Getting water took a long time. So during one of my free afternoons, I decided I would dam the stream to make a basin deep enough to dip the water jugs in, filling them much faster. I brought a trowel and found a spot twenty feet or so below the spring head, where the water passed between two good-size rocks (each the size of a big couch pillow or, as I tended to think by then, the size of a porcupine) that could anchor a dam. Watching the play of light on the braiding surface of the stream, so energetic and silvery, I felt reluctant to obstruct such a vital thing. But practicality won out.
First I scooped out gravel, fine silt streaming away in delicate tendrils, to make a basin. When it was about the size of a bushel basket, I cast around to find rocks that would fill the gap between the two porcupine rocks. I figured that a range of sizes and shapes would give me a choice when I got down to the stonemasonry puzzle. They would have to fit tightly. After ten minutes I had assembled twenty stones ranging from the size of my hand to the size of a shoe box. I anchored the larger ones in shallow holes I dug in the streambed, and then filled the gaps between, fitting progressively smaller stones into progressively smaller chinks. My hands froze wax white, but after an hour I had made a curved dam about fourteen inches high and two feet across. It looked well constructed, and I was proud of my work.
The stream didn’t notice it, though. The water slithered and shimmied through, undismayed. It didn’t rise in the basin at all.
But, I warned the stream affectionately, we hominids are very smart. We have clever minds and clever fingers! I collected still smaller rocks and wedged them into still smaller holes until I was working with pebbles the size of lima beans. I didn’t hope to make a miniature waterfall over the top, just to delay the flow enough to fill the basin to maybe eight inches deep—enough to dip the jugs or my big pot into and not have to ladle them full. But still the water refused to tarry.
Taking a cruder approach, I heaped gravel and sand on both sides of the dam. The water tarried for a few moments and then simply, cheerfully removed the gravel and kept going. So I gathered leaves, reasoning that the leaf membranes would span gaps and be pressed against them by water pressure and thereby seal the dam. They did—a little, for a while. Before long, the water had discovered all the gaps and lifted things away here and there, and the net gain in the basin was no more than an inch.
I kept at it for another hour before I understood that water’s fingers were far cleverer than mine. The water seemed newborn, so clear and quick, but it knew its job well. I was a rube, a dude, and this lithe, innocent silver snake had billions of years’ experience moving with gravity and meticulously probing everything it encountered and passing through every obstacle. The insight resonated deeply in me. The elements are subtle and profound and ancient and powerful. At this epiphany, the pieces of the world slid into a kind of order and provided a perspective of my own being and nature in relation to the world. It was both humbling and strengthening.
The next day, it rained and the stream swelled so that on the day after, when I visited the dam there was no indication that anyone had tried to build anything on the spot. I recognized a couple of my largest stones a few yards downstream. Even a little stream has unexpected muscle not to be underestimated.
Only later did I encounter the real force of Vermont’s hill waters, when an unusually heavy thunderstorm washed a four-foot diameter, twenty-two-foot-long corrugated culvert out of one of Brassard’s logging trails on the property’s east side. That stream, bigger than my spring but usually lazier, had become a car-size fist. It punched the culvert out of its position and tumbled it fifty feet downstream, leaving it cocked at a steep angle against a boulder. Earnest and Will and I dragged it back using the tractor’s winch. It took us all day to reseat the thing, and another few days to dump twenty yards of crushed rock and gravel on it to keep it there for another while.
So: humility. Brassard had suffered enough of it in his lifetime to be immune to notions about how spiritually cute it is when nature shows you you’re small and it’s big. Hail destroys your corn, cold ruptures the pipes from the well in the middle of winter when the ground’s too damn hard to dig them up, windstorms pull up sections of barn roof, ice brings down trees on the powerlines so there’s no electricity or phone for three or four days. It all costs money that isn’t there, requires time and energy you don’t have, and tests patience long since exhausted.
But I was still new enough and urban enough that I found it existentially reassuring. Earnest found my outlook amusing and made sure I knew it.
