On Brassard''s Farm

  But, he said, there’s order to the clan. Homer and his wife Fran had had four kids; the kids had had kids, and probably another generation had started up by now—they married young, Brassard said. He described Homer and Fran as good people, honest and steady. “No education, but don’t drink and they make room for everyone who needs someplace.” Homer had worked for the state highway crew for as long as Brassard could remember, and he figured Homer’s income provided the financial ballast for the extended family, whose fortunes fluctuated wildly. Fran was very obese and had diabetes, almost crippled. Two of their kids were “pretty normal,” one was truly “slow.” “Doesn’t stop em from havin kids, though. Startin about fifteen, sixteen.” He didn’t know how many grandkids—maybe eight. He thought a couple of the grandkids had been born with some problems, and he knew one of them got brain damage in infancy. “Run into Homer at the general store, this’s ten, fifteen years ago now, and he was upset. Said his son-in-law was throwin the baby in the air and it hit the ceiling and fell on the floor. Concussion and spine damage, developmental problems after that. You’ll see him out front sometimes, can’t walk straight?”

  I retrieved the hoof-holding box, but Brassard stayed standing, considering the matter further and stroking the cow’s hindquarters to calm her. “Another grandkid has that Down syndrome, you might see him sometimes. When I think of what that man has been through—Homer. What he deals with. What’re you going to do if you’re Homer and Fran? You stand by your family, same as I’d do, anyone would do.”

  He said that though the kids and grandkids sometimes got into trouble, they respected Homer and Fran and mostly didn’t bring it into the house. He spoke of Homer and Fran with respect—he called Homer “gentle” and “steady,” Fran “bighearted.”

  Number 32 began to get impatient, stamping and shifting. A 1,300-pound, head-high animal in close quarters is hard to ignore. Brassard grabbed her right ankle and drew it firmly up onto his little platform.

  “She’ll settle,” he reassured me. “Just needs to know we’re gettin the job done and she’ll be free to go.”

  As for whether I was in danger up at my place, he said he didn’t think so, but couldn’t be sure. He said some of the grandkids had friends who were definitely not upright citizens or obedient to the household rules of Homer and Fran. “If you ever see the sheriff’s car up on the ridge road, this far out, you can pretty well guess where they’re goin.”

  Then I glimpsed the authoritative side of Jim Brassard, some of the force that had earned him officer rank in Vietnam. He met my gaze straight on and said, “Better just tell me what’s happened to get you worried, so I can figure out what to do about it.”

  I told him about the guts and my conversation with Will and the footprints in the snow. His eyes went distant. “The deer, it’s more likely just habit—I never posted that hill, they’ve spent their whole lives huntin up there if they wanted. Somebody walkin around, same thing. People generally don’t worry too much about walkin in somebody’s woods as long as they don’t do any harm. When I was a boy, we’d hike around and even sleep in somebody’s camp. Nobody locked em back then. People who live out this far, some just live more in the old way.”

  He went back to work on the hoof. Then, as an afterthought: “In any case, don’t bring it up to Diz. She’s none too fond of them already, no tellin how she’d react. Whatever else, we don’t need Diz on the warpath.”

  Bob, wearing his neon-orange neckerchief, met me outside and gave me an affectionate nuzzle before he went on to see what the boss was up to. His trust and goodwill made me feel a little better, but back at my little chicken-coop apartment I kept replaying Brassard’s narrative in my head, ambivalent. He was probably right about the deer, the visitor. Cat and I had walked through any woods or fields we came to without thinking twice about whose property it was. In any case, it would be six months before I started sleeping out there again.

  But I still felt a deep unease. What had I been thinking? That Vermont was a postcard utopia without crime, poverty, violence, dysfunctional families, genetic disorders, and all the rest of humanity’s woes? All the trailers and houses I’d passed on the back roads, with debris-covered lawns and torn plastic over the windows: The lives lived there were probably a lot like the Goslants’. This was just a different kind of desolation from what I’d been accustomed to in the city. In the context of lush forest and verdant fields, it had taken me longer to fully recognize what I was seeing.

