Chickens in the Road Read online

  I never saw Ruby get excited or upset about anything. She was an ocean of calm on her farm of wonder. She wore an apron all day every day, and her table groaned with bowls and platters of food at every meal. She was comfort personified, and her house was a beacon of everything I thought home was supposed to be, from the huge, shady front porch with rocking chairs to the ticktock of the grandfather clock in the slightly shabby sitting room, from the sheets hanging on the line in the sunlit breeze to the fat, juicy tomatoes in the biggest garden I’d ever seen.

  By the time I came to live in the Slanted Little House, it stood empty but for its crowded collection of antique furnishings. Ruby had been dead for over ten years, and Carl more years than that, but the Sergent farm, like so many family farms in West Virginia, was well populated. Rural Appalachian farms commonly have two, three, even four homes. Grandma and Grandpa in one, their child or two in others, then their child or two in yet others. West Virginia is often said to have higher home ownership than any other state because so many families have generations-old family farms—and everybody lives there. By the time Ruby died, her son Bob and his wife, Georgia, had built a house on the farm, as did their son Mark after that. Bob had passed away, and Mark was married with a son around the age of my sons. I was never alone. The kids went to school. Mark went to work at the courthouse. His wife, Sheryl, went to her job as a nurse at the local hospital. But Georgia, in her late seventies by then, was always there.

  She was the lady of the manor, a workhorse, a slave driver, Miss Marple, and Martha Stewart rolled into one. Her hair was short and white, and she had it styled like clockwork every Tuesday at the old folks’ home. She wore a sweater unless it was the hottest of days, and she was always, constantly, doing something. She came over to the Slanted Little House ten times a day, and if I was in the bathroom, she waited outside the door. With my mail. Or a plate of sandwiches. Or orders to come help her hoe.

  She suffered from macular degeneration, and she liked me to drive her places.

  She’d come over and say, “What time did you say you were going to town?”

  Because I’m slow, I’d always say, “I wasn’t planning to go to town.”

  She’d say, “Yes, you were. I need to go, too. Let’s go at ten.”

  There were only a couple hundred people in town and she knew them all. Usually, she was taking some kind of food basket to somebody, so we’d have to make deliveries. I’d play her Secret Service detail, chauffeuring then hanging around outside, waiting. I’d take her to the bank and the post office and the little store, then we’d run out of places to go on parade because the town is that small. Sometimes, just to exasperate her, I’d ask if she wanted to joyride and find a bar.

  She thought I was funny. Or crazy. In any case, I was entertaining.

  Back home, she’d turn into the chore Nazi. Time to hoe. Time to can. Time to climb on ladders and clean out the gutters. Time to rake, time to drag branches to the brush pile, time to sweep something. If she couldn’t think of a good chore, then she’d come into the house, walk into my bedroom where I’d be sitting at my laptop trying to write, and just stand there.

  ME: What are you up to?

  GEORGIA: Nothing.

  Then I knew she just wanted to talk, and I learned to listen.

  Anytime I went anywhere, when I came home, she was right there, like she’d transported herself to the porch from the Starship Enterprise. She’d bring my mail to me whether I wanted her to or not, and she’d donate all her leftovers to me, whether I needed them or not. She checked up on my kids, whether they liked it or not, and none of them could get away with anything because she was half blind with laser vision.

  When I came back to West Virginia as an adult, leaving a broken marriage behind me, whether it was instinct, fantasy, or pure insanity, the first thing I did was go “home” to the Slanted Little House, like a pony finding my way back to the barn. I’d never lived in West Virginia, but it was home to me all the same. My childhood summers there had filled me with the intoxicating fantasy of its hills and woods and gurgling streams, and something about it felt just right. I was supposed to be there. I didn’t need a rhyme or reason, and I didn’t really have one. I was following my heart, pure and simple, and at that most difficult point in my personal life, my heart led me like a heat-seeking missile to my roots in West Virginia. Here, I was certain, I could find the real me.

  I barely knew Georgia when I asked her if I could live in the Slanted Little House. She and Bob had lived in various parts of West Virginia during Bob’s career before retiring back to the farm, so I had spent little time around them during my childhood visits, but she didn’t blink. She said, “Of course, you’re family.”

  I had always loved that old house, though I found it wasn’t easy to live there. There are a number of things nobody tells you about living in a hundred-year-old farmhouse before you move in.

  TEN THINGS NOBODY TELLS YOU

  1. Somebody probably died there. Maybe a couple people. Maybe they’re still there. Maybe in that ammo box on top of the pie safe. People are practical in the country. Why buy a fancy urn when there is a perfectly good empty ammo box available?

  2. It’s cold. And it’s going to get colder. And the house is not going to get warm. Remember when you were five and you thought living in an igloo would be so neat? Try to be cheerful. Buy an electric blanket and a space heater no later than November. You can forget about finding any in the store after that.

  3. You’re going to be cold anyway.

  4. Those noises in the wall? That’s mice. Huge, giant, evil mice with flaming red eyes and poisonous fangs. Your cats aren’t going to get them out of the wall for you so just forget about that, but you can stock up on scented candles because when they die there? You’ll be the first to know.

