On Brassard''s Farm

  “He was way down the hill there, in the woods.”

  “Johnnie hit me. So I went away.”

  Homer’s face received this injury but didn’t explain Johnnie or apologize for him; he held himself with dignity, defying shame, refusing to air dirty laundry in front of strangers.

  “Johnnie’s not here now,” he told Ricky. To me: “Thank you for bringin him back. We were worried. He’s my grand-nephew.” To Ricky again: “Go see Gramma now, okay? Johnnie isn’t here. She’ll make you something to eat. Grampa has to go back to work.”

  Ricky reluctantly let go of his grand-uncle, went staunchly up the steps, waved to me, and vanished into the house. Homer turned to me, a man weary to the marrow. “He won’t bother you again. He’s just here for a while, got problems at home. I’ll see he doesn’t bother you again.”

  “It wasn’t a bother,” I said. “He’s a sweet person.”

  “I’ll have a talk with Johnnie,” Homer concluded. The gray of his hair seemed to make an aura of that desolate color around him. His weariness seemed boundless, his burden of worry beyond weighing, his resignation absolute. He climbed back into the truck and waited for us to back out first.

  Will was running late, so he sped back to the farm.

  “He was so scared when I found him,” I told Will. “Kind of scared to get back home, too, though.” I was relieved to have arranged a happy ending for the adventure, but Johnnie hovered in my thoughts. I’d seen him only that once, and yet I’d conceived a fear and something like hatred of him.

  “I’d be careful about drawing too many lines between yourself and the Goslants,” Will said stiffly.

  “Well, I didn’t know who he was. I couldn’t leave him running around the woods! He seems like a perfectly nice person. Homer, too.”

  Will didn’t answer. In another few minutes, he pulled a U-turn and stopped his car in my parking spot opposite the farm’s driveway. “Sorry to be in such a rush,” he said.

  “No, I appreciate your taking the time.”

  “Annie. Just … think twice about getting connected up there, okay? Lots of things to feel pity or sympathy for, the instinct to take them under your wing, I know you’re that kind of person. But don’t ever let them think they’re … in with you somehow. I’m just saying.”

  He sped up the hill, dust swirling behind his car.

  I began the hike back up to my camp, thinking about Ricky and Homer and Johnnie. And Will: How many times had he heard that same warning from Diz? She must have instilled a deep aversion in him from infancy, one that wasn’t entirely rational and so couldn’t be articulated. I wondered whether it was based on some real experience or was just Diz’s shame—or, rather, her pride in the distance she had so rigorously maintained from these kin.

  Chapter 51

  Spring ripened into longer, benevolent days, lush with the scent of growing things. Brassard’s fields hazed green; flowers burst into bloom in Diz’s untended gardens. The hop yard needed endless work. Once the plants had climbed a few feet, Erik—we—had to go along the rows, snip about half the strands, and pull them off the training strings. This would spur the roots to put more energy into the remaining bines and would assure the mature plants of enough sun when they filled out and began producing cones.

  But again, the sheer number of plants made it impossible to complete the job within the time frame the pruning cycle demanded. So Erik hired the Vermont Tech kids on a day-to-day basis, and Perry and James came when they had time free from their own gardens. Robin, working long hours with the intent to save enough money to buy a car, arrived on her mountain bike when time allowed. The two-mile pedal, uphill the whole way, didn’t seem to tire her at all. And with her strong thighs in cut-off jeans, the flush of exertion in her cheeks, billed cap worn backward, her effulgence had become a palpable force. The Vermont Tech boys could hardly bear to look at her.

  We often saw deer at the edge of the pasture or along the back roads, and Perry warned us that if they liked hops, Erik would be in deep trouble. He said James and he had erected seven-foot mesh fences around all their gardens and had even buried the bottom of the mesh two feet below the surface to keep out burrowing groundhogs.

  Erik’s online research on the topic produced ambiguous answers. No, hops are too bitter, deer will stay away. Yes, they’ll eat hops when the bines are young. It depends: Deer in some areas will, some areas won’t.

