A Country Year

  On my own I worked out an ages-of-man theory. I decided that Successful people—those who had lived in a Golden Age, as it were—were all dead. The adults I knew who were alive were superior to me, but not Successes. Of course they could play golf and knew where buses went, but they didn’t measure up to Robert-the-Bruce. I did not even know an adult who had been in a dungeon.

  Pinky Higgins of the Chicago Cubs was an adult, but Grandma Annie was often cross with him, so he was not a Success. As for presidents, I had heard her saying some very plain things about President Roosevelt, so I knew that the affairs of our nation were in the hands of a Man of Brass.

  Eventually, as is right and proper, I grew up. It was much better, even though I never became a Success. Instead, I married and had a son and became a librarian at Brown University in Rhode Island. Being a librarian has its points. You get to wear orthopedic shoes and a tiny frown as you snap the elastic band on your packet of catalog cards. Sometimes it is even exciting. I remember the day the assistant librarian, a rumpled, inept fellow, flushed the campus flasher from the stacks, chased him through the lobby and pinned him in the revolving door—but only because his own arm was caught in the door too. The campus cops came, took the flasher into custody and freed the assistant librarian. We talked about it during coffee break for weeks.

  Paul was teaching at another university and directed the graduate biomedical engineering program there. He did important research, attended meetings and was a popular lecturer. He had been awarded tenure, that cachet of academic stability and ease. But he was not easy; in fact, he was often distinctly uneasy.

  When that uneasiness became unbearable we quit our jobs and sold our house. Brian, whose absence had made the house seem so much bigger, was in boarding school, and we left Rhode Island and wandered around the country for nearly a year until we came to the Ozarks. I liked this farm the instant I saw it and Paul said he did too, so we bought it. We had to find something to do to make a living, and Paul said that since we didn’t know anything about cows, we might as well become beekeepers. At the time that seemed perfectly reasonable.

  As it turned out, I was luckier than he, for here I found what I wanted. Today, on our wedding anniversary, I think of him and hope that he has, too.

  My chicken operation, I like to believe, is one of the few straightforward bits of farming that goes on at my place. But during the past weeks I have been trying to get the chickens organized to sleep inside the coop, and in doing so I’ve been forced to think like a chicken, which is not very straightforward at all.

  The thirty chickens, give or take a few (especially take a few as coyote dinners), are a commercial strain of white Leghorns, egg-laying machines without the wit or attention to go broody. I sell their eggs back to the general store to cover the cost of their feed, have my own eggs for free and still have enough left over to keep Ermon’s family across the hollow supplied in exchange for work on my truck.

  Leghorns are skinny little chickens, useless as slaughter birds after they have stopped laying well. Some of mine die of old age; others are picked off by coyotes, foxes, hawks, raccoons, opossums and owls. Being a chicken on this hilltop is a perilous business. Each spring I start a dozen new pullets to compensate for the depredations on the flock, and the ones that make it past the black rat snakes reach egg-laying maturity in about twenty weeks. I buy sexed day-old pullets and brood them in the cabin, where they are safe and warm and I can watch them. This past spring it was apparent after a week that the chicken sexer had made a mistake.

  Chicken sexing must be a highly skilled profession. I picture the sexers sitting there in the hatcheries, day after day, hour after hour, upending newly hatched chicks and sorting out the pullets from the cockerels. Considering how alike baby chicks are, they must be good at it, for they seldom make a mistake. But even Homer nods, and this past spring one of the baby chicks started growing a tiny, bright-red comb, proving himself to be a cockerel.

  Since the hens are temperamentally unsuited for raising their own chicks, I don’t care if the eggs are fertile or not, and I don’t really need to keep a rooster at all. But I like having one about, flapping his wings and crowing his exuberant maleness, and I fancy it to be a more wholesome state of affairs for the hens to have a rooster with them. I was glad to see the new cockerel this past spring because my old reigning rooster badly needed the lesson that only another young one could teach.

