by Daniel Hecht
We sat around the fire, eating stew off plastic plates, drinking peppermint tea out of metal cups with rims that burned our lips. Cold pressed against our backs while our faces singed. Three faces dear to me, bright-lit by the fire, framed by flickering columns of trees that shaded dimmer and dimmer and finally faded into the curtain of full dark: my heart truly overflowed.
Chapter 35
But it wasn’t long before discord joined us in the campfire circle. Erik’s mysteries were not so easily plumbed. He didn’t appear reserved—he wisecracked and shared anecdotes, gestured energetically, took off his billed cap and flipped it with vaudevillian flair back onto his head. But he deflected a lot, somehow turning questions about himself into another interesting but unrelated narrative. Between eating and joking, I saw Earnest shoot glances his way. Cat, only a little reprimand in her voice, asked Erik how long he was going to keep us in suspense before telling us what he’d been doing for seven fucking years.
When Erik stalled on that, Earnest reversed the question: “So what’s next? What’s the plan? Stick around for a while or …?”
“Actually, there’s a project I’ve been thinking about for quite a while. And I really needed to get away from the West Coast and I really wanted to see my sister, so here I am.” He gestured around the woods and down toward the farm. “It’s pretty serendipitous—I mean, that you’ve gone rural, turned farmer, Annie. Think there’s any chance Mr. Brassard could find room for me here?”
I shrugged. “The farm’s not in a great position to take anyone on. But you can ask Jim.”
“Any experience at farmwork?” Earnest asked.
Erik laughed hard enough that he slopped scalding tea onto his jeans. “Me? Extensive experience in agriculture. Or rather horticulture.”
“Like what?” Earnest said. He sat forward, put his elbows on his knees, rolling his metal teacup between his palms.
To me, his posture signaled heightened interest, but apparently Erik saw it as suspicious or aggressive. Erik’s body went very still. “Like it can wait for another time.” It was an in-your-face, up-yours comeback.
“Got me interested now,” Earnest said, absolutely without expression.
“And it’s your business because …?”
“Erik? Erik! This is Earnest, my friend! What … I don’t get …” I tapered off, unable to fathom what I was seeing, hearing.
My brother winced, drew a hand across his face as if wiping away something blurring his vision, or rubbing sleep out of his eyes. “Jesus. Sorry! Rusty social skills.” He shook his head as if to wake himself up. “Also, I’m tired as shit. Three thousand miles, driving’s fried my brain.”
“No sweat,” Earnest told him, still watchful. “I know that one.”
I heard Cat exhale. She had held her breath for the past minute. The men looked frankly at each other, taking each other’s measure, but the swell of tension that had risen so quickly now started to slip on by. Strangely, I saw a common feature in their faces, not in bones or color but in the lines and lights of character. I felt as if each recognized it in the other.
“I’ve got a regular saga,” Erik said wearily. “But I figured I’d start with my sister before I lay it on anybody else.”
“I can understand that.” Earnest tossed a glance my way. He dipped his head minutely as if to reassure me, I’m okay with him, Pilgrim, and eased back. He drank off his near-boiling tea, oblivious to the burn. We listened to the fire crackle for a time. A few early-falling leaves fluttered down, like bats descending from darkness into our sphere of light.
“Anyway,” Earnest said, “this’s past my bedtime. I’m gonna turn in.” He stood, yawned, brushed off his pants. “Anyway, yeah, you guys have some catching up to do. So I bid you goodnight, adieu, and hasta la vista. Ann, got some entertainment scheduled for the morning, remember.” Then his bearlike form faded away from the campfire’s light and disappeared downhill.
Cat and I sat there, unsure where to take it.
“You know,” Erik said, gesturing after Earnest with his cup, “I like that guy. He’s got a keen eye, that’s for sure.”
“For what?” I asked.
He shrugged. “For losers.”
Erik wanted to sleep in the woods, said he could use it, and anyway three would have crowded the tent. He gathered his mummy bags and headed off into the shadows uphill. I heard him moving about at some distance, scuffing, probably seeking enough flat ground without rocks to make a nest for himself.
