On Brassard's Farm

  Earnest came back to me. “It’s bad timing for them. I told her we should wait till Jim gets home, try to talk it over and figure out what to do so it’s not a disaster for everybody.”

  I nodded.

  We waited. Diz went into the house. Beautiful day, getting hot. I held myself and shivered, waiting for Brassard to get home.

  Chapter 12

  So, paradoxically, my financial nosedive was what kept me there.

  One day, I was on the verge of quitting—giving Brassard the last ten grand from my inheritance, then putting the land up for sale and heading back to Boston. The next, I was broke and a debtor who owed money to good people who needed the cash I’d promised and who had no wherewithal to take up the slack. I couldn’t just walk off and leave the Brassards ten grand in the hole. Even putting the land up for sale wouldn’t help: Earnest had said it had been on the market for two years before I came along—too hard to get to—and with the economy the way it was, nobody had the liquid capital to invest in marginally useless land. Not in time to get money to Brassard anytime soon.

  I considered calling Cat and other friends to see if they had some cash I could borrow, but I didn’t. I knew that none of them had that much to squander on me, and I was too ashamed to let them know the whole situation. Anyway, I wasn’t even sure who my friends were anymore: I had burned too many bridges back there. I had said things, warranted and otherwise, that I couldn’t unsay.

  The solution, brokered by Earnest, was for me to enter a kind of indentured servitude as a farmhand. Franklin, their main regular hand, was going to quit in August to start at the technical college in Randolph. The Brassards would be looking for help anyway.

  And that’s how I got initiated into farm life, farmwork. Sort of a birth trauma. The deal was that I’d give Brassard two grand and then work off the remaining eight. Diz said I’d never manage it, I wasn’t physically strong enough, I was a quitter, I’d bail and leave them high and dry just when they needed farm help the most.

  “Franklin isn’t exactly Rhodes scholar material,” Earnest reminded her. Diz couldn’t deny that Franklin wasn’t the best hand. He wasn’t bright, he wasn’t motivated, and it seemed as if he was always breaking equipment or forgetting to do assigned chores.

  “You managed it,” Brassard added quietly. Diz gave a disgusted snort, but that quieted her.

  So I began dairy farming. I would come down the hill just before dawn, go to the house for a cup of coffee, then head out to the cowshed, a long metal-roofed recent structure that was the biggest building on the farm. At first, I shadowed Franklin and Diz, learning how to move cows around and deal with the manure they left in the milking parlor and holding paddock. Only when I’d mastered that did I graduate to the milking routine and equipment cleaning. Earnest taught me to drive the Ford tractor and the little Bobcat skid-steer, to attach various implements to them, to use the tractor’s PTO—short for power takeoff, a shaft that can drive other machines—and to use their buckets or forks to move around hay bales, watering tanks, and heaps of feed grain.

  Just as I’d had imbecilic notions of the forest, I had childlike misconceptions about farms, farming, and farmers. I had an imaginary “farm” in my mind.

  I knew that most of our food is grown on factory farms run by giant corporations. I knew that growing lots of a single crop or raising lots of a single kind of animal was the rule. I knew that the self-sufficient family farm was a dying institution. I’d read about these things in the Boston Globe and New York Times.

  But as a kid, I had learned my letters by poring over picture books that depicted cozy farms with red and white barns, some friendly horses and sheep at the paddock fence, the fuddy-duddy farmer and his plump wife, the rows of vegetables, the henhouses, all surrounded by fields thick with grain. I loved Charlotte’s Web. At school, we sang “Old McDonald Had a Farm.” Every TV ad for cereal still reinforces the myth: A hale middle-aged farmer sits to his breakfast—whatever cereal is being marketed—in his sunny kitchen. Behind him are flowery curtains and a counter displaying other totems of rural life: a colander piled with just-collected pure-white eggs, a bowl of blueberries, a bunch of fresh carrots, and some greens ready for the missus to chop for dinner. Cut to him heading out, full of vigor, to his spotless small-farm compound, then fade to a close-up of the nodding heads of golden grain in his wheat field.

