Chickens in the Road

by Suzanne McMinn

  I was driven by that deep-seated need to test myself—in a situation that was both harsh and quaint. A cow was a perfect vehicle to that end.

  In the first few weeks, the physical exhaustion of milking, and handling all the milk, nearly beat me into the ground. It took me an hour and a half the first day just to get three-quarters of a gallon. Two weeks later, I looked up one day to realize I was milking twice that amount in a third of the time.

  My fingers and arms and back were stronger. I had more stamina.

  I learned to make butter from heavy cream using a quart jar to shake the cream until it thickened. 52 often got involved. He’d shake the jar, then I’d finish up with washing the butter and pressing it out. We had buttermilk biscuits and buttermilk pancakes. I’d bake fresh bread and bring him a warm slice with a pat of the newly made butter.

  Difficulties I’d had before with making cheese were forgotten as I started making cheese left and right, improving as I gained experience. I experimented with all sorts of different hard and soft cheeses.

  My milk pitchers were overflowing. I was feeding my family out of that skinny, limping, ugly cow. I loved her and that wonderful spring. We’d been at Stringtown Rising for two years. Our farm finally seemed to make sense and have purpose. We had chickens laying eggs, a cow providing all our dairy, and lambs bouncing around our meadow bottom. The ramps I’d planted the first year were coming up on our hillside for the second year in a row, and they were spreading. We had fruit trees, berry bushes, and grapevines, and our livestock were flourishing. The farm was bursting with life.

  But spring also meant flooding rains, and some days, it was almost like winter again and I was stuck. The rain would come in pouring blasts. The goats would hide in their shelter. The chickens would hide in their coop. The dogs slept on the porch. And I’d be scared to drive because of the deep mud and high water.

  Georgia called me one stormy afternoon to tell me the water was up to the trees behind her house.

  “You better not go anywhere!” she ordered. She worried about anything and everything and called me on a regular basis to make sure I wasn’t getting into trouble.

  “I have kids to pick up from the bus!” Weston and Morgan would be getting off the bus at the Slanted Little House, where I picked them up every day since the school bus didn’t come down our road.

  I headed down my driveway. I could see trouble before I was all the way down. The river was flooded, rushing wildly, out of its banks.

  There was water running down the road.

  The bridge over the creek on our driveway was stopped up with branches and brush and a tire that had washed down the creek from who knows where.

  The water was flooding out over the driveway and into the road and part of the sheep’s field. The creek running alongside the sheep’s field was full to the banks.

  I rolled down my window to stare at the creek, checking the crossing in the field. The water was loud, high and running hard.

  The first creek in the road was the deepest, and it was full and running fast, too. I chickened out, backing up to a place where I could turn around and go home.

  I called Georgia and made her day by telling her she was right. The kids would have to spend the night at my cousin’s house, and I wasn’t going anywhere. Even if the water was down enough in a few hours for 52 to make it home, he wouldn’t bring the kids, not when the water was high. If it rained again overnight, they would miss school the next day if they came home, so it was safer for them to stay put in civilization.

  I missed my kids the most on those unexpected days when they couldn’t come home. School was almost out, and Weston and Morgan would be leaving for summer in Texas with their dad. Ross would be leaving soon for boot camp.

  I wasn’t one of those mothers who had cried at the kindergarten door. I was one of those mothers who skipped back out to the parking lot full of plans for what I could do all day now that the kids were at school. Not that I didn’t love them, but I had stuff to do!

  It was different watching them grow up and leave the nest.

  The next week, I delivered Ross to the navy recruitment office in Charleston. He packed up his room, leaving everything, even his beloved cell phone. He went with nothing but the clothes on his back and his wallet. His clothes would be taken from him and either donated or sent home at his expense. He wore clothes he didn’t care about and told them to donate them. He walked in the door of the recruitment building, made a sharp turn, saluted, and said, “First Recruit Ross McMinn, reporting for duty.” They sat him down and had him sign a bunch of papers. I stood, watching him, feeling suddenly superfluous as his mother. I kissed him good-bye and cried, leaving before I could embarrass him too badly.

  I wrote him a letter every single day. I didn’t expect to get many letters back, but he surprised me.

  I saved all his letters. Carried them around in my purse. Read them over and over, cherishing my favorite parts and all the fascinating details of the mysterious life behind boot camp walls.

  “The day I got here,” Ross wrote me, “we came in around 2100 and they yelled and screamed and cussed us out all night. We were all pretty much shell-shocked. The way they acted is kinda funny to me now. When we finally got to the compartment, it was 0430. They let us sleep for 5 minutes then got us up again.”

  I got so many shots, I lost count. I couldn’t sit down for three days after the butt shot.

  I wish I could take a shower by myself for more than 2 minutes, have my cell phone, sleep in, have my truck, eat McDonald’s, and get a day off. I miss you.

