The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir (31 page)

I carry the reporter’s bags up to her room, where Brent has built a roaring fire. Brent’s turned the heat back on for our guest, so the whole house is toasty warm. It’s a welcome relief. I was tired of coming in the house and putting
on
more layers.

Everything in the guest room is as spotlessly clean as when I left for the train station, but something seems different. I look around the room as she unzips her bag on the bed. What is it?

I realize it’s not some
thing
out of place. It’s a sound. A buzzing.

The zombie flies.

They’re back.

I can see them crawling in the corners of the windows. Where do they come from? They seem to be hatching before my eyes. I look out into the hallway. They’re there too, buzzing around in haphazard circles in every single pane of the huge Palladian window.

“Why don’t you relax a bit,” I say, with a trifle less insouciance, “and come down and join us for a snack when you’re ready.”

I race down the stairs. Brent’s already thwacking away with the flyswatter in the kitchen.

“Where are they all coming from? And why now? This place is fucking haunted,” I say.

“Maybe it’s the guys moving the equipment? Maybe they’re letting them in?” Brent asks, grasping for an explanation.

“It’s five degrees outside. There are no flies outside,” I say. “They’re literally coming back from the dead. I know it.”

One of the guys calls out to see if Brent or I have a free hand. I duck back into the wide center hallway to help. Two men are struggling to unload what looks like a heavy wooden picket fence from a large case.

“What’s this?” I ask, grabbing an edge.

“A marimba.”

“A what?”

“A marimba.”

“Oh.”

Why the hell are they unloading a marimba for a formal New Year’s Eve classical concert? I turn to head into the kitchen to tell Brent about this mistake.

“Hang on a sec,” one of the men says. “Can you help a quick sec with this one too?” He’s opened the other large black case, which seems to hold a metal picket fence.

“Another marimba?” I ask, trying to hide my confusion.

“Oh, no,” the musician says. “This one is a vibraphone.”

Back in the kitchen, I interrupt Brent from his fly chasing.

“What the hell are they doing with a marimba and a vibraphone in our front hallway?”

“It’s for the concert,” Brent says.

“A marimba/vibraphone concert?! Are you kidding?” I realize that I hadn’t ever actually asked what kind of concert he’d arranged with our neighbor. In my mind I’d pictured a chamber music quartet, quietly playing “Auld Lang Syne” in the hallway while people mingled in formal dress and passed crudités. A concert not unlike one William Beekman would have hosted in the early nineteenth century. I had visions of little Mary Beekman spinning around on her tiptoes, waltzing by herself from room to room, with familiar Mozart and Tchaikovsky tunes making her forget that she’d been dead for over two hundred years. I pictured a lot of things for our final night at the Beekman. None of them included either marimbas or vibraphones.

“What? What’s wrong with that?” Brent says.

“Do you even know what a marimba is?” I ask accusingly, even though I hadn’t known exactly what one was until a few minutes ago.

“Not really,” Brent says. “It’s a jazz
something
, according to the press release.”

I pick up the press release lying on the counter that I’d been ignoring for the last two weeks: “The Beekman Mansion hosts a New Year’s Eve concert with a Grammy-winning improvisational jazz marimba/vibrophone duo…”

“They’re improvisational jazz musicians?!” I say.

“They’ve won a Grammy,” Brent says sheepishly.

“But they’re
improvisational
,” I say. “By definition that means any award they’ve won is because they just got
lucky
.”

Suddenly a loud haphazard fury of sounds explodes from the hallway behind us. What I think is the marimba is playing a low bass melody, while what I think is the vibraphone is filling in any holes with a cacophonous repetitive pinging. It’s a strange combination, unlike anything I’ve ever heard. And since it’s so unlike anything I’ve ever heard, I can’t really tell if I even like it. It sounds like the noise that would happen if the Love Boat ran full speed ahead into the Starship
Enterprise
.

It’s so loud that I don’t hear the reporter come up behind me.

“The music is…interesting,”
she shouts. I reach behind her and close the kitchen door so that I can hear her over the music. It’s about as effective as using a rice paper screen to muffle a jackhammer.

