A few weeks later, David and I woke to the call we had been expecting. It was not even daylight, and while David told the postmaster we were on our way, I began throwing on my clothes.
“They’re here!” David said when he hung up.
“I know!” I said. “I told you they would be! Get dressed!”
The night before, David had been skeptical. Do they really mail chicks halfway across the country the day they are born? Yes, I had told him. That’s how it works.
“We should have just slept in our clothes,” David said.
“You don’t have to come,” I said. “I can go by myself.”
But he was up, pulling on jeans and the same T-shirt he had worn the day before. We made coffee, and David stoked the fire in the wood boiler. Then we hopped in the car with an inexplicable sense of urgency. The chicks had been in the package for a day already. What difference could a few more minutes make?
When we got to the post office, the sky was just beginning to lighten, a flush of yellow, then pink, then violet. Per the postmaster’s instructions, we pulled around back. I jumped out of the car before David had even stopped. Another woman—an employee from Tractor Supply—was already there. I waited while the postmaster brought out her package, and when she walked past me, a dozen tiny beaks peeked through the box holes.
It had never occurred to me that someone else might be getting chicks at the same time I was. The whole idea of chickens seemed to belong just to David and me, and the fact that you could order them online from Iowa and they would show up at the post office in downtown Brevard was simply magical, as if they had flown in on a carpet versus an airplane. Or a truck. I wasn’t sure how they had arrived, now that I thought about it. But the chicks were actually here, which meant that in just a few minutes, it would be official: we would be farmers. Sort of. I was more excited than I had been in years.
“Ma’am?” the postmaster was saying.
“I’m here to pick up my chicks,” I said.
Moments later, I was holding the box from the hatchery. Very carefully, I made my way down the handicapped ramp and back to the car where David stood waiting to open the back door.
“I’m just going to hold them,” I said, climbing onto the front seat.
On my lap, the warm box shifted and rocked and gyrated as the chirping chicks clamored over each other. I stroked their downy feathers through the air holes.
“It’s okay, girls,” I said. “You’re okay.”
Once we were home, David took the box from my lap and carried it to the boiler room where he had constructed a brooder from scrap wood. He set the box in the brooder and carefully cut the tape with his pocketknife. I watched, not moving, not even breathing, while he lifted the lid. And there they were—twenty-seven peeping, popping, bouncing babies in an array of soft colors, just like the catalogue had promised.
One by one, we lifted the chicks from the box and dipped their beaks into their water dish before releasing them into the brooder, where they promptly fell sound asleep on the wood chips. We turned on their heat lamps—one on either end of the brooder—and then stood admiring them like proud parents. There were white chicks, red ones, a downy yellow one, blue ones, black ones, black-and-white speckled ones, and two huge girls that looked more like swans than any chickens I had ever seen. They were positively fascinating.
That night, I hardly slept at all. I was up before dawn, and the girls were still asleep when I walked into the boiler room. As soon as I began stoking the fire, however, they woke in a frenzy, chirping and running around. All of them, that is, except for one. That chick, a Rhode Island Red, stood motionless, her head limp and hanging. I went upstairs to tell David, but what was he to do? We watched helplessly that day as she got more and more still, her body sagging closer and closer to the boiler floor.
Later that afternoon, David found her facedown in a corner. He got her body out, wrapped it in newspaper, and set it on the woodpile where we kept the stash of bones the dogs were constantly bringing home from the woods. Later that day, he would bury her. The next day, when a second chick started doing the same thing, standing languidly, head down, David attempted to feed it electrolytes through an eyedropper, but she too was dead within hours.
Though we knew it was not unusual to lose a couple of chicks in the first forty-eight hours, we still felt like failures. We had read articles online about people who had lost all of their chicks within days of each other, and we worried our chicks had something contagious. The fact that the hatchery would replace our chicks was little consolation. I wanted these chicks, and I wanted them to be healthy. I watched the remaining chicks obsessively, repeatedly checking the two thermometers in their brooder and adjusting their heat lamps. David even rigged a system so that I could monitor the brooder temperature from our bedroom at night.
