by Daniel Hecht
“What’d Diz think?”
“Huh! Diz thought I should get my ass back to work.”
“But you do work! You’re always working!”
“This work. Work the kind she did, work the way she worked.” He got the claw straightened out and suctioned onto the teats. “Also I should have married someone who wasn’t a princess who was ‘too special to get her hands dirty.’”
I wondered just how much of a “princess” Will had married, and I was a little taken aback by the depth of his confession and vehemence. After a strained silence, he straightened, slapped himself on both cheeks, and grinned. “Okay. Sorry. You don’t need to hear anybody’s self-pitying rant. Really, that’s not who I am. It’s just a tense time.”
A thump and clatter came from the outer door, and then Robin bumped through and called hello.
She bustled in, a robust twenty-two-year-old who resembled her brother: tall, big-boned, dark hair, blue eyes. “Sorry I’m late!” she said cheerfully. She smacked her hands together and got her earbuds ready for insertion, ready to boogie with the cow crowd. “So, what’s new?”
“Not much,” Will said. “Same old shit.”
Chapter 30
I was disappointed that no inspirational lightning had struck during our brainstorming. It saddened me that Will went through life feeling that he was letting three generations of Brassards down.
He seemed so downcast after milking that instead of heading up to my camp, I invited him to dinner at my chicken-coop apartment. I asked him if he ate quiche and he said, “Any chance I get,” so I borrowed various ingredients from the house kitchen.
I had occasionally spent nights in the help dorm during the summer, but rarely, only when the weather was truly horrible or I was too exhausted to make the climb to my own place. When we came in, I realized that I was not used to seeing anyone in here, certainly not someone as tall as Will—the ceilings suddenly got lower. It had a tiny entry alcove where you stamp off mud or snow, hang up your coat, and leave your muck boots, then a little living room with a kitchen at one end, and a bedroom just big enough for a bunk bed and two bureaus. The bathroom had a shower but no tub, a stacked washer-dryer setup, and just enough room between fixtures to turn around.
The second thing I realized was that I had not made quiche in a couple of years, and though it’s pretty foolproof, I suffered a sudden lack of confidence in my ability to not screw it up. Also, I had no wine to ease the transition from work mode to socializing, so we both felt a bit awkward at first. I put on some water for peppermint tea instead. Will sat at the counter that separated the kitchen from the living room proper, while I went about breaking eggs and chopping vegetables. For a moment the room was silent, just the noises of cooking and ticks and snaps of the oven heating up.
“I’d volunteer to help, but I’d just get in the way,” he said. And it was true, the kitchen was not roomy—pull out a drawer or open a cabinet and it cut off movement.
After a while, he said, “Anyway, thanks for feeding me. I’m glad I don’t have to eat with Dad and Earnest. After today’s discussion. The suppressed atmosphere of accusation aside, it’s depressing.”
“Do you think Earnest feels the same way your father does?”
“I doubt it. He has a pretty forgiving outlook. People need to be able to make their own choices. He gets that.”
“Do you get that?”
“My brain understands that my position is rationally defensible. My gut hasn’t gotten the message.”
I nodded, didn’t come up with a follow-up conversational tack. Neither of us wanted to return to the subject of the farm’s finances. I was fortunate that I had something to do with my hands when conversation stalled, but Will didn’t.
“Do you have a DVD player?” he asked. “Or a laptop?”
“Laptop.”
“Want to see one of my productions?”
“I’d love to!” I told him.
So he went out to get a DVD from his car. The teapot shrieked while he was gone, and I put teabags into two mugs and poured them full. When he returned I set up my laptop on the counter where we both could see it.
“How long is it?” I asked as he opened the DVD case.
“We don’t have to watch the whole thing, I can just hit the high points—”
“I don’t mean that! I’d like to see the whole thing, I just want to know if I should get the quiche in the oven first, and then we’d have enough time without interruption.”
“Or we can play it while you’re cooking. Or while we’re eating.”
This created a lot of choices, each loaded with social implication—how interested was I really, how closely should I watch it?—that we sort of stumbled over.
“How long is it?” I asked finally.
“Eighteen minutes.”
“Perfect. I’ll get this in the oven and then we can drink tea and watch without distraction.” Will seemed pleased that I’d decided on the immediate agenda—he needed some script guidance here.
With the quiche in the oven, I sat on the other counter stool as he got the video going. The scene opened to show a bunch of cows with a fence in the foreground, a low steel-roofed cowshed in the background. Over that image, the title faded in—Brucellosis: Is Your Herd at Risk?—accompanied by some easy-listening-style bluegrass music. The credits slid by, showing that the film was produced by the Interstate Dairy Practices Council, and that Will was editor-in-chief and had a hand in scripting, videography, and editing. When the credits finished, the scene cut dramatically to a tiny calf lying on the ground, covered with blood and slime, a lumpy rope of umbilicus draped over its twitching body.
