Chickens in the Road

by Suzanne McMinn

  That evening, 52 and I went down together to feed the sheep. A sturdy little wool-baby in my arms, I tipped up on my feet and kissed him.

  I felt starry-eyed. “This is amazing,” I whispered. “Look what we made.”

  Other than chicks, the lambs were our first babies born on the farm.

  “I think the sheep made them,” he said.

  “We were involved!”

  I wanted to know if they were boys or girls. I tried to check in the headlights of his truck splaying bright against the darkened meadow.

  52 checked. Three were girls and one was a boy.

  They looked like monkeys more than lambs with their dark faces.

  “We have a monkey farm,” I said.

  “You can have a monkey farm if you want,” he said. “But I’m not getting you a monkey.”

  “You would,” I said, “if I wanted one.”

  He set down the lamb he’d been checking and pulled a little baggie of pipe tobacco out of his pocket. He looked at me over the end of his pipe as he lit the tobacco, not commenting.

  “But you’re in luck,” I said. “I don’t want a monkey.”

  I laughed, teasing him, but we both knew it was true. We’d have giraffes, elephants, and zebras if I wanted them.

  Every day, but especially on days like that one, I felt as if we could just start over—and everything between us would be wonderful again.

  We waded out through the snow one late winter Saturday for a trip to Spencer. 52 had business at the county clerk’s office, and I just wanted to get off the farm for a few hours. Between snow and mud, I wasn’t driving yet, and I liked the courthouse. There is nothing quite like small-town courthouses and small-town county clerks. They know everything and everybody, and they even remember you personally—because they remember everything and everybody.

  Charlie White, the Roane County clerk, was the cousin of our pig man and the brother of our farrier, Tim, which is not surprising because in small-town West Virginia, there are always multiple levels of connection. I did, however, often wonder what it was like when buttoned-down Charlie sat down at the Thanksgiving table with his cousin who cut pig balls and his brother who wrangled donkeys. I always had a hard time imagining the three of them together. Genteel Charlie, Randy (the pig man), who could advise you on the best way to fry up fresh-cut balls, and Tim, who was . . . Tim.

  Donkeys, at least mine, are generally calm, happy-go-lucky, cooperative creatures—unless you want them to go somewhere in particular. Then they act like mules. They love people, and get along well with most other farm animals, unless they find them specifically annoying. Like, say, a small dog. They pass their days in serene acceptance of their superiority and dignity.

  Until the farrier comes to visit. And then they don’t feel superior or dignified at all. In fact, they get a little irritated.

  Donkeys are smart animals, and they get to know their farrier. Jack had had a long relationship with Tim. He was Jack’s farrier before he came to our farm. They were old friends. Poky was still getting acquainted with Tim and getting used to the hoof-trimming routine. The first time Tim trimmed her, she wrestled him to the ground.

  He told her, “You ain’t gonna win!”

  He shouted that phrase frequently while hoof trimming.

  When he finished, we’d give him $50 and a beer. He always had his wife and little boy with him. One time, I asked him if he was going to teach his little boy to be a farrier.

  Tim said, “No way!”

  He wanted his son to be educated and get a nice job instead of making money getting kicked by horses.

  He said, “Would you like it?”

  Then, to demonstrate, I suppose, he kicked me in the shin.

  I wondered if that ever happened at the Thanksgiving table when Tim and Randy and Charlie sat down.

  Frequently, it seemed, Tim changed his phone number for reasons I never understood. When that happened, I’d call the courthouse and tell Charlie I needed to get hold of his brother. Charlie would call their mother, because he couldn’t keep up with his brother’s phone numbers either, and then eventually Tim would call me to make an appointment.

  With my long family history in the county, I’d been to the courthouse often to look up old wills and deeds, out of curiosity. I loved looking at old hand-scripted documents. They wrote so prettily back then. While 52 was taking care of his business, Charlie and I got to talking about the deterioration in handwriting in America. We decided, with absolutely no scientific studies to back us up, that handwriting deteriorated after the invention of the typewriter and was then completely destroyed by the computer. Charlie told me that he had a really old manual typewriter in the back room where they kept the documents.

