Instead, I nodded and said nothing. He seemed grateful for my restraint. He commented on the field guide he’d given me and seemed glad to see that I’d kept it close at hand. Then we talked about other things, more easily now, for another fifteen minutes, until I had to get back to chores.
Chapter 26
When spring came, I moved back up the hill at the earliest opportunity—which meant I took the tractor up with my stuff as soon as the soil dried out. I raked leaves and twigs off my platform and out of the fire pit, reconnoitered, set up the tent. One of my first acts was to double the number of no trespassing signs all along my uphill border, facing the Goslants, and around the western property line—yellow plastic-paper signs stapled to virtually every tree.
By the time my first anniversary on Brassard’s farm came around, I had fallen in love with my land and had in some inexplicable way invested myself in the farm and its well-being. I’d learned a little about the woods, a middling amount about myself, and a lot about hard work. I still counted the days until the end of my servitude, one more year, but not so often anymore.
For the Brassards, it had been a difficult year, and the coming year promised to be harder. Jim’s joints just got worse, and the pain really began to slow him down. When I first came, he had occasionally smoked a pipe, outside, but by late spring he no longer did, because his big-knuckled thumbs got so arthritic that the delicate movements of tamping and lighting became more trouble than they were worth. My heart broke when I watched him fumble at the attempt and then, for the first time, give it up. He dropped the book of matches in the slush of the barnyard and didn’t bother to pick it up. Bob, who tended to tag after Brassard, looked up at him with a concerned, puzzled expression.
As I write this, I realize I am stalling. I don’t want to write the next part.
Over the winter, Diz’s back pain had refused to get better. When she finally went in for an MRI, they found that the pain was caused by a tumor at the base of her spine. There was a very confusing month of tests and trying to figure out how to run the farm without Diz and often without Jim, who drove her to and from the various medical appointments. The tumor was too close to the spinal cord to remove surgically. She did chemo, but the cancer went into her organs anyway.
One day she came home from the hospital, gray and grim-faced, and told me, “My Tokuhashi is four.”
“What’s a Tokuhashi?” I asked.
“It’s a Japanese guy. A doctor. It’s also a measure of your life expectancy.”
“So is four good?”
“‘Good’ compared to what? It’s good compared to two. Bad compared to five. Means I’ll be dead in less than four months.”
Actually, it was about three months. She was often away from the farm, down at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. They sent her home to die, though, with palliative care administered by dear, dear people from the Home Health and Hospice organization. I wasn’t in the room when she died, but Jim and Earnest were. Will had made a grocery run into town and so missed the moment of passing.
Her death put the farm seriously at risk. It may strike you as insensitive to talk about the farm’s health in the same breath as the death of a person, but it’s not. The farm was part of Diz; she was part of it. It was the only thing she owned and one of the few places she’d ever lived—she had devoted her life to it and staked her pride on it. An intelligent woman, she was a fierce advocate of “the small farm life,” which she knew to be a dying tradition. A dying part of American identity. One reason she was so tough and worked so hard is that she was by God not going to relinquish her little corner of it without a fight. Coming in her own desperation to Brassard’s farm, back when she married Jim, had been her last stand, and we who did not die could not take that lightly.
That all sounds like bullshit, but it’s not. One of the last conversations I had with her reveals it unequivocally.
The hospice people had moved a rented hospital bed into the former parlor of the house, downstairs, so it was easier to tend to her needs and get food to her. A big, chrome-tubed thing with motors that raised and lowered it and tilted the head end forward, and so on. It sat in a circle of oxygen tanks and catheters and bags of urine and a wheelchair and a wide range of paraphernalia on little tables brought from other parts of the house.
I was sitting with her as Jim and Earnest were taking a break from tending to her and getting some chores done; Will was upstairs taking a nap, recovering from night duty with her. At Diz’s insistence, I was reading local news to her from the Valley Reporter. It’s basically an advertising weekly, but it’s also full of local sports team scores, marriages, births, little news items about farming or business.
