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“You can’t always explain how or why an aperture opens, how you fall into a larger seeing,” Jane Brox writes in the third book that makes up “In the Merrimack Valley: A Farm Trilogy.” She is referring to reading her father’s early farm account books after he dies and finding the names of the farm cows — “Brown Swiss, Little White, Big White, Mule Ears..
.” — written in his hand. “(It) was the first time I believe I truly understood how far he’d traveled in his life, and how much I had taken everything for granted.
” But she could be talking about the effect her beautifully written trilogy has on the reader as a whole. “In the Merrimack Valley: A Farm Trilogy,” by Jane Brox. Foreword by Suzanne Berne.
Godine, Nonpareil Books, softcover, $19.95 Brox’s three books about her family’s farm in Massachusetts, published individually some two decades ago, are a paean to a way of life once considered the bedrock of America and now mostly vanished. But the books, recently reissued by Godine in a single volume, have not a whiff of romantic sentimentality about them.
Brox interweaves many strands: her family’s personal history; the land’s Native American past; the stories of immigrants to the Merrimack Valley; the valley’s geography as well as its plants, stones and soils; and the social forces at play that contribute to the steady decline of the American family farm, a trajectory already well underway when her grandfather, a Lebanese immigrant, bought the place in 1902. Brox, who lives in Brunswick, begins with her own family history. With each succeeding book, she expands her subject matter, “both in geography and in time,” as she puts it in a new afterword.
In the first volume, “Here and Nowhere Else: Late Seasons of a Farm and Its Family” (1995), Brox describes how, after years trying to make it as a writer, she returns to the 100-acre farm in Dracut where she grew up. “The land has a kind old roll to it. Subdued hills stretch on for as far as I can see, their slopes as gradual as the hips and shoulders of a figure in repose,” she writes in subtle, evocative prose.
Her parents had taken over the farm from her grandfather. When the book begins, her parents are still farming hay, tomatoes, cucumbers, squash and other crops, but mostly the corn that inhabitants of the surrounding on the Merrimack Valley crave. Farm life shines with beautiful moments: Brox remembers her mother’s steam-moist forehead while making jelly, her father splitting a Blue Hubbard squash with a stroke “as deliberate as a stonecutter’s.
” But despite these loving images, the life is anything but kind. The work is demanding and never-ending. To manage it all requires a team.
She shares the work with her father, as well her troubled, drug-dependent brother, Sam. But the two men constantly argue about how to run the farm. Sam has great ideas but seldom follows through.
Also, he’s a late riser, unacceptable on a farm where work starts with the sun: “I remember pounding on the truck horn to wake him,” she writes, “and I clench my teeth just as then, and mutter to myself as I always have: ‘I won’t be my brother’s keeper.’” One night she declares to her parents that she simply can’t work with her brother anymore. Her mother remains silent.
Her father, 83 years old, with bad knees and “stone blind in one eye,” says, simply, “He’s my son,” and “I guess it wasn’t meant to be.” Sam himself shrugs and leaves the room. Here, with Brox still on the farm but refocused on her writing, the first volume of the trilogy ends.
In the first chapter of the second volume, “Five Thousand Days Like This One: An American Family History” (1999), she tells of the lingering death of her father, John Brox, from pneumonia. Forced to deal with the voluminous farm paperwork after his death, Brox finds herself unspooling the farm’s longer history. “.
..a man named Moses Bailey had raised the first rough buildings on the property: a shed and a cottage he used as his shoe shop and living quarters, which in time became the central link in the long, curved spine of what we think of as a New England farm.
” She writes, briefly, of the plight of the Pawtucket Native Americans who early settlers like Bailey decimated — unknowingly, with disease, knowingly, through violence. And she brings to life the wider community, the many immigrants — French, Polish, Scotch, Irish, Greek, German, Italian, Syrian, Jewish who settled in the area — especially the women, girls really, who left family farms in the area to find work in the textile mills of Lawrence. Excepting Native Americans, all Americans are immigrants, Brox makes plain.
In the final book of the trilogy, “Clearing Land: Legacies of the American Farm” (2004) Brox reaches even further back in history and wider geographically, giving a short history of farming in America and going into tragic detail about the fate of the Native Americans who once lived on the land. “Clearing Land” concludes with a meditation on death and the decline of small farm life in America. (In the afterward, she says that her family farm remains in her extended family.
) At moments throughout, Brox’s prose almost forces you to stop, to take a moment to let her exquisite descriptions soak in. In this passage, she goes outside to look at the stars during a power outage at the farm: “..
.I was accustomed to nights paled by city and suburban glow, and I had a moment’s trouble finding constellations — defiant Orion rising, the Pleiades, Casiopeia — I thought prominent in our half-starred sky,” she writes in part. “Now with their familiarity drowned by the other stars, they seemed smaller and part of a greater whole rather than the distinct gatherings I’d always taken them for.
I felt we lived in a wilder, more remoter place, and for all the mildness of the night there seemed a greater distance between outside and in. I couldn’t help but think I stood in a world closer to what we truly are, that with our lights we have only thrown up the thinnest scrim and tenuously disguised how near we are to the night.” Brox has previously written books about the history of silence and that of artificial light.
Her own gift for looking at the world deeply, thoughtfully and straight on is abundantly clear in this trilogy. With “In the Merrimack Valley,” she encourages readers to do the same. Frank Freeman is a poet and book reviewer who writes from Saco.
Writer Jane Brox discusses the nature of ‘Silence’ We believe it’s important to offer commenting on certain stories as a benefit to our readers. At its best, our comments sections can be a productive platform for readers to engage with our journalism, offer thoughts on coverage and issues, and drive conversation in a respectful, solutions-based way. It’s a form of open discourse that can be useful to our community, public officials, journalists and others.
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