans. On the night ride back to Cincinnati, we listened to the radio, and I stashed away for keeps an endearing refrain: “Since my phone still ain’t ringin’ / I assume it still ain’t you.”
It was an idyllic day, and a quintessentially American one — nailed in my memory by the next morning’s brutal headlines of the Chinese massacre.
Out little group came from miscellaneous backgrounds and races, six people thrown together in the transient fraternity of journalism. In Casey Country, we glimpsed a simpler American world, predicated on freedom, where lean lives unfolded around essentials. It’s a world to which fewer and fewer of us have any exposure and that holds little sway over the habits and imaginations of city, suburb, and mall-reared generations. Reading the paper the morning after our trip, I felt a sharp hope that it would endure.
CLAUDIA WINKLER
