When Delia was milked and both cows were back on pasture, the sun was up. Mark went to bed, to get a few minutes of rest before the real day started. I stopped to inspect the calf, who was curled into the straw. She was fawn-colored with a nip of white above a back hoof so fresh from its long bath it was perfectly clean and soft, the bottom still rough, like a brand-new shoe with a crepe rubber sole. White spots on her flanks, like her mother, but the continents rearranged: Australia on her right side, Greenland on her left. Her pretty deer’s head was capped with translucent ears. She extended her rear legs, then rested, showing me the four pink nubbins that would become her teats. She unfolded her front legs cautiously, one at a time, and wobbled there. Her focus seemed to shift between this new world and the quiet within. She was still only tenuously connected to our side, to light and time, air and gravity. At births, I find that it’s this, and not the slip and splash of delivery, that gives us a glimpse of mystery. Newly born creatures carry the great calm of the Before with them, for minutes or hours, and when you are close to it, you can feel it, too.
I named her June. For weeks, when I fell into bed exhausted, Mark had been telling me, “You think this is busy? Just wait until June.” When I was too tired to finish dinner, he would nudge the plate at me gently. “Eat,” he’d say. “You’ll need it come June.” I gathered that, on a Venn diagram of the year’s work, June was the space where everything intersected. There’d still be planting to do, and harvesting would have begun in earnest, and with the long hours of sunlight, the weeds would be going nuts. There would be hay to think about, too, and the pastures growing rank. Maybe I named the little calf June to tame the idea of it, to make it less threatening, or maybe to impart to her the vigor of it, the vital energy of the solstice.
At morning milking, Delia looked dopey. I consulted with Mark, and we decided that she was probably tired out from labor, and that we should keep an eye on her. When I went out to the pasture later that morning to move the cows’ fence, she looked much worse. I took her by the collar and tried to bring her into the barn, but she stumbled and fell and could not get back up. She felt horribly cold, as though she were already mostly dead. I ran to the house and called Dr. Goldwasser. He was out on a farm call, would come as soon as he could.
I went back to the pasture and sat with Delia. She was curled up like her calf had been, forelegs tucked, head curved around toward her flank, with her nose resting on the ground. She looked ready for the journey back into the dark. I watched for her breaths, which I could barely see, shallow and slow. There were a million things on my to-do list, but I couldn’t bear to leave her. I went to the house, got the latest issue of The New Yorker, and read articles to her out loud.
Dr. Goldwasser arrived an hour later, coming across the pasture with his bag of tricks. “She’s got milk fever,” he said. He touched her eyeball, and its lid barely flinched. “She’s pretty far gone.” Milk fever is not a fever at all but a deadly metabolic imbalance that afflicts some dairy cows at calving. Jerseys are especially prone. Their milk comes in abundantly, drawing calcium from the blood faster than the blood can recruit more from its storage place, in the bones. The level of calcium in the blood drops. Without sufficient blood calcium levels, muscles cannot function. Paralysis sets in, limbs, lungs, heart.
In his calm, easy way, Dr. Goldwasser rocked Delia’s weight onto her folded knees so he could lift her head and put a rope halter around it. He found the thick vein in her neck where the blood was still coursing, slow and sluggish, and pushed his needle in. He hooked the rubber tubing to a plastic bottle of calcium and held it low. “Not too fast,” he said. “Too fast and you give them heart failure.” I felt Delia tremble, and I thought she was finally dying. “No, that’s a good thing,” said Dr. Goldwasser. “That means it’s working.” By the time the bottle was empty, the trembling had become a deep, strong shiver. He hooked up another bottle, let it drip slowly into her. When the second bottle was empty, she struggled to her feet, looking as stunned as Lazarus. She shook for another hour, the muscles working to bring back the warmth of life, but long before she stopped shivering she was grazing again, her bovine equanimity restored. If she’d seen anything at the brink of death, it wasn’t startling enough to make her lose her appetite.
