Breaking Ground

Heather Angell — Breaking Ground

So the summer after my freshman year in college, I got a job as a farmhand. And it was 2001, and I was 19 years old. And the couple that were my new bosses, they were in their mid-60s by the time I walked up their driveway in New Hampshire, and they’d been farming for 14 hours a day for 40 years. And the husband would soon and forever become affectionately known to me simply as the old man. And he would wear a different canvas hat every day, perched kind of like a bird on his bald head.

And he had like a muddled brow, a furrowed brow, and like two watery blue eyes. And his parents were French-Canadian, and so he had learned a little bit of French. And he also spoke with a pretty good Boston accent, but it was so slow that it almost had like a Down East vibe. And that was the year that Christina Aguilera’s single Lady Marmalade came out on the Moulin Rouge soundtrack. And he would walk around the farm singing, . He was mouthy, he was charming, and he was nobody’s fool. And I soon learned that farming was really hard. The first week I worked there, he made me unload a trailer load of 50-pound bags of soil twice. We would be so dirty sometimes at the end of the day that I’d have to take off my clothes and hose off in the driveway before my mom would let me come into the house.

I thought I was going to die in his barn. The hay was so thick in the air that it would get into your lungs and it would like cut any exposed skin and be in your hair and you’d find it like the whole rest of the day. And nobody understood why I loved it so much. And the farm became really like a part of my life as I went on. And it was so different from the life that I was leading otherwise. I was going to school in Chicago. Every summer, I would come home to the farm, and every year I’d go back to school where I’d stay up till 2 a.m., and then at the farm, I’d get up at 6 a.m. But I got to do really cool stuff, too. I used to plant different varieties of pumpkins, and they had names like Cinderella and Jack B. Little and Racer, and they all sounded like bedtime stories.

And my life couldn’t have been more different than when I went back to school. I was a sophomore during the September 11th attacks, and I got really influenced by these Jesuit priests who talked a lot about nonviolence and peacemaking, and I went to teach-ins for the Iraq War. I rode all night to go to protests on buses. And when I came back to the farm, I realized that the old man did not share my views. We were both Catholic, and I had been introduced to this really radical, peacenik, kind of outside the bounds of the norms Catholicism, and he was a New Hampshire Republican.

And he would say like really kind of intense revenge stuff, and I would pause and look at him and I would say, I can never remember which gospel that’s in. Is it Matthew or Mark? And we like to have fun with each other. And the farm really became like medicine to me in his fields. My life at home was not great at that time. My dad had died a few years earlier unexpectedly. And my sisters and I weren’t really getting along. My family had moved to a much smaller house and I used to sleep on a cot on the porch. And I didn’t really feel like anybody at home really liked me that much. But when I came to the farm, they were always glad to see me. It was sort of like a sober, daytime, dirtier version of cheers, you know? And I knew that when I came back from school, you know, I’d always have a job at the farm. And I started selling Christmas trees for them in the winter.

And my college friends soon realized that the old man was more than just my boss. He was something else. And he and his wife, never anyone I called the old lady. Too much respect for her for that. Not that there’s anything wrong with old ladies. But they kind of became like my surrogate grandparents. And I would come back from the farm and visit them even after I stopped working there. I can’t remember when they stopped paying me. But at some point, I just would come and work. And that continued on in my life. And one time I was visiting them. By this time, I was in my early 30s. And his wife looked at me across the table of the farm kitchen, middle of winter, and said, more like, it was a question, but it was a statement, you’ve never met a guy you wanted to marry? And I took a deep breath, and I said, well, I don’t really date guys anymore. And the old man nodded and said, I knew it.

And he had this self-satisfied smirk. And then he said, well, don’t expect me to walk you down the aisle at your wedding. And we’d never discussed that. But he knew if anybody was ever gonna walk me down the aisle at my wedding, I would want it to be him. So I gave him the cold shoulder for a few months. And then his daughter, who started calling me her little sister, some point in the early aughts, found out what happened and read him the riot act. And he called me. He’s like, I’m sorry. I’ll walk you down the aisle at your wedding if you ever need me to. And then pretty soon, he invited my girlfriend to the famous farm Christmas parties. And it carried on like that. And they sold the farm in their mid-80s. And they retired to a condo where they grew tomatoes on their porch. If you’ve ever loved a 90-year-old, as these years went on, you hold on to every moment.

You know that you can feel the moments passing. And he would leave me these long, kind of sarcastic missives, voicemails with his lyrical voice asking me, where the hell have I been? And I saved all of them. I listened to a bunch of them today. And a few months ago, his daughter called me and told me that the end was near. He’d been sick for a while. I took the back road to the hospital and drove past the old farm. The last gasps of autumn were turning the fields like this dull gold. Everybody was there. By that point, nobody was like, why is that old farm hand here? I was part of the family. The nurse that night, her family friends owned a farm. She said, everybody’s out picking today because the frost is coming tonight. It gave us all this sense of urgency, but also this sense of peace. The next morning, I woke up before sunrise and took my dog outside, and the frost had come in the night, like silent and crisp.

And I knew he was gone before I even got the call. He was a really good farmer till the end. He knew when it was done. And the night before at the hospital, right before I left, I gave him a kiss on the forehead. He had these big, meaty hands that I held, and I said, hays in the barn, old man. The field is empty. I’ll meet you there. Thank you.