Chapter 14
I was nervous about meeting Will Brassard, because I was still terrified of Diz and because I didn’t know what judgments he might have of me as a result of my Great Betrayal.
I also knew myself as an inexplicable person living a chaotic life. I didn’t mind Earnest’s seeing me that way—I knew he enjoyed my company and forgave my failings—and was used to Brassard and Diz knowing the sad truth. But I hadn’t spent much time in the proximity of other human beings during my months on Brassard’s farm. I had only gotten stranger, more contradictory and not less, and didn’t relish the idea of others catching wise.
When Will swung into the driveway, I was wresting with a coil of four-inch drainage pipe that we planned to install below the barn to help dry out the near paddock, where the cows had churned the soil into hock-deep muck. He unfolded from his Jetta and nodded at me over the roof of the car: a pleasant-faced guy with a reddish mustache, wearing khakis and a checked shirt rolled up his forearms. He was as tall as his father but carried much less weight in the shoulders and gut, and he walked with a light stride toward the house. Diz had come out on the porch and, for the first time since I’d known her, wore a big smile that was not crimped with a sardonic tilt. Will swayed her left and right as they hugged, and then they went inside. After a time, Brassard pulled up in his truck, nodded to me, and also went inside.
Hundred-foot rolls of perforated drainage pipe aren’t that heavy, but they’re four feet in diameter and about the same tall—awkward to grip or lift, prone to tumbling out of the tractor’s bucket. I opted to roll them, one by one, through the gate and across the paddock to the ditch Earnest had dug last time he was here. The big, uneven wheels teetered and toppled unexpectedly, or suddenly veered off course; moving them was like shepherding large, strangely built toddlers. I went back and forth feeling something sour in me that took a moment to acknowledge: I felt left out.
This was the first time since I’d been here, even living as the object of Diz’s disdain, that I felt the circle of a family close around the house and exclude me. Whatever sense of inclusion I’d had was thanks to Earnest: He wasn’t a blood relative, but he stayed and worked like one, and it was easy for me to tag along in his wake. But with Will and his parents in the house, I felt envious and suddenly alone. They were in there, relishing that intimacy that only families know. I was out here in my mud boots, working to pay off the debt I owed, more of an indentured laborer than a hired hand, a woman alone and without a family to embrace her. Or any kind of plan for her life.
Hard work is the best antidote for self-pity, I told myself. As Diz had said when I first met her: “What the heck? Couldn’t tell ya, get back to work.” Being a Hardheaded Woman is not so bad. Sometimes I think our extreme sensitivity to our own emotions is an indulgence that only the urban and solvent—people with too much time on their hands—can enjoy.
So I stayed at my task. I positioned three rolls of pipe at hundred-foot intervals along the newly dug ditch. Earnest had closely analyzed the slope here and had planned the pipe’s route carefully. The trench ran across the bottom of the paddock and then took a curve downhill, getting shallower and shallower until it emerged from the ground a hundred yards below the barnyard. Earnest had explained how to stake the pipe as I unrolled it, so it wouldn’t just curl back up. I toppled a roll into the ditch and cut the strapping with my pocketknife. Suddenly, the whole
thing shrugged and slithered and expanded, startling me and becoming a still more awkward, uneven mass.
I worked in a series of forceful jerks and resentful shoves, a purse-lipped frown in my brain because seeing the Brassards together had reminded me how much I missed having a family. I cursed my brother Erik for abandoning his only sister. Where was the little bastard? I cursed Matt for being a shit and liar and skirt chaser and for thinking so highly of himself that he could jilt me! I tried, staunchly but in vain, to keep that ever-present loneliness at bay. I cursed myself for having missed the boat of life as it left port with all the more sensible people aboard.
