Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, July 31, 1990 TAG: 9007310410
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: DOE RUN LENGTH: Long
Not that it hasn't already.
There will be an auction and then, probably, a buyer for his two workhorses, Pat and Sandy. Somebody will take the huge Franklin County farm he and his father worked - with horses alone - for half a century.
Gone will be the kerosene lanterns that lighted the old farmhouse. Gone, too, will be the farmhouse.
Gone will be the moonlit trips over the two-plank footbridge to the spring. Gone will be all the old ways of Eames' life.
Some things do hold hope.
He never had a driver's license before. He got driving lessons, a license and a mint-condition 1982 Ford Fairmont, all within nine dizzying days last fall.
He never had electricity and running water before, and just two weeks ago, he moved into a brand new, $85,000 house on 5 acres above the old place. But he doesn't sleep well there . . . not yet, anyway . . . and he misses the old wood cookstove and the spring water back home.
"I'm in a different world," he says. "I wake up six times a night."
What he wants more than anything is to find a nice Christian woman and make her his wife. He won't say how old he is, but his account of his life puts him well into his 60s. He's thinking his bride ought to be 20 to 35.
He has a first-class house. Now, he says, "I need a first-class wife."
He is strong and spry, with soft blue eyes and hair still touched with blond. A question about wanting children brings an embarrassed, delighted laugh but no comment for the newspaper.
He was the only child of his parents, Harry and Elsie Julia Eames, and looked after them in their last years. His mother died seven years ago. His father was still working his fields with horses at 88 but died last year.
Now Eames is free, and that's exhilarating, but the changes are coming fast. He is both thrilled at the possibilities of his new life and pained by the passage he's undergoing.
To settle his parents' estate and bequeathals to a cousin, the 201-acre farm, a museum's-worth of horse-drawn farm machinery and a houseful of old-timey furnishings go up for auction at 10 a.m. Saturday. The farm is 5 miles southeast of Rocky Mount.
Time has stopped at the Eames place, somewhere around 1950. It is an anthropologist's dream.
Pat and Sandy, the gentle work horses, are out in the log barn. Tractors cost too much and packed the earth too hard, so only these horses and the countless pairs before them have worked this land.
Eames, without his bibbed overalls on this afternoon with a reporter and a photographer, tries to make the horses behave long enough for some pictures. They snort and quiver to chase the flies away.
"Both of 'em, just gentle as can be," he says. He sweet-talks the mares in the farmer-horse language of the centuries.
"Whoa, baby," he cajoles, as one pulls on the short rein of baler twine. "Come on now, baby. . . . Be still now, Patty. . . . Here. . . . Here. . . . They don't know how to do . . . Hold up, hold up. . . . Still. . . . They don't know no better. . . . Hold up, Pat. Don't go to grazin'. . . . I take care of you, boy. Good horsey. Good old baby boy."
He's been working horses since he was 10.
Behind him, one of the barn doors is a beautiful jumble of boards hammered together, probably in a moment of necessity some decades ago. The door's haphazard loveliness could land it in an art show.
The log outbuildings are loaded with old-fashioned tools and apparatus - a pile of hand plows, old mowers rigged for horses, old harrows and drills and wagons.
Eames' grandfather helped build the house more than a century ago. It has a foundation of stone. Inside, it is the simple, unvarnished farmhouse of the early 20th century. The greasy scent of home-cooked meals of years ago still hangs in the air.
Down a path from the house, mosses and ferns thrive at the cold spring. A worn saucepan is the dipper. His mother's old dog, a terrier named Jackie, tags along with Eames and seems rattled by all the traffic at the farm this week, as Eames' cousins come in to sort through a lifetime of country possessions.
There's a tobacco basket, quilts, rockers, a butter churn, a coffee grinder, oil lamps, old crocks, old medicine bottles. There is an 1882 shotgun. Eames' father blasted a snake into three pieces with it just a few years ago.
There is the gasoline-powered washing machine and the kerosene-fueled refrigerator that is still complete with its 1930 instruction book. There is no electricity in the house; nobody ever wanted it.
Eames cranks up the Victrola. Picking at random from old 78 rpm records, he plays "You've Had Your Day," recorded by the Manhattan Specialty Orchestra and copyrighted in 1921 on the Regal label.
Under the big oaks and maples at the house, Eames' father's blue 1950 Dodge pickup, with only 63,000 miles on it, sits ready for Saturday's sale.
Eames hopes he is. The Washington Post and publications all over the East Coast have advertised the auction. People already are coming by to sniff it out.
It will be an unnerving time for a man who has lived an uncommonly quiet life.
His most dramatic moments have come in religious visions down on the farm. Once, he says, he saw the stars form a crucifix, "a cross of fire up in the sky."
"I've seen Jesus three times in a vision," he says. "I've heard the angels singing `When the Saints Come Marching In' two times. . . . I seen seven angels at one time, dressed in white linen down to their ankles. I know the number was seven because I counted them."
He gives much credit for his good health to healing by a Holiness preacher in Eden, N.C. Twice in his life, Eanes was struck by lightning, and he says God healed him.
"I don't use any kind of drugs. I don't use any whiskey," he says. "I don't use tobacco." He used to grow some, though, along with wheat and corn.
He sets his watch and clocks by Eastern Standard Time and won't adjust them during daylight-saving time. "I don't believe in these modern ways."
He won't have a television. "I think there's too much sin on TV. . . . I'd rather be out in my field working my horses than watching TV."
Eames is not yet comfortable with his decidedly modern new house - loaded with "every convenience you can have." He has two doorbells, smoke detectors, air conditioning, gas appliances, a two-car garage with automatic door-openers, two bathrooms.
He never had indoor plumbing before and still can't believe that he has only to reach up from his bed to turn on the light switch.
In a bedroom dresser and downstairs in his basement he has gathered some keepsakes of his life on the farm: a 150-year-old clock (set to Eastern Standard Time), his mother's favorite rocking chair, a 100-pound piece of pig iron forged at a mill on the Pigg River near his home.
These things, his neighbors and maybe a wife could bring comfort after Saturday comes and the farm is gone.
"I give up my mother. I give up my father," says Eames. "Now I give up my home."
by CNB