My brain clicked through a selection of responses. I frowned at him: “What, Will needs a manual for being funny?”
Bronze-colored people do change color when embarrassed.
“Earnest! Are you being unkind?”
“Of course not! But he is sort of … a reticent guy, isn’t he?” He slipped the book back into his pocket. “You know I love Will. He’s practically like a son to me. I just thought he would, it would … be a fun book for him to have.”
He worked with me until the job was done, then went back to the house as I pushed the used bedding down the alley with the skid-steer. He headed up to Burlington a few days later and we didn’t see him again for almost two months.
In fact, Will did bring that book out to the parlor a couple of times, and he and Lynn and I had a hoot reading jokes to each other at odd moments. It helped break the tedium of those chilly predawn milkings. I put the field guide on my kitchen counter, next to my egg timer and salt and pepper shakers, where it mainly served to remind me of Earnest. It was winter now, and identifying trees would be difficult—no leaves to compare to the lush photos, hard to get to the woods in the snow.
Chapter 24
Until that winter, I’d only ever done the milking with Diz or Franklin, once in a rare while with Earnest, and I found it much more pleasant with an amiable companion such as Lynn or Will. It’s a sort of intimate experience and has its odd charms.
Typical mid-January morning: Alarm goes off at four thirty. I wake up in the dead black, grope my way to the coffeemaker, which I’ve programmed to start brewing ten minutes earlier. Fill up a huge plastic mug emblazoned with the UVM Catamounts mountain lion logo. The cup holds a quart and has a screw-on top with a sippy slot in it so I can take it around the barn with me. Check the thermometer tacked to the porch pillar: eight below.
Then, tights and shirts and pants and coveralls and a big, dirty, checked wool jacket, stocking cap, gloves, boots. It’s usually around forty degrees in the shed this time of year, around fifty in the parlor—tropical compared with outside—but bone chilling after an hour or two.
Stumble out into the dark, which is breathtaking from beauty as well as cold, stars crisp and shivering above. Motion lights blink on over house door and barn. Crunch on brittle snow toward the bare bulb glowing over the milking parlor door. To my left I see a shadowy figure bumbling in the same direction and it’s another human being with similar clothes and a cup that’s identical to mine except that it’s got the Boston Red Sox logo on it. That’s Will.
Inside, on with the lights, rows of bovine faces turn toward us. Pause, swig scalding coffee, blow out steam, knowing the other is feeling the same inertia and trying to muster the resolve needed. The cold and dark wrap around you, you’re the only two people in the universe, it’s muffled quiet except for the shifting of the cows. Then to work: move em toward the parlor, get em in position, commence the ritual.
One morning, Will was particularly fuzzy, and he started talking about his family. I got a picture of him as a freckle-cheeked all-American boy, jeans and a white T-shirt, running wild in the hills and fields when chores didn’t require him, shooting BB guns with his friends, swimming in the pools along the creek. But by the time he was fourteen, he decided he had no use for the “agricultural lifestyle.” He’d always preferred technology, won science fair prizes, ended up getting into video production.
Picturing their household, Will and his now-estranged half sister, Jane, and Diz and Jim, I asked him when Earnest had come into the picture.
“Earnest?” He looked at me over the back end of a cow. “I figured you’d have heard all this. Thought you two were good friends.”
“Well, Earnest is … a man of mystery. Your father is a man of few words, and your mother is … isn’t often forthcoming,” I said.
He laughed.
Will told me the basics in an offhand monologue with lots of ellipses as memories emerged or milking activities distracted him.
After the two men returned from Vietnam, Earnest moved to Vermont and worked on the farm. Where he met and after a couple of years married Brassard’s sister, Charlotte.
“This was before I was born, so all I know is what Dad or Earnest have told me in bits and pieces. From what I’ve heard, sounds like they were seriously in love, I mean back-on-Broadway big-time. It made Dad happy. Earnest moved in, worked on the farm, Char worked at the bank in town. Dad was glad his sister had landed ‘an honorable man.’”
