Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm (5 page)

The bird’s black form darts over the grass, and his contorted shadow makes me think not of my own shadow self but rather of Edgar Allan Poe’s Raven. This bird showed up just in time to spare me another failed attempt at relaxing, meditation, or anything of the like.

And really, if this were a full working farm, there wouldn’t be time for such feckless pursuits anyway. In an attempt to move in that direction, I have recently named my place the Big Valley, in homage to the television ranch of my youth. After our family trip out west in the 1970s, I practically worshipped reruns of that show.

Now I imagine that on my best days I am just like Victoria Barkley, the Barbara Stanwyck role—tough, resourceful, impervious to naysayers. Even with modern life trying to press in, my sons could do worse than to turn out like Jarrod, Nick, and Heath when they grow up—hardworking, independent, and fair-minded.

They’re not here, though; this new bird character is, and he needs a name. I’ll call him Edgar and pretend that the boys are just off on a two-day roundup and that someone up there sent this damaged avian guest my way to keep me company until they come home.

He is crow-sized and looks all black from a distance, but when he ventures closer I see that he has streaks of brown and tan on his breast, yellow legs, and white shoulders that are mostly hidden by the black feathers covering the rest of his wings. I’m sure he’s injured, because he doesn’t fly, just runs. Advancing toward my koi pond at a forward incline, he leads with the most dominant part of his armature, his saber-like beak.

When he hops on a rock, then wades in, I fetch my Roger Tory Peterson, the classic bird guide I keep handy on the kitchen windowsill.

I flip through the color plates and learn that he is a green heron, a secretive, carnivorous, and solitary relative of the more common great blue heron. The book says that green herons are native to the Midwest, and I know my birds, but I still don’t
remember ever seeing one like him before, at least not up close. I read on and learn that’s because his status is “threatened” due to “human disturbance.”

I feel you, Edgar.
The Big Valley
specialized in human disturbance. The boys and their mother got along fine every week, loading the wagons and riding fence and breaking the broncos and having sing-alongs by the campfire. It was other people who messed everything up. And it is not lost on me that there was no Mr. Barkley.

Outside, Edgar is enjoying the pond, and I take this as an unintended compliment. I designed, dug, built, plumbed, and landscaped that pond myself, shoehorning it into a narrow twelve-foot space between a brick walkway and an ivy-covered fence. I filled it with koi and added a waterfall, planning for the sound of moving water and the reflection of light to give off a welcoming mood next to the porch steps and my front door. This rare bird totally gets it. And I’m happy to see my efforts have actually faked out nature.

Edgar stands very still then, one yellow-rimmed eye staring down at the water. A quick lunge and there is a speckled koi struggling on the end of his beak. In two hunched gulps the young fish is gone. I watch from the porch as the other fish speed to the bottom and school together. Crap.

I didn’t fake out nature at all—it faked out me. And nature, unfortunately, kills stuff. As a rural person, I should know this. I
do
know this, and usually take the appropriate precautions.

I protect the corn seeds from the crows, the dogs from ticks, and my horses from roundworms and the strangles. I hope I’ll be able to protect my sons from the flaws of their mother, but in their
absence I’ll protect my imported pet-store fish from a threatened native bird. This is the Big Valley and, endangered or not, this trespasser is not going to eat any more of my koi.

I shoo Edgar away from the pond, across the yard, and down into my woods, where foxes, feral cats, and coyotes are known to prowl.

My bird book says that in another month Edgar should be migrating south. With that injured wing and no food source, his chances of making it aren’t good. Despite his outward bravado, he’s a fragile creature, all alone, and at the mercy of human disturbance. Mine.

Late that night, or maybe early, early morning, a thick sound wakes me up. It has the feel of an impact, like someone falling out of bed or down the stairs. Someone heavy. Too heavy for the black vampire bird of my bad dream, returned in my sleep from the woods, bloody and rotting, to peck down our farmhouse’s door.

Half-asleep, I call out, “Boys?”

The house is quiet.

