Chickens in the Road Page 7

  She said, “I was the only one there wearing a hat.”

  At seventy-eight, she walked in the foreign land of people younger than her, a land she didn’t quite understand. On the other end of the spectrum were my children, also in need of a guide in this foreign rural land that was in some ways a throwback to decades earlier. I was the in-between, the guide, the sandwich generation between Georgia’s childhood without TV and my children’s childhoods with YouTube videos on their cell phones. (I frequently reminded my kids that when I was their ages, we only had four TV channels and we had to get up to change them.)

  When we first moved to the Slanted Little House, the full-service gas station in Walton was still open. The little old man would come out and pump your gas. No card slots at the pumps. The pumps themselves looked like they were transported from the 1970s in a time machine. These were the gas pumps I remembered from my childhood, the only pumps Georgia has ever known, and pumps my children had never seen in their former suburban lives. In case you’re wondering where all those old-fashioned pumps went—they’re in the country.

  The first time my kids came with me to get gas, they were baffled when I didn’t jump out of the car. We sat there for a minute and finally one of them said, “Aren’t you going to get gas?” I said, “Yes.” The little old man came out and pumped my gas. My children nearly fell over with shock. “What is he doing?” “Why is he doing that?”

  I loved that little old gas station and the little old man. He always called me “honey” and if I wanted a bottle of water and a candy bar, he’d bring that out to the car for me, too, along with anything else I might desire.

  Georgia got her gas at the little old gas station from the little old man for years and years. When the gas station closed, Mark had to take up filling her gas tank for her. After we had lunch following the funeral outing, and before we left the “big” town of Spencer, we stopped by the modern self-service gas station. I got out, pumped the gas, and got back in the car.

  Georgia said, “Aren’t you going to pay?”

  I said, “I already paid.”

  She stared at me, not unlike my children stared at me when I didn’t get out of the car to pump the gas myself the first time they came with me to the little old gas station. I explained, “I put my debit card in the slot and I paid at the pump.”

  Georgia said, “Oh my. I didn’t know you could do that.”

  I said, “You need to get the bank to give you a debit card.”

  She said, “Oh no, no, no!”

  In spite of her reluctance to take on newfangled technology, there wasn’t much else she thought she couldn’t do.

  On rare days when nobody had sports practice after school, I also went to the Slanted Little House in the afternoon to get the kids from the bus. Ross was driving and could get himself home, but I had to pick up Weston and Morgan. I’d drive the two-plus miles over the dirt-rock road to the hard road and around a couple bends to the Slanted Little House.

  One day, there was a pretty black cow in the road. I knew who the cow belonged to, and it wasn’t an unusual sight. I got to the Slanted Little House. Weston stepped off the bus, but there was no Morgan.

  I went to Georgia’s house to call the school. She’d missed the bus.

  Then I made the mistake of telling Georgia that one of Lonnie’s cows was in the road.

  I said, “You want to call Lonnie and tell him that one of his cows is in the road? I have to go get Morgan.”

  Lonnie mowed her back pasture for hay every year, so I knew Georgia had his number. I’d called Lonnie a time or two before to let him know when his cows were in the road. The last time, he’d said, “I’ll go see when my TV show is over.”

  Georgia headed for the phone, and I headed back to my car. Before I could even pull out, she was outside loading up her car with my cousin’s son, Madison, in the driver’s seat.

  I rolled down my window. “What are you doing?”

  Georgia said, “Lonnie didn’t answer the phone. I’m going to get the cow.”

  “No, you’re not. You can’t get a cow.”

  Georgia replied, “Yes, I can.”

  I said, “Maybe you should go to Lonnie’s house first. See if you can find him outside somewhere.”

  At the pace she let Madison drive, it would take her fifteen minutes just to drive a mile up the road to Lonnie’s house. I headed for the school to pick up Morgan and drove back at a fast clip, feeling slightly panicked, imagining Georgia wrangling a cow.

