Chickens in the Road Page 4

  I started walking. I walked two miles from the Slanted Little House to the main road, then back, every day. I walked when it was hot. I walked in the rain. I walked in blowing snow.

  I loved to walk past the neighbors who had cows.

  Moo.

  The cows did not judge me, and the fresh air and exercise helped vanquish my deep feelings of guilt, at least for a little while each day. Old childhood longings, based on storybooks, for a farm and a cow and chickens awakened and stretched within me as I walked and walked and walked past the farms. A farm was just a dream, not something I had ever seen as a reality. Realistic plans were things like going to college, getting married, having kids, even getting books published. I grew up in the outlying suburbs of major metropolitan areas. I’d never known anyone who had moved to a farm. It seemed completely unrealistic. But if I had the courage to leave my marriage, what else could I do?

  After I moved into the Slanted Little House, anything I could imagine suddenly seemed within reach. Coming back to the world of my childhood, I was like a child again, with my life open before me, the future a story I could write fresh.

  Neighbors stopped by often, especially when I first moved in. I was the new local attraction. My favorite was a woman named Faye who lived several miles up the road. She wore lumberjack shirts and jeans, kept her hair tied back, and applied no makeup; she worked at the hardware store. She was good to “Georgie” as she called Georgia, and she stopped by often to visit her. Afterward, she’d come by the porch of the old farmhouse and tell me stories, spitting hulls off sunflower seeds all the while. Her husband had become disabled. She told me that he used to be mean.

  She got sick of his behavior and thought about leaving him.

  “I told him he needed to call his mother and see when she could come,” she said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “He asked that question, too,” she said. “I told him he’d need somebody to take care of him when I was gone.” She told him that he wasn’t a very nice person.

  She was doing his laundry one day not long afterward and, as always, she checked his pockets before putting his jeans in the wash.

  “He had a little folded-up paper in there,” she said. “I opened it up and it was a to-do list. Get gas, stop at the store, things like that—except for one. The last thing on the list was ‘Be a nicer person.’ That day, I decided to stay, and he did become a nicer person.”

  I was impressed. Faye was an independent woman, and she’d insisted on how she expected to be treated. She was kind, plainspoken, and tough all at once. She was like a foreigner to me, and I was fascinated.

  One day she told me that they didn’t have an indoor bathroom. They had an outhouse. It was time to move it and she was digging a new hole.

  When she left, I went straight to my cousin Mark. He was the county prosecutor by day. The rest of the time, he liked to work on old cars, drive his tractor around mowing the grass, and cook. He was six foot four, and a giant of a man. He was only a few years older than me, but his hair was salt and pepper. We hadn’t known each other well before I’d moved to the Slanted Little House, but he’d taken me in like his little sister. He did a lot of charity work, both through his church and through the courthouse. He’d help people he’d put in jail after they got out. I was his new long-term project. He’d go shopping and buy milk and other groceries, then come to the door at the Slanted Little House with his arms full and tell me they were having a sale or that the items had accidentally fallen into his cart. He knew I had three kids to feed and sometimes not enough money.

  “Yes, they use an outhouse,” Mark said in response to my flabbergasted demand. He possessed an eternally calm demeanor.

  “That’s not possible.”

  “Of course it’s possible.”

  The tectonic plates of my perception of actual hardship had taken a leery shift then, and they took another every time I drove past the mildewed, dilapidated home of my new abrasive neighbor.

  Sure, I wasn’t moving into an old trailer. I would be, in fact, moving into a nice, modern home with all the heat and insulation of which I dreamed during the cold winters at the Slanted Little House. But these two women, both living on rough, remote roads, were tough, and they represented pieces of who I wanted to become.

  And yet I was no tough mountain woman—even as I was heading for those same hills, “moving up a holler with my cousin,” as I liked to tell people.

  I had 52 to take care of me, which was a substantial comfort, and as spring came around and the house neared completion, I was excited and eager to get started on a farm. The kids were excited, too—at least about moving into a new, modern home. I’d introduced 52 into their lives gradually. They accepted him well enough. He took an interest in them, but he didn’t push himself on them. They were as ready as me to move out of the Slanted Little House and have more space. My oldest, Ross, even worked on the house with the builder. He was interested in construction. I was just hoping the house might ever be finished.

  Of all the challenges in building a house halfway up a hill on that remote road, water was the last great obstacle. Usually, water is one of the first things you determine you have in hand before you build a house, but the previous owners had had a trailer in the meadow bottom at one time, with a sixty-five-foot well. We depended on the notion that it was what we would use too. The new farmhouse was almost completed before the discovery was made that the well was nearly dry. Possibly the casing had caved somewhere inside. Nobody knew, and it didn’t really matter. A new well would have to be drilled.

  In rural areas, where no public water lines are available, a private well on your own property is your source of running water. An electric well pump pushes water from the well through buried lines to the house, where it runs through the plumbing and comes out the faucets, just as if you were hooked up to a public water source. Except that with a well, all this infrastructure is the property owner’s responsibility.

  Steve-the-Builder made the arrangements.

