Mark came running around the corner. I showed him that I was not mortally injured, and with the clarity and bossiness of shock, I told him to take care of the horses, who had disappeared down the embankment, still towing the spreader. I walked inside and dialed our neighbor Beth, who drove me the thirty-five miles to the hospital. The stoplight at the entrance to the Northway was red, but she looked both ways and drove through it. “Optional stop,” she said casually, which was how I knew she was worried. I sat in the front seat and let myself feel the pain that was happening in my hand. It was something, that pain. Enough to stop chatter and demand my full attention. Beth got me through the emergency room and to a physician’s assistant in the vain hope that all I needed was a little stitching. The PA said, “You need an X-ray.” The radiologist said, “You need to see a plastic surgeon right now.” The bone of my knuckle was broken three ways, and there was damage to the tissue around it. But considering how bad it could have been in that circumstance, I knew I was extremely lucky. There must have been half an inch between the wheel and the tree, which was probably the difference between having a finger and missing one. They gave me a humongous bolus of pills that blunted the pain and slowed my frantic thoughts about what might have happened to the horses. In my haze, with my good hand, I dialed the number at home, which rang to an empty house.
I didn’t talk to Mark until I got home late that night, my hand set and bandaged. He had been doing my chores and had not heard the phone. I wasn’t yet sure if those chores included burying two good horses. Finally, he came in and told me what had happened.
He had run to the embankment and looked over. The horses were there at the bottom, still in harness, with the spreader behind them. The horses were both down, mired in the mud of the ditch and tangled in the traces. Mark raced down and untangled them, cutting the straps he couldn’t untwist, and took the horses by the bridles. First Silver. He rocked his large body once, twice, then stood square on all four legs and shook himself, as though he’d just had a good roll in the pasture. Then Sam. He got his feet under him and walked out of the ditch too, trembling slightly but completely sound. Mark led them back to the barn. Aside from a deep scratch on Silver’s foreleg, they were unhurt.
* * *
So that day, when I heard the horses walking back from the field one by one, my heart started racing before I even got to the window to look. At first I saw nothing. The driveway was empty. Then I looked toward Pine Field to see, at the far edge of my vision, the machine that the three horses had been pulling—the pulver-mulcher—pinned in the trees and Mark trying furiously to lever it backward with a pole. There was a large chestnut-colored inert shape on the ground in the tangle of trees that could only be the third horse.
My mind flicked through the chestnut horses who might have been in the hitch that day: Cub, Abby, Jake, maybe Jay or Jack. I wanted reflexively to choose one, to make the horse on the ground the one it would hurt a little less to lose, as though I could make it so by wishing. I ran toward them down the driveway without feeling the ground. When I got close, I could see that the horse was wearing a bridle with a pink noseband. Abby. Our best mare, in the prime of her life, a brave and honest worker. Mark pulled off her collar and bridle and the harness too, cleared away the pine brush and the gear that had snapped, so as she was lying there on the ground, she was pure animal, just hair and hoof and sweat and breath, and not the civilized beast we made of her every day with all our straps, buckles, and training.
David had been driving the horses. He sometimes reminded me of Silver, our first gelding: 99 percent of the time, reliable, predictable. Because of that, I tended to ease into trusting him. But that crazy 1 percent! It was extremely dangerous. David was well-meaning, hardworking, kind and patient with children and visitors, and generally had good judgment. But 1 percent of the time, his judgment was skewed enough that if you combined it with bad luck and inexperience, it could get someone killed.
David had made a grave pair of mistakes. Either one alone could have caused a wreck; together, it was almost inevitable. He’d gotten off the seat of the pulver-mulcher and left his lines wrapped around it, then walked to the front of the horses to adjust a bridle that was rubbing Jake, the middle horse, the wrong way. The first rule for new teamsters is to never let go of your lines. When you need your hands to adjust machinery, or fasten a buckle, or open a gate, or anything, the lines are over your forearm, right line on top of left. Without lines in your hands, no matter the arrangement, you have no steering wheel, no brakes, nothing. You are a situation waiting for a complication.