  Chapter 23

  When the cows moved indoors, the nature of the job changed radically.

  The cowshed is a long, airy thing built mainly of steel beams, with a corrugated sheet steel roof and wooden end walls. The sidewalls are mostly just open to the outdoors—the cows’ collective body heat keeps it comfortably warm (for them)—unless the cold gets truly vicious, and then we roll down tarp curtains along the sidewalls. The open structure means it’s well lit during the day; it’s lit less pleasantly by overhead fluorescents after sunset. The cows spend most of their time standing or reclining in two long rows of stalls, their back ends hanging out a bit into the center alley so their manure falls onto the concrete floor.

  This was a “free stall” shed, meaning that cows are not restrained by stanchions but are free to move around. When the urge strikes them, they wander down the central aisle to take a drink from the water tanks or to stick their heads into a separate alley where we put out foodstuffs. Actually, they don’t move around much; after milking, they’ll grab a bite at the buffet and then are generally content to return to their regular stalls to chew their cud and drowse.

  Manure: I thought I knew the basics, but until the cows moved inside I didn’t know that a single cow produces about 110 pounds of it a day. That’s about as much as the entirety of me, defecated by each cow, every day. Brassard had eighty cows milking at any given time, producing six tons of manure, daily, that in winter ended up on the shed floor. Six tons that it was my job to remove.

  Every day, I’d come along the central alley with the Bobcat skid-steer. This was a small yellow tractorish thing to which Earnest had attached a cut quarter-section of some huge construction vehicle’s tire. I lowered the bucket with this scooper-squeegee attachment on it and pushed the soup of manure the whole length of the shed. At the far end, it flowed into a long floor grate and got pumped into the manure “lagoon” outside. After several passes, the aisle was still wet but reasonably clean.

  Manure and urine also ended up in the stalls. Brassard kept his cows comfortable—happy cows give more milk and stay healthier—flooring their stalls with rubber mats as well as something soft to cushion their bony bodies when they reclined, mainly sawdust but sometimes ground hay or sand. I had to rake out the wet bedding and replace it every day, in every stall.

  Having cows inside also required that we put out feed for them at frequent intervals. One of us would drive a tractor loaded with silage and grain through the feed alley as a second person shoveled the stuff to the floor. A fence kept the cows out of that alley, but they put their heads through rails to get at the goodies, munching happily. And depositing more manure that I had to remove.

  All this was in addition to the care of around sixty other cows that lived in their own shed nearby. These were heifers—young cows that hadn’t yet been bred—and mature cows that were “drying off,” that is, getting their annual two-month vacation from milking. Fortunately, their manure management required far less of me: Their floor was covered with thick straw that stayed there, composting, until warmer weather. I simply had to scoop out the wettest spots and spread a new layer of clean straw on top.

  With the added work, I was walking around in a haze of fatigue by early December. I had been putting in longer hours and more days because Diz’s lower back was “acting up” more than usual, to the point that her chiropractor told her to stop lifting and stooping, at least for a while. That she would admit to the pain, that she??
?d take his advice, told me how much it must have hurt.

  Twelve to fourteen hours, six or seven days a week: By the time my workday was done, I would fall down on my bed and could barely get up to cook myself dinner. Even so, I couldn’t accomplish a fraction of what Diz did. The farm faced a severe shortage of human-power.

  Ultimately, Brassard had to hire one of the “hippie” organic farmers from down the road to help fill in for Diz. Lynn and her husband, Theo, grew organic greens that they sold at farmers markets, kept a few chickens, and raised a small herd of goats that they milked to make soap. Their winters were not as busy as those of dairy farmers, so Lynn had time to help with Brassard’s cows. Taking on a hand to replace some of Diz’s work put a strain on the farm’s finances, but it couldn’t be avoided.

