Backbone > Frankly Speaking

Peace, It's Wonderful
By Frank Crocitto . Illustration by Leslie Bender

The farm was on the far side of Staten Island, the side that nuzzles against Jersey, near where the bridges Goethals and Outerbridge span the swamps. Deserted roads, crumbling asphalt, plentiful potholes attested to the lack of interest the borough and its real estate boys had in that corner of the world. The golden vision of a great bridge linking the backwater life of the island to the rest of the City’s scramble had loomed and gloomed so often few believed it would ever materialize. So the farms on the far side, with their abundant acres of woodland and meadow, remained with no other purpose than a site for growing things.

The air was quiet out there. One could walk down to Drumgoogle Boulevard or to the drowsy train station without seeing a car, except rusting ones here and there slowly settling into the earth. There was a scattering of houses around, most crying out for the mercy of a paint brush. If there were people that occupied them they were rarely to be seen.

Like the land around, the farm had a gentle roll to it. In front, upon a high spot, about twenty feet back from the road, sat a big matronly farmhouse. Behind it was a grassy slope where some ancient apple and pear trees gathered around a winding rill. Beyond, the fields swelled up an incline then leveled off before dipping down to a wood and a bright, brawling brook.

After what I’d been through, the farm had all the promise of paradise. The community of people living there were kind and thoughtful and clearly cared for one another. Each day was like a rose unfolding into a peaceful round of prayer and talk and meals and work. And there was always work—in the fields in summer under the tutelage of “John the Farmer” and through the other seasons: canning vegetables, baking bread, maintaining buildings, and preparing for the next spring. Except for the occasional use of a tractor, the work was done by hand. On the weekends young people ferried over from Manhattan—fresh, wide-eyed faces bubbling with radical enthusiasm.

When I arrived in early July, a single bag over my shoulder, I was given a room in the long, low bunkhouse. The men who did most of the work on the farm had rooms there—John, of course, and the elfin, pink-nosed Hans, and Slim, a simple giant in charge of the kitchen, and Andy Spillane, a warm-hearted, poetical Irish sailor who worked the farm between stints on the high seas.

The despair I had been slogging in for two years had soaked into my mind and my limbs. Two years, that seemed twenty, working as an attendant in a mental hospital plus living on the hospital grounds without a car had had its effect. I longed for nature, for simplicity, for outdoor labor and for the company of people who hadn’t lost all of their minds. Pilgrim State Hospital, proud of being the largest madhouse in the world, was a city unto itself, housing more madness per square foot than most cities.

I picked Pilgrim State from a long list of approved alternative service the United States Army provided a reluctant draftee. I could have worked in Boston’s Fogg Art Museum, I could have worked in an obstetrical hospital in Honolulu. But Pilgrim State was on Long Island, close to home. Alas, the miniscule bits of alternative good I did there was nowhere near the harm I might have done had I gone into the Army like everybody—relatives, friends, teachers, priests—wanted me to.

The farm belonged to the Catholic Worker, a radical social crusade that arose in the Depression and whose influence, far out of proportion to its size, was due to the penny newspaper it printed and to the reputation of its charismatic founder and relentless evangelizer, Dorothy Day. While I had come to my pacifist position on my own, I was drawn to the Worker, and the young people around it welcomed me as a kindred spirit. They spoke well enough of me to overcome the doubts Charlie Butterworth, a tall, thoughtful Texan who ran the farm, had about me.
Dorothy Day spent most of her life and breath on the road, talking her way around the country, advocating pacifism and community and responsible social action, stemming from a literal interpretation of Christ’s teaching. She had been a communist in her salad days, and a pal of Eugene O’Neill when he was stumble-boozing around Greenwich Village. In those days Dorothy was a tall, blond, strikingly beautiful woman. Eventually she became a convert to Catholicism. And a woman with a mission. Between road trips she hovered about her newspaper office and the soup kitchen the Worker ran on Chrystie Street near the Bowery. Inevitably she wound up at the farm.

