Читать книгу Weekends in Carolina - Jennifer Lohmann - Страница 13

CHAPTER FIVE

WHEN TREY FOUND Max in the greenhouse about ten o’clock the next morning, she had already planted the first table of broccoli and was ready for a break and a chance to stretch her legs. The monotony of the task plus the patter of the rain against the thick, plastic roof had lulled her into a trance. The only way she knew she hadn’t planted two seeds into one cell was because she was out of cells and seeds at the same time.

Since all she’d seen Trey wear so far had been jeans that were nice enough for any place in Durham; dress pants, complete with dress shirt and sport coat; and a funeral suit, she hadn’t known what to expect him to don for his tour in the rain. His boots looked a little too big, the rain slicker a little too small, and his jeans would get soaked, but they would do. Especially when she gave him something to cover his pants. He called out to her, but she couldn’t hear what he said over the drumming of the rain.

She walked across the greenhouse to where he stood petting Ashes. “There are rain bibs on the peg behind you.”

“Won’t you need...” he said before looking up and noticing the rain bibs she was wearing. “Will they fit?”

“Better than any of the clothes you have on.”

“Dad’s clothes are packed. These are my grandfather’s. Apparently, he had big feet and tiny shoulders. I found them in the closet off the back porch.”

Max thought it would have been simpler to have unpacked Hank’s clothes, especially as he and Trey were of a size—minus the beer gut. Perhaps it was easier to step into his grandfather’s shoes than his father’s.

Trey sat on the bench and tugged off his boots before stepping into the bibs. He was wearing dress socks. Max was about to comment that for a man who grew up on a farm, he didn’t know how to pack to visit one, when she realized that was probably the point. He hadn’t planned to step out of the farmhouse long enough to need woolen socks. After he and Kelly had packed up all their parents’ things, would Trey ever come back to the farm?

“Ready,” he said. The bibs covered the flannel shirt he’d also apparently found in a closet somewhere and he fastened the slicker over them. Max put on her own raincoat and, in unison, they flipped their hoods up over their heads and stepped out into the cold rain. Ashes had to be cajoled out of the greenhouse into the damp.

“I thought a farm dog wouldn’t be so averse to rain,” Trey said.

“Ashes is now an old farm dog. He likes to pick and choose his farm duties, but he wouldn’t want to be shut in the greenhouse, either.”

Trey kept up with Max easily as she strode past the packing shed and the second tobacco barn to the fields, Ashes bounding alongside. Now that being out of the rain wasn’t an option, the dog was determined to enjoy himself. Plus, rain wouldn’t scare away the geese and Ashes still had his farm chores to attend to.

Max walked more quickly than normal, but couldn’t seem to slow herself down. She didn’t want there to be any strangeness between them. Here she was, a grown woman in a man’s job, upset because Trey didn’t seem to have any leftover feelings from their near kiss last night!

Or had that near kiss been a figment of her imagination and he hadn’t been reaching for her when Ashes barked? Just because she couldn’t escape her thoughts by walking faster didn’t mean she wasn’t going to try.

When they stopped at the first field, Ashes dashed off after some geese cheeky enough to encroach on his territory. “I have four fields, each divided into two sections, and we rotate the crops. This field will have peanuts for a season, which will add nitrogen back into the soil. In the past, I’ve planted cowpeas or clover for the same purpose, but I had a request from one of the downtown restaurants for peanuts, so I’m giving it a try.” The peanuts were part of the joy and the fear of farming. She’d never grown them before and she didn’t come from a part of the country where they were grown, so she lacked a gauge to measure her progress. But there was also exhilaration in trying something new: reading the literature, testing the soil, shoving something in the ground and then looking to Mother Nature for the rest. Knowing that only some of your success or failure was under your control and that the forces of nature held tight to their power. She scanned the field, trying to read her future in the soil, then shrugged at her own silliness. If the peanuts didn’t work out, there was always next year. And regardless of whether she got a cash crop out of them, they would add nitrogen to her soil.

“Crop rotation, like during the Middle Ages?”

