“Strong as a house,” Erik proclaimed.
Earnest nodded and rolled his head to work a kink out of his neck. “Go for it, Pilgrim,” he said carelessly. He walked into the house. Also feigning indifference, Erik stood, stretched like a cat, and headed back to the hop yard.
I hiked up to my place, my redoubt, my tent and campfire and rickety outhouse, my forty acres of woods, with nerves sizzling, electric with outrage. I thought: For two years I have been lifting, pushing, hoeing, hiking up steep hills, forcing chainsaws through hardwood, shoveling snow and gravel, manhandling cranky old tractors, tossing hay bales, goading or restraining recalcitrant fourteen-hundred-pound animals, holding back five-hundred-pound tree limbs, hauling water, shoveling cow shit. I’d battled the Great Fear and Diz and twenty-below weather and Jim Brassard drunk and the Great Loneliness.
I knew I had lived an unpredictable zigzag life and had come here as damaged merchandise, but my unpredictability had dimensions yet to reveal themselves.
I kept plastic contractor’s demolition bags in my supply chest, big heavy black ones that could hold a couple of weeks’ worth of recyclables or be used as raincoats in a pinch. I took two of them and put one inside the other and then brought my shovel up the hill to the sprawling pyramid of guts. It was definitely a larger pile than the one I’d seen last fall. More bear-size, I thought. My grief and rage swelled, bulged to bursting.
The guts were heavy and slippery and difficult to shovel, but I got them into the bag. I carried the bag down the hill and saw nobody in the farmyard and got into my Toyota and drove up to the Goslants’ place. I had put the bag in the trunk, but the scent of blood and the fecal stink of entrails filled the car. I had gotten some blood on my hands and they were sticky on the steering wheel.
I had entered an alternate state. Adrenaline had washed away an overlay of civilized behavior and by doing so conjured, revealed, another part of what it is to be me or to be human.
In the Goslants’ driveway, I pulled up next to Johnnie’s tricked-out pickup and yanked the parking brake lever before the car had even stopped. I popped the trunk, hoisted the bag, carried it up the three steps, and laid it on the stoop. I hammered on the rickety aluminum door.
The twentysomething I’d seen when passing the place answered. A muffled yammer came from inside and I could just see images flickering on a big wall-mounted television screen.
“Johnnie.”
“Yeah. What?”
“I live on the land just below yours.”
“Yeah? And what?”
“You just poached an animal off my land. Which I spent a lot of time posting. The land is posted up the ass.”
“Me? It’s not season. No way.” When I lifted a blood-glazed hand and held his gaze, he switched to feigned remorse: “Sorry! Really. It was an accident.” Now he thought he was being funny.
I had not scripted this encounter, so I could only resort to an insane form of honesty. “Johnnie, do you know what PTSD is?”
“What the—”
“PTSD. You know what it is.”
“Yeah. It’s when vets come back and they’re all fucked up.”
“What do PTSD vets do?”
An impatient voice called from inside the house, and Johnnie turned and yelled, “Shut up!” Then back to me: “Fuck you talking about? What is this?”
“What do they do? PTSD guys.”
“They act nuts. Some of them. They flip out. I don’t know. Beat up their wives? There was that one that killed some people. What’s this have to do with the deer? I’ll pay you for the fucking venison. Or you take it. Now, get off our step.”
The deer. I felt a wash of relief, but the outrage didn’t ebb. I’d gotten too cranked up, my motor too revved; I had too much momentum to stop.
“Why would a woman go live out in a tent in the woods a mile from nowhere?” I asked.
“How should I know? This is shit. I got other things to do and you gotta get the fuck off the step.”
“Because I’ve got PTSD. And I act nuts.”
“I can believe that,” he said, laughing.
“And when I see this …” I picked up the bag of guts, which he hadn’t noticed. I had planned to dump it on the stoop, but I flung that bag empty so that its contents ended up on the doorsill and in the entryway. I balled up the bag and threw it against his chest. “… it brings it back to me and I go nuts big-time.”
