Fiction

From But Not For Long

Karin arrived at ten thirty, pulling up a long unpaved drive and finally parking in the shadow of a massive dark-stained wood house. She couldn't tell if there was any electricity available, and it frankly didn't seem to matter. Madison, its weird empty stores and quiet roads and murky rooms, felt as far away as the Middle East.

She gathered her notebook and pens and recorder, looked briefly in the mirror, and poked at the inner corners of her eyes with a pinky. She looked a little tired but natural. She never wore makeup for visiting farmers. It was bad enough that she was young and inexperienced. If she wore lip gloss they might not even bother.

Outside the air was grassy-smelling, warm and heavy but cooler this far north. She stretched and shook out her legs, listening for sounds of machinery or voices. She heard nothing at all. Before her the house loomed, windowpanes shining and inscrutable. Her shoes were loud in the gravel. The trees arched over her; fields stretched into woods on either side.

There was motion further up the driveway. She looked up and saw a huge animal regarding her. Some kind of hound, iron gray and wiry-haired, a long-legged creature that approached her so lightly its paws barely skimmed the ground. It never barked. As it neared, Karin slowed and then froze, realizing the dog's jaws were easily as high as her waist.

The silence—the dog's silence, the silence of the landscape around them—was deeply unnerving. The breeze moved through the branches of the trees, the surrounding grass was uncut and lissome, bending in one direction and then another as if in pleasant indecision, and at the end of the pathway rose the farmhouse, its window boxes filled with fire-colored petunias. The grey dog trotted toward her, caramel eyes agleam beneath a rakish flop of fur. Karin had the feeling she had entered a fairy tale at the wrong time. The scent of grass and manure drifted by.

She put out a hand to the dog, palm out, as if to stop it, but the dog simply kept coming and let its great head collide with her hand. She felt the knob at the back of its skull, its coarse fur. The arch of the dog's back rose almost to her chest. Yet its warm, wiry fur beneath her fingers was a relief, breaking the peculiar spell of the silence of the hilltop, its soundless guard. It was just a dog. A dog on a farm was hardly a shock. They were everywhere.

"Miss Phillips?"

"Ms.," she said automatically. As she looked up from the dog she saw a woman approaching her, wearing old jeans and lug soled boots, hands in her pockets. The boots were brown and scuffed at the toe, grass clinging to the leather, and the jeans were bleached and faded in oblong patches over the muscle of the thigh. A frizz of black curly hair stood out around the woman's face, illuminated by the sun. The rest was pulled back in a ponytail. She was startlingly young, younger than Karin. Her cheeks were round and lightly freckled, her eyes deep-set and elongated, the lids hidden.

"This is Carl," the woman said. She gestured at the dog, who bestowed an affectionate head butt to Karin's rib cage. "Carl!" The woman's voice went low and menacing, and Carl trotted over to her side.

"I'm Elaine. I'm assuming you're from Dairy Now, right?"

Karin laughed. "Oh, sorry, right." They shook hands, Elaine's palms callused and hard. "Thanks for letting me come up here at such short notice. Sometimes I think it just makes sense to really see what I'm writing about instead of doing everything by phone. It's impersonal."

Elaine nodded. "I hear you guys have another blackout," she said.

Karin felt caught; perhaps Elaine knew she'd just wanted to get out of town, knew she liked Drumlin cheese but wasn't quite as fired up about their cheese caves and U.P. Brie as she'd indicated.

"Yeah," Karin said nonchalantly. "Seems to be holding on for awhile too, I guess, but I imagine it'll all be back to normal by the time I get home. I didn't really look at whatever excuses the mayor was peddling, so I could be wrong."

Elaine smiled briefly at her, and Karin knew she understood why Karin was here. She smiled back, blandly and boldly, and admitted nothing.

"Well, our electricity is still here," Elaine said. "The local power plant took us off the grid so it couldn't spread to us. Whatever else goes on, we've still hung on to that."

"What else?" But Elaine just shook her head and waved a hand. They were both silent for a moment.

Karin changed the subject. "I was having the oddest sensation before you came out." They began to walk up the driveway. "It's so beautiful and silent up here and I felt like this gigantic creature was sort of guarding it and I'd trespassed. Now that I know his name is Carl I don't think the impact will ever be the same."

