by Ben Hewitt
I am fascinated by the extent to which creating this separation allows the boys to sink into themselves. True, they are enormously comfortable in one another’s company, and despite the occasional cruelties they exchange, they love each other with a fierceness of devotion that is capable of bringing tears to my eyes in those instances when they express it overtly. As a rule, they are exceptionally generous with each other, as if each feels honor-bound to abide by some unspoken agreement regarding the sharing of unanticipated gifts or treats. For his ninth birthday, Rye received a number of trout flies from his uncle. The flies were encased in a hinged box, and I could see the quiet look of envy that fell across Fin’s face when his brother lifted the lid. Rye saw it, too. “Fin, you can have some,” he said, extending his hand. “You can keep yours on this side of the box, and I’ll keep mine on the other.” And I recall when Fin was given a bar of chocolate from his instructor at the wilderness-skills program he attends. Chocolate is not a commonplace indulgence in this family, and on the rare occasions it is offered, the boys become covetous. But rather than hoard his stash, Fin carried it in his pocket through the day, only unwrapping it at home, where it could be divvied into four equal portions.
Yet, like all humans, particular dynamics have evolved around their relationships. And because their relationship to each other is at once so strong, so constant, and so informed by their divergent personalities, Penny and I feel as if it is our duty to provide them some space to be apart.
When one of the boys and I are alone together, I notice things that are lost to the noise and on-again, off-again unruliness that pervade my sons’ day-to-day existence. In Rye, I notice how he’s started to smile in an impishly sideways manner, cocking his eyebrows in concert with the left corner of his mouth. I notice that I no longer struggle to understand certain words, that somewhere along the way, the nearly indecipherable manner in which he pronounced his r’s for the first few of his speaking years has resolved itself. I notice that his sense of humor, slower to develop than Fin’s, has become well honed and on occasion even biting. I am somewhat relieved by this, because like myself, Fin has always tilted toward unrestrained and not-particularly-funny jokes that elicit little more than polite chuckles from those around him.
Fin: “Want to hear a dirty joke?”
Me (with trepidation): “Uh, sure.”
Fin: “A white horse fell in the mud.”
This is repeated with some frequency, and is always followed by shrieking laughter from at least one of us.
Another of his favorites:
Fin: “God tells three men that if they jump off a cliff, they’ll land in whatever they scream as they’re jumping. So the first guy jumps and yells, ‘Pillow!’ And the second guy jumps and yells, ‘Lake!’ Then the third guy goes to jump and as just as he’s about to leap, he trips on a rock and yells, ‘CRAP!’”
Fin’s jokes do not do justice to his sense of humor, which can border on ribald but is also represented in his enormous capacity for wordplay. He is prone to improvised limericks, which flow effortlessly off his tongue with no rehearsal. One evening when Fin was ten, we sat down to a meal of fried pork chops. Fin glanced at the cut of meat on his plate and then, in a singsong voice, delivered the following:
Fancy ladies in New York
eating pork with a fork
People in the hills of Cabot
eat it too, but they just grab it
He indulged himself in a chuckle at his own verbal dexterity, then with bare hands snatched up his chop and began eating.
The allocation of a morning per week during which Penny and I would pair up with one of the boys and embark on a small adventure has proven enormously popular. The rules of engagement are simple: The boys can choose what they each want to do, so long as it doesn’t cost anything and doesn’t require much vehicle travel. Generally, we stick around the home place; fishing is a popular option, as are mushroom hunting and the construction of rudimentary catapults from scrap materials on hand. On occasion, one of the boys will want nothing more than to curl up on the couch and be read to, although this option has become decidedly less popular as they’ve gotten older. Recently, it occurred to me that it would not be terribly long before they are clamoring for driving lessons.
On a fine morning of the type that can lure even the most wizened Vermonters into believing that summer will never end, it was determined that the four us would pair up and strike off. Outside, the grass was heavy with dew, bent and lush from the accumulated weight of condensed moisture; when I walked down the field to move the cows into a fresh paddock, my boots were quickly soaked through, and despite the rising sun, which was already a hot, fierce orb in the sky, I could feel the remnants of the evening’s chill in the water wicking through my socks.
Fin had little trouble deciding upon a Mama-time activity. He wanted to go squirrel hunting, as he’d recently made what he deemed a decent squirrel potpie and was keen to replicate his success. So he loaded the .22, and he and Penny set off for the woods to stalk wild rodent. As they walked out the door, Penny gave me one of those looks long-married people give one another, a look that did not require the company of words to make its point: “Next time, you’re doing the damn squirrel hunting.”
Rye, on the other hand, was having difficulty choosing how to spend his Papa time. I dangled all the usual suspects: fishing, romping through the woods, tractor-driving instruction. No, no, and no. As I mentioned, Rye is quieter and more introspective than Fin; he is more stubborn, too. Whereas Fin can generally be cajoled to do our bidding, once Rye sets his heels, there is no way short of physical force that he will capitulate. I knew that I’d made a mistake in providing so many options, that by giving him so many choices, I’d overwhelmed him. And I suspected that his noes were as much a rejection of that sense of being overwhelmed as they were a response to any of the individual options I’d presented.
