The Dirty Life.On Farming, Food, and Love

by Kristin Kimball

  I tried to see our house the way our guests would see it. It had its good points. It was square and solid, sturdy like a stevedore. The year 1902 was scratched into the foundation, and it had withstood all those winters and summers; Mark’s father, who had built houses for a living, said it had been well and carefully constructed. It had large mullioned windows and two chimneys. The old kitchen chimney was made of bricks, and it was in ruins inside. We’d broken into it through the wall above our stove to investigate, and the hole remained, covered by a tinfoil pie plate. The newer chimney, on the east side, was made of mason blocks, ugly but sound.

  I had seen old pictures of the farmhouse as it had been designed, and it was beautiful then, with a neat stone walk leading to an open, columned porch, which shaded the front door. By the time we arrived the porch had been clumsily enclosed and the columns hidden, and the roof over the porch had been lowered slightly and angled differently, and the large windows on the second floor had been replaced with small, tight, cheap things that made the house look like it was squinting. One of them was still cracked, as it had been when we arrived. The gracious front door was unused, victim of the dastardly porch renovation. We entered through the slapped-on mudroom, where a leaking roof had made large stained holes in the wallboard and there was a perpetual smell of dampness. Those leaks proved obstinate, resulting from a problem with the way the roof was joined on. The holes in the drywall were still there; we made a stab at decency by squaring the ragged edges so the straggly material wouldn’t brush people’s heads when they walked through our door.

  Inside, the house was a travesty, the good vernacular details—plaster-and-lath walls, hardwood floors—covered over with linoleum, green carpets, peeling paper, plywood paneling (standard-issue brown downstairs; upstairs, white and a green not found in nature), and, in the kitchen, a distressed faux-brick facing that never fooled anyone, even when it was new. Those elements came, as far as we could tell, from the last renovation, done thirty years ago, and since then the house had seen hard use. We’d heard in town that at one point there were sixteen people living in it, all of them just out of high school. They’d left behind fist-size holes punched into the wallboard, NASCAR stickers on the backs of doors, phone numbers scribbled in pencil on the white-and-green paneling.

  I had dreams for the house. I believed in its good bones. But in the chaos of the farm’s start-up year, I treated it badly—worse even than all the previous tenants, who at least kept the floors swept and vacuumed. The first floor was always muddy from the constant traffic of boots fresh from the field. One afternoon that summer, poor old Nico got locked in the mudroom during a thunderstorm. She was terrified of thunder, and she panicked and tried to dig and bite her way through the room’s door. Nico was fine, but the metal door was seriously mangled, bent and ripped at the bottom, and we had not had time to replace it.

  In the kitchen, we’d installed an industrial-size, three-bay, stainless-steel sink, and above it we tacked a rude drain rack made of steel pipe and wire mesh, where we stored the milk cans and stainless-steel buckets until we had a milk house. We had screwed a heavy hook into the kitchen ceiling for hanging quarters of beef while butchering until we had a proper butcher shop. They gave the kitchen a rough, industrial, S and M kind of look. There were no curtains on the windows, and our furniture was minimal, hand-me-downs from family mostly, plus a few things salvaged from my apartment in New York. We didn’t own a couch, only the hard, unyielding dining room chairs around a big pine table. There is no sitting here, the house said. Only work or sleep.

  We were the only people in town who did not keep our lawn neatly mowed. In Essex, even the scofflaws and the drunks, the wife beaters and the serial unemployed mow their lawns. On the outskirts, there might be cars up on blocks in the yard, permanent fixtures, but the grass around them was cut on a weekly basis. Our elderly neighbors, the Everharts, kept their lawn both neatly trimmed and thoroughly decorated, with figurines, birdbaths encircled by pansies, and a kind of weatherproof slide projector set up to make a picture against the house at night, a different image for every holiday, from a flag at the Fourth of July to a snowman at Christmas.