She always had me read the obituaries. John somebody, aged eighty-two. Mary somebody, forty-seven, survived by so-and-so. Mrs. Helen something, of natural causes. When I read that last, Diz burst out in a harsh cackle that startled me.
“Ha! That old witch! I prayed to God I’d outlive her and dance on her damn grave. Aah-haha! And I did! Goddamn it, I did it!” Her voice was grindingly hoarse by then but full of vengeful glee.
Mrs. Helen Crutchfield, sixty-three, died of natural causes in her home, surrounded by her loved ones. Diz had outlived her—it wouldn’t be for long, true, but the fact gave her enormous pleasure. Diz’s obit would be almost verbatim the same.
“Why’d you hate her?”
She puckered her lips, then grinned contemptuously. “Not worth talking about. Nothing that woman did in her life was worth wasting your breath on. But I can tell you I’ve waited a long time for this moment. A lo-o-o-ong time.”
Her satisfaction was absolute. A glint of the old Diz gleamed in her eyes—sardonic, irreverent, implacable, cruelly amused by life. Seeing it for the first time in many months, I realized how I’d missed that furious light.
I paused, not sure I should go on reading or let her indulge the moment longer. Suddenly her hand shot out and grasped my wrist. She jerked me toward her with a startling strength.
“Now, you listen to me. I’m dead. I’m outta here. Sayonara. That means you are going to have to take care of these men. You get that? They saved your pathetic little life, how many times, how many ways, and you owe them. You are going to have to step up and pay your dues and take care of these men.”
The effort exhausted her and she let go of me and fell back on the bed, but her eyes stayed blazing on mine. She looked like a kamikaze mother wolf or mountain lion in defense of her litter. I had never before experienced such absolute ferocity in a human being. I felt seared, scalded inside. The bruises on my wrist lasted days.
Her eyes stayed, pinning me, beaming a savage fire at me, and bit it off again: “You take care of those good men.”
“Oh, Diz,” I said. “Of course I will. Of course I will.” My voice shook and my eyes brimmed, every indication of the weakness she despised in me, but she just continued looking at me. For once, I saw no judgment or contempt.
A few days later, she was dead. I worked the farm chores hard, cooked eggs and bacon for the men, kept the house in order. Brassard was stunned, shell-shocked. He drifted looming through the house, over to his desk to shuffle papers, then realizing he couldn’t see without his reading glasses and then discovering he couldn’t find his glasses and then remembering that Diz wasn’t there to help find them as she always did.
Will and Earnest made all the arrangements. Of which there weren’t many. They bought a coffin and a plot in a cemetery near Tunbridge, where other Brassards had been buried. Jim had a stone made but didn’t hold a church service, because Diz didn’t believe in God or religion and would have disemboweled anyone who suggested doing such a thing. Toward the end, only half-jokingly, she told Jim that she wanted him to put her through the chipper—the farm keeps a big one that’s driven by the tractors’ PTO—and mix the chunks into the compost. Brassard said he wanted a place to visit her, and insisted o
n a real plot with a real gravestone.
We had a gathering of remembrance at the house. The group included Lynn and Theo and Theo’s younger sister Robin, a couple of the hospice people who had acquired a very moving affection for Diz, Jim’s sister Elizabeth, and some other Brassard relatives. Several farming neighbors from down the road came, but no “trash” Goslants from up the hill. I didn’t know any of these people and wasn’t sure how they were connected, but I noticed that none of them introduced themselves as relatives of Diz. Her long-estranged stepdaughter Jane didn’t show. There was one sixtysomething guy in a dark green jacket, who skulked uncomfortably on the periphery of the room trailing the reek of stale tobacco smoke. He struck me as the lounge-lizard type, and when I asked Earnest about him, I learned he was “one of Diz’s prior husbands.”
