Good Husbandry

by Kristin Kimball

  * * *

  The fire department’s big public moment was the Fourth of July celebration. There were freshly washed fire trucks from all the neighboring volunteer departments. A good showing of antique tractors. Some local businesses made hasty floats. Bagpipers played in a ragged line. There was a delegation of veterans marching, and the men from the Masonic Lodge. Some women and kids on horseback, in Western gear. The grand marshal, our town’s high annual honor, was Grace McCloud, one of our oldest residents, who rode in a classic car, waving shyly. The Methodist Church sold strawberry shortcake at the corner. There were games for children down by the lake. The fire department sold grilled hamburgers and hot dogs. Afterward, there was a spelling bee in Town Hall. But the parade was the big draw. People lined up three or four deep from the library to Bull Run. They set up chairs early to get a good view and to catch the rain of candy that marchers chucked into the crowd. Everyone turned out for the parade, from the fine houses on Main Street and the trailers back in the woods.

  Mark had been asked to make an appearance that year because he had some special skills. Once at a party, just after we’d first met, I heard someone ask him what he learned in college. I already knew that Mark was skeptical about the value of higher education on a cost/benefit level, so I was interested in what he would say. “I learned to juggle,” he said. The other person assumed, as I did then, that he meant to juggle priorities, but he’d meant it literally. In between classes, on the weekends, he’d worked on his circus tricks. Juggling was first. He had started with bean bags and moved to balls, then clubs, then knives and flaming torches. He’d learned to walk a slack line and ride a unicycle. In his intense, obsessive way, he’d zeroed in on these things, taught himself to do them really well. I was glad that I hadn’t known this about him before we’d gotten married, because I was pretty sure I wouldn’t have been attracted to him during the circus phase. But his tricks came in handy on the Fourth of July.

  When it was time for the parade, I met him in the field, where he was raking the hay I’d tedded the day before. Someone had to keep raking, even if it was the Fourth of July. I climbed onto the forecart and took the lines, and he climbed off, retrieving his costume from the hedgerow. He’d come up with an outfit for the parade that we were calling Sketchy the Clown: a beat-up old spandex singlet that left nothing to the imagination, a pink-and-green-striped shirt, dirty white leather sneakers, and his usual everyday big straw hat. He was sweaty and red-faced from the heat and the work, and his hair was stuck with chaff. He had three juggling clubs and his unicycle. He smiled and waved at me, walking off to the start of the parade, looking less like a clown and more like a maniac.

  * * *

  When he rejoined me in the field a few hours later, I asked him how it went. He’s usually hyperbolically positive when reporting on any sort of performance. This time, though, he looked sheepish. “Not so well,” he said. He had attempted an ambitious trick and lost control of the unicycle, and one of his clubs had flown into the crowd, where it bonked a small child on the head. “Was she hurt?” I asked. “She cried a lot,” he said. Then, after the family tried to move out of the line of fire, he ended up unicycling past them again, and on the second pass, he heard the father say, “Oh no, here he comes!” before scooping the girl up in his arms. Given Mark’s appearance, the poor child was probably at least as scared as she was hurt. To his credit, he’d made the time to do it, even though we were in the middle of a haying marathon. We brought in twenty-five hundred bales that holiday weekend. The West Barn hayloft was mostly full, and we were at least a third of the way to having what we needed for the year.

  In August, one of the beef cows gave birth to a late calf in the pasture, a little brown heifer. The beef herd was made up of cows descended from the Scottish Highland cattle we’d bought for a bargain when we were first starting out. They were tough as nails and good strong mothers. In the winter, their heavy coats kept out the cold and the snow. In the summer, though, those coats could be a liability. When the calf was a week old, Racey came to the house to say she didn’t seem to be nursing. Ugh, fly-strike, I thought. Bane of summer-born babies, especially those with long hair. The blowflies lay eggs in the birth fluids, and they hatch into maggots that can eat a calf alive. We walked back to the pasture together with a bucket of soapy water to clean her. The cure for fly-strike is mechanical removal of all the little offenders. Catching the calf was easy. She was not doing well and couldn’t run very fast. At first I couldn’t find what was wrong with her. But when I lifted a mangy patch of fur on her back, I saw the skin underneath alive with masses of white wriggling worms. This was not a job we could do on pasture, so we dumped the inadequate bucket of water on the ground and hefted her back to the barn on our shoulders, taking turns, the maggots falling into our hair like living dandruff.

