On Brassard's Farm Read online

  The day he trundled his old stake-side flatbed out of the farmyard, saluting me goodbye, a void seemed to open at the farm. I missed his warm presence instantly and almost feared the next six weeks with only Diz and Brassard for company.

  Chapter 18

  Moving into the repurposed chicken coop increased my daily contact with Diz, and I knew a showdown of some kind was inevitable.

  Even when we weren’t working together, I could see her comings and goings from my windows. She was a thickset woman, strong, given to out-of-date floral pants mismatched with her denim jackets or checked wool hunting shirts that got increasingly layered as the weather cooled. Knee-high muck boots, always. She worked continuously and vehemently, and I came to realize it was her unrelenting labor that kept the farm functioning. She did the work of at least two people, saving the cost of another hand. She personally knew every cow and every machine, and she also saw to the domestic chores of cooking and laundry, gardening, shopping, and housecleaning.

  The windows of my apartment looked directly out onto her vegetable garden, so I couldn’t help but see her working. I watched her dig up the potatoes and clip off the stalks of the brussels sprouts and load wheelbarrows full of pumpkins and winter squash. She attacked the compost heaps, stabbing and turning the stuff in huge forkfuls, carrying buckets of the ready loam and raking it into the garden rows. She tore down bean and pea vines and hacked them to bits and mixed them into the compost along with the fallen tomatoes. Earlier, she had picked apples from the trees in the yard and blackberries from the cane at the edge of the property, and now she put up applesauce and preserves. When she was canning, the kitchen windows turned white from the steam.

  She managed all this in bits of time between major farming chores.

  Most of the time, her face wore a focused frown, sometimes interrupted by a wince of pain, as if some joint suddenly complained. There were moments, though, when I suspected she’d gone off into a meditative, contented state during a task, kneeling or gathering or raking, because her face smoothed and her movements lost their perpetually hurried gracelessness.

  No such tranquil state was evident when we worked together. Clearly, she intended to punish me. For example, when the blackberries were ripe, I had picked a couple of big bucketfuls off my land and brought them down and left them in the kitchen for her. It was a not-so-oblique request for some token of reconciliation, but she had never thanked me or even mentioned it. I didn’t know if she’d even used them.

  I got sick of being afraid of her, and given that I’d made every other mistake in life, I figured I had little to lose by making some more with Diz.

  My first success occurred during a lunch break. I was munching on a sandwich and unavoidably observing as she pushed her wheelbarrow and carried other burdens back and forth through the garden gate. The gate had a flip-down peg designed to hold it open, but a stiffer-than-usual wind was blowing, today at just the right angle so that the peg dragged and the gate swung shut behind her every time she went through it. Often, the lift latch snapped shut again. This meant she had to put down her burden to open it again, then lift everything once more and push on through. Or she would back through while elbowing the latch down and banging her rump against the boards. This inefficiency surprised me—she should have given up on the peg and propped something heavy against the gate—but she was apparently so preoccupied, she didn’t notice the recurring bother.

  After a while, I couldn’t bear watching. I put down my sandwich, went out, and opened the gate for her as she approached pushing a garden cart mounded with coiled watering hose.

  She glared at me before coming through. “Go finish your lunch.”

  She went on past, down around the house. When she came back, she was surprised to find me still there. “I don’t need your help, thank you. Find something useful to do.”

  “I’m going to open the gate or help you carry stuff,” I told her.

  “No, you’re not. What did I just say?”

  I stayed in front of her, blocking her. “I can’t eat my lunch while watching another person work this hard. So I’m helping whether you like it or not.”

  “Get out of my way.”

  I crossed my arms and didn’t move. “Or what? You gonna fire me?”

  Her face stuttered: started to take on an expression, failed to achieve it, tried another, lost that one, too. I knew I couldn’t be fired, because if they didn’t have a hand right now they’d never get the fall work done. And given that I had no other income to pay off my debt with, they’d never get back the money I owed. Diz was stuck with me.

  I felt cranky and was determined to slug it out with her if need be. But her face stabilized into a small, unwilling smile. She nodded and said, as if in revelation, “Ah! You’re embracing your Inner Diz.”

  I almost laughed. It was such a clever satire of my supposed New Age psychology, such good comedic timing. Her grin tightened. I opened the gate, and she pushed through. We did some garden chores together.

  I was elated.

  My Inner Diz? What had empowered me to confront her was my unwillingness to endure any more of my own fear, my determination to prove myself of value and to not take shit off anyone. If she recognized herself in that attitude, it explained the core of her, the hard way she’d had to take to live her life.

  It suggested that Diz had come a long way from some difficult place, and the journey had forged her into the warrior I saw every day. What was that place? I wondered. It was six months before I learned more about her surprising, hard, broken path to becoming Diz Brassard.

  I became bolder. A week later, I asked after the blackberries.

  “So,” I hazarded, “I take it you got the berries? Some weeks ago?”

  “Of course I got them,” she snapped. “They were sitting on my damn kitchen counter.”