David’s second mistake had been removing the bridle from Jake while he was hitched. Not only is there no way to control the horse after that, but he is suddenly made fully conscious of the thing he is pulling behind him, which has been hidden from him all this time by blinders. Something like that had happened to me once while raking with Jay and Jack. I had left Jay’s throat latch too loose, and he had managed to rub his bridle halfway off against Jack’s neck. Jack’s steadiness had saved us then. He’d planted his feet and stopped as I scrambled off the rake to run to Jay’s head. But David was not as lucky. The sudden removal of the blinders, plus the unfettered freedom, was disaster.
The horse jerked up on his haunches, and David struggled to control them all for a few moments from in front, and then, thank goodness, he jumped clear. The horses were off, galloping together across the field with the pulver-mulcher clanging behind them. When they reached the hedgerow, still running, the outside horse—Abby—hit a young spruce tree with her neck yoke. The force of the impact slung her backward and down and stopped the other horses.
She was on her side with her belly against a tree when I got there. “She’s alive,” Mark said, which was the best he could say at that point. She couldn’t rise, but we didn’t know if it was because she was injured or because of the way she was pinned against the tree.
It is disconcerting to see a big horse on the ground, in that position of unnatural vulnerability. Her flank was moving fast; her eye was large and looking right through us. What I felt most deeply was that we’d betrayed her. They lay their instincts at our feet when they are broke to work. In order to surrender their freedom, they trust us to keep them safe.
Mark and the two others took hold of her legs and, together, turned her over her backbone to her other side. If something were broken, this movement would make it worse, but if something were broken, she was done for anyway. She rested for a moment, breathing hard, then lifted her head, tucked her legs under her, and came to her feet, quivering. Mark walked her out of the patch of hedgerow, and we all watched, silent. Her legs worked. No lameness, not even a hint of how sore she would surely feel later. There were some small cuts and scratches on her belly and flank from the pine trees, but none of them deep. Her ribs moved in and out, and her breathing seemed even and easy enough to make us hope there were no internal injuries, no fractures. Mark clipped a line to her halter and walked her onto the farm road. She stood there for a moment, looked behind to the field she had crossed in uncontrollable flight, then dropped her head, shook her body, and walked back to the barn to rest.
David left the farm. Abby recovered without complications, physical or mental. But I loosened my attachment to the horses after that. The farm was too big, the risk too great. I didn’t think we could devote the time that Donn did to work with his young teamsters; nor could we simplify our farm to be more like theirs. I didn’t think we could hold up our end of the deal with the horses and keep the farm going at its current scale. After that, we used them less and the tractors more. If someone with horse skills arrived to work at our place, we put them to good use. But we stopped training people to drive. Some of the horses still worked regularly, but others spent a lot of time on pasture. I pestered Mark to sell them, at least the teams we weren’t using, but he didn’t want to. He wanted to hold on to the link to see what came next.
* * *
Nothing remains. Not the bottomless hea
t of the sun nor your loved ones’ health nor the lubricity of your joints, your youth. Maddening impermanence. At middle age, that hot grief stokes the market for sports cars and Botox. The children growing up. The parents growing old. Summer was beginning to fade, all fin de siècle abundance, entering its age of decadence.
Mark and I walked past the overgrown lawn in front of the farmhouse, where goldenrod bloomed. Some milkweeds had escaped grazing and mowing, and into their late blossoms, the monarch butterflies feasted. A lawn is a sentimental vestige of an idealized pasture, the extrapolation of the idea of an English country estate, populated with decorative sheep. My own lawn had grown wild and coarse, beyond anything a sheep would ever want to eat. It was grazed by butterflies instead.