  “They’re going to witch a well,” he said.

  I was excited. “I want to see that!”

  He said, “I figured you’d seen that before.”

  Maybe in a movie.

  The driller arrived with his witcher. I wanted to try, so I asked him to show me how to hold the two wires, which looked like straightened coat hangers to me. (I think they were straightened coat hangers.)

  I held the wires out in front of me the way he demonstrated. They didn’t move.

  I said, “This doesn’t work. You’re making this up.”

  The witcher said, “You have to believe.”

  He walked around with the wires for a few minutes, then said, “There’s water right here.” He pointed to a spot on the ground.

  The driller pulled the rig over and started drilling. The messy innards of the earth churned forth from a pipe set across the creek. I’d parked my SUV near there, with the window down, and watched volcanic-like ash spew into my vehicle, helpless to do anything about it unless I wanted to be covered in volcanic ash, too.

  The dust filling the air made our farm look like the set of a rock concert.

  Two hundred and forty dry feet later, the driller gave up and capped it off.

  There had been water at one time at the site of the old sixty-five-foot well. One possibility was to go back to that site and drill a new well nearby.

  Or if the driller could get the rig up the hill, which would put the well closer to the house, he could drill near the natural spring in the hillside. During the weeks of the well saga, every old-timer around here told me, “Drill by the spring.”

  “Drill by the spring.”

  “Drill by the spring.”

  I asked my father for his advice since he’d grown up in this very community. He said, “Drill by the spring.”

  To get the huge drilling rig up the hill, a bulldozer would have to pull it, which was a scary proposition with added expense. Steve-the-Builder arranged for a
dozer.

  The driller arrived with his rig. 52 and I told him that we wanted to drill by the spring. He pointed to his witcher, who stood halfway up the meadow between the new dry hole and the old well site, pointing at the ground.

  He said, “I want to drill there.”

  I said, “I’m not poking holes all over this meadow. We’ve already got one dry hole down here.”

  The driller crossed his arms and gave us an even stare. “Double or nothing. I drill where I want to drill to a hundred feet. If it’s a good well, you pay double. If it’s dry, it’s free, and I go up the hill this afternoon and drill where you want to drill. If we go up the hill now, you pay for that hole and if it’s dry, then I come down here and you pay for this hole, too.”

  He hit water in the meadow at eighteen feet, but he went down to a hundred because he’d promised a hundred feet. The water was gushing all the way. We’d taken the bet that we might get a free dry hole, but it was a well and a half and we were happy enough at that.

  The witcher scooped up a handful of the water spewing from the hole and drank it from his hands. “Tastes good,” he said. “Except for the mud.”

  With the water problem solved, we’d be moved into our new house in no time.

  52 said, “I’ll come home to you every day and we’ll sit on the porch and hold hands.” That sounded good to me.

  It had taken nearly six months to build the house. I had chicken eggs in an incubator and a pile of homesteading how-to books. I could hardly wait to be a farmer.

  Chapter 4

  Up the road from the Slanted Little House was a farm with chickens. Even as our new farmhouse was still being finished, I called to ask if we could come out to see the chickens and collect some eggs. I couldn’t wait to get started on my new self-sufficient farm life. By the time we were getting ready to move in, my sons, Ross and Weston, were nearly seventeen and fifteen, respectively, and, like most teenagers, more interested in their friends and things to do in town than chickens and a farm (or their mother). My daughter, Morgan, had just turned twelve and she was the most engaged by the farm, so I took her with me. Georgia came, too. She always enjoyed an outing.

  The “chicken lady” had all sorts of chickens, some obtained by ordering mixed batches from catalogs and others by hatchings on the farm. Her eggs came in all colors—shades of brown from pink to deep umber, as well as white, blue, and green. I’d never seen blue and green eggs before in my life. (Blue and green eggs come from Ameraucana or Araucana chickens, or as they’re also known, Easter Eggers.) She had golden chickens, black chickens, red chickens, and even a naked-neck chicken, along with guineas, geese, and ducks.

  They all came running when her daughter headed to the feed shed to throw out some corn. I wanted a barnyard full of chickens of my own. I’d always loved animals but had never had a chance to have very many of them. I’d had a dog growing up, but that was it. I’d started keeping cats after I married, and during one point when we lived on a lake in Texas, I raised ducks, so I’d had a small taste of farm animals before and wanted more. Chickens seemed like the quintessential farm animal and the place to start. What Morgan wanted most of all was a horse, but our new farm wasn’t set up for one. I told her, maybe someday, when we build a barn, but I wanted to get her involved with the farm however I could. She was curious enough about the chickens to help me collect the eggs.

  We filled up a box with chicken eggs from the nesting boxes inside the henhouse. The chicken lady’s birds free-ranged during the day all over the farm and up the hills and into the woods. She had several month-old babies in a shed inside a large metal trough with a light, feeder, and waterer.

