On Brassard's Farm

  Of course, blackflies and deerflies and mosquitoes were among those moving things, and at times they became torture, enough to make me scream. I still fled back to the tent to escape them. Nor was the weather always conducive to pleasant meditations. Storms on my ridge could be frightening in their intensity; there were days of sullen drizzle, and there were hot, hazed days, murky with humidity, so stifling that the most basic camp tasks seemed impossibly difficult.

  And still, at night, fear would steal into my little clearing. At times, the image of that pile of guts came back, and I felt as if surely one of the Goslants had to be watching from the dark. One night I was wrenched out of sleep by a horrific screaming, growling, gargling, very close by—some smaller animal being killed by a larger one, probably a fisher cat. The dark forest seemed full of murder.

  But more powerful, more imposing by far was the huge, formless terror of darkness and wildness, the abyss staring back at me. It was as big as a god, whether it came from the darkness outside me or inside me, and it was a god heedless of prayer and ignorant of mercy, and my whole body knew that god from ten million years back. Yes, the Fear remained. But it was better counterbalanced now by a slowly growing sense of competence in—and a greater tolerance for the mundane discomforts of—woods living.

  Chapter 28

  Toward the end of July, on one of my days off, I was sitting on my log clipping my toenails when I heard Earnest call from down near the last trail bend: “Ann! You decent?”

  “Come on up and find out!” I yelled back.

  He came into the clearing puffing, a barrel of a bear of a man in oil-stained jeans and blue work shirt, sweat sheen on his summer-bronzed face. Like the rest of us, even the mighty Earnest was showing the strain of work. He couldn’t neglect his tree business, because it provided greenbacks—he was feeding some into the farm’s cash flow by now, to help pay for Lynn’s assistance with milking—yet he had to be at the farm as often as possible. Now he spent most nights there, coming in his big stake-side GMC so he could go straight to tree jobs.

  He had spent the previous afternoon working on the tedder, which had gone awry just when the hay had to be turned. This created an urgent problem. Once the hay’s been cut and is drying in its rows, timing is everything: If the weather turns wet when it’s on the ground, it can ruin a whole crop. If one of the hay crops can’t be used, the farmer has to buy it from someone else, and so if money’s tight it gets tighter still. The tedder is a triangular frame mounted with four big spiders that spin rapidly, that you tow behind the tractor to flip and spread the rows of semidry hay. Each of its legs ends in a pronged fork, giving the whole thing a spiny, spiky look. Part of the frame had broken and Earnest had done a lot of urgent clanking and welding to get it functional again.

  “Day off,” he stated.

  “Mm-hm.”

  He sat heavily on the ground, looking around my site, nodding to himself but ill at ease. “Nice up here.” Stalling.

  I helped him stall: “How’s your hand?” He had burned his wrist on a piece of hot steel while welding the tedder, a mistake he would never have made if he weren’t so overworked. I had put aloe on it and taped gauze over it. Maneuvering his arm and wrist to tend to him, I was struck by how thick his hand was through the palm, how startlingly solid, how strange it was to find the instrument of his incredible physical power lying passive in my own much smaller, slighter hands.

  He nodded, held up the bandaged wrist, wiggled the fingers to show they still worked.

  “Need a favor,” he said.

  My heart sank, but I knew he wouldn’t ask if he had any alternative. And I owed him a great deal.

  Earnest planned to spend the night at a motel in Burlington, so I drove behind him up to the park-and-ride lot in Williston, left my car there, and joined him in the truck. Despite our fatigue, we both felt more energized when we got off the main roads, bouncing along together on the GMC’s big bench seat, each with an elbow on our windowsill, fresh air blustering in, thermos and bagged sandwiches bouncing between us. It was to be another huge old tree, this time a silver maple that had been hit by lightning and riven and was now dangerous.

  “I’m doing this on one condition,” I told him.

  “Making me an offer I can’t refuse?”

  “You’re in no position to negotiate, no.”

  He shrugged, resigned.

