On Brassard's Farm Read online

  By early afternoon, I was getting tired, so I angled back uphill to the flat top where I’d started. That exquisite awareness of small wonders had long since faded. The morning’s fresh sun had stealthily faded into a thin, bright but sullen overcast. My feet were numb and my shoes thick with mud; my fleece was torn and bristled with burr fuzz. The constant tangling and slipping and fighting with vegetation had made me irritable.

  More, it made me despondent: I didn’t really like the outdoors that much. Buying some land wasn’t going to fix what was wrong with me, but I had no other idea what might. Here was yet another example of my inanity. The remorseless engine of self-flagellating introspection started up in me.

  Enough. I slogged down the tractor trail back to Brassard’s farm, unsure whether I should go through with my grand stupid plan, and distinctly ambivalent about this particular place.

  I crossed the road and walked past my car to the tractor Earnest had been working on. There was no sign of either man or Bob the dog.

  I walked to the barn’s broad doorway and leaned in. “Mr. Brassard? Earnest?”

  No answer. I went to the end of the yard to where the pasture fence met the corner of the barn, scouted the field and saw no one except tranquil cows.

  “Mr. Brassard?” I yelled.

  Behind me I heard the stretch of a storm-door spring and turned to see a woman coming out of the house. She was gray-haired and barrel-shaped, wearing a floral housedress, down vest, and tall rubber boots. She shut the inner door behind her and let the outer door slap shut.

  Bob had followed her out and immediately came to me to review my scent in a friendly way.

  “Bob, get your nose the hell out of that woman’s privates!” she roared. When the dog backed away, she visored her eyes with one hand to look at me. “You want the men, they’ve gone to get a tractor part and some other indispensables. Said you’d be down after a while.”

  “Are you Mrs. Brassard?”

  “Sure hope so. After thirty-five years, I’d be dismayed to discover I’d been living in sin all the while. My name is Maureen—one hell of an awful name, so people call me Diz, and don’t ask how that happened. How’d you like the property?”

  I crossed the yard and driveway to shake hands with her. “It’s really nice. I had a good time walking around.”

  Behind her glasses, shrewd eyes scanned me up and down, taking in my dishevelment. “Looks like you did. Think you’ll buy it?”

  “Well, I’ve got to think about it. Consider the money side a little more. But it’s the nicest I’ve seen so far.”

  Mrs. Brassard, Diz, gathered up a pair of empty galvanized buckets and started toward the barn, tipping her head for me to follow.

  “I get up there a couple times a year. Chase the bears out of the brambles and take about five gallons of blackberries, come August. Lose about the same in blood from the thorns. Pretty piece of property, but no good for a year-round house. What d’you want with it, anyway?”

  I sloshed behind her for another few steps. “Build a little cabin and have a place to get away to once in a while.” Then I surprised us both by confessing, “That’s what I’ve been thinking, anyway. Actually, I’m not sure exactly why.”

  She’d gotten to the door of the barn but now turned around, buckets clanking. My last comment had kicked it up a notch, suggesting that my purpose was more than recreational.

  She looked at me with heightened interest, and lips compressed in a hard smile. Behind the glasses, her blue eyes narrowed. “I wondered the same thing when I hooked up with Brassard and came out here. And often enough I still do. What the heck, Diz? And I say, Couldn’t tell ya, get back to work.”

  I laughed. Diz was obviously a “character,” a woman who enjoyed the role of conversational provocateur. I liked her, and feared her slightly. “Can I ask a question?”

  “You can certainly give it a try.”

  “Why do you want to sell that land? I don’t mean to pry, I’m just—”

  “Need the money. Things’re thin right now, milk’s down and fuel’s up, Brassard’s not gettin any younger. We could log it off and get some money from the timber. But Brassard doesn’t want to see it go that way. Likes his picturesque view, I guess, doesn’t want to look at the mess that’s left over after the trees’re down and the skidders’ve dug ruts all over. Got a sentimental streak, or else he’s got too much pride to make our place look like the trash that lives up the hill.”

  She winced up her glasses on her nose and turned back to the barn. Disappearing into the dark, she called back, “Brassard’ll be home by four or five. You give a call if you want to talk about it.”