It was March, and in our area, that meant one thing: uncertain weather. It might be seventy degrees outside one day and snowing the next. You never knew. But for the next week, the brooder needed to consistently be ninety to ninety-five degrees. After that, we would turn the temperature down five degrees per week until we got to seventy degrees, at which point the chicks would have all their feathers and would no longer need heat. The problem with this was that the room temperature was hard to regulate. The wood boiler seemed to have two settings—off and scorching. David would stoke the fire. Within minutes, the brooder would be ten degrees hotter. Other times, such as on windy days when air pulsed through the drafty room, the brooder temperature kept dropping, and I worried the chicks were too cold.
Eventually, David figured out how to keep the temperature more consistent—with a small fire regularly tended. During those weeks, we rarely left home. The house stayed dry and warm, our own little desert in the woods. It was cozy and close, and David and I spent many hours watching the tiny, fluffy balls waddling around, peeping, then falling asleep sprawled on the floors or tucked into corners or in tiny chicken heaps—twenty-five bodies illuminated by two warming lights and the orange glow of the boiler. Overhead, the pipes hissed and steamed, and something about the closeness of the room, of all the innocent lives depending on us, reminded me of another spring, the spring I was expecting Aaron.
David, Alex, and I were living in a rented duplex next to a cow pasture between Brevard and Asheville. Because we only had two bedrooms, David and I converted the walk-in closet in our bedroom into a nursery. We took out our clothes (though I have no memory of where we put them—Did we fold them and put them in drawers? Did we drape them over the furniture?) and pasted in a wallpaper border with bright blue trains. Our final touches were a black-and-white mobile over the crib and a changing table with a bright, cheerful bumper pad. After Aaron was born, I used to stand by his crib, watching my beautiful, towheaded baby sleep. I remembered his sweaty-sweet smell, his gentle baby laughter and his hiccupping cries, the way he used to run his fingers over the tiny mole on my neck when I held him.
Watching chickens sleep was not exactly the same as watching a human baby sleep. Still, there was a peacefulness about the dozing chicks, a quiet vulnerability that reminded me of mothering, of the frightening and awesome responsibility of having someone depend on me. One morning as I watched the slumbering chicks, I noticed a wood chip in their water. As I leaned in to remove it, I knocked the edge of the brooder, jostling the sleeping babies. One yellow ball hopped up and darted about, peeping frantically. In her alarm, she stumbled into a pile of sleeping chicks, and a cacophony of peeping ensued until there were twenty-five wide-awake, frantic chicks.
“It’s okay,” I cooed. “It’s just me. Go back to sleep.”
Again, they went through their bedtime rituals—food, water, peeing—and again, they settled in. One of the two Brahmas was sleeping bottom-up in the wood chips. Later, she would grow into a friendly, gorgeous white chicken with black plumage and feathered feet, but now she was fluffy and gray with a creamy yellow he
ad. She looked more like a ball of dryer lint than a chicken, and upon closer inspection, I could see that her vent was blocked with dried poop. It needed to be cleaned, a process that would disturb all the chicks again, but according to Storey’s Guide, it was imperative that a blocked vent be cleared immediately.
I headed into the kitchen to get a warm rag. Then, picking her up and holding her firmly with one hand, I wiped her vent with the warm cloth in the other hand. She squealed and squirmed, a beautiful, melodious peeping that woke all the other chicks. Once again, twenty-five chicks ran screaming and tumbling over one another until they finally settled down again.
At first, I was faithful to my promise not to name the chicks. But as the girls began to develop individual tendencies, if not personalities, it seemed necessary. David and I needed to be able to refer to them in conversation. We needed to be more specific than just, “The black chicken with green markings is acting peaked.” We needed to be able to say, “Emmy Lou is acting peaked.” For practical reasons, the birds needed names.
