Those weren’t by any means the only exchanges that took the starch out of Diz’s resentment. But we had neither a big blowout nor a heartwarming reconciliation; her hackles went down hair by hair. Throughout the fall, we had many small collisions that were overcome by many little grudging concessions and acknowledgments. Most of these slipped past because we were simply too busy to deal with them except by forgetting. We segued into a functional relationship.
Fall struck me as a season of rituals. Within just a few weeks, certain tasks simply had to be completed, in a certain order. Get up the last of the hay, bale some, roll the rest and cover it in white plastic, stack the rolls along the side of the cowshed and the fence of the near paddock. Move the cows inside and latch the outer pasture fences. Check the no hunting posters tacked to the trees around the borders. Complain about the out-of-state leaf peepers, gawking at the rusticity of it all, whose slow-rolling cars choked the roads closer to town.
Then there was harvesting the feed corn. The combine was a creature unto itself, and Brassard had a tractor, an older International Harvester, just for dragging this and the other large tilling and planting equipment. It was much bigger than the Deere, not a “utility” tractor but one designed just for towing things. I thought of it as a kind of elephant, tall and gray and massive, with a dusty dignity.
When Brassard explained the logistics of harvesting to me, he also provided an exposition on tractors. Their brand names have a legendary ring to them: Massey Ferguson, International Harvester, New Holland, Allis-Chalmers, McCormick, John Deere—the tractor equivalents of famous guns such as Colt, Smith & Wesson, and Winchester. He had no faith in the Japanese and Korean tractors—the Kubotas, Hinomotos, and Kiotis—that had flooded the market in recent years. I pictured them as futuristic, streamlined things—ninja tractors. His father had been partial to Fords and Harvesters and had purchased my beloved little Ford back in 1979.
He didn’t let me drive the Harvester, because managing turns and repositionings with the combine behind took considerable finesse. Instead, I drove the Ford alongside, pulling a high-sided trailer that received the stream of chopped stalk and grain. At intervals, Diz trundled out on the Deere to bring an empty trailer and pull away the full one. Back at the barnyard, she worked the machine that blew the mealy chaff up a long chute and into the top of one of the silos.
Finally, the fields were stripped. The corn stubble stood in rows, looking like a military graveyard seen from the air. The naked hayfields struck me as sad and vulnerable looking. The white rolls of hay along the fence suddenly looked like deep snowdrifts. After sleeping in my woods all summer, I felt claustrophobic in my tiny apartment and missed those sweet, green days and nights. I no longer felt the Great Fear at night, but the loneliness still wormed its way into my heart, my bed, despite my physical proximity to others.
I think even Diz noticed that I was a better hand than Franklin, the young man who had gone on to Vermont Tech. He was strong but always seemed a little at sea. Diz once said, “Kid’s so dumb he couldn’t find his own ass if it bit him on the ass.” Unlike him, I could generally see the larger objective behind minor chores. My ability to stick to a sequence of tasks allowed me to sync efficiently with Diz and get a lot done.
This was especially important during milking. Cows like getting milked, so in summer they spontaneously drifted toward the barn and convened in the concrete-floored paddock near the milking parlor at the appointed time. In winter, when they lived in the cowshed, they needed very little goading to get them to milking.
The Brassards’ setup was an eight-station “herringbone” parlor into which groups of cows were ushered and arranged in two rows of four. Between the two rows, down the center of the room, ran a waist-deep alley—Diz called it “the pit”—that allowed us milkers to stand, rather than crouch, as we attended to eight cow behinds.
Overhead pipes ran the length of room, and above each station hung a flexible hose ending in the apparatus that actually drew the milk. Once the cows were in position, I went the rounds with a cup of iodine solution, dipping each teat. Then I went around again, wringing out a squirt of milk from each, then went around one more time to wipe off excess disinfectant with a clean rag. When I was done, I’d get out of the pit to move cows in or out, and let Diz hook them up—she didn’t yet trust me to get the milking cups settled right. She turned on the vacuum and attached the milking cups, shup-shup-shup-shup. Diz called the milker a “claw”—to me, they looked more like robotic spiders—a set of tubes that ended in four cups, each about the size and shape of a flashlight. They applied a pulsing vacuum that brought milk surging into a glass bulb at the bottom. From there it was sucked up into ceiling tubes, its flow measured by an electronic monitor about the size of a shoe box.
The machines took about six minutes to drain each cow, then pulled off automatically when the flow tapered. By the time the last of the left-side four was hitched up, the right-side four would be finished. I would release them, shoo them out the far end of the parlor, and bring in four more from the holding area.
Each group took about sixteen minutes, so milking the whole herd took about two hours. Eighty cows with four teats each. Twice a day. After the first hour, it became mind-numbingly repetitious. Even then, the job wasn’t done—we still had to clean the whole pipe system and remove manure from
