Chickens in the Road Read online

  We’d had many conversations in which he’d told me stories about his family. His mother was a schoolteacher and was known as a hard one. I knew he’d lived in the shadow of his brilliant older sister and that his mother had been a demanding parent, difficult to please. His father was known around town, by the reports of people who remembered him, as a detached and distant man. His mother had been the force in the family, or at least that was how it had been expressed to me, mostly when 52 wasn’t present and people were saying what they really thought about his parents. His mother and father had died in a car crash years earlier, so of course I had never met them.

  I was starting to put a few things together, though.

  Someone who’d been a student of his mother’s shared with me that she’d told him he’d never succeed in life and should plan on working at a gas station. He’d all but failed her class under the esteem beating, but he had gone on to be quite successful in life.

  “Did your mother call you a stupid little boy?” I asked suddenly.

  Maybe I took him by surprise. He didn’t answer, but he didn’t deny it either, which was answer enough.

  I walked into the house quietly, almost forgetting about the dog food.

  I’d stepped into something far deeper than I’d realized.

  Chapter 9

  Ross helped me load the .22, and I lifted the gun and fired, killing the raccoon we’d trapped during the night. 52 had already left for work, and I wanted to get the job done quickly. The raccoon rattling around in the cage waiting to be dispatched was unsettling, to say the least. Not that shooting it wasn’t unsettling, too.

  “Wow,” I said. I felt strange. I’d just killed an animal. I felt good and bad all at the same time. “Do you think you could cut off the tail for me?”

  I couldn’t believe I’d just shot a raccoon and now I was asking my son to cut off the tail. I’d had a series of losses in the chicken house, including a hen dragged bit by bloody feather through a crack in the door to a nesting box while sitting on eggs. After Ross accomplished the deed, I got a hammer and nailed the tail to one of the posts on the front porch.

  Somebody give me my redneck union card. I have arrived.

  Ross was eighteen now, confident and competent. He’d taken to the back roads West Virginia lifestyle more than any of my kids. He loved to go “mudding” with his friends in pickup trucks (driving off-road), camp out, and sometimes get into a little trouble. He loved to work and didn’t want to go to college, which worried me. He’d gotten a taste of construction work helping the builder with our new house, then took a construction job after high school. I’d always envisioned my kids going to college, and I had to remind myself to not put him in a box, the way I’d felt growing up, placing expectations on him that were not his own. On the upside, cutting a tail off a raccoon was right up his alley.

  I’d never killed an animal before in my entire life. I was beginning to believe I was capable of more than I thought, though I still felt as if I was floundering on the farm. I’d started free-ranging my mature chickens from my first-year hatching so I’d have room to move in new younger ones after they came out of the brooder. I had come to dislike keeping chickens penned. I wanted my chickens to live as natural a life as possible. Chickens love to peck in the grass, scramble through the woods, perch on fence posts, roll in garden plots, and poop on the porch. However, they never did go to the road. It was too far down the hill.

  I didn’t really need more chickens, but I regularly acquired them anyway. I was possibly a chicken addict.

  Eddie, the clerk at the little store in town, showed us his process for picking chicks when we went to pick out what we hoped would be more future egg producers. His method went something like this: Pick ’em up, turn ’em over, and if they draw their legs up to their body, they’re female. If they stretch their legs out, they’re male. If one leg draws up and the other leg stretches out, put it back and try another.

  When that happened, Eddie would say, “That one’s no good.”

  I continued to incubate my own chicken eggs, along with buying chicks at the little store. I loved to watch chicks hatch, so incubating was a necessary component in my addiction. Of course, hatching out chicks means taking what you get, and often that means roosters, so picking up hens from sexed batches at the store was good for rounding out my flock with a majority in the female department. I could only stand so many roosters. Plus, I wanted some immediate chick satisfaction. While I was waiting on a hatching, I could fulfill my chick yearnings by picking up a dozen day-olds.

