Chickens in the Road

by Suzanne McMinn

“What are you doing?” I asked. “Why would you even try to say that? All I have to do is get out my checkbook to show you that’s incorrect.”

  “Why don’t you do that? Prove you’re right. You have to be right and I have to be wrong.”

  “I am right!” I didn’t usually have any patience for his right/wrong thing, but this time, it mattered. I cared, deeply, about being financially self-supporting. “And if you’ll just let me, I’ll pay more than half as soon as I can. I’m starting to make more money. You know that. I thought that would make you happy! I told you all along that I was going to make a success of my business and then everything would be okay. This is what I’ve been working for—for us!”

  “You think I’m supposed to be happy because your business is successful?”

  “Yes!”

  “Well,” he said, “I’m not.”

  We were sitting on the porch. It was getting dark. Dinner was in the oven. The chickens needed to be put up. Beulah Petunia needed her evening feed. The goats were bleating, hungry too.

  I didn’t care about any of it at the moment. 52 sat in his rocking chair on the porch puffing at his pipe, not looking at me.

  “Why? Why would you not be happy that my business is successful?”

  He jerked his gaze to me suddenly. “How do you think that makes me feel? Do you think I don’t feel inferior to you?”

  “You feel inferior to me?” All I could do was stupidly repeat what he’d said. I was floored. He’d told me that he had always felt insecure in general, all his life, but the idea that he would feel inferior to me, that somehow I could make him feel that way, hurt.

  “Your readers just love you,” he said. “They love you! Everybody loves you. Why wouldn’t I feel inferior?”

  “My readers don’t even know me personally,” I said, trying to reason with him. “Not really. They love my work, not me, and that’s a good thing. That’s how I make money, by people liking what I write. I’m a writer. If people don’t like what I write, I can’t make a living.” I stared at him. “Are you”—I couldn’t believe it— “jealous?”

  “Yes, I’m jealous.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that—or what to do about it. I was shocked that he’d admitted it.

  “I’m not going to fail so you can feel better about yourself.”

  “As soon as you make enough money, you’re going to tell me to leave,” he said. “You’ll hire people to do everything I do. You won’t need me anymore.”

  “That’s insulting.”

  “It’s true. That’s what you want. It’s what you’re planning.”

  “It’s not, but I’m not the one who can convince you of that,” I told him. “You have to convince yourself.”

  The next day, I sent him a list from my bank records of how much I’d contributed to the farm bills every month since we’d moved to the farm. It was the only objective issue, and the only one I could solve with factual evidence.

  The rest was an emotional morass, and I was lost.

  “You’re pushing me away,” I told him in an e-mail. “Is that what you want?”

  He came home from work and hugged me, telling me that he loved me. I knew that everything would be fine again. Until the next time.

  My relationship with my cow was much simpler, and I loved milking. A cow is a teacher of patience, and I thought that was what 52 needed, my patience. I was, generally, an impatient person. 52 had milked her while I was in Texas. I was glad to be back to it. Milking a cow is a meditative event. It was completely unlike my experience fighting with Clover.

  I learned to sit still long enough in the mornings to listen to the birds—because I was sitting at my cow’s udder and couldn’t go anywhere else. I learned every movement of her tail and her hooves and her head as I grew accustomed to predicting her movements in protecting my milk bucket. I was one with a cow. The cow was in no hurry, which meant neither could I be. When I’d moved to West Virginia, I didn’t even know the difference between a bale of straw and a bale of hay. Now I was milking a cow. I was drunk on farm life. I could have milk, cheese, butter, and cream even if I couldn’t get to the store. I felt empowered by my self-sufficiency. I was also really exhausted.

  I got an idea that I could help the Ornery Angel—and give myself a day or two a week off at the same time. One day when I came across her on the road going in the opposite direction, I rolled down my window and said, “Do you know how to milk a cow?”

  This wasn’t a serious question because of course she knew how to milk a cow.

  She said, “No, I’ve never milked a cow.”

  I was shocked because I had assumed she was the epitome of the wise, tough country woman who knew how to do everything. She did, however, want to learn to milk a cow and take home free milk, so she came over the next morning. She talked about her kids, her husband, her parents, and her job “sitting” with elderly people, and I taught her how to milk a cow and make butter.

  Then someone told me that sharing milk from a family cow was illegal in West Virginia, and I was never able to let her milk again. We weren’t quite friends, but we’d come a long way (or at least I had). We were neighborly, and she talked to me like I was an accepted (or at least tolerated) member of our little rural community. She called or came up when the lambs were out to let me know they were in the road, which happened frequently, and her daughters came up on a regular basis to visit Morgan or, when school was in session, to sell me whatever the latest thing was they were selling at school.

  One day they walked in when I was fixing dinner.

  The oldest girl was a couple of years younger than Morgan. She said, “What are you cooking?”

  I said, “Fried chicken.”

  She said, “Which one and what did it do?”

  It took me a few seconds to get that.

  “It’s not one of my chickens!” I told her. “It’s chicken from the store!”

  “Oh,” she said. “That’s always when my mom fries chicken. One of them makes her mad and then that’s what we have for dinner.”

