Flat Broke with Two Goats

by Jennifer McGaha

  “I mean, it’s just that I can imagine this whole other life,” I finally said.

  The pause on the other end was so long and deep, I took the phone away from my ear and looked at the seconds ticking away to make sure we were still connected. Finally, David spoke.

  “You have a life here,” he said.

  “But I have a life here too,” I said. “I have friends. A job. People I have formed attachments to.”

  They were disjointed thoughts, disparate pieces trying to come together to say something about how I was not the same person who had left home months before. Somehow, in the midst of teaching eighty-five eighteen-year-olds, of learning what YOLO and turnt up meant, of scuttling down canyons in Starved Rock State Park and bike riding along the Mississippi and chatting with my next-door neighbor while our dogs chased an errant rabbit back and forth in an endlessly entertaining game of bunny volleyball, I had come to understand important things about myself and who I was. For a few moments, there were people whose lives had lined up next to mine and eased my grief, made me feel less broken.

  Still, as much as I loved my new life in the Midwest, I knew that part of what I loved was the break from all the pressures of home, pressures that would soon follow me here.

  And in the heavy silence that lingered between David and me, I thought of a story my grandfather told me just before he died—his very first memory. In July 1917, when he was six months old, my grandfather had sat in a cornfield, propped against a thick stalk. His five older siblings were at school, and his mother had brought him there where she could watch him while she worked. The baby could see his mother through the stalks, a shifting shadow in the changing light. The ground beneath him was dark brown, almost black. Above him, the green sky swayed in the wind. The baby dug his tiny fingers in the dirt and then sucked them, drinking in the rich, loamy soil, swallowing the earth that belonged to his grandfather and to his father and his father before him.

  And then the baby noticed something—a tiny, twitching animal with large, floppy ears and shiny, sable eyes. At first, there was only one, but then there were more, ten or twenty smaller ones, darting in and out among the cornstalks. The baby was amazed, enchanted. He rocked back and forth, held out grubby baby hands. He called out in his own, special way—a cooing, gurgling chortling that rippled through the leaves and found his mother, bent over, twisting an ear of corn from the stalk. A moment later, she knelt before him, her damp hair matted to her forehead, her balled-up apron overflowing with corn.

  “Bunnies!” she said. “Do you see the baby bunnies?”

  My grandfather was well into his ninetieth year when he told me this story, and when he was finished, I was quiet, trying to find the right words. I wanted to tell him that I too saw it all so vividly—the hem of his mother’s homemade dress, the brilliant sunshine, the frolicking, magical bunnies, the way the cornstalks moved together like waves. I wanted to tell him that I too would remember that image for all of my days, through all of my growing old. I wanted to say I understood what he was telling me, that this place, these mountains, were my legacy, my birthright. But I couldn’t find the words.

  Instead, I said, “That sure must’ve been something, Papaw.”

  And he said, “It sure was.”

  Though my grandfather had been dead for five years now, his story glided across the years, found me parked next to a boxcar in the Midwest. It reminded me of my rootedness, of the deep and abiding knowledge that who I was was inextricably tied to where I was. If I stayed in Macomb, I would have a good job, good friends, a nice place to live. If I went home, I was going back to snakes and mice and spiders, to lukewarm showers and the occasional clogged water pipe.

  But I was Appalachian in a bone-deep sort of way. I missed the mountains. I missed running by the Davidson River with my dogs. I missed mountain biking and hiking. I missed hearing those voices I grew up with—the thick, unhurried speech of my people. And I missed David’s smoky, familiar smell, the way his beard scratched my neck when he hugged me, the easy way he held me. For me, David and the mountains, my kids and home, my ancestors and my identity were all hopelessly tangled into one. In order to know who I was and what I believed, I needed to go home. Now, David’s silence was filled with raw, shrill aching.

  “I’m coming home,” I told him. “I am. It’s just going to be hard.”

  The holidays were just around the corner, and all of my kids would be home, all of us together in one house, under one rather suspect roof. That is what I pictured: the house smelling of cinnamon and cloves and nutmeg, the five of us gathered around the breakfast table eating cream cheese braids and sipping Russian tea and somehow getting through Christmas without my grandmother. It was what she would have wanted.

