All we could do was keep trying. We were making it up as we went along. I remember feeling a kind of reverse nostalgia then, a longing for the future, when the canon would be established, when we would know what to expect and be equipped to handle it.
The heat came down on us like a solid thing, as though to make up for the frigid winter. The pace of growth redoubled. In the North Country, the plants have to seize the day. You could practically hear them growing; I imagined the cells dividing and madly redividing with tiny pops, the pace of their metabolism stoked by the abundance of light, heat, and rain.
The quack grass sent forth its spidery shoots, threatening to strangle the new carrots, the young beets. We pulled the one-horse cultivator out of the back of the pole barn. Next to the two-horse cultivator, it was a blunt and puny tool, a simple adjustable V that runs between the rows, teeth on the bottom, a clevis for the horse at the pointy end and handles for the humans behind. Like the plow, it’s meant to be a one-person operation, the lines buckled behind the shoulders, hands guiding the handles. I hooked Sam to it and gave it my best shot, but on the first pass I killed more carrots than weeds. Mark tried, with the same result. In times of crisis, you fall back on what you know. I unbuckled the long lines from Sam’s bridle, Mark helped me vault onto his back, and I rode him, using the strap of his checkline for reins. Mark walked behind, guiding the cultivator. It cost us two passes for every row against the two-horse cultivator’s one, and it took two people, quadruple the work, but it was good at uprooting the quack. I must have looked small way up there on Sam’s back. A neighbor stopped by the house to ask who the child was, riding the cultivating horse. “That was my job when I was a child,” he said.
Without Silver, the tide of the war turned against us. Rains came at bad times, keeping us out of the field, throwing the advantage to the weeds. Whole sections of fields were lost when they grew way beyond white thread stage and would need to be hand-pulled. We walked the fields in the rain for an emergency triage, decided to sacrifice the young parsnips and the last planting of cabbage. They were overrun and would have required too much time to save, and the weeds were not far from setting seed. A single amaranth can produce two hundred thousand seeds, which can wait in the soil for decades for the opportunity to sprout. If we let them go, we’d be sowing our own future problems. When the rain stopped I harrowed those rows into the ground, weeds and our plants meeting the same end, and afterward I felt the relief that a traitor feels when the dirty work is done.
Our friends and neighbors helped. They saved us. Mike and Laurie Davis came over with all three of their sons and spent a whole Saturday hand-weeding the onions with us at a time when their own farm’s needs were just as urgent. Lars came to see what we were up to on his land and was immediately pressed into service, clearing the last bits of old wheat and dead rats from the granary so we could use it to store new grain. He returned almost weekly throughout the season for more, launching into whatever job was most urgent with his characteristic enthusiasm. Mark’s best friend, Matt, came from his farm in New Jersey, bringing his young son, Jack. Matt and Mark had worked together at Genesis, a biodynamic vegetable farm founded by radical nuns. It was humbling to watch them harvest, each of them stripping two double rows of peas in the time it took me to work my way down one. While I dunked the peas in cold water to take the heat of the field out of them, Matt helped Mark slaughter a steer. (I worried it would upset Jack, who was six, but he was used to the sight of a big animal’s insides. “Feels like a basketball,” he said mildly, poking the steer’s taut and enormous first stomach.) Mark’s sister Linda Brook had run her own farm before her first child was born, and she and her family came to visit and were promptly put into the potatoes, hauling out the tall yellow wild mustard plants that were threatening to drop their seed. My father drove up for two- and three-day stretches and took over Mark’s job, steering the one-horse cultivator while I rode Sam. He still talks about how heartbroken he was then to see us work so hard for something that was so clearly doomed to fail. One afternoon a carload of young tourists from Maine stopped to take pictures of the horse and the cultivator. Mark met them in the field, talking fast, and before they knew what was happening, he’d pressed hoes into their hands and put them to work in the carrots.
