On
Brassard’s
Farm
A Novel
Daniel Hecht
Copyright © 2018 by Daniel Hecht
E-book published in 2018 by Blackstone Publishing
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Trade e-book ISBN 978-1-5047-5940-3
Library e-book ISBN 978-1-5047-5921-2
Fiction / Literary
CIP data for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Blackstone Publishing
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www.BlackstonePublishing.com
The minute I heard my first love story,
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.
Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere,
they’re in each other all along.
—Rumi
“You are an animal! You know how to do this!”
—Kit Gates
“Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from the cornfield.”
—President Dwight D. Eisenhower
Chapter 1
If I had to give a name to what kind of tale mine is, I would certainly have to call it a love story. But it’s not the kind of story we usually think of when hearing those words. The difference is not only what’s meant by “love,” but also who or what is loved, and how one goes about it.
The only sensible beginning place is the land itself. It is the foundation of everything that has happened to me: the physical solidity of the granite and earth I placed my feet on. That inarguable material presence allowed me to brace myself. It was there I felt the Earth’s gravity for the first time as an embrace in which I was not held down but simply held.
I first saw the land in early spring. From the interstate exit, I had driven about twenty miles on the paved road, then another six on dirt. This was hardly wilderness, but it was pretty wild for a woman who had lived in the city all her life. I passed through several towns and hamlets, but mainly it was trees and more trees, in a mist of palest pink or pale yellow-green from near-bursting buds. A darting deer, farms with mud-smeared, disinterested cows, shambling houses settling to earth deep among flaking apple trees. Snow-broken, sway-backed abandoned barns. Some badly cut-over woods. Derelict mobile homes. Muddy ruts. My hosts at the bed-and-breakfast had told me that in Vermont this is called “mud season,” and correctly warned me that the back roads would be soupy. In spots, my car skated and bogged and I wasn’t sure I’d make it through.
At the top of a forested ridge, I turned and started downhill on a yet narrower road that was little more than a slot between overhanging branches.
Soon, the woods opened up and gave me a better view of the valley in which Brassard’s farm lay. To the left, pasture sloped gently down to a small stream, then steeply up again, the fields yielding to forest that rose to a wooded ridge. Mottled black and white cows—I didn’t yet know a Holstein from a rhinoceros—ranged on the near slope. To the right ran a narrow strip of ragged untended field, last year’s milkweeds parched and tufted above dead brown high grass. Above this field rose a steep, flat-topped forested hill, an unlikely arm projecting from the main ridge. It thrust up from the sloping valley in the shape of an ironing board or a submarine just emerging from the depths.
Coming down the hill, I got a good overview of Brassard’s place: a cluster of sheds big and small, silos, an old barn with a ramp to its gable-end door, and a house. Scattered among them were trucks, tractors, and two cars that had seen some use.
A pleasant scene, I thought. Remote enough. I had looked at two disappointing parcels of land, but here my pulse picked up. Maybe this was it, maybe I was now looking at my future. It was not postcard pretty, but ruggedly comely in its curves and proportions. Close enough for jazz, as my ex-husband might have said, and I liked jazz. When I could fool myself enough, I liked to think of this whole thing as an upbeat jazzy urbanite taking an improvisatory turn into new territory.
A mailbox with “Brassard” painted on it reassured me that I’d found the right place. I pulled up between house and barn and turned off the car. My windows were open to the spring air, so that a wet smell of manure and mud came to me. The house had white clapboard siding with dark green trim around the doors and on the shutters, and a covered porch faced the road. The nearer barn was a looming ark of faded red paint with a row of small white-trimmed windows along its lowest level. Between house and barn, the driveway faded into a functional dirt yard, where a blue-and-white tractor sat, surrounded by various farm implements. A man in mud-stained jeans and T-shirt was doing something to the tractor’s motor, but he extricated his arms and put down his tools as I pulled up.
I got out, suddenly feeling citified and naive about country life and farms and machines and men like the one who was now looking questioningly at me. He wasn’t tall, probably my height, but was wide and thick in all his parts, his bare arms muscular. With his deep copper skin and blunt facial features, he was hardly the gaunt, long-faced Yankee I’d unconsciously expected: Brassard would be Uncle Sam in coveralls, the dour pitchfork-wielding farmer in American Gothic. This guy was Mexican, I thought, or maybe Native American.
“Are you Mr. Brassard?” I asked.
He turned toward the barn door and bellowed, “Jim! That Boston gal’s here.” To me: “He’s in there somewhere.”
He went back to the tractor, wedging his arms into a narrow part at the front of the motor. I stood there, feeling the give of mud beneath my suddenly wildly inappropriate white running shoes, not knowing what was expected of me. I didn’t really want to walk toward the barn and muddy the shoes further. The wide man’s wrench clanked, and a cow
