Bootstrapper

by Mardi Jo Link

  Each divorce hearing from 9:00 a.m. through 5:30 p.m. is listed by full name in twenty-minute increments on this schedule. More than two dozen cases, and that’s just for this one day. Somehow in this crazy and timeless universe, in this town of fourteen thousand, in this county of more than fifty thousand, where umpteen irreconcilable couples get divorced every year, Pete’s divorce hearing and mine are scheduled in the same courtroom, in front of the same judge, one right after the other.

  How is this even possible?

  Coincidence, said Einstein, is God’s way of remaining anonymous. I’m beginning to think this sockless, timeless mathematician might be onto something after all, because the very system designed to pull people apart is going against everything it stands for and inexplicably flinging Pete and me together.

  In this moment of perfect earthly rotation, of serendipity, of good karma and divine providence all occurring on a day that should probably go down as one of the worst days of both in our lives, what do I manage to say to him? What pithy verbal response do I have to the fist of fate reaching down and clutching the two of us in its strong fingers and thrusting us together? What do I say to the man somebody up there somewhere thinks could be my destiny?

  “Oh.”

  Do I sit down and wait for him? No. Do I smooth my skirt under my clenched behind and wait on the bench so I’ll be the first friendly female face he sees after he officially becomes a single man again? No, I do not.

  Instead, I run for the hills. For the stairs, for my doomed minivan, and for home. Romantic love doesn’t exist for women like me. Time doesn’t exist for anyone. And I need another man like Einstein needed a pocket watch.

  Once through the door, I totter to my flowered chair, curl up, and snivel and sleep until the sound of the air brakes on the first of the school buses that will stop at the end of our driveway penetrates my stupor at four o’clock. Because our driveway is so long I’ve got a minute or two between when the school-bus doors open and the kids bust inside, and I’m at the sink splashing water on my face by the time Luke and Owen walk in the door.

  “Hi, guys!” I sing, certain I’m presenting the face of a happy, albeit dripping, mother to them, the face of a woman to whom nothing much out of the ordinary has happened to today, or happens to any day. A mom focused on the second that her children will finally be home from school and the meaning in her life will resume.

  I’ve already told them that the divorce hearing was today, they don’t need a play-by-play of how it went. And, to be honest, I don’t feel like talking to them about it ever again. I just want it behind us.

  “How was school?” I chirp, as the boys walk out of the mudroom and into the kitchen, where I’m rummaging through cupboards for their after-school snack.

  “What’s wrong with your eyes?” Luke asks.

  Now that I think about it, they do feel a little swollen. And they’re burning, which means they’re also bloodshot. I have Irish eyes. Big, brown, and tender. A couple good teardrops from way down deep can swell them half shut like they’ve been bee-stung.

  “Remember?” Owen says before I can answer. “We’re the divorced kids now.”

  10

  April 2006

  EGG MOON

  Consider the Araucana. Few chickens are as delightful, especially if you have children, as the so-called “Easter egg chicken.” They lay light bluish or greenish eggs, often resembling dyed Easter eggs. Remarkably, these eggs are blue even on the inside of the shell.

  —Farmers’ Almanac

  Spring has got to be around here somewhere. I feel like I can’t take one more second of winter, of cold, of darkness, of endings. And so, regardless of what the thermometer says, three days before Easter I have the boys pull our old metal porch furniture out of the garage. They wash the caked-on dirt and crispy ladybug shells off with a bucket of hot, soapy water and then arrange the chairs and the matching table on the porch.

  It is an unseasonably warm evening, maybe forty degrees, bright and clear, and when I take a deep breath, the air is still cold but it really does smell like spring. Like bird nests and crocus blooms and dirt thawing out. Like fresh starts.

  Everywhere there is the sound of dripping. Snow from eaves, ice from tree branches, snowbanks melting into the pond. Our driveway is completely clear and the low-in-the-sky sunshine slowly dries the porch chairs off. Even though it is still too cold to sit outside, I bundle up in a blanket and do it anyway.

