Homestead

Chapter Five

Clay stared at the high painted-tin ceiling in her big room on the second floor of the B&B. She hadn’t slept much. She didn’t usually, often working late into the night, sleeping a few hours, then getting up to work again. She’d learned to sleep on the jet when she needed to, in trucks, in trailers on the job site, or most any other place. She was basically a nomad and had gotten used to being rootless.

The night before, she hadn’t even gotten her few hours of routine sleep, too keyed up from her meeting with Tess. Too stirred up in ways she hadn’t been in so long she’d forgotten she even could be. She didn’t live a boring life—business challenged her, fieldwork satisfied her, and sex took her mind off what might be missing from her life in the few hours when she wasn’t working. Most of the time she was content, but seeing Tess had reminded her that once there had been something more. After losing something, it was easier to pretend you’d never had it and didn’t need it, and Tess had just made that a lot more difficult.

Tired of the ceiling and her own dark thoughts, Clay abandoned bed at four thirty, showered, and dressed in field clothes—forest-green khaki work pants, brown cotton shirt, construction boots—and went out to look around the village. Cambridge was a quiet little town in the midst of rolling hills and farmland, too far from the big cities to be within easy commuting distance, and populated mostly by families who’d been there for centuries. For a span of four blocks in the village proper, the main street, aptly named Main Street as it was in almost every small New England town, was lined on both sides with small businesses—an IGA market for essential food shopping, a gas station/convenience store, two antique stores, a diner, a bar, a pizza shop, a Chinese-takeout storefront restaurant, the post office, and the ACE hardware store, the biggest building in town.

Most of the places hadn’t changed since the last time she’d ridden through with Tess behind her on the motorcycle. They’d come down from the lake together a time or two, once when she’d told Tess she wanted to see where she lived, once when Tess had asked her for a ride back to the farm. She remembered meeting Tess’s stepfather when he’d been on his way out to the fields, recalling the hard glint in his eyes as he’d surveyed her, the way he’d asked her name and how she knew Tess. He hadn’t been belligerent, but her gut told her he was dangerous. In hindsight, she’d been right. Ray Phelps. Tess rarely spoke of him except to say she’d been eight when her mother had married him and fourteen when her mother had died in a car accident on an icy winter road. Phelps had died not that long ago—Clay’s father had sent her an e-mail with the news. She’d been surprised at the time, wondering why her father had kept tabs on the man. Whatever the reasons, he was out of the picture, and the farm was Tess’s now. Tess looked as if the life suited her.

Clay walked to the end of the tiny business district where the residential houses began, crossed the street, and headed back to the diner. Ford, Dodge, and Chevy pickup trucks crowded both sides of the street in front of the diner. Inside, the few tables and most of the stools at the long counter were filled with men and women in work clothes like hers, sitting silently with newspapers in front of them or talking quietly over coffee. She threaded her way down the long, narrow aisle to a stool at the far end of the counter, aware of everyone watching her, some with blatant curiosity, others with casual interest.

A young woman, maybe twenty, with light-brown hair pulled back in a ponytail and a sky-blue scoop-neck T-shirt that said Susie’s Café in white letters, headed her way with a coffeepot in her hand. She filled the white porcelain mug in front of Clay and said, “Need a menu?”

“No, I’m good,” Clay said, nodding at the coffee. “How did you know?”

The girl smiled. “Nobody comes in here before five who doesn’t want coffee.”

“True enough.” Clay poured some milk into the coffee, sipped it, and raised her eyebrows. “This isn’t Maxwell House.”

“Sure isn’t. Green Mountain French Roast, ground fresh for every pot.”

“Things are getting gentrified around here.”

The girl snorted. “Not hardly, but there’s no reason we can’t have good coffee. So what will you have?”

Clay scanned the whiteboard on the wall across from her where daily specials were written in black script. “I’ll have that farmer’s omelet. Whole-wheat toast. Thanks.”

