He smiled and put his hand to my wool-padded arm, softly. “I’m just tired,” he reassured me. Then he was walking away again, and after a moment I was going down the alley with the Bobcat for another long scrape.
Chapter 47
And so Brassard’s farm limped into the New Year. Earnest’s being there helped. He was ballast for the place, kept us right side up and sailing straight. Especially for Brassard. Sometimes I’d go into the house and I’d hear the two of them in another room, conversing quietly. I don’t know what they talked about, but I knew that Earnest wouldn’t presume to lecture, shame, or instruct his friend, whom he’d always respected as the elder man.
We were all on guard, watching Brassard, checking for signs, keeping track of his whereabouts. A couple of weeks later, when we finally allowed him access to his truck, one or another of us accompanied him on his trips to town, claiming errands of our own. The farm settled back into a simulacrum of its prior rhythm, but with an added edge of vigilance.
The traditional January thaw never really ended. February was a rotten month—raw, unseasonably warm. Early January’s stark, crystalline beauty morphed into dull overcast skies, sleet, freezing rain. The Himalayas of snow I’d built shrank to dirt-crusted little ridges, and the farmyard became a basin of muck and slush. When the weather did flash cold for a day or two, it froze the rain onto cars and trucks and glazed them in rock-hard clear ice that was impossible to scrape off. All the snow melted off the fields and the hop yard, making Erik and Brassard nervous about having adequate water in the spring. Though it was often warm enough to put the cows out, we seldom did, because they came back so slimed with mud that we couldn’t manage adequate shed and parlor hygiene; Bob the dog was functionally under house arrest for the same reason. Trips to town became arduous due to the early melting of the dirt roads and the deep mud that resulted.
But the dark sky—that was the worst. Without the drama of a thunderstorm or high winds, no crazy whimsy of snowfall, that static pewter gray weighed on us. The sky literally seemed a burden we carried on our shoulders.
Still, I can now see that something good emerged from that gray smear of a month. You must understand that this is not just my Pollyanna penchant speaking, but one of those insights that can reveal themselves only over time. Nor does it have anything to do with Nietzsche’s dour cliché “That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” No: It’s that when people endure troubles together, and stand up to them, they witness the best of each other. There’s no other way to discover that resilience but through shared hardship. Earnest, Will, and I had observed one another’s varied approaches to dealing with Brassard’s and the farm’s difficulties, the scope of determination we revealed. We came to greater respect for each other as a result. Greater loyalty.
And Brassard: He cranked himself back upright, inch by inch, marshaled his willpower. Ultimately, it was he, not me with my duct tape or Will with his tractor keys, who bound himself to the mast, kept himself away from the Sirens of anesthetizing spirits. The mast was the work that needed doing and the responsibility of being the elder and, ultimately, the captain of this particular ship. I suspect this was the perspective Earnest had been nurturing in those long-closeted conversations they’d had. Brassard rose to it.
February slipped into March, windier but not much brighter. The wind blustered erratically down in our valley, rattling the branches of the apple trees around the house, but it hit the ridgetops hard and steady; at night I could hear the vast, diffuse roar of my own forest, like distant surf. Looking over the fields without the snowpack, Brassard and Erik grew still more anxious about having enough soil moisture for the crops. Brassard said he had noticed this trend over the past decade: warmer winters, changing rainfall patterns. He read us an article from the Agriview newsletter about likely impacts of climate change on Vermont’s farming—a dismal prognosis.
Erik finally brought a girlfriend home for dinner with us. They had connected at a gym in Barre, where he’d taken a membership and she divided her time as receptionist and fitness trainer. Kiera was plain of face, with unconvincing blond hair, but her gym-toned muscles gave her a nice shape and a lithe step. Though she’d never lived on a farm, she was a native Vermonter and had been around farmers all her life—in more ways than one, definitely not “a princess.” In common with Will, she was an avid Celtics and New England Patriots fan and could match him stat for stat. She was about Erik’s age, I figured, and they moved easily together.