  This vintage purple porch set once belonged to my grandma Link, she of the Emergency Steak and the blood sausage and the Lutheran resolve. After her husband, my grandfather, died, she lived another three decades alone, and about this time of year she would grab these chairs single-handedly, ham-fisting them out of her garage, wipe them down, and set them up in her driveway. Whatever resourcefulness I have, I probably owe at least some of it to her. She taught me self-reliance through her actions, not her words, though I didn’t always realize it at the time.

  Because when you’re twelve years old and you go stay with your recently widowed grandmother for a week in the summer, and she tells you that the scrumptious “fried chicken” you’ve just downed a whole plate of is actually a fat rabbit—maybe wild, maybe someone’s escaped pet—that she caught that day in her backyard, skinned, disemboweled, and dropped, piece by floured piece, into boiling lard, “Wow! Isn’t Grandma resourceful?” is not the first thing that pops into your head.

  But in these first few days of spring, putting healthy food on our table is still a challenge for me. It was probably a challenge for her, too, I just didn’t realize it. Remembering my grandma Link so clearly today has made me wonder if, even beyond those “Meat-Stretchers” in her old cookbook, we are missing out on another food source. I shun lard, and I’m pretty sure I couldn’t bring myself to kill and dress a rabbit, even the ones who wiggle into the garden, but could I wring a chicken’s neck? Maybe.

  Even if I can’t stomach plucking and gutting one, if we had our own flock of chickens at least we’d have fresh and free eggs. That’d be one way to replace the protein from Rocky. No killer instinct is required to scramble, poach, fry, or boil.

  And so on Easter Sunday, when the Congregational church we are visiting sings a rousing version of “Jesus Christ Is Risen Today,” I decide something important. The boys and I are going to try raising chickens. That hymn is probably supposed to inspire thoughts more pious than poultry, but an inspiration is an inspiration, even if mine comes with chicken feathers instead of angel wings.

  Tractor Supply, the farm store a few miles south of us, is closed on Easter, and it’s almost a week until I have time to get there on the following Saturday. I am a regular customer here, as regular as my budget allows, carting out dog food, soil thermometers, garden gloves, and mole traps. This is where I used to buy Rocky’s hog chow and where I used to buy Major and Pepper’s horse dewormer.

  A department store for farmers the week after Easter is an unlikely place to experience a spiritual revelation. But after all of my Buddhist reading and our sporadic church visiting, I do know how precious spiritual moments are in my everyday life. If one arrives in the livestock department at Tractor Supply, well then, so be it.

  I walk past the pallets stacked with fifty-pound bags of goat chow and the rows of new John Deere lawn mowers. I glance at the bargain bin of tools and move toward the racks of vegetable seeds but pull myself away before I start fondling the packets of haricots verts or black-seeded Simpson. I make a mental note instead: time is running out on ordering from the seed catalogs I have back at home, the ones stacked on top of the bill file.

  The Holy Grail I’m seeking today, though, is the help desk in the back of the store, where a man named Larry presides like the Pope—the Pope of farming.

  I don’t know Larry’s last name and he doesn’t know mine, but from him I have learned any number of useful skills: how to estimate the amount of electric fence needed for a two-acre pasture (measure, then multiply by three); what the secret
is to growing mammoth pumpkins (pinch off all the early blossoms but one); and a surefire repellant for Japanese beetles (squish their kin, float the dead bodies in a bucket of dishwater, and place strategically).

  I’ve followed each of these suggestions like the good little agricultural acolyte that I am. They all work. Larry is a real farmer, not a wannabe like me. He is the son of a farmer, the grandson of a farmer, and the great-grandson of a farmer. I am the daughter of schoolteachers. He has hundreds of acres and hundreds of head of cattle to match. He is a judge for the 4-H, butchers his own pigs, can surely do the big “S” himself, and probably not with a handgun, either. I have a farmhouse and six acres that my sons and I are still hanging on to, miraculously, by our dirty fingernails.

