We always want a simple answer, but what we get, over and over again in food production, is complexity. Is that a strongyle egg I see on the slide, or is it a piece of pollen? Is this horse infested enough to treat? With what, and what else can I do to mitigate the problem?
The white pony’s slide was clean. Fern’s, though, was a bit concerning. There were strongyle eggs all over the place. I told Chad what I’d seen, and he dosed her with fenbendazole, moved her to fresh pasture. When we tested her again two weeks later, her egg count was down to near zero, and her coat was glossy.
* * *
In late May, we got a break. The sun came out, and the wind came up and dried the fields. The water in the lake continued to rise for a while, as the streams drained the valleys, and then began to subside. Suddenly, there was action everywhere. The work we should have been doing for the past eight weeks needed to be done now, all at once. We hitched Jay and Jack to a cultivator fitted with inward-facing discs, to shape raised beds in tiny Home Field, the only place dry enough to consider putting plants, and transplanted the overgrown lettuce and onions from the greenhouse. Tim hitched his young team of gray Percherons to the manure spreader, and spread loads of compost on the driest parts of Monument Field, where we expected to grow most of our vegetables, pushing through the work until the wheels and the horses’ hooves sank too deep. We threw a lot of resources at the acre of sweet corn, which had miraculously germinated, stoking it with compost, beating back the weeds, then adding fake snakes made of old hose and strands of flashy Mylar, to scare off the crows. Chad put Jake and Abby on the forecart and dragged the pasture in Essex Field, to knock apart the cattle’s winter manure, then added his gelding, Arch, to the hitch, three horses abreast, and pulled the big spring-tine harrow over the headlands and the asparagus patch, trying to gain control of the weeds, which already had the jump on us.
All parts of the farm were interconnected. The repercussions of the rains would be myriad and would affect us all year. The budget had taken a hit already because of the hay we’d bought to get the animals through until the pastures were dry. The greenhouse flats were all full, and so was the greenhouse itself, and we couldn’t transplant things out, so we couldn’t seed anything new, which would push the timing back for everything.
The dry weather held for a week. The dairy cows finally went out to pasture, galloping and bucking awkwardly at their first sight of it. We transplanted and seeded maniacally into the cold wet ground, attacked the weeds with the desperate energy of a village about to be overrun by invaders. Everyone started in the dark and worked absurdly long days, ate their meals in the field. The taste of that spring in my memory is cold buttered biscuits a little gritty with soil, eaten over windburned lips; or slapped-together lettuce and mayonnaise sandwiches with a hint of leather and horse sweat. The children came to the field with us every day, barefoot. Jane tagged along with me or Racey, and we plopped Miranda down in the field near whoever’s work was most stationary. She crawled along the muddy furrows, pushed herself up on her feet to test her legs for walking, ate alarmingly large fistfuls of dirt. At the end of the day, I stripped both girls at the door and put them directly into the bath to soak off the mud.
Mark ran from job to job, hustling, smiling, singing to himself. That first planting of potatoes had rotted in the ground, and it was getting late for potato planting, but they were an important crop to get us through winter, so he hitched Jake and Abby to the potato planter and put in a Hail Mary patch. The horses had been working as hard as we had been, and all their youthful freshness had been buffed off by it. When he told them to whoa, they did it right away and stood perfectly still, breathing. Mark was working alone, so he thought he could trust them to stand in the field and rest while he ran to the headlands for another bag of seed potatoes to refill the hopper. It was a Friday, and our members had come to the farm to pick up their food. I was in the pavilion, cutting more seed potatoes and helping people with their food, when I heard a metallic cacophony on the road in front of the farm, accompanied by the terrifying sound of eight hooves at a dead run. I looked up to see the horses with the potato planter clanking along behind them, Mark far behind, at a sprint. I had a vision of them turning down the driveway toward us, our members and their children in their path. Instead, they ran past the driveway and crossed over the opposite lane and onto our neighbor’s lawn. The left line tightened on something, and they were running counterclockwise circles in the turf that grew smaller until the planter hit a stump and stopped. Mark and I reached them at the same time. They were blowing hard but unhurt. Mark checked the equipment. Except for a bent bar, the planter was somehow, miraculously, intact, so he went back to the field and finished planting.
