“New cheese inspector,” Tom said over his shoulder, already reaching for another wheel.
“Shit.” Nick pitched in. This was serious. Only last summer a dairyman in the next county had been led away from his farm in leg manacles by machine gun–toting FDA officials, for the crime of making unpasteurized cheese. Jailed for months. Nick put some effort into it, scooping up two wheels at a time. A new cheese inspector would want to flex his muscles. Make a name for himself.
In a minute more the shelves in the cave were bare of the beautiful, tender wheels that Tom Feely—a hatchet-faced man who wore his Purple Heart pinned to his Red Sox cap—could not and would not stop making. “I was born to make Brie,” he said of himself. “And I was born to make it right.”
Together Tom and Nick dragged the heavy trash can out and behind the barn, and Tom covered the voluptuous ruination of a month’s hard work with a hay bale. The scent of hay and cheese together was so good that Nick actually felt tears behind his eyes. “By God, Tom, that’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“There’s always more milk and more time.” The farmer crossed his arms over his chest and stared up the driveway, waiting for the inspector.
The two men had met on the day that Nick had first seen the view from the top of the hill, a mere ten minutes after he had first fallen in love with Vermont. Thruppenny Farm had been on the market, and Nick had pulled in when he’d seen the FOR SALE sign in the yard. Tom gave him a tour. The farm had been in Feely hands since the Revolution, but as Tom told Nick that day with a shrug, “Nothing lasts forever.”
Nick knew a good soldier when he met one. He assumed that selling the farm felt quite a lot like dying to Tom Feely, and he also assumed that Tom would rather die than show those emotions. But Tom was an American, and sometimes Nick thought he would never really understand Americans. They were deceptively simple. Tom might have been feeling anything at all under that baseball cap.
The tour had ended in the state-of-the-art cheese-making room and cheese cave. Nick had watched as Tom bent and looked closely at a broad-shouldered, cloth-wrapped Cheddar, his hand resting on its mottled surface. Tom straightened again and closed his eyes, the better to sense through his fingers. He was figuring out if time had done its work. It was as if Nick wasn’t there at all.
Nick made his proposition without thinking, before Tom had lifted his hand away from his cheese. And so Nick became the owner of a small Vermont dairy farm. The Feelys paid him a nominal rent and kept him in legal and illegal milk products. For himself, Nick had ended up buying a house a few miles away. Since then he had bought up a few more struggling farms, and he had four families under his guardianship. Nick spent most of his time in Vermont and was considering abandoning New York altogether.
But now there was a new cheese inspector, and one almost certainly less susceptible than his predecessor to the charms of a plummy British accent.
“Here we go.” Tom straightened his blue and red baseball cap on his head, and Nick noticed how his fingers lingered for a split second on the Purple Heart.
Owner and tenant stood side by side, watching as an old white BMW E21, streaked and spotted and marbled with rust, turned into the farmyard.
* * *
It was the feeling of it—as if Nick’s saber were an extension of his own body. As if it were his own hand he was thrusting into the young man’s neck, as if it were his nails ripping through the soft flesh, catching on the tendons, pulling, then slicing through. The man’s eyes, staring with a sort of blank surprise as red blood spilled richly over his blue uniform. Black eyes and red blood. The saber withdrawing, as if it were Nick’s own arm he was pulling back, pulling away—and now he was flying away, backward, into a tunnel of smoke . . . he was being sucked away at hideous speed, and at the distant end of the tunnel the splash of red and the young man’s face fixing in death. . . .
Nick’s eyes flew open, but it was a while before he fully realized that he had been dreaming. In the dream, it had been a smoky dusk, punctuated by the flash of cannon. But as always the dream had altered his senses. The cannon, the men and horses, the gunfire and shouting had gone silent. He heard only the sound of his own breathing and the slow, funereal drumbeat of his heart.
He took a deep breath. He was miles and years away from that battlefield. “Miles and years,” he whispered, and then started playing with rhyme, as he did sometimes to calm himself down. “Tiles and beers. Piles and jeers. Niles and tears.” Niles and tears was a good one, he thought. It captured the weariness of the distances he’d marched and the sorrow of the years he’d lost. “Niles and tears,” he whispered again, and yet again, letting the sound of his own voice drown out the sound of his heart. The woman next to him was curled into an S, sleeping quietly. “Niles and tears,” Nick said more loudly, perfectly aware that he wanted her to wake up and keep him company.
But she slept on and now he was wide awake. He sat up, letting the down comforter fall away from his bare chest. The cold against his skin reassured him; he never turned up the heat, even on the bitterest nights. He kept the thermostat just high enough to stop the pipes from freezing. Just high enough to feel like an English wintertime of long ago.
The night was dark; there was no moon. He could
