Once you’ve milked for a couple of years, you become sort of a machine yourself. You could do it in your sleep. Diz probably could have done it after she was dead. But the mix of extreme fatigue and tension and relentless routine is not a good one.
Will noticed. Kindly, he asked if I wanted to skip it this morning, he’d ring Lynn or wake Earnest up. I told him I was fine for it.
“You must be over the moon to see your brother!” he said as he settled a new group of cows into their stations and I began to move down the row of bony angular haunches and swollen bags.
“I sure am!” I said heartily. I didn’t want to go further down that track, so I turned it around and asked him about his own long-estranged half sister: How would he feel if he saw her again?
“I can’t imagine what it would be like. Also can’t imagine it happening.”
“Not even now that Diz is gone?”
“I get Christmas cards from her. With the folded news update inside? Her job, kids, husband, vacations, son’s team wins soccer tournament, Herb’s knee surgery. I drop her a note about once a year. I don’t know anything about her problem with Mom, but I don’t think it’s about anger and resentment anymore. Now it’s, what, just a matter of distance. Time and distance. Life moved on. Jane’s got her twenty-four seven all lined up, more than enough to keep busy, and it’s working for her. Me, half brother, I’m way out, barely on the radar.”
“But you grew up together! Don’t you ever miss her?”
“Huh. Well. Sometimes. But in the female companionship department, my sister isn’t my problem. My wife is my problem.”
“The absence thereof, or the presence thereof?”
He laughed. “I love that! Gotta remember that one!”
Earnest had kept me up to date on Will’s divorce and custody issues. That he lived at the farm now had less to do with its moment of need than with his having to move out of his place in Rutland. He claimed that the divorce was by mutual agreement, but he often seemed sad in a chin-up, quietly burdened way.
Another few minutes passed as Will let out another four cows and positioned four more. “Absence, presence,” he said. “Both. More gone than you’d like, but still there more than you’d like.”
“Both, that’s exactly right.” Wipe and strip, then confession: “I had a tough one myself.”
He smiled gratefully from over the backs of the cows.
I didn’t have time to wonder where Erik or Cat was, because just as we emerged from the barn, Brassard’s old friend Jack Pelletier turned into the drive. His sparkling-clean white truck pulled a covered white trailer with side windows revealing something huge and black and white moving inside. We called Bob inside and shut the door so he wouldn’t get underfoot.
Pelletier’s bulls were regionally renowned for their quality. Like Brassard, he had taken over the business from his father, who had provided bulls to Jim’s father—an intergenerational bond. I had met him at Diz’s memorial event: French Canadian ancestry, black haired, a small wiry frame that he carried with an outsize swagger. The two men shook hands, then turned to face the paddock fence as they discussed logistics.
When I first came to my land and heard farmers mention “AI,” I assumed it had to do with artificial intelligence, and rather than reveal my ignorance I’d spent hours trying to relate the concept to the context of overheard discussion. Actually, as I learned when I began working on the farm, “AI” means artificial insemination, which most dairy farmers use to impregnate their cows.
Observing the process for the first time further helped dispel the mythical image of the small farm that lingered in my mind. Surely, I had thought, there was a dashing bull out there in the pasture, proud and fearsome but gentlemanly. He’d be a Clark Gable of cattle, adored by his paramours, his gallantry adding a touch of romance to their otherwise boring lives.
But there was no such bull: Brassard had used AI since the 1990s. At intervals throughout the year, he bought cryogenically frozen bull semen in long, thin ampules called “straws.” When a cow went into heat, he—in the past, with Diz assisting—reached his whole arm into her intestinal tract, where he could then use his fingers to guide the long wand of a semen “gun” that he inserted into the birth canal. When he could feel that the wand had gotten all the way to the uterus, he pushed the plunger on the gun and emptied the straw. If all went well, the cow gave birth nine months later.
I hadn’t yet donned the armpit-length rubber glove and done the internal groping and finessing. The task held no appeal for me. But I had learned to thaw the straws, load the gun, and otherwise assist.
AI allowed Brassard to keep his herd’s calving cycles at optimum, select only the best sires, and introduce genetic diversity into the herd, making sure that he didn’t mate heifers with their own fathers. Like most Vermont farmers, he kept a vat of liquid nitrogen, about the size of a wastebasket, containing a stash of straws to be used as needed.
But farmers didn’t use the practice when he was growing up, and his father had always kept a bull or two to service the herd. In fact, Brassard was still dubious about AI. One reason was that when a cow has a date with a bull, she’s 95 percent certain to get with calf; AI was only half as reliable. Brassard and Pelletier had in common the belief—which Will insisted was totally unfounded—that natural insemination produced healthier calves that ultimately delivered more milk.
Also, Pelletier liked to do “pen testing” of his young bulls with Brassard’s cows and heifers. One of the key criteria for a bull’s value was his