  The old rooster is a magnificent New Hampshire red, twice as big as the Leghorn hens. His feathers shimmer in shades of red, brown and orange, and his tail, which is not quite so fine as he believes it to be, curves showily away from his body in deep coppery-green tones. His predecessor was a mild-mannered Leghorn who, one summer’s day when drought had stressed all wildlife and their food sources, was carried off by a female coyote, long, lean, and hungry. She had chosen her time carefully, watching until the dogs had taken themselves for a walk to the river before she made her kill. I saw her, but it was too late. I chased her, but she looked disdainfully over her shoulder at me, the rooster dangling from her jaws, and broke into an easy lope, disappearing down into the creek hollow where I sometimes hear coyotes singing at night. My flock of hens was roosterless for a time, until I met a couple over on the next ridge of hills who had two roosters and one very tired hen, all of them New Hampshire reds. We arranged a trade: one of my laying hens for their extra rooster.

  He is beautiful but mean, perhaps because he had been the number two rooster in the triangle, perhaps simply because the breed is aggressive. When I brought him home he stepped right out of the burlap bag and began setting things right among the Leghorns. He likes to keep all his hens in sight, pecking and chasing after them when they stray too far from the coop, scolding and fussing continually, full of self-importance. He attacks everything: odd-looking sticks, mice, cats, dogs, men, women and children, but particularly men, whose maleness he recognizes and whom, in some dim way, he may suspect of lusting after his hens. He might even take on a coyote, which, in addition to his beauty, is the reason I have put up with him for so long. But his personality is poor. He is a coward and a bully. If you face him, he backs down and discovers a delicious stone or speck that needs scratching, but turn your back and walk away and he comes running, fury in his wicked yellow eyes. His spurs are weapons, and whenever possible he jumps at a retreating figure, feet to the fore, and comes down stabbing with his spurs, his full ten pounds behind the attack. With a human he makes the connection on the back of the legs, and I bear my own set of scars there to show that, ungrateful brute, he will even attack the body that feeds him.

  I knew when I saw the young cockerel among the chicks last spring that, proud and aggressive as he is, the aging New Hampshire red would be no match for the young Leghorn’s inevitable challenge. By midsummer, when the newcomer first tried to crow, the old rooster knew it too. To me, the youngster sounded like a squeaky door hinge, but the old red rooster stopped in mid-bustle, transfixed, his head to one side. He watched the young rooster carefully after that and, pressing his temporary advantage of weight and experience, drove him out of the coop each night.

  As a result, the Leghorn began to roost in the trees. Gradually most of the pullets joined him, and one by one so did the old laying hens. By summer’s end, the red rooster, splendid in his possession of the safe chicken coop, had only six loyal hens. The ones who camped out always roosted too high for me to catch, but I did not worry about their safety, for they perched on flimsy branches where the raccoons could not follow, and the protective cover of leaves hid them from owls. But after the leaves fell this past autumn I was awakened several nights running by the frightened squawk of a chicken. By the time the dogs and I got outdoors there were only a few feathers left to show where the great horned owl, who calls his deep hoo-hoohoo-hoo-hoo from the pine tree, had made his kill.

  Two weeks ago I set about getting the chickens back in the coop at night. They are impossible to catch, so I contrived to make them catch themselves,
putting myself into a chicken frame of mind to do so. The chicken coop has two doors, a regular human-sized one and a small chicken-sized door. All the chickens, the ones who camp out as well as the coop birds, knew that I fed them just inside the big door and would gather nearby to watch me throw down the corn on the coop floor each morning. But when the outside birds went in, the inside ones came out, so I couldn’t simply feed them inside and close the doors. I fashioned a tunnel of chicken wire and two-by-fours outside the small door, left it open at one end, and started feeding the chickens inside the makeshift pen. They were suspicious of the wire netting, but after a few days greed overcame caution and they went inside it to feed. On the first morning of my chicken trapping I left both doors closed and waited until later than usual to feed them. The outside chickens were gathered, hungry and anxious, and when I threw the corn into the tunnel, six of them, including the Leghorn rooster, rushed right in. I pulled shut a flap of chicken wire across the open end, then went inside the coop, fed those chickens, and opened the little chicken door. The coop chickens and the outsiders spent the day going back and forth between the coop and what was now a pen, the two roosters eying one another warily and keeping their distance. At day’s end the outsiders reluctantly went to the coop and I closed the little door. The chickens outside the wire stayed hungry and roosted in the trees, uneasy without their rooster. The next morning most of them went into the tunnel for corn; since it was raining, all of them went inside the coop as soon as I had opened the little door, so I was able to close it again and keep them all together. I don’t know what happened inside, but there was a lot of crowing and commotion, suggesting that the two roosters were beginning to sort but dominance. That evening only two hens remained to roost in the trees, and during the night the great horned owl carried off one of them. The last hen, deprived of company and corn for two days, was eager to get inside the chicken-wire tunnel the following morning, and at dusk I closed the entire flock into the coop. I fed and watered them inside, and left both doors closed for a week.

