Then Diz was clumping down the stairs. She came into the room wiping her glasses on her shirttail, touched her son’s shoulder as she passed, poured herself a cup of coffee.
She sat heavily and without inflection said, “I see you’ve met Ann.” Then she looked at me. “Supposed to fill it with gravel, not tractors.”
Chapter 15
July 16
I am so tired I can hardly sit up to write. Today was the first time I’ve operated a tractor for so many hours straight. Every muscle hurts. I stink of diesel and am too tired to heat water to wash up. I conked my knee a dozen times dismounting, exactly the same place again and again, and now there’s a bruise the size of my hand, so tender something must be seriously damaged in there. I could hardly walk back up the hill. No wonder Brassard’s got such a gimp, after fifty-some years of that kind of wear and tear.
I astonish myself with my immaturity. Remind me, when’s that hard-bitten self-sufficiency supposed to kick in? I have been a devoted follower of the discipline. I have left sacrifices of my own flesh on the altar. Yet today I spent the entire day seething with juvenile resentment, feeling rejected, angry at Diz, pissed at myself, fuming and confused and out of control.
Trying to prove my worth as a human being up on the tractor, rather than just getting the job done—that was my first mistake. In the unlikely chance I ever read these scribblings, here’s a memo to my future self: Do. The. Job. Skip the extraneous emotions. The work is real. It’s simple. It’s Zen. It is necessary and it is good and it is enough.
Yeah, therein lies respite, absolution, clarity, yadda yadda, but you can take this philosophy too far.
And here I sit, still knotted and seared and all acid, despite being in heaven on Earth. The evening is gentle and sweet. Twilight comes early here among the dense midsummer trees, and it’s a serene time. The light is going blue and soothing, the air moves with decorum in the woods, scented with some blossom’s sweetness, the birds have gone drowsily quiet except for one—I should learn my birds—that makes a particularly liquid reveille: whirly-whirly-whirly-whirly. I have everything I need in my tent and my porky-proof storage boxes; I have a good book to read by lantern light. I can’t even complain about the bugs, because my diesel-skunked skin repels them. And I’m squandering all of it. Something else to detest about myself.
Today I was dumping gravel into the ditch and tipped the tractor into it and Will Brassard is visiting and he pulled me out and I thought I’d escaped without shame but Diz saw it from the upstairs window and got in a jab at me and I let it hurt me.
To his everlasting credit, Will smiled and pointed out that he and she and Brassard himself and Franklin and probably every other farming person in the history of mankind had done something similar at one time or another. In fact, he related the time Diz herself had been towing a stake-side trailer full of the big rolled-hay marshmallows and one got loose and rolled downhill, gaining speed until it bounded over the stone wall at the bottom of the field and landed on the hood and windshield of Diz’s car, which then needed eight hundred dollars’ worth of bodywork and glass.
Brassard chuckled and chimed in with some details here and there and affectionately covered his wife’s hand with his baseball mitt of a hand. Diz sipping her coffee with indifference. I liked Will for taking on his mother with good humor and no mercy.
After a bit, the conversation turned to other things, and the family seemed to wrap around itself, so I took my leave and went back out to finish the job. I covered three hundred feet of drainage pipe, back and forth dozens of times on the trusty Ford. I worked until I was so tired I was afraid I’d mess up again, then shut it down and hobbled back up here. The valley was darkening and the windows of the house came alight behind me. I walked up into my dark woods knowing that it would be one of those nights of missing kin and connection, and I dreaded it.
Slumped on my fireside log, the lantern giving light to write by, the most resonant image in my exhausted mind is Will. It’s the way he looked when he and I were hooking up the winch cable. He’s slim, rangy, well proportioned, with medium-length brown hair. He was wearing jeans and an old checked shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and for a few seconds he just stood straight and looked around the family’s acres, nostalgically appreciative. At that moment he struck me as very handsome and somehow familiar.
