The Dirty Life.On Farming, Food, and Love

by Kristin Kimball

  We’d hoped the bad weather would mean a low turnout and lots of bargains, but the Amish were undeterred. Two families were selling out, moving to a settlement in Ohio, and this was a big event. Since the Amish don’t drive, I had thought it would be a local affair, but the church doesn’t say you can’t be a passenger, so they had come from all corners of New York and Pennsylvania in rented vans and small buses, groups of grown men who were there to buy, plus lots of teenage boys, who, I deduced, had come for the social scene. A dozen teenage girls from the local community, in spotless black skirts and shawls, their hair parted precisely down the middle, were selling coffee, sandwiches, and sugary homemade pastries in a section of the barn that had been walled off with plastic sheeting and was heated with a big woodstove. The girls were supervised by a few young married women with babies and one rather severe-looking older lady in a rigid black bonnet. A girl of about eight seemed to be the designated babysitter, dandling a well-wrapped infant on her knee while simultaneously keeping a small herd of toddlers out from underfoot and away from the stove, where a batch of doughnuts was sizzling in hot lard.

  The horse equipment was parked in rows in a field outside, and Mark and I walked among it. Mark showed me what to look for—crude farm-shop welds that betray a history of breakage and repair, or badly worn joints that sometimes lurk under a bright new coat of paint. The wind was stirring up snow devils around us, and the temperature was below zero. I had heard the forecast the night before, and I’d pulled out all the stops in an attempt to stay warm: two pairs of pants, two blue goose-down parkas, one on top of the other, a pair of thick wool socks over my inadequate gloves, and a Russian Army surplus hat with furry earflaps. The bidding wasn’t due to start for an hour at least, and I was already hopping up and down, trying to restore some feeling to my extremities. The Amishmen were also outside going over the machinery, but they were wearing thin black wool overcoats, and their flat straw hats didn’t even cover their ears, and somehow they looked toasty. I was trying to get a close look at the hats—it seemed that some of them had bands made of black ribbon, and others had electrical tape wrapped around the crowns—when Mark pointed out that groups of the teenage boys were checking me out and chortling, apparently at my outfit, which, I admit, made me look like a giant blueberry aviator. “I think they’re trying to figure out what you are,” Mark said. It is something when the Amish think you dress funny.

  I left Mark and headed back to the heated section of the barn, where a crowd was lining up for doughnuts. The Amish call non-Amish people English, and groups of English, neighboring farmers, their faces chapped and impassive under pushed-back caps, had begun to arrive. They were dressed almost as uniformly as the Amish, except, instead of black, they wore either plaid or camouflage. I noted a variety of abnormalities on the older people, who must have been raised at a time and in a place where birth defects and nonlethal injuries didn’t merit fixing: a knurled nose like a cauliflower, a scar the size of my palm across a bald scalp, a giant mole sprouting hair on a neck that was weathered and corded with muscle, like Reni’s painting of the slave of the Ripa Grande. These anomalies aside, the old people looked healthier than the young, who tended toward the obese.

  The auctioneer arrived, and there was a general movement toward the other end of the barn, where the household goods and smaller farm items were stacked in lines on the floor or bunched into lots on hay wagons. The auctioneer gestured to his first item, an unremarkable set of kitchen chairs, and the crowd pressed tight for a glimpse. The household goods looked a lot like those you’d see at any rural yard sale—cheap stuff in weird colors—but the atmosphere was more like a fair, a happy sociocommercial occasion. No wonder Thomas LaFountain will drive 150 miles to go to an auction, even if he’s not intending to bid on anything. “What’d you buy?” his boys will ask when he gets home. “A hamburger,” he’ll say.