  Boot camp is stressful. It’s not like on TV. I mean it is, but on TV all they do is work out and do drills and train. They don’t show you that you have to take tests and prepare for inspections. We have to make our own time to study, like cutting into our 6 hours of sleep and eating with one hand and holding our book in the other. We get from 0700 to 1300 on Sundays to do what we want, but that’s also the only time we have to shine our boots and iron our clothes. I’ve been sneaking in writing after “Taps.”

  We lost one guy because he punched another recruit. Two guys quit and one guy from the division across the hall deserted, just ran away in the middle of the night.

  I can now make a flotation device out of a set of coveralls while I’m in the water and start wearing them in about 3 seconds.

  I hurt my foot but I haven’t told anyone because I’ll miss training, so during the PFA I did 75 pushups in 2 minutes (only needed 46), 79 sit-ups (only needed like 50) then I ran a mile and a half on one foot in 12:40.

  Mail call is the most exciting part of my day.

  We just got told at 1400 we are all gonna get beat because one of the guys decided to sneak a cookie into his rack and got caught so now we all gotta pay for it. If we are lucky, they’ll let us watch fireworks today, but the way this day has started, I doubt it.

  His next letter read:

  We didn’t get to watch fireworks yesterday. We just marched.

  And then:

  I’ve decided I hate marching.

  He made me feel like a good mother for all my daily writing.

  We’ve all been talking about back home. Everybody’s homesick. We have so much to study, we always have a book in our hands. Keep writing me. I’m always excited about mail. Most of the guys don’t get any and they’re always jealous.

  I just did the math to see how much they’re paying me since I’m on the clock 24 hours a day, and it’s roughly $1.80 per hour.

  Everybody here is already just counting the days to graduation.

  The dates on his letters were always way, way behind from when I received them. When he left for boot camp, I promised him that I would come to his graduation. In the first few weeks he was there, my mother decided she would fly from Texas to meet me there and we’d attend his graduation together. She was eighty-one and not in very good health, but she was determined to make the trip. I wrote Ross that his grandmother would be coming, along with me and the kids.<
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  Weston and Morgan were in Texas for the summer by then, and 52 and I were having our usual summer to ourselves. Our neighbor across the river, Frank, was letting us fence the five acres adjoining our farm that he owned on our side of the river for more pasture for the sheep. One of 52’s projects that summer was getting the new field ready. One lazy mid-July evening when I’d finished all my work and had dinner simmering on the stove, I walked down to the bottom to hang out with him. I walked along the riverbank taking pictures, then sat on the tractor talking to him while he strung electric fence wire.

  He was in a good mood, which was the best time to talk to him because then he didn’t find me so annoying. The oddest thing about our relationship at this point was that we hadn’t been intimate since the previous fall. We shared the same bedroom, but we were like ships passing in the night. I kept farmer hours, up as early as five and to bed before ten, often by nine. On weekends, he didn’t get up till nine, and any day, he didn’t go to bed—or even come into the house—until after midnight.

  I wasn’t sure what to think about our lack of physical intimacy, but whenever we got along and had an enjoyable evening, I thought we could just start over again and everything would be all right. The tirades would disappear and we’d go back to being lovers and best friends. The old 52 was back!

  “Do you think you could come to bed early tonight?” I asked him.

  He gave a shrug and a half smile. “Maybe.”

  I don’t know what time he came to bed, but it was long after I did. The phone rang in the middle of the night.

  It was Morgan calling me from Texas.

  The phone had woken 52, too. He asked me if anything was wrong.

  I said, “My mother is in the hospital. She had a seizure or stroke or something, I don’t know.” My voice broke. “She’s brain-dead.”

  He was silent for a long beat then he said, “I’m sorry,” and rolled back over to sleep again.

  Chapter 13

  Whether or not to tell Ross that his grandmother had died was one of the most difficult decisions of my life. I contacted his recruiter to understand the options and found that if I asked that Ross be told about his grandmother, there was no guarantee he would be allowed to leave for the funeral. Usually, leave was only granted for the death of an immediate family member, and grandparents weren’t considered immediate family by the military.

  Boot camp was stressful enough, and to find out that his grandmother had died in the middle of it would be even more stressful for Ross, especially if he wasn’t allowed to leave for the funeral. Withholding the information was a painful choice, too.

  I wrote Ross and told him that his grandmother wouldn’t be able to come to his graduation, after all. I didn’t tell him that she’d died. I borrowed a thousand dollars from my cousin and flew to Texas for her funeral.

  My mother and I had had a difficult relationship in her last several years. My parents had had a hard time accepting my divorce and were befuddled by my adoration of farm life. But through it all, my mother remained a sweet mother, always trying her best even when she didn’t know what to do or say. All my life, she had been my biggest fan. She never said a critical word to me, no matter what.

  She loved romance novels and gave me my first romance book to read. After I became a published romance novelist, I took her with me to book signings and Romance Writers of America conferences and Harlequin parties. Nora Roberts was one of her favorite authors, and I enjoyed being able to introduce her to Nora at a Harlequin party in Dallas one year.