“Yes, isn’t it amazing? They’ve won a
Grammy
,” I inform her, smiling. “Why don’t you have a seat while I prepare dinner for us?”

It’s not easy preparing a fresh-from-the-farm meal on the second to the last day of the calendar year. During the last two weeks we’d used up most of what was left in the root cellar for ourselves. Complicating factors, the reporter had informed us that she couldn’t eat red meat for health reasons, which would have been fine a few months ago, when we could’ve slaughtered a chicken. But now the only meat we have left are some various unlabeled frozen packages of Cow.

“We’ve prepared a traditional winter farmstead meal for you,” Brent explains, carrying a plate of homemade goat cheese that we’d aged in the basement. It was accompanied by freshly baked homemade rosemary crackers. As he sets the plate down, he expertly sweeps a small collection of dead zombie flies into his hand without the reporter noticing…hopefully. The flies are multiplying in the windowsills by the hundreds, as if making up for their absence during the last few weeks.

“A traditional what?” the reporter asks, straining to hear over what I’ve started thinking of as the marimbraphone.

“A
traditional winter farm meal
,” Brent says louder.
“Everything we’re serving was grown at the Beekman.”

“How fun. Sounds delicious,”
she shouts.
“Can I ask you a few questions while we eat?”

“Sure,”
Brent says. We’re all shouting now.

“So what made you two decide to buy the Beekman?”

“Well,” Brent says, “both Josh and I grew up in rural areas…” He’s launching into the approved biography answer. It’s not that there are conflicting stories, but the truth is that there is no one answer. There is no one story about anything that happens in the world. This is what people forget when they read nonfiction essays, journalism, or memoirs. Every second of every day, our heads are filled with millions of conflicting emotions and decisions. Compiled over a lifetime—or even a single day for that matter—it’s impossible to have a truthful, accurate, and concise record of anything we do.

But the reporter has twenty-five hundred words with which to sum up her experience here at the Beekman. And those words will be forever recorded in the nation’s newspaper of record as “the truth.” A truth that has a beginning word and an end word, and exactly 2,498 others in between. And for the hundreds of thousands of people reading the eventual article, those words will be Brent’s and my entire truth, from “once upon a time” till “happily ever after.” Because every story ends with “happily ever after,” right? As long as you end it at the right moment, it does. Most readers will never know more about us than what they read in this article, nor will they want to know more. They will all finish reading the last word thinking that they’ve read the whole, true story of us and the Beekman.

The reporter also knows that there is no one story. There’s just the one she needs to leave here with tomorrow morning. The answer to why we bought the Beekman could fill the entire paper. Because we wanted a place to get away from the city. Because we wanted to grow our own food. Because the place looks like it belongs on the cover of a magazine, and we wanted a life that looked like the cover of a magazine. Because no one else in the area had the means to take care of such a high-maintenance historic building, and it seemed like a generous task to take on. Because I’m turning forty next year and wanted something to show for it. Because we’re vain, kindhearted, ambitious, shallow, deep, humble, trendy, old-fashioned, rich, poor, proud, and vulnerable. Those are merely the beginning of the reasons we bought the Beekman.

But those are too many words for the reporter. She only needs one truth for the article. So we pick the one that sparkles most.

We bought the Beekman to return to a simpler life.

Truth isn’t beauty. It isn’t even always true. Truth is nothing more than consistency of message.

I learned that from advertising.

The marimbraphone is still sending its shattering call through the mansion as I pull some roasted vegetables from the oven.

“Mmmmm, those smell delicious,” the reporter says. “What are they?”

“They’re Chantenay long carrots, Sugar Hollow Crown parsnips, and celeriac,” I answer. “It’s one of our favorite combinations.”

Actually, it’s all we had, and barely at that. The first thing I did this morning was trudge out to the garden, shovel two feet of snow off a couple of the beds, and pour pails of hot water that I ferried from the barn over the frozen dirt. Eventually I was able to loosen these few vegetables up enough to pry them from the frigid earth. There aren’t many, but artfully arranged on a plate they look more “contemporary bistro” than “postwar Scarlett O’Hara.”