  The myth lives on in our beguiled minds; it resonates inside us, a template of all that is good and honest. I have a theory that we grow much like trees, that every period of our lifetimes remains fully intact inside us, just covered over with the next layer and the next. Later layers may not accord with the early ones—we know there’s no Santa Claus, but the five-year-old is still in there, waking on Christmas morning delirious with expectation.

  So I came to Brassard’s farm with that blurry-edged cameo image still underlying my expectations.

  I had begun acquiring a truer sense of things even before my Hindenburg imitation. I literally got an overview, because I’d sometimes sit in a comfortable glade just above the steep cliffs facing the farm, where, through gaps in the trees, I could see everybody’s comings and goings. I’d go there to write in my journal and then get distracted and just watch, pages unmarked.

  If it were a film played fast, you’d see humans zipping here and there, trucks and tractors whipping about. In summer, you’d see a mottled tide of cows funneling into the milking parlor, then spraying out again across the pasture. In winter, as I learned later, the cows moved indoors and then you’d see manure being moved, piled, and spread on the fields, stall bedding and silage being carted here and there. And snow being pushed and heaped.

  Inside the barn, there’s no three-legged stool and bucket: Milking is done by machines. You usher the cows into the milking parlor—they don’t need much coercion, because their udders ache and they know there’s relief in there—where you attach suction devices to the four teats. Once all the cows have been drained, you have to purge the whole apparatus with near-boiling water, scrape up the fresh manure, and then hose the whole area.

  The milk in the holding tank gets picked up every other day by a big stainless-steel tank truck that holds thousands of gallons. That’s the Agri-Mark truck, from the farmers’ cooperative that processes and markets the milk. It idles for a while as it pumps the stuff out, and the driver hands Brassard a computer-generated receipt. The milk goes to the processing plant; Brassard gets a check.

  Brassard didn’t spend his time stroking the velvety noses of his horses and giving them sugar lumps, because he didn’t have any horses, and his pockets had keys and tools and rags in them, not sugar lumps. In fact, he spent hours each day in his office, once a first-floor bedroom, at his computer, working his spreadsheets, juggling cash and debt, writing checks for equipment loans, reviewing the price of milk and feed on the exchanges. Farming is a business, and he was a capable businessman.

  Manure was a big part of his day. In colder months, when the cows lived inside, the manure flowed to a sort of pond; Brassard periodically pumped the pond’s contents into a special tank trailer that he towed behind the tractor across the fields, spraying the stuff onto the soil. The shed for the younger cows, those not yet lactating, was set up so the manure fell into straw on the floor, creating a more solid form that he moved around with the bucket on the front of his tractor. He piled it in a big U-shaped concrete berm he called the “stack,” and in spring he loaded it into another specialized trailer that flung the stuff out in lumps as he drove. Both activities trailed a plume of odor that filled the valley.

  He bought hundreds of tons of feed grain, but he also raised a lot of his own cow food. Think of it as a recipe for a cake or loaf of bread: To a hundred and ten acres of soil, sift in manure and chemical fertilizers. Whisk with spades and harrows, mix in corn seed. Let stand until it rises. Baste as needed with insecticides or herbicides. Bake in sun.

  This was
n’t sweet corn, so it was never harvested for human consumption. The cobs dried on the stalk, and in autumn the golden-brown fields were felled by a combine that chopped both cob and stalk and hurtled the mixed chaff into a high-sided trailer. The fields were left with uniform rows of stubble, and the stuff was blown into the silo to feed the cows during the winter.

  Brassard also grew ninety acres of hay, which he cut several times a summer, left in windrows, and then raked to fluff and flip it so it dried uniformly. He baled some but rolled most of it into huge wheels that he wrapped in heavy white plastic, leaving the fields scattered with six-foot marshmallows.

  Diz did grow vegetables, in a fenced plot right behind the house, but mostly they bought their green stuff at the Grand Union and kept it in the refrigerator or a freezer in the basement.

