Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm (29 page)

When we get back home, the boys and I go straight to the coop to check on the chickens. They’re all fine; the anti-fox reinforcements Pete made must have worked. We feel around in the grass outside the chicken yard and find our reward: eight still-warm eggs.

After a summer of doing nothing but eating and scratching and clucking and fertilizing, our hens are finally laying eggs. And Larry was right, too, because their eggshells are an amazing blue and green. The yolks, though, are bright orange, and for the next several days I feed the boys our own scrambled eggs for breakfast. They taste the way fresh grass smells and are better than any supermarket egg ever.

With Mrs. Donahue gone, the rest of the hens stick close together, and though they wouldn’t be laying eggs at all if they were overly stressed, I can still tell they would rather be inside the coop. At least at night.

The Meats aren’t about to let that happen. An unsuspecting visitor would never mistake our farm for
The Big Valley
television show with them roaming free. No, they’d think they’d been dropped onto the set of a horror film starring a cast of zombified birds. The Meats seem like a completely different species, bulked up to the size of steamer trunks and bulging now as if unmentionables were hidden inside. They weigh as much as bowling balls, and their skinny legs wobble under the strain.

Not only that, but there are piles of chicken crap everywhere you step (so much for containing this by-product to use as fertilizer), and if you bend over to wipe off your shoe, expect an attack from the rear.

These, I am convinced, are the fowl descendants of the rooster whose crowing in triplicate signaled Jesus’ impending betrayal. I make a farmeress decision: it’s time for them to die.

I cut recipes for chicken pot pie out of the newspaper, and plan on a stuffed chicken instead of a turkey for Thanksgiving this year. I know exactly which chicken I want to invite to our table for the holiday: the one with a thing for ankles.

“I’ll fix your little red wagon, pal,” I promise.

My brother gave us his freezer, it runs fine, and I have big plans to pack it full of legs, thighs, breasts, and roasters. I consider calling Pete to do the deed, decide we are not yet to this place in our new relationship, and sit down with the Yellow Pages instead and look up “butchers.”

It takes a few phone calls, but someone finally explains that I’m not going to be able to find a commercial butcher to come to my farm and slaughter my chickens. Michigan’s legislature has outlawed farm calls. Which means meat retailers are no longer allowed to come to your farm and kill stuff. Now, you either have to kill your livestock yourself or take it to a USDA-inspected meat-processing plant. The closest one to me is outside Grand Rapids, 160 miles south.

The prospect of three hours of highway driving accompanied by fifteen angry bowling balls with feathers, beaks, and leg spurs is not a trip I relish or even contemplate. I’ve got to talk to Larry.

“Land sakes, girl!” he bellows from the help desk, tiring by now, I’m sure, of my relentless questions. “You can kill a chicken!
Get a funnel, stick the heads in, chop ’em off, let ’em drain, parboil the feathers off, gut ’em, bag ’em, and toss ’em in the freezer for the winter!”

I have been reliving this gruesome scenario ever since I was twelve years old and unwittingly scarfed down Thumper’s deep-fried hindquarters at my grandma Link’s kitchen table. What made me think that I am any different at forty-five than I was at twelve?

I couldn’t kill a hog last fall, and I don’t think I can unleash the big “S” today on a chicken, either. Maybe I would be able to kill one if it had on a black balaclava and was coming at me in my bedroom in the dark with a knife, but I know myself, and I know I cannot kill fifteen chickens. Not without years of therapy anyway and I don’t have that kind of time.

As brutal as my fowl charges have turned out to be, I still raised the Meats from tiny babies. I can eat them, but I can’t murder them, hypocritical as that may be. Instead, I stop at the cashier on the way out of Tractor Supply and pay for another forty-pound bag of chicken feed.

The meat portion of our chicken-raising experiment has obviously gone off the rails. Just when they were beginning to relax with Pecker gone, my sons are being attacked in their own yard again, our entire wardrobe of footwear is ruined, and, at eleven dollars a bag for feed, the costs are mounting. Maybe, I think, there is someone noncommercial, who would consider doing the deed.