I was stunned. Why hadn’t Earnest told me this when I asked him about his history with Brassard, his presence at the farm? Was there any truth in the scandalous tale about the Saigon brothel?
“Yeah, she was quite a live wire, supposedly. Earnest made a ‘decent woman’ out of her. Which I’m guessing there had been some doubt about previously. There’s pictures of her up at the house. The gal leaning against the tractor, with the cheesecake pose?”
I tried to get my mind around this as I moved on—sixteen iodine dips, sixteen squirts, sixteen wipe-downs, get the claws starting their twitchy pumping, then attend to the second row of preposterously swollen mammary bags.
When he came back with the next group, Will told me more: “He and Dad were both totally screwed up when she died. It was a huge thing for them. Driving back from Rutland. Icy road, snowy night. Went off into a ditch, ruptured spleen or something. Didn’t find her until morning.” Will paused to check my reaction, which was speechlessness. Of course Earnest hadn’t said anything about it when I probed him: This wasn’t something to talk about with a virtual stranger who casually inquired.
“Hasn’t he … ever remarried? Girlfriends?”
“Earnest? He’s had girlfriends. A couple of them really set their caps for him. That’s where he’s been the last few weeks—up in Burlington. Dad says one of them has persuaded him to give it another try. Earnest is dubious, but he’s a soft touch and doesn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. Also, he’s not getting any younger, probably worth trying another heave-ho.”
I felt a sense of loss, thinking of Earnest taking up residence elsewhere—everyone seemed happier when he was around, myself included, and winter was getting very long in his absence. Again, I felt irrationally betrayed that he hadn’t told me about this part of his life. And again, I realized it wasn’t particularly any of my business.
Will released the four cows that were finished, moved in the next four, both of us quiet. We went through another cycle of eight cows before he continued.
“Yeah, that was a bad period,” Will said, returning to the time of Charlotte’s death. “A couple of bad years. I’m glad I missed out on it. Mom told me the really tough stuff.”
I didn’t say anything.
“So, you’ve noticed there’s no booze here at the house?” he asked.
I hadn’t, but apparently no alcohol came onto the property, because after Charlotte died both men drank hard and the farm went to hell. A couple of cows died from lack of timely vet care. Earnest smacked up his car. One time he drank himself to unconsciousness lying on the woodshed floor and almost froze to death. Brassard and Diz had been seeing each other, and when things went to hell she moved to the farm and took charge. She’d had her own serious problems with booze—my first impression was right about that—and knew the ropes when it came to getting sober. She was the one who pulled them out of it. According to legend, Will said, she literally, physically, fought with Earnest to get the bottle out of his mouth.
“This was no twelve-step program,” Will said, chuckling. “It was a one-step program, done Mom’s way.”
Diz had carved her place on the farm with a hatchet, from day one.
While Will was moving in the next group, one of the cows let go with a rush that almost got him point-blank. He danced away with nothing worse than brown splashes on his legs. “Witch!” he scolded the cow. To me he complained, “Is there any other animal tha
t’s so oblivious to its own defecation? You have to wonder if they even know it’s happening back there. Christ Almighty.”
He hated farm life, but paradoxically most of his video projects were about agricultural subjects, because with his background, those were the jobs he’d gotten early on and now it was his portfolio’s greatest strength. So when he wasn’t in production meetings or the editing room, he was often on farms anyway, filming. He’d done educational videos about brucellosis for a major interstate dairy organization, another for the Department of Agriculture about environmental regulations that require farmers to keep field and pasture runoff out of streams. His current project was an ambitious one, funded by the USDA, on “modern dairy practices.”
“So,” I said, “are you going to do any filming here? I’ve always wanted to be in the movies!”