  I have a Wayne’s World moment every time I approach the help desk and see Larry in his sporty red TSC vest standing behind it: I’m not worthy. But I am something better: ready. Ready to try something new but practical. Something docile and inexpensive and not so big that I can’t consider killing it, or so cute that we can’t eat it. Like chickens.

  The boys like the idea, too. I talked to them about it on our way home from church on Easter, and I could tell by their enthusiastic responses that they are fully vested.

  “Boys,” I announced, “we’re going to raise some chickens.”

  “Another pet to play with!” said Will, the idealist.

  “Another kind of poop to clean up,” said Luke, the worker.

  “Another animal in bondage,” said Owen, the activist.

  “Rule over all the livestock on earth,” said God, the God.

  Ostensibly, God said this to “man” in the first chapter of Genesis, but what if Adam was off somewhere taking a toke on his bong; then wouldn’t these directives be settled upon Eve? I mean, there was no one else around, right?

  Although I have been without a husband for ten months, and although my spiritual searching began about the same time, I am so raw still, so unevolved spiritually, that with spring and Easter on my mind, Genesis actually feels like a pretty good place to start.

  I don’t know about ruling over livestock, especially since I still believe that I am to blame somehow for what happened to Major, and for what happened to Rocky’s meat, but I still think I can handle chickens. I don’t tell any of this to Larry, of course. When I take my turn at the help desk, I’m all business.

  “I want to buy some chickens,” I tell him. “How do I do it?”

  Larry has come to expect all my questions to have a “how?” in there somewhere, and he reaches under the counter, pulls out a thick, four-color catalog, opens it up, and right then it feels like the whole earth downshifts in slow motion. The age-old chicken-and-egg question becomes immaterial. Chickens—and if you want them, fertilized eggs, too—come from the post office. The way to buy chickens is through mail order.

  “Good thing you came in today,” Larry says. “It’s the last week for orders, and the hatchery is closed on Sundays.”

  I look up at him, at his scratched eyeglasses, his pocked and bluish nose, and at that moment I am aware of my surroundings: Larry’s wisdom is an immediate blessing, and I think he might be the most enlightened being on earth.

  Chickens from a catalog. On a Saturday.

  You can order up the birds on the sixth day of the week, just like God ordered up all the animals on the Sixth Day.

  It surprises me to consider the previously unthinkable possibility that in the months since I lost the horses, the Big Valley has actually grown closer to being a real farm, and not, as I feared, farther away. A real farm feeds the people who live on it, and we are working toward this.

  I would definitely not have expected the way toward this realization to wind through Tractor Supply, but I am trying to let go of my expectations. I am getting back to basics, and what could be more basic than an egg?

  I look back at the catalog. There are light-brown chickens and black-and-white-striped chickens. There are chickens with fancy feathers cresting the tops of their heads and chickens so small they look like quail. There are even chickens that look like celebrities. Foghorn Leghorn, the Kellogg’s Corn Flakes rooster, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Chanticleer. In each vivid rendering, a rooster and a hen are shown, the rooster erect and proud, throwing out his chest, the hen calm and plain and friendly looking.

  “Meat or egg?” Larry asks me.

  “What?”

  “What d’ya want, meat chickens or egg chickens?”

  He says this quietly, and with the patience of a kindergarten teacher, even though there are three people in line behind me.

  Which came first, chicken stir-fry or egg foo young? Barbequed chicken or deviled eggs? I don’t even have the birds yet and I already feel inadequate. I still haven’t decided if I’m going to kill them or not, and I had no idea meat chickens and egg chickens were two different birds.

  Everything, I learn later, depends on that decision. What kind of feed you buy, what kind of coop you build, how long you plan on keeping them, and how they will get from coop to stove.

  Under the watchful eyes of Larry, I decide not to decide and tell him, Eve-style, that I want both. I want it all. He nods, almost as if he were expecting this to be my answer. This is called a “mixed run.” A straight run is all hens, also called pullets. The hens, the girls, are more expensive. I’m not sure why that is, but I like it.

  “Okay, now you gotta pick your breed.”

