The Dirty Life.On Farming, Food, and Love

by Kristin Kimball

  Sam and Silver had not worked hard for three weeks, since the end of sugar season. Meanwhile, they’d been eating grain and the first green tips of the growing grass, which gave them the energy of kindergarteners after too much cake. We loaded the sorry-looking plow onto our stone boat and set out for the back of the farm. There was a ten-acre piece that had been rented out to another farmer to grow corn the year before, and the soil there was loose. We weren’t planning to use it that year, so we thought it would be a good place to practice before we attempted to open up the thick sod in the fields we wanted for our vegetables.

  In the old paintings, the plowman is alone. He holds the handles of the plow, one in each hand, and steers the horses with the lines knotted around his shoulders. We were barely competent driving horses with two hands, let alone with our shoulders, so we decided to split the job in two. I guided the horses, and Mark handled the plow. I had the slightly better end of the deal, because I could keep clear of the plow handles, while Mark kept getting whacked by them, right in the gut. Sam was hitched on the right, the so-called furrow horse, charged with walking in the soft dirt of his newly dug ditch, keeping a straight line. He understood his job and stayed in the right place, but the plow would not behave. It plunged deep into the loose soil and made the horses strain against their collars, and then it surfed upward and popped out of the soil entirely, and the horses lurched forward against nothing. There were almost no rocks in that field, but when we were unlucky enough to connect with one, the plow stopped dead. Then we had to back the horses up, dragging the heavy plow by hand to the last clean place in the furrow, or else come out of the furrow entirely, circle around, and begin again.

  Mark was certain that whatever was going wrong was my fault. The horses were moving too fast, and he wanted me to slow them down, but they were high on grain and didn’t want to work at such a slow pace. They pulled at their bits until my arms felt stretched to apelike length. When Mark wanted me to move the horses a fraction of an inch to the right he’d say, “Right!” but he wouldn’t give me time to react before saying “Right!” again, and then I’d be too far right and he would be barking “Left!” Before we finished a whole furrow I wanted to kill him. (If I could have glimpsed the future, this is what I would have seen: Late spring, sunny afternoon, me seven months pregnant with our daughter, driving the team for Mark while he plowed, not because we needed two people for the job by then but for the pure pleasure of it, the knowing horses doing their work and the plow moving smoothly through soil and we two humans enjoying it like other couples enjoy a waltz together. But that was far in the future, with a lot of trying in between.)

  We kept at it doggedly for half a morning before we admitted it was hopeless. We had only a small window of dry early spring weather, and at the rate we were going, it would take us about a year to turn the five acres we needed.

  We hired our neighbor Paul and his big tractor with a five-bottom plow, and in a matter of a couple hours he opened up our vegetable ground, five acres in five fields on the good soil that ran parallel to the road. I walked behind him, in the furrow, in awe of the tractor’s gargantuan tires, the deep throb of the engine, mesmerized by the destructive power of the plow hitched behind. At the end of each row he lifted it, and the five shares, scoured by the earth, flashed like swords. He made the turn and they sank into the ground again, and the soft, grassy surface of the earth—its variegated pad of flora and fauna—was replaced by wave after wave of raw soil. The seagulls flocked knowingly to the sound of the tractor. At the bottoms of the furrows, the shocked worms writhed and dove for cover.

  We gave the new places their civilized names: Home Field, next to the farmhouse. Pine Field, tucked between two groves of trees. Mailbox Field, at the end of our long driveway. Monument Field, where the best soil was, named for an obelisklike rock that stood alongside it. Small Joy, carved out of a hayfield and flanked by a stream. Each field was an acre, more or less. I could see the fresh furrows from the upstairs window, red in the last late light.

  The next morning, Mark and I walked the headlands, counting steps, taking measure. The land was subdued but not yet entirely broken. Plowing loosens the topsoil and buries sod, but it leaves a rough surface. In our new fields, the sod and the soil clung to their old form, standing up in those dark waves, leaning on each other to make a range of tiny peaks. Stray tufts of grass stuck out between them. Smoothing the seedbed is what the harrow is for. Ancient-sounding word with its connotations of distress.