I had considered naming them after female writers I admired, my own little band of literary sisters—Charlotte, Edith, George, Louisa May, Eudora, Toni, Flannery, Zora Neale, Joyce Carol. But then a friend suggested naming them after country and bluegrass singers, so we named the blond, large-breasted one Dolly, the golden-laced Wyandotte June, the pearl Leghorn Crystal, the Brahma Wynonna, and so on. But every now and then, we broke the ladies of bluegrass pattern, such as in the case of the exuberant yellow chick that flew at David’s chest every time he came near the brooder.
“Watch it, lady,” I said each time. “He’s mine.”
It was our own little joke, just the three of us. Whenever I put my hand in the brooder, that chick would curl up next to my fingers like a puppy. Eventually, I began carrying her around the house with me, making rounds, showing her the layout. Here is the kitchen. Here is the front porch. Here is the cat you should avoid. She rode on the palm of my hand, making contented peeping sounds, hence earning the name Mella Yella, which was neither a literary name nor a musical one but at least an apt description. She even learned to like Hester and vice versa. Whenever I held her out for Hester to inspect, Hester whined and sniffed and tilted her head from side to side. She wasn’t sure what she was, but she liked her anyway.
There was another New Hampshire Red hen too, exactly like Mella Yella. At first, we could tell them apart by their personalities, or at least, we thought we could, so we referred to them as “Mella Yella and her sister.” Later, as they grew into hens, we often couldn’t tell one from another, so we just referred to them both as “the Mella Yellas,” a practice that carried over to the other duplicate breeds. Crystal became the Crystals, Wynonna, the Wynonnas, and so on.
A few weeks later, just after we turned the brooder to eighty degrees, I walked into the boiler room one morning and discovered a brooder full of miniature dinosaurs, little flying T. rexes with feathers protruding at peculiar angles. For some reason, we had not anticipated this. We thought the chicks would go from being baby chicks to reasonably mature adolescents who could go into their coop. It was now clear they needed more room. We needed a grow-out pen, so David began trying to figure out how to make one from discarded items he found in the field below our house—pallets, a camper rooftop, a black plastic dome.
“What on earth is that?” I asked, pointing to the dome.
“It’s a casket holder,” he said. “Someone was using it for a dog house, but I think I can use it for the pen.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“It’s not that bad. It just needs to be cleaned. I can pressure wash it.”
“Absolutely not,” I said. “It’s too depressing. A bad omen.”
The next morning, David began construction on what was basically an addition to our house—a wooden structure with a tin roof that abutted the right side of the house. The floor was made of salvaged pallets, and there was a real, functioning door and a large window from the Habitat for Humanity resale store. The chicks had a skylight too, a large slab of glass. From anywhere in their pen, they had a lovely view of the mountainside, of the daffodils and rhubarb and lilies growing on the bank. When it was finished, the new pen was almost as nice as our house. David moved the chicks to their new home Noah’s-ark style—two by two.
And then he started on the coop. Because he was still working six days a week doing accounting work, David could only work on the coop on Sundays, and every single Sunday, it rained, violent deluges lasting hours at a time. Normally, our waterfall had a slight, steady flow, but now it was our private Niagara, slender but fierce, gushing off the mountain and dragging with it rocks and crayfish, whole branches of trees.
Our gravel driveway was full of ruts and gullies, our car windows sprayed with sludge. Inside the house, paper shrank and curled like palm fronds. Mold crept up the windowsills. Outside the grow-out pen, the chickens tossed clumps of mud onto their feathers. Donning boots and a raincoat, I took them tubs of Stonyfield yogurt.
“Are you buying organic yogurt for the chickens?” David asked.
“Of course not,” I said, though, of course, he knew I was.
David threw up tarps, and wearing a poncho, he hammered and sawed until finally, we had a coop that was, hands down, way nicer than our house. On moving day, we ran around the yard grabbing handfuls of chickens in order of temperament—the Mella Yellas and the Wynonnas first, the two feisty blue chicks last—until, finally, all the girls were settled in their new space.
