Chickens in the Road Read online

  I said, “That’s okay. You can just go around the other way. That way, you only have to drive through a river.” That last sentence seemed to disturb him.

  I tried to convince him it was only a small river, but by the time we got to the Pocatalico for a look-see there, he was shaking his head, no, no, no, he was not crossing the river. I said, “It’s only like a foot deep. It’s got a rock bottom. I’ve driven through it lots of times. It’s hard road all the way if you go this way except for when you cross the river.”

  The farm borders the river, so from that direction, all you had to do was drive through the river—and you were there. There was no convincing him.

  In the end, the two men and their truck drove around to the ford, and our builder, Steve, made repeat trips across the river in his pickup to off-load the cabinets one truckload at a time and take them back across to the house. Meanwhile, the two men in the 18-wheeler stayed on the hard road across the river. One of them got out a video camera and took footage of the ford to take back home to Cleveland.

  I went home to the Slanted Little House and told my cousin the story of the two big men in their big truck who wouldn’t cross the river. I said, “Well, you know, they were from the city.”

  Mark said, “You really are a country girl now.”

  This wasn’t entirely true, of course. In fact, while the house was under construction, I’d totaled my previous SUV by driving across when the water was too high. I learned to respect the river and not take crossing the ford for granted. The Pocatalico River, which finds its source in Roane County not far from the ford, is a long, narrow river that flows eventually into the Kanawha River. The old-timers called it the Poky, and a lot of the new-timers call it a creek. It’s a river by length, not width, and in many spots really doesn’t look like much more than a big creek. The ford, in common use for horse and vehicle traffic for at least a hundred years, was usually no more than six inches deep and safe about 99.9 percent of the time. But right after a heavy rain, it could kill your car and possibly you if you didn’t pay attention, and, as I learned after living at the farm, once or twice a year the Pocatalico floods, transforming it into a truly terrifying force of nature. I was really glad to have a house halfway up a hill the first time I saw that happen.

  The ford was, and is, the beating heart of old Stringtown. In the old days, when my father was growing up, there was a swinging bridge across the river near the ford for foot traffic. Not far down the river from the ford is a deep spot that has served as a swimming hole from before my father’s day to today. The one-room schoolhouse was across the river, the little church on this side of the river. There were stores and a hotel and a gasoline plant not far down the road. Men congregated at the river to shoot marbles in the evenings. Women gathered to talk.

  In what remains of Stringtown today, neighbors still gather at the banks of the ford. There was a lot of talk when the new farmhouse was built.

  “Who knew there was that much room to put a house up on that hill.”

  “They should have made that roof red.”

  And my favorite one: “It’s that romance writer, you know.”

  A few years earlier, when I was still a summertime visitor to the Slanted Little House, Georgia had engineered an article in the county paper about me. I’d written a novel set in West Virginia, so she used that as a springboard to talk the editor into doing a piece. She’d set up a book signing at the one-room library in town and got the high school principal to bring me in to talk to a few classes about writing. Georgia was a one-woman promotional machine, and people still remembered that I was “that romance writer.” If that wasn’t enough, now I was building a house in Stringtown, and everybody knew it.

  I was at a school function with Morgan one evening when a massive man wearing a flannel shirt with sleeves torn off at the shoulders and tattoos on his bulging biceps approached me. He didn’t look like a West Virginia mountain man. He looked like a West Virginia mountain.

  “Are you Suzanne?”

  A number of possible responses ran through my mind, including, “No, I’m her twin sister,” and, “I think she moved away.”

  Morgan said, “That’s her name!” I gave her the evil eye.

  The man said he was a friend of my cousin’s, which might have made me feel better except my cousin was an attorney, so he knew a lot of criminals. Then he asked me if he could have my derrick.