  Putting seven-foot fences around six acres would take all summer and cost a fortune, so at Perry’s suggestion Erik started a new ritual. Everyone—men and women—had to pee around the periphery of the hop yard. Erik even pissed in a plastic milk jug at night so he could distribute it in the morning, and he led Bob along the roadside verge three times a day to water the weeds together.

  When I came down from camp in the morning or returned at night, I stopped to do my share. The Vermont Tech students thought it was a scream, chiding each other for not contributing enough, and making up endless weak jokes. “You’re in trouble now!” They cornered Erik and had a mock-serious talk with him, explaining their concern that the uphill urine border might percolate down and spoil the flavor of the hops.

  Erik laughed it off. “How do you think Budweiser and PBR get their unique flavor? Brewing’s best-kept secret—keep it to yourselves.” We must have put hundreds of gallons around that yard over the course of the summer.

  Erik also slept out in the yard with Bob and an air horn. “This is a lot like the old days,” he remarked sourly. “Waiting for the buds to ripen, keeping interlopers at bay.”

  Whether it was the pee or the bitterness of the hops, the deer didn’t show. The hop yard flourished.

  In early July, I had a disconcerting moment with Earnest. One afternoon he came back from a tree job at three o’clock—early for him and surprising because this was the height of his working season. It was a hot day, and as he often did, he used the garden hose to rinse wood chips and dust out of his hair and off his upper body. I happened to be in the kitchen making myself a late lunch, and when I saw his bare torso I was shocked to see red welts all along his left rib cage and up over his chest. He winced as he palmed water onto himself.

  I went out to him just as he finished. “Earnest! What happened?”

  “Nothing.” He hobbled over to the faucet to turn off the water. I stood there until he remembered that I didn’t relent when I had questions.

  “I took a fall. Not all the way down. My harness caught me, but the rope gave me a burn. That’s all.”

  “You’re limping!”

  “Yeah, I was hanging there and let myself down too fast.” He was angry at his own stupidity. “Twisted my ankle when I hit. No big thing. Not the first time.”

  I wrestled the story out of him. He’d been working on a long-dead elm, and he’d wrongly gauged the strength of a couple of branches. One broke as he stood on it. He’d rigged a safety rope to a branch above him, but when the first one went and his weight came onto the rope, he felt the upper branch crack and give.

  “I’m thirty feet up. All of a sudden it’s just air beneath me, I’m holding a slack rope in my hands. I fell about twenty feet and was lucky the rope snagged on something that held. It stopped me hard, like chonk! I was sort of stunned, so then I misjudged my release and landed off balance. Ankle went over. I could hardly walk at first. Figured I should call it a day.”

  I was appalled—at myself as much as the accident. I had worked with Earnest, had seen him balancing far up in the lattice of big trees, seen him swing from place to place with a chainsaw in one hand, and I’d thought only of the danger I faced when I let down a big branch!

  There’s a simple reason for my blithe, oblivious perspective: It had never occurred to me that what he was doing was dangerous. He was so happy up there, so confident, so in command, that it seemed effortless. I had begun thinking that Earnest was invincible and invulnerable, a blunt-
featured, copper-skinned Superman. He was like the sun or some other elemental constant. Just as the rope had brought him up hard, I came up suddenly against the knowledge that he was mortal after all.

  My face must have revealed my concern, because Earnest went on: “I thought I was going to die. Seriously, I was so scared, my whole lunch passed before my very eyes.”

  He’d set me up with that, caught me entirely off guard. “You’re such a shit!” I told him.

  He limped over to the steps of the house and sat down carefully, body glistening, the waistband of his jeans dark with wet. I followed him.

  He scrubbed his fingers in his hair, scattering droplets. “It’s my own fault. I wasn’t paying attention. I think I’m losing my stuff.”

  “One mistake doesn’t—”

  “It’s not the first time this summer. Nothing else that serious, but lots of little miscalculations, little oversights.” He shook his head, bit both lips, disgusted with himself. “You can’t afford that, up in a tree.”