“Well, yes.” When she nodded, the rain dripped off her hood, obscuring her view of the field. “I have a tractor instead of oxen, a pickup instead of a wagon and I can buy ladybugs over the internet, but the basic principles are the same. Rotating your plants keeps insects from gaining a foothold and your soil from being depleted. Cover crops and tilling in add nutrients. That plus elbow grease, sun and rain and you will grow good food.”

She didn’t know why she was so intent on having him understand, having him be impressed with her land management. Probably because of his dismissive attitude toward the land that was his by birth, but she didn’t want to accept that. She’d never let one person’s opinion, especially one man’s opinion, of her business affect how she felt about her life choices before.

Mud squished and squawked under their feet as they walked up the small rise to the next field. Ashes let out a woof when he finally noticed they were gone, and vaulted some rocks up to them. The gray, wet weather obscured the breath of her fields, but land was alive. Max could walk it, plant it and make it grow.

She wished Trey could see the land’s value, as useful as wishing she could plant infertile seeds plucked from hybrid plants. Max continued her tour, which had turned into a treatise on crop rotation. She talked about how she would schedule carrots in fields that had previously had potatoes because the potatoes cut down on weeds and how she planted clover between all her crop rows. If Trey was bored, he hid it well.

By the third field, Trey was talking about his life on the farm as a boy. He pointed out places where he’d hidden from his father and where he had surprised Kelly with an angry and aggressive water snake, telling him it was a water moccasin. He also pointed out where he’d been bitten by a cottonmouth, which he’d deserved for poking it with a stick, and where his brother had broken his arm jumping out of a tree into the pond during a drought.

As they rounded the dirt road from the fields back to the greenhouse, Max asked the question that had been burning inside her since Trey had actually expressed feelings other than disgust for the land. “You talk about your memories fondly, even though they involved physical pain. Why don’t you enjoy coming back here?”

“Do you want me to decide to become a gentleman farmer and kick you out?”

The hard tone in his voice pushed her into a defensive position. “Well, no, but...”

“Why don’t you return to Illinois and farm there?”

“I didn’t come to North Carolina to escape my father. I came to North Carolina because the growing season is good, the local produce market is strong without being saturated and my mom lives in Asheville. I was attracted to North Carolina, not repulsed by Illinois or my family.”

Though everything she’d told Trey was true, it wasn’t the whole truth. She’d grown up thinking she would farm her father’s land with her brother, but one summer spent interning at an organic vegetable farm outside of Chicago had changed her mind. Her brother and father grew the food that fed the world, no mistaking that, but she wanted to feel the sun directly on her back, not through the glass of a harvester window. Despite her father’s claim to her childhood, she was her mother’s daughter after all.

He harrumphed, the same noise Ashes made when scolded. “Maybe that’s the difference, then. I decided at an early age that whatever my parents were, I didn’t want to be that. Farm included.”

His use of the plural parents was interesting. “I know you didn’t like your father, but no one ever has a bad word to say about your mother. Surely she holds some tie for you.”

“My mother was an uneducated woman who worked a job she hated with people who made fun of her. She was afraid if she quit that she’d never get another job. And we needed the money because my dad was a failure at life.” Max turned her head to look at him. He raised an eyebrow at her, though the disgusted look on his face softened before he spoke again. “She was a lovely, kind person who spent her entire life being trampled on by people who never noticed she was there.”

Trey said the words with the hesitation of someone who didn’t know whether to be disgusted or sad. Max saw what he described but she credited Noreen with being a woman of untapped strength. She had to be, to put up with what Trey had described so that her children would have one stable parent and food on their table. Noreen may not have been a role model for her children, but she’d provided them with enough stubbornness to grow up and get out of a trap. Max supposed Noreen would think Trey’s success was worth the antipathy he felt toward the farm.

The wind started again, and Trey’s slicker wasn’t as weather-hardy as Max’s; the wind and rain were starting to break through. “Let’s go inside the greenhouse. It’s not much warmer in there, but we’ll be out of the weather and we can share my thermos of hot tea.”

