Moral Disorder Page 12

  Tig’s two boys came up the next weekend and slept in their bunk beds in their new room and went for a long walk with Tig, all around the property. They saw the marsh hawk – two marsh hawks. They must be a pair, said Tig; they’d been hunting for mice. The boys were pleased with the tractor in the barn. You didn’t need a licence to drive a tractor, not if you didn’t go out onto the road. Tig said that when he’d got the tractor in running order – or when someone had – the boys could drive it around the fields.

  Nell didn’t go on the walk. She stayed in the house and made biscuits. There was an old electric range that worked perfectly well except for one burner. They were going to get a wood stove too. That was the plan.

  When Tig and the boys got back, they all ate the biscuits, with honey on them, and drank tea with hot milk in it. They sat casually around Nell’s orange table with their elbows on it, just like a family.

  I’m the only person here who isn’t related to anyone, thought Nell. She was feeling cut off. She didn’t get into the city very often any more, and when she did it was on business – she met with publishers, and with the authors whose books she was editing – so she didn’t see her friends very much. In addition to which, her parents weren’t speaking to her, as such, though they weren’t not speaking to her either. Conversationally, she’d been put into a grey zone, a lot like a bus station waiting room: cold air, silences, topics limited to states of health and the weather. Her parents hadn’t got used to the fact that Nell had actually moved in with a man who was still married to someone else. She’d never been so blatant, in her former life. She’d given some thought to appearances. She’d been sneakier. But now that her change of address cards had so flagrantly been sent, there was no comfort room left for sneakiness.

  Nell threw her energies into a kitchen garden. There were groundhogs in the fields, so she began with a fence; Tig helped with it. They set the bottom edge of the chicken wire a foot into the earth so the groundhogs couldn’t tunnel under. Then Nell dug in a lot of the well-rotted cow manure from the heap she’d found in the barn. There was enough of it to last for years. Beside the front door there was a knobbly, straggly rose; she pruned it back. She pruned some of the apple trees too. She’d taken a new interest in sharp implements – shears and clippers, picks and shovels, pruning saws and pitchforks. Not axes; she didn’t think she could handle an axe.

  By this time she’d read up on the local pioneers – the people who’d arrived in the area in the early nineteenth century and had cleared the land, chopping down the trees, burning their trunks and branches, arranging their gigantic roots into the stump fences that were still to be seen here and there, slowly decaying. Many of these people had never used an axe before they’d come. Some of them had chopped off their legs; others had stood in buckets while using their axes in order to avoid that fate.

  The soil of the garden was good enough, though there were a lot of stones. Also shards from broken crockery, and medicine bottles of pressed glass, white and blue and brown. A doll’s arm. A tarnished silver spoon. Animal bones. A marble. Layer upon layer of lives lived out. For someone, once, this farm had been new. There must have been struggles, misgivings, failures, and despair. And deaths, naturally. Deaths of various kinds.

  While Nell worked in the garden, Tig went out and about. He drove up and down the side roads, exploring. He went into Garrett and tried out the hardware store, and set up an account at the bank. The in-town grocery store – not to be confused with the boxy new supermarket on the outskirts – had a sign in the window for eggs: BONELESS HEN FRUIT. On his return from these excursions, he’d tell Nell about such discoveries, and bring her gifts: a trowel, a ball of twine, a roll of plastic mulch.

  There was a combination gas station and general store at the nearest crossroads; Tig began to drink coffee there with the local farmers, the older ones. They viewed him as an oddity, he said. They hadn’t tossed him into the bin of contempt to which they consigned most people from the city. He drove a rusty car and didn’t wear a tie and knew what a ratchet set was: all to the good. But he wasn’t a farmer either. Nonetheless, they let him sit in on the coffee sessions, where he picked up farming hints and gossip. They even began teasing him a bit, a development he reported to Nell with some glee.

  Nell didn’t go along on these jaunts; she wasn’t invited. The rule for the farmers’ coffee group was men only. This was not stated, it was a given.

