Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm (6 page)

Out west on real ranches, real ranchers have so much fence to check on, they do it from horseback and call it “riding fence.” They look for rusted-through barbed wire, injured cattle, and wolf tracks.

I used to fancy myself “walking fence” every week or so when I’d circle the perimeter of our two-acre pasture in my knee-high rubber boots. I’d look for tall weeds breaking the electrical circuit, anything dangerous to horses’ hooves that might be lurking in the
ground, and broken or damaged fence wire. But there’s no reason for me to make that weekly walk anymore.

After Major was hit, I did find a spot in the fence where the fence posts were bent almost to the ground but the drooping electric wire was still intact, still “hot.” There were hoofprints gouged deep in the dirt, and looking down at them I could feel his panic.

I’ve had a few sightings of a skinny, mange-pocked German shepherd–like dog I’ve never seen before trotting in the pasture—sniffing the air, hackles up, sometimes digging or pawing at the ground. I watch him from the fenced-in safety of the garden and know I am looking at a killer. He is the reason Major was in the middle of the road in the middle of the night.

One day while the kids are at school I sit down next to my empty barn, lean my back against a warm outside wall in the sun, and face the pasture. Luke’s BB gun is across my knees and there’s a golf club in my hand. The gun is to take the dog down and the club is to finish him off. Tender heart that I am, I could do it. I think I might actually
like
doing it.

But the dog doesn’t show. Not today, and not ever. I leave the golf club handy, just in case.

Since the tourist ranch’s truck pulling the horse trailer with Pepper’s tail swinging out the back window exited the driveway, I haven’t kept up with any of the regular chores. Walking fence, mucking out the stalls, and grooming the horses used to be my favorite ones; now I don’t have to do them anymore.

And the other work here feels without purpose. There are weeds in the garden, the grass isn’t mowed, and carrots, squash, and the last of the tomatoes need to be harvested. The builder calls on the phone, but I don’t answer and he leaves a message asking
when I’d like to meet with him to discuss the unfinished remodeling project. I don’t call him back.

Instead of working outside, I keep pretty much to the house. Inside the house, I keep pretty much to a flowered chair in front of the picture window. Curled up, legs stiff as an old woman’s on a rainy day, I keep pretty much to myself.

There is no one to pray to these days, though I revisit the Buddhism books to see if subsequent readings bring any understanding. Are mountains really mountains or aren’t they? Are waters waters, or what? Thich Nhat Hanh says deep sadness comes from being attached to a flawed sense of coming and going. If I am doing either, I can’t put a finger on which one it is. I read the Book of Job a couple times through in awe. My faith is tiny. It could not withstand even one of those sadistic tests. I would fail. I feel like I have already failed.

I watch my sons out the window pick the ripe carrots, snap peas, and sweet corn that I’ve ignored, eating them raw right out there in the garden, dirt and all. In another lifetime, such antics would send me for the camera. Now, I can’t get out of my chair.

There are still a few warm days left before fall, and in the late afternoon when they get off the schoolbus, the boys set down their backpacks, take off their shirts and shoes, and run through the sprinkler in their shorts or jeans to cool off.

We live only three miles from Grand Traverse Bay and one of the most beautiful freshwater beaches in the Midwest, but all my kids get is our low-pressure, well-water sprinkler. I don’t have the energy or the gas money for the beach. I don’t have the internal drive or focus for editing and writing work, either, and assignments are overdue.

Through the screen door I hand the boys sandwiches wrapped
in squares of wax paper and Baggies full of apple slices. I watch them swordfight with sticks and make thumb whistles out of the variegated blades they rip from the landscape grasses around the pond. I can hear them out there, making a weird sound as if they were all out of breath. I have to think about it before I realize what it is. Laughing.

Blue jays are gorging themselves on the sunflower heads in the garden, tent-worm caterpillars make skeletons out of the elm tree, and late-season growth sprouts from the jack pines out by the road. These new pine branches grow in between the old ones and stick straight up, just like a middle finger. It feels like even the trees are flipping me off.

