The waitress came with our meals—Earnest’s huge slab of meat and two baked potatoes and separate bowls of coleslaw and peas, mine a half of a roasted chicken and a steaming mound of rice topped by slivers of toasted almonds and surrounded by green beans. “Another?” she asked, gesturing at my empty mug, and I nodded.
We tore at our food. We attacked those plates, ravaged them. I guzzled half my second beer in one swallow and by now the buzz of the first one, on an empty stomach, was filtering into my fatigue and it felt great. As he wielded his knife and fork, Earnest’s forearms seemed as big as my thighs.
“I figured Will Brassard would be on your agenda,” he said blandly.
“Why’d you think that?”
“Why? He’s your age, you’re single, he’s more or less single now, you’re both good-looking, he’s smart like you, and you’re both …” he paused and looked caught out.
“Both …?”
“Both don’t really want to be all that single at this time.”
I took that in. “What makes you think that?”
He shrugged, making light of it, tossed his head to one side, carelessly, Whatever.
“Just to be clear, I am not man-hunting or pining around for—”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“I’ve been enjoying the hell out of my independence! I’ve got my agenda and I’m feeling stronger every day because of it. It’s—”
“I believe you.” He put his hands up: Okay already, I give up.
“I mean it, Earnest. Yeah, I came here in a sort of desperate state of mind, but it was to sort out some shit on my own. Which I’ve been doing. What, I’m gonna move out to the fucking wilderness to find a guy?”
He nodded, taking the point. “Still,” he said mildly.
We went back to eating, and my huff faded. The beer no doubt helped.
“Actually,” I said after a while, “he wasn’t. On the agenda. But as long as you brought the subject up.”
“What do you want to know? Always been the quiet type. He’s kinda mostly sorta divorced, his daughter’s six and is named Isabelle. Master’s degree. He makes good money, but with keeping up two households and child support, he’s as strapped as the rest of us.”
“Nice to have the vital stats,” I told him. “Should I be writing this down?”
“The thing about Will is, he’s not a good self-promoter. Especially with women, in my humble opinion.”
“Hence the joke book? Give him some ice-breakers?”
He ignored me. “He’s won awards for his videos—hasn’t mentioned that, has he? Ran track and field at UVM and took trophies at some interstate competitions. Plus, I’ve seen him coming out of the shower, and the guy’s what in polite company one would call very well endowed.”
“Earnest!” I glanced quickly around us, worried that other diners had overheard. “This is a little more information than—”
“I’m just saying. He’s not a great advocate for himself, especially around women.” Clearly Earnest was enjoying my discomfort.
“Anything else I should know?” I tried to say it scathingly, but I was getting looped enough that amusement trumped sarcasm.
Earnest pondered for a moment. “Let’s see. His political views are somewhat to the right of mine, so there are places we don’t go when we talk. But I like Will and he tolerates me pretty well.”
“Like what? Political, I mean.”
“Oh, he’s more of a mainstream capitalist, that’s all. Nothing as extreme as I am.”
“How extreme is that?”
“Want a discourse on Native American culture?”
“Sure!” By now I was just plain drunk, greatly enjoying my license to ask questions and digress on any tangent.
“The Oneidas have a little reservation up near Green Bay. Tribe owns all lands in common. Has its own health-care system, universal coverage—at least it did when I was a kid. It’s a corporation and if it makes money, like from capital gains on investments, the money’s distributed equally among the tribe’s members. I got a thousand bucks two years ago, my share of timber sales from tribal land. Works pretty well.”
“So you’re a communist?” I tried to look horrified.
“No. But I am pretty red, I guess, yeah.”
“That’s funny! Red—like Indian? Redskin?” I thought it was a scream. Two beers, not used to it, I was blitzed.
He made a sad face, a commentary on the sheer poverty of the joke.
Onward we ate. Then: “Even Diz mentioned it,” Earnest said. “That’s what it was.”
“Mentioned what?”
“Will. You. She detested Will’s ex and after one of Will’s visits she was expounding on the woman’s failings. Said something like why couldn’t he land a girl with more guts, ‘like Ann.’”
My jaw literally dropped.
Shrug. “Or to that effect. I don’t remember her actual wording.”
“What virtues could I possibly possess that would make me worthy?”
Shrug. “I don’t know. She’d been railing about the ex’s lack of ‘spunk.’ Or was it ‘grit’? Wait, I remember now! ‘Even Ann has more grit!’”
My pleasure deflated. Even Ann was simply a way of establishing the lowest imaginable standard of comparison: Even malaria wasn’t as bad as smallpox. Still, I felt vaguely flattered and I had to laugh at myself for momentarily thinking that Diz had thought I possessed even the slightest utility. Earnest laughed, too. I felt giddy and silly, alcohol in my bloodstream, a good day’s work under my belt, well-deserved fatigue creeping into every limb.
We continued chowing down, and I forgot whatever else I thought I needed to discuss with him. I suppose any thread of conversation I attempted unraveled before it wove. At some point I realized I was going to burst if I ate another bite. Earnest mopped the last juice off his plate, paid, rousted me out of my seat, shepherded me out to the truck.
