The cows were eyeing the roots impatiently, so I stopped to serve them by the shovelful in front of their stanchions. As they crunched the roots, the beets stained their lips red, and they looked like they were wearing sloppy lipstick, a line of tipsy matrons out for a night on the town. Racey sat on a stool and got to work. We milked by hand then. Our mornings began in the dark, faces pressed into the fragrant flank of a cow, warm teats in our hands. It was a soft time of day, for quiet talk. When there had been only four cows, Mark and I milked alone, two cows each, and the barn at dawn felt like an extension of our bedroom. We told each other our dreams, and they felt close and real in the dim light. Or we talked out our plans, small and grand, for what the farm could be. As the membership grew, we added more cows and needed more people to milk them. The loss of intimacy between us was balanced by the relief from overwork, not just in the dairy but on the whole farm. We had employees by then, but the growth curve of work was always slightly ahead of the available labor. Sometimes our friend Jay, who taught science at the high school, would run the five miles between his house and our farm to milk two or three cows before his first class. In the evening, his wife, Kristin, would come on her own or with her youngest child, who was two years older than Jane.
Our membership was growing again that spring, and we needed more cows. We were going cow shopping that weekend to look at a lot of eight Jersey heifers, all about to calve. That would more than double our herd and our production. It was time to switch from hand-milking to machines. Sweet as that work was, I would not be sad to see the end of it. My arms and wrists had had enough. Some nights my hands went numb or throbbed enough to wake me out of a deep sleep. Mark had spent the previous week in the barn, installing the pump for the two bucket milkers we’d bought used for six hundred dollars. For years I would call it the best money we’d ever spent.
As the others started milking, I dashed back to the house to check on Jane, who was still sound asleep, then looped five halters and lead ropes over my arm and walked north again. The nine horses were nipping green shoots in a paddock close against the edge of the sugarbush, which rose on a hill to the west of the house. Two were Chad’s and two were Tim’s; the other four and the pony were ours.
Jay and Jack were our experienced team of horses. They were in their mid-teens and still worked regularly but were getting too old for long hard days and the growing amount of land we had under cultivation, so we added a young team of Belgians, Jake and Abby. They’d arrived the year before, broke to work but without much polish, and had spent the previous summer learning their jobs, which ranged from plowing in the spring to hauling firewood in the winter. They were in their prime, lean but strong, with shiny coats and bright eyes. They looked like the pictures I’d seen of farm teams from the 1920s and 1930s, after farmers had scaled up the size of their equipment and their horses to match, just before the tractor arrived. When the tractor came, draft horses were no longer central to the work of most farms, and the horses who remained got huge, with fat necks and humongous feet, as though we wanted a sense of massive power, something to match the diesel that propelled the tractor across the field. The look of draft horses went from sturdy with moderate frames to tall, heavy, and high-headed. Of the breeds that originated for farmwork, only the Suffolk remained true to its original type. Suffolks were compact and muscular, with famously good hooves and sensible temperaments. They were rare and expensive. Chad’s team was full Suffolk, and Jay and Jack were a quarter, crossed with Belgian.
I buckled the halters over their heads and knotted the lead ropes loosely around their necks while I caught Jake and Abby. Mark would need the older team’s experience and all of the younger team’s strength to get the corn planted by the end of the day. I unknotted the four lead lines from around the horses’ necks and strung them out, abreast, two on one side of me, two on the other, with the pony like a nippy little sidecar at the end. We walked to the barn that way, and I tied them into their stalls, which were freshly bedded with straw, a pile of hay and a water bucket in front of each one. I brushed them quickly, focusing on the shoulders, where the collar sat, and the parts of their backs that carried the weight of the tongue. I lugged the four collars and the heavy harnesses one at a time from the tack room, standing on my toes to shove and nudge them onto the horses’ backs, which were higher than my head. I left the britchen loose over their backs so they could stretch forward to nibble their hay. Mark could bridle and hitch them when he was ready to go to the field. Then I hurried out of the barn to make breakfast for Jane.
Every food has its moment of perfection on our farm, and every moment has its perfect food. Asparagus cedes the podium to astounding spring butter, then the first radishes, the first strawberries, then new potatoes, and so on in a harmonious stream. Our grandparents and great-grandparents understood this, of course; it’s just the advent of the global food system over the last eighty years or so that dulled our sense of which food comes in which season. If you had asked me, before farming, when pears were fresh in the Northeast or when the shell peas came, I would not have been able to tell you. They were always available, disconnected from any season or geography. Now those foods are bound to my sense of the year as tightly as Christmas is to December, and the thought of eating them out of season feels as weird as decorating a Christmas tree might in July. But there are times of the year that offer abundant choices and times that are leaner. The bottom of the year comes in spring, between the return of light and the arrival of heat. That’s when the wild plants have their moment of perfection.
