I had never seen Robin in anything but dirty jeans, muck boots, and rubber coveralls, had seldom seen her face without a smear of brown on it, but for this occasion she wore an actual dress, simple gray and belted with a thin red strap at her waist, and had her dark hair loose and lush around her shoulders. She was effervescent and vital—stunning, actually. I noticed the men’s inadvertent responses and Kiera’s less appreciative appraisal, and at one point Brassard came over to me and chuckled: “That girl is a clear and present danger to herself and others.”
I decided that Robin was exactly what effulgent looked like, and I was pretty sure I could never meet such a standard.
Chapter 48
That got us through to April. There was no snow on the ground, but in the end the season turned out happily for all the fields, including the hop yard. The unseasonably warm weather thawed the ground early, and then we had a period of regular rains that put Erik’s mind at rest.
Then the spring labors began.
Brassard went to work his fields, days and days of preparing the soil: manure spreading, fertilizing, harrowing, and planting. The cows moved outside, but milking continued and the shed needed spring cleaning. Spring calves began to come, taking every spare minute. And, as Brassard had pointed out in that very first discussion, the hop yard needed an enormous amount of work that strained to the utmost our ability to handle the other chores.
Erik’s business plan required six acres to make a net profit, and he’d planted only three last fall. But hops propagate through their rhizomes—those parts of the stem that grow horizontally under the ground, among the roots—which need to be planted as soon as the frost leaves the soil. The hops grower harvests rhizomes from mature crowns, which flourish despite being pruned.
That meant Erik, and whoever else had a spare moment, had to kneel in the wet, icy-cold soil to carefully expose each crown, clip off sections of rhizome, then mound over the root mass again. We collected hundreds of rhizome sections, filling galvanized buckets and grain bags and plastic bins. Erik worked from sunup till sundown, and by nightfall his knees and back were so stiff he could hardly stand. Working with him, I actually looked forward to milking as a relief from the stoop-labor discomfort and numbing repetitiveness of rhizome collecting. After the first day, we had a good sense of how long the surgery took for each crown, and with around 2,500 to be unearthed, clipped, and mounded back over, Erik realized that it would never get done.
“I didn’t take enough courses in human resources management,” he lamented bitterly. “My staffing model for this project was for shit.”
Ultimately, he hired three enterprising Vermont Tech students, two boys and a girl, out on spring break. Tim, who insisted on being called by his last name, Bailey, had a basketball player’s build; Jason was chubby and looked soft, but he was actually quite hardy and put on a good macho act. Jennifer had been brought up among a lot of brothers, so despite her slight build she had a solid punch when it came to rough play, and could hold her own in the badass-insults department. They worked well together.
As much as we worried about the crop and Erik’s bottom line, we welcomed their enthusiasm and energy. They got a kick out of thinking they might someday drink beer made from these very plants. Every day at sunrise, a rattletrap pickup, a rusted Toyota like mine, and a jacked-up but hard-worn muscle car parked in my pullover as muffled rock or rap music pounded inside their cabs. Later, even from inside the barn, I could hear the young people’s laughter and catcalls from out in the hop yard. But when Brassard saw them, he chewed the inside of his cheeks. I knew he saw Erik’s net income shrinking with every hour of help he had to pay for.
At lunchtime I slapped together sandwiches for them, which they inhaled. Lunch at the house, or on the front porch on warmer days, took on a party atmosphere. When Earnest and Will joined us, they answered the kids’ scandalous tales of campus life with anecdotes of comparable misadventures on base in the army. Brassard enjoyed it from a distance. He had gotten cortisone shots in his thumb joints and had taken up his pipe again, putting a leathery cherry scent into the cool air.
But the work didn’t end when the young people went back to school after break. They had clipped almost three thousand rhizomes, and with the frost safely gone from the soil, all those sticks had to get planted throughout the lower three acres of the yard. Even though Kiera joined in when she could, and the kids worked right through their last weekend off, only one acre’s worth had been planted by the time they returned to school.
I can’t remember much about that April except for one day of rapture when I came across the first daffodils, bounding out of the ground to say hello. Between farm duties and hop yard, I worked fourteen hours a day. Somewhere in there I noticed the absence of Kiera. When
