The Dirty Life.On Farming, Food, and Love

by Kristin Kimball

  I carried the light. Mark kept the gun. I don’t know how long we’d been out there, moving under a tense kind of trance, before he wordlessly passed the gun to me. I took it from him and pressed my eye to the sight, which was like a telescope with crosshairs. I swung it around to the hedgerow, and in the faint moonlight I saw a group of three deer, two young bucks with twiggy horns and a young doe, and was hit with a saturated mix of emotions. It was the awe you feel in the presence of a big, beautiful animal, a free and wild thing, plus a good dose of adrenaline, and also an eager feeling that I realized, with a kind of a jolt, must be some form of bloodlust. Instantly, my hands began to tremble so hard I could hear my bracelet rattle against the gun’s stock. I lowered the gun and handed it to Mark, who raised it and took the shot. Through the dark I could barely make out the shapes of two animals galloping off into the woods.

  The deer’s liver was heavier than it looked like it should be, and firm, and as I held it under cold running water it still had the warmth of life in it. I watched Mark slice it thin, dust the slices with a little flour and salt and pepper, and lay them in a pan of sizzling butter, where a handful of minced shallots had already gone glassy and translucent. He ran out to the field and came back with a handful of mixed herbs, chopped them into a rough chiffonade, and tossed them into the pan. The liver slices still had a hint of pink to them when he pulled them out and laid them on a plate. To the pan he added a generous splash of the white wine I’d brought, and a cup or so of cream that he skimmed from the top of a gallon of milk. After it had bubbled there for a while and thickened, he put the liver slices back in and turned them once. Then he arranged them carefully on a pair of warm plates and spooned the cream sauce over them. He’d set the table with two candles, and a canning jar of wildflowers. There was a loaf of homemade bread, a salad of cold-hardy greens, and a wooden bowl of bright apples.

  My mother is one of those people who seriously hates liver. I’d gotten the idea from her that it was something to be avoided at all costs, so I’d made it to that moment without ever tasting liver. That was probably a considerable blessing, because I was spared from eating the not-so-fresh supermarket variety, cooked to a tacky paste, that gives liver a bad name. And it added to the surprise and pleasure of that first profound bite. The texture reminded me of wild mushrooms, firm but tender, and the flavor was distinct but not overpowering, the wildness balanced between the civilized and familiar pairing of cream and wine. And there was something else about it, something more primal, a kind of craving, my body yelling, EAT THAT, I NEED IT. That was my first hint that there’s a wisdom to the appetite, that if you clear out the white noise of processed food and listen, healthy and delicious are actually allies. We are animals, after all, hardwired to like what’s good for us, and it makes sense that a vestigial part of us should still be crouched by a fire somewhere, smacking its lips over some nutritionally dense innards. That might have been the same deep part of me that first told me to love Mark. Don’t be an idiot, it said. The man hunts, he grows, he’s strapping and healthy and tall. He’ll feed you, and his genes might improve the shrimpiness of your line. LOVE HIM.

  That voice was a lot clearer in Pennsylvania than it was in Manhattan when Mark came to visit me for the first time. He took a bus, and I picked him up at Port Authority. He was wearing a stained red turtleneck, a tattered brown Carhartt jacket, and the omnipresent giant straw hat. It’s hard to shock a New Yorker, but that hat parted the midtown crowd like a shark’s fin, causing pedestrian pileups as people stopped to stare. I noted, with a certain satisfaction, that Mark looked at least as out of place in my city as I’d looked on his farm.

  I’d been looking forward to his visit, but as soon as he arrived, I realized I had no idea what to do with him in the city. He hated bars, and he didn’t see the pleasure of cafés, which ruled out both my nocturnal and my diurnal habitats. I tried to introduce him to the concept of hanging out with coffee and the Times on Sunday morning, but he didn’t get it, and my apartment felt oppressively small with him moving spastically about in it. He wasn’t impressed by the restaurants I took him to, because he considered the prices offensive when the food in his trailer was generally better. His legs were too long to fit comfortably in a theater seat. He was blind to the shabby coolness of my neighborhood and its denizens, the impressiveness of my friends’ jobs and accomplishments. I couldn’t take him to a party we were invited to in that turtleneck and hat. That left bookstores, which were mildly interesting to him, and pinball, which appealed to his competitive nature.

