The Woefield Poultry Collective (3 page)

So I said, Yeah? Because I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about and I was starting to get the feeling that she might not be the brightest bulb in the lamp.

She said she was sorry, she should have introduced herself. She’s Prudence, Harold’s niece, and she’s come to stay.

I’m not surprised the old man never mentioned her specific. People never like to talk about their slower relatives. I got a cousin, twice removed, got webs between his toes, ain’t said one word his whole life. You never hear about him in the family newsletter that goes around every Christmas. Hell, nobody mentions me, either, if it comes to that. Families is funny about who they advertise. A lot of the time, the people worth knowing in a family is the ones that don’t get mentioned in the newsletter. That’s my opinion.

The girl was still talking, saying how I must be devastated because of how Harold and I worked together for so many years and it must have been so special.

It’s true that I’ve been living in the cabin down at the edge of the far field for going on thirty-five years, ever since the old man hired me.

So I said, Oh yeah. Like that.

And the cabbie feller leaned over to her and whispered, Are you sure this is right?

And she whispered back, Yes. This is Earl, my uncle’s right-hand man. His partner, really. Earl keeps the place going. My uncle was very lucky to have him.

I was starting to feel not right. I’m not saying I didn’t help the old man, because I did. But I wasn’t ready for all that right-hand stuff.

I told her I worked the farm, such as it is, and got paid every month
for my trouble and how it was never any kind a partnership, less’n it was one of those 98–2 deals.

She siad, Oh, like she was disappointed.

We stood there for a while. Finally, the girl says, Well, maybe we should go inside? It kind of smells out here.

Like a poo, said the cabbie.

I told them that was the rendering plant down the road. It can get a little ripe in the afternoons. And since I didn’t know what else to do, I let her in and that cab driver come in right behind her, still hanging onto that goddamn suitcase. Once she was inside, I didn’t know what in hell to do with her. I don’t do a lot of entertaining, you want to know the truth, especially not young girls.

She told the cab driver he could leave the suitcase in the “four year.” Whatever the hell that meant.

He said, You sure Miss?

And she told him it would be fine.

And he asked about the rest of her bags. He wanted to know if he could bring them in for her too, like it was a goddamn special treat. And she says, That would be incredibly nice of you. And he started grinning like she just gave him a thousand bucks.

The cabbie left and she followed me into the kitchen. She looked around like she was from the health inspector and asked me if I lived in here. I told her I got my own place. Little cabin out back.

Then she asked what’s happening on the farm and I was about to tell her to mind her own damned business when we got interrupted by the cabbie. He was huffing and puffing like a workhorse with the heaves and he had hold of a suitcase even bigger than the last one.

He says, You want here?

And she says, Yes, Hugh, that’s fine.

So off he went again.

She asked again what we were producing and normally that might have seemed like a pretty goddamn snotty question, only the way she said it, it was hard to tell what kind of question it was.

Before I could tell her the place was producing nothing but bad luck
and trouble the cabbie was back again. This time he had a big canvas bag like a hockey bag and a couple more of them suitcases, all of it kind of hooked together. This time he couldn’t even talk, the damn things was so heavy. He was fighting for air.

The girl, she just smiled at him and right away he’s smiling back, even though the poor bugger’s half dead.

Off he went again and before we could start talking the girl turned to me and she’s got the tears in her eyes. Her voice was kind of sniffly and hell if she didn’t have the waterworks going. Anyway, the girl cried for a while and the cabbie came and went with a few more bags and every time he saw she was still crying he give me a look like I just shit on the floor. Then she got calmed down and asked me how her uncle died and I told her he was watching TV.

And she says, What?

I said I didn’t know what he was watching because I was back at my cabin.

She said she meant
of
what?

I got it, so I told her what the paramedic doctors said, that his ticker probably give out.

And she says, Heart attack, and starts up with the crying again. The cabbie was still standing beside her staring at me like I was the biggest bastard who ever lived.

