* * *
Just after the drainage was in place and the new field was seeded, we began to hear dark words on the weather radio. A hurricane was building off the East Coast, tracking toward us, bringing heavy rains and high winds. They were calling it Irene.
We did what we could to prepare. Mark secured the metal tops of the broiler chicken coops with old tires, while I moved the laying hens to higher ground. The tomato plants were heavy with fruit that would be destroyed in a big storm, so we harvested hundreds of pounds and stored them in the pavilion. The night before the storm hit, Mark and I put the kids to bed and walked the farm, looking for loose objects. We nailed the doors to the barn lofts closed, and weighted the tarps over the grain bins with logs and heavy rocks. Then we climbed to the top of the pole barn with hammers, crawled along the roof, and nailed down all the rattling sheets of metal. From up high, we watched the sun set. The wind was picking up. There were no clouds gathered yet, but the sky over the sugarbush hill to our west was stained a dark and ominous red.
The storm came that night and lasted all through the next day and into the next night. The kids and I watched from inside. The rain fell in heavy waves and poured off the roof in sheets. The wind raged, pressing against the windows and doors. In the middle of it, Racey appeared, and she and Mark made their way to the field where the broiler chickens were pastured. The field was flooding, already four inches deep in the spot where the coops were parked. The birds were huddled together in piles, three birds deep, soaked, and trying to stay warm. Mark and Racey tossed them into a single layer to try to save the ones beneath, but some of them were already dead from a combination of chilling and suffocating, and no sooner were they liberated than the live ones began to bunch together again. As branches crashed in the hedgerow, Mark and Racey wrestled bales of hay into place and pulled the coops up onto them, slightly uphill, so that the chickens could get out of the water and stay warm.
When the storm finally blew itself out, we’d gotten ten inches of rain. The power was gone, and the sweet corn was flattened and tousled like it had bedhead. But the tile drainage was working, drawing hundreds of gallons of warm rainwater out of the field every minute. Within two days, instead of deep puddles, we could see the lines of green rye beginning to germinate in the good soil.
We’d been very lucky. Aside from the dead chickens and a few fences that needed repair, we were okay. Over the next week, we got messages and photos from farming friends all over the East Coast whose good bottomland had been swallowed by floodwaters, their homes and buildings damaged. Still, that storm broke me. What is the use of this work when it can be taken away so easily? I thought. Why should I risk loving something this much if it’s so hard to hold on to? And just a little deeper: Why should I stay in a marriage that’s hard? Is this really a good place to raise children? The storm brought out all those water emotions in me, and I felt soaked in fear too big to speak about, at least directly.
Instead, I got remote and prickly. Mark and I chafed at each other. Rather than talk about the important things, we argued about the little things. He wanted to add a new greenhouse. I thought we couldn’t afford it. He wanted to open a line of credit so we’d have easier access to capital when we needed it. I didn’t want to risk it. The imbalance between what the farm got and what the family got was eating at me. Winter was coming again, and the dim house with its poi-colored walls felt like it was getting smaller around us. I fell asleep listening to the sink leaking in the bathroom, as it had done for five years, all that time the farm’s demands more important than the hour it would take to fix the faucet.
* * *
Racey and Nathan were leaving. She finally told me herself. She’d taken a job in Africa that started in a few weeks, and when she returned, she and Nathan were going to work at the farm down the road while they looked for their own land, to start a farm a lot like ours. It hurt that I had heard it first as whispers and rumors. It hurt to be abandoned, and for another farm, no less. And it hurt that they were looking for land nearby, with a plan to directly compete with us for the very small market of people in our town. It wasn’t the first time this had happened. Another couple we’d hired had started a farm just down the road that was also powered by horses and offered the same kind of full-diet membership we did—in fact, that was where Racey and Nathan were heading. Tobias and Blaine were looking for land in the neighborhood too, planning to start a farm that offered grass-fed meats. But it hurt more with Racey because she was my friend. I’d known it was risky to let myself become too close to her, but we had a lot in common—similar education, worldview, and interests, similar love for travel and for farming.