A patch of stinging nettles grew in the lee of the West Barn, in pockets of rich soil, where one of the farmers who had worked this land before us had piled the winter barn scrapings from his cows. This was the warmest place on the farm in early spring, sheltered from the wind. There were other early, wild greens coming up. The first garlic mustard was growing in the remnants of last year’s kitchen garden, around the patch of scrub left behind after Mark cut down the black walnut trees, just south of the farmhouse. Lamb’s-quarters were sprouting across the driveway, where the pigs had been pastured last summer. There would be tiny shoots of purslane emerging between the rows of last year’s tomatoes, but it would be weeks before they matured into something succulent and edible, and by then the civilized plants would be growing.
I took off my jacket and cut the nettles into it, along with some garlic mustard, and walked back toward the house, stopping at the nest box in the East Barn on my way. The hens had been awake for hours, foraging and scratching in the worm-rich pasture outside the barn, and were becoming preoccupied with the serious business of laying. Eggs are a special kind of magic. Forged from grass, worms, insects, and grain in the mysterious depths of the hen, they appeared like gems in the nest box each day, cased in flawless shells that were both fragile and strong. You have to put a hen-warm egg against your lips to fully appreciate its particular texture. Inside the perfect packaging lurks its slightly creepy embryonic truth. It’s an animal nut, not life yet, but the rich seed of life. It holds the instructions for feather and nail, beak and brain, scratch and cluck, lacking only a little more magic to make it so—the heat of maternal love. I dug under a hen and found a whole clutch, pocketed six, and threw a cracked one to the pigs, who had wintered in the run-in on the east side of the barn. There were five sows with a litter of piglets each, nested in deep hay. They were thin with the work of producing rich milk for those demanding babies, and they squabbled over the treat.
In the kitchen, I heated some lard in a cast-iron skillet, chopped an onion from the root cellar, and added it with salt and pepper to the sizzling pan. I put on rubber gloves to pull the nettle leaves from their stems and chop them. Raw, they packed a good sting, but as soon as they hit the heat, they would wilt and lose their fierceness. I added them to the pan along with the garlic mustard. The nettles sent up their green and slightly nutty scent, like spinach with a big personality.
I whisked the eggs with a huge heaping spoonfu
l of thick cream from the dairy, more salt, pepper, a pinch of fresh nutmeg, and poured them into the pan, then sprinkled the top of the eggs with some grated cheese cut from a five-pound wheel in the cellar. I put it under the broiler just as Jane was waking up. When she came thumping downstairs at seven o’clock, the eggs were puffed and brown on top, and we ate the farmer soufflé together, the taste of spring and of home.
* * *
Mark didn’t start planting the corn until well after lunch. A dozen small things had gone wrong and delayed him. The hydraulics on the forecart weren’t working, and then he discovered one of the coulters on the planter was jammed, blocking the flow of seed. As soon as those things were fixed, the sows got out, and I needed him to help me and Jet get them back in their pen before they destroyed the soft spring soil in the next field. Then it was lunchtime, and the whole crew came in to eat the hasty lunch I’d made—chili, with a big skillet of cornbread and a chopped cabbage salad, old standbys I could make fast with what I had in the pantry and freezer. At the end of the meal, when the dishes were cleared and the black coffee drunk and the pots hung back up over the barbarous sink, the floor of the dining room was littered with snoring people taking a ten-minute snooze before heading back to the field. The horses waited in the shady barn, harnessed, pulling at mouthfuls of hay. The clouds were rolling in, and the wind was coming up. Finally, everything was ready. I helped Mark lead the horses out and hitch them, two on either side of the forecart’s tongue. To steer four horses with only two lines, you give up some precision for simplicity. The outside horses had both sides of their bit attached to the lines, but the inside horses had only one side each; the other sides were attached to the hame of the horse next to them. Driving larger hitches of horses felt like driving a barge or a semi. Any change in direction happened slowly, so you had to think ahead. The good part was that the horses tended to be calm and tractable in larger hitches. They are gregarious animals, after all, and four of them hitched close together is a sort of artificial herd.
* * *
While Mark loaded the seed corn onto a wagon, Jane and I went to the barn for Belle and two five-gallon buckets. This was Belle’s side gig: when she wasn’t the child carrier, she was the egg pony. The pullets were pastured half a mile from the barn and were just beginning to lay. I had fashioned a complex carrying system for Belle out of a bareback pad, two buckets, and a bungee cord; it meant making sure exactly half the eggs were in each bucket, so things would stay balanced. A hundred eggs in a rickety system on a spooky pony was not the best idea I’d ever had, but I was trying to justify Belle’s existence on the farm to Mark through full productive employment. In the beginning, she was skeptical about the flapping birds, the electric fence, and the buckets banging around her sides, but I had sweetened the deal by giving her a handful of chicken feed every time she was tied up among the birds, while I collected the eggs. Pretty soon she not only stood still for egg collection but looked forward to it. Ponies are essentially ruled by their stomach.
Jane and I hitched a ride down to the layer flock on the back of Mark’s wagon, Belle trotting along behind. The first fit of rain had passed overhead, dropping a quarter of an inch and turning the warm air to a thick haze, the ride down the hill was a pleasure, with Jane nestled into my lap. The pastures were crazy with birds. We saw a pair of bluebirds, and then the black-and-white flash of a bobolink, who was filling the air with his loopy metallic call.
