At lunch, Brassard cut to the chase: “I guess here’s where I need to know what’s in that van that’s sittin in my driveway.”
Everybody’s eyes went to Erik as he absorbed the question. He stood up. He said he’d be right back. We heard him go out and, faintly, the opening drag of the van’s side door and a moment later the drag and slam. Cat kept her eyes on me.
“I’m sure you can understand my outlook, Ann,” Brassard said. This was the boss speaking.
Frankly, I was grateful for his taking charge. I hadn’t relished the idea that I would be the lone bearer of some bad secret, or the solitary carrier of difficult news from—or to—my brother.
Erik came back inside with a Styrofoam container about the size of a pizza box but six inches thick. He smiled like a chef about to serve his pièce de résistance as he brought it up to Brassard and set it on the table. He used a table knife to slit the tape and then lifted the top half of the box.
Brassard moved his glasses down his nose to look. “Roots?”
“They call them crowns, but basically they’re roots, yes,” Erik said.
In this case, it was the root mass of the hops plant, the flavor basis of beer. As Erik explained it, these were called “crowns” because, while they were the center of the underground part of the plant, they actually had two purposes. The roots headed out and down to suck up water and nutrients, but the crown also included rhizomes—underground stems that grew horizontally, sending up shoots as they went. It was a highly effective way for the plant to spread, because each shoot then turned into its own plant. Most new growers started their hop yards by buying mail-order rhizome sections cut from the crown—just sticks about as long as a hand and thick as a thumb. The advantage of having crowns instead of rhizomes, Erik said, was that they could be planted right away, that fall, and produce a robust hops yield in the first year. He would also take rhizome cuttings from the crowns and plant them in the spring.
Hops actually contained some of the same chemicals as cannabinoids, Erik went on enthusiastically. It had a lot of the same hands-on crop management needs and harvesting procedures as his prior crop of choice. His former partners were making good money selling it to the emerging artisanal beer-brewing industry in California and Oregon. In prison, with plenty of time on his hands, Erik had done market research and figured he could get in on the ground floor of the “as yet immature, but primed” East Coast artisanal brewing trend.
This was a lot of information to absorb. Brassard, the authority only moments before, pondered and, as he did so, faded thoughtfully back into the grieving, run-aground man he had been since Diz died.
Erik had come east with about twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of hops crowns in his van and was looking for a place to set up raising them. He’d planned to head to Vermont even before he knew I was here, because he had identified several start-up Vermont breweries and figured that with Vermont’s “brand” there’d be a huge market for superior aromatic hops, especially if they were organically grown. It was, as he said, serendipitous that I had gotten in with a farm. He let that comment hang.
Will put it all together first: “If you’re thinking of growing anything organic here, we’ve already considered it. We don’t have any organic land. Dad and Grandad have used commercial fertilizers and herbicides and insecticides on these fields since basically forever.”
Brassard nodded, still lost in thoughts or terrors of loss and loneliness.
“How about those scrub strips below Annie’s land?”
Did everything Erik say induce a stunned silence? That day, yes.
Brassard roused. “Never used em,” he muttered. “Couldn’t put a crop on em because they’re full of rocks so we couldn’t drag a tiller or combine over em. Didn’t need the extra headache of cleanin em out. Brush-hogged em every few years, that’s why they’re not just woods now.”
“I kept up with it the last few years,” Earnest said. “Just because … I don’t know. Brassard tradition?”
“My dad grazed over there sometimes,” Brassard put in. “Thought it would be smart to keep it open in case we ever needed.”
“How many acres?”
Another silence as Will, Brassard, and Earnest did some mental calculations.
“Well,” Brassard said, “we got about six hundred feet above Ann’s right-of-way, another, oh, eight hundred feet to the south end. Width varies, but I’d say maybe six acres total.”
Erik: “That never got sprayed or—”
Earnest, smiling: “That got logged off a hundred fifty years ago and never got used. The first farmers here cut the timber, probably grazed over there back when, but it’s never been crop fields. So no—no pesticides and whatnot.”
