It was a time of budget cutbacks at Vermont schools, and there were very few teaching jobs. I applied to three and didn’t even get an interview. I had to believe that the recommendation letters my principal had promised were less than lukewarm, so after a while I quit looking for a teaching position.
I considered jobs at day-care centers, nursing homes, burger franchises, but either the math or the morale didn’t work out. Commuting from my hill was out of the question, so I would need to move to some unfamiliar town and then pay rent, and salaries in Vermont were low. Even if I put my land on the market, I’d need to keep paying Brassard until it sold, which certainly wouldn’t happen this year. I simply couldn’t afford to live anywhere else unless I had a steady job at a respectable salary.
Anyway, by then my half-made decision to sell my land was faltering.
My land? Yes, I had begun merging with it in ways that I hadn’t anticipated. And I was earning it by enduring inconvenience and discomfort and nighttime fear and, on the farm, by the sweat of my brow. And I felt a tinge of pride. For the first time, I began to understand the true dimensions of rural people’s fierce attachment to their lands, the determination of small farmers to honor the soil they work and their own labor and that of their parents. One becomes loyal to that earth, those trees, the swell and fold of field and hill.
So fall was coming, and it appeared that I would stay on at the farm.
Earnest said that fall would be glorious, absolutely the best time to be in the woods, but that by sometime in October the cold would drive me from the hill and into a former chicken coop the Brassards had set up as a guesthouse or bunkhouse for temporary workers. It was divided into two tiny apartments side by side and had all the amenities. Diz, determined to keep up appearances, had even put flower boxes on the windowsills.
Earnest was right: It got cold and sorrowful up on the hill. While the leaves were turning it was splendid, the air filled with a dry pumpkin scent, a rust-orange scent, invigorating. The biting insects vanished and it was lovely to sit or walk without their harassment. But soon an unease came to the woods. The breezes seemed to shiver the remaining leaves, tremble them rather than toss them. Fewer and fewer birds sang among the trees, until one day they were gone and the woods were silent.
Loneliness haunted my silent woods. It was as if the absence of living things around me heightened my need for the company of human beings. With the forest now stark, loneliness encompassed me, threatened to swallow me; at times I felt I would vanish into it. And the hunger for contact became more physical. I yearned for the assurance of a companion’s arms around me.
For a time the crickets kept on, a silvery shimmer of sound, but they, too, dwindled in number until at last there was only one, a solitary dry creak at the base of a boulder near my camp. And then it, too, ceased.
That day truly signaled the end of my summer. I started getting cold at night despite covering myself with every piece of fabric I owned, and when I awoke, the water in my bedside glass would be skinned with ice. The light got bleak, and by the time I’d return to camp after the evening milking it was full dark.
One mournful day after the last leaves had fallen, I borrowed the Ford and a little utility trailer, labored up the switchbacks to my clearing, and carted down my possessions. Seeing it piled there—two big steamer trunks, a few watertight plastic tubs from Walmart, two wooden chairs I’d bought at a yard sale—brought home to me the sheer lack of stuff I owned. I had a weak grip on materiality, no ballast. I felt fragile again.
With my tent gone, my little platform looked forlorn and incongruous in the naked autumn light. Before I chugged out of the clearing, I blew it a kiss and made a fervent promise to return.
After being obliged to move down from my eyrie, the next most difficult thing that fall was saying goodbye to Earnest. He had an annual seasonal cycle, too: When it got too cold to do tree work in Vermont, he followed the warmer weather south, taking tree jobs as far down as North Carolina, wherever he had friends, cousins, old military buddies, or former clients to help find him jobs. He planned to be gone about six weeks, so before he left he worked hard to batten down the place for winter: getting the cowshed ready, putting up storm windows on the house, preparing the tractors for their winter chores. He and I cut six cords of firewood up on the far side of Brassard’s valley—most of it from dead trees and already dry—and then brought it to the house, split it, and stacked it in a roofed crib near the back door.
The day he trundled his old stake-side flatbed out of the farmyard, saluting me goodbye, a void seemed to open at the farm. I missed his warm presence instantly and almost feared the next six weeks with only Diz and Brassard for company.
Chapter 18
Moving into the repurposed chicken coop increased my daily contact with Diz, and I knew a showdown of some kind was inevitable.
Even when we weren’t working together, I could see
