Chickens in the Road

by Suzanne McMinn

  Glory Bee broke out so frequently, I actually became adept at getting her back to the goat yard by myself, which I considered a big accomplishment. We tried putting her in the bottom pasture, but that made things even worse. She broke out one day and ended up in the Ornery Angel’s yard. I figured it was better to keep her closer to the house. If she escaped from the goat yard, at least I knew where she’d go—to her mama. If she broke out from the bottomland, she might go anywhere, including up and down the road.

  I was down to milking Beulah Petunia once a day. I’d had a milk cow for over a year. I defined my life in the country into precow and postcow. A cow is a life-altering event, an experience that will push you, even when you’re tired, and make you grow. A cow will test your will and take you on a daily adventure. You will handle a thousand-pound animal every day. The most surprising part of it all was that I loved every minute of having a cow. Even as I streamlined and reduced in other areas on the farm, my commitment to my cows never wavered. I was obsessed with getting Beulah Petunia bred.

  I explained it all to my cow. She started picking through her wardrobe, polishing her nails, getting her hair done, spraying on perfume.

  Or something like that.

  I researched cow heat cycles and started studying Beulah Petunia’s “flower petals” twice daily, looking for signs. A cow goes into heat approximately every twenty-one days and is in heat for about thirty hours. The peak fertile period is in the middle of this time and is called standing heat. When cows first go into heat, they may not stand for a bull. Which, you know, gives you time to go find one. But you can’t wait too long because before you know it they will be out of heat. We would be taking Beulah Petunia across the river to Skip’s farm.

  There’s nothing like getting all up close and personal with a cow and her flower petals. The “petals” are right under certain other parts. Did you know that cows moo from both ends? Really, the things you learn when you start spending quality time with your cow’s flower petals.

  One morning, Beulah Petunia came up for her feed early. After she’d been milked, instead of disappearing back to the hinterlands as usual, she stayed up at the gate to her field. Bawling. Angry mooing. For like two hours. I thought, Wow, she sure is being mean today. Then—lightbulb!

  I had forgotten to even check her that day, slacking on my petal patrol. So I grabbed my chore boots and ran out to her. She looked red and swollen in the important parts, and I thought she was in heat.

  I e-mailed 52 at work, and he said he’d come home to help me take her to the bull.

  Beulah Petunia started going through her dresses, tossing clothes left and right, trying to decide what to wear. By the time 52 got home, she was adorned with a bright pink blossom behind her ear, attached to her halter. Simple. Understated. It said, I’m happy to be here and this is special, without also saying, Overeager and needy.

  Or at least that’s what Beulah Petunia and I thought.

  Or possibly just me. I was so excited, you would have thought I was the one headed for a date.

  It was only one mile to Skip’s farm, but it was a long mile. I’d been going to Skip’s farm all my life, but I’d never gone there with a cow. Back in my father’s day, Skip’s farm was part of my great-grandfather’s larger farm that went all up and down the road across the river from Stringtown Rising, and my father took me there often when I was a little girl. By the time I was in my twenties, Skip owned it, and together with my father and subsequently my own children when they were little, I’d been visiting Skip for years when we took the “family history” tour on trips to West Virginia.

  When we were walking Beulah Petunia over there, I had a moment where I thought back to all the times I’d gone to Skip’s farm in the past and how I would never, and I mean never, have imagined that I would one day live across the river and down the road from Skip and be taking my cow to his bull.

  One time when we were visiting Skip, my (crazy) father wanted to walk way, way up to a big open meadow on the hill above the house. Skip would always say, sure, go wherever you want, when we came calling. A bull came running in the meadow and we were all clambering down a steep cliff, hanging on to tree trunks not to fall, to the creek far, far below to get away from the bull. And now I was headed there in search of a bull.

  While it was a mile by the road from our farm to Skip’s, Skip suggested it might be shorter if we took her up the road to the family cemetery, over the hill, and across the river that way.

  If it was shorter, it was maybe shorter by nothing. It felt like twenty miles and involved climbing. But then, going a mile anywhere in West Virginia feels like twenty miles. We took her down the driveway, out the road, and up the steep, rough road to the cemetery.

  We passed through a sunny field of daisies and into a shady path of enchantment as we crossed the hill. Beulah Petunia kept wanting to stop and eat and eat and eat Skip’s tall, tall grass. 52 held her on the lead while I followed behind with a switch to keep her going. I didn’t like to swat her, so that was a bad job. I swatted her really gently, and she didn’t really care, so sometimes I had to push her on her rump.

  We finally came down and out toward the river and found the crossing by Skip’s sawmill. We took Beulah Petunia across the river and to the road and on to Skip’s paddock. Beulah Petunia bawled and bawled, letting the bull know she had arrived. She was thirsty after all that exercise, and when we let her out of the paddock and into the pasture, she went straight for the creek. From there, she started walking up the creek, into the shaded distance, and then . . . she was gone.

  I could hardly stand it. My cow! I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to go after her, camp out, watch over her, see the action. But it didn’t really seem practical. Beulah Petunia was a big girl. She knew where she was going and she wanted to go there.