  I had no shed, no trough, no light, no feeder, no waterer, no chicken house, and barely a farmhouse. I had to get the eggs back to my new farm over the rough road and across three creeks. By the time I arrived, I was afraid I’d jostled them too much and ruined them already. I had an old still-air incubator and worked to stabilize the temperature at 102, added water to the wells under the tray, and gingerly placed the eggs inside. On each egg, I marked an X on one side and an O on the other. They would have to be turned three times a day. If they were fertile, they would hatch in twenty-one days.

  I set the incubator in a back room of the new house, thinking they would be undisturbed there. I hadn’t come to know the light in the house yet and we’d had a series of cloudy days. The first sunny day, I was distressed to walk in to turn the eggs and find sunlight streaming down on my incubator from the back window. The temperature inside the incubator was 107. Panicked, I taped cardboard over the window and quickly brought down the temperature.

  I called the chicken lady. She said, “You might have cooked your eggs.”

  All I’d tried to farm so far were eggs and I’d killed them. Maybe.

  Morgan begged me not to throw the eggs away.

  I couldn’t bring myself to break her heart and toss out the eggs, but I did go back to the chicken farm to pick up more. I crowded the new eggs into the incubator with the others.

  While I waited for chicks to hatch (or explode), I watched the farm around me wake from winter. I sat on my big new wraparound porch in the mornings wearing a sweater as the pink light crept over the hills, drinking in the unfamiliar sounds of my new farm as I drank my coffee. There had to be a thousand birds! I wasn’t used to hearing so many birds. Mixed in the chorus of birdsong, I could hear the river below. The sound was loud, rushing.

  My first morning on the farm, I said, “How can I be hearing traffic? There is no traffic out here. Where is that noise coming from?” It sounded like the interstate. Then I realized it was the river, full from the spring rains.

  Sometimes I heard the steady pump-pump-pump of an oil well somewhere beyond our farm. The sound carried for miles. My great-grandfather, on his farm across the river, used to say, “That’s the sound of money.” Back in the day, when Stringtown was a center of gas and oil drilling, my great-grandfather made good money from that pump-pump-pump sound. My family still owned a share of the mineral rights on my great-grandfather’s farm. I was running on empty financially. What if my great-grandfather’s wells started pumping again? Would I do as my ancestors did, poor mountain folk who’d never seen so much money in their lives, and throw my clothes away to buy new every week because I had so much money I didn’t need to do the wash? I sat on my porch and fantasized about my imaginary future riches.

  Then I looked down at the loud river rushing between my farm and my great-grandfather’s farm, in awe that I was even there, and remembered that I was rich already. I was living on a farm, and soon I would have my first farm animals.

  On Day 23, I decided it was time to do the right thing with my first batch of eggs. It was nearly time for the second batch to hatch, and I couldn’t have bad eggs exploding in the incubator and creating an infected environment. It was easy to pick them out as I had marked them differently—the first batch was marked for turning with X’s and O’s, the second batch with A’s and B’s. I got an empty egg carton, opened the incubator, and started removing the X- and O-marked eggs, placing them one by one in their sad little casket.

  As I placed yet another egg in the carton of death, I heard something. I looked back at the incubator.

  One of the X- and O-marked eggs from the first batch, an egg I was about to pick up and throw away, had a crack in it.

  And it was peeping!

  I put all the eggs back.

  I asked Morgan what we should name the little chick as, after finally making its way completely out of its shell, we watched it flop around inside the incubator, then rest its weary head against a brother egg.

  “Lucky,” she said.

  The chick would have been even luckier if we’d had a brooder, but I was completely unprepared. We got one of the boxes we’d been using to move things from the Slanted Little House to the new house. I got a light and put newspaper down inside the box. But how to get the light fixed over the box to keep Lucky warm?

  “I�
��ve got some Scotch tape in my room,” Morgan said, trying to help.

  I rooted around and finally came up with a candelabra that I could hook onto the side of the box to brace the light. I set an old address book on top of it to keep the light directed the right way. I put the box against the wall but still needed something heavy to keep it there so the address book and the light wouldn’t change direction.

  “Find a phone book!” I told Morgan.

  She came up with the teeny tiny county phone directory.

  “No! The big one!”

  With the light set, I found small dishes to use for water and chick starter. I called my cousin to ask if I could borrow his brooder. Lucky turned out to be the sole survivor from the ill-fated first incubator batch, but twelve more hatched from the second. Within days, I had proper feeders and waterers, and 52 started building a chicken house using salvaged lumber. It felt official. I had chickens.

  We had no money, and I was immediately and necessarily fascinated with living off the land. It was spring, so I took a sack and set off across the farm in search of ramps. Ramps (Allium tricoccum), or wild leeks, are the superbly stinky April delight of Appalachia. Ramps have broad, smooth leaves with purple stems and small white bulbs just under the surface of the soil. Both the white roots and the leafy greens are edible. They grow in the dark, rich woodland soil near streams or on hillsides across the Appalachian region, and a common saying is to look for them when the trilliums are blooming. Ramps are most often fried in bacon fat with eggs and/or potatoes and served with pinto beans and corn bread, but they can be used in just about any recipe similar to how you would use onions or garlic.