After a long minute, an older man emerged from the barn, wiping his hands on a rag. He did wear denim coveralls over a checked shirt, but he was no dried-up Puritan. He was a tall man in his sixties: big in the chest and belly, clean-shaven fleshy pink face, thinning hair cut short and gone mostly gray.
“You’re Miss Tanner?”
“Turner, yes. Thanks for taking the time to see me, Mr. Brassard.”
“Well, I ain’t gonna sell the piece if somebody don’t come look at it. I’d shake your hand, but you don’t want to get what I got on your hands. Come all the way from Boston this mornin, did you?”
“No. Just from Montpelier. I’m staying at a bed-and-breakfast. It’s …” I felt a need to flatter the landscape, but Jim Brassard probably didn’t need my approval for the place he’d lived all his life. But now I had to finish: “… lovely here.”
His face remained expressionless. “You want some coffee or something, use the facilities? Or you want to just go on up and take a look?”
“I’m fine with just looking at the land. If this is an okay time for you.”
“Good’s any other.”
A yellow Lab-mix dog came up to nose my jeans. I roughed him around the ears and he licked my hand.
“Yep, Bob, he’s a friendly one,” Brassard said. “Now you’ve got him as your best buddy for life, won’t leave you alone. Throw a stick and he’ll be at you to do it again all day. Won’t you, bud?”
Bob went over to Brassard, who worked his pelt down his spine until the dog’s back leg twitched up. Brassard’s hands were huge, each finger thicker than my thumb.
The man at the tractor took his arms out and wiped his hands on his pants and looked on as Bob nosed me again and Brassard fished in his pockets to jangle keys. The wide man smiled. Native American, I decided.
Spring smell: You think you know it, but you can’t until you’re out on a small farm in the woods of New England. Break a stalk of celery and put your nose up to it; that’s a bit of the smell. Add a touch of lime, when you take the wedge and squeeze it into your Corona. A little rosewater and the dry smell of ice. A wet earth smell like the one that rises from the pots when you water your houseplants, here supplemented with the murky sweet of manure. Those things I instinctively recognized, though my experience of them was largely limited to a much weaker version along the river in Cambridge. It was a distillation of newness and optimism and another start after the snows.
Brassard pointed out the land I’d come to see: that ironing board or emerging submarine above us to the west. It was his opinion that taking a tractor up would be our best bet. Perhaps he was considering the burden of his own heavy body—he walked with a hitch that suggested sore joints. Or maybe he saw my obvious unreadiness for a steep uphill trek in spongy earth and mud. He went around the barn to get another tractor, leaving me alone with Bob the dog and the unnamed man wrestling with the blue tractor’s engine.
“So,” I hazarded, “you work for Mr. Brassard?”
He grinned back at me. “Looks that way.”
“I’m Ann Turner. What’s your name?”
“Earnest Kelley. I make myself useful when Jim needs a hand. Think you’ll buy that land?”
I heard an engine fire up, popping and clattering on the other side of the barn. “Thinking of it, yes.”
“What for?” Earnest didn’t look my way. Whatever he was working on under the engine compartment of the tractor was giving him trouble.
I was sure I wore my desperation on my face, obvious as a billboard, but I hesitated for only a heartbeat. “Just a place to get away to once in a while. I thought I’d build a cabin, spend some time there in the summers. I’m a middle-school teacher. Just moved to Vermont.”
I could have said more—this explanation, tossed off to others and to myself, was somewhere between a convenience and a lie—but this wasn’t the moment, and this guy wasn’t the person. In any case, Jim Brassard was coming around the barn driving a green and yellow tractor, and it was time for me to go figure things out in more pragmatic and present-tense ways. We were going to ride this contraption up the ridge to the forty-acre parcel he was selling.
“Best you ride the hitch rack,” he called down to me. “Put your feet on the two bars there and hold on up here. It gets steep. You want to hold on good.”
A sort of shelf of steel bars stuck out behind the tractor’s cab, offering a pair of flat blades between the big cleated wheels. I put one foot on each, found it reasonably secure, and got a good grip on the bars that supported the canopy over the seat. He checked my position, asked Earnest to hold Bob until we were over in the other field, and moved a lever on the steering wheel. The tractor’s motor clattered faster and the wheels began kicking up slats of mud.
We crossed the road and chugged between two posts holding sagging barbed wire, then up a dirt track through the strip of scrub. Brassard had to holler back at me over the engine noise: “This here would be your access road.”
In the muddy places, the tractor sashayed from side to side and it felt dangerous—those enormous wheels churning close on each side, my Adidas joggers keeping a tenuous grip. I wedged my feet into the welded joint to keep them from slipping.
“Forty acres, never could farm em—can’t get a truck or a cow up there. Lots of ledge, no good for pasture. Some good timber, though. Figured I wasn’t usin it anyways, maybe somebody’d put up a hunting camp. What’d you want with it anyway?”
“Yes, just a little cabin,”
