You can’t watch another creature’s death without contemplating your own. I wondered out loud to Mark about the sensations of it. Do you think she felt pain? Do you think she suffered? He said he did not think she felt fear. And he wasn’t sure I was asking the right question. The passage out is only a tiny part of the whole. As for himself, compared to the big and endless nothing, he said, he would rather feel something, anything. I told him that if I die while we are together I want him to compost me. “And I hope something eats my heart and my liver,” I said. After I’ve eaten so many other creatures’ hearts and livers, it’s the least I can do. We were working in a field close to the road, and a couple was approaching, on a prebreakfast power walk. She was wearing a bright blue jog bra and tight black pants, which marked them as summer visitors, city people. We hoisted the carcass up by one leg on the bucket of the tractor. The half-severed head dangled loosely in the air. They looked our way, first with curiosity, then with horror. “You better put that in writing,” Mark said.
I’d become familiar enough with the insides of animals by then to have left behind more or less completely the usual squeamishness toward eating parts other than the most common cuts of muscle. One person’s scrap is another person’s delicacy. At first, Mark and I ate more than our share of the unusual parts, because they weren’t very popular then with the members. Things have changed now, and we’re lucky if we can get our hands on a piece of liver, but back then our kitchen was a culinary playground. Mark tested and cooked and tested and cooked until he had a stupendous deviled kidney pie, spiked with cream and bacon. My own specialty was heart, the rich, meaty symbol of love. On busy days during the growing season I liked to slice it thin and sauté it, then top each plate with a spoonful of pan gravy. In winter, when the pace was a little slower and nobody minded the all-day heat from a slow oven, I stuffed whole hearts with dried herbs and mushrooms and buttered bread crumbs and braised them. I fell in love all over again with liver, experimenting with the various styles of pâté and terrines. I sought out cookbooks that could offer wisdom on these specialties—Jane Grigson’s classic Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery, so writerly, and so wise on the odd bits and pieces, like trotters and ears. I read Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn’s Charcuterie, dry and precise and insistent on the details, which made me feel like a chemist. And then I discovered my enduring favorite, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s The River Cottage Meat Book, a book that made nose-to-tail cooking seem accessible, even fun.
Hugh was the one I turned to the first time we slaughtered a bull and the testicles appeared in the refrigerator, the size of oblong softballs, squishy to the touch, covered in a whitish skin marked with squiggly purple blood vessels. “They do not appear very appetizing in the raw,” Hugh said reassuringly, “but once prepared, they lose their fearsome aspect and, like brains, I think most people would find them quite palatable if they didn’t know what they were.” Following Hugh’s directions, I blanched them in boiling water for two minutes, skinned them, and marinated them in olive oil, vinegar, green onion, and herbs. I hit a snag on the skinning step, because I couldn’t tell what was considered skin on a testicle and what was, well, other. I peeled off a layer of membrane only to find another layer. Maybe a testicle is like an onion, I thought, and if I keep peeling, I’ll end up with nothing. So I left some of the white and squiggly purple stuff on until I got to slicing them into rounds and discovered that the true interior of a testicle is light brown in color, with a fine granular texture—more prairie uni than prairie oyster, if you ask me. I tossed the slices in seasoned flour and panfried them in butter, and served them for breakfast along with scrambled eggs and toast. The taste was interesting, not too far from a very fresh sea scallop, which the slices resembled in shape and size. I liked them, and Mark loved them. “In Spain,” Hugh says, “bull’s testicles are considered a great delicacy and an enhancer of masculinity.” I wrote him a fan note.
And then there was blood. Solid parts were one thing. Fluids, I wasn’t so sure I could handle. They were a kind of last frontier. I checked for Hugh’s opinion and found his recipe for black pudding, which he called “the best possible affirmation of your intention to make good use of every last bit of your pig.”