  Oil and gas exploration in the 1890s in this area of West Virginia made Beverly Hillbillies out of countless families—including my own, who were so overcome by their surprising wealth-from-nowhere that they threw their clothes away after wearing them to buy new rather than trouble themselves with laundry. One would think they could have set aside some of their loot for their descendants. My great-grandfather, at least, spent a good portion of his oil dollars buying up land. It wasn’t his fault that his descendants sold out, leaving nothing for my generation. All that remains today of Stringtown’s gas and oil heyday is its historic junk, covered in grapevines and multiflora rose. My favorite pile of junk was the old oil derrick on our new farm. It was situated up on the hill, not far from where we were building the house. It soared through the trees, a testament to a different time in that old place.

  Flannel-and-Tattoos said the former owners of our farm had promised the derrick to him.

  “I’m going to tear it down and sell it for scrap metal,” he explained. “They said I could have it.”

  The derrick came complete with a flywheel and a gearbox that would have transmitted power to the walking wheel. The gearbox is inscribed with the forging date of July 18, 1898. The walking wheel ran the beam and rods that pulled the oil up out of the ground. A wire line wheel held cable that drew various tools in and out of the well.

  The well was lined with wood and was open when we found it. We’d covered it with a board and a heavy rock for safety.

  All this huge, heavy equipment had been hauled to Stringtown down narrow, rocky back roads and over countless hills by teams of horses and oxen. I could hardly imagine the event it must have been to construct that derrick on our hill.

  To me, it wasn’t scrap to be sold for dollars. It was history.

  “It’s not their derrick anymore,” I said firmly. “It’s ours, and I like it right where it is.”

  He looked disappointed, and I worried about whether he might sneak out to the farm and take it anyway. I mentioned him to my cousin.

  “He won’t take it if you told him no,” Mark told me. “Everybody knows it’s your farm now.”

  So many people knew about our new farm, in fact, that they became a nuisance. The builder put up a gate on the driveway to protect the materials and tools at night, but sometimes he had to lock it during the day to keep people from driving up, taking his work time to gawk and gossip. Then they’d drive real slow up and down the road in front of the farm and look up through the trees. They even sat on the hill across from the farm with binoculars.

  Then there were the people who couldn’t even find the farm.

  The electrical inspector called me at the Slanted Little House, lost on his way to inspect the electric at the new farm.

  I said, “Where are you?”

  He told me he’d gone past where the hard road stopped and then it had turned to hard road again. After a few more questions, I figured out where he was, which was about three miles past the river ford. He’d found a bar of cell service there.

  He said, “How do I get to your house from here?”

  I’d already learned that people didn’t react well to being told to drive across the river, so I said, “I’ll be right there.”

  When I found him, I rolled down my window, and he said, “The map doesn’t show this road even going to your farm.”

  I said, “Yes, it does. It’s just kind of like an adventure.”

  He said, “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t worry about it. Just follow me.”

  Sometimes it worked better to lead people
across the river and let them see me bring my car out on the other side. Then they knew they would survive.

  The road in the other direction was no easier, stretching for two and a half miles of unpaved, steep, rocky terrain. There were a handful of residents on the first half mile, close to the hard road. Once you got past that, heading out toward the ford and our farm, there were just a few scattered hunting cabins until you reached a small trailer and then Stringtown Rising Farm and the ford. I came from the rocky road direction most of the time since the Slanted Little House was just around a few bends once you hit the hard road. Between that first half mile and cluster of homes and the ford, there was little regular traffic.

  Since the woman who lived in the trailer near our farm drove her kids to the bus stop at the hard road every morning and went out again in the afternoon to pick them up, she was one of the first Stringtown neighbors with whom I interacted. She was a plain but attractive woman with three young children. She looked to be in her early thirties, her brown shoulder-length hair often pulled back, her body sturdy—neither thin nor fat—and an air of stubborn self-reliance that permeated her every expression.

