Chickens in the Road Read online

  Farm life is full of mysteries, with no one right way to do anything. It helped just to know that, at least sometimes, sheer determination could win the day.

  Determination was pretty much all I had going for me, though by this time I was starting to feel slightly experienced. I was still no good at driving in the snow, but by that third winter at Stringtown Rising, I’d developed some skills nonetheless. I was good at stocking up, planning ahead for grocery staples and supplies. I was canning and dehydrating and had a full pantry. I had full freezers too. I’d grown adept at keeping the woodstove going. I had chickens for eggs, my cow for milk, butter, and cheese.

  Winter in the country is a time for farmers to relax, sit by the fire, sip hot chocolate, and enjoy the rewards of a garden well sown and a harvest stored away. Time to put tired feet up and knit and read books. Time to—

  Oh, wait. That was my fantasy! But it was such an endearing dream.

  Winter in the country is time to break up water, carry hay, haul firewood, and keep animals sheltered. Time to muck about in the snow and mud, chore boots sinking halfway to China. There was so much work to do in the winter—and it was that much harder because it was cold.

  Mornings started out icy and dark. I carried water to the chicken house, then went back for more feed. I lugged the five-gallon bucket of layer pellets to their feeder. The chickens would be so excited that they’d jump into the feeder bin with the feed. I’d push them out and they’d squawk at me. They’d change their minds ten or eleven times about whether or not they wanted to free-range for the day, then I’d move on to the goats. They’d need hay. I used the end of a rake to break up the frozen water in their buckets. Then I carried more water from the house.

  I searched for eggs. The chickens loved to hide eggs. I carried food and water to the dogs and the cats. When everyone was fed and watered and where they wanted to be for the day, I’d carry armful after armful of wood up to the house. Every once in a while, if I was tired, I’d secretly turn up the central heat, which we normally kept very low just to keep the house from turning too cold if the fire went out overnight. I was paying the electric bill by myself, but it still made me feel guilty to use it, and I’d be careful to turn it back down and put wood on the fire before 52 came home to find I was “cheating” on the woodstove. I liked living off the land, but sometimes I was just plumb worn out. If he discovered I’d been using the central heat, I knew I’d be in for a ranting, so I didn’t want to get caught.

  After the wood was in, it was time to milk my cow. I’d reach my freezing fingers eagerly for her big warm udder and think about my past life in suburbia. Mornings spent with a cup of coffee or three, morning talk shows for company, my feet propped up on the coffee table. I was so spoiled!

  And yet the cold, crisp air was invigorating. I was forced outside to confront winter head-on. I couldn’t hide indoors and wait for it to go away. I didn’t need a gym or a Wii Fit. I got my exercise tramping back and forth in heavy boots carrying buckets of feed. I worked out my upper arms breaking up water and lugging firewood or pushing those hay bales over fences to get them to Beulah Petunia. I breathed in the fresh, frozen air, hard earth under my feet, barren branches all around. I knew winter, and winter knew me.

  I’d seen old photographs of pioneers who hauled equipment to Stringtown to build gas and oil wells, their mule-driven carts sinking deep in the thick mud. I knew that deep mud. I didn’t work nearly as hard as they did, but I felt more of a kinship with them than I did with that girl who used to drink coffee and watch morning TV, even if sometimes I cheated on the woodstove.

  No matter how hard the work was on some days, I wouldn’t have traded winter in the country for the world—and I hoped I’d never have to.

  Chapter 16

  One of my readers sent me a book called The Legend of Mammy Jane. (Subtitle: An uneducated girl becomes the lady of the manor in Appalachia.) Readers often sent me gifts, books, or even odd vintage items from their attics that they thought I might enjoy. At first, I didn’t like the book much, but I soon became obsessed with it as another peek into the past and connection with one of those pioneer women to whom I so aspired. The book was written by Sibyl Jarvis Pischke about her grandmother, Jane Jarvis, and was set in the pre–Civil War and Civil War period in what would eventually become West Virginia. Jane was a poor but resourceful girl who was working as a “hired girl” by the time she was ten. She was cute and a hard worker, and by the time she was seventeen, a widower with five children made her his wife.