“So it won’t be hard to certify as organic,” Erik said. “What do you think, Mr. Brassard? Think I could plant hops there?”
Brassard explained that the farm was hard-tasked right now, any extra hassle would break the camel’s back and he wasn’t even sure we’d be able to hold on to the place anyway, financial problems. It pained him to admit this to Erik.
“I mean, can I lease it? I’d pay you a thousand an acre for a year. And whatever you need for letting me use a tractor once in a while, some manure if you can spare it, make it ten thousand? I can pay you in advance.”
“Man who’s just out of the penitentiary,” Brassard said darkly, “isn’t goin to have any money. Unless it’s from before he went in, and I don’t know as I want anything to do with that brand of money. Come back to bite me.”
Erik laughed and for a moment looked like he did when he was a kid and his heart was light. “No, nothing like that! I get out of Elk Ridge and my friends tell me there’s this lawyer been trying to find me. They didn’t know what it was about, maybe some other trouble, so they didn’t tell him where I was. But then I contact him and discover that my old aunt Theresa had died and left me a pretty good pile. Annie, you must have gotten some too, right?”
I smacked my hand against my forehead. Of course. Right. Of course. When the lawyer notified me of the inheritance, he had asked me where Erik was. I told him I didn’t know, hadn’t heard from him in seven years, but he must have kept sleuthing.
Brassard still looked skeptical. “Thousand an acre is pretty high,” he said. “Worth that much to you?”
Brassard’s dark mood intimidated me, but Erik faced him straight on, clearly the look of an honest entreaty. “Where I’m at? Where I’ve been? I’ve kinda got only one shot here, and that shot’s worth a good deal, whether it’s on this farm or another one. The crowns have to be planted in fall if they’re going to bear anything next year. They won’t survive till spring out of the ground. So I’ve got a rush on.”
I will not pretend that my heart didn’t soar at the prospect of some money being pumped into the farm’s finances. It could make all the difference. Earnest and Will were almost goggle-eyed at the rapid pace and unexpected turns of this discussion, but I could see that in each of them a little sprout of hope had suddenly uncurled.
Brassard looked overwhelmed. He knew the chores were calling. He said he’d have to think about it. Then we were clearing the dishes, cleaning up, each in our own thoughts. Cat headed back to Boston, crying joyfully again. The Irving Oil truck came and refilled our diesel tank. Max snorted in the pen. Erik shadowed Will and me as we shunted cows around and did the milking and equipment cleanup and parlor poop removal, then went inside to talk with Brassard again.
Earnest had been clanking at some machine in the old barn, but he came to find me as I finished purging the milk pipes.
“Your brother sure knows how to make a dramatic entrance. Quite a splash. I think he’s left us all a little breathless.” He put a hand on my shoulder, looking at me in a way that told me he was concerned for me and, I could tell, for the farm. “Think he can make something like that work?”
“I have no ide
a,” I said.
Chapter 39
Sept. 17
I am writing by candlelight in my tent home. Cat returned to Boston today, forgiven, and Erik is sleeping out in the woods somewhere nearby. Another clear night, not particularly cold, silent but for the occasional falling leaf sliding down my tent fly. I’m exhausted but can’t sleep—the day cranked up the voltage of my nervous system and now I can’t dial it back down.
Erik and I headed back up here at sunset. The light was not splendid, because a thin overcast had dulled the sky, like your breath on a windowpane. As we got the fire going, lit some lanterns, I really went at Erik.
“Why didn’t you contact me? How could you do that to me?”
“I was ashamed,” he said simply.
“What,” I said, “I’d find it so morally reprehensible that you’d grown pot? I wouldn’t care! Half the people I know smoke now and then—myself included, back in Boston!”
