Good Husbandry

by Kristin Kimball

  The summer I was eighteen, we sold her. We had to. I was leaving for college. I rode her bareback across the fields to her new owner’s barn because I wouldn’t part with my saddle. Then I walked home, blind from tears, the bridle over my arm.

  * * *

  When Mark and I started farming with horses, we picked up a thread that seemed about to be lost to the fabric of time. We hooked on to it and made a link at the last possible moment. The tractor hadn’t completely displaced draft horses in this part of rural New York until the 1960s. There were men in our town who had grown up working horses on the farms all around us. Those men were native speakers of draft horse work, unlike us. We learned it late in life, so will always speak it in an awkward pidgin. There was Mr. Christian, who would come by with his sons and grandsons to give his terse opinion, only when asked, on a horse that looked a bit off, or to evaluate a new team. Mr. Christian chewed tobacco every day for seventy years. One morning he felt unwell. They operated, saw the masses of cancer that had piled around his stomach, and closed him back up. He died a few days later. Into the ground with him went the memory of the crossbred team of mares he had when he was a boy, the feeling of what it was to work them.

  Then there was old Shep Shields, obscene, arthritic, and incontinent; the stories of his philandering days were legendary in our small town. He worked Belgians on his father’s dairy when he was a boy, and after tractors came, he kept a team of horses on his own farm, for the love of them. There is a picture of him in our firehouse, driving a pair of snappy Belgian mares in the Fourth of July parade, pulling the firehouse’s antique pumper. When he could no longer care for horses, he hauled feed, driving around the neighborhood with a load of corn silage in the bed of his truck, a six-pack of cold beer in the cab. The smell from the cab was unmistakable: urine, sweet silage, beer. He would park on the side of the road when I had horses in the field, and wave me over. On hot afternoons in the summer, he would pass a beer through the driver’s window to whoever would come for it; he had to get rid of the evidence before he went home to his wife. When his wife died, he took up with a woman roughly half his age. It seemed like he would live forever, pickled by his own delight in that arrangement. But then one day even Shep was gone, and our link with the working horses of the past snapped.

  Once I was working across a field with Jake and Abby on the disc harrow, knocking large clods of soil into a smooth seedbed. The work was hard, I was tired, the horses were tired. I didn’t have a watch on, but when the wind had shifted, I’d heard the church bell chime noon. When the wind shifted back, I could time the day only by the ferry traffic. Every half hour, there was a stream of cars with different plates, and then the road was quiet again.

  I whoaed Jake and Abby in the middle of the field to give them a rest and wait for the ferry traffic to pass. I got off the seat to stretch, hung the lines over my wrist. That was when I saw that the last car in the line from the ferry had turned around in our driveway and stopped. I got back on the seat and saw that the car door was opening. “Come up,” I told the horses, ducking my head, pretending not to see. I had a long way to go and didn’t have time to chat with tourists. But on my next pass, I realized three people were heading in my direction. A man, a woman, and between them, another man, very old. They carried him over a ditch, and his feet came down on the soft dirt of the field. They were walking toward me, slow.

  The horses stood perfectly still, ears up, watching. I could have made it easier, should have moved a little closer. But the horses were content to stand and rest. There was sweat on their necks, and they were breathing hard. The heat of their bodies carried their smell to me, diffused it to the heavy air all around us. The three arrived. “He grew up on a farm,” the woman said. “He’s ninety. He used to drive a team of horses.”

  “On my father’s farm,” the old man said.

  “He just wanted to touch them,” the woman said.

  The old man laid his hand on Jake’s neck. Jake bobbed his head and blew, shook his body, made the tug chains rattle. The man was far off in his memory of a horse that had been dead seventy years; the corners of his mouth were happy. We looked at each other. We were a couple of compatriots, different ages, different genders, different times, different horses, but with an understanding. A link.