Which is the worst, the most middle school, dumb-ass fairyland thing of the whole goddamn day. I was wondering if Will Brassard is married or not, and if maybe destiny has brought me here so I’ll meet my soul mate at last. And I wondered how I’d struck him, if he’d found me gross or if maybe my muddied, sweated, dieseled, sunburned, ragged-denim-covered inept self had a certain je-ne-sais-quoi appeal.
I can hardly stand to write this. I’m too disgusted with myself. This situation is not about Finding One’s Will Brassard At Last. It’s not about a man, it’s not about a “relationship.” I am appalled to discover this awful Cinderella wannabe still living inside me. How readily she rears her ash-smudged little hopeful prince-seeking head when she gets within arm’s length of a man her own age.
I’m going to sleep now.
I did not go to sleep. At some point, I got up and dutifully heated a pot of water, soaped myself down, standing naked in my little clearing to rinse the stink and grime off me. I put my clothes into a plastic trash bag so their smell wouldn’t pollute the night air. Then, scoured skin thrilled and goose-bumped with the cold, I sort of danced. I danced gestures of apology to the night woods for ignoring their grace and generosity, and I requested their friendship again and felt as though I received it.
I assure you this was not at all a New Agey sort of thing. I didn’t try to commune with some wise, vastly serene and maternal Gaia—I doubt this dear planet has ever been either serene or particularly concerned with any one creature’s misery. What this was: a tired, desperate human being trying to regain some sense of connection to herself and to some part of the world, and resorting instinctively to something like prayer—a prayer to no being but to the whole damn thing.
Really, I had nothing else. It’s that simple.
But there it was again: necessity. The mother of invention, they say, but also the mother of resiliency. After my ablutions and dance of supplication, I felt renewed.
Chapter 16
An exposition on manure is not a digression. On dairy farms, it is a central and continuous concern. Manure requires pushing, scooping, hoeing, shoveling, pumping, relocating, hosing, piling, and spreading. In winter, with the cows in the barn, it’s a major daily undertaking, but even in summer the poop needs to be removed after the cows have sashayed into and out of the milking parlor. It’s part of every working day.
Over the years, I had walked in pastures and stepped around cow pies, those neat nests of ground-up fibrous material. So I always assumed that cow poop came out with a texture like horses’.
In reality, it emerges as a thick liquid the color of soy sauce. Deposited in the pasture, its water drains into the soil, leaving only the residues of grass and feed in that nice pie shape, solid enough that you can throw it like a discus. But on concrete, with nowhere for the water to soak away to, it lingers as a wet, soupy slurry. You spend a lot of time removing it with hoe, shovel, or the tractor’s bucket or scraper blade.
I mention this now because Will came to chat with me while I was cleaning off the concrete pad where the cows congregated as they waited their turn in the milking parlor. When I thanked him for deflecting his mother’s contempt for my tractoring, he just laughed. He acknowledged that Diz was an acquired taste.
I had recovered from the psychological stumbles of the day before. The largesse of the night woods had soothed me and allowed me to accept myself a bit. I’d landed in the new day with some measure of grace and balance.
I had even forgiven Cinderella. I figured that, like any creature in the woods, no matter how noxious, she had some rightf
ul niche in the ecosystem. If I encountered her, I would respectfully replace the rock I found her under and trust that she had some odd but indispensable place in the scheme of things.
Yes, when Will came to lean in the doorway, Cinderella was there, and I let her into the conversation, let her check him out, seek clues about his personal life. She found none. He didn’t offer any. He didn’t wear a wedding ring, but then, neither had my father or Matt.
Did I bat a conversational eyelash? I don’t think I did—I was shoveling and hosing cow shit. My rubber coveralls were splattered with it, and I was hardly in a position to feel, or be, flirtatious.
He told me he was up this way because had some business in Burlington, working on an agricultural video project in partnership with UVM’s farm extension service, just for the day, and then had to get back to Rutland. He had a nice face, long in the jaw, showing none of his mother’s hardness. He seemed interested in me in a courteous way, not as a woman but as a person who happened to be coexisting with his parents on the farm where he’d grown up. His comfort with himself, the absence of posturing, suggested he wasn’t paying much attention to my gender.
