John Graves - Hard Scrabble: Observations on a Patch of Land

Also by JOHN GRAVES

Myself and Strangers: A Memoir of Apprenticeship (2004)

A John Graves Reader (1996)

From a Limestone Ledge (1980)

Goodbye to a River (1960)

HARD SCRABBLE

Observations on a Patch of Land

JOHN GRAVES

University of Texas Press
Austin

Publication of this work was made possible in part by support from the J. E. Smothers, Sr., Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Copyright 1973, 1974 by John Graves. Introduction copyright 2002 by Southern Methodist University Press. Afterword copyright 2002 by John Graves.

Published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

All rights reserved

First University of Texas Press edition, 2016

A portion of this book originally appeared in Esquire Magazine.

The epigraph for chapter 12 () is taken from Anecdote of the Jar, by Wallace Stevens. Copyright 1923 and renewed 1951 by Wallace Stevens. Reprinted from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, by Permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

Four lines of lyrics from Corrine Corrina (on ): Copyright 1932 by Mills Music, Inc., Copyright 1932 by Mills Music, Inc., Copyright renewed 1960. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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The Library of Congress has cataloged an earlier edition as follows:

Graves, John, 19202013

Hard Scrabble: observations on a patch of land / John Graves ; new by the author.

p. cm

Originally published: New York : Knopf, 1974.

1. Graves, John, 1920Homes and hauntsTexasSomervell County. 2. Somervell County (Tex.)Social life and customs. 3. Authors, American20th centuryBiography. 4. Country lifeTexasSomervell County. I. Title.

PS3557.R2867 H3 2002

813'.54dc21

[B]

2002034515

ISBN 978-1-4773-0935-3

ISBN 978-1-4773-0959-9 (library e-book)
ISBN 978-1-4773-0960-5 (individual e-book)

For Sally

Who knows the creatures that live under rocks, and where wildflowers grow, and the things that goats can say to you, and how to laugh...

It is storied of that Prince, that having conceived a Purpose to invade Italy, he sent for Cineas, a Philosopher and the Kings friend: to whom he communicated his Designe, and desired his Counsel. Cineas asked him to what purpose he invaded Italie? He said, To Conquer it. And what will you do when you hav Conquerd it? Go into France said the King, and Conquer that. And what will you do when you have Conquerd France? Conquer Germany. And what then? said the Philosopher. Conquer Spain. I perceive said Cineas, you mean to conquer all the World. What will you do when you have conquerd all? Why then said the King we will return, and Enjoy our selvs at Quiet in our own Land. So you may now said the Philosopher without all this adoe.

THOMAS TRAHERNE: The Centuries, I, 22

A part of this book was written on time made available by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, for which I am lastingly grateful.

1

By Way of Introduction

In Southwestern terms, it is not a big enough piece of land to be called a ranch without pretension, though that title is more loosely awarded these days than it used to be. Nor is enough of its surface arable to qualify it as a serious farm. It is something less than four hundred acres of rough limestone hill country, partly covered with cedar and hardwood brush and partly open pasture, with some fair trees of various kinds and a few little creekbottom fields more or less amenable to cultivation. It has a name, Hard Scrabble, which is not shiningly original and appears on no signboard and in fact gets little use, but does reflect the way I feel about the work I have put into it and the existence it has imposed on other owners and occupants over the years. Mainly I call it the place, the old term for just about any rural property that is its owners main holding. Unconnected to it physically, though theoretically a part of its economics, is a separate hundred acres of gentler land a few miles away called usually, when anything, Soft Scrabble or just the other place.

Until lately I lived on the place only part of the year, spending summers here with my family and going down in other seasons as often as time and energy permitted, and sometimes more often than that. I would poke around after quail or dove or whitetailed deer, study birds or vegetation or the way rain works its way into and across the land and down the watercourses, stare at a liveoak fire and listen to the windowpeck of sleet borne along on a January norther, puzzle over traces of old human presenceor, more usually, plunge into one phase or another of the harsh labor that adapting such a property to even minimal use requires. Fences, pens, garden, house, outbuildings, livestock, roads, brush control, a little forage farming...

We inhabit a time of electronically amplified human crisis and change, of possible permissive delights of many descriptions, of geometrically burgeoning mortal millions creating geometrically burgeoning mortal problems that demand obsessive concern, of disappearing quiet hard rural ways and the triumph, or so they say, of easeful technology. And if at some point in his perusal of this book a perceptive and thoughtful reader should ask why the hell, in such a time, anyone even half aware of the currents of the world would choose to spend heavily out of his allotted time on such archaic irrelevances as stonemasonry, the observation of armadillos, vegetable gardening, species of underbrush, and the treatment of retained afterbirth in ruminants, with very slight expectation of even crass cash gain, he will be asking the same thing I have often asked myself. In part the book itself is an attempt to scratch through to an answer, and if one emerges to view it is almost certain to be irrational by general standards. But it is a known if little heeded fact that peoples most passionate activities never have rational, reasonable roots. Porque si is the unequivocal and comfortable Spanish answer to such questions, and it may not be a bad one to start off with. Because yes.

Anyone who seeks to find here and share a deep wide knowledge of rural and natural things is a little bit out of luck. The book is concerned with my part of the world insofar as I have a part, and I know a few things about it and into some subjects have dug deeper perhaps than most people have. But in none am I truly expert, nor have I sought to seem to be. The ways in which I accomplish various bucolic purposes, for instance, lack the glow of perfect rightness that shines through in most writings on the soil and country life and related subjects, from Junius Moderatus Columella on down through Louis Bromfield to contemporary fertilizer admen and the literati of the hippie communes. I do some things in a traditional manner, some more or less according to other peoples written-down ideals, and a good many in my own way which is occasionally ingenious but often slipshod makeshift, both temperament and the question of available time and money having entered into this....

Thus, while there are expert books on many of the concrete and unconcrete matters considered here specifically or in passing, and thank God for them, this book is not one. It is not the account of a triumphant return to the land, a rustic success story, but mainly a rumination over what a certain restricted and unmagnificent patch of the earths surface has meant to me, and occasionally over what it may mean in wider terms.