Milking became a kind of physical meditation. It was never easy, and it wasn’t always pleasant, but it was rhythmic, predictable, gentle, and quiet. Mark milked in the evening, and I milked in the morning, arriving at the barn in that holy gap between true dark and first light. The electricity in the barn was not working, so I tried to train myself to work by feel until one morning I reached blind and bare-handed into the grain bin and a mouse ran over my hand. I found a lantern and hung it from a beam, and the bats, on the way home from their night shift, flitted in and out of its soft light. By the time I had finished with Delia, the sun was fully up, and they’d squeezed into their resting places between the rafters, above the nests that the swallows would fill with chicks in the spring.
Milking wasn’t half the job. The milk in the bucket contained tiny flecks of dirt, cow hairs, and sloughed-off dry skin from the udder and teat. We didn’t have a proper milk strainer, so we filtered the milk through an old T-shirt tied with a bungee cord to a stainless-steel funnel. We didn’t have a cream separator, either, so when we wanted cream we’d let the milk sit in a tank Mark had rigged up in the barn. It had a valve in the bottom made from the cutoff tip of a water bottle stuck on a clear plastic tube, and after the cream had risen to the top of the tank we’d let the skim milk run out into a bucket until we could see the cream through the tube, then switch buckets to catch the cream. Then we’d stack all the dirty equipment in the front seat of the car and haul it back to the house in town for washing in a sink the size of a postage stamp. It was a very awkward system.
Somehow, we got through those first weeks of milking without giving Delia mastitis—an infected milk duct, scourge of all lactating mamas—or making ourselves sick. I learned to make butter by shaking cream in a gallon jar until lumps formed, bright yellow islands in a sea of foamy white. I bought books on cheese making, and a bottle of rennet. When Mark brought home the evening milk, I’d pick out an interesting recipe and experiment. My first attempts were simple cottage cheeses, just a few drops of rennet stirred into the still-warm milk. Twenty minutes later, through some mysterious alchemical process, the milk would be solid enough to cut into cubes. The pale yellow whey would seep from the cubes of curd, and I’d gently heat it, drawing out more whey, until the curd had shrunk and become firm. Then I’d spoon the curd into a cheesecloth, salt it, and let it drain, and we’d have enough cottage cheese to last us a week. Once I was confident with cottage cheese I expanded my repertoire. I made a few balls of provolone and hung them behind the cellar door to age, but they were so delicious we ate them young.
The farmhouse was split into two apartments, which had been rented out cheaply to a succession of young tenants. Inside, it smelled of pot and Raid. The downstairs was occupied by a quiet, pale couple who looked enough alike to be siblings and couldn’t have been long out of high school. Lisa smoked long, thin cigarettes and kept the apartment very tidy and clean. Troy had a collection of miniature John Deere tractors and toy farm implements arranged along the windowsills and across the coffee table, and a John Deere welcome mat guarded the stairs to the cellar. Troy came from a farming family that no longer had a farm. He worked on a construction crew and helped out part-time with milking at the Shieldses’ dairy down the road. The year before, he told us, he’d considered getting back into farming in a small way, by raising some replacement heifers in his spare time. He’d gone as far as to clear space for them in the west barn, but a relative had talked him out of it, convincing him it was too risky, a losing proposition.
Troy’s story and the little toy tractors reminded me of all the rural places we’d seen in our search for land, the unused farms on good soil, the empty silos jutting up into the horizon, and the generations of accumulated skill and local knowledge and the sense of belonging to a place that would dead-end with this generation. I’d begun to think that the prevailing explanation for what was happening to farms—young people just don’t want to work so hard anymore—was a lie. The forces were bigger than that. It was decades of misbegotten farm policy and ag schools and extension agents telling farmers to get bigger, milk harder, plant from hedgerow to hedgerow. It was the consequent supersizing of machinery and debt. It was the enormous weight of that debt against a shrinking milk check, numbers that didn’t add up, no matter how hard or long you worked. It was the bad wet year that finished you off, the cows sold at auction, the wildness creeping back into the bank-owned fields, poplar first, and scrubby cedar. It was the barn roof beginning to sag, and nobody there to buttress it. It was the house you grew up in, empty, that attracted the bored and horny young, who broke its windows, had sex on the derelict couch, left their initials and the date scribbled on the once-scrubbed walls. If you are a young man driving by places like that on your way to a steady if low-paying job, no wonder you’re easily convinced that farming is a losing proposition, and the only thing left of your rightful legacy is a row of toy tractors, which have not put you into much debt.