  “I asked them what sort of animals we should have,” Tig said one day after coming back from the store at the crossroads.

  “And?” said Nell.

  “They said, ‘None.’ ”

  “That sounds like a good idea,” said Nell.

  “Then one guy said, ‘If you’re going to have livestock, you’re going to have dead stock.’ ”

  “That’s probably true,” said Nell.

  After several days, Tig said that if they were going to live on a farm, they ought not to let the land go to waste, and that would mean having some animals. Also it would be added value for the boys to learn where food really came from. They could start with chickens: chickens were easy, said the farmers.

  Tig and the boys built a somewhat lopsided chicken house so the chickens could be protected from predators at night. They also made a fenced-in yard where the chickens could run around safely. Tig and Nell and anyone else who was there would be able to eat the eggs, said Tig, and then they could eat the chickens themselves, once they got too old to lay eggs.

  Nell wondered who was going to kill the elderly chickens when the time came. She did not think it would be her.

  The chickens arrived in burlap sacks. They adjusted to their new surroundings immediately, or they appeared to: they didn’t have a wide range of facial expressions. The farmer who’d supplied them had thrown in a rooster. “He said the hens would be more contented that way,” said Tig.

  The rooster crowed every morning – an ancient, biblical sound. The rest of the time he stalked the hens while they were scratching in the dirt and pounced on them from behind and stomped up and down on them. If Nell or the boys got too close to the hens when they went into the yard to collect the eggs, the rooster would jump on their bare legs and rake them with his spurs. They took to carrying sticks, to hit the rooster with.

  Nell made the chickens’ eggs into pound cake, which she froze in the freezer they’d found themselves buying, because where were they going to keep all the stuff that would be produced by the kitchen garden once it really got going?

  Then Tig got some ducks – not ducklings, this time – which were allowed to fend for themselves in the pond, and then two geese, which were supposed to lay eggs and produce goslings; but one of the geese injured its leg, so it had to be taken up the road to Mrs. Roblin.

  Tig and the boys and the Roblins were now friends, though Nell suspected the Roblins – the senior Roblins, who ran a dairy operation, and the junior Roblins too, of which there were many – laughed at them behind their backs. The Roblins had been on their farm for a long time, and knew what to do about all farm emergencies. The nearby cemetery had a lot of Roblins in it.

  Mrs. Roblin was a square-shaped, round-faced old woman – Nell thought she was old – with short but surprisingly strong arms and red, deft, stubby fingers that (Nell suspected) had never seen the inside of a rubber glove. The boys said she pitched in when necessary, and Nell understood that this pitching had nothing to do with baseball and everything to do with manure. Mrs. Roblin was clearly capable of any kind of enterprise involving guck and muck and blood and innards – the boys had seen her reach up into a cow and pull a calf out, legs first, a sight that had filled them with awe. While telling this, the boys would look at Nell, not critically, but dismissively: there was no way Nell would ever find herself up to the elbows in a cow’s vagina, said that look.

  Nell had hoped Mrs. Roblin would set the goose’s leg and put a splint on it, but that wasn’t what happened. The goose came back in oven-ready form, which, said Tig, was the way t
hings were done in the country. The remaining goose, or was it a gander, wandered around for a while, looking sad, thought Nell, and then flew away.

  By this time there were also two peacocks, a pair Tig had found at a peacock farm on one of the back roads and had given to Nell as a present.

  “Peacocks!” Nell said. Tig was intending to please her. He always did intend it. How could she not appreciate his enthusiasm, his spontaneity? “What about the winter?” she said. “Won’t they die?”

  “Peacocks are a northern Himalayan pheasant,” Tig said. “They’ll take care of themselves. They’ll be fine in the cold.”

  The peacocks were always together. The peacock would display, unfurling his huge tail and rattling it, and the peahen would admire him. They flew around easily, and sat in trees, and pecked about here and there. Sometimes they flew into the hen yard. The rooster knew better than to get into a fight with the peacock, which was a lot bigger than him. At night, the peacock couple roosted on the crossbeam of the barn, where they must have thought they were out of danger. They screamed like babies being murdered, usually just before dawn. Nell wondered where they would make their nest. How many little peacocks would they produce?