  He liked taking taxis, because more often than not the driver would be from an agricultural village in some timeless quarter of the world, and Mark could engage him in a lively discussion of halal slaughter methods or the nuances of donkey harness or a particular village’s strategies for controlling rat damage in stored grain. One Greek driver pulled over and turned off the meter to describe in detail the way they skinned sheep in his village, by cutting a slit in the skin of one leg and blowing it up like a balloon. A few weeks later Mark tried it, and it worked. What I learned from these experiences was that there were more cultural differences between Mark and me than there were between Mark and a random selection of taxi drivers from the developing world.

  But there was always food. After his farm slowed down for the season, he came to New York every weekend. He’d arrive at my apartment with the now-familiar crates, stuffed full of heirloom winter squashes, fall greens, bundles of dry herbs, and roots. The phone book was relegated to the top of the bookshelf. Mark cleaned a mouse nest out of my oven and discovered that it worked. He unearthed plates and glasses I’d forgotten I owned and threw a cloth my sister had brought me from India over my desk to make a dining table out of it.

  One night in November, I came home from teaching a class to find Mark had rearranged the furniture. My bed was in the center of the apartment, made up with fresh white sheets, and the desk-cum-table was next to the window, overlooking the cemetery, with a steaming pot of soup in the middle. It was cream of turnip, which sounds like the most unromantic dinner in the world, except that it was perfect, made with a Japanese variety called Hakurei, so sweet and mild they tasted like crisp white apples, and Mark’s good homemade chicken stock, and farm-fresh cream. I’d contributed dessert: a bottle of very good port and a bar of the best dark chocolate I could find. It was an easy transition between the table and the bed, and I remember thinking that, if we could just box the city half of our relationship into this tight little triangle of stove, table, and bed, everything would be much easier. I have a picture from that night that I took of us in bed, with the camera held at arm’s length, we two in the corner of it, the background the exposed brick of my apartment. When I look at it now it still takes my breath away, the beauty of his long, chiseled torso, the size of his callused hand over my breast.

  That was the night he told me he wanted to leave the farm in Pennsylvania. He didn’t own the land, and he couldn’t build a house there, and so now that we’d met, there was no point in staying. He wanted me to leave the city, give up my lease, and go looking for land with him, for a place where we could build a home and a farm together.

  We’d met in the summer, and started dating in the fall, and it wasn’t quite winter yet. I thought I loved him, but I didn’t even know him. He was asking me to leave behind all the friendships I’d cultivated, all the people I knew with similar backgrounds, educations, and interests. It broke my heart to think of leaving my sister, whose SoHo apartment was only a ten-minute walk from my own and whose proximity was the very best part of my city life. How could I not be close enough to turn up at a moment’s notice for coffee or drinks, to Monday-morning-quarterback our latest relationship dramas? And there were my professional contacts, and my teaching gigs. Paltry though they were, they were what I had to hold on to. And he was asking me to burn the only bridge that could lead me back to Manhattan if things didn’t work out between us: the lease on my affordable apartment.

  H
e’d be giving up a lot, too. He’d built up a reputation in Pennsylvania, a customer base, a vital chain of connections. He’d invested in the infrastructure of his farm. But he was so forthright, and he seemed so extremely sure.

  What he was holding out to me—home—felt so dear that it set up some kind of vibration in me. He described it—fifty acres of good soil, a farmhouse with scrubbed wooden tables in a big kitchen, a pretty orchard, cows and horses in the pasture, and chickens running around the yard—until I could see it so clearly I could almost touch it. I told him, distractedly, that I’d lived with boyfriends before, and it seemed like a bad compromise, with all the tensions of a marriage and none of the benefits. But I don’t want to be your boyfriend, he said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. I want to be your husband.

  I thought again that he was either crazy or right, and I figured the odds at about even.