After I’d tugged loose ten feet or so, the whole pipe unwound and became a huge, unwieldy series of big loops that made a plastic racket as their ridges shifted over each other. I wrestled it back into the ditch, working my way along its length, anchoring it with stakes whenever it arched or curled, then opened the next roll, coupled the ends, and repeated the process. When I’d gotten three hundred feet of it in place, I went to get the tractor to lay some gravel. My internal soliloquy went something like, I’ll show them! I’ll show how hardworking and capable I am, how good I am at solitude. I don’t need you, and I especially don’t need your attitude, Diz. Don’t worry, you’re getting your money’s worth out of me.
I wasn’t allowed to drive the newer Deere or the hulking Harvester, but that was fine because I liked the old Ford tractor better anyway. It was clanky and worn and Earnest had repaired every part of it at one time or another, but it was more my size, and sturdy. I liked that the seat was metal, not padded, and there was no canopy or fancy dashboard—that the whole thing was so simple. By now I was feeling good about my tractor-driving skills and had come to love the double brakes that allowed such tight turns. Once, when I thought I was out of view of the farm, I spun the Ford a few times just for the fun of it, to feel the centrifugal force. But Earnest had seen me, and when I got back to the barn he grinned and made some comment that made us both laugh.
I’d gotten pretty good at handling the bucket, too. Earnest had said that when I was “ready”—this in the mysterious tone of some wise philosopher–kung fu master—he would teach me how to attach other implements and then how to use the digger attachment—“the backhoe arts.”
I revved it up, lowered the bucket, and charged at walking speed toward the pile of crushed rock. When the bucket engaged the mound, the engine labored, but I continued to rock the beast forward against the slope, raising the bucket by degrees until it had a reasonable load. Then I backed away, more carefully now because the back end of the tractor seemed awfully light with all that weight up front. Through the gate. Over the softer soil of the paddock area. Up to the brink of the ditch so that the bucket hung over the pipe, then a delicate touch with the hydraulic levers to tip the bucket. The egg-size stones rained down onto the pipe more or less centered in the ditch—we would level it all by hand later—and covered the pipe with a pile about ten inches deep and four feet wide. When the bucket was empty I backed away and turned to survey my work.
Not too bad for a spoiled city twit with an identity crisis, huh, Diz?
I returned to the gravel heap. My first bucket had not made much of an impression on it, and for the first time I understood just how much there was to carry and dump. I rammed the tractor forward again, working the hydraulics, striving for a fuller bucket. The exhaust darkened with blue smoke as the engine strained, the hydraulics whined as they labored, and I knew I had a good load.
Back to the ditch. Carefully maneuver the tractor up to the edge at a right angle to the ditch, just where the first load ended, then inch forward until the bucket overhung the pipe, then slowly tilt and lower to sift the stuff off. The gravel seemed to cling inside the bucket, and the back end of the tractor rose disturbingly, but I jiggled the lever and got it bouncing, and at last the load avalanched off and made a tidy mound just where it should be.
Doin’ good! I told myself. I savored my own prowess and inhaled the diesel fumes deep into my lungs as if they were full of vitamins.
The gravel had been heaped at the end of the driveway, at the pasture end of the old barn—a small mountain that represented twenty dump-truck loads. We all had gathered to watch the first truck empty itself. When I asked why they didn’t just dump it down by the ditch, Diz had explained with excessive patience that the truck would sink to the door handles in the mud and stay there forever and “we’d use the damn thing as a planter, put our begonias in there maybe.”
Of course. A loaded ten-yard dump truck would weigh many, many tons and would indeed have a hard time in the wet soil of the paddock.
“Or end up in China,” Earnest said. “Then we’d have a problem with Immigration.”
Diz had scowled at him for interjecting genuine humor into the situation.
Screw Diz, I told myself grimly. When I came up to the pile the third time, I was thinking about how little my last bucket had taken. At this rate, it would take all day and Diz would say something about what a sensitive tractoring style I had. So I really worked the bucket in, getting the angles just right so that when I lifted it free the rocks were mounded above the bucket’s rim. I congratulated myself.
