Good Husbandry

by Kristin Kimball

  I felt for them but found their questions comforting. They reminded me that these problems weren’t just ours. This was human nature, and this was what it took to lift a farm off the ground. We were responsible for our own happiness and could weigh the costs against the benefits, and then we would have to choose.

  Mark came in from the barn and sat down with us. For someone who could be astoundingly obtuse about our own emotional conflicts, he was often insightful about others’. He peppered Elizabeth with advice: If it’s not working, redefine your role. Trim your hours. “Rest enough,” I added. Drink water. Exercise. Meditate. Take baby steps. Make a list of doable things. “Remember that you control what you choose to believe in,” I said. Anyone could look at our farm lives and see toil and squalor, or look at the same lives and see purpose, abundance, and joy. Same plot points, different story. “Very different things can be true simultaneously, and choosing the one with the better narrative is often extremely helpful.”

  Elizabeth asked what had made me decide to commit to this life. I said that farming is not an easy, and it is not going to make you rich, but it is a strong organizing principle, the best one I had found. It makes everything else fall into line. Everyone needs an organizing principle. Some people have money, or status, or art, or fashion, or church. We have farming and food. The axis around which our family revolves is a heavy rod of daily need: the plants need, the animals need, the farm needs. That’s not a curse but a blessing.

  * * *

  At the end of winter, when Mary was eight months old, she went missing. I didn’t notice at first. Donn was visiting, and we’d spent the day training horses and new teamsters. After dinner, I walked him out to say goodbye and nearly tripped over Jet. He was standing broadside to me in the mudroom, as though he’d been waiting for me to come out. His head was low, his tail down, and his eyes were locked on mine. Jet was far too dignified to make himself a nuisance over nothing. What in the world was he trying to say? That was when I noticed that Mary wasn’t there. That was weird. She, like Jet, was a stick-around dog, and even at a young age, she had predictable habits. At that time in the evening, she should be there, on her bed, in the mudroom.

  Maybe she was searching for butcher scraps in the compost pile, or hunting possum, or chasing Penelope, the infernal cat, or getting into some kind of trouble. That seemed a likely possibility, actually. Jet liked rules and wanted every beast on the farm to obey them. He could be a tattletale. I walked outside and called her. Mary was enthusiastic about many things, but nothing more than coming when I called her. She would leave what she was doing and arrive with great joy, at full speed, to sit in front of me, wagging her entire body. But she didn’t appear. I listened for her bark. There was only the wind.

  It was getting dark. The weather was turning bad, a sleety snow blowing out of the north, threatening to turn into a real tempest. Earlier, Mary had been with me in the machine shop. It occurred to me that if the wind had blown just right, it might have blown the door open, then closed, and she could have gone looking for me and gotten stuck. I ran over there, opened the door, and called.

  Meanwhile, Jet was by my side, eyeballing me. “All right,” I said. “Where’s Mary? Go find her.” He ducked his head and started off at a trot to the north, glancing back at me every few yards to make sure I was following. I followed him past the granary and the East Barn, pausing to open every door and see if Mary was stuck inside. I checked the compost pile and the hole next to the East Barn where the dogs stalked rats. Every time I stopped, Jet waited patiently and then struck off again in a curious side-to-side gait, always to the north.

  When he rounded the west side of the barn, he broke into a run along the farm road, past the wrapped hay bales, past the turnoff that leads uphill to the sugarbush. That, I hadn’t expected. I decided that he must be either blindly searching or thinking we were going for an evening walk together. There was nothing beyond the turnoff except pastures and, a quarter-mile away, Matt’s old cabin, which hadn’t been used since last summer, and in another half-mile, the covered barnyard where the horses and the beef cattle were spending the winter. I couldn’t think of anything that way that would attract Mary or trap her. Meanwhile, it had grown dark, Mark was working in the butcher shop; the kids were supposed to be in bed; and calves had to be fed. I turned around and went back to the house. Jet followed far behind me, reluctant.

  I found Mark, to put him on kid duty while I searched. “Have you checked the back of the machine shop?” he asked. There was a second room in the back of that building, where we kept the woodworking tools, and he was right, I hadn’t checked there. It seemed likely. I ran back. I was really worried now. I burst through the second door, into the woodshop, expecting to find her, but she wasn’t there. When I came back outside, Jet was sideways again, directly in my path. His expression had shifted slightly. He was always a gentleman, a diplomat, but I detected some impatience in his eyes. He was saying: This way, dumbass. But respectfully. He had very nuanced eyes. “Okay, fine,” I said. “I’ll follow you.”

  He struck out north again, faster this time. I ran, trying to keep up. Around the West Barn, north along the farm road, past the wrapped bales, past the sugarbush, past the road that led to the neighbors’, down the hill, toward the faraway pastures. When he got to the cabin, he bounded through the deep snow and stood, front feet on the steps, and looked at me. His expression was almost pity at this point. Poor human, is this sufficient, or do I need to actually spell it out for you? I ran toward the cabin, noticing finally that there were fresh boot prints in the snow, leading to the door. In the last bit of evening light, I saw movement inside. It was Mary, leaping straight up, paws bonking against the cabin’s window. Mark had taken some visitors to see the cabin that afternoon and hadn’t noticed that Mary had slipped inside. Apparently, Jet had.

