From The Mammoth Cheese:

Chapter One

It was a long walk to the end of the driveway. Margaret Prickett saw the sun glint off Mr. Kelly’s U.S. Post Office truck, nearly airborne from the pink and blue balloons tied to his side-view mirrors in cheerful disregard of government regulation. He loved kids, probably because he had none of his own, and kids loved him. When her daughter Polly was a little girl, she used to leave wax paper cups of Pepsi inside the mailbox, the red flag raised so that he wouldn’t drive past thirsty. And though by the time he opened the little black oven the cola was flat and fatty with melted wax, in gratitude he would always leave her a rubber band. It was a splendid economy.

Mr. Kelly got out of his truck only when there was something to sign for, yet to Margaret’s eyes, that morning he stepped out seemingly empty-handed. Two days ago, she had ordered some flour from King Arthur’s, but that couldn’t be here so soon, could it? She waved to him, a big hearty arm-sweep, as if to say, Great to see you. Got something good? He waved back, an unenthusiastic little shake from the wrist which could only mean, Registered letter.

Sure enough, she spotted it on his clipboard, the little square of serious pale green. She stopped about fifty yards away from him, suddenly overwhelmed by the mid-afternoon heat of the day. She felt drowsy from the narcotic tangle of honeysuckle and wild morning glories that overgrew the fence beside the gravel driveway, and nearly deafened by the lawn mower whir of dog-day cicadas. Maybe she could just turn around and calmly walk back to the cheese house. Lock herself in and make August deal with Mr. Kelly. Maybe she could just stand here until he disappeared like the mirage he looked to be in the heat, a postal spectre no more valid than a canceled stamp.

Margaret saw his eyes go from the letter to the house behind her, and some primal protective instinct took over. She pulled herself together and made herself be polite.

“Just give me your John Hancock right here,” Mr. Kelly said, trying not to look at Margaret directly when she reached him. As the mailman, he probably knew more town secrets than the expatriate shrink, Andrew Friedman. “Been to see Manda yet?”

“Can’t get through the crowds,” Margaret answered, happy to have something else to talk about. “We’ll take some food over when she gets home. Polly’s dying to see the babies.”

“You can’t imagine the mountain of letters she’s been getting,” he said, taking back his pen and tearing off the little green indictment. Couldn’t say it got lost in the mail. Couldn’t claim to have never seen it. “And stuffed animals out the ying-yang. Even a full-sized purple gorilla like you’d win at the fair.”

“Amazing,” replied Margaret, taking the letter.

“Well, give my best to the young one.” He tipped his hat as he climbed back into the truck. “Tell her things are mighty parched out on the trail without her.”

“Will do.” Margaret smiled and watched him pull away. She turned back to her hundred acres, imagining the entire parcel yellow and blighted, the barn incinerated, the house blasted to its foundation by the bad news she would release when she opened this envelope. The entire history of Prickett Farm seemed to stand between Margaret and breaking the seal. She slowly started back up the driveway.

Like the Vaughns, the Pricketts, too, could claim one of the town’s three chimneys. Margaret walked past the tower of bricks that sat up the hill by the path that led through the woods to the Franks’ new house. Though a perfectly good shade tree grew not fifteen yards farther on, for as long as anyone could remember, the Pricketts’ herd of buttery Jerseys had grazed their way across a rolling pasture of Potomac orchard grass to this chimney for their midday nap. The history of the cows’ partiality could be read by all who had the eyes to see: the much-hoofed grass from barn to stream, the long detour from stream to woods (avoiding the horrible spot in the middle of the meadow where years before Tiberia’s Queen had dropped a ­putrid calf, sending the whole herd leaping and bellowing about); the downhill path back to the barn, hard-packed and nearly bald from hungry rushing. But afternoons always found the herd sidled up to the ­ruined chimney as it cast its long sundial shadow upon them and counted off the hours till evening milking. An old farming adage says that Holsteins will look for the filthiest place to lie down, while Jerseys search out the cleanest, and in some collective cow memory, these girls must have sensed the echo of solid oak floors and imported rugs beneath their shaggy bellies; for back in the old planter days, when the county still sent a delegate to the House of Burgesses in Williamsburg, the cows’ chimney had been attached to one of the wealthiest homesteads in Orange. It had heated Mr. and Mrs. Mandeville Prickett, their son, three daughters, and any number of hour-old infants that had been vainly warmed before they were on their way to the graveyard out front. It went on to thaw a second generation of red-cheeked Prickett children, plus the nieces and nephews, the half-frozen out-of-town guests, and even their distant neighbor, young James Madison, who once took shelter with them on his way back from Mr. Robertson’s Boarding School, before the house burned down in 1779. It was the worst kind of fire, a ridiculous, careless fire, when the tallow Mrs. Randolph Prickett used for dipping candles flared and caught the drapes. The whole family and all their people fetched buckets of cold water from the spring that ran along the edge of the property, but to no avail. The wax caught the cloth and the cloth caught the wood and the wood caught the roof until all that remained were a few blackened studs, the iron door hinges, and the chimney. The family sent their indoor people to live with their field people, while they bedded at neighbors until a new house could be erected.