  Oh my! Now you’re talking. Something for me to inspect. I leaped out of my seat, whipped my camera out of my purse, and headed toward the document room on my own, which left Charlie with no real option but to follow. (I don’t think he minded.)

  I hadn’t seen an old manual typewriter in a long time. This was the kind of typewriter my father had. I can remember typing up stories on it when I was a child. As a little girl, I had a dollhouse and lots of tiny glass animals. They lived in the dollhouse instead of doll people. They had very complicated, soap operaish lives. I wrote stories and stories and stories about my glass animals. The king was a little glass bear. The queen was a cat. The cat, by the way, was bigger than the bear. (I can’t explain that. Don’t make me.) I had this bizarre urge to hug that old typewriter. It brought back all sorts of sentimental memories.

  I wondered if kids today would know what to do with that typewriter? Most have probably never even heard of a carriage return.

  And then I said, “I must see the pretty handwriting!” Not that I hadn’t seen it before, but I was inspired to gaze upon it again. To marvel at the elegant hand-scripting of our forebears, who would have been as confounded as teenagers today by that gorgeous old manual typewriter. They didn’t need no stinkin’ typewriter. They knew how to write by hand. Life was slower, and people took their time.

  Charlie pulled out one of the oldest books in the courthouse for me. He pointed out how they used every bit of the paper back then, right up to the edges. The frugality of our ancestors, in every little way, is a constant wonder when looking back at them from today’s world.

  Encouraged by my enthusiasm for the precious old books, Charlie showed me his favorite oddity. In 1863, West Virginia seceded from Virginia and became a separate state, joining the Union in the Civil War. (Bit of trivia: West Virginia is the only state that was formed because of the Civil War.) There were never very many slaves in this area compared to other parts of the South. (Situated below the Mason-Dixon line, West Virginia is generally considered part of the South, and pre–Civil War, of course, was part of the state of Virginia.) This isn’t really plantation country, and much of what became West Virginia was populated by poor farmers trying to scratch out a living in the mountains. There were some individuals, however, who could afford slaves. Charlie showed me a bill of sale, from 1857, documenting the transfer of two slaves in what was then Roane County, Virginia. One was a twenty-two-year-old man. His name was Ben. There was also a girl, “say nine months” as the bill of sale put it.

  They were sold together for $1,000. That was a lot of money in 1857.

  There was something quite surreal about touching the original, ink-drawn pages of a transaction in human beings.

  Ben and that baby girl weren’t slaves for long. They soon found themselves living in a free state. I’d love to know what became of that little girl. But courthouse records never tell the whole story, only parts, glimpses of lives that are difficult to imagine today.

  Before going back to the farm, we stopped in at the Salvation Army thrift store across the street. Thrift stores are a good thing, but all I could think about that day was how frugal our ancestors were—down to writing to the edges of the paper—while we are so wasteful today. A thrift store is filled with the cas
t-off excess of our not-so-frugal modern society. I wanted to be a more frugal person, living as self-sustainable a lifestyle as possible.

  I knew a cow would be the epitome of self-sustainability—if I could actually milk it—and my birthday was coming.

  Chapter 12

  We drove across the West Virginia/Ohio border to a farm where there were four cows for sale—a Brown Swiss bull and three Jersey cows. Two of the Jerseys were mature milkers, and one was still a heifer. I was there to pick from the girls.

  If 52 had any reservations about getting a cow, he didn’t say so.

  “What about hay?” I asked as we crossed the river into Ohio. “How much hay do cows need a year?”

  I was worried about the cost of a cow, whether we could afford to keep one. Buying a cow was one thing. Taking care of one was another. I’d already discovered when we’d hastily acquired sheep that the amount of pasture we had available at Stringtown Rising was seriously deficient. Now we were going to add a cow?

  “A hundred bales a winter for one cow,” he told me.

