Good Husbandry

by Kristin Kimball

  If Mark was not in the field or the machine shop, he was in the office, which meant there was a constant stream of people walking through the house to ask him questions, or look for something, or use the phone. There were two office chairs, rescued from the dump, with slightly uneven legs, and two beat-up old filing cabinets, the drawers slightly off their tracks. People needed to get to that office, or the kitchen, or the bathroom. With them came mud and manure that coated the floors in the spring and dried, in winter, to dust. Everywhere, there was visual evidence of Mark’s hardcore functional aesthetic. He’d written important phone numbers on the wall in black Sharpie and punched nails into the molding of the windows next to the woodstove for hanging wet clothes, camping equipment, or a pair of socks he wanted to wear later on.

  The living room formed the house’s beating heart. Walking through it was hard because an enormous table and all the mismatched chairs took up most of the floor space. The bedrooms upstairs were always cold in winter, and so they were usually empty except during sleep, which happened under goose-down comforters thick enough to flatten us to our beds through even the most exciting dreams. The second winter of Jane’s life, she spent every night sleeping in a pink snowsuit, cozy against the cold. It was a solution to the problem of keeping blankets on a toddler that seemed perfectly reasonable to me, then and now.

  To improve the circulation of heat, Mark had hacked a hole in the living room ceiling, above the woodstove. There was a piece of wood lattice roughly nailed over the hole, so nobody would fall through. When visitors came, their eyes were drawn to it, curious and a little horrified. Who chops a hole in his own house? Jane would use it as a porthole, lowering her stuffed animals through it on a noose.

  The porthole was useful because there were no interior stairs to join the first and second floors. That most logical connection had been severed before we moved in, when the upstairs and downstairs were rented out as separate apartments. In order to get from the kitchen to the bedrooms, we had to go outside to the unheated mudroom, come about, and go in an adjacent door. In the dead of winter, this was a bracing moment. If my hand was wet from washing dishes, it would freeze fast to the doorknob on the way to bed.

  There was no stairway up from the living room, but there was a stairway that led down to the cellar, which was full, from harvest until spring, of sacks of potatoes and dry beans; eight-hundred-pound crates of winter squash; mesh bags of onions and shallots; and pallets of jarred tomatoes, pickled beans, and quarts of lard. There was a stainless-steel rack of cheeses aging in the corner, their yellow-orange surfaces covered in various fragrant types of mold. We lived, in other words, over a great, wide mound of food. If all of humanity were trapped in their homes by some apocalyptic event, we would probably be the only survivors, emerging, fat, from the ashes. It was a secure kind of feeling, but it had a downside. When the house was shut tight against the winter cold, and the woodstove glowed hot to keep the pipes from freezing, the smell of our cellar wafted up through the floorboards, permeated our clothes and furniture and even our skin. It was an organic smell, half good and half awful, made up of damp earth, onions, cheese, and, as we moved toward spring, the underlying stink of decay. We lived so thoroughly in that smell that I would notice it only when I had been away for a few days. When I returned, it would hit me as soon as I opened the door, and I’d think, We really ought to do something about that.

  After a few years of harboring us, the house had seemed to molt. The wallpaper began peeling from the walls, steamed off by large-scale cooking projects: rendering lard, simmering down whey for cheese, and finishing maple syrup on the woodstove. There were six layers of wallpaper, including a 1920s floral print and something synthetic from the 1970s, the color of poi, an awful washed-out purplish gray. Once, on impulse, I’d begun yanking strips off the walls, thinking that maybe a bit more destruction would make it look chic. I was wrong. It looked leprous. Eventually, the walls and floors came to an agreement with the furniture and curtains, all of it moving toward the same shade of dun, barely illuminated by the light coming through the undersize windows, which were always in need of washing. At night, harsh shadows were cast by a bare and flyspecked bulb. Because of that general dimness, any bright spots in our house seemed particularly vibrant. A bunch of flowers on the table, or one of Jane’s crayon drawings, were beacons of color and light.

