After I stopped dominatrixing, I wanted to be done with the feminine arts. Sloughing them off and releasing their privileges was harder than I’d expected, though. Even when I was learning how to weld, and then how to butcher and slaughter animals, it took me a while to quit sex work—longer than I anticipated—and I tried to wean myself off the cash and the intrigue by working very hard at my new, equally ill-suited career welding steel with the union crew on high-rise buildings in Manhattan. I was good at the work, better than anyone expected me to be, but as soon as I graduated from my apprenticeship and started making real money, I fell into the habit of driving four hundred miles every weekend to spend time with Dean at the farm upstate. I would drive straight out of the city after work every Friday, hit traffic on the Harlem River Drive like clockwork, and speed up I-90 for hours, rolling into the farm long past dark, dirty, lonely, and exhausted. Dean spent most of his time at the farm, going down to the city once or twice a month, and he knew the trek was wearing on me.
You could move up here, you know. With me. We could both live up here.
What about work?
We were sitting on the unfinished deck at the back of the farmhouse, watching the flock of birds mill around the yard. They were on the move, pecking at each other’s feet and squawking around the long red-brown slope of the manure pile. We watched them for a while. The rear bumper of Dean’s truck was crumpled in and hanging low on the right side.
You could just be here, and not worry about it. Take care of the animals. Or we could do a job together maybe.
I didn’t say anything, but after he got up to go fiddle with the truck I got a big colander and took it out to the garden and picked all the cherry tomatoes, a job that I consistently shirked until the fruit would rot on the vine and make slimy little piles of collapsed jelly. We argued about the tomatoes more than once, about the waste. I don’t know why I didn’t just do it, but I had dug my feet in so much that getting the colander felt like a real offering, squatting out there with wet loam squeezing up between my toes, the air heavy with the sweet tang of the plants, the sun warm on my back. It was lovely in the garden, but it was still and silent, and that has always been difficult for me. I prefer work that is strenuous, repetitive, mindless, and painful, of which there was plenty. I shoveled the endless pig shit out of the stalls in heaping pitchforkfuls without complaint. I jammed the never-sharpened shovel into the rocky ground over and over and over again until it was ready for fenceposts, and then I swung the sledgehammer up and over and around my shoulder again and again until the posts were driven, careful not to miss, that’s how you sledge your knee by accident. When the winter loomed Dean paid an Amish man to split us three face cords of firewood from the oak tree that came down in a hurricane, missing the house by just a couple feet. I stacked all three by myself and when I was finished my hands were so swollen Dean had to cut my gloves off for me.
She’s my grunt, he liked to say when we were on jobsites together, because I carried everything, all the tools, the material, eighty-pound welders, yards and yards of steel cable. He would lean on the truck and worry a toothpick around the corner of his mouth, blue eyes glinting at me, watching me grunt and lift. She’s got it, he’d say when anyone tried to help me. He knew I didn’t want the help, but that’s not why he said it. He wanted to watch me work. He liked having a girl doing all this, though he was neither lazy nor unwilling to do it himself in my absence. He had taught me so much of what I knew about my work, so it felt fair, the interminable apprenticeship wherein I never moved up and he never stepped aside.
Tending the garden was different from working the farm or the jobsite, though. It was slow and tedious and required little physical exertion, so my mind ate at me, same as it did whenever my body was inactive. I avoided most activities that required this sort of half attention, because they made me feel uncomfortable. There was a sense of rush and also of paralysis, of things pent up. A pot left on simmer and walked away from, angry but indolent insects buzzing halfheartedly in a very small space. My relationship with myself was marked by this claustrophobia and unease.
I roasted the tomatoes on a cast-iron skillet. Our stove was a wood burner that Dean had modernized with a propane tank, and the 1920s enamel knobs were loose and imprecise. By the time I opened the belly of the stove to check the skillet, it was so hot that when I flicked water on it the beads didn’t even dance around the surface, they just evaporated on contact like they had never existed, like there was a place inside our house where things could disappear altogether. I reached in and grabbed the handle of the skillet with a heavy dish cloth that I had doubled over until it was thick enough to protect my hand. The heat on my arm felt like pinpricks. As I hoisted the skillet out and up to the stovetop, I could feel that I’d done a poor job at folding the cloth, that it was not quite large enough, that the pad of skin on the inside of my thumb was so close to the surface of the cast iron that it was almost touching.
Dean was sitting at the kitchen table, running his finger absentmindedly along the crack in its center. He was talking about installing new fluorescents in the metal shop, about the bid he got from the machinist, about the neighbor up the hill using Roundup. Maybe we should have the pond water tested, . . . what are we gonna do about the tank of muriatic acid from the aluminum job, it’s gonna crack when winter comes and sure it’s diluted but that can’t be good for the groundwater, . . . the water table. I didn’t know the difference between groundwater and the water table and I couldn’t believe he didn’t have a plan for the huge plastic cube that we had filled with runoff from the patina for those two-hundred-thousand-dollar trellises we had built.
The tomatoes were black around the edges, wrinkled like toes in the bath, but probably edible. There were spiderwebs inside the soft pleats of the curtains and black soot from the propane all along the underside of the bread warmer and I looked at him and wondered what it would feel like to not have a city to leave to, to not have my own job and my own money and my own truck and an escape hatch for when things got too intense. He was talking about the new woodstove and the assholes at the buildings department who said he needed a permit to install it and fuck them and this was his property and he said it like that, My property, not Ours, but Mine, and for half a second I wondered what that made me, even though I already knew.
Then I pressed my thumb into the cast iron so hard and fast that wet steam rose straight up from it. I felt time grind to a stop. Every thought and question caved. Past and future crumpled like they’d been put through a trash compactor and everything fell into the hot screaming sear of my flesh.
I just can’t believe I need a permit on my own goddamn land. He didn’t look up, and I didn’t make a noise. When I put the skillet down on the range my thumb stuck to it the way chicken skin sticks in a stir-fry pan. The only feeling I could name was hollowness. It was absence, not presence, and the failure to find words was not incidental, it was the intended effect of the whole thing. Inside my forehead there was a rubberiness, something stretching and recoiling, and I suddenly noticed the pulsing of the bare lightbulb dangling out of BX cable over the countertop. Everything else was still.
