I liken my initial dislike of farming to the way, back in Cambridge, I hated trying to get fit after an urban winter. Padded out with insulating fat, I found the initial jogs laborious, uncomfortable, even painful. And embarrassing: to be seen clunking along in clothes that don’t fit your flabbier frame.
But then after a couple of weeks, you forget to bitch at yourself as you jog, or you catch your reflection in a storefront window and don’t recoil.
Farming did that with my soul, or my “character,” as my father called that inner thing we all supposedly have. After a while, it wasn’t so difficult, and I didn’t flinch so much when I glanced into the mirror inside me.
You are a working animal, I told myself, and you know how to do this.
I spent the last two weeks of July numb with fatigue. I was wary of introspection because I didn’t want to awaken the shame and sense of rudderlessness. I told myself I had made stupid choices, had done bad by some good people, but I had sorted it out and was working off my debt. I was on a reasoned trajectory to … somewhere.
My life divided into two completely different tracks: daytime, working on the farm, and nighttime, living my solitary life up in the woods.
During the day, I did what I was told: mainly moving cows around, then milking them, then cleaning the milking apparatus and dealing with manure. Between milkings, an unending stream of odd jobs: hand-feeding the calves, unclogging culverts, putting out feed grain, towing feed wagons loaded with hay out to the pasture, helping Franklin repair fences.
My favorite times were the hours I spent with Earnest. Sometimes, he would corral me to help with the tasks he’d taken on, usually involving fixing trucks, tractors, harrows, combines, pumps, conveyors, balers, blower fans, and motors. I’d serve as his surgical nurse, handing him tools as he lay beneath a vehicle or entwined in some machine’s innards. He would explain his diagnoses, outlining the mechanical or hydraulic or electrical systems, and, through either his adroit teaching or my heretofore unnoticed engineering instincts, I actually did get a good sense of how things worked.
When we weren’t talking about the job at hand, he told me a little about the Brassards. And because he never seemed judgmental, it was easy for me to talk about myself. I was careful not to abuse this privilege, not to overindulge in confession.
But he seldom offered much when I asked him about himself. When I pointed that out to him, he answered, deadpan: “The American Indian is taciturn by nature.”
Chapter 13
After selling me my forty acres, Brassard had three hundred acres, about thirty forested and the rest divided between pasture, hay, and corn. By Midwestern standards, not much, but in Vermont it’s a pretty good spread. You can spend a day walking on it, and you can get lost in the surrounding woods because many of the borders aren’t marked. And parts of it are rugged, making it seem bigger. They say that if you pressed Vermont flat it would be big as Texas.
I’m sure I would have learned more about Brassard and Diz earlier if I hadn’t betrayed them. It took many weeks, which I spent desperately showing how hard I could work, before Diz could say more than a few words to me.
What I did learn came from Earnest. He always seemed to get a little evasive, which I took as a measure of his respect for their privacy and his contempt for gossip. So what I gleaned was pretty bare-bones, and the exact chronology was never clear to me. Brassard married young and had a daughter, Jane, who now lived out west. I deduced that she would be around forty. His first wife died, and at some unspecified point Diz appeared on the scene. Diz and Brassard married and had a son, Will, who was about my age and lived in Rutland.
When I asked Earnest if the kids ever came to visit, he said that Will managed to swing by the farm fairly often, and I’d likely see him before long. Jane, the daughter, “doesn’t get along with Diz.” His tone told me this was an understatement best left unprobed. I could easily believe that Diz was an unforgiving enemy and that she would cultivate a similar outlook in others.
My rhythms were even more closely linked with those of the sky and the forest than the Brassards’. Each morning, I awoke in a tent in a small clearing in the woods, already aware of the temperature of the air and the movement of the wind. I got so I could tell the time of day, whatever the weather, by the relative glow of the tent nylon under the morning sky. I lived among the blackflies and by their life cycle. I knew when the birds’ chicks hatched and fledged, because I heard them piping in their nests and found the shells of their eggs at the base of the trees and eventually saw their first plummeting attempts at flight, and their parents’ hopping, shrieking exhortations to get the hell back up in the air.
Important revelations, I learned, often come at you with a left-handed, offhanded, slow spiral. Insight frequently requires preparation in the form of a gradual melting of habitual stupidity. And when real revelation comes, it may not be something you can name; it may not make sense except in the deep places where our souls forge coherence from the world’s various pieces.
My epiphany about water is a good example.
While I loved drinking and cooking with and washing in the water from my spring, it was a little thing that dwindled as the warm season ripened and the snowmelt left the water table. I filled