  For the first few years of our marriage, the state of the house was acceptable to me. Mark and I were focused entirely on what happened outside of it, in the fields and pastures and barns. The house was just the place that received our bodies when they were too tired to do another hour of work. It was where we paused to warm up or dry off, and where we cooked and delighted in the food that we were growing out there in the field, which was the part of our lives that really mattered. Sometimes friends from my old life would come to visit, and I would see their shock as they took in our house. I’d follow their gaze to the hole in the ceiling or a flock of cluster flies beating themselves against the cracked windowpane. It didn’t bother me much. I even took a small, perverse pride in it. Other people could be house-proud. We were food-proud, land-proud, work-proud, and that was more than enough.

  But it began to look different to me after Jane was born. My mother came to visit once, when Jane was an infant. My lovely, kind mother, whose house was always immaculate. She loved me with her whole heart, but if possible, she might have loved this new little granddaughter just a tiny bit more. She stood in the stairway that didn’t connect the two floors of our house, my baby in her arms, and said in a masterful compression of maternal guilt, “You owe your child a better life than this.” It stung. And it raised that pesky question I still hadn’t answered: What is a good life? Is a good life for me the same as a good life for my children? And what if we can’t have both?

  After Miranda was born, the way I thought of the house began to shift. I needed to soften it, to civilize it, and to separate it somehow from the farm, with its rowdy band of farmers, its chaos, and its dirt. I needed an actual home for us, and that would prove very hard to come by.

  * * *

  The short days rolled on. I was learning that a farm was much less fun when you are an observer instead of a participant. Without the work, it was just a small business, ragged around the edges and only tenuously viable. Anchored inside with the children, I felt like it was slipping away from me, and Mark with it. When the cold spell lifted, I returned to milking in the mornings, thinking maybe that work would put me right.

  Miranda, asleep on her back, had to be roused to nurse before I left for the barn in the morning. The feeling of holding her so fresh from sleep was goodness. When she latched on to suck, my milk let down, a tingly, prickly sensation fortified with a slug of pure love. Nursing her was taking a lot out of me. All the softness of pregnancy around my face and hips was gone, melted away by the caloric pull of milk, accentuating the circles under my eyes. Still, I’d miss this when she was weaned, just as I already missed the way she had slept in her first weeks of life, her arms thrown straight up over her head in a gesture of trusting abandon.

  I could feel a bruise on my back against the hard wood of the rocking chair. The day before, one of the cows had kicked me there as I’d bent down to clean her udder. I’d been kicked many times before, in the knee, the middle of the thigh, the hand, the ankle. That was the first time I’d been kicked in the back. I hadn’t known it was possible. But I couldn’t begrudge her the gesture. We rub the udder to encourage the flow of oxytocin that enables the cow’s milk to let down. The mechanics of lactation are no different for cows than they are for women, so I imagined the feeling of letting down was the same for her as it was for me. Maybe she kicked because what came at her then were my mute human hands and not the lowing mouth of a calf.

  Miranda’s sucking slowed to an occasional twitch. She was asleep again. I put her on her back and nudged Mark, left her with him, a quiet little bundle in a basket next to our bed. I slipped into the bathroom, wher
e I’d left my clothes the night before. Layers upon layers, since the weather report had been calling for a deep freeze. Indeed, when I looked at the thermometer, it was twelve below.

  * * *

  Cold makes air seem cleaner, clearer. Shards of moonlight glinted off the snow, and my boots made a high squeak with every step. I was armed with a butane torch, a can of kerosene, and my hair dryer, in case the pipes in the milk house were frozen. In the barn, the fluorescent light struggled weakly against the cold. Nathan was at the door with his stick, calling cows: “Come on, come on.” I joined him, shining my headlamp at horns and undercarriages, looking for Steve, the new bull. He came along behind Cammie, who was in heat. “Hey hey hey,” Nathan said, and shook his stick at him. The bull turned in to the bullpen, where a pile of hay with a sprinkle of corn was waiting for him, and I locked the heavy gate behind him. The last cows filed in. We followed them back to their stanchions, where they’d found their places and were unfurling their tongues for the first tastes of corn.