  After Mark went back to his farm, I met my friend James for a game of pinball at the Ace Bar on Fifth Street. It was four in the afternoon, and the bar was empty except for the skinny, tattooed girl bartender on whom James had a crush and a couple of dusty-looking alcoholics propped on opposing barstools. James and I were afternoon regulars there, and nobody minded that I brought my big shepherd mutt, Nico, who flew around the room, greeting everyone with a flapping tongue, dragging her leash through sticky pools of old beer. The pinball game was The Simpsons, my favorite, and I got multiball as I was telling James about the weekend, so that the news that I was leaving the city to be with the farmer was interrupted by dinging bells and the snaps of the flippers. James and I were in the same boat: freelancers who were no longer kids. We both came from the same kind of middle-class home, and had left behind its conventions, its rules and tastes and predictability. I think we both teetered between seeing the lives we’d made for ourselves as adventures and seeing them as disasters, and we took a certain comfort in each other’s presence. When I told him I was leaving, he didn’t believe me.

  The same thing happened when I told my friend Brad. He was about to marry his girlfriend, and he was in the mood to believe in love, but this story of mine seemed a stretch. I couldn’t blame him. It didn’t even sound real to me until the fourth or fifth time I told it. My sister was just plain mad. “You’re abandoning me,” she said. I think my landlord was the only person who was overjoyed at the news that I’d be moving out at the end of the month. The East Village was booming, and he’d have the place renovated and the rent jacked up before the doorknob was cold.

  Mark and I spent Thanksgiving with my family upstate. I’d edited my news a little, telling them of my intention to give up my lease, leave the city, and look for a farm with Mark, but leaving out any talk of marriage. My sister had met Mark in the city, and given him mixed reviews, which I’d assumed had been disseminated. I would be introducing him to my parents and my brother, Jeff, and his wife, Dani, who live in Virginia. Jeff is a naval officer, a pilot, not quite two years older than I. Earlier in his career his job was to stand on the deck of the aircraft carrier to direct landings, making life-or-death judgments about the incoming pilot’s approach. In other words, he is a serious, logical, and entirely reliable person without many disconcerting quirks.

  We arrived loaded with food. I was full of the zeal of the newly converted, eager to show off the gorgeous vegetables my boyfriend had grown—Brussels sprouts still on the stalk, sweet potatoes, beets, winter squash with flesh the color of ripe mangoes. Mark had helped his Amish friends slaughter turkeys that week, and he’d brought us one, plus a jar of his yellow, homemade butter. I’d forgotten how very clean my mother’s world is until we walked in with those boxes, which were smudged with field dirt, a few limp leaves clinging to their bottoms. It appeared we would contaminate any surface we put them on, so Dad directed Mark to the garage, and my mother asked me quietly if I was sure it was safe to eat the turkey, which was wrapped in a drippy white shopping bag, its headless neck sticking out obscenely. I’d also forgotten that my mother prefers her food highly packaged, associations with its origins as obscured as possible. When we were kids, she would never buy brown eggs, because they seemed too “farmy.”

  Mark looked barely more trustworthy than the turkey. He’d come straight from the field, where his last act had been to harvest the food we were carrying. He could have used a haircut and a shave. He was wearing a threadbare T-shirt, inside out. (He believes shirts should be worn exactly as they appear out of the laundry—inside out or inside in. “They’ll be right every other time. They wear more evenly that way.”) “Well, he has a very nice smile,” my mother said, when we were alone. Mark slept in the guest bedroom, and I slept in my girlhood bed, surrounded by my old books and a framed copy of my college diploma, which seemed to stare accusingly at me from the wall. “I didn’t educate you for this,” it said.

  On Thanksgiving morning Mom ceded her kitchen to this stranger, this tall and wild-looking man, and he proceeded to cook with total abandon. He started at six, before the rest of the house was up, rummaging through drawers for utensils, making himself perfectly at home. By seven, as people began emerging from bedrooms in search of coffee, he was cooking his heart out, six dishes going at once, food flying around him like wood chips around a chain saw. In his enthusiasm, he’d trashed Mom’s immaculate kitchen, splashing cream on the wall, treading bits of potato into the floor. I ran interference between the beets and the white carpet nearby, and at noon on the dot I opened the wine and poured Mom a big glass.

