Sitting on the wide bench seat, I lolled against the passenger door as Earnest buckled himself in and cranked it up and pulled out onto Route 2. Dizzy, amiable silence in the dark for a few minutes.
I felt blissfully sleepy, happy. I’d had a really great day. Made two hundred dollars, fun to be with Earnest, Diz had thought I had spunk, sort of ish. I shut my eyes and just surrendered to the gentle gravities of the truck’s turns and accelerations. Sack of potatoes. Diz had been one hard nut, but maybe worth the cracking after all. Earnest was such a sweet guy, the best. Through thick lips I said, “So. Vietnam. How old does that make you now?”
“That makes me fifty-five.”
I was skunked, half asleep. “Too bad,” I mumbled.
I awakened to find myself still sprawled in the truck, in the dark. Earnest sat doing some paperwork on a clipboard he’d set on the steering wheel, reading and jotting by the metallic streetlight glow that angled into his window. We were at the Williston park-and-ride, abandoned now except for my car. The dashboard clock said it was going on midnight. He’d been sitting there with me asleep beside him for over two hours.
He looked over when he noticed my stirring. “I didn’t want to wake you,” he said. “I wasn’t going to let you drive like that.”
Earnest counted out four fifty-dollar bills and made sure I pocketed them securely. My head had cleared, but I was so stiff and sore that my legs almost buckled when I jumped down from the cab. He was watching me carefully, so I mocked him by standing on one foot, successfully, for fifteen seconds. He smiled. He waited until I started my car and turned on the headlights and backed out with enough precision to reassure him again. He honked and then his taillights sped off and I cruised back to the farm.
Chapter 29
Just as you can’t talk about dairy farm life without discussing manure, you can’t talk about it without considering business—money and the lack thereof. Manure is the more pleasant subject.
Toward the end of August, Brassard called Will and Earnest and me to his office. Almost four months after Diz’s death, he was no longer so stunned, so numb. But he had acquired a kind of resigned melancholy at odds with the genial, shyly humorous personality I’d known in my first year at the farm.
As I learned that afternoon, it wasn’t all about Diz.
I know, the plight of America’s small farmers has been a trope of rural America since well before Woody Guthrie mourned it and railed against it in his Dust Bowl–era songs. It’s not a new topic, but this was my first personal exposure to its complexities and emotional urgency.
I was aware that Brassard was running on the edge—that’s why he sold my acres in the first place. But in the back of my mind, I still held on to the grand mythology of the Grapes of Wrath saga: drought or flood, failed crops, greedy bankers. If farms fail, it’s Grapes of Wrath II, full of high drama.
But on a modern small farm, it’s more a matter of shrinking margins. Death by a thousand cuts, not by a biblical storm or plague. The need to borrow too much, changes in markets, higher fuel prices, aging farmers, aging equipment, rising interest on variable-rate loans. The distance between income and expenses shrinks and shrinks and then goes negative, and … then what?
Back when Brassard’s grandfather bought the place, eastern small farms could still bring fresh milk to nearby markets at competitive prices. But the scale of farming in the Midwest changed. Flatland corn-belt dairy farms produced so much milk, so cheaply, that Vermont’s rocky-soiled, steep-sloped farms couldn’t compete. Federal supports provided a price floor, but the floor varied, leaving small farmers in perpetual suspense.
The year I started at Brassard’s farm, milk prices had fallen to only about half what they’d been two years before. The newspapers said that between ten and twenty small Vermont dairies were going out of business each month. To put it in urban terms, I’d been making thirty-nine thousand a year teaching at Larson—how would I have fared if suddenly they paid me only nineteen thousand? I’d have to make my car payments and buy groceries with my credit card. And start running up interest, with no assurance I could ever get out from under.
You may have read the dire statistics in newspaper editorials. But it’s very different when it concerns people you care for, a patch of ground you’ve worked. I had been there less than two years, and though I still planned to leave, I had grown loyal to the sweet breezes of Brassard’s little valley and the people who made their living from the soil there.
This is, it really is, a love story. But the farm’s misfortunes were part of learning and building that love, and love is certainly as much about learning and building as it is about passion, romance, or serendipity.
Jim Brassard was no old-timey farmer. He’d kept up with computers, had a slow but functional connection to the internet; he did his accounting using QuickBooks, and he kept track of every cow on Excel spreadsheets. He read farming journals, toured agricultural websites, and went to farm shows to keep up.
But as he explained that afternoon, the accumulation of debt and fluctuations in milk and grain prices had made the finances precarious in recent years. And then the loss of Diz and the obligation to take on extra paid help—the balance had tipped into the red. Thanks to selling off my land and cash infusions from Earnest,
