Just as the pickles came out of the canner, things got serious. A contraction came that was intense enough to stop time; I held on to the corner of the table as it washed over me. It was four in the afternoon. I went up to our bedroom and asked Mark to fill the birthing pool we’d set up. Jenna checked me again and said I was fully dilated. I got in the pool as soon as it was full. When I did, the discomfort disappeared entirely, but so did the contractions, which were still not as strong nor as regular as they needed to be. “Push,” said Jenna. “You are going to have to work for it.”
This part was not nearly as fun as the first stage. It was shouldering large rocks up a steep hill. The pushing felt wrong, as though it were injuring me. It was like sticking your finger into a whirring fan or pressing your hand into broken glass. The kind of thing that a body rebels against. “Push,” she said. “Push.” I slipped into myself, my consciousness shrinking to a single porthole that looked out on a foreign world in which I had little interest. In the deepest part of the work, as the room was growing dark, I spotted a sunflower that Mark had picked for me and brought to our room. Its kind, calm face became a companion and a guide.
Jane was born after dark that night. She was bundled against me, skin to skin. She nursed, and then she slept nestled between Mark and me, and we were three instead of two.
* * *
If Jane was a sunflower, sweet and calm, then Miranda was a dragonfly, darting in on the wing. She came just before she was due, three years after her sister. Jane was asleep in her crib down the hall. Mark was asleep next to me. What I felt was nothing at all like what I had felt before. My body had learned the steps the first time, and now it was ready to dance. When I called the midwife, she said I didn’t sound much like a woman in labor. Maybe I wasn’t. Maybe this was the prelude. I took a shower, lay down again in the guest bed, enjoyed the sensations that were running through me, listened as they became more insistent. Mark woke up and timed them, then called the midwives again, this time with some urgency. It was a long drive for them through the dark mountains. I heard a whimper from Jane’s room and went in to find that she had wet her bed. I stripped her sheets between contractions, put down towels, made up the bed again, changed her into dry pajamas. Jane had not woken all the way and sank back to sleep, her hand curled at her neck. Then I told Mark to fill the birthing tub, that I needed it now. He did, and as I stepped into it, I realized he had walked out to the garden at some point that night and gathered an enormous armload of sweet Annie. The room, candlelit, was full of it and its soft, candied, childlike scent. This time, pushing was no chore but a pleasure in its reflexive, peristaltic, rhythmic insistence. It had its own timing, and there was no controlling it. Body became separate from self, something to observe from a small distance with quiet wonder. I could feel the baby’s head making its way through me, the same path her sister had forged with such difficulty, open now and clear, a relative speedway. I was aware, dimly, that the midwives had not arrived, that Mark was on the phone with one of them, checking location, getting instruction. I felt the crown of the baby’s head underwater with my fingers, the sensation of fire. Then the midwife arrived at the top of the stairs holding a travel mug of coffee. She stripped off her jacket and knelt, and five minutes later, the baby was born, surfacing like a large-headed, small-bodied fish, to rest, bloodied, blinking, on my bare chest. We were still connected as I walked, supported, from the tub to the bed. There is no we stronger than those few moments when two bodies are connected. It was four in the morning. Mark woke Jane and brought her to the room in her monkey pajamas. Jane was unsurprised, serene. She had been practicing with her scissors for weeks, so she knew exactly what to do as she clipped her sister free.
It took us a week to name her. We scrolled through the list of names we’d made before she was born, and none of them fit. Finally, we landed on a new one: Miranda, with its echo of Shakespearean magic, and a triplet beat like her quick little heart.