Cat and I washed the dishes in my aluminum sink, using warm water from the teakettle, then dowsed the fire and took to the tent. Exhaling steam, we settled into our bedding. Cat wore an Incan-knit hat pulled well down over her face, the earflaps’ braided strings tied beneath her chin. I blew out the last candles and shut off the Coleman lantern.
“That was … weird,” Cat whispered. “What the …?”
“Why’s he so closemouthed? What’s he told you?”
“Not a lot. Nothing, actually. We’ve spent almost no time together. When we did talk, we mainly talked about you.”
“Oh, yeah? What’d you tell him?”
“Huh! I was as cagey as he is. Figured you should tell him whatever it is you think he needs to know. I wasn’t going to tell him that you … ran into some hard weather and all that. Figured you should put your own spin on it.”
We were quiet for a while. A slight breeze had uncoiled from the sleeping woods, bringing down a loose scatter of leaves that landed invisibly on the tent fly with soft dry thuds and then slid rasping down the nylon.
“I guess he strikes me as someone who’s had some hard weather, too,” I said.
“For sure.”
“Back when I used to call him, out in California? He was hanging out with a druggie crowd. He sounded like a stoner. Wasn’t surprising. Remember, he got busted in high school?”
“I remember a very tense period at your house and a mandatory haircut for Erik.”
“It made me sad, because he’s too smart to waste himself that way. He never mentioned having a job. I kind of figured he’d gotten into the marijuana business. He sort of hinted at it sometimes. He was up in Northern California. That’s where a lot of it’s grown, isn’t it?”
“That was his ‘agricultural’ experience?”
“An inside joke, I guess. An insider’s joke.”
“Thus the defensive bristle.”
I didn’t know. I was getting drowsy, but Cat seemed to have a hard time getting comfortable, shifting and rearranging and rolling over and resettling her pillow.
Then her voice, tiny in the darkness: “His van? It’s really packed. I mean, I haven’t gone inside it, just stood in the door, but it’s packed to the ceiling. All these boxes, taped, sealed tight.” She paused and added reluctantly, “It … has a plant smell. Earthy, sort of sharp plant smell. Sorta like … pot.”
My heart plummeted. But I couldn’t bear to ask anything more. And I had to be up at four to milk the cows.
Chapter 36
But of course, I didn’t sleep after that. In my jagged imaginings, I could only assume that Erik had come across country with a van felony-full of dope that he planned to sell on the East Coast or, for all I knew, here in Vermont. And that the van was now sitting on Brassard’s property, and that Erik was extremely touchy about it all. I replayed our campfire conversation and saw hints of danger throughout. I needed to get away from the West Coast. What—needed a change of pace, a new “headspace”? Or that the law was after him? Or he’d gotten into trouble with some other California drug suppliers? Needed to escape child-support payments? The creaky hyper hamster wheel of my mind spun all night.
At some point, I heard an irritating noise that was, of course, my little alarm clock: four a.m. Whatever else, the cows had to get milked. Cat didn’t wake. I dressed and stumped downhill, exhausted, and crossed the road just as W
ill came out of the house to take his shift with me. The motion lights switched on in the farmyard. Erik’s van had no side windows, but I shaded my eyes to peek through the windshield, and back in the dim interior I could just make out what Cat had described: a wall of stacked boxes, all the same size, floor to ceiling. I fled to the milking parlor.
Once you’ve milked for a couple of years, you become sort of a machine yourself. You could do it in your sleep. Diz probably could have done it after she was dead. But the mix of extreme fatigue and tension and relentless routine is not a good one.
Will noticed. Kindly, he asked if I wanted to skip it this morning, he’d ring Lynn or wake Earnest up. I told him I was fine for it.
“You must be over the moon to see your brother!” he said as he settled a new group of cows into their stations and I began to move down the row of bony angular haunches and swollen bags.
“I sure am!” I said heartily. I didn’t want to go further down that track, so I turned it around and asked him about his own long-estranged half sister: How would he feel if he saw her again?
