by Daniel Hecht
From midsummer: Brassard’s place, like every farm, has barn cats, which provide an essential service by controlling rodents. They’re feral, but if you approach them with the right noises and body language, some will warily let you pet them. The number varies depending on how many kittens get born and how many get eaten by owls or fisher cats, the giant murderous weasels that prowl Vermont’s hills like forest sharks. When I first came that spring, there were two (feline) cats, but one gave birth on an empty burlap bag in a corner of the hayloft: five kittens in a wild array of stripes and calico patches.
The strict policy, Diz had told me, was that they never fed the cats. Otherwise, the farm would be swarming with them, and they’d want to get into the house, and they’d get run over by tractors, and so on. Anyway, there was plenty of wild game—best keep them hungry for it.
But by July, when the kittens were big enough to roam around the whole barn, I spotted Brassard putting out a pie tin of dog kibble soaked in milk. The kittens came and set to it like lions on a fresh-killed zebra. He stayed bent and rubbed the back of their necks as they ravaged their prey.
He glanced over when I came into the room, and looked caught out. I said something like: “Mr. Brassard! I’m shocked!”
He grinned weakly as if he wasn’t sure I was kidding, and creaked back upright—his knees were almost kaput with arthritis, his lower back in continuous pain—and said seriously, “Just don’t tell Diz!”
We chuckled and went about our work. Later, I passed by the spot and noticed that the pie tin was gone. Brassard had hidden the evidence.
What made this so amusing is that a few days later, I came into one of the sheds to find Diz doing the same thing. Kibble, milk, Bob’s outdoor dog dish. She looked mortified, then angry, that I’d caught her. “For Chrissake, don’t mention this to Jim!” she warned me.
That litter got too tame. They had Bob figured for a softy, and they had no reservations about coming to the house door. We had to take out an ad in the weekly advertiser to find homes for them. I personally handed them away to the happy Volvo- and Subaru-driving families who found their way to the farm in response. As soon as they were gone, I missed their mischief around the place.
Another vignette: Brassard and Diz, early fall afternoon, the forested hills just barely starting to show splashes of yellow here and there. I spied on them through a window in the barn as I did some cleaning in the equipment room. A moment between chores, they came out of the house and sat on the porch swing, side by side. Brassard in his denim bib coveralls with a T-shirt underneath, Diz in an oversize flowery Walmart shirt and camo pants. Plastic mugs of coffee. Two aging people, catching their breath together. Bob the dog came and stuck his head onto Brassard’s lap, got a good working over, then moved on to Diz, who gave him an attentive scratching.
After a while, Brassard gave Bob a gentle shove with his knee and told him something like “Enough now,” and Bob obediently lay down. The man and the woman then chatted sparingly as they sipped coffee. Diz’s hand idly came up and massaged the base of Brassard’s red, bristly neck, and he gratefully leaned his head back, left, right, into the pressure of her fingers. When she stopped, his big hand moved to Diz’s knee, and they just sat, gazing out across the road at nothing much, the swing moving back and forth like a slow breath, in and out, in and out.
What’s in a moment like that? Is it any different from two draft horses in the same harness, standing wearily until their driver urges them on again? I can’t speak for horses, but in this case I saw it as two human people, being on the planet in a particular moment of their allotted time, which they have agreed to share until the end. This is what that only-ever time consisted of: this moment, this farm, each other. And, it seemed to me, at that moment they were aware that was what they were doing, and were cherishing it. Were grateful for it.
A few minutes later, Diz checked her watch, leaned over to Brassard, who by then was drowsing. She briefly put her forehead against his chin, then stood and half hoisted him to his feet. He followed her obediently back into the house, and a few moments later they emerged from the side door and went their separate ways back to the demands of the farm.
Chapter 21
Nov. 12
Haven’t seen Earnest in too long. Brassard told me he calls every now and then, mainly to say he’s been very busy, got a lot of jobs, isn’t sure when he’ll return. I’ve been thinking about how, or whether, to talk to him about his lending Brassard the money I defaulted on. So far, I haven’t decided. Would it be better for him to think I didn’t know? And what would I say—thank you? I still think there’s more to their relationship than Brassard saving Earnest’s bacon in a Saigon whorehouse.
