With the quiche in the oven, I sat on the other counter stool as he got the video going. The scene opened to show a bunch of cows with a fence in the foreground, a low steel-roofed cowshed in the background. Over that image, the title faded in—Brucellosis: Is Your Herd at Risk?—accompanied by some easy-listening-style bluegrass music. The credits slid by, showing that the film was produced by the Interstate Dairy Practices Council, and that Will was editor-in-chief and had a hand in scripting, videography, and editing. When the credits finished, the scene cut dramatically to a tiny calf lying on the ground, covered with blood and slime, a lumpy rope of umbilicus draped over its twitching body.
“Brucellosis,” said the bland voice-over, “otherwise known as spontaneous abortion disease or Bang’s disease, is a highly contagious bacterial infection that strikes not just cattle but can be transferred to humans who consume milk products.” The dying miscarried calf dissolved to a dairy farmer, talking to the camera as his name appeared in a tag that unfurled at the bottom of the screen.
Will brought down the volume to explain that Vermont is pretty well brucellosis free, but the rising popularity of raw milk could create an increased brucellosis risk to consumers.
Watching the video, I learned that not only do cows abort, they have a hard time eliminating the infected placenta. The disease can be transferred from cow to bull and bull to cow. The close-ups of enlarged bull’s testicles and brucellosis-affected placentas were no doubt of great practical value to farmers, but I was relieved when the focus moved from the farm to the laboratory, where bulk milk samples were being tested for brucellosis in sterile white-and-chrome environments.
I went to check the quiche, which didn’t need checking. “It’s a very professional job, Will. It must be challenging to keep all the pieces of a big project like this organized.”
He brought down the volume again. “You know what’s amazing? This thing is eighteen minutes long. We had to shoot about eighteen hours of footage to get those eighteen minutes.”
I kept my eyes on the screen as I refilled the teakettle. “And as many hours in the editing studio, I’d bet.”
He nodded. “I know the start is pretty grisly, but I wanted to go for a sort of shock effect, to let people know how serious it is. The middle is more scientific, but then I got very graphic again at the end to remind the viewer.”
“Sounds like a good approach. Drive the point home at the end.”
I worked at minor food preparation tasks; Will sipped from his tea, watched the screen, then looked over at me. “You’re handling this very gracefully, Ann.”
“What?”
“Brucellosis videos before dinner.” He reached over, ejected the disk, and waved it in the air. “Not great first-date material, is it?” He smiled ruefully, then appeared caught out. His ears reddened. Neither of us had acknowledged this as a “date”—the thought hadn’t even occurred to me.
“I just grabbed it out of the car,” Will said. “I wasn’t thinking.”
“Will, it’s fine. I’m glad to know more about what you do.”
“The only other one I have with me is about mastitis. Infection of the udder, clogging of the teats. More relevant to this place. Really hits some Vermont farms.”
“Please leave me a copy,” I told him. “I really should learn about this stuff.”
He laughed and shook his head. “There you go with the being gracious thing again.”
“I’ll just take that as a compliment and leave it there.”
Then I told him it was time for him to set the counter for dinner, that I was going to make a salad, and that while I did I’d love it if he told me more about his family, meaning his wife and daughter. Again he seemed glad to have an agenda established.
The quiche turned out better than I’d expected. We did talk about various topics, mainly about Will’s daughter, whom he adored. He didn’t mention his wife and I didn’t tell of my catastrophes in Boston. Conversation stalled at around eight o’clock; I intuited that Will wanted to say something that stuck in his throat. Eventually he gave up on it and decided he’d turn in early. We told each other thanks and goodnight.
I don’t know what he’d been unable to say—a request for another “date,” a question about my marital situation? As a social interlude, date or otherwise, it had been a little awkward. Still, I liked Will’s innocence, his lack of finesse in hanging out with me, his lack of premeditation in showing me the video. Earnest was right: He was not a great self-promoter around a woman. But he struck me as honest, and I appreciated that.
Chapter 31
Sept. 7
Brassard figures the only way out is to auction off half the cows and then sell off some of his fields, fifty acres subdivided into four lots. Earnest, even though he’s legally co-owner, defers to Brassard on these matters because ultimately it’s Jim’s family’s heritage. And anyway, he can’t offer a better course. Will can only shrug.
The parcel he’s chosen to sell is right on the road—flat, pretty, well-drained acres at the lower end of his fields, so if he can find some buyers who want to live this far out, it’ll bring in a decent price. Having made the decision, this big, quiet, gentle man now goes about his days in a kind of mourning. It doesn’t help that this change comes so hard on the heels of losing his wife. He’s a man going through the motions, a man surrendering his past. In a rare moment of confession, sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee growing cold at his elbow, he told me it’s hard to accept that the skills he’d acquired through a lifetime, all that devotion and hard work, mattered not one jot. At the same time, he says, he’s had it, he’s had enough of this. “It
