Inside, on with the lights, rows of bovine faces turn toward us. Pause, swig scalding coffee, blow out steam, knowing the other is feeling the same inertia and trying to muster the resolve needed. The cold and dark wrap around you, you’re the only two people in the universe, it’s muffled quiet except for the shifting of the cows. Then to work: move em toward the parlor, get em in position, commence the ritual.
One morning, Will was particularly fuzzy, and he started talking about his family. I got a picture of him as a freckle-cheeked all-American boy, jeans and a white T-shirt, running wild in the hills and fields when chores didn’t require him, shooting BB guns with his friends, swimming in the pools along the creek. But by the time he was fourteen, he decided he had no use for the “agricultural lifestyle.” He’d always preferred technology, won science fair prizes, ended up getting into video production.
Picturing their household, Will and his now-estranged half sister, Jane, and Diz and Jim, I asked him when Earnest had come into the picture.
“Earnest?” He looked at me over the back end of a cow. “I figured you’d have heard all this. Thought you two were good friends.”
“Well, Earnest is … a man of mystery. Your father is a man of few words, and your mother is … isn’t often forthcoming,” I said.
He laughed.
Will told me the basics in an offhand monologue with lots of ellipses as memories emerged or milking activities distracted him.
After the two men returned from Vietnam, Earnest moved to Vermont and worked on the farm. Where he met and after a couple of years married Brassard’s sister, Charlotte.
“This was before I was born, so all I know is what Dad or Earnest have told me in bits and pieces. From what I’ve heard, sounds like they were seriously in love, I mean back-on-Broadway big-time. It made Dad happy. Earnest moved in, worked on the farm, Char worked at the bank in town. Dad was glad his sister had landed ‘an honorable man.’”
I was stunned. Why hadn’t Earnest told me this when I asked him about his history with Brassard, his presence at the farm? Was there any truth in the scandalous tale about the Saigon brothel?
“Yeah, she was quite a live wire, supposedly. Earnest made a ‘decent woman’ out of her. Which I’m guessing there had been some doubt about previously. There’s pictures of her up at the house. The gal leaning against the tractor, with the cheesecake pose?”
I tried to get my mind around this as I moved on—sixteen iodine dips, sixteen squirts, sixteen wipe-downs, get the claws starting their twitchy pumping, then attend to the second row of preposterously swollen mammary bags.
When he came back with the next group, Will told me more: “He and Dad were both totally screwed up when she died. It was a huge thing for them. Driving back from Rutland. Icy road, snowy night. Went off into a ditch, ruptured spleen or something. Didn’t find her until morning.” Will paused to check my reaction, which was speechlessness. Of course Earnest hadn’t said anything about it when I probed him: This wasn’t something to talk about with a virtual stranger who casually inquired.
“Hasn’t he … ever remarried? Girlfriends?”
“Earnest? He’s had girlfriends. A couple of them really set their caps for him. That’s where he’s been the last few weeks—up in Burlington. Dad says one of them has persuaded him to give it another try. Earnest is dubious, but he’s a soft touch and doesn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. Also, he’s not getting any younger, probably worth trying another heave-ho.”
I felt a sense of loss, thinking of Earnest taking up residence elsewhere—everyone seemed happier when he was around, myself included, and winter was getting very long in his absence. Again, I felt irrationally betrayed that he hadn’t told me about this part of his life. And again, I realized it wasn’t particularly any of my business.
Will released the four cows that were finished, moved in the next four, both of us quiet. We went through another cycle of eight cows before he continued.
“Yeah, that was a bad period,” Will said, returning to the time of Charlotte’s death. “A couple of bad years. I’m glad I missed out on it. Mom told me the really tough stuff.”
I didn’t say anything.
“So, you’ve noticed there’s no booze here at the house?” he asked.
I hadn’t, but apparently no alcohol came onto the property, because after Charlotte died both men drank hard and the farm went to hell. A couple of cows died from lack of timely vet care. Earnest smacked up his car. One time he drank himself to unconsciousness lying on the woodshed floor and almost froze to death. Brassard and Diz had been seeing each other, and when things went to hell she moved to the farm and took charge. She’d had her own serious problems with booze—my first impression was right about that—and knew the ropes when it came to getting sober. She was the one who pulled them out of it. According to legend, Will said, she literally, physically, fought with Earnest to get the bottle out of his mouth.
“This was no twelve-step program,” Will said, chuckling. “It was a one-step program, done Mom’s way.”
Diz had carved her place on the farm with a hatchet, from day one.
While Will was moving in the next group, one of the cows let go with a rush that almost got him point-blank. He danced away with nothing worse than brown splashes on his legs. “Witch!” he scolded the cow. To me he complained, “Is there any other animal that’s so oblivious to its own defecation? You have to wonder if they even know it’s happening back there. Christ Almighty.”
He hated farm life, but paradoxically most
