2. Alex
It’sfour-thirty in the morning, I haven’t had any coffee yet, and my best friend is standing in my kitchen in his underwear, scratching his nuts.
“Pants,” I tell him. I didn’t think I had to have a pants-wearing rule in my house, but here we are.
Kit stops scratching his nuts, but it’s just to stretch and give a great big yawn. “Dude, being a dairy farmer sucks ass,” he says.
Kit is not a dairy farmer. He’s my unemployed best friend who has crashed with me for the foreseeable future after quitting his desk job in Albany.
I’m the dairy farmer, and since the four-thirty wake-up call comes every day, I’m used to it. I don’t own this farm, but my bosses, the Schumans, trust me with it. There are animals to milk and my crew to manage, and today, that also means managing this one, who’s working for me in exchange for food and rent until he figures out what the fuck to do with his life.
Kit’s hand wanders back toward his boxers, and I roll my eyes. “Pants.”
“It’s early,” he whines, clearly disillusioned with the job even before his first day has started.
I smack his hand before it reaches its target. “Pants,” I growl. My dog, Trixie, a miniature Australian shepherd, lifts her head from her food bowl and whines at my tone.
There’s a sharp, indignant noise from him as he shoves my shoulder, and it is so on.
A few moments later, I’ve got him pinned on the floor, facedown, with a hand behind his back as he cries uncle. Kit never wins when he does this with me. Trixie hops around us, barking and bowing, wanting to be let in on playtime.
My brothers and I—and occasionally Colleen, my sister—wrestled a lot. I’m sure it was fun when we were young, but most of my memories of wrestling with my siblings involve my older brother Ethan, and they aren’t happy ones.
So, when Kit tried to wrestle me for the first time during our freshman year of college, it ended with him hanging off of me like a monkey, and I was completely bewildered.
Eventually, I met Kit’s family and saw how physical affection radiates from them, and it started to make sense.
And then, it was bashed into my head after repeatedly watching Kit wrestle with his siblings over the decade that I’ve known them.
Now, though, I hold a smidge longer and bring my mouth right up to Kit’s ear. “Pants.”
“Oh baby, talk dirty to me more.” He grins.
I roll off him, and he teases me with a “bummer.” Kit flirts with everyone: my gran, his neighbors, my cows…even once when he was drunk in college, a mannequin.
When he gets up, thankfully, Kit trots back toward my guest bedroom. By the time he emerges wearing jeans and a long-sleeve shirt, I’ve poured coffee into two Yetis and appropriately doctored them (black for me, sickly sweet for Kit).
We throw on our coats and head out the door four minutes later than usual for me. Two trucks are next to Kit’s Altima, and my three key employees stand behind them, chatting in the crisp morning air. It’s mid-May, and while it’ll be comfortable during the day for outdoor work, the mornings are still chilly, especially this early. The sun is about half an hour from rising, casting a grayish hue with a touch of amber at the horizon. From here, we have a panoramic view of the farm I manage, Udderly Creamy. The house and the barn sit at the top of a hill, and the pasture extends down the rolling hills and out to the west.
Trixie peels off to do her business while Kit and I approach the group. Perry and Jesús are my two full-time farm hands, and Anna, Jesús’s wife, works part-time for me. I have a handful of other part-timers, too, who do evening chores.
“Buenos dias,” Anna greets me. She’s a petite woman in her forties with graying dark hair and tanned skin. Anna comes every morning to prepare food for us. She and Jesús are originally from Mexico and have come here via the valley in Texas, so our meals are Tex-Mex cuisine you can’t find in restaurants in upstate New York. Working on the farm burns a ton of calories and requires a lot of time in the morning, so we need someone else to run the kitchen for us. In a few hours, after Jesús runs the cows and goats through the robot, the four of us will be back inside for breakfast, and Anna will make lunch for later.
“Morning. How’s Luis?” Their high school senior got his wisdom teeth removed yesterday.
“Tired and cranky. But he went through just fine, gracias a dios. Now besame.”
She taps her cheek, and I buss a kiss on it. Jesús does the same, and Perry, the last of my full-time farmhands, starts walking toward the barn.
“But who is this?” Anna cries, spotting Kit.
“Christopher David Hutchinson, but you can call me Kit. May I?”
Anna’s already in his arms, giggling as he plants a noisy air kiss on one side of her. She swats him away, laughing.
Kit follows me, calling over his shoulder, “I look forward to breakfast, Anna!”
I roll my eyes for what feels like the hundredth time this morning, and the sun isn’t even up. But good news for me, bad news for Kit; it’s time for him to shovel shit.