  In the garden, Nell planted everything she could think of. Tomatoes, peas, spinach, carrots, turnips, beets, winter and summer squash, cucumbers, zucchinis, onions, potatoes. She wanted generosity, abundance, an overflowing of fecundity, as in Renaissance paintings of fruitful goddesses – Demeter, Pomona – in flowing robes with one breast bare and glowing edibles tumbling out of their baskets. She put in a herb garden with chives and parsley and rosemary and oregano and thyme, and three rhubarb plants, and some currant bushes, a red and a white, and some elderberry bushes so they could make elderflower wine in the spring, and a bed of strawberries. She planted runner beans that were supposed to grow up tripods made of poles.

  The local farmers did not recognize this bean method. On their regular sightseeing forays into the yard – there was always an excuse, a stray dog, the loan of a wrench or hammer, but really they just wanted to see what Tig and Nell were up to – they looked hard at the structures of bare poles. They didn’t ask what these were. When the beans started creeping into view, they stopped looking.

  “Hear your cows went on a spree again,” they would say. They had a way of staring at Nell sideways: they couldn’t figure her out. Were she and Tig married, or what? The way they half-grinned at her said they didn’t think so. Maybe she was a free-lover, some sort of hippie. That would fit in with her busting her ass in the garden. Real farm wives didn’t have gardens. They loaded their pickups with groceries once a week from the supermarket in Garrett, twenty miles to the east.

  “Hear it took three days to get them cows back in the barn. Maybe you should take ’em to Anderson’s.”

  Nell knew what Anderson’s was. It was the abattoir: Anderson’s Custom Slaughtering. “Oh, I don’t think so,” said Nell. “Not yet.”

  They had the cows because Tig had decided they should raise their own beef: the coffee-drinking farmers all did. “Raise four, sell three, put one in the freezer, you’re all set,” was their pronouncement. So Tig purchased four Charolais-Hereford crosses on credit from one of these helpful farmers, who didn’t tell any actual lies, but it would have been better for Nell and Tig if they’d asked a few informed questions. They didn’t know that the cows would be able to jump, and jump so high.

  The fences had to be raised and strengthened, but sometimes the cows got out anyway and ran off to join a large herd of other cows nearby. Tig had to take the two boys to get them back – throw some ropes on them, wrestle them into the truck they’d borrow for the purpose. That was dangerous, because the cows were skittish and never wanted to come home.

  “Maybe they know we’re going to eat them,” said Nell.

  “Cows want to be with other cows,” said Tig. “They’re like shoppers.”

  The cows’ names were Susan, Velma, Megan, and Ruby. The boys had named them. They were warned about doing that – humanizing the cows – but they did it anyway.

  Oona always telephoned on the weekends. At first she’d wanted to speak to Nell as well as to Tig and the boys – she wanted to enlist Nell’s help, and issue instructions – but after a while she’d stopped doing that. Once in a while curt messages were relayed to Nell from Oona, via folded and sealed notes delivered by the boys. Usually they concerned missing socks.

  One of the hens escaped from the yard and was found among the rhubarb plants with her throat slit. “Weasel,” said Mrs. Roblin, having inspected the wound. “They drink the blood.” She asked if Nell wanted to take the hen home and stew it, as it was still fresh and the blood had been let out. Nell did not – the victim of a weasel murder was surely tainted – so Mrs. Roblin kept the hen, saying she could think of a use for it.

  Another hen set up shop behind a jumble of machinery parts in the drive shed, where she hoarded eggs – her own, and those of other hens avoiding their brooding duties. By the time Nell found her, she was sitting on twenty-five eggs. What could be done? The eggs were too old – too well developed, too full of embryos – to be eaten.

  The boys were going to spend the rest of the summer at the farm, said Tig – a last-minute arrangement, because Oona was going on vacation. She was heading for a Caribbean resort, not alone.