  I had one rooster, Mean Rooster, who scared me to death. He was one of the free rangers, and he’d stalk me. This progressed to pecking at me and sometimes flying up at my back as I was walking. I took to carrying a broom with me when I walked around the farm.

  One of the first times he flew at my back to attack me, before I’d started carrying a broom, was a Saturday morning. 52 was home, leaning over the porch rail, watching me as I walked down to let the chickens out of the house for the morning.

  Mean Rooster started following me. I walked faster. He flew up at me, jumping on my back. I shoved him off, turning in a circle and half dancing, screaming for help as Mean Rooster flapped around me, darting in and out trying to peck me as I tried to escape.

  52 didn’t move off the porch, just stood there, watching. In fact, he seemed downright entertained.

  “Why didn’t you help me?” I demanded when I finally got back to the porch, safe from Mean Rooster.

  “What did you expect me to do?” he asked.

  “Help me! I was calling you!”

  “I’m not going to come just because you call me,” he said. “You were being hysterical.”

  Maybe, but I would have felt better if he’d come down. It hadn’t been a serious incident, but it left me with an uneasy feeling even as I plowed dead ahead with our life on the farm.

  Georgia reminded me regularly that, a year after moving out, I still had a few things at the Slanted Little House. I needed to collect the last of my things, clean up the Slanted Little House, and finish unpacking at the new house.

  When I drove over to drop the kids off for the bus, I stayed to work, packing up stray items, and cleaning up the mess we’d left behind. I’d promised Georgia I’d make it sparkly, and aside from that, I owed it to the Slanted Little House, which now sat uninhabited as it had before I’d arrived, to leave it in pristine condition.

  “Be patient,” I begged Georgia when she’d remind me that I hadn’t cleaned the house yet. “And don’t touch anything. I’ll do it!” It was past time.

  I worked on the old kitchen first. It was probably my favorite room in the house—not because it was a great kitchen, but because I had rediscovered my neglected love of baking in the two and a half years I spent there, and it was where I learned to can with Georgia.

  One day when I lived there, Georgia walked into the kitchen and said, “I took care of that possum.”

  Raccoons and possums are common country pests. They unload your trash cans, kill your chickens, eat your dog’s food, and even break into people’s houses. A possum had been skulking around my cousin’s house of late.

  I said, “How’d you do that?”

  She said, “I hit it over the head with a shovel.”

  Georgia was full of surprises. And so many of my surprising conversations with her took place in that kitchen.

  I wiped down everything in the room, dusted the glass, put back my great-aunt Ruby’s knickknacks that I’d taken down to put up mine while I lived there. It was Ruby’s kitchen again.

  Except, to me, it would always be mine.

  Next, I swept the front room and dusted all the old photographs. Georgia watched, supervising, then went to the cellar and dragged out a sled.

  “Sweep all the dust bunnies onto here,” she instructed. Then she told me to dump them on the garden.

  I asked her why we were dumping dust bunnies on the garden, eager to absorb her drops of knowledge.
Speak to me, Yoda. She stared at me for a long moment, then said, “I don’t know. I just feel like it.”

  Oh.

  Georgia was a character and a half, as was her friend Faye. Every week the Spencer newspaper spotlighted a citizen they caught on the street, sort of the “every man” piece in the weekly county paper.

  One week, it was Faye.

  They had a routine list of questions for the spotlight. The hapless newspaper editor who fell into Faye’s clutches on the sidewalk of the town square could have had no idea what he was getting into, but he found out soon enough. He asked Faye if she wanted to be in the spotlight.

  Faye said, “I told him, do you see this sun shining on me? I am already in the spotlight.”

  I whipped out my copy of the paper and perused her answers to the routine questions.

  Occupation: Hardware clerk.

  My commentary: Could Faye work anywhere else but at the little store in Walton? Of course not. And of course she worked in the hardware section.

  Hobby: Drawing.

  My commentary: Faye is an amazing, accomplished artist. I’ve seen several of her paintings hanging in Georgia’s house.

  Favorite food: Steak.

  My commentary: Could we imagine any different?