  Diz was a stickler for “respectability,” keeping the house and immediate grounds well tended and pretty. She maintained a fringe of lilies and poppies and chrysanthemums, three mountainous lilacs, and some apple trees. Morning glories climbed a trellis near the door. She mowed the lawn and weed-whacked the taller grass along the road.

  But the farmyard, just to the side of this island of order, wasn’t pretty. It was shapeless and often muddy and marked by the braided ruts made by tractor wheels. Tractors and tractor attachments sat haphazardly when not in use, along with various cars and Brassard’s truck—a massive red double-cab Dodge Ram that he washed often and took great pride in. Earnest’s regular pickup was often there, and sometimes his big old warhorse stake-side, the one he used for his tree business, decorated the place as well.

  Beyond the farmyard and the near paddocks, though, lovely pasture opened up, green and inviting. Brassard’s cows grazed freely there during the warm months, contentedly lounging or strolling along meandering trails they’d worn in the grass to favorite grazing spots.

  So cows, manure, machines, and corn are the most obvious elements of the small dairy farm. Diz didn’t even raise chickens—she used to but said she got sick of having to go out to the henhouse with the .22 to “pop” raiding weasels, raccoons, and fisher cats. She bought her eggs from a “hippie” couple who ran an organic vegetable farm about two miles down the road.

  I wasn’t exactly disillusioned by the realities of Brassard’s operation, but for a while it did leave a hollow in me where the ideal farm used to glow. The six-year-old in me, you could say, mourned the dream’s passing.

  And yet. And yet—another example of why we should be more patient with life—despite modern farming’s hard pragmatism and reliance on technology, I found that there is strength to be gained from having feet on the ground and hands (or at least tools) in the earth. Your psychic clock is set by the sun’s year and by its day, and I do believe our lives are better when we acknowledge and live by the power of those cycles. Otherwise, we get out of step with the world and with ourselves, our rhythms wrong, then wonder why we’re stumbling and off balance.

  And I believe that we know ourselves to be real when we experience ourselves as creatures—as animals. Every woman I know who has had a baby, who has suffered through the burden of carrying and then the pain of birthing, says that this holding and cleaving wakened her to her life. I was there when my friend Terri gave birth, and I remember her screams and mounting fear when it seemed the baby’s head simply would not crown. I remember what the midwife said so fiercely to her, what pulled her out of her dive into despair: “You are a female animal! You know how to do this!”

  And Terri was. And she did.

  Similarly, waking to the red-tinted sky and getting your work-stiffened limbs moving, and going outside to the first tentative bird calls, and inhaling unapologetic animal and earth smells, and getting cold if it’s cold and wet if it’s raining, and looking a large fellow mammal in her long-lashed eye—these things are basic, natural, foundational. They make you strong, and at times they can still the jittery yammering of the urban monkey-mind. No meditation practice has ever granted me such long stretches of productive emptiness, such single-pointedness of mind.

  Mucking out the parlor and holding area, giving a no-nonsense shove to a recalcitrant cow, wiping dew off the tractor seat so my butt wouldn’t be wet all day: I simply was the task, the manure, the cow, the tractor.

  I liken my initial dislike of farming to the way, back in Cambridge, I hated trying to get fit after an urban winter. Padded out with insulating fat, I found the initial jogs laborious, uncomfortable, even painful. And embarrassing: to be seen clunking along in clothes that don’t fit your flabbier frame.

  But then after a couple of weeks, you forget to bitch at yourself as you jog, or you catch your reflection in a storefront window and don’t recoil.

  Farming did that with my soul, or my “character,” as my father called that inner thing we all supposedly have. After a while, it wasn’t so difficult, and I didn’t flinch so much when I glanced into the mirror inside me.

  You are a working animal, I told myself, and you know how to do this.

  I spent the last two weeks of July numb with fatigue. I was wary of introspection because I didn’t want to awaken the shame and sense of rudderlessness. I told myself I had made stupid choices, had done bad by some good people, but I had sorted it out and was working off my debt. I was on a reasoned trajectory to … somewhere.

  My life divided into two completely different tracks: daytime, working on the farm, and nighttime, living my solitary life up in the woods.