  Chapter 5

  I’d been pronouncing the name “Bruh-SARD,” accent on the second syllable, because in college I’d known a Jill Brassard and that’s how she said it. But Diz pronounced it to rhyme with “bastard”—hard A, emphasis on the brass. I wasn’t sure whether that was the accepted way of saying it hereabouts or another eccentricity of hers—maybe some habitual jab at her husband. On the drive back, I decided she was a former alcoholic, one of those early-sixties, witty, sarcastic, seen-it-all, don’t-give-a-damn-what-anybody-thinks women with practical haircuts and mannish clothes that declared they were beyond all that business about wanting or needing males. They’d cleaned up their act but, like Diz, still had the husky voice of the ex-alkie, ex-smoker. I’d met them on both sides of the desk in the legal aid office where I worked, and I’d volunteered alongside them at park clean-ups or tree plantings. Whether still married or widowed, if they spoke of their husbands at all it was without a shred of sentimentality.

  Back at my B and B, I managed to get into my room without the owners seeing what a mess I was. I would have collapsed on the bed, but I carried too much organic material on my clothes and didn’t want to ruin the bedspread. I took off my clothes intending to take a shower, decided I’d lie down to recharge a bit first, and woke up almost three hours later. Without once even thinking about it, I called Brassard and said I wanted to buy the land.

  “Okay.”

  “Would you take sixty for it?” He had advertised it for seventy thousand.

  He paused. “I guess I would.”

  I was pretty sure he meant it in the Vermont vernacular, that is, “yes.”

  We arranged for him to come up to Montpelier on Friday so we could meet with his lawyer to complete the transaction.

  And there it was. My irrational determination had culminated in an equally irrational decision. Why? Perhaps it was that clarity of detail, the seeing I’d done for that first half hour, a rare spirit or feng shui that had spoken to what was still bright and unsoured in me.

  But, sadly, I have to admit, it was mainly my three-hour harried hike along the borders, the scratches on my hands and cheeks and the soreness of my calves, the mucked shoes and ruined jacket, that decided the issue.

  That was the real deal. The land promised a harrowing that I needed and deserved, some hard, skin-thickening, making-do woods living, a taste of the ascetic’s life. Look, I even have the stigmata!

  To the extent that I had any real hopes for personal growth, I also knew that here was what needed confronting: my own bramble patch, my own deep woods. Brassard’s land was its perfect external manifestation.

  With less than five thousand dollars to my name, I was hardly rich enough to afford such a purchase. What made this whole idea marginally possible was that my aunt Theresa had died and had left me sixty-five thousand dollars. I’d received most of it, with about ten thousand due to me in another few weeks, when the last of her bonds were liquidated. Brassard had kindly agreed to owner-finance that bit. When he met me at the lawyer’s office, I handed over a cashier’s check for fifty thousand, and Brassard, after carefully reviewing Aunt Theresa’s portfolio statements, had me sign a short-term promissory note for the remaining ten grand. The lawyer tried to force a celebra
tory joviality on the process that neither of us really felt. Brassard didn’t want to part with his woods; he just needed the damned money.

  When I had shaken his big hand and left the office and got back into my car, I immediately felt that I’d done something really, profoundly stupid, like getting pregnant from a one-night stand. Another act of self-destructive impulsiveness.

  My plan, if one could call it that, had been to buy some land and live off the remaining ten grand while I looked for a job nearby. I’d build a little cabin on the cheap. I’d live in the woods for the summer and move into an apartment in town when winter came. Even then, I’d still make pilgrimages out there, in the snow. I needed physical hardship. I would build the cabin with my own hands. It would show, or require the acquisition of, independence and grit. My cell phone would keep me connected. If I really felt the hunger for human company, I would make new friends in town or invite my few remaining Boston friends up for a taste of roughing it. Any man who might enter the picture would by necessity have to share my longing for primitive living, a hankering for physical hardship. It would provide a good filter for unsuitable suitors.