He pulled back. There was a speckling of blood on his Metallica T-shirt, and some had splashed onto his shoes. “You are fuckin—”
“Nuts! What’ve I been telling you? So if I see this again on my land—a footprint, a twig broken—this is you.” I kicked some of the guts farther into the house.
He still played it cool, but I was in an alien-strange groove. I believed what I was saying, and he did, too.
“Okay, I got it. You’re fucked in the head. Got that. No problem. I got enough screwballs around already, I don’t need another one.”
Another call from inside the house: “Johnnie, who the hell are you talking to?”
“Shut up! It’s nobody.” He turned back to me again and said, “Brassard never gave a shit if we hunted there.”
“I’m not Brassard. It’s mine now.”
“Okay. Your land is posted. You’re fucked in the head. It’s your land. It’s posted. It’s all yours. Take the goddamn deer, it’s behind the garage. Have a ball, fruitcake.”
He had to kick a coil of intestine out of the way so he could slam the door.
I got back into my car with so much adrenaline in my body, I felt as if I could squeeze the steering wheel into a strand of spaghetti.
If you are reading this and you are a war veteran and have seen combat, please understand that I know the difference. I never claimed, I would never claim, that I had served in the armed forces and seen and done what you have. But at that moment, I realized that yes, I really had come up to the land with some injuries inside. Maybe a lot of the wounds were self-inflicted, but they were real all the same. And the hour I’d spent in fear that it was one of my bears, my sacred friends, had dug a knife into me and lanced the awful pits and pockets of every grief and loss, all the anger and pain, the distillation of every betrayal and resentment that hid in me. Remembering Ricky’s trembling fear of Johnnie had added to it. And on my way to the Goslants’ place, all those secret poisons gushed forth and converged until my blood seethed with the toxic chemistry of rage.
I drove a few miles on the back roads before heading home, the window open so the wind tugged my hair. The sweet forest flowed past while I cried. I cried for Johnnie because he was a sad little bastard stuck in a shit-out-of-luck life. Cried for Ricky, wherever he was now. Cried for relief, knowing my bears were still out there somewhere. I cried for me, too, and for all the injuries and injustices the world inflicts on us all. And for every damn thing.
I know, I do know, how little I have been hurt, compared to what life can really do to you. But there had been in me a hurtling dark freight train loaded with that lifetime’s worth of pain and anger—monstrous, mindless, spraying sparks from the rails. And though I’d had so much good fortune in the past two years, so much that was dear and sweet, that black train still had been coming and had to bull and charge at anything in front of it, and this day it had arrived.
Johnnie, for all that he’d trespassed and killed and been smug and insulting, had hurt his helpless cousin or nephew or whatever Ricky was, had absorbed more of its force than he’d actually earned.
I did feel pity for him. But in coming to my land, I had for the first time in my life staked out some turf, forty full acres of it. I was its steward, and I would honor the obligations of my stewardship.
When I got back, Earnest and Will and Erik were in the kitchen, pretending to be relaxed. I went to the sink and washed and rewashed my hands.
“How’d
it go?” Earnest and Will asked offhandedly, in accidental unison.
“Good. Went well. I don’t think it’ll be a problem anymore,” I said.
And it has proved true: No Goslant has ever trespassed again. More importantly, I have never again felt the rumble of that dark train, never put someone in front of it. It went off a bridge or cliff or off its rails into a night all its own, far from me.
Chapter 54
By now, you have no doubt discovered that I had fallen in love, and not just with my land and Brassard’s farm. Even though I haven’t directly stated it, I have not been trying to keep it a secret—just telling it as it revealed itself. I felt it burgeoning but simply didn’t recognize it myself through all the days I have been recounting. I was submerged in it, consumed with it, and surrounded by it. And truly, I had never experienced it, not this, before—how could I have recognized it?
I did feel it coming, an inner turbulence I tried to ignore, but as Erik later pointed out, I was “slow on the draw” in these matters.
In the end, I required permission to recognize it, and Erik gave me that permission by acting like a little brother—one who had always put me up against things I didn’t want to, or simply couldn’t, face.
