On Brassard's Farm Read online

  Another bastard hardest thing: For the first two weeks, I brought my water up the hill in plastic gallon jugs. It was agonizing, but I can only prevail upon the Brassards’ help so many times. Two jugs, one in each hand, leaving my arms and shoulders and hands aching by the time I got to the top. Relished the discomfort the first few times, proof I was living hard, then got fucking sick of it. Finally I set out and did a methodical search for the water source Brassard said might be up here.

  And I found it. It’s about two hundred yards uphill from camp, a little channel about six inches deep and two feet wide, clear water running off toward Brassard’s valley. The bottom is made up of clean rocks. I tracked it back up the hill almost to the boulder wall, to a point where it bubbles up out of the earth. It’s crystal clear and tooth-achingly cold, the best water I’ve ever tasted. It’s never been in a pipe, never languished in a plastic bottle absorbing carcinogens. Brassard says the fact that it’s a real spring and not a runoff stream is a very good thing. Comes from deep underground, no germs or cow poop in it. I look forward to washing in it every morning, even though the cold burns my skin. I’m sure it’s good for your complexion.

  Hardest bastard parts: On the physical side, bugs rank at or near the top. Blackflies are the worst. Each is about half the size of a grain of rice. They bite every exposed part, particularly blood-rich areas like behind my ears, where the bites itch intolerably. They create a dive-bombing cloud around your face that drives you to madness. You get virtually hysterical, and the state is not optional; it’s your body, not your brain. Slathering my face and arms with insect repellent reduces their biting but doesn’t diminish their frenzied activity all around me. And some still get through. Eventually, they drive me screaming to the shelter of the tent. Another way to diminish their bloodthirsty ardor is to light a fire. I have come to smell like wood smoke from cooking, warming myself in the chilly evenings, and hovering in the smoke of the dying fire to escape them. They’re bad in the morning, absent during the middle of the day, and intolerable in the late afternoon and evening. Earnest says they’ll be mostly gone by mid-July.

  There are mosquitoes, too—not as many, but another maddening irritation at night. Several always get into the tent, whining around invisible in the dim light and biting me when my guard is down. I splat them when they land, and thwack their little flat corpses off my skin with one finger. Hundreds more hover and press frantically at the tent’s window screens with a high urgent screamy whine. The sound creates an uneasiness at a primal level, awakens an instinctive aversion to biting insects that’s built into the human genome. Impossible to ignore. Makes me feel under siege, eases off when I blow out the candles.

  There are bugs I’d never heard of and didn’t believe existed until they bit me: no-see-ums. No-see-ums are semitransparent flies about as big as a comma, and they bite painfully. You’re going about your business and are startled by a sharp pain, like a splinter. When you look for the source of the pain, you can’t find it at first. Then you spot the tiny bastard and smear him into nothing. How can such a minute thing cause such pain in a creature as big as, relatively, a mountain? Fortunately, the bite doesn’t itch afterward. And they can’t get at me inside the tent. I was lucky I bought superfine-mesh tent screens, or they’d drive me out of here.

  Then there’s fear. Sometimes, when the weather is just right and the bugs are momentarily absent and the woods do look like serene glades in the sun and the birds are singing all around, there’s no nag of fear at all; it’s sweet and good. But at times, even during the day, I get spooked when I head up to the spring and into the deeper woods. I always feel I’m being covertly watched, and I probably am—animals live here. I realize I am a stranger here. It’s like walking in an unfamiliar neighborhood and some local gives you more attention than you’d like. The woods are a community, and I don’t know its residents.

  At night, I’m always afraid. The dark is mysterious; I am blind; my little outpost of candlelight seems very isolated. Earnest swears that Vermont’s black bears are harmless, but I am deathly afraid of them at night—I nearly threw up after watching Grizzly Man last year. I strain my ears to hear the night noises beyond the mosquitoes’ shrilling. And there are always things moving out there. A crackle in this direction, a leafy scraping there. The stealthy progress of some creature moving over last year’s leaf litter. Shiftings. A stick breaking. Once, a series of hellish shrieks in the distance that literally brought up the hair on my arms.

