Good Husbandry

by Kristin Kimball

  Another day, I called my sister. She knew all about Mark’s usual overpowering exuberance, and she listened to me describe this new person I was living with, his opposite. “He is so extreme!” I complained. “Yeah. You would never be happy with a normal person,” she said, sighing. The truth of both women’s words settled into the angry place in my heart and made me laugh.

  * * *

  Mark’s pain didn’t go away all at once, but it abated a little at a time. He saw a good physical therapist who gave him exercises to do and assured him he would heal eventually. The therapist said it was important to get up and move around even if it hurt. So Mark emerged from his bed, snappish and testy. The fields looked terrible, despite all our effort. We’d lost the second planting of potatoes to rot. The first planting of tomatoes had drowned, and so had all of the peas, half the winter wheat. Weed control was a nightmare. Cultivation works best in dry conditions. A lot of the weeds that we had disrupted with hoes or the horses had simply replanted themselves in the wet earth and grown right back. All the rain had washed nitrogen and other nutrients out of the soil, leaving plants weak and vulnerable to pests and diseases. There was downy mildew in the cucumbers, and battalions of beetles eating the leaves of the zucchini and melons down to sad lace. And we’d compacted the soil, in spite of our best efforts, which made it hard for the roots to penetrate. The crops had never looked so bad, yellow, stunted, drooping.

  Mark looked at them and his shoulders slumped. The sight of the farm was yet another kind of pain. He cast about for someone or something to blame, and everyone around him received a dose. After how hard we had worked in his absence, that did terrible things to morale. Chad was quietly exhausted. He’d moved out of the Yellow House and was living in a barn with no kitchen, no bathroom, little money. One of our members came by in tears to tell Mark that Blaine had shamed her in the butcher shop for taking too much meat. Customer service wasn’t Blaine’s strong suit, with her fiery, volatile moods, and Mark squabbled with her about it, both of them dug into their own corner. But we didn’t have anyone else who could cut meat. I braced myself against all the conflict, tried to hold it away from me, keep my eyes on the fields and what was happening in them.

  Tim took me aside one afternoon while Mark was at physical therapy. We sat under the sour cherry tree in the scraggly grass in front of the house. “Mark…” he said. “Maybe he’s just not that good with people. Be careful of getting too big.” It was like an oracle was speaking hard words out of Tim’s kind and handsome face. Were we growing beyond the bounds of what we were supposed to be? All the old arguments about scale played through my head. The thing about growth is that it’s awfully hard to reverse. You can’t service the cost of having gotten bigger by becoming smaller again. I didn’t know how to answer Tim, but I worried that he would be quitting any minute, and the rest of the farmers would too, and Mark would go back to bed, and I’d be crushed by the weight of the whole place on my shoulders. I’d heard rumors that Nathan and Racey would be leaving that fall to work on a different farm down the road. I’d walked in on a quickly hushed conversation between Tobias and Blaine on the same subject. They all wanted their own farms and felt ready to move on. I understood, but I still felt betrayed.

  * * *

  One afternoon in June, the sky northwest of the barns turned the color of old bruises—dark shades of yellow, green, purple. The clouds moved fast, full of thunder, and when they opened up, they dropped hail the size of marbles. The thrum of ice against the ground in June may be the ugliest sound in a farmer’s world. If hail destroyed the crops, it would be too late to start over. Mark had told me stories about fields he’d seen after a hailstorm in the Midwest that looked like they had been ravaged by a plague of locusts. We had just transplanted the rest of the tomatoes and eight thousand leeks.

  After the storm ended, with the girls in bed, Mark and I went to check on the crops and to see if the broiler chicken coops were where we’d left them. On the way out, we stopped to look at a fungus we’d never seen before, growing on a composting pile of hardwood chips. It formed sloppy neon-yellow splatters in the wood. The broilers had survived the storm inside their mobile coops, and the leeks in the field were beaten but not dead. The tomato plants were all lying flat in the wet soil, but if we could get them trellised quickly, they’d have a chance of surviving.

  As we made our way along the farm road, down the hill toward Fallen Oak Field, something odd caught my eye from fifty yards away in Long Pasture. Squinting, I saw one of the pretty little Jersey heifers on her side, dead, legs sticking out stiffly from the four corners of a grotesquely rounded body, as if someone had inflated her with a bicycle pump. I jumped the fence, speculating. Bloat? That pasture wasn’t rich enough to cause a heifer to bloat. Predation? She looked turgidly intact. Then I saw the exploded tree, hunks of bark littering the grass. Lightning from a storm that had come through just before dawn the previous morning. I’d heard the rip and crash of the strike from bed. She must have been under the tree when it hit, but the force of it had thrown her through the air twenty feet. “Mother Nature,” Mark said, “is pissed.”

  CHAPTER 9

  The summer solstice came. Mark was in and out of bed, doing his exercises, worn down from the grinding pain. At the end of the year’s longest day, we took a slow walk around the fields together. The plants were stunted little things. Some rows were completely empty because they had not been planted. “If it were mid-April,” he said grimly, “I’d say it looks fantastic.” How tightly our egos were tied to the fields. When the farm was thriving, it was easy to be proud of what we did. When it wasn’t, we felt bad not just about the crops or sick animals, predation or weeds, but about ourselves.

