Chickens in the Road

by Suzanne McMinn

  ME: Okay. Can you just tell me something about your mother? What was she like?

  I had to know the deep, dark secrets of this strawberry cake woman.

  Give me something.

  Mrs. Brooks Randolph’s daughter said, “Oh, she was funny. She loved the farm and she worked hard at it. She canned and made lard and soap. She enjoyed a joke and she saw fun in things. In the summer when the farm would come in, we’d have all that cooking to do. She never fussed about it. She’d pack baskets to take to the hands on our other farms and she was just a good-natured person, very happy. She loved to cook. She made strawberry shortcake, but I don’t remember any strawberry cake. She was a good cook and always jolly.”

  Mrs. Brooks Randolph was born in the 1890s. Mr. Randolph was a farmer. She was a “farm mother” as her daughter put it. He died first. She died when she was ninety-two. She moved to town when she couldn’t take care of the farm by herself anymore and lived with her daughter. She died of a stroke. And her daughter did not have her strawberry shortcake recipe. I asked.

  I said, “Can you just tell me one more thing?”

  Mrs. Brooks Randolph’s daughter replied, “Yes?”

  “What was Mrs. Randolph’s first name?”

  “Marie.”

  Mrs. Brooks Randolph was neither here nor there in any kind of reality for me, but she had been real and she was exactly the sort of self-sufficient farm woman I was trying to be. I canned! And when we butchered the pigs, I was going to make lard.

  Except unless you counted the pigs (which I hadn’t even handled directly), I felt as if most of the time I wasn’t doing much more than running a large petting zoo. I started thinking about a milk cow. It would either make me a farmer or kill me.

  Chapter 10

  One rainy fall day, after slogging through thick mud pushing a wheelbarrow full of cement at his construction job, Ross came home and said he didn’t think he wanted to do that for the rest of his life.

  Great! Could we talk about college again?

  No. He wanted to talk about the military again. He’d been talking about the military for four years. And I’d been crying about it for four years. I’d had a few not-so-friendly run-ins with military recruiters. And I’d bothered the principal of the high school a few times about letting those recruiters into the school. Why, why, why must they let them come there? Leave my little boy alone! Don’t they know these are children?

  Recruiters would send stuff in the mail and I would throw it out. I’m a mother. I like my child just how he is, with all his arms and legs attached. At one point, Ross asked me to sign him into the military when he was seventeen, when it requires a parent signature.

  Are you kidding? My grandmother signed my father’s little brother into the Marines when he was seventeen, during World War II, and he was killed on a Pacific Island. So. I don’t think so.

  But Ross was eighteen now and he had already scheduled an appointment with a navy recruiter to go to Beckley, West Virginia, a couple of hours south, to the military entrance processing station there. I asked him what else he’d done without telling me. Was he married? (No. Whew.) The navy recruiter called the next day and I grilled him. He almost made me feel like it might be okay.

  Ross wanted to be a Seabee. Seabees are the construction engineers of the navy, and it fit with his interest in building and doing things with his hands. He had taken the ASVAB (general military entrance exam). Only when he went to Beckley to sign up, there were no positions available in the Seabees. The economy had created a backlog in the military for new enlistees.

  Oh, happy day! No more military. If only. There were still two jobs needing enlistees in the navy. That would be Navy SEALs and nukes (the nuclear program). SEALs and nukes were in demand because these are positions that require high qualifications.

  I actually had some experience and knowledge about navy nukes. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I was a navy wife. I was married to a nuclear submariner. He was stationed in Charleston, South Carolina, though he ported out of King’s Bay, Georgia. He was, in fact (of course), Ross’s father, my ex-husband.

  To be a navy nuke is prestigious—and difficult. It requires a six-year enlistment due to the two-year educational training. There are big bonuses and advanced pay grades. It’s rigorous and only the smartest of the smart get in there.