“Boys?” I call again, climbing out of bed, climbing out of sleep, climbing out of that half-remembered dream. And then I’m down my unfinished stairway, hopping over the central landing, up the boys’ stairway and almost to the other side of the second floor and their bedrooms, when I remember. They are still across the road at their father’s. I am in the house alone, and there’s no one here but the dogs and me.

Super, our Akita, has a guard dog’s suspicious nature and would bite an intruder without so much as snarling at him first, but Friday, our corgi, is a herding dog, and he would run circles around a trespasser and bark and bark. I haven’t heard so much
as a whine, though, and check the mudroom. The dogs are both asleep on their rugs, and so I know for drowsy certain that the house is unbreached.

With the remodel only half done, the kitchen ceiling is still stripped to its lathing, there are fistlike holes where light fixtures are supposed to be, and the stairway is just raw wood and open to the kitchen. The house has changed its olden voice, and sound echoes differently now from room to room and floor to floor. Something feels off, but maybe what I heard was just a sheet of drywall stored somewhere, perhaps leaned against the basement wall, falling to the floor.

It’s a muggy night, I’ve left the windows open, and just when I think I either imagined the sound or that even if I didn’t it isn’t anything to worry about, I hear sirens on the road. They’re close, and so I walk outside in my nightgown to see what brought them here.

The details of the next several minutes blur. Do I hear or see the sheriff’s car park in front of my house? I’m not sure, it just isn’t there, and then in another glance it is. I might run outside, straight to the side of the road, or maybe I just walk, still hopeful this is someone else’s nightmare.

My next memory is a well-defined one, though, even if I wish it weren’t. Blue and red lights are blinking on the bare skin of my arms as I sit cross-legged in the grass between the pasture and the road. There’s a lawman standing up next to his car, door flung open, talking on his car radio.

My nightgown sticks to my thighs and my horse Major’s head is in my lap.

He’s lying by the side of the road next to me, groaning, and I am kissing his velvet nose, and even though it is a suffocating and humid night in August, I can’t stop shivering.

And at first, I don’t know anything. Not how to breathe, not how to relax my throat so the scream can get out, not what just happened, or why, or who called the police.

And I actually try to ask. I try to ask who called them, as if this were somehow important, but I feel my whole body shake, and I gag on the metal smell of all that blood as it pumps down my shins, and I can’t get the words out.

I press my forehead to my horse’s white blaze instead, bury my mouth against bone and hair, and his last-ever gesture to me isn’t a nicker or a head shake or a tail swish, it’s just to muffle my sobs with his wide neck.

Major is dying, my dream of horses is dying, or I am dying, or maybe all three.

And it is a single line of poetry I remember at this wrong moment that
saves me, just, from that death blow: “First I would like to write for you a poem to be shouted in the teeth of a strong wind.”

A horse’s head is heavy, but I focus on this one harmless line of words instead of thinking about the weight, instead of petting his Roman nose, the one that the horse trader said was a flaw but that I fell instantly in love with after just one test ride around the arena. I focus on that line instead of the intelligent face of his that I attached to in an instant, handing over the birthday money my mother gave me to buy him, more than thirty years after I first asked her for a horse.

And I am watching all this from way high up, as if I were actually on the moon instead of seeing a crescent of it reflected in Major’s wide-open eye. As if I were floating and not sitting here next to my horse and holding him while he dies. Because up here, I can just flick that line of poetry straight down to some other
woman and some other horse like a lead rope tossed out for a last-second rescue.

But now is not the time for poetry, or the time for rescue, either. Now is the time for this woman to put her girlish dreams aside. For her to realize that the sound that woke her up was real. The copper smell of blood soaking my nightgown is real, and the police are real, and the impact was real, too. As real as the front of a truck connecting with the broad side of horseflesh at, the sheriff says, a reasonably high rate of speed.

And for the first time I notice two people sitting in the front seat of a smashed-up truck, staring straight ahead, and the sheriff puts his hand on my shoulder and says not to worry any, because the people are badly shaken but unhurt.

