“So, how’s your day going?” he ventured cautiously.
“There’s a stupid, shitting, stupid thing about to happen, and it’s making me sick. I’m embarrassed that you or Lynn or Brassard have to witness it.”
Startled, he dropped a socket wrench. “I can hardly wait,” he said.
I retrieved the wrench and met him halfway up the ladder to hand it to him.
Back on the stanchion, I told him the situation: fucking Cat, conceiving of this fucking crude subterfuge to bring some Romeo all the way from fucking Boston.
Earnest, balanced easily half on the ladder and half on a horizontal beam, drove in a screw with his impact driver, bra-a-a-a-a-a-t, drove another, setting the brackets I’d brought him. He examined the result, experimentally spun the big blades by hand, lifted and dropped the louvers. A few more rattles and clanks, another bra-a-a-a-a-a-t, and he climbed down. He came over to me, wiping his hands on the bib of his overalls. Back on earth, standing in front of me wearing his tool belt laden with drill driver, wrenches, pliers, coils of electrical wire, he was a broad and firmly planted presence.
“You guys ever done this before? I mean, set things up—”
“Yeah. In fucking seventh grade.”
He nodded thoughtfully, then leaned back against the ladder. If I had expected some pearl of wisdom, I was mistaken. “You know,” he said, “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say ‘fucking’ so often in such a short period of time.”
I was able to smile slightly.
But then he went on to say that maybe I should give Cat the benefit of the doubt, maybe there was something here. I couldn’t tell whether he meant it or was baiting me, being ironic, but if it was a joke his timing was bad. When I interrupted to tell him to fuck off, he just made a check mark in the air, still counting each “fuck” and “fucking.”
I remembered the groceries sitting in the truck. We left the shed and carried things inside and put them away. Earnest made a sandwich for himself. I tried to drink a cup of coffee, but it struck me as bitter and I put it aside. My stomach was full of bile.
The September sun slanted through the windows and cast a band of brightness across the dining room table. Earnest was clearly upset by my distress. “We could turn the tables on Cat,” he suggested. “Call Lynn, go get Jim, four of us stand in a row, scowling, arms crossed. Make him run the gauntlet of our disapproval. Intimidate this little bastard—who must have a lot of brass himself if he’s letting Cat do him the same way she’s doing you.”
“He may not know the whole plan. Probably doesn’t. Long way to drive for a blind date.”
He nodded, chewed thoughtfully. I checked my watch.
We improvised schemes to discourage Cat and this guy and after a while got pretty absurd, which helped considerably. Earnest suggested that if Brassard parked the manure spreader in the driveway and had it accidentally start spraying, that would put a crimp in the guy’s style. We laughed and my hackles went down a few degrees.
Another weak brainstorm struck me: “Earnest. Could you be my boyfriend for, like, ten minutes?”
He tipped his head, puzzled, biting his upper lip as if waiting for the punchline.
“I mean, when they come, you and I go out there holding hands or otherwise being, you know, ‘demonstrative’ in a way that says—”
The humor left this face, and he said, “That would require quite a stretch of their imaginations, Pilgrim—a guy almost twenty years older? Just meet this twit, pretend you never heard Cat’s pitch. My two cents, there’s absolutely no reason for you to bullshit anybody, no reason to play any game at all. Just tell them to go to hell if that’s how you feel.”
That last cheered me. Of course he was right. We sat for a bit, then went out to do some raking and cleaning up of the porch and lawns, waiting for Jim to get back and the bull and my unwelcome guests to arrive. Making it look good in honor of Diz. I pictured her doing this chore, brusque and ruthless, keeping things in shipshape, and missed her. She would have had some advice to stiffen my spine! Or she would have given Cat and her little gigolo a glimpse of her hard side, and they’d be gone in minutes.
We worked silently, thoughtfully, under Bob the dog’s amiable supervision. Earnest seemed to have run out of ways to lighten the mood. The afternoon milking was still a couple of hours away.