As is so often the case in parenting, I recognized my error a few seconds too late, and now needed to extricate myself from the hole I’d dug and stumbled into. I knew Rye well enough that I suspected I’d be extricating for a while, and so it was out of something approaching desperation that I suggested we help Melvin load square bales of hay into his barn. I’d seen Melvin baling at nearly nine the evening before, his tractor and wagon little more than shadows in the gathering dark, and I knew the hay would still be sitting in his barnyard, uncovered. This was fine so long as the weather held. But showers were forecast for the afternoon, and if that hay didn’t get under cover, it’d be ruined. It’s not that Melvin couldn’t have put the hay in the barn by himself, but loading square bales is one of those brute-force tasks, like stacking firewood or digging ditches, that begs for extra hands.
To say I was surprised when Rye agreed would be an understatement. But I knew better than to allow my surprise to register, and so it was that we headed out the door, bound for Melvin’s. Already, I was second-guessing my suggestion. First of all, at seven thirty A.M. it was already suffocatingly hot and humid, the air a wet, heavy thing that hung about us like a cloak. I knew it would be hotter still in the loft of Melvin’s old barn as the sun rose higher in the sky and the motionless air became thick with heat, and that motes of dust and chaff would fill our lungs with every gulping breath. And second, I knew the bales would weigh somewhere in the range of 50 to 60 pounds. Rye weighs somewhere in the range of 50 to 60 pounds. For a moment, I imagined myself moving a 180-pound hay bale. It was not a flattering picture. But we were in motion, and Rye wasn’t merely accepting of the idea, he was downright excited. I’d miraculously extricated myself, and I wasn’t about to start digging another hole.
“Can I be in the up part?” Rye asked, meaning that he wanted to be on the receiving end of the hay elevator, which would transport the bales from ground level to the barn’s third-floor haymow, a vast, cavernous space that could hold ten thousand bales or more. There is something soaring and almost cathedral-like about the haymows of big barns, as if what transpires
there is somehow sacred. Perhaps, in a sense, it is.
We puttered a half mile down the hill to find Melvin, which wasn’t that hard, considering he was where he is every single morning of every single day of every single week at seven thirty A.M. Which is to say, he was milking, bent at the side of one of his big Holsteins, one hand affixing the rubber tentacles of the milking machine to her teats, the other reflexively stroking her side. He arose with enviable speed and agility for a man approaching his eighth decade.
“Melvin, we came to unload the wagon,” I said. He looked at me, then at Rye, and almost—but not quite—missed a beat. I could see it in his face, a subtle rearranging around the quick shimmer of doubt. But one does not survive a half century of dairy farming by being flappable, and Melvin wasn’t about to sacrifice his composure over a seven-year-old willing to throw square bales. Or willing to try, at least.
A few minutes later, we had the wagon positioned at the bottom of the hay elevator, and Rye had scampered up the rickety wooden ladder into the loft. Per my son’s request, it was determined that I would load the elevator from the wagon and that Rye would pile bales in the barn. My confidence that he could hold up his end of the task was thin, and I suspected I’d be scrambling into the loft in short order to extricate him from the mounting pile of hay. But there was nothing to be gained by not trying, so Melvin returned to the rows of big Holsteins in the milking parlor, while I gingerly plugged the elevator’s power cord into an exposed outlet. It clattered to life.
We quickly settled into a rhythm. I’d reach through the open gate of the wagon, pluck a bale off the pile, and place it on the elevator, which is little more than a revolving row of large metal teeth set into a steel frame. Leaned up against the barn from ground to third-story haymow, the skeletal contraption looked a bit like a ladder, albeit one tilted at a worryingly shallow angle. The upward-churning teeth sank into the soft underbelly of each bale and carried it up, up, up, until it plopped off the high end at Rye’s feet, at which point he would grab the bale by its twin loops of twine and muscle it into the growing pile behind him. Since we couldn’t hear each other over the elevator’s racket, Rye and I communicated by hand signals. He raised his arms and shook his hands in an imploring motion; at first, I assumed he needed a break, but the motions only became more animated, and I realized he was asking me to place the bales closer together so there would be less down time between each one.
Within an hour, we had the majority of the bales unloaded, and Melvin had finished milking. He emerged from the milk house and we all set to moving them from the big pile Rye had made, carrying each bale a hundred or so feet along the length of the loft floor, to where we could stack them neatly along the back gable wall. Melvin and Rye stacked the low rows and, being the tallest of the bunch, I set the upper layers. Sweat ran thick down our faces, but the work was not unpleasant, and the mounting stack defined our progress in a way that was quietly satisfying, each bale filling a space that, only moments before, had been nothing but air.
In the vast, open space of the barn the pile of hay looked inconsequential, and I knew it was maybe three days’ worth of feed for Melvin’s small herd of cows—three days out of the two hundred or so days they’d need to be fed hay over the year. And for a moment my mind lingered on all of the essential work that happens that most of us never see, work that goes unheralded and unnoticed, simply so we can pour milk over our cereal or splash cream in our coffee.