  A couple of times, I swear I’ve been stalked by a human. Regular, two-legged-sounding quiet footfalls from uphill coming closer, a zipping sound like fabric scraping past a twig. Then silence charged with horrible imminence, expectancy. Maybe one of the Goslant “trash” up the hill, who heard about this woman camping out where no one could hear her scream. I haven’t seen one of the Goslants yet, but picture them as a tribe of leering, gap-toothed, twitchy-eyed sinewy men with evil intentions about everything.

  I may have a death wish, but if I’m going to shuffle off this mortal coil I’m going to do it my way, not subject myself to some other creature’s or human’s perverse preferences. So I go to sleep with a set of defensive weapons carefully arranged where my hand can find them in the dark: flashlight, sheath knife out of its sheath, hammer, shovel. Anything and anyone could come through the thin nylon with ease. Wake up in the night but am too afraid to go out to the outhouse hole I dug, about a hundred feet away among the trees, so I wait until my bladder’s about to explode, and then I scuttle out and pee right next to the tent.

  Like so much else I feel up here, this fear transcends conscious or rational control. My body must remember being a timid little hominid in a big predatory world. It knows the harsh laws that govern nighttime in the deep woods. Sometimes I lie with suspended breath so I can hear noises better.

  And, I hate to write this down—an admission I’ll feel stupid about later, when I’ve escaped this situation: I fear supernatural dangers. It’s as if I sense movements in mental space, unnamed creatures of the air or earth, sentient but inhuman beings that all outdoor-living peoples acknowledge and fear. If I could say where they came from, it would be the boulder tumble uphill, out of the crevasses. I don’t even know that they’re malevolent, only that being around them could destroy me, or that our kinds have always been enemies.

  Each dawn I chide myself for these imaginings. I rationalize them as stemming from the same species proclivities that led people to invent gods, demons, ghosts. I almost laugh at myself. And as night falls I become aware of the gargantuan stupidity, the hubris, of such skepticism. Of such profound ignorance of the world’s real ways. The source of the fear is vast, ancient, deeper by far than reason and the easy lies of daylight.

  And yes, I am lonely. This loneliness is not a godlike presence, like the fear, just a cringing small thing dwelling close to my heart. Each night, I think of Mom and Pop, and Erik wherever he went, and Cat and even friends from grade school, and I miss them unbearably. I cry a little and feel sorry for myself. I feel unprotected and disconnected. At these moments, I curl up on my cot, more like a grub than a fetus, cringing away from my distance from everyone. “Where are you?” I ask everyone I ever loved. Then, as I drift off to sleep in my curl I think of the comfort of spooning back-to-belly with your loved one, and of course it’s Matt, and then I wake and fling his memory from even my loneliness. I will be lonely for the whole human race, but not him.

  It hurts to be this lonely curled grub.

  This process is the woods prying me open, can-opening me, to expose fears and senses and awarenesses and feelings and instincts that have always been in there. That’s good, isn’t it? Isn’t that what I wanted in coming here?

  No. I was supposed to come to a hard-won understanding of myself, a tough-love relationship with my life. Atone for past sins. True, in the background I harbored carefully suppressed, more optimistic aspirations. To the extent I hoped for any deeper self-aw
areness, I was supposed to serenely discover insightful but conventional perspectives on my past, my family, my relationships—all the usual. It was also about remaking myself as bolder, sturdier, independent, more capable. Maybe, my most idealistic inner voices piped, I’d even get healed by unexpectedly touching a nurturing Gaia, learning earthy wisdom, accepting nature’s gentle embrace. Hasn’t worked that way. I am over all that.

  And I’m striking out on the job front. Applied for a couple teaching positions, didn’t get called for interviews. I can only wonder what my recommendation letters say.