Mark saw things completely differently, as usual. He thought the world needed a lot more small, diversified farms, and if we could help spawn them here, in the place we loved, then that was a good thing—a great thing. Yes, there would be more businesses producing for the same market, but we could choose to see that as competition or look for the ways in which we could collaborate. “Imagine if we have enough farms here in ten years for someone to reopen the farm supply store!” he said. “We wouldn’t have to drive two hours to get parts when the mower breaks. Imagine if we could buy our supplies cooperatively. We could have a real functioning small-farm economy here for the first time in a hundred years. It’d be good for everyone.” I was skeptical. That didn’t solve the problem of sales. I couldn’t shake the feeling that doom was right around the corner.
* * *
Jenny arrived to take Racey’s place. She’d just shown up in our dusty driveway one day, in a car with her native Ohio plates, carrying all her possessions. She had sent us a résumé and left some messages over the summer, when we’d been too overwhelmed to follow up. When she didn’t get a response, she just got in the car and drove east, then announced that she’d be working for us. She was in her mid-twenties, tall and strong, with a wide and constant smile and thick brown hair. She’d gotten an undergraduate degree in urban planning, then figured out she was interested in food. She’d worked in the kitchen at Chez Panisse, then spent a year working at a horse-powered farm in California, and she knew she was onto something, so she came to work for us. Without hesitating, she jumped in and began to help.
The first Sunday she was with us unfolded in the usual mix of routine plus surprises. I was in the house with the kids, and Mark was in the barn. One of the dairy cows, Camden, calved that day, a sweet little heifer. Mark carried the calf the whole mile up from the dry cow pasture on his shoulders, got her settled in the calf nursery, and tended to Camden’s swollen udder. The girls and I joined him and fed the calf her first bottle. Then we cleaned the house, made lunch, washed the dishes, swept the floor. Jane drew a picture of me dressed up as a clown for Halloween: purple shirt, green pants, wild hair, and juggling balls. I asked her if she might want to be an artist when she grew up.
“No,” she said.
“What about a farmer?”
“Nope,” she said, without looking up from her crayons. “Way too much work.” Then a long pause. “Mom? Do artists get to sleep?”
“Yep, they sleep.”
“Okay, then, I might want to be an artist.”
* * *
After their naps, the girls and I took a plate of sugar cookies over to Ronnie and Don. Milking had already started by the time we got back, and I knew Mark would need help with the new calf, so I pulled up to the barn. Jenny was helping Mark milk. I told her I’d get a quick bite of food into the girls, grab our boots, and be right back out. But as I was getting Miranda into her high chair, Jenny came into the house, looking for a quart of vegetable oil. Mark had sent her to tell me that Juniper—daughter of June, a granddaughter of good old Delia—was down, and he suspected she had bloat. Bloat? I was skeptical. On our farm, bloat is usually a spring problem, not a fall one. It happens when ruminants graze lush pasture that is rich in legumes, like clover or peas. When any sort of feed hits a cow’s rumen—the first stomach—it mixes into a very rich br
oth of microorganisms and begins to ferment. Eventually, it forms a cud, which the cow will regurgitate, chew again, and swallow, to finish digesting in her next stomachs—reticulum, omasum, abomasum. The rumen does the grunt work. It can hold nearly fifty gallons of material. The dense mix of microorganisms in the rumen breaks down the cell walls of plants. One of the by-products of all that biological activity is gas. Normally, the gas bubbles are released through the mouth. But in bloat conditions, the legumes cause the rumen contents to get frothy, like beer from a keg just before it’s kicked. The gases from fermentation are trapped in the froth. Because the gas can’t be released, pressure builds inside the rumen. It can happen very quickly. The left side of the cow’s body puffs up and tightens like a drum. If it progresses, the rumen presses against the other organs, crowds the diaphragm and lungs, and the cow can’t breathe and dies a painful and miserable death. Could it be bloat? True, all the rain we’d had made for some gorgeous lush grazing, and they were on a field rich in clover. It was possible. In any case, the treatment—a drench of vegetable oil—wouldn’t hurt her. Oil would hit the foam in the rumen and cause it to settle so the gas could be released. If that didn’t work, the emergency lifesaving alternative would be stabbing a hole into the swollen balloon of rumen with a trocar—a gruesome operation that would make it deflate all at once and bring relief but also a chance of infection.
