Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm (28 page)

What am I doing?

“Hello, girls,” I say to the hens as I fling their feed in the grass. I open the door to the coop, humming, and try to shoo out the Meats, but they just run back in. I scoop chicken feed out of the metal bin and toss it on the ground; the hens cluck out their contentment, stroll back over to their pen, and peck at the yellow grain.

The Meats see the feed I’m tossing down and thunder toward me, jostling each other shoulder-to-shoulder like a pack of feathered wolves closing in. The hens flee in terror, taking cover near the barn. Something is going to have to be done about the Meats,
and soon, but I already know that when the time comes, I will not be able to kill them.

I look at Pete relaxing on the porch, then back at the Meats. Pete … Meats. Pete … Meats. And I wonder.

Could he butcher chickens?

He bow-hunts for deer, he ice-fishes, he has a boat just for catching salmon out of the bay, so the answer is probably yes, and I imagine how this might go down tonight, after we’re finished discussing our remodeling business and when the not-exactly-a-date part of this evening begins.

Mardi: “What do you want to do?”

Pete: “I don’t know, what do
you
want to do?”

Mardi: “Oh, I don’t know. Wanna butcher some chickens?”

Pete: “I thought you’d never ask!”

At which point in this fantasy he’d drop to his knees, clasp his hands together in prayer, and exclaim, “Thank you, Jesus, for delivering unto me the perfect woman.”

Yeah, right.

If you count the Uncle Kracker concert and the half-dozen times Pete has anonymously plowed my driveway and the other times he’s stopped by, this happy hour on my porch might qualify as a second date. Chicken butchering seems more like a sixth or seventh date, doesn’t it? Or maybe even more serious than that. Maybe it’s an activity reserved for a relationship that has advanced to the boyfriend/girlfriend stage.

It’s no wonder I discard the idea, then. Because Lord knows, I do
not
want a boyfriend.

·  ·  ·

The sound of panic from somewhere outside wakes us up. Pete sits straight up like a catapult, and even half asleep I almost expect something—a boulder, a ball of flame—to be flung into the center of the bed. To be hurled our way in some form of punishment.

Not only did I invite a man over who is not my husband, and not even my boyfriend, I asked him to stay.

It’s almost a full moon, and we left the windows open so a near-perfect breeze comes into my silvery bedroom. But along with this breeze comes the sounds that woke us. Frantic screeching and wings flapping.

“My hens!” is all I can yell.

But Pete is up out of my bed and halfway down the stairs in his underwear. By the time I’ve bolted out the front door, he is already jogging around the outside of the coop.

“I can’t see anything,” he yells, “but your chickens are going nuts!”

What I see are my hens, my light-brown hens, seeming to throw themselves three feet up in the air against the chicken wire. As soon as their feet touch the ground, they jump up and kamikaze again. The Meats are inside the coop, won’t give up the nesting boxes, and have bullied the hens into the chicken yard.

The moon casts an eerie glow but not enough to see by, so Pete runs to his truck, starts it up, flips on his brights, and angles it so that the headlights shine directly at the coop. Framed in the fluorescent glare are fangs, two glinting eyes, and bloody feathers.

A fox has one of my hens in its mouth and is standing perfectly still. The hen’s eyes are open, her beak is open too, and I can see her paralyzed little tongue. It’s Mrs. Donahue, the hen I named after my kindergarten teacher.

“Hey!” Pete yells, running straight at the fox and waving his arms. The fox turns its head then, just a hair, and looks directly at Pete. It doesn’t make a move to run away, it doesn’t drop the hen, it just stands its ground and lifts a single front paw.

My hands reach down on the ground in the dark, and I spread my fingers out and feel for rocks. For something to throw. Sticks, tools left out, a tennis ball, anything. There is nothing, though, and the fox looks over toward the pasture, looks back toward us, and then trots away with Mrs. Donahue.

We watch its bushy tail swish back and forth like a rudder until it disappears into the waves of grass between the pasture and the woods. White feathers float in the headlight beams, my hands are on my knees, and I am panting.

