I was pleased to meet Lawrence and touched by their jive talking. But the encounter made me realize how little I knew Earnest. I didn’t know that he’d ever been out west or that he had friends there, including one to whom Earnest was so important that he’d name his son after him.
Later I saw the two men walking, Earnest pointing out features of the farm and landscape, Lawrence nodding, Bob tagging along behind. Neither of the men was smiling anymore; in fact, though I couldn’t see that well from my distance, Lawrence seemed downcast, almost in tears. Earnest had draped one of Brassard’s checked wool jackets over Lawrence’s nylon-clad shoulders. When I came out of the barn again an hour later, Lawrence’s car was gone.
Later, I went looking for Earnest and found him in the shed that he used as the farm’s repair shop. Coming in through the adjoining room, I could tell from the fluttering light and smell of hot steel that he was welding. I backed in, found an extra face shield, and put it on before I turned to face him. The faceplate was so dark that I could barely make out Earnest’s form hovering above the brilliant burn star. He gave me a signal to let me know he’d seen me.
At last he finished, snuffed the torch, and flipped up his visor. I did the same.
“How about taking a break? I’m making some sandwiches.”
He gave me a thumbs-up and started putting away his equipment.
We went to my apartment, where Earnest sat on a stool at the counter, shedding cold from his coveralls and giving off the smell of burnt gases and molten metal.
“What are you making in there? Or fixing?” I didn’t recognize the long, elaborate but decrepit machine he’d been working on.
“Just adapting an old conveyor that Jim doesn’t use anymore.”
“Adapting for what?”
He shook his head. “It’s a hops-related secret. On a need-to-know basis. Your brother got me going on it.”
Impatient, I slapped a plate down in front of him. “Lots of secrets. You haven’t caught me up on Larry Hoskie’s visit. Every time I learn something new about you, it just opens up a bunch of new mysteries.”
He looked offended. “Not so. My life is an open book.”
“Maybe so, but I can’t read it. Greek? Sanskrit?”
Ordinarily, Earnest would have at least smiled or offered a rejoinder, but now he seemed somber. I put two bologna-and-lettuce sandwiches on his plate, then sat at the counter with my own.
“Larry is a good guy,” he explained. “I love the man. He’s got a problem, wanted to talk with me about it in person. Came two hundred miles each way from Boston—that’s a sign of how serious it is.”
I didn’t want to offend by asking what that problem might be. “How did you two get so close?” I asked instead.
“If you’re thinking about battlefield heroics again, you’re wrong. I didn’t meet him till we were on base, back here.”
“Where you were an MP …”
“Right. And he ran the PX. PX is basically the store where the enlisted men can buy consumer crap—shaving cream, soda pop, cigarettes, stuff like that. He did the same in Vietnam. Never fought.”
“But somewhere in there, you earned his affection or loyalty to the extent that he named his son after you.”
My probing irritated him. He glanced impatiently around the kitchen, stalling. “You have any orange juice or something? Welding gives a man a powerful thirst.”
I brought out the carton and a glass and put them in front of him. I sat again and waited him out.
He poured, drained the glass in one long swallow, then frowned speculatively at me. “You white girls are pretty smart. Perceptive.”
“We like to think so, yes.”
“So I told you, I mainly broke up fights and hauled guys to the brig or to their superior officers, or put them back to bed or whatever. Lawrence got into a lot of fights, so I had to … intervene on his behalf on several occasions.”
“Lawrence? Fights?”
A pause as Earnest folded his second sandwich in half and took it in with two bites. I went to make another.
“Exactly. Not an imposing physical specimen, is he? That was the problem. His build, the fact he’d never seen combat. That meant he was queer, which meant he took a lot of shit off the other guys, which meant he took offense and then needed to be rescued. I looked out for him.”
“You’d think the other guys on the base would’ve gotten the message. After you stepped in a couple of times.” I could picture Earnest piling into a group of men and scattering them like bowling pins.
“Oh, they did. It wasn’t a problem after a while. They were all good guys, really, just needed a broader perspective.”
I smiled inwardly at that. We ate. Earnest checked his watch, I checked mine. Again I waited him out.
