The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir (32 page)

Just as I begin to wonder whether to make noise outside of her door, the reporter descends the staircase and enters the kitchen.

“Good morning!” Brent chimes, jumping into breakfast action like Aunt Jemima on methamphetamines. He doesn’t share my sense of surrender about our failure to impress. “How did you sleep?”

“Great,” she answers. “Too well, actually. I think I might have overslept. My train is at eleven-oh-five.”

I look at the clock, which happens to be directly above the window framing the blizzard outside.
Shit.

“We’ll have to leave right now to make the train,” I say. “It might take two hours to get to the station in this snow.”

“Really?” the reporter says.

“It’s not like the city around here,” I explain. “There are only two village plows. And one of them only seems to run during the summer months.”

The reporter heads back upstairs to pack her suitcase and, I assume, probably take some photos of the fly killing fields for her editor.

“Shouldn’t we at least make her breakfast before she goes?” Brent asks, grasping at straws.

“There’s no time,” I say.

“But she didn’t even get a chance to eat dinner last night.”

Why can’t he just give it up?

“Just put a piece of cherry pie on a plate, and drizzle some honey on some yogurt for her to eat on the way,” I suggest simply so that his feelings aren’t hurt further.

I bundle up and head outside to try to shovel enough drifted snow away from the truck to enable me to back out. Overnight the drifts have piled up nearly to the door handles on the driver’s side. Ten minutes later, the reporter emerges from the door, pulling her suitcase down the steps and through the two-and-a-half-foot-deep snow. I’m helping her into her seat when Brent appears at the door.

“Her breakfast,”
he hollers to me. I bound back up the steps to grab it.

“What’s this?” she asks as I climb in the truck and hand her the plate.

“It’s some homemade goat milk yogurt we made.” I rev the engine and throw it into reverse. The truck lurches backward about two feet before the wheels start spinning in the snow. I shift into drive and rock forward. “The bacteria culture is from the very first batch we made when the goats first arrived at the Beekman. We’ve kept it alive for nearly two years.” Reverse again. This time I make it about three feet. Forward. Gun. Reverse. Gun. “It’s unpasteurized,” I continue, “which means that none of the most beneficial enzymes was killed off with heat.” Gun. Reverse. Spin. Forward. Spin. Reverse. “Of course, most health officials would say that no one should eat unpastuerized dairy products…” Forward. Reverse. Forward. Reverse. If she ever does manage to get a spoonful to her mouth, she’s going to be too nauseated to keep any of it down. “But pasteurization laws really just exist to prevent widespread bacterial outbreaks from industrial agribusiness dairies.” Forward. Reverse. Spin. Smoke from the gunning engine is beginning to come through the heating vents. “Naturally, people have been drinking and eating raw milk products from the beginning of time.” Rock. Spin. Gun. The reporter is trying to aim the spoon into the small jar, but the rocking truck is making it near impossible. “Some people believe that raw milk products are so much healthier than pasteurized products that raw milk clubs have formed and have organized an illegal distribution system in New York City.”
ZzzzzZZZZZZZZZZ.
The tires seem to be packing the snow down into pure ice. “And the honey is from our neighbors down the road. We also saved you a piece of the heirloom cherry pie from last nigh—”

Suddenly the truck catches the smallest bit of friction and careens backward. The reporter winds up juggling the pie plate, yogurt jar, and spoon as she tries to keep it from upsetting into her lap. If I slow down even the slightest bit, we risk getting stuck again. I jerk the steering wheel back and forth as the truck does a sort of reverse fish tail out the driveway. Every time the tailgate hits a drift, curtains of snow shower over the truck.

Finally we make it to the road, which is slightly clearer but not much. I can tell by the time we’re only twenty yards away from the house that this trip is going to take much longer than I’d anticipated.

It takes two and a half hours, as it turns out, in four-wheel drive the entire way. Semis are jackknifed on the road, and the slightest inclines on the thruway have pileups of cars at the bottom, unable to make the icy climb. Even a large snowplow had pulled over under an overpass to ride out the furious snow.