Nobody had warned me that changing the shape of our family would be a different kind of labor. It wasn’t just the work of having an infant, the feeding and soothing that happened around the clock, tedious but sweet. It was adjusting to a new family structure. After Jane was born, in my memory, at least, we’d slipped easily into a new rhythm. One little baby between two grown adults on the farm was doable. Aside from the breastfeeding, we’d split the duties of caring for her more or less evenly. Jane had spent her first winter zipped into our thick jackets, riding in a sling, or napping in the barn with us at milking time, tucked warmly into a bushel box. When we added a fourth person to our family, the dynamics got more complicated. A toddler plus an infant equaled one full-time job, and instead of splitting it between us or even discussing it much, we seemed to assume that job was mine. I soon found it wasn’t an easy one. An infant who sleeps in two-to-three-hour snatches is manageable if you can take turns and get an occasional nap. But an infant who sleeps in two-to-three-hour snatches, along with a toddler who has her own set of needs, in the care of one adult, is a different thing altogether. Exhaustion built. The farm had grown too, and demanded more of everyone.
After Miranda was born, Mark seemed to be touched by some kind of postpartum unease. He took a two-week paternity leave from the farm but spent most of it in bed, reading magazines and sleeping while I nursed the new baby and cooked meals and played with Jane. Maybe, I thought, he needed a rest. There was something else, hard to say, but so it is: a gap had opened between us, a space that hadn’t been there before. It wasn’t us plus a child anymore. Now I was on one side, with the children and their needs, and he was on the other, with the farm and all its work. The sense of common purpose that had been so strong between us was smaller. “What’s wrong?” I asked him. “Nothing,” he said. A long pause. Then, “It’s just clear to me where I fall on your priority list now. And it isn’t first or second.” I couldn’t say it wasn’t true. How could it be? That seemed to rattle him. When the two weeks were over, he got up and went back to the fields, in command of what suddenly felt like his farm, his battalion of farmers, his cavalry of horses.
* * *
Fall shifted to winter, the fields drifted deep with snow, the deer yarded up in the woods. The temperatures dropped so low, zero felt balmy. From the kitchen window, I could see the horses in the pasture behind the house. The pony followed the draft horses to water, her belly leaving brush marks in the snow. They chipped at the edge of the icy pond with their sharp hooves, dunked their muzzles into the water, and lifted them, the whiskers on their chins white with frost.
Racey had gone back to Africa. She had a four-month job in Central African Republic, working as a consultant for the World Bank. A few weeks before she left, Nathan had pulled into the driveway in a Subaru stuffed full of apprentice farmers. They had all finished their summer jobs and were on a road trip, exploring farms that sounded interesting or that they thought had something to teach them. There had been a stream of cars and trucks just like it that year. Word had gotten around that we were producing a full diet, year-round, for our local community, and that we were powered by draft horses. Young farmers wanted to see what that looked like and how it was humanly possible. Usually, we would feed them and find a place for them to sleep in exchange for a few days or weeks of work. For our full-time farmers, these visits could be enlivening, or they could feel exhausting. That day, for Racey, it was the latter. She was wrapping up a long season and mentally preparing to depart for the other side of the world. The last thing she wanted was to get to know a new bunch of people. They’d need to be shown how to do everything, and they’d probably end up sleeping on the floor at the Yellow House. But some corner of her brain registered Nathan’s smile, his kind and friendly demeanor.
Nathan and his friends stayed for the weekend, and Mark gave them the Herculean task of mucking out a calf pen in the West Barn that was four feet deep in bedding. Racey was milking that weekend, and when she walked past them—to bring in the cows, feed the calves, let the cows
out, check the heifers—she noted how efficiently they were working, with Nathan in the lead. They were having a blast, laughing and talking as the pitchforks bit deeper and deeper into the pile. Nathan stripped as he went, hanging pieces of clothing on the gate. A pair of long johns, an undershirt, and then a shirt. Each time Racey walked by, the muck pile was smaller, and he was happier, dirtier, and more naked. She allowed herself to be a little bit impressed.
