Good Husbandry

by Kristin Kimball

  * * *

  And there were times when I asked too much of myself. One late-winter weekend, Miranda and Jane both had colds, and nobody had slept in two nights for all the hacking. But it was okay because it was Sunday, and I was going to sleep in because we had Dylan.

  Dylan was a wiry, energetic young farmer from the next town who had started his own vegetable business the year before. He worked insane hours during the growing season, employing a shifting cast of Jamaicans and hippies, all fueled by quarts of black coffee. They often harvested by headlamp at midnight, blasting jam-band music out of big speakers hung on the rafters of the packing house. They had installed a tap through the wall of their walk-in cooler, stocked with kegs of beer. Dylan’s farm was a good place to go at any hour if you wanted company, work, or a party. But sometimes the partying made Dylan less than perfectly reliable.

  After frost, Dylan’s workload lifted because he wasn’t raising stock. He usually spent winters in Ecuador, where he bought and sold coffee and hung around in sunny hammocks, but this year, he and his girlfriend had had a baby, so he was staying home and was available for short-term hire. He had worked on a dairy before starting his own farm, so he knew how to milk and care for cows. I had been frayed at the edges for weeks, and I knew without fully acknowledging it that the first serious cracks were beginning to appear in my ability to cope. As a way to forestall actual breakage, I’d hired Dylan to milk for me on Sunday mornings. That first beautiful morning had finally arrived. To say I’d been looking forward to it is insufficient. I’d been clinging to it like a waterlogged sailor to a bit of flotsam. I’d gone to sleep knowing that Dylan would milk, Mark would do the rest of the chores, and I and the two kids would snuggle back in for a little more dear, dear sleep.

  From under a thick pillow well before dawn, I heard Mark get up and dress, trot down the stairs, and walk out the door to the barn. Then, with growing dread, I heard the disconcerting noise of all of that happening again, but in reverse. And there he was at the doorway, rousing me as gently as possible to tell me that the cows were not in the barn, that Dylan had not shown up, and that I needed to go milk the cows.

  What was I going to do? Mark had the morning chores to do, and they couldn’t wait. The cows had to be milked. That couldn’t wait either. There was no use complaining. I pulled the runny-nosed children from their beds, waking them in the process. They whimpered at the injustice and resisted my attempts to put four arms in snowsuits, four feet in socks. When everyone was dressed, Jane kicked off her boots and declared that she needed breakfast before going out. That, I realized, was a reasonable demand. I buttered a piece of bread for her, poured myself a cup of cold coffee from yesterday’s pot, then looked at the clock and hustled. Hustling sick, tired children is the worst idea in the world. There were now tears from both small sets of eyes, and two pitches of squalling. But finally, they were both in the stroller, bread in one hand, mittens on all three others, and we were rolling.

  We got to the barn and let the cows into their stanchions. Their dishy faces ranged in color from light fawn to nearly black. Zea was the new girl, a nervous, jumpy cow who had just had her first calf. Delia was gone. Her daughter Sis had taken her place in the stanchion by the door.

  Jane climbed out of the stroller to watch me assemble the milking machine. I ran buckets of hot water to wash the cows’ udders, and put the ten-gallon milk cans and the big stainless-steel filter in the alley of the barn. Then I recruited Jane to push the baby around in the stroller, a tactic meant to occupy them both.

  I got the first cow’s udder washed and prepped and had just put the milking machine on her teats when the stroller rolled into the gutter at the other end of the barn and dumped the baby. As I ran to rescue her, the cow kicked off the machine. I tried again, employing the cats this time to entertain Jane, parking the crying baby in front of the milker, where I hoped the suck-suck noise would soothe her. When one of the cats scratched Jane, I dumped five gallons of milk into an already full milk can, and half a cow’s daily production ran onto the barn floor. Jane wailed over her scratched hand. Miranda wailed over the cold wet muck on her snowsuit. I wailed for Mark in a voice that implied it was all his fault. He left his chores, noted the milk in the gutter, scooped up both kids, took them to the milk house, and plopped Miranda on the floor, where I could hear her crying herself to sleep. That was when Zea took advantage of my inattention and kicked me, landing a good one on the kneecap. Silent rage bubbled out of me, not toward the cow but toward Dylan.