By mid-August, the hops bines had filled out, clustered with the cones that we would soon be harvesting, and they were heavy enough to make the strongest trellis wires sag. The hop yard was marvelous: long, deep corridors lined with walls of foliage, canted forward somewhat, hallways roofed by a strip of sky. The fact that we’d had to accommodate boulders and buried rocks made this grove more interesting and mysterious. The rows were not straight, but zigged and zagged slightly; with the geometry somewhat relaxed, the lanes gave a secret view here, a longer view there, a sense of benevolent enclosure. A scent, at once familiar and indefinable, hovered between the walls: almost but not quite a mix of pine, basil, and marijuana.
Even Brassard, who by then was spending most of his time in his corn and hay, and who you’d think would have had enough of green things, enjoyed the yard.
One afternoon I was searching for Erik, who was somewhere in those six acres, to bring him some lunch, which I knew he would otherwise go without. I came across Brassard, strolling along in the shaded lane, smoking his pipe as he tipped his head up to inspect the knots of cones at the top of this unfamiliar plant. He smiled at me, and I at him.
“Looks like it’s comin along well, doesn’t it? Not that I’d know. But seems a robust crop. Got lucky this time around, so far.” He spoke with the stem of the pipe in his teeth.
I agreed that it looked good, then asked him if he’d seen Erik in his wanderings.
He put his thumb over his shoulder. “Back a good ways, three rows over. He’ll be glad to see that!” He gestured at the plastic bag of edibles I carried.
“Yeah. He forgets to eat.”
“Pleasant back in here. Peaceful.” Brassard removed his pipe from his lips and said, “If you’re not the one doin the work.”
I found Erik teetering at the very top of a stepladder, clipping off some cone-covered sections of bine. He untangled a few and tossed them into the lane, then climbed down to inspect them.
“You’re going to break your neck doing that,” I told him.
“Wouldn’t that be nice,” he said bitterly.
I gave him some sandwiches and a bottle of Gatorade that he chugged like a collegiate beer-drinking champ. Then he sat down to look carefully at the cones he’d clipped. They were about the size of strawberries, and though they were still a bright green, their scales were paling a bit and becoming almost papery. He broke a few off the bine, rubbed them between finger and thumb, and held them to his nose.
“Another week, I’d guess.”
“That’s exciting!” I sat next to him.
He didn’t share my enthusiasm. “A very scary week.”
“How so?”
“Number one, they have to mature just right to develop the flavor components, and I don’t really know jack shit about when exactly they’re ready. Number two, rain could delay harvest or make them too wet so that they rot rather than dry when we get them inside. Number three, I don’t know how long it’ll take to clip off six acres in whatever weather the good Lord chooses to inflict on us. And on and on.” He fingered another cone, frowned, and passed it to me. “And then there’s this.”
The one he handed me had slight blackening on its lower scales, and at the base some were peeling back from the core.
“What is it?”
“Hell if I know. But if it takes over, I’m dead.” He unsheathed his knife and carefully sliced through the darkening cone, then held it close to his face to inspect it. “Leaf and bine development have been good all summer, so it’s not a soil issue. I don’t see any aphids. I don’t know. It might be bacterial. I just don’t know enough about this!”
I wanted to console him but had no advice to offer. I suggested that he eat his forgotten sandwiches, and he complied.
Here it was again: Farm, and you live in suspense. You can’t predict the vicissitudes of weather, pests, crop yield, or morale. You can’t anticipate market conditions half a year ahead, when your crop will be ready. You don’t get unemployment compensation if your operation crashes. And what happens if you get sick and miss a few days of work at a crucial moment in the cycle of growing and harvesting that nature, not you, decrees?
My brother finished eating and then flopped onto his back, spread his legs and arms, and stared at the sky, breathing in and out deliberately as he tried to relax. I settled back, too, so that we lay like two kids making snow angels, except that it was August and we lay on cut-over weeds and grass. I was thrilled when he reached and linked his little finger with mine, the way he would when we were kids and two years’ age difference was a long time and I could be a comforting big sister. A murther of three crows flew over, and I imagined that from their vantage we looked like Hansel and Gretel, innocents lost in the wide, labyrinthine world and trying to comfort each other.
