Farm Work

by Richard Giles

Daddy’s mother was a farmer’s daughter and his father was a travelling salesman.  It’s like a joke that Daddy would have told.

But he didn’t like to talk about it. His father drank himself to death. His mother, my grandmother, was tough as a hickory stick, ninety three pounds on the bathroom scale, out the door walking to church on Sunday morning, and lying like a tiny shrunken bird in her blue satin-lined casket at the age of 99. She told us grandchildren story after story about growing up on the prairie in Missouri. The one I most remember is about the hired man who killed the team of mules because he wouldn’t take the bits out of their mouths to let them drink at noon. And Grandmother laughing and her crooked finger wagging a scold at that long-gone hired man as she finished telling the story. 

All his life, Daddy worked around crops and animals and farmers, but he never owned a farm until he was just about done working. He and Mama built a house, and then Mama got sick and died, and then Daddy thrashed around on the farm another eight or nine years before he died. In the end he wanted to live. The day they cut open his heart, he already had the plug in the bathtub drain for the next morning. The house sat there on the farm without them. Their shrubs and pear trees grew and bloomed, and the water started running rusty out of the faucet in the kitchen.

I sold my part of his little farm to my sister and started looking for a place of my own.  A cottage, a cabin, a shack, a garden, a woodlot, a stream, a place to go to, a place to get away. Then I met a girl named Holley, and then the forty acres along the river at the foot of the mountain. 

Her face is long and beautiful, her nose could slice peaches. I wanted somebody to fix me toast, and she needed a man to fix her toaster. She wanted two children, a girl and a boy. The land is silt loam four feet deep, laid down by the glacier and then overlaid by the river. Chocolate cake with sweet icing. The first time I walked over it was a Monday morning toward the end of October. Little bits of snow were flying into the thick corn stubble. The river ran clear as glass over rocks. I wanted to lie down and eat handfuls of the dark loamy dirt! I plowed and planted and named the patches of the farm. Holley tended wild flowers, and eagles cruised the river. I quit my job. After lunch we floated down the river on tractor tubes. It was the story of Eden, and then things went wrong.  But that’s the story of Eden all over again.

January 

I knock the snow off my boots and come into the dog room, but she’s re-arranged the room, and when I go to set my boots near the heater vent to dry, she says, “No, they go over there now.”  This pisses me off and I throw my boots against the wall.

“I hate this fucking house,” she yells and goes slamming through the kitchen door.

I pull my boots back on and go outside with the kids, which is what they wanted anyway. Play with us, Daddy. I push them down in the deep snow, first Sibyla—those big startled, laughing eyes set in her mothers fine face—and then Asa, puffed like a small bear in his snowsuit. They get up and attack me, and I push them down again and again. Out through the snow, beyond where my trucks are parked, we climb the big dirt pile, now a snowy mountain. Asa makes it to the top first and defends the peak. I remember that the bigger truck wouldn’t build up brake air when I started it last week and I go over to crank it and let it warm up. Asa yells, brokenhearted, from the top of his mountain, “Daddy, you were supposed to play with us.”

“I am,” I say and I head back to his mountain, but Sibyla catches him off his guard and throws him brutally down the hill. The snow is bloody beneath his dripping nose and he’s making the most of it. A wail echoing already off the big mountain beyond the river, an inherited roar against big sisters, and I think of my sweet sister living away off in Mama and Daddy’s little dream house with the willow-oak and the blackgum tree in the yard and the owl in the big pines on the slope down to the double ponds where brother John and I skated on thin ice, years after the Christmas incident on the frozen creek.

All of this is too much. I carry my boy up the barn lane toward the house. The frost-proof water valve in the barn froze and cracked last week. I need to replace the broken head with the head from the one that broke its rod two years ago. Where did I put that piece of junk? Crescent wrench and a 14 inch pipe wrench, and I could fix it in fifteen minutes, half an hour at most. The iron pipe and the tools so cold your fingers stick to them. We climb on up the path toward the house. I tell Asa that, yes, he can stand on his chair and stir the cocoa into the milk for the hot chocolate. Wonder do we have enough milk, is that pint of cream still good. Yes, yes, Sibyla, you can whip the cream.

Holley comes into the kitchen with a book in her hand. Judgment on the cocoa dust and spilt cream. “Don’t,” I say, and she goes out. Then she comes back in without the book. She wants something, makes a stiff attempt at a gentle embrace, a skill she’s never learned. Truce, not reconciliation. On the counter I catch our reflection. A love scene reflected and exaggerated in the blank chrome of a toaster. Held briefly then broken.

Clatter of the egg-beater whipping the cream, the milky smell of the milk beginning to warm, licked cream, bitter brown chocolate, the blatant western sun slashing in through the side window, and the view out the back door—the bright barn, the broad field glittering with snow, cool black mountain behind it all.

And then I remember I left the truck idling in the barnyard. 