In the bathroom, I dipped my thumb into a pot of silver sulfadiazine and wrapped it with gauze. I served Dean the burned tomatoes and he ate them, unfazed. For all that could be said about his endless string of demands and dissatisfactions, he always ate my food with gusto. I could feel the beat of my heart in my thumb, pulsing like a bass line. Later, after I awkwardly scrubbed the skillet with one hand, we climbed up the rickety wooden stairs to our summer bedroom. My thumb was still throbbing, and I wanted nothing from him, but when he reached for me I did not pretend to be sleeping, as I sometimes did. I sat straight up on my knees, my toes tucked neatly under me. I pulled off my oversize sweatshirt with the hole in the belly, clasped my hands behind my back, and tilted my face toward him. He slapped me once, hard, and I hardly felt it. I hadn’t really been in my body since I started thinking in the tomato patch. He stood and I tipped my face up to him again. It was so dark that I could only see the glinting wetness of his teeth and eyes, but I knew where he was, and he didn’t miss. He held my chin in one sandpapery hand, a firm and measured grasp. It was a proprietary touch, the same one he used with the lambs. He slapped me again and suddenly there was light, shiny white like platinum or the surface of the moon, glowing all around me but fading fast the way a dream goes; when I looked for it, it vanished. I felt heat on my cheek, right in time with the sickening crack, but nothing else.
You scare me sometimes, he would say to me later, more than once, in earnest moments, and I know these were the times he was talking about. He smelled sweet and dusty like clover hay, cut through with the spicy animal smell of rough men. I leaned my face into his belly: diesel fuel and line-dried cotton. He put one of his hands on top of my head, smoothed my hair back from my forehead, pulled me in closer.
Are you ok? You seem like you’re somewhere else.
________________
For a week I wavered about moving up to the farm. I got dubious advice from a friend who was living with a married man and his wife and pretending to be their nanny. Do what you would do if you had no fear, she told me. Bubbling over with Eckhart Tolle–isms and the flush of illicit sex, she flung this jewel at me over lattes in Prospect Park as we sat on benches covered in plasticky green paint pocked with bubbles.
You know what the smart thing to do is, a better friend told me, which is the only kind of advice you can give to someone who won’t take any. Maybe just keep your job, she said, careful to trail off with the hesitant lilt of a question, though any sane person would know it should have been a statement.
I spent some time thinking about what I would do if I had no fear—fifteen minutes, at least. The truth was that it had been decided long before I went through the routine of considering it.
That October, we bought pigs because we were driving past a place with a sign that said PIGS FOR SALE and Dean had money. We did not know that no one buys pigs in October. People slaughter pigs in October, before the winter comes. During winter, pigs turn into money pits who eat and eat and eat and yet grow thinner by the day, but we did not know this. We also did not understand what it meant to have a drafty crumbling barn in the dead of winter. We had vague ideas about the animals’ bodies creating heat and some books about straw bale insulation, but the truth was that we bought the pigs like we bought snacks in the overpriced gourmet bodegas on Bedford Avenue: throw ’em in the bag.
The pigs, as it turned out, were incredibly stressful to tend. We wanted to think of ourselves as good farmers, so we did everything we could for them. We went out to the barn at six in the morning to break open with the blunt wooden handle of an old broom the ice that covered their water, the sweat inside our thermal onesies freezing to a thin glaze of slush next to our skin.
Dean, as it turned out, did not respond to the stress of the pigs very well. I had seen him under stress before, but only the city kind. Job stress, contractor stress, real estate market stress, day trading stress. Poker stress, Certificate of Occupancy stress, Department of Buildings stress, parking ticket stress. Any problem that can be solved with money isn’t a real problem, he liked to say, and all those stresses were around the accumulation and retention of money. Dean was good at money. The arrogance that hindered him in personal matters was gold for business, and he had enough of it to charge double for what he sold and to lowball what he bought. He got what he demanded, seemingly every time. More than just that, though, he was a great picker. He had an instinct for the untapped resource, the diamond in the rough, the gentrification bubble that hadn’t even come out of the wand yet. That eye for the undervalued was accompanied by an uncanny certainty in his ability to do things that he had no experience with. In another era, he would have struck gold in California.
This was why he had plenty of money to make rash purchases of livestock and machinery, always in cash. Since the neighborhood had flipped, the abandoned girdle factory on the wrong side of Brooklyn that he had bought in the early nineties was such a cash cow that he could afford to buy trucks and property in cash. The only problem was that he was also a card player. A good one, which is the worst kind. He slipped away some nights after I was asleep and woke me early in the morning by throwing cash all over me, with the manic glint in his eye that I knew meant he had played well and won. Since the first night I met him, I had never seen him without a roll of bills the size of a small sandwich in his front pocket, bound in half with two or three thick rubber bands. I bought him a money clip once, but he never used it. Not big enough.
I knew he was compensating for something with all the cash, filling the same hole that he filled with the terrible things he said to me on the mornings when he came home after losing. I knew that it was the deep well of pain inside him that made him so arrogant and unkind.
He bought the farm with cash, trying to turn all his money into something else. To spin it into something true and real and invulnerable to influence. So we drove up to the woods where irony didn’t live, where a full set of teeth was a pretentious thing to have, and we took responsibility. For him, this was what the animals were for.
Under the lash of a winter colder and longer than either of us had imagined, we took care of the pigs. Four of them, covered in red-brown hair the texture of a Brillo pad. Four of them, cold and hungry and in constant need. They broke the stalls and we fixed them. They injured themselves and we tended them. They ran away and we inched down our icy county road in Dean’s big black Dodge Ram, trying to herd them back home in the least effective way possible but the only one we could think of. I worried about their safety and well-being without interruption, while Dean seemed able to turn his attention off when he chose.
While we were out at the grocery store one afternoon, the pigs broke out of their stalls and gained entry to the house. We came home to a scene so comically wretched that I could only sit down on the ground and laugh. The kitchen door was wide open, and every cabinet was splayed open. They had gotten up on the counters, covering everything with the sour porcine stench of their feces and the deeper, softer musk of their body oils. There were hoofprints on the marble, shattered dishes all over the floor, wet smears of pig shit along the baseboards. They ate all the cereal.
