Erik’s van held enough hops crowns for three acres; the other three acres he would plant with rhizomes cut from these crowns in the spring. He estimated that even with leaving fourteen feet of unworked soil between planting rows, he’d need to break and soften and smooth about a quarter mile in each of those six acres. He and Will did some math and figured it would take two weeks of ten-hour days, barring equipment failure or weather delays. And only then could Erik start drilling the holes for the six hundred poles he needed to erect. And, after that, start planting before the cold came and the ground froze.
As Will and Erik discussed this, Earnest had been quiet, frowning, chewing first on his upper lip and then on his lower lip. After a while he drifted off to the barn, and while we all kept talking we heard a tractor fire up and then saw the Ford chug away down the slope of pasture and out of view.
Watching him go, Erik slumped as if he just now realized the scope of what he had planned. He jabbed his thumb over his shoulder in Earnest’s general direction. “I guess he got discouraged, huh?”
Will and I glanced at each other. Being discouraged by a physical challenge was not something either of us could easily associate with Earnest.
Will had to go up to Burlington and I had other work to do, so we left Erik sitting on one of the ancient tractor’s wheels, flipping his empty coffee mug by its handle like a flashy cowboy gunslinger spinning his Colt, and staring forlornly at the acres he’d already worked so hard to tame. He was no doubt second-guessing his determination to plant on Brassard’s farm. He’d done it because I was there, Brassard needed the money, and the deal could be concluded fast. But he could have kept looking for some other organic acres for a week or more and might still have had the time to get the crowns in—probably could have gotten them in sooner, in fact, if the soil had been worked before. I had even asked Theo and Lynn about putting the yard on their place, but they said they simply didn’t have enough land to spare. Now it was too late; he’d made a deal with Brassard and had paid him in advance.
And anyway, there I was, and Erik and I needed to be near each other.
He cut a solitary figure on the tractor’s wheel, flipping his coffee mug. As I walked away, I knew that he’d left a lot of his story untold, and that it would ultimately reveal a person struggling with a loneliness not unlike my own. And the self-questioning: It no doubt ran in the blood.
About an hour later, I heard an unusual noise as I was doing supply inventory. I came out of the barn and joined Bob to watch Earnest driving the Ford up the road, pulling one of the derelict implements from that overgrown patch of field below the house. Its tall, skinny iron wheels squeaked, and it trailed strands of the grass and blackberry canes it had been half buried in. A metal seat rose on a single shaft between the wheels, just ahead of a triangular frame mounted with what looked like a witch’s spindly fingers curled into claws.
Earnest dragged it into the farmyard. It was a chisel plow, he told us, made to go deep into hard soil. Its name made sense: Each of the three curved claws ended in a sharply beveled arrowhead. The beauty of it, Earnest explained, was the ingenuity of the tines’ curve, which rose high above the frame before continuing down to the chisel tip—actually more of a spiral than a semicircle. The bevel of the spade-shaped heads would draw the fingers down into the ground, but if one of them hit something it couldn’t get through, the spiral would open wider and allow that particular tine to momentarily rise above the obstacle. The fact that it had a seat told him it had once been pulled by horses.
Farm implement manufacturers still made variations of chisel plows, he said, but he figured Erik would want to hang on to his money. This one was in pretty good shape—it hadn’t been abandoned because it broke, it had simply become outmoded.
Earnest and Erik worked on it for two hours, patch-welding parts as needed, greasing the axles, oiling the control levers, sharpening the chisel blades with an angle grinder. To get it out of the bushes, Earnest had attached it to the Ford’s tow bar using loops of heavy wire, meaning the men also needed to build a proper hitch.
They finished just before milking, so I got to watch the first test of it in the hop yard. Earnest sat on the seat to manipulate the levers that set the tines’ depth. Erik drove, starting out in crawler gear, twisting himself around in the Ford’s seat to check on the action behind. The blades bit and pulled themselves into the ground; the spirals opened out a bit; Erik notched up the throttle lever. On the surface, the tines cut only slender furrows, but their real work was below the surface, where each arrowhead sliced and jumbled the soil. And hit rocks—the curved tines rose and fell independently of each other, a slow three-fingered pianist.
It was not a straight shot by any means. The old spring-steel tines had lost much of their flexibility and one of them broke off the housing; Earnest welded it on again along with a piece of old leaf spring from another implement. At intervals, a big rock stopped forward motion entirely. When that happened, they backed up, lifted the tines, drove past the obstacle, and then set up a little stick with surveyor’s flagging tape on it, marking the spots that would need the backhoe. Then, the second day in, the poor thing gave up the ghost, breaking two tines and cracking the frame. Earnest didn’t believe it could survive another round of repairs. So they towed it back to the parking area and set it up opposite the old tractor, the two forming a rustic ceremonial gateway to my access path and to what we hoped would become Erik’s hop yard. We admired the relics’ optimism: History meets future here, they seemed to proclaim.
Erik scouted the back roads looking for another antique that might do the job, but eventually he had to go spend two thousand dollars on a modern chisel plow from a farm implement store in Rutland. It was utterly without the slender grace of the old one, more like a weapon of war. Its frame was painted a gaudy red, and its three, heavily built, straight tines—shanks—were black and cruel looking. Appropriately, he said, they were now called “V-rippers.”
