Then it was done. I was moved and astonished. I had noticed Will filming now and again, mainly in the hop yard, but never realized he had assembled so many moments. I also realized I hadn’t given him credit for such a good eye, or sense of humor, or sensitivity. He had been looking, observing, seeing, all that time.
“I love it. That’s … us. You got us.”
“Thanks. It’s not really done. Just a bunch of clips I pasted together. But it’s fun, isn’t it?”
“There’s someone missing, though.”
“Who’s that?”
“Will Brassard.”
“Well, someone’s got to be behind the camera.” He went to check the spaghetti, then turned up the heat on the sauce and meatballs. He set me up at the counter with lettuce, carrots, and tomatoes to make a salad.
“I think you should branch out,” I said. “With your eye, your sense of timing? I mean, you’ve landed in an agricultural-productions professional niche. But that’s pretty ironic, don’t you think? Given your feelings about farm life?”
“Oh, farm life is okay to visit; I just wouldn’t want to live there.”
We both chuckled. The growing anxiety and fatigue was wearing on me, too, and I was having my own doubts. I remembered getting my monthly check from Larson Middle School, its reassuring predictability, and the pleasure that came from a workday that actually ended.
We ate without saying much. The silence felt a little uncomfortable, so I played some of Erik’s Celtic tunes on my laptop. But they were melancholy, not the best choice. It had gotten dark outside, and despite each other’s company, I think we both felt the lonesomeness of a rural night wrap around the farm and around my little apartment. I had heard Erik come into his side, but no further noises, and I knew he hadn’t made himself any dinner—he’d taken one look at his bed and collapsed into it.
“Yeah, I thought I should redeem myself after the brucellosis fiasco,” Will said.
“Hey, don’t put it down! I am now much more vigilant for signs of brucellosis.”
He was supposed to smile at that but didn’t. Another silence.
“Dad has dropped your name on me about ten times in the last week,” he confessed. “Increasingly in the last couple of months.”
“Likewise.”
You must understand that I have never been any good at moments like this. The nakedness that both parties feel is difficult for me, and I have too little experience, no habitual reflexes, to fall back on. I knew Will was the same kind of person. To our credit, though, if we were not adept we were pretty straight up.
“What do you say when he does?” he asked carefully.
“Nothing. He just … it’s very indirect.”
We looked at each other frankly for a long moment.
“You’re not really there with it, are you?” he asked.
I considered that as he watched me attentively: a good-looking, intelligent, well-intentioned man facing determinedly into a moment of difficult honesty.
“I’m not sure where I am with anything much,” I said at last. “Do you maybe mean ‘Am I ready?’”
“I suppose that’s one way to put it.”
“Because I think there are really two questions there. One is if I am. The other is if you are. And I’m not sure you are, because you’re fresh off a hard breakup and you don’t know whether you’re just lonely and unanchored and are … reaching out. I mean, it is scary. Being single. When you’re not used to it.” I knew the feeling all too well but couldn’t express it, so I tried to make the shape of it with my hands: “There’s this gap in every day, where there’s … supposed to be someone.”
He nodded. Clearly, he knew that feeling, too.
I wondered whether he noticed that I’d avoided directly answering his question. I thought about effulgence and my brother’s crabby but insightful observations. The slot machine tumblers Erik had set in motion were still rolling. But though they had not quite come around to their fated final combination, they were definitely slowing.
“I guess you’re a couple of years further along than I am,” he said.
I counted up the time in my head. “Yeah. Two years further past it, I guess.” “So … what’s it like out there?” A sad smile. “Get any better?”
I turned toward him on my stool and put my hands up, resting one on each cheek so he’d know I meant it, and kissed him on his forehead: “Much better,” I assured him.
After he left, I thought about our conversation. I decided that Will had after all noted my attempt to deflect his question, had recognized as camouflage my clichés about not being “ready,” and had concluded that the answer was probably no.
Chapter 56
I wish I could say that the hops harvesting went well and we got rich and lived happily ever after. But it didn’t, and we didn’t. The weather held through most of it, but we didn’t have enough experience and we didn’t have the right equipment and the seasonal clock ran the seconds down until it was too late.
The upper yard matured first—which was good because it allowed some time for processing the cones before the lower yard had to get cut. When Erik gave the signal, it was all hands on deck. Even Brassard came for the fun.
We fanned out in the upper yard and walked up and down the rows with machetes, cutting the bines off at about three feet above the ground. Now they hung straight down, like curtains, creating more room for Brassard to drive along the lanes in his Deere, towing a low-sided wooden trailer. Up front was Earnest, lifted high in the Deere’s bucket, wielding a hedge-trimmer to cut the bines and training strings just below the trellis wire. Perry walked alongside to catch each bine as it fell, and as the trailer rolled by he flipped it up to James, who laid it on the bed. When the trailer became too full to manage anymore, I drove up on the Ford. I left an empty trailer for Brassard and then drove the full one back to the barn.