  The auctioneer began his pitch for the chairs, describing them as lovingly as if they had come directly from under his own mother’s kitchen table. Shopping is a simple transaction—do I want this thing at this given price?—but an auction is relative: Do I want this thing more than the man standing next to me wants it? How much more? It’s a party, a casino, a circus, or a concert, and the auctioneer is its host, its ringmaster, its conductor. The bidding began, the numbers rolling off his tongue, elided and almost incomprehensible, sandwiched between meaningless syllables and some corny one-liners. If the bidding slowed he’d look stern, taking the crowd to task for overlooking the virtues of a particular item. He had three henchmen, big, paunchy men who carried sticks and punctuated the auctioneer’s song with a loud basso “HEP!” and a thump of the stick when they spotted a bid. The spotters were necessary because bidding was practically a contest in subtlety, placed with a raised eyebrow, a microscopic nod, or at most the twitch of a cheek. The spotters were on these little movements like bird dogs to the flutter of a wing. Our friends the Owenses, who are great auction goers, had warned us to watch out for the unscrupulous spotters who “HEP!” at phantom bidders to drive up the price, or for the auctioneer’s shill, buried in the crowd, who guarantees bottoms on the more valuable items with house bids if they threaten to sell too low.

  It was lunchtime before the household goods were sold and the bidding started on the stock, and the crowd thinned a bit as people drifted toward the woodstove for hot soup. The crate of hens went for five dollars a bird, and the ducks brought two-fifty each. The two mares we had seen drawing the bobsled were also for sale, and they were chunky, sound, and well-broke. The auctioneer pointed out that the younger one was bred to the son of a famous Belgian stallion, and due to foal in June. In effect, she was two horses for the price of one. Conventional horse wisdom says you should never buy horses at auction, but bidding was slow, and the temptation was almost too much for me. My hand twitched upward a couple times, but Mark gave me a look that said he wouldn’t hesitate to hold it down physically if necessary.

  The crowd returned as the auctioneer geared up to sell the machinery. He opened bidding on a horse-drawn forecart fitted with a small engine that would power the spinning shaft of any tractor-based tool, like a hay baler or a rotary tedder. The price shot up like a flushed quail, leveling out north of five thousand dollars. Who knew the plain people had such fat wallets? There were no big bargains to be had that day. Everything was in good condition, and the Amishmen knew what it was worth, and had come with cash. We fought hard and won on the two-horse cultivator, but the walking plow and the grain binder that Mark lusted after went soaring way above our budget. We comforted ourselves with the realization that the money the men were spending had been earned by farming with horses, and if they said a tool was worth good money, then there must be money to make from it. Later, a man who had noticed our bidding offered us a grain binder that he had restored. We made a deal for it and contracted for him to deliver it, along with the cultivator we’d bought, which would not fit in our car.

  Before the machinery was all sold, I was rigid with cold, despite my outrageous outfit. I found myself a bench next to the woodstove in the barn where the girls were doing a brisk business in hot coffee. I must have luxuriated in there for an hour, talking to a cluster of bent old men about draft horses. Then the auction ended, and the Amishmen came streaming in. They all have the same style eyeglasses—those slightly oversize plain wire frames that the kids who took the auto shop classes in high school wore—and they have the lenses that tint dark when they’re out in the sun, so when the whole lot of them walked into the warming area, it looked like a ZZ Top tribute band convention, all long beards, dark suits, and shades. Then the auctioneer came in without his microphone or his spotters and stepped up to the table stacked with leftover sweets. He picked up a bag of doughnuts and held it high over his head. “We got a sack of delicious homemade doughnuts here,” he said. “Whaddaya give? Do I hear five-biddy-fie-biddy-fie?” and he launched into his well-worn song. The girls sold all their baked goods, and a bunch of Amish teenage
rs rode home to Pennsylvania on the crest of a sugar high.

  Delia was doing her best to heal. Her scabs hung thick and heavy on the stumps of her ears, and she had a set of angry abscesses all along her neck, where we’d injected her with antibiotics in the days right after the incident. Roy took a look at them and told us not to worry, that he’d had them on his cows before, sometimes two feet long. Delia accepted them as she’d accepted everything else that had happened since she’d come to us: patiently, placidly. Her udder had healed well, though, and she was milking like crazy, three rich gallons per day.

  Two people and one cow was a lopsided equation. Our refrigerator was so full of dairy products in various forms, there was no room for anything else. One morning, I opened it to find some cream, and a quart jar of milk fell on my foot. “We have to do something about this,” I said. Mark had finished his breakfast and was scanning the weekly circular for useful tools. “There’s a litter of piglets for sale twenty minutes north,” he said. “They could drink some milk.” I grabbed the phone and dialed, and before I’d hung up I’d agreed to buy four, with a fifth thrown in for free, because he had fits, the lady said, and something was wrong with his neck.

