Soil and Sacrament by Fred Bahnson

Author:Fred Bahnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

CHAPTER SIX

Significant Soil

For most of us, this is the aim

Never here to be realized;

Who are only undefeated

Because we have gone on trying;

We, content at the last

If our temporal reversion nourish

The life of significant soil.

—T. S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages

In September of 2005, my first year at Anathoth, I called up a local farmer named Vaughn to see if I could buy chicken manure for the garden. I had never met Vaughn, but knew that he was a former member of Cedar Grove UMC. Vaughn told me they used all their manure on their tobacco fields. I thanked him anyway and was about to hang up when he said, “But even if I did have some, I wouldn’t sell you any.” Vaughn proceeded to berate me, an outsider, for coming into his community, “where my family has been since 1783,” and “messing everything up.” He said he thought the community garden was a terrible idea, that “outsiders” had taken over the church, and that as long as “you outsiders” were doing things like starting community gardens, he’d never set foot in the church again. I asked if we could talk about this in person. Why was the community garden such a bad idea? He laughed bitterly and hung up.

I was determined not to let naysayers like Vaughn deter my enthusiasm. Good things were also unfolding—a well digger put in a well for half price, a crew of carpenters volunteered to build the barn. Yet even as the garden project grew and won trust in the community, a small but vocal opposition persisted. Some church members, in all four years I served at Anathoth, refused to set foot on the place.

It certainly didn’t help that I was a cultural outsider who practiced new methods of agriculture. “Organic” in this tobacco-growing county was a four-letter word. But despite my strong convictions about growing food organically, I tried to reach out to the older farmers in the congregation who farmed with conventional methods.

Mr. Rimmer lived across Mill Creek Road and was Anathoth’s nearest neighbor. He wore coveralls every day except Sunday and alternated caps given to him by the Farmers’ Credit Union, Brown’s Feed & Supply, and John Deere. Sometimes I walked across the road to borrow a hank of rope or to ask his advice about planting dates (“you plant your peas on Ash Wednesday”). Other times he would drive up in his beat-up Chevy pickup to see what kind of strange things we owgaanic people were planting that day. Several years into the project we built a brick-fired pizza oven. Mr. Rimmer soon stopped by wanting to see our new “pizza hut.” He’d farmed this land all his life, tobacco mostly, and as a result of much time spent around carburetors and corn pickers had lost the ends of several fingers on each hand. When he talked he massaged his stumps, as if he could feel those parts of himself he once possessed.

One day Mr. Rimmer donated a bushel basket of turnips. “Give these to your people,” he said.

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