When Will swung into the driveway, I was wresting with a coil of four-inch drainage pipe that we planned to install below the barn to help dry out the near paddock, where the cows had churned the soil into hock-deep muck. He unfolded from his Jetta and nodded at me over the roof of the car: a pleasant-faced guy with a reddish mustache, wearing khakis and a checked shirt rolled up his forearms. He was as tall as his father but carried much less weight in the shoulders and gut, and he walked with a light stride toward the house. Diz had come out on the porch and, for the first time since I’d known her, wore a big smile that was not crimped with a sardonic tilt. Will swayed her left and right as they hugged, and then they went inside. After a time, Brassard pulled up in his truck, nodded to me, and also went inside.
Hundred-foot rolls of perforated drainage pipe aren’t that heavy, but they’re four feet in diameter and about the same tall—awkward to grip or lift, prone to tumbling out of the tractor’s bucket. I opted to roll them, one by one, through the gate and across the paddock to the ditch Earnest had dug last time he was here. The big, uneven wheels teetered and toppled unexpectedly, or suddenly veered off course; moving them was like shepherding large, strangely built toddlers. I went back and forth feeling something sour in me that took a moment to acknowledge: I felt left out.
This was the first time since I’d been here, even living as the object of Diz’s disdain, that I felt the circle of a family close around the house and exclude me. Whatever sense of inclusion I’d had was thanks to Earnest: He wasn’t a blood relative, but he stayed and worked like one, and it was easy for me to tag along in his wake. But with Will and his parents in the house, I felt envious and suddenly alone. They were in there, relishing that intimacy that only families know. I was out here in my mud boots, working to pay off the debt I owed, more of an indentured laborer than a hired hand, a woman alone and without a family to embrace her. Or any kind of plan for her life.
Hard work is the best antidote for self-pity, I told myself. As Diz had said when I first met her: “What the heck? Couldn’t tell ya, get back to work.” Being a Hardheaded Woman is not so bad. Sometimes I think our extreme sensitivity to our own emotions is an indulgence that only the urban and solvent—people with too much time on their hands—can enjoy.
So I stayed at my task. I positioned three rolls of pipe at hundred-foot intervals along the newly dug ditch. Earnest had closely analyzed the slope here and had planned the pipe’s route carefully. The trench ran across the bottom of the paddock and then took a curve downhill, getting shallower and shallower until it emerged from the ground a hundred yards below the barnyard. Earnest had explained how to stake the pipe as I unrolled it, so it wouldn’t just curl back up. I toppled a roll into the ditch and cut the strapping with my pocketknife. Suddenly, the whole thing shrugged and slithered and expanded, startling me and becoming a still more awkward, uneven mass.
I worked in a series of forceful jerks and resentful shoves, a purse-lipped frown in my brain because seeing the Brassards together had reminded me how much I missed having a family. I cursed my brother Erik for abandoning his only sister. Where was the little bastard? I cursed Matt for being a shit and liar and skirt chaser and for thinking so highly of himself that he could jilt me! I tried, staunchly but in vain, to keep that ever-present loneliness at bay. I cursed myself for having missed the boat of life as it left port with all the more sensible people aboard.
After I’d tugged loose ten feet or so, the whole pipe unwound and became a huge, unwieldy series of big loops that made a plastic racket as their ridges shifted over each other. I wrestled it back into the ditch, working my way along its length, anchoring it with stakes whenever it arched or curled, then opened the next roll, coupled the ends, and repeated the process. When I’d gotten three hundred feet of it in place, I went to get the tractor to lay some gravel. My internal soliloquy went something like, I’ll show them! I’ll show how hardworking and capable I am, how good I am at solitude. I don’t need you, and I especially don’t need your attitude, Diz. Don’t worry, you’re getting your money’s worth out of me.
I wasn’t allowed to drive the newer Deere or the hulking Harvester, but that was fine because I liked the old Ford tractor better anyway. It was clanky and worn and Earnest had repaired every part of it at one time or another, but it was more my size, and sturdy. I liked that the seat was metal, not padded, and there was no canopy or fancy dashboard—that the whole thing was so simple. By now I was feeling good about my tractor-driving skills and had come to love the double brakes that allowed such tight turns. Once, when I thought I was out of view of the farm, I spun the Ford a few times just for the fun of it, to feel