  Every time I felt like I’d gone real country, something or someone reminded me that I was really only scratching the surface.

  One time, a deer fell over dead outside the Ornery Angel’s trailer. She thought something was wrong with it, or I’m sure she would have fixed it for supper. We came across her driving out the road with the dead deer in her truck, looking for a better eternal resting spot for it than her yard. It was the type of gruesome activity she’d take on by herself, which would impress me because if even a chicken fell over dead in the chicken house, I’d wait for 52 to come home to dispose of it. The Ornery Angel was like an alien from another planet, and I always wished I could be more like her. I could milk a cow, but I was still nowhere near as self-reliant and tough as she.

  I wasn’t sure I’d be able to keep milking my cow, though. By this point, I was becoming very concerned as to whether or not Beulah Petunia had been bred when we brought her home from Ohio.

  Some months previous, a veterinarian from the USDA had come out to our farm to enroll our livestock in the federal scrapie program. Scrapie is a fatal degenerative disease in sheep, and (more rarely) goats, which is evidenced by signs such as excessive rubbing and scratching, lack of coordination, and tremors. It’s a disease of the central nervous system. The federal government operates a program to identify and track sheep and goats through assigning flock or herd numbers to individual farmers and providing free genetic testing. Dr. Casto, the USDA vet, became quite interested when he found out about our animals as we had such unusual breeds. He was particularly interested in our Jacob sheep and Fainting goats. Often, they just assign a flock and/or herd number over the phone, but he said, “I want to come out and see those critters.” He was generous with his time and expertise and gave us a free examination of all the sheep and goats.

  Around the time I was becoming insatiably curious as to whether or not Beulah Petunia was in the family way, Dr. Casto made a follow-up
visit to test more of our sheep.

  I couldn’t let him leave without saying, “Do you know how to tell if a cow is pregnant?”

  He laughed and said, of course, he did, but he didn’t have any long gloves with him, sorry! (He didn’t look sorry.)

  His assistant said, “I have some in my truck!”

  Dr. Casto told his assistant he was fired!

  Poor Dr. Casto. He wasn’t even getting paid for this.

  His assistant went back to his truck for the gloves while I raced off to corral my cow. The most common method for determining whether or not a cow is pregnant is called rectal palpation. This explains the shoulder-length gloves.

  I locked Beulah Petunia into her milk stand while Dr. Casto put on the gloves. Holding her tail out of the way with one hand, he went in with the other. And in. And in. And pulled out some fecal matter to get it out of the way.

  And then he’d had all he could take and he taught his assistant a lesson for bringing those gloves with him. Dr. Casto told him to get another pair.

  “I haven’t done this in a long time,” Dr. Casto said. “You do it.”

  His assistant got behind Beulah Petunia and went in.

  He looked back at me with as much of a grin as a man can have who has his entire arm inside of a cow.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “There’s a calf in there.”

  When Beulah Petunia was due was another question. They could only guess. We’d gotten her in April, and she’d been with the bull for four months at that time. Cows are pregnant for nine months. It was late summer, and she could be due any day for all we knew. Ross’s boot camp graduation was coming up. I’d be gone for a week, so either 52 would have to milk her again for me or I could go ahead and dry her off. Cows should be dried off a month or two before they give birth in order to give their bodies a chance to refortify before calving and starting the milking cycle all over again. I decided to dry her off before I left, but I had the faucet on and no idea how to turn it off.

  I took Georgia to visit her sister and brother for lunch one day. Her brother Nelson used to milk five cows every day before he went to school, and he’d worked with cows all his life.

  ME: I don’t know how to get my cow dried off.

  NELSON: Stop milking her.

  ME: But I’m worried she’ll get sick.

  NELSON: Stop milking her.

  ME: But don’t I have to—

  NELSON: Stop milking her.

  ME: But—

  NELSON: Stop milking her.

  It could be that I made everything too complicated.

  I went home and stopped milking Beulah Petunia, but I still drove down to the meadow bottom every day to check on her. One morning, she wasn’t there and I found a section of fence down. I contemplated panicking.

  What do you do if your cow is missing? Who do you call? Do you drive up and down the road looking for your cow? What if you don’t find it on the road? Do you put up flyers in the local stores? Do you call the sheriff? “Hello, I want to report a missing cow.”

  If I were Lonnie, the old farmer who cut my cousin’s hay, I might go back to the house, watch a couple TV shows, and wait for the cow to show up on her own. But I didn’t have a couple hundred cows like Lonnie. I had one cow, and she was pregnant. We weren’t sure exactly when she was due to deliver, but it was soon.

  Our farm was hilly and surrounded by more hills and thick woods. Beulah Petunia wasn’t that agile. She spent most of her spare time sitting on the creek bank chewing her cud. How much ambition could she have to go anywhere? I called for her just like when I was going to milk her.

  I heard something in the woods.

  It was just a chicken, scratching in the underbrush on the hill.

  I was never going to see my cow again. I was ready to throw myself on the ground and sob. If I could find a spot that didn’t have any cow, sheep, or donkey doo-doo.

  Then I heard something else . . . Something . . . that was not a chicken.