  There was a disc harrow on the farm, but it was the modern kind, humongous, meant to be pulled by a large tractor. Luckily, Shane Sharpe had loaned us his horse-drawn disc harrow. The day after we plowed, Mark and I rolled it onto the driveway and hitched Sam and Silver to it. It was a simple machine, a six-foot-long metal frame that rolled along on a dozen slightly cupped metal discs. The discs were divided into two gangs, their relationship to each other adjustable, so that when traveling on the farm roads, they rolled along in one straight line, but in the field they could be angled toward one another to form a V. The discs cut into the surface of the soil, further loosening it and breaking up clods. Each disc throws some soil inward, to flatten out lumps and furrows, and kill weeds. There was a hard metal tractor seat bolted onto the top of the frame, and a crude metal rack behind, to hold rocks for added weight.

  I took to the disc harrow immediately. Harrowing with it was a more reasonable job than plowing for a teamster as inexperienced as I was. If the horses and I couldn’t manage to travel in a perfectly straight line, we left an interesting trail behind us but didn’t jeopardize the whole operation. I relaxed, and so did the horses, who seemed calmed by the steady pull. It was quiet in Small Joy, except for the crazy pinging call of a bobolink and the faint, far-off sound of a rooster. Nico, who’d followed us, matched the horses’ pace with her shepherdy slink. She raised her ears at a killdeer that was desperately trying to make her chase it, flopping around with her wing out, close to the ground. I guess we’d wrecked the bird’s nest with the plow the day before. I tried for a minute to imagine a way of eating that involves no suffering and came down to Thoreau next to the pond with his little patch of beans. Then I remembered that he walked to his mother’s house in town every day for lunch.

  The furrows smoothed and flattened out behind us. When I stopped to clear a stick from between the discs, the ground felt springy underneath my feet, like a giant trampoline. It was a good workout for the horses, who were out of shape after their time off. We stopped at the end of each pass for a rest, and they stood and blew, and the sweat dripped from their bellies onto the raw earth like a balm or a blessing.

  In May, it felt like spring was accelerating, under the influence of more and more sun. There was no time for social engagements now; phone calls went unreturned. Our attention was focused on the land and its changing rhythm. I rode Sam to the other side of the farm in the evenings, to check the beef herd, count heads. Each trip, I saw some new species budding or blooming or being born. In the woods, first the trillium, then the trout lily, the wild strawberries, and the violets. One night the plum trees in our neighbor’s orchard were snowy with blossoms. Then the gnarled old apple trees in the sugar bush—ancient relics of some other farmer’s plans—thrust out their tender leaves.

  As soon as the disc harrowing was finished, a bank of slate-colored clouds moved in and it began to rain, cold and steady. Mark and I walked along the edges of the fields and watched the rivulets form, the topsoil washing down the slightest rise into miniature deltas. The time for seeding and transplanting had arrived, but we couldn’t get into the fields when they were wet like that. We’d crush the life out of the soil, push out the air spaces that plants like so much, turn the seedbed into concrete. Making breakfast, I watched out the window, nervous, waiting for the weather to shift.

  My old friend James, when he sees a pretty girl, calls her foxy. A really pretty girl is fox factor five. That’s what I thought of, looking out the kitchen window at the May
rain, when the fox ran through the pasture. I could not help but admire her. She moved lightly across the ground, fox-trotting, her tail carried like a banner. Her fur looked as though she had just had it washed, conditioned, and blown out at the salon. I ran to the next window, watching, then realized that the chickens had wandered far out into the pasture, scratching the wet ground for the worms. And sure enough, the fox was tugging at something in the grass, something half as heavy as she was: a fat black hen, one of our best layers. The fox probably had kits to feed. A real farmer would have gone for the gun. I knew that, but I couldn’t bear the thought of tattering her. I rallied the dog and ran out of the house in my slippers, gave a war cry that raised the fur on Nico’s back and sent her across the field at what passes for a run in a thirteen-year-old dog with bad hips. The fox melted into the landscape, and I was left in the rain with wet feet and a dead chicken.