Another deputy arrives in his cruiser, leaves the lights flashing but shuts the siren off the way they do when speed is no longer necessary. The two men confer. One gets back on the radio and I see his lips move, see him recite my address, and I am tied right here to the present but I want to go back to that trip out west.

I want to go back to the time when the only thing real about a horse was my dream of having one. A horse that existed only in my longing for him, and not the horse who is here, who is beloved, whom I recite poetry to, and who, even though I know I get every word of that poem right, is still dying by the side of the road.

I look across his body, across the road, and see no lights on at the Wonderful residence.

Please, God. Please don’t let the boys wake up and see this. Please
.

I cup Major’s soft ear in my palm and choke out that line: “I would like to write for you a poem to be shouted in the teeth of a strong wind.”

His breath leaves him in a sigh, I feel him relax, and I think—no, I know—that all the horse dreams of my girlhood are dead now. My marriage is dead, my dreams are dead, and my real horse is dead, too. And no one comes outside from the Wonderful house, because that is an easy prayer to answer.

Then the deputy fills out some paperwork for me to sign, and soon everyone is gone. The two deputies, the people staring straight ahead, their smashed-up truck, the tow truck, and my horse, too. Gone.

When I went to sleep last night, I had a horse named Major. Then I woke up. And all that’s left of him is a destroyed spot in the grass shaped exactly like a horse in mid-gallop. Yesterday morning, I thought I was lonely. Not just lonely, but six different kinds of lonely. I stare at the awful wound in the dirt and know that until this second, I didn’t even know what that word meant.

Something else, though, is absolutely clear: this is the limitless space of the human heart.

I walk away from the road, up the front steps, and into my empty farmhouse like a sleepwalker. I’m sticky with horsehair and dried blood, and my dogs smell it on me and must feel afraid, even lionhearted Super, because they crawl toward me on their bellies. I put my hands on their warm heads, stand in my dark kitchen, and hug that dumb and hopeful girl goodbye.

My memory delivers the next couple of lines from that poem then, and I just let them come.

·  ·  ·

The sun actually comes up the next morning, and the one after that, too. Two days without Major and I can tell that Pepper already knows from lonely. She has pawed and stamped a deep hole in her stall, I went to Tractor Supply and bought a bag of her favorite treats, but she still won’t eat. Horses are herd animals, a holdover from days when they were more likely to meet their end by a wolf’s fang or a cougar’s claw and not the front end of a dual-axle pickup truck. They get anxious and lonely if kept all by themselves, I am in no position to buy another horse, and so I sell Pepper and most of my horse tack to a tourist ranch down the road.

The boys ask me if we can go and visit her, and three times I make arrangements to, but when the time comes I am still too broken and can’t bring myself to see her again, and I make up excuses. After a few weeks, my sons don’t ask me about her anymore.

And even though she is getting good care, I hear from a friend of a friend that Pepper is not adjusting well to her new home. She is allowed to leave the barn and accompany groups of trail riders, but since she is new to this ranch, and untried, she isn’t saddled up and assigned a rider. Instead, she is just patronized, and clipped behind one of the wranglers’ horses by her halter.

One day, these trail riders head out as usual, but Pepper is left behind in a pasture. Just an oversight, probably. But she watches this group leave the ranch without her, panics when they round a bend into the woods and out of her sight, and it takes some time and some doing but she is determined and eventually she escapes the fence. She doesn’t catch up to the group of riders, though, and the wranglers only notice that she is missing when they return to the barn at the end of the day.

It had been rainy for several days when Pepper found her way out of that pasture, and the wranglers find her just before dark, stuck in a mud hole in the woods up to her chest. She is in so deep, she has to be pulled out with a tractor. Remarkably, she is unharmed, no broken legs, no broken anything. At least nothing visible.

The ranch people say they have no idea why a smart old horse like Pepper would do something so nutty. But I know why. As a matter of fact, I know six kinds of lonely reasons why.