“Did you meet Will?” Brassard asked. “Will, this is Ann, our neighbor and our hand for the time bein.”
Will leaned the recliner upright and stood up, and we shook hands. He smiled; I smiled. I covertly examined his face for signs of the contempt he would feel if he’d heard much about me, but couldn’t see anything definite.
“Diz is up taking a nap,” Brassard said. “I’ve got to get these bills paid, but you can sit if you’d like. There’s coffee.” He turned in his chair and looked at me over his glasses, and his eyes widened. “What?”
“There’s a problem,” I said.
It wasn’t as big a problem as all that. Brassard looked out over the pasture fence at the distant up-canted back end of the Ford and said to Will, “You want to do the honors?” Will said he would. Brassard went to fire up the Deere, then brought it around to where we stood. He clambered down, Will swung up, I climbed onto the hitch rack, and we rolled at a leisurely pace out to the ditch. Over his shoulder, Will told me not to worry, he’d done the same thing more than once.
Will positioned the Deere, and I hauled out the winch cable and attached the hook to a steel loop on the Ford’s frame. I started up the little tractor and put it into reverse, and when Will said, “Go,” I let up the clutch. The Deere effortlessly pulled the thing out and there it was, done. The indestructible Ford was none the worse for wear. I dismounted and checked and found to my relief that its front wheels had not crushed the plastic pipe; then I got back in the saddle and dumped the damned bucket. Will and I chugged back on the two tractors like a tiny parade. At Brassard’s invitation, I joined them for a cup of coffee at the kitchen table.
When Will asked me about myself, I gave him a heavily redacted history: from Boston most recently, middle school teacher but out of work so far, glad to be learning about farmwork.
Brassard mentioned that I was the gal who’d bought the land uphill, and Will just smiled and asked how I liked it.
“It’s beautiful,” I told him. What was most beautiful at that moment was realizing that Will had not heard about my transgression. I could sit here without the stage fright that comes with being a bad actor and not knowing your lines. Better yet, I’d gotten away with my tractoring faux pas without Diz knowing about it! The coffee was bracingly hot and excellent.
Will said he and his friends used to camp out up on my hill when he was a kid. He told me he had seen moose a couple of times, and bears in the blackberries. I told him about the bears Cat and I saw, but said I’d mainly seen just porcupines and blackflies. He said he’d seen them often enough, too.
Then Diz was clumping down the stairs. She came into the room wiping her glasses on her shirttail, touched her son’s shoulder as she passed, poured herself a cup of coffee.
She sat heavily and without inflection said, “I see you’ve met Ann.” Then she looked at me. “Supposed to fill it with gravel, not tractors.”
Chapter 15
July 16
I am so tired I can hardly sit up to write. Today was the first time I’ve operated a tractor for so many hours straight. Every muscle hurts. I stink of diesel and am too tired to heat water to wash up. I conked my knee a dozen times dismounting, exactly the same place again and again, and now there’s a bruise the size of my hand, so tender something must be seriously damaged in there. I could hardly walk back up the hill. No wonder Brassard’s got such a gimp, after fifty-some years of that kind of wear and tear.
I astonish myself with my immaturity. Remind me, when’s that hard-bitten self-sufficiency supposed to kick in? I have been a devoted follower of the discipline. I have left sacrifices of my own flesh on the altar. Yet today I spent the entire day seething with juvenile resentment, feeling rejected, angry at Diz, pissed at myself, fuming and confused and out of control.
Trying to prove my worth as a human being up on the tractor, rather than just getting the job done—that was my first mistake. In the unlikely chance I ever read these scribblings, here’s a memo to my future self: Do. The. Job. Skip the extraneous emotions. The work is real. It’s simple. It’s Zen. It is necessary and it is good and it is enough.
Yeah, therein lies respite, absolution, clarity, yadda yadda, but you can take this philosophy too far.
And here I sit, still knotted and seared and all acid, despite being in heaven on Earth. The evening is gentle and sweet. Twilight comes early here among the dense midsummer trees, and it’s a serene time. The light is going blue and soothing, the air moves with decorum in the woods, scented with some blossom’s sweetness, the birds have gone drowsily quiet except for one—I should learn my birds—that makes a particularly liquid reveille: whirly-whirly-whirly-whirly. I have everything I need in my tent and my porky-proof storage boxes; I have a good book to read by lantern light. I can’t even complain about the bugs, because my diesel-skunked skin repels them. And I’m squandering all of it. Something else to detest about myself.
Today I was dumping gravel into the ditch and tipped the tractor into it and Will Brassard is visiting and he pulled me out and I thought I’d escaped without shame but Diz saw it from the upstairs window and got in a jab at me and I let it hurt me.
To his everlasting credit, Will smiled and pointed out that he and she and Brassard himself and Franklin and probably every other farming person in the history of mankind had