  “Hmmm” is all I can muster.

  Larry suggests Leghorns for my meat chickens and Ida Browns and Araucanas for my egg chickens. All three breeds can tolerate the northern Michigan cold. Before he closes the catalog and puts it back under the counter, he tells me there’s something else.

  “Them Araucanas are called the ‘Easter Egg chicken’ because their eggs are light blue and light green. Ain’t that something?”

  Can it get any more spiritual, I wonder, here among the galvanized toolboxes and salt blocks and rolls of chicken wire? I place a minimum order—ten egg and fifteen meat. They are $2 each for the mixed run, $2.75 each for the straight run of hens. I write a check out of my Finding Utopia money for $57.50 plus tax and shipping. Not a bad deal for a Saturday-morning revelation.

  Seeds are much cheaper than chickens, but their catalogs are just as glorious. Some women might drool over designer clothing, lingerie, or home-decorating catalogs but I reserve my coveting for the catalogs that offer mail-order vegetable seeds. These companies have names like Nature’s Crossroads, Abundant Life, the Cook’s Garden, Johnny’s, and Fedco. I order only organic seeds from companies based in the Midwest or at least from places in cold-weather climates. A tomato from Texas or a bean from Alabama is probably not going to make it here.

  A small fire glows in our fireplace and I spread the catalogs out on the dining room table. Outside there is still snow on the ground and the trees are bare, even though a few patches of grass are showing near the old stone foundation of the house. It’s hard to believe that it will ever be warm enough to grow the heat-loving melons and gleaming purple-black eggplants that take some coaxing to ripen in our short season, but these catalogs, and my own experience, assure me otherwise.

  The Congregationalists have the Bible to refresh their faith; I have seed catalogs.

  Color photographs of Ox Heart tomatoes, Jacob’s Cattle beans, Tall Telephone peas, and Detroit Red beets beckon. I love the vintage names people have given these heirloom vegetable seeds over the years, some of which are old favorites that have been grown in American gardens for a century or more.

  That history makes me feel connected to a whole ancestry of farmers and gardeners I labor alongside of through time, but will never meet or know. It makes me feel part of something bigger than me, bigger than my sons, bigger even than the Big Valley. All of which will, if I take care of them, still be here on this earth long after me.

  I see something called an Eight Ball zucchini and have to order some, just for the name. This is a tiny extravagance: a packet of
seed is only $1.50.

  There’s poetry, too, in the catalog descriptions. Fedco’s are my favorite. Their catalog is just tiny black-and-white text and a few drawings, no photographs, so maybe that’s why they put so much obvious love into the writing. A radish’s “crisp white flesh has a good sweet taste with only a little heat.” And here’s to Presidential leeks, a relative of the onion: “Lincoln may be sown thickly like scallions, and bunched for discerning chefs. Will withstand frosts.” Be advised, however, that yellow tomatoes “will catface under cold or excessively wet conditions.”

  And I learn new things from these catalogs, too. A parsnip pie is an amazing treat. The spicy burn in hot peppers is caused by a naturally occurring compound, capsaicin; police-issue pepper spray is made from this same chemical, just concentrated.

  And if one has cause to order more than fifty pounds of Brussels-sprout seeds, there is a price break. I grow Brussels sprouts, too. A seed for this vegetable is the size of a small peppercorn, and I try to imagine the farm and the mother and the children who preside over such a harvest. They are superheroes.

  A bush bean’s varietal description from Fedco makes me smile, though, because I think it says as much about me as it does about the bean: “Nothing provides like Provider, even under adverse conditions.”

  I add three packages to my order: $6.10.

  Because I’ve been busy ordering the chickens, planning the garden, ordering the vegetable seeds, and working for Finding Utopia, we haven’t been to church in two weeks, not since Easter Sunday.

  So far, we haven’t found a place to call our church home, but I’m still determined to try. My grandma Link was a dedicated Lutheran, and she attended the same church for more than eighty years. In her memory I rally the four of us to visit another new church this week.