Chickens in the Road Page 19

  When I’d ask him if he was trying to drive me away, he’d say no. When I’d ask him if he wished he could leave, he’d say no. When I’d ask him if he wanted to continue to have a relationship with me, he’d say yes.

  I’d say, “Well, then, could you stop yelling at me?”

  Apparently, that was a bridge too far, and I felt stuck. He wouldn’t offer to go, and I couldn’t tell him to leave. And worse, he wouldn’t stop ranting at me.

  Sometimes I felt guilty for constantly imagining the farm without 52. Then he would start yelling at me, and I knew I had no choice but to imagine another way. I had to survive, and by this point, the emotional beating of his abuse was beginning to crush me. Some days, those cheerful posts on my website were hard to come by. I was sinking into a depression.

  Meanwhile, I kept working, trying to earn my way out of my nightmare. Between working and milking and other farm chores, I had a hard time keeping up with the house. Cleaning was the bottom of my priority list, but I liked a tidy house and my time was better spent writing.

  I hired a cleaning lady. Secretly.

  By this time, I had a lot of secrets, and this one was about to blow up in my face.

  Chapter 17

  With Ross moved out and in the navy, and Weston soon heading off to college, I started renovating the lower floor of the house where they had their bedrooms. I had some ideas about installing a second kitchen downstairs. There was already a sitting room, a bathroom, and two bedrooms down there, with another space that could be a kitchen. I was toying with a plan to host farm stays and workshops at Stringtown Rising.

  The downstairs was a mess. The cement block walls made it look like a prison. In the area I hoped to turn into a kitchen, we’d periodically kept brooder chicks, and 52 kept his workbench and a lot of his tools stacked in one corner. Much of the rest of the space was cluttered with stacks of those detested quart jars and other junk, some of it mine, and I was quite eager to dispose of it. I started painting the block walls a cheerful off-white that brightened the space considerably, and I made plans to clean up and redesign the boys’ bedrooms. It would make a really nice workshop and farm stay space, separated from the house on its own floor yet part of the house at the same time. If I was ever going to take over paying the mortgage and second mortgage by myself, I needed to come up with another source of income. Taking over the farm on my own felt like a pipe dream, but the fantasy kept me going.

  The plans became a bone of contention between 52 and me when I asked him to move things he had stored downstairs to open up space for the kitchen.

  Despite his objections, I kept working on the renovations, mostly by myself. Even if we stayed together, we needed the money that could come from utilizing the space.

  Sometimes I also toyed with simply moving downstairs myself, making it a separate apartment. It would be a way to move away from 52 without leaving the farm. After all, I couldn’t force him to leave, so even if I ever managed to overcome all the other obstacles to taking over the farm on my own, I might never have the chance. If I just moved downstairs, I could get away from all his browbeating. Might as well paint the place and pretty it up.

  Maybe down deep 52 recognized that potential, too, because his objections never made sense otherwise, especially after I offered to pay half for a nice outdoor storage building where he could store his workbench and tools. He agreed to put in the other half for the building and move his things, but not without a lot of angry tirades. He ended up with a nice little building, but I don’t think he was ever happy about it.

  I would have paid for the whole building, but I didn’t think that would make him any happier.

  At this point, I couldn’t think of anything that would make him happy. And he was about to get unhappier.

  Debbie had been coming to clean the house for me for three months when he caught me.

  He left for work every day at 8 A.M.

  Except when he didn’t.

  Debbie came every other Tuesday at nine.

  He’d noticed the house was cleaner and had complimented me several times and thanked me for keeping the house clean. He was, between bouts of anger, very polite.

  One Tuesday morning, he woke late and decided not to go to work. Debbie drove up the driveway in her big blue pickup truck.

  52 and I were sitting on the porch drinking coffee. I was waiting for the sky to fall.

  He said, “Who’s that?”

  By this time, Debbie was out of her truck holding her mop and pail, ready to start coming up the steps.

  I said, “That’s Debbie. She’s the cleaning lady.”