It is only later that I think about Pecker. You don’t need roosters for eggs; you need them to protect your hens. Pecker might have died doing it, but I know he would have taken on that fox. And Luke’s words echo:
He’s just being what he is
. Pecker had a purpose here, after all; he just never had the chance to fulfill it.

I think about Major, and the night he died unfolds in my mind again like a horrible slide show. Mrs. Donahue was just a chicken, not a horse I worked for and cared for and loved. But she still lived on the Big Valley and therefore was a life that I was responsible for.

You can’t let your guard down for one single night, you know?
I think.
Not even one
.

At least when I watch this animal about to die, I’m not doing it all alone.

·  ·  ·

The next morning I am expecting Pete to flee; instead, he makes us plates of steaming scrambled eggs and fried potatoes, and then gets to work fixing the holes in the chicken yard and the coop.

While he pulls boards out of the bed of his truck and finds the extra roll of chicken-wire in the barn, I fetch the mail—and pull a pretty little envelope out of the mailbox. There’s the Big Valley’s address in thick black ink, handwritten in my mother’s perfect calligraphy.

I knew this was coming, I’ve been looking forward to it even, but with the land sale, and subsequent bill-paying marathon, and the Pecker extraction, and planning for the remodeling project to get going again, I’ve put the occasion out of my mind until now.

My parents are celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary with a big party. And their golden milestone just makes me feel like a failure. I am forty-five years old. Unless I meet the love of my life tomorrow and marry him the day after, I will never have a chance at a fiftieth wedding anniversary. Not ever.

And it sounds silly to admit it, but even after enduring years feeling stuck, even after my painful divorce, even after giving away my wedding dress and vowing never to get married again, I still want that. As a matter of fact, now that I know I can depend on myself, I actually want someone more than when I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to handle everything alone.

I’d like a man around. Someone to share the Big Valley with, and even to share raising my sons the rest of the way with. Most startling of all, someone not just to be with, but to be married to.

I look at the invitation and know I want my own version of the kind of marriage that my parents have.

The sound of Pete’s hammer on the chicken coop echoes, and
I realize there is still one hole in my life, regardless of my efforts to patch them all over.

But even if I’ll never have what my parents do, I can at least get the focus off of me for one second and be happy for them. Happy that they’ve kept their marriage going strong for half a century. And I am happy for them, and proud of being their daughter. I’m also even a little excited about a weekend away from the Big Valley.

Priority number one over the next week is dress clothes for the boys, and as the day nears I take them shopping at, where else, Goodwill. I buy them each a pair of khaki pants and short-sleeved white button-downs. Owen and Luke still fit into the dress shoes I bought them last year to wear for their school orchestra concerts, because I bought them a half-size too big. Will is just going to have to make do with his sneakers.

To mark their special day, my Mom and Dad have invited friends and family to cruise the Saginaw Bay with them in an open-air tour boat, and then we will all head over to their church, Messiah Lutheran, for a chicken dinner.

The boys and I arrive and I watch my parents stand united on the gangplank and I love them so much it actually aches. My father’s white hair is blowing in the breeze, but instead of messing it up, the wind just styles it perfectly and makes him look like he could captain this boat himself if he wanted to. Which, as a matter of fact, he could—when Ben and I were kids, our family went on weeks-long sailing vacations across Lake Huron and the Straits of Mackinac all the way to Canada. As our captain, my father was the very definition of seaworthiness, no matter the weather, the rocky moorings, the wind direction.

Standing next to him now, my mother is smiling. A genuine smile, a smile from deep inside, and it’s good to see her so happy.
She is tall and regal and pretty. No, she is beautiful. Together, they greet their guests—their sailing friends, our grandpa Hain, their tall Lutheran pastor and his wife, the cousin who has gone far in advertising—and I take stock. And wonder what happened to my brother and me.

With parents like these, how could we have gone so wrong? Between Ben and me we have three marriages (one common-law), two divorces, three DUIs, five kids, two bad credit ratings, and a history of disconnected telephones. I mean, what the hell?