He laughed. “This place? If it was in the film, it’d be as an example of out-of-date technology and practices. Nowadays it’s all indoors, they never set foot outside. Free-roaming in the shed with on-demand robot milking when the cow wants it, automatic latch-on, computer monitoring of each one’s daily output and milk fat content. Hormones to stimulate lactation.” He gazed along the row of bovine back ridges, then tipped his head. “But to give my folks credit, the hygiene is pretty good, given the limitations of the equipment. That’s mainly my mother’s doing. Runs a tight ship. Gotta keep things neat, ‘respectable.’ Work herself into an early grave.”
For a while, we kept on in silence, and it occurred to me that we’d spent many hours doing chores together over the past few weeks, but I couldn’t think of one personal topic, aside from his job, that he’d revealed.
So I asked him. “So, are you married?”
He blew out air between his teeth. “Right now I don’t exactly have a wife, but I do exactly have a divorce. I also do exactly have a daughter, along with custody issues.”
“I’m sorry. That must be tough.”
“Actually, the divorce—it’s not much fun, about like getting a root canal, but it’s long overdue. The hardest part is my daughter.”
“How old?”
“Six. Temporary arrangement is, I can see her several times a week. Problem is, with my work, I’m gone so often. Messes up the schedule.”
I expected him to reciprocate with comparable questions, but he was, as Earnest had said, “reticent.”
Both bored with our roles, we switched positions, Will going into the pit as I managed cow flow. It was quiet again but for the dull thump of hooves, the huff of the great bellows of their lungs. Bright yellow ear tags gave each cow a numerical identity, but, like Queenie, some stood out as individuals and had acquired names. The next group included a skittish cow named Twiggy, who was sometimes reluctant to enter the parlor and whose restlessness could infect the others. I was firmer with her, sweet-talking but also prodding with hips, elbows, or a two-handed shove here or there to keep her moving.
Will observed my management technique and said, “You’re getting good at this!” And I felt quite flattered.
That morning, when we’d finished and had cleaned up the parlor, he swatted my many-layered shoulder in a comradely way as we headed back toward our respective quarters, a casual affirmation: Good on us, huh, one more damn milking out of the way.
I can tell you about this now only because I have the security of retrospect and have forgiven myself for my pitiful state at the time. That night, after Will clapped me on the shoulder, I remembered that casual, unconscious touch for hours. My response was another demonstration of the drift of my heart and body. Back at Larson Middle School, before my apocalypse, my colleagues and I had routinely shared that kind of touch, men and women alike, an affirmation that we were fellow soldiers fighting on behalf of a good cause. But when Will tagged my shoulder, he brought back full force the longing that had been growing in me.
I knew, or should have known, where I stood on this stuff, and it should not have caused any particular disturbance: I was and am heterosexual, and I had pretty well justified Cinderella by acknowledging that I was and am sentimental, full of romantic longings. I also knew that I was instinctively or fundamentally monogamous, always, even when it wasn’t fashionable. One at a time is all I can manage.
And when it’s with someone I like a lot, someone who intrigues or attracts the whole of me, I love sex. My liberal humanistic parents, coming of age in the sixties, raised me to accept and celebrate my body, my sexuality, to forgo the puritanical shame paradigm. They liked my high school boyfriends and allowed us time alone at the house. I may be ashamed of other things, but my body and its yearnings have never been among them.
So, sex: That night, my response showed me that I had a backlog of figuring out to do. I wondered whether it was a factor of my age—when I was younger, I sometimes went a year or two without a boyfriend. Was it so difficult? Actually, that night I couldn’t remember. And I knew it didn’t matter anyway. That was the moment I was living, and now is always now.
Cat was not as monogamously inclined as I was. She did get into the recreational aspect of sex more than I did, but she agreed with me that it wasn’t just about arousal and the mating dance, so much of which is pretense anyway and, eventually, rather too predictable. It wasn’t just about fucking. No: There’s the whole swirl of physical contact, the mammal need for touch, for rubbing up against a warm, receptive fellow creature. I remember how my father and Erik and I used to wrestle on the living room floor, how Pop would grab my mother’s ankle and pull her into the tangle and we’d squirm and tickle and throttle each other and laugh and finally just lie there in a heap, flushed, momentarily exhausted.
