Chickens in the Road Read online

  “You always have a plan. What’s your plan?”

  I wished I had a real plan. I had hopes and dreams and desperate wishes, fantasies masquerading as plans. I could streamline the animals and take imaginary flights in which I would somehow manage the farm on my own, but a workable plan was nowhere in sight.

  “My plan,” I told him, “is to stay here as long as I can. It’s my home, and it’s my children’s home.”

  He sat in his rocking chair, puffing at his pipe. A long beat passed. He was staring straight ahead, at our view across to the hills.

  I said, “I’m really disappointed that things have ended this way for us. I think it’s time for us to redefine our relationship.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  Had I just broken up with him? Another long, long beat passed. I got up and walked inside the house. He had taken my ring from his ashtray and I didn’t know where it was. I didn’t ask for it back.

  The kids were coming home from Texas, and the Chickens in the Road Retreat was looming on the horizon. I got Weston settled into college, started up again with Morgan’s sports, and threw myself into the retreat preparations. At first, the mere notion had terrified me. I was going to organize, manage, and host an event bringing in sixty people, providing accommodations, meals, and homesteading-styled workshops over a two-day period? By this time, I’d been throwing a Party on the Farm at Stringtown Rising every fall. I invited any of my readers who wanted to come. And they did, from far and wide and even out of state. I’d ask everyone to bring a dish, and I organized demonstrations of things like cheese making and soap making. The “petting zoo” was open for feeding cookies to the goats, and it was a fun but exhausting time. People never believed me, but I was actually quite shy. Sometimes I spent a good part of the party hiding in the bathroom. I preferred to remain behind my laptop, spinning my stories, but I also knew I needed to connect with my readers face-to-face, and I wanted to be as open as possible with my life and my farm—in spite of the veil I kept over my private secrets.

  52 was always helpful with the party, cleaning up the farm, which was usually a mess, so it was our annual “spring” cleaning in the fall. He didn’t throw his junk out, but at least he would tidy the piles and stacks. Cindy came ahead of the retreat to help me prepare and stayed for several days following the retreat and the party. She was one of the few people who knew the truth about my relationship with 52. She was smart and practical, and I had come to trust her judgment. The extremely nice and polite veneer 52 presented in front of other people cracked after a few days, and she caught a glimpse of his disdainful treatment of me.

  She told me she didn’t know how I could stand it. I told her I didn’t know how I was standing it either. I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving the farm. She encouraged me to find a way out—for me, for my animals, and for my business, but I had no clue what it could be. Winter was coming, and I couldn’t survive at Stringtown Rising without 52’s help.

  After months of working to get Beulah Petunia bred, I was hoping I’d succeeded. I wished Dr. Casto would show up, but the scrapie tests on our sheep had been negative, so we hadn’t seen him again. I cast about for an alternative, a country preg checker. As usual, you could find someone willing to undertake any odd farm task if you asked around enough.

  Tucker was an older man who worked pipeline when he wasn’t poking his entire arm inside a cow for a mere $20. He went in and out of Beulah Petunia’s privates about five or six times while I stood by anxiously. He didn’t give up easily, but he said he felt nothing in there. Nothing! He punched her side for good measure, and again, came up empty.

  Punching a cow’s side is an optional method for determining pregnancy. If you know what you’re doing, you can feel a calf. I’ve tried punching cows myself, and any time I do it, I feel the side of a cow (and a sense of guilt for punching a cow). But an experienced cow-puncher knows a calf when he feels it.

  I couldn’t believe it. How could she not be pregnant by now? I wanted a second opinion and arranged for a vet to pay a visit to the farm. I picked up Morgan after volleyball practice and swung by the vet’s office so he could follow me to the farm. It was close to dark, and I knew Beulah Petunia better be ready for him when we arrived. We wouldn’t have time to call her up from the hinterlands of her field. She needed to be up at the gate and waiting. I told Morgan to call the house on her cell phone to let 52 know we were on our way. “Tell him to get BP up,” I said.