  Dr. Goldwasser happened to be on the farm, treating one of Tim’s horses for a scratched eye. He helped us shave the worst parts—a bloody raw patch the size of a football on the calf’s back and another on her hind leg. It would be impossible to get all of the maggots in one go, so she would need to stay at the barn for a few days of assiduous scrubbing and to regain some strength. I went back to the pasture to herd her mother up so the calf could nurse, while Mark worked on maggot eradication, using a hose and a brush. Each time we thought we were finished, we would comb through the fur with our fingers, and one would wriggle and give itself away. It took a while, but at last it was done.

  We went back to the house for long, hot, soapy showers and dinner with Jane, in that order. That night in bed, as we were replaying the day, Mark leaned over to kiss me. He paused and scratched at his midsection, one eyebrow raised, then shrugged. Exhausted, we clicked off the light. An hour later, he clicked it back on again and sat quickly upright. “I need you to look at something,” he said, pointing. I got the flashlight and illuminated his belly button. Deep in there, something moved. It was a slender, limbless spelunker, its tiny jaws looking for nourishment. I got the tweezers and plucked it out, extinguished its soft life between my thumb and forefinger, and then we clicked off the light again and returned to our precious sleep.

  * * *

  On the night of the full August moon, we were awakened by the telephone. Ron, our neighbor who was captain of the volunteer rescue squad, had been coming home from a midnight ambulance run and found our horses—all nine of them—on the road in front of the farm. They’d been pastured nearby, on Ron’s side, next to his pond. Maybe someone had forgotten to turn on the electric fence, or else they had run out of good grass and smelled the clover on the other side of the road and decided to brave it. They had been in limbo when Ron came along, lingering around the yellow lines, not sure which direction to go. Luckily, it was a bright night, and no drunken or speeding drivers had been past before Ron. He had hazed them into the field on our side before calling us. I pulled on my maternity pants and ran downstairs as quickly as I could, eight months pregnant. Mark bicycled to the barn to get the halters and lead ropes.

  I could see all nine of them clearly in the moonlight. They had found the best patch of clover between two sections of the vegetable fields, and they had their heads down, grazing quickly and with purpose, like children bolting some forbidden sugar cereal. They were free, and they knew it. The clover was thick and almost to my knees, and walking to them was like wading in a shallow green sea. Tim’s dappled gray team, the youngest and most playful, were the first to come to us. They were like big puppies, friendly and affectionate. They weren’t wise yet to the connection between us and the loss of their freedom and that clover. They put their noses in their halters, trusting. Jay, one of the old half-Suffolk geldings, and Jake, the young Belgian, came too, and Mark walked that brace of four to the barn while I worked on the mares, Chad’s team, and old Jack, the other Suffolk cross.

  There is a sense of fun in horses when they know they have the upper hand. Abby let me get close to her, keeping her head down and still eating but with one eye and
one ear on me. The last bite was taken with her mouth at an angle, because her legs were already moving away. She stopped just out of my reach and put her head down again. I tromped after her with the big halter looped over my arm. We were still at it when Mark got back from the barn, the horse now clearly laughing at me. Mark and I worked as a team, and after an hour, all of them had consented to being caught except old Jack, who was just plain stubborn about it. In the end, he followed along free behind the others, walked into the barn, and went straight to his stall.