When summer came, we brought home two Duroc barrows and a pregnant Hampshire sow. We thought we had become experienced farmers by this point, so we felt ready for a five-hundred-pound animal who cost eight hundred dollars and could need imminent medical intervention at any time. She was so big I was frightened of her, a great heaving mass of flesh rendered in pinks and grays, large enough that I imagined she could kill me just by pressing me between her body and the side of her stall. Her swollen teats all poked in different directions. Her vulva bulged out of her body, an angry pink brighter than anything else in the barnyard.
The farmer we bought her from seemed confident in his prediction of her due date. Three months, three weeks, and three days, he told us. Dean and I were both too embarrassed at our urban ignorance to ask the obvious, From when? So we brought her home and we plushed her stall up with a double layer of straw and we waited.
June passed and she seemed larger each day. According to our instructions, we kept her in her stall and fed her generously. The waiting felt interminable. She developed sores on the thin skin of her belly, the part where I could see the mottled patches of gray and pink underneath the sparse covering of short hairs. I wanted to clean and dress the sores, but I was afraid that she would bite me. I didn’t admit it to Dean, but I was afraid of the pigs, of their needlelike teeth and the reptilian movements of their bodies, of their panicky reactions and frantic irrationality. Afraid of their piercing shrieks, so human in pitch and volume that I thought of a woman being tortured every time I heard them wail.
I am not afraid of stray dogs or unbroken horses. Dogs and horses, no matter how large and fierce, have a logic I can understand. They have instincts I recognize, fears and desires. But the pigs were unpredictable, at times self-defeating in their terror and at others wholly sensible. They were either too smart or too stupid, I’d believe either and I didn’t know which. I just knew that every day I filled my five-gallon buckets up with two scoops of wheat, two scoops of corn. I ran lukewarm water that smelled like pipes out of the kinked-up barn hose and I plunged my hand into the bucket almost up to the elbow and I grabbed and stirred until a coarse mash was formed. Every day I did this, yet when I pushed through the door from the feed room to the barn, I didn’t know what to expect from the pigs. The farm was full of unpredictable creatures, in the barn and in the farmhouse both, and I learned to approach with caution. Some days they were docile, patiently waiting for me to toss sloppy handfuls into the black rubber troughs at the corners of the stalls, eating with gusto but not aggression. Some days they were already biting each other by the time I got the door open, cutting through thick hide to leave sharp puncture wounds, pushing each other down and stepping on each other’s legs, bellies, cheeks to get closer to my buckets. Some days they bashed against the wooden slats that formed the barriers to their stalls, and I heard the thin soggy old barnwood we had repurposed as lumber creak and squeal under the pressure. On those days I imagined what they might do to me if they broke through. Would they just step on me with their soggy cloven hooves until they got to the buckets, or would they turn on me like they turned on each other, carving their teeth into my flesh the same way I do to barbecued ribs?
Once they started eating, they calmed down. The sharp wails faded into contented grumbles, low snorty noises that were half-absorbed into the wet piles of anesthetizing carbohydrates. I liked watching them eat. It was one of the few moments on our farm when I felt competent and useful. I watched their bellies swell as they swallowed without chewing, and I wasn’t afraid any longer. It was not them I feared, not exactly. It was their hunger.
July passed and we still did not have piglets. Momma’s body was so distended that she could hardly get to her feet. My fear of the morning feeding ritual was lulled into remission by repetition. I was comfortable enough to gently scratch her between the bases of her ears—not while she was eating, but after, when her eyes were half-closed and her face was glazed with visible satisfaction. She seemed to enjoy being touched. Her body had been alone for months. Since she’d been pregnant, she’d been in a single stall, safe from ravenous stags and the rapacious boars, any of which would have eagerly torn her asunder. At our place, the other pigs roamed and rooted around outside, but Momma had to be protected from parasites, from tetanus, from mange. The piglets imprisoned her in her vast ulcerated body, and we imprisoned her in the maternity stall.
On August first she farrowed the litter in the night, with no help from anyone and no need for anything. When I went out to mix the feed in the morning, I found them: twelve tiny piglets, squirming in the straw like minnows, with russet-colored hair and long anteater noses like their daddy, a Duroc. Momma looked like a beach ball with a slow leak. She was on her side and didn’t get up when I crashed through the door with the buckets, just lifted her head. She met my eyes. It was the first time I had made eye contact with her.
It feels very natural to look at an animal in the way that I look at a pickup truck or a dinner plate or an earring. The gaze is outward only, and I feel free because I feel unseen. I feel the same way alone, or with a blindfold on my eyes. The feeling is not a consequence of reality, it is a consequence of perception. Once I met Momma’s eyes, the place where I thought my looking ended became a mirror. The privacy was gone. She saw me.
The piglets rustled against each other, groping blindly toward her teats, pushing for light and air and food and warmth, experiencing their aliveness in a way that consumed and overwhelmed them. Momma looked into me and I looked into her, and I had no idea what to make of what was flowing between us because she was a pig and I was an emotionally erratic woman who has been to too much therapy and overthinks everything, but what I thought I felt was a communion.
________________
The arrival of the piglets brought back the awareness of how incompetent we were at farming. On their second day of life, Dean headed out to the barn and came running back out ten minutes later, his arms full of a lumpy pink load. When he got closer, I saw that it was three of the babies. Dean was crying the same way he cried when the neighbor’s dog killed our ducklings, the way I sometimes caught him doing in the corner of his office, his torso hunched over and a wrinkled photograph of his first dog Nina in his lap.
The first time I saw him cry about Nina I felt jealous. She was magnificent—a Fila Brasileiro, a breed of dog bred to hunt people, one hundred and forty pounds of glossy brindle and muscled jowls. Nina died of a heart attack in Dean’s arms, at the top of a hill at the end of a run that was too long on a day that was too hot. He carried her for miles, but her big mastiff heart had stopped beating by the time he got her back to the car, and he was never quite the same afterward.
I wondered, when he told me the story, if he would have done the same for me. If he would have gathered my crumpled weight in his arms and run with me, sweating and stumbling and crying. If that blank spot that he had for me was bigger and colder than his love for me as an animal, a faithful thing, something he had assumed responsibility for.