And I learn that a lowland jungle of leaves and vines have taken over the pasture on a Saturday when I hear one of the boys crying.

“Mom!” comes the sobbing holler from outside. It sounds like Will. And it sounds like he just said, “Luke squashed my head!”

I think of Luke’s precision with the BB gun and have just enough concern to get myself outside.

The holler is followed by a boy running toward the house, one hand pressed to the side of his blond head, the other still gripping his stick sword and pumping back and forth as he runs toward me on tireless boy legs. Dirty face, no shirt. Yes, it is Will—so aptly named—and even though he is crying, he isn’t sad at all, he is furious.

I am outside for the first time in days and we meet on the porch. He drops the stick at my feet and drops himself into my arms, pouring out an injustice he’s been subjected to during a fight with the enemy. Also known as his brother.

“No heads!” he spits out. “That’s the rule! Luke did it on purpose!”

I feel a lump starting to form on the side of his head when I peel away his sweaty hand. I look down at his weapon and see the end of it has been expertly sharpened. Probably with a jackknife—all the boys have one of their own, given to them by my brother, Ben, from his camping, hunting, and fishing stash. Someone has wrapped the handle of Will’s stick in duct tape for a better grip. I touch the business end with the tip of my finger; it is so sharp, it could spear fish.

“What’s this for?” I ask him, holding it up so the point is at eye level.

“For throwing,” he answers, looking me in the eye and crossing his arms tightly over his bare chest. “And jabbing.”

I’ve failed my sons. Again. For proof of this, just look at what they’ve been up to while I’m not paying attention. Owen, who has been such a help these past few weeks, isn’t here right now to step in and referee. He’s put together a rock band with some high school friends and they’re all off writing music somewhere. I should know exactly where, but I don’t. Because I haven’t been paying attention to that, either.

When I unravel Will’s story I find out he didn’t yell “Luke squashed my head” but, rather, “Luke threw a squash
at
my head.”

The leaves, vines, and manure piles at the edge of our fallow pasture are conspiring together to create log-sized super-squash the boys have each stockpiled in separate caches and are now heaving at each other like Olympic shot-putters. These squash bombs are an anomaly—unplanted volunteers freakishly large because they’ve grown in their own nutrient-rich greenhouse of
sorts—a microclimate in the manure piles along the south side of the barn.

Any other year, I would have noticed them. Any other year, I would have noticed a lot of things.

One of the reasons I am divorcing their father is because he sleeps his way through life. Because he refuses to take any real action against his longtime perpetual melancholy.

This behavior was a shock to me when we got married. I grew up with parents who shared the work of a marriage but who shared the joy, too. It never felt like that was the case between Mr. Wonderful and me. It felt like I got the lion’s share of each. But now here I am, all wound up in a melancholy of my own. And what’s worse is that there isn’t another me to pick up the slack while I take a break from life.

At least in their
Lord of the Flies
moment, the boys have instituted rules. One rule anyway. According to Will, the single decree of pasture war is this: they are not allowed to aim their squash bombs at each other’s heads. Any hit to the body is fine, but no head shots.

And my first thought about their conflict is not all that maternal.

Because when I picture my beloved sons raining vegetable bombs down upon each other, the first thing that comes into my mind is not that one of them could have been badly hurt—the sharpened sticks are probably more dangerous than the squash bombs. Nor am I all that perturbed over Luke’s obvious lack of fair play. Will may look like a cherub, but I know that he has his own Cain-like tendencies. No, my first thought is that these boys are wasting a potential food source.

Two months in and we are having some success with our
living-off-the-farm efforts, but our money is still dwindling fast. We don’t have to buy vegetables at the store, and we have enough extra sweet corn, beans, broccoli, and cauliflower to freeze for the winter. Onions, carrots, and potatoes can be stored in the root cellar in our basement. I make homemade tomato sauce and pizza sauce and salsa, as well as huge batches of basil pesto. Strawberries from the garden mixed with fruit from two ancient mulberry trees in our front yard make great-tasting jam.