  I told the kids, “We have to go help Georgia get a cow.”

  Weston said, “I can’t get a cow.”

  “Neither can I. And neither can Georgia. But at the very least, we need to stop her from jumping on its back and riding it over the hill.”

  By the time we got back to the place where the cow had been in the road, Georgia and Madison were parked to the side in the weeds.

  I jumped out. “Where’s the cow? I raced back here to stop you from jumping on its back and riding it over the hill.”

  Georgia said, “Oh, it went back in on its own.”

  I said, “Exactly. That’s why Lonnie doesn’t interrupt his TV shows. And when Mark gets home, I’m telling on you.”

  Georgia said, “Well,” and that day, it meant that she didn’t give a hoot what I told anybody. She’d chase all the cows she wanted, and she knew I was just about as crazy as she was anyway, though I think she secretly enjoyed my imaginary scenarios in which she was riding cows over the hill.

  My new daily life on the farm wavered between the fantastical and the harsh reality when it came to livestock.

  I gave up milking Clover before winter, beaten by the struggle. I was disappointed with myself. What kind of farmer was I? But I was relieved at the same time. I baked Clover a batch of molasses cookies and told her we’d talk about milking another time.

  She said, “I win!” Seriously, I swear it.

  The chickens had started laying in the fall, but eggs were scarce as the weather turned cold, and many times the ones I found were frozen and broken. It was snowing by November and I was terrified of our steep driveway, which was even scarier than the road. Winter driving lessons with my cousin didn’t help. I took to parking my SUV at the bottom of the driveway, which meant hiking up and down the hill every morning to take the kids to the school bus, only to repeat it all again in the afternoon. To get to the bus, I had to drive the icy, rocky road, past sheer drop-offs that had me clenching my fingers over the steering wheel. Sometimes I had to send the kids to stay at my cousin’s house because I couldn’t get down the road at all.

  Sometimes I made a mistake, starting down the road when it was icier than I could handle, or bad weather would start up after I was already out. We’d have to get home somehow, and somehow meant driving down the road.

  Once you started down the road, there was no choice but to keep going. On these occasions, I would inch along, my fingers numb from my death grip on the wheel.

  “Mom, it’ll be okay.”

  Morgan was my little cheerleader. If I’d been in her place, I would have had my hands covering my eyes.

  I would move the vehicle another inch and tell myself that we weren’t dead yet.

  Then I’d steel my nerves to move the next inch. The road would be completely covered in snow and ice, and that kind of back road never received salt or scraping by county trucks. There were no guardrails to stop you if you started sliding.

  In those conditions, it could take me forty-five minutes to drive the two and a half miles to our farm. By the time we arrived, I’d be shaking and crying.

  Starting that first winter, whenever possible in that kind of weather, I relied on 52 for almost everything. The first snow usually came by Thanksgiving, and it could snow off and on until late March—when the mud season started, running through April and into May before summer came to dry things up. The thick, deep mud on the road was as scary as the ice, if not more. 52 brought home the groceries and the mail, and sometimes th
e kids. He didn’t seem to mind doing these things, but I felt isolated and dependent on a man who seemed increasingly hostile otherwise and seemed to mind everything else.

  He minded my noise, the kids’ noise, any kind of noise. Footsteps running on the stairs, the kids banging around downstairs in horseplay, the sound of pots and pans in the kitchen, doors shutting too hard, and most especially my conversation, which he frequently cut off to tell me I was talking too much or too loudly, that I was repeating myself or telling stories that were too long, and that I didn’t care about him and that I wanted to be right about everything. I began to recognize a pattern, which started with him picking on one thing or another, followed by a routine in which he told me I thought I was perfect and he was stupid. Any disagreement I made to those statements was labeled an excuse or an argument. This frequently ended with him telling me that I wanted to tell him to leave.