I knew when I saw him running with the armful of piglets that he was remembering Nina, that his body knew this feeling of having been too powerful and having made a terrible mistake. A life is a heavy weight, something that suspends itself between the brain and the heart and doesn’t allow benefit of the doubt.
Two of the piglets were clearly dead, cold and breathless and beginning to stiffen. One was breathing, a harsh and shallow sound tearing out of its gullet. Its belly and loins were covered in a hideous purple-black bruise that looked like a puddle spreading over its most vital and tender organs. She rolled over on them, Dean choked out, spittle flying out of his mouth. I took the struggling piglet out of Dean’s arms and hurried into the house. He was inconsolable, I knew, and the animal had to come first.
The piglet’s eyes were terribly small. This was our first home litter, so I had no idea if this was normal or a consequence of the accident. I tried to look into them, to make contact, to confirm life, but I couldn’t. The piglet just stared out with beady intensity, his pain radiating out in the trembling of his body and the low whimpers that came with every few breaths.
I took him into the bedroom and nestled him into the corner of the white velvet Victorian couch that had been fancy before work pants and dog hair and moths and mildew got the best of it. This was where we always took the broken animals. Some of them made it out—the gaggle of goslings whose mother wouldn’t let them under her wings, our big beautiful Rottweiler with the wrecked hip, Bigelow the baby goat who couldn’t figure out how to latch on to his momma’s teat. We heat-lamped and bed-rested and bottle-fed them back to wellness and they left the bedroom and made it back outside, but others weren’t so lucky. Our tiny chick who couldn’t get her digestive system working: I cleaned her tiny body with a warm wet Q-tip and fed her pinches of presoaked food, but she died anyway. The baby goat with the defective front legs, who never stood up but spent her short life struggling on her knees until her equally defective organs gave out. Our poor duck, Harold, who lost his leg and then his life to a maggot-eaten infection. We kept those broken babies alive longer than they would have lived without our clumsy interference, and then we allowed our selfish hearts to break when they did the most natural thing any animal can do.
I covered the piglet up with some laundry and gathered the hurt-animal supplies. Plastic bin, straw, baby bottle, heat lamp. It was summertime, and hot, but I knew from a book that shock makes bodies cold in any temperature. I assembled the nest, pushing the straw up high on the sides of the bin so that the piglet’s body would be supported. I couldn’t yet tell if he was going to die, but each of the animal deaths taught me that what rattles around painfully in my head afterward are the small kindnesses I withheld out of thoughtlessness. I think about how I might feel if I were tiny and terrified and bleeding internally. I think about how I have felt when my body has been broken, when I have feared for my life.
I piled the straw higher, clipped the lamp to the bin, and gently scooped the piglet up from the couch. I meant to put him right in. And yet. There was something about his weight in my arms—not even five pounds, less than a package of sugar—that made me ache deep in my chest. His skin was cool to the touch, and there was a gurgle of foamy spit gathering in the corner of his mouth. The hair on his ears was as fine as a spider’s legs and the sun streaming through the dusty windowpanes settled on it, a little sparkly. I was crying by then, cradling the piglet to my aching chest in a motion no one ever showed me but that I felt utterly sure of. My body was made for this, evolved from a time when people were just mammals and the point of everything was to make more people, a time before work boots and checkbooks and Microsoft Word. My soft parts were engineered for a moment just like this, when a helpless wailing thing would need me to quell its fear and sustain its life. It wasn’t supposed to be a fucked-up piglet, but there I was.
He didn’t make it through the night. When the sun went down for the day the summer heat receded with it, so it took a while before I noticed how cold and still the piglet’s body was. I put my ear to the side of his belly, hoping to hear the light fluttering thump of a tiny heart, but there was nothing. His legs were beginning to stiffen, and I suddenly understood I had played a trick on myself with hope and guilt and impotence, that I had been holding on to a dead thing for some hours.
In the morning I drove down to the city, still wearing my sour-smelling barn clothes, my hands stained with the milky smell of the piglet and my hair studded with straw. I’ll take care of it, Dean said when I asked him where we should bury the body. We had eaten pork shoulder and loins and homemade bacon every day for the past week. If the piglet had lived we would have let him grow broad and round and we would have killed and eaten him too. It was baffling, where I drew the lines in my head, with my heart, where I doled out compassion and respect and where I claimed my privilege to possess and destroy. When the animals died prematurely—and by this I mean before we chose to take their lives—we felt great cavernous sadness in our chests, both of us. We ached with feeling and remorse and compassion and regret. We could have done more, been better, worked harder, known more. We could have husbanded these animals more competently, the better to usher them toward the deaths that we had pre-decided not to feel upset about.
When they died by accident we buried them with a piece of fruit. We had an odd somber ritual we hardly discussed. I can’t remember its origin. Dean dug the hole. I wrapped the cold stiff bundle in a dish cloth or a feed bag or whatever scrap of fabric I could find. I placed the package in the ground, Dean nestled the fruit on top and then covered them with soft shovelfuls of loamy upstate earth, studded with rocks and worms and shiny snails. He patted the ground level with the backside of the shovel and sometimes we said a prayer, which is an odd thing for two people without religion to do. It was a performance of some kind, or maybe just a stab in the dark, an imitation of what we imagined different kinds of people would do in the face of death. I was comforted by the existence of a ritual around our grimmer mistakes. That we might believe in something, even if it was just ourselves, felt important.
I put a ripe peach on the edge of the kitchen table on my way out the door. To send with him, I told Dean, though he already knew what it was for. I drove away, half wishing I had stayed for the burial, half grateful I didn’t have to, and by the time I put fifty miles between me and the farm, I had almost convinced myself I’d never felt anything at all.
I left the farm in autumn, five years after I first arrived, two years after our first litter of piglets. By the time I left, everything was dead or gone. After all the animals, it was an odd feeling, to be responsible for nothing. It felt like weightlessness, as if an anchor I hadn’t been aware of had been loosened in the night and I could float away somewhere and nothing would be altered by my absence.