  Chickens’ tiny brains do not remember much, and when I let them out a few days ago they had lost all memory of roosting anywhere but in the coop, and tidily returned to it each evening. Rooster realignment had taken place. The mild and polite white Leghorn acts self-assured and is in charge; the red rooster, chastened and subdued, hasn’t even the heart to spur me when I walk past him. I have heard the great horned owl each night in the pine tree close to my bedroom window. He will have to look elsewhere for dinner.

  My farm lies north of town. After the first two miles, the black top gives way to a five-mile stretch of rocky road that shakes apart the pickups my neighbors and I drive. My mailbox is at the junction of this road and a mile-and-a-half gravel lane that meanders between it and the cabin, skirting the cliffs of the river that runs fast and clear below. Lichens, ferns and mosses grow there, and wind and rain have eroded caves and root holds for scrubby, twisted trees on the cliff faces. The thin soil at the top sustains a richer growth, and in the springtime the cliff top is abloom, first with serviceberry, then redbud and dogwood. In the summer, oaks shade the lane, grass grows in the middle of it, and black-eyed Susans grow beside it. In the winter, winds howl up out of the river gorge, driving snow across the lane in drifts so deep that sometimes I am marooned for a week or more.

  I returned yesterday from a honey-selling trip and was grateful, as I always am, to turn at the mailbox and head down my lane. I drive a big three-quarter-ton white truck on these trips, one fitted out to carry a 5,000-pound load, a truck new enough to be repaired if it should break down in Hackensack without hours of poking around in a salvage yard, the source of parts for “Press on Regardless.”

  The white truck is commodious and dependable, and I am fond of it. It is a part of my life. One night I dropped off to sleep after reading about the nature of the soul. I dreamed about my own soul, and found that it is a female white truck, buoyant, impatient, one that speeds along, almost too fast in an exhilarating way, skimming slightly above the road, not quite keeping to the pathway. I rather enjoy having a soul of that sort.

  Like many of my neighbors, I am poor. I live on an income well below the poverty line—although it does not seem like poverty when the redbud and dogwood are in bloom together—and when I travel I have to be careful about expenses. I eat in restaurants as little as possible, and I sleep in the truck: I pull into a truck stop, unroll my sleeping bag on the front seat and sleep there, as warm and comfortable as can be. In the morning I brush my teeth in the truck-stop restroom, and have my morning coffee in the restaurant. When I travel, people seldom notice or talk to me. I am unnoticeable in my ordinariness. If I were young and pretty, I might attract attention. But I am too old to be pretty, and rumpled besides, so I am invisible. This delights me, for I can sit in a booth at the truck stop, drink my coffee and watch without being watched.

  One morning I was having coffee at 5:30 A.M., snugged up in a booth in a truck stop in New Mexico. The truckers were eating their breakfasts, straddling the stools at the horseshoe-shaped counter. A three-sided projection screen hung from the ceiling, showing slides that changed every minute or so. The truckers watched, absorbed, as the slides alternated between the animate and the inanimate. A supertruck, dazzling in the sunshine, every tailpipe and chrome strip gleaming, was followed by a D-cup woman, pouring out of her teeny dress, provocatively pumping gasoline into a truck. The next slide was a low shot of a truck grille; this was followed by a scene with a plump blonde in a cute cop outfit, showing rather more breast and crotch than one would think regulation, arresting a naughty trucker.