  5. Buy really, really long wooden matches. You’ll be less scared that you’re going to blow yourself up if you have long matches when it’s freezing and you’re lighting the gas stove in the cellar porch every night in the winter to keep the pipes from freezing.

  6. The pipes are going to freeze anyway.

  7. Don’t get excited about buying ten extension cords with multiple plugs to make up for the lack of existing outlets in the house. You’re just going to go home and blow all the circuits.

  8. Those slanted floors that were the first thing you noticed when you moved in? You’ll totally forget about them after a few years. So be careful when you’re drinking.

  9. No matter the inconveniences, no matter the hardships, living in a slanted little house is a privilege. It might change your life. It will certainly change your perspective.

  10. If you can move out before anyone puts you in an ammo box, it’s all good.

  By the time I met 52, I was longing for a home of my own (with insulation and outlets), a fresh start, a new life . . . a farm. A real working farm, like Carl and Ruby’s used to be.

  We met at the farmers’ market in Charleston, or one day when he pulled over at the Slanted Little House to ask directions—depending on which story we were telling that day. In fact, we met online at a dating site. Neither of us liked that story, so we had a few alternate versions.

  I had regretted signing up for the site nearly as soon as I’d done it and quickly removed my profile, but not before receiving a message from 52. We began to correspond. I thought he was funny.

  “Funny ha-ha or funny strange?” he wanted to know.

  Maybe a little of both.

  We did, indeed, meet in person for the first time at the farmers’ market in Charleston. We had lunch at Soho’s, a trendy Italian restaurant located inside the Capital Market. He had the minestrone, which I later found he always ordered there, and I had a sandwich. He was supposed to go back to work, but we talked for three hours. He spent much of that time describing his failed marriage. He had three grown children. His relationship with them had been strained in the past but had since grown closer. It was the continuing bitterness with which he spoke of his
ex-wife that was off-putting.

  On the drive home, I decided not to see him again, but no sooner had I gotten back to the Slanted Little House than he’d e-mailed me.

  He’d been satisfied alone, he said, but he wouldn’t be as happy that way as he could be.

  He told me I was cute and thanked me for giving him a chance.

  I didn’t have time to respond. Georgia was waiting for me outside the farmhouse when I got home, nearly in a fit because she was worried about where I had been all that time. The kids had just gotten off the bus, and I had to figure out what in the world I was doing with 52 and why I still wanted to talk to him. I’d promised myself I wouldn’t, but later that day I e-mailed him back.

  We met for the second time when he did, indeed, pull over in front of the Slanted Little House. And maybe he was looking for directions, in a sense. I had admitted my conflicted feelings about a relationship that was anything more than friendship with him.

  “You’re not finished with your experience with me yet,” he said. “Once you’re sure you’re done with that, you can move on.”

  “If you’re nice,” I said, “I’ll never move on.”

  Aside from my doubts about him, my kids were ten, thirteen, and fifteen. My daughter, Morgan, was my youngest, and I had two boys, Weston and Ross. I didn’t think they were ready to see me involved with a man, but at the same time, I wanted to go on with my life. I wasn’t sure if 52 was the one with whom I wanted to go on, but we had enough in common to make me curious. We had discovered our distant family relationship along with our shared interest in simple living. We took long drives to nowhere on backcountry roads, picking blackberries and looking for old barns. We took walks, holding hands, while he told me all the names of the wildflowers and trees. We went to the New River Bridge, Dolly Sods, Blackwater Falls, the Canaan Valley, Spruce Knob, Seneca Forest. He was my West Virginia tour guide.

  I had come empty, looking for West Virginia to fill me up, and he became the epitome of my West Virginia.

  We were friends, and eventually lovers, though I kept my relationship with him mostly to myself, seeing him on weekends and summertimes when the kids were visiting their dad.

  By the time I’d become enamored of chickens in the road, we were looking for a farm of our own.

  He wrote down a beautiful dream and gave it to me. The cats would sleep in the road. We’d leave our doors unlocked and feel safe. We’d have a smokehouse and a woodstove. We’d be so warm we’d open our windows in the winter. There would be cows and horses, and kids playing ball in the meadow bottom. If we needed help, we’d call the neighbors and they’d come ’round the hill in the middle of the night or a Sunday afternoon.

  We’d rock grand-babies on the porch swing, can from the garden, and have a giant corn patch, and flowers—so many flowers. There’d be sled riding and Christmas lights, a tire swing and a big rooster.

  “And we’ll just sit on the porch and get old together—and we won’t care if we’re fat and old and worn out because we’ll love each other too much to care.”

  The sum of it all, he told me, was that I was his dream.

  I wanted it all—the sweetness of him, the corn patch, the Christmas lights, the big rooster, and the love. I was a romance writer, and I was ready for my own storybook. He was my hero.

  We signed the papers at the bank and we had a farm . . . without so much as a tumbled-down fence post with which to begin.

  Chapter 2

  Soon after we’d bought the farm, my father called and said, “Whatever you do, don’t buy a farm in the country. Buy a house in Charleston.”

  It took me a few months to get up the courage to tell him that not only had I bought a farm in the country, I’d bought a farm in Stringtown.