I call the 4-H, the local food co-op, an organic rabbit farm, and a commune in the next county. Will anyone butcher my chickens? “Too late,” “Don’t do it,” “Too messy,” and “Dude, we’re vegans” are my answers.

I let the Meats roam during the day and they stray to a distant neighbor’s yard and scratch up her landscape mulch. She no longer waves when she sees me at my mailbox. Their drumsticks, I am convinced, are getting tougher by the day, and they have pecked all the grapes off my grapevine. They drink the water out of my landscape pond and terrify the koi. Even the stray cats fear them.

On a day I shoo the Meats out of the road where they have stopped traffic, my brother has apparently gotten his driver’s license back, because he arrives for an impromptu visit.

“Those are pit-bull chickens!” he says, hurrying into my house and slamming the door.

I hug him. “Please kill them,” I say, thinking of his gun collection.

Finally, a solution. Why didn’t I think of it earlier? Ben is the consummate fisherman and hunter. If you go to his trailer for dinner, you will be served fish or game. Might be bluegill, might be lake trout, might be venison, might even be rabbit, but it will be tasty and it will be something he shot or hooked or trapped or snared. Once I opened his refrigerator door on a whim and found a six-pack of Schlitz and a foil-wrapped mass shaped exactly like a squirrel, tail included. “Bacon-wrapped,” he said, “they ain’t half bad.”

Ben is not a workingman whose hobby is hunting; he is a hunting man whose hobby is working. Butchering chickens should be like flicking June bugs into a bucket for him.

“No problem,” he says.

My brother
can
do the big “S.” At last! A chicken hit man has not only been identified, but contracted, too. What a relief!

But three days later, despite frequent reminders from me, the Meats are still roaming the countryside like a gang of Nazi youth.
And while I’m out running errands, my brother packs up and leaves for bigger game. He’s meeting some buddies farther north to scout deer blind sites for fall. All the beer in my refrigerator is gone. That is the way of the hunter.

I have now been betrayed by my government, local merchants, the 4-H, the hippies, and even my own family. For this, I am not above asking for help.

God, I pray before I go to sleep that night,
please smite the Meats. Smite them hard and smite them now
.

The next morning when I open my front door, they are on the threshold. I call the newspaper and pay for a one-day advertisement to run on Saturday in the classifieds. It contains my phone number and simply reads:

On Saturday morning at 6:30 the phone rings.

“You still have chickens?” a man asks.

“Yes, I still have chickens,” I answer. “Please, in the name of all that’s holy, come and get them.”

“I will,” he replies.

The day scratches on without chicken removal. But after dark, just as I have given up hope, a small pickup truck pulls into the driveway. Our dog Friday barks as if signaling the apocalypse and there is a knock on the door. I open it and see a muscular and handsome middle-aged man in jeans and a trucker hat. He has black hair and black eyes.

“I am here,” he says. He is my savior.

I grab a flashlight. The door to the pickup truck opens and two young men, an old woman, and a little girl get out. The apostles, I think. We walk to the coop, where the Meats are sleeping. My poor hens are huddling together as usual, just outside.

The two younger men are dressed as if they were about to appear in a music video: oversized leather jackets and baggy jeans, chain wallets, baseball caps turned to the side. They cross their rangy arms over their chests. They
so
do not want to be here, boxing up free chickens. One look from the savior, though, and that is what they do.

The old woman is expressionless, but she nods to me and I nod back. I smile at the little girl and she turns her face into the hood of her jacket. They speak to each other in Spanish. The man, my savior, is the only one who speaks to me.

“My family eats well tomorrow,” he says, and shakes my hand.

All spring and all summer I was raising meat for them and I didn’t even know it. I thought I was doing something for myself and for my family. I wasn’t. I was doing it for him and for his family.

It has taken us a whole year, twelve full moons have come and gone, but our circumstances have shifted, just a little. My moon is waxing now, not waning anymore.

A year ago I would have served the wild turkey that Owen hit with our car, and now I’m giving away good meat to a family that might need it even more than we do.

