The Woefield Poultry Collective (28 page)

Sara nodded.

“You going to show your birds?’

Another nod.

“Good for you. Look, I want to talk to Seth here about something. You mind giving us a few minutes?”

He didn’t talk to her like she was a little kid. He didn’t disrespect her or condescend. To tell you the truth, I even felt sort of flattered that he knew my name. Good-looking people get away with murder.

Sara picked up Alec and said she was going to practice over near the coop. And I said, “Sure, sounds good,” trying to sound like I was some high-level chicken show coach or something.

The guy, who was pretty buff as well as tall, came over and sat down across the door from me. There was this intensity to him, a clarity. He was seriously handsome. In metal terms, he made me feel like Lemmy standing next to Bret Michaels circa 1989, only the big guy was less skeezy than Michaels and I was several orders of magnitude less cool than Lemmy. When you spend all day, every day, on the Internet you develop an image of yourself in relation to the world. You know what I mean? It’s like your looks or lack of them are manageable. Because you focus on other people and no one can see you and if you make the odd crack about yourself, well, that’s just you being human and relatable. But when you get confronted by a demigod with an advanced degree in old jeans, well that kind of fuckery plays hell with the whole construction.

I went to run my hand through my hair, but realized I was doing it in an “I wish my hair was like yours” way, so I stopped. Plus I had on a hat and I hadn’t washed my hair for a while. Instead I put my hands between my legs so he wouldn’t see them shake.

“You feeling better?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said. I wasn’t about to get into it. I had just started to feel almost like I was going to make it through the aftermath. No way was I about to start dissecting my feelings. That was a whole swamp full of alligators and pythons right there.

“I couldn’t help but notice that you were a bit shitfaced last night.”

“Sherlock fucking Holmes, at your service,” I muttered, and then felt bad.

The guy soldiered on and it occurred to me that Prudence might have hired him. Or he was from some religious group. Either way, I decided to stonewall him to get the visit over as soon as possible.

“It doesn’t have to be like this,” he said.

I was on the verge of making a crack about being on the porch, pushing a chicken around with a piece of doweling, but I didn’t. I didn’t say anything.

“You’ve heard of AA, right?” he said.

Fuck me. I should have known. Although, to be completely honest, most of what I know about the whole self-help thing I learned from
TV, like when Dexter landed himself a crazy bitch sponsor at an NA meeting and that guy on one of those FBI shows had to go to AA after he got shot and turned into a total lush and a pill head. My parents talked about AA sometimes like it was exactly the thing you wanted to avoid, because if you went there you had to quit drinking and that would be the worst possible thing that could happen to a successful drinking career.

I was weirded out that AA had sent their best-looking ambassador to get me. It was like getting recruited to Scientology by Tom Cruise or to the Jehovah’s Witnesses by Prince or something.

I cleared my throat.

“If you want to keep drinking it’s your business,” he said. “If you want to stop, there’s help.” Just like on the late-night TV spot. Only he seemed sort of embarrassed as he said it.

“Prudence ask you to talk to me?”

He frowned. “No. I saw you, drew my own conclusions. This has nothing to do with Prudence. I just thought I’d put it out there for you. Someone did the same for me.”

This
bastard was in a self-help program? For what? Square-jawed, cleft-chin sufferers? Handsome Bastards Anonymous?

“So what, you want me to go to some meeting? Join a club? Make a vow?”

“If you feel like things are getting out of hand, I’ll take you to a meeting. You don’t have to be a fuckup your whole life. Trust me. If I can pull it together …”

The crazy thing is I believed him. Partly because I could see he wasn’t enjoying saying all this to me.

I got this sudden, clear as a police siren on Sunday morning image of Prudence pulling off my piss-soaked jeans as I lay on the porch. I thought of the kid this morning, looking at me the way you’d look at someone who was dying. Like I was Ivan Ilyich from that Russian story and Sara was the farm boy. Oh, I was lost, all right. And right there the shaky little foundations I’d tried to rebuild around myself in the past couple of hours fell apart in a heap of busted nails and splintered lumber.