  * * *

  Mary was coming along as a herding dog. I’d never learned the sort of impressive skills that you see in sheepherding competitions. I just brought Mary with me, and together we figured out how to get things done. We practiced on the dairy cows, walking them in for milking, and then on the sheep, keeping it simple and safe. Where Jet was large-boned empathy and soft power, Mary was police tactics, force. She was small, fast, judgmental, and more useful to me in the field at a year old than Jet ever was. But some things made for complications. Her instincts to guard and to please me were very strong. She was always watching, and sometimes I taught her things I didn’t intend. She picked up on my need for boundaries, for example, and decided to defend them for me. When one of the farmers knocked on the door while I was in the house, it was usually because there was a problem on the farm—animals out or injured, or the well gone dry. “Uh-oh,” I’d say under my breath, wondering what type of complication was coming my way. That was the same thing I’d say when something went wrong while we were bringing in the cows and a heifer stepped out of line to sneak a mouthful of chicken feed, or stopped to graze a sweet patch of clover. It was Mary’s cue to streak in and enforce my rules with a quick nip at the cow’s heel. It took me a long time to figure out that this was why Mary was nipping at the heels of the farmers when they came in the house. It took even longer to train her out of it.

  Then it was spring. Lambing time, three years since the first ewes arrived, and the flock had grown from seven ewes to fifty. Daytime highs hit seventy, and there was a fresh wind blowing the water off the fields. The first greens appeared among the browns. The birds were in overdrive, building. My nightly checks in the lambing barn left me stumbling back to the house with a crust of colostrum and afterbirth on my hands. I fell asleep on the couch, and the dog licked them clean, then I woke up, ready to go. The warm days brought a physical sensation that felt akin to looking at a freshly pulled double espresso waiting on the bar. It was the same anticipatory rush. The body feels it before it hits.

  The first lambs to come were twins, a ewe and a ram, to a ewe I’d bought the year before, a first-timer. The lambs stood ri
ght away but struggled to find the teat on wobbly legs. The ewe swung away from them, confused. I pinned her against the wall and held the little ram lamb’s mouth to her teat. When his sucking mouth found it, I felt his body relax with the rightness of it. Then his tail began to flit back and forth, a metronome of satisfaction. By the time the ewe lamb was fed, the ewe had the hang of it. She nudged her lambs and nickered to them. I put the three of them in a small pen together to bond, rest, nurse. After two days, when they had gotten to know one another, I’d release them into the larger flock. But first I weighed them: 7.5 pounds and 8.5 pounds. Just about the size of our own children at birth, Mark pointed out. Could these two strapping children have ever been so small? I know they were, just as the ewe, who now outweighed me, had been this fragile only eighteen months ago.

  The next day I watched one of the ewes give birth. She’d been so big that we all guessed it would be triplets, and out they came, 7.5, 9, and 10 pounds, a real belly full of lambs. It was a busy hour for that ewe. She was an old-timer and knew her business. Even as the second lamb was emerging, she was licking the first, and as the third came, she was singing to the first two, reaching for them with her tongue. She nudged them each to her teat and let them suck.

  * * *

  Racey had her baby, a beautiful little boy named Lewis. I sat on the edge of her bed in the basement of the new house and held him. He was four days old, a tiny mite of a human. Racey looked overwhelmed and very, very tired. Her birth had been hard, the price of the firstborn. Her eyes filled with tears as she said, “Of course nobody could have explained to me how intense it would be,” and there was the barest hint of betrayal in her voice, an unspoken question—why hadn’t I warned her? I gathered their laundry and brought it home to wash, like Ronnie had done for us after Miranda was born. Nathan had snapped to, taking on the role of father, rushing in from chores to hold his son, make tea for his wife. But she was right. Nobody could have explained how it would be.

  CHAPTER 16

  When summer came, we had new farmers in the field, new horses. We were still doing most of our fieldwork with horses, but we were often short on trained teamsters, so the tractors were making their way into more jobs.

  I was in the farmhouse one day, making lunch, and lifted my head at the unusual sound of one horse on the driveway, being walked by one person, back toward the barn. Then another horse by another person. Then nothing. That was strange. I’d watched a three-horse hitch go to the field earlier, so two horses going back to the barn didn’t make any sense. Also, if we had to walk horses somewhere, one person would lead two or three or even four together, the horses shoulder-to-shoulder on either side of the person. What was with the extra person? That was when my heart started pounding.

  There’s a difference between knowing in your head that a risk exists and feeling it in your body. The sound through the window of a situation going bad would cause my adrenal glands to send pure fight-or-flight energy into my bloodstream. Mothers who can’t find their toddlers are familiar with this feeling. Those who have barely escaped a car accident. Usually, when I felt it, it turned out to be nothing—just an innocent shout from the field or horses in high spirits. Still, I was on guard when I knew there were horses at work. Part of my consciousness would always be aware of who was driving, which horses they were using, what they were pulling, and calculating the potential for trouble. On windy days or in spring, when the horses were spooky or not yet used to daily work, or with green teamsters or certain combinations of horses, I never relaxed until I knew they were finished and back in the barn.

