There are weeks in May when anyone in the world can find pleasure in farmwork. There is bright sun, the smell of warm earth, a cool breeze. The horses trot out of the barn eager, fueled by the sweet young shoots of grass, glowing from the inside. It’s all so lovely and wonderful. Then, as summer comes on, things shift. The sun gets serious and the weeds begin to grow fast, threatening to overtake and smother all the work of winter and spring. Our skin burns, and we sweat, and the sweat stings where the skin is burned. You get used to it and find the rewards override the discomfort, or you get out.
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Occasionally, the discomfort really is too much, for us or for the animals. The week the corn tasseled, the flies descended. We’d had a stretch of warm weather followed by a soaking rain that gave me a special feeling of dread, because that pattern is the signal for the green-bodied horseflies to hatch. They are the size of fat raisins, with helmeted eyes, like fighter pilots from some evil future realm. They have their own focused plan of work and are just doing their jobs like the rest of us—they need some blood for their babies.
I was too pregnant by then for cultivating. Sitting on the cultivator, behind two horses, I couldn’t see past my belly to the rows passing between my feet. But I could stand on the forecart and drive a team to ted the hay. Tedding was a relaxing job, a light pull for the horses, that didn’t require much precision. We ted after we mow, to fluff the grass and help it dry so it can be baled before the next rain comes. It has to happen quickly, in the window between rains.
I chose Jake and Abby, the young team, harnessed and hitched them, and headed up the sugarbush hill toward the field on Middle Road. It had rained the night before, and the ground was spongy. Hot, damp air was rising from the tall grass. When we brushed through it, the biting flies rose too; the pair of warm-bodied horses, already damp with sweat and exuding great clouds of attractive carbon dioxide, were the answer to their most ambitious dreams. The organic fly spray we used on the horses didn’t do much. The fly nets they wore—which went over the tops of their bridles, with black strings that dangled over their eyes so they looked like they needed their bangs cut—helped a little, but only at first. The newly hatched flies were too ravenous. They bit the horses on their flanks, their necks, on the gelding’s sheath and the tender place at the base of the mare’s udder. The horses, in their harnesses and tightly hooked to my cart, had little recourse. They could swish their tails, shake their manes, stomp. But mostly, when working, they just had to tolerate it.
Abby became more and more frustrated. She pinned her ears. She trotted a few paces, but I used my hands on her bit to keep her from going faster. Her energy built and had to go somewhere. She dropped her head as far as the check rein would allow, kicked out with her back leg. “Quit it,” I said, even though I sympathized. “Come up.” We continued up the hill. Another swarm, more bites, and enough was enough. Down went Abby’s head, out flashed her hoof. And this time it landed on the wrong side of the tongue of the forecart—the stout ash beam that rested in the eye on the yoke between their shoulders—so that she was straddling it. Not good, I thought. But after seven years, hundreds of hours behind horses, and a few terrifying incidents, I had developed some tools for situations like these. The first is to shove aside any inkling of panic, to convey only certainty and control. Everyone just calm down, I said in my head. I told them to whoa, set the brake on the forecart, and hoisted myself to the ground, arms crossed over my big belly.
Abby was bucking now, small, tentative bucks, weight rocking from her front end to her back, accompanied by a high whinny like a muffled scream. The tongue was scraping against her inner thigh as she crashed up and down. No horse likes to have things between her back legs. For some, it’s intolerable. Abby, I knew, could handle it, but I didn’t know how long, especially with the flies taking advantage of our stillness. Meanwhile, Jake was starting to dance a little bit, upset by the way Abby was forcing him into the outside tug. He blamed her, and laid his ears back.
Everyone just calm down, I thought again. We can work through this. I had the lines in my hands and shortened the right one just a bit, so if they bolted, their heads would be going that way, and they’d run off the trail into the woods instead of straight up the path and onto the road. All those motions were automatic by then. So was the voice projecting calm.