  I spied the cup of cold black coffee on the step to the hayloft. Caffeine might substantially improve my attitude, which was spiraling fast. I milked Sis, the last cow in the lineup and my favorite, inheritor of Delia’s sweet nature. Over the noise of the milker, I could hear Mark singing with Jane in the milk house as he washed the pails—“cockles and mussels alive, alive, oh!”—and Jane correcting her dad on the lyrics. Miranda was finally quiet, asleep. I took the claw off Sis and put my coffee cup under her. There was still some good hindmilk in the back teats, and I grasped one, warm and soft in my hand, and stripped it out. The rich milk hit the coffee and foamed, a farmer cappuccino. I milked until my coffee was both light and warm. I fed the cows and sipped my coffee. Then I stood still and listened to the sounds of the cows munching and my family singing.

  This was not at all what I had pictured, way back at the beginning, when I imagined raising children on a farm. How would they think of their childhood when they were my age? Would the stories they told be about pretty cows or tears? Maybe it hinged on whether Mark and I could figure out how to navigate the dangerous territory we had entered. As the winter wore on, we were increasingly in opposition. It was more than sleep deprivation. It was not just the change in group dynamics. It was a long hard game of family versus farm. Which needs would get met when there wasn’t sufficient time, money, or sleep? I was looking at the present and taking care of the children. Their needs were more important to me than the farm’s. Mark was looking at the bigger picture and working on behalf of the farm first, thinking long-term, even if it meant sacrifice or unhappiness in the present. Two strong-willed people pulling in different directions created a lot of tension.

  * * *

  The winter weeks wore on. Milking was liberation from the house, but it added to my exhaustion. On nights when Miranda didn’t sleep well, it felt nearly impossible to get out of bed at four-thirty and continue all day. The house, meanwhile, seemed to be closing in on us, filling with visiting young farmers interested in our horses and our full-diet model. Mark loved company, new opinions, and the constant underlying hum of youth and action, which fueled our winter work. To me, the house felt increasingly crowded and dirty, and there was way too much noise for a family with an infant. Someone would bang a pot too hard against the stove or scrape back a chair in front of the woodstove, and the sound would rattle the baby from her hard-won sleep and shave away my last nerve. Or a salty word would land in Jane’s receptive ear and become part of her three-year-old vocabulary. Or the work of cleaning up after so many people would overwhelm me. Mark came up with what he thought was the perfect solution: he assigned everyone his or her own place setting, and everyone could choose to wash or not wash their dishes before the next meal. One afternoon in the pantry, looking for a cup for Jane, I picked up someone’s proprietary mug and found it stuck fast to the plate beneath it.

  I called my friend Emily, who lived a few miles up the road and had two boys who were a little older than our girls. “Tell me it gets easier,” I said. “Or if it doesn’t, just lie.” She came over, washed the mountain of dishes in the sink, and left dinner for us, and a pie. The next week, she drove down the hill again, after dark, in the middle of another snowstorm. She had her skates and a cooler with two bottles of beer. The cooler was not to keep the beer cold but to keep it from freezing.

  I hauled my own skates out of the garage and pulled on my ski pants and followed her to the pond. The snow was falling fast. We each had a sho
vel, and we scraped away at the inch of fresh snow on the ice until we had made a loop. By then we were warm in our thick clothes. Flying around the edge of the pond, without the weight of a child or chores, felt impossibly fast and free. When we were tired, we hunkered down into the snowbank at the northern edge, under the shelter of a clump of sumacs, and opened our beers. The falling snow made a sort of private room out of the open air. We talked about children, and me turning forty, which I would do in a few short weeks, and I vented about the rapidly changing farm and my shifting marriage, both completing their itchy seventh years. I told her about the long nights, my exhaustion. She took it all in and nodded. She never did say it would get better. Neither did she say it wouldn’t. Instead, she quoted Wendell Berry, a line from a poem that I had known well once but forgotten. “ ‘Be joyful,’ ” she said, “ ‘though you have considered all the facts.’ ” It made me laugh, and gave me hope. Maybe this time of year was not for avoiding the dark and difficulty but for embracing it, finding the hush in its depths.

