He let out the fawn from the shed, fed it from his hand, held the pan of milk mixed with water for it to drink, and the two set off. The fawn ran sometimes behind him, sometimes ahead, making short forays into the brush, bounding back to him in alarm that Jody was sure was only pretended. Sometimes it walked beside him and this was the best. Excerpt from page 199, The Yearling.
I am reading The Yearling this month. It was written by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and published by Scribners in 1938. Rawlings’s novel is set in Florida just after the Civil War. It focuses on Penny Baxter, his wife Ora and their son Jody. The author successfully creates a canvas that is colorful and layered with her artful story telling. Her written sentences have the structure of a master’s paintbrush bringing the novel’s canvas to life. Her character’s dialects add multi dimensional depth to every scene as they unfold. The Yearling, of course, is titled after the fawn Jody befriends and welcomes into his young life on the 100 acre family farm. The two are inseparable. Another focus in Jody’s and Penny Baxter’s life are their neighbors, the Forrester family. There is history here as Penny acquired his homestead from them. The land is scrub and not the best quality but it is full of wildlife that can help support the Baxter’s. Of course it also produced the young deer that grows into a yearling along side Jody. Each spring the family farm is on high alert as an old large black bear, with one paw missing a toe, begins to scent a meal to satiate his winter hunger. The bear’s name, given to him by Jody’s father, is Old Slewfoot. Even though the Forrester family is hard to be neighborly with, Jody does befriend one of their sons who happens to be lame. This son of the Forrester’s is described as having a humped and twisted body (that) moved in a series of contortions, like a wounded ape. Fodder-wing Forrester and Jody love all the wildlife that share their Florida homes with the two families.
This is my second reading of The Yearling, my first encounter with Rawling’s masterpiece came in high school. I may have disclosed in earlier blogs that I was fortunate to have an English teacher who wanted us to learn true literature is more than Archie and Veronica comics and Mad Magazine. ( Please know that comic books and Mad Magazine were also important bricks in the foundation of my early education.)
This month I also found time to read Nicholas Eberstadt’s compilation of essays titled Population, Poverty, Policy published in 2018, and his post pandemic edition published in 2022, titled Men Without Work. Recently I listened to an interview where Dr. Eberstadt was the guest. I had never heard of him, but I learned that he is a political economist. From the interview I also learned that he is a demographic scientist. The interview was focused on statistics about the decline of working age people over 25 years of age to 55 that are not in the labor force. I do not intend to do a deep dive here on the details but he intrigued me enough to purchase his book of essays and Men without Work.
If you read my Lighthouse Reflected LV you’ll remember that it contained statistics about the shocking total of gun deaths in our country since 1990. Well of course I also reflected on other mass casualties events that occurred over the past century. Events such as two world wars, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, pandemics, H.I.V., Ebola, the Holocaust, genocidal wars, failing wars on drugs and last, but not least, natural disasters now happening against the back drop of global warming. My judgemental opinion was simply this, as a human race we must be facing population declines.
One fact in his essay titled Too many People? found in Chapter 2 of Population, Poverty,Policy totally contradicted my assumption that we are in the midst of population decline. On page 27 he writes, Reason for the 20th century’s population explosion. Between 1900 and 2000, human numbers almost quadrupled leaping from around 1.6 billion to over 6 billion. Why? It was not because people suddenly started breeding like rabbits- rather, it was they finally stopped dying like flies.
Dr. Eberstadt continues. Human life span likely doubled: from a planetary life expectancy at birth of perhaps thirty years to one of well over sixty years. Among the most proximate reasons for the global surge was the worldwide drop in infant mortality rates. The population explosion was really a health explosion.
Rawlings novel, The Yearling of course is fiction but as all great writers do they weave facts of the time period their stories are seeded, sprouted, and grown in. Her wonderful story has no chance if Penny Baxter and Ora do not have a child. Without their son Jody there would be no addition to their homestead of a young deer. So Rawlings gives me, the reader, the back story. She looked into the mid 1800’s from her future as she wrote her novel and Rawlings drew upon the too frequent drama of infant mortality during the 19th century alluded to in Eberstadt’s essay.
The Yearling, page 19: Penny had married in his thirties a buxom girl already twice his size. Moved his new bride to an hundred acre tract of land. He had indeed planned boldly for sons and daughters, moving in prolific plenty among the long-leaf pines. The family had come. Ora Baxter was plainly built for child bearing. But it had seemed as though his seed were as himself.
The babies were frail, and almost as fast as they came, they sickened and died. Penny had buried them one by one in a cleared place among the black-jack oaks where the poor soil made the digging easier. The plot grew in size until he was compelled to fence it in against the vandalism of hogs and pole-cats. He had carved little wooden tombstones for all. He could picture them now, standing white and straight in the moonlight. Some of them had names: Ezra Jr.; Little Ora; William T. On one, Penny had scratched laboriously with his pocket-knife, “She never saw the light of day.” His mind moved back down the years, touching them, as a man touched fence-posts in his passing.
After a hiatus in the births. Then when when the loneliness of the place had begun to frighten him a little, and his wife was almost past the age of bearing, Jody Baxter was born and thrived.
Dr. Eberstadt’s states a quadrupling of our world’s living population in a mere hundred years can be summed up in two words, health explosion! As I sit here leaning against my metaphorical light house this month, the snow is gently falling, the ocean remains gentle too. A tree behind me welcomes a couple of early spring robins. The year round cardinal takes exception and moves the bobbin robins along. A large woodpecker walks the trunk trying to pry a hibernating bug from his bark shelter. The sound of the waves, the birds, and my thoughts are muffled by the falling snow. But I am not satiated enough to let my earlier alarms of all the mass casualty events of the past hundred years slip from my consciousness. I am not arguing with the main reason of population growth being a health explosion, but I must continue to support family members, neighbors, and all who face losses of loved ones day in and day out. May be infant mortality is not as endemic as it was during Penny Baxter’s time in the 1800’s but it still tests the faith and strength of too many mothers and fathers.
I have been blessed to have listened to people who have extraordinary faith. I have been blessed to read about those who know and believe that no matter how brief a soul has touched a mother in the physical of the here and now, on some conscious, unconscious, subconscious level that briefness is only an illusion. Rawlings wrote in her novel that the moment Penny Baxter reflected on his many children who had briefly come into Ora’s and his life, he was laying next to his sleeping wife. Penny, the father was still connected to all of them. I have been blessed to share time with a father who is calling on his faith to stay connected. My point here is as follows: a mother’s connection, of course, can not be duplicated by a man, but for both, faith and unconditional love go a long way!
Be in peace and joy!
Thank you for reading.
Mark