We took a farewell walk around the farm the day before she left. She held Jane’s hand. I had Miranda, tiny, on my back. Racey and I had become close friends, and she had grown attached to the girls. Most afternoons, she’d pop her head into the house, ask Jane if she wanted to collect eggs. Jane would rush to shove her feet in her rubber boots and run out the door. I knew the energy and time it cost to take a little kid along on chores, and I appreciated it. When Racey came in to visit and found Miranda fussing, she’d scoop her up and walk her around until she cooed or slept. Most people without kids of their own wouldn’t think to do that, but it was natural for Racey. She wanted kids, I knew, but she hadn’t met the right man. “What do you think,” she asked as we passed the solar panels, “of having a baby on my own?” She was in her thirties, facing the fact that she was not going to get any more fertile. I thought about what it might be like alone. The sleeplessness, the stress when they were sick, the long marathon of patience it took to raise them, and also the life-changing surge of love. I imagined what kind of mother Racey would be, and it was a very good one. “Better to do it on your own than not to do it at all,” I said. We talked dreamily about what it might look like if she built a little house for herself here, became a partner in the farm, and had a child who could grow up alongside ours.
Nathan decided he wanted to spend a year working with us. He took over Racey’s jobs with the animals and in the dairy, and moved into her old room in the Yellow House. When Racey and I Skyped, I could see her equatorial world, glaring sun and dust and a fine expat’s apartment, and she could see mine: the chilly, grimy kitchen, the children bundled in their heavy winter clothes, the dark and shut-up house. We talked about her work in a country that was just beginning to come back from a devastating war, and about a French paratrooper she was vaguely dating. One night she asked, “How’s Nathan working out?” I said, “He’s good. A little nerdy, maybe, but really kind, smart, and very hardworking. He asked about you.” She blinked, shrugged. “Nothing wrong with nerdy,” she said.
Another new farmer arrived, Tobias. He sat across from Blaine at lunch and looked at her openly from behind his big scratched-up glasses. She scowled at him reflexively, then smiled the barest hint of a smile. Blaine was dating someone else, but the energy between her and Tobias built day by day. You could see the heat rising between them like waves in the air over a hot patch of road.
The relationships that developed on our farm that year were like the ones that happen in a war zone. There was no hiding your true self when you were working side by side for grueling hours in all weather, dripping with sweat and muck. The farm provided shared purpose and a mix of frustration and satisfaction, which encouraged camaraderie. The beauty of the landscape and the physical nature of the work seemed to open people’s hearts. Sometimes it was a friendship that developed, sometimes a romance. When that happened, love sparked fast and burned out or else caught and transformed into commitment. This pair, I thought, could go either way.
* * *
It was too cold to be outside with a newborn. The wind would make her gasp and choke. I stayed inside the house, cooked big lunches, and got news of the farm around the table. There was no fieldwork for the horses in winter, but there were a lot of odd jobs. Chad used a team to cut and haul firewood to be bucked and split for sugaring. When Blaine shot a steer in the field, Tim hitched a team to haul it home. I worried that the horses would mind the shot or the smell of blood, but neither seemed to bother them much. Tobias rigged up a ramp and a chain so the horses could pull the steer up onto the wagon. A smooth process, no tractor required. When it snowed, Tim and Nathan hitched a team to a blade we bought at an auction, to plow the farm roads. It wasn’t a perfect rig, but good enough to clear a path to haul a load of hay to the beef cattle.
All winter, Mark watched the weather forecast, waiting for warm windy days. When they came, he rushed through his work as fast as he could, then headed for the lake. He was too busy to get away from the farm during the growing and harvest seasons, so he made the most of the rest of the year. When a January thaw came, he got his chance. The south wind built all morning, bringing rain that melted the snow. By noon, it had become a steady howling beast. I stoked the woodstove and put a pot of black beans on top of it, with carrots, onions, celery root, and hunks of salt pork. When the wind is like that, I want to feel four walls around me and enjoy the petulant sound of it trying to get through the cracks. Mark, on the other hand, wants to be in it, on the lake. His medium for this communion is a Windsurfer, and most of his gear is thirty years old. He had told me early in our relationship that if he dies on the water, I should know that he died happy, doing exactly what he wanted to do. It was midafternoon when he put on his dry suit, with layers of winter clothes underneath. The temperature outside was 35 degrees, warm enough, barely, to keep the water from freezing on his sail. “What time will you be back?” I asked, as I always did.
