Good Husbandry

by Kristin Kimball

  My hands drove the horses, but my mind was elsewhere. The noise we made was small—the hollow clop-clop of their hooves on the hard dirt road, the rattle of the harness—and the sound of life around us was big, putting us in our proper place. I heard red-winged blackbirds and a nattering squirrel. Then I heard a group of crows putting up such a huge fuss at the top of the hedgerow oak that I scanned the sky for the hawk that I knew must be there, and there it was, a redtail, lifted high over the pasture on a hot breeze. We passed a milkweed plant in full purple bloom, and I stopped the horses for a minute, arrested by its smell, which was as sweet and strong as any pampered garden flower. Why did I feel a quick ripple of sadness? I traced the feeling backward to the fleeting thought that engendered it and found: I will really miss the beauty of life when I am dead.

  I chose Jay and Jack that day because I didn’t need power, I needed slow-paced precision and experience. They were the most patient. Nobody on the farm knew their jobs as well as Jay and Jack, including me. The first task on my list was cultivating the newly emerged carrots, and the first cultivation of the carrots was a big responsibility. Carrots take forever to germinate, and grow very slowly when they do, which allows the weeds to get the jump on them, even in a year when we aren’t slowed down by biblical-scale rains. I squinted, looking for the carrot tops among the weeds. The cultivator was fitted with eight shanks and a pair of flimsy metal shields, fixed on a frame that could be steered with my feet and raised or lowered with a lever. The shanks killed the weeds on either side of the row, and the microscopic carrots ran down the middle, directly underneath me. There was a blanket of young weeds around them that were similar in size and only a slightly different shade of green. The straight row of the carrots could be seen when viewed head-on, but disappeared if viewed obliquely, a mirage of regularity in a field of stochastic greens.

  We had nine acres of vegetables to weed. In the two days it would take to cultivate, the horses would walk thirty miles. For me, the tiring part was the eyestrain of seeing when the plants were so small. Later in the season, if all went well, the plants would be large enough to brush the seat of my cultivator. The movement of the plants would release their scents, which would reach the open windows of the cars driving by. There would be the tenement smell of crushed onion, the base note of celeriac, and the spicy green aroma of cilantro. But for now, they were all small, and it was up to me to decide how close to come to them. If I were too tentative, I would leave behind lots of weeds that would grow too big to cultivate, pull energy and nutrients from the plants, and create hundreds of hours of handwork. If I were too aggressive, I would bury the tender seedlings and kill them. A few minutes of inattention could bury a whole row. The lesson of cultivation is compromise. You walk into the job knowing you can’t kill every weed, and you can’t save every plant.

  Carrots were always a high priority, because they were a mainstay of our members’ kitchens through the long cold winter. If this field yielded decently, we would get eight tons. If the weeds won and the crop failed, we would need to buy them from another farm with money we really didn’t have.

  Farms teach you that when everything is overwhelming—when you look out at a huge field of weedy vegetables on a hundred-degree day—you must simply pick a row and start. Cultivation was satisfying work. Every step the horses took killed hundreds of tiny weeds. But the most precious part of cultivating that summer was the silence. Outside of the house, alone, I could quietly think. I thought about all sorts of things. Big things and piddly things. The children. Mark and our marriage. The tax bill peeking out from behind the flour bin. My grandmothers. Old boyfriends. Blessings. Problems. Poems I knew by heart. It felt luxurious to think without interruption, to let memories, ideas, or logical connections play out all the way to their gentle ends.

  I had not known that we lose the ability to do that when we have little children. Nobody had warned me. And it was a shock. Maybe this was why contemplatives in all those religious orders were celibate: not because of sex itself but for its consequence, the family, which is a beautiful, worthy, but all-encompassing project that tends to march your mind along a trail of quotidian details. Would Saint Augustine have had his revelations if the delicate ember of his idea had been extinguished by a toddler rapid-handling a roll of toilet paper onto the bathroom floor? I thought of nuns and monks in their gardens with their bees. Maybe their lives of chaste fieldwork were arranged to free enough of their minds to give them access to the slippery, elusive divine. I knew that this stage of motherhood would pass, that I would soon miss cool little lips on my cheek, small hands grasping my leg, and the constant stream of needs that I was well qualified to fulfill. I adored my girls so much I felt it physically when I thought of them, a near-pain under my sternum. But for those hours on the gently rocking cultivator, with my two old horses who knew their job so well, it just felt good to be alone.

