Erik scouted the back roads looking for another antique that might do the job, but eventually he had to go spend two thousand dollars on a modern chisel plow from a farm implement store in Rutland. It was utterly without the slender grace of the old one, more like a weapon of war. Its frame was painted a gaudy red, and its three, heavily built, straight tines—shanks—were black and cruel looking. Appropriately, he said, they were now called “V-rippers.”
Erik claimed he liked the old one better, but this one allowed him to drive faster and needed only one person to operate, allowing Earnest to catch up with tree jobs he’d been putting off.
That autumn is hard for me to recall and even harder to recount. We saw each other, all of us, through a fog of fatigue and urgent preoccupation, and with a disconcerting intermittence. Earnest here then gone, Will here then gone, Lynn and Robin coming and going when goats and gardens allowed, Brassard appearing and disappearing. We were like a juggler’s pins, spinning end over end, passing each other in the air in every imaginable recombination.
We all had more work than could be accomplished in twenty-four hours. With Earnest still at his tree jobs at least three days a week, and Will editing a video project that often took him away, I became the Swiss Army knife—small but with every tool you might need. We all helped Erik whenever a window of time opened up, and devised a meticulously planned staffing schedule to make it all mesh.
For the next few weeks, Erik worked in a frenzy. He used the Ford’s backhoe attachment to remove the larger stones he had flagged on the first pass. He located sources for the trellis poles, got them delivered; he bought big spools holding, literally, miles of steel cable, and hundreds of fittings such as cable clamps and turnbuckles and anchor pins. He and I drilled hundreds of holes with an auger attached to the Ford’s PTO. He hired a contractor with the right equipment and worked with the men to erect the poles and string cable along their tops. Once the poles were up—visualize a sparse, geometric forest of telephone poles—he further softened his planting strips using a big walk-behind tiller, like the Gravely, that he rented. He worked in the rain until the ground got too soupy to continue. He skipped lunch because he forgot to eat. He worked after dark by the light of the Ford’s or the tiller’s headlamps and a big handheld beam he directed where he needed more light.
One night, just a sheen of sunset light gilding the inverted bowl of the sky, I saw Brassard come out of the house, cross the road, and limp into the hop yard. He flagged down Erik, shouted something up at him. The tractor motor chattered to silence. Erik creaked stiffly down. As they walked back, Brassard put his arm over my brother’s shoulder, talking seriously with him.
Later I asked him about their exchange.
“He told me I was done working for the day, flat and simple,” Erik explained. “Said it was time for some chow and some R and R. ‘No point in workin the ground if you end up in it before your damn hops do.’ He took the key out!” This was testament to Brassard’s determination on the point: No one ever took the keys out of the tractors.
Another moment that gave me a sweet pang in my chest: Earnest and Erik, working together, jive-talking, insulting each other’s proficiency at all things, laughing. At one point, they started shouldering and shoving, roughhousing like brothers. Erik has probably done his share of fighting, but it was like a bear playing with a puppy. Erik laughed about it later, marveling at Earnest’s power.
I did a lot of the hole drilling that preceded the installation of the poles. This required a twelve-inch auger attached to the PTO of my—the—Ford. The auger is a broad drill bit, an Archimedes screw about five feet long, that the tractor motor rotates and that the hydraulics push down into the soil. Erik had gone out earlier with a tape line and chalk powder to mark the drilling spots along the trellis lines. I’d position the back end of the Ford a few feet beyond the chalk spot, engage the hydraulics, and slowly jam the auger into the soil. We had to get down about five feet so the bottom of the pole would settle below the frost line.
This soil hadn’t been shattered by the chisel plow, had never been forced to do anything and wasn’t inclined to acquiesce now. Again and again rocks stopped the auger and broke the shear pin, an insert on the shaft that’s intended to self-destruct rather than let the shock destroy the whole rig. When a pin sheared, I’d stop. Then, with Erik’s or Earnest’s help, I’d twist and wrestle the auger and the vertical shaft into alignment, punch out the mutilated pin, and bang in a new one. Then I’d lift the auger and look into the hole to see what we were up against. If it seemed an immovable object, I’d scoot the Ford a few feet farther along the line and start drilling a new hole. Fortunately, the hops trellis formation didn’t have to be absolutely precise.
After a couple of days’ drilling, the math began to discourage us.