  Favorite TV show: The Golden Girls.

  My commentary: I think she meant the alternate universe version. The Golden Girls Clear Brush.

  Favorite author: Agatha Christie.

  I choked on that answer. “Faye! What is wrong with you?”

  Faye said, “What?”

  “Why didn’t you say me?”

  Faye said, “I’ve never read one of your books.”

  I said, “That is not the point! You could have said me anyway! I’m taking you out of my will!”

  “You don’t have any money.”

  Person most admired: David Hedges.

  My commentary: David Hedges is the editor of the newspaper. Faye had the driest sense of humor in town.

  Faye said, “I told him there was no way they’d put that answer in the paper.”

  Pet peeve: When something she is expecting is not in the county paper.

  I said, “Smart mouth.”

  Which was why she got along so well with Georgia.

  It took me a couple weeks off and on, but I finally got things sparkly enough over at the Slanted Little House that I turned my attention back to my new house with a clean conscience. I unpacked a box that held my grandmother’s china. The pattern, French Rose 1264 and imported from Japan, was in delicate shades of pink and gray with a platinum edging. I thought the dishes were beautiful, though I hadn’t always thought that much of them.

  The dishes came from my grandmother on my mother’s side. I could remember eating on that china at my grandmother’s little house in Oklahoma. My grandmother was a frugal farm woman, and she didn’t have a lot of excess. This was her fine china for holidays and special occasions. It was an extensive set, including an assortment of serving dishes and various-sized plates in somewhat incomprehensibly changing numbers. There were eighteen teacups and saucers, and eighteen dinner plates, but twelve of most other pieces. Some pieces were hard to decipher. Along with the dinner plates, there were also plates in a small size and a medium size. Maybe one was a dessert plate and one a luncheon plate. Or perhaps a salad plate.

  I’d had the dishes for about fifteen years. I initially didn’t like them that much, but I took them because I thought my mother wanted me to take them. I put them away in a cupboard and never used them. Then I moved and put them away in a new cupboard. Then I moved again and put them in a box. And never took them out.

  The box ended up on my porch at the farm, and eventually I started thinking about those dishes. I especially thought about the dishes when the chickens started laying eggs in the box on top of the dishes. Sometimes the cats sat in the box on top of the dishes. The box was open at the top. The dishes weren’t that well packed.

  I brought the box inside and decided I would wash the dishes and put them away. In fact, I had an urge to use them. I had never been a “china person” in a lot of ways. China always felt too formal to me, but this china had a softer, gentler feel to it than most. The pattern was quiet and minimal. My grandmother lived a simple life in a simple home. It fit that her china was also simple.

  I’d developed a fascination with old skills and ideas and things, and possibly I was becoming more sentimental even as I hardened as a farmer. My mother always called my grandmother “Mama”—and when my mother died, I knew I’d never hear someone refer to my grandmother as Mama again. I knew and remembered my grandmother, but my children didn’t. My youngest child wasn’t even born when my grandmother died. So after all those years of moving that box around, I wanted those dishes.

  However, I had no place to even put them. My cabinets were full of junk.

  I reminded myself that our ancestors didn’t have all this junk. They couldn’t afford it, or they just plain knew better. Living frugally and simply is about more than saving money. It’s a lifestyle that permeates your entire home. With that in mind, I unloaded the cabinets, spreading out all the stuff on the floor and even the dining room table.

  I boxed up all sorts of various items to give away and cleared out the cabinet enough to make room for my grandmother’s dishes. I unwrapped them one by one from newspaper that was shredded in places, probably because mice had been in the box. I washed the dishes all by hand and twice in the dishwasher to sanitize and sanitize again. And then I served dinner to my children on “Mama’s dishes.”

  I explained it all to the kids, and I’m not sure they thought it was as important as I did, but I wanted to give them that connection even if they weren’t ready to appreciate it yet. And I was, desperately, seeking that connection for myself. Not just with my grandmother, but with the strength and self-sufficiency of the women of her time.