Now the cows served as its walls and the abandoned chimney looked down the hill on the second Prickett homestead, built lower on their property, nearby the stream: a whitewashed brick farmhouse in a stand of oak trees, far enough back from the water to weather flash flooding, but close enough for buckets to be passed hand to hand. Margaret took a long look at the new house (though it had been standing for two hundred years, no one referred to it as anything other than “the new house”). It was so familiar, she rarely observed it any more closely than she did her own tired face in the bathroom mirror each morning. Now, in light of the letter, she saw it as Mr. Kelly must have seen it driving up every day, as her neighbors must see it. Its old green tin roof had completely rusted out along the flashing, the verandah screens were squirrel-torn, the bricks in desperate need of repointing and a whitewash. Margaret had every intention of taking care of all those little things before they got worse, and yet, worse they got, year after year, as the money went to the more pressing disasters of crop failure and low production and drought.

She continued up the driveway toward the house, passing the geriatric tractor out in the alfalfa field, and the manure spreader, which she’d spent most of the morning trying to de-clog. With Francis gone, it was unlikely she and August would plant a crop after next year. It would make more sense to keep the pastures up and simply buy their winter feed until she could repopulate the herd. She felt traitorous even thinking such thoughts, for Margaret Abingdon Prickett was born into a proud family, a family that honored its history, that considered giving its child a middle name like Ann or Lynn or Sue as unthinkable as laying shag carpeting over hardwood floors or living out by the airport. Cows are not the only creatures of strong habits, and for many years after the fire, the Prickett sons were proud to live in the new house exactly as their fathers had in the old: planting tobacco, driving the hogsheads down the old rowling road to sell to traders in Fredericksburg, buying their furniture and throwing their barbecues on credit they carried from one crop to the next. When, after the War (and by “the War,” everyone in town still meant the Civil War), the price of tobacco plummeted, and a collective feeling of urgent survivalism gripped farming communities all across the South, it seemed to the Pricketts that they must never allow themselves to become dependent again—if they could not smelt their own cannons, they could at least produce their own food. A great agricultural shift took place in Three Chimneys and the luxurious tobacco crop found itself eschewed in favor of pragmatic corn and peas; hogs for meat, oxen for labor. But of all the money borrowed during Reconstruction to coax a real farm from the brown stubble of Bright Leaf, they spent by far the most (neighbors shook their heads; far, far too much, they said) on their new state-of-the-art dairy: the dairy up ahead that, 140 years later, Margaret Prickett still used.

Omnis pecuniae pecus fundamentum.