I can’t really describe what I felt for that last half hour. Initially, all I’d felt was outrage at Cat, resentment, disappointment in her. You don’t do this kind of thing. Even if, especially if, you know someone is lonely and living so far off the beaten path. I questioned the state of our relationship: Maybe we were moving beyond each other; maybe this friendship had run its course. But another voice told me this was so off the charts that I should consider the remote possibility that Cat was onto something. Hadn’t I learned that love comes at you from strange angles? Wasn’t this better than internet dating?
Strangely, to my own irritation, I did in fact feel an uptick of excitement. A premonition of something imminent—a revving of the engine of curiosity, anyway. It grew as the hour passed, and it was not entirely unfamiliar: I realized I had vaguely felt something like this for months, a growing awareness of some change approaching. It starts with the faintest tickle at the back of your mind, the base of your brain, then swells into a microscopic electric thrill or tension in your chest and shoulders. I have to believe that future events send signals backward in time to us, and we can sometimes feel them coming with some sixth or seventh sense for which we have no name.
But of course I didn’t know what form it would take. And thinking about romantic love just then, I also felt a twist or turn, a knot of confusion that I probed and couldn’t recognize. Something about the whole equation had changed; an integer had shifted in the calculus of love, needing, loneliness, desire. I was truly more on my feet, more balanced despite my sometimes intolerable longing. There was certainly a lonely hollow place in the center of my being, but its shape had changed. If I had arrived at my land and the farm as a box of disconnected Lego pieces, now it seemed that a few of them had connected, locked together here and there amid the jumble.
I decided I’d be reasonably gracious, but businesslike. I was in the middle of my working day. Brassard’s friend Jack Pelletier would be delivering a bull tomorrow, a rare event, and we needed to isolate the six cows and heifers that the bull would tend to, and to set out feed and water for the visitor. And I had milking and cleanup to do, and I did have to join—I liked joining—the ritual of cooking dinner with the men. Cat and this guy would have to entertain themselves however they could while I did what needed doing.
My eyes were drawn to a flash of reflected sunlight as a car crested the hill, and instinctively I knew it was them. I groaned and wished this whole thing were over with and I could just have a normal evening: finish the day’s work, then climb gratefully up the hill to my own land and my tent. The veeries hadn’t yet left, and I wanted nothing more than to listen to their down-spiraling whirly-whirly-whirly-whirly calling all to tranquility as I stared into my campfire, absorbing the surcease that only being alone and sufficient in the evening woods can provide. I wondered whether Cat thought they were going to spend the night and where they expected to spend it.
Cat’s beat-up BMW trundled down the road with a white van trailing some distance behind it. Cat put on her blinker, turned into the driveway, and to my surprise the white van followed and pulled up beside it. My puzzlement grew as I approached the BMW and couldn’t see anyone in the passenger seat. Then Cat exploded out of her door and practically leaped over her own hood, smiling hugely, crazily. I had planned to give her a dead-eye gaze, but things were moving too fast and too strangely.
“This is so fun!” she said. “This is TOO good! God help me, I’m gonna have a heart attack!” She turned back to the van and yelled “Get the hell out here, for Chrissakes! She won’t bite!”
The van’s parking
brake ratcheted, the silhouette of the driver moved inside. The driver’s door opened, and then around the front of the van stepped a guy with buzz-cut brown hair and that kind of facial stubble that looks so careless but that I always figure must take a lot of effort to maintain. He walked reluctantly, his face paradoxical with mixed emotions—a man guarded yet undone, unprotected.
My heart did a flip, literally seemed to tumble upside down. Yes, it was destiny and it was love at first sight, overwhelming. Earnest came up beside me and I fell against him slightly.
Then I was in my brother’s arms, holding him. Locking Erik against me, swearing I’d never ever ever let him go. “You little shit bastard bastard bastard!” I said. Cat burst into tears, and it ignited Erik and me. We cried and rocked as poor Earnest stood there looking baffled.
