The Dirty Life.On Farming, Food, and Love

by Kristin Kimball

  The tenants left the farmhouse at the end of the winter, a few months before their lease was up. We moved in and discovered it was infested with rats. The whole farm was ratty, in fact, thanks to the several tons of wheat that had been left in the granary years before and never cleared away. We did not have any furniture and were sleeping on a mattress on the floor in the downstairs apartment’s bedroom, and I would wake up at night to the sound of the rats scrabbling around in the walls. We tracked the noises to the crawl space at the top of the house, and when Mark looked in there, he found innumerable nests in the insulation. If I went to the kitchen at night for a glass of water, the light would catch a sleek brown body and a long skinny tail disappearing into a hole in the wall above the stove. The phone went dead, and when we investigated, we found the rats had chewed through the line. Part of their home invasion plan seemed to include cutting us off from the outside world. After that, I worried they’d chew through the electrical wires and burn the house down with us inside. Outside, they’d gotten cozy with the pigs, eight or ten of them nosing around for scraps at one time in broad daylight. I figured we were outnumbered by a factor of a hundred.

  We set traps, the kind that look like oversize mouse traps, with the springs so loaded they’d break a person’s finger. We set them night after night inside the walls, where the rats had chewed holes through the wallboard, and night after night we would hear the snap! of a trap going off and find a dead rat in the morning. My city-raised dog, Nico, had shown no interest in hunting rats. I found a website that said if you want your dog to rat, you have to show her that rats are the enemy. So I put on rubber gloves, shucked a freshly dead rat from a trap, and took it outside. With Nico watching, I shrieked at the rat, hurled it to the ground, did violence to it with the heel of my boot, and shrieked some more. Nico watched skeptically, then tucked her tail and slunk off, thoroughly convinced that rats should be avoided at all costs. Then the rats got wise to the snap traps and we stopped catching them; the rat traffic decreased not a whit.

  Another website suggested barrel traps. We sprinkled grain in the bottom of a fifty-gallon barrel and propped a two-by-four on the outside, so the rats could climb in, and another on the inside, so they could climb out. After a few days of this, we removed the inside stick, put a foot of water in the barrel, and floated grain on the water. The rats would go in but never come out. One morning we caught six this way, and we must have killed two dozen over the course of two weeks, but then they got smart to it and left the barrel alone.

  Finally I went to the animal shelter and asked them for their fiercest, least adoptable inmates. I came home with three cats, two bobtailed sisters and a black-and-white. They weren’t exactly the cold-blooded killing machines I’d had in mind. They were stunted, hard-luck things, not much bigger than the biggest rats. When I released them in the barn, they circled my legs and purred. When a lady came by a few days later with a box full of kittens—word had gotten around we were looking for some—I took them. I figured we’d need reinforcements.

  The five kittens were just weaned, and at night they slept together in the barn, curled into a fuzzy ball. During the day they batted paper towels around the barn floor, staged elaborate ambushes and mock fights, and mewed to be picked up and petted. One morning, a week after they arrived, I flipped on the lights in the barn and there was no mewing. I found the first one, the little gray, next to the cows’ stanchions, cold and stiff, and then saw two more. I picked the gray one up. Dead, it felt tinier than in life, a little rack of bones covered in soft fur. Mark came in and took it from me, examined it, parted the fur at the neck, and found a pair of vampiric puncture wounds, half an inch apart.

  “It was a weasel,” he said. “They suck blood.”

  Is the whole world just a cruel dance between eaters and the eaten? I buried the poor things in the compost pile. The two surviving kittens emerged from hiding after a few days, and we named them Mink and Marten. The weasel evaded our efforts to trap it and went on to kill a banty hen and all her chicks; then it slipped back to the underworld, through whatever steaming crack it had emerged from, never to torment us again.

  But the rats began to disappear, too, little by little, first from the house and later from the barns. I never saw a cat kill one, but the cats stalked all the rats’ favorite places, even took their luxurious naps in the granary, on top of the sacks of grain. Maybe the rats retreated or became less brazen. Maybe the cats were eating the rat babies. Whatever it was, we were gaining on them.

