We drove back to Hines’s house, which is on a pond, and borrowed bathing suits and went swimming. The water was dark and cool and we swam out a ways and treaded water, then went back to the dock. Hines got lobsters for us, and we had a fine dinner and went back to the hotel around ten.
The next morning at breakfast, Lovett’s manner was grave. The night before, at a racetrack outside Houston, one of his horses had fallen and broken her spine. His mother and uncle were in the stands, and had to go down to the track and make the decision to have the horse put to sleep. They had tried to reach Lovett, but he had gone to bed and turned off his phone. By the morning he had twelve messages. “She’s Dad’s last horse,” he said at breakfast. “He never got to see her grow up.”
Lovett bought back Adam Klein’s farm in 1995, using “all that great music-business money, which I’m still paying on,” he says. “I paid what they wanted, so I paid more than it was worth. I just wanted to get it back.” For years, he had avoided walking in the fields, so as not to see the “For Sale” signs.
The Kleins built on the perimeter of the farm, to be close to the roads. What is left of the fields is a pasture in the interior, like a huge courtyard. Not all the land around it remains in the family. Now and then a helicopter passes over the farm, and that is a neighbor who is the minister of three African-American congregations and travels among them in the helicopter. The pasture has been farmed since Adam Klein settled it. Lovett’s grandfather ran the place as a truck farm, and his sons ran it as a dairy farm. Lovett has horses and cattle on it.
One evening in September, Lovett and I and Jorge Mandujano, Lovett’s ranch hand, sprayed on bug spray, then rode horses along the fence line to the trees at the far end of the pasture. We circled a pond and turned back toward the barn. It took us about forty-five minutes. The cows lifted their heads from the grass and watched us. Lovett and Mandujano fed the horses, then Lovett and I played for a while with some big Dobermans he keeps. Then we walked past the house to a field and stopped among some shade trees. “We’d be standing on my grandmother’s front porch here,” Lovett said. He took a few steps. “The back door was about here,” he said, “and this holly tree was right at the end of her bedroom window.”
The sun was low over the pasture. The helicopter flew over the far fence line. “There goes the reverend,” Lovett said. We turned back toward the house. “By the time I was in high school, the old farmers had started selling their home places and moving up to Madisonville,” Lovett said. “It went on my entire growing up. Seemed like there was always a deal going on. Everything was changing, and I thought, Wouldn’t it be great to preserve this farm—have it all put back the way it was supposed to look.”
Lovett’s mother’s car turned in to her driveway. Kimble came out the back door of Lovett’s house and walked toward us.
“There’s Momma,” Lovett said to her when she arrived.
Mandujano was hosing down a horse under a shade tree.
“My great-grandpa’s barns were built in the eighteen-seventies, and when we fixed them up, for me that was a real proud accomplishment,” Lovett went on. “I understand everything has to change, but all my life I’ve been interested in preserving the old stuff.”
Kimble asked Lovett if he wanted to have dinner in town, meaning Houston. He said he wasn’t sure. He asked Mandujano to use fly spray on the Charolais bull, the one that had broken his leg.
Mandujano said he would.
“Don’t get in there with him,” Lovett said, and Mandujano grinned and said he wouldn’t. The light was fading. The color was leaving the fields. We stood quietly for a moment, then Lovett broke the silence, saying pensively, “Progress is the hardest thing for me to accept.” ♦
