Good Husbandry

by Kristin Kimball

  The object of the day’s lesson was to reinforce, in Polly, the concept of yield. “Teaching left and right is easy,” Donn said. “Yielding, acceptance, is the hard part.” Yield relates to everything. We are small, slow, and weak, and they are big, fast, and strong. Try to lead a two-thousand-pound horse who has decided not to yield to you. Before Polly could learn to work happily, she needed to learn to yield. This would involve overcoming the instinct to push into pressure instead of moving away from it. Push your palm against an untrained haunch, and the haunch will push back and lean against you. This oppositional inclination, Donn said, is extremely strong in the donkey and weaker in the horse. The mule is smack-dab between them.

  In order to teach yield, you have to apply pressure. Every part of a person holds the potential for pressure. Your eyes, voice, legs. Your very presence. It’s a variable sort of power. Some animals are more sensitive to it than others, and some people carry more of it, naturally. The key to pressure, the thing that turns it into a tool for communication rather than a weapon, is the appropriate use of its opposite. Release. The removal of pressure is the reward for getting the right answer. Donn squared his eyes at Polly’s flank, and she began to move around him in a circle. Her inside ear twitched front and back as she figured out what was wanted of her. There was no conflict in that conversation, only a gradual, mutual movement to an understanding.

  Donn moved out of the circle, and Daniel stepped in. He started at Polly’s flank, but she didn’t move. “Look at her eyes and ears to understand what she’s thinking,” Donn said. “Anticipate what she’ll do. Set up ways to make the animal right. Avoid the power struggle. If she doesn’t want to move, then ask her to stand.”

  Soon Daniel and Polly were in conversation too, not quite as smooth as Donn’s but functional. Then Polly became irked with the small circles, stopped, and refused to move no matter what Daniel did. He sighed and looked to Donn for help. “You might as well stop there,” Donn said. “If you are frustrated, you’ve lost.”

  We walked to the next field, where Scott and Daniel were supposed to hook Polly to a log and pull it out of the field. She trotted, and shied, and wouldn’t stand still long enough for the boys to fix the chains. When they circled for another try, she rolled into a tight canter, and the boys struggled to keep up. “You have to make a distinction between her energy and your own,” Donn intoned from the sidelines. “Don’t get into a pulling contest! Don’t be afraid of her energy. Just direct it. And figure out ways to make her right.”

  I watched Scott take the lines. He didn’t know much yet, and this horse was a powder keg. But Donn was serene, arms crossed over his chest, spouting his koans from a distance. “Your energy is not her energy,” he boomed.

  There were moments when I wanted to grab the lines, sure the boys were going to get crushed by the log or lose control of Polly, but Donn busied himself with clearing away branches, chatting with me about mules, one eye on Polly, shouting corrections from afar. Making a distinction, in other words, between his energy and theirs. At last, Daniel unhooked the tug chains from their place at the hip of the harness. Scott asked Polly to back until the tugs reached the log. Daniel clipped the chain on, and the horse and the tree were joined. She danced, testing, testing, looking for a reason to escape, and when Scott told her to come up, she hit the end of the chain—BAM!—and the log moved. Polly dug in, tucked her pretty head, all business, and pulled.

  * * *

  At lunchtime, I found Maryrose on her back in front of the washing machine, tools scattered around the floor, which was freshly mopped from a flooding. She pulled off the cover, fished around, brought out a plug of hay, straw, and horse hair. I’d done the same thing with my own machine the week before, extracting a wad of similar composition. Machines in the civilian world are not built to withstand what farmers throw at them. Maryrose had spent her morning on sheep chores, turning the cheeses in her cheese cave and cutting labels for the rounds that were ready for market. Unlike Donn, she preferred to work alone. This was understood between them.

  I spent the night with them, then drove to my parents’ house and picked up the children to head home to the farm. The girls conked out in the back. In the quiet car, I thought about what Donn had been teaching and how it applied to marriage and parenting. The way that in a partnership, the idea of yield is everything. In order to work together as a team, you had to first overcome the natural urge to oppose. Instead of addressing all the ways it’s gone wrong, look for ways to make the other one right. And when things get wild, dark, or hard, make sure to separate your energy from the other person’s energy. Your energy is your energy, I intoned to myself, and his is his.