“I can’t imagine what it would be like. Also can’t imagine it happening.”
“Not even now that Diz is gone?”
“I get Christmas cards from her. With the folded news update inside? Her job, kids, husband, vacations, son’s team wins soccer tournament, Herb’s knee surgery. I drop her a note about once a year. I don’t know anything about her problem with Mom, but I don’t think it’s about anger and resentment anymore. Now it’s, what, just a matter of distance. Time and distance. Life moved on. Jane’s got her twenty-four seven all lined up, more than enough to keep busy, and it’s working for her. Me, half brother, I’m way out, barely on the radar.”
“But you grew up together! Don’t you ever miss her?”
“Huh. Well. Sometimes. But in the female companionship department, my sister isn’t my problem. My wife is my problem.”
“The absence thereof, or the presence thereof?”
He laughed. “I love that! Gotta remember that one!”
Earnest had kept me up to date on Will’s divorce and custody issues. That he lived at the farm now had less to do with its moment of need than with his having to move out of his place in Rutland. He claimed that the divorce was by mutual agreement, but he often seemed sad in a chin-up, quietly burdened way.
Another few minutes passed as Will let out another four cows and positioned four more. “Absence, presence,” he said. “Both. More gone than you’d like, but still there more than you’d like.”
“Both, that’s exactly right.” Wipe and strip, then confession: “I had a tough one myself.”
He smiled gratefully from over the backs of the cows.
I didn’t have time to wonder where Erik or Cat was, because just as we emerged from the barn, Brassard’s old friend Jack Pelletier turned into the drive. His sparkling-clean white truck pulled a covered white trailer with side windows revealing something huge and black and white moving inside. We called Bob inside and shut the door so he wouldn’t get underfoot.
Pelletier’s bulls were regionally renowned for their quality. Like Brassard, he had taken over the business from his father, who had provided bulls to Jim’s father—an intergenerational bond. I had met him at Diz’s memorial event: French Canadian ancestry, black haired, a small wiry frame that he carried with an outsize swagger. The two men shook hands, then turned to face the paddock fence as they discussed logistics.
When I first came to my land and heard farmers mention “AI,” I assumed it had to do with artificial intelligence, and rather than reveal my ignorance I’d spent hours trying to relate the concept to the context of overheard discussion. Actually, as I learned when I began working on the farm, “AI” means artificial insemination, which most dairy farmers use to impregnate their cows.
Observing the process for the first time further helped dispel the mythical image of the small farm that lingered in my mind. Surely, I had thought, there was a dashing bull out there in the pasture, proud and fearsome but gentlemanly. He’d be a Clark Gable of cattle, adored by his paramours, his gallantry adding a touch of romance to their otherwise boring lives.
But there was no such bull: Brassard had used AI since the 1990s. At intervals throughout the year, he bought cryogenically frozen bull semen in long, thin ampules called “straws.” When a cow went into heat, he—in the past, with Diz assisting—reached his whole arm into her intestinal tract, where he could then use his fingers to guide the long wand of a semen “gun” that he inserted into the birth canal. When he could feel that the wand had gotten all the way to the uterus, he pushed the plunger on the gun and emptied the straw. If all went well, the cow gave birth nine months later.
I hadn’t yet donned the armpit-length rubber glove and done the internal groping and finessing. The task held no appeal for me. But I had learned to thaw the straws, load the gun, and otherwise assist.
AI allowed Brassard to keep his herd’s calving cycles at optimum, select only the best sires, and introduce genetic diversity into the herd, making sure that he didn’t mate heifers with their own fathers. Like most Vermont farmers, he kept a vat of liquid nitrogen, about the size of a wastebasket, containing a stash of straws to be used as needed.
But farmers didn’t use the practice when he was growing up, and his father had always kept a bull or two to service the herd. In fact, Brassard was still dubious about AI. One reason was that when a cow has a date with a bull, she’s 95 percent certain to get with calf; AI was only half as reliable. Brassard and Pelletier had in common the belief—which Will insisted was totally unfounded—that natural insemination produced healthier calves that ultimately delivered more milk.