  After noon, I lifted the shanks out of the soil and walked the horses to the trough in the shade of the linden row, at the edge of the field. It would take too long to walk back to the house for lunch, so I’d brought it with me: hard-boiled eggs, a pint of strawberries, a pile of fresh greens, well wilted from the heat, and a quart of water with a splash of cider vinegar, maple syrup, and some salt, our farm version of Gatorade, to keep us vertical when sweat was pouring off us at a ridiculous rate. The week before, Blaine had taken the same lunch while she was out cultivating with the horses, but she had forgotten to salt her eggs, so she had rubbed them on the horses’ sweaty necks instead, experimentally, and found it wasn’t very good. I took off their bridles, tied their halters to a tree, and sat in the shade to eat. The simple food tasted spectacularly delicious, the way it does when you’re hungry.

  I lay down under a linden next to the horses, closed my eyes, and fell asleep to the sound of their movements, the creak and clink of their harness when they stretched or shook. I woke up a few minutes later with the image of a painting in my head. Caravaggio’s Conversion on the Road to Damascus. I saw it in person when I was twenty, in Rome on a summer job, writing copy for a budget travel guide. In the whirl of visiting hostels, cheap restaurants, and museums, I stumbled on this painting. I stood in front of it for an hour, feeding coins to the meter to keep the dim light on, trying to block out all the rococo noise around it. Saint Paul was lying on his back, his hands upstretched. He had fallen off his horse, and God had struck him blind. But the painting wasn’t really about the saint. It was about the horse. He was black with large white patches, built tall and sturdy, like a draft. It seemed an interesting choice to me, that Caravaggio had made the horse piebald—why such a flashy ride for a saint?—but maybe he did it to show off how good he was at using white paint. It didn’t matter; it worked. In the foreground, a barefoot servant held the horse’s bridle, and the horse’s front hoof was raised, crudely shod with heavy iron. The saint was almost underneath the horse, and both he and the servant’s bare foot looked vulnerable next to the big hoof.

  But what Caravaggio put his whole effort into, his whole toolbox for emotion, was the horse’s eye. The horse’s eye was so gentle. His head was low, and he was watching where he was going. That horse was not going to step on the saint nor on the servant’s foot if he could help it. It wasn’t lost on me, as I climbed back onto the cultivator, that the saint’s conversion happened on horseback, to the rock of a horse’s walk. Maybe what Caravaggio was really saying was that vulnerability is necessary if you hope to find some grace.

  * * *

  We finished cultivating the carrots, the potatoes, the sweet corn, and all the greens by early evening. Then we headed back, and I put the tired horses in the barn, unharnessed, brushed, and fed them. I walked toward the house and stopped at the clothesline to unpeg the sheets that had dried to a delicious crispness while I was away. As I folded them into the basket, Jet tore around the edge of the house, and I heard his deep, alert woof. I ran after him and found him taut with importance, his ruff standing up, and the fox cornered u
nder the porch. The fox wore that same poker face, quiet, calm. Maybe he was weak with hunger or the effects of whatever was making him so patchy and scabrous. I told Jet he was a good boy and made him lie down—no need for the good dog to tangle with a sick fox when a gun could do it. I called for Mark, who was upstairs with the girls. The windows were open, and he heard me. He left the kids inside and came out, saw the situation, and limped to the gun cabinet for a sawed-off shotgun that someone had given us once, in payment of a debt—an ugly thing painted flat black that I didn’t like to look at, much less shoot. I kept the fox pinned under the porch with my eyes, Jet behind me for backup. The fox blinked but did not move.