On our evening farm walks, the list of crops to harvest grew longer. We cruised the peas as the sun went down, grazing on handfuls of pods so full they looked dented. Next to them, the deer had gotten into the lettuces, taking a bite from the very heart of each head, sampling a hundred but eating none to the end. Mark liked to graze lettuces that way in the evening, too. He’d cut a head from its base with his knife and sink his face into it, ripping the sweet center with his teeth, casting away the rest. This is the farmer’s privilege, a form of decadence, and it made us feel rich.
Question: Why is farming like a relationship?
Answer: Because you do not reap what you sow. That’s a lie. You reap what you sow, hill, cultivate, fertilize, harvest, and store.
Silver healed. A hailstorm missed us. The worst of the crisis passed. The tomatoes were heavy on the vine. The corn neared the cusp of its glory, doing its brave best, ten feet tall in the good places. Corn! That’s what it said when I looked at it, the exclamation point green as its leaves in my mind. The onions had collapsed at the neck, laying their leaves on the ground. “What’s wrong with them?” I asked Mark. “Nothing,” he said. “It’s senescence. They’ve finished growing.”
The grass that had been left to its own devices was up to my chest. When we walked the mowed margins of the fields in the evenings, a school of black crickets sprang ahead of us like dolphins in front of a ship. The pond behind the farmhouse had shrunk to half its size, and it was thick with frogs. Every afternoon, the great blue heron came, patience in the form of a bird. Still, still, and then a movement too quick to be seen. The heron had gigged a frog. The frog struggled at the end of the heron’s bill, and the heron tilted his wedge of a head to the sky, swallowed, and resumed his perfect stillness, one skinny chorus-girl leg cocked backward at the knee.
Some new weather settled in, heavy with humidity, and the farm felt almost oppressively fertile. The zucchini grew monstrous overnight, flies blanketed a knuckle bone left in the hot grass with their eggs. Just a tick past fruition sits decay.
The spokesthing for the hot decline of the season was the tomato hornworm. Who knew these creatures existed? Fat as Mark’s thumb and at least as long, they had smooth, soft skin the color of a Granny Smith apple, with white filigree details. Looked at one way, they were beautiful, meticulously crafted pieces of living art; another way, and they were horrible, soft, voracious aliens. Either way, I had to admire the camouflage, which was so good I could stare at a damaged plant for ages before I saw the worm, though the evidence of its presence was obvious: leaves missing, whole stems consumed, big, wet clumps of black frass. Sometimes, when I was close but still couldn’t see it, the worm gave itself up with a faint but menacing clickclickclickclick. Mark had told me they bite, so I plucked each one off with my Leatherman and rubbed it into the dirt with my boot. The insides were a bright green jelly; the seven-chambered heart continued to pulse in the dust. I did not dare turn my back on it until it was still.
July hustled by, and the crops edged closer to assured. By August, the wall of frost was coming, so new weeds were less worrisome. Frost would kill them for us before they set seed. We stayed up half the night to get the wedding invitations out, and once they slid through the slot at the post office, I felt a terrible dread.
This man I was supposed to be marrying, he was maddening. I was maddening with him. We generated a ferocious energy together. I remember in my early twenties talking with my sister, ten years my senior, about the nature of marriage. She was just out of one then, and wise. There are two kinds, she said. The comfortable kind and the fiery kind. Mark and I, we were tinder, just begging for a spark.
The things I admired most about him in the abstract were
what drove me nuts in the specific. He was a believer. When he was fifteen, he was home alone after school one day when the Jehovah’s Witnesses knocked on the door. He opened it and invited them in. When his parents came home, many hours later, they found him giving an exegesis on his personal credo, which he had typed into a five-page document. The Witnesses were silent on the other end of the couch.
By the time I met him, his credo had been informed by his studies and a lot of travel in the developing world. He’d spent time in villages and cities in Kenya, Ecuador, and Mexico with his family, then, after college, he’d lived and worked for stretches in Venezuela and India. To him, the impoverished lives, loss of rural culture, and environmental degradation in those places seemed tied to the world’s accelerating cycle of production and consumption. He saw that cheap goods cost somebody, somewhere, plenty, but by the time they reached the big-box shelves thousands of miles away, those costs were invisible. He became uncomfortable with processes he could not see, impacts he could not measure.