The men had turned the upstairs of the old barn, the spacious hayloft, into a hops-processing plant. They had set up the cone separator just inside the door at the gable end, at the top of the ramp from the road. Farther back were rows upon rows of chicken-wire bins that the cones would sit in as they dried. Erik fed the bines into the flail rollers as the Vermont Tech kids dealt with debris and cones.
It took the cutting team only two hours to harvest that first acre. But at the barn, the bines backed up in front of the feed end of the separator, mounded into toppling heaps, until we had to stop cutting new ones.
Earnest and Erik had done a brilliant job designing their contraption. It worked perfectly. Nothing broke. The cones bounced down the conveyor at a tempo that allowed Jennifer to pick out bad ones and any leaf pieces that happened to go with them. Jason and Bailey worked in excellent synchrony, handing fresh bines up to Erik, raking leaves out of the chicken-wire barrel, removing the stripped bines, and carting away the heaps of leaf debris that fell continuously off the top of the conveyor.
An air of optimism filled the place—for about an hour.
It isn’t my desire to inflict vicarious misery on you, so I will simply say that it took thirty-two hours to strip cones off one acre’s worth of bines. Thirty-two nearly-continuous hours of racketing drive chains and gears and belts and the relentless thrashing of the stripper flails. The upper three acres took five eighteen-hour days with Erik and Earnest and me, and anyone else who could find the time, working in shifts all day and through half the night. We also needed an extra day just to rearrange the mountains of debris, tune up the separator, and generally regroup.
So by the time the upper acres got processed, the lower acres were going by—the cones losing their lupulin yellow, going brown, losing their bitter odor. Eight days into the project, two successive days of downpour compelled us to abandon further harvesting. In the end, we managed to get in only four acres.
Later that fall, we fed everything on the last two acres into the ch
ipper along with the other hop yard leftovers. It made some great compost.
On the bright side, the drying arrangement worked pretty well. And Erik had been courting buyers all summer, so when the cones were about dry enough, a couple of brewers came by to crumble and slice and sniff them. They made a pretty good offer. We bagged the cones by hand and then did our best to shrink-wrap them using a vacuum setup the men had cobbled together. We delivered them in Earnest’s big stake-side truck: Earnest, me, and Erik sitting like limp hay-stuffed scarecrows, speechless blank numb with exhaustion, side by side on the wide bench seat, rumbling up to Waterbury to drop them off.
I insisted on buying the men a steak dinner, honoring the ritual Earnest had established. This time it was Erik who drank some beers and who was asleep, leaning heavily on my shoulder, by the time we made it back to the farm. He toppled out of the truck, lurched through his door, and slept for two days straight.
For a variety of reasons, I had fallen into the role of managing the bank account. By the time the dust settled, I calculated that Erik had lost almost fourteen thousand dollars on that first crop. And the only way he’d managed to keep the loss that small was by getting so much pro bono work from, mainly, Earnest and me. And Earnest’s skipping some tree jobs—and losing a few grand in income—to make time to help. And the time Will put in.
But a loss of fourteen thousand wasn’t too bad, actually. It meant that he had recouped enough of the money he’d invested that he could live on the cheap until the next harvest. He’d even have some funds to invest in better equipment, and now the big expense of the trellis was out of the way. Later, the brewers told us they were ecstatic about the hops, highly aromatic and bitter with notes of grapefruit that they conveyed to the beer. They designed a new recipe around Erik’s hops and placed an advance order for every last cone he could produce next summer.
So it was a loss, but not a total loss. The next year had promise. When I mentioned that to Brassard, he looked at me over his reading glasses and said, “It’s always next year that’ll do better and put you over the top.”
Despite his exhaustion, Erik didn’t renege on any of the work required in the hops war’s aftermath. He clipped the rest of the bines from the lower acres, gathered together the other debris, and ran it all through the chipper to get composted. He and Earnest moved the separator to a corner of the repair shed, and then Erik dismantled his drying racks. This liberated the upstairs of the old barn so it could receive the baled hay, which had been waiting under tarps, and Erik did his share of the relocation. He and I went over the books with Brassard to make sure he’d paid every penny owed for tractor and tool use and the manure he had churned into the hop yard soil.
“Got the makins of a good farmer,” Brassard commented. Then, dryly: “’Course, you have to stick with it over some years to know if it’s goin to work for you or not.”
As I expected, when he’d completed the last hops chores, Erik pretty well vanished again. Love called from beyond the valley.
Chapter 57
I had assumed that my state of disquiet would fade once the hops adventure had resolved itself. But it didn’t. I resigned myself to being an unsettled person. I always had been, I told myself; why should anything be different now? But this was a dismal prognosis and didn’t seem quite right in any case. I wished I could talk to Earnest about it—in fact, I was accruing a backlog of things to ask him and tell him—but we had become guarded around each other, and it seemed there was never a time without interruptions and other priorities.
A couple of weeks after we finished the hops, just as the forest leaves began to turn, a minor thunderstorm jostled through. At Brassard’s farm, the nearby hills tended to break and jumble the winds, so we seldom had monumental storms. Instead, we had many smaller, chaotic atmospheric tussles; this one was just a bully sticking out his elbows to push his way through a crowd. The lightning rarely struck where we could see its forks, the bombs of thunder stayed distant. It wasn’t even enough of a bother to stop work outside, though it did cause Bob the dog to cower and the rest of us to wear hooded raincoats.
