The Dirty Life.On Farming, Food, and Love

by Kristin Kimball

  Mark had spent a few late nights in the machine shop that week, rebuilding the horse-drawn manure spreader we’d bought to spread our compost. He and I filled it a quarter of the way full with shovels of our compost and took it to the field to test it out. It was a slick old machine. A wagon, basically, with a narrow, high-sided wooden box. Two chains ran along the bottom of the box, toward a set of three beaters in the back. The chains and the beaters were geared to the wagon’s wheels. When I engaged the gears and the horses moved forward, the chain moved and the beaters spun and our compost was flung in a high, wide arc behind the moving wagon. Mark and I cheered. Then, halfway down the row, the beaters kicked a clod of compost forward instead of back. It sailed past my head and whacked Silver on the rump. Startled, he laid his ears back and moved faster. The chain and the beaters moved faster, too, and got louder. The horses, unnerved, tried to run, and it took all my strength to hold them back. After that, Silver seemed to distrust the spreader. When I engaged the gears, his neck tensed and his head shot up high.

  The horses and I could spread a ton of compost in the time it took to cross the long edge of our field, which was less than three minutes. The tedious part of the job was loading that ton of compost into the spreader. Mark helped me shovel it in with a pitchfork, by hand, and each load took twenty minutes. As the day wore on, we got tired, and each load took longer still. By afternoon, the tractor, with its bucket loader, began to look very attractive. It could do the same work in two effortless scoops. The only problem was, Silver hated that tractor. When we passed it, parked in the barnyard, he eyed it as though it were a crouching wolf. I worried that the sound of it roaring behind him, in his blind spot, would be too much for him. But we were tired, and it was getting late. Mark fired up the tractor, promising to stop and turn it off if Silver got worked up. I got off my seat on the spreader and went to the horses’ heads, because that’s what I’d always done with riding horses, to give them confidence.

  I remember what happened next as though it were a movie. Wide shot of me at the horses’ heads, holding one bridle in each hand, watching Silver’s ears. Then a close-up on the blue bucket of the tractor, brimming with compost. The soundtrack is a throbbing diesel engine. Cut to Silver dancing a little but holding it together. Then the bucket dumping into the spreader, Silver going hollow-backed and stiff, the bucket clanking once against the metal side of the spreader, and Silver exploding, his weight on his haunches, his front end off the ground, his head eight feet in the air, my hand no longer on his bridle. Then we see the back ends of two horses at a dead run, the spreader rocketing down the long driveway toward the road, the futile lines between the rolling wheels of the spreader, as impossible to reach as the moon.

  I’ve had more than one opportunity to wonder, since then, what it feels like to be a horse running away. I know there is fear, but also I think there’s a certain kind of joy, or if not joy then exhilaration, abandon. The broke horse is always poised between his instincts and his training, and running is giving in to the instinct, the powerful impulse to use his long legs for what they evolved for, to put distance between himself and his death. That’s why a horse that has been through a runaway once cannot be fully trusted again. The option of escape has been opened.

  I don’t remember making the choice to jump clear of Silver when he reared, only that suddenly I was clear, and the horses were running. The noise of the spreader clanging along the driveway was like gas on a fire. Instead of running from the sound of the tractor, the horses were running from the loud, inescapable thing hitched behind them. They ran with their necks stretched out, bits resting loose in their mouths, full gallop. Ridiculously, I ran after them. I remember stripping off my jacket and dropping it on the driveway, as though that could make me run faster. The distance between me and the horses was impossible within seconds, and it opened up, wider and wider. By the time they reached the end of the driveway they were a hundred yards away from me. I tried to will them to stop before they reached the road. They did not stop. They turned. Now they were running parallel to the road, on the path at the edge of the field. I ran off the driveway and through a field, hoping against logic that I could cut them off, catch up, and—what? Jump in front of them? Out of the corner of my eye I saw Mark moving like a bullet down the driveway. He’d leapt from the tractor and grabbed his bicycle, and he was tearing after the horses, leaning forward in racer position, legs like pistons, silent, fast.

