Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm (27 page)

“All things, O priests, are on fire,” Siddhartha said, before he became the Buddha. “The eye is on fire; forms are on fire; eye-consciousness is on fire; impressions received by the eye are on fire.”

Is this my shot at enlightenment? Somehow I doubt it, and I want to shut my eyes to it but I’m riveted. A dummy in the front seat and a smaller dummy in the backseat are cut free from their seat belts and dragged to safety before smoke and flames engulf the green van entirely. A smiling but sooty firefighter is interviewed, the program ends, and I turn the television off.

“Parents should not jump to conclusions before getting all the information,” advises my SMILE handbook. “A parent should not ask children what goes on in the other parent’s home. This is a violation of children’s trust.”

Whatever.

“What’s going on with the green van?” I ask Luke the second I get him alone.

He and his brothers walked over from across the road this afternoon instead of being dropped off in the van by Mr. Wonderful, providing me with an innocent enough reason for asking about it. Owen reads me like a billboard, and Will isn’t always aware of events beyond his nine-year-old world, so when I am at my worst and use one of my sons for my own devices, it is easygoing Luke I violate.

“Oh yeah, so this is pretty cool,” he tells me, eyes sparkling. “The transmission broke, and dad said it would cost too much to fix it, so he donated it to the fire department. They burned it. It was awesome.”

Because of his father’s good-hearted charity, Luke explains
proudly, if a mom and her kids are ever trapped inside a burning minivan, our local firefighters will all know exactly how to save their lives.

And that’s when the hottest, still-glowing embers of bitterness smoldering in my heart go out, just like that.

The Big Valley looks different to me now. Like a photograph carefully edited, the definition and color-saturation levels cranked up as far as they will go. It’s ours now,
ours!
, and the frantic work that has been my refuge over the past year is my daily security now. Today, this work is even a joy, and there’s a sense of purpose to our labor that I haven’t felt since Major died.

I’m smiling at this, pulling on my boots and about to head
out to water the garden, when Owen comes inside with a pronouncement.

“One of your chickens is gay,” he deadpans.

“What!?” I squawk.

“See for yourself,” he offers, opening the mudroom door and making the knowing gesture of a carnival barker at the curiosity tent.

I have heard of the fluorescent pink sheep, the world’s largest pig, and the two-headed cow. But the gay chicken? This I have to see.

The Meats are lumbering around outside the garden fence, trying to get in and peck the tomatoes, but the hens are all inside their pen, right where they’re supposed to be. Nine of them scratch along the edge of the coop for worms and bugs, or squat down on the ground and fluff their feathers in the dirt.

But the biggest hen of all, the one I’ve begun calling Alpha Chick, because she is a little bit of a bully, is standing on top of the water trough. She is arching her back and stretching out her neck as far as it will stretch. She opens her beak, almost as if she were trying to tell us something, and holds the pose for several seconds, but no sound comes out.

“Her?” I ask

“That’s the one,” Owen confirms.

Upon closer inspection I see that Alpha Chick has started to grow a red appendage on the top of her head that looks like a half-chewed gumball. There are a couple of emerald-green feathers sprouting from her backside that I haven’t noticed before, either.

The rest of the hens are still uniform in color, a soft and lovely tan. I narrow my eye in Alpha Chick’s direction, but before I can point out these physical changes to Owen, she hops off the water
trough, runs straight at one of the hens taking a dirt bath—I think it’s Pink Ranger—and humps her.

“Oh my God!” I yell.

“I’m telling you,” Owen says, nodding.

The coupling is over quick, then Alpha Chick communicates her dominance verbally—or at least vocally. She stretches up her neck and opens up her beak again, but this time she actually speaks. And what she says is unmistakably “Cock-a-freakin’-doodle-do!”

Alpha Chick looks suspiciously like one of the roosters in Larry’s poultry catalog. Alpha Chick isn’t gay, I realize, because she isn’t even a chick—she’s a dude! As I watch her make a mad dash for Cher, I’m pretty sure that Alpha Chick is actually Alpha Chap.

