The Bucolic Plague

by Josh Kilmer-Purcell

  I’d met Martha in her kitchen, which I’d recognized from dozens of photos and television specials. She was making our meal. When we’d been invited to her house for lunch, I hadn’t expected her to actually be making it herself. But there she was, making freshly ground tuna and wasabi patties with her bare hands, just like my mother. (If my mother made freshly ground tuna and wasabi patties.)

  Given Martha’s reputation as a stern taskmaster, I was a little nervous about standing around doing nothing while she cooked.

  “Can I help with anything?” I asked.

  “Yes, thank you,” Martha replied in her adopted Connecticut clipped enunciation. “Would you cut up that celery for the salad?”

  I stared at the stalks of celery lying perfectly and crisply prone on the counter before me. I was frozen with fear as the questions started a pileup in my mind.

  How big? Diced? Chopped? Do I string it first? Didn’t I see her string celery on a Thanksgiving special once? Do I cut straight across? On an angle? Which angle?! Forty-five degrees? Twenty degrees? A slight but decorative slant? Isn’t this a paring knife? Don’t I need a chef’s knife? Can celery be pared? Is this a cutting board or a platter? What if this is the meat cutting board (which must be washed with a light bleach solution—Martha Stewart Living, January 1992) and not the vegetable one (which should be rubbed with a cut lemon to deodorize a lingering onion smell—November 1996)? Is the proper way to slit one’s wrist across the veins or along the veins? Can I die without getting any bloodstains on Martha’s spotless kitchen floor?

  I closed my eyes and went for broke.

  Chop.

  I looked up. Martha hadn’t exploded in a rage. So I continued.

  “So, Josh, tell me,” Martha said, as she began washing freshly shelled peas in a Martha Stewart green strainer. “What do you do?”

  “Well, I work in advertising,” I answered, “and I write.”

  “Oh. Interesting. What do you write?”

  “Um. I, ah, wrote a memoir,” I answered, pronouncing “memoir” with an overly pretentious French accent in an attempt to make a joke out of the fact that I—at only thirty-six years old—had already written the story of my life. “Mem-MWAAHHE.” The joke fell flat. Apparently French accents aren’t all that pretentiously out of place in East Hampton.

  “A memoir?” Martha continued. “What did you have to write a memoir about?”

  I looked over at Brent. He furrowed his brow in warning. But what could I do? She asked me.

  “Weeeellll, um, I, uh…I was a drag queen for many years and I worked in nightclubs, but I had a, well, little drinking problem that put me in, ah, rather sordid situations, and then I met a boyfriend whom I thought was going to help me clean myself up, but he turned out to be a, um, male escort specializing in, ah, sadomasochism who I also eventually found out had a massive crack cocaine addiction, which didn’t help my drinking issues. But it’s not all that sad; it’s more of a tragicomedy, if you know what I mean, because, well, I did a lot of funny things and all my costumes had live goldfish swimming around in my fake tits—er—breasts, which was really quite creative, Martha. You would have really appreciated it. Because it was creative. It was like Halloween all year round. A lot of crafting went into my costumes. Really, it was quite creative. And crafty. Really. Crafts…”

  For some reason, I thought that if I could successfully reframe my checkered past as one big craft project, Martha could relate to it better. She couldn’t.

  The resulting silence seemed to last forever. Standing there in the kitchen I’d seen so many times on television, I’d desperately wished that fate would somehow intervene and cut to a commercial break.

  Instead, Martha turned off the faucet, shook the strainer of wet peas, looked me in the eye and said:

  “So. Are you normal now?”

  I remember biting my tongue to keep from blurting out: “About as normal as a sixty-five-year-old billionairess wearing a federal penal system ankle monitor.” But I didn’t. It was an interesting question. Looking back, I don’t think she was judging, just asking. I think she would’ve agreed that she, herself, wasn’t all that “normal.”

  And in fact, at the time she’d asked, I had become far too normal. I’d left behind my drinking, drugs, and drag, and had fallen into a predictable pattern of work, sleep, and, well, more work and sleep. And while I might have successfully saved my health, my life had certainly lost a lot of its entertainment value—not just for others, but also for myself. I was just another ad guy going into work each day, tossing off a few commercial scripts, and pretending that I was so much cooler than the accountants, executive assistants, wholesalers, and Wall Street suits riding the subway car home with me each evening. But it was growing harder and harder to convince myself.

  So purchasing the Beekman was both a step backward and forward at the same time. For good or for bad, buying a farm was just as unexpected a move for an urban gay ad guy as putting on a dress and a wig. Maybe I was well on my way back to abnormal.

  Funnily enough, the sheer absurdity of owning a farm felt just as comfortable and wildly unpredictable as my drag gigs in nightclubs. I was excited again for the first time in several years. I had so many new dance steps to learn, so many new costumes to try on. What did I know about owning a farm? My future was suddenly as promising as a roll of free drink tickets once was to me.

  By Sunday night, when Brent and I piled into our new truck for the return trip to the train station, we had a to-do list that filled two full pages of a yellow legal pad—both sides. The house needed to be painted. The barn had to be cleaned out of old furniture and equipment. The chicken coop was nearly shin-deep in fossilized manure. Instead of being daunted in the face of all these unfamiliar tasks, I was energized. Finally, I was in unfamiliar territory again without a map.