Will comes by every few days but seldom stays long; still, I relish these brief contacts with a person other than Jim and Diz, someone my own age and with more connection to the world beyond Brassard’s valley.
Something happened today that in retrospect startles me. I know absolutely that I am a hired hand, not family, not a friend (except to Earnest). But I used the plural first-person pronoun. It just slipped out. I’d been doing an inventory in one of the supply rooms and told Diz, “We’re going to need more iodine dip pretty soon.”
“Write it down,” she said, preoccupied.
I jotted it on the clipboard where, as it occurs to us, we write down tasks to remember to do and supplies to buy. Then I went on without noticing, “Oh, and Jim says we’re low on diesel. He said I should remind you to call Agway.” The tractors are refueled from a pair of 250-gallon tanks on the other side of the old barn, which Agway refills from a tanker truck every now and then.
Diz nodded, putting it on her mental to-do list. Neither of us noticed my grammar at the time. Of course, I had many times used “we” in reference to Diz and myself, as in “Do we need to bring a shovel?” But this time, I’d used it in reference to the farm itself, the collective effort, which in some recess of my mind had apparently come to include me.
Now I am wondering about it and marveling at it. So many questions to ask myself. What does “we” mean? Who is “we”?
Chapter 22
Deer hunting is another of Vermont’s important fall rituals, and like so much else that first year, it demanded some adaptation on my part. Having grown up in the city, I was at first taken aback at the sight of people openly carrying guns. There was also more visible blood and guts than one would hope to see on a city street: eviscerated, empty-eyed deer lolling and leaking on truck tailgates or hanging outside the general stores that serve as Fish and Wildlife Department weighing stations. And some of this gore I experienced at much closer range, in more personal circumstances, than I would have preferred.
Once the rifle season opens, you see pickup trucks and station wagons pulled onto the shoulders of every rural road. Men in brilliant neon orange vests and hats, rifles over their shoulders, stalk the roads, looking for sign. Gunshots pierce the quiet. Conversation at the hardware store shifts from baseball to guns, scent lures, skinning tools, venison smoking techniques, and tales of magnificent bucks sighted from afar.
Will gave me an overview of how it works: By the time the season opens, there’s usually a little snow on the ground, so it’s easy to follow a line of paired-crescent tracks. The trees are bare, so you can see a long way through the woods, and with binoculars you can spot a deer before it spots you. You want a clean shot through the lungs because otherwise you have to follow a blood trail for who knows how long, and carrying the carcass back to your car can be tiring. When you bag a deer, you field-dress it: You slit it lengthwise along the soft belly, then scoop out intestines and organs until the abdomen is empty. This makes for a lighter load on the trek back.
Some hunters track deer, but others put up blinds in trees at places where they know deer will pass. They crouch, “freezing their butts off,” and if they’ve correctly scoped the deer’s habits, they get their buck. Most season
s, you can only “take,” or “harvest,” bucks, not does, and the more “points”—branches of the antlers—the greater your glory. Easily half the importance of the ritual is social: Groups of friends spend weekends at somebody’s shack deep in the woods, hunting during daylight and drinking into the night.
Will seemed like a gentle guy, and I was surprised at how casually—callously, to my urban perspective—he related the bloody ritual. I had often seen deer weaving delicately through my woods and bounding across the roads, and could not imagine killing these graceful, timorous creatures. Then again, I was new up here, and I was a hypocrite—I was perfectly happy to eat a pig or cow if somebody else did the gory work for me. Will said Vermonters ate the venison they brought home; he didn’t know anyone who hunted just for the trophy.
According to Will, the law says that unless a landowner posts the borders with no hunting signs, hunters can roam freely anywhere. Knowing my sentimental tendencies, Earnest had bought me a fat roll of brilliant yellow plastic-paper signs and lent me his staple gun, and in the weeks before the season opened I had signed each one of them with a laundry marker and posted them around my borders.