The herd is the foundation of all wealth. It was a quote from the Roman historian Varro, and it was a clever lesson in etymology, for the Latin word for wealth, pecunia, comes from the word for cattle, pecus. It was the official motto of the American Jersey Cattle Club, and it was stenciled in strong black letters onto a sign that hung in the Prickett cheese house. Margaret’s great-grandfather was even a member of the Jersey Scouts of America until 1919, when the moniker was dropped on protest by Boy Scouts of the same name. Jersey cattle were to restore the Prickett family fortune, and to that end, they borrowed heavily to raise a modern stanchion barn with newfangled swinging headgates, and to build adjacent, over the running stream so that the icy water might cool the milk most efficiently, a cheese house, complete with floor-to-ceiling wooden shelves and ripening cave. No expense was spared on sowing the pastures and digging the trench silos, and a good thing, too, for the cows chosen to graze upon the Prickett clover and to populate the fine new outbuildings were, naturally, no common stock themselves, but descended from the First Families of Virginia dairy cattle. These mothers and daughters, sisters and aunts could trace their lineage back to the famed Tormentor family and the celebrated stud, Flying Fox. Sultana’s Foxy Increase was true Jersey royalty—on one side the great-great-great-great-great-and so on-granddaughter of Flying Fox, while her distaff side wound back to Sultane, the acknowledged “mother” of all Jerseys in America. Compared with their cattle, the Pricketts joked, they were mere upstarts.

The herd is the foundation of all wealth. This motto was Margaret’s inheritance. She knew it was only in the mysterious alchemy of those patrician stomachs working together to turn grass and grain and sunshine and water into the most sublime milk, hinting of fresh Piedmont air and summer’s own roses, that the Prickett Dairy Farm had any prayer of survival. She would not abandon the motto—even if the herd upon which it was founded had dwindled to a mere twenty-two when, after her father died, she was forced to sell off three-quarters of the stock to recoup his bad investments, and even if the second house was collapsing around her. She was raised on homemade ­jonquil-colored Jersey butter and crumbly sharp Jersey cheese that her great-grandparents had given names like Manassas Gold and Wilderness Cheddar. She had been taught at her grandfather’s knee how to preserve calves’ stomachs at the dark of the moon and how to tell, almost by smell, the exact greenish moment that curd separates from whey, and if she’d become almost Confucian in her fealty to her ancestors’ ways, then so be it. There were some things in life worth preserving.

Margaret shoved the letter deep into her pocket. Nothing so far had shaken her resolve to continue as her great-grandparents had a hundred years ago, not even when her soon-to-be ex-husband Francis Marvel packed his bags and moved out, nor when her daughter Polly wept that their life was getting so weird any minute PBS was going to show up and make a documentary about them. Registered letter be damned. At thirty-six, Margaret Prickett knew who she was and she knew what mattered. There was still a place in the world for those who did things the right way, the old-fashioned way. Sadly, for the aristocratic Jerseys napping at the old chimney, unaware they were about to go the way of all anciens régimes, First Virginia Savings and Loan did not agree.

At three-thirty in the afternoon, all was quiet in the barn except for the soft strains of Sinatra that Margaret left playing on the sound system for the girls. Over the years, she’d had success with Grieg and Joni Mitchell—it never mattered, classical or modern, so long as it was the same thing every day—but nothing soothed the girls like the sweet, swinging chauvinism of Frank. Their milk flowed freer when he crooned to them, they no longer kicked over their pails, but stood dreamily by like bobby-soxers, chewing their bright pink Bazooka cuds. The cows even had favorite songs. This summer it seemed to be the melancholic “It Was a Very Good Year.”

Inside, she washed up and dressed for the cheese house, tying her wiry hair under a kerchief. Margaret used to be considered one of the most attractive girls in Three Chimneys, though she thought few were likely to confer the title on her now. She had no-nonsense brown eyes and a tall, vegetal figure; she wore her chestnut hair, grown long through missed salon appointments, in a single plait down her back. Margaret had devolved from attractive into that adjective farmers loved to use for thoroughbreds of any species—she was a “handsome” woman, and had become, like many of pure blood, utterly indifferent to what others thought of her. Now she pulled on her homemade white cotton shirt and pants, the scuffed white plastic boots that came to just below the knee, then tied on a white canvas apron. Before she headed over to the cheese house, she wanted to quickly check on Sultana, the only springer left this fall, since Jolly Chimney’s Anna and Orange Frieda had already dropped their calves and none of the replacement heifers had gotten the job done. They were young yet, she reasoned, and might very well take next month when she got the loan of Franklin’s stud again. Sultana was one of the best milkers Margaret had, so she’d give her a rest of sixty days or so after she laid down, and then bring the stud back in. They used to have a stud of their own, but with only she and August to work the farm, he had become just too much of a handful.