  The late report that night from Skip was that the bull checked her out but didn’t mount her. Had he not seen her flower?

  It was my first clue that getting a cow pregnant wasn’t going to be that easy.

  I left Beulah Petunia over at Skip’s farm for two days, and by the end of that time, I was feeling a little frustrated, not sure what was going on or what I should do about it. Even as I was contemplating that conundrum, I was also wondering how I was even going to find my cow on Skip’s big farm full of sunny meadows, shaded creeks, nooks and crannies, and . . . cows.

  The last time I’d seen Beulah Petunia, she was disappearing into the woods following a creek. I went back, passed through the paddock and into the field above the creek, looked up at the hill where I knew lay a huge open meadow full of tall, tall grass . . . and called her name, feeling a little hopeless. I figured I was about to take an (arduous!) hike all over Skip’s farm looking for my cow—who was in serious need of milking.

  I heard a cow answer me. I thought it was her, but—I didn’t have a bunch of cows. Maybe they all sounded the same. I called her again, twice, and—

  She came right out to the edge of that sunny meadow, looked down at me, and started coming.

  I couldn’t believe it. I’d arrived at this big farm and called my cow. And here she came!

  She plodded in her slow, sure, methodical way, straight for me, off the hilltop and down the bank.

  My cow!

  She loved me.

  Or she thought I might have some goodies.

  Anyway, she came!

  And she was still wearing her flower!

  I didn’t know anything about her other flower. Using a bucket, I hand-milked her on the spot. The ground was uneven and she stepped in the bucket, but she seemed happy to be relieved. The next evening, we went back with the milking machine and a generator set up on the back of 52’s truck to run the vacuum pump by the paddock. I shifted her around to an evening milking schedule since that was when 52 could help me by bringing his truck with the milking machine on it.

  A few evenings later, when I went to Skip’s farm to milk her, she had company: Skip’s Black Angus–Gelbvieh cross bull.
There was a lot of nuzzling going on.

  I was a bit freaked out. How was I going to milk? The bull, whose name was Adam, seemed a little concerned we were going to take away his Eve, and he went to work. Which freaked me out even more and I had to watch. And take photos. And go home and enlarge the photos so I could see if he was getting in there. He was.

  52 ran the bull out of the paddock so I could milk, which I could barely accomplish after being blinded by the salacious activity. The bull waited up on the hill until Beulah Petunia was once again available.

  The next day, thinking she was surely bred, I brought Skip a loaf of homemade bread and a jar of apple butter and took Beulah Petunia home. This time, 52 drove me to Skip’s and I took my cow by her lead and walked her home on the road, instead of over the hill, with 52 following behind me in his truck.

  Walking down a country road leading a cow was one of those events that made me feel like a little girl playing dress-up in farmer clothes, or maybe as if I were wandering on foot through a children’s storybook. Beulah Petunia clip-clopped down the road by my side, the sun shining down, the air filled with birdsong. It was a mile to the river ford. Across the ford, she could hear Glory Bee mooing from the top of the hill, and she knew she was home.

  I marked the calendar and started the clock.

  Three weeks later, she was in heat again. It was the summer of Beulah Petunia and Skip’s bull, and we spent a lot of time going back and forth across the ford, not just with the cow, but taking feed to the cow and milking the cow, trying to get her bred.

  Our farm was near the river ford, and back in the day, the ford was the center of society here. This tiny spot of civilization in the heart of Appalachia, remote and mostly deserted now, was once a busy teeny tropolis of oil and gas activity that brought money and people to this sideways mountain foothills farmland. Back when my great-great-grandfather first came here, there was no one and nothing. By the time his son, my great-grandfather, was growing up (late 1800s), the boom had arrived. My great-grandfather’s house was across the river ford from our farm. He owned over eight hundred acres up and down the halfway paved road across the river. Our dirt road formed a T with that road at the ford.

  We were the dirt-rock starving tail falling down from the half-paved top of that T. The river ford was the connection, then and now. The ford was still the center of Stringtown. There just weren’t so many people there anymore.

  We’d drive across the ford every night to go see Beulah Petunia. I’d scratch her and pet her and remind her that she was my cow, and half the time when we got back to the ford, someone from the ’hood was on its banks and we’d stop to shoot the breeze for an hour.

  I loved our ’hood of Stringtown. It was full of family-style squabbling and family-style help. We were out in the middle of nowhere, and yet we had a ’hood, centered on the ford, as it had always been for a hundred years and more. And for a hundred years and more, not everyone has gotten along, but when someone needed help, the ’hood was there. Every single one of them had helped us at one time or another, and when we could, we had helped them. On either side of the property belonging to the farther members of our ’hood (Sonny on one side, Skip on the other), you had to drive quite a way to reach the next home. There, centered on the river ford, was our little community. The ones in easy walking—or even yelling—distance if you needed help.

  And I don’t care what they’d say if you asked them ahead of time, but when the chips were down, even if it was Frank who was in trouble, every single one of them would be there if they were called. Country life in that remote holler was just strange and wonderful that way.

  Chapter 19

  Meanwhile back at the farm, I found raspberries.

