I saw a ripple of displeasure cross Mark’s face. “You won’t know what to get. It’s not so simple. It requires some research. It’s not important right now. And anyway, if you have that much time, we could use your help in the field. It’s harvest day, and we’re shorthanded.”
My fear that he loved the farm more than he loved us was counterbalanced by his fear that I didn’t love the farm enough. That my commitment wasn’t sufficiently deep to keep it alive now that we had children. That if I strayed too far from the farm’s gravity—that hard constant pull of responsibility and work—I’d be swept beyond its reach. Every time I wanted to leave, even for an afternoon, he came up with a list of reasons I should stay. It wasn’t that I couldn’t go, I knew, but that the fight would be too tiresome, and there would be smoldering resentment in its wake. “Fine,” I said, and walked upstairs to bed.
When I close my eyes and picture that period of our marriage, the image that I see is this: a late-summer patch of ground. The soil is rich and well-watered. The sun is bright. There are good crops coming ripe, but the rows are overrun by our worst weed, galinsoga. The curse of galinsoga is its seeming insignificance. It grows low to the ground, without the powerful grandeur of the redroot pigweed or the spiky menace of a thistle. Its tiny white and yellow flowers are delicate, pretty, like daisies grown for a mouse. But get close and you’ll see that though it has barely bloomed, the white and yellow flower has already gone to seed. Closer, and you’ll encounter its pungent stinkbug stink.
The tiny seeds of our disagreements were like that. So were the resentments I’d harbored when he was injured, as well as every time he did or said something that made me feel we were less important to him than the farm. They were insignificant until they multiplied, each one dropping a new generation of wrath. They choked out the beauty until it was hard to see.
* * *
In the wake of the drainage, the purgative of Irene—Mark was lit even brighter than before with enthusiasm for farming. His natural reaction to stress was to throw himself toward it and turn up the amperage of his default optimism. My instinct was to retreat, back to a time before we had to deal with so many zeroes on our expenses, or employees who were often disgruntled. Despite the bills on the table, Mark wanted to make some major, expensive improvements. We needed to reconfigure the well, to make it more reliable, and as long as we were going to fix that, he wanted to find the money to invest in an underground corridor that would carry beefed-up electrical wires, water pipes, and telecommunications infrastructure all the way from the farmyard to the pavilion. It would cost ten thousand dollars and do nothing for us in the short run. But what we had in place was antique, with limited capacity. It would not support a farm any bigger than we already were. He made a convincing argument, based on how smart it would be in the long run, and I agreed, but not without a shudder of dread.
Mark was so enlivened by work and what he wanted to accomplish that he sometimes woke up at midnight that fall and couldn’t wait to start. When I got out of bed at five, I’d find him cooking breakfast in the kitchen, humming, having pulled the stakes from the spent tomato patch by headlamp or completely reorganized the machine shop, then run the four miles around the farm for the joy of it.
* * *
It doesn’t feel great to be the shade on anyone’s lamp. I didn’t want to be so down. Maybe I just needed to get out there again and work. Now that Miranda was walking, my shoulder was starting to heal. In mid-November, I took over the evening animal chores on weekends. Mark would watch the girls. On my first Saturday, I kissed them goodbye, pulled on my warm overalls, mittens, and hat with furry earflaps, and walked out to feed the cows.
The late-afternoon sun was weak, coming through dense clouds. The wind and the damp air made for a chill that felt colder than the bright deep-cold days of midwinter. In the driveway, the mud was half-frozen, the texture of pottery clay. But it was good to be outside, moving, and free to walk at my own pace without the weight of a baby on me. Jet was with me, happy we were at work together, pacing along at my heel.
The dairy cows were pastured just behind the East Barn. They would need thirteen bales of hay, which was stored in the loft. The square bales we’d made were poor quality, but at least they were plentiful, good enough to fill the cows’ bellies while they grazed the end of the stockpiled grass. The last of them, put up in late September, had filled the loft completely; the final wagonload had to be wedged tightly against the slanting boards of the roof, leaving only a small crawl space down the center.