The upstairs apartment was rented to a guy in his twenties named Roy Reynolds. He had short-cropped hair and a sparse beard, grown long. His neck was so meaty that it pushed the skin of his scalp upward, making abstract crenulations across the back of his head. His eyelids were weighted down with pads of fat, and he had a habit of tipping his head back and crossing his arms when he talked to you so you couldn’t tell if he was glaring or simply regarding you. Outside, in all weather, he wore a thin white undershirt that left an inch of belly above the belt exposed. When the temperature dipped below freezing he added a tall, faux fur hat, hot pink, which somehow made him look more menacing instead of less.
Roy had been running his own dairy farm until the year before. He’d been ambitious and he’d gotten fairly big very fast, financed by a wealthy partner. Roy told us that he’d been milking three hundred Holsteins when he and the partner had a falling-out, and when the partner pulled out Roy had found himself deeply in debt. “They repoed my farm,” he told us. If there was any sadness in him it was hidden behind a bright kind of toughness. “I have never woken up in the dark and thought, Dang, I wish I could go milk three hundred cows right now,” he said. Since the bankruptcy, he’d been making a living as a truck driver.
If any of the tenants resented us for getting them kicked out of their house as soon as the lease was up, the only one who showed it was the pit bull, Duke. When we walked past on the way to the barns he leered at us from the doghouse, and occasionally he’d make another silent run at us, full speed into the end of his chain. He belonged to Lisa and Troy, and with them he was kittenish, lolling on his back, begging for a scratch on the chest. Roy owned the two cringing white dogs. They were strays he’d picked up at a truck stop, and he’d named the male dog Turbo and the female Fried. They lived loose outside all year, wandering the roads, returning to eat from the fifty-pound bag of kibble Roy left ripped open for them in the garage, an arrangement that made the rats as content as the dogs.
It was Roy who pulled up to our rental house in town on a cold, overcast day and told us we needed to call a vet. “Something happened to your milk cow,” he said heavily. “My dogs had something to do with it.”
We’d built a little corral off of Delia’s stall, so that she could go outside during the day if she wanted to, and that’s where we found her, standing still, her head drooping nearly to the ground. Her soft ears were tattered, bloody ribbons hanging limp next to her head. Her eyes were swollen almost shut, and the blood from two dozen wounds dripped from her face onto the frozen ground. Her udder was cut, and she had lacerations on her belly and each of her legs. I couldn’t believe an animal could be so injured and still standing. It was painful to look at her.
Duke had gotten loose. Nobody had ever heard of a dog attacking a healthy cow in broad daylight, but that’s what happened. In my imagination, I see him finding her alone in her corral, circling her, Delia lowering her hornless, defenseless head, and Duke snapping at her nose, drawing blood. Then the white dogs joining in, goaded by the smell of blo
od and the frenzied Duke and the lowing of the suffering cow. By the time Roy and Troy heard the commotion, all three dogs were slick with blood.
The vet, David Goldwasser, a slight and gentle man who moved deliberately and looked tired, arrived. I thought he would advise us to put Delia down, but he said that of all the large animals cows are the most resilient, and he thought she would probably pull through. It was good that it was cold, because there was less risk of infection, and she would not be tormented by flies. He clipped the hair from around her wounds and dressed and sewed up the worst of them. Her ears were beyond repair, so he took out some scissors and cut them away, leaving a pair of raw and waxy nubbins that stood out from the sides of her head like the hard blooms of some strange tropical plant. She stood placidly for him, wondering mutely at her own pain, and when we had to milk her full udder that evening, trying to be as gentle as possible with the injured tissue, she never raised a hoof at us.