  Mark and I had eight draft horses on our farm that year, plus a fat white pony. The pony, Belle, was almost short enough to walk under the draft horses’ bellies, and saucy enough to try it. She’d belonged to our friend Scott Christian, but his kids had outgrown her, and she’d been languishing for a year in a box stall at his place. Scott had come by one day the previous winter and offered to sell her. Mark, who couldn’t see much benefit in having a pony to feed and care for, had declined. But Scott, who is a clever judge of people, came by again and found me at home alone. He offered her to me, this time for free. “You’re going to need a pony for Jane,” he said. This, I thought, was absolutely true.

  It had just begun to dawn on me that being a kid on a farm involved some trade-offs, and I would need to be aware of them in order to make the balance of childhood come out on the right side of even. For one, we were poor. There was a good chance we always would be. The biggest part of every dollar that came in went right back out and was sunk into the farm. If we ever spent money on something other than the farm, we were ridiculously frugal. We had to be, if we wanted the farm to survive. I didn’t feel poor. We owned this beautiful and productive land, plus our house, and we ate like royalty every day. But now that we had a child who was beginning to be conscious of the world around her, I realized that even if we didn’t feel poor, we usually looked it. Our car had 180,000 miles on it and was pocked with rust. We never bought new clothes, and I cut everyone’s hair.

  Mark had always been oblivious to markers of socioeconomic status and mostly blind to the way he appeared to others. He truly didn’t care what he wore and never had. The only thing he asked of his clothes was that they sufficiently cover his nakedness, and he kept them for as long as they could fulfill that basic duty. I came from a middle-class family who put a predictable emphasis on the way people looked. When I’d arrived in Essex, I’d made an effort to stay presentable, but the farm soon knocked it out of me. There’s no point in caring about clothes when they are likely to get ripped on barbed wire by the end of a week, or permanently stained by blood or manure before that. Besides, who was going to see me on the farm except Mark, who didn’t care? By the time Jane came along, it seemed absurd to me to spend any money on clothes, especially when there were so many hand-me-downs circulating in our community. I don’t think I bought a new piece of clothing for Jane until she went to school, and then it was just one outfit to mark the occasion. For myself, I got by on the boxes of discarded clothes that my fashionable sister sent me from the city. They were a year or two out of date in New York, which meant way ahead of the style curve in town, and I desecrated them quickly. Every six months or so, I treated myself to new socks. Once our mechanic, Jeff, had given me a long look while I waited for him to right some wrong in the belly of our car. “You know,” he said, “you’ve changed a lot since you moved here.” “In what way?” I asked, unwisely. Did I get fitter? Funnier? More skilled? “Well,” he said, almost to himself as he went back to his work, “you’re a mom now.” I pulled up my stretch pants, wrote him a check, and drove away, disheartened.

  We weren’t much richer in time than we were in money. We were either working at something or asleep, which didn’t leave room for the sort of child-centric things I saw other parents doing with their young children. Summers, when other families kicked back a little, we were in the thick of it. Even if we could afford it, taking Jane to Disney World for a vacation seemed as impossible as taking her to the moon. Forget a vacation. We milked cows. We couldn’t be away from home longer than twelve hours, at least not both parents at the same time.

  I wasn’t sure yet how these forces would shape her childhood, but I was aware that this one was the only one sh
e would get. I had chosen farming when I was a fully mature adult who had seen a lot of the world and had other choices. I’d decided, on thin evidence, that what I’d get from it equaled what I knew I was giving up—things like predictable hours, a paycheck that arrived even in the wake of a flood or a drought. I’d reckoned it was a fair trade, for me. What I couldn’t have known back then was what it would feel like to have made this choice for a child too. What would she get as recompense for the hard parts?

  Sometimes I’d make a list of the good things and tick them off on my fingers when I woke up worrying in the middle of the night. She’d have the best food. She’d have the run of five hundred acres and a sense of complete physical freedom. She’d belong to a place more deeply than most people. She’d get two parents who were very busy but always present, right here at home, working hard at what they loved and believed in. And she’d get to grow up in the intimate company of nonhuman living things, the sort of company that was entirely normal once, which I had craved as a child but which has become increasingly rare. She’d have garden spiders, barn cats, dogs, cows, pigs, crayfish, and chickens to play with, woods and fields to explore.