Erik claimed he liked the old one better, but this one allowed him to drive faster and needed only one person to operate, allowing Earnest to catch up with tree jobs he’d been putting off.
That autumn is hard for me to recall and even harder to recount. We saw each other, all of us, through a fog of fatigue and urgent preoccupation, and with a disconcerting intermittence. Earnest here then gone, Will here then gone, Lynn and Robin coming and going when goats and gardens allowed, Brassard appearing and disappearing. We were like a juggler’s pins, spinning end over end, passing each other in the air in every imaginable recombination.
We all had more work than could be accomplished in twenty-four hours. With Earnest still at his tree jobs at least three days a week, and Will editing a video project that often took him away, I became the Swiss Army knife—small but with every tool you might need. We all helped Erik whenever a window of time opened up, and devised a meticulously planned staffing schedule to make it all mesh.
For the next few weeks, Erik worked in a frenzy. He used the Ford’s backhoe attachment to remove the larger stones he had flagged on the first pass. He located sources for the trellis poles, got them delivered; he bought big spools holding, literally, miles of steel cable, and hundreds of fittings such as cable clamps and turnbuckles and anchor pins. He and I drilled hundreds of holes with an auger attached to the Ford’s PTO. He hired a contractor with the right equipment and worked with the men to erect the poles and string cable along their tops. Once the poles were up—visualize a sparse, geometric forest of telephone poles—he further softened his planting strips using a big walk-behind tiller, like the Gravely, that he rented. He worked in the rain until the ground got too soupy to continue. He skipped lunch because he forgot to eat. He worked after dark by the light of the Ford’s or the tiller’s headlamps and a big handheld beam he directed where he needed more light.
One night, just a sheen of sunset light gilding the inverted bowl of the sky, I saw Brassard come out of th
e house, cross the road, and limp into the hop yard. He flagged down Erik, shouted something up at him. The tractor motor chattered to silence. Erik creaked stiffly down. As they walked back, Brassard put his arm over my brother’s shoulder, talking seriously with him.
Later I asked him about their exchange.
“He told me I was done working for the day, flat and simple,” Erik explained. “Said it was time for some chow and some R and R. ‘No point in workin the ground if you end up in it before your damn hops do.’ He took the key out!” This was testament to Brassard’s determination on the point: No one ever took the keys out of the tractors.
Another moment that gave me a sweet pang in my chest: Earnest and Erik, working together, jive-talking, insulting each other’s proficiency at all things, laughing. At one point, they started shouldering and shoving, roughhousing like brothers. Erik has probably done his share of fighting, but it was like a bear playing with a puppy. Erik laughed about it later, marveling at Earnest’s power.
I did a lot of the hole drilling that preceded the installation of the poles. This required a twelve-inch auger attached to the PTO of my—the—Ford. The auger is a broad drill bit, an Archimedes screw about five feet long, that the tractor motor rotates and that the hydraulics push down into the soil. Erik had gone out earlier with a tape line and chalk powder to mark the drilling spots along the trellis lines. I’d position the back end of the Ford a few feet beyond the chalk spot, engage the hydraulics, and slowly jam the auger into the soil. We had to get down about five feet so the bottom of the pole would settle below the frost line.
This soil hadn’t been shattered by the chisel plow, had never been forced to do anything and wasn’t inclined to acquiesce now. Again and again rocks stopped the auger and broke the shear pin, an insert on the shaft that’s intended to self-destruct rather than let the shock destroy the whole rig. When a pin sheared, I’d stop. Then, with Erik’s or Earnest’s help, I’d twist and wrestle the auger and the vertical shaft into alignment, punch out the mutilated pin, and bang in a new one. Then I’d lift the auger and look into the hole to see what we were up against. If it seemed an immovable object, I’d scoot the Ford a few feet farther along the line and start drilling a new hole. Fortunately, the hops trellis formation didn’t have to be absolutely precise.
After a couple of days’ drilling, the math began to discourage us. The top three acres required around three hundred poles. Three hundred five-foot-deep bores through rocky soil broke dozens of shear pins and bent and nicked the auger’s blades so that Earnest had to hammer them straight and weld in new patches of steel. The Ford proved indomitable, but the humans got sheared, bent, and nicked, too. Drifting off to sleep, I saw the auger pulling up soil between its blades, spewing and dumping the earth as it rose. I heard the laboring engine and the groans of the straining PTO rig, the awful screams and scrapes of steel against stone, deep in the ground. I’m sure Erik unwillingly relived his day’s striving as he tried to sleep, too. The job was getting done, but it was taking its toll.