  I liked Lynn immediately: late twenties, slim, pale-skinned, white-blond straight hair pulled back into a short ponytail. She was quiet and struck me as centered and certain of her path—so unlike me. She was optimistic about small farming’s future, hadn’t had her idealism kicked out of her yet. She’d gone to U. Mass and studied anthropology for three years before dropping out: “And the only anthro I’ve done since then is fieldwork, studying my husband and his family.” Theo is a native Vermonter, a mild-mannered guy who tagged along with college friends when they went to whoop it up among the big-city Amherst kids. He hadn’t done much whooping, apparently, just looked embarrassed by everybody else’s lack of decorum, until Lynn talked to him. She had a sly grin that invited confidences and drew me into a conspiratorial sense of camaraderie. I loved the idea of marriage as an anthropological study.

  Two can do the milking, but it was better to have three on duty: one person to manage “cow flow,” one to work in the pit, and the third exploiting the cows’ absence to rake out the stalls and distribute fresh bedding. Also, the purging of milk pipes and washing of the claws always went faster with more hands. So it helped that Will Brassard’s work brought him to the area more often. He’d stay over for a couple of nights, get up to help with the morning milking, drive off to the studio to work on his video project, then return in time for the evening milking.

  When I commented on his schedule to Diz, she told me, “Got his work ethic from his old lady.” Then she snorted and added a disclaimer: “Huh! Sorta.”

  He inherited some of her other mannerisms, too. He could be very blunt. Early on, five in the morning, pitch dark outside, he was working his way along the udders as I leaned over the pit railing to chat. Our breath steamed and the coffee was barely starting to perk in our veins and Will said, “I detest this shit. How my parents stand it, I couldn’t tell you. This is why I’ll never work on a farm.” He meant it, but he said it without Diz’s scalding bile. “I like clean clothes. I like clean hands. I don’t like getting up this early. I don’t like freezing my ass off. I don’t like animal poop. I don’t even fucking drink milk!”

  Eighty cows, 320 teats twice a day, plus six tons of manure to clean up every day: I could see his point.

  I think the first time I realized just how acclimated I’d become to farm living was the moment I came out of the barn and my heart leaped at the sight of Earnest’s big stake-side truck in the farmyard. I realized I had an affection for that old funky rig. I liked its lines, the pragmatism of its construction, its dents and scrapes and other evidence of the hard miles it had put in—the same charms of the Ford tractor I drove every day.

  I went into the house to find Earnest at the table, telling Brassard and Diz of his misadventures in the comparative tropics. He was sitting with his back to the door, and as I came in I couldn’t resist grabbing his ears from behind and tugging them.

  “I’m glad to see you, too,” he said.

  I joined them for coffee. Earnest related how he’d done a few jobs in Maryland, just north of Washington, DC, then worked his way down through Virginia. He had a moment of trepidation when a North Carolina state cop pulled him over for no reason, came to the window, looked at him, and said “¿Habla inglés?” And Earnest answered, “Sorry, what? I don’t speak any Spanish except ¿Qué pasa?”

  “Jeezum!” Brassard exclaimed. “Could’ve caught yourself some trouble that way! What’d he do?”

  “Asked to see my license and registration. Read my name, laughed at himself. ‘Arnest Kelley—Irish, then, are we?’ he said. With the accent.”

  Brassard laughed aloud and slapped his thigh.

  “Yeah. His name tag said Officer McGillicuddy. Good sense of humor. We got talking. I ended up giving him one of my cards, he said he’d show it around, see if anyone needed tree work.”

  Earnest had a small duffel on the floor beside him, and after a few minutes he rummaged in it and presented gifts he’d brought back from foreign climes: “early Christmas presents.” For Diz he’d bought a big coffee-table photo book, Washington, DC: America’s Historic Heritage, which she began paging through immediately. Brassard’s was a pouch of pipe tobacco that Earnest had bought near the farm that had grown it—sold illegally and famous for its flavor, sort of like a local moonshine.