“Sure enough.”

Clay drank the very good coffee and ate the equally good cheese, ham, mushroom, spinach, sausage, and potato omelet while organizing her day in her mind. Around her, the low murmur of voices gave her a comforting sense of community, something she never really noticed in big-city restaurants, where no matter how many people were congregated, everyone seemed to occupy separate islands in a vast ocean. Disconnected, alone. Another thing she’d gotten used to.

Meal done, she was reaching for the bill when a strain of conversation rose above all the others, catching her attention.

“Heard they’re going to start drilling pretty soon,” a husky male voice said from somewhere down the counter.

Clay let the bill lie where it was and motioned for another cup of coffee. As she worked on her refill, she listened.

“I hear Pete Townsend’s trying to put a stop to all that,” a second man said. “Doesn’t want them contaminating his land.”

“Pete doesn’t want anything to change, that’s his deal. Me,” yet another person chimed in, “I think it’s a good idea. These gas people—they bring money, lots of it. Not just for the ones who sell them the rights, either, but for everybody. They got to truck it all out, don’t they? They gotta build roads for them big trucks, they gotta have houses for the people who’re working there. They gotta eat, right? I’ve read about these things. Everybody ends up making money.”

“Yeah,” a woman piped up, “unless you happen to be one of the ones whose water gets contaminated by all the stuff they flush up along with the gas. The Whiteside Creek runs right through where they’re supposed to be drilling, and most of our land gets water from there. If that water gets tainted, our crops and our livestock are going to get sick. Maybe us too.”

Clay shot a glance down the counter at the woman. Fortysomething, blond hair held back with a simple gold clip, elegant features, and diamond-hard blue eyes. Pretty and pissed.

“I’m with Pete,” the woman went on, “and so are a lot of us. We don’t need these people coming up from wherever they’re coming from to take what they want and then leave us with the mess. This land is farmland, that’s what it’s meant for, and that’s what we ought to be paying attention to.”

The hubbub of voices grew louder as people tossed out opinions, talking over each other, dissecting the issues. Clay had heard it all before and often came up against prejudices fostered by the lack of facts. People only knew what they’d read or heard, usually not from the fracking companies. The media always liked a good story, and good stories were often one-sided. In most situations, an advance team from NorthAm came into an area to deal with community relations well before site work began, but this time she’d been tossed into the fire and she’d have to deal with resistance on her own. But not in the diner at five in the morning—she wanted to do it face-to-face, family by family, for starters.

Just as she was making a mental note to have Ella set up a town meeting once she had a sense of where most of the community was going to fall out, Ella walked in. All conversation stopped. Clay might have gotten a few curious looks, but Ella, even in casual clothes—which for her meant tailored black pants, a form-fitting white tee, and a light blazer to cover her weapon—drew outright stares. She strode over to Clay as if oblivious to the attention, but Clay knew she could recite exactly where everyone was seated and what they looked like.

“Morning,” Clay said.

“Couldn’t sleep?” Ella nodded to the counter girl who set down a full mug of coffee by her right hand. “Thanks.”

“Just can’t wait to get started,” Clay said.

Ella laughed. “I’ll bet. I’m guessing we’ll need a town meeting before this is done.”

“You guessed right.” Clay thought of the conversations she’d just heard, thought of Tess’s automatic distrust of her and the company. She really needed to talk to the farmers, including Tess.

That idea was the best thing about the morning so far.

Tess walked her best milker into the milking stall and tethered her with a loose lead rope to the ring mounted on the wall. After dipping each udder into a container of Betadine, she attached the suction tubes to each one and started the automatic milking machine. Immediately, thick white fluid streamed into the collection tubes. Tess ran her hand down the cow’s flank as the milk ran into the sterile lines that carried the milk to the storage tanks. On a good day, this cow—Buttercup—would give her over a hundred gallons of milk. And Buttercup’d eat the same amount of food—at least a hundred pounds of corn, hay, and grain—and drink fifty gallons of water. Multiplied by eighty, the herd consumed an incredible amount of feed. She relied on her fields for the corn and alfalfa to sustain her herd, and if she didn’t get it this year, she’d be dipping into her bank account to supplement before long.