  And she could have a pony. I thought of the first time I’d touched a horse’s nose, the breathless joy that gave me. Other things I’d like to give Jane might be out of my reach, but this one wasn’t. I’d never laid eyes on Scott’s pony, but I quickly decided he was right. We needed a pony. So I said yes, and before Mark could come along and countermand my decision, Scott went home, hooked up his trailer, loaded the pony, and delivered her to the door of the West Barn.

  * * *

  In my imagination, she’d been perfect. In reality, she had overgrown hooves, a large belly, and a thick white coat full of dust and pied with mud-brown spots. When she took a deep breath, she coughed. The places around her eyes and nose looked too pink, like those of an albino rabbit. The eyes themselves were hard and canny. She had two brown ears and a brown cap between them, a pattern that Native Americans call medicine hat, which is supposed to give a horse special powers. I liked her immediately.

  The first time I brushed her, pulling out clumps of white fur with a shedding blade, she turned her small butt toward me and offered to kick, a gesture that seemed almost laughable to me after seven years of working with horses that weighed a ton each. But when I put my old saddle on her back and gently tightened the girth, she laid her ears back, dove at me like a striking snake, and bit me hard on the thigh. I pulled my pants down to see if I was bleeding and found the impression of her teeth in a hard blue bruise. Mark walked into the barn and found me like that, pants down, next to a pony he didn’t recognize. He took in the scene, realized what I’d done, and shook his head. The bruise was already impressive. “That pony,” he said, “is going to be the most dangerous animal around here.” I felt an allegiance with her despite the bite: “She’s not dangerous. She’s opinionated.” We were two small creatures on a farm that often seemed scaled too big for us, and we had to assert our power where we could.

  Belle was short but sturdily built, just big enough for me to ride. That was a lucky thing, because she was the kind of pony who believed in her own free will and had developed some ideas about what she should and should not have to do, ideas that we’d need to straighten out before she could be Jane’s pony. Once I was aboard, bareback, Belle settled down and was game for anything—a trot along the firm ground between the raspberry bushes or even a good gallop through the flat, grassy alley made by two rows of linden trees. When I turned her out with the draft horses for the first time, I watched for a tense few minutes as the big horses ran her around the paddock, her ears pinned, her small legs running double time to their beat. The earth shook. I was afraid they would run her right through the fence, and I pictured myself picking up pony parts. Then the other horses lost that avid quality, slowed, circled, squealed a little, and put their heads down to eat. When one of the geldings got too close and pushy, Belle gave him a kick low in the ribs, swiftly establishing her place in the herd order.

  Over the winter, we got to know each other and worked on her faults. Unlike the calm, steady draft horses, the pony had a flair for drama. Sometimes she would spook so wildly at an innocent object, I actually suspected she was acting, and not very convincingly. A raised voice or stern gesture from me in response to something like biting solicited an overreaction from her, which escalated the situation instead of correcting it. I figured out the best way to train Belle was to arrange consequences for her undesirable actions that seemed accidental. The next time I tightened her girth, as she pinned her ears and swung her head toward me to bite, I casually positioned my elbow in the path of her nose so that she collided with it. I pretended I hadn’t noticed and continued about my business. She put her ears half back, thinking, and tried it again. A few such bonks, and the biting stopped.

  That spring, just in time, Belle was ready for a job. I was pregnant, and when the exhaustion of the first trimester struck me, Jane was still too small to keep up when we walked around the farm but felt too big to be carried all the time. She could sit on the pony while I led her, and we could go anywhere together at a grown-up’s pace. As soon as she was employed, Belle perked up considerably. She seemed to like carrying a child and began looking for me when I came to find her in the pasture, instead of running away. Jane developed good balance on that spooky pony and learned to pick herself up and get back on when she fell off.

