The solution, brokered by Earnest, was for me to enter a kind of indentured servitude as a farmhand. Franklin, their main regular hand, was going to quit in August to start at the technical college in Randolph. The Brassards would be looking for help anyway.
And that’s how I got initiated into farm life, farmwork. Sort of a birth trauma. The deal was that I’d give Brassard two grand and then work off the remaining eight. Diz said I’d never manage it, I wasn’t physically strong enough, I was a quitter, I’d bail and leave them high and dry just when they needed farm help the most.
“Franklin isn’t exactly Rhodes scholar material,” Earnest reminded her. Diz couldn’t deny that Franklin wasn’t the best hand. He wasn’t bright, he wasn’t motivated, and it seemed as if he was always breaking equipment or forgetting to do assigned chores.
“You managed it,” Brassard added quietly. Diz gave a disgusted snort, but that quieted her.
So I began dairy farming. I would come down the hill just before dawn, go to the house for a cup of coffee, then head out to the cowshed, a long metal-roofed recent structure that was the biggest building on the farm. At first, I shadowed Franklin and Diz, learning how to move cows around and deal with the manure they left in the milking parlor and holding paddock. Only when I’d mastered that did I graduate to the milking routine and equipment cleaning. Earnest taught me to drive the Ford tractor and the little Bobcat skid-steer, to attach various implements to them, to use the tractor’s PTO—short for power takeoff, a shaft that can drive other machines—and to use their buckets or forks to move around hay bales, watering tanks, and heaps of feed grain.
Just as I’d had imbecilic notions of the forest, I had childlike misconceptions about farms, farming, and farmers. I had an imaginary “farm” in my mind.
I knew that most of our food is grown on factory farms run by giant corporations. I knew that growing lots of a single crop or raising lots of a single kind of animal was the rule. I knew that the self-sufficient family farm was a dying institution. I’d read about these things in the Boston Globe and New York Times.
But as a kid, I had learned my letters by poring over picture books that depicted cozy farms with red and white barns, some friendly horses and sheep at the paddock fence, the fuddy-duddy farmer and his plump wife, the rows of vegetables, the henhouses, all surrounded by fields thick with grain. I loved Charlotte’s Web. At school, we sang “Old McDonald Had a Farm.” Every TV ad for cereal still reinforces the myth: A hale middle-aged farmer sits to his breakfast—whatever cereal is being marketed—in his sunny kitchen. Behind him are flowery curtains and a counter displaying other totems of rural life: a colander piled with just-collected pure-white eggs, a bowl of blueberries, a bunch of fresh carrots, and some greens ready for the missus to chop for dinner. Cut to him heading out, full of vigor, to his spotless small-farm compound, then fade to a close-up of the nodding heads of golden grain in his wheat field.
The myth lives on in our beguiled minds; it resonates inside us, a template of all that is good and honest. I have a theory that we grow much like trees, that every period of our lifetimes remains fully intact inside us, just covered over with the next layer and the next. Later layers may not accord with the early ones—we know there’s no Santa Claus, but the five-year-old is still in there, waking on Christmas morning delirious with expectation.
So I came to Brassard’s farm with that blurry-edged cameo image still underlying my expectations.
I had begun acquiring a truer sense of things even before my Hindenburg imitation. I literally got an overview, because I’d sometimes sit in a comfortable glade just above the steep cliffs facing the farm, where, through gaps in the trees, I could see everybody’s comings and goings. I’d go there to write in my journal and then get distracted and just watch, pages unmarked.
If it were a film played fast, you’d see humans zipping here and there, trucks and tractors whipping about. In summer, you’d see a mottled tide of cows funneling into the milking parlor, then spraying out again across the pasture. In winter, as I learned later, the cows moved indoors and then you’d see manure being moved, piled, and spread on the fields, stall bedding and silage being carted here and there. And snow being pushed and heaped.
Inside the barn, there’s no three-legged stool and bucket: Milking is done by machines. You usher the cows into the milking parlor—they don’t need much coercion, because their udders ache and they know there’s relief in there—where you attach suction devices to the four teats. Once all the cows have been drained, you have to purge the whole apparatus with near-boiling water, scrape up the fresh manure, and then hose the whole area.
The milk in the holding tank gets picked up every other day by a big stainless-steel tank truck that holds thousands of gallons. That’s the Agri-Mark truck, from the farmers’ cooperative that processes and markets the milk. It idles for a while as it pumps the stuff out, and the driver hands Brassard a computer-generated receipt. The milk goes to the processing plant; Brassard gets a check.
Brassard didn’t spend his time stroking the velvety noses of his horses and giving them sugar lumps, because he didn’t have any horses, and his