I grilled chicken outside and prepared trays of other edibles. Mostly people talked about cows, crops, weather, dairy policy, tractors, and other relatives or neighbors who had died. At one point, Will came to help me in the kitchen, where he stood at the counter trying to remember what he was supposed to do, which can to open or cheese to slice, looking so lost that I took his hand. Didn’t say anything. Didn’t look at each other. He just held my hand with a firm, grateful grip: two lonesome hands there on the Masonite counter.
After a time, I let go because it was time to ferry some bread and cheese slices back to the living room.
Numb, adrift, Brassard gave a short eulogy: “She was my wife. I loved her and I don’t know how I’m gonna get along without her. She was my companion and I loved her. I was always very proud of her. Lot of people don’t know it, but back fifteen years ago she had the gumption to go out and get a certificate in cosmetology. Worked for two years at it between milkins, can you believe it, at the beauty place over to Randolph, and you never heard that woman complain, not once. I was proud of her. Always proud to call her my wife.”
He seemed to have more to say but couldn’t put his finger on just what. Will took him by the elbow, led him to a chair, said some words from a grieving son’s perspective.
We caravanned to the cemetery, a typical Vermont graveyard on a gentle slope with a few big maples in the lawn, shelves of bedrock rearing out of the ground here and there, gravestones with dates ranging from the 1700s to the present.
The cemetery people had dug the hole. The funeral home delivered the coffin and settled it into the straps, where it hovered for a while at the top of the grave as we said our farewells. Will, wry sorrow on his lips, knocked affectionately on the lid as it began to descend. We threw in flowers and then handfuls of dirt. We left before the backhoe came up to start filling it in, but not before I spotted her gravestone, waiting to get set up. It was a simple rectangle carved out of good Vermont gray granite, polished on the front, rough on the other side.
All this time, I hadn’t cried for Diz, had been too preoccupied living up to my promise to her. But I burst into tears when I read the inscription on her stone and abruptly a window opened on this hard-fought life:
In Memory of
Our Beloved Wife and Mother
Maureen Goslant Brassard
“Diz”
Chapter 27
I had stepped into Diz’s functional role even before her death, so the workday didn’t change much for me except for the period right after her funeral, when it fell upon me to help deal with her things. Elizabeth, Brassard’s widowed sister from Rutland, came to help with this—somehow, as throughout history, certain details of death being left to the women. I doubt Brassard wanted Diz erased so quickly from the house, but Elizabeth, four years his senior and considering herself an old hand at spouse death, said it was the best way to do things, and he assented.
We sorted Diz’s wardrobe, a typical bunch of underthings, pants, shirts, and a very small collection of dresses. Mainly, she owned work clothes. Her cosmetics were similarly limited: She had long since abandoned lipstick, rouge, eye shadow. Jewelry: She did have pierced ears, and small earrings appeared to be her only indulgence. There were probably two dozen pairs, inexpensive things, practical and nothing pendulous, because, she’d told me once, they’d catch on things in the course of a day’s work “and rip your damn earlobe off.” Her wedding ring had stayed on her finger, into the grave.
Diz had kept a shelf of books and periodicals about gardening, including, surprisingly, a few issues of a magazine about orchids. Another shelf held cookbooks and some large volumes of photographs—“coffee table books”: The Wonders of Paris, The Mysteries of Egypt, The Amazon Rain Forest, Historic Savannah, and Earnest’s Washington, DC: America’s Historic Heritage. I wondered whether he had given her all these, and whether they signified an inner yearning for those faraway places, some hint of a life’s unfulfilled longings.
I dwell on these artifacts because in total they were shockingly few. Her collection of personal things was hardly bigger than my own, up on the hill. To me it said that she had been so fully subsumed by the apparatus of life on the farm that there really wasn’t time or mental energy left over for a personal life.
This terrified me. Whatever personal transformational trajectory I’d envisioned, it did not include becoming merely a part in a machine, even a machine as worthy as a farm and an inadvertently adopted family. Making Brassard’s farm functional had cost her everything. Even my heartfelt vow to take care of the men did not encompass that level of sacrifice. It would not.
