Good Husbandry

by Kristin Kimball

  * * *

  Another big reason we made it through those hard stretches was Candace, our therapist who lived just a mile away, in the village. She might have been the only shrink in the world who could properly handle us both. I thought of her as part shrink, part coach, part shaman, which fit us exactly. She came bustling into our shabby house for weekly meetings, never minding that she had to walk past a broody hen recovering in a cage in the mudroom, or a calf’s head that Jet had dragged out of the compost pile and left at the door, ghoulishly, faceup. Candace was always exuberant, sometimes singing. She brought a mix of intuition and empathy and complete acceptance along with her useful psychological training and many years of experience. She walked us in baby steps through the hardest parts of those years, gave us tiny assignments that we could actually manage, sometimes as small as to just look at each other for five minutes. She armed us with the tools we needed to live together in peace and, eventually, to fall in love again, in a different way, which allowed us to see each other more fully, to admire each other’s good parts, and to tolerate each other’s faults.

  I got some feedback from Candace that helped me see where I was, with the clarity of perspective that I didn’t yet have. Part of the difficulty, those years, was feeling like I was doing it wrong somehow. I believed, deep down, that raising kids should have been easier than it was. My own mother had made it look not only easy but almost always extremely fun, and she did it without five hundred acres of space for us children to roam. Of course, Candace pointed out, my mother also did it without a farm to run or a job outside the home. I’d somehow fused the sweet memory of my stay-at-home non-farming mother with the vision of the twenty-year-old mother who had visited us and farmed all day with a baby on her back, and I really believed I should be able to do both things gracefully. If I couldn’t, if it wasn’t productive, fun, and easy all at the same time, then I must be failing. “Nope,” Candace corrected me. “You’re in the trenches of young childhood right now, and it’s really fucking hard.” The thing about a trench is that you can’t see much outside it. Candace gave me a very specific, very unshrinky forecast, which I grabbed and held tightly on to in the dark times. “It all gets a lot easier,” she said, “when your youngest turns five.”

  I still suspected that more experienced mothers figured out better systems, a different set of rules. If I was struggling, how could families manage with more than two kids? I’d heard people in large families say that it gets easier after the fourth because the older ones can help. I was walking down the farm road with an Amish grandmother a few years ago, chattering about children. “How many grandchildren do you have?” I asked. “Oh, almost a hundred, I guess. I’ve lost the exact count.” At first, I thought she was pulling my leg in the dry Amish-humor way, but then I did the math. She had fourteen grown children, and they had their own large families. A hundred was entirely plausible. If anyone knew the secret system that made raising children a snap, it would be this lady.

  “I’ve heard that it gets easier,” I said, repeating my grain of wisdom, “after the fourth child comes along. Is that true?”

  I saw her mouth twitch around the corner of her black bonnet. “Easier? Well, no, I’d say it gets a little harder every single time,” she said evenly.

  * * *

  But it did get easier, bit by bit, as the girls got older. Mark and I learned that we needed to keep working to define my role on the farm so I was a part of it but could also accommodate the children and their needs. What I could handle changed as they grew, but it always involved adjusting my expectations of what a productive day looked like, and prioritizing patience over checking items off the to-do list.

  We learned to call in help when we needed it. Ronnie swooped in at crucial moments to scoop up a fussy child or a toddler on the verge of a tantrum. Sometimes when I was needed in the field, she would come over to watch the girls, and I’d return in the evening to find her canning tomatoes for us in the kitchen or cleaning onions in the basement, the children contentedly asleep, the laundry done, and the house as neat as it ever got. On Friday nights, she would contribute something delicious for Team Dinner, and she and her husband, Don, would join the fray, elder statesmen among the wild and disheveled youth. Later, it became routine for our girls to go once a week to their house, where they got to be regular American children, with television, central heat, and wall-to-wall carpeting that Jane would describe to me later in hushed and reverent tones.