The reporter, if she is at all nervous about my driving, never mentions it once. I’m sure her only goal is to find her way back into civilization by any means necessary—away from the squadrons of zombie flies, the Russian peasant meals, and the jackhammer marimbraphone. This couldn’t have been the pastoral version of country life that she’d pitched to her editor. As a fellow writer, I sympathize with her. How she plans on eking the bucolic, aspirational weekend home story necessary for the Real Estate section’s Great Homes and Destinations column out of this experience is beyond any skills I have. Perhaps she’ll just back out of the project altogether. That might be the best Brent and I can hope for.

Once we reach the station, we wind up getting stopped at the bottom of the incline of the overpass that straddles the train tracks. The station is only a hundred yards away, but the pileup of cars at the bottom of the hill is blocking anyone from getting to the front doors. A few policemen are valiantly trying to push cars and cabs out of the way for the more able vehicles to pass, but every time they push a car in one direction, another one starts sliding into it from the other direction. Her train is parked just underneath us, already boarding.

“I think you might have to walk from here,” I say. Normally I’d help, but I can’t risk abandoning the truck in this pileup. I still have to make the long journey back to help set up for the party and concert tonight, if I’m lucky enough to survive the return trip.

“No problem,” she says cheerily. The proximity to her escape must be buoying her thoughts. I hop out of the truck and grab her rolling bag from the back. If I were in her place, I’d be furious. What was supposed to be a fun little assignment for her turned into a literal migraine.

I watch her slight figure bravely struggling to pull her suitcase through the deepening snow and gusts of frigid wind. One of the policemen waves for me to reverse down the hill away from the spaghetti mess of stalled and stuck cars.

The reporter disappears in my rearview mirror, like most everything else this year.

It takes me even longer to return to the Beekman. What would normally be less than a two-hour round trip has taken me over five.

When I walk in the door, the mansion is a flurry of activity. Several volunteers are setting up the folding chairs in the grand hallway for the concert. The musicians are back practicing again, rehearsing a surprisingly familiar improvisational set. I’m not sure whether my percussive jazz knowledge is improving or my hearing is permanently damaged, but either way, today I’m finding the music much more palatable, even festive. Maybe it’s just the knowledge that we gave the Beekman one last chance, and now that all is decidedly lost, I can finally relax and enjoy the final moments.

I walk in the kitchen where Brent is putting the finishing touches on two dozen votive candleholders that he carved from navel oranges. He’d cut each orange in half, scooped it out, placed a tea light in one half, and replaced the other half—with a hole cut out for smoke—back on top. One was lit on the counter. Nestled in a nest of pine boughs it was wonderfully beautiful—a glowing orange globe, studded with a few decorative cloves. And even better than it looked was the fragrance.

“These look beautiful,” I say, putting my arm around him. “Perfect, even.”

“I know we shouldn’t have spent the money on oranges just for decoration. But I kept all the pulp. We can use it for juice.”

“It’s okay,” I say. “The Beekman deserves a little festivity this season.”

I hate seeing someone as wonderful and expansive as Brent make excuses about wasting orange pulp. He’d done his best this past year, and I hate that I’d made his life so miserable for most of it. It’s not his fault that he strives for perfection as much as Martha does. I realize that of all the things that never quite reached perfection in this past nightmarish year, I was the biggest blemish of all for many reasons: for complaining, for not working as hard as he did, for pushing him away. When I think of how hard he tried to make my wishes come true…
My
wishes…Not his…Mine.

Okay. I can’t think of that. I just can’t.

I spend the next few hours sweeping up after the volunteers and generally trying to stay out of everyone’s way. I carefully stack kindling and firewood in each of the fireplaces, and once finished, go room to room lighting each one.

When the sun begins setting, I head outside to take some pictures of the house exterior for posterity. Someday I’ll look back, I think, and be able to appreciate that the Beekman was ours, if even for a short time.