The hens were pastured in Superjoy. One of them was outside the fence. She fixed us with one small black eye, her head bobbing over a wave of long grass. There is nothing so foolish as the sight of a grown person trying to catch a hen. In an open field, the hen always wins. But Mary saw her too and looked to me for permission to apprehend. “Sh sh,” I said in encouragement. She launched, faster and more agile than I and smarter than the hen. She stepped on a wing to hold the bird and then pinned her with her mouth, over the neck. She didn’t chomp. She held. The hen submitted, as if to a rooster, squatting suggestively, suddenly still, with her wings tucked in a V behind her. I walked toward them, told Mary she was a good dog, and picked up the hen, a neat package of feathers. I tossed her over the electric net, and she rejoined her sisters, who were squabbling over a dead toad.
While Mark went to inspect the cabbage, I sat outside the chicken fence and watched. Spectating and not doing is a form of indulgence we call farmer TV. There is not always time for it. I could have been bedding the nest boxes with fresh straw or cleaning out the water basins. But sometimes we indulge ourselves. This particular show should have carried a trigger warning. Watching the hens with a toad reminded me of middle school girls. Innocuous in the singular but, as a group, bloodthirsty, brutal. The last thing that poor toad saw was a bunch of feathered giants converging on him, beaks raised. Chickens are omnivores. They eat bugs, mice, pretty much anything they can get their beaks into. The toad was a coveted piece of protein. They all wanted it, and none of them could eat it, because in order to do so, the hen with possession would have to drop the toad, aim, and peck. But she couldn’t even get to the dropping part, because every other hen on the field was trying to sack her. The toad went from hen to hen, the whole flock at full speed, to the soundtrack of excited caws and cackles. When Mark returned from the cabbages, they were still at it. I wondered how it would end. Maybe with the sunset. For hens, the world ends every night. As evening comes on, they sidle toward their roosts. They trudge up the ramp, settling in, and they are still until the sun comes up again. A hen caught by darkness away from her roost is, well, a sitting duck, as good as paralyzed until the light returns.
CHAPTER 17
I’m still working on separating my ego from outcome and my own happiness from Mark’s. Focusing on the joy that comes from working hard every day and not on its result.
My friend John is a painter. He just turned sixty. He arranged his life carefully from an early age to make it suit his art, which he has practiced every day without fail. Sometimes his work goes well, and sometimes it doesn’t. Recently, he told me, he walked into his studio and realized everything in it was heading in the wrong direction. He stood in front of a painting he had worked on for months and began again. “Sometimes you kill the shark,” he said, shrugging, “and sometimes the shark kills you.” But you don’t ever stop swimming. John has been going so deep into his work all these years that everything else disappears. When he’s in it, nothing can touch him.
A few years ago, he fell in love with a Frenchwoman, and they got married. She left him suddenly, soon after her immigration papers were arranged, and she took a lot of his money. He was ruffled for a while but basically unfazed. The thing that is most deeply him—his soul, his work—can’t be taken away.
Mark is like John, with the farm. He walked into the work of it every day, with intensity, without fail, until he became it. He works with acquired detachment from any individual success or failure, his eye on the larger picture. I don’t have John’s steadiness or certainty. I don’t have Mark’s focus. In my work, I vacillate wildly between shark hunter and chum. But I know both Mark and John are onto something good that grants peace and happiness. The farm taught me that. When you look at a farm from the outside, it looks like work is the cost. From the inside, you find that the work is the reward or, rather, the work is all there is, and it’s a beautiful thing.
The Amish see it more literally. To them, work is a form of worship, a means of glorifying God. They sing at work, an ethereal, strange, and dissonant sound. How do I know that? Because just as the wave of young people interested in farming slowed, the Amish arrived in our region. They settled the old pieces of land around us that had fallen into disuse. They brought skilled hands and a desire for work. It’s a good thing we held on to those horses. We have Amish people who work at our farm now, and the horses are back in the fields.