“So if I wanted to go to a meeting, what time would we have to go?” I asked him, like I was very busy. I might have been willing to try something new, but I didn’t want the guy thinking I was free all the time.

Things sure changed after I started staying here. For one thing, everyone was very busy. Seth started going out with Dr. Eustace every night. I wished I could go with them because it seemed like they had really good talks. If I wasn’t into leadership, which Mr. Lymer says means minding your own business except when you are asked for your opinion, I’d have definitely wanted to listen in.

Earl was building a platform out in the field, with a back wall and a roof that Prudence said was going to be the bandstand. Seth was helping and Prudence hired a few other people, too, like the nice man who drives a cab and one of the writers that she teaches. Personally, I thought Prudence should get people to work on a barn, but Prudence said that’s going to come after the festival. Earl was hardly talking, even to swear.

I think Prudence is one of the busiest people who ever lived. Probably only God and Jesus and the devil are more busy than Prudence. When she wasn’t telling Earl what to do, she was on the phone or she was walking all over the property saying how this area is going to be camping and this area over here is going to be parking during the festival and I couldn’t tell how she was deciding because the two areas looked exactly the same. Seth kept warning her about mud pits full of hippies.

I think everyone enjoyed it when the reporter came and started asking questions, even though he was mostly just interested in Earl. I could tell he was disappointed that I didn’t have more stories about
him, but he tried to hide it and that was nice. In addition, I could tell that the reporter was getting interested in my chickens. Everyone does, eventually. He said he wished he could come to the fair with us so he could take photos for his magazine. He said his editor would like the “local color.” I told him we’d tell him all about it when we got back.

To get ready, I had to give the frizzles two baths. White chickens are a lot of work to prepare. I didn’t know that when I bought them or I might have chosen to get red ones instead. You have to dip the white ones in this bluing stuff and let them dry. Then you have to do it again. It’s good that Prudence is letting me keep them on the porch because they’d just get dirty again if they went in the coop.

Almost all of the animals here live on porches. I think that makes us unique. I hope the reporter mentions that in his article.

I was damned happy to get off the farm to go with the kid to her poultry show, although I might not have said that at the time. I’d been working my tail off ever since Prudence started up with all that shit about having a concert and needing a bandstand and ticket booth and whatnot. I figured nothing would come of it. Even when that reporter feller showed up and started hanging around the place, asking questions about me and Merle and the High Lonesome Boys, I didn’t think much of it. I figured he was making it up about that magazine of his.
Bluegrass Revival
sounds like it’d have about four goddamn readers. I was surprised as hell when he showed me a copy. We had so many people hanging around the place doing Christ only knows what one more didn’t make a frog’s hair worth of difference.

Anyway, it’s too bad he had to go do a conference call with his editor or he’d have seen that they put on a good fair down there. Not many places do anymore. A lot of fairs have developed a—what do you call it—dependence on rides run by all them tattooed carnie buggers, look like goddamn criminals. I would have made sure to go with the kid no matter what, knowing them bastards was around. But this fair had some good stuff too.

Course, everything was a cock-up from the start. First, Chubnuts was having one of his days. Ever since he give up the bottle, he’s been kind of funny. Not down, like you’d expect. Sorta chatty-like. Talking all kinds of personal business that a person doesn’t want to hear unless it’s on TV. It was like Chubnuts, who was looking a hell of a lot
better, specially since he trimmed that hair of his and started washing it regular, was taking
his
prize chickens to the fair. He couldn’t shut up or calm down and he must have changed his goddamn clothes three times. First he put on them tight jeans, don’t know how he gets his feet into them, then the white track pants with the racing stripes at the sides that are too long and drag on the ground. Like those were his Sunday-go-to-meeting pants. Then back into jeans, only these ones were black and tighter than a banker’s fist.

The kid though, she was calm, packing up her birds into their cages, putting the bedsheet over them so the birds wouldn’t get too worked up. I helped her put them in the back of the truck and then she went and sat on the porch steps. Considering what she’s got for parents, that girl is something else. Her old lady called every day at 4:00 p.m. She talked to the kid for five or ten minutes. Kid hardly said a word. Just yes, no. Nods. Even I could hear her mother crying on the other end.