  CHAPTER 14

  I kept a stack of books beside my bed. Straw-bale house design. How to timber-frame. I read up on skills and tools. I invented a house in my head that I could build, away from this one. Why couldn’t I make a house for us from the farm itself? Bright and snug? We had wood for the timber frame, stone for the foundation. The walls could be made of straw and clay. I read all about it. Rye straw is the best for walls. When we planted it that spring, I watched the rows germinate. As it grew, the girls played house in it, and I imagined it as our actual house. When it was cut and dried and baled, the straw was stacked in the East Barn run-in, bright yellow, clean-smelling. I’d look at it on my way to check on the chicks or collect eggs and think about what it could be. But then we needed it, urgently, for bedding for the dairy cows. It disappeared bale by bale, shat upon, swept into the compost pile, until it was gone. Meanwhile, the children were getting older. You can see time passing very clearly as your kids are growing up. I clocked how much of their childhood was left, how much had been spent in the dingy old house.

  When Miranda turned three, I felt an old familiar restlessness that usually presaged a change. In another time, it would have been answered by heading off to a new country or a new relationship. The core of me is a little warped in that way, its tentacles always stretched out, seeking novelty. I had to learn how to manage that as a married person with children and a farm. I knew I didn’t want to change the foundation of what we’d built together. Especially now, when it was solid. But maybe we could bump out a wall, build a little addition? I asked myself, as candidly as I could, what was it I wanted? It was not another child. We were too busy and quite possibly too old. But it was something new and small.

  That spring, we’d had a visit from Houlie, who used Jet as a stud dog on her English shepherd, Rosie. Jet got a lot of work as a stud back then. He was larger than most English shepherds and had a rock-solid temperament that made him easy to work with. Rosie was a star where she lived in Pennsylvania, a small, lightly built search-and-rescue dog trained in air scenting, trailing, and cadaver work. She could work stock too; Houlie and her husband kept goats, chickens, turkeys, and sheep on their farm. But Rosie was so keen to work, and so intolerant of foolishness, that she needed a skilled handler. Houlie was a professional dog trainer and described Rosie as a canine Ferrari—an awesome animal to own and work but too much dog for most people. Houlie thought Jet might add some size to the line and moderate Rosie’s ambition enough to make her pups more user-friendly. I trusted Houlie’s judgment. Stud fee can be taken two ways: one pup, your pick of the litter; or a pup’s cash equivalent. Back when Rosie was bred, I was certain we wanted the money. Now that the pups were on the ground, I wasn’t so sure. I called Houlie, who was sorting through puppy contracts, registrations, buyer applications. I wanted her to talk me out of it. “I’m not sure I can manage a pup right now. Another infant.”

  “Yes,” she said, “but each stage only lasts days or weeks, not years.” I took that in and considered.

  * * *

  Mary arrived on a fine fall day, when the girls were three and six. Houlie had picked her for me after getting a look at what our farm was like. She knew the stresses, the daily challenges, and also the opportunities. Working breeds like English shepherds are rare because the types of work they wer
e bred to do have become rare. A diversified, mixed farm like ours was where an independent-thinking dog who could hunt, herd, and guard could really show her stuff.

  We needed a dog, Houlie said, who was brave and could withstand frequent challenges. That sounded to me like a good set of credentials for anyone who wanted to go into farming. Houlie watched as each pup from the litter encountered the electric fence on her farm for the first time, in the course of exploring the world. The pop of a fence sends some pups into blind panic, to huddle at the handler’s feet, or all the way back home, to the place they feel safest. It wasn’t the reaction that was important but the recovery. Houlie watched Mary hit the fence, yelp once, and come right back sniffing in circles, looking for what had bitten her, a little more cautious but unafraid.