  “I have …” I counted them in my head “… five items on my conversational agenda, and I’ll expect you to be forthright about them.”

  “‘Forthright.’”

  “Yes.”

  He groaned, downshifted, cranked the wheel to turn onto the dirt road, rumbled the truck back up to speed.

  “Diz,” I said. “Maureen Goslant.”

  “Yeah, Diz. Our Diz. Not closely related to those Goslants up the hill, I don’t think. Maybe second or third cousins. With them, though, who knows? A, uh, certain amount of intermarrying among the clans. Lots of Goslants, big tribe—old Vermont backwoods name. Her immediate family came from up near Marshfield.”

  “She was ashamed of the name. Of being associated with them in any way.”

  He thought about that, then reframed the issue: “She worked hard to draw a line that distinguished her, yes.” He mused for a moment, then chuckled. “Early on, when she first came to the farm, the bunch up the hill claimed some kind of relationship. They wanted to borrow money or a truck or something. Second time they drove up, Diz came out on the porch with Jim’s deer rifle.”

  That was a scary image. “What did Jim think?”

  “Of her family tree? Of her cutting loose of it?”

  “Either. Both.”

  He drew a deep breath, exhaled slowly through pursed lips. “At the time Diz moved in, Jim didn’t have too many choices. He was … we were having a tough time on the farm right around then. Various problems. Plus, Will was already on the way. Diz whipped us into shipshape, pronto.”

  It would have been just a short step from there to Earnest’s wife and her death and the misfortunes of that era. But I just didn’t dare, not yet.

  “I have a question for you,” I hazarded instead.

  “Proceed,” he intoned gravely.

  “Okay. This is about Goslants, too, but maybe it’s about … I don’t know, etiquette? Vermont tradition?” I told him about the poached deer, the guts in my woods, and watched closely to see his response.

  “When was this?”

  “Back in November.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

  In fact, I hadn’t known what to say about it—he had been gone when it happened, and by the time he returned I had moved onto the farm and the issue seemed less urgent. “Well, I talked to Will, I talked to Jim, they thought I should sort of let it go. Talking about Diz reminded me just now. And fall’s not so far off. What if it happens again?”

  He winced his eyes shut, a sort of a please not this frown. The muscles in his jaw rippled. “‘Etiquette’ isn’t the right word, Ann. Homer and Fran are good people, but some of them are fucking dangerous woodchucks, PPP. You don’t want to mess with them, but you can’t let them take an inch or think you don’t have borders or limits. It’s a real bitch. God damn it!”

  “PPP?” I thought he was talking about a drug, something like meth.

  “Piss-poor protoplasm.” He glanced over to see that my puzzlement lingered, then translated primly: “A term I learned from Diz, meaning lousy genetic inheritance not conducive to high intelligence.”

  “Earnest, that’s really offensive!”

  “Diz should know, right? Would you have argued the point with her?”

  “I don’t believe in that! In genetic destiny. It’s, like—”

  “It’s like a good, politically correct, liberal, white, college-educated female schoolteacher believing it’s all socioeconomic, cultural deprivation, bias, what
ever, and not getting the picture. That’s why I worry about you up there, at night, with those PPP fuckers just through the woods from you.”

  My whole upbringing, and my training as an educator, rebelled against the idea that people fell into “types” determined by race or family history, and I was shocked by Earnest’s embrace of this genetic determinism, this eugenicists’ rationale. Also, it was the first time Earnest had ever chided me or derided my urbanite’s naïveté or labeled me in any way. I felt a gust of anger, then hurt.

  “I am all those things—liberal, politically correct, college-educated, and whatever else you said,” I told him stiffly. “And I am not likely to change my outlook anytime soon.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  When I opened my mouth to speak again, my brain skipped a groove. “And there’s no reason to worry about me!” I bit off. “I can take care of myself.” Oddly, though, the thought pleased me: It was as if his derision had been a slap, and this a caress.

  He just drove, his lips set.

