Chickens in the Road Read online

  Dedication

  In Memory of Clover

  May 29, 2007–September 10, 2012

  This book is dedicated with love and gratitude to each and every one of my readers at Chickens in the Road. You carried me through this journey on your wings of unflagging support and encouragement. Thank you always.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Recipes

  Crafts

  Index

  Photographic Insert

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Foreword

  It was a cold late autumn day when I brought my children to live in rural Walton, West Virginia. The farmhouse was one hundred years old, there was already snow on the ground, and the heat was sparse—as was the insulation. The floors weren’t even either. My then-twelve-year-old son walked in the door and said, “You’ve brought us to this slanted little house to die.”

  Products of suburbia, my three children wondered why there was no cable TV or Target, not to mention central heat. My daughter, hungry from the trip, tried to call Domino’s. My cousin Mark explained gently and without laughing that “they don’t deliver pizza out here.” I think it took her a good thirty minutes to believe he wasn’t making that up.

  I was at a turning point in my life, a crossroads where for the first time I could choose where I would live, not simply be carried along by circumstance. I was born in Texas, grew up in Maryland, Alabama, and California, and had since lived everywhere from Idaho to the Carolinas. When people used to ask me where I was from, I would go blank, like a foster child passed around to too many families to know which one was home. Where did I come from? I longed, deeply, to find a place to call mine. And as a writer, my office was my laptop. I could choose anywhere.

  So why did I choose West Virginia, a state that has notoriously lost population in the past century?

  When I was a little girl and we lived in a suburb of D.C., my father took us every summer to an old cabin in West Virginia. It stood on the last family-owned piece of a farm that had belonged to my great-grandfather, a farm once spanning hundreds of acres on the banks of the Pocatalico River. My father was born and raised on that farm in Stringtown, an early twentieth-century gas and oil boomtown in rural Roane County, rising up out of the backwoods between Walton and the county seat of Spencer. Back in his day, what are now wild woods were cleared farm fields. There was a church, a school, a store, and even a hotel. The gasoline plant employed fifty men. There were wooden sidewalks down the dirt road and a public walking bridge across the river. The one-room schoolhouse where my grandmother taught still stands, but the Stringtown where I played during those long-ago summers was much different otherwise. It was like some kind of lushly forested alternate universe filled with the ghosts and tales of my ancestors—the now-overgrown hills and meadows they once farmed, the caves where they hid their horses from Confederate soldiers, the graves in hidden cemeteries where they were buried.

  I loved those summers in West Virginia. I loved the trees and the quiet. I loved swinging on grapevines over the river and learning to skip rocks. And most of all, I loved that sense of history and place. My father clearly felt enough sentiment for the land to share it with me by bringing me to visit. Yet despite its charms he—like so many of his generation, drawn like moths to the flame of cosmopolitan life beyond those simple hills—grew up and moved away, never to return but for those brief times. He used to say about West Virginia, “I got out of there as soon as I could.”

  But when I stood at that crossroads in my life and decided to move to the boonies of West Virginia, to the countryside outside the tiny town of Walton just over the hill from my great-grandfather’s old farm, I took a deep breath of the clean air, looked up at the sky littered with stars you could actually see, felt the far-reaching pull of my family’s roots, and said, “I got here as soon as I could.”

  The tiny town of Walton takes, oh, a minute and a half to drive through. Most people might think there’s not much there, but there’s all we need. If we actually want something from the city, we can drive the winding road to the interstate and get it, but that doesn’t happen too often. There is a cute little one-room library, a cute little grocery store with half a dozen aisles, a couple of small churches, and a bank, all flanked by country roads so narrow you have to pull off to pass. The school is so small, when my younger son graduated from eighth grade and I asked him who his friends were, he looked at me as if that was a stupid question and said, “There are only thirty-six students in the whole grade. I have to be friends with everyone.”

  And he was right—everyone is friends with everyone. Walton was like one big Cheers bar. Everybody knows your name. At first, I found this disconcerting. Why were these strangers at the Thriftway, Walton’s one little store, talking to me as if they knew me? And how did they know my name? When my oldest son totaled my car two days after he got his driver’s license, all the kids at school knew about it by the time he got there the next morning. When I arrived at the accident scene, a paramedic I’d never laid eyes on before was calling me by my first name. Mark, my cousin, heard about it at his office and drove down to check on the scene. Mark’s wife, Sheryl, a nurse at the nearby hospital, ran down to the emergency room in case we needed to come in. It’s like everyone knows everything by some kind of osmosis. Everywhere I went for the next month, people asked me about the accident. I was a world away from the anonymous suburbs. Here, people were connected—to the land, to the history, to one another.

  My kids ate sandwiches sitting in apple trees. They jumped fully clothed into the river. They skated on frozen creeks and learned how to pick a hoe out of the shed. They knew what a low-water bridge was and how to set a turtle trap. They piled corn on the cob on their plates and remembered planting the seeds. We didn’t worry about burglars at night—just raccoons.