  It was clear from the beginning that Mary had gotten a full dose of her mother’s genes and not very much of Jet’s. Even as a little pup, she had raw ambition. Arrogance, even. And was so tolerant of pain that she could get kicked hard by a frisky heifer and jump right back in the game. Her motivations were more complex than Jet’s; she had her own agenda. Unlike Jet, who was born honest, Mary was capable of duplicity. Once I made a stack of pancakes for breakfast and left them on the table. I went upstairs to wake the girls and came back to find we were now one short. Mary trotted out of the playroom and lay down by the stove, where I had left her, sleeping. Hum-de-dum-dum, her eyes said. I walked into the playroom, rooted through the children’s toy box. There, under a layer of balls, dolls, and plastic horses, was the pancake. Mary watched from the other room like an actress cast to play innocent.

  Jet worked out of obligation and a strong sense of duty. Mary worked for the absolute joy of it, with her whole heart, the perfect clicking of her instinct into action. About the only things I recognized of her father in her were Jet’s sharp intelligence and his capacity for loyalty. Mary tolerated Mark and liked the children fine but lived with one eye on me, in case I moved toward my jacket and boots. She was always hoping we had a job to do, preferably a big one that required her to run fast and use her teeth. There weren’t many jobs like that, in reality. The key to using a dog on stock is to keep things calm, low stress for everyone. Where Jet had needed encouragement, Mary needed to develop restraint. There was no way I could have handled her if she had been my first working dog; as my second dog, I could, but barely. She was a lot like my husband: challenging, enthusiastic, and never dull.

  I cooked, took care of the kids, trained the puppy, who went everywhere with me, tethered to my belt by a light rope. The crops came on, and the weeds. Farmers left, new farmers arrived, a whirl of youthful energy. Many of them are smudgy images in my memory, faces who came and went; others stayed for years, became an extension of our family. They learned skills that would serve them later on in life, whether they kept farming or not. Hard skills, with their hands, and soft ones, of character.

  * * *

  The strings between me and the girls loosened, a little at a time. Jane began exploring the sugarbush, the swamp, the edges of the field on her own, or dragging Miranda along behind her. They went a little farther afield every day. Sometimes they hiked out to pick strawberries together, coming back with their faces covered in juice, their baskets empty. From May until September, they were almost always barefoot. One afternoon they came running into the house, shouting with excitement. Jane had found a snapping turtle hatchling, the size of a silver dollar and the color of the muck at the bottom of our pond. It stretched out its tiny wrinkled neck, showed its beak. That beak, when fully grown, could take off my thumb. Jane put the turtle down on the kitchen table. They claimed her for a pet and agreed to name her Charcoal. They watched turtle videos on YouTube and learned that she could live for a century and grow to forty pounds, and if they wanted to keep her they’d need a heat lamp and an enormous tub of water. So they decided she was only a twenty-four-hour guest, after which they’d return her to the puddle she came from.

  This was first in a line of not-furry creatures that the girls befriended. Snails, spiders, and a terrifying venomous water bug had all done time in my kitchen. Jane was a master at catching snakes but not so great at holding on to them. Two of them had escaped inside the house and slithered into the dark unknown, never to be seen again. I hoped they found each other, in one of our crevices, and escaped the house together to start a little snake family of their own.

  * * *

  In the fall, Jane went to public school. She was fine getting on the bus, she had a ball in class, and she loved meeting new friends. She had one concern: lunch. Why did she have to pack our usual homegrown stuff in her lunch box while her classmates brought bright packaged “things from the store” that she hadn’t learned the names of yet? Because food is the center of our family, I thought. It governs the rhythm of our day and of our year. It is our sustenance, our living, our lifestyle. And because that pork belly and sauerkraut sandwich I made for you totally rocked. Then I tried to translate that into language she would understand. “Food,” I said, “is what we do. It is one of the things that makes our family special.” She took that in, thinking.

  Miranda went to preschool, and a space opened up again in my days for the farm. The New York City share was growing fast now, bringing in more revenue than our local share. We’d hired more staff. The whole business was big enough that I had the luxury of being able to choose what I wanted to work on. I chose the sheep and the dairy.