The door at the far end of the barn creaked open, letting in a shaft of early-morning sun, and her foreman, Tomas, a suntanned fifty-year-old whose hair was still as coal black as it had been when he was twenty, strode toward her. Tomas had been on the farm as long as she could remember, starting as a young man working the fields. He’d grown with the needs of the business, taking courses in animal husbandry at night at the community college where Tess had eventually gotten her degree. He’d never wanted to leave and buy his own farm, saying he could never find a place as beautiful to work or people as friendly to work with.

“How are things looking?” Tess asked.

Without Tomas, Tess doubted she’d be able to handle everything that needed to be done on the farm. Even with plenty of help, farming was a seventeen-hour-a-day job. Most dairy farms in the country were family-owned businesses because it took a family of one kind or another to run a farm—tending the cows, rotating them out to feeding stations or the fields and into the barn for milking twice a day, ensuring they had the right feed mixture and timely veterinary care and a clean, healthy living environment. Add to that the stress of calving, feeding and caring for the young, not to mention documenting their entire lives from birth until they were culled from the herd or died from other causes. The state regulated everything about dairy farming from the health of the herd to the soil composition to how the milk was stored and transported. When she wasn’t directly overseeing the milking, the care of the stock, or the state of the fields, she was doing paperwork. When she returned to the house at night she always had one form or another to complete or update. On most farms, the extended family—spouses, children, multiple generations of family members—divided up the chores. With her mother gone and now her stepfather, Tomas was a critical member of her farm family.

“The yield is down a little,” Tomas said. “The heat.”

“I was afraid of that.” Tess sighed, took the clipboard he handed her, and ran her eye down the totals for the morning milking. Off about 10 percent. “How’s the silage holding up? I think we might be able to get another cutting from the back fields next week, but it won’t be ready for feed for a while.”

“We’ll be all right for a bit.” He slipped a stick of spearmint gum from the ever-present pack he carried in his front pocket and offered her one.

“Thanks, no,” Tess said as she always did. She’d given up telling him she detested spearmint gum when she was ten.

“Calves are all looking good. Growing fine. Vet’s due tomorrow,” Tomas said as he folded a piece into his mouth.

“Right.” Tomorrow was Saturday already. Ordinarily she never forgot appointments, but she’d been a little distracted, what with the news about the drilling…and Clay. Tess grimaced, shook her head. “Eight o’clock, right?”

“Yep. I can take care of it if you want.”

“Thanks, but I’ll need to be there.” Tess switched off the milking machine as the amount coming down from the near-flaccid milk bag slowed to a trickle, removed the suction tubes from the udders, and wiped them down again with Betadine. “You’ll have enough to do with the milking. Transport will be coming around right about then too.”

“Okay. I was thinking to have Jimmy move some of the chop over for the heifers—the pasture’s looking a little thin.”

“Good, thanks. I have to be out this afternoon. Call me if anything comes up.”

“Will do.” Tomas released the ties on the cow to take her back to her stall. “You plan on being at the town meeting tomorrow night?”

“That’s tomorrow too?” Tess rubbed her eyes, nodded. She tried to make the town meetings whenever she could, but this was one she couldn’t afford to miss. The issue of drilling would undoubtedly be on the agenda. “I’ll be there.”

Satisfied that everything was under control for the moment, Tess started back for the house and her second cup of coffee. A black pickup truck turned into the drive just as she reached her porch. She stopped and waited, recognizing the driver as he drew near. Pete Townsend owned a big farm south of hers. Whenever she ran into him at Grange meetings, he was always friendly, but she wouldn’t say she knew him well. She had a feeling she knew what this visit was about, though.