They shot all three dogs. The next spring, when the snow melted, I found their collars in the mud next to the garage. Such is the way of rural people, no clemency. What if it had been a kid, they said. For Roy Reynolds it was the unsentimental last straw in a series of aggravations those white dogs had caused him, but Troy must have loved that big brute of a pit. When we knocked on his door to collect a check for the vet bill, which all three of them had offered to pay, he was red-eyed.
The town of Essex, sleepy with the approach of winter, had detected the presence of newcomers and roused itself to greet us. In one week, two people knocked on the door of our rental house bearing actual welcome baskets, and three others came by to invite us to the Tuesday-night potluck at St. John’s Episcopal Church. I didn’t know what to make of such friendliness. In the city, the only reason neighbors knocked on your door was to complain about the noise you were making. It occurred to me that there is more distance between rural and the urban in the same country—the same state!—than there is between cities on different continents. I would have felt more at home in Istanbul, Rome, or Yangon. Here, I was a true foreigner, making it up as I went along.
There were seven hundred people living in town, and everyone we met already knew our backstory with varying degrees of accuracy, and they all knew the farm better than we did. “How’s your tree spade working?” Dave Lansing, the fire chief, asked us. We had no idea. “I hear it’s broken,” he said. We were visited by the town’s doyenne, an elegant woman who went by the disarming name of Frisky. She invited us to her house for dinner, which began with sherry and ended with poached pears and for which we were underdressed. The next week we met some people our age who had us to dinner at the off-the-grid cabin they’d built themselves, set into the woods a few miles outside of town. They made a party of it, inviting other young couples, and after dinner the babies were laid down to sleep on the bed and the fiddles came out and the cabin filled up with music, like an episode of Little House on the Prairie, but with beer.
Every day, people drove into the farm to introduce themselves and to satisfy their curiosity. They’d heard the outline of our plans, and wanted to judge for themselves whether or not the situation was as hopeless as it sounded. We’d installed a proper woodstove in one of the newer outbuildings, a small, well-insulated cabin that Lars had built for his caretaker to use as an office. A few sticks of wood kept it warm all day, and in cold weather we ate lunch in there, and received guests. One day I returned from some errand to find Mark sitting with Neal Owens, a man so big he dwarfed the furniture and the room. His great size was counterbalanced by an aura of diffidence and humble courtesy. He had heard we were interested in draft horses, and he’d brought some equipment that had been sitting around his place too long, some good-looking collars and pieces of harness that he said we could borrow.
His family had been in the neighborhood so long that a road to our south was named for them; the farm his father and grandfather had grown up on was just over the next hill, but it had been sold out of the family. There were farmers in each generation, and Neal and his brother, Donald, had run a dairy, too, until a combination of debt and bad luck had bankrupted them. They’d been in their twenties then. Now they had kids of their own, three boys between them, and Neal and Donald and Neal’s wife, Tammy, and the kids and their grandparents all lived together in a rented house. Tammy worked two jobs, and Neal managed the kids and worked part-time, putting together the county fair and also serving as town dogcatcher. The house they rented came with a barn and some pasture, and the kids kept an ever-shifting collection of goats, dogs, calves, ponies, rabbits, chickens, and geese, which, to hear Neal tell it, they traded like other kids trade baseball cards: a billy goat for five rabbits, or all the chickens sold at auction in order to buy a calf for a 4-H project.
Before Neal left that day, we’d struck a tentative deal for his family to make our hay the next year. Neal and Donald had made hay since they were kids and knew the equipment. Their dad, a hale seventy-something, would help out. They’d use our tractors and our land, and we’d buy the hay back from them at a reduced price.