  Morgan called the house. 52 answered. Morgan said, “Mom wants you to wake up BP.”

  Obviously, Morgan hadn’t spent much time with the cows.

  I imagined 52 out in the field shaking a slumbering cow. “Wake up, BP, wake up!”

  I was lucky we didn’t roll off the road, I was laughing so hard at her misunderstanding of what I meant when I said I needed 52 to get the cow up. Morgan was a farm girl to a degree and no further. I called her the “donkey whisperer” because she always helped when we moved the donkeys from one field to another. She often helped move the sheep, too, and she was my assistant when I did my annual Christmas photo shoots with Clover, but she was too busy with sports to get involved with the farm on a daily basis, as was Weston. In the summers, when school was out, the kids were with their dad most of the time. They weren’t as fascinated with farm life as I was anyway.

  I stood by as the vet pulled on the long gloves. This might sound weird, but I wished it was my arm going in there. I wanted to preg check my cow for myself. The vet told me how if the cow sat down, it could break your arm. That put me off a little or I probably would have gone out and bought long gloves. Or gone somewhere to have my head examined. In any case, after months of back and forthing to Skip’s, the vet confirmed that she wasn’t bred. I didn’t know if she was too old to breed again, or if I’d just gotten my timing repeatedly wrong. Glory Bee was nearly old enough to breed by then, but I was tired of taking cows up the road. Fall had arrived. Winter was around the corner, and no way could I take cows back and forth once the snows hit. I didn’t know what I was going to do.

  My life as a farmer seemed at a standstill.

  Sometimes I felt crushed by the hard work of Stringtown Rising. It could be an act of gymnastics just to get a bale of hay to the cows due to the poor layout and management of the farm. But it wasn’t my body that was failing me. It was my spirit.

  I’d been strong enough to walk away from an unhealthy marriage, but I thought I was being strong by staying in another unhealthy environment at Stringtown Rising?

  Your readers think you’re so wonderful, but you’re not. You’re selfish, selfish, selfish.

  52 beat those words and similar ones into my head every time he got a chance. If I halfway opened my mouth, he told me to stop arguing. Often, he put words in my mouth for me. “I know what you’re going to say. You think you’re perfect. You think you’re right about everything.” Then he’d take off again for another twenty minutes, responding to my imaginary statements.

  Most of the time, I wasn’t even sure what brought on his tirades. They seemed to come out of nowhere or stem from some trivial matter. Eventually I stopped trying to figure it out because I felt like an outsider in an argument that didn’t involve me.

  I got home late one night from one of Morgan’s volleyball games. I had e-mailed 52 just before he left work at five to let him know that I’d be going to the game and would be home late. I sat down with him on the porch, and he asked me if I had watched the game.

  I said, “No, I read a book.” I’m the worst sports mother in the history of sports mothers. I hate sports.

  52 said, “Why did you go up there at five if you weren’t going to watch the game?”

  I said, “I didn’t go up there at five. I went up there at seven because I had concession stand duty for the second half, but they weren’t done playing because there were three teams there for some reason and they kept playing games and it was like there were three halfs.” I know that halfs is not a proper word, but
I think it might be in volleyball.

  “Then you shouldn’t have gone up there at five.”

  “I didn’t go up there at—”

  “Stop arguing with me.”

  Then I just stopped talking and let him finish explaining how I had to be right about everything and thought I was perfect, and not to mention, how I shouldn’t have gone up there at five.

  When he wound down, I said good night like a good girl and went to bed.

  As I opened the door to go inside, he heaved a great sigh and said, “You know that you are a really frustrating person, don’t you?”

  I said, “Yes, I know. You’ve told me.”