  I am considering leaving, calling the experiment a bust. Maybe Brassard will let me off the hook and give me some of my money back. Maybe I’ll move back to Boston, try for a job at some other school. Get real again, pretend to be like real people.

  Chapter 7

  I did not buy my land with the intent to totally isolate myself. While I badly wanted some distance from my prior life, I never intended to become a hermit.

  I’d closed my Facebook page the year before, at the peak of my catastrophes, so I didn’t have to read my friends’ happy inane postings. But I still drove to the public library in Montpelier to check in on friends’ pages, make telephone calls, and send emails inviting people to visit me “in my new digs.” I even wrote an actual paper letter to my friend Cat—Catherine—which I actually put into Brassard’s mailbox. I put up the little red metal flag, and the US Postal Service actually picked it up and delivered it. (The Postal Service cars here are privately owned, typically back-road-weary SUVs with nothing to differentiate them from any other car but their jerry-rigged right-hand drive and some yellow flashers on their roof racks.)

  Cat thought getting a paper letter was a hoot. Never reciprocated, but said she’d love to visit.

  We met in eighth grade, made it through high school by protecting each other’s back from the daggers of other girls, went to different colleges but shared an apartment for a year or so after graduation—the first place either of us had lived “on our own.” She has brittle blond hair that makes her look caffeinated and frenetic even when she’s not. She’s skinny, runs half marathons, eats a lot of meat, drives an old BMW that costs more in repairs than she’d pay on a new car loan. Her cynical outlook helps make her a superb middle school teacher: that withering ironic wit gives voice to the students’ contempt for government and convention and adults and racists and routine, and they love her for it.

  She’d been through more boyfriends than I had in our years as friends—a diverse lot. One was a tubby, shy, big-bearded hospice nurse who tended to mumble and grope for words yet was a marvelous poet; another was a buff Harley rider who managed a car-detailing shop. She spent a year with a Pakistani man, Sandeep: smart, great sense of humor, handsome, a financial advisor at some big firm. And others. She was almost always the one to break it off with them.

  Ordinarily, one is well advised to avoid commentary on another’s choices in love. Cat and I were always candid about men, jobs, families, and our bodies, but over the years we’d developed an unspoken compact that if one of us didn’t offer to talk about something, the other didn’t press the issue.

  With Sandeep, though, I felt compelled to say something. They just seemed to fit. He was clearly devoted to her, and from what she told me, they really hit it off in bed. They seemed enthusiastic about each other until the day she cut him off.

  I approached it with trepidation: “Cat, I love you, right? I like to think I know you pretty well. So forgive me for sticking my nose in, but, I mean, of course I don’t know all the nuances of your relationship with Sandeep, but—”

  “Spit it out,” she said. “Let’s get this over with.”

  “I think you’re making a mistake. I really think you’re doing the wrong thing this time. I think you’re being … like, crazy.” I kept eye contact with her to make sure she knew I meant it. Then I went ahead with the hard part: “Sometimes I think you’re … running away from something.”

  Deadpan, she gave it a couple of beats and then said briskly, “Good. Forgiven. Thanks for being honest with me, sweetie.” As she left the room, she couldn’t help but call back one little jab: “Let me know if you want his phone number.”

  Life went on, and eventually that water went under the bridge to merge with the ocean of other forgiven and forgotten things. I treasured the resilience of our friendship.

  In my emails, I described my land and state of mind without minimizing the discomforts, fears, and doubts. At least I thought I did. When Cat said she’d like to visit, I assumed she understood about the bugs, the hole in the ground that served as outhouse, the ice water carried back to camp by hand, the squatting in the dirt around the fire, the gut-clench of fear that came with hearing something moving in the midnight dark. I figured she’d have enough ironic distance to enjoy Diz; she’d rather admire Jim Brassard as the man-of-few-words professional that he was, and she’d probably get a crush on Earnest. Maybe she’d even pick up on some of the deeper charms of the situation, understand the difficult, transformative magic it was working on me.