  The sky didn’t fall, of course, until she left. 52 would never misbehave in front of other people.

  When she was gone, he said, “It’s ridiculous for you to have a cleaning lady.”

  I said, “I work hard. I need the help.”

  “It’s a waste of money.”

  “I pay my half of the mortgage and the second mortgage, and I pay all the bills for the house and the farm,” I said. “What I do with my spare money after that is none of your business.”

  “I need money,” he said. “If you have extra money, then give it to me.”

  “I’m trying to help you. That’s why I took over the bills here.”

  “I need money,” he repeated.

  “For what?”

  “Gas.”

  “You have all the money that you’re not using to pay your half of the bills here,” I pointed out.

  I tried to not ever mention that I was paying the bills because I knew he was sensitive about it, although he’d been quick to let me do it. I didn’t want to rub it in or hold it over his head. All I really wanted was for him to be nice to me, but obviously I couldn’t buy that.

  Giving him gas money wouldn’t make him be nice to me either, and I resented the demand. I worked my tail off to pay all the bills and if I had extra that I could use to hire a cleaning lady to make my life a little bit easier, I wasn’t going to stop so I could give that money to him, too.

  “Then pay me to clean the house,” he said.

  I blinked. “Pay you to clean the house?”

  “Yes. If you’re going to pay someone to clean the house, pay me.”

  “I’m not going to pay you to clean your own house! You live here! If you want to clean it, go ahead! I’m not going to pay you.”

  He’d said a lot of outrageous things to me, but this one really took the cake.

  “Are you not embarrassed to ask me to pay you to clean the house?” I asked, dumbfounded.

  “No,” he said. “You should pay me to chop firewood, too.”

  I thought a lot about hiring a man to do things around the farm, but I wasn’t going to hire 52. He owned half the farm. Besides, if 52 ever left and I got a hired man someday, I’d expect him to be nice to me.

  I couldn’t pay 52 enough to get him to do that.

  I said, “I’m not paying you to do anything around here any more than you pay me. You don’t get paid to take care of your own place. If you want to clean houses for extra money, put up a flyer at the post office. That’s how I found Debbie.”

  “You’re just selfish, you know that?” he said. “You’re selfish, selfish, selfish.”

  He was off and running. I was pretty good at going off myself—into my own world. My latest project was developing a more open crumb, an airy texture with holes, to my breads.

  “Your readers think you’re so wonderful—”

  I’d been experimenting with longer rise times, then I’d worked with the sponge method.

  “—but you’re not.”

  I tried adding vital wheat gluten to recipes too. A wetter dough also seemed to help.

  “You’re selfish, selfish, selfish.”

  I could plan out entire new recipes while he went on.

  And maybe he knew I wasn’t really listening. Probably. Especially since I never responded once he got rolling. But the ranting would quadruple if I dared walk out while he was in
the midst of a tirade.

  At least I made up a lot of good recipe ideas that way. It was also a good time to come up with cute animal stories or ponder a new craft project.

  But by the time he wound down and it was safe to get up and walk away, even though I tried really hard to not listen, I felt like I’d been run over by a couple of out-of-control 18-wheelers.

  I was never sure if he truly understood how exhausting the farm was for me. He left for work at 8 A.M. and often didn’t get home until after 7 P.M. or later from his job. When he’d built a new milk stand for me near the house, he’d built it at the base of a ravine in the hillside that stretched out above the plateau where the house, goat yard, and upper cow pasture were located. When it rained, water poured down the hillside in that cut in the hill—right into the milk stand. The ground grew muddy in the spring and never dried up because Beulah Petunia’s constant stomping in and out of the stand kept it churned up.

