Looking at him, I was dismayed to see how slim he had become—he’d never had any weight to spare, and had lost easily ten pounds since he first arrived.
The night grew dark around us as we faced each other across the fire. It was windless and very quiet except for the muffled hooting of a barred owl—goo-goo-ga-joob!—somewhere deep in my woods. With the late-summer foliage dense around my clearing, we were totally enclosed but for the circle of dark star-pricked sky above. It was a safe and private place to talk about serious things, I thought.
My plan was to cleverly maneuver our conversation toward generalities about relationships and then gradually bring the issue to bear on him. He didn’t need any more pressure, but it wouldn’t hurt him to start thinking about it. In a low-key, almost absentminded way, I would eventually suggest that if you don’t like these periods of singleness, maybe you ought to take a look at your approach to relationships and think about someday checking one out for more than a few months.
Instead, the soul of tact, I said: “So. How’s your love life?” I said it briskly, meant it rhetorically.
“However it is or isn’t, it’ll have to wait until the fucking hops are harvested, won’t it?” He spat into the fire. “What I was thinking, I don’t know. I’d rather pump gas. Bag groceries. Go back to Elk fucking Ridge! My blood pressure is through the roof. Anything goes wrong, I’m done. Cooked. Game over.”
It was true: He had staked everything on this first harvest and had inadvertently staked the farm’s future on it as well. I was trying to formulate a reassuring reply when he preempted me.
“Funny that you should bring it up, though,” he said. “My love life.”
“I was just—”
“What are you doing, Annie?”
“What do you mean?”
He sighed and shut his eyes, a pantomime of great, weary patience. “You’re the smartest person I know, and yet there are places where you’re … dense. Slow on the draw. Sorta stupid, actually. Sorry, but it’s true.”
“Gee, thanks, bro. Now that you’ve totally alienated and offended me, what were you planning to say?”
“You know what I think? I think you can’t see it because it’s sort of against the rules. Like you’re afraid of it, or you’re not allowed? And this I don’t get, because in every other way, you seem willing and able to break rules and live pretty far outside the ordinary.” He gestured at my tidy yet wild little clearing. “I’m proud of you for that, by the way.”
“I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”
“See? That’s what I mean!” He was a very tired man, sincerely frustrated with me. “We were talking about love. I’m trying to tell you something here. Jesus Christ!”
“Yeah? Well, you’re not making it any clearer, whatever it is.”
“Okay. So tell me, how’re you sleeping at night?”
Again his change of tack confused and affronted me. “What’s this? Now you’re my shrink?”
“Whatever, Annie.” He snorted with disdain and scuffed dirt at the campfire. “Whatever.”
It bothered me that he was right. I often awoke in the night and lay there in a jittery malaise. It was a physical as well as emotional discomfort, my body drawing taut with tension that I had to consciously dispel again and again. The feeling of fecundity I’d cherished at first, that sphere of warmth cradled between my hipbones, had become more of an ache.
“Of course I can’t sleep! I’m as nervous as you are about the hops! It’s a stressful period for all of us. We—”
“Do you need ‘permission’?” He put quote marks in the air with his fingers. “Is that what it is? Okay, you have my permission. It is totally permitted. Permission City here.”
His attitude irritated me, and I almost snapped at him, “I don’t need permission for anything from my little brother.” But his words had set my mind spinning, thoughts and feelings like rollers in a slot machine, a blur of roses and cherries, spades and clubs, peaches and diamonds. I intuited that the wheels would stop and end up at some configuration that made sense. Even in my confusion, I knew that much.
“I still don’t get it,” I told him.
He gave me a hard look, utterly out of patience. “I’m going to sleep now.”
And he took his gear and crackled away into the darkness.
So that’s how I got permission to fall in love. It took another few weeks for the rollers to chunk into place—one, then another, then the last. When they did and the combination registered, my unease rose in a shrill crescendo until something had to give.
Chapter 55
Again, Erik’s biggest problem was simply a matter of math. How long would it take to pick thousands of fourteen-foot tangles of bine and cones? He had a plan for it, but he couldn’t predict how long it would take. As harvest approached, he hired the Vermont Tech students on a standby basis, arranged for Perry and James to come down when they could take time from their own crops. I warned Lynn and Robin that they would have to do the milking themselves some afternoons so I could work with the hops. We all watched the weather anxiously.
Erik and Earnest invited me to the maiden voyage of the bizarre-looking contraption they’d been working on in the repair shop—their secret project. It was a cone separator they had designed based on Erik’s glimpse of his former partners’ equipment and on YouTube videos of commercial hop growers processing their cut bines. Many of the parts came from an old baler that had been gathering dust in the hayloft for the past decade. Its conveyor was designed to take bales from the tractor’s hay compactor and carry them back onto the wagon trailing behind. Earnest had been adapting it for hops.