Sitting on the wide bench seat, I lolled against the passenger door as Earnest buckled himself in and cranked it up and pulled out onto Route 2. Dizzy, amiable silence in the dark for a few minutes.
I felt blissfully sleepy, happy. I’d had a really great day. Made two hundred dollars, fun to be with Earnest, Diz had thought I had spunk, sort of ish. I shut my eyes and just surrendered to the gentle gravities of the truck’s turns and accelerations. Sack of potatoes. Diz had been one hard nut, but maybe worth the cracking after all. Earnest was such a sweet guy, the best. Through thick lips I said, “So. Vietnam. How old does that make you now?”
“That makes me fifty-five.”
I was skunked, half asleep. “Too bad,” I mumbled.
I awakened to find myself still sprawled in the truck, in the dark. Earnest sat doing some paperwork on a clipboard he’d set on the steering wheel, reading and jotting by the metallic streetlight glow that angled into his window. We were at the Williston park-and-ride, abandoned now except for my car. The dashboard clock said it was going on midnight. He’d been sitting there with me asleep beside him for over two hours.
He looked over when he noticed my stirring. “I didn’t want to wake you,” he said. “I wasn’t going to let you drive like that.”
Earnest counted out four fifty-dollar bills and made sure I pocketed them securely. My head had cleared, but I was so stiff and sore that my legs almost buckled when I jumped down from the cab. He was watching me carefully, so I mocked him by standing on one foot, successfully, for fifteen seconds. He smiled. He waited until I started my car and turned on the headlights and backed out with enough precision to reassure him again. He honked and then his taillights sped off and I cruised back to the farm.
Chapter 29
Just as you can’t talk about dairy farm life without discussing manure, you can’t talk about it without considering business—money and the lack thereof. Manure is the more pleasant su
bject.
Toward the end of August, Brassard called Will and Earnest and me to his office. Almost four months after Diz’s death, he was no longer so stunned, so numb. But he had acquired a kind of resigned melancholy at odds with the genial, shyly humorous personality I’d known in my first year at the farm.
As I learned that afternoon, it wasn’t all about Diz.
I know, the plight of America’s small farmers has been a trope of rural America since well before Woody Guthrie mourned it and railed against it in his Dust Bowl–era songs. It’s not a new topic, but this was my first personal exposure to its complexities and emotional urgency.
I was aware that Brassard was running on the edge—that’s why he sold my acres in the first place. But in the back of my mind, I still held on to the grand mythology of the Grapes of Wrath saga: drought or flood, failed crops, greedy bankers. If farms fail, it’s Grapes of Wrath II, full of high drama.
But on a modern small farm, it’s more a matter of shrinking margins. Death by a thousand cuts, not by a biblical storm or plague. The need to borrow too much, changes in markets, higher fuel prices, aging farmers, aging equipment, rising interest on variable-rate loans. The distance between income and expenses shrinks and shrinks and then goes negative, and … then what?
Back when Brassard’s grandfather bought the place, eastern small farms could still bring fresh milk to nearby markets at competitive prices. But the scale of farming in the Midwest changed. Flatland corn-belt dairy farms produced so much milk, so cheaply, that Vermont’s rocky-soiled, steep-sloped farms couldn’t compete. Federal supports provided a price floor, but the floor varied, leaving small farmers in perpetual suspense.
The year I started at Brassard’s farm, milk prices had fallen to only about half what they’d been two years before. The newspapers said that between ten and twenty small Vermont dairies were going out of business each month. To put it in urban terms, I’d been making thirty-nine thousand a year teaching at Larson—how would I have fared if suddenly they paid me only nineteen thousand? I’d have to make my car payments and buy groceries with my credit card. And start running up interest, with no assurance I could ever get out from under.
You may have read the dire statistics in newspaper editorials. But it’s very different when it concerns people you care for, a patch of ground you’ve worked. I had been there less than two years, and though I still planned to leave, I had grown loyal to the sweet breezes of Brassard’s little valley and the people who made their living from the soil there.
This is, it really is, a love story. But the farm’s misfortunes were part of learning and building that love, and love is certainly as much about learning and building as it is about passion, romance, or serendipity.
Jim Brassard was no old-timey farmer. He’d kept up with computers, had a slow but functional connection to the internet; he did his accounting using QuickBooks, and he kept track of every cow on Excel spreadsheets. He read farming journals, toured agricultural websites, and went to farm shows to keep up.
But as he explained that afternoon, the accumulation of debt and fluctuations in milk and grain prices had made the finances precarious in recent years. And then the loss of Diz and the obligation to take on extra paid help—the balance had tipped into the red. Thanks to selling off my land and cash infusions from Earnest, Brassard had met a balloon payment on a loan, but he had not enough cash flow and no more borrowing power. Earnest told me that a single tire for the Harvester might cost eight hundred dollars; the failure of one of the summer’s hay harvest cycles would require the purchase of about five thousand in hay from off the farm.