  My brain was electric with adrenaline, shuffling the possibilities, which ranged from bad to worse. The field ran east along the road for half a mile before turning into woods. There was a ditch between the field and the road. Would the horses hit the woods and stop? Or would they run into the ditch and wreck? Or would they turn and keep running around the farm until they hung up on something or upended? The answer was none of the above. Near the end of the field, there was a covered culvert over a ten-foot section of the ditch. Neatly, as though they’d planned it, the pair slowed slightly, made the ninety-degree turn over the culvert onto the road, and turned again, running east now on pavement, toward town.

  They’d crossed the yellow line, so at least they were running in the proper lane, as they’d been trained, and not straight into oncoming traffic. I could hear them for longer than I could see them, the metal wheels of the spreader raising an enormous clatter. By the time I reached the road they were gone, out of sight over a slight hill, and so was Mark, pumping furiously behind them, gaining. Nico was on the road, too, caught up in the excitement, running crookedly on her arthritic legs, trailing the whole parade. They were a half mile from town when I last saw them. If they made it all the way, the road would end in a T, and the worst-case scenarios would get worse still.

  I stood in the middle of the road and flagged down the first car that came by, driven by a middle-aged man with a beard. He was brave to stop for me, panting, hair on end, daubed with manure. He let me into the passenger seat of his car. I tried to control my breathing, told him my horses had run away, and asked if he would please drive me toward town, slowly. He asked how long it had been since they’d gotten loose, and I said I thought about fifteen minutes, which was ridiculous, in retrospect. It couldn’t have been more than three. He did not comment, and I did not offer any more details. I knew the end of the story was close, and I dreaded it. The traffic was light on that road but fast. A collision was unthinkable, and Mark looked awfully vulnerable on the bicycle. I couldn’t believe the horses could go at that pace much longer before one of them tripped and went down, and I couldn’t force my brain to imagine what would happen after that. I do remember calculating how long it would take me to get back to the farmhouse for the gun, should one be needed.

  It was a very long mile I rode with that man.

  Just as we crested the small rise, I saw the horses coming toward us in the proper lane, at a calm walk, bathed in golden, late afternoon light, like the saccharine closing shot of a Hollywood movie. Mark was on the seat of the spreader, lines in his hands, smiling, and Nico was trotting along behind, tongue lolling. Neither horse looked lame, and I did not see any blood.

  I rode home in the box of the spreader, and Mark told me his story. He’d caught up with the horses and pulled ahead of them on his bicycle, slowed down slightly, and told them to whoa. They had been running in the right lane, but when they saw him in front of them, they veered into the left lane. Mark inched left, and they veered back to the right. A car approached from behind them at that moment, saw what was happening, and—unbelievably—passed them on the far left. The car pulled ahead of the horses and tapped its brakes, and the horses slowed a little. Whoever was driving the car must have thought better of it then, because they sped off, leaving Mark and the galloping horses behind. Mark struggled to stay ahead and slightly to the left of the horses, and they drifted more and more to the right until Sam, who was hitched on the right, was on the soft shoulder of the road. Mark saw with a sick feeling that they were approaching the beginning of a guardrail, a
metal post strung with three strands of thick cable. In two strides they were upon it, one horse on either side. In another stride it would pass between the horses and hit the spreader, and at that speed, the spreader would flip or worse, and both horses would be maimed or killed.

  That was what should have happened. What actually happened was that Sam ran on one side of the guardrail, and Silver on the other, and they both went from a dead run to a full stop in one stride, and the spreader stopped a foot before the guardrail, and both horses stood still, blowing, until Mark got to their heads. He said that when he reached for their bridles they did not look panicked as much as sheepish. He picked up the lines, took his seat, backed them away from the guardrail, then turned them around, and began the walk home.

  When the rain came again it was time to put food up for winter. My neighbor Beth came over, and we canned tomatoes together, the lazy person’s way, not bothering to skin or seed, just cutting them into rough chunks and throwing them in a pot to simmer overnight into a thick paste. We canned hundreds of pounds of them, the whole big wooden kitchen table covered in tomatoes and juice. At night I dreamed of tomatoes.