The bales covered the southern door to the loft so that the only way in was through a hole in the ceiling inside the barn. There were a few boards tacked between the barn’s beams to make a rickety ladder. I climbed them to find that the bales above my head were stacked nearly flush with the hole, only two inches of wood around the edge. When the ladder ended, I had to get a toe on the loft floor and climb straight up the bales, holding on to their strings, my body hanging over the dark abyss of the hole. I felt a flutter in my stomach.
There was no light in the barn; I reached up to turn on my headlamp. The battery was dying, and the light that the lamp gave was barely enough to see the bales in front of my face. There was a metal cable halfway up the stack, which tied the beams of the barn together. I grabbed the cable and a bale string and pulled myself up, then planted a foot on the cable and felt for the top of the bales. There was not enough space to stand, so I crawled away from the hole, on top of the bales, until I reached the window at the northern gable end. I threw thirteen bales out of it, into the pasture below, watching them crash onto the grass. Next I needed to climb back down the ladder, toss the bales into the feed bunk, then open them with my knife and spread them out so all the cows could eat.
By the time I crawled back to the exit hole, my headlamp had gone out completely. There was still light in the sky outside, but away from the window, the dark in the loft was complete, no hint of shapes or shadows in front of my eyes. I was a little frightened, thinking of that cool vertical expanse of dark I had to navigate, and the fear made me hurry. I found the edge of the bales with my hand, held on to the strings, and sent my feet over the side, feeling for purchase. Then I grabbed for the cable with my mitten-clad hands. The idea was to hold on to the cable, keep my feet against the bales, and slowly inch my hands down until my toes found the two inches of floor. Then I could creep around, holding the bale strings, until I got to the ladder. But I was too hasty, and my hands were too cold, the mittens too slippery. My hands slipped off the cable, and from the top of the stack of bales, I fell.
I had time to think, This is really happening, and feel the rush of black air as I went down through the hole, and then a wordless flash, a glimpse in my mind of Mark and the kids, before I whomped into a pile of loose hay on the floor of the barn. I had fallen fifteen feet. By some miracle, my flailing arms had snagged a loop of hose suspended from the barn’s ceiling on the way down, and I’d caught it against my body. That knocked the wind out of me and bruised my ribs but also slowed my fall. Thanks to the hay and the way that I landed, there was nothing else wrong with me.
I lay still, feeling the wave of adrenaline crest and begin to abate, while Jet licked at my face, which was suddenly wet with snot and tears. It had been a long series of painful separations, beginning the year before with that irreversible snip of rubbery blue-white cord that had connected Miranda to me. There was the separation of me from the work of the farm, of Mark from me, of the farmers from the house, and me from Racey, the separation between workers and friends. There was the long season of disastrous weather that seemed to separate us from a secure future and raised doubts about whether I wanted our story to continue. There was the looming stretch of midlife ahead, of youth behind. The fall from the loft was an abrupt end to it. It snapped something between me and the past.
There was no use holding on to the way Mark and I used to be together, when we were a couple and not a family. Did we work in our new shape? The family an
d the farm propped each other up even as they wore each other down. There would be no farm without the marriage, and I suspected there would be no marriage without the farm.
The farm had to grow and change in order to live, and we’d have to grow and change along with it if we wanted to keep it. There was no guarantee we’d be okay. There was no guarantee the farm would survive. The risks would always be there. I could grieve the loss of what had been and reach for what was coming. I’d have to, if I wanted to stay.
Because there was also a big question in that long split second of dark descent. Do you want this? This life, this farm, this man, this marriage, this struggle to make it all work? And an answer. I do.