  We’d only needed around two hundred bales for all our donkeys, sheep, and goats combined the previous winter. We didn’t have any place to store even that much hay.

  “Can we afford that? What about feed? How much pasture does a cow need? I don’t have a milk stand! What if I can’t milk her?”

  “Do you want a cow?”

  We were probably within thirty miles of the farm with the cows for sale. I’d waited till now to panic?

  “Yes.”

  “Happy birthday.”

  It was a ridiculous conversation anyway. We both knew we were going to get a cow.

  The gesture itself was romantic. 52 often gifted me with things that were out of the norm, not something you’d find in a magazine gift guide. An elderberry bush. A vintage KitchenAid stand mixer. A box of day-old goslings. He was thoughtful at keying in on just the things I wanted but wouldn’t buy for myself.

  In between those gestures, his behavior toward me seemed to be growing increasingly angry and sometimes irrational. I was his second chance, just as he was mine. He told me he wanted our relationship to work, but he wouldn’t discuss our problems.

  He pressured me to make more money, but he blew up at me about the time I spent working. I kept hoping he’d be less stressed if I could take the financial pressure off, so I continued to work hard to grow my website. We were still on shaky financial ground from building the house.

  Taking on the responsibility of a cow wouldn’t help with the financial pressure, but it was almost like a couple in trouble deciding to have a baby. We threw ourselves in headfirst, off on another adventure in self-sustainable living. Moments like these brought us together.

  And eventually pulled us apart, but we weren’t good at looking ahead.

  We arrived at the farm to look over the cows. I thought the heifer was gorgeous, but she’d never been pregnant, never been milked. Probably not the best choice for an inexperienced person who’d never had a cow before. Or even spent much time up close to one. I didn’t need a cow that required training. What if she was a kicker? And she wasn’t even in milk, of course.

  The younger mature Jersey was pretty, too. I thought she might be just right except she didn’t have a good udder. Not that I would know, but the man selling the cows pointed it out.

  And then there was the old cow. She was priced at a bargain.

  She was a career girl with a good udder, but she wasn’t a beauty queen like the others. She looked rode hard and put up wet. She’d been worked in a dairy operation. She was a professional cow. One of us had to know what we were doing, and it wasn’t going to be me, so she seemed like the best choice despite the fact that she was, well, almost ugly. I’d never seen a more bony cow in my life. Add to that, she had a limp.

  I reached under and gave her a quick test. She just stood there, placidly staring back at me as milk squirted from her long teats, relieving my lingering not-so-good feelings since my experience milking Clover. I looked up at 52.

  “I like this one,” I said.

  So did he. She was the cheapest one, at $500.

  She’d been with the Brown Swiss bull for four months, so she might be bred.

  The man said, “I can’t feel a calf when I punch her, though, so she might not be.”

  He showed me how he punched her to feel for a calf. I tried punching her. It was a complete mystery to me how anyone could tell if there was a calf in there or not. And she was so skinny, I was afraid of killing her by punching her.

  “If she’s not bred,” the man said, “just milk her as long as she has milk, then she’ll make good hamburger.”

  I looked into those humongous placid cow eyes. She needed me. She was old, ugly, bony, and she had a limp. Without me, she’d be hamburger.

  A week later, we went back to get her.

  We backed the truck up to a big pile of gravel, and they led my new cow up the pile, using the feed to entice her to move, and then onto the truck. The man selling the cow had a bunch of kids, and the whole family got involved with the pushing and shoving.

  I wondered, if it took half a dozen people to shove her on, how were we going to get her off? I asked them if they wanted to come to West Virginia with us. They said no. And right about then they leaped into action as a family again, chasing down a calf that made a break for it while we were all paying attention to putting the cow on the truck.

  It’s always entertaining when a farm animal gets out—if it’s not yours.

  I helped block the calf from going on down the road and herded her to the gate. They thanked me for helping. I said, “No big deal. I herded a ram this morning before I got here.” Sentences like that made me feel like a farmer. Our sheep were constantly escaping and wandering down the road.