Whenever the word blew in that Dorothy was coming, the farm went berserk. The house was scrubbed, the men made their beds, washed under their arms, put on fresh duds, and pasted on their very best pious face. Dorothy liked piety. By the time I met her she was an old lady and she had become increasingly, aggressively devout. Sometimes—if our paths happened to cross—she’d invite me to go to Mass with her. Not on a Sunday, of course, but on weekdays when devout Catholics go—old women and young men bound for the priesthood. I went with her a few times, and she praised me for it. She also praised me, publicly, for having made the sandals I was wearing, and indeed, I had made them with my own hands. The awkwardness I felt at her praise came from knowing I’d done a helluva lot of other things more worth praising which she was blithely oblivious of.

Little did I know I was living out my dream of an idyllic existence—working the land, walking like Thoreau in the woods, reading Dostoyevsky, impressing the visiting flower-haired, sandal-shod young ladies with my profundity—events were cooking that would bring my presence in paradise into question.

Because Dorothy believed in hospitality, she accepted all shapes and sizes into her circle. One of them was a 16-year-old named Billy Barry. Billy lived down the road and he bopped onto the farm whenever he was so moved. But since the conditions of his acceptance did not include someone to supervise him, Billy did as he damn well pleased. The mainstays of the farm turned their backs and grumbled whenever Billy passed through.

He was a handful, Billy was. He liked to break things. He liked to vituperate. He liked to overturn chairs. Apparently, Dorothy cherished the hope that mere contact with the farm folk would save Billy from reform school. Despite his rough and reckless ways, there was a refreshing vigor about the boy. He was handsome, with sable-black hair, and he had the freewheeling tone of an animal in the wild. His only apparent flaw was an eye that was just slightly crossed. There was something endearing about Billy. Whenever he showed up, I found myself grappling with the conflicting feelings he aroused. I didn’t turn away from him; I looked at him. And not a word passed between us.

So it came to pass on a Sunday afternoon in early April, when green was starting to show on the ash tree in the yard, Billy Barry came crashing into the house. We had just finished an interminable supper of baked beans and franks and cornbread, sprinkled with pious observations Dorothy extracted from her late pilgrimage through Utah, Idaho, Montana, Kansas, Nebraska, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio. The cleanup was in progress, and Dorothy had retired to her bedroom off the kitchen. Billy descended, and in this particular descent he was followed by his buxom little garlic-munching girlfriend, Beatrice.

Theirs was a relationship of moods and stomping, bickering and kisses with frequent eruptions into raging arguments. It was on the foamy crest of one of these arguments that the two entered the house. There was much screaming and cursing and knocking over of chairs. At a loss, Billy snatched a vase of daffodils off the dining room table and flung it against the wall.

Then he began waving his fists over the girl’s head. When I glanced over at the eight or so people on the clean-up crew—some at the sinks, some drying dishes, some sweeping—I noticed that all of them had their backs to the action.
I had the tablecloth in my hands at the time, about to shake it outside. But I paused to watch the feuding couple for a moment. Then, deciding that he and she were not my responsibility but Charlie Butterworth’s and the other community-veterans’, I turned to go. I didn’t see it but I heard it, the sound of a punch landing and a scream. Yes, indeed, Billy was using his beloved Beatrice as a punching bag. And still the work in the kitchen continued as if the two kids were squabbling on the other side of the moon.

“Hey!!” was all that I said. And I dropped the tablecloth.

By the time I reached the other side of the table Beatrice had received a few more punches and was reeling against the wall, clutching at her eyes. I stepped between the lovers, arms wide, and bellowed into Billy’s face.

“What the hell are you doing?!!”

Then there was blackness. When I woke up I was sitting on Billy’s chest, my left hand on his throat and my right hand cocked above his face.

“Are you gonna stop?!!”

At that precise moment, and no sooner, did Dorothy Day emerge from her bedroom. She had a ratty green robe on and her white hair, unbraided, hung down to her waist. On her face was a look of horror and disappointment. That the lovers had been fighting, that Billy had been walloping Beatrice, that the girl’s nose was bleeding and there was blood trickling from her left eye, that Billy had hauled off on the one person who was trying to stop things, that Billy hadn’t actually received the punch he was about to get and so richly deserved, were all irrelevancies to Dorothy. She knew a villain when she saw one.

After that day Billy and I were fast friends. Whenever he came to the farm he came looking for me, wanting to talk, wanting to play ball. Beatrice got better and they were more loving than ever. But my days were numbered there on the farm.

The day I left Billy met me on the road. He said he was sorry, and he walked me all the way to the train station.