Bubby struggles in the deep snow, trying to keep up with me as I walk around taking shots of the glowing house against the purple twilight sky from every angle. All four chimneys are puffing out picturesque columns of gray smoke, scenting the crisp air. Brent’s placed a glowing votive in each window. The chandelier is framed perfectly in the tall Palladian window on the second floor. And the yellow lights from every window crisscross the snow in the yard, making illusory sidewalks of warmth, beckoning passersby to come inside.

If I didn’t know better, I’d almost buy into the fantasy we’ve created. But I don’t have the asking price.

The winter storm has passed, and only the lightest of breezes blows through the stately maple trees lining the road. Their frozen branches clack against one another.

“C’mon, Bubs,” I say, reaching down to throw him up on my shoulder. He must weigh a good five pounds more during the winter months. He nestles into my neck, both of us happy for the shared warmth. “What do you think, Bubster? Pretty, isn’t it?”

He pushes his purring head against my jaw. I take a close-up picture of his beautiful gold eyes.

“I’m gonna miss you, Bubby,” I say.

Now it’s my turn to cry.

Chapter Thirty-Five

It’s amazing how quickly the house reverts to complete emptiness.

Immediately after the caterer hauls the last empty tray to her van, shortly after 2
A.M.
, Brent and I turn the heat back down to 40 degrees. By force of habit, we start cleaning and straightening. By 4
A.M.
we’ve stacked all the borrowed chairs and folding tables on the porch for someone to pick up and return to Village Hall Gallery sometime in the next week or so. We’ve mopped the floors and trudged across the barnyard in the pitch dark with bag after bag of trash and empty bottles. We’ve washed, dried, and folded a load of dirty dish towels, and run the dishwasher three times.

By the time we make it to bed, we only have two and a half hours before Farmer John arrives to take us to the train station. We’ll store our truck in the barn over the winter. That way, if we need to, we can sell it along with the house.

I sleep fitfully. Between the hard apple cider and the harsh reality of our situation, I toss and turn often enough for Brent to scold me several times during the short night.

John arrives in the morning immediately after finishing his morning chores. Brent enlists his help in baiting and setting dozens of mousetraps to scatter around the house. Without any activity in the place, the resident mice are likely to nest in the mattresses and couch cushions if left unchecked. I learned that from a Martha checklist.

“You should probably check one last time to be sure the crypt door is closed,” Brent says. “Remember last spring when we found that the coyotes had been inside all winter and crapped all over the place?”

I really hadn’t wanted to dress in full snow gear again. About the only thing that excited me about closing up the Beekman and leaving was that I would no longer have to stuff my feet into chunky boots and wear ski masks that froze over with snot vapor the minute I stepped outdoors.

The trek across the backyard is the most exercise I’ve had in months. The drifts are the highest there, being wide open to the vast pasture and winds that blow without impediment all the way from Cherry Valley. In some places I sink in the snow up to mid-thigh.

I’m completely out of breath by the time I make it around the slight berth to the entrance to the crypt. Because of the angle it was built, the stone walls lining the entry completely protect the doorway from the blowing snow, and the walkway is as clear as if someone had shoveled it. These are the little genius historical lessons that have been completely forgotten. In 1802, if half your family was wiped out by scarlet fever and the ground was too frozen to bury them, the last thing you needed to worry about was whether you could get the bodies somewhere safe until the spring thaw. So you angle your crypt away from the wind. I think of all the common sense that has been lost to history.

The crypt door has blown open a bit, which is fine, since after the trudging I need to sit down and rest for a second before making my way back to the house. I swing open the heavy iron door and step inside. I wait for my eyes to adjust to the dark before taking the one step down to the slate floor.

It’s warm inside. Well, maybe not warm, but the earthen insulation keeps the inside of the crypt at least a few degrees warmer than the frigid winter outside. And it’s completely quiet. Overall it’s not, I decide, a bad place to spend eternity if one has to. Brent and I once fantasized that we, ourselves, would have our cremated remains entombed beneath the crypt’s floor. Now it looks like we’d be even less than a footnote on the crypt’s engraved obelisk.

I perch on the ledge that used to support the coffins—probably at one time William’s and Joanna’s. Maybe even Mary’s. If I hold my breath, there’s not even the smallest sound in the air.