  He’d taught me a lot about West Virginia and country life. He knew his way around a farm, and into the woods. I’d take a photo of a wildflower or a tree and show it to him—and he always knew what it was called. He taught me how to hear the whip-poor-wills and see the spring peepers. He helped me learn to light a woodstove and milk a cow. He was always willing to hop in his truck and drive me anywhere I wanted to explore, especially if it involved a dirt road or an abandoned outhouse. He’d pull down grapevines for a craft or build me a homemade cheese press.

  He’d do everything I asked him to do, no matter how nutty, but he couldn’t do the one thing I needed him to stop doing. He was driven by his own demons that I never completely understood.

  I knew there was a good man inside somewhere. I’d known him, and I’d loved him. I believed he loved me, too, but I brought out the worst in him. I know he thought I was annoying, because he told me so constantly. At least once a week, I asked him where the trash cans were. He’d say, “How can you not remember where the trash cans are? They’re in the same place they always are and where I told you they were four days ago.” Me: “But then I made up a new recipe and now I can’t remember.” I was flighty and out of his control.

  (No matter how many times he told me that my Explorer was an SUV or a truck, I kept referring to it as my car. Calling an SUV a car, how could anyone be expected to live with that?! And toward the end, I did have to start laughing at that kind of anal-retentive obsession over precision because otherwise, how could anyone be expected to live with that?! Laughing did not improve the situation. Except from my perspective.)

  I lost my car keys (precisely, my Explorer keys) one time for a month. Luckily it was winter and I couldn’t go anywhere anyway. I searched. He even searched. I can’t remember where I found them eventually, but it was like on top of my head, the location was so ridiculously obvious, and I came out on the porch laughing so hard at myself that I had tears rolling down my face. When I got out what I thought was so hilarious, “You’re not going to believe where I found my car keys!” he bit my head off, explaining that it wasn’t funny at all. And probably using the word car didn’t help.

  Despite the rigidity of my family’s beliefs, I was raised with a sense of humor and an appreciation for wacky behavior. My dad’s idea of a good joke was to tape a homemade bumper sticker to my mother’s car that said, “Honk if you’re gay.” It was difficult for me to relate to someone who couldn’t find humor in absurdity. Or who expected me to remember where the trash cans were, to panic if the goats’ water bucket was half full (or half empty), or to always remember to say good night before I fell asleep.

  Persistence isn’t always a virtue.

  I’d thought my tolerance of his behavior was my strength, but it was, in truth, my weakness. I tolerated his abuse because I was afraid of losing the farm and my job. I e-mailed Cindy and told her I was afraid I was about to crack.

  “You can have a farm anywhere, Suzanne,” Cindy wrote back. “Your readers will follow you.”

  I’d promised 52 that I would never tell him to leave again, but I’d never promised him that I wouldn’t be the one to leave.

  I couldn’t imagine leaving.

  I was sitting on the porch one night in mid-October when he came home from work. I thought it was just another ordinary day until he walked up to the porch from his truck and, without preamble, said, “I’m not going to pay my half of the mortgage and the second mortgage anymore.”

  The words fell out of my mouth. “I’m moving out.”

  He said, “Where are you going?”

  I felt as stunned as he looked.

  I said, “I don’t know.”

  Chapter 20

  I loved Stringtown Rising Farm in the sentimental crazy way that only a sentimental crazy person like me could love a farm that was one of the most inhospitable, inaccessible, and unmanageable pieces of land on the planet. I loved it anyway, and for my love of it, I stayed there longer than I was happy in my personal situation. I couldn’t bear to leave the farm, but that night in mid-October I recognized that I had a responsibility to love myself more than I loved the farm or my job.

  I didn’t know if 52 meant his words. He’d complained and sometimes refused to pay other bills until I’d taken them over, one by one, by myself. His statement that night about the mortgages might have been nothing more than a ploy, a mind game, a way to get me to take over all the rest of the bills, or even simply the latest way to torment me.