  The first time I met her, her car had broken down after she’d picked up her kids from the bus. I was on my way out to check on our under-construction house and I took her and her children home in my SUV. My second interaction with her, months later, was when we met on the road, going in opposite directions. We met at a wide spot where I was able to pass. I happened to have my window down and she rolled her window down to tell me that I drove too fast on this road and she didn’t like it. I thanked her for letting me know and went on. Having been stuck behind her on the road a few times already, I knew that her idea of fast was anything swifter than five miles an hour.

  Sometimes three.

  There were no posted speed limits on the road, though I’d been told it was commonly considered a twenty-five-mile-an-hour limit on unpaved roads in the area. It would be difficult to go any faster than that without careening over a cliff, and I supposed no sign was posted because the rough, winding road formed its own limit and for much of it, even twenty-five was too high, but creeping along at five miles an hour or below wasn’t necessary unless it was winter. Two and a half miles is a long way to go at creeping speed. There were various points along the road where I could go around her if she stopped or even pulled over just a little, but she refused, leaving me to creep along behind her.

  If I had to pass her on the road coming from the other direction, it was always me who had to move over, not her, even if it was harder for me and sometimes required backing up to find a place wide enough. One time I came across her and she stopped her car in the middle of the road when she saw me. I waited for her to move over at least a little to help me pass her. She didn’t move. Eventually, she got out of her car, marched up to my window, told me I had four-wheel drive and she didn’t, so she wasn’t going to move over and I’d better just figure out how to get around her. I asked her if she could move over just a bit since there was a cliff there and she was in the middle of the road. She refused to budge.

  I sensed her resentment. I was an outlander, “that writer” who was building that house on the hill to pretend to be a farmer. I was an oncoming blight upon the community, and she let me know, in her way, that I wasn’t welcome.

  In the house where this woman lived with her husband and young children, they had electricity, but little else. At the time, they had no phone service and no satellite TV. Their house was made up of two old single-wide trailers put together, and there was mildew almost completely covering the outside of the trailers. Their living situation was the classic image of stark Appalachian poverty.

  I was appalled, fascinated, and a little bit scared of her, but I soon discovered she was the least of my worries.

  Chapter 3

  I was terrified of driving on the road to our new farm once the snows started. 52 still lived in the city, and it was up to me to keep tabs on the construction progress and to meet with the builder when he needed a quick consultation on-site about one detail or another. I was often so scared and exhausted after the three-mile trip from the Slanted Little House to our farm on its icy, unpaved road that I would get to the bottom of the driveway to the new house, blow my horn, and wait for the builder to drive down and take me up.

  My cousin Mark took me for a winter driving lesson.

  “What if we roll over the hill?” I asked.

  Mark sat in the passenger seat beside me in my SUV, his deadpan gaze suggesting he wasn’t getting paid enough for this expedition. I had the key in the ignition, my hands on the wheel. The steep, twisting, narrow rural roads of West Virginia—so bucolic in spring, summer, and fall—looked like nightmare sheets of ice.

  One-lane back roads were cut into hillsides, bordered by sharp drop-offs—and there weren’t any guardrails. The mountainous landscape was breathtaking and scary.

  “If you start sliding, stay off the brake so you can steer,” Mark said.

  “What if we careen off a cliff?”

  “Just take it easy. And step on the gas.”

  “But what if we go over the cliff?”

  “We’ll call Peewee to come get your car.” Peewee was my cousin’s mechanic buddy, and I knew the answer was meant to reassure me. I didn’t want to be reassured.

  “What if we die?” I countered. Some drop-offs were fifty or more feet down.

  “What if a meteor hits us? What if a spaceship lands on our heads?”

  “Now you understand!”

  Lost in the foreign land of rural Appalachia, sometimes I just needed someone to validate my hysteria.

