Bootstrapper

by Mardi Jo Link

  If I have to trick him along the way in order to make that happen, so be it.

  We work together for an hour or so, uprooting all the dead plants in the garden and tossing them next to the compost pile. I’m the lucky recipient of the silent treatment for about five minutes, but he is not the kind of boy who stays mad for long. He breaks up the cornstalks and sunflower stems into smaller pieces while I turn the compost pile with a pitchfork.

  Steam rises from inside the pile. Will notices and comes over to investigate this by-product of healthy decomposition.

  “Can I try?” he asks, holding his hands out for the pitchfork.

  I hand it over smugly—my plan is working, he’s into the task now—and he takes it from me in his boy hands, hefts it up and down a couple times, then hurls the tool one-armed deep into the center of the pile like a spear. His back arches like a gladiator’s, fists raised to the heavens, his boy body in a compact Y. He roars the roar of victory, then turns to grin at me.

  “Nice one,” I say. “The worms are terrified. Now how about actually turning some of it.”

  The gladiator disappears, Will the boy returns, and goes to work on the pile. He digs and turns, digs and turns, making it about halfway through when something, or rather several somethings, flees his bayonet.

  Our compost pile is home to crickets, spiders, worms, earwigs, centipedes, and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth according to its kind. Some of these creatures are completely unidentifiable without an entomology degree. And every time I turn the pile, they scramble out.

  But these somethings Will has just uncovered have fur, not exo-skeletal shells. They have whiskers, tiny round ears, and silky gray bellies. They have intelligent eyes—panicked intelligent eyes. They are meadow voles: a bigger, chubbier, and decidedly cuter relative of the mouse, with little round butts and stubs for tails and faces straight out of a Beatrix Potter illustration.

  Will sees them too, drops the pitchfork on the ground, and bends down to get a closer look as the voles try to scatter. Some can’t run at all, because they are just babies.

  “I broke their house,” he breathes out softly. “I broke their little house.”

  We comb through the warm earth and broken cornstalks and find a loose nest of grass, milkweed fluff, and hay. There are three babies curled together inside. They have fur, their eyes are open, but they don’t look quite big enough to survive on their own. Will cups the nest in his hands and watches as they try to squirm away from the light.

  “They’re going to die now, aren’t they?” he asks.

  “Maybe,” I answer.

  We try to save them by digging a new hole in a corner of the garden, in the same area where the other older voles just ran. Will sets the nest of babies inside, then covers it with dead grass, more milkweed fluff, and a lattice of bean vines.

  “People wreck everything,” he says, standing now and looking at the results of our rescue effort. The hole is a little obvious, not well blended into our garden landscape the way it was when the voles built it themselves.

  “They sure do,” I say. “But people can fix things, too. You made them a good little nest. If we leave them alone, maybe the mother will come back.”

  Will looks at the nest and considers this possibility.

  “If she doesn’t,” he decides, “they’re goners.”

  We wipe down our tools and put them in the shed. I tell him his work is over for the day. Who has the heart to make him clean up dog crap after this? I sure don’t. I brought him into the garden this morning to teach him a lesson. One I thought he needed to learn—that he was overdue for, even.

  I just didn’t think it was going to be this one.

  11

  May 2006

  FLOWER MOON

  It’s like being lost

  in the forest, hungry, with a

  plump live chicken in your cradling

  arms: you want to savage the bird,

  but you also want the eggs.

  You go weak on your legs.

  What’s worse, what you need

  most is the companionship,

  but you’re too hungry to know that…

  —JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT, “Chicken Pig”

  It takes three weeks from the day I ordered our chickens until they arrive, but in May I get a call in the middle of the day from a clerk at the post office.

  “Your chickens are here!” she says. “I’ve got them on my counter and they’re peeping like crazy!”

  I picture the full-grown chickens from Larry’s catalog hopping and clucking around the post office. In this scene I conjure, they are pecking at the stamp machine and hopping onto the packages. They are scratching at the linoleum floor, looking for food. I’ve got to get over there.

  Will’s school is on the way to the post office, so I call Nurse Ratched and tell her I am on my way to pick him up and I’ll be taking him out of school for the rest of the day. With such a stellar attendance record as his, this is unusual.

  “Everything’s okay, I hope?” she asks, probing.

  “Everything’s fine,” I tell her, and leave it at that. I’m not going to give her the chance to ask me how the free lunches are working out.

  When I get to the school, she already has Will sitting in the orange chair, and he looks at me, relieved, but his face is a question mark. I smile but say nothing, sign him out, and we walk out to our doomed minivan.

  This will probably be the last time he rides in it with me, since I have to turn it over to his father. I choose not to think about that right now, though, because once inside, with the doors safely closed and all authority figures out of earshot, it is just the two of us in here together and I don’t want to wreck it.

  “Why are you here?” he asks me.

  I relax into the present, and everything else disappears. This is the first time I have ever achieved this level of mindfulness, and Will’s honest question fills me up so full, there’s no room for anything else.

  “The chickens are in,” I whisper, as if we could still be overheard.

  “Cool,” he whispers back.