“After dark,” he answered. Dark would be over us in an hour or so. “You shouldn’t worry until ten.”
“What then?” I asked.
“Then you could call 911.”
I filed that in my consciousness without dwelling too much on it.
Once, just after Jane was born, I did worry. It was a stormy late-summer evening, and he was gone for hours. A tree came down on the power line, and the electricity went out. I drove down to the lake at dusk, with the newborn in her car seat, and scanned the whitecaps with binoculars. When it was truly dark, I drove back to the farm and sat on the staircase with the little babe asleep in my arms, imagining what it would be like to raise her without him. When he came home finally, he was limping, his feet cut from hauling his gear barefoot out of shallow water choked with sharp-shelled zebra mussels. He’d been blown so far downwind, he’d had to hitchhike home. I upbraided him for making me worry. “Worry is your choice,” he said. “I’m always going to be like this.”
After that, I didn’t worry. It was like turning off a little signal in my heart. And it was necessary if I was going to love the person he authentically was. But you can’t extinguish worry without also extinguishing some of the tender aspect of love. The physics of the heart won’t allow it. You have to loosen your attachment or else you’ll suffer.
So that warm, windy day in January, I did not worry. I hardly thought of him, even though I could hear the loose tin on the pole barn’s roof tearing off in the dusk. I ate dinner with the girls and did not worry. I put them in the bath and did not worry. The trick of it, I’d learned, was to remove the center of yourself from the circumstance over which you have no control. The worry becomes an external thing, an object to observe and not experience. I’d gotten good at hushing the litany of what-ifs, stilling the slideshow of potential disastrous outcomes.
He walked into the bathroom after their hair was washed, trailing sand, half numb. He had come the last half-mile through the crashing waves in the dark, holding to the mast, his sail tattered and useless. His thigh was locked into a terrific charley horse that would not relent for days. I could see only the middle of his face, because the edges were covered by his thick rubber hood, but the visible skin was red from cold and the sand that the wind had whipped into it as he struggled onto the shore. The face was smiling a squished but unstoppable smile. He was enormously happy. That was Mark. And that was how he would always be. Happiest clinging to the mast, just this side of disaster.
CHAPTER 6
By February, the farmhouse was making me feel claustrophobic. It was built in 1920, redecorated most recently in the 1970s, and caught by us in a s
tate of arrested decline, pinned there on a downhill slope. In the years when the farm was out of production, the house had been rented to a series of young people. It was a party house then, the closets wired and plumbed for growing pot, a pole for dancing. There had been some unfortunate renovations before that—the front porch enclosed in an awkward-looking frame, the ceiling of the dining room covered with dull acoustic tile, some of the large original windows replaced with others that were small and cheap-looking and positioned too high for me to see out of. One of them was cracked when we arrived and had never been fixed. I’d hung a piece of stained glass over the crack to keep from feeling a sting of guilt when I glanced that way. But the house’s bones were solid. There were even some traces of the handwrought beauty of its youth: finely milled, shellacked fir moldings around the windows and the doorframes, which had aged to a glowing amber; still-sound horsehair plaster walls; and a hard maple floor that revealed itself, covered in stains, when we pulled up the layers of carpet and linoleum that we’d wrecked completely during our first year of farming, when we used to butcher sides of beef in the kitchen and separate our cream in a hand-cranked machine bolted directly to that hard-suffering maple floor. All that action had moved to the butcher shop and milk house, but traces remained in the kitchen. There was a hole in the ceiling where the meat hook had hung, and a patch of dark wood around the ghost of the old separator.
To get to the farm office, you had to walk a long U from the mudroom, where the fiberglass insulation was coming down in neon yellow puffs, through a dark, tight hallway, then through the kitchen and the living room, which also served as our dining room. There was a long table against the office windows. Its surface resembled the contours of Mark’s brain: a crowded, complex kind of order that only he could understand. It was piled high with folders, papers, odd bits of hardware, the hay-dusted contents of his end-of-day pockets. There were jars marked with obsolete labels that no longer corresponded to their contents.
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