The Bucolic Plague

by Josh Kilmer-Purcell

  “A traditional what?” the reporter asks, straining to hear over what I’ve started thinking of as the marimbraphone.

  “A traditional winter farm meal,” Brent says louder. “Everything we’re serving was grown at the Beekman.”

  “How fun. Sounds delicious,” she shouts. “Can I ask you a few questions while we eat?”

  “Sure,” Brent says. We’re all shouting now.

  “So what made you two decide to buy the Beekman?”

  “Well,” Brent says, “both Josh and I grew up in rural areas…” He’s launching into the approved biography answer. It’s not that there are conflicting stories, but the truth is that there is no one answer. There is no one story about anything that happens in the world. This is what people forget when they read nonfiction essays, journalism, or memoirs. Every second of every day, our heads are filled with millions of conflicting emotions and decisions. Compiled over a lifetime—or even a single day for that matter—it’s impossible to have a truthful, accurate, and concise record of anything we do.

  But the reporter has twenty-five hundred words with which to sum up her experience here at the Beekman. And those words will be forever recorded in the nation’s newspaper of record as “the truth.” A truth that has a beginning word and an end word, and exactly 2,498 others in between. And for the hundreds of thousands of people reading the eventual article, those words will be Brent’s and my entire truth, from “once upon a time” till “happily ever after.” Because every story ends with “happily ever after,” right? As long as you end it at the right moment, it does. Most readers will never know more about us than what they read in this article, nor will they want to know more. They will all finish reading the last word thinking that they’ve read the whole, true story of us and the Beekman.

  The reporter also knows that there is no one story. There’s just the one she needs to leave here with tomorrow morning. The answer to why we bought the Beekman could fill the entire paper. Because we wanted a place to get away from the city. Because we wanted to grow our own food. Because the place looks like it belongs on the cover of a magazine, and we wanted a life that looked like the cover of a magazine. Because no one else in the area had the means to take care of such a high-maintenance historic building, and it seemed like a generous task to take on. Because I’m turning forty next year and wanted something to show for it. Because we’re vain, kindhearted, ambitious, shallow, deep, humble, trendy, old-fashioned, rich, poor, proud, and vulnerable. Those are merely the beginning of the reasons we bought the Beekman.

  But those are too many words for the reporter. She only needs one truth for the article. So we pick the one that sparkles most.

  We bought the Beekman to return to a simpler life.

  Truth isn’t beauty. It isn’t even always true. Truth is nothing more than consistency of message.

  I learned that from advertising.

  The marimbraphone is still sending its shattering call through the mansion as I pull some roasted vegetables from the oven.

  “Mmmmm, those smell delicious,” the reporter says. “What are they?”

  “They’re Chantenay long carrots, Sugar Hollow Crown parsnips, and celeriac,” I answer. “It’s one of our favorite combinations.”

  Actually, it’s all we had, and barely at that. The first thing I did this morning was trudge out to the garden, shovel two feet of snow off a couple of the beds, and pour pails of hot water that I ferried from the barn over the frozen dirt. Eventually I was able to loosen these few vegetables up enough to pry them from the frigid earth. There aren’t many, but artfully arranged on a plate they look more “contemporary bistro” than “postwar Scarlett O’Hara.”

  I was also able to find a few unfrozen spinach leaves in the corner of one of the cold frames that I’d rigged up months ago by propping an old window I’d found in the haymow on top of one of the raised beds. With it, Brent assembled a simple winter salad garnished with our own roasted sunflower and pumpkin seeds, minced pieces of dried apple, olive oil, and our homemade apple cider vinegar. For the “main course,” we thinly sliced a few pickled green heirloom tomatoes and layered them on thick slabs of country bread that I’d made the day before. On top we spread a thick smear of homemade goat milk ricotta and some fresh ground pepper, and placed the simple “bruschetta” under the broiler.