  Brassard took it, opened it, sniffed it, made a dubious face. “I’ll give it a try, anyway,” he said.

  “Not in the house!” Diz commanded.

  Earnest rummaged in his duffel again, then seemed to change his mind and came up empty-handed. “Got something for Will … something for you, too, Pilgrim. But I’ll get it to you later. Right now I think I’d better take a shower and have a nap. Lot of driving the last few days.”

  He came out to see me a couple of hours later while I was stall bedding. Usually, I’d go through and rake the dirty stuff into the alley and replace it with clean material while the cows were getting milked, but we’d had only two on duty that morning and nobody had seen to it. I was coaxing a cow out of almost every stall to do the job.

  Earnest appeared beside me with another rake, and without saying anything, he encouraged number 17 to back out so he could clean out her stall. She acquiesced and stood by to watch the proceedings with mild curiosity.

  “You again,” I said. My breath steamed in the air.

  “How’s it going with Diz? She let you in the house—that’s a good sign.”

  “We’re totally best buddies. Like sisters now.”

  He made a few more vigorous strokes with his rake. Within seconds, number 17’s stall was empty.

  “We get by,” I amended. “Her back is killing her, so I’ve been filling in for her quite a bit. She has to treat me a little better.”

  His brow furrowed. “Diz? Skipping work? That’s a first.”

  I shrugged and kept pulling out sawdust. Earnest spread number 17’s clean bedding from a pile I’d put at the head end of the stall.

  “So,” he said, “aren’t you dying to see the present I brought you?”

  “Perishing. Actually, I figured you had forgotten to get me anything and were covering up.”

  “No. It’s something I thought you needed, up there in the wilderness.”

  “Twenty-minute walk isn’t wilderness.”

  “In the woods, then.” He dug in the pockets of his jacket and produced a field guide to New England trees and shrubs, the size of a ham sandwich but twice as thick. He presented it to me with a certain ceremoniousness and a somber expression that struck me as incongruous. I had hoped he’d be as happy to see me as I was him.

  “Earnest, that’s very sweet of you!”

  He dipped his head, moved on to the next stall, which was empty; its occupant was out for a meal or drink elsewhere in the shed. I moved on to my next stall and began raking out clots of manure and wet sawdust.

  “I mean,” he explained, “you live among the trees, I figured you’d want to know more about them. They’re like … the walls of your house.”

  “True.”

  “I work with trees every day. Know them intimately. They’re really very interesting when
you get to know them better. Incredibly complex and diverse organisms.”

  I didn’t know why, but the way he told me this felt sort of stiff, artificial—unlike him. Something had changed in the dynamic between us.

  The cow in the next stall along the row was Queenie, the biggest and orneriest of Brassard’s herd. She had an alpha attitude, and facial markings that looked to me like war paint. I had often seen her humping her sisters in the pasture. She didn’t move when I urged her out, just turned her head around to show me her sullen expression. I was reluctant—afraid, actually—to get into a shoving match with her in such close quarters. Even Diz was wary of her.

  “Earnest, what should I do with Queenie?” I asked.

  He came over. He squeezed himself up to her head and spoke to her in a friendly way: “Honey. It’s Earnest. You know what happens when you and I have to get physical. Right? Let’s get your place tidied up.”

  Queenie backed out and went down the aisle to get away from us.

  I marveled but didn’t say anything. Earnest raked out her stall and spread the new bedding. But he stayed quiet, thoughtful in what I felt to be a troubled way. It put me into a similar mood.

  “Ann, I have some stuff to attend to,” he said. “I might be away for another while.”

  “But you just got back!”

  “I know.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Good question,” he said gloomily.

  I leaned on my rake to frown at him. “Seems like you’re avoiding answering me.”

  “It’s personal, complex, and at the moment it’s awkward. Let’s leave it. Want to see what I got Will?”

  “Okay …”

  He grinned, pulled another book out of his pocket, and flashed me its cover: Pretty Good Joke Book, by Garrison Keillor.