Then her mother would ask the kid to put Prudence on the phone and Prudence would be stuck there for a good thirty minutes.

It was no situation for a little kid.

I figure the more people who aren’t crying around her the better. Especially in a stressful situation like a poultry show.

We had to wait around for a good hour or more, until Chubnuts picked his clothes and put his perfume on and got the red snot rag tied around his head just right. He came out dragging this big bag of I don’t know what all. Like a traveling hairdresser, with fancy brushes and rags and a blow dryer. He said it was in case one of the birds stepped in a water dish and needed to be dried.

I told him that if he put a dryer on one of them hens she was likely to die of a conniption fit, and he told me that I don’t understand the cutthroat world of competitive poultry. And he might have had a point there.

Then he said we had to stop and pick up his sponsor. And Prudence said to Sara, I didn’t know you got a sponsor for the show. And Chubnuts says, no he means
his
sponsor.

So I said to him, What the hell you need a sponsor for? You don’t
even have birds entered. Where were they going to advertise? And he told us he didn’t mean a commercial sponsor, he meant a spiritual sponsor.

This seemed to mean something to Prudence because she shut right up.

So I said, We’re going and I can’t fit no one else in the truck and whoever wants to come better get in the truck now.

The kid and Prudence climbed in and Chubnuts said he was going to wait for his spiritual sponsor to pick him up because he needed to talk to him.

We were driving away and Chubnuts was still talking, saying, Do you think Robert Downey or Steven Tyler go to events without their sponsors? Then he started telling Sara that he’d be right behind her and Don’t worry and Don’t let Earl anywhere near Alec Baldwin!

We’re on the road about five minutes and the kid said, I like Seth. He always makes me feel more confident.

See what I mean? Kids is a goddamn mystery.

My favorite part of the Cedar Agricultural Fair was the animals, in particular the sheep. They took my breath away. Bertie had almost entirely recovered from her hoof trim and shearing. The cuts had healed nicely and she seemed in better spirits because I think she liked living on Earl’s porch. We’d made that her semi-permanent home because she pushed her way under the strands of the portable corral as soon as we put her into it and she went straight back up Earl’s stairs. But as I looked around that fair, I had to admit that she was no show sheep, even on her best day.

The sheep at the fair were spotlessly white and soft and fluffy—like summer clouds. And so docile! They allowed their owners to lead them around without any argument at all. No kicking, no bleating, no trying to pull on the rope and run away. They were half a step away from being pillows.

I helped Earl carry the cages to the chicken building but left quickly. It was smelly and noisy, even first thing in the morning and only a quarter full. I told Sara that Earl would look after her and that I had to go and see some people. This was somewhat true. It was also true that I was avoiding Eustace, which was an odd experience because I’d never avoided anyone before. I’d never had to. My feelings were all mixed up. Sure, I’d lied to him, but it certainly wasn’t out of malice or anything like that. A small misdirection aimed at a bank is hardly a capital crime! Minor white lies barely count. To be honest, considering the greed of the banking industry, I think we should be applauded.

I considered apologizing, but decided not to. Apologizing muddies the waters, in my experience.

Anyway, my focus at the fair was on promoting the concert. I’d never put on a concert before, so I was glad to have Travis, the music journalist, as a resource. My research told me that bluegrass fans travel extensively to attend jamborees and festivals, often in their RVs and campers, but until I talked to Travis I don’t think I quite understood how popular bluegrass is. Dozens, if not hundreds, of musicians and bands play at festivals year round, and a lot of events have bluegrass workshops where aspiring players can learn to yodel and play banjo and what have you. It’s a huge and growing movement and we were going to be a part of it!

I couldn’t find a how-to guide for putting on a concert but was relieved to learn from Travis that all we really needed was a place for camping, a place for the bands to play, another for workshops, a beer garden, as well as microphones, amplifiers and speakers, contracts and insurance. It was just fabulous of Travis to offer to help with everything, especially given the fact that he was supposed to be working on his article about Earl.