  Her attitude rankled and I said, “You’re welcome, Diz.”

  She started to bristle but then decided to take the high, if utterly sarcastic, ground: “You’re right. I should give you some of the preserves. How thoughtless of me.”

  Those weren’t by any means the only exchanges that took the starch out of Diz’s resentment. But we had neither a big blowout nor a heartwarming reconciliation; her hackles went down hair by hair. Throughout the fall, we had many small collisions that were overcome by many little grudging concessions and acknowledgments. Most of these slipped past because we were simply too busy to deal with them except by forgetting. We segued into a functional relationship.

  Fall struck me as a season of rituals. Within just a few weeks, certain tasks simply had to be completed, in a certain order. Get up the last of the hay, bale some, roll the rest and cover it in white plastic, stack the rolls along the side of the cowshed and the fence of the near paddock. Move the cows inside and latch the outer pasture fences. Check the no hunting posters tacked to the trees around the borders. Complain about the out-of-state leaf peepers, gawking at the rusticity of it all, whose slow-rolling cars choked the roads closer to town.

  Then there was harvesting the feed corn. The combine was a creature unto itself, and Brassard had a tractor, an older International Harvester, just for dragging this and the other large tilling and planting equipment. It was much bigger than the Deere, not a “utility” tractor but one designed just for towing things. I thought of it as a kind of elephant, tall and gray and massive, with a dusty dignity.

  When Brassard explained the logistics of harvesting to me, he also provided an exposition on tractors. Their brand names have a legendary ring to them: Massey Ferguson, International Harvester, New Holland, Allis-Chalmers, McCormick, John Deere—the tractor equivalents of famous guns such as Colt, Smith & Wesson, and Winchester. He had no faith in the Japanese and Korean tractors—the Kubotas, Hinomotos, and Kiotis—that had flooded the market in recent years. I pictured them as futuristic, streamlined things—ninja tractors. His father had b
een partial to Fords and Harvesters and had purchased my beloved little Ford back in 1979.

  He didn’t let me drive the Harvester, because managing turns and repositionings with the combine behind took considerable finesse. Instead, I drove the Ford alongside, pulling a high-sided trailer that received the stream of chopped stalk and grain. At intervals, Diz trundled out on the Deere to bring an empty trailer and pull away the full one. Back at the barnyard, she worked the machine that blew the mealy chaff up a long chute and into the top of one of the silos.

  Finally, the fields were stripped. The corn stubble stood in rows, looking like a military graveyard seen from the air. The naked hayfields struck me as sad and vulnerable looking. The white rolls of hay along the fence suddenly looked like deep snowdrifts. After sleeping in my woods all summer, I felt claustrophobic in my tiny apartment and missed those sweet, green days and nights. I no longer felt the Great Fear at night, but the loneliness still wormed its way into my heart, my bed, despite my physical proximity to others.

  I think even Diz noticed that I was a better hand than Franklin, the young man who had gone on to Vermont Tech. He was strong but always seemed a little at sea. Diz once said, “Kid’s so dumb he couldn’t find his own ass if it bit him on the ass.” Unlike him, I could generally see the larger objective behind minor chores. My ability to stick to a sequence of tasks allowed me to sync efficiently with Diz and get a lot done.

  This was especially important during milking. Cows like getting milked, so in summer they spontaneously drifted toward the barn and convened in the concrete-floored paddock near the milking parlor at the appointed time. In winter, when they lived in the cowshed, they needed very little goading to get them to milking.

  The Brassards’ setup was an eight-station “herringbone” parlor into which groups of cows were ushered and arranged in two rows of four. Between the two rows, down the center of the room, ran a waist-deep alley—Diz called it “the pit”—that allowed us milkers to stand, rather than crouch, as we attended to eight cow behinds.

  Overhead pipes ran the length of room, and above each station hung a flexible hose ending in the apparatus that actually drew the milk. Once the cows were in position, I went the rounds with a cup of iodine solution, dipping each teat. Then I went around again, wringing out a squirt of milk from each, then went around one more time to wipe off excess disinfectant with a clean rag. When I was done, I’d get out of the pit to move cows in or out, and let Diz hook them up—she didn’t yet trust me to get the milking cups settled right. She turned on the vacuum and attached the milking cups, shup-shup-shup-shup. Diz called the milker a “claw”—to me, they looked more like robotic spiders—a set of tubes that ended in four cups, each about the size and shape of a flashlight. They applied a pulsing vacuum that brought milk surging into a glass bulb at the bottom. From there it was sucked up into ceiling tubes, its flow measured by an electronic monitor about the size of a shoe box.

  The machines took about six minutes to drain each cow, then pulled off automatically when the flow tapered. By the time the last of the left-side four was hitched up, the right-side four would be finished. I would release them, shoo them out the far end of the parlor, and bring in four more from the holding area.

  Each group took about sixteen minutes, so milking the whole herd took about two hours. Eighty cows with four teats each. Twice a day. After the first hour, it became mind-numbingly repetitious. Even then, the job wasn’t done—we still had to clean the whole pipe system and remove manure from the parlor and antechamber. Diz had very high standards for cleanliness and made sure I lived up to every one of them.