I had still been making occasional pilgrimages to my land, because I missed the place and because I wanted to witness it in all its seasons, its varying raiment and mood.
During hunting season, I dressed in orange from head to foot before heading out. That day was unseasonably cold, the snow brilliant but only an inch deep. Heading up, I found the bends and switchbacks of my trail utterly unfamiliar, as if the topography, the geology itself, had been transformed by the leafless trees and blinding white carpet. A starker, simpler place.
My little clearing was especially strange to me. Without leaves, it had no real borders. The sense of its being an enclosure of any kind, a sort of room, was gone. It was just an area without bare tree branches overhead. Plumped by snow, my tent platform looked like a big mattress somebody had left outside.
But the beauty of it grew on me. Spacious, keen, Spartan. Trees dark but certainly not dead. A sense of latency: I could feel the plants hiding and hoarding their vital force, all the creatures burrowed and curled somewhere, wrapped around winter dreams as they began to ride out the harsh caloric economy of the cold season.
The only sign of animal presence was a deer trail that I followed up toward my spring, one set of split-hoof prints joined by another and then another, their tracks braiding together and then apart again. I almost couldn’t find the spring—it was just a long, shallow dent in the snow. But when I scuffed at the surface, I found a thin, rippled layer of ice with the water running quick and vivid as ever just below. Bubbles meandered quicksilver on the underside of the ice, and I could hear a quiet chuckle of water moving.
My heart swelled with affection. Then I wondered whether a stream is the water in it, or the bed in which the water travels. The bed is a place and is always there, but it has no life or function without the water. But the water is transient, here now but miles away by tomorrow … I have no answer except that what I love is the whole, both the thing that stays and the thing that goes, which ultimately cannot be understood except as a unity.
After a time, I continued uphill, and in another hundred yards I came to an inexplicable and ghastly sight: an area of disturbed and trampled snow, with red stains and spatters toward the middle and a horrific pile at the center. I recoiled but couldn’t help moving closer to study it. Lumpy, tangled ropes of viscera, branching veins, yellow and purple and red-brown globs. A mound about a foot deep, two or three feet across. Guts and organs. Frost only just forming on the surface fluids.
I fell back away from it, two steps, five. Then I saw the tread marks of boots heading up the hill.
Someone had poached a deer on my land and field-dressed it and made off with the carcass. And I knew it must have been one of the Goslants.
I came down the hill feeling shaky, angry, sick, violated, utterly out of my depth again. I had posted the land! I had relished the idea of creating a little refuge for deer in this season of wholesale murder.
I wondered whether I should tell the Brassards about it, but given Diz’s hatred of the Goslants, I was afraid that would set off repercussions that might lead to trouble. Also, I worried about getting into some kind of range war with these people, whom I’d never met but had glimpsed and found frightening on so many levels.
At the same time, I couldn’t have people coming onto my property and doing whatever they pleased, taking anything they wanted. Brassard said the Goslants weren’t too worried about borders when it came to cutting trees, either. Then I wondered whether they had visited my campsite in my absence, scouted me out, maybe even come stealthily at night. It was deeply unsettling, an unfamiliar sense of violation.
I asked Will about it while milking that night. He paused for a moment, frowning, before he went back to his task. “Poaching? Hm. It could be more complex than that. If a hunter wounds a deer, he really should follow it and finish it off, even if it strays onto posted property. Actually, I don’t know if that’s what the law says, but it makes moral sense, don’t you think?”
I could understand that perspective. But that night, the image of the pile of guts, a living deer turned inside out, was hard to shake. It kept returning to my mind’s eye as I tried to sleep. And thinking it over, I couldn’t recall seeing any blood trail leading to the scene. Surely I’d have seen droplets or spatters on the way or on the periphery of the butchering site. On the other hand, I hadn’t been looking for them. And probably the blood would have melted down out of immediate view. I gnawed at this question until my thoughts faded into vivisectionist dreams.