The only way out was through. I had to unhitch them from the forecart so I could get Abby’s leg back over the tongue. With all that explosive energy building up between them, I had to do it carefully, like a sapper clearing a mine. It’s dangerous to put your body in the zone between the horse and whatever they are pulling. If they bolt, you get flattened. Very simple. You can’t always stay out of that danger zone, but you must always be aware when you are in it. My belly put me at a disadvantage. I wasn’t nimble.
I used my knee to push the evener forward and give myself slack to unhook Abby’s outside tug chain. The chain came loose, and the evener swung back the other way. I reached around her rear end and unhooked the inside tug chain. She stood. Good mare. Now she would have more freedom to move forward, to swing her butt back into position, but if she ran taking Jake with her, the tongue would knock loose of the neck yoke in front, maybe break its safety chain, drop to the ground, dig in, disaster.
We’re fine. Everyone calm down. It’s a form of telecommunication. It is faking it. But it has real utility, with animals, with children, maybe even with spouses. Think it and make it so. It helps to know your horses and have their trust, which is hard earned and easily spent. This time, it worked. I unchained the tugs on Jake’s side, and now I could reach Abby’s leg. My head was more or less even with her back when I stood up. Her hind leg weighed nearly as much as my whole body. “Lift,” I commanded, and she did, her heavy hoof dwarfing my palm. She had to flex her leg backward, hard, from the hip and the hock to get her hoof over the tongue, an uncomfortable, unnatural position. We worked it together. The toe of her hoof scraped white paint from the tongue. Then it was over. Relief. We were all in our places. I rehooked the chains, took off the brake, and we were a unit again, coordinated, cooperative, under control. The horses were as relieved as I was. They were law-and-order creatures in the end, happy to be back inside clear boundaries. Before I got onto my seat again, I walked a wide circle around them, crushing the flies on their bellies, feeling the crisp bloody pop between my hand and the horses’ bodies, which were slick with sweat. Then we walked the rest of the way up the hill to ted the field.
A thing about farming that is difficult to explain is that it requires you to wield authority. The working relationship we have with animals is different from the pet relationship. Once I was visiting a man in Paris. I was in my late twenties, and I had flown there to spend a week with him, in his garret looking out toward Notre Dame. There were thick white sheets, small French appliances, the smell of day-old coffee grounds in a press. It was November. The sky was gray all week. Cold wind blew against mullioned windows. Those years were confusing ones. I was unsure of the form my life was supposed to take, unsure of pretty much everything. He was a poet. Maybe a poet could pull me through. He was only slightly older than I but infinitely surer. From a distance, over the phone, that had seemed so attractive. But in his flat, up close, I was intimidated—by his erudition, his awards, the book with his name on the cover. He did nothing to reassure me, which was not as unkind as it felt back then.
While he wrote in the mornings, I looked at paintings in the Louvre. I walked along the Seine in my high-heeled boots and black coat, which was too thin for the weather but the most stylish one I owned. When he was finished writing, I could go back to the apartment.
As the week wore on, I could feel his strong brain searching mine for something of value. That shut me down, made it difficult to speak. In bed one night, he asked me to tell him about something I knew that he didn’t. He might have been trying to put me at ease, but it felt like a test. I had nothing to offer. Music, art, books. He knew more about all of them
. Horses! I thought. Suddenly, I could talk. I spoke the parts of a horse’s body, the names of the tack we use to communicate with them; I explained how different types of bits work, some on a horse’s lips, some on the nose, some on the bars of a horse’s mouth. Bars, you know, gums, the place where he has no teeth. I explained the idea of pressure and release, how horses will move away from pressure—from the leg, or the heel, or the bit—and are rewarded by the release of that pressure when they do what is asked. I described how good it feels the moment a horse collects underneath you, because you’ve asked for a paradox, to move forward with your legs and hold back with your hands, and he understands and does it, two opposite things at once. The corners of the poet’s mouth turned down. I could see my monologue wasn’t going over well. He remained unimpressed. “It sounds,” he said, “coercive. How is that not coercive?” That I could not say. I closed my eyes, fell silent.