These were not extraordinary conclusions, and many other people all over the world have seen and acknowledged them, and then gone on living more or less the same way they have all along. Mark was not one of those people. He tried, as much as possible, to live outside of the river of consumption that is normal life in America. He preferred secondhand everything, from underwear to appliances. Even better than secondhand was handmade. He dreamed aloud to me of someday making his own toothbrushes out of boars’ bristles. He hated plastic, couldn’t stand the thought of adding more of it to the world. He hated waste. When we met he owned a big ball of his own used dental floss, which he was keeping, he said vaguely, because it was useful. When pressed for specifics, he said he might need it one day to stitch up a rip in his pants.
He thought about the effects of every quotidian decision. Once, when we were living in New Paltz, we had a discussion on the way to the store about whether it was better to buy organic food that was not local or local food that was not organic. It was a one-sided discussion, a monologue really, and it was long, because my old Honda had finally died, and he’d resisted replacing it, and for a brief while I’d played along, so we were riding to the store on the red tandem bicycle left over from his last relationship. When we got to the store I picked up a jar of some bitter coffee substitute that I wanted to try, to attempt to methadone myself off of the absurd amount of coffee I was drinking at the time, and he pointed out that it was neither local nor organic and suggested I put it back. I found that shocking and ridiculous and bought it anyway.
My friends and I, we weren’t big believers. We pretty much closed out the age of irony. If we believed in anything, it was in the coolness of the Lower East Side Mexican place that would sell you illegal margaritas in to-go cups. For me, rules were kind of like accessories, nice things to have but detachable. But what is your ethic? Mark would ask, when we got entangled in a disagreement about the right way to do something on the farm. I don’t have an ethic, I’d say. I’m from New York. I’m a hedonist.
His beliefs were not all grim and pious. They had a lot of leavening. He believed in the basic goodness and generosity of the world and its people. The world, in general, responded to him with goodness and generosity. When it didn’t, he largely ignored it, and was undeterred. My own belief in the goodness and generosity of the world was contingent on constant positive feedback, which I suppose made it less a belief than a hypothesis.
All this believing gave Mark an unbending strength. Without it, we never would have gotten through our first season. We never would have learned, through all the difficulties, how to farm with horses. It was what allowed him to convince other people to get onboard with us. To a person like me, untethered from the values I grew up with and not firmly in possession of my own, this was terribly attractive. But in those weeks before the wedding, I was keenly aware that unbending strength is almost exactly the same as rigidity, and that Mark could be blinkered by it, and unforgiving of people like me, who were neither as sure nor as tenacious as he.
And that stubborn courage, sometimes it made him a daredevil, sometimes it slipped into foolish. A few years after we started, we hired employees, and Mark sent two of them, James and Paige, to the fifty-acre field where the beef herd had wintered, to castrate a new calf. They came back looking pale, the calf still in possession of his testicles. The mother cow, they reported, had gotten agitated when James grabbed her baby’s leg, and they’d decided that the job would be safer with three people. “Oh, bah,” Mark said. He’d castrated plenty of calves all by himself, with the mama bawling and shaking her head at him. You just have to be quick and decisive and not look so scared, he advised. James and Paige had worked with us long enough by then not to give in to their boss. “You do it, then,” James said.
The mother in question was named Sinestra, a young black cow with a blunted left horn. She’d lost her first calf the year before, during a stretch of cold, wet weather. Mark and I had spotted him way out in the field, with Sinestra standing over him, mooing pitifully. In the early days I used to see a sleeping creature from a distance in the field and worry, unreasonably, that it was dead, and I’d make a lot of noise until I startled it into getting up. But dead things are too flat and still, and there is some other subtle thing that you can see, maybe the absence of suppleness. Once you’ve seen it, death is obvious, even from a distance, and that calf was very, very dead, a little heap of wet brown leaves.