  Another pillar of love and stability was Barbara. As the young farmers who worked for us came and went, an ever shifting cast, Barbara remained. She gravitated to the dairy, where she helped milk and make cheese. Her cooking was legendary. She could make something delicious and civilized out of any given ingredient—including a ragout made from gizzards and chicken hearts that became a popular farmhouse standard. Her apple tart, which she had learned to make as a girl, working at her uncle’s restaurant in Adelboden, would appear regularly on our table. In her spare time, she liked to knit and weave. Like Ronnie, she had a sixth sense for when our girls needed a break from the farm, and would appear at the door with an offer to take them out on an adventure or over to her house for tea. The way she nurtured our children was different from the way Ronnie nurtured them; she gave them a pragmatic sort of Swiss love that was a perfect counterpoint to Ronnie’s softness. Because of Barbara, our girls could knit before they could read, and they learned to spin yarn by hand from a raw fleece.

  When the girls were two and five, Ronnie gave them their own little kitchen knives, sized for children’s small hands, with rounded tips. The handles were shaped like dogs’ heads, the cutting edges rolled like butter knives, safe for playing but not that useful for actual cutting. Mark watched the girls mush at a bunch of chives while standing on their stools at the kitchen table, then silently took the knives out of their hands, walked to the shop, and put them to the grindstone. When the knives came back, the edges were chef-sharp, though he’d stopped short of honing pointy tips on the ends. He stood over them, took their little hands in his big ones, showed them how to hold a knife, how to keep their fingers tucked out of harm’s way. From then on, they knew how knives worked, and they spent hours absorbed in small, real jobs with me in the kitchen. They hunked carrots into chunks, chopped herbs, peeled and cut potatoes. They learned to cut safely. In the meantime, they learned the tastes of all the things that came from our dirt, their smells and textures. There were some bandages as they learned but no stitches. Our pediatrician told us he rarely saw farm children for injuries. Despite the dangerous environment—or, rather, because of it, he said—farm children learn physical skills and boundaries earlier than most children, and they know the high stakes of transgression, because farm parents have to be sure to teach them.

  Mark and I never shaded the dangers of our farm with gentle words. We never pretended there was no such thing as dead. “See that?” I told Miranda as I carried her around the farm on my back during the dangerous stage of childhood that comes between full mobility and development of a truly functional forebrain. “That’s a bull. He’s not gentle. If you go into his pen or his pasture, he will stomp you into the ground and kill you.” Miranda was too young to keep up with me at a walk, but she knew well enough to stay far away from the bull, the boar, the ram, to move fast out of the way of horses on the farm road, to watch out for tractors, trucks, and machines.

  * * *

  The winter after we threw our boats in the lake, I turned forty-one. My friends Terry and Amelia came over for my birthday dinner. We’d been friends for ten years. Amelia’s family owned a lake house near our farm, but she and Terry lived in New York City, worked in finance, and were one of my reference points for normalcy, tracking along the path somewhat parallel to the one I might have taken if my life hadn’t made a U-turn at farming.

  After dinner, during coffee and cake, Mark reached into the freezer and gave Jane a dead chickadee that had brained itself, earlier that day, on our kitchen window. Mark
did not believe children should watch TV, play video games, or eat sugar. However, he saw nothing wrong with a child fondling a bird carcass during a dinner party. Jane held the bird at eye level, stroked its feathers, made puppet moves with the beak, the feet.

  “Dad,” Jane said, “could you cut the wing off, so I can see how it works?” Sure he could, and he did. Jane played with the dismembered wing for a while, then returned to the main carcass and slowly twisted off its head.

  Me: “On a parenting scale of one to ten, one being perfectly normal and ten being we have to call the police, how weird was that?”

  Amelia: “Two.”

  Terry: “Two.”

  They were such good friends.

  * * *

  The next day, Mark loaded us all into the car. “We’re going to look at your present,” he said to me. He drove south of town and pulled into an unfamiliar driveway, a tan house with a barn in the back. “This way,” he said, heading for the barn. Over the crunch of snow under our feet, I heard the sonorous bleating of sheep. It reminded me of hearing full-throated Italian for the first time, in the airport, on my first trip to Rome. It was so rich with lyrical Italianness, with passion and emotion, I was sure they were putting it on. That’s the way sheep sounded to me. So expressive of their sheepliness, so melodramatically plaintive and demanding. I threw my arms around Mark and kissed him.