  Mark came back and took my place. He pulled the trigger, and the sound of the gun filled the evening, its echo rolling over us in waves. Mark forgot to hold the gun tight to his shoulder, and its enormous kick knocked him backward a step. For Mark, that was the only pain of it, but for me, there was that familiar feeling of necessary loss. We can’t have a sick fox in the barnyard, killing chickens or hanging around the kids’ swing set, and yet who wants to blast holes in a small fierce thing with knowing eyes? I pulled the tattered carcass out from under the porch with my thumb and forefinger. It was nearly as light as the hide and bones it soon would be, and crawling with ticks. Jet jumped around us, triumphant. He is on Mark’s team, unequivocal.

  * * *

  I had the chance, during all those quiet hours in the field, to think a lot about our marriage. The truth was, it had been under strain even before Mark got hurt. Our partnership was always as complex as the farm itself. We are both quirky and intense. We are both stubborn, competitive, and generally certain that we’re right. Moreover, we have different values, priorities, motivations, and needs. I knew this going in, and so did he. Both of us believed we could make it work, in the same cocky way we believed we could orchestrate agricultural synergy out of our farm’s wild diversity.

  I suspected that most marriages were more complicated than couples tended to let on. That summer, it seemed like every week brought news of another pair in our community who were splitting up. They were all around our age, most with little kids, trying to run their own businesses in a small economy. The evidence of those breakups directly contradicted the rosy way relationships were portrayed on Facebook, in public. I began to believe that future generations would study how we represent our long-term partnerships, and call us on our lies, in the same way we look at how the Victorians depicted sex and know that it simply wasn’t like that, not behind closed doors or in the hayloft. We hide marital conflict with the same sense of decorum. We’d do more good if we were honest and set realistic expectations for what it’s like in the long run. Marriage—my marriage—was a long journey across a craggy landscape. Some stretches wound through a green valley. But some were hard climbs up rocks, in the rain. The dangerous parts were the flat empty desert places that didn’t seem difficult as much as they were lonely.

  The farm was what we had in common. We both wanted it to thrive and succeed. But like any shared project that two people love intensely, the farm also gave us things to argue about. Normal couples argue about kids, money, and household chores. Farm couples argue about roofing the house versus roofing the barn, when to make hay, the condition of the animals, agricultural risks, too much debt versus too much work. Also, kids, money, and household chores.

  There was so much we expected of each other, all interconnected. We were housemates, lovers, business partners, coworkers, and parents together, with each of those relationships demanding a different set of skills, extracting energy from both of us. At times, the farm was so overwhelming that there was no time outside of it for friends, so then we had to be that to each other too. When one of those relationships became disjointed, they all did.

  That night, tired from the ongoing battle with Mark, from the farm’s constant static, from the mess of our collective lives, I thought, I might just be using myself up. Maybe I’ll die young. Then, just for a moment: Oh, that would be so restful. But the shotgun’s kick had jolted something free in Mark’s body. He felt a little better, just enough to give him some sleep. And a few days later, as I was coming in from the field, Liz and Brendan appeared, unannounced and most welcome.

  They were a pair of benevolent wizards, bearing needles. Brendan was a friend of Mark’s from college. Mark described him, back then, as the most radical member of a radical band of activists, on fire for environmental justice, at the front of every march, the first to get arrested. After graduation, Brendan had studied classical Chinese medicine, a form called Five Elements, specializing in the combination of herbs and acupuncture. He had met Liz in acupuncture school, and they’d married, then practiced together in Montana before settling across the lake from us, in Vermont. Liz said Chinese medicine helped moderate the more extreme parts of Brendan’s personality, so by the time I met him, he was a proper citizen.

  She had brought a bag of surprises for the girls—books, a puzzle, animal toys made of wood. Before acupuncture, she’d been a pediatric occupational therapist, and she thoroughly understood small children. She and Jane were instant friends. We left Mark with Brendan at the house and walked across the farm together, Jane holding Liz’s hand, Miranda in a stroller.