I filled a beer bottle with oil and gave it to Jenny. A few minutes later, she came back, asking for another. I quickly got the girls dressed and in the double stroller and walked through the pitch dark to the barn.
Juniper was clearly in distress, lying on her side, left flank distended, looking like she wanted to die. Mark and Jenny had been trying to haul her up onto her feet, and she wasn’t having it. I joined them, and we were able to get her up and into a horse stall before she went down again. At least the angle of the bedding made her front higher than her rear, and put her mouth above her rumen, which could help the gas come out. Mark reached into her mouth with his hand and tied a stick between her teeth. She worked at it with her tongue. This was supposed to help encourage her to burp and release the gas. After a minute, she let out a tremendous belch. And another. And three smaller ones. Jenny watched, mute. Juniper rose to her feet. Cows are strikingly unexpressive about pain—they are prey animals, and in the long game of evolution, no good came to a prey animal that revealed its wounds or weaknesses—but with each burp, you could see a shift in her energy, back toward wanting to live.
By then, it was past suppertime, and we hadn’t even started to milk. Jenny could help Mark finish milking and feed calves. I’d get the kids fed and put to bed and then bring some dinner to the barn.
Back in the kitchen, things didn’t look very promising. On weekends, I made a point of using up leftovers, and by Sunday evenings, we were sometimes down to half a jar of yogurt and a collection of what Jane derisively called “cold scraps.” The kids were hungry and chilled from the barn, and Mark and Jenny would need more than cold scraps too. I found six cooked potatoes, half a pork chop, an onion, and a mixed bundle of fresh herbs. I needed something that would be fast, fill five bellies, taste nourishing, transport easily, and be eaten with hands. This was a situation that called for fritters. I pushed the potatoes through a food mill, grated the onion, and cut the pork chop into bits, then added eggs and a handful of flour, plus salt and pepper and all of the herbs, chopped fine. I heated an obscenely large spoonful of lard in the big cast-iron pan and fried the mixture in blobs that turned golden brown, crisp on the outside, fluffy and tender on the inside, shiny with hot lard. I left the kids at the table, a fritter in each fist, and ran out to the barn with a steaming plate for Jenny and Mark and a jar of sour cream.
Juniper was already back in her stanchion, eating dry hay, as though nothing had happened. Mark sloshed some of the fresh warm milk into mason jars, and before I went back to the kids, I stood in the aisle of the barn, drinking warm milk and eating hot fritters slathered in sour cream. I checked Jenny’s face. Was it too much for her? This wasn’t Chez Panisse. But she was smiling widely in that way that let me know she got it. That she was good with this crazy, dirty, brutal life.
CHAPTER 12
The farm changed into her early-autumn dress, dark green with red and orange accents. I lay in bed before dawn, listening to the geese honking their way south. The weather was serene that fall, all its rage already spent. The honeybees plundered the goldenrod, returning to the hives with their saddlebags full of gold dust. We shifted the solar panels to their fall positions to catch the fading light. It felt bittersweet to watch it go. The tilt of the world tells us there’s an end to everything.
No more planting but not much weeding either; weeds have to obey the light just as the crops do. We made a last few acres of hay, using the horses on the sickle-bar mower to cut it, because every bale that went into the mow was another small piece of security against the coming winter. The cover crops of rye and vetch grew into a fertile green blanket over the bare ground on the newly drained field. The leaves on the pumpkins and winter squash withered and died back, exposing their finished work: orange globes, beige blobs, and green-striped yellow zeppelins. On cold mornings, instead of lighting the woodstove, the girls and I filled the oven with pumpkins, roasted them, then scooped out the flesh to freeze for a winter’s worth of pumpkin soup, pumpkin pie, pumpkin cake. The tomato plants slowly succumbed to early blight, death creeping up from the ground into their leaves and vines, which were still heavy with cracked green fruit. The celeriac grew larger, and so did the potatoes, carrots, and beets. The sweet corn was tattered by the hurricane, but the stalks were vertical again, lifted by the sun.
