A fox has one of my hens in its mouth and is standing perfectly still. The hen’s eyes are open, her beak is open too, and I can see her paralyzed little tongue. It’s Mrs. Donahue, the hen I named after my kindergarten teacher.
“Hey!” Pete yells, running straight at the fox and waving his arms. The fox turns its head then, just a hair, and looks directly at Pete. It doesn’t make a move to run away, it doesn’t drop the hen, it just stands its ground and lifts a single front paw.
My hands reach down on the ground in the dark, and I spread my fingers out and feel for rocks. For something to throw. Sticks, tools left out, a tennis ball, anything. There is nothing, though, and the fox looks over toward the pasture, looks back toward us, and then trots away with Mrs. Donahue.
We watch its bushy tail swish back and forth like a rudder until it disappears into the waves of grass between the pasture and the woods. White feathers float in the headlight beams, my hands are on my knees, and I am panting.
It is only later that I think about Pecker. You don’t need roosters for eggs; you need them to protect your hens. Pecker might have died doing it, but I know he would have taken on that fox. And Luke’s words echo: He’s just being what he is. Pecker had a purpose here, after all; he just never had the chance to fulfill it.
I think about Major, and the night he died unfolds in my mind again like a horrible slide show. Mrs. Donahue was just a chicken, not a horse I worked for and cared for and loved. But she still lived on the Big Valley and therefore was a life that I was responsible for.
You can’t let your guard down for one single night, you know? I think. Not even one.
At least when I watch this animal about to die, I’m not doing it all alone.
· · ·
The next morning I am expecting Pete to flee; instead, he makes us plates of steaming scrambled eggs and fried potatoes, and then gets to work fixing the holes in the chicken yard and the coop.
While he pulls boards out of the bed of his truck and finds the extra roll of chicken-wire in the barn, I fetch the mail—and pull a pretty little envelope out of the mailbox. There’s the Big Valley’s address in thick black ink, handwritten in my mother’s perfect calligraphy.
I knew this was coming, I’ve been looking forward to it even, but with the land sale, and subsequent bill-paying marathon, and the Pecker extraction, and planning for the remodeling project to get going again, I’ve put the occasion out of my mind until now.
My parents are celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary with a big party. And their golden milestone just makes me feel like a failure. I am forty-five years old. Unless I meet the love of my life tomorrow and marry him the day after, I will never have a chance at a fiftieth wedding anniversary. Not ever.
And it sounds silly to admit it, but even after enduring years feeling stuck, even after my painful divorce, even after giving away my wedding dress and vowing never to get married again, I still want that. As a matter of fact, now that I know I can depend on myself, I actually want someone more than when I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to handle everything alone.
I’d like a man around. Someone to share the Big Valley with, and even to share raising my sons the rest of the way with. Most startling of all, someone not just to be with, but to be married to.
I look at the invitation and know I want my own version of the kind of marriage that my parents have.
The sound of Pete’s hammer on the chicken coop echoes, and I realize there is still one hole in my life, regardless of my efforts to patch them all over.
But even if I’ll never have what my parents do, I can at least get the focus off of me for one second and be happy for them. Happy that they’ve kept their marriage going strong for half a century. And I am happy for them, and proud of being their daughter. I’m also even a little excited about a weekend away from the Big Valley.
Priority number one over the next week is dress clothes for the boys, and as the day nears I take them shopping at, where else, Goodwill. I buy them each a pair of khaki pants and short-sleeved white button-downs. Owen and Luke still fit into the dress shoes I bought them last year to wear for their school orchestra concerts, because I bought them a half-size too big. Will is just going to have to make do with his sneakers.
To mark their special day, my Mom and Dad have invited friends and family to cruise the Saginaw Bay with them in an open-air tour boat, and then we will all head over to their church, Messiah Lutheran, for a chicken dinner.