“His son,” Earnest said. “For Navajos, an uncle is the same as a father. When Earnie was born, Larry asked me to be his uncle and I said yes. In their tradition, that’s a great honor and a serious responsibility. Kid and I got to be pretty close after I’d visited a couple of times. Last time was back when he was maybe fourteen. He was having a tough time and badly needed an uncle-type at that juncture. We’ve always hit it off. Smart, sweet kid. Like his father.”
I got up to clear our dishes.
“Some of those modern American problems Larry mentioned—meth and oxy have come in, it’s not just booze anymore. There are Navajo and Mexican gangs making it and selling it and killing each other over it. My godson-slash-nephew has a problem with drugs and with the Navajo police. Arizona State Police, too, but the Navajos are touchy about jurisdiction, they’ve got a lot of sovereign rights, and they won’t extradite him to the US. So for now Earnie’s still on the rez, but he’s not doing well. Larry wouldn’t like me to tell anyone more than that. He asked me to help out.”
“What—you’d go out there?”
“Got to.” Earnest stared at the floor. “There are two other uncles, but one of them was the guy who sold the kid drugs in the first place, started him off. The other is the opposite, so pissed off and ashamed that he refuses to help. Larry wouldn’t ask me if it wasn’t urgent, if he had other choices.”
“What will you do? That his father can’t?”
“I don’t know yet. Sometimes being the father makes it harder, though. Sometimes a young guy needs an outside voice he trusts, somebody without all the knots and baggage. Apparently I was of some help to the kid last time.”
I nodded. Selfishly, I was thinking not about Earnie or Larry but about the farm, in winter, without Earnest. “When was that?”
“Ten years ago.” He rubbed his forehead as if working out tension there. I could tell he was already thinking ahead to his trip west. “When I went out for Larry’s wife’s funeral.”
I took that in, and we sat there, saying nothing, for a moment.
“You have my cell number, right?” he asked. He knew I did. I took it as an invitation and felt a little better.
“I think I might have it around here somewhere,” I told him.
Chapter 44
Earnest’s departure, after only two weeks at home, began what would be a lonely and difficult winter at the farm. Part of it was the absence of Diz, of course—her continuous activity had made the commotion of at least two people. But Will was also gone a lot on an assignment that took him to Massachusetts for many days in a row; Erik was off seeking love somewhere within a radius of fifty or who knew how many miles and often coming home only once a week, if that. When he did, he seemed in good spirits but revealed nothing of his time away from the farm, not even in contented grins of conquest or pouts of frustration. I didn’t grill him, figuring he’d tell me what I needed to know when I needed to know it.
The hardest part was a second long and unexpected stretch without Earnest, in January. He had barely gotten back from Arizona when his sister in Milwaukee called with an
other urgent errand for him. She had to move out of her duplex because of a rent increase, and the guy she’d married had become nowhere to be found for the past year or so. Two kids, working full time, she needed help. Earnest drove out in his pickup to move her belongings, do some repairs on the new place—“a dump”—and help her get her household set up. We hadn’t even had enough time to catch up on what happened in Arizona with young Earnie and Lawrence, and the troubles of modern America hitting the Navajo Nation.
At intervals, I called Earnest on his cell from Brassard’s landline after dinner, just to check in with him. He always seemed glad to hear from home, but preoccupied and remote. Within a few days of his arrival, he had helped his sister pack up and they’d taken ten trips back and forth in his truck. His next job was to help set up her new place, which would require some rewiring and wall patching that the new landlord wouldn’t have paid for and didn’t need to know about. His niece and nephew were great kids, talkative and helpful, but his sister said their pleasant disposition was an illusion; they had put their stubborn, sullen teenage ways on temporary hold only because he was there. Earnest’s voice seemed too small coming over the wire when one was accustomed to the bigness of him. And our conversations were always too short, Earnest giving indications of wanting to get off long before I’d let him. In that, he was like my father, Matt, Erik, every man I’d known; I tried not to take it personally.