  We spent a wet day at the kitchen table, with a map of our new fields and a list of the crops we were planning to grow. We’d ordered extra seed, enough to plant three or four times the produce we estimated we’d need. That was our insurance, in case the weather was bad, crops failed, the membership grew, or all three. We’d decided to go heavy on the no-nonsense crops that most people eat regularly, not try to get too fancy. And we were feeding people through the long North Country winter, so we would need a whole lot of roots. If we did well and had extra, we could always feed it to the cows or pigs.

  We filled in the map of Monument Field with rows of potatoes, cabbage, kale, onions and leeks, collards, carrots, beets. Dry beans, winter squash, and popcorn would cluster together in Pine Field, next to melons and the tomatoes. We’d put the early crops in Small Joy: peas, spinach, the first plantings of radish and lettuce. After those crops were harvested, we’d plant the field to winter wheat. Home Field would be reserved for flowers and herbs.

  It looked like a real farm, on paper at least. Outside in the real world, it was still too wet to plant. At least the rain hustled the green into the pastures. The dairy cows were enjoying a flush of new clover. Delia had come to us already pregnant, artificially inseminated at the Shields farm, and she was due to calve at the end of May. We’d stopped milking her eight weeks earlier, to give her a rest. Just before we dried her off, she had been looking awfully skinny, her hip bones jutting out sharply, ribs showing. The calf was growing inside of her. At her last milking, my cheek against her flank, I could feel it move. Delia was putting her energy into the calf and into milk—more even than she was taking in from her food. “She’s milkin’ off her back,” Neal Owens said when he saw her. Some cows are like that, too generous for their own good. The two-month rest and the new grass had done a lot for her. She’d put on flesh, and by the time she was ready to calve, she looked about as good as a cow can look without ears. I had her due date written in red on the calendar, and I read and reread the chapter on calving in The Family Cow and watched for the signs of imminence—a ballooning udder, a puffy vulva, and depressions in the flesh on either side of the root of her tail, which would mean the calf was moving toward the birth canal.

  It was raining, of course, the night she calved. When I’d gone to get Raye at milking time that evening, Delia had been off by herself, not grazing, her bag stretched so tight the teats stood out taut, like four fingers on a blown-up rubber glove. She looked too heavy to move, so I left her alone and walked Raye in by herself.

  I checked Delia at midnight, and she was lying quietly at the edge of the pasture. I set the alarm for three but woke before it went off and nudged Mark, who got up and pulled on his clothes. (These days, neither of us would be quite so vigilant. Sleep is too precious, our cows have always birthed without difficulty, and they seem to prefer to do so in solitude. But this was our first birth, and we were excited and a little anxious.) Outside, the rain was steady but the air was still, and it wasn’t cold. Two of the cats joined us at the barn, scampering in front of us like sprites.

  In the pasture, we heard the low, urgent grunt—so familiar to me now—that a new mother cow makes, the sound of bovine tenderness. In the light from my headlamp the cats’ eyes gleamed. I scanned the field, looking for the source of the sound. I saw another pair of eyes—Raye—then another pair—Delia—and then, finally, on the ground, a third. Closer, we could make out Delia with her head down, licking her little prize anxiously, intently. The calf struggled to stand, and Delia made encouraging sounds. Raye mooed, too, maybe remembering, in her slow bovine way, her own last calf. The little one wobbled to its feet, sure of where it was supposed to go but unable to make its new legs obey. Delia seemed to know she was supposed to do something, too, but was hoping for God’s sake it had nothing to do with the very sore, swollen balloon underneath her. Every time the calf lurched toward the udder, Delia turned away, so they were moving in a drunken circle. Raye watched, interested, but kept a polite distance. I came closer, peeked under the calf’s tail, and saw the tiny vertical slit of the vulva. A heifer then. Mark and I smiled at each other in the dark.

