I drove a few miles on the back roads before heading home, the window open so the wind tugged my hair. The sweet forest flowed past while I cried. I cried for Johnnie because he was a sad little bastard stuck in a shit-out-of-luck life. Cried for Ricky, wherever he was now. Cried for relief, knowing my bears were still out there somewhere. I cried for me, too, and for all the injuries and injustices the world inflicts on us all. And for every damn thing.
I know, I do know, how little I have been hurt, compared to what life can really do to you. But there had been in me a hurtling dark freight train loaded with that lifetime’s worth of pain and anger—monstrous, mindless, spraying sparks from the rails. And though I’d had so much good fortune in the past two years, so much that was dear and sweet, that black train still had been coming and had to bull and charge at anything in front of it, and this day it had arrived.
Johnnie, for all that he’d trespassed and killed and been smug and insulting, had hurt his helpless cousin or nephew or whatever Ricky was, had absorbed more of its force than he’d actually earned.
I did feel pity for him. But in coming to my land, I had for the first time in my life staked out some turf, forty full acres of it. I was its steward, and I would honor the obligations of my stewardship.
When I got back, Earnest and Will and Erik were in the kitchen, pretending to be relaxed. I went to the sink and washed and rewashed my hands.
“How’d it go?” Earnest and Will asked offhandedly, in accidental unison.
“Good. Went well. I don’t think it’ll be a problem anymore,” I said.
And it has proved true: No Goslant has ever trespassed again. More importantly, I have never again felt the rumble of that dark train, never put someone in front of it. It went off a bridge or cliff or off its rails into a night all its own, far from me.
Chapter 54
By now, you have no doubt discovered that I had fallen in love, and not just with my land and Brassard’s farm. Even though I haven’t directly stated it, I have not been trying to keep it a secret—just telling it as it revealed itself. I felt it burgeoning but simply didn’t recognize it myself through all the days I have been recounting. I was submerged in it, consumed with it, and surrounded by it. And truly, I had never experienced it, not this, before—how could I have recognized it?
I did feel it coming, an inner turbulence I tried to ignore, but as Erik later pointed out, I was “slow on the draw” in these matters.
In the end, I required permission to recognize it, and Erik gave me that permission by acting like a little brother—one who had always put me up against things I didn’t want to, or simply couldn’t, face.
By mid-August, the hops bines had filled out, clustered with the cones that we would soon be harvesting, and they were heavy enough to make the strongest trellis wires sag. The hop yard was marvelous: long, deep corridors lined with walls of foliage, canted forward somewhat, hallways roofed by a strip of sky. The fact that we’d had to accommodate boulders and buried rocks made this grove more interesting and mysterious. The rows were not straight, but zigged and zagged slightly; with the geometry somewhat relaxed, the lanes gave a secret view here, a longer view there, a sense of benevolent enclosure. A scent, at once familiar and indefinable, hovered between the walls: almost but not quite a mix of pine, basil, and marijuana.
Even Brassard, who by then was spending most of his time in his corn and hay, and who you’d think would have had enough of green things, enjoyed the yard.
One afternoon I was searching for Erik, who was somewhere in those six acres, to bring him some lunch, which I knew he would otherwise go without. I came across Brassard, strolling along in the shaded lane, smoking his pipe as he tipped his head up to inspect the knots of cones at the top of this unfamiliar plant. He smiled at me, and I at him.
“Looks like it’s comin along well, doesn’t it? Not that I’d know. But seems a robust crop. Got lucky this time around, so far.” He spoke with the stem of the pipe in his teeth.
I agreed that it looked good, then asked him if he’d seen Erik in his wanderings.
He put his thumb over his shoulder. “Back a good ways, three rows over. He’ll be glad to see that!” He gestured at the plastic bag of edibles I carried.
“Yeah. He forgets to eat.”
“Pleasant back in here. Peaceful.” Brassard removed his pipe from his lips and said, “If you’re not the one doin the work.”
I found Erik teetering at the very top of a stepladder, clipping off some cone-covered sections of bine. He untangled a few and tossed them into the lane, then climbed down to inspect them.
“You’re going to break your neck doing that,” I told him.
“Wouldn’t that be nice,” he said bitterly.
I gave him some sandwiches and a bottle of Gatorade that he chugged like a collegiate beer-drinking champ. Then he sat down to look carefully at the cones he’d clipped. They were about the size of strawberries, and though they were still a bright green, their