I took a pot to the field with me when Mark and I went to slaughter a pig and caught about half a gallon of blood. Following the recipe, I stirred it while it was warm, scooping out the stringy bits that clotted around my spoon. The liquid that remained was intensely red, redder than anything that I’d ever called food before. I sautéed an onion, added sherry, cream, herbs, bread crumbs, and diced pork fat, and mixed all of it into the blood. Mark held the knotted casing for me while I funneled the mixture in. Now I had a set of long red water balloons, still not food. I put a shallow pan on the stove at a gentle simmer and laid the balloons in to poach. Some of them exploded, but the ones that remained intact quickly turned from squishy to firm, and from red to lavender. They looked theoretically edible. Cooled, they were sliceable, dotted with white, succulent bits of fat. They were very rich and asked to be eaten in small bites, but there was nothing challenging about the taste, which was subtle enough to leave room for the sherry and the herbs. The texture was delicate and appealingly mousselike.
Summer advanced, and the fields began to send forth vegetables by the bushel. On Friday mornings, Mark and I got out of bed in the cool dark to harvest bushels of lettuce, spinach, chard, arugula, and snap peas, then baby beets, baby carrots, shell peas. I had never eaten shell peas straight from the field before, and I could not get enough of their sweet green crunch. Thomas LaFountain introduced me to the North Country way of cooking them. Gently simmer freshly shelled peas in milk until they turn bright but not mushy; add salt and pepper and a little butter, and, at the end, a sprig or two of mint. A bowl of spring peas cooked in milk is worth any amount of time spent weeding and picking.
We dug the first new potatoes, the size of eggs, with bright, thin reddish-pink skins. For a week’s worth of lunches, Mark and I feasted on boiled new potatoes with butter and salt, and enormous bowls of fresh greens. Eating on the stone bench in front of the house, looking out over our fields, I could see that the farm was beginning to come together. The buildings were still leaning, the farmhouse’s window was still broken, but it had a visible sense of purpose now, an animating spark. It has regained its soul, I thought.
The members, who had been happy enough with meat, milk, and nettles, were ecstatic when they began getting vegetables. Word of our farm spread, and as the summer went on, our membership doubled, then tripled.
* * *
My existence, from daybreak to dark, became focused on the assassination of weeds. Before that first year, I’d filed “agriculture,” in the card catalog of my head, in the same general place as “nature.” As in many things, I was so wrong. Farming, I discovered, is a great and ongoing war. The farmers are continually fighting to keep nature behind the hedgerow, and nature is continually fighting to overtake the field. Inside the ramparts are the sativas, the cultivated plants, soft and vulnerable, too highbred and civilized for fighting. Aligned with nature, there are the weeds, tough foot soldiers, evolved for battle. As we approached the solstice, both sides were at full tilt, stoked by rain and the abundance of sun. Every morning, Mark and I would look out over the fields at first light and see a fresh haze of green. For every one of ours, there were a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand of theirs, wave after wave, unending.
If you ever wonder why organic vegetables cost more, blame weeds. The work on a conventional farm that can be done with one pass of the sprayer must, on an organic farm, be done continually, from germination to harvest, by physically disrupting the weeds. When they have just emerged from the ground—the infant stage called white thread, for the appearance of the first thin taproot—they are easy to kill by barely nudging them, exposing that delicate root to the drying air or burying the new leaves so that they are starved of sun. If allowed to become bigger—the taproot expanding o
ut into a fine white web, the leaves unfolding on a thickening stem—they require increasingly more effort to kill. Much beyond white thread, our tool of choice is a hoe. If the weeds are allowed to grow bigger still, the hoe becomes useless, and the row must be hand-weeded.
Lucky for us, all farmers were once what we now call organic, and the horse-drawn tools they invented to deal with weeds were precise and efficient. The best one in our arsenal was the ancient, rusty International two-horse cultivator we’d bought at the Amish auction. Mark cut a new tongue for it out of green ash and replaced some of its broken parts. Like so many other things that year, it wasn’t exactly right—the bearings were bad, so the wheels tilted and flopped on hills and turns—but it was usable. It looked like the two-wheeled sulkies that harness racers drive, but with lots of levers and adjusters and gears stuck on it. It was the kind of machine Willy Wonka would have used if he were a dirt farmer instead of a chocolatier.