Nobody said nothing for a couple of minutes and she asked him, Is that all the bags?

He said yes, but he didn’t move.

And so she said, Thank you, Hugh. You’ve been terrific. He asked about four more times if there was anything else he could do for her and he shot me a few more of them suspicious-type looks before he buggered off.

Then the girl saw the pile of mail on the table and asked if it was her uncle’s.

I nodded, but didn’t say nothing else. I knew what those letters was full of. People asking to get paid. It was happening even before the old man died. Between you and me, I knew his financials wasn’t in
order. I’d just been waiting for someone from the bank to come along and close the whole shitteree down. Put a padlock on her. When that happened, I was going to put the camper on the back of the truck and head south, like I’d always planned. To hell with waiting until I had the money for a new camper. The old one would do fine if I took it down south where it never rains. I’d give that damn sheep to the neighbors and get the hell out. I never did much around the place anyway, ‘cept let the old man listen when I played.

The girl flipped through the letters, looking at the addresses. Real snoopy. She said that even though she never got to know Harold, she knew about him because he was the last of her family and he lived in Canada, which she says she respected, especially during the Bush era, and she couldn’t believe he’d left her everything.

It took a minute for what she said to sink in. The old man left this little girl the farm. Jesus, Jesus.

I didn’t know what the hell to say to that. All I know is that I got the hell out of there before I said something I’d regret.

For me, the first priority was building a sense of community. I don’t think many people would argue that whether you live in the city or on a farmstead, you need your neighbors. Of course, the type of community will vary.

In rural communities church is very important, as are farmers’ cooperatives and so forth. In cities, it’s more about … well, I’m not sure. I went to a square dancing club on the Upper East Side for a while. I also belonged to an interesting rooftop gardening group. Plus, I hung out with my friends from college. Things are a bit more fragmented in the city. I wanted to be open to every possibility here. Joining a church. Volunteering at the Ladies’ Auxiliary. Having coffee at the local café. All of it. My first order of business was to establish myself as a new and valuable resident of the area.

I thought I’d get to know people by hosting a memorial in honor of my uncle so locals wouldn’t think I’d just swooped in and taken this prime piece of property out from under them. For all they knew, I could have been a developer, looking to put up condos or mini-malls or something. I wanted to allay their fears and get to know them.

Next on the To Do list was tackling the house and land. The property was spectacular. So rugged and untouched. All that wonderful grass. The beauty of stray stones in a field! It just needed to be cultivated and enriched. There was even more work to be done around the house. Consistency is a thing that matters to me and there was a severe lack of it in the paint scheme, which varied radically from room to room: eleven
rooms in the house painted thirteen, non-complementary colors. For the first little while, I had to pause between rooms for a moment to let my eyes adjust to the different shades. There were eight different flooring materials, including five types of linoleum, two species of hardwood and one bathroom done entirely (floors, walls and even the ceiling) in chipped one-inch tiles. The porch sagged and the roof was sheathed in several layers of tarps. But the house had good bones. My guess was that once I’d made an effort to meet people in the community, offers to help would come pouring in. After all, Hugh the taxi driver had already volunteered to assist in any way he could.

I thought of all these things that first night in my uncle’s house. It was cold and the blankets and sheets were threadbare. I could feel wind slipping into the room through gaps around the window frames. Also, the silence was strange after so many years in Brooklyn. To deal with the cold I wore warm-up pants over my pajamas and two pairs of socks. I slept soundly and woke with the birds. I think they might have been crows, rather than songbirds, but still!

When I was dressed I went outside and found Earl feeding a sheep, which was just so great, even though the sheep didn’t look quite right. It appeared to have a skin disease that had caused it to lose its wool on one side, but Earl appeared to be fond of it so I didn’t comment. He seemed a bit sensitive about the farm in general. I made a mental note to put calling a vet on the To Do list along with adding weather stripping to the windows once I was settled in and Earl trusted me more.