It was a complex machine. As Earnest explained it, one person was to introduce the end of the bine into a feed hopper, which dragged the bine between a series of whirling flails that more or less separated leaves and cones from the bines. The green stuff that was battered and yanked off the bine strand was then supposed to pass through a rotating chicken-wire barrel and fall onto the conveyor. The conveyor was set at an angle with the belt rolling upward. The cones, being heavier, would bounce down the sloped belt and into a bin, while the leaves and other lighter stuff followed the belt up and fell off the end. Once the bine was stripped, the person at the hopper flail end pulled it back out and threw it onto a waste pile.
That was the theory, anyway.
To test it, Erik came in on the Bobcat with a half-dozen bines, each about ten feet long, in the bucket—they were light but too bulky to carry by hand. Earnest turned on the electric motor that moved the clattering gears and chains, and I stayed well out of the way.
Erik climbed up onto the wooden platform and fed in the first bine—I worried about his hands being drawn in with it—which immediately snarled and wrapped itself around the rollers and axles of the spinning flails.
Earnest hit the switch to shut down the rig. Three or four cones bounced down the conveyor belt.
Earnest dusted his palms together, miming satisfaction. “That went well!” he said.
Erik’s sense of humor had been sweated out of him long before. He began yanking the string and bine out in broken lengths a couple of feet long and pitching them away as hard as he could. There was little satisfaction in it, though, since they were too light to fly far.
“Erik. We’ll get it right,” Earnest told him. “There’ll always be a few kinks to work out.”
“Yeah, they had a few kinks to work out of the Titanic, too.”
“That was human error, actually,” Earnest retorted primly. “Which we are not going to make here.”
He unplugged the motor, got his toolbox, and climbed up onto the thing. First he clipped the rest of the tangled bine off the rollers and then began poking around the top of the flail compartment. Erik stomped off to cool his jets with some fresh air before coming back to help.
“Your brother will sur
vive,” Earnest assured me. “I have a good feeling about this.”
“Yuh-huh,” I said skeptically.
“No, seriously. I can tell.” He picked up a wrench and began ratcheting bolts out of the roller assembly. Without humor, as if levity were a demand imposed on him, he said, “Prophetic intuition. Quite common among aboriginal peoples.”
I threw a hop cone at him and left. I didn’t know how to comfort Erik, or make the machine work, and my Caucasian, colonialist intuition didn’t tell me much of anything except that it was a very anxious time and that somebody’s hands could get drawn into the flailing rollers and that my brother was falling apart and that I wasn’t doing a whole lot better. And that Earnest was doing a great job of being the steady one but a lot of it was pretense and something had come between us and I hated it.
Later, Erik found me as I was loading hay onto a feed wagon. He said his mood was much improved. Trying to reassure me, he told me something he remembered from business classes: “If you want to be a market leader, you need to be willing push your risk tolerance. Sixty percent of all millionaires have gone bankrupt at least once.”
That evening, I was just about to hike up the hill when Will drove in, parked, and flagged me down.
“What’s the rumpus?” I asked as he got out.
“I was going to ask you to ask me over to your place for dinner.” He gestured back at my chicken-coop apartment.
“That’s very generous of you,” I said. We both laughed.
“I have a video I thought you’d like to see. One I made. It’s not about cow diseases.”
“If you cook,” I said. He readily agreed.
I told him my larder was empty—I almost never spent time in my “downhill place” if the weather was anything short of nasty, and didn’t keep any edibles there but my emergency ramen—so he went to the house to scavenge foodstuffs. I showered, then realized that my closet was as empty as my refrigerator, leaving me with no choice but to put on my dirty working jeans and shirt again. I set my computer on the counter and booted it up, wondering what he had in mind.
Will came in with a paper grocery bag and laid out a box of dried spaghetti, a jar of tomato sauce, and various greens. Last, he tentatively put a plastic-wrapped brick of hamburger on the countertop. He gestured at the meat. “You up for that? I’m not much of a cook, but spaghetti and meatballs I can do. I guess I could get some eggs and make a kind of carbonara. Might be weird without bacon, though.” He was remembering my difficulty with culling.
“I’m still working on the larger issues,” I said, “but until I figure it out, that sounds great.”
He went to work in the kitchen as I sat at the counter and watched. He was about six feet two inches tall, the top of his head barely a hand’s width from the ceiling. He got water going, salted it, then liberally sprinkled the burger with various herbs from jars on my shelves, onion and garlic powder, finely chopped scallions. To mix it all, he put his hands into the bowl and squelched the meat between his fingers until they became so clogged with clinging fat that he had to stop and scrape it off with a fork.
“See what I mean?” He scowled at the mash he’d made. “My ex did all the cooking. Any skills I have are left over from my bachelor days. Spaghetti, scrambled eggs, and peanut butter sandwiches. And beer. I can pop a top with the best of them.”
“Speaking of the ex, how’s that going?” I asked.
“Settled. Papers signed, sealed, delivered. The problem remains my daughter. It’s not that I’m deemed unacceptable as a parent, just that my schedule is so uneven. Also, she’s in second grade in Rutland and I need to be up here for now. Hard for her to come out here except on weekends, and even that’s hit and miss with my schedule. So. For now it’s me visiting her when time permits.”
He got quiet and distant for a moment as he poured tomato sauce into a pan; then he brightened. “The ex has a boyfriend, though!”