“That’s no lesbian!” I blurt out to Owen. “That’s a rooster!”

“Whoa,” he says. “For real?”

Yes, as we will all be made aware of in the coming days, for real. For very, very real.

I have learned some things in the past year about moon phases, and vegetable gardening, and, yes, even about chickens. I’m not quite so naive about all this anymore. And I know that when it comes to raising chickens for eggs or meat, roosters are nothing but an extraneous and aggressive annoyance. Hens lay just as many eggs with or without them. You need roosters if you want to hatch fertilized eggs to raise your own chicks, but other than that they’re just a menace.

Over the next few days our rooster flapped his big wings and strutted, jumped the hens at will, and attacked every hand that tried to feed him. Caring for the chickens—tossing in the grain, refilling and cleaning out their water trough, raking the manure out of their pen—was a chore shared by the boys, so they were the ones taking the brunt of our rooster’s testosterone flares.

And each of my sons devised his own method to outwit or outmatch him. Owen kept big rocks handy. He’d throw one at the side of the coop to create a distraction, then toss in the feed and slam the pen gate shut. If the distraction didn’t work, he’d throw the rock
at
the rooster instead.

Luke was more of a chicken-wrangling stylist, and wore my tall rubber muck boots to protect his legs while waving a beach towel or a belt in figure eights like a matador, successfully fending off the bird’s air attacks as well as those aimed at ankle height.

Will took his inspiration from medieval times and donned a suit of armor he cobbled together out of a cardboard box, a skateboard helmet, a wooden sword, and a trash-can lid.

“Back!” he’d order, opening the pen and striding inside, shield first. Leading with his beak or the fanglike spurs that had recently popped out of the back of his legs, the rooster never tired of attacking Will’s shield. Maybe the shine infuriated him, because the
ping!
of beak on galvanized aluminum soon became a familiar sound.

“I got a name for our rooster!” Will yelled, running into the house one morning after another battle with the bird. “Pecker!” To emphasize that he had earned these naming rights, he held up his little hand, showing off the latest battle wound. Blood dripped from a V-shaped cut near his knuckle.

The double meaning of the name “Pecker” was lost on Will but not on my poor hens. With no armor, no weapons, and no chance of a diversion, they had no way to protect themselves from the gender traitor in their midst. The rooster terrorized their pebble-sized brains and their melon-sized bodies, and it was all day every day with the humping.

Pecker attacked the UPS man when he walked up the driveway
to deliver the onion sets I ordered. He attacked the Meats whenever they were within range, even though they had grown to almost twice his size. He attacked leaves blowing across the yard, joggers getting in some rural miles, and two Jehovah’s Witnesses whose only crime was to walk up on our porch bearing pamphlets promising, “The End of False Religion Is Near!”

As these two navy-colored suits hopped back onto their bicycles and fled, I understood another thing about roosters. If Pecker wasn’t stopped soon, I could get sued for assault with a deadly chicken. Something had to be done, but what?

The next day, as I watched him run toward Gladys, I considered my options. Shoot him with the BB gun, beat him to death with that old golf club, or run him over with the minivan? Sic our big dog Super on him, put antifreeze in his water, slam the coop door on his head? Drop a cement block on him, light and toss some well-aimed firecrackers, microwave his ass?

I dismissed all of these options as the revenge fantasies of a temporarily unbalanced woman, and the boys and I gathered to brainstorm a humane end for Pecker. Execution was not off the table; we just had to devise a painless way to do it.

“Even PETA would want to kill that crazy bird,” Owen says.

Despite his animal-rights stance, my oldest has been attacked one too many times, is running out of rocks, and votes in favor of Pecker’s death by pretty much any means we devise.

“Yup. I vote for death, too,” Will says.

His vote is contingent on two things: not having to participate in the assassination or be a witness to it.