I asked Earl to join me in the house for coffee so we could discuss our plan of attack, but when I went to make coffee I found only a plastic tub full of instant crystals in the cupboard. The door of the cupboard was sticky to the touch and missing a handle. It was another thing to add to the list! I wasn’t about to make instant coffee, so I pulled the four-pound bag of Mayan organic beans and a grinder from one of my bags and brought them downstairs and got to work.

Earl had come in and was taking off his work boots on the rag rug in the kitchen doorway when his head came up and he sniffed the air. He asked what was burning.

“Oh, that’s coffee,” I told him. “I think you’re really going to enjoy it.”

He winced and crinkled his brow like I’d just told him the most outrageous lie. Such a character!

When he was seated at the kitchen table, I poured him a cup of coffee and put the jar of sugar on the table and apologized that there was no light cream.

“Where’s the Coffee-Mate?” he asked.

“Coffee-Mate? Oh, you mean the powdered stuff. You don’t want that. It’s full of chemicals. We’ll keep cream on hand from now on.”

He took a sip of the coffee and scrunched his face even harder, making him basically indistinguishable from a raisin.

“Too strong?” I asked.

“Jesus Christ Almighty,” he said.

I could see that he wanted to spit it out.

“I’ll add some water.” I took his cup and added a splash of hot water from the kitchen faucet. The water smelled lightly of sulfur and I made a mental note to find out why.

When I set his mug down in front of him he stared at it like it was a coiled rattler.

I took a seat across the table from him.

“So Earl, you mentioned yesterday that the barn burned down recently,” I said.

He grunted.

“That’s really too bad. A barn seems like an essential thing on a farm. Do rural people still enjoy barn raising?”

He transferred his suspicious glare from the coffee cup to me.

“You know, one of those parties where everyone comes together to help out a neighbor who has had a misfortune,” I added, in case he wasn’t familiar with the custom.

He grumbled something about not being “goddamn Mennonites.” I think he may have meant Amish. I gathered from his reaction that barn raisings are not as common as they once were. Or maybe they belong to a bygone era, perhaps due to worker’s compensation considerations. In any case, I didn’t have the money for building supplies,
so our barn raisers would have had to bring the materials, which is probably considered above and beyond even among the Amish and the Mennonites.

I thought for a moment and sipped my coffee. It was good, but the rotten-egg smell was persistent.

“How about a strawberry social. Those are still extant, aren’t they?”

Earl just stared at me.

Considering that he was hired help, I couldn’t avoid noticing that he wasn’t very helpful. I wondered when he’d last been paid. Perhaps a raise would improve his morale.

When he still hadn’t spoken after three long minutes, I made up my mind. You can’t wait around for other people to make decisions or nothing will get done.

“Yes, I think we’ll have a strawberry social tea in honor of my uncle’s memory. I just need to know who to invite.”

“Don’t have a goddamn clue,” said Earl.

The man is wonderfully fierce. A classic type. I’d been reading about people like him for years but never met one in the flesh. I knew as soon as I saw his wide orange suspenders that he was going to be an important source of local knowledge if I could just get him to open up. When I pressed, Earl went over to the bulletin board by the phone and copied down a few names and numbers on the back of an envelope, which he handed to me, and then went to the back door and started pulling on his boots.

The list was very short, which was probably just as well because the supplies for entertaining around the house were limited. I’d surveyed the kitchen and found only two cheap pots, one frying pan, four bent forks, two butter knives, three mismatched spoons, a large collection of lethal-looking but dull knives stuck in a dirty wooden block and a can opener. None of it appeared to have been used for a very long time. Everything was sticky with old food residue and grease and dust. Uncle Harold must have eaten out a lot, which probably helps to explain his premature death.

I asked Earl if he’d mind calling the people on the list and asking
them to come over on Saturday at three. He grabbed the hammer that he’d leaned against the wall when he came in, and for a disconcerting second I thought he was going to swing it at me. Then he said he had business to attend to and walked out.