“No,” he said. He seemed close to tears. “No. For being asshole stupid for so many years. Getting arrested was just the cherry on top. Pop said I was wasting my talents. You said it! You all said I could do better than the buddies and girlfriends I chose to hang with. I grew pot and I also did a little on-and-off dance with H, okay, I fucking wasted how many years of my life? And, trust me, putting on the ol’ orange jumpsuit really brings that shit home to you. I wasn’t going to do you much good for twelve years anyway.”
“You’re my brother,” I reminded him.
“I was fucked up and it was all coming at me faster than I could handle it and by the time I got a grip I was like two years in and it was a habit—being alone.”
“You’re my brother!”
And he said, “What can I say? It’s done. It happened the way it did. I’d love it if we could leave it there. Leave it back where I’m trying to leave a bunch of other stuff.”
I could see that. Given that I am trying to leave a bunch of other stuff “back there,” too.
He seemed to read my mind: “When are you going to tell me what happened to you? Because some shit happened, that much I know.”
I told him I wasn’t up for it right now. I made a big omelet for each of us, eggs folded over cheddar and diced tomatoes and onions. We ate in silence.
When he talked again, he told me more about why he’d felt compelled to leave the coast. The only reason he hadn’t gotten a longer sentence, the way he’d avoided implicating his partners, was that he’d done a plea deal in which he revealed instead the location of the “different kind of ponytail” guys back in California. For which he felt no remorse at all. But when he got out, his former partners said they’d heard rumors that the guys still “on the outside” had long memories and vengeful souls. Also, upon returning to his old friends, Erik discovered that his wife—had he mentioned he’d gotten married?—who was one of the partners, lived with another of the partners and had had a kid with him. Cute little girl, four years old now. And while he understood—after all, seven years is a long time—it was the first he’d heard of it, which he kind of resented and anyway it would have made working together pretty tense.
I asked him what it was like in prison. He said Elk Ridge was not what you’d call a spa but not the kind of place where you had to worry about bending over to pick up the soap in the shower. Still, it behooved one to stay in shape, so he’d worked out in the gym every day.
I assume this was more of that wry understatement, but can’t be sure. I asked, “But how about your mind? Morale? How’d you … a person like you, especially, how’d you stay sane?”
“What is a person like me?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“Yeah, well, it was touch and go sometimes, he admitted, especially around the third year. They’d been long years and I thought I still had nine to go. That’s when I got my first tattoo. Tattoos, it’s one of the things you do to fight boredom. This one I did at that low point. And it actually helped.” He unzipped his jacket and rolled up his shirt and yes, as Cat said, he is muscled, slim but rock hard. Over his heart he had tattooed “I Am Free.” He explained that that was his heart talking, reminding him every day that no matter what, it would never be imprisoned, not in Elk Ridge or anywhere. “The one on my arm, that one I did later when I knew I was getting out. By way of explanation, I guess.”
After a while, he went off to sleep in the woods again. “As you can imagine, I’m enjoying the hell out of open spaces,” he explained. The absence of walls.
I heard his harmonica for a few minutes in the distance, quiet and spare and plaintive.
One more rather wonderful thing happened this afternoon. As we did our chores, Will called me “Annie,” the way Erik does. It just came spontaneously. I guess, after hearing Erik call me that all day, maybe it just seemed to fit. Later, Brassard did, too: “Annie.” Earnest hasn’t adopted it, maybe because he already has his own personal name for me.
But Annie: I like it. “Ann” seems formal and stiff, an overly frilled English queen. “Annie” is less pretentious and more countrified and it’s also the name I’m called by family.
Chapter 40
It was mid-September, meaning there were only so many weeks until the ground froze and working in the soil would get impossibly difficult. Erik had to work fast to plant his crowns. With any other crop, there would have been no chance, given the rocks: The tillable fields Brassard and his fellow farmers had enjoyed for the past two hundred years had been hacked from this land by families willing to gouge out each stone and stump with shovels and mattocks, ropes and ox-pulled sledges, over many years.