  Once we got back to our farm, 52 backed the truck up to the creek bank. We got the cow turned around inside the truck, and it only took a little pulling to encourage her to come right off. She walked around our meadow bottom like a giant in Lilliput. I started milking her the next morning.

  Her previous owners had been getting up to two gallons a milking from her, sometimes a gallon and a half, and they had her trained to milk once a day. I’d never heard of milking a cow once a day, but I liked it. I brought home three-quarters of a gallon the first time. I stared and stared at the milk in my refrigerator. And took it out and examined it. And put it back. And took it out. And photographed it like it was artwork.

  My cow and I, we made that. I named her Beulah Petunia and became besotted with her.

  Morgan declared she was having nothing to do with the fresh cow milk. I told her I wasn’t buying any more milk from the store, so she’d have to drink water for the rest of her life. She insisted she would buy her own milk. Of course, she had no way to get to the store, and she liked milk. She came home from school the next day and declared, “I’m drinking this milk!” And filled up a big tall glass and drank it down.

  It was typical of her short resistance to farm life. She’d say no to anything new and different, then quickly jump in. The boys were older when we moved to the country, and their resistance usually lasted a little while longer, though Ross had eventually embraced West Virginia and would try anything with bravado and move on as if he’d been doing it all his life. Between work and his girlfriend, he’d never been much involved with the farm, but he helped out with anything I asked of him. His boot camp ship date was nearing, and when he came home from Texas, he didn’t think twice about drinking my fresh milk.

  Weston was the most resistant to farm living, and it was a bone of contention between 52 and me that I wouldn’t push Weston to take on more chores around the farm. It had been my choice to move to a farm, and I didn’t see the kids as laborers in fulfilling my dream. I encouraged 52 to develop more of a relationship with Weston so that Weston might enjoy doing projects with him, but he said Weston didn’t like him and he wasn’t going to ask him to do anything.

  “Weston is a chi
ld and you’re an adult,” I pointed out. “You have to take the lead.” This got me nowhere, and the sense that he and I, and I and the kids, were two families living in the same house grew.

  I started out milking Beulah Petunia inside a sheep shelter in the meadow bottom. The first couple of days, I just had her tied to a post in the shelter. That didn’t work very well because she could move around quite a bit. Side to side. Back and forth. Once she’d run out of her feed, she’d get even more restless. I couldn’t blame her. I wasn’t an experienced milkmaid, and it took me forever to hand-milk her. Within a few days, 52 had built a stanchion with a headlock inside the shelter, which was similar to a goat milk stand except the cow walked into it rather than climbing up on a stand. A feed bin at the far end encouraged the cow to stroll right in, put her head between the boards, and start eating. The two boards were then pushed in place to hold the neck, with a pin to lock them until the milking was done. Beulah Petunia couldn’t get her head out of the headlock until I released her, though one day she did walk off with the entire milk stand still locked around her neck.

  After that episode, 52 secured the stand to the posts of the shelter.

  Since I milked her in the meadow bottom, I’d take the milk back to the car where I’d sit on an overturned bucket in the middle of the dirt road and pour it into quart jars to take up to the house. I didn’t have a tight-fitting lid for my make-do milk pail and unless I poured it into jars with screw-on lids, I’d spill the milk lurching up our rocky driveway in my vehicle. Back in my kitchen, I’d filter it and pour it into an oversized bowl in the fridge to set the cream.

  It was a production, but nothing I’d done on a farm to that point—hatching chicks, collecting eggs, raising and milking goats, raising and chasing sheep—had made that primal connection for me with farming that a cow did. A cow was an experience—work and hardship and challenge. Everything I’d been looking for when I’d come to the country.

  My life had been sheltered, spoiled, too easy. When I came to the country, I’d been looking for some kind of connection with life that was visceral, purposeful, even sometimes dirty, but most especially difficult. I’d left my box behind, but I was still trying to find out who I was outside of it. I felt weak for all the years I’d lived up to everyone else’s expectations. I set new expectations for myself, many of them difficult, looking for some intangible sense of strength.