The boys and I arrive and I watch my parents stand united on the gangplank and I love them so much it actually aches. My father’s white hair is blowing in the breeze, but instead of messing it up, the wind just styles it perfectly and makes him look like he could captain this boat himself if he wanted to. Which, as a matter of fact, he could—when Ben and I were kids, our family went on weeks-long sailing vacations across Lake Huron and the Straits of Mackinac all the way to Canada. As our captain, my father was the very definition of seaworthiness, no matter the weather, the rocky moorings, the wind direction.
Standing next to him now, my mother is smiling. A genuine smile, a smile from deep inside, and it’s good to see her so happy. She is tall and regal and pretty. No, she is beautiful. Together, they greet their guests—their sailing friends, our grandpa Hain, their tall Lutheran pastor and his wife, the cousin who has gone far in advertising—and I take stock. And wonder what happened to my brother and me.
With parents like these, how could we have gone so wrong? Between Ben and me we have three marriages (one common-law), two divorces, three DUIs, five kids, two bad credit ratings, and a history of disconnected telephones. I mean, what the hell?
I ask my brother about this when I drive to the outskirts of the downstate town where he lives with his guns and his new girlfriend. I am there to pick them up—him and his girlfriend, not the guns—and give them a ride to the anniversary party, because neither of them has a valid driver’s license.
“Not everyone can be like them,” my brother tells me. “Not everyone wants to.”
For the first time it occurs to me that he’s okay with this. He’s okay with the continental drift of difference between our parents’ lifestyle and his own. I, on the other hand, am not. I love my farm. I love our lives there enough to go through a lot to keep them going. I can’t imagine ever living anywhere else. And with the land sale, there’s no doubt we’ve gained a little traction. But my parents have made it look easy for half a century; why does a single year of my life have to be so hard?
At the party my sons agree to help out as waiters, and they circulate among the guests with platters of cheese, crackers, and fruit. I’m proud that they’re so willing to help, but quickly see that you can take the boy off the Big Valley, but you can’t take the Big Valley out of the boy.
I overhear Owen bashing our country’s president, George W., to my big grandpa Hain, whose monetary contributions to the Republican Party are legendary. In the Hain basement hangs a framed, signed color photograph of a denim-clad Ronald Reagan astride a huge chestnut gelding.
“He’s not even really our president,” Owen says, eating from the tray of hors d’oeuvres he is supposed to be offering to the guests. “I can’t believe I might actually have to go to war someday and fight for a fake president.”
Luke, creative as ever, has set down his tray on a deck chair and is throwing random items over the side of the tour boat: cheese slices, ice cubes, a grape, a pacifier he found on the deck. Somewhere, a baby is wailing.
“Haven’t you ever seen David Letterman do ‘Will It Float?’ ” he asks a distant cousin as I hurry by, looking for Will. I wonder how Luke has stayed up late enough to watch Mr. Letterman’s program without my even knowing.
I find my youngest downstairs on the first floor of the double-decker boat, near the galley. I’m just relieved that he hasn’t fallen overboard, until I watch my dad take a tip cup away from him, but not before it has been stuffed with dollar bills, presumably by my parents’ gues
ts.
Will admits that he swiped a plastic beer cup from the bar and borrowed a black marker from one of the boat’s crew members to draw dollar signs all over it. He never actually asked anyone for money, he just rearranged the fruit, making room for the cup in the middle of his tray, then looked up at people and smiled.
“I can keep the money, right?” Will is asking my dad.
I hug my youngest as my dad looks on. My dad is not a meddler, yet now offers a rare piece of unsolicited parenting advice.
“You need to keep taking these boys to church, Mard,” he says, not unkindly, then leaves to circulate.
Will stuffs the bills and change into the pocket of his used pants. A year ago, trying so hard to make us look like a normal family, I would have felt embarrassed by my sons’ behavior. Not anymore. This, I think with some satisfaction, is why God gave me three sons.
Because when they are grown, Owen will know when I am too old and decrepit to farm and will take the lead in analyzing nursing-home placements; Luke will be unselfish and caring enough to come and visit me regularly there; and Will’s ambition will ensure he is the one with the money to pay the bill.