  I found myself running around trying to make sure everything was done just right and trying to get the kids to be quiet before he came home. I was tongue-tied when he arrived, afraid I’d say the wrong thing and spark the next diatribe.

  I wasn’t standing up for myself. I didn’t feel very good about it, and I felt a growing frustration with his unreasonable blowups, which were interfering with the happy life we were supposed to be enjoying.

  Hello, we were living on a farm! Dream come true! Time to be happy!

  We split the farm expenses and bills for the house fifty-fifty, each depositing our half into a joint account from which we paid bills. We both had our own separate bills, too—car insurances and so on, which we paid from our individual personal accounts.

  As busy as I was with writing and running around with the kids, he had taken over paying the bills from the joint account. I realized something was wrong when I got a phone call letting me know that our satellite TV service was going to be shut off. I’d just deposited my entire (slightly measly) royalty check from my latest romance novels in the joint account because 52 had said the bills were high and we needed more money.

  I hunted down the checkbook for the joint account, which I hadn’t looked at in some time, and discovered that the only person who’d been depositing money in the joint account recently had been me. Even with my regular monthly deposit plus my additional royalty check, that wasn’t enough to pay all the bills.

  We had no money left in the account. He hadn’t made his deposit.

  I’d wanted to save my royalty check to buy Christmas presents for the kids, but I’d deposited it in the joint account at his insistence. If he’d needed to reduce what he was depositing temporarily for some reason, that wouldn’t have been the end of the world, but I felt as if he’d been dishonest with me. When he came home, I confronted him.

  He said he didn’t know what I was talking about, but when I presented him with the checkbook ledger, he switched gears.

  “You’re right,” he said. “You’re always right. You have to always be right.”

  “Well, in this case,” I said, “I am right. I’ve been depositing money in the joint account and you haven’t. Why not?”

  “You think you’re perfect, don’t you?”

  I was exasperated. I had no patience for his routine about how perfect I thought I was. We were scraping by financially, but it took both of us.

  “I’m not having a conversation about who thinks who is perfect! Why didn’t you make your deposit in the joint account?”

  “Why don’t you just admit that you don’t even like me?” he demanded. “You don’t care about me. All you care about is yourself. You want to tell me to leave.”

  “Right now,” I spit at him, “I don’t care if you leave or not.”

  “Are you telling me to leave?”

  All my repressed frustration with his repeated rounds of nonsense attacks over the past several months welled up in me and I said, “Yes, I’m telling you to leave.”

  He walked down to his truck and drove away.

  I felt strong for a minute or two, then I burst into tears. I didn’t know if I’d stood up for myself or just stepped into a trap. Hadn’t he been taunting me for months now that I wanted to tell him to leave? It hadn’t been my idea, but he’d certainly talked me into it. We hadn’t even made it through a year on the farm together, and I hadn’t bargained for a farm by myself. I needed 52, and it wasn’t long before I missed him. Like, about five minutes. I missed the old 52, the man I’d known before we moved to the farm.

  Traffic was increasing on my website, and I couldn’t afford the higher hosting fees. Even as I found myself suddenly alone on the farm, the economy took a nosedive and advertising—which was how I got a paycheck—dropped with it. Readers pitched in with donations to help support the site’s costs. They also sent letters and e-mails and left comments on my blog to encourage me, telling me how much my writings about the farm meant to them. I was farming inspiration, if little else. Many of them were struggling as much as I was, or more.

  One day I went to Georgia’s house. I’d promised her I’d help her bake seventy-five mini holiday pumpkin breads. She’d started without me because she was impatient and it had started snowing that morning. Everybody knew I was scared to drive in the snow, so she thought I wasn’t coming.

  She made pumpkin bread every year for the little church in town. They made up big gift baskets to distribute to the elderly in the community. Georgia had a hard time handling the work of seventy-five mini holiday pumpkin breads because she was one of the elderly herself who should have been getting a basket—but she didn’t like that idea. She wanted to be one of the younguns fixing goodies for the baskets, not one of the “old people” getting one. Only she couldn’t quite do it because, well, she was elderly. So she called me and told me she’d “help” me make those mini pumpkin breads if I’d come over.