But hops is not a ground-growing crop. It’s a climber, so the farmer builds it a vertical field—a trellis. As Erik explained, you set twenty-foot posts into holes in the ground every forty feet, string cables between them, and then put down vertical ropes for the hops vines—actually, “bines”—to snake their way up. The hops farmer can just leave the biggest rocks where the glaciers did and work among them. Erik needed to get the crowns into the ground as soon as possible, but first he had to soften the soil, erect the posts, and string the trellis cables so that in spring they’d be ready to go.
Erik’s deal with Brassard had included use of the tractors and implements at an hourly rate. But Jim’s Deere was off limits unless he drove it himself, and the big gray Harvester was not designed for this kind of work. That left the Ford and the little Bobcat, available when not needed elsewhere.
I could only observe the process in glimpses caught between chores, but there was something ceremonial about the day Erik started carving out his hop yard. At the very least, it was one man trying to build his future, to put his ragtag life on a better footing, much as I had done in buying my land. It could also be the beginning of renewal at Brassard’s farm.
He started by brush-hogging that long strip between the road and my land. I had always assumed that brush-hogging involved pigs—I don’t know, putting a bunch of them on some land and letting them root around and eat all the vegetable matter. But it doesn’t. It involves a tractor, to which you attach what is really just a bigger version of a domestic lawnmower—a broad flat platform covering two monstrously powerful spinning blades and supported by little caster wheels. You drag it up and down, and the whirling blades hack through grass, reeds, bushes, saplings—anything. It makes a terrifying noise of rending and thrashing, and sometimes a hair-raising metallic gunshot when a blade hits a rock. It’s a crude tool, but all growing things fall behind it, turned to chips and shreds fine enough to work into the soil.
Erik spent a bruising day cutting brush from those six acres, and he came back to the farm deaf, exhausted, and coughing from breathing so much diesel exhaust. He’d had to give some of the bigger rocks a wide berth, so the next day we delivered a more nuanced shave with a huge walk-behind cutter, a Gravely. Partly to show off my hardihood to Erik, I volunteered. It went like this: You grip t
he two-wheeled, four-hundred-pound Gravely by handles extending to the rear, controlling it with levers for clutch and blade and braking. When you engage the drive wheels and try to navigate around rocks on uneven ground, it flings around a person of my weight like a dog shaking a rabbit. After about an hour, you are exhausted. Then Earnest takes over and the bitching thing becomes docile and compliant for a couple of hours while you watch, lying torpid and dead useless against the windshield of your car, trying to gather enough energy to milk the cows.
Erik had towed the prehistoric metal-wheeled tractor out of the field earlier, but when they finished brush-hogging he repositioned it at the edge of my parking area, where my uphill trail began and where we went in and out of the scrub field. I liked the look of it there.
Erik’s most grueling challenge was opening up soil with so many rocks in it—the same dilemma every early Vermont farmer had faced. He couldn’t use any of Brassard’s implements, which were too wide and designed for broader, softer fields that had been cleared of rocks and long since leavened by a century of regular tilling.
Will and Earnest and Erik and I considered the problem as we looked out over the freshly bristle-cut field, swigging coffee from big plastic cups. The boulders humping up here and there from the mash of shredded grass and brush were not the problem. Beneath the surface, the ground was full of rocks ranging from the size of my hand to the size of a gunnysack of feed grain. Now Erik had to break that soil, soften it, aerate it, and fertilize it with fermented manure. Fortunately, he didn’t have to open up all the soil, just thin strips with fourteen feet of unbroken ground between them. Still, it was a daunting prospect: eight strips, each two hundred feet long, per acre.
Will proposed using the Ford’s backhoe attachment, a jointed arm and digger bucket that, when folded, resembled a scorpion’s stinger tail. You’d move the tractor along the trellis line, stop, dig and scrape with the toothed bucket, lift out the larger rocks and set them aside, then smooth the dirt back into place with back-of-bucket swipes. Then drive forward another ten feet, stop, and repeat the process. Somebody would tag along with the Bobcat, making off with the bigger rocks in its loader bucket and piling them where they wouldn’t get in the way.