I liked Lynn immediately: late twenties, slim, pale-skinned, white-blond straight hair pulled back into a short ponytail. She was quiet and struck me as centered and certain of her path—so unlike me. She was optimistic about small farming’s future, hadn’t had her idealism kicked out of her yet. She’d gone to U. Mass and studied anthropology for three years before dropping out: “And the only anthro I’ve done since then is fieldwork, studying my husband and his family.” Theo is a native Vermonter, a mild-mannered guy who tagged along with college friends when they went to whoop it up among the big-city Amherst kids. He hadn’t done much whooping, apparently, just looked embarrassed by everybody else’s lack of decorum, until Lynn talked to him. She had a sly grin that invited confidences and drew me into a conspiratorial sense of camaraderie. I loved the idea of marriage as an anthropological study.
Two can do the milking, but it was better to have three on duty: one person to manage “cow flow,” one to work in the pit, and the third exploiting the cows’ absence to rake out the stalls and distribute fresh bedding. Also, the purging of milk pipes and washing of the claws always went faster with more hands. So it helped that Will Brassard’s work brought him to the area more often. He’d stay over for a couple of nights, get up to help with the morning milking, drive off to the studio to work on his video project, then return in time for the evening milking.
When I commented on his schedule to Diz, she told me, “Got his work ethic from his old lady.” Then she snorted and added a disclaimer: “Huh! Sorta.”
He inherited some of her other mannerisms, too. He could be very blunt. Early on, five in the morning, pitch dark outside, he was working his way along the udders as I leaned over the pit railing to chat. Our breath steamed and the coffee was barely starting to perk in our veins and Will said, “I detest this shit. How my parents stand it, I couldn’t tell you. This is why I’ll never work on a farm.” He meant it, but he said it without Diz’s scalding bile. “I like clean clothes. I like clean hands. I don’t like getting up this early. I don’t like freezing my ass off. I don’t like animal poop. I don’t even fucking drink milk!”
Eighty cows, 320 teats twice a day, plus six tons of manure to clean up every day: I could see his point.
I think the first time I realized just how acclimated I’d become to farm living was the moment I came out of the barn and my heart leaped at the sight of Earnest’s big stake-side truck in the farmyard. I realized I had an affection for that old funky rig. I liked its lines, the pragmatism of its construction, its dents and scrapes and other evidence of the hard miles it had put in—the same charms of the Ford tractor I drove every day.
I went into the house to find Earnest at the table, telling Brassard and Diz of his misadventures in the comparative tropics. He was sitting with his back to the door, and as I came in I couldn’t resist grabbing his ears from behind and tugging them.
“I’m glad to see you, too,” he said.
I joined them for coffee. Earnest related how he’d done a few jobs in Maryland, just north of Washington, DC, then worked his way down through Virginia. He had a moment of trepidation when a North Carolina state cop pulled him over for no reason, came to the window, looked at him, and said “¿Habla inglés?” And Earnest answered, “Sorry, what? I don’t speak any Spanish except ¿Qué pasa?”
“Jeezum!” Brassard exclaimed. “Could’ve caught yourself some trouble that way! What’d he do?”
“Asked to see my license and registration. Read my name, laughed at himself. ‘Arnest Kelley—Irish, then, are we?’ he said. With the accent.”
Brassard laughed aloud and slapped his thigh.
“Yeah. His name tag said Officer McGillicuddy. Good sense of humor. We got talking. I ended up giving him one of my cards, he said he’d show it around, see if anyone needed tree work.”
Earnest had a small duffel on the floor beside him, and after a few minutes he rummaged in it and presented gifts he’d brought back from foreign climes: “early Christmas presents.” For Diz he’d bought a big coffee-table photo book, Washington, DC: America’s Historic Heritage, which she began paging through immediately. Brassard’s was a pouch of pipe tobacco that Earnest had bought near the farm that had grown it—sold illegally and famous for its flavor, sort of like a local moonshine.
Brassard took it, opened it, sniffed it, made a dubious face. “I’ll give it a try, anyway,” he said.
“Not in the house!” Diz commanded.
Earnest rummaged in his duffel again, then seemed to change his mind and came up empty-handed. “Got something for Will … something for you, too, Pilgrim. But I’ll get it to you later. Right now I think I’d better take a shower and have a nap. Lot of driving the last few days.”
He came out to see me a couple of hours later while I was stall bedding. Usually, I’d go through and rake the dirty stuff into the alley and replace it with clean material while the cows were getting milked, but we’d had only two on duty that morning and nobody had seen to it. I was coaxing a cow out of almost every stall to do the job.
Earnest appeared beside me with another rake, and without saying anything, he encouraged number 17 to back out so he could clean out her stall. She acquiesced and stood by to watch the proceedings with mild curiosity.
“You again,” I said. My breath steamed in the air.
“How’s it going with Diz? She let you in the house—that’s