  Ross threw his Seabees dream out the window, but he was bound and determined to join the navy. He didn’t want to be a SEAL, though. He’d do that nuke thing. That’d be fine. The navy recruiter took another glance at his less-than-stellar high school transcripts, which didn’t include classes like, say, physics, and told him that he didn’t think that was going to work out.

  Ross + high school = girls + cars.

  Sorry, there wasn’t much (or any) time for that studying thing. Or taking real classes.

  His ASVAB score wasn’t high enough. He’d have to take the separate nuclear test and pass it with flying colors. The navy recruiter advised against it. Maybe a job requiring less qualification would come up. Ross decided he’d take the nuke test.

  He went home and asked his eleventh-grade football-playing little brother, Weston, to explain physics to him. Another job in the navy, requiring less qualification, did come up. The recruiter called. Ross refused it. He went back to Beckley and took the nuke test.

  And passed it.

  Only he didn’t pass it very high, so if he was going to get in the nuke program, he was going to have to go back yet again and retake the ASVAB and earn a very high score to qualify.

  The navy recruiter said he’d never had anyone retake the ASVAB and improve their score. At all. Much less by a significant margin, which was what Ross needed to do.

  He thought Ross was wasting his time. He gave him two weeks to prepare.

  I cried a little bit more, then I bought Ross a study book. Ross decided to learn everything there was to know about physics in two weeks. (Teenagers are so funny.) And I decided that if he could really make it into the navy’s nuclear program, I was okay. It was safe. He’d be living in a submarine and sleeping on a shelf. I’ve been inside a navy submarine. I was a navy wife.

  Ross took the study book in hand and said, “I don’t know how to study. I can’t remember the last time I studied.”

  I replied, “Well, it wasn’t in high school, was it?”

  He went back to Beckley and retook the ASVAB. He scored so high that, if he’d done that the first time around, he wouldn’t have even had to take the separate nuke test.

  He was scheduled for boot camp in Great Lakes, Illinois, the following spring, and two years of nuclear school in Charleston, South Carolina, to be followed by four years of sea duty. There was a total six-year commitment. He volunteered for submarines.

  I was proud of him, in spite of my fears. He had broken up with his high school girlfriend just before making the decision to join the navy, and after signing his enlistment papers, he decided to go live with his dad in Texas until his boot camp ship date.

  A few evenings before he was set to leave for Texas, he came up to the house and said he’d just passed the Ornery Angel’s husband on the road. “He said he was dying,” Ross said. “Did you know that?”

  “He’s not dying,” 52 told him.

  The man had a penchant for telling neighbors he was dying of one disease or another as a joke. (Not telling people it was a joke was the joke, apparently.)

  Frank, our neighbor who lived directly across the ford, spent a lot of time cutting and stacking wood for the Ornery Angel and her children for winter. He liked to be outside, working, and he tried to help out the Ornery Angel when he saw her husband wasn’t getting wood cut for her. Frank would also always buy anything any of my kids or the Ornery Angel’s kids were selling for school. He bought a volleyball hoodie from Morgan one time. She went to deliver it to him and happened on him naked inside his house when she went to the door.

  She refused to ever go to Frank’s house again, and eventually, Frank (wh
o hadn’t seen Morgan that day when she’d gone to his door) asked about his hoodie and 52 had to deliver it.

  By this time, winter was coming on. My first little bird had flown the nest, but I was still preparing for a household of four on a remote farm. It was scary, too, but also exciting in a way. Winter was a challenge, and I loved challenges. Winter also meant it was finally time for Sausage and Patty to meet their maker.

  I didn’t feel at all bad about butchering something we’d raised. I didn’t like the pigs. My cousin came over to do the deed, and I mostly avoided the scene, though I was driving home after picking up the kids from the bus and saw the pig hanging in the meadow bottom to bleed out. Or whatever it is you do with a pig after it’s dead.