I became one with that beautiful tool. I climbed aboard as soon as chores could be finished, the horses brushed and fed and harnessed. The sun would be up by then, the dew burning off. In the field, I adjusted the many levers, which controlled the depth and angle of the sweeps that ran along the ground. The goal was to disrupt the soil as close as possible to the plants without actually killing them. The horses walked on either side of the row, and I rode above it, moving the sweeps from side to side with my feet. It was magic at white thread stage, killing hundreds of thousands of tiny wild mustards and lamb’s-quarters on every pass of the field. It was enormously satisfying to finish a row and look back at all the little upended weeds, wilting in the drying air.
From that perspective, I got to know our enemies, and their various strengths and weaknesses. There was crafty smartweed, the plotting intellectual; purslane, the Trojan horse, who rode into the fields on our tools and grew into a formidable foe. There was thistle, the big brute with the mace, slow and obvious but heavily armored, and his timing was pure genius, going to seed at the climax of the season, when we were too busy on other fronts and watched helplessly as the purple blooms changed to white fluff and spread in the wind. Finally there was the pretty, strangling bindweed, a cousin to morning glory, nature’s Mata Hari. She was my nemesis.
Bindweed appeared innocuous enough at first. Pale, succulent, vulnerable-looking tentacles that soon produced small heart-shaped leaves. It grew slowly and then seemed to explode, adding inches of vine per day and twining over the young crops, intending to smother. It was largely immune to the sweeps of the cultivator, which were so effective at killing the young annual weeds. Bindweed could not be killed by uprooting or by burying. Some of the weed would tangle in the sweeps and be torn out of the ground, and if it had reached a crop plant, the crop plant would be torn out, too. Then the crop plant would wither and die in the sun, while the bindweed drew on its own moist flesh, rerooted, and grew. As the bindweed gained on us, the vines became luxuriant mats over the ground, and they wrapped around the working parts of the cultivator in the first feet of a row, which turned the sweeps into useless things that dug rough trenches in the ground and made the horses sweat with effort. The only thing to do for bindweed was crawl along the row with a bucket and tear every piece out by hand, haul it away from the field, and dump it. And spit on it. We could spend a whole day clearing the field we called Small Joy, and by the end of it, a new wave of succulent tips was pushing up to the surface of the soil.
Haymaking began. All ears were tuned to the weather radio, all eyes on the grass. We’d hired the Owens family to make our hay that year, old Mr. Owens and his grown sons, Neal and Donald. We could hear familial bickering coming from the machine shop in the evenings as the men worked on the baler. It had a bad knotting mechanism that had confounded the best mechanics in the neighborhood.
We needed five thousand bales of hay to bring our animals through the winter. The success of haying depends on the weather. You have to have a stretch of dry days, so that the grass can be mowed, dried, fluffed, dried some more, then raked into windrows and baled. If hay is rained on, its quality deteriorates. If hay is put into a loft when it is too wet, it heats up and molds. In the worst-case scenario, it heats and heats until it spontaneously combusts and the barn burns down.
During stretches of good weather, the Owenses rushed to make as much hay as possible, and Mark and I left whatever else we were doing to help. I had to learn to drive the tractor, a skill I’d managed to avoid acquiring until then. I didn’t hate it as much as I feared it. I was paranoid that my foot would slip off the clutch and I’d run someone down with those unforgiving tires. But haying season is no time to indulge fears. At the end of the day, I climbed up into the cab of the giant orange Same, an Italian machine with enough horsepower to flatten cities, and I drove while the men stacked bales onto the wagon behind me. Once I got used to it, it felt sickly good, like holding a gun. Neal, the largest of the Owenses, could pick up a fifty-pound bale by its strings with his thick fingers and fling it in a graceful arc to its place on the wagon. He made the action look effortless, even delicate, like a girl tossing rose petals. The afternoon light turned the fields golden, and everyone’s skin looked tawny.
Sometimes, haymaking continued late into the night. The Owenses brought the bales in from the field, and Mark and I stacked them in the mow. One night I was in the loft alone. There was a big moon, and the sky was clear, but in the mow, it was deeply dark, the single bulb sending its light out in a paltry circle through the dust. Mark was outside, sending the mountain of bales one by one up the hay elevator and through the window. I listened for them to thump to the loft floor, then hauled and heaved them into place. The loft was half full, and the loose bits of hay had been falling all evening under the elevator, and all noise was muted, as in a heavy snow. Suddenly, close to me, I heard a loud panting and rustling and scrabbling sound. My tired mind raced. “BEAR!” I shrieked, in the voice I use only for emergencies. It carried through the muted, dusty air of the loft and out the mow and over the clanky elevator to Mark, who shut down the elevator. Then I heard a soft, deep huh huh huh. It was Neal, who had hefted himself up the loft ladder with much effort to help me stack the bales, laughing in the dark.