  Beulah Petunia!

  She stood between trees on an old logging track that ran along the far side of the creek outside the fence line, up against our hillside. Sort of like a child who runs away and only goes to the backyard.

  I snapped the lead on her halter and pushed, pulled, and dragged her back, moving her into another field and shutting the gate on the field with the damaged fence.

  No sooner did I get back to the house and sit down on the porch to relax after all that pushing, pulling, dragging, and panicking than I heard something suspiciously like a baby goat in the goat yard. Clover had recently delivered twins, and she and her babies were supposed to be confined to a pen.

  I ran down the porch steps, into the goat yard, and tackled the baby. Then I fought off four goats and two donkeys who wanted to come into the goat pen with me when I put it back. I sat down on the porch again and waited for the next disaster. I didn’t have to wait long. We’d acquired guineas and ducks by then and one of the guineas had gotten into the garden. It was running back and forth, desperately, because it couldn’t find the gate to get back out.

  Minor animal “emergencies” were par for the course. Most were of the “Three Stooges” variety, but farming can be a dangerous occupation, and it’s even more dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing. 52 had grown up in town, but he had some previous farm experience from a few years when he and his former wife had lived on a farm. They hadn’t developed their farm to the extent that we had at Stringtown Rising with so many different kinds of animals, but he had more experience than me. I had no experience at all.

  We went down to the meadow bottom one night to move the sheep. We planned to move them to the next field over and shut the gate between the fields. 52 worked in the city, so often it would be late in the evening when we did things that required both of us on a weekday. I had a can of feed and I went into the field while 52 stayed at the first gate, where he would give them feed and keep them there while I had time to get to the second. I was to take the can of feed through the field to the next gate and lure the sheep after me once I had it open. I could never remember later why we were doing it exactly this way since there were about ten thousand things wrong with this plan, but it was probably my idea.

  We’d driven down to the meadow bottom in his little car. His truck was in the shop. His headlights were beamed on the first gate. By the time I got into the middle of the field, I was walking in pitch black. I had a sense of the general direction of the other gate, and I just kept walking. I heard the thunder of sheep behind me and I turned.

  Mr. Cotswold came at me full force, ramming me in the lower abdomen.

  I reeled in pain.

  The field around me was covered in darkness. I could see the light of the car beaming on the gate at the end of the field. I screamed for 52.

  He didn’t answer, and I couldn’t see him.

  I couldn’t see where the ram had gone either.

  I was scared to move, not sure where the ram was, but I was scared to keep standing still, too. I cried for help, over and over. I was terrified of being alone in the field, in the dark, with the ram. I had nothing to use to protect myself if he came at me again.

  Finally, I gave up on help and stumbled in the direction of the road to find the fence line, afraid with every step that Mr. Cotswold was going to come up behind me. I was closer to the gate I’d been heading for than the gate I’d come from, so I followed the fence along the road, then down the field until I came to the second gate. From there, I followed the fence back up the other side and on to a gate that let out onto the road.

  I walked back up the road in the dark to the car.

  52 stood at the gate.

  I said, “Why didn’t you come to me? I was calling for you!”

  He said, “I don’t like demands.”

  I said, “He rammed me! He hurt me! I was afraid he was going to kill me! Didn’t you hear me calling for help?”

  “You sounded hysterical. I’m not going to come just because
you’re hysterical.”

  The coldness in his voice left me stunned. His words echoed his response the time Mean Rooster had been attacking me. That incident hadn’t been serious, but this was different and his reaction was the same.

  “Of course I was hysterical! I was terrified!” I wanted to go back to the house.

  He told me he wasn’t finished with some other things he had to do, and we’d go back to the house when he was done.

  I was hurting too much to hike up the driveway, and it was too dark anyway. I sat in the car, shaking.

  I’d made a terrible mistake to walk into a field with a ram in the dark with a can of feed. But it wasn’t the only mistake I’d made.

  I was hip-deep in a farm with 52, and I didn’t trust him anymore.

  Chapter 14

  I drove to Great Lakes, Illinois, with Weston and Morgan for Ross’s boot camp graduation. The navy puts on an amazing show in an enormous hall with music and the graduating divisions marching in formation. I could hardly wait to pick Ross out from the sea of white uniforms. He could hardly wait to ask for his contact lenses, which he had not been allowed to wear during boot camp.

  He had a weekend of liberty, and I had a whole list of potential entertainment, but he didn’t want to do much besides hang out in the hotel room with his family. I had to tell him about his grandmother. As difficult as that was, I could see how much he had grown up during boot camp.

  I was a little bit sad that boot camp was over, because I knew that would be the end of the wonderful letters.

  On the last evening, he cried when I drove him back to the base. He was heading to Charleston, South Carolina, for nearly two years of nuclear power school training before being assigned to a submarine, and we were heading home to prepare for another school year and another hard winter. The annual Party on the Farm was coming up, too, and I went into cleaning mode. Every fall, I had a big party and invited any readers who could attend. But the farm was a mess. 52 was a hoarder, and I had a hard time convincing him to ever get rid of anything—but I could throw away my own things at will and did.