  I wrote frequently on my website about my interest in all things old, and one of my readers sent me a big red World War II–era book titled Food for Health and National Defense, A West Virginia Cookbook. The cover noted it came from the West Virginia Department of Agriculture. It appeared to be something that was somewhat handmade, typed on an old-fashioned typewriter, filled with tried-and-true recipes from women across the state plus tacked-in additions of newspaper and magazine clippings—almost like a workbook of a sort. Almost every woman listed her name as Mrs. in conjunction with her husband’s first name and last name. No first name for the woman herself.

  I decided to try a recipe and settled on one for strawberry cake submitted by Mrs. Brooks Randolph from Lost Creek, West Virginia.

  The recipe used six eggs, butter, sugar, strawberry preserves, flour, buttermilk, and a mix of spices, all organized in complete disorder in the ingredients list. Things got even more convoluted in the instructions. I tried to make sense of the recipe, putting the ingredients in rational order and modern terms.

  After writing about Mrs. Brooks Randolph and her recipe, noting that after attempting to follow the instructions for her cake, I thought she was “ornery” and needed a spankin’, one of my readers sent me the phone number for Mrs. Randolph’s nephew.

  What would anyone in their right mind do with this phone number?

  I picked up the phone and dialed it. (That is not, by the way, the correct answer to the above question.)

  Mrs. Randolph’s nephew’s wife answered the phone.

  ME: I’m looking for Mrs. Brooks Randolph.

  MRS. RANDOLPH’S NEPHEW’S WIFE: Who?

  ME: Mrs. Brooks Randolph.

  MRS. RANDOLPH’S NEPHEW’S WIFE: That was my husband’s aunt.

  ME: Yes! Is she alive?

  MRS. RANDOLPH’S NEPHEW’S WIFE: No, she died.

  ME: I need to know what she would have thought was a small

  teaspoon.

  MRS. RANDOLPH’S NEPHEW’S WIFE: A small spoon?

  ME: A small teaspoon. What did she think was a small teaspoon?

  MRS. RAND
OLPH’S NEPHEW’S WIFE: Oh. I don’t know.

  ME: Did you ever eat her strawberry cake?

  MRS. RANDOLPH’S NEPHEW’S WIFE: Strudel cake?

  ME: Strawberry cake.

  MRS. RANDOLPH’S NEPHEW’S WIFE: She never made strawberry cake.

  ME: Yes, she did! She put it in a cookbook! And she measured in small teaspoons. What would she have thought was a small teaspoon?

  MRS. RANDOLPH’S NEPHEW’S WIFE: I have her daughter’s phone number. Do you want that?

  What would anyone in their right mind do with this phone number?

  I picked up the phone and dialed it. (That is not, by the way, the correct answer to the above question.)

  Mrs. Randolph’s daughter answered the phone.

  Mrs. Randolph’s daughter was eighty-seven.

  ME: Are you Mrs. Brooks Randolph’s daughter?

  MRS. BROOKS RANDOLPH’S DAUGHTER: Yes?

  ME: I need to know what she would have thought was a small teaspoon?

  MRS. BROOKS RANDOLPH’S DAUGHTER: A small spoon?

  ME: A small teaspoon.

  MRS. BROOKS RANDOLPH’S DAUGHTER: A small teaspoon?

  ME: Yes. A small teaspoon. What was a small teaspoon?

  MRS. BROOKS RANDOLPH’S DAUGHTER: I don’t know.

  ME: What about when she made strawberry cake? When she made strawberry cake, what was a small teaspoon?

  MRS. BROOKS RANDOLPH’S DAUGHTER: She never made strawberry cake.

  ME: I have a book! She submitted a strawberry cake recipe.

  MRS. BROOKS RANDOLPH’S DAUGHTER: She made strawberry shortcake. She never made strawberry cake.

  Mrs. Brooks Randolph? Where were you, Mrs. Brooks Randolph? What secret life did you and your strawberry cake and your small teaspoons lead that was hidden from your family?