At dinnertime, I put a pot of water on the stove to boil, and took the girls to the field to pick sweet corn. The leaves were raised like a church full of believers waving hands in the air to catch the spirit.
Jane was in a tutu and tiara phase, and had spent most of the summer in a pair of sparkly red shoes, the glitter now worn off at the toe and embedded with soil. The ensemble made it easier to spot her even when she ran far off between the shady rows. I heard her break off a low ear, shuck it, and munch it raw, a farm-kid appetizer. Miranda was beginning to walk, and she pulled herself up on a sturdy stalk. I yelled to Jane to hunt for huitlacoche, the lumpy fungus that is a delicacy in Mexico. It was one of our favorite treats. She shouted back when she found an ear of it, and it was a good one, not yet blown out in black spores but bulging with firm lobes. We put it carefully in our bag and then chose our corn for dinner. I craved ears that were as mature as the season felt by then, with hulking kernels that I could sink my teeth into, a complex corn character, not the extra-sugary kind with kernels that pop off into your mouth when you bite. On the way home, we stopped at the raspberry patch. The storm had melted the oldest berries into a fermented mush, but a fresh wave of them had ripened. We had forgotten to bring a berry box with us, so we pulled off Miranda’s shirt, made a pocket of it, and filled it with a quart of berries.
The water was boiling when we got back to the house with our loot. Into the steam went a dozen pieces of corn. Fully half of them were for me. Mark still could not get over the fact that his bantamweight wife could eat six ears at a sitting. Jane cut the huitlacoche from its host cob, and we sautéed it with butter, salt, and green onion, and a sprinkle of chopped cilantro. Mark came in from the field and lay flat in the middle of the floor for a ten-minute nap, which he fell into, as usual, within seconds of lying down, while Miranda crawled over him. Then he came to the table and we feasted on corn, some of it rubbed with butter and sprinkled with salt, some slathered with homemade mayonnaise, and some dusted with hot chili and spritzed with lime.
For dessert, I pulled a pint of our heavy cream from the refrigerator. The dairy cows were thriving on the late-summer grass and clover, and the cream was the golden color of a milkmaid’s dreams, the texture of cake batter. We spooned it into bowls that we topped with the raspberries, which I had cook
ed with a vanilla bean to a vibrant bubbly sauce, and a swirl of buckwheat honey from our hive. We ate it all and licked the bowls clean.
Nobody went hungry that year. The generosity of what the farm provided for us and for our members, the abundance and variety and sheer deliciousness of our food even in the worst year we could have imagined, should have buoyed me. Instead, I couldn’t shake free of the fear that what we had endured could happen again. When Mark saw that, he wanted to erase it. Maybe his own happiness was too fragile to risk being dulled by my doubts.
One evening we sat at the kitchen table, going over the books and planning the work for the week. I could feel the tension in my shoulders and jaw. The numbers looked scary, and the list of tasks was both daunting and urgent. As Mark talked on, enthusiastic, I stopped listening, became fixated on the steady drip of the drain under the kitchen sink, which was leaking into a dog dish, as it had been for months, old dishwater collecting there in a viscous gray soup. I need to get out of here, I thought. I hadn’t been off the farm in days, maybe weeks. Actually, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d left the farm. No wonder I was feeling a little crazy. A day in town would do us good.
I looked up and interrupted him. “I’m going to take the kids to Plattsburgh tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll pick up the parts we need to fix the drain.” Plattsburgh was a forty-five-minute drive north, the city we went to when we had to buy supplies, see the dentist or the pediatrician. I’d had a sudden vision of the three of us, whizzing through the aisles of the big-box hardware store, the baby in the seat of the shopping cart, the toddler holding on in front, as I bought the mysterious parts. Maybe I’d stop in the paint aisle too, for something to spruce up the walls of the bathroom. Maybe, afterward, I’d take them out for hamburgers.
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