  Meanwhile, our lawn grew shaggy. I looked at it as I ran by with my hands full of crates or tools or stakes, feeling a growing self-loathing, knowing that it was a black mark against us in the collective mind of our community, a civic failure. One evening at the beginning of summer I’d grabbed the little electric mower my parents had given us and made an attempt to cut it, but by then the grass had grown so rank it was like trying to shear a sheep with nose hair clippers. I made one crushed, chewed-up stripe of grass at the lawn’s periphery and was defeated. By August the lawn was so overgrown it could swallow dogs and small children. Our community has more than its fair share of eccentrics, and it is tolerant of them, but I could tell the lawn bothered our neighbors, because they didn’t tease us about it. Others of our quirks—such as the pair of Highland horns that Shane Sharpe helped Mark bolt onto the hood of our Honda, making the car look like it’s sporting a handlebar mustache—they would tease us about incessantly. About the lawn, they were ominously silent.

  Mark is immune to this kind of social pressure, and generally contemptuous of lawns. In his mind, grass is for grazing. And therein lay the solution. We might never find time to mow the lawn, but if it looked fecund enough, and the cattle were hungry, we could find the time to put up a fence. A few weeks before our wedding, we ringed the lawn with electric fence and moved the beef herd onto it. The dairy herd was recruited for the smaller patch across the driveway.

  For three days, the cattle mowed our lawn. We fell asleep to Rupert calling to the dairy cows: a series of mournful, falling bass notes, the sound of a monumental desire. Then a petulant trumpeting, the pitch rising to what passes for tenor in a bull, the sound of desire thwarted by electric fence. We awoke to the gentle rip-rip sound of cows grazing right outside our bedroom window and ate breakfast, on a foggy dawn, to the mamas bellowing through the mist to find their sleepy babies. While brushing my teeth, I watched them from the upstairs bathroom window. They’d disturbed the mallard who was nesting next to the pond, but the tree swallows were thrilled with the boost in fly population. I opened the window and helloed to the cattle, and they answered, in chorus, and raised their heads, jaws working, to look for me. By the time they moved on to fresh pasture, the lawn was a lawn again, nipped neatly to within an inch of the ground. The neighbors nodded their approval, and I checked “mow lawn” off the wedding to-do list.

  My friend Alexis came for another visit at the end of summer, on her way to Greece. When we were both college students, she and I had worked as travel writers for a summer on the same assignment in Rome, where we sat outside the Pantheon and ate gelato and watched black-haired boys zip past us on Vespas.

  It was the last day of the county fair. Grease gone old in the frying vats, the carnies’ cries hoarse now, and weary. The horse trailers and pickups were pulling up to the barns to load the 4-H projects: geese and rabbits and hens, calves, ponies, sheep, plus cots and sleeping bags, coolers, currycombs and hoof polish and electric clippers. The animals looked weary. The kids looked weary. The parents looked weary. In the barn, the teenagers had decorated their horses’ stalls with plastic flowers and bunting, photographs, ribbons from the show, sentiments on poster board in felt-tipped cursive (“Thank you, Lord, for giving us horses and for giving us Jesus, who saves us from hell”) and, on one, a memorial, for someone’s uncle just killed in Russia, drowned, it said specifically, an accident, in the Black Sea. We emerged from the barn into the bright afternoon. The Ferris wheel turned against a cloudless sky. Next door, in Floral Hall, the antiabortion people had lined the edge of their table with pink plastic fetuses. The Republicans had a table, and I waved to our neighbor Ron, who was handing out red, white, and blue pamphlets there. Across the crowded floor a bearded man was selling tooled leather goods, his stall hung with purses and belts, the buckles of the latter embossed w
ith surprised-looking bucks carrying enormous racks of horn.

