Chickens in the Road Page 6

  I came away with a tablespoon of milk. And I was still excited! I took my tablespoon of milk back to the kitchen, filtered it, and put it in the refrigerator. I figured I’d start collecting. In another ten years or so, I’d have enough to make cheese!

  Or . . . not.

  I learned to hobble one leg, tying it to a post on the stand. Then I learned to hobble two. Then three. Believe it or not, a goat hobbled on three legs can still kick. I used a belly band attached to either side of the milk stand to keep her from sitting down. She chewed off the belly band, kicked off all the hobbles, and kicked me. Meanwhile, however, I was highly successful at getting her to wear hats, jewelry, and other accessories in photos for my website, and she loved to be hand-fed cookies. She quickly became the most popular character on my blog for her ability to constantly one-up me and for her adoration of all things sugar sprinkled.

  Stubborn, I continued to make adjustments until I was able to manage alone without 52 coming down to the milk stand with me to help with the hobbles. I would sit down and start to milk, listening to the crow of the roosters and the steady squirts of Clover’s sweet, warm milk into the pail. This Disneylike scene would last about thirty seconds, and then she’d start kicking.

  I persisted, and I felt like a real farmer the morning I stopped in at the little store in town, after dropping the kids off at the school bus, and said to Faye, “I have to go home and milk my goat.”

  Goat milk is sweet and rich, perfect for cheese and baking and anything else for which you would use store-bought milk. Handling milk was an all-new experience for me, but I was eager to learn.

  I assembled the following supplies, in addition to my stainless steel milk pail and milk filters:

  a strainer

  bleach

  dishwashing liquid

  small stainless steel bowl for the udder wash

  teat dip cup

  a strip cup

  paper towels

  water

  glass containers to hold the filtered milk

  Each morning when I prepared to milk Clover, I started with the small bowl and cup I used for the udder wash and teat dip. I dropped a small splash of bleach in a stainless steel bowl, followed by a drop of dishwashing liquid. I added hot running water, then placed the small teat dip cup in the bowl to carry out to the milk stand.

  Next, I would drop a larger splash of bleach into the milking pail in the sink and run hot water into the pail to sanitize. When pouring the water out, I’d pour it over the strainer I would be using later with the filter to sanitize it as well. I dried the pail with a clean paper towel and set the strainer on top of it on the counter.

  To the milk stand, I would carry my bowl of udder wash (with the teat dip cup nested inside) and my milking pail (with extra clean paper towels tucked within).

  Once in the milking pen, I would remove the teat dip cup from the udder wash bowl, making sure the teat dip cup was filled with some of the solution, and set it aside. I soaked a paper towel with the udder wash and cleaned Clover’s entire udder area, drying it with another paper towel. I dipped my own hands in the remaining udder wash solution, drying them on another paper towel. Using the strip cup, I’d draw out the first few squirts.

  The first few squirts could contain bacteria that collected in the teat, which should be eliminated. The strip cup also allows you to check the milk for any abnormalities, helping you keep an eye on your goat’s health and her milk.

  Then I’d set the strip cup aside to milk my lovely Clover, telling her how pretty she looked. In return, she would tell me how many cookies she wanted for this daily violation of her person.

  There might or might not (okay, would) be a lot of kicking during the milking, including kicking off the hobbles entirely, which would lead to rehobbling, then resanitizing my hands before continuing. There was often some crying. And some begging. That would be by me, not Clover.

  When I finished, I would set the pail aside and pick up the teat dip. I’d dip her teats in the solution, scratch her behind the ears, thank her for not kicking me in the head, and set her free.

  When milk leaves the udder, it is at 100 degrees. Ideally, it should be chilled to 38 degrees within one hour.

  Before chilling the milk, I’d wash my hands, then take out a fresh milk filter. Milk filters (available at farm supply stores) are somewhat similar to coffee filters, but not exactly. I’d place a milk filter inside the strainer, then slowly pour the milk from the pail into the filter-lined strainer, which was positioned over a glass pint jar. Using a pint jar was an exercise in positive thinking as I rarely got that much milk.

  I would then place the pint jar in the freezer to quick-chill for about an hour before moving it to the fridge. After I had stored my milk properly, the milk pail and the rest of the equipment and supplies were rinsed in cool water and wiped out, ready to be sanitized the next day. And every day, there was Clover, ready with a fresh supply of her sweet, rich milk. And her kicking.

  I wavered between loving it and hating it. I really wanted to be a farmer, and milking seemed like a farmerish thing to do, though I was sure in the old days they skipped all the sanitizing and just filtered through an old shirt, and as much as Clover kicked, she would have been supper.

  Eventually, as I actually started collecting enough milk to make it possible, I was eager to try my hand at cheese. Missy, who had sold Clover to me, wanted to learn to make cheese too. She had a herd of a dozen does, but she hadn’t tried her hand at cheese making yet. We were both nervous, so we decided to do it together. Like me, Missy hailed from suburbia and had returned to West Virginia to her family roots.