  “It don’t matter if we have any gifts or not,” she used to say, “just so long as we’re all together.”

  That winter would be one of the coldest, snowiest winters on record for the Midwest, and the December day I left Macomb for good, it was six degrees below zero. My front porch was covered with a thin layer of ice. I had packed all of my belongings the day before, and the entranceway was cluttered with bags and boxes. Before dawn, bundled in two coats, a pair of gloves, a hat, and boots, I gripped the handrail on the porch and staggered outside, carrying box after box to my car. Hester stood shivering on the porch, her eyes roaming from the boxes to the car.

  “Come on, girl,” I said to her when I was finished.

  She bolted down the steps, out the front gate, directly onto the box of student papers in my back seat.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. And then, “We’re going home, girl.”

  Hester flicked her tail. On the way out, I checked the mailbox one last time. Inside was a book Chris had recently mentioned to me, Nora Ephron’s Wallflower at the Orgy, with a sticky note on the front that said, “Take good care. C.” I put the book on top of one of the boxes and made a final run to campus to return my students’ papers, and then Hester and I headed south. For hours, we rode past snow-covered fields until, finally, the ground became wavy again, then rocky and jagged. Twelve hours later, we hit the Smokies.

  It was dark outside and misting rain as we zigzagged through the gorge outside of Knoxville. Fog hovered over the highway. I turned on the defroster, and as we crossed into North Carolina, I could hear my grandmother naming each community along the way. Fines Creek. Jonathan Creek. Crabtree. Newfound Gap.

  They were places she had known her entire life, places she understood in relation to her own life and the people she had known. She had cousins who lived in Crabtree, in-laws on Newfound. She could tell you the weather in any of those other areas simply by looking out her living room window.

  “We’ve got about five inches of snow out here,” she would say, “so they’ve got upward of eight inches out at Fines Creek.”

  In another two months, my grandparents’ home would be sold. The garden, the walkway lined with peonies, the grapevine where, as children, my brother and I flicked Japanese beetles into mason jars—all of those things would belong to someone else. I had promised myself I wouldn’t cry when I passed the Canton exit on I-40. It had been six months. I should be doing better now. But as soon as I saw the plumes of smoke from the paper plant, the tears came, not soft, quiet tears but a terrific rush. Hester whined and pawed at my shirt sleeve, and for a moment, I thought I would not be able to breathe, that I would never be able to breathe again.

  When my grandmother and my uncle Bill were still alive, it felt a little like my grandfather was still here too. Through their storytelling, their humor, their humble ways of being in the world, they had kept him alive, and I had been part of something larger, something I understood. After my grandmother died, my extended family were all really gone—not just my grandparents and their siblings but everyone who came before them. These mountains were rapidly changing. Factories and tobacco fields had given way to craft breweries and mountain b
ike trails, and as this generation passed, an entire way of living and speaking and being had passed with it. For me, the loss was unfathomably deep.

  I knew that eventually I would be able to sort through my grandmother’s dresser drawers. I would be able to throw on my grandfather’s flannel shirt without stopping to see if it still smelled like him. I would be able to wear my grandmother’s watch and her scarves, to dump out the canister of self-rising flour and the jar of honey peanut butter I would never use. I would be able to tell funny stories about my grandparents, listen to their favorite songs on the radio, summon their voices at the times when I most needed them. But feeling better would not mean the loss was less real, only less raw and exposed. Instead of being on my skin, my grief would seep through my pores and adhere to my heart and lungs, to my blood and guts. And now I had to figure out how to live like that, how to behave like a normal, sane person, a person who was not haunted.

  As I passed the exit to my grandmother’s home, I thought of a worn black-and-white photograph she had kept in an old shirt box along with all the family photographs. In the photo, two young men wore cowboy getups—jeans, boots, hats, flannel shirts. Each man had a guitar slung over his shoulder.

  “Who’s that?” I asked her once.

