The Bucolic Plague

by Josh Kilmer-Purcell

  I steered the tiller toward the small twenty-by-thirty-foot patch of grass that I envisioned would supply our multitude of summer dinner parties. Though there still was a spring chill in the air, I was sweating profusely by the time I reached my destination. I tugged at the lever that I thought activated the tines. It did. They began spinning, slowly and determinedly, tugging at the long weeds. At first the tines simply scraped at the surface of the ground as I walked back and forth over my plot of dreams. The grasses wrapped themselves around the axle of the tiller’s blades. By the third pass I’d accomplished nothing more than collecting what looked like a large knotted spool of raffia ribbon.

  Just when I convinced myself that I was going to harvest nothing more than hay, one of the tines sank into the hard, clumpy dirt…and immediately kicked up a baseball-size rock that rocketed with great force directly into my shin.

  “Fuck! Ow!”

  But there, in the concave hole where the rock had just been, was a bare spot of dirt as black and rich as any I’d seen in my Wisconsin youth. I wiped my sweaty forehead with my sweatshirt sleeve and pushed onward, forward, back and forth, up and down what would eventually be the rows of my heirloom vegetable Eden. Each pass across the plot drew new bruises on both shins as rocks, chunks of old fenceposts, and random rusty machine parts shot up out of the earth, as if it kept its own artillery down below.

  Strangely, the most common pieces of detritus were bones. Ranging from the size of a thumb to a shin (literally), the ground was coughing up as many gray and stained skeletal pieces as rocks. I hadn’t thought about it, but the number of dead animals that must have been buried this close to the barn over the course of 205 years must have been staggering. And I hoped they were animals. For all I knew, I could just as easily be desecrating an old slave burial plot. If that was the case, I prayed they were gaining some comfort in watching the plantation master sweat his own ass off with bleeding shins.

  For the next six hours I shoved, and grinded, and clawed at the muddy ground. Occasionally I’d spot Brent around the barnyard, but I had no idea what he was doing. I was completely focused. I didn’t feel a minute of chill as the sun set behind the hills of Cherry Valley off to the west. By the time I noticed John shutting off the light inside the barn after the evening milking, the purple cloudless evening sky was just barely light enough to keep me from chopping my own feet off. When John appeared in the barn’s doorway, I could see him squinting out into the darkness toward me and the sound of the tiller’s engine. Having been inside with the goats all afternoon, he’d surely forgotten that I’d been steadily hacking away. He stood and watched me for a minute. I’d like to think he was impressed that this city boy had been sweating at his chores for as long a time as he had been.

  As he crossed the yard to the small “co-farmer’s” cottage, he avoided making eye contact.

  He was probably still thinking that it was far too late in the season to plant peas.

  My next three days were consumed with the alchemy of turning my six-hundred-square-foot neglected pasture into an oasis of silken chocolate earth. I arose at the first HERE COMES THE BRIDE! and brought my morning cup of coffee out to the “garden” where the tiller waited for me, coated in dew. I’d come to learn its most intimate secrets, from the barely audible squeaking when one of the tines needed readjustment to the complaining flatulence when the gas tank ran low.

  Brent came to check on me occasionally, but he’d been with me long enough to know that when I become obsessed with a task, it’s best to stay out of my way—especially if I’m wielding a piece of heavy machinery outfitted with rotating claws.

  My only real company was Bubby the Barn Cat. Bubby sat on the fencepost by the garden-in-progress and watched me toil through most of the day. Occasionally he jumped down to glide between my feet as I tilled my rows, defying the spinning tines of death in an effort to get me to pick him up and carry him on my shoulder.

  Bubby was another of the animals we’d inherited with the farm. Most of the barn cats I’d known in my youth subscribed to the “good mousers should be neither seen nor heard” philosophy. Perhaps having escaped the weighted-burlap-bag-tossed-in-cow-pond fate of most barn kittens, they felt it best not to tempt further human contact.