“Brucellosis,” said the bland voice-over, “otherwise known as spontaneous abortion disease or Bang’s disease, is a highly contagious bacterial infection that strikes not just cattle but can be transferred to humans who consume milk products.” The dying miscarried calf dissolved to a dairy farmer, talking to the camera as his name appeared in a tag that unfurled at the bottom of the screen.
Will brought down the volume to explain that Vermont is pretty well brucellosis free, but the rising popularity of raw milk could create an increased brucellosis risk to consumers.
Watching the video, I learned that not only do cows abort, they have a hard time eliminating the infected placenta. The disease can be transferred from cow to bull and bull to cow. The close-ups of enlarged bull’s testicles and brucellosis-affected placentas were no doubt of great practical value to farmers, but I was relieved when the focus moved from the farm to the laboratory, where bulk milk samples were being tested for brucellosis in sterile white-and-chrome environments.
I went to check the quiche, which didn’t need checking. “It’s a very professional job, Will. It must be challenging to keep all the pieces of a big project like this organized.”
He brought down the volume again. “You know what’s amazing? This thing is eighteen minutes long. We had to shoot about eighteen hours of footage to get those eighteen minutes.”
I kept my eyes on the screen as I refilled the teakettle. “And as many hours in the editing studio, I’d bet.”
He nodded. “I know the start is pretty grisly, but I wanted to go for a sort of shock effect, to let people know how serious it is. The middle is more scientific, but then I got very graphic again at the end to remind the viewer.”
“Sounds like a good approach. Drive the point home at the end.”
I worked at minor food preparation tasks; Will sipped from his tea, watched the screen, then looked over at me. “You’re handling this very gracefully, Ann.”
“What?”
“Brucellosis videos before dinner.” He reached over, ejected the disk, and waved it in the air. “Not great first-date material, is it?” He smiled ruefully, then appeared caught out. His ears reddened. Neither of us had acknowledged this as a “date”—
the thought hadn’t even occurred to me.
“I just grabbed it out of the car,” Will said. “I wasn’t thinking.”
“Will, it’s fine. I’m glad to know more about what you do.”
“The only other one I have with me is about mastitis. Infection of the udder, clogging of the teats. More relevant to this place. Really hits some Vermont farms.”
“Please leave me a copy,” I told him. “I really should learn about this stuff.”
He laughed and shook his head. “There you go with the being gracious thing again.”
“I’ll just take that as a compliment and leave it there.”
Then I told him it was time for him to set the counter for dinner, that I was going to make a salad, and that while I did I’d love it if he told me more about his family, meaning his wife and daughter. Again he seemed glad to have an agenda established.
The quiche turned out better than I’d expected. We did talk about various topics, mainly about Will’s daughter, whom he adored. He didn’t mention his wife and I didn’t tell of my catastrophes in Boston. Conversation stalled at around eight o’clock; I intuited that Will wanted to say something that stuck in his throat. Eventually he gave up on it and decided he’d turn in early. We told each other thanks and goodnight.
I don’t know what he’d been unable to say—a request for another “date,” a question about my marital situation? As a social interlude, date or otherwise, it had been a little awkward. Still, I liked Will’s innocence, his lack of finesse in hanging out with me, his lack of premeditation in showing me the video. Earnest was right: He was not a great self-promoter around a woman. But he struck me as honest, and I appreciated that.
Chapter 31
Sept. 7
Brassard figures the only way out is to auction off half the cows and then sell off some of his fields, fifty acres subdivided into four lots. Earnest, even though he’s legally co-owner, defers to Brassard on these matters because ultimately it’s Jim’s family’s heritage. And anyway, he can’t offer a better course. Will can only shrug.
The parcel he’s chosen to sell is right on the road—flat, pretty, well-drained acres at the lower end of his fields, so if he can find some buyers who want to live this far out, it’ll bring in a decent price. Having made the decision, this big, quiet, gentle man now goes about his days in a kind of mourning. It doesn’t help that this change comes so hard on the heels of losing his wife. He’s a man going through the motions, a man surrendering his past. In a rare moment of confession, sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee growing cold at his elbow, he told me it’s hard to accept that the skills he’d acquired through a lifetime, all that devotion and hard work, mattered not one jot. At the same time, he says, he’s had it, he’s had enough of this. “It probably is time to cut back or call it quits, with these damn knees and knuckles the way they are.”
So, another Vermont dairy farm down the drain. Four houses popping up on another rural road. Brassard will see them from his living room window. I might see them from some spots on my land, at least when the leaves fall.
But what’s the matter with that? Four families will have nice homes. They’ll plant little trees along their driveways and do that cute thing with circles of redwood bark around their shrubs. There’ll be more traffic on our road, maybe even school buses, I’ll probably hear their lawn mowers from my little patch of wilderness. But that’s modern times, right?
I’m ashamed to write this. As a “flatlander” myself, I have no right to criticize, no right to mourn the passing of the old ruggedness and honesty and ragged edges of the working landscape. I’ve spent so little time in it, have devoted too little of myself to it. I haven’t earned the right to mourn.