Still researching the topic, I took Erik aside at one point and asked him if she was effulgent. He rolled his eyes. “No, Annie! Jesus! She’s just a good pal.”
After that, I added good pal to my relationship-cataloging process. I assessed women in the grocery store or hardware store to see whether they were effulgent or were good pal material. Some were obviously contenders for neither, such as Millie, the short-spoken, laughless woman at the general store who had explained to Cat why she kept night crawlers in the fridges. Mostly, though, I had no basis for judgment and so came away no wiser from my inspections. Anyway, I knew there were more categories to be added to the list. Was Cat effulgent? I couldn’t see it, but Robin was a definite maybe. Was Lynn a good pal? No, she was much more, too keen and balanced to be dismissed so lightly. What was she, then?
We had some good times despite the relentless weight of the sky and the anxiety created by the absence of snow.
On Valentine’s Day, Brassard, Will, Earnest, and Erik each gave me some token. I felt very appreciated. Given the diversity of their approaches, I don’t think it was a coordinated effort. Brassard’s was a Hallmark card with a note written in his careful cursive, wishing me a Happy Valentine’s Day and telling me “we” were lucky to have me in the family. Will bought me a set of four much-needed earthenware plates, suitable for pasta, playfully colorful, for my chicken coop apartment. Earnest’s gift was a cupcake he’d had specially made at the Grand Union’s deli counter, red frosting topped not by a sugary heart but by a licorice-looking Pilgrim’s hat with an arrow through it, which I considered sublime wit. Erik knocked on my door, opened it before I could answer, tossed me a red rose wrapped in green tissue, and blew me a kiss.
Toward the middle of March, Erik and Kiera decided that we should have a big dinner together. We invited Lynn, Theo, and Robin, and Brassard invited John and Sarah Hubbard, the middle-aged farming couple who owned the land on the other side of mine—eleven of us in all, a big crowd compared to what we were used to. Outside, the weather was raw and miserable, but inside we were a merry bunch, baking chickens and pies and whipping up mashed potatoes and sizzling onions for gravy. Thanksgiving in March. The kitchen and dining room turned tropical. Will and Erik and Kiera argued about sports, Erik’s loyalties being with West Coast teams, putting him at odds with the other two. Brassard and Hubbard had a lot of farming to talk about, and Earnest joined them for a discussion of various new implements that were coming onto the market. Brassard, clearly enjoying the crowded rooms and the bustle, looked better than he had in a long time.
I had never seen Robin in anything but dirty jeans, muck boots, and rubber coveralls, had seldom seen her face without a smear of brown on it, but for this occasion she wore an actual dress, simple gray and belted with a thin red strap at her waist, and had her dark hair loose and lush around her shoulders. She was effervescent and vital—stunning, actually. I noticed the men’s inadvertent responses and Kiera’s less appreciative appraisal, and at one point Brassard came over to me and chuckled: “That girl is a clear and present danger to herself and others.”
I decided that Robin was exactly what effulgent looked like, and I was pretty sure I could never meet such a standard.
Chapter 48
That got us through to April. There was no snow on the ground, but in the end the season turned out happily for all the fields, including the hop yard. The unseasonably warm weather thawed the ground early, and then we had a period o
f regular rains that put Erik’s mind at rest.
Then the spring labors began.
Brassard went to work his fields, days and days of preparing the soil: manure spreading, fertilizing, harrowing, and planting. The cows moved outside, but milking continued and the shed needed spring cleaning. Spring calves began to come, taking every spare minute. And, as Brassard had pointed out in that very first discussion, the hop yard needed an enormous amount of work that strained to the utmost our ability to handle the other chores.
Erik’s business plan required six acres to make a net profit, and he’d planted only three last fall. But hops propagate through their rhizomes—those parts of the stem that grow horizontally under the ground, among the roots—which need to be planted as soon as the frost leaves the soil. The hops grower harvests rhizomes from mature crowns, which flourish despite being pruned.