  Part Three

  Spring

  It was a strange betrothal. Romantic, but different from what that word had meant to me in my old life, when it had been almost synonymous with intrigue. Mark didn’t even know how to have a relationship like that. When he was in third grade, he wrote long, involved love notes to a series of girls in his class. The boys would tackle him on the playground, steal the notes from his pockets, and read them out loud from the top of the monkey bars. That didn’t stop him from writing them. His biggest crush that year was on a girl named Claudia. He used his allowance to buy her a glittery poster—white unicorn in the foreground, castle and rainbow in the background—and when she told him primly that she couldn’t accept it, he tried to give it to another girl. She rejected it, too, so he shrugged, took it home, and hung it on his own wall. He was undaunted then, and remained so. It would never occur to him to be coy. He had no hidden agenda, was plotting no reversal. He had shown me who he was the first time we met, and had never been cagey about his intentions.

  So the romance between us came from some new and different source, from being yoked together with a common goal, a tight little team of two. I imagined this was what it would feel like to forge a relationship at boot camp or be marooned together, albeit on a very fertile island. We woke up and fell asleep talking about stock, seeds, drainage, tools, or how to eke another minute out of the day by streamlining a chore, saving steps. Our bodies were so tired. Sometimes, in the brief moment between bed and sleep, we’d touch our fingertips together, an act we cynically called farmer love. If we were destined to have children, I remember thinking, they’d have to be conceived in the dead of winter, when nights were long.

  I had never in my life been so dirty. The work was always dirty, beyond what I’d previously defined as dirty, and it took too much energy to keep oneself out of it. I had daily intimacy not just with dirt dirt but with blood, manure, milk, pus, my own sweat and the sweat of other creatures, with the grease of engines and the grease of animals, with innards, with all the stages of decomposition. Slowly, the boundary of what I found disgusting pushed outward. The thought of bathing was unappealing at the end of the chilly spring day, with the unheated bathroom so far from the woodstove and morning milking so near. Some nights I would only peel off my outer layer of clothes before leaping under the thick comforter, leaving the pieces at the foot of the bed for easy access in the morning dark. My wardrobe from the city had sifted down to one small drawer of unruined things, reserved for off-farm use, which meant they never got worn. The rest had been added, piece by piece, to the general-use bin. I discovered the insulating properties of silk, which gave my collection of lingerie new purpose. Some days I farmed in a black cashmere V-neck that I used to call my first-date sweater. In its youth I’d pampered it with dry cleaning and padded hangers. Now it was flecked with hay, two holes worn in the elbows.

  I let my hair grow out, not by conscious choice but because making and keeping an appointment to cut it never reached the top of the priority list. I forgot to pluck my eyebrows. I hardly ever looked in the mirror, and when I did I saw that all the outdoor work was etching new lines around my eyes, weathering my complexion, bringing out the red tones, the freckles. I began to feel the weight of my skin on my brow, my cheeks folding down at the sides of my mouth. My new life was marking me. It was happening so quickly. There were intermittent spells of resistance, during which I’d pluck and moisturize and exfoliate, and then there was a period of grieving for
my old self, who seemed to be disappearing toward the horizon, and then I relaxed into it.

  March was a tense and slightly dangerous time, like a border crossing between two conflicting countries. It’s not the deprivations of winter that get you, or the damp of spring, but the no-man’s-land between. The weather was beyond unpredictable, zero some nights, forty others, with winds that tore loose the tin on the barn roofs and made the horses wild in their pasture. In the fields, the snow took on a dull, depressed look, ceding more and more territory each day to the mud. Beside the driveway, the spiky piles of scrap metal came unglued from the thawing ground. On warm days, the mud in front of the barn was deep enough to grab and hold our boots. The potholes became a menace. Melting snow revealed two small outbuildings, undone by the weight of winter, resting under folded roofs. We skulked around, cold feet in wet boots.