Elaine chuckled. "My brother named him," she said. "You'll meet him too. Come on into the house. We'll have a snack and then take a tour around the place, okay?" She looked worried suddenly. "If you want to, I mean. I don't know, how do other people do it? Do you usually get straight to work? I don't want to waste your time."

"No, that's great," Karin said. She was feeling stupid about admitting the fairy tale thing. Farmers weren't usually into a lot of esoteric chitchat about weird sensations. "I'd love a snack. We can talk a little about your operation too."

Carl disappeared behind the house. Elaine led Karin around the back, up a staircase to a deck. A grill sat to one end, next to a long picnic table, with two shaded tables on the other end. They could have sat twelve people. "Have a seat," Elaine said. "We're having cheese, if that's okay. What would you like to drink?"

"Anything with caffeine."

Elaine nodded and disappeared inside.

Over the deck's railings the land was visible for miles: undulant, green, the nearby trees giving off the fecund, yeasty fragrance of pollen. Karin could see two barns about a half mile off, the yellowed-ivory shapes of sheep against the fields. Sheep were better from a distance. Up close their oily, strong-smelling fleece took on a dirty polar bear color, or else resembled the damp-patched gray of an old sweater of dubious origin. Karin preferred cows, whose barny scent of hay and manure was somehow inoffensive, their bristled skin smooth over their massive bodies. The Rothbergers raised both, plus goats. Goats were easy. A lot of people started with goats. They ate well and gave a lot of milk, and good goat cheese was always as chic as a little black dress.

Elaine returned through the sliding door bearing a tray of iced tea, a wedge of white cheese, and a plate of crackers and sliced apples. "I should really have baked bread for you too," she said. "Complete the picture, you know." She set down the tray and rearranged the cheese on its plate.

"This looks great," Karin said. She added, "My roommate is always going on about baking bread. He buys fresh yeast, like every weekend, and then procrastinates and procrastinates until the yeast goes bad. Then the next week he buys more."

"Why doesn't he buy dried?" Elaine went back to the sliding door and closed it.

Karin smiled. "For numerous reasons, having to do with the earth and agriculture and nutrition, but chiefly so he'll never have to bake unless the stars align." For a moment she felt a wave of warmth for Hal, vexing though he was.

Elaine sat down opposite Karin and crossed her legs primly. She reached up and adjusted the umbrella on the table to give Karin more shade. Then she resettled herself and smiled, shrugging as if to say, Well, you know what to do.

So far in Karin's brief career these profiles had proceeded in jerks and stops, aided by long pauses, questions the farmers often found extremely obvious, and Karin's wildly enthusiastic response to their products. Media-wise, you hit the sweet spot at either end of the industrial spectrum, either very big or very small: the artisans were usually people who had left some other career and come to cheese out of love of food and various political leanings, and they understood why and how to work the press at every level. People in big corporations knew it, too; they were employed to know it, coming out of marketing razors or crackers or whatever their last gig had been. Trouble came in the laconic form of the cheesemaker who'd been doing this for enough years that it was old hat, an operation neither new nor venerable, products neither earth-shattering nor appalling. They had a job to do and never really understood Karin's interest in it. She often had to hope for an upstart heir who'd been to business school and planned on taking it all over someday. She couldn't tell where Elaine, who looked to be twenty-two at most, would fall.

"So," Karin said. "Who all is in on this operation?"

Elaine ticked them off on her fingers. "My brother Kenneth and his wife Janine. My parents. This is actually their land. We used to visit here when I was little and my dad's parents owned it, but Kenny and I grew up in Appleton. Anyway, you don't care where we grew up. My mom keeps the books, my dad keeps the livestock. I make the cheese. Kenneth oversees the crops. Janine meanders the landscape. Kenny used to help my husband."

Karin was writing furiously. "And did your husband move to another part of the operation?"

"He died," said Elaine.

Now Karin looked up. "I'm so sorry," she blurted. She glanced at the cheese Elaine had sliced for her, the hopeful ivory square of it. This didn't seem the right time to snack.