  * * *

  The next day, I walked to feed the beef herd through a four-inch layer of perfectly fluffy snow with Miranda asleep on my back. The storm had passed, and it was cold and crisp and the sky was blue, mottled with dense clouds that sent forth slow fat flakes. Down the hill next to Long Pasture, I walked past the cabin built by one of our first employees as his housing, before we figured out that it was better for everyone when employees had a place away from the farm to go home to at night. My eye caught something wrong. A hole. The cabin’s window was shattered. In my exhaustion, I thought, Vandals? Here? I swung open the door. The shards of window glass covered the mattress, the floor. The hole was enormous. Then I saw the bird. It was curled belly-up on the floor, a drop of blood next to its beak. I picked it up, stroked its cold feathers. It was large and heavy for a bird. What was it? Quail? Pheasant? My mind flicked through the birds I knew. Then I got it. Grouse. Not just grouse but one particular Grouse, the one that always made a startled noise as I walked down this hill, then flew in front of me across the farm road, at eye height, into the woods around the cabin. I guess the last time she had an unlucky trajectory. Fear is a terrible accelerant. A flight of panic ends in shards, I thought. Remember that.

  Mark met me in the field, driving Jay and Jack hitched to a wagonload of hay. Jane was perched next to him, holding on to the bale strings. I opened the gate for them and settled the baby next to her, safe between two bales. The herd of cattle came lowing through the snow. Mark drove the horses and tossed the bales off in a line, and I followed along, cutting them open, collecting the strings. With an ax, I chopped a fresh hole through the ice of the spring where the cattle drank. Then I jumped back on, and we drove up the hill toward home. Going past the cabin, I felt my heart tighten. I knew all of a sudden what we had to do. It wasn’t a thought—my brain was too tired for that—but a certainty. “We need to get the farmers out of the house,” I said flatly. This was an argument we’d had many times before. Usually, Mark argued for the efficiency of one person cooking for the whole group—he had calculated it into minutes per meal served—and in winter, the efficiency of a single heated space. But this time, he looked at my tired face, the downward shape of my mouth. “We can make it happen tomorrow,” he said.

  * * *

  We called a farm meeting and broke it to them. They could eat breakfast at the Yellow House, before morning meeting, and go back home for lunch or bring it along with them. No more huddles around the woodstove. The office was moving out of the house too. Mark got on the phone and found a beat-up old trailer that had been the on-site office for a construction company. We had an electric space heater for it, and a stove we could install for cooking. Until then, the farmers could warm up during the day in the greenhouse. We’d continue to host dinner every Friday night at the house for anyone who wanted to come. But during the rest of the week, the house would be for family.

  It didn’t go over well. Chad didn’t say anything. Nathan and Tim nodded, quiet. Tobias looked at Blaine. Blaine looked angry. I could understand why. On our farm, meals were an important part of the deal. The work was hard and not well paid, but the meals we ate together were amazing, which, for some types, helped the job make sense. The food, after all, was why we were here, all of us. “But the table is where the magic happens,” Blaine said, shaking her head at us. And she was right, but so was I.

  * * *

  On Valentine’s Day, we got a babysitter, and Mark and I spent the afternoon working together, a farmer date. We’d harvested the last of our corn by hand, and stored it on the cob, and now we needed to get it shelled. We’d borrowed a combine and parked it in the barnyard. I sat in the cab of the John Deere and worked the levers while Mark dumped loads of corn into the maw. It was something, to sit high up in that giant machine and watch the cobs go in the front, the clean kernels come out the augur in the back. We were three-quarters finished when pieces of cob jammed up somewhere deep in the bowels of the machine, and the combine choked and died. Date over. I went to collect the girls, and Mark, Nathan, and Tim spent the rest of the day underneath the combine, trying to free things up. Mark came back to the house at dusk, luminous with corn dust, like a coal miner in negative.