I didn’t want to leave. It wasn’t my plan. My plan was to get in the Westfalia camper van Dean and I had packed to the gills, which had a bad clutch and could only be started by pushing from the back, running alongside as it picked up speed, and then jumping in the flapping door before the van got going too fast. It was full of art books and power tools and tins of smoked fish. The heater barely worked, so we planned to drive straight south, through Virginia and the Carolinas, then to veer west when the temperature got high enough for the wipers to stay unfrozen. We made the plans together, to head to Texas for Dean to find the echo of Donald Judd and wait out the winter, then to LA, where my writing class would start in March. I didn’t have much money left after spending the year upstate, but Dean’s Brooklyn tenants sent him thousands in rent every month, and we had been living as a team for a while by then. He collected the checks, I did the bookkeeping. I had quit my job. It had not occurred to me to worry about my dwindling bank balance, or about my long-term employment prospects as second-chair vagabond living in a van. I trusted him completely.
In Texas he would make sculptures. It was only when he was making sculptures that he was happy, and it was only when he was happy that he was kind. So in Texas, he would be kind. I was only happy when he was happy, so in Texas, I would also be happy. I had never been to Texas before, and a van, no matter how twee and German, is close quarters for two people who sometimes fail violently to get along. But I had hardly considered these factors, because I had decided that in Texas we would be happy. It was just a matter of getting there.
To have a farm is to be rooted to one place, beholden to feeding schedules and broken fence lines and deworming protocols. Animals are inherently stabilizing to the people who tend them, because their needs are regular and predictable and relentless. I often felt suffocated by these demands, by the early mornings and the long drives to the grain supply, by not being able to go away for a weekend or spend money recklessly without considering what it would mean for the animals. But I felt this imposition like discipline, and while I did not always receive this discipline comfortably, I mostly understood that it was molding and shaping me into something better. Dean was different. Wilder, more defiant, one of those horses that would break its own legs trying to escape before submitting to a halter. He bucked the schedules, the demands, the common sense. He asked why when it was not relevant or helpful, and he insisted on iconoclasm when conformity would have better served.
When we began talking about leaving for the winter, I had a long list of reasons why not. The animals, for one. And money. And our house, still half-dressed in gray-stained Tyvek that whipped in the wind like a long billowing skirt.
But we can’t leave. The pipes will freeze. The roof could leak. The silo might collapse. With each of these protestations, I saw his eyelids clench closer and closer into a furious squint until he was glaring at me like a big jungle cat. In the wild, it is important for prey animals always to be attuned to the fine movements of predators.
I will not, he over-enunciated—another sign that I had overreached—stay here all winter with you just because you are afraid. I will not—here the T sliced through the air like a knife sliding against a sharpening stone—be told what to do by you.
I could sometimes see it coming in the arch of his eyebrows, a certain imperiousness that descended as if from an off-site cloud of fury, ready to be weaponized into rage with a few moments’ notice. But by the time his voice switched from easy New York fast talk to the clipped diction of a drill instructor, I had already missed too many signals.
Your fear is disgusting, he began. I don’t want it around me, it’s toxic. You would try to make rules for me in my fucking house? I could feel his engine turn over and slide into gear as his rage started, first low in his belly, then spilling out of his chest.
So we decided to pack the van and head south. We decided this by way of him saying I hate you, and me saying But I love you, and him saying I don’t want you to come with me, and me saying But I will be perfect. We decided this by him driving fast out the driveway without letting his engine warm up and me sitting with my bare skin on the splintery wood of the porch, wrapped in a blanket that smelled like musty cedar and spilled tea and the body odor of our dead dog. I sat until the sun went down, feeling inconsolable, and when the cold crept too far into my face and my feet I moped back into the house, where I curled up on the creaky bed in one of the back bedrooms and mercifully slept the rest of the day away.
When he came back I could tell he had been to the casino and won. I don’t know how I could tell, it is a certain paying of attention that was cultivated so early in my life that I can’t see the mechanisms of it. At six years old I could tell whether my father was warm and jovial or icily brooding, just from how our apartment door sounded when he walked through it. I’m a watcher, and a listener, but it’s more than that, it’s another sense, a vigilance to emotional frequency that is trained always on men.
By the time Dean was standing next to the bed, I was fully alert. I could smell him, diesel and wool and cold air. The moonlight illuminated his silhouette.
Get up, he growled, and reached into my scalp for a rough handful of knotty hair. Living in the country gave me permission to quit all the beauty rituals that are required of women in the city, and no more blowouts and facials and pedicures quickly degenerated into no more hair brushing or face washing or changing out of work clothes. I looked like a messy little country girl and presented as so young in my sneakers and baseball hats that I was sometimes mistaken for Dean’s daughter.
I hate having my hair pulled. I always have, since my overcommitted mother used to rip a fine-tooth comb through my snarls with one hand while packing school lunches with the other. Unlike some other kinds of pain, it makes me angry. He hoisted me out of the bed by my head, holding it high while I scrambled to arrange my limbs under it. I swallowed the anger into a hot roiling bolus that settled in my low belly. Everything was happening very slowly. He led me down the long windowless hallway toward the kitchen. Safe in the darkness, I let my face break into a wide smile I knew better than to reveal. This would be ugly, I knew, but it didn’t matter. At the end of it I would have my power back.
________________
The next day, with a few tender bald spots on my head, I began to pack the van. After I filled the storage areas with clothes, linens, power tools, and nonperishable food, I cleaned the farmhouse, sweeping a few long snarls of brown hair into the heavy metal dustpan along with coffee bean crumbs and mouse droppings. The inside of my cheek was purplish black, and Dean hadn’t spent much time in the house, but everything was settled. We were going to Texas together.
For us to leave, the animals had to be dealt with. The van couldn’t handle the highways with any serious snowfall, so we had to leave before Thanksgiving. The days were ticking by quickly, and Dean was gone, collecting money and looking in on jobs and wrapping up loose ends in the city. We were leaving in ten days or a couple weeks. I was too overwhelmed to check the date.