  I wondered whether I should rub some lanolin on his rope burns, maybe tape some gauze over them, but I decided not to. By now bruises were coming in, blue under the abraded skin, and they’d be painfully tender. I also knew he’d rather forget about it, not have me underline his vulnerability with too much solicitousness.

  But, thinking back, I had noticed a change in Earnest during the past few weeks. Or was it longer? He had been quieter, more restrained. Blue, I thought, and distant. It troubled me.

  I sat there with him. “Did you have a good rope man?”

  “He’s fine. Good worker. Not his fault. I paid him for the full day anyway.”

  “Why do you think you’re off your stride?”

  He glowered at his hands, shrugged. “Preoccupied. Distracted. That’s all.”

  I wondered what was bothering him. Something with his Navajo friends, or the uncertain fate of the farm? His sister? A girlfriend he hadn’t mentioned? Or some other aspect of his life?

  My stomach growled and I remembered that I was starving and that lunch-making materials were waiting on the counter inside. Finally, I stood up.

  “You really lost your lunch?” I asked.

  “That was a feeble attempt at wit. Didn’t have any lunch.”

  “I was just making myself a sandwich. How about I make you one?”

  He needed a moment to think about the proposition. “No. I’m fine. I should try to get something done as long as I’m here.”

  “With your ankle like that?”

  He rubbed his eyes wearily, still reluctant but yielding. “Okay. I guess a sandwich would be good.” He shook his T-shirt to shed some dust, and put it back on with an inadvertent groan.

  We took our plates and coffee mugs to the dining room and sat on opposite sides of the table as we ate. Earnest had nothing to say and barely glanced at me.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “What’s what?”

  “What’s bothering you. You’re not just preoccupied. You don’t smile much. You seem … guarded.”

  He chewed, swallowed, looked around the room as if the answer were somewhere on the wallpaper or sideboard or china cabinet. “Just another aging fart’s midlife crisis.”

  “That pisses me off, Earnest.”

  “What does?”

  “Every word you just said. First of all, you’re insulting a friend of mine! And ‘midlife crisis’ is flat-out ducking me.”

  He shrugged. I stared hard at him.

  Earnest never did well under an unyielding glare from me. He heaved a sigh of surrender. “It’s simple. I’ve screwed up some things in my life, and now I’ve got to think about what I’m doing and why. And what’s next, what I want. I need to make some changes, but I can’t figure out what they should be. So my mind goes around and around and doesn’t come up with solutions and then I fall out of trees.”

  He inspected his coffee, took a swig of it, and finally did look at me. “I’m pretty sure you know something about that state of mind.” He didn’t smile, but his eyes warmed with the resigned amusement of a fellow sufferer.

  “Yes. I am familiar with it.” He knew what an understatement that was.

  We finished our food, drained our cups. Earnest stood and collected our dishes, but I stopped him as he limped toward the kitchen.

  “Is there anything I can do to make it better? I mean your state of mind. Given my expertise in the subject, and all.”

  He gave one small cough of a laugh. “No. Nothing for anybody but me to do. Thanks, though, Pilgrim.” His eyes met mine, and a little arc leaped between us—his appreciation for my concern.

  He rinsed the dishes; I dried. Then I went back to the cows, and over my protests, he gimped out to his project in the machine shop.

  Chapter 52

  By now I was fairly competent at living on my hill. But the woods continued to change me, and in ways I could never have imagined.

  It’s hard to tell all that I’ve seen and done, because I doubt you will believe it. But this is a fact: When you live in the woods, especially when you’re there at night, all night, you experience unusual things. At moments, you glimpse other dimensions of the world that are always present but that we’re habituated to ignore. Encountering them can upend your view of life and of your place in it.

  I have been candid about the Great Fear and my own foolishness and weakness, and I’ve done my best to honestly describe the other inexplicable powers and wonders that revealed themselves to me. What happened that summer seems unbelievable, but I can only relate it as I experienced it.