  We set the kerosene heater in the aisle of the barn and ran it full blast. It threw off a paltry heat that dissipated within a few inches. I went to the milk house to fill buckets with hot soapy water for teat cleaning. Two minutes after leaving the heated space, the suds on top of the water were frozen into a brittle white foam.

  I’d gotten to know Nathan better by then. He was from Massachusetts, like Racey was. He had a degree in geology, spoke fluent Spanish, was a masterful tennis player, a good musician, and already knew that he really, really loved farming. His last job had been at a small dairy in Canada, where he’d learned to drive draft horses. When he came to our farm, he improved so many systems so quickly that we barely knew where to put him next.

  When I reported all that to Racey, in Africa, over Skype, she said, “Man, is there anything that guy can’t do?” I knew he took an interest in her, developed during the two weeks their jobs had overlapped. I’d overheard him talking with Tim about her in the milk house. Nathan sounded thoughtful, sincere, and determined. That might be a dangerous tone to take with Racey, I thought. She tended toward roguish men who lived on other continents and offered excitement in place of intimacy. But maybe.

  * * *

  I hadn’t milked regularly since before I got too pregnant with Miranda. The milking machines had changed the nature of the work, and it was new to me. Instead of the contemplative crouch and slow squirt-by-squirt action, milking had become a solitary aerobic activity, one person, two machines, fifteen cows. We had not come entirely into the modern world. The milking machines we were using were from the 1960s, five-gallon sealed stainless-steel buckets that we could pick up and move from cow to cow. From the top of each bucket sprouted three lines: one for the milk, one to provide suction, and the third to feed a genius little plastic-and-metal regulator that allowed the suction on the teats to come and relax in one-second pulses, much in the same way a calf would do it. The bucket milker’s line attached to a suction pipe that ran in front of the cows’ stanchions. The business end of the bucket milker was the claw, which had four rubber tubes inside stainless-steel covers. Milking meant first cleaning the teats and udder thoroughly, which would also stimulate letdown, squirting the first milk from each teat by hand, then attaching the claw. When it was finished, we took off the claw, sanitized the teats and the machine parts, then worked through the same process with the next cow in the lineup.

  Usually, two cows’ worth of milk could fit in each bucket. When it was full, I would take off the bucket’s top and empty the milk through a filter into a ten-gallon stainless-steel can. Once I learned the timing, it was an enjoyable process, the pace brisk but manageable. Even on the coldest mornings, it warmed me enough to take off at least one layer. By hand, milking took us about ten minutes per cow. With the machine, we could milk two cows at once in as little as two or three minutes. We lost the animal-to-animal intimacy of hand-milking, and the congenial morning and evening talk between milking stools, but I soon came to think the cows preferred the machines for their speedy efficiency and the reduced wear and tear on the teats. Anyway, we needed the increased efficiency so we could stay on top of the farm’s fast growth.

  * * *

  The first time I’d milked after having Miranda, I’d been all thumbs, awkward. The routine jobs—chores, harnessing, milking—are like dances. The first time, you trip over yourself. It takes forever, maddening for the learner and a drag for the teacher. A few days later, though, you know the steps. Then you can do it without thinking at all, and without wasting any movement, and lose yourself in the flow, your mind quiet or noodling on some idea or noticing important things at the edge of your vision—is that cow looking a little off? Is she coming into heat? Meanwhile, your body is in motion, at medium speed, over long periods of time, releasing puffs of endorphins that leave you happy.