  I watched the truckers as they watched the screen, chewing away on the leathery eggs-over-easy, their eyes glassy, as intent on chrome as on flesh. I finished my coffee and drove on unnoticed.

  The trip I returned from yesterday was to Dallas, and as sales trips go, it was a good one. Its maze of freeways make it easy to get around, and I was grateful to the food buyers, who placed Texas-sized orders.

  On the way to Dallas I stopped for lunch at an Oklahoma restaurant which had big windows facing the parking lot. Seeing the signs on my truck proclaiming my business and home town, the man at the cash register gave me a big grin when I walked inside and asked, “You the sweetest thing in Missouri?”

  If there is one skill I have learned from living in the Ozarks, it is how to talk Good Old Boy, so I quickly replied, “Shore am,” and took my seat at a table to order a bowl of soup. As I paid the tab, my new friend inquired about the honey business; when he found out that my truck was loaded with honey for sale in Dallas, he bought a case for the restaurant gift shop and asked to be put on my mailing list. “Now that’s Joe Ben Ponder, you hear? Joe Ben,” he said in his soft southern Oklahoma drawl.

  It seemed like an auspicious beginning for a sales trip, and I badly needed a good one. I had just returned from Boston and New York, where sales had been poor, although the trip was good in some ways. In Boston I stayed with Liddy and Brian, and one evening they took me to the Harvard chapel, where Gustav Leonhardt played a program of baroque music on the chapel organ. It was beautiful and I enjoyed it; I also enjoyed seeing other friends and relatives whom I love and see too seldom, but I did not make any money. In New York there are stores on every corner that sell French bread, marvelous cheeses, imported salmon, exquisite delicacies and honey, some of it made by my honeybees. But then there is another such store in the middle of the block. The customers are spread thin, and many places where I have sold honey for years have fired their managers and hired new ones, groping for a formula that will bring in the dollars once again. Macy’s and Zabar’s were having a war, and their buyers had no time for me. Sales elsewhere were poor, too, for it cut no French mustard with new managers that honey from my bees had been selling in the store for ten years. I drove up to Westchester and southern Connecticut to set up new accounts in the suburbs.

  In my worn jeans and steel-toed work boots, one of which has a hole in it from the
time I dripped battery acid on it, I wandered through those fashionable towns peddling honey, towns filled with women out buying things to drape on themselves, and things to put in their houses, and things to take care of the things hanging on themselves and the things in their houses.

  Twenty or twenty-five years ago I lived on the edge of lives like these. In those days the women used to drive station wagons, and today they drive sleek little cars, but the look of strain on their faces is the same today as it was back then. I was glad to escape that life then and at the end of the sales day I was glad to escape in my white truck and head westward onto the Interstates with their green signs and truck stops, toward Missouri, toward my wild mountain top, toward home.

  There has been an odd lot of siding and not-siding on the barn and its lean-tos: old weathered barn boards, tar paper, wooden shingles and, on the new storage loft, bare plywood. I needed to cover up this plywood before winter, and the handsomeness of the new loft suggested that now was the time to cover the barn and its sheds with something which would tie together the entire structure. The wooden shingles on the honey house lean-to had weathered beautifully, and I thought I might finish off the rest of the barn to match, but when I priced wooden shingles at the lumber yard they were impossibly expensive, so I made my own.

  My raw materials came from the pallet mill to the east of town. Industrial pallets are made from four-foot oak blocks, trimmed to exact widths. It was the trim that made my shingles. The mill sells two thousand pounds of trim pieces for $2.00, my kind of price. I drove the Chevy over there, and a helpful mill worker loaded them into it with his forklift. When he dumped the bundle onto the pickup bed, the truck groaned a bit and squatted down, its springs splayed out flat. I drove home slowly and carefully, wondering how I would unload the bundle without having to cut the bands and take the trim pieces out bit by bit. But when I got home I put the truck to the task of unloading itself: I hooked a chain around the post that holds up the deck to the barn loft, fastened the other end to the steel bands around the pallet trim and drove out from under the load. The truck groaned in relief as the bed came back up to normal height.