  To put these events in perspective: I’ve never been superstitious. I grew up in a proudly secular family. Though I’ve always felt that there is something like “God,” my sense of that being is not like anything I’ve encountered in anyone’s scriptures, tracts, or sermons. I’ve never taken LSD. I can’t claim to have had a “paranormal” experience. And as far as my primal fear of unnamed forces dwelling in the deep woods, the Great Fear, I know only that in the right circumstances we all can feel it and that when it arrives, one knows one is experiencing something primordial and real.

  Here’s the thing: The world will teach you. It will. When you’ve been busted open as I had been and you’re on unfamiliar ground, the true world steps in and reveals itself. And it’s not what you expect. Most often, your days’ events are explicable by all the facts and assumptions you absorbed in science class. But sometimes, very rarely, you are allowed a peek through a crack in the door—no, through a crack or flaw in that misleadingly solid-seeming edifice of assumptions.

  I can’t explain what the “mechanism” of a miracle is. There is no mechanism; there’s a vast living thing that dwells everywhere. I can’t further define it. Ultimately, it is beyond definition.

  One evening in the middle of July, I returned to the tent grubby and exhausted. Erik was still slaving at his hops, using the last of the daylight, planning to sleep at the bunkhouse.

  Since the day Earnest fell, I had been increasingly conscious of his mood. He seemed remote, didn’t talk or laugh as much. If he smiled at all, it was with a rueful tilt. He became opaque, and I began to feel less at ease around him. And in my solitary times, mostly when I was alone on my hill, I began to experience my own unease, a muddled amalgam of tension and something like dismay.

  But this had been a good day, and that disquiet had subsided as I walked up the hill and into the forest’s calming embrace. The calves were healthy; we’d introduced the new cows into the rest of the herd with no problems. No equipment had broken; Brassard seemed good. I had snagged Earnest when he got home, and made him visit me in the milking parlor as Robin and I worked. He seemed more relaxed than he had in some weeks as he told us about his day. He stayed only a few minutes before going off to work on his mysterious mechanical project, but this momentary return to our regular sync eased me an
d contributed to the calm of the evening.

  As the sun went down, the forest cool slowly reasserted itself, pleasant on my skin. I made a crude shish kebab of vegetables and sausage slices speared on a stick, basted with an improvised marinade of Perry and James’ maple syrup, soy sauce, and mustard, and seared over a hot fire. I ate it with satisfaction, and the world felt in harmony: tired muscles, good day’s work done, full belly, dinner music of the veery and wood thrush singing as they headed for their nests. Blackflies gone to wherever they go, and only a few unmotivated mosquitoes.

  For once, when the fire burned down to embers and the last sunlight was almost gone, I didn’t go into the tent. Just sat on my log, lazy, pleased with life, too tired for the necessary rituals of battening everything down and lighting the candle lanterns. Night came out of the leaves, blue-black spreading into the air, and for some reason it seemed particularly full of expectancy. I didn’t exactly like that feeling, but it intrigued me and I didn’t retreat from it. In another little while, the trees hid in full dark, no moon yet, no clouds to bounce down the last high rays of the sun. The woods grew quiet. The stealthy noises began.

  By now Erik had no doubt called it quits and was probably in his room, showering or eating soup, unheated, right out of the can.

  Finally, reluctantly, I made sure all food was put away and the fire safely doused. I thought to read for a bit, but when I put on my pajamas and slid into my sleeping bag, I went out like a snuffed candle.

  I awoke to find the tent wall glowing, a palomino mottle of light and shadow. Through the screen I saw the moon rising, just a middling young crescent but enough to send pearly shafts through the trees. I got out of my bed and unzipped the door and went out to look at it. It seemed not an astronomical thing but one closer to the ground, the blade of a slow-moving sickle, slicing harmlessly through the highest branches. I smiled up at it and then, without a thought in my head, I moved toward the darkness uphill. I slipped into it. That sense of imminence had burgeoned. The night was waiting. My mind was utterly devoid of thought or intent.