He prefers not to think about money but he doesn’t have that luxury.
The trust-fund gene skipped his family, and it’s been thus far a life
of fiscal constraint. Not that he’s complaining: He’s done good enough
to keep gas in the Chevy and shoes on the boys. The roof doesn’t leak,
even when it’s raining. There’s milk in the fridge and ammo for the
rifle. He is not impoverished.

Still. That stimulus check. He can’t stop thinking about it.
They’re gonna max it out, him and the Mrs., what with the modest income
and pair of dependents. Eighteen hundred bucks he’s got coming, and hot
damn but ain’t that a pretty good payday! Okay, so he wasn’t born
yesterday; he knows nothing comes for free; he knows he has paid and
will pay for years to come, that the $1,800 can’t begin to compensate
for the almost surreal way in which he and so many middle-income
Americans have been robbed in the hot light of midday.

But that’s that hard truth whether or not he takes that $1,800
and mainlines it into the consumer economy. So he’s going shopping.

First, he’ll celebrate with a few sixers of Rock Art’s IPA. He
sees himself sitting and sipping on his porch in the soft light of a
late-June evening, muscle-sore from pitching bales of first cut, or
maybe splitting chunks of hard maple, savoring the fatigue and the
early-summer rightness of everything: the cows lolling, the pigs
settling in for the evening, the goddamn rooster quiet for once, the
sweet corn just beginning to sprout little ears.

And then: He’s got the addition to the barn already sketched out
in his mind. A little sheepfold, a simple thing built on fat cedar logs
he’ll pull from the woods with the tractor. But he’ll need some siding,
a few hundred board feet of rough-cut spruce from the yard at P&R
Lumber in Hardwick, one of those rare Vermont businesses that still
close for hunting season and don’t keep a website. He’s got his eye on
a pile of used roofing down the road; he’ll stop by some night with a
coupl’a twenties and a six-pack and see if he can’t strike a deal.

The Chevy needs a windshield, so he guesses he’ll do that, too,
unless he chooses to forego the inspection and insurance and relegate
the beast to backroads and farm duty, which is damn tempting what with
gas closing in on $4 and the ol’ 454 bringing 8 mpg on a good day.

Maybe instead he’ll mosey down to Onion River Sports (yeah, it
means going into Montpelier and subjecting himself to all the
progressive righteousness of the place, to which the only sensible
antidote is to pilot the Silverado down State Street, squinting through
the cracked windshield and blasting David Lee Roth-era Van Halen from
the tape deck) and spend some money on one of them trailers that hook
onto your bike. Wouldn’t that be cool? Pedaling down the road, Ozzy on
the iPod, the trailer stacked with a couple gallons of raw milk from
the farm on the other side of town. Yes, a trailer.

Piglets. A couple of fall piglets would be good, because piglets
get cheap in the fall and there’s lots of garden detritus to feed them.
He’ll slaughter right before Christmas and there’ll be ham on the table
with the potatoes they dug back in October and the last salad they
picked out of the greenhouse just that morning.

Goodness. He’s still got almost $1200 tucked into the little
slit he cut in the Chevy’s bench seat and already he’s done almost more
stimulating than he can stand. What to do with the rest? Nothing less
than the very thing his so-called leaders hope he won’t: Pay down his
damn mortgage.

‘The Greenneck’ lives and writes in the rusted-out shell of a one-ton Chevy pickup somewhere in Cabot.