A south wind blew all night, and the next morning the sun came up bright in a cloudless, robin-egg sky. It gained strength as it rose, drew the water from the dark surfaces of the fields, firming them, warming them. The weather held, and two days later, Mark and I toured our five plowed acres. The high parts of the fields were dry, but in the low parts, water still gathered in puddles, and our feet sank. The weather radio called for more rain at the end of the week, and the plants waiting on the porch and in our cold frames were yellowing, straining against the confines of their small dirt cells. We decided to risk smoothing the seedbed with the spring-tine harrow, the final step before marking our rows and planting.
The feeling you get when you step out of the barn with a team of horses on a morning like that is so specific and so bright there ought to be a name for it. I hooked Sam and Silver to the spring-tine harrow, a simple frame with C-shaped tines that stick down into the soil to loosen the top layer, level it, knock out clumps. There’s no seat on the spring-tine harrow. You get to walk behind.
We walked down the driveway, past Home Field and Mailbox. The fields were already showing the personalities they’d keep for as long as they remained in existence. Home Field had good drainage and beautiful loamy soil, but its placement was awkward, abutting a grove of trees, which made it difficult to turn the horses at the end of a row. Mailbox was easier to maneuver in, but it contained a big streak of clay. After a rain the clay would clump around the horses’ feet, and stay heavy and too wet until it suddenly cracked at the surface like old porcelain and was too hard and too dry.
We pulled up in Monument Field, where our potatoes were scheduled to go. Our neighbor Ron had told us that a house had once stood at the edge of this field. The plow had revealed several of its broken bricks. This land had been farmed since before the American Revolution. The stock, the crops, the fence lines, the buildings, and the farmers had come and gone, passing over the fields like shadows in the course of the day. You can’t truly own a farm, no matter what the deed says. It has a life of its own. You can love it beyond measure, and you are responsible for it, but at most you’re married to it. I levered the tines into the surface of the soil. The horses pushed into their collars and moved forward with energy. It felt good to walk along behind them, smelling the spring smells of good, damp earth and warm horses.
We’d finished half the field when I heard the tines clank against something metal. I whoaed the horses and stooped to pick it up. It was a horseshoe, crusted with rust and dirt. One bent nail was fused to it, hand-forged. It was just about the size of my hand with all my fingers spread. If they wore them, Sam and Silver would require shoes the size of dinner plates. The old-time farm horses were smaller, tough and compact, closer to one thousand pounds than to our two-thousand-pound giants. I wondered what that old horse was up to the day he lost his shoe. It might have been a day like that day, when the low end of the field was still too wet to work, and they were out working anyway because the planting needed to be done, or the weeds were threatening to get away. I thought of the farmer who drove the horse, the man or boy who would have appreciated the rockless, forgiving soil like I did, the kind of soil, I knew, that most farmers only dream of. I thought of him looking around for that shoe after realizing his horse had cast it, the dark ribbon of iron blending in with the dirt. Then giving up, going in to dinner, his horseshoe waiting all these years under the surface, an irrelevance to all the farmers who came between us, for me to find it, and imagine him.
* * *
Mark was still courting me. His love and his commitment never wavered, even though mine seemed to go up and down like an EKG. The gifts that he brought me that spring were humble and so beautiful. The contrast between the harshness
of our lives then and the tenderness of those small gestures was shocking. A little bundle of wildflowers, laid on my pillow in the afternoon. A small drawing of the hawk we’d watched flying low over the marshy field behind the house. After the plants were in the ground I went to bed with a fever, and he brought me a plate of wild strawberries ringed by flowers and leaves, and sat on the edge of my bed and chattered and joked while I ate them, and would not take any for himself.
When my fever was gone, there was a big hunger in its place. There were no greens yet in the cultivated fields, but my body had begun to request them. Politely at first, and then not so much. It’s not bleak winter that is meager on our farm but bright spring. We walked through the pastures with a basket and a pair of kitchen shears. The wild greens had the jump on the season. Mark cut some young stinging nettles from the rich soil at the edges of the barnyard. He cut piles of the ubiquitous dandelion, with its tonic, bitter leaves. I was ravenous for them.