* * *

TREY DIDN’T SAY anything as Max took a sip from the thermos cup before handing it to him. She’d stripped off her slicker as soon as they had stepped under cover, so now she was wearing her rain bibs, a neon green thermal undershirt and a navy blue flannel shirt. With her masses of hair, she looked ridiculous and underdressed. And also like the loveliest thing he’d ever seen. A fire burned inside her that warmed her from the inside out. It made her glow. Trey gripped the tiny plastic cup with a fear that he would never be warm again. He tried to step closer to Max, but she moved away, busy in her greenhouse on her farm.

Despite the official ownership, this was more her farm than his—or than it had ever been his father’s. She’d taken a ratty, falling-down piece of property and was turning it into something productive and wonderful. He wanted to pack up his clothes and drive back to D.C. Sell the dirt under his feet to the highest bidder and forget he’d ever lived here. Instead, he poured another cup of tea.

Max was laying out flats on one of the long tables. When her hands stopped moving, he handed her the cup and she took a big gulp. “Thank you.”

“What are you planting?” Besides the flat, she had seeds and soil.

“The last of the broccoli for today.” She was already looking down at her task. Tour was over and tea was shared; he’d been dismissed for work. “Broccoli gets started early then transplanted into the fields. In another two weeks, I’ll seed more broccoli. I should have three weeks of broccoli for the CSA and six weeks of broccoli for the market.”

“Can I help?” He couldn’t say where the impulse behind the question had come from. A lack of desire to go outside into the rain made more sense than wanting to spend more time with Max.

Her head jerked up and her pale eyes were questioning. “Sure, I guess. Planting’s not that hard.” She demonstrated, filling the flat with soil, adding a seed to each cell and topping it with a little more soil. “It’s basically your same seed-starting process as in a garden, only on a larger scale.” She gestured to the table of flats. “I’ll need 2600 feet of broccoli in the field. Makes for a lot of little transplants.”

“You don’t have help?” Trey didn’t know what he’d pictured winter on a vegetable farm to be like, but he’d expected more people.

“No.” She stopped, putting her hands down on top of the flat. “I have three interns March through September, otherwise I’m the only one. It’s a lot of work, but not more than I can handle.”

“I didn’t mean to imply...”

“The winter’s slow, spent mostly planning the coming summer. I’ve thought of starting a winter CSA. Or maybe selling at the market in the winter. I already grow a winter garden for myself. But selling means I’d need another person and I’ve never been willing to risk the cost, especially since I wouldn’t be able to provide housing. If I’m living in the farmhouse, the second person can live in the barn and a winter CSA might be feasible.”

As she was talking, he realized he’d opened his hand out in offering to her. All of her dreams depended on him and his willingness to keep leasing her the land. But she didn’t appear to notice that the land wasn’t resting like a gift on his proffered palm. Once she had stopped talking, she had started planting again. Trey followed her movements until he’d gotten the hang of them enough to find his own rhythm. Ignorance of the farm and Max had been preferable to this...whatever their relationship was now. He’d rather think of the farm as his personal trap than as soil for dreams. But he still couldn’t help asking, “What other plans do you have for the farm?”

She glanced up from her planting and her uncertainty looked tinged with fear. But that was ridiculous. A woman with her forthright gaze couldn’t be afraid of anything. Yet it was written on her face.

When she didn’t answer, he clarified his question. “If money was no object, what would Max’s Vegetable Patch look like?”

“I’ve toyed with the idea of raising animals, but—” she stalled and he could see the objections to her grand plans piling up in her brain “—they’re expensive and unless you’ve got the staff you can’t ever go on vacation.”

He raised a brow at her. “Money is no object.”

“What about time?” she retorted.

“If you have money, you can hire extra people to cover the time.”

“Right.” She went back to planting and Trey gave her some space to organize her thoughts. What he’d meant to be a simple question asked out of curiosity clearly was not.

“Right now I’d like to own the land I farm. Renovate the second tobacco barn so I can offer housing to two interns. Past that, I have no plans.”

