Erik’s van held enough hops crowns for three acres; the other three acres he would plant with rhizomes cut from these crowns in the spring. He estimated that even with leaving fourteen feet of unworked soil between planting rows, he’d need to break and soften and smooth about a quarter mile in each of those six acres. He and Will did some math and figured it would take two weeks of ten-hour days, barring equipment failure or weather delays. And only then could Erik start drilling the holes for the six hundred poles he needed to erect. And, after that, start planting before the cold came and the ground froze.
As Will and Erik discussed this, Earnest had been quiet, frowning, chewing first on his upper lip and then on his lower lip. After a while he drifted off to the barn, and while we all kept talking we heard a tractor fire up and then saw the Ford chug away down the slope of pasture and out of view.
Watching him go, Erik slumped as if he just now realized the scope of what he had planned. He jabbed his thumb over his shoulder in Earnest’s general direction. “I guess he got discouraged, huh?”
Will and I glanced at each other. Being discouraged by a physical challenge was not something either of us could easily associate with Earnest.
Will had to go up to Burlington and I had other work to do, so we left Erik sitting on one of the ancient tractor’s wheels, flipping his empty coffee mug by its handle like a flashy cowboy gunslinger spinning his Colt, and staring forlornly at the acres he’d already worked so hard to tame. He was no doubt second-guessing his determination to plant on Brassard’s farm. He’d done it because I was there, Brassard needed the money, and the deal could be concluded fast. But he could have kept looking for some other organic acres for a week or more and might still have had the time to get the crowns in—probably could have gotten them in sooner, in fact, if the soil had been worked before. I had even asked Theo and Lynn about putting the yard on their place, but they said they simply didn’t have enough land to spare. Now it was too late; he’d made a deal with Brassard and had paid him in advance.
And anyway, there I was, and Erik and I needed to be near each other.
He cut a solitary figure on the tractor’s wheel, flipping his coffee mug. As I walked away, I knew that he’d left a lot of his story untold, and that it would ultimately reveal a person struggling with a loneliness not unlike my own. And the self-questioning: It no doubt ran in the blood.
About an hour later, I heard an unusual noise as I was doing supply inventory. I came out of the barn and joined Bob to watch Earnest driving the Ford up the road, pulling one of the derelict implements from that overgrown patch of field below the house. Its tall, skinny iron wheels squeaked, and it trailed strands of the grass and blackberry canes it had been half buried in. A metal seat rose on a single shaft between the wheels, just ahead of a triangular frame mounted with what looked like a witch’s spindly fingers curled into claws.
Earnest dragged it into the farmyard. It was a chisel plow, he told us, made to go deep into hard soil. Its name made sense: Each of the three curved claws ended in a sharply beveled arrowhead. The beauty of it, Earnest explained, was the ingenuity of the tines’ curve, which rose high above the frame before continuing down to the chisel tip—actually more of a spiral than a semicircle. The bevel of the spade-shaped heads would draw the fingers down into the ground, but if one of them hit something it couldn’t get through, the spiral would open wider and allow that particular tine to momentarily rise above the obstacle. The fact that it had a seat told him it had once been pulled by horses.
Farm implement manufacturers still made variations of chisel plows, he said, but he figured Erik would want to hang on to his money. This one was in pretty good shape—it hadn’t been abandoned because it broke, it had simply become outmoded.
Earnest and Erik worked on it for two hours, patch-welding parts as needed, greasing the axles, oiling the control levers, sharpening the chisel blades with an angle grinder. To get it out of the bushes, Earnest had attached it to the Ford’s tow bar using loops of heavy wire, meaning the men also needed to build a proper hitch.
They finished just before milking, so I got to watch the first test of it in the hop yard. Earnest sat on the seat to manipulate the levers that set the tines’ depth. Erik drove, starting out in crawler gear, twisting himself around in the Ford’s seat to check on the action behind. The blades bit and pulled themselves into the ground; the spirals opened out a bit; Erik notched up the throttle lever. On the surface, the tines cut only slender furrows, but their real work was below the surface, where each arrowhead sliced and jumbled the soil. And hit rocks—the curved tines rose and fell independently of each other, a slow three-fingered pianist.
It was not a straight shot by any means. The old spring-steel tines had lost much of their flexibility and one of them broke off the housing; Earnest welded it on again along with a piece of old leaf spring from another implement. At intervals, a big rock stopped forward motion entirely. When that happened, they backed up, lifted the tines, drove past the obstacle, and