This
, I think,
this present moment, this is what a good harvest feels like
.

It wasn’t only a farm that needed saving a year ago; it was a family. It was all four of us.

My savior, the apostles, and the Meats all get back in the
pickup truck and drive away. I watch until their taillights disappear at the end of my driveway. I shine the flashlight into the coop. The hens have already moved back in, and snuggle together in the nesting boxes. I think back to when they were just baby chicks, just yellow cotton balls with eyes.

Maybe God thinks of me and my sons this way.

“Safe and sound,” I say. “We are all safe and sound.”

Through my bedroom window I hear the lazy afternoon hum of cicadas in the old elm tree, mixing together with a gold-inch’s cheery song and the excited whispering of the last guests to arrive.

There’s a pause, time slows, then I hear Owen launch into “Over the Rainbow” on his cello and my heart vibrates. That’s my cue.

I walk down the stairs and there’s Luke and Will, waiting for me at the bottom and grinning. They’re handsome in their new khakis, white collared shirts tucked in, and leather belts. Their thick hair, often so unruly, is combed and smooth. They smell like soap. Luke has polished his new dress shoes, but Will is wearing flip-flops.

“I can’t find my other shoes,” he whispers, as if he is already anticipating my irritation, but I hardly notice.

Even with heels on I have to stand on my tiptoes to kiss the top of Will’s blond head. But flip-flops are fine, field flowers are fine, dancing in a barn is just fine, too. Pete is waiting, so it’s all just fine by me.

My sons hook their arms in mine and we walk out our front door and onto our porch and down the length of it until we stop in the middle. My porch posts are decorated with beautiful paper flowers handmade by my mother, and the railing is draped with yards and yards of orange and white gingham. Our guests stand in the front lawn, smiling at our second chance, and the late-summer sun shines on their faces.

A local poet, ordained via the magic of the Internet, looks smart in his paisley vest and bow tie. He faces the crowd, the Good Book open, and begins to read from the Song of Solomon.

“Arise, my darling, my beautiful one, and come along. For behold, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers have already appeared and the voice of the turtledove has been heard in our land.

“Arise, my darling, my beautiful one, And come along!”

The door at the other end of the porch opens and out walks Pete in a black suit, his two grown sons in khaki and white too, and they join Luke, Will, and me on our porch. Owen stops playing, puts down his cello bow, and joins us. Together we are a bride, a groom, and our five solid sons. Together, we are a family.

“Welcome!” the Poet says.

Pete takes both my hands in his and looks into my face. Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson are our witnesses, then more
pretty things are said that I don’t remember clearly, because I am too happy.

“Repeat after me …” the Poet says. Pete turns to face the assembled crowd, grins at my parents and then at our family and friends.

“I, Pete!” he bellows, with a surety that fills up my whole body. Shoulders back, chin up, his hands relax over the porch railing as he says, “Take you, Mardi.”

He takes me
, I think. He’s seen a fox run off with one of my chickens, he’s heard me on the phone negotiating with bill collectors, he likes his own farmhouse but knows what the Big Valley means to me and agrees we’ll live here.

He knows me and yet still he takes me.
Me
.

Nearly five years ago he and I shared one of the worst days of our lives and now we’re sharing one of the best.

Then this man I love and am in love with slides a pear-shaped diamond ring on my finger. The Poet can hardly get the words out before I take Pete, I
so
take him for me, and then we are married, and then we are kissing.

“I’d like to present to you—H​O​O​O​N​N​N​N​K​K​K!”

The Poet is about to say, “I’d like to present to you Pete and Mardi, husband and wife,” when the ceremony is interrupted.

A huge semi truck drives by and blows its horn. Loud.

My road is on a hill and this truck is on the downslope, and the driver must have seen all the flowers and my white cotton dress and the big crowd gathered, because he blows that sucker for a really,
really
long time. It echoes down the hill and into the valley long after he has passed by.

“I’d like to present to you—H​O​O​O​N​N​N​N​K​K​K!”