“Is that a good thing, or—”
“Are you kidding? I’m thrilled! Distracts her from thinking up new ways to make my life miserable. Puts her in a better mood. She’s been a lot more agreeable since they got together.”
“That’s great!” I thought back to my own divorce and remembered my initial feelings—no, my feelings for at least the first year—toward Matt: I’d have liked to dissect him and his girlfriends with a dull spoon. But thinking about it just then, all that heat and heartache and wrangle, seemed unfathomable to me—childish, boring, an unpleasant but mercifully short chapter of my life. Was it just the passage of time, I wondered, or had some other change moved me beyond and above crap like that?
“So,” he said, “my latest masterpiece. Not on contract, just my own thing. Been working on it since spring, thought you might like to see it.”
He dumped the spaghetti sticks into the boiling water, put the sauce on simmer, scrubbed his hands to get rid of the grease, and joined me at the counter. He produced a shiny unlabeled DVD, slid it in, and started the show.
It opened with a shot of my forested hill, of all things, as seen from the hop yard. Then the camera panned slowly down; the top of the trellis appeared, then the tips of midsummer bines, stirring in a gentle breeze. Suddenly the frame moved quickly downward to a midshot of my brother flipping the bird to the camera. There was no sound.
It moved on to a wonderful montage of vignettes from the hop yard. Here was Jason, the chubbier of the Vermont Tech kids, bent to work planting rhizomes, with a more-than-generous view of his exposed rear, pink above his jeans. He turned and made as if to punch the camera. Then, seen through a gap in younger bines in one of the lanes, Bailey-not-Tim and Jennifer, who everybody knew were having an affair that they were inexplicably trying to keep secret. Bailey grabbed her and tried to kiss her; Jennifer shoved him away, laughing and looking over her shoulder to see whether somebody might be watching. I could read her lips: “Cut it out!”
Then came a series of rapid-fire shots that had me laughing helplessly: all the men, at one time or another, urine-marking the border of the yard. Will had done a discreet job, never getting a frontal shot, but the streams were often visible and the postures unmistakable. Each lasted about two seconds and faded into a similar shot of another of the crew, and another, and another, speeding up until it seemed as if the enterprise must have occupied every minute of the summer, that a tsunami must surely have descended on the yard. Even Bob had a couple of cameos, doing his part.
I screeched with laughter, something I’d done only when Cat got on a comic roll. “Fabulous!” I told Will. “Perfect. Brilliant.”
“It changes a bit,” he said.
By degrees, the tone of the video segued from silly to simply amusing to pleasantly rural to more serious, capturing portraits of the people at the farm, busy with their work. Here was Brassard, sweaty, holding his Agri-Mark hat off his head to scratch his scalp as he puzzled over something problematic. He turned to catch Will filming, mouthed, “Don’t you have something better to do?” But after a scene of Earnest flinging huge sections of tree trunk off his truck—eventually to become part of the winter’s firewood supply—there was Brassard again, climbing down from the Deere with the wincing carefulness of a man whose knees were killing him. Then Earnest, shirt off, skin sweat-sheened and oil-smeared, muscles balling as he cranked a wrench on the cone separator. I thought it was an aesthetically effective shot, a Rodin of man and machine, force brought against resistance, defined by the play of light on surfaces.
Next, a woman doing cow flow, lightly swatting the back end of a lagger, calling over the backs of the cows to someone in the parlor. With a shock, I realized it was me. I was making a joke and smiling, and at that moment, for the first time in years, I thought I looked good. I don’t mean sexy, but just, I don’t know, a decent, competent person in reasonable command of herself. Because I hadn’t expected to see her, I had momentarily glimpsed Ann Turner without vanity or defens
iveness, and in that instant I had rather liked that person. The scene passed in a few seconds but left me pleased and a little stunned.
The vignettes lengthened; the tempo slowed. More often now, they showed tired people: Erik with his hair sticking up crazily, shirt off, sweat drenched, dragging a shovel behind him as if he were too weak to lift it. Me in the big door of the shed, swiping hair off my face and trying unsuccessfully to tuck it behind my ear with my leather-gloved fingers. Brassard with his pipe, looking out over corn in the late afternoon and swatting at a persistent horsefly. Robin, muck boots on, leaning against the Jeep, one hip stuck out, tired but unconsciously glamorous as she shaded her eyes against the afternoon light, apparently waiting for Lynn to come out of the barn. A lingering shot of Perry and James, walking away from the camera, along the uphill end of the hop yard, two bearded men holding hands, talking, absentmindedly bumping shoulders.
Then Earnest and Erik and me, sitting on the edge of the porch, all three of us in exactly the same posture, leaning forward with elbows on knees, hands dangling, talking seriously, thinking something through. Bob lounging at our feet, tongue hanging, oblivious. Again I had a moment of that clear vision that comes with unfamiliarity, this time not in seeing myself but seeing Earnest and my brother: What handsome men! I thought.
It ended with a close shot of a single brilliant deep-orange poppy standing tall above Diz’s derelict flower garden, swaying gently in one of the breezes of that particular summer of all those people’s lives.