This sounds like misery, and often enough it was. But I also felt, I think we all did, a lovely sense of community. No, of unity. The seven of us had become a sort of single organism, a collective entity, cohering by common purpose and the shared state of exhaustion. Fingers of the same hand. It was unconscious and probably unnoticed by the others, a natural product of our coordinated labors and our exertion. No need to apologize for being too tired to converse or for rambling on like an idiot, no need to explain laughing your head off about nothing. One day we all cracked up about “having high hopes for the hops” and then trying to decide whether a single hops plant was a “hop.” From there we went on to explore other plurals and singulars. If you were a member of the New York Yankees baseball team, you’d call yourself a Yankee, no problem. But if you were with the Boston Red Sox, would you refer to yourself as a Red Sock? We laughed till we groaned, and offered no apologies.
Hidden within all that desperate fuss and fury, derived from it, rose a glow of reawakened purpose and hope.
And, getting out of bed one morning, tired but more confident again, I thought about that ground: This is what the good round world is made of, this tough, stubborn, fertile stuff. Thanks be. And I thought, I shall be tough stubborn stuff, too, and one day fertile as well.
Yes. That was the day, the moment, that I realized I wanted to have a child. I was stunned and thirty-seven and so often lonely and empty at night and thought I knew myself, and at that moment I entered a new era of my life.
Chapter 41
We were fortunate that the cold came late that year. The maples’ brilliant foliage faded and browned, and then let go all in a single day’s wind-borne blizzard. Again the pines magically appeared, deepest dark green in the gray of the shorn woods. Though October’s bright, dry days lingered on into November, and at night the temperature rarely got below freezing, every single task of constructing the hop yard took longer than estimated. Erik worried that the crowns would not get in the ground in time.
But the weather stayed mild. The rest of the crowns went in, and still the soil in the southern three acres remained soft enough to break with the V-ripper, churn with the tiller, and drill for postholes. We got better and faster at it as we went. By the time the first snow came, a second field of telephone poles stood there, stark and strange, south of my access track. The two fields resembled a primitive version of a power transformer station, rows of those posts with a skein of cables taut between.
Erik’s arrival and the potential of hop farming had boosted the morale at Brassard’s farm, but while the cash helped, it only slowed, not stopped, the downward spiral. Again, it all came back to Diz, the hole left when she died. We all agreed that getting the hops into the ground was an urgent priority. It might be the “turnaround business plan” that Earnest had spoken of. If the hops did well next summer, Brassard could feel secure in the money he made from Erik’s leasing the land. The farm would have a little more financial ballast. He and Erik had also discussed the possibility of Brassard putting up his own trellises on a few acres. If Erik made good wholesale contacts, Brassard could consider shifting from dairy even if his land was not certifiably organic.
But that was all long-term pie in the sky, and at odds with the short term. With Will and Earnest and me putting time into the hop yard, Brassard had to hire Lynn and Robin every day for milking and other dairy chores. It helped that Erik started paying two hundred a month to rent the twin of my apartment in the chicken coop, but that didn’t begin to offset the low milk prices, barely recovered from the prior year. Brassard had decades of financial planning experience, and he knew how tight his margins still were. And he was a man hurting in a lot of places. I soon learned that he was unraveling even as he tried to heal, but carrying himself like a good soldier.
Once the hops were safely put to bed and I had dismantled my camp on the hill, there was nothing more to be done on my side of the road. Earnest followed his tree jobs south, planning to return in late November or early December. Will stayed at the farm most nights but was usually gone during the day.
My moving back into my tiny apartment in the guesthouse-help dorm meant that Erik and I became neighbors and could spend time together after the working day. Sometimes we all had dinner in the house, Brassard and Will, Erik and me. Mostly, though, it was just Erik and me cooking for each other in our Spartan workers’ quarters.
Those dinners allowed us time to talk unhurriedly, and we slipped by degrees into the familiarity and honesty that we’d had when we
