Sam and I live on The Farm In Lucy. There are several oddities about that sentence. As a statement, however, it is true, or at least it’s factually accurate. The most immediately apparent oddity in its facts is that Lucy really is a place, a small farming community in southwestern Tennessee, just slightly north and east of Memphis. The Choctaw lived here long before anybody else, primarily, I suspect, because of the deep, wide river that separated us from the rest of the world and must have given them both transport and a rich harvest of fish. The Choctaw word for “river” is, roughly translated, “hatchie;” but “loosa” is the word for “beautiful.” Put together, the two are Loosahatchie, which is still the name of our beautiful river. The problem was that the English-speaking invaders knew no Choctaw, only English. As a result, “loosa” became “Lucy,” and has remained our village’s name for these two centuries. The second peculiarity here is all the caps in The Farm In Lucy. Believe it or not, I am not the responsible party on that one. Our children are. None of us can remember now which one of them at what point began to write his/her address that way, but somebody did; and it stuck.
The third oddity is that where we live is no more a farm than a duck is a turkey, though they do bear some similarities and presumably share a common ancestor somewhere back along the way. The Farm In Lucy is down in size now to about ten acres. It still has a barn, albeit a moldering one, and a whole panoply of outhouses and sheds that are in a similar state of incipient decay. There is a garden still, out of which we eat rather heartily, in fact, but the animals who share life with us and our two dogs are feral cats, innumerable mice, the omnivorous deer, an unpleasant number of raccoons, and the occasional fox. Not a cow or a chicken or a guinea or a horse on the whole place. Not, in other words, a farm any longer by any definition or in any place.
It was not always so, of course. Once the chickens squawked and flustered all day long, raucously and incessantly. Once the guineas drove us crazy with their guard-dog alarms and the ducks did likewise with their honking. Once the bee hives gave us our honey and the blackberry breaks gave us our spring delights and summer cobblers. Once the cows-the loves of my life-grazed and bred and mooed and sauntered to the pasture fence with news of how thing were for them and with the naked desire of the totally innocent to be petted and stroked and embraced. Those things are memories now; but occasionally something happens to yank the memory forward from past time into present time. Always I am grateful.
Last Thursday, Sam and I were driving home from a day in Memphis. We had turned off of the state highway onto Lucy Road and gone about a mile or so when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw her. The terrain in Lucy is rolling and, for west Tennessee, fairly high. Accordingly, we have in places some steep gullies, a few ravines, and an occasional really evil ditch. One such ditch-narrow and perhaps three to four feet deep-runs beside Lucy Road off and on for three or four miles. And she was teetering on the edge of one.
I am sure it was habit that made me see her, for I certainly was not looking in her direction. “A cow!,” I said to Sam. “There’s a cow out at the top of the ditch.”
He drove to the nearest driveway cut, turned around without saying a word, and drove back. And there she still was. “She’s beautiful,” he said as matter-of-factly as if he were telling me the sun was shining. And she was. A year old, probably, and her whole body glowing in the spring sunlight with the blonde sheen of young red heifers in the clean light of early spring. There was a break in the fence behind her that she had obviously grazed her way through. Now she was caught with one front and back leg still clinging to the edge of the pasture and the other front and back legs precariously planted six inches below on the edge of the ditch.
“Damn!” Sam said, which was about as appropriate as anything I could imagine either of us saying. She couldn’t hang there much longer. Her shoulder and hip girdles would both give out soon, and she would have to move. If she lost her footing and went into the ditch, she would either flip onto her back in her tumble or land in too narrow a space for her to be able to get her legs under her and up. Either way, she was in trouble.
We drove up the road to the house where her owner and our neighbor lives. There was a car and a pick-up truck both at home, but not a soul in sight. I went calling and knocking and halloing, while Sam honked and drove farther up into the property. No luck. What we needed, barring people, was a rope, at the very least. And even if we had gone on to The Farm In Lucy, there were no longer any ropes.
Afraid to waste more time, we turned around and went back to her, expecting in both our minds to see that beautiful creature broken-legged and trapped….but she was gone! When we got there, she was gone. Somehow…who knows how, whether our honking and shouting had called her or whether by sheer grace…somehow she had managed to do the impossible and side-step her way up to enough level space to get back through the break in the fence. We saw her, regal in the pasture. She turned and looked at us, as cows are wont to do, with exquisite patience and almost a kind of fondness for our having stopped and cared.
“Beautiful,” Sam said again, and we went on home.
There is a large part of me that resists with disgust and scorn speakers-most especially preachers-and writers-most especially those in religion-who tell a good story and then demean it by making it an object lesson, after the fact, for some kind of inanity or moral tedium. I hope that’s not what I am doing here this morning. Whether it is or not, however, the story of the young heifer is the story that wants to be told; and when a story really wants to be told, there’s no denying it its release. Until it is told, nothing else of any moment will come out. Thus, this morning, my red heifer. But having said that, I must say as well that I don’t think it was the heifer herself, for all her beauty, that has absorbed me these last few days. It is I who have absorbed me.
It is my amazement at how quickly Sam and I turned back into farmers on the pivot of a moment, yes. But more than that, it is how we both fell into her beauty like hungry children falling into a hearty supper. And what has arrested my attention most is how I saw that beautiful animal for the first time only when I saw her out of context.
We pass that herd at least twice every single day of our lives. They graze all the way to the fence line that parallels Lucy Road; and often when we pass there, they are resting beside the fence, watching the trucks so by. They are there and have been for who knows how long or how many times; but I never saw her or her sheen until the surround in which I am accustomed to see her disappeared. That realization, mundane as it may seem, is what wanted out, because it is the same, and ever-growing, realization I have every time I pick up Jesus’ words in the Sayings format.
Lifted out of the habitat in which I have known them for years, they suddenly take on a drama and a beauty I had grown too jaded or habituated or simply too familiar to see. What I want is to know that they will never turn, like my beautiful red yearling, and slip back into an obscuring context. Pray God, no.
Phyllis Tickle