* * *
It turned out that Mark’s energy was not bottomless after all. He burned with such brightness that spring, but eventually, the fuse blew, and the whole room went dark. He spent a long day with his six-feet-six-inch frame perched atop the bumpy two-horse cultivator, trying to knock back quack grass; it’s no use getting seeds in the ground if they’re just going to be vanquished by weeds. Then he jumped off the cultivator to plant next year’s strawberries, which had been languishing in the cooler since they’d arrived from our supplier and were beginning to look limp. He was using a spade, making holes in the wet ground, pressing the plants into them with his heel. Somewhere around the four hundredth plant, his back twanged, and the shock of it sent him to the ground. He lay there, trying to relax his spasming muscles. The to-do list was still long, and rain was coming again, so he got up and pushed through the pain, planting until well after dark. By the next morning, he could barely move. I left him with the kids while I went to milk the cows. When Miranda woke up crying, he crawled into her room, tipped her crib over, and gently rolled her out because he couldn’t stand up to lift her.
I was hoping it was just a three-day tweak. That’s what we call it when a horse pulls or strains something and needs a little rest. In the meantime, Mark could run the farm like a brain in a jar, sorting out the priorities from the office window, directing without doing; we had six other fit people to do the physical work, and four teams of strong horses. In any case, it started to rain again. There wasn’t much we could do.
I wish I could say that I was a supportive and empathetic partner while Mark was injured, but seeing him in pain brought out the worst in me. It cracked the image I’d constructed of him: so tall and strong and determined and capable of using his body to wrestle to the ground whatever problem the farm threw at him. I had seen him do extraordinary things over the years—move rocks all day without resting, hoist an enormous beam onto his shoulder, work sixteen-hour days for weeks—and had trusted it would always be so. Now that superman was replaced by this immobile and needy imposter. I couldn’t reconcile those two different men, and it frightened me, and my fear made me brittle. We began to argue about small things—what the children were eating for lunch or if they could watch a video while I milked—and the fighting made him tense, his back worse.
* * *
Two nights later, I was yanked out of sleep by a disconcerting sound. There were only two sounds that could wake me that fast. One was a child’s cry. I’d begun to think there must be an undiscovered organ, adjacent to the uterus, that is tuned to the sound of a child’s need. The smallest cry, or a feverish whimper, would yank me out of bed and have me on my feet before I was fully conscious. Other sounds—the howling of coyotes or the sound of Jet chasing them out of the barnyard—would register but leave me where I wanted to be, near the bottom of the ocean of sleep.
That night, it wasn’t a child but the other noise: the dreaded sound of sharp teeth making expert work of a piece of wood disconcertingly nearby. I had developed a good ear for rodents. I could tell a mouse’s covert nibble from a squirrel’s hyper scrabble while only half-conscious. Either of those sounds would allow me to sink back to sleep—a problem that could wait until morning. But rats were another story. This was the unabashed rack
et of a diligent worker at a construction site, with a permit. There was nothing covert about it. Rats sound entitled. And that was the noise pulling me to the surface of full consciousness that night and holding me there.
All farms have rats. We do our best against them, and good farmers keep them under control, but inherently, farms are rat utopia, with food available year-round and soft warm places to bed and mate. When we first moved to our farm, there was a legacy population of lazy rats who lived happily in the old granary. They had reproduced for many generations without a challenge, and we vanquished them fairly easily with traps and cats. But the survivors regrouped, rebred, honed their genetics to our challenges. Whenever we let our defenses down, the rats surged. We’d learned that a sloppy grain delivery, an unturned pile of cool compost, or the inattention of a busy spring could cause a population spike.