  It took another ten minutes to get to the job site, during which we spoke very little. Once we got there, we just let go of the damn discussion, though we both chewed it over in our thoughts. There was work to be done.

  The tree was another monument, a tragic one. The silver maple is not like its cousin, the more common sugar maple. They grow huge, wider than tall, with grand random branches—really, multiple trunks—free-form throughout. In a good breeze, the leaves toss and flash their silvery undersides, in the right light a kaleidoscopic effect. This one, a hundred years old, fully leafed, robustly healthy, had been hit by lighting and now showed a white line of ruptured bark from its highest big fork right into the ground. It loomed over a garage on one side and a house on the other. At the top of the split, the weight of the tree had started to pry the wood apart, a widening gap of splintered strands, too far gone to cable together. The meat of the tree, I thought, is the bone of the tree. Earnest was right: In any kind of wind, the tree would split and crush anything nearby.

  We unloaded the gear as Earnest explained our strategy for the felling. The clients, an elderly couple, came out to watch. Everybody was glum, and Earnest and I a bit brittle with each other. Clanking in his fetishistic leather and steel harness and burdened with coils of rope, Earnest paused before he started to climb, to stroke the big wall of bark with his hands. It was an apologetic farewell, like a compassionate veterinarian calming a horse he’s about to put down.

  Then he climbed, and again I witnessed his miraculous transformation into a weightless being, an acrobat of the inner space of the tree. Swinging and alighting, climbing, rappelling, he reconnoitered its architecture for a time, then commanded me to start sending up the tools and big ropes. The clients watched until the first of the big branches swept down, crashing and fanning onto their lawn. A few minutes later, when I looked up from my chainsawing, I saw that they had retreated inside.

  This was harder work, by far, than the elm we had done before. The branches, so light and airy on the tree, came down heavily, weighted with their leaves and innumerable small branches that I had to slash and battle through to make my cuts. At intervals, Earnest descended and drove off with truckloads of brush as I continued to saw. Even with my headphones on, I felt myself going deaf from the whining and snarling saw. My hands grew numb from its vibration, from wrestling and rocking it into the wood. Its oily blue smoke gathered in my lungs and on my clothes.

  The elderly couple made us pitchers of lemonade with ice in it, and I was glad we weren’t in Deputy Dickhead’s jurisdiction. But the labor was unrelenting. No rest breaks, no time to converse. Earnest had set as our goal for the day the removal of all the branches; he planned to come the following day to topple the main trunk.

  Toward evening, I was so exhausted that I almost told Earnest I had to quit, couldn’t do it, was afraid I’d cut off my own leg. But as long as he kept going, I felt I had to stick it out. And just as it got too dark to continue, we loaded the last branches onto the truck, strapped them down, found places for the tools, and rattled away.

  “PPP,” he said as soon as we hit the bigger road. “You’re right. It’s a rotten way to say it. It’s a pretty horrible idea. Like original sin or some other bullshit you’re supposedly stuck with from birth.”

  “Yes.”

  Clearly, it had been bothering him all day, and now he was wrestling with how to express it. “When I was a kid, my mother called people like that ‘accident prone.’ That’s observably true of your neighbors.”

  “I wouldn’t know. Jim says so, yeah.”

  He sighed again. “Diz could’ve given you the genealogy of some of them up there, in detail, and I suspect you’d see patterns that posed risks to genetic inheritance. And yes, I’m sure socioeconomic factors play a major role, too. When you’re poor and dropped out of school at fifteen and maybe aren’t very bright, who are you going to marry? Marie Curie? Albert Einstein? It comes around full circle in the next generation.”

  “You’re taking a very academic approach to explaining this.”

  “Because I’m talking to a white, college-educated, politically correct schoolteacher and I’m trying to speak her language.” He said that carefully, without scorn.

  “Okay.”

  “So let me rephrase it. Some of the people living uphill from you often demonstrate ‘a lack of good judgment.’ They’re about a mile away, straight through the woods. They know those woods better than you do. And it sometimes … gives me pause.”

  I nodded.