Maybe I will keep taking them to church, as my father just suggested. Maybe there is a place for us inside a church and we just haven’t found it yet. Or maybe they will each take up their own searches someday and find their own spiritual place. Either way, my sons have adapted like they were born to this life of grab-and-hold-on. They make no apologies for it, either, proving they’ve adjusted to it even better than I have.
I walk up to the top deck with Will, and he joins his brothers. They stand together, just the three of them, talking and laughing, each still doing his duty and holding his tray. I watch my triangle of boys and whatever sense of failure I’ve been hanging on to drifts away.
I lost my marriage, but they lost a childhood with two united parents and yet have adapted just fine. Despite the empty cupboards, the layer of ice on their bedroom windows, the carloads of firewood, the free school lunches, the sale of our land, and their parents’ divorce, they are more than just fine; they are, well, wonderful. They are the very best of both of us.
I’ve given them everything I had in the past year, but their father probably has, too. And no milestone I pass, no victory I win, and no harvest I grow will ever be better than that. If I never in my whole life accomplish anything beyond just knowing this, it will be enough.
When we get back home, the boys and I go straight to the coop to check on the chickens. They’re all fine; the anti-fox reinforcements Pete made must have worked. We feel around in the grass outside the chicken yard and find our reward: eight still-warm eggs.
After a summer of doing nothing but eating and scratching and clucking and fertilizing, our hens are finally laying eggs. And Larry was right, too, because their eggshells are an amazing blue and green. The yolks, though, are bright orange, and for the next several days I feed the boys our own scrambled eggs for breakfast. They taste the way fresh grass smells and are better than any supermarket egg ever.
With Mrs. Donahue gone, the rest of the hens stick close together, and though they wouldn’t be laying eggs at all if they were overly stressed, I can still tell they would rather be inside the coop. At least at night.
The Meats aren’t about to let that happen. An unsuspecting visitor would never mistake our farm for The Big Valley television show with them roaming free. No, they’d think they’d been dropped onto the set of a horror film starring a cast of zombified birds. The Meats seem like a completely different species, bulked up to the size of steamer trunks and bulging now as if unmentionables were hidden inside. They weigh as much as bowling balls, and their skinny legs wobble under the strain.
Not only that, but there are piles of chicken crap everywhere you step (so much for containing this by-product to use as fertilizer), and if you bend over to wipe off your shoe, expect an attack from the rear.
These, I am convinced, are the fowl descendants of the rooster whose crowing in triplicate signaled Jesus’ impending betrayal. I make a farmeress decision: it’s time for them to die.
I cut recipes for chicken pot pie out of the newspaper, and plan on a stuffed chicken instead of a turkey for Thanksgiving this year. I know exactly which chicken I want to invite to our table for the holiday: the one with a thing for ankles.
“I’ll fix your little red wagon, pal,” I promise.
My brother gave us his freezer, it runs fine, and I have big plans to pack it full of legs, thighs, breasts, and roasters. I consider calling Pete to do the deed, decide we are not yet to this place in our new relationship, and sit down with the Yellow Pages instead and look up “butchers.”
It takes a few phone calls, but someone finally explains that I’m not going to be able to find a commercial butcher to come to my farm and slaughter my chickens. Michigan’s legislature has outlawed farm calls. Which means meat retailers are no longer allowed to come to your farm and kill stuff. Now, you either have to kill your livestock yourself or take it to a USDA-inspected meat-processing plant. The closest one to me is outside Grand Rapids, 160 miles south.
The prospect of three hours of highway driving accompanied by fifteen angry bowling balls with feathers, beaks, and leg spurs is not a trip I relish or even contemplate. I’ve got to talk to Larry.
“Land sakes, girl!” he bellows from the help desk, tiring by now, I’m sure, of my relentless questions. “You can kill a chicken! Get a funnel, stick the heads in, chop ’em off, let ’em drain, parboil the feathers off, gut ’em, bag ’em, and toss ’em in the freezer for the winter!”
