  Celebrating the recent birth of eleven babies born to a local couple after fertility treatments, the citizens of Three Chimneys, Virginia, set out to re-create the making of an original Thomas Jefferson-era, 1,235-pound cheese. By the author of The Dress Lodger. Reader's Guide available. Reprint. 100,000 first printing. $75,000 ad/promo. 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 rgimes, 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.
Continues...
Excerpted from The Mammoth Cheese
by Sheri Holman
Copyright © 2003 by Sheri Holman.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Copyright © 2003
Sheri Holman
All right reserved.
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