  I knew this was a radical departure for a person with my background, and I relished the thought of the courage and discomfort it would demand of me. Maybe over time I would ease into an earthier, more rooted rural life, growing some vegetables, cutting some firewood, and learning at least a few self-sufficiency skills. I would manage the world on my own terms. I pumped myself up and swore that nothing would dissuade me.

  Chapter 6

  May 21

  It’s been a while since I kept up with my journal, mainly because there’s no way my scribblings can adequately describe what I’ve been doing or feeling. Why am I bothering with this? Who am I writing to? I ask as I sit here and flail at the blackflies that torture me.

  To myself, of course. Basic principle: Leave tracks so you can find your way back. What idiocies led you here? Remember and avoid them next time. Assuming you bother to read your own diary, which I don’t—lousy handwriting, too much whining. Thus am I condemned to repeat history.

  I am camping on my land, alternating three or four days out here with a partial day and a night at a cheap motel near the interstate where I can shower and watch TV, enjoy indoor plumbing and the absence of dirt, and make phone calls—there’s no reception on my hill. Also to escape the pressure of insects who want to suck me dry as a mummy. Little pestilent shits! I kill every one I can slap, determined to reduce their available DNA in proportion to the nutrition they extract from me, which would otherwise go to breeding new ones.

  It’s been very hard. Goodie! I felt at first, with each new difficulty or discomfort. But I failed to anticipate the effect of prolonged subfatal, insufficiently dramatic discomfort. It erodes even masochistic impulses. And I hadn’t taken fear into consideration—not the urbanite’s comfortable, self-imposed existential fear, but a primal, irresistible terror springing from the deep caverns of instinct. Fear has been hard.

  Writing about the last few weeks is an exercise in answering the question “What’s the hardest part?” Answer: All of it. Mostly it’s been a bastard. It’s been murder.

  There have been some wonderful moments, but nothing has ever been easy. I realize now that the camping trips we so enjoyed were nothing more than luxurious fantasies of rugged living. We set up our tent on a flat piece of mowed grass with our car fifteen feet away. We were surrounded by other families, never all alone in the deep woods. Running water, toilets, sinks and showers, firewood for sale at the ranger’s office, a coin-op laundry room. Clothes and food kept safe in the back of the station wagon. Not a wild animal within a mile. Hardly any bugs. We thought we were roughing it, but we were just playing house. But I fell for the fantasy, and now I’m stuck with my own foolishness.

  My tent has turned out better than I expected. I had no idea tent technology had advanced so far. It’s tall enough to stand up in, big enough to tuck my sleeping stuff out of the way and to keep my old sea chest here, full of clothes and other necessities. I keep food in a strongly built wooden cabinet covered with galvanized sheet steel to keep mice and porcupines from chewing their way in—Earnest taught me that trick—nailed to a tree near my campfire circle. But the tent had its “hardest part” moments.

  The night of my first heavy rain, two weeks ago, began as one of the greatest delights I’ve ever experienced—lying in the dark, listening to the varying patter and thrum of the rain on the tent’s fly, hearing it hiss and roar in the trees in every direction, hundreds of layers of distance and intensity. Rain comes and goes in irregular waves, and you can hear a heavier fall moving through the trees toward you. I was ecstatic and less afraid than usual—surely no bears or mountain lions or deranged hillbillies would be out in this. The sound was symphonic in complexity, sometimes a murmured susurrus, then swelling to a bass waterfall sound, grand and sometimes martial, even threatening. And the air was exquisite, as if the rain carried down cool, pure, rarified atmosphere from high altitudes, tinged with ozone.

  Drifted off in a heavenly state. Woke up well before dawn to find that my sleeping bag and pillow were sopped and cold, the floor was slimy. The seams had leaked and humidity had condensed on the ceiling and fallen on everything inside, a baby rainfall birthed by its big mother.

  I spent a miserable day wearing a plastic trash bag over my last dry clothes as the rain came and went. I couldn’t retreat: I was ashamed to go down the hill and risk having anyone at the farm see me in my bedraggled condition. So I spent a second horrible night shivering in my ever-wetter sleeping bag, getting up now and then to mop the hanging droplets off the ceiling with paper towels.