  At her first job, taking care of a family during and following a “laying-in” (childbirth), she’s barely arrived before she’s fixing a complete dinner, cleaning everything in sight, and burying the afterbirth out back. And saying things like, “ . . . a man wanted his supper as soon as he washed up.” And Jane didn’t even say, “Well, you better get started on it, mister!”

  After she married and arrived at her new husband’s neglected home, she had everything in the house in washtubs, and she was scrubbing the kids in the creek, digging potatoes in the garden, milking the cow, and making new straw mattresses. And that’s just what she did before lunch. Not including the biscuits. She got all the kids who were old enough to help, too. Lots of kids/helpers is a plus, but Jane was an undeniable driving force.

  The book was interesting for its detailed descriptions of customs and remedies and sayings of the time as well as for the amount of work a pioneer had to do every day to survive, but it was the central figure of Jane, who could work like nobody’s business and was the epitome of perseverance, that carried the story. There was no problem, not even war, that Jane couldn’t overcome by working harder or making a nut cake.

  I’m not sure if I fell in love with Jane, or if I just loved to hate her, but she was definitely fascinating. And there were pieces and parts of her life that resembled mine, too. I lived on a farm! I didn’t have enough money! I had a cow and a woodstove! Jane even lived in Calhoun County, which was just the next county over from where I lived in Roane County. I decided to act like Jane for a day. (Except for the part where she treated men as if they were masters of the universe.)

  Jane bounded from bed in the wee hours and started the day with breakfast for everybody. She got the woodstove going. Put the biscuits in the oven.

  I woke at 6:10. We had to leave to drive to the bus at 6:15. No time for biscuits. I didn’t even check the woodstove. Got my boots on and got going. There was some hardship involved, though, so that kind of took the place of the biscuits. The driveway was muddy. And it had snowed. Again. The kids and I had to walk down the driveway in the dark to where I’d left the car at the bottom then drive across the river and out the frosty road to meet the bus. When I came home, I had to walk back up the muddy driveway. In the dark.

  I figured predawn hiking in snow and ice beat biscuits any day. I gave myself a check. Or half a check. Jane probably could have hiked the icy, muddy driveway and made biscuits.

  My kids would have to eat breakfast at school.

  Having started the day with an excuse, I worked on improving. I got the woodstove going and started feeling my inner Jane.

  Jane always made biscuits before she went out to milk. I’d already missed biscuit time so I made a loaf of bread. I got the dough started and in the bowl to rise.

  I was Jane! Check!

  Next, out to feed the animals. Dogs, cats. Hay to the goats and donkeys and Glory Bee in the yard.

  Hay and water to the goat mommies in the goat house.

  Feed to the chickens and ducks. I collected eggs. I only found six.

  Jane wouldn’t have put up with that. I told the chickens Jane would have tossed them in a frying pan. They didn’t care. They knew Jane wasn’t there.

  Beulah Petunia was mooing angrily and impatiently by this time. Jane’s cow was sweet and docile and stood still for milking without any feed. I didn’t have Jane’s cow. I carried hay and feed to Beulah Petunia, then milked her.

  I carried the milk back
to the house, checked the fire, punched down the dough and put it in the loaf pan, and took care of the home dairy. Filtered the day’s new milk. Skimmed the previous day’s set milk. I was Jane! Check!

  I had heavy cream in a jar sitting out overnight, ready to make butter. I used my KitchenAid stand mixer, the modern churn. Was that cheating?

  Jane used a real churn. Churning butter was one of the few things Jane admitted to not enjoying. She couldn’t wait to turn it over to the younguns as soon as one of the girls was old enough to take over the chore. I was so Jane! I made Morgan make butter once! Check!

  By this time, I’d baked the bread and had stopped to have a couple slices for lunch with my fresh butter, barely resisting the urge to devour the entire loaf.