  And really, it was his fault.

  I didn’t grow up there, but I was indoctrinated in the West Virginian’s reverence for roots by my father, who not only took me “back home” every summer of my childhood to the old cabin and Ruby’s Slanted Little House, but told me the stories as he did it. Here is where your great-great-grandfather hid his horses from the Confederate soldiers, here is where he built a log cabin, here is where he is buried.

  When I was growing up, I can recall the occasional resentment of my mother for the emphasis my father placed on his family’s roots as opposed to her own.

  She would sometimes stamp her foot and say, “I have a family history, too.”

  But she was from Oklahoma, and the same way a Texan swaggers into a room with the confidence that everything is bigger in Texas, a West Virginian quietly and yet emphatically lets you know there are no roots like West Virginia roots. My father, who frequently repeated, “I got out of there as soon as I could,” was a West Virginian to the bone nonetheless. I’d grown up on the tales of Stringtown, and now I was moving there.

  52 came up with the farm’s new name, Stringtown Rising Farm. Stringtown would rise again! I felt an immediate, intense sentimental attachment for the property, located as it was in the midst of my family history and childhood memories.

  There was a two-and-a-half-mile unpaved road between the Slanted Little House and Stringtown Rising. The road was icy and barely passable in the winter (and certainly not without a four-wheel-drive). There was no U.S. mail, UPS, or FedEx delivery. No cell phone, cable, or DSL service. No school bus. No trash pickup. And, as I later learned, no local television satellite service. Stringtown Rising was hemmed in by three creek crossings in one direction and a river ford in the other, but it was directly across the river from my great-grandfather’s old farm, across the road from our old family cemetery with its beaten-down tombstones, and within a mile of the house where my father grew up and the old cabin where I had spent so many of my childhood summers.

  Not only that, but my grandmother had lived on this farm in one of the oil company worker houses that once lined the road, and she had later taught in the little white church that doubled as a one-room schoolhouse that had once stood on the farm. My father attended that little community church throughout his childhood and went to school there to first grade, after which a new school was built across the river.

  I wrote sentimentally about the road to our new farm on my website, not yet smart enough to fear it.

  “There are no guardrails, no pavement beneath your wheels. It’s a hard road to travel. You can’t speed down it even if you want to, but there are things to discover along the way, and something beautiful at the end.

  “Many of the people on this road are passers-through. The road is scattered with weekend cabins. They come in the fall with their orange coats and their deer rifles. They come in the summer with their ATVs and their beer. If you wait long enough, they’ll go away.

  “The handful of people who stick around for the isolating snows of winter and the pounding rains of spring are an optimistic bunch. They put out mailboxes at the ends of their driveways as an affirmation to the universe that someday the post office will deliver mail down this road. They know anything is possible if you believe. Even mail.

  “Don’t be scared by the first creek. The creeks get bigger. Keep going. You’re not going to drown. Don’t forget to look around. You might see a black bear or a wild turkey. Or maybe the first sweet pea leaning its pretty bloom over a fence post.

  “Some people want to stop at the second creek. But you can’t turn around. There’s no place to go but forward. Do you see a bunch of abandoned vehicles? People have gone down this road before you and they made it.

  “Look around and see the foundation stones of the old gasoline plant that employed fifty men a century ago in the gas and oil heyday of this now-deserted area. They didn’t have cars. They had to walk this road every day.

  “The last creek is the biggest. Flash floods can make it temporarily impassable, but if you just wait a little while, the water will go down. If you can get past this final obstacle, there are better things ahead. Maybe even a brand-new farmhouse.”

  52 and I had decided not to marry, ha
ving both experienced divorce, but we had few qualms about going into a property purchase together—or at least few that we discussed. I was, in truth, afraid of tackling a farm on my own. I knew nothing about farming, and I’d spent most of my life being taken care of by other people—first by my parents, then by my husband, then, in a sense, by my cousin Mark. I was having a hard time breaking that habit and was only even vaguely aware that I was, again, counting on a man to take care of me. Defying a marriage certificate was a false independence to which I clung.

  We hired a builder and began construction. The property boasted no remaining structures, but it did have a nice meadow bottom large enough for a pasture and a barn (in my imagination), with a creek winding along the foot of the hillside. The new house was built on a plateau halfway up the hill, accessed by a driveway carved into the hill by loggers a few years earlier when the property had been selectively timbered. The loggers had also created the plateau where the house was built, which provided enough semiflat space around the house for a vegetable garden, chicken house, duck pond, and a few small fields to keep animals, but building a house in such a remote and inaccessible location created one obstacle after another.

  One day, an 18-wheeler from Ohio arrived at the Slanted Little House, where the kids and I continued to live during the construction, with the kitchen cabinet delivery for the new farmhouse. Two big men got out of the truck and one of them said, “I stopped at the little store in town and they told me we’d have to drive through three creeks to get to your farm.”

  I said, “Oh. Yeah.” Well, he wasn’t so sure about that and decided he’d better hop in my SUV and let me take him out there for a look-see.

  We didn’t get a quarter of a mile down the road before he said, “I’m not taking my truck down this road.”