  People around here don’t have much if you compare them to suburbanites. Even if they can afford it, they don’t buy granite countertops or designer clothes, and there’s not much competition at the high school for the swankest car. As my older son liked to say (in his exaggerated teenage way), “They’re all driving cars their grandfathers bought in 1950.” But for all they don’t have, what they do have is one another, along with that deeply held pride in community and family and plain living that has been largely lost in the contemporary world.

  And that’s exactly why I wanted to bring my once-pampered suburban children here, to grow up knowing what matters, what is real. The rural landscape of Appalachia is still an alternate universe from the rest of the country. Here, you don’t call for pizza. You call your neighbor.

  Other people may have chosen to leave, but I chose to come, and I choose to stay. When people ask me where I’m from now, I have an answer. I’m from West Virginia. And my children, who once wondered if I brought them to this Slanted Little House to die, bloomed like flowers taken from a sterile hothouse and put out in the natural sun.

  We didn’t come to this Slanted Little House to die. We came here to live.

  Chapter 1

&nb
sp; I want to live where I can have chickens in the road.” I made this pronouncement one day while driving down a dusty back road bordered by weedy woods and intermittent dilapidated farms. A big red rooster led a line of hens across the lane, lending a charming, storybookish air to the run-down scenery.

  I was so smitten.

  52, by my side, said, “You can have all the chickens you want.”

  Maybe I loved him. Maybe I just wanted the chickens. I thought I wanted both, but it was hard to tell. They were deeply intertwined.

  He and I were cousins six or seven times removed, which isn’t unusual in West Virginia. Unless you are talking to someone fresh from Alaska, you are probably related. He’d grown up in Roane County and his family roots went back as far as mine, though he was living in Charleston then. At the time we met, he was 52, which became my endearment for him. He was more than a decade older than me, with an air of calm wisdom. He was bespectacled, gray haired, and he smoked cherry tobacco in an old pipe. Tall, neatly dressed on workdays in an ever-present button-down white shirt and the day’s choice of navy blue or khaki slacks or his weekend uniform of worn jeans and a plain T-shirt, he was my soft place to land.

  He liked the nickname I’d given him. “I’m 52 forever,” he liked to say.

  We’d started out as friends, but our relationship gradually deepened. He told me a story one day about a feral cat that had shown up outside his door in Charleston. The cat wouldn’t let him come near her, but one day he left his back door open. The cat came inside. For three weeks, he didn’t even try to touch her.

  He was, just simply, kind to her. “And eventually,” he said, “she was mine.”

  It was how he got me, too.

  I’d had a couple of hard years. I’d left my marriage and my life behind to move “home” to West Virginia, a place I’d visited often during childhood but had never lived. I could already point to a jury of family and friends who would say I’d lost my mind. Now I was going to buy a farm.

  With 52.

  Who was so kind.

  I couldn’t think of anyone with whom I’d rather start a flock of chickens.

  He got me. He completely understood my crazy desire for a farm. He wanted one, too. We were, most of all, mutual enablers, ready to pull each other by the hand as we leaped into the mist.

  I could never remember later who first said, “Let’s buy a farm together,” but we were both on board. I’d dreamed of a farm all my life, though my motivation wasn’t that simple. I was lost and trying to find myself in my childhood memories of West Virginia. I’d come to test myself, to discover the real me. He’d actually owned a farm in the past, which had ended badly in a broken marriage, and he was ready to go back to a farm again and do it right.

  I was the one who found the real estate listing online. Forty acres, free gas, green meadows, blue skies, a dirt-rock road. In my imagination, I added butterflies on the breeze, chickens in the road, and bluebirds on the windowsill. I was instantly transported to fantasyland. I was going to be a pioneer! All I needed was an apron and a bonnet!

  The free gas turned out to be a lie, and the best house site was halfway up a hill with a steep, terrifying access. But the property was in my family’s long-ago stomping grounds of Stringtown.

  Even the real estate agent got lost trying to find it. The fact that the sign had been knocked down didn’t help. The farm was on a two-and-a-half-mile stretch of dirt-rock road that ran between two paved roads. To reach the hard (paved) road on one end, you had to ford a river.

  To reach the hard road on the other end, you had to cross three creeks.

  There were no bridges.

  Bridges were for sissies.

  This was rural Roane County, West Virginia. It was only about thirty miles outside the capital city of Charleston, but there was a world of twisty, curvy roads and wild terrain between them. In the hills of West Virginia, barriers don’t take up much mileage. Once you hit the back roads, go country or go home. I had only recently figured out the difference between hay and straw, but I was going country all the way.

  From a population perspective, West Virginia is a small state. The total population is slightly under two million, which is roughly the same number it held a century before—and that is after some slight recent growth. The largest city in the state, the capital of Charleston, boasts just over fifty thousand residents—which is but a medium-size town in many places. Roane County is a typical county within the state, its heyday in the gas and oil age of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries long gone, leaving a population of only around fifteen thousand. Most of that population is centered in and around the county seat of Spencer, with a few small towns in the outlying areas, including the tiny town of Walton, outside of which my cousin’s farm is located. It is a very rural county with many small communities that long ago disappeared, such as Stringtown.