  Missy came over to the farm. I’d ordered supplies—citric acid, rennet, and cheese salt, which came in a kit from New England Cheesemaking. I’d already read the directions about twenty times. Missy and I read them together another twenty times, then we were ready. We added the citric acid to the milk and began to heat the pot. Missy’s husband, Pete, had come with her, and he and 52 hung out on the porch, drinking wine while they waited for us to show up with some bruschetta topped with melted homemade goat mozzarella.

  When the milk reached 90 degrees, we added the rennet, mixing it in with the mysterious instructions for the “up-and-down” motion with the spoon that we didn’t quite understand. We let the pot sit for five minutes, then returned to see what we’d done.

  The milk had turned into this very firm jellylike substance, pulling away from the sides of the pot where we could see the clear yellowish whey—the water that releases from milk as it’s turned into cheese.

  We were overjoyed! Thrilled! Impressed with ourselves! The Little Miss Muffet nursery rhyme finally made sense. So that’s what curds and whey are!

  Of course, we weren’t actually finished. The mozzarella recipe we were using was a thirty-minute shortcut version of true mozzarella and is the type of mozzarella made by most home cheese makers. After achieving curds, the cheese is scooped with a slotted spoon into a bowl and microwaved three successive times, kneading in between and releasing more whey each time.

  Missy and I studied the mozzarella like we were observing a foreign life form. We overheated it and overkneaded it and eventually killed it. It was like a brick by the time I said, “Do you think it’s done?”

  Missy said, “I don’t know. Maybe we should try it.”

  I cut off a couple tiny pieces and we each took a taste.

  We looked at each other.

  “This is terrible!” I said.

  “Maybe it will be better when it’s melted?” Missy suggested.

  I had bread for bruschetta prepared for the broiler. We added herbs and our fresh-made awful cheese, then tucked it in the oven and called the men inside.

  Luckily, everyone had had a couple of glasses of wine by then or it probably would have tasted worse.

  While I tried to conquer goat milking and cheese making, the hot, sweaty summer slipped into fall. I welcomed the cooler weather, but not the endless rounds of sports pr
actices that came with it. Ross had a job and a girlfriend and a car, but Weston and Morgan were avid athletes, keeping me on the run every afternoon and evening.

  52 and I had enjoyed a summer, lazy only in the sense that we had been alone together. He’d scratched a garden from a sloped but sunny space near the house, and I had learned to can green beans with a pressure canner. We had very little money, a fact he reminded me about frequently.

  I reminded him about something he’d said to me when we first met and I was going through a difficult time. “Things are always harder in the middle,” I said. “Remember? I’m going to make my website a success and we’ll be all right.”

  Our bills were paid each month, and I didn’t see any reason to wait to be happy until we were out of debt. I wanted to be happy in the here and now, and despite my worries—which were more about his seeming tension with everything and everyone than about our tight finances—I was. I loved living on a farm.

  I sat on my front porch and was surrounded by land that belonged to me. I lived on a farm! It was an awesome, and continually surprising, realization. I was raising dairy goats for milk and chickens for eggs. I was, in fact, infatuated with the farm more every day despite the increasing labor involved.

  I loved the way its boundaries were defined in the old deed book at the county courthouse.

  “Beginning at the road in the Schoolhouse lot, thence with the road of the ford of the run above the mill, thence back in the field about six rods to or near a small black walnut, thence to or just above the white walnut at the spring in the drain, thence just above and with the meanderings of the fence now around the upper side of the lot to a small sugar tree by the old fence going up to the cliff, thence with the creek to the branch below the ford. . . .” And so on and so forth, including references to a pile of rocks, a stump hole, and a dead hickory tree. Need I point out that of course most of these landmarks no longer existed? There was an iron pin referred to in the deed book that remained, as well as some survey flags in a few spots that were placed some years ago. We had relied on the prior owners’ directions as to boundaries, and the neighbors had been agreeable to the designations.

  Just being in possession of forty acres felt staggering to me. It was far more acreage than we would ever actually utilize, especially since much of it was heavily wooded, but the privacy it afforded was one of its most enjoyable aspects.

  I could walk and walk and get tired and still be on my own land. In suburban life, the perspective is more focused on the house and the yard. It’s different in the country. There is something so significant about land. Not its value in money, but its sheer substance. There is a weight to it, some kind of primal quality that is ethereal and tangible all at once. It has a life of its own, the land does.

  My farm teemed with trees and springs, a creek and a river, wildflowers and vines, birds and chipmunks, raccoons and deer. It held secrets I didn’t know yet, and many I would never know. It welcomed me and protected me, and it often exhausted me and sometimes scared me. Mostly, it was patient with me. Land is long-suffering. It knows it isn’t going anywhere. It was there before I arrived, and it would be there when I was gone.

  No matter how stressed I was some days, writing constantly for my website between spending hours running for the kids’ sports, not to mention taking care of the animals, I could sit down on the porch for even a minute, look out at my land, and feel happiness flow over me.

  I wanted 52 to feel it, too.

  I waited for him on the porch when I expected him home from work.

  “Tell me about your day,” I invited when he sat down in his rocking chair. Whether I had cut small branches for fall decorations, had come up with a new bread recipe twist, or had managed to keep the hobble on Clover, I was eager to tell him about it.