  Eventually, I couldn’t walk to the milk stand because of the mud. One day, one of my boots was sucked right off when I stepped in it. It would take me so long to get through the mud to the stand that Beulah Petunia would attack the feed bucket before I could get in there. Electric fence wire separated the cow pasture from the yard to the side of the house. The milk stand backed up to the ravine and the hillside, making it difficult for Beulah Petunia to get around there, so I started hiking up the steep hillside to the back of the milk stand, carrying the milk pail and a five-gallon bucket full of feed. From there, I’d duck under the electric wire and climb over the back of the milk stand, avoiding the mud.

  By the time I milked, then did this all in reverse, with a pail full of milk, I was worn out. And I hadn’t even had breakfast yet. But I loved milking, so I kept doing it until it occurred to me to give up the milk stand completely. I started milking Beulah Petunia wherever it was dry, in the side yard, up beside the house, in the goat yard. I never used the milk stand again. Constantly changing milking locations came with its own problems, but at least I wasn’t clambering up a steep hillside.

  I knew our farm was more difficult than it had to be, but I didn’t know how to get to the solution. I would need hired help to make the various construction modifications that the farm desperately required. When I’d asked 52 to make steps in the hillside so I could get around to the back of the milk stand without so much fear of falling on the steep, slippery hillside, he’d chopped out a few shallow steps in the ground. The steps were so shallow, I gave them up immediately because they were more dangerous than the hillside itself. I didn’t think he understood my problem, but then he wasn’t clambering up the hillside carrying buckets and pails, and he didn’t seem to care that I was. Sometimes I felt sure it was all designed to drive me away—the ranting, leaving the burden of the bills to me, neglecting to fix problems on the farm that made my chores difficult or dangerous. I didn’t think he wanted to take responsibility for walking away, but I didn’t put it past him to make my life so impossible that I would do the walking away for him. Anyone with half a brain would have given up in my circumstances. I persisted. If he was trying to drive me away, he’d underestimated my love for the farm.

  He’d also do incredibly nice things for me out of the blue, which would leave me confused all over again. I couldn’t figure out if he loved me or hated me.

  I was thrilled to get out of town for a week. In the spring, I took Morgan, Weston, and Weston’s girlfriend on a trip to South Carolina to visit Ross while he was in between A school and power school. I turned Glory Bee in with Beulah Petunia and ran away from home.

  Because I was hopeless this way, I missed 52 while I was gone. I didn’t really want him to leave. What I wanted most of all was for us to be happy together on the farm, the way we’d dreamed when we bought it. By the time I got back, I couldn’t wait to see him and tell him all about our trip. I waited for him on the porch.

  He came home from work, kissed me, and told me that he’d missed me.

  I launched into a tale from our trip, eager to tell him everything. I got out about two sentences.

  52 cut in to say, “I don’t want to hear a long story.”

  I burst into tears.

  He hadn’t had to listen to me speak for a week, yet within two sentences, his patience with my conversation was exhausted.

  He felt badly and told me so, and I believed him. He did feel ashamed for cutting me off and making me cry. I think he even truly missed me.

  But that didn’t diminish the fact that he couldn’t stand to be around me, even if he wished that were different, and worse, he couldn’t control his behavior in response.

  And it wouldn’t be long before he’d be ranting at me about how selfish I was, demanding I give him money, or blowing up if I made too much noise in the kitchen.

  We’d been at the farm for three years. Spring was tumbling fast toward summer. After summer came fall, and after fall . . . Before I knew it, I’d be trapped with him for another winter.

  If I was ever going to separate from him, it had to be in the summer, by my thinking. By fall it would be late, and by winter, it would be too late. I had to have time to prepare for winter alone on the farm. Only I couldn’t figure out how to adequately prepare to manage the farm alone in any season, much less winter.

  “Does it make me a terrible person that I live with him, but I spend all my time trying to figure out how to live without him?” I asked Sheryl.

  My cousin’s wife was used to these philosophical questions about my relationship with 52. She was a good listener, a good hand patter, but she couldn’t solve my problem.

  “No, it doesn’t make you a terrible person,” she said. “He could be nicer to you, then it wouldn’t be an issue.”

  “He’s not going to be nicer to me.”