  Mark was busy that morning trying to untangle the electrical panel in the west barn, so I drove by myself to pick them up. When I got there, I peered over the side of the horse stall where the piglets were sleeping in a heap and then drew back. I’d pictured creatures the size of Chihuahuas, but they were twice that size. The crate I’d brought to haul them home in was way too small. We did not own a truck, and the lady I was buying them from did not have time to haul them. I shrugged, put an old bedspread into the hatchback of my Honda, shoved the squealing pigs in, and jimmied a pallet into place in the backseat. The pigs made short work of the bedspread, which was soon crumpled uselessly in the corner, but the pallet held until the moment I pulled into the farm driveway, when they all scrambled over the backseat like invaders over a parapet. The stink of pig in the upholstery was muted until warmer weather arrived, and then it came on hard, and stayed. We fished the piglets out of the car one by one and carried them to Delia’s pen, which Mark had divided down the center with scrap lumber. We named the deformed one Torque.

  The pigs became my responsibility. Mark and I were getting into power struggles over every little decision that needed to be made, neither of us wanting to lose control. To diffuse tension we’d decided to split the farm in two. Each of us was captain of half of the farm. As a farm management strategy, it was awkward, but it was necessary for the preservation of our relationship at that time. When we’d divided the livestock, Mark got charge of our one-cow dairy. Lucky me, I got the pigs.

  By the time they arrived, my pigs were past the coy, curly-tailed stage and well into the voracious, menacing phase. Pigs really do have terrifically gluttonous natures. They can’t help it. We’ve bred them to be professional eaters, meat packed as fast as possible onto four stumpy legs. They can gain more than a pound a day. That kind of growth is fueled by prodigious appetite, and in a group situation, at feeding time, they are viciously competitive, using their dense bodies to check, and their sharp teeth to bite, and their deep-throated barks to intimidate. The worst part of my day quickly became the moment when I would scramble over their pen wall carrying a five-gallon bucket full of sour skim milk mixed with cornmeal and wade through a swarm of pig bodies intent on knocking me down. More than once I ended up on my back, covered in sour milk and pig manure, shoved and bitten by five frenzied beasts.

  One-on-one, they were less menacing but no less troublesome. One pig had figured out how to wiggle past the wall that divided the pigpen from the cow pen, and when I arrived at the farm in the morning, I’d find her in with Delia. There was no way to get her back in the proper place without catching her, lifting her, and dropping her over the chest-high barrier. It was like catching a large greased watermelon, a shockingly fast and willful one, one with an ear-piercing squeal.

  I hit pig bottom one day during the darkest week of December, when the temperature had ventured tentatively above freezing and the snow wilted into chilly, slick-bottomed puddles. I was alone on the farm, Mark off to the farmers’ market in Troy, networking.

  Aside from chores and milking, my only job of the day was to move the pigs out of their pen in the west barn, which they’d outgrown, and into the roomy run-in of the east barn thirty feet away, which I had already filled with a thick layer of mulch hay. I figured I could get this done quickly and then go home, stoke up the fire, and enjoy the almost unimaginable luxury of a quiet, empty house, a hot bath, and a book. The problem was that, when it came down to it, I realized I had no idea how I was going to move those pigs. They’d become too big to carry. I knew from experience that they would not herd, and if I tried to push them they would just push back. I suspected if they got loose outside they’d be gone, quite possibly for good. Okay, I thought, I’m a smart person. I can figure out how to move five pigs thirty feet. The thing to do, I decided, was to build a chute.