I was also able to find a few unfrozen spinach leaves in the corner of one of the cold frames that I’d rigged up months ago by propping an old window I’d found in the haymow on top of one of the raised beds. With it, Brent assembled a simple winter salad garnished with our own roasted sunflower and pumpkin seeds, minced pieces of dried apple, olive oil, and our homemade apple cider vinegar. For the “main course,” we thinly sliced a few pickled green heirloom tomatoes and layered them on thick slabs of country bread that I’d made the day before. On top we spread a thick smear of homemade goat milk ricotta and some fresh ground pepper, and placed the simple “bruschetta” under the broiler.

Altogether the meal has a quaintly desperate cleaning-out-the-root-cellar feel to it that I’m sure the reporter felt was purposeful. We valiantly try to conduct the interview over the marimbraphones, but I’m sure she only catches about half of what we say.

As I clear the dishes, I hiss in Brent’s ear.

“Can’t you ask them to stop? They’ve been rehearsing for four hours.”

Brent’s trying to shoo zombie flies away from the homemade cherry pie sitting on the counter.

“You go ask them,” he whispers.

“I mean, they’re supposed to be improvisational. What’s the point of rehearsing anyway?”

A zombie fly falls from the window straight down into a lattice hole of the pie. Brent turns his back to the reporter and tries to fish it out with his finger while I distract her.

“The cherries in the pie,”
I shout over the never-ending music,
“come from an ancient cherry tree that grows down by the crypt. We believe it’s a variety that is no longer commercially available.”

The reporter looks up from her notes. She rubs her temples.

“You know, guys,” she says. “I think I’ll skip the pie tonight. I think I’m coming down with a migraine.”

Shit. Between the zombie flies and the withered root vegetables and the marimbraphone, everything was falling apart. We never should have agreed to do this. A
New York Times
reporter comes all the way to Sharon Springs to write an article on our simple life of quiet country pleasures and instead we send her fleeing to her bedroom before the sun has even ducked below the horizon.

“We can pick it up in the morning,” the reporter says. “Save me a piece of pie.”

As if she’s really going to feel like pie after waking up in a bed covered with hundreds, if not thousands, of flies. That’s it. We’ve completely ruined our chances of selling the Beekman brand of country living to the most influential readership in the world. Whatever chance we had of saving the Beekman and turning it into a thriving farm business disappeared up the chimney alongside the smoke from the aged applewood kindling lovingly chopped with the hand-forged hatchet used to kill our heritage breed turkeys.

We failed. Again.

“Well, there’s goes our last chance,” I say to Brent, scraping bits of nubbly uneaten parsnips into the trash.

“What?”
he asks over the music, brushing a zombie fly out of his hair.

“Never mind,” I say. “Pay no attention to the homely drag queen doing dishes.”

“Should we wake her up?” Brent asks, nervously wiping the counters of flies yet again. He’d awoken at 5:30 for fly patrol, to make sure the kitchen was clear by the time the reporter came down to breakfast. Usually the guests staying in the reporter’s room were woken up by our rooster choir. But in the sub-zero weather, we’d shut them inside the coop with heat lamps. If everything was still, one could still hear the occasional, muffled
HERE COMES THE BRIDE!
from inside, but it was hardly enough to wake anyone up. Which was okay. I didn’t feel much like sparkling this morning.

I’d managed to find two eggs in the chicken coop. With the shortening days, most of the hens had long since stopped laying. On the kitchen table, I’d laid out the country bread for toast and homemade pumpkin butter. I planned on poaching the eggs and garnishing them with some of the spindly parsley stalks from the cold frame. The last few potatoes from the root cellar were peeled and pared of their rotten spots, waiting to be turned into hash browns.

After yesterday’s catastrophes, it was probably futile to try to woo the reporter back into our good graces, but we had to use up the food anyway. Potatoes rotting in the basement would probably affect the Beekman’s asking price for when we had to sell.

A winter storm had moved in overnight, blanketing the yard with yet another fresh foot of snow, and it was still falling. It’s conventionally pretty, but Brent and I were long past being affected by the Courier and Ivy–ness of the landscape.