  Mark and I bought a chest freezer, installed it in our basement, and filled it with bags of blanched chard, kale, broccoli, a lucky late planting of spinach, the last pickings of green beans and edamame. Our membership had grown to more than thirty people over the course of the season, and the fields yielded enough for everyone to store as much as they wanted.

  When the freezer was full and I’d had enough of canning, we started fermenting vegetables in crocks. Freaky Sandor Katz’s book Wild Fermentation was indispensable. Following his guidelines, I filled a five-gallon crock with a layer of garlic and dill, a few handfuls of grape leaves to add tannin, for crispness, and then a whole bushel of cucumbers, and covered everything with brine. Sandor said that was all it took. I was skeptical, but he was right. Two weeks later the pickles were ready—tangy, garlicky, alive, as good as Guss’ on the Lower East Side.

  Then the potatoes were ready, and they were daunting. The vines had withered on top of the rows, and underground, their tubers were big as Mark’s fist, ten of them for every one we’d planted, for a total of ten thousand pounds. I was weary, and the thought of all that weight panicked me. Mark went through our phone book and called everyone we knew in the area, members and friends and acquaintances. We didn’t know how many of them would come on harvest day, but any one of them would be a help.

  The appointed Saturday came, and we stacked the wagon with bushel boxes, then hitched Sam and Silver to the potato digger. We’d bought it at auction, had not tested it, and weren’t entirely sure it would work. It hooks to the forecart and has an adjustable prow that dips down under the hilled row, so that, as the horses pull, a thick layer of soil and the potatoes it contains flows up and over it. There is a seat where one person sits, adjusting the depth of the dig. The back of the machine is a wire belt that conveys the potatoes back to the ground, bouncing them free from dirt on the way. When it works, the digger leaves behind it a thick trail of potatoes, waiting on the surface for people to come and pick them up. Mark sat on the digger, and I drove the horses from the forecart.

  We set it too deep on the first pass, and the draft was very heavy. The horses were mighty strong by the end of the season of work, and they pulled so hard that the leather tug of Silver’s harness snapped, sending the evener crashing into his back legs. Mark raced back to the barn for spare harness parts while I fussed over Silver, who was aggrieved but unhurt. We fixed the harness in the field, farm-style, with a length of wire and a few wraps of electrical tape, and started again. This time we got the depth right, and the potatoes came up out of the ground like magic. Mark whooped. I stopped at the end of the row and looked back at a thick carpet of potatoes, and then I saw the cars and trucks arriving, whole families come to help. By the time we’d dug all our rows there were thirty people in the field, friends and also people I’d never met, all ages, from kids to old people, bending over buckets of potatoes, shouting and laughing between the rows. A well-organized brigade of the strongest people hauled full boxes to the wagon.

  I walked the horses home and put them in their stalls and went back to the field with a pot and pints of butter. It was truly fall, the air still cold at noon despite the bright sun. The rows of popcorn had lost every trace of life, their leaves like brown paper flags rattling in the shifting breeze. We boiled potatoes in their skins in the field and served them steaming in napkins. We all warmed our chilled fingers on them, popped them open, invested them with quantities of butter and salt. If there is a more perfect way to celebrate the potato’s earthy, sustaining essence, I have not yet discovered it.

  The RSVPs came back from our new friends and neighbors, from old friends and family who’d be arriving from Europe, from California, from up and down the East Coast. When Mark met someone new, he issued an invitation, so the guest list had swelled to nearly three hundred. The wedding seemed like a huge wave approaching on the horizon, inexorable and possibly deadly. Still, the farm’s needs trumped everything else. We listened to the weather radio for warnings of frost. The squash would need to come in before it hit or they’d be ruined, and any remaining tomatoes. Raye calved, unexpectedly. We found her big bull calf in the pasture one morning, three-quarters Holstein, lanky and spotted black and white. Raye’s tricky udder swelled to twice its usual size, and milking it was like picking a lock. She was giving four gallons twice a day, and it took Mark or me two hours each milking.