January is the month of stillness and rest, the month to repair the broken machinery and read to the kids. The month of the haunting sleepless nightmare of the dollar, of loss, of failure—the harvest bins lying silently full in their protected room against the bank wall of the barn, but the list of needs for the new crop running to the margins of page after page of scrap paper stacked on my desk. I leave the small desk lamp turned on so I can come at any hour of the night and add another startling item to the list of need. Like a parent coming in the night to comfort a sick child, I come to chart the balance of my ailing farm, and to comfort myself that naming the nightmare might make me a better man.

Monday morning the order comes in, and after the sun begins to warm the side of the barn, we staple sheets of plastic over the windows and thaw the rollers on the potato washer with buckets of warm water hauled from the house. Carolas, reds, and Kennebecks and a few cases of onions—two pallets all together. If we hustle we’ll have it out the door by early afternoon, on the truck and down the road. All this food in the dead of winter. And the money coming home like salvation. 

JUNE
I’m crossing the barnyard to the shop, talking on the phone to Joe about Wednesday’s order, when I see the cloud coming up the valley. There’s more of everything in the field than I had expected, so we’re revising the offering, adding cases more of lettuce, collards, spinach, and escarole. From west to east the cloud rolls into the blue afternoon sky, silent, powerful, deeply American in its beauty. It’s the moment you’ve seen caught in some painting of agriculture and weather. The boys are running their tractors away off across the field. The girls run to fasten greenhouse doors, and I shut the doors to the barn and shop and then turn again to the west to see a brilliant curtain of white sweeping up the valley. In the moment before the storm hits us, I see the air go green, hear the odd clatter in the trees out on the mountainside, notice the precipitation leaping from the earth as the storm bounds across the field toward the barn, and I think: hail storm, as if the words might break the curse. Then the ice rattles suddenly, deafeningly against the trucks, the barn, the greenhouses, and stings where it hammers my head, and I run into the small greenhouse we call Brooklyn, where the girls are already gasping and tugging off their cold shirts.

It comes on for half an hour like grape-shot running horizontal in a forty knot wind, piling in great shoals along the windward side of the buildings, hammering so loud on the greenhouse roof that we give up trying to talk and bow our heads in a kind of reverence, the girls and I, to what has to be. When, just at the end of the storm, the boys run in laughing and shedding their wet clothes, we look at them and know that they haven’t thought about those thousands of tender plants in the field but only of the wild adventure of weather.

Half an hour of clattering disaster and then sudden silence. “Go on home,” I say, and we head out across the icy barnyard. The children, home from school, run screaming across the yard and down the path. “Ice,” they yell, scooping handfuls of it from beneath the apple tree. The magical reality of this summer ice storm will mark them more indelibly than all the other summer days, and the memory of this day—along with the story of the summer day three years ago, when we paddled the canoe across our flooded field and into our neighbor’s yard to see if he needed a ride to higher ground—will become the story they tell their grandchildren.

Kalan, big brother to my little farm team and de facto crew chief, lingers after the others leave. We take the camera from the shelf in the wash room and drive together out toward the field. Along the state road, a plow truck scrapes the hail into a berm on the shoulders. The yards and the roofs of the village are papered with leaves stripped from the trees. Down in our fields, ice lies five and six inches deep in the row middles. The leaves of the broccoli and kale and beans and Swiss chard have been shredded and flung to the ground or blown into the next county, and the standing skeletons of the plants are pocked with bullet holes. The lettuce looks to have been run over with a lawnmower.

Kalan takes pictures of his own hand holding the ice and pictures of our damaged crop. We walk together through the crop. Across the floor of the valley, a frosty fog rises from the mass of thawing ice, chilling our legs and threatening to freeze the battered plants, adding insult to obliteration. Above the mountain and above the hovering fog that hangs across the valley, the sky is again blue and still. The evening sun shines quietly across the disaster the way the sun will shine on a boat flipped over in a storm. 

Kalan, this big boy with his big heart, asks me if I think the farm can recover from this. I don’t know and I tell him so. “It’ll take months to know that,” I say. “But we’ll get over it. And we have plenty to do.”

As we walk to the river I phone Joe to tell him we won’t have an order for him this week, or the next. Rafts of hailstones float down the river, and the inlet, a quarter acre of water that reaches into the field, is crusted with the shining ice. Joe refuses to believe that we have nothing at all to save of the crop I offered him only an hour ago. I try to describe the lawn-mowered lettuce, the great heaps of ice in the valley, and the river in front of me. He tells me to sleep on it, call him in the morning.

I tell him I’ll send him a picture and I fold the phone and put it away. Kalan, who has overheard this, is laughing.

Next morning we all huddle around to look at the photos he made of a quiet field, where the reflected sun breaks across the pools of melt-water as if the reflection were the sun itself. Outside the soil is soggy, and there is no need to go out and look again at our destroyed crop.The girls begin their work in the greenhouse, watering and tending their plants on the benches and then dropping thousands of new seeds into little blocks of soil that they have pressed and arranged on trays.