Every season has its delicacy, even the skimpiest one. Our butter at the end of spring is the best of the year. The pastures are at their finest, and the cows are in heaven, filling their bellies with the fast-growing grass, not yet molested by flies, the weather cool and breezy. The butter that comes from the cows then is soft, luscious, and the deep, vibrant color of antique gold.
Mark threw a big, bright hunk of that butter into a heated pot, added a diced onion and, when it had gone limp, a big pile of the dark green nettles. They wilted immediately, which took away their sting, and the smell of them was very green, like spinach but without the acridity and with a wild, nutty edge. He added some garlic, then some chicken stock, and a few handfuls of rice, and let it simmer until the greens and the rice were soft. He added salt and pepper and a scrape of nutmeg, blended it smooth, and served it with a dollop of sour cream on top, a hunk of his good bread on the side. The dandelion greens went into the still-hot pan for a few moments. Dressed with a little oil and a splash of good balsamic vinegar, they were a tart sidekick to the nourishing nettle soup.
The members were hungry for greens, too, even if they were only weeds. We found the best patches of nettles and lamb’s-quarter on the farm and harvested big bushels of them.
Meanwhile, I was on a campaign to sell the idea of scrapple, a food that Mark had introduced me to, via his Amish friends in Pennsylvania. I thought it was the most ingenious and delicious breakfast item I’d ever eaten. I had made about a hundred pounds of it when we’d last slaughtered a pig, and I was having a hard time moving it. I thought maybe our members just didn’t know what it was or how it was made, so I wrote this note, my own attempt at rebranding, to the members.
Don’t knock it just because it sounds like a cross between scrap and offal! Scrapple is fine dining. Take bones of one pig plus any meat that hasn’t been used for cuts or sausage and simmer until the meat is free of bones. Remove bones. Pass broth and meat through a grinder. Bring to a boil, and add fine meal (corn or wheat or buckwheat), black pepper, salt, and sage. Pour into molds and let cool into lovely brown gelatinous bricks.
To prepare scrapple, slice thinly. Heat a skillet with a little butter or lard until quite hot. Dredge scrapple slices in flour and throw on skillet. Turn down to medium and cook longer than you think you should. Turn once only, and cook the other side. It should be crispy brown. Eat for breakfast with eggs, or do as the Pennsylvania Amish do and make yourself a scrapple sandwich!
In my zeal and my spring delirium, I thought “lovely brown gelatinous bricks” sounded appetizing, which tells you why Mark is in charge of sales.
We were learning, slowly, but everything needed to be done quickly. There was one moment of triumph during potato-planting week. The potatoes—a thousand pounds of them—had already been cut into golf ball–size hunks. Each hunk had at least one eye on it, where the white sprouts were already beginning to emerge. It was a Friday, and we’d spent the morning and noontime harvesting more nettles, moving milk to the distribution refrigerator, making cuts of beef. In the afternoon, while I finished arranging the share for the members, Mark hitched the horses to the cultivator, with one large spade attached straight down the middle. He used it to dig the trenches, taking care to dig them straight, perfectly parallel, forty inches apart. If he wiggled, cultivation and hilling later in the season would be impossible, at least without digging up the very potatoes we were planting. Mark was good at straight lines from the beginning, which I took as a sign of his upright character.
As evening settled in, I took the team from him and put them up in their stalls, still harnessed, then ran back to the field to help him drop the cut potatoes into their trenches, ten inches apart. Before we were finished, the sun had set, and the potatoes still had to be covered. There was a stretch of rain predicted to begin the next day, and we were close to the end of the window for potato planting. Tired as we were, if we wanted potatoes for the year, it had to be done.