  When I finally came down, Earnest was there—he’s often not, off working as a tree surgeon up in Chittenden County. He’s started to call me “Pilgrim”—either an allusion to the old John Wayne movie or a subtler comment on my purpose for being here. “You look like shit, Pilgrim! Don’t know enough to come out of the rain?” He explained that if you’re tent camping for any extended period, you’ve got to make sure you’ve sealed your seams. And you have to build a wooden floor, even just a few inches off the ground, and set your tent on top of that. That way, the air circulates beneath, the ground moisture never touches your tent, everything ventilates better, no condensation. He took me to the lumberyard that morning and we brought the boards back in his pickup. We strapped it all to a flat trailer that the faithful tractor dragged up to my eyrie. He lent me a hammer, carpenter’s square, tape measure, and handsaw, then left me to figure out how to build it.

  I think of myself as fit, but putting together the platform taught me how weak my wrists and forearms are. Jogging and biking don’t use them much. It was almost impossible to cut the wood by hand and to drive the big sixteen-penny nails through two-by-fours. But when it was done, I was satisfied with it. Not a cabin, but at least a first step toward an education in carpentry.

  I set up the tent on the platform and it was great. Flat floor, dry, more civilized. I felt clever and capable for two days. Then a big wind came up—no rain, just one of those robust, ebullient spring winds that come in to make sure winter is thoroughly swept away. It bent the trees frighteningly and flapped my tent fly with a sound like machine-gun fire that stopped suddenly when the thing ripped loose and flew away in the darkness. Without a waterproof covering, the tent was fully exposed to any rain that might come, and I spent a night of high anxiety wondering if a thunderstorm would drown me out completely. At times, the arched aluminum poles swayed and the nylon wall ballooned so much, I was sure the whole thing would lift up like a box kite, with me still inside, a woman blown away into the night sky.

  Didn’t blow me away, didn’t rain. In the morning—beautifully fresh and clear, ringing blue sky, winter absolutely combed out of the woods—I found the fly, snarled high in a tree about a hundred feet from camp, inaccessible and badly torn. I had to buy another for almost as mu
ch as a whole new tent would have cost. When I mentioned it to Earnest, he told me you really had to use every one of the loops for a guy wire that would hold the fly tight. He also had a little secret, a way to use a marble-size pebble to make extra tie-down grommets on the nylon, with short ropes that could tie to the platform and pull the fly closer to the inner shell. Less room for the wind to get under.

  The tent has been much nicer and since then has handled rains and winds in fine shape.

  Earnest: I’ve enjoyed our times together. Turns out he’s an Oneida, born on the tribe’s lands near Green Bay, Wisconsin. They were originally a New York tribe, he says, but they were kicked out by the governor in eighteen-something and marched to their new “nature preserve” (his term)—but not before Gov. Schuyler fathered twenty-seven kids by Indian women. When I asked him how he ended up in Vermont, he told me that he and Brassard served together in Vietnam in the early seventies and when they got back to the States Earnest had no big plans or prospects, so Brassard hired him to work on the farm.

  “I didn’t like working for Jim,” he explained. He seemed a bit uncomfortable telling me this. “Anyway, after a few years I got to a head place where I needed some distance from the farm and went up and started my own business.” He went on to tell me he set up as a tree surgeon up near Burlington, but realized he had gotten attached to the farm, and started coming down to help out: “Now when I come down, I’m not getting paid, so he and Diz can’t tell me what to do.” He smiled at that.

  Earnest is the equipment fixer and major project manager. It’s a marginal farm, no extra money, the nineteen-year-old kid Brassard hires is a pretty dim bulb, and a lot of the machines are getting old and cranky, so his skills are badly needed. He’s also strong as an ox and doesn’t have any physical problems. I’d guess Earnest is in his midfifties. Brassard is probably ten years older and has arthritic joints, so he can use the help. I get the sense there’s some bond between the men, some exceptional basis for their loyalty to each other. From what I can gather, Brassard spent five years in Vietnam while Earnest only served there for the last humiliating, stumbling year of the war. Maybe some act of heroism, one saving the other’s life or something.