Is it coercive? It is, I know, hierarchical. Otherwise, it doesn’t work, becomes dangerous for both sides. It’s a partnership, but there’s a boss. The human must hold authority, must claim the right to rule. Benevolently, fairly, but definitely. I wish now that I had lectured the poet about the difference between authority and coercion. The right to touch the velvet-nosed beast, and to look him in the eye, is something that has to be earned and, once earned, held. Horses are like fire. Color, form, movement. And like a fire, under some conditions, they are only tenuously controlled. What would we have built in this world without horses or flame? The control of them is part of what made us human.
* * *
When the whole field was tedded, I brought the tired team back to the barn, unharnessed them, brushed the dried sweat from their hair. I fed and watered them and felt their physical satisfaction, a mirror of my own. We shared the pleasant end-of-day feeling of a job well done. That’s not to say they were always thrilled to put on their harnesses and head out the barn door. Or that they would not have quit sooner if they had the choice. But farming with horses taught me that when challenging things are required, we become more complex beings. When the tasks required of them are fair and possible, and when there is also sufficient rest, food, water, and mutual understanding, then the complexity is good. When the effort is toward a shared purpose, that is the best of all.
The next day, it was time to rake and bale. It was also the Fourth of July, and the volunteer fire department had organized a celebration. When Mark and I first arrived in Essex, I was shocked to learn that when something really dire happens—like your house is on fire or you are having a heart attack—help comes in the form of a neighbor. You need a massage or your teeth cleaned, you go to a professional. You need to be extracted, bleeding, from your crumpled car lodged in a snowbank, you get a volunteer. The anonymous “they” that I counted on in the city to take care of emergencies—the messy splatter of accident, of disaster, of misfortune both public and private—had become a small and knowable “we.”
I had joined the volunteer fire department the year after we’d arrived. Dave Lansing, the fire chief, had driven up in his white Chevy Silverado with the array of lights on the top, as I was planting garlic in the field next to the driveway, early November. It was raining gently, I was cold, lunch was overdue, and my legs were chafing inside my Helly Hansens. When he rolled down the window and asked if I wanted to volunteer for the fire department, I said yes without thinking. It was probably because my blood sugar was low and a simple yes seemed easier than explaining a long-winded no. Also, I had no idea back then what it would entail. Mark, thinking more deeply than I, demurred.
I went to my first meeting at the firehouse, which sat at the far end of our easternmost field. I was feeling exquisitely self-conscious. I’d envisioned a roomful of beefy men, secret handshakes, maybe some cigars. When I opened the door, I thought I’d gotten the wrong night. There were three men sitting in a line of chairs, looking at an empty table. I sat in the only open chair, which was facing them, across the table. “Not there,” one of the men said. “That’s the chief’s chair.” Blushing, I moved another chair next to the three of them, making a fourth in the row. Dave was just Dave when we met him in the village, but in this building, we called him Chief. He came from the radio room and took his place, then all the chairs scraped back, and the meeting began with a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. I felt like an impostor with my hand over my heart—an act I had not performed since grade school assemblies—and then we all bowed our heads for a moment of silence in honor of fallen firefighters. After the meeting, they took me to the bay and showed me the truck and the tanker, and the new mini-pumper, pride of the department, all bright red and decorated with a picture of the town’s antique horse-drawn pumper, which was stowed in the last bay. The other trucks were painted with the names of former chiefs. At the edge of the bay were red lockers full of bunker gear—heavy fireproof jackets and bibs, helmets, boots, face masks, gloves. I’d been worried about being accepted, and they’d warmly welcomed me. I understand now that this wasn’t exactly personal. They would have been excited to have anyone to fill out their thin and aging ranks.
What the job entailed, it turned out, was quite a bit more than I’d expected. Training was held at another department, a forty-five-minute drive through the mountains. All the trainees from the north country would be there. We would meet three nights per week for twelve weeks. I did not have time for this. The farm was too much already. But I’d promised, and besides, they’d already spent the taxpayers’ hard-earned money on a new set of bunker gear specially sized for me, so I went. The time would have to come out of my sleep budget. At the last minute, Mark, perhaps not wanting to be alone at home all those nights, decided to join too.