As we passed the beef herd, I spotted a problem. Through the hedgerow, I could see a large puddle in the middle of the field and a fountain of spray coming from a leaking water line. A few cows and calves were standing downwind of it, enjoying a refreshing spritz. Shouting to Mark to whoa the horses, I jumped off the wagon, lifted Jane down, tied the pony to a fence post, and went to investigate while Mark went on to seed the field. There was a small hole in the hose, a straightforward repair that would require some tools from the machine shop. But when I went back to get the pony, I found an empty fence post. I had the same feeling I used to have in the city when my car got towed: Maybe I forgot where I parked. It has to be around here somewhere. Then the slow dawning that indeed it was gone.
Jane and I trudged back up the hill on foot. Racey, Tim, and Blaine were in the barnyard, wrapping things up for the day. They hadn’t seen a stray pony, but they were willing to stay late and help. Between us, we fixed the hose, collected the eggs, took Mark his dinner in the field, fed the hungry toddler, and finally found the errant pony, who was standing innocently in a stall in the barn. At dark, Tim drove a tractor down to the field to take the place of the horses, who had no headlights, and took the weary horses home to unharness for a good brushing and some feed.
Mark made it back to the house just before midnight. I woke up to find him sitting on the edge of the bed, headlamp still on, smiling. His face and clothes were streaked with mud from the combination of field dust and the rain, which had just arrived in earnest, pounding on the farmhouse roof and watering in the seed.
There’d been a steady stream of frustrations that day but also a lot of luck. The corn planter’s hitch had broken clean off, Mark said—the sort of definitive break that forced you to stop work and would take hours of welding in the machine shop to fix. But it had happened just as he was rolling out, two feet after he’d finished seeding the field. The rain had started then too, and the timing of those things delighted him. He laughed, telling me about it, through the mud and his own exhaustion. That was the way Mark always told the story of his day: with the focus not on the failure of the hitch or the mud on his clothes but on the great luck of the timing. It felt like a metaphor for the whole farm that year. We faced a series of problems and frustrations, but they were lucky problems. We’d created a life together that presented to us precisely the problems we wanted to spend our time solving, and we felt up to the challenge.
CHAPTER 4
The corn germinated and grew. The greenhouse filled up with new seedlings and then emptied again as the summer crops went to the field. There were savoy and Chinese cabbages, broccoli, kale, and lettuces of all kinds. Next to the house, we’d planted an acre of buckwheat to control weeds and build the soil. Every morning, as soon as the sun rose, I’d walk out with my coffee to see how much it had grown overnight. Buckwheat is a sprinter, leaping out of the soil fast enough to outpace all the other plants, its succulent leaves vigorous enough to shade weeds into stunted things that will not go to seed. One morning, instead of green, it was white with blossoms and already loud with bees.
July came. Haymaking time. Long days under a scorching sun. The first cherry tomatoes ripened. I went out barefoot to pick them in the afternoon, and the soil was so hot it burned my feet. The corn came on strong and tall, soaking in all the heat, turning it to leaf and stem. We started those days at three in the morning. We hitched the horses in the dark and came out of the barn at four under the first gray hint of dawn. Even then the horses were damp with sweat. We quit at lunchtime, slept in the shade in the afternoon, then picked up again in the evening. By the end of the week, everyone looked wrung out. Everyone except Mark. Like the corn, he seemed to thrive in the heat.
The tomatoes rolled in by the hundredweight, the green beans stacked in bins the size of ottomans. The rain came exactly when we needed it and cleared away when we didn’t. The pastures grew, were grazed, and regrew into lush carpets of grass and clover, to be grazed again. My belly grew too, every day closer to ripe and every day a little heavier to carry. It was uncomfortable, but by then I knew uncomfortable is not the worst thing in the world. Sometimes you have to do things when you don’t feel strong or well. A farm, with its shifting chorus of constant needs, won’t let you slide. We forget sometimes that uncomfortable is not the same as harmful and is something humans can get used to. I was pretty certain that for me, it was better to have life animated by clear purpose, and structured by a farm’s responsibilities, than to always be comfortable.
The people who came to work with us seemed to f
eel the same way. It mattered that the work was physical and that it happened outside. For all of us who lasted more than a week on the farm, working outdoors made us happy. Working with our bodies made us happy. I thought of Jane at two in a temper tantrum, gone boneless. That state came from an overload of frustration and was temporary. Nobody really wants to be boneless. We have bodies, and it generally feels good to use them. It feels especially good when we use them for a purpose, toward something we believe in. It is a simple thing but profound, and it is easy to lose sight of in a world that places more value on work that happens inside, on a screen, while seated at a desk. “If people knew how much fun farming is,” Mark used to say, “we wouldn’t be able to keep them away.”
Not everyone is susceptible, though. Plenty of people who came to work on our farm found it had no magic to offer them. To some people, farming was simply ill-compensated drudgery or struggle and decay. If you didn’t see the work, at least in part, as something more than a job—as a calling—it made no sense to keep going. We didn’t pay well, and people who weren’t used to sweat and sore muscles would quickly be miserable. One woman came all the way from California, worked a day, and drove off in the middle of the night, leaving a scribbled note of explanation on our door.
Good Husbandry Page 6