  “Then you have to do what you have to do,” she said plainly. “There’s no point feeling bad about it. You have to survive. And the way he treats you, he may be thinking the same thing and just doesn’t know how to get out of it.”

  I had no idea what he was thinking, but I’d given him plenty of chances to get out of it. By this time it had been a year and a half since we’d had an intimate relationship, but every time I broached the subject, asking if he wanted our relationship to be over, he told me no. I wasn’t sure what his idea of a relationship was, but I thought it had been over for a long time.

  We weren’t married, and we didn’t have sex.

  We were co-owners on a farm, period.

  Yet no matter how I tried to establish this truth about our relationship, he wouldn’t admit it or accept it. I thought maybe if he stopped thinking of me as his girlfriend, he’d treat me like he treated everybody else—politely. Only I couldn’t get him to admit I hadn’t been his girlfriend for a year and a half.

  He kissed me every day before he went to work, and he kissed me when he came home. Half the time he followed that up with an evening ranting session, but he liked following certain rigid structures, and the kiss was part of it. He’d have a fit if I didn’t say good night before I went to bed, and good morning when I saw him in the morning. If I said, “I’m going to bed,” but forgot to add “good night” at the end of it, he’d even come flip on the light, stand over the bed, and berate me for not saying good night. As a creative person, his regimented behaviors left me baffled, but I tried to comply because I didn’t like the consequences if I didn’t.

  Weston graduated from high school that spring, having achieved his National Merit Scholarship and a full ride to West Virginia University. He and Morgan went away for the summer, and I started sleeping downstairs. I was still fixing it up and working on my downstairs kitchen dream of workshops and farm stays, though I’d run into a few major obstacles with the county health department. We had well water, which was the biggest problem. To give cooking, even cheese making, workshops, or any workshop that involved food or where I wanted to provide a lunch, I had to have a health-department-approved kitchen, and the health department wouldn’t approve wel
l water unless I jumped through some complex hoops. I’d have to install an in-line UV water filter, and do tests and make reports regularly. To do the tests, I’d have to get a sanitation certification. There was hurdle after hurdle, and they were all expensive.

  The prospects of ever achieving my dream of workshops and farm stays downstairs in our house starting looking pretty dim, but I was determined to persevere. I was a sucker for the pursuit of lost causes and, mostly, desperate. I was also overwhelmed.

  The Chickens in the Road Retreat was coming up at the end of the summer, and the preparations were massive. I’d never thrown such a huge event before, lasting several days, and the organization was time-consuming. I’d decided to book-end the retreat with the annual fall Party on the Farm, which would be bigger than ever. I sold spots at the retreat through my website.

  My website had come a long way. It had started as a blog about a farm but had grown to much more. The CITR forum was active, and I’d added a separate recipe community, Farm Bell Recipes. I’d been doing the Party on the Farm, inviting readers out for a day of food and demonstrations, since our first year on the farm, but adding the retreat along with it was a big step.

  Most of the time, I did okay with my monthly income from advertising, but advertising was a risky and changing business, based on a shaky up-and-down economy. Some months, I still struggled, especially since I’d taken on most of the financial responsibility of the farm. Other months, I made extra money. In any case, I always somehow made ends meet, and Debbie kept coming every other Tuesday.

  One month I had enough extra money to splurge on a milking machine. It wasn’t very Jane, but it definitely helped me get more done in a day as I was never a very fast hand milker.

  I had an idea to create a “duck ’n’ buck” yard to house the male goats and halfway—and more safely—free-range the ducks, fencing a field around the pond. I also wanted a barn, and 52 was keen on the idea of building one from pallets. He loved pallets, which he collected for free from stores eager to get rid of them, and he’d used them in several projects on the farm. Enthusiastic about a large pallet project, he started collecting more pallets right away while still finding time to build a fenced herb garden for me with a gate. (The gate was made from a pallet, of course.) The only thing I had against the pallets was that they were never weather protected. After just a few years on the farm, things he’d built with pallets were already beginning to fall apart.