We talked for ten minutes, then he said so long. We exchanged jaunty waves. I went about my work.
Earnest came the next day to help Brassard and me finish the drainage project. He and I worked in the ditch, shoveling the gravel around—those ice-cube-to-egg-size irregular chunks collectively make a stubborn medium, so in reality you’re sort of raking it, kicking it, digging at it—as Brassard unrolled a fabric silt screen over the top and used the Deere’s backhoe to fill in soil on top. It got hot and my entire T-shirt, starting at the armpits and working outward, turned dark with sweat.
Earnest just took off his shirt. It was the first time I had seen his broad, copper-colored torso without clothing, and I was stunned. His body was gently rounded by a layer of hard fat, but when he raked and jabbed with the shovel, the muscles of his back rolled and stood in ridges, and his biceps and shoulder muscles bulged and balled. His body seemed a locus of great power, radiating it, and I found myself stealing glances at him, at once fascinated and intimidated. It seemed an elemental phenomenon. My scratchings and scuffings accomplished virtually nothing, but when Earnest told things to move, they moved. Brassard smiled as he worked—the pleasure of a man glad to see a job getting done. I’d noticed that the mood at the farm always brightened when Earnest was there.
That night, up the hill, exhausted again, my mind turned to the day’s activities, conversations, images. And my thoughts returned again and again to Earnest—the power of him, the sun-warmed color of his glistening skin, his pleasure in the effort of the work. The masculinity of his form.
It was the second time in two days that my thoughts had lingered on a man, on a man’s physical self, and I realized abruptly and completely that I had just come up hard against another challenge or problem with my choice to seek land and live in the woods and be utterly self-sufficient in every way. Eros is a river, I realized, and just like my little stream, it will not let itself be dammed for long.
Chapter 17
With the drainage system installed, I returned to my regular work routine. Maybe it was Will’s comment about Diz’s own farming faux pas, or my imagination, but I thought I detected a slight softening in Diz. We worked together for the afternoon milking, and she didn’t scowl the entire time. We became an efficient team, trading off tasks and tools without hesitation. I had studied her various techniques of getting an animal ten times your weight to do what you wanted, and was getting pretty good at them. I think she noticed.
Against the daily, unchanging rhythm of milking, another slow and subtle longer beat had been playing: The corn came up. The hay came up. The off-cycle fields of clover came up. Brassard’s brown-earth soil disappeared under robust green.
And so my first summer passed.
I spent every night at my camp, and I worked on the farm for about twelve hours, five days a week, depending on the needs of the herd and the season and the availability of other help. By late August, life on my hill had become downright civilized. I dug a deeper hole and erected a rickety structure with a roof over it, and made a sort of chair of scrap lumber, to which I nailed a store-bought toilet seat—almost a genuine outhouse. I built a kitchen consisting of two-by-fours tied to two trees, with boards across for a counter, then put my Coleman white-gas stove there so I could sometimes cook standing up instead of crouching in the dirt. The biggest luxury was the aluminum sink I installed in my counter. I still hand-carried water from the spring, but now I could plug the drain and use the basin to wash vegetables, and myself, well clear of the soil floor. When I was done, I’d pull the plug and the water would pour out onto the ground and slither away in a little runnel I had dug. It felt very high-tech.
Brassard was paying me eight bucks an hour. By the end of August, I had earned $3,325 and, after my living expenses and car payments and first-ever property tax bill, had paid back about $1,900. At that rate, factoring in the 4 percent interest I was paying him, I would finish off my debt in sixteen more months. That is, I’d work the coming fall and winter, all the next summer and fall, and be paid up by January of the following year.
I loved living in my tiny palace, loved making shift to see to basic needs, and the woods did strengthen and smooth me. I learned to manage my nighttime fears somewhat better, and the knowledge that I could challenge them, or at least weather them, also helped reconstruct me.
But I had no intention of working on the farm for sixteen more months. It was occasionally fun, but mostly it was difficult and boring and uncomfortable. My hard-used hands ached at night. So I kept looking for jobs. I read the help-wanted ads in the newspapers, and when I had some time off I’d go to the Montpelier public library and search the online jobs site run by the Department of Labor.