  She didn’t really know how to use a computer, but she got one so she could see my blog every day. She could hardly figure out how to send an e-mail (and frequently sent me blank e-mails or e-mails cut off in the middle of a sentence because she couldn’t remember where to click), but she knew how to get to my website. Every day.

  Some of my most vivid memories of her from childhood were how she would wiggle her hips with a natural exuberance about herself that she couldn’t contain. Even in church. She’d wiggle right down the aisle. She loved jewelry and makeup and fashion, and most of all, she enjoyed keeping herself fit and looking good. She was born Norma Jean Prescott on a dust-bowl farm in Depression-era Oklahoma, but she embraced modern city life with both arms in her identity as a successful preacher’s wife. She loved to entertain, and she enjoyed fine things without placing them above what was real. She had taste and a soft heart.

  My mother was sixteen when she met my father on a double date. They weren’t dating each other. Pretty soon, though, they were. I suspect there was some hip wiggling involved. My father was stationed at a base in Oklahoma following his missions in World War II, and that’s how a farm boy from West Virginia met a farm girl in Oklahoma. They eloped when she was still sixteen, and he took her away from the flatlands to the hills of West Virginia where she learned to make Grandmother Bread from my father’s mother—and one day taught it to me. I was her youngest child, and her favorite. Or so she always told me. And if she ever told anyone different, I didn’t want to hear about it.

  Most of all, she loved her grandchildren. Morgan was her only granddaughter, and she enjoyed showering her with girly things and taking her to lunch and shopping and the beauty salon. When Morgan was eighteen months old, my mother commissioned a porcelain doll made in Morgan’s image and dressed it in one of Morgan’s baby dresses. She loved all her many grandsons just as much, but she only had one granddaughter and they had an extraordinarily close relationship. Even after we moved away from Texas, Morgan continued to spend a great deal of time with her every summer. Morgan was with her when she was taken to the hospital, and she was heartbroken at the funeral, bursting into sobs.

  Usually, Weston and Morgan would have stayed a few more weeks in Texas before coming home, but after the funeral, they made the trip back with me.

  I was glad to get home to West Virginia and its lush green woods, enfolding hills, gurgling streams, and simple comforts. It was where I belonged.

  I’d missed 52, too, and he said he’d missed me.

  As usual, I thought we were on the verge of everything being perfectly fantastic, but within a few days, I was proved wrong.

  My financial prospects had recently improved. I’d had to borrow money from my cousin to make the unexpected trip for my mother’s funeral, but in the near future, I expected to see an earnings increase. I’d signed with a new advertising network to handle the advertising on my website, and I had good reason to expect a rise in income. I didn’t think I was about to be rich, but I was pretty sure I would soon be able to pay my cousin back, keep up with bills more comfortably, and hopefully take some pressure off 52 by taking over some of the farm bills completely.

  As soon as I got home from my trip with the kids, 52 started complaining about the electric bill again, set off every time they left on a light or ran the dryer too long.

  “As soon as I can, I’ll take over the electric bill,” I told him.

  “Hurry up,” he said. “You need to pay more of the bills.”

  “I’m paying my half of the bills, and as soon as I can, I’ll pay more than half.” I had kids living in the house and he didn’t, so I didn’t mind paying more than half. When we’d moved in, we’d agreed to split everything fifty-fifty, but I’d realized a long time before that he resented that arrangement. I’d decided early on that as soon as I could afford to pay more, I would.

  “You’ve never paid half,” he said.

  I blinked. “I’ve paid half every month except for a few months after the economy dived and I had almost no income,” I reminded him. I didn’t remind him of the time he hadn’t paid his share at all. I didn’t like to ever bring up the events surrounding the time I told him to leave the farm. What I’d been upset about that time wasn’t so much that he hadn’t made his deposit to the account but that he hadn’t been up front with me about it. He was secretive about money in general, which baffled me on a regular basis. I told him how much money I was making every month, and t
he times I’d been short, I’d told him in advance.

  I’d put more money into the farm in the beginning because I had a settlement from my divorce, and I’d taken out more personal credit to finish the house because home improvement stores were willing to give more credit to me than they were to him. My income fluctuated, so I’d told him at the time that the up-front cash I had to put into the farm between my divorce settlement and the extra credit debt was to make up for times I might be short month to month, but he quickly dismissed the money I’d put in up front as if it had never happened. But he’d also helped me in several ways, for which I was grateful. He’d helped me pay for my website hosting when my traffic grew faster than the income to support it, and he’d helped me buy a new computer. He often gave me unexpected or generous gifts (like a cow). Overall, I thought we were pretty even, but I didn’t really care. I just wanted us to be happy, and I was willing to pay for it if that was what it took.

  “You’ve never paid half,” he repeated.

  I stared at him, dumbfounded as to why he would say that I hadn’t been contributing my share. I’d paid half every month without fail for a long time. In fact, I paid it in a single check that I wrote directly to him once a month, so how could he deny it? He was still handling the bills for the farm, so I wrote one check to him and he paid the bills.