This sounds like misery, and often enough it was. But I also felt, I think we all did, a lovely sense of community. No, of unity. The seven of us had become a sort of single organism, a collective entity, cohering by common purpose and the shared state of exhaustion. Fingers of the same hand. It was unconscious and probably unnoticed by the others, a natural product of our coordinated labors and our exertion. No need to apologize for being too tired to converse or for rambling on like an idiot, no need to explain laughing your head off about nothing. One day we all cracked up about “having high hopes for the hops” and then trying to decide whether a single hops plant was a “hop.” From there we went on to explore other plurals and singulars. If you were a member of the New York Yankees baseball team, you’d call yourself a Yankee, no problem. But if you were with the Boston Red Sox, would you refer to yourself as a Red Sock? We laughed till we groaned, and offered no apologies.
Hidden within all that desperate fuss and fury, derived from it, rose a glow of reawakened purpose and hope.
And, getting out of bed one morning, tired but more confident again, I thought about that ground: This is what the good round world is made of, this tough, stubborn, fertile stuff. Thanks be. And I thought, I shall be tough stubborn stuff, too, and one day fertile as well.
Yes. That was the day, the moment, that I realized I wanted to have a child. I was stunned and thirty-seven and so often lonely and empty at night and thought I knew myself, and at that moment I entered a new era of my life.
Chapter 41
We were fortunate that the cold came late that year. The maples’ brilliant foliage faded and browned, and then let go all in a single day’s wind-borne blizzard. Again the pines magically appeared, deepest dark green in the gray of the shorn woods. Though October’s bright, dry days lingered on into November, and at night the temperature rarely got below freezing, every single task of constructing the hop yard took longer than estimated. Erik worried that the crowns would not get in the ground in time.
But the weather stayed mild. The rest of the crowns went in, and still the soil in the southern three acres remained soft enough to break with the V-ripper, churn with the tiller, and drill for postholes. We got better and faster at it as we went. By the time the first snow came, a second field of telephone poles stood there, stark and strange, south of my access track. The two fields resembled a primitive version of a power transformer station, rows of those posts with a skein of cables taut between.
Erik’s arrival and the potential of hop farming had boosted the morale at Brassard’s farm, but while the cash helped, it only slowed, not stopped, the downward spiral. Again, it all came back to Diz, the hole left when she died. We all agreed that getting the hops into the ground was an urgent priority. It might be the “turnaround business plan” that Earnest had spoken of. If the hops did well next summer, Brassard could feel secure in the money he made from Erik’s leasing the land. The farm would have a little more financial ballast. He and Erik had also discussed the possibility of Brassard putting up his own trellises on a few acres. If Erik made good wholesale contacts, Brassard could consider shifting from dairy even if his land was not certifiably organic.
But that was all long-term pie in the sky, and at odds with the short term. With Will and Earnest and me putting time into the hop yard, Brassard had to hire Lynn and Robin every day for milking and other dairy chores. It helped that Erik started paying two hundred a month to rent the twin of my apartment in the chicken coop, but that didn’t begin to offset the low milk prices, barely recovered from the prior year. Brassard had decades of financial planning experience, and he knew how tight his margins still were. And he was a man hurting in a lot of places. I soon learned that he was unraveling even as he tried to heal, but carrying himself like a good soldier.
Once the hops were safely put to bed and I had dismantled my camp on the hill, there was nothing more to be done on my side of the road. Earnest followed his tree jobs south, planning to return in late November or early December. Will stayed at the farm most nights but was usually gone during the day.
My moving back into my tiny apartment in the guesthouse-help dorm meant that Erik and I became neighbors and could spend time together after the working day. Sometimes we all had dinner in the house, Brassard and Will, Erik and me. Mostly, though, it was just Erik and me cooking for each other in our Spartan workers’ quarters.
Those dinners allowed us time to talk unhurriedly, and we slipped by degrees into the familiarity and honesty that we’d had when we were younger. In prison, he had gotten into Celtic music, particularly the lovely mournful Irish tunes of lost love and homeland, and played them from his iPod as the musical score for my tales of miseries and mistakes in Boston. I confessed in serial fashion during dinners and evening card games; Erik bristled in outrage on my behalf, mourned in commiseration, and agreed with me, shaking his head incredulously, about what a complete “dumb-as
s wimp-out” I’d been. I had told it all to Cat, of course, but this was the first time I’d revealed the whole pathetic saga—including the desperation of physical need—to a man. He served not just as a foil for catharsis but also, unknowingly, as an ambassador for the male gender, easing me toward rapprochement. He was sympathetic but didn’t coddle me or try to persuade me that I hadn’t, as he said, “screwed the pooch.” Once I had primed the pump, he revealed more about his own burden of hurt and shame, and I know our talks relieved him of some of that weight.
Erik was always moving. He picked things up, looked at them closely but distractedly, put them down again. He fidgeted in elaborate ways, doing improvised prestidigitation with a can opener or spatula, balancing a saucer on one finger, flipping the cap of the soy sauce bottle into the air and vanishing it with a one-handed swipe as fast as a cat’s. It seemed to me his nervous intensity was mounting.
One night we were sitting at my kitchen counter, empty dinner dishes still in front of us, and he explained his state to me.
“I hope the elder sister recognizes the self-control the younger brother has shown,” he said as preamble. “As a sign of his maturity and determination.”
“In what way?”
“Annie, I spent seven years in the pen. I got out and drove here and started planting hops. I’m sitting here having dinner with my sister.”
“And …?”