I was astonished—and flattered—that I was included in this deeply revealing meeting. To me, it meant that I had truly joined “we.” I wasn’t Diz—not by any stretch of the imagination capable of her workload or possessing her range of skills—but I was somehow “the woman” of the farm. I looked at the faces of these three men and loved their trust of me, and their need.
Is needing the same as loving? No. But to the extent you seek to love yourself and the life you’ve been given, you recognize that need and love, giving and receiving each, are closely linked. I had glimpsed one type of need—felt it still—during my divorce. But the kind of need Brassard’s farm had is a different and more complex linkage. It is an honor to be so needed. Maybe Diz had been trying to explain this when she made me swear to “take care of these good men.” Being Diz, she’d summed it up not as some philosophical abstraction, but in terms of what one must do to love. You take care of each other, you meet each other’s need; you do whatever you must to see to their happiness and sufficiency.
Brassard’s projections showed that the farm would go broke by midwinter. Then there would not be enough money to pay the vet or buy diesel fuel, and certainly not enough for the property taxes due in spring.
I just listened as the men considered the range of possible scenarios. Bankruptcy? Brassard bristled at the idea, and Will said it was unlikely to succeed unless a hefty portion of capital assets—cows, equipment, land—were sold to partially repay creditors. And then there’d be no source of income. And the bankruptcy process itself would incur substantial legal expenses.
Earnest said he had about twelve thousand in savings, but he didn’t want to put it up unless there was some plan for a turnaround in the farm’s finances. Which there wasn’t.
When Will suggested that his father borrow some money from his widowed sister in Rutland, Brassard scowled. She didn’t have enough to make a difference, and, again, what was the point without some longer-term change in the business plan?
Brassard could sell the whole place outright to another farmer who felt he could run it at profit, or more likely had the capital to convert it to a confined animal-feeding operation, use all the pastures for corn and buy a lot more feed, expand the parlor’s milk throughput capacity. Brassard didn’t like the idea, but if he got a decent price, he’d be tempted. Not that he had any buyers on the radar or could find one in time.
Another possibility was to sell just the cows and equipment, rent out his fields to another farmer, and live out his life as a marginally solvent old widower. I had gone with Brassard and Earnest to an auction of another farm’s estate, where every cow and tractor and baler and tank and stepladder and bucket was paraded before a crowd. I’d found it deeply upsetting: the apologetic but eager bidders, the seller’s tight, shame-filled face. Jim told me afterward that the proceeds were disappointing. The prices fetched were not great, because the equipment was outdated and because the bidding farmers needed good bargains as desperately as the old guy needed cash.
Or Brassard could sell off some more of his land, open land that would bring more bucks per acre, and a few houses would get built up around the old farmstead. I knew he was revolted by the thought. I shared the feeling. I had a completely self-interested stake in that possibility: I didn’t want my land, my wild home, to overlook a housing development or trailer tract. In any case, it could be years before an offering for sale resulted in cash in the pocket, and the farm didn’t have years.
The happiest but least possible was that Brassard could radically change the business plan and develop a solvent farm adapted to emerging market opportunities. Lynn and Theo, down the road, had found a niche for their organic produce and goat’s-milk soap, and so far it was working. Something like that was by far the most palatable solution overall, but there was no capital to invest in such a change, and it would take years to create new farm products and build a market for them. And while we knew organic anything was a growing market, Will explained that “organic” was a strictly regulated term, requiring certification of soil chemistry and usage history. Given the fertilizers and herbicides applied on it over the years, none of Brassard’s land would qualify.
After two hours, this discussion petered out due to the sheer depletion of morale. All we knew was that the farm had entered a glide path toward failure.
Brassard drove into town on errands. Earnest went off to repair something unspecified. Will and I headed to the barn to do the afternoon milking, with Theo’s sister due any minute to help.
I took first shift on cow flow while Will worked in the operator’s pit. We had settled the first four cows in their positions and Will had started along the line of udders when he asked gloomily, “So, did you pick up on any of the subtext in all that?”
“Subtext?”
“In what Dad said. In how he said it.”
I thought back. “Well, how he said it … he was pretty blue, obviously. I’d think it would involve some … shame or embarrassment … it’s got to be a monumental disappointment to—”
“Disappointment, yeah.”
I puzzled at the bitterness in his voice and looked at him for some kind of clue. “I guess I missed the subtext, Will. This is all