  “Do you mind?” Tig said, and Nell said of course not, though it would have been nice to have been told ahead of time. Tig said there hadn’t been any ahead of time.

  Nell stuck a list onto the refrigerator with a magnet. It was a list of cleaning duties: sweeping, clearing the table, washing the dishes. They would all take turns. She herself would continue to do all the laundry, in the temperamental second-hand wringer machine they’d found; she’d continue to hang it on the line. She was already baking the bread, and the pies, and making the ice cream, with some of the extra eggs and the cream they were getting up at Roblins’. Also there were the currants to be considered – she couldn’t make every single currant into jelly. She’d tried to dry some of them in the sun, but then she’d forgotten about them and it had rained. Despite the various lists she’d been making, she couldn’t keep track of everything.

  There were numerous auctions that season – farmers died or sold up, and then everything in the house and barn would be put on the block. Nell felt like a scavenger; still, she went. She got a couple of quilts that way – they needed only a little mending – and a wooden chest, with missing hinges, but those would be easily fixed once she got around to it. She wanted things that would add up to a look – a farm look. More or less olden days.

  Tig bought a baler, dirt cheap because it was an out-of-date kind. It produced small oblong bales – not the outsized cinnamon buns of hay that were the fashion now. He and the boys would take off the hay, he said. They could feed it to the cows in the winter and sell the excess hay at a dollar a bale. He’d pay the boys, of course – whatever you’d pay an unskilled labourer. Tig and Nell would lose money on this venture, or break even at best, said Tig, but it would be a terrific experience for the boys, who would be able to do some real work and feel useful. What did Nell think of that?

  “I think it’s fine,” said Nell. This had become her standard answer when it was a question of Tig’s enthusiasms.

  While Nell and Tig were going to farm sales, the boys spent time in the barn. They got up to lots of things in there. Alcohol was consumed, psychedelic substances tested, cigarettes and dope smoked regularly. The dope came from local back fields, where some of the younger farmers were growing lucrative though illegal crops of what they called “wacky tobaccy.” Inside the barn, plots were hatched. Making off with the car was considered, running away to Montreal, or at least to Garrett, to see horror movies. These plots remained theoretical, and the boys did not shout or smash things, unlike some Nell had heard of, so Tig and Nell had no idea. They found all this out much later, once the boys had grown up, and had passed through their twenties and their anger a
t Tig for having left home, and had begun to share their reminiscences.

  The boys weren’t getting on too well at school – Oona had forwarded their report cards, implying that this lack of progress was Tig’s fault. But Tig – who had the tractor working now, who let the boys drive it around the farmyard and out to the back field – said they were learning so many other things, things that would come in handy for them in their later lives.

  The boys were taller now – taller than Nell. One of them was almost as tall as Tig. They had tans, and biceps; they ate huge meals, and when Tig didn’t have them working at something else they were under the tractor, unscrewing parts of it and screwing them on again. They got covered with grease and oil and dirt and sometimes blood from various tool-inflicted wounds, which seemed to make them quite happy. Nell washed a lot of towels.

  When the weather was right – hot and sunny – and the hay had been cut and raked into rows, Tig and the boys laboured at the baling, wearing thick gloves and bandanas twisted around their foreheads to keep the sweat from running into their eyes. The baler got dragged around the fields by the tractor, spewing out bales and chunks of dried mud and pieces of twine. The process was hot and dusty, and very noisy. Straw made its way into their clothes, fragments of it went up their noses. Getting the bales into the barn was the worst part. Nell helped sometimes, wearing a bandana and a big-brimmed hat. In the evenings they were all so tired they could barely eat; they fell into bed before sunset.

  At the end of August, Tig received a typed letter from Oona, accusing him and Nell of exploiting the boys as child labour in order to make a profit from them.

  Tig and Oona were supposed to be drawing up a separation agreement so they could get a divorce, but Oona kept changing lawyers. She thought that because Tig and Nell owned a farm, Tig must be lying to her about his income. She wanted more money. But Tig didn’t have any more.