  It was not the way I would have chosen to spend the night, but I wasn’t sorry it had happened. How else would I ever have known how a herd of horses looks casting moonshadows into heavy clover that is silver with dew? And it was a treat to get to work alone with Mark. We had fallen in love over work, had poured all the energy of the early days of our marriage into it. Getting bigger meant we’d begun to lose the intimacy we had when we created the farm. It was a difficult adjustment. Our jobs had been cut up and redistributed among so many other hands. I’d begun to miss the shoulder-to-shoulder effort that had brought us together. We stopped at the coop on the way back to the house and filled our pockets with eggs. At the herb garden, I cut handfuls of parsley and dill.

  It was too late to go back to sleep, so I put the water on for coffee and pulled the eggs from my pocket and started cracking. I love the dark morning time before the farm is awake. We moved quietly, talking low, so we wouldn’t disturb Jane. Mark chopped dill, parsley, and thyme and sautéed diced onion with zucchini and a little bit of pork sausage. I cracked eight eggs into a bowl and sprinkled them with salt and pepper. They were pullet eggs, petite, and the yolks were bright yellow from the grass and clover the birds were eating.

  We sat next to each other, facing the east window, and ate our breakfast. As the baby kicked inside me, we watched the sun come brilliantly up over the fields to the east, coloring the high clouds pink and orange and purple.

  CHAPTER 5

  My children’s births foretold their natures. Jane’s had been a long, thoughtful birth. A week before she was due, the rows of sunflowers we’d planted began to bloom. I took long walks in that field, between the nodding flowers that stood five feet over my head. Then Mark and I went to visit the hospital where I was scheduled to deliver. No, my body said simply as I walked in the door and smelled the hospital smells. No, it said in the elevator going up, sharing the ride with a groaning man on a gurney. No, on the maternity floor, where a red-nosed nurse was rude to us. I had the emotional hypersensitivity of pregnancy, and standing in the little room crowded with equipment, I said to Mark, “I’m not giving birth here.” It wasn’t a logical statement but a visceral one, and definitive. I was totally sure. “Okay,” said Mark, taking my hand.

  I knew other people who’d had their babies at home, with midwives. Mark’s sister had done it twice. I had read credible studies showing home birth to be at least as safe as hospital birth for low-risk women. Earlier in my pregnancy, I had even looked for a midwife. The licensing laws in New York make it difficult to give birth at home, and there are very few midwives who do it. I couldn’t find anyone close enough in our corner of the state. One of our members, a gentle, skilled woman who lived an hour north of us, was licensed for home birth in Vermont but not New York. Vermont was only a ferry ride away. For a while, we’d considered renting a room there, or borrowing an RV, but either of those options seemed at least as uncomfortable in practice as the hospital, and logistically tricky.

  When we got home from the hospital, Mark made one last phone call, to a midwife we’d called before, and begged. She just couldn’t do it. We lived too far away, and her other clients needed her. But just before she hung up, she remembered that a midwife she knew had just come back from living abroad and was practicing again. She put us in touch, and that is how it came to be that Jane was born in the same house where she was conceived.

  I’d had an exquisitely healthy and active pregnancy. I had farmed gently but constantly, enjoying the alien feeling of my changing body, the sound of my own thickened pulse in my ears. I had to give up milking cows late in the third trimester, because I could no longer reach the teats over my belly. I stopped driving horses then too, because the bounce and rattle of the implements over rough ground was uncomfortable. But I could still move animals to fresh pasture, hand-weed, and walk the farm with Mark in the evenings. Between exercise, our own good food, and no alcohol, I was in the best shape of my life. I felt like a sleek animal, an athlete trained for birth. As the baby grew bigger, the hard weight of my belly began pressing down instead of out. The bones of my pelvis creaked, the sinews loosened.