  He looked over at me as he drove. “Can we leave it now? Is it done?”

  I nodded.

  He still wasn’t sure, so he reached over and we shook hands to seal the deal that it was done.

  We found a steak house near the interstate for what I now understood to be a ritual celebration of a hard day’s work getting done. We got some glances from the other customers, but I felt righteously proud as we walked in, in our honest filth and stink.

  We read the menus. We both commented on how, when you’re hungry, really hungry, your mouth waters just from reading descriptions of the meals.

  I ordered a pint of beer along with my food and only after the waitress had left did I remember Will’s tales of the bad times on Brassard’s farm.

  I looked up at Earnest, alarmed, and blurted, “Oh! I’m sorry!”

  “For what?”

  I gestured randomly, table, menu, disappearing waitress. “Beer. The beer. I forgot—”

  “I take it somebody told you some history. Will, huh?”

  “I’ll have her take it back. I forgot!”

  He shook his head as if I were a lovable but dim child. “Ann. Ann. Amazingly, in the last thirty years I have witnessed people drinking beer and even enjoying it. I drink one myself now and then. I am not an alcoholic, not even a perpetually recovering one. That’s more Jim’s situation. I just … avoid it a bit.”

  I nodded. “Okay.”

  The waitress appeared with a basket of sliced hot bread; Earnest folded a slice around a couple of butter pats and stuffed it whole into his mouth.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about Charlotte, about all that?”

  “What’s the point? Thirty years ago.”

  What was the point? I wondered. I was curious, yes, but was that any reason to expect someone to spill about difficult personal events, no doubt painful in their recollection? At that moment, I realized there are different kinds of curiosities. There’s the idle variety, and mine was not. There’s the prurient sort, which mine was certainly not. Rational, scientific inquiry, no.

  That left the it matters to me kind.

  Then the waitress presented me with my beer. Amber, bubbles rising merrily, it filled a heavy frosted mug, and it looked glorious. I was dying of thirst. I glanced up at Earnest to confirm his amused approval, and then I picked up that mug and gulpe
d and it was bliss. The bitter hops cut through the oily chainsaw taste in my mouth.

  “What was she like?” I asked.

  He exhaled slowly. “I don’t know. You replay memories enough times, after a while it’s just memories of memories, don’t connect with anything real.” He tipped his head to think about it some more. “Mainly, what I remember is the feeling of being with her. Then the feeling of being without her. But it’s not something I think about every day. Almost remarried a couple of times, as my recent egg-timer adventure demonstrates. Dodged the bullet each time.”

  I just nodded and swigged some more beer.

  After a little while, Earnest asked, “Was Char part of your five-item agenda?”

  I was astonished that he remembered my morning preamble. “Yes.”

  “What else?”

  “A matter of ten grand nobody but Diz thought to tell me about.” I took another swallow. “That I didn’t ever thank you for.”

  “Goddamn Diz. Just another way to make you feel shittier than you already felt.”

  “No! Really, she just sort of stumbled into it, we were milking and she mentioned it. To say how great a person you were.”

  “Diz said that? Huh!”

  “‘Saint Earnest.’”

  He grinned to himself. “Who’d a thunk?”

  “Back to the ten grand.”

  “She said something almost nice about you, too, you know.”

  Truly, I rocked back in my seat. “What?”

  He frogged his lips, hesitated. “Well, I can’t exactly remember at the moment.”

  “The ten grand, Earnest.”

  “It was no act of chivalry on my part. I’m part owner of the farm. It got everybody through a tight spot. The farm needed another hand. You needed some money.”

  He watched as I processed that. Of course he was part owner! Brassard’s father willed it to Jim and Charlotte, Earnest was Charlotte’s husband, her half descended to him when she died. Another revelation. I thought back to the first day I set foot on the farm, the oil-smudged man who, when I asked if he worked for Mr. Brassard, had grinned and said, “Looks that way.” It had looked that way, but was not that way, just Earnest’s understated, self-deprecating humor, a joke just for himself.