Luke has been uncharacteristically silent during our discussion, and so I ask him what he thinks should happen to Pecker. Surprisingly, he votes for clemency, and though he doesn’t exactly
say why, it’s probably because he’s the one of the three who saw the aftermath of our pig’s death.

“He doesn’t think he’s doing anything wrong,” Luke explains. “He’s just being what he is. And I don’t think he should have to
die
for it.”

We can respect that, and so we all agree that Luke has a week to come up with a way to spare Pecker’s life, or else I will plan a humane execution. The “how” of that task is left open, and I think of the old golf club still leaning up against the barn and cringe.

So I’m relieved when the end of Pecker’s reign of terror comes not with a BB-gun blast, a snap of the neck, or a tee shot, but with a whimper. Or at least the closest thing to a whimper I can imagine emanating from our rooster’s abusive beak.

Luke’s friend with the free-range chickens, the one who helped us move the playhouse and turn it into a coop, lives just a few miles away. In addition to chickens, his family also keeps ducks, guinea fowl, and even a peacock. If we can arrange to transport our rooster, and will throw in a bag of feed, they will adopt Pecker.

And so one weekend morning we lure the beast into Super’s big wire dog kennel using green tomatoes as bait, then latch the kennel door shut and load him, lunging and squawking, into the back of the minivan. On the short drive, Pecker whirls and flops around inside the cage like a Tasmanian-devil chicken, but we arrive with him safely contained, unload the kennel, set it down on the ground, and watch as Pecker’s new flock bobs on over to investigate.

Luke opens the kennel door; Pecker charges out to attack and is immediately set upon by two roosters much smaller than he is but with, we gleefully see, an obvious home advantage. Pecker fends them off, but not before losing a few feathers and taking a
bloodletting beak-shot to the leg. This is exactly why it’s called “pecking order,” and I am satisfied to see that our rooster has been taken down a few notches. By the time we leave, Pecker is no longer trying to attack anything or anyone; he is cowering under a shrub.

Our weekend errand successfully completed, I drop the boys off at their father’s before I head home to check on our hens. I thought they’d be clucking around happily in their chicken yard, doing their hen things, but instead they’re scattered around the property, looking frightened and lost.

With Pecker gone, the Meats have wasted no time in pushing the hens out of the coop and taking over the nesting boxes and the fenced-in chicken yard. As usual, it looks like in trying to solve one problem, I’ve only succeeded in trading it in for a whole bunch of new ones.

Chicken drama will just have to wait a day. Plenty of people let their chickens range free, and tonight I just don’t have time to battle the Meats. Because tonight, for once, I actually have plans.

Pete will be joining me for happy hour on the porch, where we’ll discuss him finishing the remodeling project he started more than a year ago. Some of the money from the land sale will go to pay for this, but I’ve also been making more from my writing and editing assignments, too. The bill folder is empty, I’ve got a small savings account, and the well is more than half paid off.

Tonight isn’t exactly a date, I don’t think, because we’ll be discussing business; but it isn’t just an appointment, either, because I also invited him for drinks and dinner.

So what is this get-together, exactly? And why do I need to
give everything a label? Farmer vs. gardener; Christian vs. Buddhist; builder vs. boyfriend. Why can’t I just
be
and let life unfold?

“To conquer oneself,” the Buddha said, “is a greater task than conquering others.”

I thought I
had
conquered myself, at least the part of myself that enjoys male company, when I donated my wedding dress to Goodwill. Is that the act of a woman interested in another romantic relationship? I don’t think so. And yet here I am, doing something I swore I’d never, ever do again: inviting a man over.

I could have discussed the remodel with him over the phone; I didn’t have to throw in dinner and drinks.

Friday happy hour on the porch is an every-other-week ritual that I am used to observing all alone, often beginning one second after the boys go to Mr. W’s for his “parenting time.” And yet today, I have company.

There is a man leaning back in one of Grandma Link’s lilac porch chairs, looking real comfortable, and watching me stride across the yard to feed the chickens. And God forgive me if I don’t give him a little wiggle as I go.