I know a bakery that sells day-old bread for half price, and a neighbor down the road has laying chickens and so we are eating a lot of farm-fresh eggs—deviled, fried, scrambled, poached, and hard-boiled. They aren’t free at $1.50 a dozen, but they are a cheap source of protein, so we eat a lot of them. So many, in fact, that one night when I put a platter of curried poached eggs and brown rice on the table for dinner, Luke looks first at the entrée and then up at me and says, cave-boy-style, “I want some meat.”

“Be patient,” I remind him. “That’s what Rocky’s for.”

We’ve chipped in with friends and bought two piglets. The friends took one and we took the other. Owen has recently turned vegetarian, but I’m still planning that our piglet will grow into a hog and then into enough prepared pork to satisfy those of us who are carnivores. The boys named him Rocky, after the boxing champ. From the glint in Luke’s eye, I know exactly what he’s thinking. At the mention of our pig, it’s not the stocky, bricklike animal with a curly tail and damp snout he sees, but a full-grown ham, propelled around its pen on maple-smoked-bacon legs.

Still, you can’t pay an electric bill with bacon and eggs. Or put gas in the car or pay the mortgage on this farm that feels big enough now to choke a turkey vulture. Can you eat turkey vulture? I wonder.

In a fate so purely rendered I’m now certain not only that there is a God, but that She has a crackerjack sense of humor, one of my freelance gigs has morphed into steady work with steady pay. The job? Helping a successful financial planner edit his children’s book,
Finding Utopia
. The irony of that title when coupled with our lives is so perfectly timed it shakes me to my agnostic core.

Even with this new source of income we are still short this month. So desperate am I for every penny that I file an insurance claim on the loss of Major. It isn’t fair, but it’s necessary: a horse’s whole life for one month of ours. That check plus the money from selling Pepper will pay our September bills with not a penny left over.

And so here we are, subsisting on eggs, vegetables, day-old bread, and homemade jam day after day, while my boys finish their chores and then decide to have a food fight. They might as well be throwing armloads of rolled coins at each other.

I am no innocent in this predicament, either. I might not be hurling squash bombs at my own family members, but I am letting my melancholy over the end of my marriage, over Major’s death, over selling Pepper, over our money problems, over my perfect rural life dissolving in front of my eyes, have its way with me. Grief has pinned me in this chair as tightly as if it were holding Will’s pointed stick to the white of my neck.

“Emotional turmoil can interfere with the mom and dad roles even though the husband and wife roles have ended,” I read in SMILE. “This is a time when the children need more affection and attention but there is too little of the parents to go around.”

Yearning for what I’ve lost is, I decide right now, an indulgence,
An indulgence that’s certainly not in the best interest of my sons, but that’s also not in the budget.

It’s been a month since Major died. My grief over his death will not end this soon, and maybe not ever, but my inaction has to. And when Will and I walk out to the edge of the pasture, I can hardly believe what I see. In less than a month the field of grass that had been bitten to the quick by Major and Pepper is now covered in rambling green. Leaves and vines serpentine everywhere, and hidden underneath, dozens of squashes, some with the heft and density of bowling balls.

“See?” Will says to me, satisfied at my shocked face. “Told you. Bombs.”

Luke is in a corner of the pasture, crouching down next to his stash of munitions, a battered lacrosse stick rigged into an arm-powered trebuchet at the ready. He has it loaded and ready to let fly.

Here in Will’s stronghold, the remains of shattered squashes are lying at our feet. Seeds, ripened flesh, and crescents of rinds are everywhere. I put my hands under the gigantic leaves, feel around, and wrestle two squash logs from their vines. With one under each arm I walk back toward the house. My sons look at me as if I’ve finally just gone ahead and lost my mind. Maybe they think I am headed across the road to launch these green torpedoes at their father.