  When the rain stopped, it stopped so completely, the memory of it was like a bad dream. The wind came up, the sun pounded down, the puddles disappeared, and the topsoil dried and cracked. In place of the rain came oppressive heat and more weeds. Also the pressure to do the impossible: catch up with work that could no longer be done. There was no field corn in the ground; it was too late to plant. The acre of sweet corn was struggling. The grass in the hayfields was already stemmy and heading toward seed, so the hay we’d eventually make from it would be coarse and bulky, low in protein and available energy. But the weeds were flourishing. All hands were on deck to kill them as fast as possible. Mark’s injury had reversed our roles: he spent long days in the house with the kids, and I spent them in the field.

  It was a relief to be in the field, away from the house and the barnyard. The tension was thick in both those places. Mark and Blaine had a series of skirmishes over priorities, division of labor, pay scale, hours, and anything else they could manage to argue about. These fights would blow up and then blow over, but the sting of them lingered. Blaine and Tobias were already half-gone, I knew. I heard them in the office, making phone calls to realtors, looking to buy a piece of land. But I worried that fighting with Mark would push them out early, and then what would I do? I didn’t have the skills to cut meat. Tobias was managing the vegetables. There was no way I could handle that too. And the day before, I had heard Mark arguing with Racey in the front yard. She was in charge of animals that summer and had been trying to castrate a litter of piglets. The sow had escaped from the place where she was penned, and Racey had to scramble to avoid being attacked. She was asking Mark for advice, but all she was getting was criticism. She hadn’t thought it through, he was saying, and had wasted half the afternoon, and we couldn’t afford it in a year like this. There wasn’t any concern in his words for the fact that she had nearly been savaged. I listened from the house, torn between wanting to hide and wanting to intervene. I took the middle ground, shouting out the window to them both to come in for a cup of tea, whereupon Mark hustled upstairs back to bed, and Racey and I talked through a better pig plan.

  * * *

  The day after the solstice, I got up at four and went out to catch Jay and Jack. Back before farming, when I was a civilian, the arrival
of summer was a cue to take it down a notch, enjoy half-Fridays in the office, rent a beach house, relax. Now summer was the high season of work, the climax of the light.

  Jay and Jack were in their twenties then, a pair of old campaigners, their shoulders scarred by years in harness. The scars came from galls, and white hair sprouted from them that looked like medals of honor on the brown fur. Most working draft horses carry them. The old-timers would wash their horses’ shoulders with salt water to try to toughen the skin under the collar in the spring. Everyone tries to prevent galls—with well-fitting collars and clean pads, thorough brushing before harnessing, and making sure there aren’t pieces of mane stuck under the collar, which rub like a strand of rope in a sock—but sometimes they happen anyway, especially in the spring, when the hours in harness are long and the horses are soft and not yet in good muscle. Galls were hard to heal because the horses were working every day, and the scab that formed overnight would come off under the sweaty collar the next day. We dabbed salve on the trouble spots—a thick, ancient-smelling paste that came in a can whose design looked like it had not changed in a hundred years—but what helped most was several days of rest, and those were in short supply.

  My relationship with horses had changed a lot in the years we’d been farming with them. I had stopped ascribing humanlike feelings and motivations to them, and now saw them fully for the beasts they were, which only made them more interesting. Working hard with them every day, I’d lost the reverence I used to feel around them. But it was replaced with something stronger and more intimate.

  Jay and Jack were still healthy and useful, but there was no joy in asking them for a full day of heavy pulling. They were very good for light jobs and for training new teamsters to drive. They were square-bodied, straight-shouldered, and so well matched that I had to look for the irregular whorl in the white hair on Jay’s forehead to tell them apart. If I couldn’t see the front of their heads, I could tell them apart by coming close to them and speaking. Jay was an amiable guy and would turn toward the attention. Jack, however, was a curmudgeon. In his stall, he flinched when I patted him, as though I were a fly, and gave me a look that conveyed not fear but very deep displeasure. He carried a narrow six-inch scar of bright white hair across the hard bones of his face, between the eye and the muzzle, and I had long wondered where that had come from and what it had to do with his disposition. We had bought the team from a retired couple in Vermont who had used them recreationally. They had bought them in Ohio from an Amish dealer. Everything we knew about their past came thirdhand. They were supposed to be Belgian/Suffolk crosses, and they had a Suffolk’s chunky, short-legged, useful build. They had long, natural tails, which was unusual but a good thing. Most draft-horse breeders cut away some of the tail and keep the hair bobbed short, which keeps the long hairs from getting tangled in harness or machinery, but takes away his only weapon against the flies.