The next morning, after milking and cleanup, I decided I had to know. Had they legitimately pursued an injured deer and put it out of its misery on my land, or had they brazenly poached? I covered myself in orange and hiked uphill again, following my own footsteps. The air rang with occasional distant gunshots.
I didn’t get as far as the bloody pile. I didn’t do any crime scene forensics, because before I got there I encountered something in some ways worse. When I came into my clearing, I found more boot tracks, new ones, tracks that were definitely not there the day before. I’d stood on my snow-rounded tent platform, and now so had this unwelcome visitor. This same person had prowled around my kitchen setup and had pissed in the snow nearby. And then had headed back uphill, toward the guts and toward my border with the Goslants’ land. I didn’t follow the trail.
So I talked to Brassard about it. It was midmorning by then and he was trimming hooves. With the cows indoors now, he’d taken extra time to check the health of each one and had found a few needing a trim. I wasn’t up for dealing with Diz and was glad to find she’d gone to town on errands.
Brassard was hunkered down with a cow whose ear tag read 78. He had tethered her in a stall and hoisted her back leg up onto a plywood box he’d hammered together. Apparently, the hind hooves are hardest to trim—the cow can deliver a kick that requires a visit to the emergency ward—but Brassard was sort of a “cow whisperer.” He had cared for those cows throughout their lives, had trimmed them before, so his propping up one hind leg and carving away didn’t bother them that much.
The upturned hoof looked like a black, dirt- and manure-crusted lobster claw. It was as hard as a leather shoe sole, but with quick, forceful strokes of his straight-razor sharp, old-fashioned hoof knife, Brassard easily peeled off strips of the stuff.
“Got six or eight grow too much hoof even over summer,” he told me. “Grow too long in the toe and rock the ankle back, that’s bad, but the heel’s more important. Don’t get the heel right, you put her lame in no time, especially comin indoors and on concrete all day.” He drew the knife again, expertly, and checked the cut. “Nowadays, most use an angle grinder. But I got pretty good doin it this way as a kid, never saw the need.”
I started by asking about the Goslants—vaguely, like
what kind of people they were.
Brassard kept slicing, peeling off thin slices and taking his time answering. When he’d trimmed the hoof to an oyster-shell white and held a gauge to the heel, he let it down and looked up at me thoughtfully. The cow set her newly pedicured foot on the rubber mat experimentally, found no pain, forgot about it.
As Brassard cleaned off his tools, he gave me the lowdown. The Goslants had been there since before he was born. There used to be a farmhouse, behind where the trailers are now, but it had always been in bad repair and burned down twenty years ago. Then they moved the trailers in.
His description didn’t match my expectations. He said that the elders of the clan, Homer and his wife, Fran, were about his age, had lived there all his life and had raised their family there. But there was a lot of coming and going, residents changing as a son or daughter or cousin or uncle or grandchild ran into tough times and came to stay on the family estate. He said there was “some intermarrying” between Goslants and maybe that accounted for some of their “problems.” There might be as many as eight or ten people crowded in there sometimes, sometimes maybe just three or four; he couldn’t keep track.
He moved over his hoof stand and picked up the next cow’s right rear hoof—she resisted for a moment till he spoke soothingly to her—then used a thin tool, like an ice pick, to pry out impacted debris. As he probed with his fingers, assessing the health and length of the hoof, he asked me why I wanted to know.
“Do you think I have to worry about them? Like … when I’m up at my camp?”
At that, he stopped working on the hoof. Even the cow, number 32, turned her big head to look back as if wondering what caused this interruption of the trimming rite. She shifted and daintily kicked the box so that it spun out from under her leg and bounced away.
Brassard grunted as he straightened, then faced me, checking my face and then gazing distantly down the row of stalls. “No question but some of em get up to trouble. Don’t know the details. Not bein farmers, they don’t travel in the same social circles as us. Diz won’t have anything to do with em.”