Margaret followed a plaintive low to Sultana’s straw-filled stall, where August had brought her in early from the pasture. Like an ungainly grasshopper, he crouched with his long legs drawn up around his ears, a big red one of which he had pressed against her belly.

“What’s wrong?” Margaret asked.

“Thought I heard—probably nothing,” he said, rubbing the taut caramel bulge. He was trying to convince himself he had not just heard what he thought he heard. A calf’s heart beats twice as fast as its mother’s and so there was always a double heartbeat inside the drum of a pregnant cow. He was not positive, but he thought he detected a faint syncopation. “Might be twins.”

“Don’t say that,” she answered grimly. “Hasn’t Manda had enough to last us all?”

“She’s due in six weeks.” August rose and checked the calendar on the Palm Pilot he carried in his overalls. “Probably time to dry her off.”

“Let’s take her off her concentrates.”

She gave August directions on what succulents to cut out of Sultana’s feed to help dry up her old milk so that her new milk could come down, and stenciled her rump with a big, purple D in indelible marker. When she leaned over, August noticed an envelope sticking out of her deep apron pocket. She saw his eyes go to it worriedly, but in perfect August fashion, he did not ask her about it.

“I’m going to the cheese house,” she announced.

He nodded numbly, and electronically punched Sultana’s new feed ratio into the spreadsheet he kept on each one of the girls. “Remember, I have my program tomorrow,” he called as she headed toward the cheese house.

“What time will you be back?” she asked.

“By milking time.”

Margaret hosed off her boots before entering the small stone building and dunked her arms, up to the elbow, in a bucket of disinfectant she kept by the door. The whitewashed antechamber, built over a cold, underground spring, was her favorite place on the farm, especially on hot early-September days like this. This morning’s small-mouthed, hooded pails bobbed like stainless steel buoys in the spring-fed tank, and Margaret checked the thermometers she had in each. Through a low doorway, she could reach the main room, where her cheesemaking equipment hung over a thirty-year-old water-circulated double-walled vat, the only real upgrade her father had made, sick to death as he was of feeding the old woodstove. She kept her cultures in mason jars on the shelf, neatly labeled Penicilium candidum, and Lactococcus lactis, and Bacteria linens. August had repaired the old Dutch press she used for the larger cheeses and Margaret tightened the screw on this morning’s creamy almond Caerphilly.

She took the ten steps down to the cheese cave, dug out behind and half beneath the house above. Because of the spring, the cave had nearly ideal conditions for ripening. It was just humid enough and a constant fifty-five degrees, winter and summer. Upstairs, she sweltered over the stove and the curd vat, but below, the sweat dried on her forehead, her heart slowed, she could make the rounds of her wheels and plump pyramids and black waxed blocks of Yellow Tavern and Mattaponi Reserve.

She began this afternoon with her day-old ten-pound Cheshires. Margaret sniffed each swaddled bundle, gently unwrapped it, and rubbed a handful of coarse salt into its sticky rind, going over every inch of her cheese like a mother cat would over her young. These larger cheeses took longer to harden, and if she wasn’t careful, she could lose them all in the early days to cracks and air pockets and all the wrong sorts of bacteria. There was nothing worse than to tend a cheese six months, reverently turning it to make sure it dried evenly, carefully waxing it, only to cut into a gassy bloat of ruined milk. It happened to Margaret from time to time and she never ceased taking it as a personal failure.