Chapter 33
We went in and had coffee and all talked stiffly and safely for a bit. Then Cat and Earnest sort of went away on some pretext, and in the absence of observers, Erik and I eyed each other cautiously. He was shorter than I remembered, leaner in the face, slim but clearly fit—in the warmth of the house, he rolled his shirtsleeves off his forearms and they were sinewy and branched with veins. Tattoos—a line of Chinese characters, bruise blue—ran up one arm.
That moment of silence and observation was the default response for both of us, in itself a family resemblance. We didn’t try to fill the gap with inanities. His eyes moved over me, up and down, and then he looked around at the kitchen and the view out the windows as if they were part of me. His eyes, his mind, just as I remembered, seemed quicker than mine.
“You look … terrific. I mean, I always knew you were pretty, but I didn’t realize …” He gestured at the whole of me. “I mean, beautiful.”
I was wearing a shapeless oversize Carhartt canvas jacket, jeans, and mucking-out boots, and I’d tied my hair back severely to keep it out of my face.
“Where were you?”
“I went to some strange places. I’ll tell you all about it, but not right now, okay? I gotta just … try to catch my breath.”
I was surfing alternating waves of joy and resentment. “Did you know you were hurting me?”
“I don’t know about that, but I thought about you an awful lot.”
Silence. I wanted to cry again. I had so much to tell, so much to ask, that it all dammed up and jammed up. I managed: “You here for a while?”
“As long as I’m welcome.”
“I ask because we’ve got a bull coming tomorrow and there’s still prep to do for that. And then I’ve got cows to milk. And other stuff that can’t wait. You’ll have to come help out or sit here with Cat or something. That is, if you’re not leaving in the next ten minutes.” I was trying to be hurtful.
He dipped his chin. “Sure. But I have a question for you. Personal question.”
“What’s that?”
“Are you happy here?”
I actually thought about it for a few seconds. “Sometimes.”
“So … How many options, life options, do you have right now?”
“What? Oh, Christ! I know what Cat thinks about—”
“No, I mean it. Nothing to do with Cat. I really want to know. Me.”
I thought of a lot of things to say, mostly ways to defend myself or say it was only temporary or turn it around in a way that would punish him. But I said, “What you see amounts to the sum total. For a variety of reasons.”
“I ask because I’m pretty low on options myself. Lots of … reasons at my end, too.”
I was moved. He was approaching intimacy by telling me we had to take each other’s existential temperature first, no beating around the bush. I remembered now that his quick intuition and candor had often pissed off his insecure teenage sister and had not improved his popularity at school, except among the smart-ass crowd.
“Yeah, I’ve got exactly one iron in the fire.” Then he added, brightening, “But it’s a good one!”
Before I could answer, the phone rang. It was Jack Pelletier, Brassard’s friend and the owner of the bull, calling to remind us he was coming by with Maximillian in the morning. We joked about how the ladies would have to hold out for another day. Then Will’s car pulled up in the driveway, and there came Brassard driving the Deere around the far side of the barn, returning from the joys of manure spreading. A moment later, Will stamped his feet in the mudroom. Then I saw the Agri-Mark truck turning into the bulk tank access drive on the far side of the old barn.
“I gotta go see to the Agri-Mark guy,” I told Erik. “The milk pickup people. This is how it goes around here.”
Chapter 34
Sept. 16
Erik has what is for me a disconcerting way of meeting people. He smiles, shakes hands, says the requisite polite and blandly positive things, but then tips his head back and watches, still holding a small smile, eyes ever so slightly lidded. It’s not supercilious, not at all, not judgmental, but you can almost hear his synapses sizzling. He’s just observing. He’s letting the other person show their hand first. It only lasts a couple of seconds, and I doubt anyone notices.
He did that momentary assessment when I introduced him to Earnest, standing in the front yard: Earnest who was radiant with pleasure, truly happy to discover who this unknown visitor turned out to be, shaking Erik’s hand and squeezing his shoulder hard.
Erik did it again when Will got back, as Will more reservedly shook hands, remarked on our family resemblance, and told him how much the Brassards had enjoyed having his sister “join the team here.” When Will asked, the way one does, what Erik did for a living, Erik chuckled or coughed and said, “It’s kind of an overused answer, but I guess I’ve gotta say ‘a little of this and a little of that.’” Will was courteous enough not to push him for more. I have the same question.