That meant Erik, and whoever else had a spare moment, had to kneel in the wet, icy-cold soil to carefully expose each crown, clip off sections of rhizome, then mound over the root mass again. We collected hundreds of rhizome sections, filling galvanized buckets and grain bags and plastic bins. Erik worked from sunup till sundown, and by nightfall his knees and back were so stiff he could hardly stand. Working with him, I actually looked forward to milking as a relief from the stoop-labor discomfort and numbing repetitiveness of rhizome collecting. After the first day, we had a good sense of how long the surgery took for each crown, and with around 2,500 to be unearthed, clipped, and mounded back over, Erik realized that it would never get done.
“I didn’t take enough courses in human resources management,” he lamented bitterly. “My staffing model for this project was for shit.”
Ultimately, he hired three enterprising Vermont Tech students, two boys and a girl, out on spring break. Tim, who insisted on being called by his last name, Bailey, had a basketball player’s build; Jason was chubby and looked soft, but he was actually quite hardy and put on a good macho act. Jennifer had been brought up among a lot of brothers, so despite her slight build she had a solid punch when it came to rough play, and could hold her own in the badass-insults department. They worked well together.
As much as we worried about the crop and Erik’s bottom line, we welcomed their enthusiasm and energy. They got a kick out of thinking they might someday drink beer made from these very plants. Every day at sunrise, a rattletrap pickup, a rusted Toyota like mine, and a jacked-up but hard-worn muscle car parked in my pullover as muffled rock or rap music pounded inside their cabs. Later, even from inside the barn, I could hear the young people’s laughter and catcalls from out in the hop yard. But when Brassard saw them, he chewed the inside of his cheeks. I knew he saw Erik’s net income shrinking with every hour of help he had to pay for.
At lunchtime I slapped together sandwiches for them, which they inhaled. Lunch at the house, or on the front porch on warmer days, took on a party atmosphere. When Earnest and Will joined us, they answered the kids’ scandalous tales of campus life with anecdotes of comparable misadventures on base in the army. Brassard enjoyed it from a distance. He had gotten cortisone shots in his thumb joints and had taken up his pipe again, putting a leathery cherry scent into the cool air.
But the work didn’t end when the young people went back to school after break. They had clipped almost three thousand rhizomes, and with the frost safely gone from the soil, all those sticks had to get planted throughout the lower three acres of the yard. Even though Kiera joined in when she could, and the kids worked right through their last weekend off, only one acre’s worth had been planted by the time they returned to school.
I can’t remember much about that April except for one day of rapture when I came across the first daffodils, bounding out of the ground to say hello. Between farm duties and hop yard, I worked fourteen hours a day. Somewhere in there I noticed the absence of Kiera. When I mentioned it to Erik, he shrugged it off: “If you can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen. I warned her when we first started going out.”
He didn’t mean the heat of passion; he meant slavery on a farm. I drew a better bead on what good pal meant.
Ultimately, we got the rhizomes in more or less on schedule. Without pausing to inhale, Erik started putting in the training strings, pairs of them hanging down in a V shape from the high trellis wires. When the hops sprouted above the soil, he’d need to guide them to the strings so they would twine and climb. He would allow each crown and rhizome to send up two bines, then clip the rest.
Installing such a huge number of training strings was too much even for Erik’s long days and all the time Earnest and Will and I could spare, so again he had to hire extra hands.
They were a uniquely Vermont pair: a middle-aged gay couple with big beards, callused hands, and hard-slim, gnarly bodies. They lived in an off-the-grid log cabin, eating from their own subsistence gardens and earning some cash from a maple sugaring operation. Lunch was fun: Though they looked like hard-bitten hillbillies—“woodchucks,” in Vermont parlance—Perry had a degree in philosophy, James in English lit, and they had a marvelously idiosyncratic sense of humor, rich with scholarly allusion. They had been together for twenty years and had married the moment Vermont made it legal.