There was a lot of killing yet to be done. We placed most of the animals somewhere—our two horses at a boarding farm, our birds given to Milo, the Amish man who chopped our wood. Milo didn’t exactly want the birds, but when we showed up on his land with a truck full of squawking cardboard boxes, he gave us a long slow nod and sliced the packing tape open with his knife. Our chickens, who could fly just enough to make them flighty but not enough to actually take flight, pushed their way out of the box, jumped off the edge of the tailgate, and toddled hopefully toward Milo’s dark sweet-smelling barn. Our tom turkey, beloved to Dean, looked befuddled and followed the flock, dodging the hot stream of diesel fumes pushing out of the back end of the truck. The geese went last, and we were not sad to see them spread their wings and screech their unveiled threats to the rest of Milo’s animals as they crested their elegant necks and reached their beaks to the sky. They were violent animals, the geese, lacking both the fear and the sweetness of the other birds, their sleek profiles belying the unpredictable meanness of their nature. I was dive-bombed by them more than once, as was Dean. We knew their beaks left mean welts. To catch them, we had to use bath towels and feed buckets, sprinting around our back field in pursuit for a long afternoon. Milo gave us another inscrutable nod as Dean pressed a thin fold of cash into his hand for feed.
Y’all have a good winter, he told us, the crinkling skin under his eyes the only evidence of his smile, which was otherwise hidden under his voluminous red beard. Milo has never driven a car, but he once took a train to Arizona with all eight of his children in tow to seek medical treatment for his mother-in-law. He told me this in my truck one day as I was driving him home after we hired him for a day’s labor, as is expected of any English who do business with the Amish. His farm was forty minutes from ours, and I loved those drives. I loved his unfamiliar smells and Pennsylvania Dutch accent, how he was my age but felt wizened like a grandfather. I thought, when he told me about seeing the Appalachian Mountains and the Sonoran Desert out the window of the train, that maybe there was a wish in there, a wistful thought about unchosen options. The world was right there, passing before him every day with hybrid vehicles and microwave popcorn and drive-through cappuccinos. He once asked me for a photograph, which is expressly forbidden by his religion, of a neighbor’s Christmas light display. I just want to look at it later, he explained, shrugging his shoulders, and I wondered what else this gentle man who worked from dawn to dusk in calm indifference to everything I am in thrall to might want.
Dean also loved Milo. He was something of a spiritual figure to us, which is not at all fair to put on a man who is only trying to muddle through life a little differently than the rest of us, but we couldn’t help it. His gentleness and lack of appetites struck us dumb, and we tried not to ogle, but our fascination crept out in our questions, our confusions, our long looks. Not all the Amish men were like this. Some were sloppy and angry and covetous, just like any men. But Milo was different, and it was visible in everything from the way he sat on a bucket in the corner to eat his sandwich at lunchtime, neither consumed with his own thoughts nor engaging in conversation, looking at nothing, just being there, a man on a bucket eating a sandwich, gentle even to the space he occupied.
He called me on my cell phone a few times a year, just to check in, using an English neighbor’s phone that all the local Amish made use of. The neighbor would take messages and walk them up the road. We talked about the weather and the stars, which he could read. In another life maybe he would have been a navigator.
When Dean left and I was alone with the pigs, I called the neighbor’s phone and asked to leave a message for Milo.
You want I should tell him to catch a ride? she asked. I think his cousin’s working around your way. I said yes and spent the night shivering between two heating pads, watching television on my laptop while moths clogged up the screen. I was afraid of what had to happen, and when I am afraid, I retreat.
Have you taken care of the pigs yet? Dean asked me on the phone the next day.
Not yet, I replied.
What have you been doing, then?
Packing and cleaning. I covered the beds with plastic sheets and boxed up all our clothes. Cleaned the kitchen out. Got the vacuum seal bags ready.
You know they have to hang for a while, right? We’re gonna run out of time if you don’t do it soon.
I know.
His voice was half-impatient and half-gentle. All I had to say was that I was afraid, that I wasn’t sure I could do a good job, that I couldn’t do it by myself. He understood those things, especially when it came to the animals, because he felt all of them too. But I was afraid that what would follow would be, Why don’t you just stay for the winter? Or Maybe it’s too much for you to take care of in time. Or, worst, I’m going to leave without you. And there was nothing that I wouldn’t do to avoid that. It was a gross and unwieldy truth, but I stared it in the eyes too many times to pretend I didn’t know its depths. There was nothing I wouldn’t have given up to keep him, no part of myself I wouldn’t conceal or compromise or serve up like meat on a platter.
And so I knew I had to kill our recent litter of piglets. I had to do it right then and I had to do it myself and it didn’t matter that they were young, younger than anyone kills piglets, or that since we wrenched their momma out of the stall a few weeks ago they had been clustered around each other like they had a preternatural idea that someone was coming for them next. In those end times I had to play god and executioner whether I liked it or not, because the alternative—to admit my incompetence and insecurity, to confess that it did something to my heart to slide a blade into soft unsuspecting flesh—carried with it more consequences than I could bear, and if I was anything I was selfish, following my disoriented heart down a questionable path to a dark and ugly place.
The next day, like magic, Milo arrived at the end of our driveway. I had done all the packing and cleaning I could possibly do and the only chore left was to process the piglets. The sheep were stacked in vacuum-sealed cuts in the freezer, their heads and hooves buried in a big rotting pile of blood and bones by the edge of the property line. They were easier, because they were full grown, because Dean and I had done them together, and because unlike pigs, ruminants are deeply trusting and never seem to know that you are about to cut their throats. They went quietly—peacefully, I told myself—sitting on their haunches while we hugged their bodies tight and sturdy. They didn’t cry and they didn’t flail and they could be easily coaxed with a small tin of grain.
Pigs know, though. Many people believe they are smarter than dogs. They always know.
Milo took care of the piglets for me and never once acknowledged the unspeakable selfishness of prematurely ending their lives so that I could go on a road trip. He did it in the barn and every hour or so walked over to the house with a tarpaulin armful of quartered carcasses. It was so cold in the butchering room that I was afraid I would slice my own flesh and not feel it. My apron was covered with crystallized frozen blood and fat, and my hands prickled with impending frostbite.