I was astonished—and flattered—that I was included in this deeply revealing meeting. To me, it meant that I had truly joined “we.” I wasn’t Diz—not by any stretch of the imagination capable of her workload or possessing her range of skills—but I was somehow “the woman” of the farm. I looked at the faces of these three men and loved their trust of me, and their need.
Is needing the same as loving? No. But to the extent you seek to love yourself and the life you’ve been given, you recognize that need and love, giving and receiving each, are closely linked. I had glimpsed one type of need—felt it still—during my divorce. But the kind of need Brassard’s farm had is a different and more complex linkage. It is an honor to be so needed. Maybe Diz had been trying to explain this when she made me swear to “take care of these good men.” Being Diz, she’d summed it up not as some philosophical abstraction, but in terms of what one must do to love. You take care of each other, you meet each other’s need; you do whatever you must to see to their happiness and sufficiency.
Brassard’s projections showed that the farm would go broke by midwinter. Then there would not be enough money to pay the vet or buy diesel fuel, and certainly not enough for the property taxes due in spring.
I just listened as the men considered the range of possible scenarios. Bankruptcy? Brassard bristled at the idea, and Will said it was unlikely to succeed unless a hefty portion of capital assets—cows, equipment, land—were sold to partially repay creditors. And then there’d be no source of income. And the bankruptcy process itself would incur substantial legal expenses.
Earnest said he had about twelve thousand in savings, but he didn’t want to put it up unless there was some plan for a turnaround in the farm’s finances. Which there wasn’t.
When Will suggested that his father borrow some money from his widowed sister in Rutland, Brassard scowled. She didn’t have enough to make a difference, and, again, what was the point without some longer-term change in the business plan?
Brassard could sell the whole place outright to another farmer who felt he could run it at profit, or more likely had the capital to convert it to a confined animal-feeding operation, use all the pastures for corn and buy a lot more feed, expand the parlor’s milk throughput capacity. Brassard didn’t like the idea, but if he got a decent price, he’d be tempted. Not that he had any buyers on the radar or could find one in time.
Another possibility was to sell just the cows and equipment, rent out his fields to another farmer, and live out his life as a marginally solvent old widower. I had gone with Brassard and Earnest to an auction of another farm’s estate, where every cow and tractor and baler and tank and stepladder and bucket was paraded before a crowd. I’d found it deeply upsetting: the apologetic but eager bidders, the seller’s tight, shame-filled face. Jim told me afterward that the proceeds were disappointing. The prices fetched were not great, because the equipment was outdated and because the bidding farmers needed good bargains as desperately as the old guy needed cash.
Or Brassard could sell off some more of his land, open land that would bring more bucks per acre, and a few houses would get built up around the old farmstead. I knew he was revolted by the thought. I shared the feeling. I had a completely self-interested stake in that possibility: I didn’t want my land, my wild home, to overlook a housing development or trailer tract. In any case, it could be years before an offering for sale resulted in cash in the pocket, and the farm didn’t have years.
The happiest but least possible was that Brassard could radically change the business plan and develop a solvent farm adapted to emerging market opportunities. Lynn and Theo, down the road, had found a niche for their organic produce and goat’s-milk soap, and so far it was working. Something like that was by far the most palatable solution overall, but there was no capital to invest in such a change, and it would take years to create new farm products and build a market for them. And while we knew organic anything was a growing market, Will explained that “organic” was a strictly regulated term, requiring certification of soil chemistry and usage history. Given the fertilizers and herbicides applied on it over the years, none of Brassard’s land would qualify.
After two hours, this discussion petered out due to the sheer depletion of morale. All we knew was that the farm had entered a glide path toward fai
lure.
Brassard drove into town on errands. Earnest went off to repair something unspecified. Will and I headed to the barn to do the afternoon milking, with Theo’s sister due any minute to help.
I took first shift on cow flow while Will worked in the operator’s pit. We had settled the first four cows in their positions and Will had started along the line of udders when he asked gloomily, “So, did you pick up on any of the subtext in all that?”
“Subtext?”
“In what Dad said. In how he said it.”
I thought back. “Well, how he said it … he was pretty blue, obviously. I’d think it would involve some … shame or embarrassment … it’s got to be a monumental disappointment to—”
“Disappointment, yeah.”
I puzzled at the bitterness in his voice and looked at him for some kind of clue. “I guess I missed the subtext, Will. This is all a new universe for me.”
He sighed, frowned, flipped his forelock off his forehead. “He couldn’t look at me. Because he feels like I let him down. Back of his mind, I sort of caused this because I didn’t, won’t, come back and take over the farm. Three generations of farmers, and I’m the one blowing it off.”
Now that he explained it, yes, I realized that Brassard had seemed to tighten up when he spoke to, or listened to, Will.
“But what difference would that have made anyway?”
“I’d have been free help for the last twenty years. And my wife and kids would have helped, too. And I could have skipped college and saved all that tuition money. Or—”
“Will!”
“What?”
“I think you’re exaggerating this.”
He was having a hard time attaching one of the claws, shaking its tangled outflow tubes in frustration. “We’ve had talks over the years. He blames me for some of it. Justified or not, it makes me feel like shit and pisses me off.”