  I’d never lived where it snowed much, and the true four seasons of West Virginia had been a big attraction to me. The reality was a big challenge, not just on the road but in the Slanted Little House as we waited for the new house to be finished. Outside the Slanted Little House, it was a gorgeous winter wonderland, crisp and cold. Inside . . . it was crisp and cold. On snow days home from school, the kids would sleep in front of the gas fire in the sitting room. It was the only warm place in the house. Windows were covered in plastic, rugs were shoved along the bottoms of the doors, all to no avail. It was freezing cold, inside and out. There was no such thing as insulation or double-paned glass back in the day that house was built. Pipes, added later when running water didn’t mean running out to the well, passed through the cellar porch on their way to the house, and they froze regularly. (The “cellar porch” was not much more than an enclosed porch that connected the old cellar to the rest of the house.) I used an old gas range in the cellar porch to try to keep the pipes warm. The ignition didn’t work quite right, so I’d have to turn on the burners, then light them with a match. Most nights, I’d just light one burner.

  If it got down into the teens or below, it was a two-burner night.

  Usually if it was that cold, the pipes froze anyway.

  I’d had a three-thousand-square-foot modern colonial back in the suburbs of Raleigh, North Carolina. I married when I was eighteen years old. I met my husband when I was fifteen. I still loved him like family, but our relationship had spiraled into a disaster. I wrote romance novels for a living—a dream concocted during my teen years reading Harlequins—and I had begun to feel trapped in a happily ever after that wasn’t happy or even my own.

  My childhood environment had been sheltered and traditional. My father was a Church of Christ preacher, which was a strict denomination. Men were looked upon as the head of the household and the family’s religious leader. Marriage was a woman’s true calling, and divorce was severely discouraged—for almost any reason. I was a good girl, and I couldn’t get married soon enough. My husband was in the navy at the time, and we both finished college after his enlistment ended. Children were next on the to-do list. Three, just how I’d always planned. I had two boys, then the last one was a girl. Perfect.

  It was a bad time to realize that I didn’t like my husband very much and that marriage m
ight not be my true calling. I worked hard turning out books left and right. The rest of my attention was focused on the kids. My husband felt neglected and became increasingly angry. I buried myself in my shell, pouring all my passion into my writing while my marriage disintegrated around me. He would explode in outbursts of temper that, while never physical, still scared me and scared the kids, too. The night my youngest, Morgan, ran downstairs crying, demanding to know if we were getting a divorce, stopped me in my tracks.

  It wasn’t the kind of environment in which I wanted to raise my children, and the moment catapulted me into facing the truth I’d been carrying for too long. I was unhappy. At the same time, I knew that a divorce would not be acceptable. I had been the good girl all my life, the one who never caused my parents trouble, the one who always did what was expected, the one who could be counted on to go along to get along.

  I was the youngest child. My sister was two years older than me and liked to lock me in the pantry when we were little. My brother was thirteen years older than me and used to hold me upside down by my ankles over dog poop piles when he got home from school. No matter what they did, I never told my mother because then my brother and sister would have been mad at me. I knew how to tolerate trouble and keep it a secret.

  While my brother and sister rebelled against our strict upbringing and had been in frequent conflict with my parents during childhood, I behaved like the ideal child, the one who ate her peas, made perfect grades, and kept her mouth shut. And by the time I was thinking about moving to West Virginia, I’d realized that I could either keep behaving like the ideal child for the rest of my life or I could find out who I was if I stopped doing what everyone expected me to do just because they expected me to do it.

  The decision to divorce was selfish or courageous, depending on whom you asked.

  I lived in the Slanted Little House for two and a half years after leaving my husband. During my early days there, sometimes when the kids went to school I just stretched out on the tattered couch and stared at the ceiling. For hours. Crying. I’d made a sudden, radical change in the course of my life—and I had no idea how to live outside the perfect good girl box I’d spent my entire life building. I blamed myself for the pain the divorce caused—hurting my husband, hurting my kids, hurting my parents. I couldn’t do what was expected of me anymore, but I couldn’t accept my decision to do differently. I was in desperate need of inner peace, which I sought in various avenues of simplicity in my new country life. I started baking, which I hadn’t done much in years, and learned to make West Virginia staples like corn bread in an iron skillet and big pots of beans.