“I guess what I’m saying,” he said after a while, shyly, “is I’m feeling really fucked up right now.” An honest request for reassurance.
I said, “You’re going to be fine. Okay? You’re not alone in this.” I tried to say it with confidence, but in fact I’d been feeling the rising pressure, too. The uncertainty was wearing on me.
I had by default taken over banking for the operation—Erik said he was too impatient for accounting, he was a “bigger-picture entrepreneur”—so I knew that he had badly underestimated the amount of labor he’d have to pay for. And that Aunt Theresa’s inheritance—his “initial capitalization”—was almost gone. But I had never gotten a clear idea of how much money he might earn from the yard.
As we lay there, he told me that if nothing went wrong, the acres grown from the crowns would produce a thousand pounds or more per acre, when dried. He expected less from the rhizome-planted acres this year, but from the whole yard he had been hoping for about five thousand pounds. If nothing went wrong. If he got a decent price for them, he might make seventy grand this first year. That would mean he’d cover his out-of-pocket expenses and have a little more to live on and to improve the yard for the next harvest. That would be a bigger crop, and the brewers would know what good stuff he was peddling, and he would make some serious money.
If nothing went wrong.
My brain was calculating the other side of the equation: the impact on Brassard’s farm. If this year was a disaster for the hops, if Erik fled from the project in exhaustion and despair and loneliness for female company, Brassard would lose the lease income and the other money Erik was paying. That slender path to the farm’s renewal would be gone.
How much tension can be transmitted through lovingly linked little fingers? I began to feel a little ill.
Chores were calling almost audibly in my head. I got up and brushed myself off; Erik
stood and shook himself all over, like a dog. He would be exhausted tonight, and I knew he had been living off microwaved popcorn and canned soup, so I invited him up to my camp for dinner. I had made a grocery run and set aside some solid fare for the purpose.
I did want to make sure he was well fed, but I had ulterior motives for my invitation. Whatever happened with the hops, I had felt for some time that his real difficulties came from another source: his intimate relationships. Love is an irresistible tide, I had decided, lifting all things regardless of other vagaries of circumstance, so I planned to ask him about it, prod him to think about it a bit. He needed more than a big sister’s love and devotion. I worried about his well-being, especially after having endured almost six months of unrelenting labor to the exclusion of every other life activity, including romance. He wasn’t happy with the situation, and between overwork and that absence he had become increasingly irritable and, I knew, existentially overwhelmed.
I had thought I would deliver a wise, sisterly sermon about finding “a good woman,” and probably every other cliché about the stabilizing and affirming benefits of longer-term partnership. Look at Perry and James, twenty years together, I would have said; look at Lynn and Theo and their stable, productive little farm. Our father would have said something along the lines of “You know, there comes a time when a man benefits from making some commitments that help balance his life.”
Erik came up just after sunset, his sleeping bag and mat over one shoulder. He readily agreed when I forbade any talk whatsoever about hops or money.
I had planned to care for him, but during his years minding his marijuana patch he had developed exceptional skills as an outdoor chef, and he insisted on doing the cooking. He didn’t appear to take any pleasure in it, but it gave his impatient hands something useful to do, and I could see that it helped him decompress after the day’s tensions. I had bought some sweet corn, which he soaked in heavily salted water for a half hour. When he deemed it and the fire ready, he expertly raked and spread the coals, then arranged the cobs so they would singe and steam in their husks. Then he set up some cheese sandwiches with ham slices and thick slabs of sweet onion and tomato in them; my only suggestion was to add a few basil leaves I’d culled from Diz’s derelict garden. He quickly seared the ham, then grilled the sandwiches in my big iron skillet until the cheese oozed, and that meal was blue-ribbon, off-the-charts delicious. We were ravenous but tried to eat like civilized humans.