Down here in the cheese cave, it seemed safe to look at the letter. She didn’t need to open it to know what it said: It was the emphatic end of the conversation she’d had last week with her extension agent, the same conversation they’d had every few months since her father died. Once more, he begged her to switch to Holsteins—which though giving a far less rich milk, gave in quantities far vaster than Jerseys. Barring that, would she not at least upgrade to milking machines? No one outside of a few crackpot Mennonites, he said, still milked by hand. But Margaret never expected to turn a profit on milk alone. No, in her soul, she was not a farmer; she was a cheesemaker. She had learned her ancestors’ farmstead recipes and perfected them: milking by hand into the same seamless zinc pails her grandparents used; heating the milk in the same copper cauldron; cutting it with the same wire knives. She was obsessive in her quest to keep the ­recipes absolutely faithful, going so far as to culture her own molds from pumpernickel and rye breads she baked herself, just as her grandmother did. And Margaret’s carefulness was finally paying off. Last July, she saw her sales spike when she was mentioned beside Duke’s Mayonnaise and Hanover tomatoes in Gourmet magazine’s Southern Culinary Hall Of Fame.

If she could just hold on two months more, she thought, turning the letter over but still not opening it. Two months to keep them at bay. Those eight weeks would make no real difference in the quality of her cheeses, nor in the farm’s cash flow, but two months from today was the first Tuesday in November, and on that day, the one man who had the power to make this little slip of mint green go away would be in office.

Adams stands for Amnesty.

He spoke the word over and over, a banner waving above all those other fraught mn words like amnesia and amniocentesis, an unimpeachable mouthful, a rockets’ red glare of eternal pardon and utter freedom.

Amnesty.

It was what Adams Brooke promised when he was elected. An abolition of the estate tax on small farms, but beyond that, a onetime government bailout of farms earning less than $250,000 a year. That simple, he repeated nearly every night on Margaret’s black-and- white television. He was raised on a working dairy farm, he had watched his grandparents struggle, and he promised—no, he vowed, with his forefinger raised and his hair standing on end—to redress the wrongs of four decades’ worth of uncaring administrations, to wipe the slate clean, to find a place at the table for those who grew the food that was eaten at it!

Forgiveness of her dairy’s debt meant everything to Margaret, and not just for her sake, but for the memory of everyone who’d come before her. Amnesty today meant forgiveness at last for Mandeville Prickett who defaulted on his British creditors, and her great-great-great-grandfather Abingdon with his worthless box of Confederate bonds, and her father who speculated on Internet stocks when he didn’t even own a computer. It meant grace for all the preceding generations who had brought her to this dark, gnawing place, so burdened with her family’s mistakes and miscalculations that she would never get out from under it in her lifetime, and thus would be forced, like her father, and his father before him, to bequeath it to her daughter Polly. And did she hear him? Adams Brooke demanded on the Sunday morning talk shows. Not low-interest loans, or postponements, or debt restructuring, but free and clear absolution. This was what he vowed. This was why Margaret Prickett would never again have to sign for a registered letter.

Margaret put the envelope back in her pocket and unlocked the door to an even darker moonscape of a chamber, where in semitwilight her soft cheeses bloomed blue and green, three-inch silken hair nodding faintly as she entered, tasting the air around her. She settled each upon her palm, stroking them like sightless ocean creatures, easing their crine into a velvety softshell. It was not ­legal for her to sell these, her favorite, secret children, because they grew from raw, unpasteurized milk and were aged under two months. But a few chefs had ferreted out her contraband and were ordering it for the best restaurants in Charlottesville and Washington and as far away as New York City. Margaret didn’t mind breaking the law over something like this. These cheeses were as old as humanity itself, they were as close as you might come to circulating the earth and ether of a place, your plot of land balanced on the tongue of a diplomat in Dupont Circle or a starlet in SoHo. Why suddenly now, in this cramped corner of the twenty-first century, should our government be proscribing the established methods of thousands of years?

Adams Brooke and her cheese. To August and Polly, the two who knew her best, it seemed she cared about nothing else these days. Some people in town thought that had she cared more about her husband, he wouldn’t have needed to spend so much of his time down at Drafty’s with Andrew Friedman. Many said her obsessiveness about Brooke had driven Francis to his affair—what man wouldn’t be ­jealous if his wife spent every night down at her self-styled Election Headquarters, running off flyers and phoning complete strangers in other counties? But then there were others in town who said it was more a chicken-or-egg sort of thing, that they never saw Margaret out late stumping for Brooke until after the news about Francis and his secretary broke.