  Altogether the meal has a quaintly desperate cleaning-out-the-root-cellar feel to it that I’m sure the reporter felt was purposeful. We valiantly try to conduct the interview over the marimbraphones, but I’m sure she only catches about half of what we say.

  As I clear the dishes, I hiss in Brent’s ear.

  “Can’t you ask them to stop? They’ve been rehearsing for four hours.”

  Brent’s trying to shoo zombie flies away from the homemade cherry pie sitting on the counter.

  “You go ask them,” he whispers.

  “I mean, they’re supposed to be improvisational. What’s the point of rehearsing anyway?”

  A zombie fly falls from the window straight down into a lattice hole of the pie. Brent turns his back to the reporter and tries to fish it out with his finger while I distract her.

  “The cherries in the pie,” I shout over the never-ending music, “come from an ancient cherry tree that grows down by the crypt. We believe it’s a variety that is no longer commercially available.”

  The reporter looks up from her notes. She rubs her temples.

  “You know, guys,” she says. “I think I’ll skip the pie tonight. I think I’m coming down with a migraine.”

  Shit. Between the zombie flies and the withered root vegetables and the marimbraphone, everything was falling apart. We never should have agreed to do this. A New York Times reporter comes all the way to Sharon Springs to write an article on our simple life of quiet country pleasures and instead we send her fleeing to her bedroom before the sun has even ducked below the horizon.

  “We can pick it up in the morning,” the reporter says. “Save me a piece of pie.”

  As if she’s really going to feel like pie after waking up in a bed covered with hundreds, if not thousands, of flies. That’s it. We’ve completely ruined our chances of selling the Beekman brand of country living to the most influential readership in the world. Whatever chance we had of saving the Beekman and turning it into a thriving farm business disappeared up the chimney alongside the smoke from the aged applewood kindling lovingly chopped with the hand-forged hatchet used to kill our heritage breed turkeys.

  We failed. Again.

  “Well, there’s goes our last chance,” I say to Brent, scraping bits of nubbly uneaten parsnips into the trash.

  “What?” he asks over the music, brushing a zombie fly out of his hair.

  “Never mind,” I say. “Pay no attention to the homely drag queen doing dishes.”

  “Should we wake her up?” Brent asks, nervously wiping the counters of flies yet again. He’d awoken at 5:30 for fly patrol, to make sure the kitchen was clear by the time the reporter came down to breakfast. Usually the guests staying in the reporter’s room were woken up by our rooster choir. But in the sub-zero weather, we’d shut them inside the coop with heat lamps. If everything was still, one could still hear the occasional, muffled HERE COMES THE BRIDE! from inside, but it was hardly enough to wake anyone up. Which was okay. I didn’t feel much like sparkling this morning.

  I’d managed to find two eggs in the chicken coop. With the shortening days, most of the hens had long since stopped laying. On the kitchen table, I’d laid out the country bread for toast and homemade pumpkin butter. I planned on poaching the eggs and garnishing them with some of the spindly parsley stalks from the cold frame. The last few potatoes from the root cellar were peeled and pared of their rotten spots, waiting to be turned into hash browns.

  After yesterday’s catastrophes, it was probably futile to try to woo the reporter back into our good graces, but we had to use up the food anyway. Potatoes rotting in the basement would probably affect the Beekman
’s asking price for when we had to sell.

  A winter storm had moved in overnight, blanketing the yard with yet another fresh foot of snow, and it was still falling. It’s conventionally pretty, but Brent and I were long past being affected by the Courier and Ivy–ness of the landscape.

  Just as I begin to wonder whether to make noise outside of her door, the reporter descends the staircase and enters the kitchen.

  “Good morning!” Brent chimes, jumping into breakfast action like Aunt Jemima on methamphetamines. He doesn’t share my sense of surrender about our failure to impress. “How did you sleep?”

  “Great,” she answers. “Too well, actually. I think I might have overslept. My train is at eleven-oh-five.”

  I look at the clock, which happens to be directly above the window framing the blizzard outside. Shit.