A big snowstorm blew in just before New Year’s, so I got to have fun with the Ford, building mountain ranges at the edge of the farmyard and along the driveway. The tractor and I also enjoyed breaking the three-foot banks left by the town road crews with their enormous trucks and giant plow blades that curled like the perfect surfer’s wave. But in the stark white of late December and early January, I was pretty sure that my ostensible effulgence had gone into hibernation along with bears, raccoons, porcupines, and skunks.
Aside from Brassard, Lynn and Robin were my main company. On those cold predawn shifts, it was the headlights of their Jeep I saw in the darkness as I bumbled out for the morning milking. Lynn and her sister-in-law were very different—one slim and blond and graceful in her movements, the other strong boned and with a lovely dark-Irish pale complexion, black hair, and startling blue eyes—yet they were in accord, good friends, working in easy harmony. Three women: We called each other the Fates, sometimes; at other times, when we made more mistakes than usual, the Three Stoogettes. If one or more of us were in a bad mood, we thought of ourselves as the three witches, the Wayward Sisters, in Macbeth. I enjoyed these twice-daily interludes of female company and saw them drive off each time with a pang of loneliness.
In the year since I’d met her, Robin had matured, filled out as a person, and I began to think that maybe this was what effulgent looked like. I took to covertly studying her for indications, while we worked, without coming to any firm conclusions.
In midwinter, Vermont is a hard, ragged place. People start to fray. Those cold, short days established a pervasive chill that couldn’t be banished by the woodstove or furnace in the house or the kerosene heater in my chicken-coop apartment. The long shed stood full of silent cows, warming their space only by their collective body heat. On moonless nights, the pasture and lower fields became dim gray smooth curves and planes, lonesome, and my land a dark and mysterious mass looming over the near valley to the west. When the moon waxed close to full, the fields gave off an eerie glow, as if lit from beneath the snow. The motion lights that snapped on over the barn and house doors created an island of artificial light, increasing the sense of isolation and blinding me to everything beyond the driveway and farmyard.
I often had dinner alone with Jim Brassard at the house. At first he insisted on trying to help me cook despite the fact that he’d done little of it when Diz was alive—“Wouldn’t let me. Kicked me out if I tried.” I could see why she had: He was a large man who crowded the space, slow moving, clumsy with his leathery fingers. It was easier for me to take charge and tell him to relax while I pulled something together. Anyway, it was a luxury to have a full-size kitchen and all its gadgets, and I fully indulged in it. I roasted whole chickens with potatoes, carrots, onions, and garlic cloves alongside. My mother, being a Midwestern woman, had been fond of meatloaf and had taught me to cook it at an early age; Brassard claimed he loved it. Beef and pork roasts, winter squash, baked potatoes, chicken pies, baked apples—in the cold times, we enjoyed anything that required using the oven. Sometimes a stew seemed in order, so I’d throw whatever was available into a pot and simmer it for a couple of hours, steaming up the house, Brassard commenting at intervals from the living room, “That smells good enough to eat!”
When Erik and Will were there, talk flowed more easily: more people rowing the conversational boat. But Brassard was not a talkative person, and when he and I ate alone the silences often stretched overlong. Sitting with this midsixties man aching from arthritic joints and still wounded by his wife’s death, there in the dark of the deep winter, entailed a lot of patience. I didn’t feel right filling the silence with jabber, and there was only so much news to bring from the cows. He knew I could manage only limited discussion of the articles he’d found interesting in the farming journals. To take the edge off the silence, I sometimes brought my laptop over and played music—Celtic tunes I’d borrowed from Erik, or indie singer-songwriters I had downloaded in prehistory—which sounded small and metallic coming through the tiny speakers. I didn’t know what sort of music Brassard enjoyed, if any; he never listened to the radio, because here between the arms of the hills the reception was so poor. Sometimes we sat for long intervals during which the only sounds were our small noises of eating, air sucking through the woodstove grate, or wind nagging at the shutters and eaves.
But I don’t think he found the silence particularly awkward, and he sometimes surprised me with his candor and insight.
“You doin all right, then, Annie?” he said one night. “After all this. Probably not what you thought you were buyin into.”
