We often saw deer at the edge of the pasture or along the back roads, and Perry warned us that if they liked hops, Erik would be in deep trouble. He said James and he had erected seven-foot mesh fences around all their gardens and had even buried the bottom of the mesh two feet below the surface to keep out burrowing groundhogs.
Erik’s online research on the topic produced ambiguous answers. No, hops are too bitter, deer will stay away. Yes, they’ll eat hops when the bines are young. It depends: Deer in some areas will, some areas won’t.
Putting seven-foot fences around six acres would take all summer and cost a fortune, so at Perry’s suggestion Erik started a new ritual. Everyone—men and women—had to pee around the periphery of the hop yard. Erik even pissed in a plastic milk jug at night so he could distribute it in the morning, and he led Bob along the roadside verge three times a day to water the weeds together.
When I came down from camp in the morning or returned at night, I stopped to do my share. The Vermont Tech students thought it was a scream, chiding each other for not contributing enough, and making up endless weak jokes. “You’re in trouble now!” They cornered Erik and had a mock-serious talk with him, explaining their concern that the uphill urine border might percolate down and spoil the flavor of the hops.
Erik laughed it off. “How do you think Budweiser and PBR get their unique flavor? Brewing’s best-kept secret—keep it to yourselves.” We must have put hundreds of gallons around that yard over the course of the summer.
Erik also slept out in the yard with Bob and an air horn. “This is a lot like the old days,” he remarked sourly. “Waiting for the buds to ripen, keeping interlopers at bay.”
Whether it was the pee or the bitterness of the hops, the deer didn’t show. The hop yard flourished.
In early July, I had a disconcerting moment with Earnest. One afternoon he came back from a tree job at three o’clock—early for him and surprising because this was the height of his working season. It was a hot day, and as he often did, he used the garden hose to rinse wood chips and dust out of his hair and off his upper body. I happened to be in the kitchen making myself a late lunch, and when I saw his bare torso I was shocked to see red welts all along his left rib cage and up over his chest. He winced as he palmed water onto himself.
I went out to him just as he finished. “Earnest! What happened?”
“Nothing.” He hobbled over to the faucet to turn off the water. I stood there until he remembered that I didn’t relent when I had questions.
“I took a fall. Not all the way down. My harness caught me, but the rope gave me a burn. That’s all.”
“You’re limping!”
“Yeah, I was hanging there and let myself down too fast.” He was angry at his own stupidity. “Twisted my ankle when I hit. No big thing. Not the first time.”
I wrestled the story out of him. He’d been working on a long-dead elm, and he’d wrongly gauged the strength of a couple of branches. One broke as he stood on it. He’d rigged a safety rope to a branch above him, but when the first one went and his weight came onto the rope, he felt the upper branch crack and give.
“I’m thirty feet up. All of a sudden it’s just air beneath me, I’m holding a slack rope in my hands. I fell about twenty feet and was lucky the rope snagged on something that held. It stopped me hard, like chonk! I was sort of stunned, so then I misjudged my release and landed off balance. Ankle went over. I could hardly walk at first. Figured I should call it a day.”
I was appalled—at myself as much as the accident. I had worked with Earnest, had seen him balancing far up in the lattice of big trees, seen him swing from place to place with a chainsaw in one hand, and I’d thought only of the danger I faced when I let down a big branch!
There’s a simple reason for my blithe, oblivious perspective: It had never occurred to me that what he was doing was dangerous. He was so happy up there, so confident, so in command, that it seemed effortless. I had begun thinking that Earnest was invincible and invulnerable, a blunt-featured, copper-skinned Superman. He was like the sun or some other elemental constant. Just as the rope had brought him up hard, I came up suddenly against the knowledge that he was mortal after all.
My face must have revealed my concern, because Earnest went on: “I thought I was going to die. Seriously, I was so scared, my whole lunch passed before my very eyes.”
He’d set me up with that, caught me entirely off guard. “You’re such a shit!” I told him.
He limped over to the steps of the house and sat down carefully, body glistening, the waistband of his jeans dark with wet. I followed him.
He scrubbed his fingers in his hair, scattering droplets. “It’s my own fault. I wasn’t paying attention. I think I’m losing my stuff.”
“One mistake doesn’t—”
“It’s not the