When it was all done, I drove Milo home. He cleaned his knife in the driveway before getting into my truck. We hardly spoke on the drive, and when I dropped him off at his own farm, the coil of smoke rising from the chimney and the warm hearth smell from his woodstove made me feel achy and wrong, so alien from the idea of a huge warm family that churns butter together and takes turns getting up to stoke the fire that I didn’t even get out of the truck; I just handed him a wad of cash, which he accepted without counting, tucking it into the breast pocket of his work shirt. I thanked him weakly and drove through the dusk, over underboughs littering the county road, past barns that had crumbled in on themselves and trailers sagging at awkward angles, past wavy glass windowpanes spilling over with cheery yellow light, past rusted tractors and parted-out trucks. In the debris of this land I wanted to see some kind of poetic hopelessness, or hopefulness, or anything really, that would allow me to graft a narrative onto the sore swelling feeling in my gut.
When I pulled back into the driveway and killed my engine, the farm was quieter than it had ever been. I was the only living creature on the land, except maybe the mice in the barn. The piglets were dead. Their stalls smelled like wet straw and iron and the freezer was so full of petite plastic packages that the lid wouldn’t fully close.
Dean came back a few days later, to collect me and the van and assess my work closing up the farm. I had covered with plastic everything that could be eaten by mice and moths, had thrown out everything perishable, and had disconnected all the appliances except the chest freezers. When the pained whirring of the jerry-rigged antique icebox had shuddered to a silence, the quietness that descended was heavy and laden with guilt and fear. I thought I could hear my own heart beating.
He came back rushed and angry after too many nights at the underground poker houses and not enough sleep and frustrations with the tenants. I was angrier than I understood, resentful of the flashing images of tiny hooves and snouts, tails still covered with the downy fluff of a baby animal. I hadn’t wanted to go to Texas and I hadn’t wanted to kill the piglets and I hadn’t wanted to end up cold and bloody and afraid of being left alone. I had signed up for a bucolic gingham-apron fantasy, not a horror movie of backwoods dysfunction, and I was mad about it.
So when he suggested that I should have boxed our clothes up differently, that I should have put more of the art books in the van, that I should reconnect the icebox and defrost it again in a few days, that I had filled the van with too many of my own belongings, a tiny rip opened in my carefully maintained mantle of patience and devotion. I felt it happen, a ruined stitch over a critical seam tearing open into a gaping hole of fury as words spilled out of my mouth, all starting with You didn’t and You haven’t and You couldn’t, until I reached a crescendo and was crying so furiously that I could no longer talk.
He sat at the bare kitchen table as I bellowed, drinking tea out of a Mason jar, staring at me like I was a flailing animal on which he didn’t want to waste energy wrestling to the ground. This was a critical reversal of roles, me furious and him calm. My anger picked up so much steam that I was no longer conscious of consequence, and as I threw off the heavy yoke of my caution I felt absolutely intoxicated by my rage. His eyes were glowing ice-blue, and had I noticed that I would have been alarmed, but my own eyes were stinging and squinting with bright blinding wrathful tears. I was screaming for every time my neck wanted a soft touch and got the prints of five fingers, every time I wanted to be folded into an embrace and got a slammed door and squealing wheels, every time I needed to be told I was loved or valuable or smart or beautiful and instead was stained with the worst, most violent words the language contains. I needed to cleanse myself of all this resentment before I got into the van, before the world shrank again. Every time I followed him the quarters got smaller and the relationship muscled itself into greater and greater magnitude in relation. The farm was small enough, these ten acres of bruises and harshness, of spilled blood and unheard screams. On the farm, there was pain, yes, but also there was space. I held myself together in my secret hayloft hiding spot, the deep woods behind the land, my truck, the bathroom. But in the van? In the van there wouldn’t be anything but pain.
The van, with its manual German transmission that I could not operate, with one key that I did not possess, with all my options and agency streaming out the windows as we would head south to a place where I would have no money of my own and no people to call. What a fucking nightmare. Even in the midst of my fit I knew the van was a terrible place for me, and I screamed all the louder for knowing so and not being able to voice it. Even in my loss of control, I still did hold back.
He let me go on for longer than I expected. I don’t know that I would have stopped without him stopping me. My voice was hoarse and my cheeks were sore by the time he stood up and pushed the table so hard two of its thick wooden legs left the ground.
Shut up, he bellowed, his starting volume so much louder than the apex of my outburst that I was immediately shaken into silence.
Shut up, again, though I was no longer making any noise. He smashed the Mason jar on the ground and I watched the cold wet tea spread across the flaking barn-red paint on the floorboards until it reached my feet. The slowing of time felt elastic, like I was watching taffy being pulled in slow-motion reverse. He was yelling and I couldn’t tell what he was saying until he settled on a familiar refrain: Stupid, stupid, stupid, with pain and anger and disbelief. Stupid, stupid, stupid, with fury and frustration and sadness.
I waited for him to move toward me, my stomach clenched in certain anticipation. We had been doing this dance for long enough that we both knew the moves by heart. But he didn’t, and his volume dropped, though he didn’t stop muttering stupid, stupid, stupid and shaking his head and looking at me. He was crying too, which was not part of how this was supposed to go. He was supposed to choke me and scream at me and then fuck me and slap me in the face and I was supposed to cry again at the outrage of it all. I was supposed to make a large and luxurious breakfast and apologize profusely while he steeled his jaw and said I just don’t know, and I was supposed to beg him not to leave me and to promise to be better. That was the dance.
But he didn’t reach for my neck. He stepped over the shattered Mason jar, the glass crunching under his boots like brittle bones, and he run-walked out the door, up the hill to the metal shop, where he slammed the door and turned one small light on and appeared to stay there all night, at least until I fell asleep watching the shop from the window.
In the morning I woke up with a crick in my neck and a nervous weight in my gut, like I had been filled with something toxic. His truck was neatly parallel parked next to the metal shop. The van was gone. I called him and left a message. I apologized for my behavior and promised to be different and asked what kind of pancakes he would like for breakfast. He could be at the casino. He probably went to the casino. Or maybe he went to run an errand, some last-minute pre–road trip vehicle repair, some unpaid account, it could have been anything, really. We were leaving the next day and he always left things like paying the insurance and filling his prescriptions and buying clothes to the very last minute. Surely he was doing something like that.
I couldn’t get him on the phone but the cell service was always spotty upstate so probably he was on his way back, driving around the lake, the van’s tires slippy on the slick stretch of road behind Glimmerglass, his focus on driving. I pulled a bag of bananas, a bag of blueberries, a stick of butter, and a sack of almond flour out of the freezer. I had cleaned the house of most of the food, but it was important that I make homemade breakfast after we fought like this, because it was the only way I could begin to win him back. The bananas were frozen too solid to mash, and I held them in my hands to soften them until I could squeeze them into a slimy pulp.