“I’m doing fine. We’ve had some teat chap, but Lynn and Robin and I have been—”
“Well, I’m glad to hear you’re takin care of the cows. Never had a doubt. I was talkin about you, though. If you’re holdin up.” He forked some chicken into his mouth, looked up and held my eye.
I wanted to answer glibly, glide past it with one of the many conventions and easy ways out we’re accustomed to, but Jim Brassard knew how to cut to the chase and how to spot evasiveness when he saw it. I wasn’t sure whether his probing was simply good human-resources management or personal concern, but he did carry authority in him and could show it in a range of circumstances.
“I consider myself fortunate that I came to work on Brassard’s farm,” I told him. “And I’m glad my brother could land here, too, however it pans out with the hops. The winter’s getting a little long, but I’m doing pretty well.”
“Came here a little beat-up, though. We knew that, Diz and I. What was it—man trouble?”
“Everything trouble.”
He took that in and said, “Times like that for all of us, I guess.” He paused, and I could only assume that was how he saw the current era of his life. “But you’re doin better now, looks like. Hasn’t entirely disagreed with you. And you’ve been good for this place. For me, Earn, Will. God help me, even Diz would agree if she wasn’t dead and so stubborn.”
“I am much better now. It helps to know I’m being of some use. I mean, that I’m working, I’m earning my keep, I’ve got … people to care about.”
He nodded and attended to his eating. It was a spacious conversation.
“Question I have is, a woman your age, I’d think you’d want to marry. Good to have a companion. It’s a lonely road sometimes, you know that. This farm isn’t helpin you there.”
“When the time is right, I figure I’ll know. Or somebody will discover it and let me know.”
He chewed,
pondered that for a while. “Well,” he said, “Will’s got out of his marriage. Guess he’s in the same boat now.”
I had to smile. Brassard went on eating contentedly, apparently guileless. A farmer, planting a seed and knowing well that patience was required thereafter. It seemed that everyone on the farm thought of Will and me more than I did.
“And a good thing,” he went on, hardening. “That gal he married—not right, never was, not for a farmer’s kid even if he did go to college. Diz couldn’t take the sight of her. Took her to task if she came out here, put her through the wringer. Poor gal. We didn’t see much of Will for some years.”
“Ouch.”
He sighed heavily as his thoughts moved along. “You didn’t know her too long,” he said. “Diz. More to her than you’d think. Than you saw.”
“Well. Sometimes I got a peek inside. And the things she said about me—she was right, Jim. She had me pegged right.”
He looked at me gratefully. “She wasn’t soft anywhere, I’m not sayin that. Just she had parts of her where she wasn’t so prickly. Very smart woman. You’d be surprised the things that interested her. Hard to believe, she wanted to raise orchids. Orchids! In Vermont! Just a few, to look at, to play at growin. Years, she was a member of the American Orchid Society, read every issue of that magazine. We’d’ve had to build some special little greenhouse and we just never got around to it. I guess I let her down that way.”
His reminiscence was drifting toward the melancholy, and his face began to sag. “Even got me interested. Orchids, for Chrissake! Most amazin damn things! Twenty-eight thousand species of em.”
“I doubt she saw it as you letting her down, Jim.”
Bob came over to put his head in his master’s lap. Brassard stroked him thoughtfully. “Always plenty else to do, I guess.”
Chapter 45
It took me a while to see that something was changing in Brassard. If I’d had more experience in this domain, I’m sure I would have spotted it sooner. His melancholies lasted longer and got deeper, and he seemed older than his years. When he came to the table, his hand would reach for the chair back, miss, and have to take another try. One morning, he dropped his truck keys in some puffy new snow and couldn’t find them, and he had to come out to the barn to ask me for help. I couldn’t find them, either, but then I thought to use the magnetic roller we used wherever we worried about nails getting into cows’ hooves, or metal into their feed. It’s T-shaped, like a push broom with little wheels, except that where the bristles would be there’s a powerful magnetic bar. I swiped it through the snow between house and truck until I heard the satisfying click of the keys latching on. Brassard was pleased with my ingenuity.