Remembering by Wendell Berry Page B

If you need them, it helps.”
    â€œHave you ever thought of mechanizing the place you have?”
    â€œWhat for? So my children can work in a factory?”
    The horses were rested. It was time for Isaac to return to work and for Andy to be on his way. After taking the children to the house, they returned with the team to where they’d left the plow. They shook hands.
    â€œThanks,” Andy said. “Thank you very much. I hope we’ll meet again.”
    â€œThat would be good,” Isaac said. “Maybe we will. I’ll be here.”
    In the middle of that afternoon, after Andy had been back on the main road a long time, all that he had learned in the last two days finally settled into place in his mind. He braked suddenly and again pulled over to the side of the road, for at last he had seen what was unmistakably the point: Twenty-five families like Isaac Troyer’s could have farmed and thrived — could have made a healthy, comely, independent community — on the two thousand acres where Bill Meikelberger lived virtually alone with his ulcer, the best friend that the bank and the farm machinery business and the fertilizer business and the oil companies and the chemical companies ever had.
    Andy sat for a long time then with his hands on top of the steering wheel and his head on his hands, and then he picked up a pad of paper from the seat beside him and outlined an article about Isaac Troyer. He would write it for his friend Rove Upperson, the only agricultural journalist he knew who would want to read it.

    â€œDid you really think we could publish this?” Tommy Netherbough asked. He was sitting with one foot on the corner of his desk, holding the Isaac Troyer article with two fingers as if it were covered with mayonnaise.
    Andy was sitting in a chair on the other side of the desk. He had understood that the dividing of ways had come when he received Tommy’s
peremptory note: “See me.” Once in Tommy’s office, he got the feeling that he was supposed to remain standing, as one who was outside the perquisites of friendship, and so he sat down.
    â€œWe’re interested in successful farmers, aren’t we?”
    â€œI sent you to write on a successful farmer. Where the hell is the Meikelberger article?”
    â€œIf I wrote the truth about Meikelberger, you wouldn’t publish that either.”
    â€œMeikelberger’s the future of American agriculture.”
    â€œMeikelberger’s the end of American agriculture — the end of the future. He’s a success by way of a monstrous debt and a stomach ulcer and insomnia and the disappearance of a neighborhood. Isaac Troyer’s the successful one of the pair, by any standard I know.”
    â€œIsaac Troyer is over and done with. He’s as obsolete as the outdoor toilet. His farm is history, Andy. It’s a museum.”
    â€œYou mean you’re against it.”
    â€œI’m not against it or for it. I can see that it’s finished. We’re not going to farm that way.”
    â€œYou mean you don’t want anybody to farm that way.”
    â€œI mean I don’t want anybody to farm that way. You’re letting nostalgia overrule your judgment. You’ve lost your sense of reality. What do you want, a job with The Draft Horse Gazette ?”
    â€œ The Draft Horse Gazette — I’ll have to find out about that.”
    â€œYou should.”
    â€œI will.”
    The dividing of ways had come, but Andy made no move to get up. He was not arguing for himself now.
    â€œWhat is this magazine trying to do — improve farming and help farmers, or sell agri-industrial products?”
    Tommy sat looking at him, slowly nodding his head. He was angry now, Andy saw, and he did not care. He was angry himself. He was going to go. He had known it ever since the afternoon after his visit with the Troyers. He knew he was going; he did not yet know where.
    Tommy said,