Did I bat a conversational eyelash? I don’t think I did—I was shoveling and hosing cow shit. My rubber coveralls were splattered with it, and I was hardly in a position to feel, or be, flirtatious.
He told me he was up this way because had some business in Burlington, working on an agricultural video project in partnership with UVM’s farm extension service, just for the day, and then had to get back to Rutland. He had a nice face, long in the jaw, showing none of his mother’s hardness. He seemed interested in me in a courteous way, not as a woman but as a person who happened to be coexisting with his parents on the farm where he’d grown up. His comfort with himself, the absence of posturing, suggested he wasn’t paying much attention to my gender.
We talked for ten minutes, then he said so long. We exchanged jaunty waves. I went about my work.
Earnest came the next day to help Brassard and me finish the drainage project. He and I worked in the ditch, shoveling the gravel around—those ice-cube-to-egg-size irregular chunks collectively make a stubborn medium, so in reality you’re sort of raking it, kicking it, digging at it—as Brassard unrolled a fabric silt screen over the top and used the Deere’s backhoe to fill in soil on top. It got hot and my entire T-shirt, starting at the armpits and working outward, turned dark with sweat.
Earnest just took off his shirt. It was the first time I had seen his broad, copper-colored torso without clothing, and I was stunned. His body was gently rounded by a layer of hard fat, but when he raked and jabbed with the shovel, the muscles of his back rolled and stood in ridges, and his biceps and shoulder muscles bulged and balled. His body seemed a locus of great power, radiating it, and I found myself stealing glances at him, at once fascinated and intimidated. It seemed an elemental phenomenon. My scratchings and scuffings accomplished virtually nothing, but when Earnest told things to move, they moved. Brassard smiled as he worked—the pleasure of a man glad to see a job getting done. I’d noticed that the mood at the farm always brightened when Earnest was there.
That night, up the hill, exhausted again, my mind turned to the day’s activities, conversations, images. And my thoughts returned again and again to Earnest—the power of him, the sun-warmed color of his glistening skin, his pleasure in the effort of the work. The masculinity of his form.
It was the second time in two days that my thoughts had lingered on a man, on a man’s physical self, and I realized abruptly and completely that I had just come up hard against another challenge or problem with my choice to seek land and live in the woods and be utterly self-sufficient in every way. Eros is a river, I realized, and just like my little stream, it will not let itself be dammed for long.
Chapter 17
With the drainage system installed, I returned to my regular work routine. Maybe it was Will’s comment about Diz’s own farming faux pas, or my imagination, but I thought I detected a slight softening in Diz. We worked together for the afternoon milking, and she didn’t scowl the entire time. We became an efficient team, trading off tasks and tools without hesitation. I had studied her various techniques of getting an animal ten times your weight to do what you wanted, and was getting pretty good at them. I think she noticed.
Against the daily, unchanging rhythm of milking, another slow and subtle longer beat had been playing: The corn came up. The hay came up. The off-cycle fields of clover came up. Brassard’s brown-earth soil disappeared under robust green.
And so my first summer passed.
I spent every night at my camp, and I worked on the farm for about twelve hours, five days a week, depending on the needs of the herd and the season and the availability of other help. By late August, life on my hill had become downright civilized. I dug a deeper hole and erected a rickety structure with a roof over it, and made a sort of chair of scrap lumber, to which I nailed a store-bought toilet seat—almost a genuine outhouse. I built a kitchen consisting of two-by-fours tied to two trees, with boards across for a counter, then put my Coleman white-gas stove there so I could sometimes cook standing up instead of crouching in the dirt. The biggest luxury was the aluminum sink I installed in my counter. I still hand-carried water from the spring, but now I could plug the drain and use the basin to wash vegetables, and myself, well clear of the soil floor. When I was done, I’d pull the plug and the water would pour out onto the ground and slither away in a little runnel I had dug. It felt very high-tech.
Brassard was paying me eight bucks an hour. By the end of August, I had earned $3,325 and, after my living expenses and car payments and first-ever property tax bill, had paid back about $1,900. At that rate, factoring in the 4 percent interest I was paying him, I would finish off my debt in sixteen more months. That is, I’d work the coming fall and winter, all the next summer and fall, and be paid up by January of the following year.
I loved living in my tiny palace, loved making shift to see to basic needs, and the woods did strengthen and smooth me. I learned to manage my nighttime fears somewhat better, and the knowledge that I could challenge them, or at least weather them, also helped reconstruct me.
But I