  But Bubby was different. When he was introduced to us by the previous caretaker’s wife, she’d explained that from the day he mysteriously showed up at the Beekman he’d always been the number-one mouser at the farm. His large size attested to his skills. Back then he wasn’t any friendlier than most barn cats, she told us, but he was the best at his job. He didn’t tolerate anything smaller than a foot long within a hundred-yard vicinity of the barn. He was known to sit high in the hayloft door, watching for approaching intruders in the surrounding fields. Within a split second, he’d run down the hay conveyor belt, leap onto the split rail fence, and race down the pasture, reaching his victim before it even knew it was in a war zone. We were pretty sure it was Bubby’s remarkably bright goldenrod-yellow eyes that gave him his super-feline x-ray vision.

  Then one evening a few years ago Bubby was struck by a car on the road in front of the house. He survived till morning. The caretaker and his wife spotted him at sunrise dragging himself toward the barn on his front paws. Even with his back legs mangled, Bubby was not going to miss a day of work. They called the Selzners, the Beekman’s previous owners, who instructed them to bring their chief mouser to the vet and to spare no expense in his treatment and recovery.

  Which is how Bubby wound up being perhaps the only barn cat in the world with his hip held together with an intricate patchwork of titanium rods. His nickname was “Bionic Bubby.”

  And, as if he knew how fortunate he was, he also returned home from the animal hospital as the world’s most grateful and loving barn cat.

  By the time the sun had reached its highest point in the sky on Memorial Day, I’d spent three full days working the rough patch of dirt. It probably wasn’t ready for a Martha Stewart Living photo spread yet, but at least I had workable dirt that could sustain life.

  “What do you think, Bubs?”

  Bubby, perched on my shoulder, carefully surveyed the new garden with me, making sure that I hadn’t unearthed anything mammalian. Along the side of the garden, I’d made one pile for the rocks I raked through and another pile of all the bones. The bone pile was easily three times as large. I picked up a shovel and scooped them into the wheelbarrow, filling it almost to the point of overflowing. I wheeled it through a broken section of the split rail fence and halfway up the eastern pasture. When I reached a spot fifty yards or so from the garden, I tilted the wheelbarrow sideways, letting the various bones slide out into the deep weeds.

  I didn’t know if there was an appropriate catchall, reburial service for two hundred years’ worth of mixed remains of Native Americans, slaves, childhood victims of scarlet fever/consumption/measles/etc., cows, chickens, and horses. But as I took my hands and spread the bone pile more evenly across the springtime pasture, I hoped that the past spirits took some solace in my efforts to revive, even on a small scale, a part of what they contributed their lives to years ago.

  Now we were a real farm.

  Again.

  Chapter Ten

  “What do I do with this?” Jason, one of the summer interns at my ad agency, asked me. He was holding his mug of coffee in one hand and staring quizzically at the produce dangling tentatively from his other.

  “You eat it,” I answered, sweeping up the scattered dirt that had fallen onto the counter in the agency’s kitchen area. A crowd had gathered around the basket filled with the earliest bounty from the Beekman garden. One of the account executives, Julie, was holding an egg with the same perplexed look on her face.

  “Don’t you have to do something to eggs before you can eat them?” she asked.

  “Well,” I answered, “You can fry them or boil them—”

  “No,” she interrupted. “I mean, are they safe? Do we have to sterilize them somehow?”
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  It would’ve been easy to make fun of my colleagues’ lack of knowledge about where food comes from, but I was actually quite pleased at the number of them checking out the array of dirty and misshapen produce I’d arranged under a sign with the handwritten words: BEEKMAN FREE FARMERS MARKET. Most New Yorkers barely grocery shopped, let alone knew the details of the journey their food took before it reached the store.

  “Rinse it off and take a bite,” I instructed Jason. “Go on.”

  He held it under the running faucet for a moment, as tentatively as if it were going to wrap around his wrist and climb up his arm. He shook off the excess water drops and took a minuscule nibble with his front teeth.

  “What is it,” he asked, obviously not quite sure if he liked it.

  “It’s a radish,” I answered. He immediately broke out into a wide grin.