  We’d traded the other pig for half a cow, which was already in our freezer, and we took our freshly slaughtered pig to the house of a friend who knew how to butcher. The butchering process took hours and was disgusting, but I was trying to learn to knit so I kept busy and out of the bloody stuff. I couldn’t wait to get home and start frying pork chops and making lard.

  We were closer to being real farmers than ever. My pantry was stocked to the rafters with home-preserved food, and we had freezers full of meat. 52 had bought a generator so we’d be ready for power outages, and he came up with a used woodstove that he installed on the main floor of the house.

  Not that I knew how to start a fire.

  52 chopped up fallen trees from the woods and taught me how to light a fire.

  ME: I’m scared of fire.

  52: That’s handy.

  After practicing numerous times, I finally got a fire started all by myself. Then 52 went to work, leaving me a supply of logs and kindling on the porch. About two hours later, the fire died. I couldn’t get it started again.

  I added logs and kindling. I added paper. It kept dying. I e-mailed 52 in a panic. “The fire keeps dying!”

  He told me to get more kindling.

  ME: But I’m out of kindling!

  52: You have forty acres of kindling.

  Oh.

  On the upside, I felt like a pioneer when I went out to collect kindling. Unfortunately, it was snowy, and stuff out there was wet. Eventually, I managed to collect enough semidry kindling to get the fire started again. I struggled with it all day. And the next day. And for the next several weeks, but finally I got better at it. We were trying to save money on our electric and propane bills. Wood was free. I was the one who was home all day, so it was up to me to keep the fire going.

  And to restart it if I let it die.

  52 had told everyone at his office that we had chickens, and people unloaded empty egg cartons on him until I had a large stash. Many of these were cardboard egg cartons, which made a great base for homemade fire starters. Since I remained slightly clumsy in my fire-starting abilities, I could use all the help I could get.

  I melted down and recycled the bottoms of old container candles to make new candles, so I always had a lot of candle wax. I had friends and relatives giving me their used candles, too.

  In perhaps my strangest collection, I had everyone saving their dryer lint for me.

  I tucked a ball of dryer lint in each cup of a cardboard egg carton, then poured melted candle wax into the cup, over the dryer lint. To use as fire starters, I’d just tear the cups apart. One cup was usually enough to get the fire started, but two or three was better. I could make fire anytime I wanted! Although I still struggled with keeping a fire going, at least I could restart it, and we would be warm that winter no matter what.

  I was over at Georgia’s house collecting her dryer lint one day when she wanted to show me her new refrigerator, which was quite lovely, but what I fell in love with were the old jars she had moved around in the whole process of getting the new fridge installed. The jars had been on top of her old fridge and I’d never noticed them before. Her new fridge was bigger and taller, so she was still figuring out how and where she was going to put back the jars.

  She had them all lined up on a table in her living room. I examined them eagerly, forever and always fascinated with old canning jars. Some of them had old dried stuff in them that might have been ten or twenty or fifty years old. She didn’t know what it was.

  I told her she better not eat that! You never knew what Georgia might do.

  The jars had the old bail wire and rubber rings, which are so adorably quaint and antiquated. They came with reusable glass lids. All you changed out was the rubber seal ring.

  Georgia showed me how they worked.

  I said, “You’re lucky you’re alive. They don’t let you can in jars like that anymore.”

  She said, “They might not approve, but I could can in anything I want to.”

  Rascal.

  I reminded her that she didn’t can anymore anyway—unless I canned with her. If she tried, I’d take those jars away from her. You know, for safekeeping.

  She reminded me that we had bad weather coming and I’d better get ready. Georgia was always on top of the weather forecast.

  Power outages, virtually unheard of in my suburban childhood and later adulthood, are more common in a state like West Virginia. The icy trees and mostly overhead power lines, combined with the rough and remote terrain of much of the state, make extended power outages an expected part of winter.

  We found, after moving to one of the most remote areas, that we seemed to always be among the last to get our power restored. It was a comfort going into that winter to know we had a generator. The next day, I woke to a poststorm Saturday morning of snow and darkness. No power.