“Mom!”

Upstairs, she heard the screen door slam Polly home from school.

“Mom!”

Margaret set down her mermaid Epoisse and raced upstairs at the sound of panic in Polly’s voice. August had dropped the bag of rolled oats and cottonseed meal he was measuring out for Sultana’s dinner and run outside to see what was the matter. Polly was halfway down the long gravel driveway, pointing wildly to a caravan of cars churning a pillow of dust on the old dirt road that led from Manda and Jake’s house next door. There had been a ton of cars up and down the dirt road since the news was announced—curiosity-seekers mostly, the kind of people who park outside the houses of convicted murderers or drive to the steep embankments off which school buses have plunged, and wait, as if to feel some emanation of the event. But the six black Buicks and two news vans that went flying down the road looked far more official.

“Mom!” cried Polly, catching sight of the license plate. “It’s Governor Brooke!”

“Why didn’t someone tell me he was coming?” Margaret Prickett wailed, flinging off her apron, snatching up one of the many posters she kept in the barn, and sprinting down the driveway to stand with her daughter. August retrieved her apron with its mint green letter, and carefully hung it behind the door before walking down to join them. The three stood by the mailbox while six identical black cars with tinted windows, two white vans impaled by corkscrewing satellite antennae, and the ten-year-old, two-toned banana Cadillac driven by Mrs. Frank, Jake’s mother, rumbled past them. Margaret waved her sign like a madwoman, shouting out his name, jumping up and down, until all that remained was a choking cloud of dust and the magnificat of cicadas.

The cows, when they were driven in for their afternoon milking, immediately felt the full force of her disappointment. They were used to hearing her sing along with Frank—“Summer Wind,” “Forget Domani”—and nothing could make them forget the terror of having stepped in a gopher hole or being barked at by a big dog like coming in from the pasture to Margaret’s sweet singing voice and soothing hands. But today she did not sing. And when she milked them (not even dry—their udders ached afterward) she leaned her head against their flanks as if it were too heavy for her to hold upright.

“A man like that,” August said from his own milking stool, “he must be booked solid with appointments. He must be racing around all over the country.”

But Margaret didn’t want consolation. She left her pails for him to empty. She had to go turn the cheese.

That night, Margaret washed her hair with borax and an egg yolk, and while it dried, she kneaded two loaves of raisin bread for Polly’s breakfast in the morning. Her kitchen was dark and quiet, with only one low-watt bulb in the ceiling fixture and a kerosene lamp on the counter. The lamp cast its flickering shadow on her coffee mill, still perfumed with home-roasted beans for tomorrow’s percolator, and on the crank wooden butter churn, freshly washed with sweet cream and well water, which had just an hour before yielded its new butter to the icy shelf of her old white Hotpoint refrigerator, as heavy to open as a coffin. It was a large but homey kitchen, with patina-streaked copper pots hanging from the ceiling and a brick hearth big enough to roast a whole pig. Margaret sifted flour onto the worm-knotted farmer’s table in the center of the room and slammed the bread down, punching and heeling the gluten to elasticity. Polly was tucked safely into bed. Margaret had laid out her one hundred percent cotton school clothes and was preparing a preservative-free breakfast: homemade yogurt and butter in the refrigerator, hand-canned peach jam in the pantry, fresh raisin bread. While she worked, the old black-and-white TV played the ten o’clock news soundlessly in the next room: scenes of Amanda Frank’s stricken face against the white hospital pillow, of Jake and Pastor Vaughn standing by like boys waiting for a ballplayer’s autograph, and of Adams Brooke—her good, honest Adams Brooke—straddling the hospital room threshold like a colossus. Margaret shaped the loaves, draped them with a damp cloth, and set them to the back of her old cast-iron gas stove, where the pilot light kept everything a little bit warmer. Another day of saving her daughter from pollution. Another day closer to amnesty. Margaret sat down at her floured kitchen table, buried her head in her hands, and waited for the bread to rise.

Copyright © 2003 by Sheri Holman. Reprinted with permission from Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.