The three of us stood for a moment in the broad opening to the haymow, and for a second, I wished I could see us from below with our silhouettes visible against the barn’s great, yawing mouth. I thought about how I wish to instill in my boys a quiet appreciation for precisely the sort of work we’d just done and for the people who devote their lives to it. Such work and people are rare, I think, and getting rarer, in this era of mechanization and industry and careers built on little more than the flow of money and information.
How satisfying it was to see those bales stacked in Melvin’s listing barn, a wealth that few would understand and none would see but for Melvin, my son, and me. And, I suppose, the cows. I wanted to somehow express this satisfaction to Rye, so that perhaps he might be understand the dignity that comes of honest labor, and that so much of the essential work unfolds in quiet anonymity, receiving neither acknowledgment nor acclaim. But I wasn’t sure how exactly to get my point across, and besides, I’ve long ago learned that my children understand far more than I give them credit for, and it’s best to just keep my mouth shut.
I know that our neighbor’s life is not always easy. We have been Melvin’s neighbor for more than fifteen years, and for more than fifteen years, we have watched him work. And work. I know roughly what he has: a piece of land upon which he is entirely dependent for his livelihood, along with a drafty old farmhouse that requires a dozen cords of firewood each year just to keep the windows from icing over. A barn, in poor enough repair to be as much a liability as an asset. Just enough cows to produce just enough milk to make payments on the equipment to make hay and spread manure. For this, and not much more, he works a dozen hours per day, seven days per week, fifty-two weeks per year, and at sixty-six years of age, the end is not yet in sight, in part because he does not want the end to be in sight, but also because he cannot afford for the end to be in sight. Melvin will work as long as he can possibly work, until the very day and perhaps even minute his body will no longer allow it. It will be enough. It will have to be.
As grinding as this may sound, I have never heard Melvin express anything but gratitude for the life he has chosen. After nearly two decades of seeing him nearly every day, after countless hours of standing in his barnyard talking weather and politics and cows and all the other minutiae that comprise our lives on the hill we both call home, I have never, not once, heard him express bitterness that he does not have more, or that his future looks pretty much the same as his past, that his list of undone tasks form a line stretching farther than his day can accommodate. Perhaps even farther than his life can accommodate.
“I’ve followed my dream,” he told me once. We were standing in his barn at milking time, enveloped in the sweet smell of fermented hay and manure, his cows shuffling to and fro in their stanchions, waiting for their turn with the milking machine. “I’ve gotten to do exactly what I wanted to do,” and as he told me this, I thought about how every winter I see Melvin crossing his pasture in his tractor, driving through the deep snow on his way to the woods, where he’ll cut enough firewood to fill the machine’s loader. It will last for a day or maybe two, and then I’ll see him on his way to the woods again. He always waves broadly when he sees me. He is always smiling. I know that back at his house, the fire has gone cold, or is slowly burning through the final lengths of wood from the previous day’s gather. And I thought about how frequently he comments on something he’s observed on one of his trips to gather wood; the tracks of an animal, perhaps, or the way you can sometimes see a storm blowing in, the way the sky first crinkles then darkens as weather moves across it.
In my life, I have observed time and again how the people who’ve taught me the most never actually relayed much information. Oh, sure, I’ve learned my share of tips and tricks from Melvin, mostly relating to the handling of large animals or other farm-related tasks. But the more important lesson is the one I absorb every time he smiles and waves on his way to collect just enough firewood that his house won’t freeze for at least another day. The more important lesson is him standing in his barn in the eleventh hour of a twelve-hour workday, leaning wearily on the hoe he uses to scrape shit into the gutter, telling me he’s gotten to do exactly what he wanted to do.
Rye and I left Melvin’s covered in drying perspiration and hay chaff. Melvin thanked us, and I knew he meant it, because it is not Melvin’s style to express hollow gratitude. I asked Rye if it had been hard for him to move the bales and if he was tired. But he just looked at me out of the corner of his eye, gave me the sideways grin I am coming to love so
much, and shrugged.
That night, after chores and dinner and reading, Rye showed me his hands, and the blisters that had already burst. Flaps of skin hung ragged from his small palms. They looked like little flags.
“That was fun,” he said, and for a second I thought of asking for clarification. Was it truly “fun,” or was it satisfying? Because perhaps this would be a fine opportunity to expound on the difference between the two.
Fortunately, I caught myself just before launching into a teaching moment, and instead merely nodded my head. “It sure was.”
At that, Rye rolled over, tucked his ruined hands under his head, and went to sleep.
LETTING THEM BE
The boys are building a shelter down in the woods, inspired by a recent trip to help raise a barn. The fellows raising the barn—two mid-twenties college buddies who soured on corporate life and went in on a thirty-acre parcel half a stone’s throw from the Canadian border—are living for the summer in a netted tent constructed of small trees and a few sheets of metal roofing. The tent is situated on a jut of land by the banks of a stream, and it’s impossible not to imagine how it might be to fall asleep there, with the water rushing by and the breeze stealing through the net. I could see my sons’ imaginations kick into overdrive the moment they saw the structure; I could tell simply from how their faces were arranged that they’d decided to build one for themselves. This decision had been reached in approximately four-and-a-half seconds. Not a word had been spoken.