“FINN! COME HERE, BRICKS are heavy.”
“Isabelle! The hammer is here, I found it under the wood pile.”
“Finn! Pipe of water broken! Gushing, gushing!”
“Isabelle! Can the eggplant go next to the cucumbers?”
“Finn, push post in harder. Harder, Finn! Look, it’s still wobbling! Whole fence is going to fall.”
“Isabelle! How close do we space the zucchini, nine or ten inches apart?”
“Finn! Damn rabbits! Why are there so many rabbits already! Are they multiplying?”
“Yes, like rabbits.”
“Finn! Where’s gun?”
“Isabelle! Where’s the ammunition?”
After her argument with Finn, Vanessa tried to get up earlier, she really did. She struggled out of bed around ten or eleven, forced herself to do it by counting down from a hundred or by naming all the items in her room as she put one foot, then the other, on the wood floor. The house was so blissfully quiet. She would creep to the kitchen, pour herself a cup of coffee that someone else had already made, butter a piece of bread, and then stand by the window in her room and watch them in the fields, to-ing and fro-ing. She couldn’t hear what they said to each other, but Finn and Isabelle were constantly discussing something, animatedly shaking their heads, pointing, waving hoes and tillers, measuring the rows with their booted feet. Isabelle would walk it like she was proving a point, and then Finn would walk it like he was proving a different point. They would argue and argue. Sometimes they would laugh.
Isabelle wore a kerchief tied around her hair and was dusty from head to foot, and Finn wore a cap on his dark blond head and suspenders to hold up his trousers and was dusty from head to foot. They would swat flies from each other’s heads and adjust one another’s head coverings and work and talk and occasionally amble over to the well and drink from the same bucket of water and have a cigarette. He would light hers and then his own, and they would stand and smoke and discuss more things, and just before lunch, Vanessa would watch them pump water from the well for each other, and Finn would wash his arms and neck and face while Isabelle watched him as her hand moved up and down on the pump, pouring water onto his body, and then she would wash her arms and neck and face while he watched her as his hand moved up and down on the pump, pouring water onto her body.
And what Vanessa thought as she watched this day in and day out was: They’re about to come inside, demanding I do this or that for them. I wish it were summer already and hot and they could stay out till sundown and not bother me.
The utility pole was finally installed on Lovering Road. Lines were run to the service mast and dropped into the electrical box, and at last, the family had power! Vanessa put on the radio to drown out the farming ruckus outside, but the radio turned out to be a mixed blessing. The news stories and discussion hours during the day kept drawing her to the outside world, where she also didn’t want to be. Staggering unemployment, dust storms in Oklahoma, the upcoming presidential election, another firefight in Boston Harbor between rumrunners and the Coast Guard, rumblings of a humanitarian catastrophe in Ukraine despite vehement Soviet denials. There was no good place for Vanessa, not there and not here.
After they cleared the ground of stones and debris and dead grass, after they raked and leveled it, Isabelle told the family they had to decide what was going to grow where. Before they divided the rows into sections and dug the trenches, they had to plan and allocate the correct amount of space for each crop. She thought she’d be the only one with an opinion on this. She couldn’t have been more wrong.
The debate continued for the better part of a week. Isabelle thought she’d be discussing it only with Finn, but out of all of them, Finn, surprisingly, was the most agreeable. “Grow whatever wherever. I don’t care. Just tell man in dress shirt with shovel where to dig.” The children wanted corn and cucumbers. Lucy cared nothing for eggplant. No one was familiar with zucchini, so they didn’t want to grow it at all. And no one could imagine what a fully grown wheat field might look like in four months, so they kept relegating the wheat to a small bed near the cabbages. No one knew that potatoes didn’t grow five feet in the air like oats, or that they didn’t require supports like cucumbers.
At the beginning of April, Isabelle showed Finn and Monty how deep to dig the trenches for the plantings and how shallow to make the narrower trenches next to them for irrigation.
Finally, on April 8, the whole family—except Vanessa—went out into the field that was ready at last to receive the seed. Under Isabelle’s direction, they dropped the berries and kernels into the open beds. Isabelle thought this part would be easy, but she had a hard time teaching them to drop seeds in a circular motion, and not to drop so many in one spot at once, and not to plant them so close to each other. “Twelve inches apart,” Isabelle kept saying. “Little circle of sprinkle, then twelve inches away for next circle.”
“Doesn’t seem like enough,” Walter said. “We want lots of tomatoes.”
“And lots of corn!” said Junie.
“We’re not planting corn yet, Junebug,” Isabelle said. “That’s middle of May. We need to make different soil for corn.” Corn needed something called loamy earth—soil filled with sand and clay.
“Why so few seeds?” said Lucy. “Walter’s right, it doesn’t seem enough.”