It was a time of budget cutbacks at Vermont schools, and there were very few teaching jobs. I applied to three and didn’t even get an interview. I had to believe that the recommendation letters my principal had promised were less than lukewarm, so after a while I quit looking for a teaching position.
I considered jobs at day-care centers, nursing homes, burger franchises, but either the math or the morale didn’t work out. Commuting from my hill was out of the question, so I would need to move to some unfamiliar town and then pay rent, and salaries in Vermont were low. Even if I put my land on the market, I’d need to keep paying Brassard until it sold, which certainly wouldn’t happen this year. I simply couldn’t afford to live anywhere else unless I had a steady job at a respectable salary.
Anyway, by then my half-made decision to sell my land was faltering.
My land? Yes, I had begun merging with it in ways that I hadn’t anticipated. And I was earning it by enduring inconvenience and discomfort and nighttime fear and, on the farm, by the sweat of my brow. And I felt a tinge of pride. For the first time, I began to understand the true dimensions of rural people’s fierce attachment to their lands, the determination of small farmers to honor the soil they work and their own labor and that of their parents. One becomes loyal to that earth, those trees, the swell and fold of field and hill.
So fall was coming, and it appeared that I would stay on at the farm.
Earnest said that fall would be glorious, absolutely the best time to be in the woods, but that by sometime in October the cold would drive me from the hill and into a former chicken coop the Brassards had set up as a guesthouse or bunkhouse for temporary workers. It was divided into two tiny apartments side by side and had all the amenities. Diz, determined to keep up appearances, had even put flower boxes on the windowsills.
Earnest was right: It got cold and sorrowful up on the hill. While the leaves were turning it was splendid, the air filled with a dry pumpkin scent, a rust-orange scent, invigorating. The biting insects vanished and it was lovely to sit or walk without their harassment. But soon an unease came t
o the woods. The breezes seemed to shiver the remaining leaves, tremble them rather than toss them. Fewer and fewer birds sang among the trees, until one day they were gone and the woods were silent.
Loneliness haunted my silent woods. It was as if the absence of living things around me heightened my need for the company of human beings. With the forest now stark, loneliness encompassed me, threatened to swallow me; at times I felt I would vanish into it. And the hunger for contact became more physical. I yearned for the assurance of a companion’s arms around me.
For a time the crickets kept on, a silvery shimmer of sound, but they, too, dwindled in number until at last there was only one, a solitary dry creak at the base of a boulder near my camp. And then it, too, ceased.
That day truly signaled the end of my summer. I started getting cold at night despite covering myself with every piece of fabric I owned, and when I awoke, the water in my bedside glass would be skinned with ice. The light got bleak, and by the time I’d return to camp after the evening milking it was full dark.
One mournful day after the last leaves had fallen, I borrowed the Ford and a little utility trailer, labored up the switchbacks to my clearing, and carted down my possessions. Seeing it piled there—two big steamer trunks, a few watertight plastic tubs from Walmart, two wooden chairs I’d bought at a yard sale—brought home to me the sheer lack of stuff I owned. I had a weak grip on materiality, no ballast. I felt fragile again.
With my tent gone, my little platform looked forlorn and incongruous in the naked autumn light. Before I chugged out of the clearing, I blew it a kiss and made a fervent promise to return.
After being obliged to move down from my eyrie, the next most difficult thing that fall was saying goodbye to Earnest. He had an annual seasonal cycle, too: When it got too cold to do tree work in Vermont, he followed the warmer weather south, taking tree jobs as far down as North Carolina, wherever he had friends, cousins, old military buddies, or former clients to help find him jobs. He planned to be gone about six weeks, so before he left he worked hard to batten down the place for winter: getting the cowshed ready, putting up storm windows on the house, preparing the tractors for their winter chores. He and I cut six cords of firewood up on the far side of Brassard’s valley—most of it from dead trees and already dry—and then brought it to the house, split it, and stacked it in a roofed crib near the back door.