Week Thirty

Light in Absence

Early Novembers in Vermont were a mixed bag. The ever-present low-hanging clouds gave off a chill that pierced bones. And the mixture of rain and snow that fell in equal measure layered the fields and roads with a brown mash of sludge that smelled of peaty organic decay.

I was playing with my G.I. Joes on the lowered tailgate of my father's rapidly-rusting Chevy C/K, and engineered a battle to take the hill of the truck's wheel well while my father was in the back of the town's hardware store getting his propane tanks refueled. 

"Who's winning?" the cigarette smoke-dusted voice of Mr. Chambers fell like a slow-moving rockslide toward the back of the truck.

"The Joes. The Joes always win," I muttered back, still too engrossed in the battle and too impolite to turn around and greet Mr. Chambers.

My father placed the now-filled tanks into the bed of the truck, and issued a command that - based on the tone and force - I knew was not meant as a question. "Kevin, but your army men away, ok?"

I reluctantly grabbed my action figures, placed them in my jacket pocket, and finally made eye-contact with the worn and wet eyes of Mr. Chambers. Giving him a brief shoulder shrug, I huffed to the front of the truck, and hopped up into the passenger side to resume the war. I watched in the rearview mirror as he and my dad talked for a few minutes - wondering what it was that adults talk about.

As we drove back up the twisted and rutted road to my parents' home nestled on the side of a hill, I found the bravery to ask my dad why Mr. Chambers always looked so sad. He took a breath, and in the short moment between the inhale and his answer, I could see him arranging the words in a way that would make sense to my 8 year-old mind. 

"Remember when I told you I was in the war?" he said.

"Yeah, Vietnam, right?" I responded, proud that I'd pronounced it correctly.

"Right. Well, I had it pretty easy. I sat behind a desk for most of the time and typed reports. I never saw any action."

"You didn't shoot anyone?"

"No buddy, I never shot anyone."

"Did Mr. Chambers shoot anyone?"

"Well, I'm not sure. But he was also in Vietnam and he didn't have it easy. A lot of his friends died, and that makes him really sad."

"But that was so long ago."

"Yes, but sadness like that doesn't just go away. You can be so deeply affected by it that it stays with you for the rest of their lives."

I looked out the window and watched as the rain and snow traced lines across the glass. My dad, clearly realizing that he, perhaps, had gone to deep on the explanation, quickly tried to explain himself.

"But you're lucky. You won't have to experience that sort of thing. We've learned from our mistake," and he punctuated the end of the conversation by turning on the radio and let the sounds of Eddie Van Halen and crew fill the humid air of the truck's cabin.

---

A few years ago, at the request of my father, I'd started helping out around the Meadowbrook Dairy farm. What began as mucking the cow barn, lead to setting up the Holsteins in the milking parlour. And at some point, I became Mr. Chambers' ranch hand, for lack of a better term. And in all that time, outside of small instructions and greetings, we rarely spoke. So it caught me off guard when he called me into the small room off the parlor that performed as a makeshift office. 

Instead of talking, he passed a document over to me and said, quite matter of factly, "that's it." I would come to understand later that the document, sent by the US government, was asking local farmers to sell their cows for above fair market value in an attempt to reduce competition among dairy farms. The cows would be slaughtered, and the farms would sit empty. But at that moment, while the metallic din of the conveyor belt set the tone as it ran behind the cows and carried their manure out of the parlor and into a heap beside the barn, all I saw was a numerical figure. A figure larger than I'd ever known, but one that didn't seem to affect Chambers.

"Farm hasn't been profitable for years. I can't really turn this down," he said, taking the paper back, folding it, and placing it in his worn wooden desk. "I expect they'll shut us down in a month or two."

Because we'd said so little, I was unsure how to proceed. If someone had presented me with that kind of money, my immature sense of worth would have taken it in a second. But I could sense a feeling of resignation, perhaps a touch of fatalism, from Chambers, and said the only thing I could muster, "I'm sorry."

I turned to go back to work, and saw the cows lined up in two rows down the center of the parlor, blissfully ignorant as to their fate.

---

The sap hoses arched between the maple tree trunks, drawing the sweet fluid toward the fill buckets scattered near the edge of the drive, and they looked like the skeletal remains of festive bunting that'd been ruined by too many Vermont winters. It was early morning, and the dull sunlight cast a deep purple over the fields as I drove the truck toward Meadowbrook. 

The barns were empty - the cows removed by the truckload en route to an unspeakable death - and the stillness of the morning exaggerated each creak from a wooden slat on the barn, every footstep through the muddy drive left a slock and gurgle as I walked toward the entrance to the milking parlor. 

Chambers had asked me to come and move some of the equipment he was selling off to a large farming conglomerate that was slowly buying up property in the area. I felt like I owed it to him - maybe I owed it to the farm - but we were in this together, and I needed to see it through to completion. 

My father would tell me later that emptiness is crushing. "Sadness can be tolerated, but emptiness, true loss of everything, was detrimental and irreversible to the human spirit." And it was the first time that I understood Mr. Chambers' motivation.

Due to the danger of fires, the door to the silo was never left open. So when I saw it cracked, I knew something was wrong. In a way, my mind had already filled in the blanks as to what I was about to see. Brushing past the open door, I saw Chambers' feet dangling where they shouldn't be.

I turned around quietly, reverently, and phoned the police from the same wooden desk that Chambers had signed the sale of his Holsteins over to the government. Sitting in the silence while I waited for the sirens to grow closer, I found a small envelope with "Kevin" scrawled across the front in Chambers' handwriting, and hesitated for a moment - secretly praying I wasn't about to read his suicide note.

I opened it slowly, and wiped my eyes that'd already seen too much this early in the morning.

Kevin,
Everyone will experience darkness in their life. But it's how bright you shine in the darkness that will make all the difference.

-Farmer William Chambers