  Jane didn’t have a website, but I did, and she had a whole passel of kids to help, and I didn’t, so I eschewed heading outside to dig taters or scrub the curtains in washtubs filled with boiling water. I did some writing instead and tended to some other officey-type business. (I don’t think Jane had an office.) I also made ahead some balls of piecrust dough, brewed and chilled some vanilla coffee for homemade Frappucinos for Morgan, washed one and a half dozen eggs (collected over the last few days), and took in and out three loads of dishes from the dishwasher. Jane would have washed all the floors, cut up pumpkins to dry, found a cure for cancer growing in the woods, then milked the cow again. It was time for me to milk the cow again, too, and feed all the animals all over again. Jane would get supper on the table, then sew some diapers out of feed sacks or make new outfits for the children from the curtains. They didn’t have meat available all the time, but Jane could whip together a dandy meal with fried squash, potatoes, and corn bread with cream.

  I whipped together some fried eggplant, rice with pork and corn, and fresh homemade bread. I didn’t hand-sew any baby diapers out of feed sacks, but I did do some crochet. I decided I knew why they sewed so much. They got to sit down.

  Luckily, I didn’t have to go to bed on a straw mattress. At the end of the day, I prepped a pot of soft cheese to set overnight and hang in the morning. I had fresh buttermilk. I’d make biscuits in the morning!

  Later in the book, Jane’s husband went off to war and she struggled through life with the children by herself, ultimately prospering and becoming known as the lady of the manor and a figure of resourcefulness and courage. She helped others and helped herself. The thread that went through it all was the hard, hard work.

  I wasn’t a stranger to hard work, which was a large part of what attracted me to Jane’s story. She had a strength I was looking for in myself. When I wrote about the book on my website, my readers told me I was their modern Jane. I thought that was an overstatement (they didn’t know I cheated on my woodstove sometimes), but I felt a connection with Jane all the same. I knew she had lived in the next county over, but it was only when I actually checked a map that I realized her house was a mere fifteen to twenty miles away from our farm. I also knew, from researching Jane, that her house was still standing.

  The enticing proximity led me to forget everything I’d learned about West Virginia since I’d moved there, such as that fifteen to twenty miles translates into approximately fifteen hundred to two thousand miles since there is no straight path to anywhere here unless you are a crow. Going to find Jane’s house was precisely one of those nonsensical adventures that 52 and I did so well together. He was charming at such times, completely indulgent of my latest crazy whim, reminding me of why I loved him and making me think we were going to make it.

  That alone was worth the trip.

  And so, all common sense tossed behind me, I set out upon my adventure, an intrepid explorer, full of bravado in the face of twisting, unmarked, switchback dirt roads and overlapping hills that send you to New York and back trying to get around them. I was going to find Mammy Jane’s house! Well, 52 was going to find it while I rode shotgun.

  And do what once I got there? I had no clue.

  I was sure it would only take a couple of hours, max, to go there and back, unmarked twisting roads notwithstanding.

  We set off across the river ford, in the opposite direction from town, and promptly came upon one of Skip’s cows in the road.

  Dear readers, if there aren’t livestock in the road in the story, you aren’t reading a story about West Virginia.

  Skip was the farmer who came over to sex Glory Bee for me. He owned the house in which my dad grew up along with much of my great-grandfather’s old farm across the river. Skip was just a bit farther up the road, past the wandering cow, near his sawmill. We reached him and I rolled down my window. “Skip, your cow is in the road back there.”

  Skip said, “They’re all in the road.”

  Turned out someone had stolen Skip’s fence. Seriously. Someone had stolen his entire fence along the road. He had put up a new fence, and someone had stolen it again. They caught the guy after the second time, but Skip hadn’t put up the fence again yet because, you know, he was a bit miffed.

  So his cows were wandering more than usual. Skip said he wasn’t worried about it. They came home at feeding time.

  We continued on, following the road that followed the river. The “hard road” in that direction turned into a dirt road. The river was narrow and shallow and looked like a creek.