  Walton has its little store, an elementary/middle school, a post office, and a couple of tiny churches. In Spencer, one can find the courthouse, the one high school in the county, a Walmart, a few fast-food restaurants and mom-and-pop diners, and the Robey Theatre, which holds the distinction of being the longest continuously operating movie theater in the United States. (In 1941, when my dad was sixteen, he could take a date to the Robey with twenty-five cents—tickets, popcorn, and Cokes included.) If you need more, Charleston is less than an hour away, but from those lost communities like Stringtown, tucked away on near-impassable rock roads in the depths of the hills and hollers, you might as well be on the moon. I was attracted to the isolation, the challenge, and the charm of the unspoiled land.

  I went home to the Slanted Little House and told Georgia I was buying a farm in Stringtown. She was Mark’s mother, and my stand-in mother, adoptive grandmother, constant friend, and waking nightmare. Georgia had grown up in West Virginia, and she was smarter than me.

  Georgia said, “How will you get out in the winter?”

  “Other people live out there! They must be able to get out! If I can’t get out sometimes, I’ll stock up!”

  Georgia said, “Well.”

  In Georgia-speak, “well” could mean many things. That day, it meant, “You don’t know what you’re doing, girl.”

  Georgia was a woman of few words and she said a lot of them with her eyeballs.

  Not that I was listening. I was about to buy the most magical farm in all the land! Or, in fact, I was about to embark on an intense experience of hardship, deprivation, passion, danger, and romance gone awry.

  But it was a good thing I didn’t know any of that right then.

  I’d been living in the Slanted Little House for well over a year by that time. The Slanted Little House was—and still is—a one-hundred-year-old farmhouse that stands on a farm in Walton, West Virginia. The current owner is Georgia’s son, my cousin Mark, who built his own home next door. He’s actually my second cousin, but in West Virginia, almost everyone is your cousin to one degree or another, so we don’t usually get that detailed.

  Back in the day, Mark’s grandparents, my great-aunt Ruby and great-uncle Carl, lived in the Slanted Little House. Carl Sergent was a farmer and an oil field worker, and he was also active in local politics, which meant he got his road paved. When the road crew arrived, they told Carl to cut a nine-foot rod for them to use to make the width of the road as they paved. Carl didn’t want a nine-foot road so he cut a twelve-foot rod. Nobody double-checked him, so he got a twelve-foot road. Carl knew how to get things done.

  The original farmhouse (dubbed the Slanted Little House by my younger son because of its uneven floors) was built sometime around the turn of the twentieth century and consisted of what are now the front rooms. The construction was typical of its era—a simple white clapboard home with a small front porch that was later expanded to become quite large, stretching across the entire front. Porch swings hung on each end, and large rocking chairs with peeling green paint lined up in front of the wide banisters. It was the kind of porch that begged you to si
t a spell in its shaded cocoon.

  An old-fashioned well, the kind with a pail on a chain enclosed in a quaint well house, still stands to one side. On the other side, there is a stone cellar, which was later attached to the house through the cellar porch and the addition of back rooms. No hallways exist—all the rooms open onto each other, one doorway leading to the next. (Where there are doors, that is. Ruby didn’t like doors.) A small bathroom was added at some point. The kitchen was remodeled sometime in the 1950s or 1960s and remains a testament to Formica and linoleum.

  During my childhood, family trips to Stringtown, where we camped out in an old cabin, were always bookended with visits to the Slanted Little House, which was only a few miles away and over the hill. Ruby would be outside doing strange things, like taking corn off an actual cornstalk. Who knew you could grow your own corn? And truly, I didn’t think anyone did, except for my great-aunt Ruby. She grew all kinds of things I didn’t know people could grow, plus some other things I’d never heard of and didn’t want to eat, like beets and rhubarb. Then she’d do some trick where she’d get the stuff into jars and keep it in the cellar. The old stone cellar had a short medieval-style door that latched with a chain. The ceiling was low and inside it was dark. Cobwebs lurked in the corners. The sagging shelves were always lined with jars filled with Great-Aunt Ruby’s garden witchery. As a child, I found it both creepy and mysteriously alluring.

  At home, we had a bright, clean pantry full of food with labels from Green Giant and Kellogg.

  In earlier days, Carl and Ruby raised chickens, cows, sheep, and pigs, but by the time I was a child, they’d retired from farming and just kept a pony around for the grandkids and other visiting children. For some reason I can’t imagine, I was allowed to take off down the road with the pony one day. The road just past their farm was dirt, because of course Carl only had the county pave the road to his farm and no farther. The pony got away from me. It had been raining, and I can still see the puddles in the dirt road as I ran screaming and crying after it. The pony kept running, and I went sobbing around the back of the house to find Ruby in the garden. She said, “It knows where it belongs. It’ll come home.” And it did.