  No, Martha, I wasn’t normal yet.

  But it had been a close call.

  Chapter Seven

  Dear Brent and Josh,

  I heard about your purchase of the Beekman Mansion from Doug and Garth at the American Hotel. I hope you don’t mind me writing to you, but I wanted to see whether you might be looking for a caretaker.

  My name is John Hall, and I grew up in Sharon Springs. I have always admired the Beekman, even when it was abandoned and falling apart. It is a beautiful house and farm. If I were caretaker of the Beekman, I would keep it in a condition so that people driving by would want to stop and stare at it.

  I am an avid gardener and also own several goats. I always wanted goats as a child. They are very friendly and peaceful. I recently broke up with my partner and am living at my parents’ home. If you are interested in having animals, I could bring my goats to the Beekman as well. My ex-partner is letting me keep them at his farm for the time being. I have another month to find them a new home before I have to sell them at auction.

  I am including a picture of me in my vegetable garden, and with two of my newest “girls,” Darla and Dana. They were born two weeks ago.

  Sincerely,

  John Hall

  Brent looked over my shoulder at the letter and two enclosed photos we found tucked in an unmarked envelope that had been placed in our mailbox. One photo was of a husky balding man who seemed to be about forty-five holding on to a sunflower stalk that must have stood at least twelve feet tall. He was smiling broadly. At his feet were vines and flowers of what appeared to be a lush vegetable garden.

  In the other photo, the man was sitting—with the same broad smile—on top of an upturned bucket. On his lap were two small animals…either goats or sheep. I couldn’t tell. Or more accurately: I didn’t know. The goats/sheep were suckling at two bottles he held in either hand. I couldn’t tell who seemed more content—the animals or the man. In both pictures the man’s smile seemed so honest, guileless. Having lived in New York City for so many years, I wasn’t used to seeing a smile that didn’t have an agenda behind it.

  I was jealous of the man in the pictures. How wonderful it must
be to have a job that is instantaneously rewarding. He didn’t have to create sixty-page PowerPoint presentations on how to market an aging airline brand to leisure travelers. He didn’t have to hold daylong management meetings about year over year growth strategies and merger possibilities. After our first stay in our new second home, the past week in the city had seemed interminably long. All I could think about was returning for our second weekend at the Beekman.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Brent warned.

  “But look at how cute they are.”

  I knew exactly what Brent was concerned about. Being a proud student of Martha’s, he was worried about messing up the barn—and the smell. Brent had visited Martha’s stables at Bedford. They were spotless and smelled faintly of orange disinfectant. Some people throw around clichés like “so clean that you could eat off of the floor” metaphorically. But Martha actually serves her Thanksgiving dinners each year in her stable.

  “We can’t afford a caretaker,” Brent said.

  “Maybe he’d work for free. We could give him the empty house and pay for all his utilities.” We still hadn’t decided what we were going to do with the small modular home where the previous caretaker lived.

  “I’m not sure that’s fair to him,” Brent said. “Besides, we could make some money renting out that house.”

  “But we can’t go on asking the neighbors to feed the chickens during the week.”

  “It’s a fair trade for eggs.”

  “Look at these baby goats,” I said, holding up the picture again. “If he doesn’t find a home for them in a month, they’re going to have to go to the auction house. And I don’t mean Sotheby’s.”

  Brent took a second look at the picture.

  “We can’t afford it,” Brent said again.

  “Baaah…” I said, in my best imitation of what a homeless baby goat might sound like.

  “That’s the noise sheep make,” Brent said. “And, by the way, the correct name for baby goats is ‘kids.’”

  “See? You know so much about goats already,” I said. “Your mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

  “Look,” Brent said. “We don’t need a barn full of animals. We’re not real farmers.”

  “But we wouldn’t even have to do any work,” I protested. “They’re John’s goats. All we’d need to do is pet them on the weekends.”

  “No.”

  “Okay. You’ll think about it.”

  “No.”

  “Just get back to me once you’ve decided.”

  “No.”

  “So you’ll sleep on it.”

  “No.”

  We spent the next forty-eight hours having the same conversation. While we were cleaning out the hayloft:

  “You know what eats hay? Baby goats.”

  “No.”

  While we were sweeping up the past week’s worth of dead zombie flies:

  “Goats eat anything. I bet they eat flies.”

  “No.”

  While we were arguing about living room paint colors:

  “You know what else butts heads?”

  “I said no.”

  Sunday evening rolled around without my being able to get so much as a single “maybe” out of Brent. He argued that we had enough chores on our hands simply trying to keep a 205-year-old house in one piece. I argued that John would actually be helping us. He could keep the lawn mowed and do some other light handiwork.

  In Brent’s defense, our first two weekends were incredibly full of chores. We worked from sunrise to sunset trying to keep the property in pristine, Martha-worthy condition. Adding yet another element to the farm, especially one that wasn’t toilet trained, would probably only complicate our lives even more, which was exactly the opposite of why we’d purchased a weekend home. We wanted a place to relax, to get away from our respective offices with their own peculiar Animal Farm style of politics.

