“For …?”
He made a big, floppy, encompassing gesture. “For all this. The whole damn business.”
“I’m not sure what you’re saying. Another way to go … you mean money? I thought Erik had helped out on that score, things were tracking better now.”
“Oh, definitely does help. It does help, sweetie. Just not enough. We’re still going down the drain, just slower. Damn milk price is stranglin us.”
“Would it change if the hops came out well, if next year we put in some acres on this side of the road? They wouldn’t be organic, but they’d still bring in some decent money. Erik says his strain is really good and once the brewers get—”
“Oh, it’s a grand scheme. Problem is, no vegetable thing is gonna do just what you want. Not ever, especially your first time through. Anything can go wrong. Everything can go wrong. Turns out the deer or groundhogs like em, forget about a crop. Couple molds, mildews, aphids, there’s a beetle cuts em down like a weed whacker. Looked it up on Google. It’d be easier if they weren’t organic, could spray em. What’s he gonna do, pick the bugs off one by one?”
“Knowing Erik, he will if he has to.”
He laughed grimly. “Talkin to your brother, he says hops’re hands-on, cuttin em back and weedin all spring, then pickin em pretty much by hand. Time intensive—he’ll have to take on help, and that’ll cut his net to hell. Sure, maybe next year we could take out some of my corn and put in more hops, but that still puts the first harvest two years out. Don’t know that we’ll hold out that long.”
Then, to my shock, he reached down and picked up a bottle of vodka from the floor behind him. He didn’t drink right away, just sloshed it around, pondering the liquid through the glass. It was two-thirds empty.
He glanced up at me sideways, a cunning look. “Now, don’t tell Will or Earn, right?”
“Jim—what are you doing?” I stuttered.
“Oh, don’t get on some high horse. What, we’re growin six acres of beer across the road and can’t take a drop over this side?” Now he took a big slug that he swished through his dentures before he swallowed. He exhaled the burn with satisfaction. “See, the secret with vodka is you can’t smell it on the breath,” he said, pleased with his ingenuity.
“That’s a really bad idea, Jim,” I said, gesturing at the bottle. I was stunned, unable to respond coherently. I thought back to the many times I’d noticed his fumbling or mumbling, and realized it must have been going on for weeks.
“Well, I guess I’ve always been good at bad ideas.” He took another mouthful, chewed it and swallowed, then waved one hand in a loose circle around his head, indicating his whole world, whole life. “Got a knack for it.”
My thoughts scattered like pigeons when a dog comes along the sidewalk. I didn’t know what to do, where to start dealing with this. First thing would be to keep booze out of his hands. I might be able to snatch this bottle, but he could have hidden bottles in any of a hundred places on the farm, stashed in the house or barns or sheds or his truck.
Brassard’s face took on that clever, confiding expression again. “You haven’t been here long enough, but we used to have a problem with the propane feed. Out back the barn there? Got a sort of a main, comes out of the tank, then branches off to the space heaters in shed and parlor, water heaters, workrooms. Went through a time when we had a problem with leaks. Must be a hundred valves and fittins in here, took Earn a long time to find em and fix em all.”
The propane tank was shaped like a giant vitamin capsule: fat, white, blunt-round at both ends, mounted horizontally on two concrete brackets. I guessed it contained at least a thousand gallons, enough to burn down or blow to pieces the whole farm. I glanced up again at the ceiling above the stepladder, the snaking pipes.
“See, you can’t use accelerants, like gasoline or diesel, the fire inspectors know that one, figure that out in a heartbeat.”
The strange drift of this terrified me. “What is this bullshit, Jim?”
“But an accidental propane fire, insurance would bite on that. Happens all the time. We’ve never made a claim in forty years, not a nickel. How much they’ve made off us, we deserve something in return. Forty, fifty years—not a nickel!”
“Don’t say another word! I’m going to the house. You’re coming with me. We’re going to call Will.”
He just shrugged and remained on his bale, rocking his big torso from side to side. He didn’t resist much when I took the bottle out of his hand, but he didn’t get up, either, and he was too heavy for me to lift.
His thoughts turned inward. “Hasn’t this been just one hell of a year?” he asked himself as I left the room. “One hell of a year?”
I knew that Will was deep in his project with his production team, but I called him anyway and left a barely coherent message on his answering service. I called Erik’s cell with the same result. Then I called Earnest in Milwaukee. He picked up and listened as I spewed the tale.
“Okay. I’ll head back. Still, can’t get there right away. It’ll take me at least a day, probably two, to wrap things up here, I’ve got wiring hanging from the ceiling, gotta close it up. Then a full day of driving if I go straight through. Say, minimum of three days. You and Will are going to have to manage till then.”
“What should I do? What did Diz do?”
“You’re not Diz. You can’t be Diz. Don’t be Diz.”
“But what did she do?”
“Ann, I was blitzed myself. She beat the shit out of me, and it scared me to death. This little woman at