  About two miles from our farm, the road passed my great-great-grandfather’s house. I wondered if my ancestors knew the Mammy Jane family, but back then, fifteen miles was a long way. Especially in West Virginia. And I was about to find out how far fifteen miles still was. It took us about three hours to find the house.

  I recognized it right away from a photo I’d seen online in my research. I was there! I’d found it! What to do now? I got out of the car and started taking pictures. 52 suggested that since I was running around taking pictures outside the house, it might be a good idea to knock on the door and introduce myself before somebody started shooting.

  I knocked on the back porch door. A little bitty teeny tiny elderly woman came to the door. I told her my name and explained what I was doing and she waved her hand at me and walked off. She came back putting a hearing aid in her ear and I started over. I said, “Are you Irene?” Because I knew that Irene was Mammy Jane’s granddaughter and that she owned the house now. She said she was, then turned to take some corn bread out of the oven. The back porch door opened into the kitchen. I half expected her to pour cream over the bread, fry up some squash, and call the younguns. I was standing at Mammy Jane’s door!

  We chatted for a few minutes about Jane and the book. I thanked her for letting me take pictures of the house and said I had a cow waiting at home for me, so I’d better go.

  She said, “Why don’t you come in?”

  Okay!

  I felt guilty for showing up there like that, though, so I just stood right inside the door. By then, 52 had joined me. We chatted for probably another thirty minutes about Jane. I never stepped a foot away from just inside the door. Eventually, I told her again that I had a cow waiting at home for milking, so I’d better go. By this time, it was getting dark.

  She said, “Don’t you want to see the rest of the house?”

  Well, yes! So I finally stepped away from just inside the door, and she took 52 and me through the entire house, room by room, telling us about each one.

  I already had an idea from some things I had discovered in researching Jane on the Internet that not everything in the book was accurate. It was, of course, a fictionalized account of Jane’s life, so that was to be expected. Irene shared with me a number of fabrications and inaccuracies in the book, and that most of what was true in the story was Jane’s character and how she worked. She never learned to read or write, but she conducted business with an iron hand and ran her home with a backbone of steel. She knew how to do anything, could make everything, worked like a dog, and managed money. She was an extraordinarily strong woman in her time. But that, Irene said, just wasn’t dramatic enough for a book.

  It was good
enough for me, and I admired the real Jane as much, if not more, than the fictional character. For me, it was equally satisfying to find out the truth. And I think that was why I was so driven to go in search of Jane. I knew the book was fiction. What I was looking for was the truth.

  And then finally I said to Irene again, I have to go, my cow is going to be mad. By then, it was way past dark and considering it had taken us five billion hours to trek the fifteen to twenty miles there, we still had another five billion hours to get home. I thanked her for her time, and she invited me to come back.

  I thought often of returning to visit again, but never did. I’d found out what I needed to know about Jane.

  It was the truth inside myself for which I was still searching. I felt, more and more, as if my whole life was a lie. I wrote about frugality and simplicity while my days were absorbed with trying to make money so I could somehow take over the farm. I did everything I could think of to expand my readership and develop extra income streams.

  I’d started working with New England Cheesemaking, writing posts for them that appeared on both my site and theirs in a traffic-trading partnership. Beulah Petunia was pouring milk from her udder, and I was making a new cheese every month as part of my “cheese challenge” with NEC. Since my first year on the farm I’d been writing a bimonthly column for the Charleston Daily Mail, and for a time I wrote a monthly column for a regional publication called Two Lane Livin’. I was deep in plans for a Chickens in the Road Retreat—several days of workshops to be held at a large camp facility with a hall for classes and meals and cabins for lodging.

  It was going to take money for me to take over the farm.

  It was also going to take 52 deciding to leave voluntarily—because I’d promised him I’d never tell him to leave again. Most of the time, he seemed miserable enough that I had reason to hope he might decide on his own to go back to the city.

  I really couldn’t understand why he stayed there. Except for when we were having an “adventure” that pulled us together temporarily, he appeared to find me intolerable.