The previous fall, we’d decided to buy our greenhouse supplies in bulk, when the price was cheapest. We’d bought twenty yards of potting soil, delivered in a dump truck and placed between two giant tarps spread on the ground next to the greenhouse, across the driveway from our house. That pile of potting soil was the best rat home ever engineered. It was rich and loose, and the top tarp kept the soil warm. The chickens were wintering in the greenhouse, their feed stored nearby, so there was an all-you-can-eat buffet mere steps away. At the end of February, when Mark pulled the tarp back to begin seeding the early crops in the greenhouse, he discovered that they’d spent the winter having orgies, holding feasts, sculpting intricate living quarters. He and I had stormed them one bloody afternoon and dispatched the majority with sticks, shovels, and Jet, but a few had escaped and dispersed.
The noise I heard was likely made by one of those exiled survivors, one that had discovered that our house was yet warmer and drier than their old heap of soil, and had decided to get the place ready for his fellows. It sounded like a major excavation of the laundry room floor, the widening of a hole. I nudged Mark, who reluctantly heaved himself from bed and limped down the hall. I followed, tentative, miserable. Outside, I could handle them. Inside, rats were different. They made me want to cover my face and jump on top of furniture.
Mark was in no shape for a round of hand-to-hand combat. He could barely move. He shuffled into the laundry room, looking under items near the source of the noise. When the rat squirted between his legs and into the bathroom, I screamed. He hobbled in front of me and shut the bathroom door. “Go in after it,” he said. That, I thought, I cannot do. He was injured, and I knew I should go, but I simply couldn’t make myself.
So he did it. I heard a cartoonlike scuffle behind the closed door that went on for ages. “I need some help in here!” he yelled. I paced and pretended not to hear. Finally, he emerged, the toilet plunger in one hand, a huge dead rat, held by the tail, in the other. The rat had scurried underneath the linen chest, and Mark had shoved it aside, whereupon the rat had scrambled directly up his leg and leaped into the bathtub, which was the rat’s biggest strategic error, because the slippery sides contained it. Mark grabbed the plunger, and that was the end of the rat. But Mark was definitely a casualty. The battle had thrown his back into a new range of pain. The next morning, for the first time since I had known him, he did not get out of bed.
Mark wasn’t used to pain. His body had always done for him all the unreasonable things he’d asked of it. Suddenly, it seemed, his body had decided that the generosity of its youth was spent. He couldn’t stand up and he couldn’t lie still. He moved his legs constantly, looking for some relief, until he wore a hole through the sheets.
The pain started in his body and quickly bled to his spirit. He stayed in bed most of the day, shades down, not sleeping. He played endless games of electronic Go on my phone. His muscles began to waste. My tall oak of a husband looked weak and undernourished. The pain took away the center of him, so I couldn’t find him in his eyes.
And he didn’t seem to care what happened on the farm. The rain eased up, and we were back to work in the fields without him. I’d ferry bunches of questions from the barn to his bedside. “I don’t know,” he’d say. “You’ll have to figure it out.” This was a man known for managing all of our many endeavors down to the microscopic level. His usual optimism evaporated, along with his leadership. Farming was the singular passion that had animated him since we’d met. Without it, I hardly knew him. Not that I had time for contemplation. I had a baby, a three-year-old, and Mark to care for. And the only remnant of his old self I could recognize was his formidable libido. When I walked too close to his bed, carrying a dirty diaper, stupid with exhaustion, he would reach for me hungrily. I felt like I was stuck inside a three-part fugue of need. The soprano sang, “Nurse!” the alto went, “Read me a story,” and the bass boomed, “Want to make out?” all at once, over and over and over again.
It wasn’t like we could just call the year a loss, sit it out, and take a do-over. We had a mortgage to pay and a lot of people to feed. Some of them had paid us the whole year in advance so we could meet our spring expenses. They trusted us to put food on their tables.
* * *
There was another thing, and it was so scary, I couldn’t look it square in the face. We’d gotten a tax bill that we weren’t expecting—on the grant money we’d received for the solar panels. The expenses had come in one calendar year, the reimbursement in the next, and that made it look like we belonged in the same tax bracket as a mid-career banker. When I saw the number, I had to sit down. We didn’t have the money to cover it, not even close. I put the bill back in its envelope and stuck it behind the flour canister in the pantry, where I wouldn’t see it, except in the bad dreams that woke me in the defenseless hours between midnight and dawn.