  Out in the pasture, the Highland cattle had mites; they scratched themselves with their horns or against the trees and shed out in clumps, pink skin showing through in patches. Then came the dysentery. It started with the biggest steer, a white fellow with one long horn. Every few minutes he’d lift his tail and send an alarming jet of watery, brown liquid streaming out behind. Two days later the brown liquid was tinted deep red and there were cords of mucus and sloughed-off intestinal lining in it, and the steer’s condition deteriorated, his coat going dull, midribs showing. We consulted the Owenses, who said there wasn’t much to do for it but watch for the turnaround, which happened five days later. The steer picked up as quickly as he went down, first recovering a little light in his eyes, then nibbling at the rougher bits of hay, the faucet of his intestines slowing from a stream to a trickle. Another of the Highlands had it by then, and we thought shelter might do the herd some good, so we moved them to the east barn run-in. The first day we watched them jostle one another for hay. The next morning, one of the yearling steers was standing alone, roach-backed and shivering. He looked like he’d been shot in the ribs with a large-caliber bullet. He’d been gored.

  We called the Owenses, and Neal and his brother, Donald, came over to have a look. The steer’s fate depended, they said, on whether or not the horn had pierced an intestine. If not, he would probably heal, but if so, there would be no hope. Donald and Mark shouldered him into a wall, the steer still strong enough to give the two big men a good challenge, and Donald drew some fluid from the wound with a syringe and smelled it. There was the telltale stink of manure, the sign of a leaking intestine. There was nothing to do but slaughter the yearling right away. Once he was skinned and hanging, we could see the patch of infected meat around the wound, stained chartreuse, so bright and vivid it was almost neon. We cut it out and cut out some meat around it for good measure and threw it on the ground. Nico snapped it up and slunk away, and she looked pleased for days. The rest of the meat we butchered into packages for our freezer.

  The cold, wet weather wasn’t kind to the other animals, either. The horses sank to their fetlocks in the mud, and they didn’t move far from their hay. The pigs had it the worst. We’d moved them out of the barn to pasture, and Mark had made them a shelter from a round fiberglass irrigation tank that he’d cut in half and dubbed the pigloo. We filled it with several bales of straw, and when the pigs were all cuddled up inside it was cozy, steam rising out of the chimneylike hole in the top. Outside the pigloo, though, the pasture was saturated, and the pigs had churned it to deep mud. Soon they were reduced to a turtlelike lumber, their sharp trotters sinking almost to the hilt. We fenced in a higher, adjacent section of pasture, and they came onto firm ground tentatively, like sea-legged sailors just off ship. A brown gilt with black spots hung back. She was too well-trained to the boundary of her old pasture and would not transgress it, even when the electric string was removed. She paced and grunted nervously, while the other pigs rooted for last year’s grass. We were late for milking, so we left her there by herself. It was two whole days before her loneliness trumped her fear and she crossed.

  Funny that out of this scabby and difficult season flows all the sweetness of the North Country year. We got another storm, a foot of heavy snow, and then the clouds cleared and the night froze hard. The next day the sun rose with new energy. Mark and I were eating our lunch at noon and heard a thick sheet of ice tear free from the roof of the farmhouse, followed by the drip and patter of melt from the eaves. With that, the mood of our whole world changed. We’d crossed the border into friendlier territory. The sap was rising in the trees.

  The sap buckets were scrubbed and the spiles were ready and waiting. We’d planned to lash Thomas’s sap tank to a small wagon, to be pulled through the woods by the horses. Everything was in order, except that the snow in the woods was too deep for wheels. We needed a sled—a jumper, the Owenses called it—and we needed it soon. When Neal and Donald Owens’s father was young, the family farm ran on horsepower, and everyone sugared. If anyone knew how to make a jumper, it would be Mr. Owens.

  Mr. Owens arrived with Neal, in his seventies and sparely built. He looked as though he’d been weathered down from Neal’s bulk to their common essential form, which was hard and locustlike, with a knobby nose and penetrating eyes the blue of a Spode teacup. Unlike the other older farmers we’d met, who favored feed-company caps and T-shirts, Mr. Owens was sharply dressed, in a cowboy hat and pointy boots with high slanted heels and a smart Western-style shirt. The wallet in the back pocket of his jeans was joined to his belt loop with a chain, trucker-style. Mark and Neal and I walked him through the machine shop and the east barn, giving him the tour, and he took in the details in perfect silence. He grew up on a farm within three miles of us, and he’d certainly seen our place a million times in his life and knew its corners better than we did. Then we all walked to the west barn, where Sam and Silver were in their stalls, picking at a flake of hay. I could see Mr. Owens perk up then, and he broke off from our group, where Mark and Neal were debating how many bales would fit in the loft. Mr. Owens fingered the harness hanging on a hook and then went to the horses. He stepped into the stall, murmuring “whoa” in a low voice, and ran a hand along Silver’s shoulder, down both front legs, stepped back to get a good look at how the horse was put together. He gave a little nod.