  “We’ll have to leave right now to make the train,” I say. “It might take two hours to get to the station in this snow.”

  “Really?” the reporter says.

  “It’s not like the city around here,” I explain. “There are only two village plows. And one of them only seems to run during the summer months.”

  The reporter heads back upstairs to pack her suitcase and, I assume, probably take some photos of the fly killing fields for her editor.

  “Shouldn’t we at least make her breakfast before she goes?” Brent asks, grasping at straws.

  “There’s no time,” I say.

  “But she didn’t even get a chance to eat dinner last night.”

  Why can’t he just give it up?

  “Just put a piece of cherry pie on a plate, and drizzle some honey on some yogurt for her to eat on the way,” I suggest simply so that his feelings aren’t hurt further.

  I bundle up and head outside to try to shovel enough drifted snow away from the truck to enable me to back out. Overnight the drifts have piled up nearly to the door handles on the driver’s side. Ten minutes later, the reporter emerges from the door, pulling her suitcase down the steps and through the two-and-a-half-foot-deep snow. I’m helping her into her seat when Brent appears at the door.

  “Her breakfast,” he hollers to me. I bound back up the steps to grab it.

  “What’s this?” she asks as I climb in the truck and hand her the plate.

  “It’s some homemade goat milk yogurt we made.” I rev the engine and throw it into reverse. The truck lurches backward about two feet before the wheels start spinning in the snow. I shift into drive and rock forward. “The bacteria culture is from the very first batch we made when the goats first arrived at the Beekman. We’ve kept it alive for nearly two years.” Reverse again. This time I make it about three feet. Forward. Gun. Reverse. Gun. “It’s unpasteurized,” I continue, “which means that none of the most beneficial enzymes was killed off with heat.” Gun. Reverse. Spin. Forward. Spin. Reverse. “Of course, most health officials would say that no one should eat unpastuerized dairy products…” Forward. Reverse. Forward. Reverse. If she ever does manage to get a spoonful to her mouth, she’s going to be too nauseated to keep any of it down. “But pasteurization laws really just exist to prevent widespread bacterial outbreaks from industrial agribusiness dairies.” Forward. Reverse. Spin. Smoke from the gunning engine is beginning to come through the heating vents. “Naturally, people have been drinking and eating raw milk products from the beginning of time.” Rock. Spin. Gun. The reporter is trying to aim the spoon into the small jar, but the rocking truck is making it near impossible. “Some people believe that raw milk products are so much healthier than pasteurized products that raw milk clubs have formed and have organized an illegal distribution system in New York City.” ZzzzzZZZZZZZZZZ. The tires seem to be packing the snow down into pure ice. “And the honey is from our neighbors down the road. We also saved you a piece of the heirloom cherry pie from last nigh—”

  Suddenly the truck catches the smallest bit of friction and careens backward. The reporter winds up juggling the pie plate, yogurt jar, and spoon as she tries to keep it from upsetting into her lap. If I slow down even the slightest bit, we risk getting stuck again. I jerk the steering wheel back and forth as the truck does a sort of reverse fish tail out the driveway. Every time the tailgate hits a drift, curtains of snow shower over the truck.

  Finally we make it to the road, which is slightly clearer but not much. I can tell by the time we’re only twenty yards away from the house that this trip is going to take much longer than I’d anticipated.

  It takes two and a half hours, as it turns out, in four-wheel drive the entire way. Semis are jackknifed on the road, and the slightest inclines on the thruway have pileups of cars at the bottom, unable to make the icy climb. Even a large snowplow had pulled over under an overpass to ride out the furious snow.

  The reporter, if she is at all nervous about my driving, never mentions it once. I’m sure her only goal is to find her way back into civilization by any means necessary—away from the squadrons of zombie flies, the Russian peasant meals, and the jackhammer marimbraphone. This couldn’t have been the pastoral version of country life that she’d pitched to her editor. As a fellow writer, I sympathize with her. How she plans on eking the bucolic, aspirational weekend home story necessary for the Real Estate section’s Great Homes and Destinations column out of this experience is beyond any skills I have. Perhaps she’ll just back out of the project altogether. That might be the best Brent and I can hope for.