  “Oh yeah! It is!” he responded, as if he was finally able to reconcile the sharp taste in his mouth with his memory of a salad. “I’ve never seen a whole one!”

  Within minutes the basket was empty of the Cimarron lettuce, French breakfast radishes, Freezonia pea shoots, baby Bloomsdale spinach leaves, and the few tiny Scarlet Nantes Half-Long carrots I’d picked early because I was too excited to let them mature. By the time I returned to my desk, I had a dozen e-mails asking me for more details about the garden. What else was I growing? What was I holding out from them? Did I have beans? Potatoes?

  I’d grown to relish my role in the office as a sort of rural conquistador. It was like I’d opened up a trade route to far-off mysterious lands. Excursions for many of my colleagues meant weekends in the Hamptons, shopping at the same high-end stores and eating at restaurants manned by the same chefs as in Manhattan. By comparison, my three-hour weekly trek to Schoharie County was practically the Silk Road. I’d already advised one colleague about how to plant tomato plants on her Brooklyn fire escape, and another one was considering buying a couple of chickens for her Bronx backyard.

  Over at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Brent too was enjoying his role as gentleman farmer. On rainy weekdays, he’d taken to wearing the shiny black rubber barn-mucking boots he bought at Walmart to his work. The fashionistas there loved them, and he’d already had to bring back several pairs in women’s sizes.

  The only downside of our new nomadic life was how long the week seemed in between the weekends. I hadn’t expected to feel so at home at the Beekman as quickly as I had. We’d purchased it as a second home, but it was already easily winning our affections over our home in the city.

  We’d also made many more new friends in Sharon Springs than we’d expected. The sudden rash made me realize how many of my friends in New York City were colleagues. All of them, really—just another indication of how my career was beginning to completely define me. In Sharon Springs, our new friends seemed to have no real interest in the advertising and marketing world. The Stewart’s Shops convenience store at the village’s only stoplight didn’t carry Adweek magazine or PR News. It was surprisingly much more rewarding to spend five minutes talking about the weather in the Agway parking lot than at a three-day seminar about the future of digital direct marketing. Okay, maybe it was just surprising to me.

  An additional bonus of having a new social circle in Sharon Springs was that they never made me feel uncool. New York City sometimes seems like one large competitive cocktail party. From the moment I chose an outfit to wear each morning to the moment I chose which new restaurant to eat at in the evening, I felt as if every choice I made was being evaluated by my friends and colleagues. Was the new belt I was wearing stylish? Or at the very least, ironic? Should I risk eating at that new Indonesian take-out place that had just opened in a warehouse basement near my office? It was recommended by a popular blogger, but there was clearly a rat’s nest behind the stairway leading down to the entrance.

  Like most advertising agencies, the average age of the employees at mine seemed to hover around twenty-four. Most of the people I worked with were born just around the time I was busy being uncool in high school. It felt as if I’d had a brief moment of inexplicable popularity sometime in my twenties, mostly attributed to my drag queen escapades, and ever since I’d been slipping back toward geekdom or worse—complete irrelevance. I only knew a handful of successful advertising colleagues who managed to be gainfully employed past forty-five. The rest, I was convinced, were shipped away to the Midwest after they showed up to work one day wearing the wrong shade of denim. Hell, I didn’t know if “denim” was a word anymore.

  But none of that mattered in Sharon Springs. I could show up at the Agway wearing my high school prom tux and the person behind me in line would still just bitch about the rain.

  To celebrate all of our new “uncool” friends, and to thank them for all their help in getting the Beekman back up and running, we decided to throw our very first party a few months after we’d moved in. Brent had planned for it to be an old-fashioned Fourth of July picnic, Martha-style, with bunting on the porch, grass-fed hamburgers, sparklers, and, to top it all off, a cherry pie from the cherries of our very own tree.

  We’d watched all spring as the old cherry tree in the backyard grew heavier and heavier with ripening fruit. Two weekends before the Fourth, I followed the advice of someone I’d met in line at Agway (of course, where else?) and purchased a large roll of black plastic bird netting. It wasn’t easy to cover the twenty-foot tree, but Brent and I finished it late the previous Sunday evening. We knew that by the time the holiday came around, the tree would be laden with jewel-red fruit, unscathed by the flocks of birds that called the Beekman their home.