I ask my brother about this when I drive to the outskirts of the downstate town where he lives with his guns and his new girlfriend. I am there to pick them up—him and his girlfriend, not the guns—and give them a ride to the anniversary party, because neither of them has a valid driver’s license.

“Not everyone can be like them,” my brother tells me. “Not everyone wants to.”

For the first time it occurs to me that he’s okay with this. He’s okay with the continental drift of difference between our parents’ lifestyle and his own. I, on the other hand, am not. I love my farm. I love our lives there enough to go through a lot to keep them going. I can’t imagine ever living anywhere else. And with the land sale, there’s no doubt we’ve gained a little traction. But my parents have made it look easy for half a century; why does a single year of my life have to be so hard?

At the party my sons agree to help out as waiters, and they circulate among the guests with platters of cheese, crackers, and fruit. I’m proud that they’re so willing to help, but quickly see that you can take the boy off the Big Valley, but you can’t take the Big Valley out of the boy.

I overhear Owen bashing our country’s president, George W.,
to my big grandpa Hain, whose monetary contributions to the Republican Party are legendary. In the Hain basement hangs a framed, signed color photograph of a denim-clad Ronald Reagan astride a huge chestnut gelding.

“He’s not even really our president,” Owen says, eating from the tray of hors d’oeuvres he is supposed to be offering to the guests. “I can’t believe I might actually have to go to war someday and fight for a
fake
president.”

Luke, creative as ever, has set down his tray on a deck chair and is throwing random items over the side of the tour boat: cheese slices, ice cubes, a grape, a pacifier he found on the deck. Somewhere, a baby is wailing.

“Haven’t you ever seen David Letterman do ‘Will It Float?’ ” he asks a distant cousin as I hurry by, looking for Will. I wonder how Luke has stayed up late enough to watch Mr. Letterman’s program without my even knowing.

I find my youngest downstairs on the first floor of the double-decker boat, near the galley. I’m just relieved that he hasn’t fallen overboard, until I watch my dad take a tip cup away from him, but not before it has been stuffed with dollar bills, presumably by my parents’ guests.

Will admits that he swiped a plastic beer cup from the bar and borrowed a black marker from one of the boat’s crew members to draw dollar signs all over it. He never actually
asked
anyone for money, he just rearranged the fruit, making room for the cup in the middle of his tray, then looked up at people and smiled.

“I can keep the money, right?” Will is asking my dad.

I hug my youngest as my dad looks on. My dad is not a meddler, yet now offers a rare piece of unsolicited parenting advice.

“You need to keep taking these boys to church, Mard,” he says, not unkindly, then leaves to circulate.

Will stuffs the bills and change into the pocket of his used pants. A year ago, trying so hard to make us look like a normal family, I would have felt embarrassed by my sons’ behavior. Not anymore.
This
, I think with some satisfaction,
is why God gave me three sons
.

Because when they are grown, Owen will know when I am too old and decrepit to farm and will take the lead in analyzing nursing-home placements; Luke will be unselfish and caring enough to come and visit me regularly there; and Will’s ambition will ensure he is the one with the money to pay the bill.

Maybe I will keep taking them to church, as my father just suggested. Maybe there is a place for us inside a church and we just haven’t found it yet. Or maybe they will each take up their own searches someday and find their own spiritual place. Either way, my sons have adapted like they were born to this life of grab-and-hold-on. They make no apologies for it, either, proving they’ve adjusted to it even better than I have.

I walk up to the top deck with Will, and he joins his brothers. They stand together, just the three of them, talking and laughing, each still doing his duty and holding his tray. I watch my triangle of boys and whatever sense of failure I’ve been hanging on to drifts away.

I lost my marriage, but they lost a childhood with two united parents and yet have adapted just fine. Despite the empty cupboards, the layer of ice on their bedroom windows, the carloads of firewood, the free school lunches, the sale of our land, and their parents’ divorce, they are more than just fine; they are, well, wonderful. They are the very best of both of us.

I’ve given them everything I had in the past year, but their father probably has, too. And no milestone I pass, no victory I win, and no harvest I grow will ever be better than that. If I never in my whole life accomplish anything beyond just knowing this, it will be enough.