  Once we reach the station, we wind up getting stopped at the bottom of the incline of the overpass that straddles the train tracks. The station is only a hundred yards away, but the pileup of cars at the bottom of the hill is blocking anyone from getting to the front doors. A few policemen are valiantly trying to push cars and cabs out of the way for the more able vehicles to pass, but every time they push a car in one direction, another one starts sliding into it from the other direction. Her train is parked just underneath us, already boarding.

  “I think you might have to walk from here,” I say. Normally I’d help, but I can’t risk abandoning the truck in this pileup. I still have to make the long journey back to help set up for the party and concert tonight, if I’m lucky enough to survive the return trip.

  “No problem,” she says cheerily. The proximity to her escape must be buoying her thoughts. I hop out of the truck and grab her rolling bag from the back. If I were in her place, I’d be furious. What was supposed to be a fun little assignment for her turned into a literal migraine.

  I watch her slight figure bravely struggling to pull her suitcase through the deepening snow and gusts of frigid wind. One of the policemen waves for me to reverse down the hill away from the spaghetti mess of stalled and stuck cars.

  The reporter disappears in my rearview mirror, like most everything else this year.

  It takes me even longer to return to the Beekman. What would normally be less than a two-hour round trip has taken me over five.

  When I walk in the door, the mansion is a flurry of activity. Several volunteers are setting up the folding chairs in the grand hallway for the concert. The musicians are back practicing again, rehearsing a surprisingly familiar improvisational set. I’m not sure whether my percussive jazz knowledge is improving or my hearing is permanently damaged, but either way, today I’m finding the music much more palatable, even festive. Maybe it’s just the knowledge that we gave the Beekman one last chance, and now that all is decidedly lost, I can finally relax and enjoy the final moments.

  I walk in the kitchen where Brent is putting the finishing touches on two dozen votive candleholders that he carved from navel oranges. He’d cut each orange in half, scooped it out, placed a tea light in one half, and replaced the other half—with a hole cut out for smoke—back on top. One was lit on the counter. Nestled in a nest of pine boughs it was wonderfully beautiful—a glowing orange globe, studded with a few decorative cloves. And even better than it looked was the fragrance.

  “These look beautiful,” I say, putting my arm around him. “Perfect, even.�
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  “I know we shouldn’t have spent the money on oranges just for decoration. But I kept all the pulp. We can use it for juice.”

  “It’s okay,” I say. “The Beekman deserves a little festivity this season.”

  I hate seeing someone as wonderful and expansive as Brent make excuses about wasting orange pulp. He’d done his best this past year, and I hate that I’d made his life so miserable for most of it. It’s not his fault that he strives for perfection as much as Martha does. I realize that of all the things that never quite reached perfection in this past nightmarish year, I was the biggest blemish of all for many reasons: for complaining, for not working as hard as he did, for pushing him away. When I think of how hard he tried to make my wishes come true…My wishes…Not his…Mine.

  Okay. I can’t think of that. I just can’t.

  I spend the next few hours sweeping up after the volunteers and generally trying to stay out of everyone’s way. I carefully stack kindling and firewood in each of the fireplaces, and once finished, go room to room lighting each one.

  When the sun begins setting, I head outside to take some pictures of the house exterior for posterity. Someday I’ll look back, I think, and be able to appreciate that the Beekman was ours, if even for a short time.

  Bubby struggles in the deep snow, trying to keep up with me as I walk around taking shots of the glowing house against the purple twilight sky from every angle. All four chimneys are puffing out picturesque columns of gray smoke, scenting the crisp air. Brent’s placed a glowing votive in each window. The chandelier is framed perfectly in the tall Palladian window on the second floor. And the yellow lights from every window crisscross the snow in the yard, making illusory sidewalks of warmth, beckoning passersby to come inside.