Chug-chug back to the ditch, the tractor crushed low in front and daintily high off the ground in back. I was fuming inside but I took it slow, mindful of the weight differential. I positioned myself, edged out over the ditch, and tipped the bucket. Only a few stones fell. The gravel had lodged itself in there pretty well. So I joggled it up and down, the tractor clanking and rocking front to back, and inched a little closer, and then the edge of the ditch gave way and the tractor tipped forward and the front wheels went down so that the full bucket lay flat on the far bank. The Ford’s back wheels floated just off the ground. The whole thing was locked in place, canted at a hard forward tilt and pinned by the bucket full of half a ton of gravel. The bucket couldn’t lift and the tractor couldn’t reverse itself out of the trap.
I shut off the engine. For a moment, I sat there, leaning forward, holding myself off the steering wheel with my arms. It was a fine day. Birds making a lovely cacophony in the woods. Cows unperturbed on the green slope. A tranquil bucolic scene. My mind racing like a panicked rat in some gruesome lab experiment.
Truly, literally, I thought of just sprinting to my car, getting in and driving away and never coming back. Leave all my stuff up on the hill. Send the papers back to Brassard and they’d never hear from me again.
But I didn’t. This was my cross and I was destined to be crucified on it and was apparently to drive the spikes myself. So I walked along my wheel ruts back to the yard and up the porch steps. I went through the mudroom and tapped on the inner door, mortified at having to bring this awful news into a happy family get-together.
Brassard called from the living room: “In here, Ann.”
I left my boots on the porch and went through the kitchen and into the living room, where I was surprised to see no family gathering but just Will in Brassard’s recliner, reading a magazine while Brassard, wearing his reading glasses, did some paperwork. Diz wasn’t in sight.
“Did you meet Will?” Brassard asked. “Will, this is Ann, our neighbor and our hand for the time bein.”
Will leaned the recliner upright and stood up, and we shook hands. He smiled; I smiled. I covertly examined his face for signs of the contempt he would feel if he’d heard much about me, but couldn’t see anything definite.
“Diz is up taking a nap,” Brassard said. “I’ve got to get these bills paid, but you can sit if you’d like. There’s coffee.” He turned in his chair and looked at me over his glasses, and his eyes widened. “What?”
“There’s a problem,” I said.
It wasn’t as big a problem as all that. Brassard looked out over the pasture fence at the distant up-canted back end of the Ford and said to Will, “You want to do the honors?” Will said he would. Brassard went to f
ire up the Deere, then brought it around to where we stood. He clambered down, Will swung up, I climbed onto the hitch rack, and we rolled at a leisurely pace out to the ditch. Over his shoulder, Will told me not to worry, he’d done the same thing more than once.
Will positioned the Deere, and I hauled out the winch cable and attached the hook to a steel loop on the Ford’s frame. I started up the little tractor and put it into reverse, and when Will said, “Go,” I let up the clutch. The Deere effortlessly pulled the thing out and there it was, done. The indestructible Ford was none the worse for wear. I dismounted and checked and found to my relief that its front wheels had not crushed the plastic pipe; then I got back in the saddle and dumped the damned bucket. Will and I chugged back on the two tractors like a tiny parade. At Brassard’s invitation, I joined them for a cup of coffee at the kitchen table.
When Will asked me about myself, I gave him a heavily redacted history: from Boston most recently, middle school teacher but out of work so far, glad to be learning about farmwork.
Brassard mentioned that I was the gal who’d bought the land uphill, and Will just smiled and asked how I liked it.
“It’s beautiful,” I told him. What was most beautiful at that moment was realizing that Will had not heard about my transgression. I could sit here without the stage fright that comes with being a bad actor and not knowing your lines. Better yet, I’d gotten away with my tractoring faux pas without Diz knowing about it! The coffee was bracingly hot and excellent.
Will said he and his friends used to camp out up on my hill when he was a kid. He told me he had seen moose a couple of times, and bears in the blackberries. I told him about the bears Cat and I saw, but said I’d mainly seen just porcupines and blackflies. He said he’d seen them often enough, too.