  At three, the turkey came out of the oven, and it was glorious, skin crisp and perfectly brown, worthy of a cookbook centerfold. Mark had wrapped up his cooking early and had been out in the backyard with Dad and Jeff, splitting firewood. I’d watched his strong body out the window, bringing the ax down on the wood like a force of nature, never hurried, never resting. He split the wood from an entire tree, and then he came back in to make the gravy, stirring flour into the drippings in the pan, then stock and wine and herbs. Dani came to the stove to taste it, and her eyes got wide. “This gravy makes my nipples hard,” she whispered to me. Then we all sat down, and the food worked that kind of magic on the whole family.

  It was a simple meal, without flourishes, the kind of cooking that lets the food speak for itself. My mother declared it the best turkey she’d ever tasted, and said she was going to buy organic potatoes from now on. For Mark, food is an expression of love—love of life, and love for the people around him—all the way from seed to table. I think my family could taste how deep his love ran, and between the squash pie and another glass of wine, they decided—even as he talked freely about his desire to live in a money-free economy, in a house without nails—that it was possible, just possible, that I had not come completely unhinged. “Well, he’s the best one she’s brought home so far,” I heard my brother mumble to my sister over coffee. It wasn’t a perfect beginning, but they’d decided to give him a chance.

  Mark drove back to the city with me to help me pack and move. I was in a profound state of giddiness, exactly the way I feel when I’m on a plane pointed somewhere far away and foreign, just before the wheels leave the tarmac. We sorted through my belongings and made a big pile of the ones Mark said I wouldn’t need in my new life, and a tiny pile of things to bring along. I didn’t want to leave behind my bed, which I’d spent a pile of money on, and loved. “Don’t worry,” Mark said. “I’ll make you a new one, and it’ll be so much more beautiful than this one, and it will be more special, because it will be handmade.” So we hauled mine downstairs to Janet’s and helped her throw out her old one, which smelled of poodle, and tossed my keys inside my apartment and closed the door on all of it.

  We moved an hour and a half up the Hudson, to New Paltz, where Mark had grown up and where his parents and sister still lived. We rented from his parents half a house, the house his grandmother lived in until she died. It was tucked into the elbow of a winding mountain road, and it had an old barn in the back stuffed with family artifacts: blueprints of th
e high-rise Manhattan buildings Mark’s grandfather designed, boxes of papers, heavy furniture. The woods rose up behind the barn, and behind the woods was the Shawangunk Ridge and on it a knobby rock proboscis called Bonticou Crag. A few days after we moved in Mark took me for a hike up the cliffs behind the house. It was January, and the rocks were icy, and my dog, Nico, who was used to sidewalks, scrambled to keep up. We got to the top, and Mark, nearly mute with nerves, officially asked me to marry him. I watched a hawk circling in the clear, cold sky beneath us. The wind was vicious; the view was spectacular. I said yes. When I called my family to tell them the news, my parents weren’t quite able to mask their alarm at what they were calling “a hasty decision,” and my brother actually asked, “To whom?” My sister-in-law pointed out that a long engagement is a good thing because it allows a couple to really test each other out, and my sister, Kelly, said directly that, if this was what I wanted to do, I should go ahead, because divorce is always an option.

  The house in New Paltz was supposed to be a layover, a place to base ourselves while looking for the embodiment of that vision Mark had presented to me—land, farmhouse, orchard. In my preflight giddiness, I’d imagined the layover would be brief. The bad news was that it was a terrible time to be looking. New Paltz was absorbing a surge of post–September 11 emigrants from the city, and the housing boom was in full swing. Land prices were soaring. The farms we saw were selling for $25,000 per acre, and the soil was nothing to brag about. It started to look like it might be a hellishly long layover.

  This was the first time that Mark had been without a farm since college, and without the constant hard physical work, he was wound up tighter than a border collie without a flock to herd. His obsessive side flourished unchecked. He wanted to live without electricity, but since he couldn’t rip the wiring out of the house his parents owned, he decided we would simply not use it. He bought dozens of candles and got pissed off if I flipped on a light switch. He built a compost toilet out of a bucket full of peat moss, a toilet seat, and a wooden crate and installed it in the middle of the living room. When I protested he grudgingly added a screen. He learned to spin wool and spent hours at it until he could make fine, thin yarn. There was a neighbor with an outdoor wood-fired oven, and Mark took it over, turning out forty loaves of dense bread a week, which he would drop like bricks on the neighbors’ doorsteps. He rode his bike to New Jersey and back.