Shane Sharpe and Bud Campbell came by to meet us one afternoon, too, on one of their weekend tours around the neighborhood. Shane’s son Luke, a husky teenager with Down syndrome, was sandwiched between them in the cab. Shane and Bud kept their cooler of Busch in the back of Shane’s pickup, accessible for the conversations that took place at each stop, while they stood leaning into the truck bed. Shane owned a machine shop that made parts for the defense industry, and it had done well enough that he’d retired from the day-to-day work of it by the time he turned forty. He was known locally as a mechanical genius, the kind of guy who can walk into our shop, where Mark has been muttering and torquing away for hours with some tool I don’t even know the name of, take one look at the situation, and then make a small and profound suggestion that lifts the veil of confusion to reveal a simple, elegant solution. Since retirement he’d spent his time fooling around with his sawmill or his draft horses or doing favors for friends who needed something fixed, and, if nothing else was going on, you could find him in his shop, patiently restoring a 1939 Dodge flatbed truck that he was planning to paint candy apple red. Shane was the only person I’d ever met outside of literature who suffered from gout. His doctors had told him the gout would get better if he quit drinking, and occasionally he made short feints in that direction. Bud, who was a carpenter and lived alone, did not pretend to want to quit.
It was Shane who dispelled the rumor that had been circulating around Dale Ranger’s barn in the valley west of ours. Dale tolerates drinking at evening milking, so he is rarely short of help. I think it started because at the time I was still wearing the standard-issue city clothes that I’d moved with, tailored shirts and skirts cut above the knee and boots with a little bit of heel, and this is a town where lip gloss is considered daring, a special-occasion accessory. Someone decided I was formerly a high-end prostitute in New York City, and this news was fully believed and widely disseminated by the men at Dale’s barn until Shane got to know us and reported back that I was not an ex-whore after all and had graduated from college, to which, Shane said, Bud Campbell had replied, I don’t know, it’s just what I heard.
We also got to know Thomas LaFountain, a tall and heavily built man with twinkly blue eyes who runs the local custom butcher shop, where hunters take their deer to be cut and packaged in the fall. Thomas told us he’d been a heavy drinker and a dangerous barroom brawler before his doctor and his wife ganged up on him, told him he’d have to quit or die alone, and so he quit, at once and for good.
For a long time, Thomas and Shane were the only men who talked directly to me. The rest of them would pull in, roll down the truck window, and ask, “Mark around?” or “’Stha boss here?” and then would sit silently until Mark appeared, directing all questions, comments, and dealings to him and ignoring me completely. When departing, they’d say, “See you later, Mark,” even if I’d been standing there the entire time, trying to interject my opinion. Mar
k is so much taller than I am, nobody even made eye contact with me. But then Thomas or Shane would come by when Mark happened to be gone, and actually acknowledge my existence, and instead of leaving immediately they’d roll down their truck windows to chat, and I would suddenly realize that I had no idea what to say to them, no subject at disposal that seemed of common interest, and I would get nervous and say whatever weird things came into my head just to fill up the silence. Both of them handled my awkwardness with courtesy.
It took me the better part of a year to figure out that here, talking doesn’t necessarily have to have a point. It really can be about the weather, or it can comfortably tread over already well-covered ground. In fact, it’s perfectly acceptable to not talk at all. I learned this while hanging around Thomas’s shop, wrapping cuts of pork that he’d butchered for us. It was deer season, and Thomas was busy, working well into the evening, the cooler full of field-dressed carcasses, a pile of venison ribs growing into a tall heap outside the door. Poop Henderson, a man in his fifties with a gray beard long enough to tuck into the front of his pants and black-framed glasses with thick and cloudy lenses, came in. Poop lives with his mother and rarely leaves the valley, traveling in a triangle from his house to Thomas’s butcher shop to Dale’s barn with a pair of Busch cans tucked into his shirt pockets. Poop and Thomas exchanged monosyllabic greetings, and Poop extracted one of his beers from its pocket and took a seat next to the meat saw as Thomas boned a shoulder of venison, measured his sausage spices, the salt and pepper and sage, and ran the seasoned meat through the grinder, the local country station playing softly in the background. They did not say a word until an hour later when Poop lifted himself up, said, “Well, I suppose,” which was answered by “All right,” and exited. That counted as a visit, and it is what friends and neighbors do.
The Dirty Life.On Farming, Food, and Love Page 6