  “Just an old boyfriend,” she said. “They were musicians. I liked that one,” she said, placing her forefinger on the shorter guy, the one with the shy, crooked smile, “and Beatrice liked the other one.”

  My grandmother had been married to my grandfather for almost seventy years. Their relationship had been so close, their roots so deeply intertwined, that I rarely thought of them as individuals. Together, they had been one powerful spiritual force, a two-tiered anchor, a double-sided talisman. Now, for the first time, I wondered if my grandmother had ever longed for another life, if she had had any regrets, if on that last morning, while I was cooking oatmeal and spooning Folgers into her mug, she was dreaming of all the places she had been and the people she had loved, or if, in the end, she had simply taken one giant leap and become a part of it all.

  Mamaw’s Cornbread

  •1 1/2 cups self-rising cornmeal

  •3 tablespoons self-rising flour

  •1 egg, beaten

  •About 1/2 cup milk (whole, evaporated, or buttermilk)

  •1 to 2 tablespoons oil or shortening for pan

  Preheat a cast-iron skillet coated with oil or shortening in oven at 425 degrees. Mix dry ingredients. Stir in egg, and add milk until the batter is the consistency of thick pancake batter. Pour into hot pan. Bake about 18 minutes or until brown on top.

  Chapter Eight

  The February after I came home from Macomb, our region saw our first real snowstorm in many years. Over a foot of snow fell, followed by ice, resulting in treacherous roads for days afterward. Our driveway was impassable. David chopped wood and tended the boiler while I cooked soup and cornbread, creamed chicken and biscuits, lentil stew. Finally, one afternoon, bored from being stuck indoors, we donned our boots and down coats and set out walking. Reba and Hester ran ahead, skating gracefully on the ice, while David and I trudged through snow up to our knees.

  The four of us followed the creek until we came to a second waterfall just beyond our house. Sheathed in ice, the falls were white and hard and eerily quiet—a magnificent ice sculpture. We watched, listening to the silence, and then we angled up the mountain to the ridge above the house, then down to the property line, across the driveway, and up the other side of the mountain. We lumbered over fallen limbs, searching for the pink markers Aaron had used to mark the trail the previous spring.

  The Earlobe Trail, Aaron had dubbed it, an allusion to the Art Loeb Trail, a 30.1-mile trail that began near the entrance to the Pisgah National Forest, just down the road. Aaron had trimmed overhanging branches, added footholds, marked the path. Like sorting markers into baggies or converting a spare bedroom into a film studio, it had been a way of putting his imprint on this place, of making it home. Ultimately, however, the markers proved unnecessary. Reba had been Aaron’s constant companion during the long afternoons on the trail, and she remembered every twist and turn. Navigating downed hemlocks and rhododendron thickets, she perched high on a bank and waited. Like a gargoyle, we said. At the top of the trail, near the spring basin, we paused.

  Beneath us, the world was white—the trees, the tin roof, the smoke furling from the chimney. Rhododendrons sagged with snow, and all around us, tree limbs popped and cracked. Bundled in layers of clothing, only our eyes and noses and mouths exposed, David and I stood with our sleeves touching, our breaths phantoms in the frigid air. And then I remembered another gray day like this one, over a quarter of a century ago.

  In the spring of 1984, when David was nineteen and I was sixteen, we sat on a rock at the base of Looking Glass Falls, a cooler of beer and a pen and notebook wedged between us. Because I was editor of the high school newspaper, I was in charge of writing senior superlatives for our final issue, and since David also knew almost all the seniors, he was helping. Shouting over the roar of the falls, the water spraying our clothes and our hair, we made our way through the list.

  The superlatives needed to be humorous in a tasteful, not offensive way so that my advisor would approve them. Or they had to be seemingly innocuous but not actually so. For example, two of our friends—Sam and Catherine—had recently been in a minor car accident, the result of Catherine giving Sam a blow job while he was navigating a curvy mountain road. Sam had lost control of the car and crashed into a bank, and though they were otherwise fine, the impact knocked out Catherine’s front teeth. For Catherine’s superlative, David suggested most likely to need dentures. I wrote that down. It was silly, perhaps even unkind, but I was not thinking of those things then.