  I admit that I was a bit proud of my new hardihood and my radical divergence from the mainstream—what else was there to be proud of?—and I was looking forward to showing it off.

  I gave her directions to the right interstate exit and to a general store about six miles from the farm; after that point, navigation on unmarked dirt roads was too complex to explain. We arranged to meet at the store at one o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon so I could lead her to my new home.

  She got there before me. I came trundling down the road, and there she was: a skinny, frizzle-headed blond leaning against the hood of a funky BMW, wearing a vivid pink tank top, tight black jeans, and flip-flops. She was eating something plastic-wrapped and complicated that required licking her fingers at intervals.

  “Hey, baby,” I called as I pulled alongside her. “Want to come up to my place?”

  She had her mouth full, and her hands were gummed with pastry and cream. When she had swallowed, she said, “What’s with this place? You’re the third person to ask in the last five minutes!”

  I got out and we hugged and she finished her food, which she declared “the best whoopie pie I ever ate! No label or anything, homemade!”

  I got gas at the pump while she headed back into the store. When the nozzle chunked, I went in to find her at the counter with a twelve-pack of Heineken. She was chatting with the cashier, an obese fiftyish woman who didn’t look as if she laughed often.

  “I can’t believe you keep worms in there with the groceries!” Cat said.

  “Crawlers have to be kept cool,” the cashier said. “Or they die.”

  Cat turned to me: “They’re in Chinese take-out boxes! Right in with the beer and cream cheese and everything!”

  “People fish. Need bait.” She handed over Cat’s change and took my gas money.

  We caravanned back to Brassard’s farm, with Cat’s car sometimes lost in the dust my tires churned up. At the top of the hill, where you get the first glimpse of the farm and its valley and my own little ridge, I stopped and went back to explain the layout.

  She got out and looked. “Very bucolic.”

  “It’s pretty, don’t you think?”

  “Totally pastoral,” she said with marginally more enthusiasm.

  Brassard’s nearer cows swung their heads toward us as we passed the upper pasture, and then I led Cat into the turnout where I always parked. From there, a pair of tractor-wheel ruts cut through the scrub field to the bottom of my hill, the access route Brassard had provided as part of our deal.

  I figured I’d start by introducing her to the Brassards so they would know what the unfamiliar car was doing there. But from the powerful manure smell, I knew that Brassard himself was out with the spreader, and Earnest’s truck wasn’t there. So that left Diz. As we crossed the road and headed into the farmyard, I felt
a twinge of anxiety about the impending chemistry between the two women.

  There was no sign of Diz outside, so we stood on the porch and knocked. Bob wandered amiably over to say hello. After a bit, Diz came to stand behind the screen. I made introductions, and Diz said, “A visitor!”

  “Yep!” Cat piped. “Hi!”

  “Well, no woman is an island, I guess—not even our Ann, apparently. Welcome to Brassard’s Farm, Cat, and God help you.”

  “Thank you.”

  Diz came out so she could look Cat over more closely. The door whacked shut behind her, and she scanned Cat up and down, taking in her naked arms and shoulders and back, the thin elastic fabric of her tank top, her bare ankles and feet.

  To me, dryly: “How’re you fixed for bug dope up there? Got some here if you need more.”

  “We’re good,” I said. “Thanks, though!”

  Diz nodded, checked her watch. This was not a gesture of impatience but a real concern for the relentless cycle of a dairy farm’s chores.

  “Friends for a long time?” Diz asked Cat rhetorically. “You don’t strike me as the deeply introspective, overly sensitive type. Unlike—”

  Cat laughed. “Got that right! We met in, what, seventh grade? She was the brainy girl.”

  “So you’re, what, the antidote?”

  “Diz is very insightful,” I warned Cat. I was afraid that some comment of Diz’s would constitute one barb too many, and that Cat might reciprocate. And then it would get unpleasant.