This story had legs. For weeks, when people came by the farm, they’d droll through the open truck window, “I hear you thought ol’ Neal was a bear,” as though reciting the price of milk.
* * *
The peak of summer was the crazy race that Mark had warned me about, a frantic contest of urgency. Haymaking! Fences! Harvest! Weeds! We sprinted through the late plantings of fall carrots and beets. We abused the young cabbage transplants, trotting along a row with a tray of them, throwing them to the ground, then crawling on our knees and slamming each into the dirt with one unnurturing gesture, moving on to the next. The days started at 3:45 A.M. Chores before dawn, out in the fields with the horses by the time the sun was fully up, then work, work, work, racing the weather, the weeds, the season. One afternoon, I fell asleep on the cultivator at the end of a row and dreamed I was on a boat. Evening milking started at 4:30 P.M., and cleanup and chores were over by 7:00, but the chickens would not roost until 9:00 and had to be closed into their coop so they wouldn’t be eaten by owls. Too few hours later, the whole thing began again.
Mark seemed to have tapped into a secret and possibly diabolical source of energy. I’d never seen him so exuberant, so excessively cheerful. He sang in Spanish while he washed dishes or picked peas. When we worked in the field together, he took new interest in subjects he’d known nothing about, asking me about pop culture and the romantic lives of stars he would not have recognized if they’d walked out onto our field and bonked him on the head with a hoe. He questioned me closely on what exactly a hipster was, and whether or not I had been one when we’d met. Those weeks were intensely happy ones for me, too. In my weekly note to the members, I enthused, “Did you see the sunrises this week?” and “The zinnias in the Home Field are frankly rioting.”
In the even
ings, we’d walk the fields again, to see how our new seeds had germinated, which sections were most in need of weeding. We made lists, ranked according to urgency. The striped cucumber beetles had descended thickly on the cucurbits in Mailbox Field and eaten the newly transplanted buttercup squashes to lace. Walking downwind of them one evening, we could smell them, an acrid stinkbug stink, like nail polish remover and armpit. They moved to the top of the list, and the next morning, while the bugs were still torpid and flightless, we walked through the field, knocked them into buckets of soapy water, and crushed big heaps of them under our heels on the driveway.
Farmers toil. Nature laughs. Farmers weep. There’s your history of agriculture in a nutshell. At the climax of the season, when we needed him most desperately, Silver got hurt. I noticed it in the morning, with the team harnessed, walking down the driveway on the way to the spring-tine harrow. His big head jerked up a little too high each time his left front hoof touched the ground and bobbed a little too low when he stepped down on the right side. I drove them back to the barn, left Sam in his stall, and took Silver back out to the hard-packed dirt driveway. Holding him by the bridle, I coaxed him into a trot, running alongside him just to be sure. At that point, the lameness showed up as a subtle disturbance of rhythm. By afternoon, when Dr. Goldwasser came, poor Silver was gimping around like a wounded soldier, barely able to touch the foot to the ground. He had a puncture in his sole, a deep, inch-long cut. I’d driven him through the barnyard, near where we’d pulled down one of the old buildings, and it had probably happened there—an old nail or a piece of sharp metal or a badly angled hunk of glass. At least he hadn’t injured the flexor tendon inside his hoof. He would probably be fine. But he needed rest, a course of antibiotics, bandages, and daily soaks in a bucket of hot water and Epsom salts. The soaking and the dressing were highly exhausting, because he took great joy in stepping on the bucket instead of in it, and when he decided he’d had enough fooling, he planted his big foot and flatly refused to pick it up. And the rest? If he were a saddle horse, forced rest would have been an annoyance. Because he was half our source of traction at the busiest point in the season, it was a catastrophe.
The Dirty Life.On Farming, Food, and Love Page 17