When she stepped away from her finished tray of broccoli to begin another, he thought their conversation was over. Max didn’t hum to herself. She didn’t whistle or mutter. The only noise she made was the brushing of her clothing against itself as her hands busily planted seeds and the occasional shuffling of a seeding tray against the wooden tables. Outside the greenhouse the rain pounded—on the ground, on the sides of the greenhouse, on the trees. But even with all the noise Mother Nature could muster in the storm, Max was so centered in her thoughts and her work that the greenhouse felt silent. Trey knew it wasn’t. When he stopped working to listen, the rain buffeted about outside and Ashes panted at Max’s feet. So long as he didn’t resist, Max and the work pulled him into a meditative state.

It wasn’t until Max checked her watch that Trey noticed how the light had faded. He’d spent several hours in contemplative, comfortable peace with a woman on his dad’s farm. No anger, no frustration, no resentment, just the repetitive movements of planting seeds.

“Finish up your tray and then we’re done. I got far more finished today than I’d hoped. Thank you for your help.”

Trey stretched his hands out in front of him and rolled the stiffness out of his neck. “You’re welcome. Thank you for the tour and conversation.” Now that he was moving, anger poured back into the empty space left from his meditation. The tightness that had been in his shoulders from stillness morphed into the restrictive straitjacket he was familiar with. He tilted his head from the left to the right, hoping to add ease back into his muscles.

Max directed him through cleaning up and they walked out of the greenhouse into the drizzle together. Only the noise of the rain, the shuffling of their steps and the rustle of their clothing accompanied them, leaving Trey to concentrate on Max walking next to him. Even Ashes seemed contemplative. As they were passing the chicken coop, Max spoke again. “I thought a lot about your question.”

“My question?” After the absorbing quiet of the greenhouse, his question now felt intrusive. His idea of bigger, better and flashier was out of sync with the peace of the farm.

“There are so many things I could do with this farm that would make a splash in the organic farming world. There’s this guy in upstate New York with a complete CSA. People pay him a yearly fee and once a week they pick up all their food, meat, cheese, bread, preserves, vegetables, everything. His wife wrote a book about it. Closer to home, there’s a farm in Orange County with a complete rotation of their animals and vegetables. They do things with organic farming I could only dream about.”

“But?” Just because he felt like he was intruding, didn’t mean he was going to stop.

“I’m pretty simple. My dreams for the farm are modest: a winter CSA, a renovated tobacco barn and land I can count as mine.”

“What’s wrong with saying that?”

“What are your dreams, Trey?”

Trey stopped and stared at the farmhouse. His mouth opened to speak but drizzle dripped off his nose into the emptiness of what he couldn’t say and he had to shut his mouth before he drowned. He either said what he didn’t even want to admit to himself or never speak again. “All I ever wanted was to get away from my father and this farm.”

“And after you moved away, how did you decide what to do next if you didn’t have dreams?”

Max’s eyes were clear and bright, even through the fading light and the spit coming down from the heavens. Trey started walking again, to the farmhouse. He’d never imagined wanting to enter those doors, but the house was dry. And warm.

When Max and Ashes caught up with him on the enclosed porch, he could feel the cowardly way he hadn’t answered her question in the prickle in his spine. The drips off the metal roof were louder now than the sound of the rain, but neither noise was loud enough to drown out the truth he didn’t want to admit to himself.

“Since I packed up my car and left North Carolina, I haven’t had a single dream for my life. I’ve taken logical and practical steps to further my career and the agendas of my employers, but nothing I’ve done has been my dream.”

Ashes’s wet tail made a squishing noise as it swept back and forth on the concrete floor. Max was silent.

“Kelly’s coming over soon so we can do more packing. I should go inside.” Trey hadn’t looked at her during his confession. He didn’t want to see pity in her eyes.

The irony of the situation wasn’t lost on him as he watched Max and Ashes shuffle down the steps and around the back of the house. Max had one very simple dream, and he owned it. He had had one simple dream, too, and owning Max’s dream meant he hadn’t fully realized his.