  I suspected the latter, but it didn’t matter whether he meant the words or not. In the three and a half years I’d lived at Stringtown Rising, I had never been able to imagine leaving, but once those words left his lips, I couldn’t imagine staying. I’d always felt as if my life at Stringtown Rising was at risk, but the direct threat was the last straw. Even if—or especially if—he didn’t really mean it.

  I’d spent a solid year or more going over in my mind if there was any way I could possibly remain at Stringtown Rising on my own. I’d made a series of lists of what I would have to buy, build, change, and hire done (regularly) in order to operate the farm alone were I to buy out 52’s half (if I could even come up with the money or if he would even agree). The farm was awkwardly laid out due to the terrain, and in the winter, it was at times barely accessible to completely inaccessible, in or out. There was no mail delivery. No trash pickup. The school bus didn’t come. In the winter, the river was often either too high or iced over. The road the other way was narrow, icy, steep, with sharp drop-offs and no guardrails. There were also numerous issues with the well and the water supply that were beyond my ability to personally maintain. There was inadequate fencing, inadequate pasture—how much hay did I want to haul and handle by myself because of the inadequate pasture? How would I replenish the hay and feed supply in the winter? How much would it cost to build more storage for winter? How would I get Morgan to the school bus in the winter? There were often stretches of weeks at a time from January to March when I was afraid to even move my vehicle and could only get myself or Morgan out with 52’s help. Would I have to send Morgan away to stay with my cousin for three or four months of the year?

  The lists were long, and expensive. Stringtown Rising Farm was an adventure fueled by manpower. To stay alone, I would have to fuel it with a huge infusion of cash for improvements and hired help, and money couldn’t buy everything to make a farm like Stringtown Rising more manageable.

  Money couldn’t buy out winter.

  To remain at such a farm alone was a stupid idea, even if I could afford it, and possibly dangerous for a woman on her own—and I could no longer remain there with 52. Stringtown Rising would have to be put up for sale. I stared down the barrel of my greatest fear, and within it, I found the strength I’d been searching for all along.

  I looked for a farm of my own that would provide everything I needed to be independent and safe.

  I found it about ten miles away, still in Roane County, West Virginia, in an area known as Clio. It was a hundred-acre farm on a hard road. Not only was it a hard road, there weren’t even any potholes. No potholes! There was mail delivery. Mail delivery! And the school bus came—right in front of the house! The house was a small but charming 1930s move-in-ready farmhouse that had been restored and maintained, and it came with free gas to keep me warm in the winter.

&n
bsp; There was a separate studio in the back that I could use as my second kitchen for classes and other farm-related events. Under the studio was a large stone cellar. There was a mature cherry tree and several mature apple trees in the yard. On the land were wild raspberries, blackberries, sassafras, ginseng, and morels. There were creeks and springs—and a sunny flat space for a garden.

  Much of the hundred acres was cleared (and flat!) and fenced, primed for animals to move right in. There were many different fields with connecting gates to allow for rotational grazing, including huge upper meadows. There was a large field near the house perfect for goats, and it came with a goat house. There was a faucet at the goat field for water—no carrying water! There was a good well, and public water was also available.

  There was a vintage but sturdy 1890s red barn with a number of stalls, tack room, and paddock. A couple of the stalls were set up as horse stalls in particular, and some of the fields were fenced specifically for horses. Former owners of the farm had had wild mustangs and Percherons. There was a water faucet at the barn, and electric. There were lights in all the stalls and the alleyway. There was a large hayloft with a winch. It was a farm made for animals. It was a real farm—and a manageable one. I knew I could handle it by myself.

  With the layout of the farm, there was even a very good likelihood that the chickens would go in the road.

  One of the first few times I went out to the farm, I noticed there was a telephone pole with a light by the road. I was standing by one of the fields across the road (the farm spanned both sides of the road and held the view in every direction), talking to the owner. I said, “Is that a streetlight?”

  He said, “Yes.”

  “Does it come on?” I must have sounded as if I’d just landed from Mars, but there was no such thing as a streetlight anywhere near Stringtown Rising Farm.