  One by one, I let go of the expectations I’d held for the wedding. The house would not be painted, or the cracked window fixed. The faux-brick and paneling interior would remain unapologetically faux. The lawn, at best, would be freshly grazed. At lunch we composed menus, heaped tasks on the to-do lists: Clear hay from loft, build staircase, wire for lights. Find tables and chairs. Slaughter bull for ox roast. Butcher chickens for rehearsal dinner. Write vows.

  The food at harvest season is so right that the less done to it, the better. Sunday dinners were exercises in simplicity. Green salad, practically naked. Steamed green beans with butter. Beets roasted in a hot oven, sliced and tossed with a whisper of oil, a suggestion of vinegar, a bit of dill on the top. That’s what we were eating when the subject of our names came up, the last Sunday before the guests arrived. I had never even considered changing my name. Nina had kept hers when she married, and so had most other women I knew. I liked my name, the alliteration of it, the solidity of its four trochaic syllables. I had nothing against his name, but this one was mine, and it stood for me, as firmly as the word fork stood for the thing I was holding in my hand. I didn’t think I should have to give that up. I guess I’d assumed Mark knew that, even though we had not talked about it. I was shocked when he said he didn’t feel the same way. He was thinking of children, and he hated the awkwardness of hyphens, and the explaining that different names entailed, especially in a community where different names are considered unusual. Besides, he said, changing your name signifies the commitment; it linguistically establishes the fact that you have become a family. Listening, I felt myself bristle, preparing to man my battle stations. “So I guess I’ll take yours, then,” Mark said with a shrug, a solution that seemed as simple and generous as the meal we’d made.

  * * *

  A week before the wedding, our parents arrived. All four of them did their best to hide their shock at finding hay still in the loft where the dance would be held and no preparations made beyond our to-do lists. We assigned them jobs according to their skills and interests. My mom was on cleaning, my dad was sent across the lake to Vermont, to acquire kegs of beer and hard cider. Mark’s dad would build the set of stairs to the loft and wire it for lights, and his mom drew the crafty stuff, seeking out brown paper to use as table coverings, three hundred red bandannas for napkins. Mark’s sister arrived with her cherubic redheaded toddler, Olin, and took charge of the flowers.

  Nothing went smoothly, the consequence of n
o advance planning. The loft, where the dinner would be served, was splattered with pigeon manure ranging in age from ancient and powdery to fresh and wet. As my mother scrubbed the warped wood floors, the pigeons cooed from the cupola and made fresh deposits. Mark and I dashed to the hardware store and came back with chicken wire, which we used to screen out the birds. Wild birds, though, were only half the problem. Our free-range hens’ coop was stationed too close to the barn, and the more adventurous among them had discovered the loft, and persisted in visiting it, to lay a sneaky egg or scratch around on the newly cleaned floor. My mother hates chickens above all living creatures. We decided we had to move the coop, both for my mother’s sanity and because the guests might trip on the hens on the way up the as-yet-unbuilt stairs.

  Three days before the wedding I shut the hens in the coop when they went to roost in the evening, hooked the coop to a tractor, and hauled it fifty yards away, into the adjacent field. The next morning, the hens made their way back to the barnyard and the loft anyway, and, worse, when evening came, they forsook the coop and roosted in their old neighborhood, a hundred of them tucked into the barnyard’s hedgerow or along the rafters in the barn, above where the guests were to eat. Even we, in our muddled state, could see that this was unacceptable. Besides the tripping hazard and the mess, they couldn’t sleep outside like that. They’d get eaten by owls or raccoons. We tried to corral them toward their coop with improvised nets and pieces of fence, and again and again they fluttered free. I saw my mom in her work gloves, bravely holding up one end of the net, and knew beyond any doubt how much she loved me. Eventually we abandoned the net and did it by hand, plucking all hundred hens from their roosting places, searching them out by flashlight, and chucking them, by ones and twos, into the coop, a process that took us until midnight.