  Diz avoided personal conversation, but she often expounded on the economics of dairy farming. Brassard’s farm operated on a razor’s edge where the costs of operations intersected income from milk sales. Brassard had bought the current equipment in the 1990s to increase production and meet federally mandated dairy hygiene standards. Diz didn’t like the parlor design, because there was no splash guard and runnel, so if the cows urinated or shat it went onto the floor or into the pit. But this setup was the best their finances could manage.

  I was appalled when Diz told me they were still paying off the loans Brassard had taken out back then. As he was for the Deere and the truck and the bulk milk storage tank and an extension of the shed in 1998, which had allowed them to take on another twenty cows.

  Like every other small farmer, they were perpetually trying to find the elusive sweet spot of milk production, where sales offset debt enough to leave some net income. When milk prices are up, this works. When prices fall, farmers can lose money on every gallon they produce. They have no choice but to keep producing, because the cows need to be milked and supply contracts have to be honored. Brassard had lost almost ninety thousand dollars the year before I came, because milk prices were so low.

  No wonder Will had taken up a different line of work and swore he’d never work on the farm.

  Last year’s loss explained why they had sold me my land, and when Diz told me this, I realized just how seriously my default had put them at risk. I was appalled, horrified, to understand what I had done.

  To her credit, though, Diz explained all this without directing her rancor toward me. She was angry at “the system.” As she saw it, they were personally, anonymously—and thanklessly—putting that milk on America’s tables at direct expense to themselves.

  She told me this at five in the afternoon, when we were about half an hour into the milking routine. She started the vacuum, affixed the next four cups, then leaned back and said, “All I can say is, thank God for Earnest.”

  “How so?”

  She slumped, despairing of me. “Take a wild guess, sweetheart.”

  I stared stupidly at her.

  She tipped her head toward the holding area door to remind me to get the next group of cows moving. “Paid your bail.” She watched me process that. “Put up ten K to keep us afloat while you paid us off with labor. We were up against the wall. Had to make a balloon payment on a revolving credit line, and it was either take Earnest’s money or default and screw ourselves up the be-hind.”

  We worked for another half hour before I could find any words: “You know I’m sorry, Diz, right? I really want you to know how sorry I am.”

  “Not sorry enough yet, but I’ll make sure you get there.”

  “Why would Earnest … I mean …”

  “Saint Earnest,” she said to the next claw. “Another ten of him, the world wouldn’t be in such a mess.”

  Chapter 19

  Nov. 6

  Observations of late fall: The fields are dark brown for a time, but then comes a morning when they’re hazed over gray with a surface frost—the night’s dew, frozen. As the sun rises, later and later, the shadows of the hills stretch farther across the fields, and the soil stays white-gray in the shade while the sunlit areas turn brown again, a distinct melt line.

  The forested hills turn gray-brown except where, suddenly, clumps of pine and fir appear, dark green, almost black, as if they’d sneaked in from somewhere else or just now stood up from the earth.

  The mud in the paddock and driveway crusts over with ice, so that when you walk on it your boot crunches through to the taffy-like partially frozen soil beneath. Dressing for your day takes longer as you layer things on under your coveralls; Brassard warns you not to put on your long johns until January, or you’ll get used to them and have no further recourse when the serious cold hits. Your exhaled breath turns dazzlingly bright when you’re working in the sun. On windless days, the Brassards’ chimney releases a perfectly vertical stream of white smoke, and the delicious smell of burning hardwood fills the barnyard. One morning your Toyota won’t start and you put a new battery on the list of other purchases to be made on the next town run.

  A fox, bright rust red against the gray forest, trots purposefully along the edge of the pasture.

  Mor
e chainsaws in the far distance: getting up the last of the firewood. Deer-hunting season starts, gunshots echo in the hills. You wear a fluorescent-orange stocking cap even when working in the barn or close to the house. Diz replaces Bob’s collar with a neckerchief of the same color.

  A late and straggly V of geese angles across the sky, changes direction for a time, then reorients with more confidence. Later a solitary goose flaps uncertainly, first this way, then that, honking lost and mournful, and you feel a sudden pang in your chest: that’s me.

  Chapter 20

  Life improved as the tension ratcheted down between Diz and me. I had to ask myself how I would have treated someone who had put me in such jeopardy, had forced my husband to prevail upon the charity of his old friend. And I had to admit, I probably wouldn’t have done any better than Diz. I doubted that my capacity to forgive, or to handle sudden extreme pressure with grace, was any greater than hers.

  And looking back at what I’ve written, I realize I’ve painted an incomplete portrait of Diz and Brassard. Diz is only snarly, Brassard bland and rather absent. To be fair to them and honest about my own feelings, I should round out the picture.

  Unlike my time with Earnest, my interactions with them were generally brief, always functional, never intimate, so I got only glimpses and can capture only vignettes. But those moments can be telling.