  More than thirty years had passed since that day, but looking over the glassy falls above the cabin, I could still feel the cool rock beneath me. I could see the dark, swirling pool beneath the falls, and I could still see David there—blue jeans and a light blue T-shirt, thick, tinted glasses, a bottle of Budweiser in one hand, the other hand resting on my bare thigh.

  David and I had been married for almost twenty-three years, and yet our transformation from two carefree kids to a middle-aged couple seemed so abrupt, my mind struggled to keep up. I knew other people who had experienced a dramatic life change, a move from, say, a townhouse in the city to a home in the woods. But those people had chosen that path, sought it out, and then created a life that was still relatively comfortable. They had hot water heaters, cable television, regular phone service, hardwood floors, ceramic chicken sculptures, and quaint flower gardens.

  Our situation felt different, not a Thoreauvian quest so much as an exile of sorts, a banishment from mainstream society. In the year and a half since we had moved to the cabin, our financial situation had only gotten worse. Because we had yet not settled with the IRS or the Department of Revenue, we were accruing exorbitant penalties on our overdue taxes, and because the payment plan the IRS had originally given us was way beyond our means, we were in a holding pattern—“wait and see” mode. The IRS had moved our status to “not collectable,” which meant that though we still technically owed taxes, the IRS was not actively pursuing us. It was obvious that we didn’t have the money to pay what we owed. Still, we kept hoping that our situation would improve enough for us to make the IRS an offer in compromise, an offer to settle for a portion of the full amount due. Just as often, we hoped that the money to pay off everything in full would simply fall out of the sky—that we would win the lottery or find a golden ticket in a chocolate bar. We hoped for something—anything—that would allow us to put this behind us and move forward, and the fervent hoping, the incessant pressure of thinking through every what if, cast a constant shadow over our lives.

  Though I knew we were lucky to live in such beautiful surroundings, calling this place home meant embracing something I had not chosen. Even now, whenever I
was away, I instantly pictured myself back at our old house, in my old kitchen, cooking a pot of corn chowder or baking a tomato pie. The self I knew and understood was back there, in that old life, not a perfect life certainly, but a life where I had an intact home and a house full of kids and a grandmother who was still very much alive.

  In addition to our financial worries, I was still often stressed by the day-to-day challenges of living in this dusty, dark cabin. We had not replaced the fluorescent lighting. We had not renovated the bathroom. We had not finished replacing the floors. I constantly coughed and sneezed and wheezed due to the boiler smoke. I worried about the drinking water. Still, looking down at the cabin from the top of the ridge, the whole hollow illuminated in white light, the dogs running in circles, kicking up snow behind them, I felt something else too, something faint but sure—the very first tug of belonging, a low and steady rumbling. And with that came a steady surge of other realizations: Maybe I could learn to love this place. Maybe I could forgive David. Maybe I could forgive myself.

  The wind, which had been blowing evenly all afternoon, picked up speed. A great howl began over the far ridge, swept across the hollow and up the mountainside. I cinched my hood tighter and leaned into David.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  I nodded. Our feet and faces tingly and numb, we walked sideways down the mountain—or perhaps more accurately, David walked, and I slid. He took a few steps, then waited until I crashed into him. Then he steadied me and took another step. Eventually, using the slide-and-crash method, we made our way down the mountain. Our hiking adventure complete, it was time to make snow cream.

  I had left a mixing bowl and a long spoon on the picnic table, and now we scoured the snow for a spot free of dog pee. When we had located a good place, David chipped through the outer layer of ice, then filled the bowl with snow. We headed inside, stripped off our wet clothes, and hung them on chairs to dry. While David threw another log on the fire, I added vanilla and sugar and cream to the bowl of snow. Then, wearing only our long johns, we sat kitty-corner at the kitchen counter, listening to jazz on the radio, slurping snow cream and sipping Fireball whiskey, and in that moment, I felt a little like a kid again, content and giddy and hopeful, all at the same time.