They also worked like mules. But despite the extra help, Erik was still stringing when the first shoots began popping up.
As the weather warmed, my apartment began to feel close, no longer pleasantly cozy but stuffy and airless. My land was calling me. The trees were misting with buds, just as they were when I first saw the place, and the air took on that wet tang of earth and ice. As soon as the ground got dry enough, I packed my belongings into their plastic tubs, loaded them onto the little trailer, cranked up the Ford, and dragged them up the hill. Traces of snow still hid in the north-facing shadows of tree trunks and boulders.
When I turned off the tractor and the engine clatter stopped, the forest’s subtler noises flowed around me. A few birds, just back from southern haunts, called near and far among the trees; a faint breeze told quiet secrets among the still-bare branches. Distant cows lowing, the scratchy skittering of an invisible red squirrel racing up a tree, the uneven calls of geese following the valley to their summer nesting sites farther north: From the sounds alone, I knew I had come home again.
I worried for Erik and felt guilty for not helping him at every available opportunity. But I was getting exhausted. From work in the wet soil, my hands were so chapped that no amount of Bag Balm could smooth them or heal the cracks. I was not Diz and had sworn not to become her successor, but I felt myself turning into her. So I made it clear to all—Erik, Will, Earnest, Brassard—that I would keep living on my land and I would spend time there sometimes, regardless of the fortunes of the farm or the hop yard. One of my commitments to myself had been to honor my commitments to myself.
So I had a mostly clear conscience as I swept the twigs and leaves off my little platform and set up the tent. Erik had bitten off his agenda here, and he understood my sticking to my own with the same determination he showed. Brassard had his, his family’s, fate to contend with, and though our fates were intertwined, I had by now paid an honest price in cash and labor for my acres.
On the first of May, Brassard signed the deed over to me, formally acknowledging that my indentured servitude had ended. It was the beginning of my third year there.
That didn’t mean I could stop working at the farm. It needed me, and it mattered greatly to me. If the land was the home of my soloing spirit, the farm was my home among the human family. I had learned that a family—which by then included not just Erik but also Earnest and Brassard and Will and even Lynn and Robin—is an ecosystem. It is as complex and beautiful as my forest. All its parts, all its members, are continually coevolving, each adapting to each, as every living thing must if it wishes to thrive. It is good to be part of it. My land affirmed that I was a bright and strong thread; the farm affirmed that I was woven into a sturdy
and comely fabric.
But that deed—I took great satisfaction in having it tucked safely into my sea chest. These woods were now inarguably mine. It was something like a marriage. But the woods could not confuse me with my own ambivalence: I simply and without any doubt or reservation loved this forested hill. Nor could the woods disappoint or betray me, because I had no illusions about what it was I so loved. The forest was an ancient rugged wild organism, tolerating and, at least a little, accepting me.
Chapter 49
I haven’t explained a great deal about the darker aspects of dairy farming, in part because even by the end of my second year there I still didn’t know the whole story. Finally coming face-to-face with them was a wrenching experience that brought me up hard against my own hypocrisy. I came to appreciate Will more from working alongside him and for his willingness to talk with me as I wobbled through it all.
A dairy farmer carefully oversees the cycles of cows’ lives: their periods of giving milk, drying off, delivering calves, getting pregnant again. It’s a testament to Brassard’s skills that he can manage his herd to sustain steady milk production throughout the year. Of course, he also has to maintain a consistent herd size—he can’t have more cows than his fields can feed or his barns shelter—so he also has to deal with the end fate of each cow. They’re born; they must die.
I understood the need to put down the occasional cow that got badly injured or irredeemably sick. Since I arrived, Brassard had twice shot cows who had broken their leg or pelvis, carried their bodies in the Deere’s bucket loader, and dumped them into the pickup bed. I myself had sorrowfully shepherded a number of limping, head-hanging cows, declared unsalvageable by the vet, to the truck that would take them to be butchered.