* * *
We met without him in the mornings to sort out the work, the six of us around a big pot of coffee. Managing people was not a strong part of my skill set. I hated telling the farmers what to do or trying to defend decisions that I wasn’t entirely sure were right. And though I didn’t like to admit it, I wasn’t good at the complex organizational work of keeping the whole farm going, balancing all the competing priorities for the good of the whole, especially in such an anomalous year. Mark was a genius at that. He had the ability to see and quickly rank the vast number of jobs that needed to be done. Moreover, he’d never had a problem with telling people exactly what to do. Occasionally, he was wrong, but he was never in doubt. I had spent most of my time working with the animals. The technical aspects of plants—the timing of planting, the spacing between rows, the temperature that a seed needed for germination, the quantity we needed to plant—those things were a mystery to me. I felt entirely lost and very much alone. I should have summoned more empathy for his pain, but what I felt instead was smoldering resentment.
When we had a dry day, we needed to get as much land prepared for planting as possible. I was very lucky to have such a dedicated and capable team of farmers with me. They used all their resources to help keep the farm going, and worked so hard and thoughtfully. It wasn’t their farm, but they acted like it was. One rare dry day, Chad figured out how to hitch six horses to a tractor-size spring-tine harrow so he could more efficiently knock back weeds and loosen the soil in Monument Field. Blaine, Tim, and Nathan followed, making beds raised up out of the moisture, then cultivating them with another team of horses, to smooth them for planting. They got thirty-one beds prepared in one long day. Tobias and a team of volunteers did the hard handwork, hoeing rows that were too wet or too far gone with weeds to be cultivated with the horses. Racey moved fencing so we could get the beef herd out of the barn and onto the grass at last. And grass, at least on the better-drained fields, was the one piece of good news. It was lush and high, and the dairy cows were gorging on it, producing lots of delicious milk.
* * *
The farm was a large ship that had lost its rudder. No matter how hard we worked, we couldn’t keep up. I was not getting nearly enough sleep. Weeds were encroaching, crops were drowning, employees were
working unsustainable hours. In the evening, when the children were asleep, Mark would emerge from his bedroom and come downstairs to sit on a chair while I did the dishes. Our conversations were loaded with fear and shaded by fatigue and often ended in squabbling. I looked and looked and couldn’t see a good ending. In bed, in the dark, I’d wonder what would happen if we left, the girls and I. What if we just turned our backs on all of this wet mess and drove away to find a new place and start over.
But I had chosen Mark and a farm life after having a good look around the world. I’d known I was trading the possibility of a nice steady paycheck, of weekends off and paid vacations, for work that was beautiful to me. I’d known that choosing farming meant choosing a modest life and sometimes a pinching and scrimping one. I had even known that this dark part of Mark lurked somewhere under the surface, the foil for his great passion, energy, optimism, and belief. I’d known all of it when I had made my vows to him in the loft of the West Barn in front of all those people. As the baby howled and the rain fell, I looked at the cards on the table and thought, Sometimes the hardest hand to play is the one you dealt yourself.
Twice in that time of crisis, our marriage was saved by women I love. Once it was my friend Cydni, whom I’ve known since we were eighteen, when we were freshmen-year roommates. She had returned to her small ranching town in Idaho right after graduation to marry her cowboy lover, so in the marriage department, she had ten years of experience on me, but she’d always been wiser even when we were young. The week Mark and I got married, she took me aside. “Listen,” she said, “the first year is hard, and then it gets easier. Around the seventh year it gets hellish, and then it gets easier. Don’t use sex toys until year eight. You have to hold something in abeyance.” She is an attorney, and words like “abeyance” sound natural coming from her, even when she is talking about sex toys. This time, when I called her—from the only private place in the house, inside my closet—she could tell it was serious. “You have no idea how hard he is to live with,” I whispered into the phone. “You aren’t so easy yourself, my dear,” she answered.
Good Husbandry Page 14