  I left the house and walked toward the horse pasture in the half-light, pausing at the clothesline next to the kids’ swing set to hang a load of sheets. Barbara was milking that morning, and I could see her coming up the hill toward the West Barn, the cows stretched out single-file in a long line in front of her. Barbara was our longest-term employee, our friend and neighbor. She was in her sixties, with two adult daughters. She’d grown up in Switzerland, then joined the foreign service and lived in Afghanistan, Iran, Poland, and Singapore before marrying a farmer who lived in the north country. They farmed together, three miles down the road from us, for sixteen years, until a drought finished the farm and their marriage. She moved to town after that, fledged her daughters, and then started working with us. It was good, she told us, to be able to do the farmwork she loved without the stress of endless decisions.

  As Barbara and the cows passed the East Barn, there was a commotion. I could hear her yelling but could not make out the words. I ran toward them. The hens were fenced in a shady patch that included the compost pile, where they spent their days scratching. The nest boxes and night perches were tucked into the foundation of the old round barn, where it was dark, cool, and silent. There was a fox dragging a limp hen across the barnyard. He saw me, dropped the hen, and lit out for the high grass at the base of the woods. Barbara and I watched his red back crest the grass like a dolphin.

  We returned to work, she with the cows and I with a set of wrenches, setting up the shields and sweeps on the horse-drawn cultivator for the day. When I was almost finished, the hens raised an alarm. The fox was back. I saw him scoot under the electric fence. The ground was dry and the fence charge low, and the fox’s hunger overrode the shock it gave him. I ran toward him, grabbing a stick on the way.

  We did our best to live in harmony with predators. Fox, coyote, raccoon, skunk. Sometimes bobcat, bear, or mink. The aerial hunters, owl and hawk. They were all a healthy and necessary part of the farm and of the larger ecosystem. They kept the population of rodents in check and the deer at bay. But any of them would take an easy meal if they could get it, and everyone likes chicken. To keep the hens safe, we pastured them inside electric fences, away from natural cover, and rotated their positions so the predators couldn’t get entirely comfortable with a situation. Later, we added livestock guardian dogs. Usually, these deterrents worked, except when a bold or desperate individual broke the rules.

  I jumped the fence and peeked into the henhouse, and there was the fox, his long body tucked into a nest box, his delicate face in poker mode, eyes flat, revealing nothing. Nobody here but us hens, it said. I menaced him with my stick as the hens and the rooster squawked their alarm. If Mark had been with me, he would have grabbed the stick, and that would have been the end of the fox. But I hesitated. What if he was rabid? What if he bit? What if I don’t want to hit something so wild and scared? The fox read me, gathered himself. He sprang from the nest box, leaped past me, and was gone. In the moment he passed me, I saw that he was an awfully poor fox, young and small and stringy, his fur patched with itchy-looking mange. Though I knew better, I hoped he was an impressionable thing and would be scared of us and of the barnyard after this and leave the hens alone. I set the electric fence back into place, narrowed the gaps at the base, and made sure it was hot, then walked out to catch the horses.

  * * *

  I carried a reel of portable fence in one hand and four fence posts in the other, the horses’ halters and lead ropes looped over my shoulder. The fencing was a concession to Jack’s only flaw. We had owned him for six years, and I had wasted many frustrating hours trying to catch him in the field. This was a fault he had come with, and we had not been able to break him of it. If he was working every day, he was easy to catch, but if he hadn’t worked for a week, he was almost impossible. He would wait for me to get close, then trot to the opposite side of the pasture and resume grazing.

  On a day like this one, I didn’t have the time to match wits with him. So I walked him into a corner of the paddock, pushing him in front of me, and then, using my reel of portable fence and the posts, made a triangle with Jack in the middle. It was small enough that he could not escape. He looked mildly peeved at this, the oldest trick in our book. I touched him lightly on his back and tossed the lead rope over his neck. Instantly, as always, he relented. That was the thing about Jack. As soon as he felt the rope over his neck—which was no physical restraint at all, only a symbol of it—he was caught, and he was all business. Aside from his rebellion in the pasture, he had perfect manners. He never balked or misbehaved. He was the first horse in the hitch to listen and do what was wanted of him. He loved rules, straight lines, and doing his duty. As a teamster, I had to be careful not to let him get ahead of me, because he was sharp-brained, would compare past to future and look for patterns in order to anticipate what was coming next. If Jack were a human, I’d hire him immediately and pay him well. He would be a dour presence but terribly efficient.

  It was forecast to be the hottest day of the year, reaching close to a hundred degrees before noon—perfect weather for killi
ng weeds. I harnessed as quickly as I could and walked the horses out of the barn. Then I hopped up on the seat, and we set out for the field.

  The horses and I were dressed for the conditions. I wore a long-sleeve white button-down shirt with the collar turned up, and a giant hat to keep the dazzling sun off my head. The horses wore their old-fashioned fly nets. As I walked them out of the barnyard, I saw the fox again, crouched near the long coarse grass at the edge of the pasture, gazing chickenward. He was twenty yards from me, in full view, but he didn’t flinch when I looked at him, didn’t move when I yelled at him. Either hunger had made him very bold or he was ill. I couldn’t do anything more with the horses on my hands, so I went on, wishing the hens good luck.

  As we walked the half-mile to the field, I whoaed twice to slap the flies away from the horses’ bellies. Even at that early hour, the sweat wore a groove through the dust on Jack’s leg, making a little brown rivulet.