Within twenty-four hours, every blade of grass, every weed, every living thing in their area was gone—wiped clean. We threw out scratch and kitchen scraps, lettuce and carrots and the tops of fennel bulbs. We brought them tortillas that they flipped into the air with their beaks like pancakes.
“You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a chicken eat a watermelon,” a friend told me.
So we brought them watermelons, cut in two. The chickens squealed and dove in, face-first, twenty-five chickens at once. On warm, sunny days, they dug holes in the yard, then tossed dirt onto their feathers. The practical function of this was to clean their feathers and rid them of pests, but it always struck me as a playful, joyful act: chicken recess. I stood by the fence and watched as they bickered over the choice holes. Box seats, we called them. At night, the girls arranged themselves on the perch according to kind: Brahmas. Brown Leghorns. White Leghorns. New Hampshire Reds. Only Dolly, our sole buff Orpington, sat alone at the end of the perch.
Gradually, our lives began to wrap around the rituals of farm life. All those things that at first seemed so complicated—regulating the chick’s water flow and food supply, mixing the right amount of oyster shells with the feed, and so on—became part of our routines. In the mornings, I walked down the gravel road to the coop with the “little dogs,” Pretzel, Kate, and Piper. Piper was the oldest of our dogs. He was almost twelve, and he had cataracts and a bad hip. Still, he looked forward to our morning jaunts to the barn, and he walked right at my heels, ears up, nose down, as he sniffed for mice and bunnies and squirrels. Our cat, Chip, was an honorary member of the “little dog team,” so he joined us on those mornings. The four of them waited outside the fence while I opened the coop and threw out scratch for the chickens.
The hens flew from their perches in rapid succession, colorful, winged parachuters. Swoosh. Plop. Swoosh. Plop. Twenty-five extreme adventurers. I refilled their feeders, then checked their outside water supply. David had run a line from the creek to automatically fill their buckets, but on cold mornings, I hacked apart the top layer of ice with a stick. Then the dogs and Chip and I walked back up to the house together to make coffee and let the “big dogs,” Reba and Hester, out. In the evenings, David took the big dogs with him to shut the chickens into the coop for the night.
One afternoon, David and I were down by the coop. He was working on the fence, and I was planting a salsa garden—toma
toes, peppers, herbs—when all the chickens began screaming. A small, speckled hen twisted and flopped across the dirt, a speckled hot potato. Twenty-four frantic, panicked, yelling chickens ran inside the coop. Unsure of what if any action to take, David and I stopped what we were doing and watched.
“Look at that!” he finally said.
“Should we do something?”
“Like what?”
While I was trying to think of what might be best, the hen stopped thrashing and lay motionless in the dirt. I looked away.
“Is she dead?” I asked.
“Maybe,” David said.
It looked a lot like a seizure, or rather, it looked how I remembered a seizure felt. I had had three seizures when I was a kid, the first when I was seven years old. I had been standing in line at McDonald’s on Patton Avenue in Asheville with my mother when I felt strange. My head was heavy and light at the same time. My vision blurred. The people at the counter, the people in line, the tables and chairs and drink machines all went fuzzy. And then I saw only a blank television screen, black and white lines running together. I fell backward. My mother screamed.
“Call an ambulance!” someone yelled.
When I came to, I was lying on the floor. Shadowy figures hovered over me. Somewhere far away, my mother was still screaming. A man hollered for everyone to back away, then knelt beside me. At first, he was a gray man with gray clothes, but gradually, color returned. In a far corner, Ronald McDonald was a yellow, orange, and red giant. The man wore a light blue shirt with a red striped tie.
“Can you hear me?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Do you know where you are?”
I nodded.
There was more shouting, and two uniformed men rushed in. They unfolded a stretcher. Then one of them replaced the man kneeling next to me. He took my blood pressure. He put two fingers around my wrist and silently counted. Then he wrote in a notebook.
Flat Broke with Two Goats Page 12