  The barnyard upends the cruel calculus of human cultures that prize male babies and devalue females. On a farm, one male’s worth of sperm is enough to service a score or more of females. Extra testosterone is a liability. It only causes problems: fights, injuries to animals, injuries to humans, broken fences, unintended breedings. In the milking herds, the rule is ironclad. Most dairy bull calves are slaughtered young, for veal. As bulls, dairy cattle are unpredictable, dangerous as loaded guns. As steers, they grow up stringy and thin, not muscly, and on most farms, it doesn’t pay to raise them for meat. The birth of a bull calf in the dairy herd is always tinged with sadness.

  A heifer is a different story, a cause for celebration. If all went well, this calf would be with us for years, an intimate, practically a member of the family. She’d get the best hay, the best grass, the best winter quarters. The trade-off would be that when she was in her mother’s place, tenderly licking clean a new baby, she would not get to keep hers, either.

  This calf would need only a gallon of milk per day, and Delia would be giving several times that amount. If we left them together, the calf would get too much milk, and we would get too little. Some farms will leave mamas and babies together for a few hours a day, separating them for a long stretch before milkings, but we didn’t have the time or the infrastructure to do that. We’d decided to put Delia back out with Raye and bottle-feed the calf. Since we were going to separate them, the sooner the better, before they could bond.

  Mark wrapped a towel around the heifer, hoisted her onto his shoulders, front legs in his left hand, hind legs in his right, and walked toward the barn. We expected Delia to follow, but she couldn’t understand where her calf had gone. She nosed the grass where she had given birth, wondering if it was still there but invisible. She bawled urgently and would not move from the spot. Raye, though, seemed to think it must be milking time and was happy to head toward the barn. And then Delia came, too, and I followed her, so that we made a funny little parade through the rainy night. Delia’s hind legs swung wide around her swollen bag, and she trailed a little string of gore.

  As soon as she was moving, Delia stopped bawling for her calf. From then on, it was as though there had never been a calf, or she had willed herself to forget.

  The cows walked into their usual stanchions. Mark had put fresh, tender hay in front of both of them, and a bucket of warm water with a little salt in it for Delia. She sucked it down in gulps. In the light I could see her bag more clearly. Milk beaded at the tips of her teats. There was the fleshy, iron smell of birth, richer than blood. The cats bounced down the aisle, hopeful, and then bounced away. Delia nibbled some hay and then paused, her gaze turned inward, and the little piece of gore hanging out her back end made some progress, then retreated. That was the afterbirth, which Neal Owens had called cleanings. It was supposed to be expelled in the hour or two after calving.

  Mark settled the calf in the nursery we’d made by filling the shed next to the house wit
h a thick layer of straw, and she promptly went to sleep. I washed Delia’s udder and grasped her teats. She was so swollen, I could fit only two fingers on them. Still, the colostrum spilled from her, the color and thickness of eggnog. This is the first milk, full of the mother’s antibodies. It would give the calf passive immunity to disease until her own immune system kicked in. Curious, I tasted it. It was salty and a little bitter, nothing like milk and not something I’d want to try again. Once I had a quart in my bucket, Mark filled a calf bottle and went to feed the heifer. A calf’s gut can absorb those crucial antibodies for only the first twenty-four hours after birth. The more colostrum she got, and soon, the stronger her resistance to disease would be while she was small and vulnerable. If she got none, she would die.

  The great big, taut bag softened a little as I milked, and Delia seemed grateful. She looked at me with patient eyes, as though I were her missing calf. I felt her heave, and the afterbirth came partway out and hung there. I could see the meaty cotyledons, where the placenta had been attached to Delia’s uterus, and the cellophane layers of the calf’s sac. Another heave and it was delivered, perhaps fifteen pounds of it. Delia strained in her stanchion, trying to get at it. I moved the dripping heap to her head, and she reached for it, chewing, slurping, chewing, slurping until it was gone, leaving her vegetarian’s mouth disconcertingly bloody. I don’t know why new mothers’ inner compasses tell them to do this, whether it’s to keep the wolves away or to fill the newly empty gut, but I do know that someone should make a horror film about it.