For the next few weeks, I could feel bruises on my ribs when I laughed or breathed deeply, which reminded me to be grateful that I was still doing both of those things. I kept doing my chores and picked up a milking shift, which helped put me back in touch with the daily work of the farm, providing exercise, purpose, and fresh air. And I called Candace, a therapist who lived in the village. She agreed to sit down with Mark and me, to help us try to put ourselves back together.
* * *
The holidays arrived. We hitched Jay and Jack to the hay wagon, gathered all the farmers, and went caroling through the village. We had my great-grandparents’ sleigh bells for the horses, and fifteen of us on board, trotting through the cold night. A flask of cheer went around among us, and the sound of our singing got louder and more off-key. Mark drove the horses, Miranda snuggled into my arms, and Jane leaned into my shoulder.
The week of Christmas, there were chores to do, cows to be milked, and most of our farmers were gone to see their families, so Mark was in the barn or the shop, or rushing between groups of animals, keeping everyone fed, watered, and bedded. Two days before Christmas, I strapped Miranda into the backpack and put Jane in her snowsuit and trudged out through the soft snow, stopping at the shop for a saw, in search of a Christmas tree. We found a spindly spruce, good enough, in the no-man’s-land north of the farm road. The half-grown pigs were pastured there, and as we stepped carefully over their low electric fence, they snorted at us, then ran off together like a school of pink fish. I cut the tree down near the ground and hauled it back to the house, stabbing the baby in the process, and prickling Jane, who was already crying, because she had gotten snow in her boot.
The trunk was too small for our tree stand, and it refused to stay vertical, so I stood on a chair, screwed a hook into the crumbling plaster ceiling, and tied the tree precariously up with a piece of fishing line. It dangled there, ridiculous. The project had taken most of the afternoon, and there were more tears. But at last, it was done. While the girls reverently fingered through the box of ornaments, I put on some Christmas music and made popcorn to string. Then I stoked the woodstove and poured myself a little glass of port. As the heat filled the house, I sniffed at the air, detected something alarming under the smell of popcorn, and slowly zoned in on the source. A dark and disconcerting stink was coming off the boughs of the Christmas tree. I got closer and found I had dragged the tree through the pigs’ half-frozen manure, and the green needles had deftly picked it up and held on to it through all the tugging and righting of the tree, until the heat from the stove released it.
* * *
On the last day of the year, the girls and I made paper boats to hold our wins and losses. On one side of my boat, I wrote down blights and injury and financial stress, all the marital conflict, the fatigue, and the endless god-awful rain. On the other, I wrote down the good things: two healthy children who made my heart squeeze with love every time I saw them. Our expanded dairy, a mighty team of farmers, twenty-eight acres of drained ground with gorgeous soil, the strong horses in big hitches, pulling the equipment. And one last word, in all caps: FOOD. Even that year, the food had delighted and nourished us.
At sunset, we took our boats to the lake. It was ten degrees outside. Miranda was sixteen months old, a twenty-pound live weight with a strong will. Sometimes at the end of the day, I just didn’t have the strength to wrestle with her. I decided to skip the frustration of mittens, snowsuits, hats, double socks, and warm boots—all of which would go on with tears and complaints and then probably have to come off again before we were out the door, because one of them would need to pee. I warmed up the car and left all the gear in a heap by the door. I put their jackets on, hoods up, and tucked a random selection of mittens into my pockets. On the way down the driveway, we ran into Mark, between chores, and he jumped into the car with us.
We got to the park, and I slid the car down the ice-covered slope to the lake. I didn’t have snow tires, but there was one bare strip of pavement showing, enough to stick a tire to for the climb back up. The lake lapped at the town dock, each wave adding a layer to the thick coating of ice on the windward side. The ferry was coming in; the water looked more substantial than usual in its few degrees above freezing, as though it were already thinking of going solid. I left the car running and popped Miranda out of her car seat and carried her over the snowbank onto the dock with her scribbled-over paper boat clutched in her bare hand. Mark brought Jane on his hip. She had made a tiny paper bowl for a boat, the size of a pea, just big enough, she said, to hold her wishes. He set her down at the edge of the dock, and she leaned forward over the water to throw it. I grabbed the back of her jacket so she wouldn’t fall in, and she leaned even farther, then launched. I tossed Miranda’s boat for her, and then I threw my own. It landed sideways, rode the waves for a few moments, and sank out of view. Then we turned our backs on that difficult year, and we all walked away, together.