  He often said he had nothing to tell about his day, so I went on with telling him about mine. One day, I’d bought some new rubber boots for the coming winter (for myself), and I had managed to actually get the boots on Clover while she was in the milk stand and take her picture wearing them for a post on my blog. The boots went all the way up her legs, of course, and she looked really cute. I barely got started when he interrupted me.

  “I don’t want to hear a long story,” he said.

  I was taken aback. “I wasn’t going to tell you a long story. It was kinda like a short one.”

  “You’re not interested in me, are you?”

  I was taken aback again. “Of course I’m interested in you. I asked you about your day. You said you had nothing to tell, so I thought I’d tell you about my day.”

  “You don’t care about my day.”

  “Of course I care about your day. I asked about it, didn’t I?”

  “You didn’t really want to hear about it.”

  He looked quite angry, and I wasn’t sure why.

  “The goats need water,” he said.

  I looked over the porch rail. The main floor of the house was actually on the second floor, with what had originally been intended as a basement on the first floor. During construction, the builder had discovered too much rock to make digging a basement down a feasible prospect, so we’d built a basement that was not a basement on the first floor with steps leading up to the porch on the main, or second, floor. The goat yard was directly in front of the porch, so I could look straight down into the goat yard and see inside the water bucket.

  “The bucket is half full,” I said. “I check on their water in the morning and in the evening. I haven’t done my evening round yet, but there was plenty of water this morning and there’s still water.”

  “Animals need water all the time,” he said. “If the bucket is half full, it’s half empty. You should fill it up before it’s half empty.”

  “I haven’t done my evening round yet,” I repeated. “I’ll fill it up then. They’re not out of water.”

  “Animals need water all the time,” he repeated. “They’ll die without water.”

  “They have water!” I stared at him, confused. “What is this about? Are you upset about something else?”

  “The goats need water all the time. Don’t change the subject.”

  “The goats have water. I’m trying to find out what the subject actually is!”

  “Now you’re arguing with me.”

  “I don’t want to argue with you. I’m just trying to find out why you’re upset about the goats not having water when they have water.”

  “You’re right. Of course. You’re always right about everything.”

  “I don’t want to be—”

  “You always have to be right. You’re perfect, and you think I’m stupid.”

  I sat there for a very long pause, then got up, knelt by his chair, and put my hand on his knee. “I don’t care who is right and who is wrong. I’m not perfect and I don’t even want to be. I have never once had the thought enter my mind that you’re stupid. I love you. I just want us to be happy.”

  “You’re not happy,” he said.

  “Yes, I am,” I insisted. “I’m stressed, a lot, with work and sports and everything else, but I love it here. I love our farm. I’m happy, and I just want you to be happy, too. I want us to be happy.”

  “You’re not happy,” he repeated. “And you don’t care about me. You want to tell me to leave.”

  My mind reeled a little bit. I had no idea where any of this was coming from, and I was completely lost.

  “I don’t want to tell you to leave!”

  “Yes, you do,” he said. “You’d have another man in here in a week. That’s all I am to you, a man to do the work around the farm. You don’t need me to build fences. You can find somebody else. You don’t even like me.”

  I stood, backing off. I had no idea what to say. I was insulted, hurt, and mostly just stunned.

  “I don’t want anyone else,” I said softly. My voice cracked. “I don’t understand what any of this is about.”

  “That’s because you’re selfish,” he said. “All yo
u care about is yourself.”

  I didn’t know how to reason with him. What happened to him coming home to me at night so we could sit on the porch and hold hands? I felt hot tears streaking down my face.

  “All I really want right now is for you to hold me,” I whispered roughly.

  He smoked his pipe, unmoved.

  I felt scared. I didn’t know this man. I knew the other man, the one who told me beautiful dreams of our sweet life together. I brushed at my wet cheeks, speechless. I went down to fill the goats’ bucket, then out to check on the chicken house before going inside to finish fixing dinner. It was already late, and the kids were hungry after their practices. They took their plates to their rooms while I tried to hide my emotional state. I told 52 that dinner was ready, but he didn’t come in. I wasn’t hungry and didn’t care about eating. I wrapped up the leftovers and went to bed alone.

  In the morning, he gave me an extratender hug after he filled his coffee cup and told me that he loved me. As I watched his pickup roll down the driveway on the way to his office, I wondered which man was coming home.

  Chapter 6

  Georgia called me on a regular basis to ask me what I was doing. It was almost like I was still living at the Slanted Little House, and in fact, I was there every weekday as I took the kids each morning to get on the school bus. Sometimes I’d go over to Georgia’s house to see her, especially if I’d just canned something and had a jar for her. Sometimes I took her to the eye doctor, and she always loved a good funeral outing.

  She rarely drove herself anywhere, which was just as well since the little gas station in town had closed. Georgia didn’t know how to pump gas.

  I didn’t know there were still places in the world where you didn’t have to know how to pump gas. I hadn’t seen a full-service gas station since I was a kid. My own children had never seen a full-service gas station.

  I took her to Spencer one morning for a funeral. She wore a hat that made her look as if she were prepared to motor across the English countryside. We went to lunch after the funeral.