But I do mourn. I have been nurtured by this, strengthened by it. I’ve taken solace in the fact that there are still tranquil corners of America where people make do even if roads are muddy or cell phones don’t work. I’ve just started to get my feet under me and I know living this way is the reason. I can’t help but see the pending loss as another verification that my need to flee my prior life and “get away from it all” is doomed and pointless. There is no “away.”
Chapter 32
A lot can change in a few days. The lesson applies to despairing predictions just as much as to counting your chickens before they hatch.
About a week after that business meeting, I got an outlandish message from Cat on my voice mail. She’d left it the day before, but I didn’t hear it until I drove to town on errands and had both the time and the cell reception to get messages. She said she’d met a man, and she really wanted to, had to, bring him up to meet me ASAP, this can absolutely not wait another minute. The message went on with an inordinate number of superlatives. Of course, she’s always been irrepressible, her enthusiasms infectious and impossible to argue with, but after twenty-some years you learn to gauge a friend’s degrees of urgency. This is the real deal, Ann, this is huge, you know I’m not into premature and excessive enthusiasms. That was not entirely true, but something in her voice—an unfamiliar, lower note of earnestness, a sort of husky breathlessness—gave me pause.
She also said she wanted to come up Tuesday, the very day I got the message. It was not a good day for visitors. I had a rain cloud over my head, the farm was melancholy, and there was so much work to do. Going on mid-September, the last hay had to be got up, we had a bull coming to impregnate the next round of cows and some new heifers and still had some preparations to see to. Also, Brassard had asked Earnest and me to come to another business discussion that night, and it could only mean more bad news. Much as I wanted to meet Cat’s new guy, to indulge her as a good friend should, I had to tell her this wasn’t the best time to come.
I was sitting in Brassard’s truck, top of the ridge road, when I called her back. She was peeved that I was calling a day late, so I told her that it had been a very busy period and this was my first chance to get up the hill, in fact this wasn’t the best time for …
She swept aside everything I said, went on again about this guy, she was in heaven, I had to meet him and he was handsome as bejeesus, smart as hell, really intriguing past, had the requisite ironic attitude about the cosmos. Et cetera.
That much I could understand, but then she threw me for a loop. She lowered her voice conspiratorially and said something like, “In fact, it occurred to me, I mean I know this sounds strange, but maybe he’s someone, I mean, better for you than for me. I can see it, Ann. I can really see it.”
I was gobsmacked, bewildered. So the whole “I met the right man” thing was a clumsy ruse to connect this guy with Cat’s sad, lonely, out-of-touch friend? Next came anger at the condescension implicit—that I was so badly in need of matchmaking.
She was going on again, so I shouted to interrupt her: “Cat!”
“What?”
“This sounds all wrong. What’s really going on?”
“Trust me on this!” she hissed. It was a dodge, but she had got her back up, too, angry at me, and again I heard that husky tone in her voice.
“You’re pissing me off,” I told her. “First, it’s not a good time to have people coming. I’m depressed, we’ve got to get a bunch of cows impregnated, there’s a lot of stuff that has to happen when it has to happen. I don’t have time for fun and games. Second, I don’t need or want anybody’s fucking help with romance. Are you out of your mind? And right now I have to get back to work. Do not come now, are you hearing me? And don’t bring anybody up to see me. I’m not available.”
She made a sort of growl. “Tough luck, toots. We’re already on our way. At a gas station in White River and he’s filling up the tank even as we speak. What’s that—hour and a half, two hours out? So get your ass prettied up and give me the benefit of the doubt. For this guy, you are available, bet on it.”
She cut off the call before I could respond. I called back but she didn’t pick up.
I drove Brassard’s truck aggressively as I went about my errands. I parked it with a jolt and threw gravel when I pulled out. Big truck, double cab and double wheels in back, I’d learned to wrangle it like an old hand. Lumberyard, gas, grocery store, pharmacy for Brassard’s blood thinners. Get your ass prettied up—you are available, bet on it. It was beyond condescending. A creepy, clumsy attempt at a setup. I was angry at myself for telling her too much about my inner state over the past two years, furious with her for whatever this was. I bashed my way back over the ruts that corrugated our back roads.
Brassard was far out across the lower fields, flinging manure; Lynn had gone back to her place. But I found Earnest on a ladder in the main shed, up installing a new ventilator fan where one of the old ones had gone defunct. It was a job that would ordinarily require at least two people—the fans are about five feet in diameter and heavily built. I wasn’t there to see him bring it up the ladder, but I didn’t doubt he’d carried the thing with one hand, like a lady’s purse.
I gave him the parts he’d ordered, then sat on a stanchion to watch him as he continued to work.
I tried to calm myself. With the cows still outside for another few weeks, the floors pressure-washed clean, it was a spacious and pleasant space. The open doors and side windows were open so daylight flooded in and a breeze came through, carrying the woody scent of a billion leaves just starting to turn. Really, a beautiful day and a tranquil place, comfortably upwind of the manure spreading. And there I sat, feeling ill with anger and resentment.
Always happiest in high places, Earnest whistled as he clanked away. I didn’t say anything for a few minutes, long enough that he was startled when he turned his head and saw me still there.