A big snowstorm blew in just before New Year’s, so I got to have fun with the Ford, building mountain ranges at the edge of the farmyard and along the driveway. The tractor and I also enjoyed breaking the three-foot banks left by the town road crews with their enormous trucks and giant plow blades that curled like the perfect surfer’s wave. But in the stark white of late December and early January, I was pretty sure that my ostensible effulgence had gone into hibernation along with bears, raccoons, porcupines, and skunks.
Aside from Brassard, Lynn and Robin were my main company. On those cold predawn shifts, it was the headlights of their Jeep I saw in the darkness as I bumbled out for the morning milking. Lynn and her sister-in-law were very different—one slim and blond and graceful in her movements, the other strong boned and with a lovely dark-Irish pale complexion, black hair, and startling blue eyes—yet they were in accord, good friends, working in easy harmony. Three women: We called each other the Fates, sometimes; at other times, when we made more mistakes than usual, the Three Stoogettes. If one or more of us were in a bad mood, we thought of ourselves as the three witches, the Wayward Sisters, in Macbeth. I enjoyed these twice-daily interludes of female company and saw them drive off each time with a pang of loneliness.
In the year since I’d met her, Robin had matured, filled out as a person, and I began to think that maybe this was what effulgent looked like. I took to covertly studying her for indications, while we worked, without coming to any firm conclusions.
In midwinter, Vermont is a hard, ragged place. People start to fray. Those cold, short days established a pervasive chill that couldn’t be banished by the woodstove or furnace in the house or the kerosene heater in my chicken-coop apartment. The long shed stood full of silent cows, warming their space only by their collective body heat. On moonless nights, the pasture and lower fields became dim gray smooth curves and planes, lonesome, and my land a dark and mysterious mass looming over the near valley to the west. When the moon waxed close to full, the fields gave off an eerie glow, as if lit from beneath the snow. The motion lights that snapped on over the barn and house doors created an island of artificial light, increasing the sense of isolation and blinding me to everything beyond the driveway and farmyard.
I often had dinner alone with Jim Brassard at the house. At first he insisted on trying to help me cook despite the fact that he’d done little of it when Diz was alive—“Wouldn’t let me. Kicked me out if I tried.” I could see why she had: He was a large man who crowded the space, slow moving, clumsy with his leathery fingers. It was easier for me to take charge and tell him to relax while I pulled something together. Anyway, it was a luxury to have a full-size kitchen and all its gadgets, and I fully indulged in it. I roasted whole chickens with potatoes, carrots, onions, and garlic cloves alongside. My mother, being a Midwestern woman, had been fond of meatloaf and had taught me to cook it at an early age; Brassard claimed he loved it. Beef and pork roasts, winter squash, baked potatoes, chicken pies, baked apples—in the cold times, we enjoyed anything that required using the oven. Sometimes a stew seemed in order, so I’d throw whatever was available into a pot and simmer it for a couple of hours, steaming up the house, Brassard commenting at intervals from the living room, “That smells good enough to eat!”
When Erik and Will were there, talk flowed more easily: more people rowing the conversational boat. But Brassard was not a talkative person, and when he and I ate alone the silences often stretched overlong. Sitting with this midsixties man aching from arthritic joints and still wounded by his wife’s death, there in the dark of the deep winter, entailed a lot of patience. I didn’t feel right filling the silence with jabber, and there was only so much news to bring from the cows. He knew I could manage only limited discussion of the articles he’d found interesting in the farming journals. To take the edge off the silence, I sometimes brought my laptop over and played music—Celtic tunes I’d borrowed from Erik, or indie singer-songwriters I had downloaded in prehistory—which sounded small and metallic coming through the tiny speakers. I didn’t know what sort of music Brassard enjoyed, if any; he never listened to the radio, because here between the arms of the hills the reception was so poor. Sometimes we sat for long intervals during which the only sounds were our small noises of eating, air sucking through the woodstove grate, or wind nagging at the shutters and eaves.
But I don’t think he found the silence particularly awkward, and he sometimes surprised me with his candor and insight.
“You doin all right, then, Annie?” he said one night. “After all this. Probably not what you thought you were buyin into.”
“I’m doing fine. We’ve had some teat chap, but Lynn and Robin and I have been—”
“Well, I’m glad to hear you’re takin care of the cows. Never had a doubt. I was talkin about you, though. If you’re holdin up.” He forked some chicken into his mouth, looked up and held my eye.
I wanted to answer glibly, glide past it with one of the many conventions and easy ways out we’re accustomed to, but Jim Brassard knew how to cut to the chase and how to spot evasiveness when he saw it. I wasn’t sure whether his probing was simply good human-resources management or personal concern, but he did carry authority in him and could show it in a range of circumstances.
“I consider myself fortunate that I came