  When we built the house, a lot of ground was disrupted. I’d looked and looked, hoping for wild blackberries and raspberries, but didn’t find any. That summer, while I was trying to get Beulah Petunia bred, I found both—and lots of them. There was a huge patch of blackberries back behind the house, on the hillside between the house and the cow pasture. I found more small patches of wild raspberries every day, up and down the driveway and even up by the house. Once I started looking, they popped up everywhere.

  Over the past few years, desperate for my own berries, we’d planted a number of bushes—blackberry (the thornless kind), blueberries, elderberries, and raspberries. I was hoping to get a few berries that summer off those plants—if the chickens didn’t get them first.

  I was especially excited about the wild raspberries because I wasn’t expecting them at all. Wild blackberries were more common around those parts than raspberries, so it felt like magic.

  But then, Stringtown Rising was magic in so many ways. Whip-poor-wills were rare, too, but we had them and had the rare pleasure of listening to them every spring. Now we had raspberries, too.

  I became every bit as obsessed with the berries as I was with Beulah Petunia’s love life. Every day, I’d check on my newly discovered magic berries.

  I collected them as they ripened for fear the birds would get them if I waited till they were all ripe. It was me against the birds. Every once in a while, I’d find a ripe one that had been half eaten and I knew they’d gotten there before me, but most of the time I’d pull off the plump, juicy berries first. I’d go out collecting every day. It became a little daily ritual, my walk around the farm to all my spots. While I was walking, I’d look for new spots—and sometimes I found them. I found more raspberry patches than I ever imagined the day I found what I thought was just one patch by the driveway. I found more along the driveway, then I found them up by the house, below the driveway, and across the road.

  I grew better at finding them along the sunny edges of the woods, and also better at identifying the new canes shooting up first-year growth. I knew where more raspberries would be the next year.

  I also grew bolder as my obsession grew. I collected raspberries high. I collected raspberries low. No ripe berry was left behind. I leaped to raspberries along cliffs. I clambered up banks and dived into underbrush and through trees. You had to get down in there because sometimes the berries were hiding.

  I’d hear the phone ringing back at the house and I didn’t care. I was collecting raspberries.

  One of my favorite patches was a huge sprawling patch of both raspberries and blackberries below the driveway, between the driveway and Frank’s field. There was about a six-foot steep bank dropping off from the driveway down to a run that drained into the creek. On the other side of the run, the ground sloped down to the fence and the field beyond. I walked along the fence, risking life and limb to reach across the ditch to the berries growing along the steep bank.

  The sheep thought it would be funny if I fell in. Or not notice, because sheep don’t care much about people. Unless you are carrying a feed bucket.

  The flora was exploding on our farm that year. Before the disruption of our construction three years earlier, there had been a previous disruption by loggers when the farm was selectively timbered a few years before we bought it. Our driveway was built by the loggers, and the location of the house was a large cleared area once used as a staging ground by the loggers who spread and graded it, widening the area, which provided space for our garden and goat yard in front of the house. The wide cleared swaths out past the duck ’n’ buck yard and out through the cow pasture were originally logging roads.

  Because of the loggers, the hillside behind the house was also disrupted quite a bit before we got there and added to the general disruption with our construction. The forest was bursting back. The land was recovering, and it was gorgeous—and filled with berries.

  When I’d get all the way down the driveway in my raspberry collecting each day, I’d look up the driveway and barely recognize the entrance to our farm because of the lush growth. Things were starting to look not only settled but well established. My daily walks among the berries were a chance to notice, and to enjoy, and to cross my fingers that it would all last.

  52 w
as on a ranting binge that summer. This meant that the ranting wasn’t just sporadic but constant, night after night in a row. He couldn’t see me without telling me how selfish I was. One evening, after a particularly lengthy browbeating, I took off my ring when he went down to feed the sheep. We each wore a silver ring on our ring fingers. We didn’t have a particular name for the rings. They weren’t engagement rings and didn’t signify anything other than that we were together. I’d bought the ring for myself and had given a matching one to him for Christmas one year early in our relationship.

  I set my ring on his pipe ashtray, where I knew he would see it. It was dark when I drove down the driveway. I didn’t know where I was going. I just knew I had to get away. I set off across the river ford, thinking I’d go to Ripley in the next county over, where there were hotels. By the time I got down the road, I decided I was too tired to drive all the way to Ripley. When I got to the highway, I headed back in the direction of the Slanted Little House.

  I spent the night in my old bedroom. The house was unlocked, and it was almost as if nothing had changed at all since I’d lived there. My bedding was still on the bed. I woke up in the middle of the night and heard Elvis singing. It freaked me out until I realized the radio had been left on in the cellar porch. My cousin must have been doing something in there that day.

  In the morning, I sneaked out without anyone seeing me. I couldn’t think of anything to do but go home to 52.

  He was up early—and angry. He asked me where I’d been.

  “I went to the old farmhouse,” I told him.

  “You didn’t drive out in that direction.”

  “I didn’t know where I was going when I left,” I said.

  “What are you planning to do?”

  I sat down on the porch, shaking. I’d hardly slept, and I was scared for my future. “I don’t have a plan.”