I laughed. Diz was obviously a “character,” a woman who enjoyed the role of conversational provocateur. I liked her, and feared her slightly. “Can I ask a question?”
“You can certainly give it a try.”
“Why do you want to sell that land? I don’t mean to pry, I’m just—”
“Need the money. Things’re thin right now, milk’s down and fuel’s up, Brassard’s not gettin any younger. We could log it off and get some money from the timber. But Brassard doesn’t want to see it go that way. Likes his picturesque view, I guess, doesn’t want to look at the mess that’s left over after the trees’re down and the skidders’ve dug ruts all over. Got a sentimental streak, or else he’s got too much pride to make our place look like the trash that lives up the hill.”
She winced up her glasses on her nose and turned back to the barn. Disappearing into the dark, she called back, “Brassard’ll be home by four or five. You give a call if you want to talk about it.”
Chapter 5
I’d been pronouncing the name “Bruh-SARD,” accent on the second syllable, because in college I’d known a Jill Brassard and that’s how she said it. But Diz pronounced it to rhyme with “bastard”—hard A, emphasis on the brass. I wasn’t sure whether that was the accepted way of saying it hereabouts or another eccentricity of hers—maybe some habitual jab at her husband. On the drive back, I decided she was a former alcoholic, one of those early-sixties, witty, sarcastic, seen-it-all, don’t-give-a-damn-what-anybody-thinks women with practical haircuts and mannish clothes that declared they were beyond all that business about wanting or needing males. They’d cleaned up their act but, like Diz, still had the husky voice of the ex-alkie, ex-smoker. I’d met them on both sides of the desk in the legal aid office where I worked, and I’d volunteered alongside them at park clean-ups or tree plantings. Whether still married or widowed, if they spoke of their husbands at all it was without a shred of sentimentality.
Back at my B and B, I managed to get into my room without the owners seeing what a mess I was. I would have collapsed on the bed, but I carried too much organic material on my clothes and didn’t want to ruin the bedspread. I took off my clothes intending to take a shower, decided I’d lie down to recharge a bit first, and woke up almost three hours later. Without once even thinking about it, I called Brassard and said I wanted to buy the land.
“Okay.”
“Would you take sixty for it?” He had advertised it for seventy thousand.
He paused. “I guess I would.”
I was pretty sure he meant it in the Vermont vernacular, that is, “yes.”
We arranged for him to come up to Montpelier on Friday so we could meet with his lawyer to complete the transaction.
And there it was. My irrational determination had culminated in an equally irrational decision. Why? Perhaps it was that clarity of detail, the seeing I’d done for that first half hour, a rare spirit or feng shui that had spoken to what was still bright and unsoured in me.
But, sadly, I have to admit, it was mainly my three-hour harried hike along the borders, the scratches on my hands and cheeks and the soreness of my calves, the mucked shoes and ruined jacket, that decided the issue.
That was the real deal. The land promised a harrowing that I needed and deserved, some hard, skin-thickening, making-do woods living, a taste of the ascetic’s life. Look, I even have the stigmata!
To the extent that I had any real hopes for personal growth, I also knew that here was what needed confronting: my own bramble patch, my own deep woods. Brassard’s land was its perfect external manifestation.
With less than five thousand dollars to my name, I was hardly rich enough to afford such a purchase. What made this whole idea marginally possible was that my aunt Theresa had died and had left me sixty-five thousand dollars. I’d received most of it, with about ten thousand due to me in another few weeks, when the last of her bonds were liquidated. Brassard had kindly agreed to owner-finance that bit. When he met me at the lawyer’s office, I handed over a cashier’s check for fifty thousand, and Brassard, after carefully reviewing Aunt Theresa’s portfolio statements, had me sign a short-term promissory note for the remaining ten grand. The lawyer tried to force a celebratory joviality on the process that neither of us really felt. Brassard didn’t want to part with his woods; he just needed the damned money.
When I had shaken his big hand and left the office and got back into my car, I immediately felt that I’d done something really, profoundly stupid, like getting pregnant from a one-night stand. Another act of self-destructive impulsiveness.
My plan, if one could call it that, had been to buy some land and live off the remaining ten grand while I looked for a job nearby. I’d build a little cabin on the cheap. I’d live in the woods for the summer and move into an apartment in town when winter came. Even then, I’d still make pilgrimages out there, in the snow. I needed physical hardship. I would build the cabin with my own hands. It would show, or require the acquisition of, independence and grit. My cell phone would keep me connected. If I really felt the hunger for human company, I would make new friends in town or invite my few remaining Boston friends up for a taste of roughing it. Any man who might enter the picture would by necessity have to share my longing for primitive living, a hankering