PART 3 REGROWTH
CHAPTER 13
Nothing really gets better all at once except in books. The streak of bad weather lasted another two years. Without drainage, we wouldn’t have made it to our tenth anniversary. With drainage, there were still plenty of moments of uncertainty and despair.
We scrambled, financially, to make up for the setbacks of weather. We lost some members to the new farms around us. We took on more debt to pay for the grain and hay we couldn’t grow, the new well, and more drainage to the fields. We needed to increase our sales in order to service the new debt, and the local market had gone flat, so we started delivering our year-round share to New York City every week. That changed our potential market from the few thousand people who lived close enough to get to us, to the many millions of people in and around the city. Sales grew rapidly, but the growth required a huge input of labor and infrastructure. Mark and I were both aware, as we lifted this new heavy project off the ground and tried to steady it, that the act of creating something new is easier when you’re younger, and we weren’t getting any younger. We wondered out loud how much more heavy lifting we had in us, if the farm should require it.
We got remarkably lucky. The wet years, when we were short on hay and grain, were followed by mild winters. Without the caloric drain of deep cold, the animals needed less feed, which saved us from having to buy too much. My first book brought in an unexpected royalty check just in the nick of time. We squeaked by, barely. One summer after all the ready cash was spent, we needed to buy a truck to replace the old Honda Civic, which had finally and decisively died. The Barnes family was on the farm that week, putting in more drainage on credit. As they were setting the lines in Pine Field, the drainage plow snagged some ancient copper wire. Whatever it used to service was long defunct. But it came snaking out of the soil behind the plow, hundreds of feet, buried treasure. We unearthed just enough of that valuable stuff to make an even trade with our friend Jason, who took the copper for scrap in exchange for a decent old Ford F150.
* * *
Mark’s lights burned out two more times. The following spring, he injured his back again, not planting but in true hippie style: playing Ultimate Frisbee with the farm crew. That injury was at least as excruciating as the previous spring’s. He was down for five weeks. The year after that, toward the end of winter, he took our whole farm crew skiing, to t
hank them for all their hard work. On the first foggy run of the day, just off the chairlift, he crossed his tips and broke his leg in such spectacular fashion that he required a four-hour surgery, a selection of plates and screws, and a big fat bone graft; he wasn’t back to normal until August.
Both times, there was that same separation between us, and I felt the same lonely fear of failure and loss. Both times, we teetered. And both times, we pulled back together. Why? It helped to have been through it before and come out the other side. And because we somehow fit each other’s unusual emotional topography. As my sister had told me, I could probably never love a normal person. Maybe a normal person could never love me. Once I was rifling through the chest freezer in the basement, looking for green vegetables. “Find any?” Mark yelled from the top of the stairs. “Nope,” I yelled back, “just loads of tomatoes, some cow colostrum, and a bag of raspberries. Oh, wait, those aren’t raspberries. That’s Miranda’s placenta.” We’d buried Jane’s just after she was born, and planted a sour cherry tree on top of it, but hadn’t gotten around to burying Miranda’s before the ground froze. “You should be very glad you’re not in the dating pool,” Mark called as I stuffed it back into the freezer.
Most of all, we stayed together because we had between us some important things that we had created, that it was our duty and privilege to nurture—two small children and one big farm. Even a radical farm imparts conservative values. It does so without you really knowing it. In the same way the military makes you a person who stands up straight, a farm will give you grit and perseverance.
Good Husbandry Page 21