  I tried one last time on the train back to the city.

  “Did you know that goat pupils are actually rectangular?”

  “No,” Brent replied. “And no.”

  Much to both of our dismay, Brent was unable to come up to the Beekman the following weekend. He had to travel with Martha to the West Coast for a weeklong string of business meetings ending with a weekend spa retreat in Arizona.

  Since it seemed he and I were only able to scratch the surface of chores in our allotted forty-eight-hour visits, I’d decided to surprise Brent while he was away by taking an entire week off of work to check off a wide swath of our Beekman to-do list.

  On my first day alone at the Beekman, someone delivered a thin promotional paper to our mailbox called the Penny Saver. It was a miraculous publication. I found listings for everything from pool services to house painters to exterminators, and had begun referring to it as “my own personal Penny Savior.”

  By Tuesday I had a veritable army assembled at the Beekman, and by Wednesday the property was humming with activity. The life was welcome. Without Brent, I’d found the cavernous, empty house to be a little bit lonely at night, and the wide-open windswept fields to be a little desolate by day.

  By the time I had to return to the city the following Sunday evening, I’d had the pool opened, new gravel put in the driveway, half of the mansion’s east facade painted, the chicken coop cleaned out, the massive flower beds raked, summer screens placed in all of the windows, the gutters gutted, and the lawn mowed.

  Brent would be amazed at all I’d accomplished when we returned the following weekend.

  Perhaps he’d be so surprised that he wouldn’t even mind the eighty-eight goats in the barn.

  Chapter Eight

  “What was that?” Brent asked as he pulled his heavy briefcase out of the backseat of the pickup truck. A large June bug buzzed past my ear in its kamikaze rush toward the truck’s dome light. The evening was surprisingly warm. Our trip to the farm from the train station was slowed by a heavy fog that clung along the roads. My mother used to call this summer nighttime phenomenon a “witches haze.”

  “What was what?”

  “That noise.”

  “Probably one of the roosters.”

  “At ten o’clock at night?”

  “Maybe he’s rehearsing.”

  “Shh,” he said. “Someone’s in the barn.”

  “No one’s in the barn,” I said, sighing, just as another loud thud echoed across the yard. Shit. I’d hoped that we could make it inside the house, go to bed, and wait until the morning for a tour of all the work that had been accomplished. Winding up, of course, in the barn.

  “Oh, whatever,” I said. “You’re going to find out soon enough. Follow me.”

  The sliding barn door was heavy, and it took me three heavy pulls before it gave way. Its squeaky protest jolted the barnful of goats into a rousing chorus of “baaahs.”

  Brent glared at me.

  “Just come in and look,” I said.

  The moment I flicked on the light, eighty-eight goats of all shapes and sizes rose to their feet at once and came running over to the edge of their pens to greet us.

  “Oh God,” Brent said.

  “They’re so wonderful,” I quickly retorted. “So friendly.”

  “I can’t believe you did this after I clearly said no.”

  “If after nine years together you still haven’t learned that I don’t listen to you, then you clearly deserve what you get.” I crossed my arms, content with such a logical argument.

  Brent sighed.

  “What are we going to do with all of them?”

  “Nothing. We don’t have to do anything with them. Co-farmer John takes care of them.”

  “You hired him?”

  “No, I didn’t ‘hire’ him,” I explained. “We don’t have to pay anything other than some utilities.”

  Brent shook his head in disbelief.

  “Why didn’t you wait until we could talk about this more?”

  “Because you would’ve have said no again. I’m not stupid.”
/>   He seemed frozen in place.

  “Go on,” I said. “Climb in the pen and pet them.” The pens were divided by the goats’ relative ages. The mothers were in one, the ones born earlier in spring in another, and the very newest ones were in yet another, huddled under heat lamps.

  “I have my suit on,” Brent said. “I don’t want to get dirty.”

  “Well, go inside and change then,” I said.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” Brent said, turning away. How was he resisting their allure?

  On the walk back to the house he kept several steps in front of me.

  “Are you mad at me?” I asked his back.

  “I’m pissed,” he replied without turning around. “We’re supposed to be doing this together.”

  Once we were in the house, he headed straight up to the bedroom. I heard the shower running, then shut off. I’d bought some local cheese to make him an omelet for dinner using our eggs. But he didn’t come back downstairs.

  By the time I went upstairs to check on him, he was already asleep, having broken our rule of not going to bed angry with each other for the very first time.

  The full moon shone across the bed, outlining his curled-up form. Maybe he was right. Maybe my decision had been too rash. What had I been thinking? Wasn’t taking care of a 205-year-old mansion enough of a weekend job? Did we really need a herd of goats to complicate matters? I hate when I begin to doubt myself. Especially when it involves things that can’t be undone.

  I’ve always been too impetuous…and capricious. That’s why I used to wake up on the F line at 6 A.M. with stubble growing through my makeup, one high heel missing, and a chorus of tiny empty Absolut bottles rolling across the subway car floor. Last call, my ass.