Sinestra, though, didn’t understand. All she knew was that her bag was aching and her baby wouldn’t move. When we got closer, we could see how much she’d been licking him, because his fur was all in tufts. We’d come to the field to feed the herd their hay, and once the wagon was empty, we drove out to pick up the carcass, which would otherwise encourage scavenging, which can lead to predation. We loaded the calf on the wagon and took him away, but Sinestra lingered around that spot in the field for days, searching, lowing. I think that in her wordless way she blamed us for her loss, and I think that’s what was in her head when she saw Mark coming across the field with the elastrator, aiming for her boy.
The way it usually goes, the hardest part of castrating a bull calf is catching him. They are fast almost from birth, and they can duck and spin, but if you get to one before he’s a week old, it’s not impossible; a good sprint or two and you’ve got him. After that, you just flip him on his back, feel to make sure both testicles are present and accounted for, and use the four-pronged elastrator to slip a tight, heavy rubber band around their base. Then you let him go. The mother cow usually hovers nearby giving you the hairy eyeball, but it’s all over so fast, she doesn’t have time to organize her molasseslike thoughts into action.
Sinestra, though, must have been thinking ahead. I was not there to see it, but James and Paige were. Mark had taken them along to show them how it is done. As soon as Mark touched the calf, they said, Sinestra charged. Mark was not convinced she was serious, so he kept working, and Sinestra knocked him flat and then tried to rub him into the ground with her big horns. James and Paige had been watching from a safe distance, but when it got serious they ran in, arms flapping, and hazed her away. Sinestra, the little black calf in tow, lit out for the metal barn with no sides, where the rest of the herd was calmly eating hay.
At this point, most people would count themselves lucky to have gotten through such an experience without serious injury and gone home to figure out a new way. Mark, being Mark, dusted himself off and decided to have one more go. This time, he hadn’t even gotten hold of the calf before Sinestra charged him. She’d worked out the kinks in her plan on the first charge. This time, it was business. Mark darted for cover behind one of the barn’s metal I-beams, and Sinestra ran squarely into it, with spectacular force, so that the whole barn shook. It was only then that Mark decided her son could keep his testicles for the time being.
There is a little coda to this story, though, and, to be fair to Mark and his dang magic circle, I have to tell it. A few days afte
r the Sinestra incident, while we were all still having a good laugh about it at Mark’s expense, we got a call from a couple looking specifically for a black Highland bull calf to raise as their herd sire. Black is relatively rare in the breed, and Sinestra’s boy was the only black one in our herd. They were willing to pay a premium, so that black calf and his untouched testicles were sold at a tidy profit.
The wedding was to happen on the farm, and all these people from my past would be arriving to see my new life. My parents’ many friends were all invited. These people from my hometown had sent me off into the world with great hopes for my future. I’d been given the enormous gift of an Ivy League education and had moved on from there to the gleaming, mysterious city, and now this. I felt that they had certain expectations of me, that they had a right to them, and that those expectations would probably be dashed by the sight of a scurrying rat or the smell of pig manure. I had a lot of anxiety about the wedding.
We chose the site for our ceremony, a rolling thirty-acre field in the middle of the farm, a little higher than the surrounding land. It was one of our best fields, well-drained and full of clover. We’d grazed it, rested it, and then cut the hay from it late in the season, so that as summer waned and fall came on, it looked like acres and acres of perfectly manicured lawn. The hedgerow on three sides was old and full of large trees and stretches of stone fence, elegant signifiers of another farmer’s work. On the fourth side the hedgerow was young and the trees were mostly brush and saplings, except for one twisty, old oak that stood in the middle, towering over everything. No film scout could find a location that said bucolic wedding more sweetly, and the oak—sturdy, ancient thing—seemed an auspicious symbol of permanence and stability. It was a half-mile walk from the barnyard, too far for some of our guests, so we planned to shuttle them down with the horses and a long green wagon with bench seats that we borrowed from Shane Sharpe. We would have the reception dinner and a dance in the loft of the west barn. That would require some work, since the barn was empty of hay but full of pigeons, had no lights, and could be reached only by means of a ladder up the side.
The Dirty Life.On Farming, Food, and Love Page 18