  Back outside, we passed the duck pond, the pony rides, and the exotic-animal man, who was packing up his snakes. Alexis and I lined up in front of a trailer to buy corn dogs and snow cones. They were advertising a plastic mug of soda the size of a pony keg. I was wondering who in the world would buy such a thing when the three people in line in front of us and the guy behind us each ordered one. The crowd was flowing toward the grandstand, wrists bent under the weight of their kegs of soda, lining up for tickets to the demolition derby. It cost five dollars to get into the grandstand for the derby, on top of the ten dollars at the gate to get into the fair, kids included, so a family of four had dropped sixty dollars before they even bought a hot dog or a gallon of soda, and they were ready to see some action.

  In the stands were halter tops and tank tops, tattoos, skinny girls and heavy women, pockets sticking out the bottoms of cutoff shorts. T-shirts with the logos of oil companies, car companies. Many small children were bouncing like pinballs against the patient legs of the extended family.

  They’d put up heavy concrete forms to make barriers on the horse-racing track, forming a rectangle about fifty yards long. A tanker from the DOT sprayed water on the dirt surface until it was several inches deep in mud. Outside the barriers the derby cars were lining up. For the last several weeks groups of men had been working on those cars in their backyards, evenings and weekends, a multigenerational tradition, sacred as Christmas. They had souped up the engines and taken the glass out of the windshields, chained closed the doors and trunks, replaced the regulation gas tanks with little one-gallon boxes. Some drivers had lashed foam padding to their doorframes with duct tape. The cars were decorated with checkerboards and stripes, some painted with martial phrases (“It’s Gonna Hurt”), some with humor (“I like beer”) and some with names of family and loved ones (“Dad + Samantha,” “Hi Foxy,” and “Jessica Our Angle,” that unfortunate misspelling done in careful block letters on a 1980s Olds painted bright green). There were twelve cars per heat. They roared onto the track like motorized lions, like mechanical testosterone, an American bullfight.

  The first heat was the four-cylinder, small cars. They lined up in four rows of three, front to back. I asked the family next to us to explain how it worked and they told us that the last car that can still move is the winner, that the experienced drivers ram the others with the backs of their cars, not the fronts, to spare the engines, and they don’t do it too hard if they want to finish in the money. Others—the less experienced, or the ones who just can’t help themselves—floor their gas pedals and T-bone their opponents with everything they’ve got, smashing their own cars in the process.

  The green flag waved and the cars screeched toward one another. It was too loud, suddenly, to hear yourself whoop, a wall of general noise. When metal hit metal you didn’t hear it as much as feel the impact in your bones. The drivers rocked from side to side inside their cars, helmets bumping off the glassless doorframes. Within seconds there were flames shooting from the hood of one car, and oily smoke drifting up into the stands, and the flagman stopped the action while the firefighters came out with their extinguishers.

  The heat lasted ten minutes. It wound down slowly, as cars stalled or got stuck. By the end there was only one car barely moving, and this limping survivor was declared the winner. The track was littered with dead machines, smoke and steam rising from them, leaking fluids. Two four-wheel-drive trucks came onto the track then to tow the losers away. The drivers of the trucks were high school boys—jeans, baseball caps, no shirts to hide their smooth chests—and they exuded proprietary know-how as they maneuvered among the cars. There were pretty girls with long hair and tan shoulders in the front seats next to them and also in the truck beds, which had been tricked out with upholstered seats pushed up next to the cabs. The girls wore spaghetti-strap tanks and short shorts and big hoop earrings and large sunglasses, and did not smile, and pretended that nobody was looking at them.

  The bigger cars went next, and then the muscle cars, and later, there would be the moms in minivans division, but by then we couldn’t take it anymore. The smoke, the noise, the tension. On top of the roar of the fair, it was all too much, and we were exhausted. The heats would go on for hours, and the winners would be pitted against one another, until the final winner got a thousand-dollar check. Alexis and I stepped over legs and feet and brushed through the riveted crowd, out of the grandstand, back to the row of booths hung with pink beehives of cotton candy, oversize stuffed animals. The lights were coming on now, and under their gaudy glow and into the twilight beyond, pairs of middle school boys and girls walked twined together, fair dates, shouting loudly to each other to belie the intimacy of their touching, as though loudness could render their desire invisible.