  When the grass began to grow, I went to see Racey’s new farm. She and Nathan had bought a beautiful piece of land in the valley to our west. Chad and Gwen bought another piece right across the street. The fields looked like ours had when we first started. Disused, rough, full of potential. They were ringed with hills and already had horses on them: Nathan and Racey had bought a trio of Suffolk weanlings, two fillies and a colt. Their coats were the color of new pennies. Chad had his eye on a Suffolk stallion. They’d work together, breeding and training horses and raising vegetables, grains, sunflowers, and meats.

  Racey and I walked through the fields, talking about soil, which animals or crops might thrive in each field. The sadness and anxiety I’d felt when she left our farm was gone entirely. Mark was right. More farms were a good thing. We could cooperate instead of competing. We all needed to stay nimble, anyway, keep looking for new markets. And it was better than good—a great thing—to have my friend on her own land, nearby.

  The land came with an old house, which was slipping off its foundation, already condemned. We walked inside. Nathan was at a makeshift desk making a list for the day. The room was big and bare, with cracked windows and a plywood floor. They had set up a camplike kitchen at one end, a giant table in the middle, the office at the other end. They slept upstairs in a loft accessed by a ladder. The house had been damaged in a fire in the 1970s and never properly repaired. The exposed beams were charred, and some daylight showed through the walls. Racey said that during the winter, when the woodstove died overnight, the temperature in their bedroom had dipped regularly into the twenties, and the glass of water she left by the side of the bed froze solid after midnight. They’d be building a new house, but it would take a while because they had a barn to build first, and they’d be doing all the work themselves, in their hours away from farming. This hard living in the condemned house was part of the plan. They were lifting a new farm off the ground, and this was what it would take. They were working their way toward ownership, as we had done ten years before. There was some urgency, though, because Racey was going to have a baby.

  * * *

  There is a poem by John Berger about an old peasant visiting with Death, who will soon claim her.

  What she asked him was his opposite?

  Milk he answered with appetite

  At the end of November, I walked through the barnyard in the dusk. One heifer had just freshened, and I was expecting another one, Posy, to calve any minute. When I had checked her at lunchtime, everything about her looked big. Her body was full of calf, and he
r bag was very tight and swollen.

  It wasn’t officially winter yet, but the weather had already turned cruel. There was a dusting of hard dry snow on the ground, and the wind picked it up and threw it at my face. The forecast said it would be zero that day, below zero at night. The cows were in the barn already for milking, and I slipped in at the heavy sliding door, with Mary tethered to my belt, and closed it behind us. The wind screamed around its edges, but inside, it was warm and quiet, the only sounds the music of the cows’ bells and the rustle of their eating.

  The dairy had been in a long period of quiet anticipation. Most of the cows were dry. This is the rhythm of a cow’s life: She calves, which turns on the faucet of her milk. It will run, with varying intensity, for the better part of a year, until it slows or she is two months away from calving again and we stop milking her, thereby turning it off. When she is dried off, we keep her in the milking herd for a few days, to rub her udder with liniment and make sure she doesn’t come down with mastitis. That seldom happens on our farm; by the time we dry our cows off, they are producing very little milk. After the cow is dry, she is turned out to pasture for two months to rest and regain condition before her next calf comes, which turns the faucet on again.

  The dry period had been longer than usual that year, and we were calving in the cold dark edge of winter, because of a bull problem. The bull had come on loan from a dairy in Massachusetts. He was supposed to be proven as a sire, but when we got specific with the farm who rented him to us, we learned that he was used to breed cows in a herd that included other bulls, so he was not proven after all. He seemed like a good enough specimen. I’d watched him trot off the trailer and into the pasture and immediately begin the work of a bull. But after several weeks of diligent breeding, I noticed the cows who should have been settled were coming back into heat. They weren’t pregnant. If it had been one cow or even two, the issue would have been muddled; I might have suspected a cow problem. But if all of them were coming back into heat, the problem was the bull. The trouble was, it was hard to be sure. I put Miranda on my back and went out to investigate. We bicycled to the barnyard, where the bull was with the cows.