  Blaine wasn’t hiding her feelings about getting kicked out of the farmhouse and took a leave from the farm, traveled to Guatemala. We had less work in the winter, and she’d be back in spring. It felt easier with her gone. The tension between her and Tobias was palpable, but nobody knew where they stood, and I didn’t dare ask. Two men had given her rifles for her birthday; Tobias had had the wooden stock of his inscribed with her name. Having her gone for a while would make things smoother. Everyone else accepted the change without comment. But it was a line between us and them. I didn’t quite understand that lines between us and the people who worked here were necessary, not a bad thing. Back then, lines made me uncomfortable. And there were starting to be a lot of them. There was the line between us the farm owners, and they the farmworkers, which was thin when it came to the type and intensity of work we did but got thick when there were disagreements, or when someone started to wonder why they were working so hard, anyway—and thicker still as they gained skills, began dreaming of their own land and how they’d like to work it. Increasingly, there was age. When we first started hiring people, our farmworkers had been our contemporaries or close to it. As we got older, the rotating cast of people we hired did not. They were all somewhere between young-young and middle-young, and I’d just turned forty, which made me officially old-young. There would be lots of good, even lifelong relationships to come, but Racey would be the last employee who felt like my friend.

  The biggest line of all was having children. I knew how hard it was for them to imagine what it was really like with kids, just as it had been hard for me to imagine before I had them. Once, after Miranda was born, I’d come downstairs to join a table full of farmers for lunch. The front of my sweatshirt was stained with breast milk, the baby was crying, and Jane was taking food from my plate and then wiping her hands carefully in the baby’s hair as I tried to hurriedly eat. I heard a guy who was visiting the farm for a week—a young kid, still in college—lean over to his friend as he glanced at me and my armload of children and ask, “Why on earth would anyone sign up for that?” He didn’t mean the farm or the crowded house. He meant having kids. So the farmers, all young, single, and childless, didn’t really understand why we were kicking them out of the house, and they didn’t like it, but for the most part, they accepted it. The rest of the winter, I’d walk past them at lunchtime, eating together miserably in the dripping greenhouse, and feel a strong mix of guilt and relief.

  The house was so quiet without the farmers in it. I took all the extra leaves out of the dining table and shrank it from an enormous rectangle to a four-person square. I made small delicious lunches for the girls, unused to cooking at a family scale, and the three of us ate clustered together around one corner. We would set a place for
Mark, but most days, he didn’t have time to come in. As winter faded, the separation increased. Between me and Mark, firmly on different teams, with our opposing needs. Between me and the farm and its endless stream of demands.

  PART 2 BEDROCK

  CHAPTER 7

  March arrived, sweet and wretched. The barnyard was four inches deep in mud, the beef herd had its annual case of mites, and the ground itself looked patchy and worn, bare land showing through snow in circles under each tree. Then the south wind brought the smell of spring. We’d tapped the maple trees during the last cold stretch, when it seemed like winter would never break. On the first Sunday, the thermometer hit fifty before noon. The forecast was perfect for sugaring. A freeze was predicted for that night, and another warm day the next, with the same pattern of warm days and cold nights likely to continue through the week.

  Sugar season brought some relief from the claustrophobia of the house. Sugaring, the way we do it—tapping the maple trees by hand, hanging them with buckets, and collecting the sap with the horses—is joyful work, made to be done with little kids. Because the first run was on a Sunday, the farm was quiet after the morning milking and chores, just us family. Mark and I brushed Jake and Abby, then harnessed and hitched them to the sap wagon while the children took their naps. In the late afternoon, Mark and the horses picked us up at the house, the girls bundled into layers, and we set out for the sugarbush together. Miranda rode on my back and Jane ran through the woods from tap to tap, catching the drips of sweet sap on her tongue. When her legs got tired, she hopped on the back of the wagon and rode. I carried the full buckets of cold, clear sap to the wagon and dumped them through the filter, which caught the stray pieces of bark, the moths that had perished in the sap overnight. Jet trotted along behind us. This was how I had imagined it when I thought about raising kids on a farm. I’d almost forgotten how happy it made me to work together outside in the fresh air. It felt good to stretch my legs, tromp through the mud, the last piles of snow, in the cold air and sunshine, and feel the woods coming to life around us. Mark whistled to himself at the front of the wagon, lines in his hands. On the straight flat path at the top of the sugarbush hill, the horses picked up their feet and trotted, arching their necks, caught up in the good spirits of the day.