“Hi, Pete,” she called as he stepped out of his truck. He was a big clean-shaven man, still fit with just a bit of softness around the middle. As usual, he wore a khaki work shirt, pants, and heavy boots, his close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair covered by a black Yankees cap.

“Tess,” he said, walking up the stone path toward her. “Got a minute? Sorry to drop in so early. You’ve probably got milking—”

“No problem. Milking’s done.” Tess came down the stairs, trying not to let her annoyance show at his veiled suggestion that she wouldn’t have the morning’s work well in hand by seven a.m. “Come on in. I was just about to have another cup of coffee myself. I’ve got some blueberry muffins from Caroline’s. If you’re of a mind.”

“I’m always of a mind,” he said, ruefully patting his stomach as she led him around the back to the kitchen.

She brought coffee, plates, and butter and set the muffins in front of him. She sipped her coffee and waited while Pete broke a muffin in half and generously buttered it. “I suppose you’re here about the drilling.”

He took a bite, chewed, sipped his coffee, and swallowed. “I am. Things are moving pretty fast, faster than we expected, and I don’t think we’re ready for this slick outfit they sent in here. They’ve already got trailers and people up to the Hansen place and big machinery coming in every hour. If we don’t do something, they’ll be drilling by the end of next week.”

“It seems to me that horse has already left the barn,” Tess said. “Hansen and quite a few others signed over their gas rights years ago, didn’t they? And now the state seems pretty determined that the drilling goes on.”

“All that’s true, but other townships have been able to block the drilling, and we might be able to slow them for a while—make them prove they’re not going to compromise our farms.”

Tess agreed with him, which was exactly the reason she planned on talking to Leslie that afternoon, but that was her business. “I don’t imagine that will be easy.”

“It might be if we all stand together. You’re closer to Hansen’s place than I am, you’ve got to be worried.” Pete paused with the last remnants of muffin in his hand. “I know Ray was talking to them back a ways.”

A cold hand skimmed down Tess’s spine. She hadn’t known that. And she wasn’t about to confess that to Pete. “Anything that affects my farm concerns me.”

“I’m hearing they’re sending in some kind of big shot to run this project—like we’ll be impressed or too intimidated to stand up to him.”

The big shot was Clay. Tess thought about what Clay had said the night before, that she would be speaking to the farmers about the drilling and how it might affect them. She’d have a tough sell with Pete and his ilk, but that wasn’t Tess’s worry. She didn’t want secondhand information from anyone, including Clay. “Well, I’m certainly interested in the facts, and you can be sure I’m going to be looking out for the interests of my land and my animals.”

He studied her silently and she held his gaze. If he was taking her measure, she didn’t mind. She was used to it.

“I know quite a few people have talked to you already about selling,” Pete said casually. “And I understand this is your family home. But you’ve got five hundred acres of land that needs tending. That’s a lot of work for one wo—person. Might be we could strike a deal where you can keep the house and a little bit of land, sell me the fields and the stock—”

“No,” Tess said, keeping her tone friendly. “I’m not interested in selling. You might pass that word along because the message just doesn’t seem to be sticking.”

He smiled. “Thought I’d give it a try.” He stood, picked up the cap he’d set on the table. “I’m hoping you’ll see things my way, Tess. The more people that oppose the fuel company, the better chance we’ll have at keeping them out. And believe me, that’s what we want to do.”

“Thanks for stopping by, Pete.”

Tess walked him to the door and watched him drive away. She wasn’t surprised he’d made an offer for her farm and briefly wondered what else motivated his opposition to the drilling. Pete struck her as the kind of man who always had a contingency plan. Clay would handle him, although Tess didn’t know why she believed that. She knew nothing of the woman Clay had become. And she didn’t want to.

She really didn’t want to think about Clay at all, even though she’d done almost nothing except exactly that since Clay had appeared out of nowhere, as if she’d never been gone.