Elaine unbound her ponytail and shook it out, raking her fingers through it. A mass of near-black curls fell below her shoulders, the sun showing its dark-copper streaks. Her hair was a wild thing, a puffy cushion Karin longed to pat. "Yeah," Elaine sighed. "The funny part is that he wanted the farm in the first place." She gestured toward the land, the sheep in the far distance. "Like I said, we lived in Appleton. I was working in the office of a box manufacturer. My parents owned a gift store, my brother was working in construction. Janine was wandering the Appleton landscape. But Jack and I had this idea that it was time to get back to the land, you know, that we'd beat the rush he was sure was coming. My grandparents had left this to my dad and Jack was the one who made up the business plan and everything. He sort of sat us all down at Thanksgiving one year and pitched it over pie."

"Wow." Karin was at a loss for words. Was it really such a sad story, or was it only that this poor boy had died? She saw him as fresh out of college, shaggy haired and talking too fast, pacing before a living room of baffled family holding plates of dessert on their laps. "Was he the one who named it Drumlin?" Karin asked. She allowed her pen to touch the paper again.

Elaine nodded briskly. "Yeah. He wanted something to reflect the Wisconsin geography. You know what they are, right? You can put it in there if you want. Kind of whale-shaped mounds glaciers left around Wisconsin, if anyone's asking." She paused. "Try the cheese, tell me what you think."

Karin gazed down at the cracker on its square blue napkin. A line of ash ran through the cheese's center, the square banded by a soft rind. She took a bite and chewed thoughtfully. She stopped chewing. Then she bravely continued. The mouthful was so sharp it gave an impression of actual heat on the palate, followed by a bitter whiff that rose into her sinuses.

"Shit," Elaine sighed, watching her. "That's what I thought." She tasted a wedge of the cheese herself, while Karin sipped her iced tea determinedly. "Yeah, it's a nightmare. I tried something new. That sure didn't work." She pulled a wastebasket over to the table with one foot, plucked the cheese off its tray and chucked it into the basket. "I was never really supposed to be the cheesemaker," she told Karin. "I just fell into it after Jack died. It was a car wreck, by the way, before you waste any energy wondering if it was at all mysterious or if he was a soldier or something. He wanted to make aged Gruyere-style cheeses. I like soft ones but we're doing both to keep the income through the year, you know. People always forget you need babies to get milk and that it doesn't go year round, so I try to stagger the aging. But I keep trying to invent new cheeses and brush them with this and that and it's a lot harder than you'd think. I wanted to do a partnership with a local beer company, you know, to brush on the cheese during the aging? Like the Belgians and the Germans do. And I'm still experimenting with the beer."

"I had the, uh, the U.P. Brie at the Midwest Dairy show," Karin said. "It was really very good."

Elaine seemed relieved. "Was it? I like that one. It's selling okay too. The name, I feel compelled to mention, is Kenneth's idea. I'm looking for a way to gently tell him it's unspeakably bad. Janine thinks it's cute." She rolled her eyes. "Listen, let's take a walk, okay? You can meet the rest of my family and some of the livestock. I have my favorites." She rose and brushed off her jeans. Carl's iron-grey head appeared above the stairs of the deck, waiting.

"Great. And the caves too," Karin said.

Elaine looked away. "Sure," she said after a moment. "They're not that special really, but of course you can, if you want. I should go by the henhouse too, if you want to come." She turned away and down the steps.

"You were really nice about the cheese," Elaine called over her shoulder. She walked backwards, giving Karin time to catch up. "Don't write about it, okay? I don't need the whole industry knowing we're just a bunch of hacks up here."

Karin protested but Elaine was already walking across the grass, Carl preceding her. "It's okay," Elaine said. She shoved her hands into the pockets of her coat as they headed toward the barns. Her face, with its pointed chin and slanted eyes, the wide, thin mouth, was softer in profile. "There's a long tradition in my family of trying totally new careers now and again. My dad alone's been through like five already. I don't even know what the next one will be. Jack was the one kind of spearheading it. He dies, what, a year into the whole deal, and we're all still wandering around up here, frankly pretty baffled by it all."