  I filled a wheelbarrow with things I found in the machine shop that looked like they might be useful: a hammer, a saw, and—eureka!—some pieces of metal roofing, three feet wide by fifteen feet long. Then I walked back to the barns and stared at my problem. The pigpen had a door that let out onto the alley between the two barns, but the door to the run-in was all the way around on the east barn’s south side. I was thinking I would somehow build a laneway for the pigs with the sheets of roofing, but I didn’t have enough material to get all the way to the door of the east barn. Just then, as if on cue, a wet, sleety snow began to fall. The bath and the book that I had been looking forward to all week began to seem remote. I decided I was overthinking it, trying to come up with an elegant solution when any solution would do. We weren’t building the Taj Mahal here, I reminded myself. We were trying to move five pigs thirty feet. So I picked up the saw from the wheelbarrow and began cutting a hole in the wall of the east barn run-in, directly across from the door to the pigpen.

  I was struggling mightily with the sawing, making very little progress, and the sleet was dripping off the edge of the barn down the collar of my coat, when I heard a pickup idling in the driveway. I looked up to see Shep Shields, our neighbor from over the hill, hobbling toward me. Shep had become a daily visitor, bringing us small things from his barn that he thought we could use, or sometimes a box of cake he picked up at the store. On my birthday, he brought me a potted plant.

  He squinted at me through the sleet. I thought about how I must look, wet, red-fingered from cold, cutting a hole in a perfectly good barn for no apparent reason. “I don’t want to tell you what to do,” Shep began. This, I’d found, was a very common statement in the North Country. You’re not considered rude if you don’t return phone calls, or if you get drunk while working, or fail to show up as promised, but telling someone how to do something is bad form and requires a disclaimer. I braced myself. “I don’t want to tell you what to do,” Shep said, “but that saw you’re using? That’s a hacksaw. You want a wood saw.” And he hobbled back to his truck and left.

  I was coming up against a cold, hard truth. I was well-educated, well-read, and well-traveled. I could hold my own in cocktail conversation most places in the world. But when it came to physical work, I was virtually retarded.

  After I’d traded the hacksaw for a wood saw and made a pig-size hole in the barn wall, I propped the rusty roofing into a chute held together with baling twine and opened the pen door. I braced myself for a five-pig stampede, but absolutely nothing happened. I’d baited the chute and the run-in with loaves of old bread soaked in sour milk, but for once the damn pigs weren’t hungry. They had no desire to leave their snug, dry pen, and no amount of shoving, shouting, begging, or cursing would make them change their minds. I was cold, wet, and exhausted, and the sun was going down. It was time to milk Delia again. I’d pinned the pigs’ door open in such a way that I’d have to disassemble the entire chute in order to close it, something I w
as not, at that moment, willing to do. I finished the chores and left, hoping the pigs would feel bolder and hungrier in the dark, and find their way through the chute to the run-in on their own.

  I fell asleep as soon as I’d stripped off my clothes and had bad dreams about pigs all night. Mark did not get home from Troy until past midnight, so I got up alone the next morning and went to the farm to milk.

  It was still mostly dark when I pulled up to the barn, but as my headlights swept the alley I could see that my chute was toast. The pigs had completely flattened it, and when I got out of the car I found their little, pointy tracks all over the barnyard. I looked around. I listened intently. No sign of them. I looked in the pen and in the run-in, but both were echoey and empty. It slowly dawned on me what a bad situation this was. They could be anywhere by now, in the woods, rooting up the neighbor’s semifrozen lawn, or wandering on the road, where they could cause a serious accident.

  I jumped back in the car with a sick feeling and drove to the house. Mark was squirreled under the covers, deeply asleep. I told him a strategically edited version of the story, and he got out of bed and into his clothes, not happy but at least on the move. We drove to the farm in peevish silence.

  The sun was fully up by then, and we could see the tracks more clearly in the melting snow. I thought about how the devil is supposed to have a cloven foot, just like the pig. Mark circled around, trying to figure out which direction they’d headed, but the tracks didn’t seem to go anywhere. I was off to the barn to get a bucket of grain with which to bait them, if we ever found them, when I heard a familiar snorting bark from inside the run-in. I peered over the gate and saw one of the pigs emerging from underneath the hay, and then four other piglike lumps began to stir, hay falling from their backs. All home, all safe, exactly where I wanted them. Mark stood and watched, shaking his head. I gave him a triumphant smile, and told him I had everything under control and he could feel free to go home and back to bed. I needed to get him out of there before he noticed the hole in the side of the barn, and I needed to figure out how to fix it.