The class was full, every seat taken. The youngest were just sixteen, second- and third-generation members. They’d looked forward to this rite of passage all their lives. They talked movingly about what it meant to be able to give back to their communities. There were older people too, who had retired and finally had time to do this.
Over the course of the winter, I learned how to take apart and put together, with my eyes closed, the air tanks we wore on our backs. I learned about rollovers and flash points, how to properly climb up a ladder, and the cool trick of how to climb down one while carrying a full-grown adult. I learned how and why to vent a roof with an ax. I overcame, barely, my intense claustrophobia to crawl blindly through a training culvert filled with hanging loops of wire that caught on the bulky gear, learning how to carefully, patiently untangle myself before running out of air. At the end of the course, the chief of the host department shook my hand and told me he’d be happy to have me on his fire scene any day. I felt a tingle of real pride.
My first fire was a barn fire in the next valley, just after my training was complete. The call came at midnight, jolting us out of deep sleep. It was early spring. No moon. Jumping into my gear, I felt a confusing mix of fear and excitement.
Mark and I could see it from a mile away, the light of the fire and the light of the trucks that had already arrived—the first an ominous yellow-and-black feral glow and the second the pure blue-white focused light of civilization. It was Reggie Carver’s barn. His dairy sat along one of the dark roads near the river. Every department in the region was called out, and it was crowded with trucks and people.
We turned off the road and drove along the rough cow track toward the fire. In the darkness at the edge of the light, I could see the Holsteins, loose and milling, confused. Cows are creatures of habit. They called to each other in the dark, low mournful sounds. When we got closer, there were the sounds of the fire itself and shouting men. At big fires, with volunteers from different departments, it is almost impossible to hold a proper chain of command. There is no way to communicate. The fire is loud, the trucks are loud, there is smoke, and many, many people are running in all directions, most with their own idea of the best thing to do. Our neighbor Ron set up the pumper while Mark and I got our masks and air packs on. I don’t remember who t
old us to go in, but we did, hauling one heavy, charged hose between us. A barn cat, skinny, mangy, with the large-headed look of the closely bred, slunk around the hot foundation, illuminated by fire.
We walked like aliens into the burning milk house, spreading water in front of us. There was the bulk tank, intact, and next to it, smoldering bags of chemicals. There were the calves chained in their stanchions, the smell of burned hair, and the sound of our friend Bradley shooting the calves who had been burned but were still alive.
Once one of the bigger departments arrived with the aerial, there was not much more for us to do. They sprayed from high above, knocking down what was left of the fire. We stood by, putting out little fires around the edges when they popped up. We watched dawn reveal the smoldering remains. The fire had eaten almost everything. In the first good light, the cows were herded across the road to Lee Garvey’s barn, where they were milked for several days in rotation with his own, and then they were sold. Reggie was dying of cancer, and he would not rebuild.
We all had to play a part to make our town run. Some served on the town board, volunteered to bake for the Grange fundraisers, or worked as town justice. I trained for hazardous substances, took a class on how to set up a temporary detox station, learned the symptoms of nerve gas poisoning—this was post-9/11 America, after all. Once a train derailed at the crossing a quarter-mile from our farm. Word came across the pager that a tanker had overturned and was spewing its contents on the tracks. We geared up, ready for hazardous substances. It was, it turned out, a carload of squid moving from Montreal to New York. We briefly considered going into the salvage business, offering to compost that tank of stinking nitrogen-rich stuff, then thought better of it.
After Jane was born, I stopped volunteering as a firefighter. We couldn’t leave her alone to respond to calls together, and Mark’s physical strength made him more valuable on a fire scene. But I became a fire commissioner, one of a board of five elected officials who allocate the budget. Sometimes I go to the firehouse when the farm is extremely busy and I need a break from the chaos. I wrote my first book in its broom closet, moving the mop bucket out each morning and a small desk in.
Good Husbandry Page 7