  Cold days are always more complicated, especially with milking. Liquids become problematic solids. Buckets freeze to the floor, hoses clog with ice, doors stick, and stanchions jam and are difficult to fix with numb fingers. If you leave a drop of milk or the liquid iodine dip on the tips of a cow’s teats, she’ll get frostbite there, in the worst possible place. At fifteen below, the pulsator slowed to an ineffectual swish-swish, the valve to the suction pump jammed, and the water line in the milk house froze. By the time all the problems were solved, the cows milked and turned back out for the day with Brian the bull, it was nearly midmorning, and my own breasts were full to bursting again. I hustled back to the house, where I found Mark in the kitchen, talking through the day’s work plan with Chad, while holding a fussy, hungry baby and corralling an equally hungry toddler. I gathered the children, took a plate of leftover breakfast, and trooped upstairs with them, shedding layers as we went.

  * * *

  That night, a snowstorm hit. Not a normal snow-globe snowstorm but the quiet, vicious kind that comes every few years and drops snow so heavy and wet that it tears down the power lines, the fences. Two barns in the neighborhood collapsed under the weight. Every hour or two through the night, we went outside to gently coax the snow from on top of the greenhouses. We were lucky. The barns stood, the house stood, the greenhouses stood. In the pasture north of the West Barn, the dairy cows stood in a circle around their hay feeder, then came in for milking one foot at a time, their full udders leaving drag marks in the snow. The chickens stood at the barn door and pecked at the snow but would not step out, preferring to mill together in the warm, dry barn. The pigs had feed and shelter in the field. But the beef cattle were pastured a mile from the barnyard, in Essex Field. They had enough hay for twelve hours, maybe eighteen, but then they would be hungry, and the electric fence that held them in had no power. The last time the cattle had been hungry inside a compromised fence, they had walked the dirt road toward town, where we’d found them nibbling the shrubs around the statue of the Holy Family at St. Joseph’s Church. So we needed to feed them, but their hay was here, in the barnyard.

  The roads were impassable. This snow was too heavy to be plowed with a blade and had to be scooped out of the way slowly, with the bucket of a tractor. We were on our own, and there was so much to do. We split up. After milking, Mark took the tractor and began making his way, bucket by bucket, north of the barns. I took the children and the barnyard chores. The snow was too deep for Jane to navigate, so I put her and the baby on a toboggan and pulled them toward the East Barn. Jane was in a heavy snowsuit, and Miranda was practically immobilized by extreme bundling, with just her pink face poking out. She fell asleep almost as soon as the sled started moving. By the time I had trudged, thigh-deep, to the East Barn, I was winded. I needed to go in and feed the chickens and collect the eggs. Jane was happily humming to herself, and Miranda was sound asleep, and I could do it faster without them. “Stay here,” I told Jane, “and watch your sister. I’ll be right back.”

  I collected the eggs as fast as I could, made sure the chickens had enough feed and water to get through until the next day. As soon as I
opened the door of the barn, I heard Jane wailing. Not fussing or crying but the most brokenhearted wail, as if someone had died. “Mom!” she bawled, unable to get her breath. “Mom! There’s a cat! On my sister!” Indeed, there was Bubby the barn cat, lying on Miranda’s cushioned chest, energetically kneading her claws into the red snowsuit, staring at the baby’s face. Miranda was lying like a starfish on a bright white beach, still peacefully asleep. To me, the scene was innocent, even adorable. To Jane, it was terrifying, awful. The three rules we had taught her when her sister was born were these: “Always be gentle. Don’t put anything over her face. Don’t put your weight on her.” The cat was putting its weight on her, and to Jane, this was going to kill her, and my instruction had been “Watch your sister.” Jane had tried to swat Bubby away, but the scarred old battle-ax of a barn cat knew a good thing when she found it, warm, soft, and dry.

  There were times when we asked too much of our children, Jane especially. She had the innate sense of duty and responsibility that I think is common to oldest siblings, whether they are born on a farm or not. Once, when Miranda was mobile but not old enough to understand boundaries, we let Jane take her to the swing set at the side of the house. “Don’t let her go out on the farm road,” we said. But Miranda was willful, and I found Jane, hysterical, trying with all her four-year-old might to haul the toddler back from the road, where there was no chance of her getting run down except in Jane’s imagination. But for her, it could not be more real.