  My worst runaway happened in our third year. I had spent hundreds of hours working Sam and Silver by then, but I was still a green teamster, and I made some mistakes. We had been spreading compost in Monument Field. Spreading is brief, intense work that builds muscle on a team, like a couple of football players hitting the tackle sled over and over. The pull was easy on the way to the field, even with two thousand pounds of compost in the box, rolling over the hard farm road thanks to the magic of wheels. But once in the field, with the ground-driven web engaged, the horses had to work to push the compost backward as well as pull the cart forward, while the heavy box sank into the soft tilled earth. They needed all of their coordinated strength to make the first few dozen yards. As the compost was tossed out of the box and over the ground, the load became progressively lighter until, by the end of the field, they were pulling only me and an empty box.

  The spreader, like most of our equipment in those early years, was cobbled together from antiques, some bought at auction, some pulled out of a neighbor’s hedgerow. This one was unique—a horse-drawn spreader that had been converted to tractor, which we converted back to be pulled by horses. It had a tractor seat stuck on the front of it and, in place of a solid footboard, a flimsy piece of rusted metal set slightly too low for me to reach, so that my legs dangled like a child’s.

  Over the course of the week, the team had grown comfortable with the work. They liked the routine of it, the same thing over and over. Silver seemed to enjoy the opportunity to show off his muscles. I’d noticed, though, that something was irritating Silver. He tossed his head a lot, hung back, and needed encouragement to keep up with Sam. Maybe the bit was bothering him? That morning, I had switched his usual Liverpool bit, which had shanks, for a thick, mild snaffle, which offered no leverage between my hands and his mouth.

  Near the end of my tenth load, I heard a disconcerting snap. I looked back to see that the compost was no longer coming out of the spreader. I stopped the horses and jumped off my seat to find that the ground-driven chain had broken and was dangling underneath the box. This was the price of old equipment. Something was always breaking, something so antiquated that the new part would almost always have to be improvised; we lost a lot of time that way in those years. I pulled back the lever to switch off the gears and rode the spreader back to the shop, where I called Mark to fix it. Fixing a broken link was a routine job, so we didn’t bother to unhitch the horses, and I stayed on the seat. The horses were happy to have a break, and all three of us relaxed while Mark worked.

  When the links were joined again, Mark told me to put the spreader in gear and move forward to test it. I did it lazily, without my full attention. The horses were half dozing when they began to walk forward. When I engaged the chain, the noise startled Silver, who lunged forward, a full neck in front of his partner. I felt a shot from my adrenal glands then, knew I had a quarter of a second to gain control of the situation. I pulled Silver in, but the mild bit, with no leverage, was nothing to him. I don’t think he could even feel it. Because he was in front of Sam, I had no contact at all with Sam’s mouth, the lines to his bit slack. In that instant, Sam leaped forward to keep up with Silver, and then they were both at a run, and I was focused only on staying perched on the precarious seat.

  I tried to steer them west, into the wall of the well house, but didn’t have enough strength to control their direction, let alone slow them. Instead, they turned east, through a section of the farmyard where we parked equipment we weren’t using. I scrambled to find the flimsy footboard to brace my feet so I could use my arm strength on the lines. But it was more than enough just to keep my balance up there. I was aware that if I fell off, I could easily be run over by the heavy metal wheels.

  Two horses hitched together and running away are a team of conjoined dancers in magic shoes, like the witch at the end of Snow White. Once they are going, they must go. If one falls, he will be dragged by his partner. They make their decisions independently, but their fate is tied together by thick leather and heavy chain. Sam and Silver snaked through the equipment yard at high speed, avoiding collision until Silver ran too close to a single-axle trailer resting on its tongue, the bed sloped up in the rear. Instead of stopping, Silver ran over it. The wagon tilted to its balance point under his weight, and he hesitated. In that moment, the spreader came to a sudden halt, and I was thrown from the seat. Somehow I landed on my feet, just in fron
t of the spreader, and jumped clear. I was firmly on the ground, the lines still in my hands, dimly aware of Mark in the background yelling, “LET GO.” But my brain was telling me to hold on. I was responsible for these horses, and if, by chance, they made it without lethal injury through this obstacle course of equipment, they were headed straight for a steep embankment and a ditch. I skidded alongside the spreader, leaning back, lines in my hands, pulling with all my might.

  What happened next is preserved in my memory in narrow focus. The horses cut close to a stout sapling at the edge of the barnyard, just before the flat ground dropped off toward the ditch. I gave one last effort to pull them to a halt and then, too late, realized that I had cornered myself into a bad angle with the sapling. It happened so fast. The lines were running through my hands as the heavy metal wheel of the spreader hammered toward me and caught my left hand between it and the sapling before continuing on, the horses disappearing over the hill.

  I was wearing a thick leather glove, and in the shock that followed, I could see the tracks the wheel had etched in it, and that was how I knew I was hurt. I yanked the glove off just before swelling made removing it impossible. The glove had saved most of the skin, but there was a tear over my first knuckle through which I could see the white glint of the bone.