  “This how he hooks ’em?” he asked, pointing to Sam, the taller horse, on the left side of the stall, and Silver, shorter but stockier, on the right. I nodded. “Why, that’s Canadian style!” he hooted. “We always hooked our bigger horse on the nigh side.” One hand on Silver’s flank, he told me he’d gotten his own first team of horses when he was a boy of ten or eleven. His father’s horses were full-size drafts, but his first team was a pair of Percheron-Morgan crosses, a gelding and a mare, small horses with good feet and big hearts and brains. “That’s the Morgan in them, you see,” he said. They could work a whole hot summer day at haying alongside his father’s big team without giving up. His first job as a boy was to use his team to lift loads of loose hay from the wagons into the mow, using a grapple hook. The grapple was on a pulley and track that ran back into the mow. That little team of his was so smart he could wrap the lines around the rail and send them along on their own. They knew where to stop, and Mr. Owens, who was known then as young Donald, would release the grapple load of hay to its proper place in the mow, and the horses would turn around and come back to the place where they started, ready to begin again. While he was telling me this story, his face had come to life, as though he were talking about a lost first love. Then he lapsed back into silence and his face went still.

  We walked to the woods west of the barn, Neal breaking a trail in front, Mark next, lugging the chain saw, and Mr. Owens following, spry and silent, a knitted cap on now in place of the cowboy hat. We were looking for hardhack, the local name for hop hornbeam, a heavy, dense hardwood that wears extremely well and is, according to Mr. Owens, the very best material from which to make a jumper. Halfway up the hill to the sugar bush, he raised an oracular hand and pointed out a pair of twelve-foot saplings, bowed slightly at the
thin end, as though they were aspiring all along to be runners.

  I ran to the barn to get Silver, while Mark went to work with the chain saw. By the time I got back up the hill he had three saplings—the two hardhack runners plus a straight young ash, destined to be our tongue—felled and limbed. We wrapped a logging chain around them and hitched it to Silver, who pulled the three trees home through the snow with about as much effort as it would take me to haul home a trio of toothpicks.

  In the machine shop, we bound the hardhack runners to wooden braces and decked them over with pine boards to make a sturdy platform, six feet by eight. Nobody had built a jumper in our neighborhood for years, and when word got around, our neighbors came to see, some bringing their woodworking tools, some just standing at the margins, watching. The jumper took on form, low to the ground, rough but elegant, its lines as natural as the trees it was made from. Mr. Owens directed, pointing out where to add more bracing, how to tie in the runners so they’d stay straight and true. As we were getting ready to attach the tongue, a disagreement arose over some detail that Mr. Owens insisted on and the others—his sons and Mark and a whole shop full of younger men now—deemed illogical. Mr. Owens got quietly peeved and went and sat in the truck for the rest of the day, so he missed the inauguration of the jumper, which was too bad. I stepped Sam over the new ash tongue, and Mark hooked the four tug chains to the evener, and I sat down on the green-smelling planks with the lines in my hands, and the horses leaned into the collars. The first few yards in the driveway were hard going, peeling the bark from the bottoms of the runners, and then we hit the snow and were free.

  I’d spent a lot of hours with the horses by then, not all of them easy. Harnessing was still too much for me. I’d struggle to lift the seventy-pound tangle of leather and hames up onto the horses’ backs day after day, and every day I’d be defeated. I could thread my arm under the britchen and saddle and grasp the hames down low, one in each hand, like I’d seen Jimmy Cooper do it, and I could carry it to the horses, and I could even lift the far hame up high over my head and nudge it inch by inch over the withers. But then the rest of the harness would press awkwardly into my neck, cutting off the blood to my brain, and I’d go faint and have to start all over again, my arms more exhausted with each try. I hated asking Mark to help me. With his strength, and from his height, he could pick up the harness and place it on a horse’s back as easily as if it were made of twine. I would spend a half hour damaging my brain cells and exhausting myself before going to find Mark, who kept insisting it was just a matter of technique.