Brassard had towed the manure spreader around to the far side of the barn, to its home near the other really stinky things, and when he joined us and learned who Erik was, his eyebrows popped above the rim of his glasses. A weather-front odor of manure had arrived with him, so he mimed shaking hands, made a small grin, and left us, saying he had something of a hankering for a shower and a change of clothes.
I took Erik on a tour of the farm, with Earnest and Cat tagging along tactfully well behind us: The dog’s name is Bob. Here’s the old barn, here’s the milking parlor, here’s the skid-steer, that over there’s the manure stack, and that’s the manure spreader, I had a hard time back in Boston, I really felt I had destroyed my whole life, this is my special buddy the old Ford, that’s Brassard’s Deere, there’s the tedder and that’s the roll baler and that’s the feed mixer thing, it got so I missed you and worried about you so much that I learned to cut you out of my thoughts, do you even get that? This big shed is where the cows will live come cold weather, here are the workers’ quarters where I live in winter. Off that way, up to the left, that’s all pasture, Brassard’s land ends on the ridge above it, in the woods past the cows. Over this way, downhill over the curve of the slope, is where the hay and cornfields are. On the other side of the road, that long strip of open land, up to the base of the hill, that’s just scrub, not used for anything.
But above that, all those woods there, that’s my land.
Erik and Cat spent the night with me up here. Brassard invited them to dinner, said they could stay in the house or the help dorm, but Erik said he wanted to see my place and get a taste of my lifestyle. Will had already started preparing a huge pan of shepherd’s pie, but I asked Earnest if he wanted to join us up on the hill for some canned stew by firelight, and to my surprise he said yes. So after milking and equipment cleaning, the four of us headed up.
Orange-pink sunset on leaves just turning to warm hues: In that rare rake of light, the woods glowed like a jack-o’-lantern’s eyes when a candle’s lit inside. Cat learned her lesson during her first visit and wore hiking boots and down parka, Erik seem
ed used to hardy living and brought up a couple of army surplus mummy bags. At intervals, he stopped to look at the farm and up and down the valley, from different vantages, stroking his stubbled cheeks, nodding appraisingly and appreciatively. Earnest had stolen a few edibles from the house.
Marching up the hill, I told Cat, “I still plan to kill you. Just not tonight.”
Dead serious, she shot back, “I had to keep you in the dark. No way, no imaginable possible way, was I going to miss being there at that moment.”
Erik told us he’d driven across from Oregon in four days, sleeping at night on the ground or across the seats at highway rest stops. He would have called me but had no way of finding me—why didn’t I keep a Facebook page? So he called Cat, who still has a landline and an actual listed number. Cat said, “I was eating spaghetti when I got his call and I nearly choked to death. I had to give myself the Heimlich maneuver.” They’d caravanned up in two cars because Cat had to get back to her job and Erik wanted to spend more time with me, if that was all right.
It’s odd, when you bring a stranger to a place familiar to you, you see it differently, as if through their unbiased eyes. When I came into my camp it looked orderly and beautiful and, strangely, “sensible,” a not-entirely-unreasonable abode. The sun had dropped by the time we got there, leaving just the tops of the trees still radiant, casting now a pinker light through the darkening lower forest—illumination like a magical theater set. We got the lanterns going and I showed Erik where I keep the outhouse. Cat gathered twigs and oversaw the opening of four cans of stew, Earnest and I built and lit and encouraged the fire. Back among us, Erik showed quick reflexes and nervous energy, not just picking up my ladle but flipping it up spinning and deftly catching the handle, rattling a quick drumroll with a couple of my metal cups. He carries a harmonica in his back pocket and though he didn’t play it, he took it out and fiddled with it, balancing it on the tip of one finger. The woods had gone dark by the time the stew pot steamed. Earnest shined a flashlight into the grocery bag he’d brought and discovered a loaf of bread, a bunch of carrots, and a bag of corn chips.