  CHAPTER 3

  There’s no month or week or even day when there isn’t work to be done. I’ve never once looked around and thought, Huh, I guess we’re all caught up. But the amplitude of the work rises in the spring. The rhythm of the day is fast and urgent, because the outcome of the entire year hinges on what happens now. All sorts of disappointments can befall a farm in other seasons. There are summer floods, early frosts, and deadly blizzards, but in spring, it’s all pure potential. If spring work is left undone, you’re not even in the game. You can’t harvest something you never planted. The sun pours in, all that gold hitting the ground at a faster and faster pace, and the energy is the riotous energy of a bull market, so you want to be up every day before the sun is, to catch it.

  During the dry spell, Mark had spent several days behind a team of two horses, plowing twenty-four acres for corn. We’d graduated by then from a walk-behind plow to a sulky plow that the driver could ride on, raising and lowering the plow bottoms with a spring-loaded lever—a leap of technology that brought us in a flash from the preindustrial world all the way up to the 1920s. The sulky plow was easier to control than the walking plow, and the two bottoms allowed us to plow more easily in both directions. After plowing came harrowing, which smoothed the furrows and was done with a heavy disc harrow we’d pulled from our neighbor Ron’s hedgerow. Then the spring-tine harrow, to make a fine seedbed, and the soil was ready to receive the corn. The size of our membership was growing fast, and we needed to produce more grain to feed the chickens and pigs; if the quality of our hay wasn’t good enough, we’d need the grain to bring the dairy cows through the darkest part of winter, and the horses would eat it when they were in heavy work. It also would become the sort of belly-filling food that would anchor our meals for the next year—cornbread, spoon bread, polenta, tamales, hominy, johnnycakes, and tortillas. We would plant an acre of sweet corn, but compared to field corn, that was a novelty item, a lovely treat in late summer, not the serious stuff that would really feed us.

  * * *

  It’s hard to overstate the importance of corn—a great concentrator of resources, almost pure carbohydrate, taking the sun’s energy and converting it to a gorgeous golden grain. Corn has taken its knocks as a heavily subsidized monocrop and a cheap source of calories, but it is a plant to be revered. You can feel its power when you run through a field of it in late summer, the rows higher than your head, giant garden spiders looping their elaborate webs from stalk to stalk. The long, wide leaves are palpably alive, with their razored edges breathing in carbo
n dioxide and breathing out oxygen so that you feel like you are running through a chamber of alien beings who exude strength. Every few rows, there’s a blighted ear, like something struck by a curse, enveloped in a gray-black fungus that is ugly but in fact deliciously edible.

  After the sun retreats in the fall, the green life will flow out of the leaves and they will rattle dryly on their stalks. All their energy will have run into the kernels by then, and the ears will hang down, dense and gold, wrapped in a sheath of silk and husk. Then the sun’s energy is safe, stable, mobile, storable. Sometimes the raccoons discover the corn and take their share, hauling the loot down with their clever hands, or the crows, who perch on the stalks, or some lucky deer, who nibble at it and grow fat. Sometimes it’s discovered by bears, who eat corn in a pantomime of gluttony. They lumber into the best part of the field and plop themselves down, then swoop out a paw, knock down stalks, and pull them close so they don’t have to move while they eat. Unlike the neat deer, they leave a total mess. Half-chewed mouthfuls of corn, a rough circle of flattened plants, and, as an insult, giant piles of corn-filled poop.

  * * *

  If all goes well, when the ground has begun to freeze and the rest of the land is sleeping, the combine will arrive, hired from our grain-farming neighbors, the Wrisleys. It will devour the rows six at a time, cutting the dry stalks and the leaves, grabbing the ears with its metal teeth, scraping the kernels from their sockets, leaving the cobs behind in the dirt. The kernels will become a river of golden energy that flows out of the combine into the bed of the truck that travels next to it. Then to the auger, which lifts it to the top of the grain bin in the farmyard. The corn will sit there like a dense cold star, sleeping, waiting to be ignited by teeth or beak, and be transformed again in the cauldron of an animal’s stomach.