  The world is very still when nothing is running. You forget how still it can be. No low hum from the refrigerator. No television. No central heat to kick on if the fire in the woodstove dies out.

  There was noise outside. Branches cracking under the weight of snow. Roosters crowing from roosts they refused to leave. Light thumps against the goat house floor and walls as animals rearranged themselves, nestling together to share body heat.

  The phone line was still working, so I could use the old-fashioned nonelectric phone to call the power company and report our outage. No panic. We were second-year farmers. We were smarter than first-year farmers! We had a generator. We had wood piled up, and we had a woodstove. We had food laid in for an army, much of it home preserved over the long, wonderful summer and autumn months of bounty.

  Knowing the storm was coming, I had simmered a big pot of beans the night before. I took out the pot of beans and set it on top of the woodstove to heat it up. There were still hot coals in the bed of the woodstove. I struggled a little to start a fire in the cold, cold house.

  Winter was difficult, but it was also like the final exam. Without it, how would we prove to ourselves that we had, indeed, become self-sufficient? There was a certain satisfaction in winter’s hardships. We spent our months of plenty preparing for that very moment. The moment we could stick out our tongues at winter and say, HA.

  In today’s sophisticated world, self-sufficiency is in many ways not entirely necessary. In most urban and suburban areas, you can expect power to be restored in a reasonable period of time. Even if it’s not restored quickly, you can expect the streets to be plowed so you can go across town to someone else’s house who has power, or even to the public library. You can find a restaurant with power and buy your dinner. In truly dire circumstances, there are even shelters. There’s a collective joint sufficiency to fall back on. In the most rural of places, there’s no such thing as road plows, and you can expect to be last on the priority list for power restoration. And from a remote farm, there is no going anywhere for anything.

  For some reason, there are those of us who leave the collective cocoon of public care, determined to test our grit against the challenge of individual self-sufficiency. Maybe it’s stubbornness. Maybe it’s arrogance. Maybe it’s the desire to meet and defeat challenge. Other people jump out of airplanes. Some climb sheer mountain faces. Still others race cars. It’s all about testing some deep
place inside that the comfortable, secure world today won’t make you test otherwise. For me, it was surviving winter on a remote farm. That was my airplane, my mountain, my race car.

  My test.

  At least that was what I told myself as I sat in the still, early morn dark after finding the telephone and the power company’s number by the light of candles I had made myself. I was cold, still having trouble getting things going in the woodstove. I poked at the fire, made it finally flame bright.

  And I felt like a total hero.

  We had a foot of snow. The woods around our farmhouse creaked and groaned under the wintry weight, branches, even entire trees, crashing to the ground. There wasn’t any mystery as to what had happened to the power lines. The power company said they’d have electricity back by midnight, but as the outage mounted into tens of thousands of homes, the message changed.

  By the end of the day, they were saying midnight the next day. And then the next and the next. We lost phone service eventually, too, and we didn’t have cell service at the farm. Using generator power, I was able to set a post on my blog and send my column to the newspaper, but we had to conserve gas for the generator, so using the generator for satellite Internet service was limited. Our driveway was impassably covered, as was the road—which was also blocked by numerous fallen trees. 52, Weston, Morgan, and I were snowed in. There was no way out. And I was on vacation! I couldn’t work on my website every day as usual.

  I puttered around the house. I cleaned. I repacked and reorganized all the boxes of extra Christmas ornaments. I cooked. We had beans and corn bread the first day, heated on the woodstove. We were also still able to use our gas cooktop in the kitchen (lit with a match) as well as our gas grill on the back porch. We had chili and pork chops with fried potatoes, and even homemade pizza on the grill. The chickens suddenly set to work in the freezing temperatures, and we had bacon and eggs in the mornings.

  I read books. I knitted. 52 moved the generator lines around and kept wood coming into the house for the stove. Weston and Morgan played board games and cards, had fights with swimming noodles, and built snowmen.