By noon the boys have torn the ruined axle out from under the smaller truck. We light into it with wrenches and pry-bars, tossing bolts into a coffee can. When we pull the gear chunk from its housing, the raw smell of gear oil fills the shop, and there among the cogs are chunks of disintegrated pinion bearing, some of them rolled flat like Quaker oats along the curved faces of the gears.  Beautiful. The problem and its solution lie in the same heap at our feet. By tonight we’ll have the truck on the road again. We’ll be in business. 

SEPTEMBER
We come to the wash-room at six in the morning. Nate sharpens the knives. The rest of us pull on our rain bibs and boots while Kalan chatters and badgers his sisters to load crates into the trucks. Talk turns to who did what last night, and we all look at Alese. Alese of the straight brown hair. 

“What?” she says, and then “Leave me alone,” she says, laughing. She laughs, as my grandmother did, about everything sad or mean or painful. She’s sleeping some nights with a handsome man who’s no good, and her brother and her sisters can’t let it be, rising as they do again and again these mornings to batter her with their logic against idiocy and ruin. And I see her worthless man taking form again and again in their anger and fear. As if he existed only there in their breath of words against him, spoken into the cool September morning air. As if a day without mention of him might cause him to leave the world. This much is true. He’s filling the empty crater left by Micah. The day will come when talk of him will die, and then it will be as if he has died. And he will leave her life or she‘ll kick him out like a dog.

Before the sun comes out across the field, we are cutting romaine lettuce and packing it into crates that we then stack in the idling refrigerated truck. Our rain bibs are yellow and orange and blue and slick with the damp collected from the night air.  The girls wear hooded sweatshirts and they laugh into the morning air, and their voices bloom and cross the field in the quiet air and then bloom again. The boys work bent into the rows of lettuce, cutting and then stepping forward to cut again, silent except for the pant of breath and the muttering of numbers as they count the harvest.

First the roof and then the broad high walls of the barn catch the sun as it comes over the trees at the top of the mountain. The light sweeping the neighbor’s hillside meadow raises a breath of mist from the grass where his heifers have marked dark tracks across in the night. Slowly the light crosses to where we are harvesting, folding the mountain shadow back like a bedsheet across the rows of lettuce and then still more slowly across the hayfield and finally to the edge of the river, which is still clouded by its own soft roll of fog at the foot of the mountain. And now the hemlocks on the mountainside, bright on the sun side and starkly shadowed on their lower sides, stand sharp and tall among the hardwoods.

Kalan mutters to Alese as they work together. “Shut up,” She says. We work across the field, cutting, packing, loading the truck, and pulling off our jackets as the morning warms, piling them in heaps on the seat of the truck. Pretty Daniele and pretty Ashley shake their hair out of their sweaters, take their coffee containers from the back of the truck, sip twice, then back to the lettuce. We work into the sun, blessed. Before the morning is half gone, we’ll send a loaded truck of cool lettuce back to the barn to wash and pack. Tomorrow morning at the crack of dawn, our lettuce will smile down the grocery aisles of New York City.

The night that Micah crashed his car we all went insane. He and Alese had a beautiful kid together, and then they fought their battles across the fields of vegetables, she crying and ripping at the lettuce leaves, he carrying his love for her like a sack of dirt, hunched on his shoulders through the morning. Crushing love. 

Against the old currents, he had come here young from Wisconsin, all springy blond curls, and smiles and glacier-blue eyes. He grew up playing hockey in towns with their blocks knocked off by twisters, house trailers scattered all through his family. Divorce and abandonment. One more good strong wind and his whole family tree would have been uprooted. A Gatsby with small dreams, he planted his little family in the up-steep-stairs apartment of a proper house, bought a foreign car, learned to cook and eat home-grown food. Mid-morning, he and Alese were kissing and making up in the shade of the refrigerated truck.. Disgustingly sweet. Her pretty gapped teeth smiling up at his dimples, hands rubbing all over, touching faces, pulling at tangled hair, the rest of us picking up their slack in the field.

The morning after the wreck I tried to make sense of the way his wheel tracks ran out of the highway curve and across the meadow and then almost back to meet the highway. Like a muddy map back to Saturday night. Could have had a happy ending—the map of a good time, a map of the Forth of July, a shortcut home to bed with his girls. 

Through the next weeks we farmed the best we could, wandering the fields like mental patients, heads down, hands behind us. Everything important was suddenly trivial. Everything trivial was suddenly loud and bright and significant. Sleep was no intermission. From some corner of the night, a dark breeze came up the valley against the barn and awakened a squawking piece of sheet iron roof that had blown loose in a thunderstorm fifteen years ago. The dogs barked until their voices were hoarse.

Today we harvest lettuce, kale, colored Swiss chard, forty boxes of beans, beets, and peas. Tomorrow is broccoli and carrots. Friday when we’ve finished washing the crop for the weekend markets, we’ll bring beer down from the store and sit together talking on the benches outside the barn, sobriety slipping away toward evening, like history, like intimacy, like love. 

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