“Walter, think of it like money in your bank,” Isabelle said. “Start with little and it will grow—unless there’s hurricane or Big Crash. But on field, unlike in bank, if you seed too much, crops will suffocate each other. Roots won’t have anywhere to spread.”
It took four hours, the entire mild April afternoon. After they were finished and had watered the soil, Isabelle told the family this was a wonderful birthday gift to her. Junie asked when her actual birthday was, and Isabelle said, “Today. That’s why I say birthday gift.”
“Today is your birthday? Daddy, Daddy! Did you hear? Today is Isabelle’s birthday!”
“I heard,” Finn said, peering into Isabelle’s face. “I can’t tell if Isabelle is joking.”
“Where is joke here?” Isabelle said. “Do you know what joke is?”
“Why didn’t you tell us?”
“You never asked.”
“Oh, we should have!” said Mae. “We’re so sorry! What can we do for you for your birthday?”
“You did it already,” Isabelle said. “We planted what is going to be bountiful harvest.”
At night, after everyone had gone to bed, Finn and Isabelle sat on the bench he had finally built for her—just two tree stumps and a long plank of wood nailed into them. They sat under a dark and still-leafless oak on the side of the house by the pantries and sheds, the side that had no windows, where no one could see them, where no one ever went. They had a smoke and a celebratory glass of whisky. The kerosene lamp flickered between them, next to the ashtray, the cigarettes, and the glasses.
The clinked and drank and said Budmo.
“Lots of arguments today,” he said. “Everyone is usually so fake-polite.”
“It’s better this way,” Isabelle said. “They care what they put in soil. Wait till it starts growing. They’re going to feel real ownership of it. You think your father barely cares about planting, but once Earl’s tomatoes sprout, just you wait. Your mother too. She wanted eggplant. And Lucy said she didn’t like eggplant, and your mother said she wasn’t growing it for Lucy. And I have the most delicious recipe for eggplant. What?” Finn was looking at her with an expression she couldn’t decipher.
“Nothing.”
“Why you looking at me funny?”
“Not funny.”
“No, you’re right, definitely not funny. But peculiar.”
“How long for germination?” he asked.
“A week with good weather.”
“You grew all this on your farm?”
“Much less. My mother and all kids grew it mostly. We helped at beginning, and of course at end, when harvest came and all heads or hands on farm had to help. But I didn’t do much of actual farming, not like here. I was with horses most of day. And I helped Mirik with milk.”
“Should we get a horse?”
“You don’t get horse,” Isabelle said. “You buy horse. That’s expensive. And horse must eat. We barely feeding ourselves.”
“But do we need a horse for the farm?”
She shook her head. “Horse big help, but horse is work. Also we are not growing enough crops for horse. This is very small.”
“What we planted today is small?”
“Tiny. Only forty meters by forty meters.”
“Your mother planted more than this?”
“No, I told you, less,” Isabelle said. “But when we gave up ten acres of our land to plant wheat for communists, area we sowed was 220 meters long by 180 meters wide.”
Finn whistled. “That’s nearly 700 square feet. That’s colossal.”
“That’s what the actress said to the bishop,” said Isabelle in a Mae West voice. “But yes, big field. Definitely needed horses for that. And steel plow.”
Finn smoked, listening intently to her every word.
“But wheat didn’t grow,” she said, her voice growing desolate, as it often did when she talked about her life in Ukraine. “Because of freeze and then flood, but also—we didn’t plant all berries they gave us. We sowed only half. Rest we ground into flour. We were hungry. We had no food.”
“What if it doesn’t grow here either?” Finn said. “What if there’s a dust storm?”
“A storm of dust in New Hampshire? Not likely. Too many trees.” Smiling, she almost patted him. “Don’t worry. I have good feeling.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know—experience? We had heavy snow. That means ground put to sleep with long freeze. That’s good for ground. It renews it. Crops explode after ground asleep.”
“I bet.” He put away his cigarettes and got ready to leave. “Did you have a silo? Do we need a silo?”
“How much wheat you think you’re going to reap, Finn Evans, from two rows each hundred feet long?” She laughed. “We don’t need silo. Maybe basket.” She gazed at him fondly. “If we need to put extra grain somewhere, we have small granary.”
“Where’s that?”
“Next to corn crib.”
“You’re just making up words now,” he said, mining her face from crown to chin. “I didn’t even ask how old you were.”
“Thirty-two. What you looking at? Do I look thirty-two?”
“Nope, not a day over thirty-one.”
“Thanks, old man. You nearly thirty-four, right?”
“I can’t believe you’ve been with me for almost three years and never told me your date of birth,” said Finn.
“I can’t believe I’ve been with you for almost three years and you never asked,” said Isabelle.