  Liz was regal, with short silver hair and a perfectly centered manner. She reminded me of a cat. She would laugh—a ringing, free laugh—at exactly what she thought was amusing, but not to be polite, not necessarily at my jokes. Her face seemed extraordinarily still to me, which reminded me how much I had been moving mine around in order to please people, to try to communicate my own agreeableness. Liz’s face made me want to stop that, so my face would reflect only what I was authentically feeling. Which was maybe why she could see, in my face, something that made her eyes go soft, her head tilt to the side.

  On our way home, we harvested a bowl full of zucchini blossoms, the first of the green onions, sweet tender basil, a handful of garlic scapes, some baby carrots, chard, and a dinner’s worth of lettuce. Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought the plants were beginning to look a little bit better.

  Brendan was already in the kitchen with Mark, beginning work on a gorgeous frittata, and Liz and I joined them, using our loot to complete the meal. As soon as dinner was over, Brendan and Mark went upstairs for a treatment. We left the dishes on the table while I put Miranda, sound asleep, in her crib. In the next room, Liz read books to Jane, kissed her good night, and turned off her light. “Your turn,” she said to me. I sat on the edge of our bed, and Liz sat next to me. She took my pulse, her fingers dancing over my wrist like four little animals with very sharp senses. “Depleted,” she muttered, and looked at me seriously. As she gathered her needles, I asked her what she meant. “Look,” she said, “a man loses chi through ejaculation. A woman loses it through childbirth. Think of how many times a man ejaculates versus how many times a woman gives birth. You have given so much of yourself in the last five years.” I let that sink in as she leveled her cat gaze at me. “You need to do less. You need to rest. You have daughters who need to see you rest. Stop jumping up for everything.” The first needles were going in, tiny stingers, into my toes, my forehead, my belly. Her voice was hypnotic.

  “In our medicine, everyone is ruled by one of the five elements; every element is associated with an emotion. Your element is water. Your ruling emotion is fear and also lack of fear. Mark is fire. His emotion is joy, lack of joy.” More needles went in, one by one, and then she left me to let them do their work. I felt drugged, as if the needles were pulling me gently into a peaceful, comfortable room I hadn’t visited in ages.

  What she’d said about my element and its corresponding emotion was right. I knew it in a place deeper than thought. My fear held me back from full commitment to life as it was, rather than what I thought it should be; my lack of fear propelled me forward, sometimes into opportunity, sometimes into regrettable situations. It was my lack of fear, my ability to leap into the unknown, that had landed me at t
his crazy farm, but it was my fear that made me feel like running from it, and from him.

  Mark’s joy was incandescent. It was the volatile fuel that fed the whole five-hundred-acre experiment. His lack of joy, when it hit, was a dark hole that sucked us all in with him.

  I thought about fire, and water, and what happened when those two things come together. Liz came back with a stick of moxa, made from mugwort, and lit it next to the needles. It’s supposed to counter irritation. Before the heat of it had even warmed my skin, I fell into the deepest sleep of my life.

  After Liz was finished and the needles were out, she tucked me into bed. Mark had materialized, tucked in next to me. It was a strange kind of intimacy, not quite private, like Yoko and John in bed together with the photographers around. Brendan and Liz fussed over us, collected their needles, closed their cases. “The girls are asleep,” Liz said. “The dishes are done. Stay in bed, we know the way out.”

  * * *

  Mark began to get better. He could move again. But for a long time, we didn’t move much closer together. When he was well, he was fully well. He got out of our bed, returned to his old grueling hours with the same old intensity. It was like the rain: because the pain and darkness had ended so abruptly, they seemed, in retrospect, like a bad dream. He didn’t seem to remember how bad things had been. His eyes were fixed, as usual, on the future. He began running the farm again, zero to a hundred in the course of one week. His old spirit returned, along with his desire to manage things down to the smallest detail. His drive to build the business into something secure doubled, now that its existence was threatened. He reminded me of how he looked after windsurfing. Happiest when he was clinging to the mast, just this side of disaster.

  He tackled the finances first, pulling the tax bill from behind the flour bin. There was a flurry of phone calls, a long discussion with an accountant, some papers to sign, and then the bill disappeared. Someone had ticked the wrong box, the whole thing was a mistake, and we didn’t owe the money.