  Part Five

  Fall

  The fields are a clock read in colors. As the days of summer passed, the palette of our world shifted from bright greens to dark greens, then ocher, dun, all the variations of gold. The days grew shorter, the light took on a golden cast. Spots of color spread through the trees—reds, oranges, and yellows. The pumpkins became beacons against the dull earth. The late-planted sunflowers bloomed, and their heads, ten feet in the air, were crazy with bees. The goldenrod blossoming in the hedgerow matched exactly the color of the wedding rings I’d kept in a box for more than a year. I’d bought them from a gold merchant in Burma when I was there on an assignment, right after we got engaged. I bought them without knowing Mark’s ring size. I guessed his finger was bigger than that of your average Burman, so I’d scoured the market stalls for the biggest ring I could find. I found it and its mate in a shop hung with red silk and smelling of sandalwood. They were twenty-four-karat, dark yellow, simply rounded, heavy, with a dull finish, as deliciously plain and austere as gold can ever be. Mine was too big, and I guessed Mark’s would be too small, but I figured I could get them resized at home. When I told the merchant that, she was alarmed. “No cut,” she said, tapping the rings with her two fingers. “Bad luck. No break love.”

  It was September, deep harvest season, days of pulling carrots, pulling beets, stacking hundred-pound bags in the root cellars. Mark scythed the rows of black beans and kidney beans, dry and hard in their brittle pods, and I forked them, stems and all, onto the wagon, which the horses drew slowly down the row. We hauled home a shaky stack that rose six feet above the deck of the wagon, spread them on the concrete floor of the pavilion, and commenced to whack the beans loose with flails we’d made out of pieces of broomstick looped together with baling twine.

  When whole sections of the fields had been harvested, we spread them with compost, to replenish the soil with nutrients and get it ready for next year’s crops. The compost came from our own pile, which was seven feet tall and twelve feet wide, and snaked sixty feet across the farmyard. The heart of it was made of eleven tons of spoiled field corn that a grain-growing neighbor had given us in the winter, when we’d first arrived. On top of the corn we’d piled layers of all the organic things we had no better use for: manure, weeds pulled from the fields, urine-soaked straw bedding, unwholesome hay, bushels of spent vegetables that didn’t appeal to the pigs or the chickens, plus the parts of the animals we butchered that we don’t eat: the hide, intestines, stomach, spleen, pancreas, lungs, hooves, horns.

  Given the right balance of carbon and nitrogen, the appropriate amount of water, and enough mass, a compost pile can digest anything that was once alive. Throughout the previous winter, delicate clouds of steam had risen from it, like smoke at a disco. It had smelled, not unpleasantly, like a slightly moldy tortilla set on a hot griddle. It was warm enough on top to hatch flies. One foot under the surface, it was hot enough to burn the life out of weed seeds, hot enough to burn your curious hand. Of all the confounding things I encountered that first year, the heat of decomposition—its intensity and duration—was the most surprising, the one that made me want to slap my knee and say, Who knew? That hea
t comes from the action of hordes of organisms, some so tiny billions can live in a tablespoon of soil. They are in there, eating and multiplying and dying, feeding on and releasing the energy that the larger organisms—the plants and the animals—stored up in their time, energy that came, originally, from the sun. I think it’s worth it, for wonder’s sake, to stick your hand in a compost pile in winter and be burned by a series of suns that last set the summer before.

  Throughout the winter and into the spring, we had turned the pile with the tractor’s bucket loader, pushing the cool material from the top and edges to the still-hot middle. After mixing, the temperature spiked again, but not as high. Mix, cook, cool, repeat. The volume of the pile shrank and shrank, and by the end of summer, it was reduced by half, its individual components melted into a uniform substance rich in nitrogen, crumbly and black, ready to spread on the fields.