  “I think we should crank our own ice cream to put on the cherry pie,” Brent mused on the train trip up to the Beekman that long holiday weekend.

  “I don’t think we’re going to have time to make our own ice cream,” I said. “The cherry tree is loaded. Most of the weekend will be spent picking, pitting, and freezing them.”

  “Oh, that can’t take more than a couple of hours,” Brent said.

  “Look at my palms,” I said, holding them out for his inspection. “See how white they are?”

  Brent, not knowing exactly where this was heading but equally certain that I was about to make a pointless point, rolled his eyes.

  “They were permanently bleached from pitting sour cherries, day after day after day, when I was a child. One tree will give buckets and buckets of cherries.”

  “Your hands were not permanently bleached,” he sighed.

  “They’re awfully white, aren’t they?”

  “Yes, you’re suffering from a very rare case of reverse melanoma.” In his capacity as house doctor, Brent frequently diagnosed me with terminal cancer just to get me to quit complaining. When I do finally die, I plan to do so writhing in pain and bleeding from all orifices, simply to spite him.

  “Plus this is the weekend we said we’d clean out the hayloft, weed the flower garden, and trellis the beans,” I said. “By the time the party rolls around, we’ll be exhausted. Let’s just buy ice cream.”

  “That’s not very Martha Stewart Entertaining,” he said.

  “I think two gay city boys trying to light a grill will be entertaining enough for them.”

  First thing Saturday morning, having been awoken to the usual Wagner/Madonna/Sinatra rooster medley, we grabbed two buckets from the barn and headed out to the cherry tree.

  “Wow. It’s loaded,” Brent said. The branches were bent to the ground, weighted down with the most beautiful sprays of ruby red globes. Brent reached through the netting, picked a cherry, and popped it in his mouth, then quickly spit it out. “They’re not ripe yet,” he said. “They’re still really sour.”

  “They’re supposed to be,” I explained. Having grown up in the South, Brent was used to sweet cherries. Where I lived, only sour cherry trees would survive the winter. “They’re sour cherries. For pies. And jellies. You can’t eat them raw.”

  “Blech.” He spit out the remaining unchewed pieces.
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  “I read online that they’re one of Martha’s favorite pie varieties,” I said, completely lying. “Now help me get this netting off.”

  He walked to the other side of the tree and began tugging at the black netting. We struggled for a good half hour before the netting finally landed in a tangled heap of snagged leaves and branches on the ground next to the base of the tree.

  And then it began to move.

  Random corners of the billowy netting were flapping and fluttering at our feet. I lifted up one of the moving corners to investigate.

  “There’s a bird caught in the net,” I said.

  “I know. There’s one over on this end too.”

  I dropped to my knees and began trying to unravel the terrified sparrow. Each time I managed to free so much as a tail feather, it spasmed and flapped and became even further entangled. I shifted my position to get a better angle, and wound up kneeling on something soft. Moving my knee I found a corpse of another bird, this one long dead. It must have become tangled earlier in the week and starved.

  “There are dozens of dead birds!” I called out. Brent realized the same thing at his end. “Go get me some scissors.”

  The rest of the morning was spent creating a sort of triage on the yard. The dead birds were put in one pile, the mostly dead birds were wrapped tightly in kitchen towels so as not to further injure themselves, and the healthiest freed birds were set underneath the nearby mock orange shrubs with a saucer of water where they would hopefully recuperate from their shock.

  Bubby, of course, had to be continually shooed away. He and the other barn cats circled the scene like leopards at a watering hole.

  We finally extricated the last bird around noon. The few of them that had survived limped and flapped their way to their own private hiding spaces in the flower garden.

  Bubby, perhaps sensing our crestfallen exhaustion, moved in closer and rubbed against my shins while eyeing the bounty of the fallen battleground all around us.