* * *
When Racey’s son was ten months old, there was a fire. I heard the call come over the pager as I was getting ready for bed. Her address, structure fire, fully involved, the pager said. That’s a very bad string of words. It didn’t say which structure. I thought of her with her baby in the basement of the new house and felt a chill. I sent her a text, and she texted right back, surprised to hear there was a fire at her farm. She was safe inside with the baby, but when she got my text, she looked out the window to see their new barn in flames. Nathan had been nursing a sick calf out there, had left a heat lamp on. Maybe it was the heat lamp, maybe it was bad wiring. Maybe it was the brooder that was in the other corner, full of chicks. Nobody knew. Someone had seen it from the road and called the fire department. The neighbors were there in seconds and, in another minute, the truck. By then Nathan had seen the fire and come running, and so had Chad. But it was far too late. The whole building was engulfed, burning fast, hot, and bright. There were no horses in the barn, just the calf, the chicks, and some laying hens. It burned to the ground, along with all their tools, the combine, the hammer mill, fencing equipment, and a year’s worth of hay and grain.
The next day, I made a potpie to take to them. What else is there to do when your friends are hurting but make them food? That’s the thing about misfortune and grief: they have a lot of weight but no mass. You can’t lift them on behalf of a friend. But at least you can bring food. There is something inherently comforting about a potpie. The savory sauce, the rich chicken and mushrooms, all covered by a blanket of pastry. Smothery love in a dish.
When I pulled into the driveway, the shock of it hit me. The barn that they had worked so hard to build was gone. I got out of the car bearing my potpie and burst into tears. It was sorrow not for the building, which was just a building, but for the loss of the work that went into it. The building and everything in it could be replaced, but the work, on a new farm, is imbued with all the hope for the future, not yet sullied by bad harvest, disappointment, quarrels. I cried for the setback and the burning up of hope. When I saw Nathan and Racey, though, they were resilient, strong. They were glad their family was safe, sad for the loss of the barn, but ready to build again.
Mark and I went back after the insurance inspectors had left. It is something to see the aftermath of such a fire. It’s not the absence of the whole that gets you but the odd parts that remain. In one corner, there was a set of intricate gears, teeth still perfectly aligned but with the case of whatever had contained them burned away. In another corner, chickens roasted in their feathers, like a demonic barbecue. A few exploded rats, who must have been very rudely expelled from their cozy home in the grain or under the hay. Around the perimeter, there lay the almost-new hardware that held the barn together, only now without the wood, which had turned to smoke and ash.
* * *
They rebuilt, of course, and finished their house. They had another baby, a girl, and built the farm up, one field at a time. Chad and Gwen built their new home across the street and got married there. They share work and equipment with Racey and Nathan. Chad’s Suffolk stallion has sired foals all over the region. Blaine and Tobias got married too, and built a beautiful farm together in a town nearby, where they raise beef, pork, and lamb and run a custom butcher shop. They have a new baby, a little girl. Tim’s farm is farther away, south of us. He has a CSA that produces vegetables and eggs for his year-round members and makes good use of his team of Percherons. We all see each other as regularly as our work permits, to share advice or tools, or trade produce, and talk as equals about the challenges of pulling a living out of the dirt.
* * *
Our farmhouse, though, was still a problem. The thought of returning to the dim and dingy house every day continued to depress me. According to Mark, it was never the right time to renovate. All years, all seasons, all weeks and days were full. Every dollar that came in was quickly whisked into the large needy maw of the farm. Our assets increased a bit, but not our comfort level.
After living with Mark for a decade, I’d come to understand that he felt true and deep-rooted antipathy toward the idea of fixing anything in the house. On the farm, no project was too big, no ambition too grand; the house was where he stowed all his hesitation and fear. If I brought up a small improvement, he listed the things that could go wrong, the ways it could balloon into some crushing job that sucked away all our time and money. Raising the topic of house renovations pretty much guaranteed a fight. Which didn’t always stop me from raising it.
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