It rumbled away well before nightfall, and I walked up to my camp quite confident that my tent had survived in good shape. It had, but a gigantic birch had been knocked over and lay across the far end of my clearing, broken from impact.
I think it is the golden birch that gets so grand and broad in its ancient age. Even using my manual, it’s hard for me to tell, because the bark of these old trees has changed with age to the indeterminate color of some baser metal. They can be six feet through the trunk, standing with most limbs broken off, almost dead themselves but nurturing all kinds of living things. Little pines and maples start growing in forks where accumulated leaves have turned to soil, rooted twenty feet from the ground. Shelf fungi jut from the trunks. Small mammals and birds make homes in deep holes they dig here and there, and I had often seen woodpeckers hacking at their bark and ripping away chunks of rotten wood the size of my hand. Incredibly, these ruins often retain one or two slim branches still bearing leaves, fresh as saplings despite the passage of decades or perhaps centuries.
Though I had loved having this birch and its denizens as my neighbors, and appreciated the tree as the probable ancestor of the younger birches all around, I didn’t want its bulk lying across my meager clearing. It crushed the blackberry cane that I knew the bears and raccoons and birds needed, and it blocked my path uphill to the spring. My little chainsaw wouldn’t reach a third of the way through its trunk.
Of course I went to Earnest for a solution: Earnest, master of trees; Earnest, tree whisperer. And of course he said he would come to check it out and help me deal with it, when he found the time. He’d been working his tree jobs up in Chittenden County until sunset every day. That’s why I was surprised when the next evening, well before sunset, I heard his call from down the path: “Pilgrim! It’s the Indians.”
Darkness was still an hour away, but I had lit my fire for the pleasure it gave. He came up the track in his work clothes, still sawdust-covered.
“Got tree problems? I’m your man. Extensive experience. References upon request.” His humor, as it had been for many weeks, was forced.
I told him to shut up. We sat on the logs near the fire as I made some chamomile tea in a pot big enough to give us each several mugfuls.
He looked tired. I was just glad to see his face there in my home. Whatever I’d thought to say, or he had, neither of us got to it right away. We sat on the logs and percolated as the water did.
“Good day today?” I asked.
“Okay, yeah.”
“Doesn’t sound very okay.”
He sighed heavily. “Killing trees in South Burlington shopping mall parking lots.” But his face smoothed a bit as he scanned my woods. “Nice to be up here, though. A relief.”
The pot reached boiling and I threw in a handful of teabags. We were quiet as we watched the chamomile essence diffusing into the water.
“I have something to say to you,” I said finally.
He seemed alarmed at the prospect. “You know, it’s late and maybe—”
“It’s about when I told you and Erik about the bears.”
“Yes.”
“You told me to go up to the Goslants’ on my own. Will offered to do it, Erik said he’d go up and kill Johnnie—”
“Really? He said that? Good man!”
“Well, he admitted he was exaggerating.”
Earnest enjoyed that. I poked the fire with a stick so that a crazy flurry of sparks spun up.
“Meanwhile, the toughest guy east of the Mississippi said I should go up there on my own. By myself. To get into a fight with a screw-loose kid who kills things.”
He shrugged. I waited him out. He knew I would wait him out. The tea diffused.
“Those bears. I don’t know the story, but the way you were …” He looked at me straig
ht-on. “You couldn’t see yourself, but when somebody’s vibrating like a tuning fork and their eyes look like, what, a samurai’s eyes … When it’s that important, one thing I know, you have to deal with it yourself. You can’t duck it or delegate it.”
I nodded.
“Tell me about the bears.” He was very serious, and the power of Earnest’s command to honesty was not something I could resist. “What happened that was so important.”
So I told him. I told him everything, about the inexplicable call of the darkness, the silly pointless noise I made, the bears and me together in the darkness, and how I felt afterward. The magic of that night came back to me in all its irrationality and mystery, and sharing it with someone was blissful.
When I finished, Earnest didn’t say anything, just let the story hang in the air of my dimming glade, respecting it. The tea was ready by then. I had replaced my tin cups with some big plastic mugs, and poured it steaming into two of them. We each squeezed some honey from a plastic honey-bear and then cupped our hands around the mugs and contemplated them as if they could tell us something. It was quiet except for the fire’s small, busy noises and the occasional fat drops of water falling from leaves that had cupped them since yesterday’s storm.
“You were strong enough,” he said finally. “You are strong enough. I thought you should know that.”
That was good tea. We each savored two whole mugs full and both had to head off in the dimming light to pee, I at my outhouse, Earnest somewhere in the woods at a respectable distance.
When we got back I said without thinking, “You have been melancholy, and I want to know why.”
“It’s not something I can go into with you right now.” He picked up his empty mug and stared into it.
“Are you angry with me?”
That startled him: “No! Why would I be? Why do you say that?”
“You’ve … you’re, like, cautious when we talk. You’re too polite! I hate it when you’re polite with me, Earnest!”