Also, Pelletier liked to do “pen testing” of his young bulls with Brassard’s cows and heifers. One of the key criteria for a bull’s value was his sex drive—how motivated was he, what was his “service capacity”? A bull demonstrating good libido could be counted on to produce more sperm and thus more money. Pelletier was proud of his animals, always eager to show off his latest breeding masterpiece; Brassard, this time with three heifers and three mature cows ready to go, was grateful for the favor.
The pending arrival of the bull had required some preparation. Over the years, Brassard had kept the farm’s old breeding pen—a strongly built board-fenced paddock set into the near pasture—in pretty good shape. Still, the morning before Cat’s telephone call, Will and I had gone out to check the condition of the fence. We hammered in every nail head, checked every board and replaced older ones with fresh lumber, tested gate hinges and latches. As we worked, Will told me horror stories about bulls trampling and goring farmers, injuring cows so badly they had to be put down, killing farm dogs, crashing through fences. They were preposterously strong and had volatile tempers—another reason farmers preferred AI.
By the time we finished battening down the pen, my imagination had conjured a new and unsettling image of bulls. They weren’t Ferdinand, the callow youngster sniffing flowers under the cork tree, nor chivalrous bovine Clark Gables. They were monsters, demons so savage they were effectively carnivores. Max’s imminent arrival added to my anxiety about Erik and his van: I envisioned the bull coming to the farm strapped and chained to a sort of a dolly, the way Hannibal Lecter got transported, to be rolled to the breeding pen.
Chuckling, Will also cautioned me about Pelletier himself. He was Brassard’s age, but he had a lascivious persona, liked to chat up women and exploit his profession and his animals for suggestive narratives. I could expect some ribald commentary.
Lynn had moved the harem into the breeding pen while Will and I did the milking, so by the time Pelletier arrived we were ready.
Brassard and Pelletier talked some more, then Pelletier started up his truck again and expertly backed up so that the trailer was closer to the paddock gate. When at last he swung aside the doors to reveal the monster, I was imp
ressed but not terrified. Max had shoulders and chest like a pile of boulders, and a neck thick as a tree trunk, but he did not have horns or a surly attitude. He was not Hannibal Lecter and this was not Pamplona. He clomped daintily down the ramp from his trailer, lifted his nose, then moved toward the cows. He actually was quite handsome. Jack Pelletier walked next to him, holding the rope to his nose ring as Brassard flanked him on the other side. Charged with gate duty, I stayed well ahead, intimidated by Max’s sheer mass more than his disposition. Earnest followed with an extra rope in case of any unexpected turns of events.
Pelletier told me he had a particular fondness and great hopes for young Max, who was fourteen months old and had a scrotal circumference of thirty-eight centimeters. Mistaking me for someone who knew anything about the subject, he rambled happily on, using acronyms and specific measures of health, vigor, muscle-to-fat ratios, and so on.
This was Max’s first date, Pelletier explained cheerfully. Sure, he wanted to pen test the boy’s service capacity, but just as important, it only seemed fair that a bull—most likely doomed to mechanical mates for the rest of his life—should experience the real thing at least once. Six or eight mounts in a day, Pelletier said, would be good for the boy’s morale and qualify him as a gigolo or porn star with excellent career prospects.
The men introduced Max to his harem, and we all lingered to watch. There were no fireworks. The cows didn’t seem to care much, and even the heifers showed very little agitation. Max didn’t rip around, snorting and kicking up turf, but just nosed his way among the girls, mildly interested in their behinds but not aggressively so. None of them seemed particularly focused on the task at hand—tails switched at flies, ears swiveled this way and that as they listened to sounds from around the farm.
I was standing next to Earnest, arms folded over the paddock fence, watching, when hands came around my waist and held me hard. Erik kissed the back of my head, Cat joined us at the fence. At the far end of the pen, the small mountain of Max’s body reared high as he made his first mount of the day. “Attaboy,” Pelletier said quietly, fondly. The cow seemed hardly to notice. When Max came back to all fours, he rested his big head on his mate’s hindquarters.