The River of No Return

swung out of his pickup, shoved his hands into the pockets of his coat, and walked into the barn. The sweet smell of well-tended animals and hay hit his nose. He stood for a moment breathing it in while his eyes adjusted to the dim light. Tom usually waited for him here, but aside from the cows shifting in their stalls and an insinuating cat making free with his ankles, there was no one around.
    Then he heard the distant clank of metal against metal and realized Tom must already be in the cheese room. He went out the barn’s back entrance and across to the small, new building with the stainless steel door. It opened into a vestibule where Nick took off his boots, fished a pair of Crocs out of the tub of disinfectant, shook them vigorously, and pushed his thick-socked feet into them. He opened another stainless steel door into the brightly lit cheese-making room, the heart of this farm and Tom Feely’s pride and joy.
    Tom was there, heaving the illegal cheeses out of the cheese cave and into a big plastic trash can that he’d clearly dragged in from the barn; it was far from clean.
    “What the hell?” Nick stared as Tom hurled a particularly gorgeous wheel of Brie down into the mess. It burst open like a smashed melon.
    “New cheese inspector,” Tom said over his shoulder, already reaching for another wheel.
    “Shit.” Nick pitched in. This was serious. Only last summer a dairyman in the next county had been led away from his farm in leg manacles by machine gun–toting FDA officials, for the crime of making unpasteurized cheese. Jailed for months. Nick put some effort into it, scooping up two wheels at a time. A new cheese inspector would want to flex his muscles. Make a name for himself.
    In a minute more the shelves in the cave were bare of the beautiful, tender wheels that Tom Feely—a hatchet-faced man who wore his Purple Heart pinned to his Red Sox cap—could not and would not stop making. “I was born to make Brie,” he said of himself. “And I was born to make it right.”
    Together Tom and Nick dragged the heavy trash can out and behind the barn, and Tom covered the voluptuous ruination of a month’s hard work with a hay bale. The scent of hay and cheese together was so good that Nick actually felt tears behind his eyes. “By God, Tom, that’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.”
    “There’s always more milk and more time.” The farmer crossed his arms over his chest and stared up the driveway, waiting for the inspector.
    The two men had met on the day that Nick had first seen the view from the top of the hill, a mere ten minutes after he had first fallen in love with Vermont. Thruppenny Farm had been on the market, and Nick had pulled in when he’d seen the FOR SALE sign in the yard. Tom gave him a tour. The farm had been in Feely hands since the Revolution, but as Tom told Nick that day with a shrug, “Nothing lasts forever.”
    Nick knew a good soldier when he met one. He assumed that selling the farm felt quite a lot like dying to Tom Feely, and he also assumed that Tom would rather die than show those emotions. But Tom was an American, and sometimes Nick thought he would never really understand Americans. They were deceptively simple. Tom might have been feeling anything at all under that baseball cap.
    The tour had ended in the state-of-the-art cheese-making room and cheese cave. Nick had watched as Tom bent and looked closely at a broad-shouldered, cloth-wrapped Cheddar, his hand resting on its mottled surface. Tom straightened again and closed his eyes, the better to sense through his fingers. He was figuring out if time had done its work. It was as if Nick wasn’t there at all.
    Nick made his proposition without thinking, before Tom had lifted his hand away from his cheese. And so Nick became the owner of a small Vermont dairy farm. The Feelys paid him a nominal rent and kept him in legal and illegal milk products. For himself, Nick had ended up buying a house a few miles away. Since then he had bought up a few more struggling farms, and he had four families under his guardianship. Nick spent most of his time in Vermont and was considering abandoning New York altogether.
    But now there was a new cheese inspector, and one almost certainly less susceptible than his predecessor to the charms of a plummy British accent.
    “Here we go.” Tom straightened his blue and red baseball cap on his head, and Nick noticed how his fingers lingered for a split second on the Purple