  For years, at our winter planning meetings, I’d brought up the idea of raising sheep, naming all the reasons I thought we should do it. They were small enough for me to handle and manage on my own. The children could work with me, and I wouldn’t be so worried that they would be hurt or killed. They were ruminants that could be raised and finished on grass alone, without grain, which is always expensive, both environmentally and economically. They were delicious! The most flavorful domesticated meat in the world. Also, they produced wool, which could be sent out for processing into yarn, for another small stream of income. Mark would counter with equally strong reasons why sheep were a terrible idea. They were the world’s most vulnerable prey animals. Coyotes would come from neighboring counties for the privilege of eating them. While they may be flavorful, it was a flavor the majority of Americas didn’t tend to actually like. They were far more labor-intensive to raise and butcher, per pound, than beef, and in our one-price membership model, they would bring no premium. Sheep were delicate compared to cattle. Cattle have amazing immune systems, can recover from the most astounding injuries. There’s a farmer saying: SSSS, for “Sick sheep seldom survive.”

  I got my way on my birthday, not because he agreed with me but because he loved me and wanted to make me happy. Also because of his thrift. A friend of Mark’s had given us this flock. He had grown up in Greece and raised sheep as a hobby for thirty years but was tired of it and ready to get out. There were seven ewes, one with a lamb at her side and the rest on the cusp of lambing. The ewes ranged from yearlings to a toothless twelve-year-old, a sturdy American breed called Polypay, meant mostly for meat but with good, interesting fleeces that I have since heard compared to the fuzz of polyester batting, but in a good way. It spins into springy white yarn that knits up beautifully into thick warm hats or mittens.

  We put them in the woodshed, which was empty of wood, and built them a small corral so they could venture into the frozen driveway. They lambed, one by one, singles and twins. The chorus of baaing greeted me every morning, as the kids and I walked out to feed and water them. They hadn’t been sheared in two years, and the fleeces were extremely heavy. They were so well insulated, the snow piled up on top of them without melting. As the lambs grew, they used the ewes like giant puffy eiderdowns, standing on top of them, pouncing from back to back, then, when the ewes lay down, curling up next to them to sleep. The following year, I bred the ewe lambs along with the ewes, and the year after that, I bought in some new stock, saved the ewe lambs, and continued expanding. I learned as much as I could about sheep. In a few years, the project that was meant to be something small and easy that I could do with children would become a real flock of 250 head, and an important part of our business.

  * * *

  After my birthday, I packed the kids in the car and drove off to my hometown, three hours west, while Mark stayed home to keep the farm running. I spent the night with my parents, and the next day, I got up early and drove off, leaving the kids with my mother. They’d soak in some cartoons, sugar cereal, and grandmother love, while I went to visit our friends Donn and Maryrose.

  They milked a flock of grass-fed sheep and produced a raw Roquefort-style blue cheese that made my knees weak with pleasure. They used draft animals for most of their work, like making hay, clipping pastures, logging and hauling wood in the winter. Donn had a fondness for draft mules, and he bred and kept some along with his Percheron and Suffolk horses and his mammoth jack, Eddie. I did not share his enthusiasm for donkeys and mules, but still, in the tiny corner of alternative agriculture where we resided, he and Maryrose were two of our closest neighbors. They were also ten years older and more than ten years wiser.

  Their farm was perched on a high grassy hill. I could see the sheep as I pulled into their long dirt driveway, which was bordered on either side with pasture. The light was returning—it was sugar season—but it was cold, and there were fat flakes of snow blowing horizontally through a pewter-colored sky. The ewes were heavily pregnant. I was glad they were wearing such good wool coats and were still a few weeks away from dropping their lambs.