I knew something was wrong. But I had trained the muscle that ignores intuition and evidence so well that I just pushed that knowledge elsewhere as if it didn’t exist. The part of me that is animal and wanted to stay alive had been silenced and suppressed for so long that I could hardly hear it, it was barely a whisper at the end of a long drafty hallway. But still, I knew. I always knew.
I made the pancakes and they went cold on the marble countertop and I disconnected the propane tank and I threw the pancakes away and I called and called and called and called. The roiling knot in my low belly was growing in size and strength and I could not feel any other part of my body. I tested the pad of my thumb on a razor knife to verify this, and I was correct.
Hours later he picked up the phone, after I had called so many times the voicemail box was full. I was hysterical by the time I heard his voice, the voice I always feared and always loved and always listened to.
I’m not coming back, he said, and for a few seconds I understood and then something happened to me that felt like prickly ice on my lower forehead and burning on my ears and like gravity had been suspended in favor of intense tremors both within and without. I dropped the phone. I picked it back up. My hands weren’t working correctly so I jammed it between my ear and my shoulder.
What do you mean? I asked him, and he said You know it has to be this way and then all I could say was No, no, no, no no no no no, more forcefully than I had ever said it or anything else in my life, more afraid than I ever had been.
He used to leave a lot. He had been leaving for years, a decade maybe, so there was a thin stab of hope that felt like the shock of a too-bright stripe of cold noon sun through a timidly opened window blind. But there was something that felt different, this time. I went outside to the pond until I was too cold to feel my limbs, and then I climbed up the ladder to our sleeping loft and stayed there for a long time, until the sun faded and the stab of hope slipped away along with it. My body felt dull and heavy, like I was swaddled in choking fabric. I curled up small and felt all the minuscule debris in the bed, tiny shards of pebbles, wisps of spiderweb, food crumbs, the onionskin wings of dead bugs. I felt everything on my skin, through my damp clothes and the sheet and the lumpy down comforter, as if I had been granted some incredibly mundane form of extrasensory perception.
For the first time, I did not know which way to go. What was happening in my mind felt terrifying, a great wrenching, breaking, and splitting that I had no words for, coming from someplace so close I couldn’t get free of it but so far away I couldn’t locate it. I had always known what to do with confusion, despair, and agony. I had methods, ways of dissolving them so they could leak out of me and evaporate away. I had sliced, burned, and splayed myself open for arbitrary horrors that granted me something preferable to the swirling madness in my mind. I had bled and gasped and begged and gagged, and by doing so I had retained the ability to turn off the faucet in my mind, to know myself as a bundle of meat and bones and dampness rather than the vessel for a thing more painful than any of that, a thing I felt I might die before submitting to.
For a long time I’d harbored the suspicion that a time would come when my ways wouldn’t work any longer. When I would find myself chest to chest with a feeling too great and too hungry to remain unaltered by its breadth and heft. I thought of this in an abstract way and I saw it in the terrified eyes of the animals and I thought if I could just go deep enough into the recesses of my body, maybe I would be able to dodge it for my whole life, but there I was, with a two-dimensional slideshow of my various tricks and tactics dully flipping in my mind, and I understood, with the blunt force of more apathy than I had ever felt before, that the only ways out from under this pain were to sit through it or to destroy my body forever.
In a house where people hurt each other for recreation, certain objects take on unexpected meaning. In the farmhouse, a coiled belt, for example, could never not make me think of a broad hot sting on my flesh. A pile of rope always made me think of raw scratchy burning around my throat. A blade was a cold feeling just above the clavicle, and a plastic clothes hanger could not be separated from the sharp sound of its angles sizzling through the air and cracking over my backside. The question of how much damage my body could tolerate had been the open question of the last decade, and alone with these objects, the question pushed at me again, loud.
The dead piglets were in deep freeze by then, the white moss of freezer burn creeping around their bagged-up parts. I thought of razor blades and ceiling joists and the sharp turn over the gorge on Skaneateles Road. I thought of the way my breath caught in my throat when Momma and I first met eyes, and of the sound I had heard when Milo went back to the barn for the last time, the final shriek from the last of the small brothers just before he took them with his knife. Animals fight for their lives.
The house was getting colder. I hadn’t lit the woodstove all day, and the toilet water was frozen into a shimmering sheet of ice. I didn’t know what to do with myself, in a practical sense—where to go, who to call, any of it. I sat and shivered and curled up and lay down, waiting for the acute phase of whatever was happening to me to pass.
And it did. In two days I was so numb I couldn’t feel anything at all. My lips were so cold that when I finally made a telephone call to arrange a rental car, they didn’t work properly. By then, all the terrible feelings were somewhere on the other side of the room, hanging over my shoulder like a storm slowly rolling out. They never quite left my rearview, but they hung back, a greater mercy than I had dared to hope for.
He never came back.
I saw him two more times, for less than twenty minutes each time. There were things to wrap up: accounts and passwords and login information, titles and deeds and Polaroid photographs. I left almost everything behind in the farmhouse. My truck, my clothes, my Bolivian stone mortar and pestle, the four-hundred-pound butcher block I had wrestled out of an old meat processing plant in Utica with three men I paid to help me. Our dog Max’s ashes in the coffin-shaped wooden box, my tools, my special plates, my dignity, my heart. I left with my body and a rental car and a cigarette-burned jacket and two backpacks of books. I left without knowing where I was going.
After we exchanged and disbanded everything we had put together, I never saw him again. I didn’t want to see him. I was afraid to see him. But he was still close to me for a long time, because I saw him every day in the fingerprints he had left on my body. I saw him in the scars, some long, sharp and geometric, some jagged and sloppy, and I felt him, the way he had trained me to feel. Every time I ran so long and hard that I threw up and kept going, I felt him, and every time I found a hard hand to strike my face, I felt him.
After a year, I paid a woman to cover the place where his name was tattooed on my arm. She covered it with a tattoo of a peacock feather. I can see, through the eye of the feather, the echo of where his name was, but no one else can.