  During the day, I did what I was told: mainly moving cows around, then milking them, then cleaning the milking apparatus and dealing with manure. Between milkings, an unending stream of odd jobs: hand-feeding the calves, unclogging culverts, putting out feed grain, towing feed wagons loaded with hay out to the pasture, helping Franklin repair fences.

  My favorite times were the hours I spent with Earnest. Sometimes, he would corral me to help with the tasks he’d taken on, usually involving fixing trucks, tractors, harrows, combines, pumps, conveyors, balers, blower fans, and motors. I’d serve as his surgical nurse, handing him tools as he lay beneath a vehicle or entwined in some machine’s innards. He would explain his diagnoses, outlining the mechanical or hydraulic or electrical systems, and, through either his adroit teaching or my heretofore unnoticed engineering instincts, I actually did get a good sense of how things worked.

  When we weren’t talking about the job at hand, he told me a little about the Brassards. And because he never seemed judgmental, it was easy for me to talk about myself. I was careful not to abuse this privilege, not to overindulge in confession.

  But he seldom offered much when I asked him about himself. When I pointed that out to him, he answered, deadpan: “The American Indian is taciturn by nature.”

  Chapter 13

  After selling me my forty acres, Brassard had three hundred acres, about thirty forested and the rest divided between pasture, hay, and corn. By Midwestern standards, not much, but in Vermont it’s a pretty good spread. You can spend a day walking on it, and you can get lost in the surrounding woods because many of the borders aren’t marked. And parts of it are rugged, making it seem bigger. They say that if you pressed Vermont flat it would be big as Texas.

  I’m sure I would have learned more about Brassard and Diz earlier if I hadn’t betrayed them. It took many weeks, which I spent desperately showing how hard I could work, before Diz could say more than a few words to me.

  What I did learn came from Earnest. He always seemed to get a little evasive, which I took as a measure of his respect for their privacy and his contempt for gossip. So what I gleaned was pretty bare-bones, and the exact chronology was never clear to me. Brassard married young and had a daughter, Jane, who now lived out west. I deduced that she would be around forty. His first wife died, and at some unspecified point Diz appeared on the scene. Diz and Brassard married and had a son, Will, who was about my age and lived in Rutland.

  When I asked Ea
rnest if the kids ever came to visit, he said that Will managed to swing by the farm fairly often, and I’d likely see him before long. Jane, the daughter, “doesn’t get along with Diz.” His tone told me this was an understatement best left unprobed. I could easily believe that Diz was an unforgiving enemy and that she would cultivate a similar outlook in others.

  My rhythms were even more closely linked with those of the sky and the forest than the Brassards’. Each morning, I awoke in a tent in a small clearing in the woods, already aware of the temperature of the air and the movement of the wind. I got so I could tell the time of day, whatever the weather, by the relative glow of the tent nylon under the morning sky. I lived among the blackflies and by their life cycle. I knew when the birds’ chicks hatched and fledged, because I heard them piping in their nests and found the shells of their eggs at the base of the trees and eventually saw their first plummeting attempts at flight, and their parents’ hopping, shrieking exhortations to get the hell back up in the air.

  Important revelations, I learned, often come at you with a left-handed, offhanded, slow spiral. Insight frequently requires preparation in the form of a gradual melting of habitual stupidity. And when real revelation comes, it may not be something you can name; it may not make sense except in the deep places where our souls forge coherence from the world’s various pieces.

  My epiphany about water is a good example.

  While I loved drinking and cooking with and washing in the water from my spring, it was a little thing that dwindled as the warm season ripened and the snowmelt left the water table. I filled my jug by sitting at the stream’s edge and scooping water with a small saucepan. Scoop, pour, scoop, pour, spilling half of it over numbing fingers and back into the stream: It took ten minutes to get my day’s supply into containers I would then lug back to my campsite. I washed the same way, ladling the crystal ice liquid onto myself. Or, if I felt really felt begrimed, I humped the jugs back to the tent and heated the water on my fire before washing.