  * * *

  Then it was late August, a week after my due date. The farm felt hot and dry. From the sultry kitchen, where I was canning tomatoes, I watched Mark drive the team past the house toward the barn, dust rising behind them. I was craving raspberry-leaf tea, and I had learned to pay attention to my cravings during pregnancy. In the second trimester, I had been overcome one day by an urgent need for chicken soup. I didn’t have any chickens in the freezer, but there were dozens of laying hens in the coop. I marched outside, hardly thinking, and into the hen’s pasture. Inside the coop, I found a hen pecking at another bird’s egg. I picked her up and turned her over. She had a dull-looking comb and a dry vent, signs that she was no longer laying. Moreover, egg eating is a capital offense. Once a hen has begun breaking eggs and discovering their delicious contents, she is not likely to stop, and she can teach the habit to her sisters. It doesn’t work, on a farm, to keep an animal who consumes more than she gives. I took her outside and stroked her feathers, thanked her for her work, then put her head under my foot and pulled up on her body firmly to break her neck. I skinned and gutted her over the compost pile, saving her heart and liver. Fifteen minutes after my craving had struck, she was in the pot with carrots, onions, celery, and herbs, and the kitchen was filling with the smell of chicken soup. It is true that the hen, in pecking the egg, was responding to her own natural craving. Sometimes it comes down to who is bigger, who is stronger. If we were equal-size, I have no doubt she could take me, because pound for pound, hens are certainly fiercer than I am. They are omnivorous, and good hunters. I have watched chickens peck to death animals as large as bullfrogs and as fast as mice. It is the way I imagine a stoning to be, death by accumulation of small blows that are collectively brutal.

  The craving for raspberry-leaf tea required less violence to fulfill. We had wild raspberries on the farm, but they were scattered and hard to reach through heavy stands of goldenrod and poison parsnip. Our neighbor had recently moved away, leaving a large patch of cultivated raspberries, and had given us permission to pick them. I helped Mark unharness and brush the sweaty horses and put them out to pasture. Mark took Abby, and I led Jake, who kept a respectful distance from my awkward body.

  The neighbor’s empty house stood on the north side of our farm. A path connected us, blocked by a locked page-wire gate. Mark climbed over first, and I followed him, hoisting my belly over the top of the gate, landing heavily on the other side. We gathered a grocery bag full of raspberry leaves, and on the way back over the gate, I felt a tiny pop inside of me, and a trickle of warm water ran down my leg.

  But labor was slow-coming. I waited, took long walks, drank raspberry-leaf tea until my eyeballs floated. Finally, Jenna, our midwife, advised me to take a dose of castor oil. This would evacuate my bowels, she said, and sometimes it got labor moving. It worked, and late that night, as Mark read to me in bed, I felt the contractions become steadier and stronger. We called Jenna, who planned to arrive the next day unless we needed her sooner. The contractions continued, but gently enough that I could sleep.

  Jenna pulled into the driveway the next morning with her equipment and a cake. “A birthday cake,” she said, handing it over. She was a sturdy, confident woman, gray-haired, opinionated, sure in all her movements. She was married to an obstetrician. In the course of her long career, she had caught more
than five thousand babies, in all sorts of circumstances, all over the world. She examined me and found that I was several centimeters dilated. She listened to the baby’s heart. “Strong and beautiful,” she said, tapping my belly reassuringly. She gave me a bitter-tasting tincture and told me to take a walk while she settled in. Walking would bring the weight and pressure of the baby’s head against the opening bones of my pelvis and trigger stronger contractions. I held Mark’s hand for balance and walked with my legs swinging wide around the large hard rock of the baby’s head.

  We covered several miles that morning. I paused once in a while to let a contraction break over me. I was not afraid of the contractions. They weren’t terribly painful. They were interesting, and elusive. The more I wished for them, the longer the pause grew between them.

  We hiked all over the farm, talking, stopping occasionally to rest. We sat under a tree in Fireman’s Field, collected daisies, ate wild blackberries that were growing in the hedgerow. In the sugarbush, I hung by my arms from a tree branch, the absurd belly in front of me, willing gravity to work. When we came back inside, I was eight centimeters dilated, and Jenna told me not to stray too far from the house. I wasn’t feeling much like talking, but I did feel like cooking. Jenna and Mark left me alone, and I brought in ten pounds of cucumbers to make a big batch of bread-and-butter pickles. I sliced the cucumbers and swayed and hummed in the steam of the kettle, the stinging scent of vinegar, the warm smells of peppercorns, bay leaf, mustard seed.