I have been reliving this gruesome scenario ever since I was twelve years old and unwittingly scarfed down Thumper’s deep-fried hindquarters at my grandma Link’s kitchen table. What made me think that I am any different at forty-five than I was at twelve?
I couldn’t kill a hog last fall, and I don’t think I can unleash the big “S” today on a chicken, either. Maybe I would be able to kill one if it had on a black balaclava and was coming at me in my bedroom in the dark with a knife, but I know myself, and I know I cannot kill fifteen chickens. Not without years of therapy anyway and I don’t have that kind of time.
As brutal as my fowl charges have turned out to be, I still raised the Meats from tiny babies. I can eat them, but I can’t murder them, hypocritical as that may be. Instead, I stop at the cashier on the way out of Tractor Supply and pay for another forty-pound bag of chicken feed.
The meat portion of our chicken-raising experiment has obviously gone off the rails. Just when they were beginning to relax with Pecker gone, my sons are being attacked in their own yard again, our entire wardrobe of footwear is ruined, and, at eleven dollars a bag for feed, the costs are mounting. Maybe, I think, there is someone noncommercial, who would consider doing the deed.
I call the 4-H, the local food co-op, an organic rabbit farm, and a commune in the next county. Will anyone butcher my chickens? “Too late,” “Don’t do it,” “Too messy,” and “Dude, we’re vegans” are my answers.
I let the Meats roam during the day and they stray to a distant neighbor’s yard and scratch up her landscape mulch. She no longer waves when she sees me at my mailbox. Their drumsticks, I am convinced, are getting tougher by the day, and they have pecked all the grapes off my grapevine. They drink the water out of my landscape pond and terrify the koi. Even the stray cats fear them.
On a day I shoo the Meats out of the road where they have stopped traffic, my brother has apparently gotten his driver’s license back, because he arrives for an impromptu visit.
“Those are pit-bull chickens!” he says, hurrying into my house and slamming the door.
I hug him. “Please kill them,” I say, thinking of his gun collection.
Finally, a solution. Why didn’t I think of it earlier? Ben is the consummate fisherman and hunter. If you go to his trailer for dinner, you will be served fish or game. Might be bluegill, might be lake trout, might be venison, might eve
n be rabbit, but it will be tasty and it will be something he shot or hooked or trapped or snared. Once I opened his refrigerator door on a whim and found a six-pack of Schlitz and a foil-wrapped mass shaped exactly like a squirrel, tail included. “Bacon-wrapped,” he said, “they ain’t half bad.”
Ben is not a workingman whose hobby is hunting; he is a hunting man whose hobby is working. Butchering chickens should be like flicking June bugs into a bucket for him.
“No problem,” he says.
My brother can do the big “S.” At last! A chicken hit man has not only been identified, but contracted, too. What a relief!
But three days later, despite frequent reminders from me, the Meats are still roaming the countryside like a gang of Nazi youth. And while I’m out running errands, my brother packs up and leaves for bigger game. He’s meeting some buddies farther north to scout deer blind sites for fall. All the beer in my refrigerator is gone. That is the way of the hunter.
I have now been betrayed by my government, local merchants, the 4-H, the hippies, and even my own family. For this, I am not above asking for help.
God, I pray before I go to sleep that night, please smite the Meats. Smite them hard and smite them now.
The next morning when I open my front door, they are on the threshold. I call the newspaper and pay for a one-day advertisement to run on Saturday in the classifieds. It contains my phone number and simply reads:
FREE.
LIVE MEAT CHICKENS.
YOU PICK UP.
On Saturday morning at 6:30 the phone rings.
“You still have chickens?” a man asks.
“Yes, I still have chickens,” I answer. “Please, in the name of all that’s holy, come and get them.”
“I will,” he replies.
The day scratches on without chicken removal. But after dark, just as I have given up hope, a small pickup truck pulls into the driveway. Our dog Friday barks as if signaling the apocalypse and there is a knock on the door. I open it and see a muscular and handsome middle-aged man in jeans and a trucker hat. He has black hair and black eyes.
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