  Right now, this second, I am not the woman who divorced his father, I am not an authority figure, I am an accomplice. I turn around and look at his still-small frame dwarfed by the big backseat. He is expectant. Innocent still, thank God. Surprises for him are always good ones. Time might be unreal, but this moment isn’t. And inside of it is our past, our present, and our future, too.

  So much of childhood fades; I want this to be a day he’ll remember as an adult. I want this moment to be the way he remembers the whole of his growing up with me—unconventional, earthy, fun.

  The post office looks normal enough: a line of people waiting to mail a package or a letter; three clerks at their windows helping customers. There is no evidence of a chicken infestation. Everything smells clean. Industrial. We get in line and soon are up at the counter.

  “We’re here to pick up our chickens,” I say, as if this were the most common thing in the world.

  “Right,” the clerk says, index finger in the air, immediately heading to the back room. She returns with a box that is making high-pitched cheep-cheep-cheeping sounds. The box is very small, because—duh, Mard—they are baby chicks, not full-grown chickens. They must be very tiny, because twenty-five of them fit inside a container not much bigger than two egg cartons.

  “Be careful when you open the box—it says the directions are under the shipping label.”

  Directions? She pushes the box toward me, our business concluded. I take it and we walk out the door and get into the van. I can’t believe that they just let me leave. I’m being trusted with twenty-five innocent lives. I felt this way when I left the hospital after Owen was born. Are they really going to let me just take a newborn baby? What are they thinking? Don’t they know I have no idea what I’m doing? In the backseat, Will holds the box on his lap and gently pushes his pinky through one of the airholes.

  “They’re pecking me
!” he laughs. “They think my finger is a worm.”

  Once home, we take the box into the kitchen and open it up. Inside is a pile of yellow cotton balls with eyes. They look up at us in unison, then flock into a corner of the box. They’re terrified.

  “Eww!” Will says.

  They stink. Bad. But this doesn’t deter him from petting their fluff.

  The directions are titled “Basic and Emergency Care for Baby Chicks.” I do not want to consider any emergencies. The basics are this: Keep the temperature between 90 and 95 degrees for the first week, five degrees less per week down to 70 degrees. Keep chick starter—special food—available at all times. Provide water with three tablespoons of sugar per gallon mixed in for the first three days; dip the chick’s beak in the water, because they may not know how to drink yet. Pray.

  This last bit of advice does not appear in the written directions, but I think it should. Their bodies are so fragile, my barn has been empty for so long, and it is drafty and big.

  We put the lid back on the box, leave the chicks on the kitchen counter, and drive back to the source, Tractor Supply. The Pope is nowhere in sight. We buy a bag of chick starter, a heat lamp, a clip-on thermometer, a chick-watering pan, and a chick-feed trough. Grand total, $46.

  So much for “free” eggs and meat. Are chicken accessories tax-deductible? I make a mental note to check. The money for all this came from my tax-refund check—a godsend that arrived a few days ago in the mail.

  Behind the store by the Dumpster I find a big empty cardboard box with the words “Farm Play Set” printed on the side. I rip the top flaps off as cleanly as I can and shove it into the back of the van.

  Back home, we go out to the barn together and assemble a chicken condo that would make even Chicken Little feel secure. Our work finally done, we kneel down in silence, place our hands in our laps, and watch as the chicks get their bearings.

  They hop around, peck at their food, peck at the newspaper, peck each other and peck the cardboard. Their seed-sized hearts are beating fast, and the only sound is their cheeping.

  The barn is dimly lit and I can feel the May chill sneaking up under the back of my sweater. Warmth and light radiate from the heat lamp. The glow reflects on Will’s face, and with his freckles, his blond hair, his oversize hooded sweatshirt, he looks like a modern-day cherub.

  “Look, Mom,” he whispers. “Safe and sound.”

  For the chaos he accidentally wrought down upon the meadow voles, he is now redeemed. And in this moment, in the filtered light, with the hay dust glistening, he has grown wings.

  In the coming days, our baby chicks grow quickly and our financial reckoning closes in. The green minivan is Mr. Wonderful’s now and I’m down to just Cookie for transportation, so the four of us can’t go anywhere together—at least not safely or legally. Even more worrisome, though, is the issue of our home, our land, our farm, and the mortgage refinance.

  “We have a glitch,” the loan broker tells me.

  No woman wants to hear her mortgage broker tell her that. Certainly not me. And certainly not after everything I’ve been through with my sons already. We’ve survived for nearly a year on squash, pilfered firewood, purple climbing rope, Finding Utopia, and spiritual longing. Lady, I’d like to tell her, we are pretty sick of glitches.

  At the divorce hearing in March, the judge allotted me ninety days to find a bank willing to refinance the farmhouse in my name only. I’ve asked every bank in town for a loan, and their universal answer is a resounding, echoing “No, ma’am.”

  More than half of my ninety days are past, and so the odds of me being able to make the payments on this place wouldn’t tempt the most desperate compulsive gambler.

  Even though Mr. Wonderful has paid his child support on time every single month, and even though I am still getting a Utopia paycheck, and even though I’m paying most of our bills, I’m still paying them late. Every month it seems that our moon wanes a little more and we are getting farther and farther behind.

