So it was a loss, but not a total loss. The next year had promise. When I mentioned that to Brassard, he looked at me over his reading glasses and said, “It’s always next year that’ll do better and put you over the top.”
Despite his exhaustion, Erik didn’t renege on any of the work required in the hops war’s aftermath. He clipped the rest of the bines from the lower acres, gathered together the other debris, and ran it all through the chipper to get composted. He and Earnest moved the separator to a corner of the repair shed, and then Erik dismantled his drying racks. This liberated the upstairs of the old barn so it could receive the baled hay, which had been waiting under tarps, and Erik did his share of the relocation. He and I went over the books with Brassard to make sure he’d paid every penny owed for tractor and tool use and the manure he had churned into the hop yard soil.
“Got the makins of a good farmer,” Brassard commented. Then, dryly: “’Course, you have to stick with it over some years to know if it’s goin to work for you or not.”
As I expected, when he’d completed the last hops chores, Erik pretty well vanished again. Love called from beyond the valley.
Chapter 57
I had assumed that my state of disquiet would fade once the hops adventure had resolved itself. But it didn’t. I resigned myself to being an unsettled person. I always had been, I told myself; why should anything be different now? But this was a dismal prognosis and didn’t seem quite right in any case. I wished I could talk to Earnest about it—in fact, I was accruing a backlog of things to ask him and tell him—but we had become guarded around each other, and it seemed there was never a time without interruptions and other priorities.
A couple of weeks after we finished the hops, just as the forest leaves began to turn, a minor thunderstorm jostled through. At Brassard’s farm, the nearby hills tended to break and jumble the winds, so we seldom had monumental storms. Instead, we had many smaller, chaotic atmospheric tussles; this one was just a bully sticking out his elbows to push his way through a crowd. The lightning rarely struck where we could see its forks, the bombs of thunder stayed distant. It wasn’t even enough of a bother to stop work outside, though it did cause Bob the dog to cower and the rest of us to wear hooded raincoats.
It rumbled away well before nightfall, and I walked up to my camp quite confident that my tent had survived in good shape. It had, but a gigantic birch had been knocked over and lay across the far end of my clearing, broken from impact.
I think it is the golden birch that gets so grand and broad in its ancient age. Even using my manual, it’s hard for me to tell, because the bark of these old trees has changed with age to the indeterminate color of some baser metal. They can be six feet through the trunk, standing with most limbs broken off, almost dead themselves but nurturing all kinds of living things. Little pines and maples start growing in forks where accumulated leaves have turned to soil, rooted twenty feet from the ground. Shelf fungi jut from the trunks. Small mammals and birds make homes in deep holes they dig here and there, and I had often seen woodpeckers hacking at their bark and ripping away chunks of rotten wood the size of my hand. Incredibly, these ruins often retain one or two slim branches still bearing leaves, fresh as saplings despite the passage of decades or perhaps centuries.
Though I had loved having this birch and its denizens as my neighbors, and appreciated the tree as the probable ancestor of the younger birches all around, I didn’t want its bulk lying across my meager clearing. It crushed the blackberry cane that I knew the bears and raccoons and birds needed, and it blocked my path uphill to the spring. My little chainsaw wouldn’t reach a third of the way through its trunk.
Of course I went to Earnest for a solution: Earnest, master of trees; Earnest, tree whisperer. And of course he said he would come to check it out and help me deal with it, when he found the time. He’d been working his tree jobs up in Chittenden County until sunset every day. That’s why I was surprised when the next evening, well before sunset, I heard his call from down the path: “Pilgrim! It’s the Indians.”
Darkness was still an hour away, but I had lit my fire for the pleasure it gave. He came up the track in his work clothes, still sawdust-covered.
“Got tree problems? I’m your man. Extensive experience. References upon request.” His humor, as it had been for many weeks, was forced.
I told him to shut up. We sat on the logs near the fire as I made some chamomile tea in a pot big enough to give us each several mugfuls.
He looked tired. I was just glad to see his face there in my home. Whatever I’d thought to say, or he had, neither of us got to it right away. We sat on the logs and percolated as the water did.
“Good day today?” I asked.
“Okay, yeah.”
“Doesn’t sound very okay.”
He sighed heavily. “Killing trees in South Burlington shopping mall parking lots.” But his face smoothed a