My father called it “the mammal pile”—it’s just what mammals do, he said, and thank the gods. Erik would chirp, “Mammals are the best!”—a proud chauvinist of the class of fur-bearers and milk-givers.
That night after milking, the absence of it ached. It just ached. We hug our parents and friends, we hold and stroke our children, we even comfort hurting strangers with the assurance of body-to-body contact. Feeling another person’s heartbeat, just opposite your own heart, says You aren’t alone. I hadn’t felt a moment of such contact since Cat’s visit and the hugs we’d exchanged.
But if you’re attracted to someone and feel the tug, and you enter the orbit, that swirl spins gently and then inevitably and then urgently around sex, the most intimate and surrendered of physical contacts. When the inward spiral has been graceful, unforced, and without pretense, conjoining in sex is its fulfillment, and it’s wonderful.
That night I tried to persuade myself that all I really yearned for was the deep assurance of the mammal pile. But I knew I ached for the whole deal. And there was nothing I could do about it.
Chapter 25
Feb. 27
Earnest returned today as I headed into my apartment to make lunch. I was startled to see him after so long. He waved to me as he went up the steps into the house, I waved back.
I have to confess I’ve been wondering about his romantic life—perhaps because there’s so little to occupy my poor brain. Winter gets wearying out here in the sticks. I guess I’d never thought of it, being a child of the city. We’re a long way from any kind of diversion, no movie theaters within thirty miles, no restaurants—and no money to treat oneself to a fancy meal. No malls to stroll, no urban bustle outside the windows, no choice of twenty radio stations—no radio at all, because the reception here between the hills is at best intermittent and full of static. I tend to avoid driving, because the roads are often tricky and my snow tires aren’t great. There’s farmwork; books from the Montpelier library; still somewhat strained dealings with Diz, who’s extra crabby because of her back pain and, I suspect, a secret shame that she’s not “pulling her weight.” Brassard himself is hardly what one would call a big socializer.
A few pleasant visits with Will, yes, and some fun conversations with Lynn. A week ago I had dinner
with her and Theo at their place, a warm and fun evening in their cozy house, a glass of wine. Theo’s younger sister Robin was visiting, a sweet, forthright young woman full of tales of college life. That event has lingered in recent memory like a sunny island in a gray sea. Spring is theoretically approaching but is hardly around the proverbial corner. I am desperately looking forward to a release from the clench of cold and the winter routine.
So I was pleased when, after about an hour inside, Earnest came out to see me in my chicken coop abode. He came in, took off his snow-covered boots, gave me a quick bear hug, and agreed readily when I offered to make some tea. When I asked him how he’d been, he tilted his hand side to side, his face saying maybe less than so-so. In fact, I thought he looked a little careworn. As I filled the teakettle, he sat at the counter, fiddling distractedly with the egg timer.
“Rumor has it you’ve been fanning an old flame up in Burlington,” I said.
“‘Flame’ is a little strong. She and I lived together for a few years, then broke it off. But we kept in touch. A good person. We got talking a bit when I was down south this fall. You know.”
I found mugs and my honey bear and a couple of spoons, then presented him with a few boxes of my tea stash. “Peppermint, black, jasmine, hibiscus—name your poison.”
“Black.”
I decided to be bold: “How’s it been going?”
He grinned—a little sadly, I thought. “Kind of like this.” He held up the egg timer, the round, retro-styled, hand-winding type.
He gave the knob a halfhearted little twist and set it ticking on the counter. For several seconds I looked at it, at him, puzzled, and then it went “Ding!”
Then I understood: It was done, very short but not unexpectedly so. I wanted to ask more: What didn’t work? How did you decide that it had ended? How are you doing with it? Part of me wanted to assure him that she wasn’t good enough for him anyway—absurd since I knew nothing about her, not even her name.