  She fussed around a lot while she was “helping” me because she wanted to be sure I did things right and usually I didn’t. She had the recipe clipped on her fridge and the clip was right over the part where it said how much ground cloves to put in. It was supposed to be ½ teaspoon, but I couldn’t see the first part of that and I thought it said 2 teaspoons. Georgia almost had a fainting spell when she found out I’d been putting in 2 teaspoons.

  I made her do a taste test on one of the breads baked from the batter with too much ground cloves.

  She said, “Well,” which meant she liked it and all was forgiven.

  In between baking rounds, I wandered over to the Slanted Little House. I stood in the sitting room with the gas fire and remembered how the kids and I used to gather round its heat as we shivered through the winters. On snow days, the children fought for who got to sleep closest to it on the floor.

  I peeked into Morgan’s old bedroom. I’d bought her new bedding at the new house, so her old bed in the Slanted Little House looked the same, as if she might come home from school and jump right onto it. I walked through the old retro ’60s-remodeled kitchen. I had rediscovered my love of baking in that kitchen. I hated it and loved it and missed it, and sometimes I wanted to come over and just cook something in it for old times’ sake. Sometimes I couldn’t find something at my new farmhouse, like my Bundt pan, and I’d realize I must have left it there so I’d have to go over and hunt through the cabinets. It still felt like my kitchen.

  I looked out the big window to the meadow. It was always a good place to watch deer graze along the creek at dusk, or children shooting arrows into hay bales, or cats jumping in the tall, tall grass in summertime.

  I walked down to the old cellar porch where I didn’t have to worry about lighting the gas on the old stove to keep the pipes from freezing now. Mark took care of that since I was gone. No one lived in the house anymore.

  I could close my eyes and see Ross, just the year before, bringing his first girlfriend home one day from high school, hear Morgan tell her, “What do you want to know about Ross? I know him really well.” And hear Ross say to his new girlfriend, “We’re leaving now.”

 
I could see my younger son, Weston, stepping off the bus in front of the Slanted Little House with his football jersey the first year he’d played, and all three of my kids the day they broke a four-foot-long icicle off the cliff across the road and proudly brought it home. There was a framed photo of that day I’d left in the sitting room of the Slanted Little House—Ross and Weston with their neatly clipped crew cuts and Morgan with her flyaway shoulder-length hair she refused to ever pull back, balancing a giant icicle between them, faces beaming.

  I could see Morgan, at one and a half, in the washtub when I gave her a bath on one of our visits to the Slanted Little House way back then and see my mother rocking on the front porch, patting Morgan’s freshly diapered bottom.

  I could see me, age five, out front riding the little red tricycle Great-Aunt Ruby used to keep around for the little kids in the family.

  I could even almost see my dad when he was in high school in town and the weather was so bad he’d have to stay the night with his aunt because he couldn’t make it back to Stringtown.

  And even more distantly, I could almost see my great-grandparents coming from Stringtown—over the hill and through the woods—to visit their daughter Ruby after she married and moved into this house. I could see them in the parlor and on the porch, not just on the wall where they were framed.

  I opened my eyes and I could see generations of family in an almost elastic space and time where no matter how far the years stretched, they also pulled back together—here—in this place.

  The Slanted Little House had inspired me in the beginning, and it still inspired me. Someday, I dreamed, my house would be an old farmhouse, filled with memories—joy, sadness, hardship, triumph, all that makes up the fabric of a good life. I wanted, desperately, to grab hold of that good life. I wanted 52 to come back to the farm.

  Chapter 7

  The electricity to the well went out. 52 came back to the farm to fix the well for me, and I asked him to stay. We agreed together to see a counselor, and I was thrilled, certain we could find the solution to our problems.