The farm-related details of that spring and early summer are vague in my memory because it was all so centered on Diz’s dying, and so devoted to work, and the work was so repetitious, that days blurred together. Theo’s younger sister Robin graduated from UVM and moved in with them, and we hired her on a regular basis for the afternoon milking rituals. Earnest was there more often, Will came and went but worked hard when he was there. Brassard mainly did tractoring and truck-driving chores and the business side of things, whatever didn’t put stress on his joints. Nobody tended to Diz’s vegetable garden, so weeds moved in, the lettuce and asparagus bolted early; later, some pest got into the tomatoes so they puckered and paled. The lawn often went unmowed; I forgot to water the flower boxes at the windows and they browned and died. The place wasn’t as “respectable” as it used to be, and Earnest said he could hear Diz spinning in her grave.
But cows got milked. Milk pipes and tanks got sterilized. Calves got born, fed, weaned. Corn and hay got put in. Tractors and their attachments got fixed. The Agri-Mark tanker came and went. By unspoken mutual consent, I stopped counting my hours; Brassard knew I was more than repaying him for the land, and I knew I would quit when the payoff time rolled around, late next winter.
But my life had divided into two distinct halves, and if the farmwork got blurry, my life on the hill was distinct and keen. Some nights I was just too tired to hike up, but mostly I made it to the tent in time to enjoy the late sunlight and lush evenings. Also, Brassard knew burnout all too well, and he insisted I take at least one day a week off, two if possible. He quoted some maxim from one of his books on modern management techniques, how having a tired and disgruntled staff cuts productivity.
Eavesdropping from nearby, Earnest nodded sagely. “And is bad for retention,” he added. A joke for my benefit: As if I didn’t already want to quit! Brassard had no laughter in him.
And as far as disgruntlement went, I was simply too busy to be disgruntled.
Life on my hill was easier now, in part because I was hardier and in part because, by increments, I was making my camp more civilized. The most important improvement was figuring out how to get running water into my kitchen sink. I couldn’t dam my spring, but I did manage to trick it into delivering some of its flow to the campsite. I cut the bottom off a plastic one-gallon milk jug to make an oversize funnel, staked it in the streambed, then attached almost four hundred feet of garden hose that gravity-fed water to my kitchen. The stream didn’t seem to mind this borrowing of water as long
as I didn’t try to stop or slow the main flow.
It was hardly a Roman aqueduct, but I was proud of my ingenuity. And, turning on the faucet for the first time, watching the water spill from the sink drain and soak into the soil beneath, I experienced a lovely epiphany. It’s just common sense, but then, the deepest insights usually are: The spring’s waters, separated briefly by my hose, would reunite downhill. Eventually they’d merge with all the other waters from these mountains, in Lake Champlain, I suppose, or maybe the ocean. Things separated connect again.
Having running water on demand, in my outdoor kitchen, seemed almost embarrassingly high-tech.
If you are not already familiar with the woods in summer, I will not be able to convey to you how alive they are. Everything moves. The trees sway and billow, shift and shimmer, bees hover and zip as they tend the tiny forest flowers, birds flit and glide and racket in the treetops. Gnats float in clouds above sun-warmed spots, tiny caterpillars swing from invisible threads. A porcupine trundles into the clearing, oblivious, then notices the human presence, hesitates in a befuddled way, and ambles off. Red squirrels scold the human interloper with a machine-gun chattering trill and barking squeaks. The weather seems alive, too, as cloud shadows drift through the woods, and the forest light goes from shy to bold to shy again. When the sun is bright, tossing leaf shadows turn the forest floor into a freckling surface that moves like wavelets on a small pond.
Even on the most windless of days, seemingly dead still, you’ll see one single paradoxical leaf waving back and forth, elastic on its stem and caught just so in an imperceptible movement of air.
Most people have hiked in the woods, have cut firewood, gone hunting, taken dogs for walks, but I think too few have spent the purposeless time that allows the forest to reveal its own innumerable purposes. On my days off, I luxuriated in simply being still, observing. My silence and immobility encouraged the woods to resume their normal activity.