  Donn and Maryrose built their farmhouse themselves, with timber harvested from their own woods, and straw bales from the neighboring field. The exterior walls were plastered over with clay. I walked in, feeling, as I always did, the snugness of that structure, its security. It was modestly sized and, inside, both beautiful and entirely practical. The south side was dominated by a pair of large French doors that led onto an attached solarium, which was floored with heat-absorbing bricks, set in sand. There was a woodstove in the main room that doubled as a cookstove. On sunny days, even in the dead of winter, they would not need the stove. The greenhouse was the main source of heat, bringing a steady, radiant warmth into the house, which was so well insulated by the straw that it held the heat throughout the night. Whenever I got depressed about our house, I thought of theirs. Maybe I could build one, like they had, out of what we could grow and harvest on our farm.

  I had arrived in time for breakfast. Every farm has its primary strategy for survival. Ours was a combination of diversity and intensity. Donn and Maryrose’s was a strict sense of simplicity. They had imposed a quota on decisions. For example, so there was never the problem of deciding what to wear, Maryrose wore the same uniform every day: Carhartt overalls cut off just below the knee, over a T-shirt in the summer, long johns in spring and fall. In the dead of winter, she switched the Carhartts out for an insulated coverall. And instead of deciding what to have for breakfast every morning, they always ate exactly the same thing: black beans, some cheese from their sheep, and a fried egg on a tortilla. It was very satisfying. After the plates were empty, they picked them up and licked them clean to make washing up easier. I did not lick mine, so Donn reached across the table and licked it for me. “You can do it yourself tomorrow,” he said, grinning.

  When the dishes were put away, Maryrose reached for the bulk-size bottle of ibuprofen on the table and swallowed a big dose. Her knees, she sighed, were wrecked. Every Thanksgiving, as they went around their table saying what they were grateful for, she gave a shout-out to her good friend ibuprofen. She was also deep into what she called her menopause project, which, she said, was not for sissies. “The loss of muscle is the hardest to deal with,” she said. She didn’t have the strength she used to have. Jobs like shearing had to be done in steps instead of in one big day. This is one of the truths of farming. We are very ordinary athletes who can do what we do the way we do it only as long as our bodies will let us.

  Maryrose and Donn had also simplified their roles on their farm, divided according to wha
t suited them and their interests. Maryrose was in charge of sheep, grazing, and cheese. She had a degree in dairy science and was a master cheesemaker. She was nine when she went on a trip to Ireland with her family and saw someone hand-milking a cow, and she knew with extreme clarity what her life would be. And she had made it so. Donn was in charge of draft animals, haymaking, pasture, and people management.

  I watched them move smoothly through their morning routine. Maryrose was walking a little stiffly between the table and the sink, waiting for her ibuprofen to kick in. “What will you do when you’re too old to do this?” I asked. It was a rude question, but I needed to know. I had seen how work came to a full stop when someone was injured. But they were ten years older, and surely they would have the answer.

  “We’ll scale down,” she said. “We can hire people to help us. We’ll strategize, probably move from wool sheep to hair sheep, so we won’t have to shear.” She paused. “And then, you know, we have a retirement plan.” I leaned closer, because that was exactly what I wanted, and I had seen no way to do it. “We are going to run a donkey-drawn taco cart,” she said, smiling at the vision. “Yeah,” added Donn, looking out at the snow, which was blowing against the window. “Somewhere warm.”

  * * *

  After breakfast, Donn and I walked outside to the barn. I looked over the backs of the horses and mules. Among his steady workers were always a few special projects. This time, it was Polly, a good-looking black Percheron mare who had washed out of a sleigh-ride business because of her tendency to bolt. Even in the corral, I could see she was high-strung for a draft horse, her energy coiled like springs in her pretty feet. Donn’s interns, Scott and Daniel, walked up to her and hooked a lead line to her halter, then led her out to a clear spot under a group of trees. They would do some groundwork with her before using her to move logs from one end of the adjacent field to the woodpile. I settled my back against a tree and watched.