  So despite the fact that their rates are a lot higher, I’ve begun negotiating with the finance company that holds the current mortgage on the Big Valley—the company that approved the mortgage application when I was married. And they’re the ones who have informed me of said “glitch.” Even though I’ve pitched them a perfectly good financing idea that requires nothing more complicated than a common office supply: Wite-Out.

  Can’t the underwriter just dip the magic brush into the little bottle of liquid and paint over Mr. Wonderful’s name? Um, no, Rebecca, I’m afraid they really can’t.

  “It’s your credit rating,” the mortgage broker says glumly, as if giving me a medical diagnosis. “It came back ‘Seriously Delinquent.’ ”

  In the past month I’ve spent more than a hundred dollars on chickens and their accessories, so that we can have free eggs instead of paying a dollar fifty a dozen for them. I’ve spent that much again on seeds to plant in soil that I might not even own in a few months. I’m still in debt for the well to water these seeds that will be planted in that same tenuous soil. These are examples of the kind of high-grade financial genius that I am.

  But I do know how to manipulate people sometimes, and this just happens to be one of those times.

  “I thought you said you could get anyone a mortgage,” I taunt.

  “Well,” the broker says, giving me a big sigh, “if you could come up with some decent collateral, something easily liquidated, I could resubmit.”

  Right, I think. Hold the line and give me just one sec and I’ll pull that stuff right out of my ass.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I tell her.

  “Super!” she sings back and clicks off the line.

  We are not, as Will just observed about our new baby chicks, safe and sound. Not even close.

  I’ve done everything I can think of to bring in extra money. I’ve sold the pasture fencing and the wood and hardware from the horse stalls and even the few remaining bales of hay that were still stacked in the barn. I’ve sold some furniture I was storing in the garage. My parents are buying a new minivan and have offered to give me their old one to replace the one I just lost in the divorce. I accept it with relief and gratitude, and then sell off my truck, Cookie, too. All this brings in a few thousand dollars and helps catch me up on my bills, but it’s not enough to be considered any kind of collateral.

  I’m speeding through my ninety days now hell-bent-for-leather. Time’s a runaway horse and I’m strapped on.

  Funny thing, but it’s actually easier to plan a chicken coop than it is to find decent mortgage collateral, which is maybe why I spend the next week in chicken-related denial. If I really accepted the possibility that we could lose the farm, I wouldn’t be adding to the population of beings who live here.

  But I cannot and will not accept that possibility. And so I plan a permanent home for the chickens instead, as if this will somehow make the Big Valley our permanent home, too.

  Plus, the chicks don’t care about my credit rating and just continue to grow regardless. They are quickly outgrowing their cardboard condo and within ten days of their arrival, we can even tell the meat chickens from the egg chickens. The egg chickens are still small and cute. Still lemon yellow, though they are bigger now and their tiny wing feathers are starting to grow. The meat chickens have turned a dirty white, are beefed up, and they lumber around the box like fat children. They dwarf the egg chickens and crowd the food trough. They are bullies.

  “That one looks like this one kid in my class,” Will says, pointing at a big white chick that is cocking its head and staring us in the eye.

  In the next two weeks, the meat chickens triple in size and the egg chickens grow a little bit, too. We move them first into a blue plastic kiddie pool the boys have outgrown, and then into an empty refrigerator box I find next to the recycling station at the township dump.

  Then, we name them.

  The meat chickens we just call “the Meats,” because they are not individua
l beings, they are a pack. Plus, the plan is to eat them, and after our experience with Rocky, naming them doesn’t seem right.

  But the egg chickens are more like separate beings, we aren’t going to eat them, we’ll hopefully have them for a long time, perhaps several years, and they deserve names. There are Alice, Cher (tall and the longest-legged), Mrs. Donahue (named after my long-ago kindergarten teacher), Fluffy, Clucker, Pink Ranger (of Power Ranger fame), Missy, Prissy, Gladys, and Star.

  For ease of care and so it can be seen from the house, the coop will be built in a corner of the vegetable garden. We are three miles south of the east arm of Grand Traverse Bay, and without regular enrichments our soil is still like beach sand, and so I’m also thinking free fertilizer. Chicken manure is the richest poop of all, better in nutrients than dairy cow, horse, steer, rabbit, or sheep doo. It’s so rich that it has to be composted first or it will actually burn your vegetable plants. I want me some of that.

  On a windy and cold day in late May, Luke and I stand side by side on the rise next to the driveway and look down at the garden. We will need to build a shelter for the chickens to roost in at night and during bad weather, nesting boxes for them to lay their eggs in, easy access to the nesting boxes so we can collect the eggs, and a fenced-in yard for exercise. The exercise yard will have to have a roof of chicken wire to keep out hawks yet be tall enough for us to walk inside of and clean.

  Luke sets down his toolbox and stares silently at the building site. He is almost as tall as I am now and, of my three sons, is the one that people are most likely to say looks like me. He has long fingers, and there are gold flecks in his green eyes. He is wearing a Metallica T-shirt under his camouflage jacket. His light-brown curls show below his black knit cap. He is architect, builder, boy.

  “Got any ideas?” I ask.