Mark kept dropping potatoes, speeding along the rows at a run, while I went back to the barn. Following his hurried instructions, I wrenched the spade off the cultivator and replaced it with a pair of discs, set on an inward-facing V, to push the loose soil over the potatoes in their trench. Then I went to the barn for the dozing horses and rehitched them. Like us, they had already worked overtime that day, and they were probably expecting I’d turn them out on pasture for the night. I hated to ask them to work again, but we didn’t have much choice. I was starting to distrust anthropomorphic feelings by then—I suspected that to assign human emotion to animals was to underestimate the beasts—but Sam certainly moved with a sense of purpose that night, leaning into the bit and picking up his feet on the way to the field, practically dragging sluggish old Silver with him.
I had never used the cultivator before, but Mark was the faster potato dropper, so I drew the job of teamster. The wheels and the discs adjust by foot pedal, so the trick is to try to watch where the horses are going and watch the ground underneath your seat, both at the same time. You must keep the row centered perfectly between the horses so that the naked potatoes get buried completely. I found that I was not so good at straight lines and wondered what that meant about my character.
Sam, though, was the teacher’s pet in our little class of two, and either he had cultivated row crops before or he was a very fast learner. At the end of a row, I’d whoa the team to disengage the heavy discs, and Sam would flick one ear back, listening for the cue to turn. In the pasture, Silver was the undisputed king, but in harness, when he knew the answers, Sam was not afraid to assert himself. He nudged Silver through the turns, sometimes laying his ears back and throwing his weight into it, with attitude.
The moon rose, but it was no help—a pale splinter flanked by the fat spring Venus. By the time we were three-quarters finished, it was truly dark. Mark was still sprinting along the final trenches, dropping potatoes. I couldn’t see where the rows started anymore. I was about to yell to Mark that we had to quit and go in when I realized Sam knew exactly what we were doing and could see better than I could in the dark. Soon as we rounded a turn, I’d give him a loose line and he’d find the right place at the top of the row and stop. Silver kerthumped along next to him. When I asked them to step up, the potatoes were right where they were supposed to be, passing between my feet, vague white orbs in deep shadow, and I had nothing to do with it. We finished the whole field that way, the horses’ backs steaming in the chilly night air. To this day I don’t know why they work for us so willingly. They are big enough to say no, but they keep saying yes, even at the end of a long day, even in the dark.
Part Four
Summer
The first hot days came, and with them the flies. Great green-headed ones that tormented the horses, and the blackflies and deerflies that tormented us; the face flies that gathered at the corners of the cows’ eyes, and the carrion flies that lurked everywhere, waiting for spilled blood. We slaughtered the cow we’d named Kathleen first thing after chores, before the flies would be too thick. We’d ha
d the beef cattle checked for pregnancy, and Kathleen was not bred, despite the bull’s best efforts. Dr. Goldwasser could feel something wrong with her ovaries, so we’d marked her for culling. She was an interesting-looking cow, dark brown with a beautiful streak of white in her shaggy forelock that made me think of Susan Sontag.
Mark and I moved through the steps of slaughter gracefully now, a coordinated team of two. She was grazing quietly. Mark shot her, in the x between her eyes and ears, and she dropped. Cattle fall with a kind of preordained momentum that seems faster and more forceful somehow than mere gravity. Sheep, too. Chickens, by contrast, flap their way to death, wildly, nervously. Pigs do not go gently but with furious motion. I used to wonder if the differences in those last moments had something to do with the essence of their natures coming out—the pushy pig, the docile cow, the twitchy hen—but now I think they are just tricks of anatomy, the thickness of the skull or the map of nerves.
Mark handed me the gun, I handed him the knife. He cut her throat quickly, and the hot blood poured out on the grass. She bled and kicked, parody of flight, her eyes blank, beyond unconscious. When her reflexive movements slowed, I wrapped a chain around one of her hind legs, and then she kicked again, slowly but purposefully, as though the leg knew what I was doing and was making a final protest, even if it wasn’t connected to a brain anymore. I held the leg for a moment, felt the strength seep from the big muscles. It takes time to drain all the life from a living thing, as though life were a substance, some sluggish liquid more viscous than blood, or the sand in the Wicked Witch’s hourglass.
The Dirty Life.On Farming, Food, and Love Page 16