Fifteen minutes later, Jesús and Perry have moved the cows out of their stalls and into the robot barn for their milking, and Kit and I are shoveling the dirty bedding out.Trixie will spend all day running around as a self-appointed working dog; she doesn’t have any official training, but she bounces back and forth from the herd, to the farm hands, to me. If something’s going on in the farm, she likes to have her nose in it.
Since the temperature’s nice and we’re working hard, the barn doors and curtains are open, letting in a breeze. We’re still in spring, but soon, as it warms up, this job will be a hot one. Everything gets busier in the summer. We have to keep the girls comfortable, so fans run inside the barn, and we switch out the water more regularly. Milking takes longer because they are producing more of it.
Right now, we only have to clean stalls twice, since they’ll spend most of the day outdoors in the pasture.
I didn’t give Kit much of a tour, but he’s already marveling over what he can see. “A conveyor for shit,” he’d said earlier in awe. “Never thought I’d see the day.”
Now, though, he’s shifted the topic on to something he finds much more interesting: my family.
“I can’t believe Ethan’s growing strawberries,” he says. Ethan, my older brother, runs Bedd Fellows Farm, the legacy my grandad left him.
“I know. Grandad must be rolling in his grave.” Well, Grandad left us with nearly a million dollars of debt on the family farm when he passed unexpectedly, so I don’t feel too bad about that.
But there is a twinge in my heart whenever I think about him. We didn’t get along too well, and it’d been a while since I’d last seen him, even though our farms were just a few miles away. And now he’s gone, so the reconciliation I’d always secretly hoped for would never happen.
“How do you feel about it?”
I shrug, but Kit doesn’t let me get away with it. He scoops a big patty onto the belt and then stops, leaning against his shovel.
“I know you don’t like to talk about feelings, but that’s gotta hurt. You and Samuel always told him to diversify and now, all of a sudden, Ethan’s on board?”
Samuel, my brother who’s two years younger than me and the twin to Colleen, always pushed Grandad’s buttons alongside me, but the difference was that Samuel was smart. He was always meant to get out of Fork Lick and do great things. He went to Cornell, for Christ’s sake.
I, on the other hand, only ever wanted to be a farmer. Specifically, a farmer at Bedd Fellows Farm, but that clearly didn’t work out since I’m here shoveling shit.
Guilt floods me with that thought, too. Sure, shoveling shit isn’t glamorous, but I do love my job. As a teenager, I started working here at Udderly Creamy for the Schumans. They’re the owners of this dairy farm, but they’re retired and live in Florida. Between starting work at sixteen and now, at the age of thirty, the Schumans taught me everything I know about raising animals, put me through SUNY Morrisville, and slowly handed the reins over to me.
Kit’s used to my silence, so he picks the shovel up and does what he does best: talking. “Well, I’m excited for the strawberries this weekend. Bedd Fellows strawberries. I bet they’ll be tasty as hell. I wonder how long we can eat strawberries just plain until we get sick of them. Then we’ll have to make strawberry rhubarb pie, strawberry shortcake, strawberry ice cream…ooh, can we make it with Udderly Creamy milk?”
And that’s how my morning goes. I listen to Kit babble about strawberries (and then how ice cream is made, the soul-sucking office job he just quit, and his sister’s new boyfriend) until it’s time for breakfast.
I check my phone as I toe off my boots and step back into the house. Anna’s made migas, one of my favorite dishes, and the smell of scrambled eggs and corn tortillas wafts over me. My stomach growls, but I’m distracted by a message from my brother.
Ethan
Hey, you’re going to come by this weekend for the grand opening, right?
Texts from my brother are rare, and not just because we don’t talk much. He’s terrible at technology, and even I, just a year younger than him, cringe when I watch him chicken-peck out a text.
This weekend marks the grand opening of strawberry picking season at Bedd Fellows. I’ve been spending more time at the farm than I have since I went to college, but it’s out of necessity. When they need help, it’s usually Colleen or Gran who asks me to come out. A few months ago, I went out to help plant the strawberry seedlings.
Even though I helped plant them myself, it’s still unbelievable to me that Ethan turned part of the farm from soy to strawberries. I guess that’s what happens when you get desperate.
As much as I don’t enjoy spending time at the family farm, I don’t want Gran and Ethan to lose it, either. While all five of us Bedd kids grew up on the farm, this has always been Gran’s home and it’s all Ethan’s ever done. So, I better show up.
Sure,I text back, and put my phone away. At least I’ll have Kit with me to act as a buffer.