Brassard kept slicing, peeling off thin slices and taking his time answering. When he’d trimmed the hoof to an oyster-shell white and held a gauge to the heel, he let it down and looked up at me thoughtfully. The cow set her newly pedicured foot on the rubber mat experimentally, found no pain, forgot about it.
As Brassard cleaned off his tools, he gave me the lowdown. The Goslants had been there since before he was born. There used to be a farmhouse, behind where the trailers are now, but it had always been in bad repair and burned down twenty years ago. Then they moved the trailers in.
His description didn’t match my expectations. He said that the elders of the clan, Homer and his wife, Fran, were about his age, had lived there all his life and had raised their family there. But there was a lot of coming and going, residents changing as a son or daughter or cousin or uncle or grandchild ran into tough times and came to stay on the family estate. He said there was “some intermarrying” between Goslants and maybe that accounted for some of their “problems.” There might be as many as eight or ten people crowded in there sometimes, sometimes maybe just three or four; he couldn’t keep track.
He moved over his hoof stand and picked up the next cow’s right rear hoof—she resisted for a moment till he spoke soothingly to her—then used a thin tool, like an ice pick, to pry out impacted debris. As he probed with his fingers, assessing the health and length of the hoof, he asked me why I wanted to know.
“Do you think I have to worry about them? Like … when I’m up at my camp?”
At that, he stopped working on the hoof. Even the cow, number 32, turned her big head to look back as if wondering what caused this interruption of the trimming rite. She shifted and daintily kicked the box so that it spun out from under her leg and bounced away.
Brassard grunted as he straightened, then faced me, checking my face and then gazing distantly down the row of stalls. “No question but some of em get up to trouble. Don’t know the details. Not bein farmers, they don’t travel in the same social circles as us. Diz won’t have anything to do with em.”
But, he said, there’s order to the clan. Homer and his wife Fran had had four kids; the kids had had kids, and probably another generation had started up by now—they married young, Brassard said. He described Homer and Fran as good people, honest and steady. “No education, but don’t drink and they make room for everyone who needs someplace.” Homer had worked for the state highway crew for as long as Brassard could remember, and he figured Homer’s income provided the financial ballast for the extended family, whose fortunes fluctuated wildly. Fran was very obese and had diabetes, almost crippled. Two of their kids were “pretty normal,” one was truly “slow.” “Doesn’t stop em from havin kids, though. Startin about fifteen, sixteen.” He didn’t know how many grandkids—maybe eight. He thought a couple of the grandkids had been born with some problems, and he knew one of them got brain damage in infancy. “Run into Homer at the general store, this’s ten, fifteen years ago now, and he was upset. Said his son-in-law was throwin the baby in the air and it hit the ceiling and fell on the floor. Concussion and spine damage, developmental problems after that. You’ll see him out front sometimes, can’t walk straight?”
I retrieved the hoof-holding box, but Brassard stayed standing, considering the matter further and stroking the cow’s hindquarters to calm her. “Another grandkid has that Down syndrome, you might see him sometimes. When I think of what that man has been through—Homer. What he deals with. What’re you going to do if you’re Homer and Fran? You stand by your family, same as I’d do, anyone would do.”
He said that though the kids and grandkids sometimes got into trouble, they respected Homer and Fran and mostly didn’t bring it into the house. He spoke of Homer and Fran with respect—he called Homer “gentle” and “steady,” Fran “bighearted.”
Number 32 began to get impatient, stamping and shifting. A 1,300-pound, head-high animal in close quarters is hard to ignore. Brassard grabbed her right ankle and drew it firmly up onto his little platform.
“She’ll settle,” he reassured me. “Just needs to know we’re gettin the job done and she’ll be free to go.”
As for whether I was in danger up at my place, he said he didn’t think so, but couldn’t be sure. He said some of the grandkids had friends who were definitely not upright citizens or obedient to the household rules of Homer and Fran. “If you ever see the sheriff’s car up on the ridge road, this far out, you can pretty well guess where they’re goin.”
Then I glimpsed the authoritative side of Jim Brassard, some of the force that had earned him officer rank in Vietnam. He met my gaze straight on and said, “Better just tell me what’s happened to get you worried, so I can figure out what to do about it.”
I told him about the guts and my conversation with Will and the footprints in the snow. His eyes went distant. “The deer, it’s more likely just habit—I never posted that hill, they’ve spent their whole lives huntin up there if they wanted. Somebody walkin around, same thing. People generally don’t worry too much about walkin in somebody’s woods as long as they don’t do any harm. When I was a boy, we’d hike around and even sleep in somebody’s camp. Nobody locked em back then. People who live out this far, some just live more in the old way.”
He went back to work on the hoof. Then, as an afterthought: “In any case, don’t bring it up to
