As I tried to explain the mess I’d made and how sorry I was, Awesome just raised his eyebrows. Humiliated, I had to walk him back to my car to show him exactly what was going on. When he realized what I had done, a look of horror stretched across his face, and I just knew that he was thinking, What idiot bought this house? But, bless him, he just turned and got the John Deere tractor and a chain and pulled me out. I left the Suburban at the barn.
Later in the day, when Jeff showed up, he asked, “You parked at the barn?”
“Oh yeah. I moved for the trucks,” I said, not mentioning that I had destroyed the back forty in the process.
As we wrapped up the move from the cabin, the last order of business was to take our deer heads down. Don’t worry, Jeff and I don’t kill anything; we’re far too sentimental for that. But Jeffrey had picked through various antique stores, rescuing any sad-faced mounts that needed a home. Not all of these creatures were grateful. One deer with a hefty set of antlers decided to exact his revenge on me for hanging him on our wall; as I pulled him down, his antlers twisted, and he snapped my hand. Gus was playing on a nearby couch when I cursed, loudly and with flourish. “You okay, mama?”
“Yup. Mama is just fine!” Jeff was out of town, Gus was still a little dude, and there was too much to do to stop and go to the ER. I walked around for four days still unpacking and setting up shop, and every time I moved a box or grabbed a paintbrush, a barbed ache beat its way from my fingers to my brain. My hand was gnarled, like I had some kind of terrible palsy.
Finally, I went to urgent care, where a doctor took x-rays and promptly told me, “Lady, you broke two bones in your hand.” Cool.
We moved in to Mischief Farm, and Gus and I were promptly knocked out by a vicious flu. Jeffrey lit fires for us in the living room, but I was starting to wonder whether too many bad omens were presenting themselves. Things weren’t supposed to be this hard. Nowhere in any of my beautifully illustrated farm books did they talk about broken bones and fevers and a very messy learning curve.
“This feels like the Oregon Trail. We got caught with an illness and the oxen are dying,” I joked to Jeff.
“Sure, but we get three hundred points for being farmers.”
8
It doesn’t matter what you do . . . so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away.
—Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
At Mischief Farm, there were a number of projects to jump right into. The convergence of all of the various chap- ters of our lives was overwhelming. Everything from Jeff’s LA house, all the leftovers from my North Carolina house, and all of our combined accumulations from the cabin made for one hell of an organization project. But the farm really did symbolize a commitment. No more “his” and “hers.” If we were going to tackle this beast, we’d have to do it together.
In March, Jeffrey’s mom and stepdad visited for Gus’s fourth birthday, and I went all-out making sure that all the planters had flowers in them, everything was shipshape, and the house was spectacular. (Though two weeks later, everything I had planted died, which is when I learned that you do not plant things until after Mother’s Day, even if the weather seems to have turned. The temperature will drop. It will snow. Everything will be destroyed. Everything.)
Jeff was out exploring one sunny day, and when he found me in the kitchen later he asked, “I found these huge divots along the perimeter of the property. Do you know what that’s about?”
It was then that I had to admit my muddy moving-day debacle. “There was nothing else I could do,” I said. “I had to just plow through the mud.” (I think that’s probably a metaphor for how we handle most things around here.)
I couldn’t tell what Jeff was thinking; he had a quizzical look on his face. Finally he said, “You’re a terrible driver, so I can’t for the life of me understand how you drove that big-ass car through that tiny space between the fences and fucking three-hundred-year-old trees and didn’t hit a thing!”
It was the highest compliment.
For Gus’s birthday, we all took a trip to Ed Hackett’s feed store, since the chicks arrive there every March. Gus plopped a flock of different-colored baby chicks in a box, and we kept them in our bathtub for a couple of weeks while trying to keep Bisou and Bandit from eating them. Bandit always was a little wild. He was born in the Puerto Rican jungle. Jeff had been filming there when a puppy came out of the trees and got hit by a car. Jeff insisted that he would pay the bill if somebody could get the puppy to a vet. A month later, the dog was released from the vet, in a full body cast, and someone brought him to Jeff saying, “Mr. Morgan, here’s your dog.” When I arrived, he sheepishly said, “So, I’ve got a dog. We can give it to someone else if you don’t want it.”
“Jeff, it’s a fucking feral dog. No, I don’t want it. It’s going to eat our baby! You could’ve brought a coyote home.” But Jeff is an optimist, and he had already decided in his heart that we were going to keep that dog. Feral or not, Bandit never ate a baby, human or chicken.
As an homage to the Super Bowl champions, we named the two chicks that had fluffy feet Russell Wilson and Dickie Sherman. Another was a red chicken named Red that I really loved; she was such a good layer. Another chick’s beak was crooked, so she had a hard time eating; Jeff and I fed her with a dropper and trimmed her beak when needed. Gus named her Scissor Beak. Another had a head like a hawk, thus the name Hawk.
We didn’t know any of the breeds. People would ask us, “Are those Leghorn Rhode Island Reds or Red Barons?”
“I don’t freaking know,” I’d say. “They’re just cool. Gus picked them out. Gus wanted a brown one and a yellow one and a red one.”
Gus became very attached to these birds. When they were pullets—two months old, not full-grown chickens, but teenagers—I took little Russell Wilson to his classroom for show-and-tell, and that chick just sat on Gus’s shoulder. Nowadays, when Gus disappears, nine times out of ten he’s down in the chicken houses.
After Jeff’s parents left, we invited friends up to the farm for the first time to celebrate Gus’s birthday. We made eggs from the bounty that Sunny’s grown chickens gave us and showed off our baby chicks while Bandit sat outside the bathroom with a string of drool leaking out of his mouth.
Our dogs never tried to hurt the chickens, but other predators lurked around the farm. During that first year, there were many nights that I was frightened. At first I was scared of the coyotes. You could hear them howling into the night; it sounded like forty-seven of them were right outside the back door. That winter we also found bobcat and bear tracks in the woods.
I always watched a lot of Dateline, and at night in the dark with no one around, I’d scurry nervously from the car to the house, no matter how irrational it was. One night Jeff and I were lying in bed watching The Killing when we heard a woman screaming bloody murder. Clearly, someone was being murdered in the woods! But we didn’t call 911; instead, I googled “woman screaming in woods.” The first thing that came up was “female fox in heat.”
You can’t leave this place for five minutes without foxes getting comfortable. Once, after we’d been gone for two weeks, I was chopping tomatoes in the kitchen when I looked up and saw Bandit walking across the back deck. I couldn’t understand how he had gotten outside. Then I looked closer and realized that it wasn’t Bandit but a huge red fox. Our surviving rooster and hens are impressive specimens. The weak ones have been weeded out, and the ones that are still with us can literally outwit a fox.
After Gus’s birthday celebrations were over, it was time to really get to work to settle into the new place. I painted and repaired the chicken houses for Sunny’s brood and the new chicks. There were a couple of projects that Jeffrey wanted done right away in order to feel fully at home. For instance, the entire place was in dire need of a thick coat of paint. The exterior walls of all the barns and the house were beige with dark-green trim. It was handsome,
but it wasn’t us. Jeff wanted a vivid Americana fantasy farm. Lots of red and white and deep dark blue. Classic and totally something out of Hollywood set dressing. You can take the actor out of the drama, but you can’t take the drama out of the actor.
Paint did wonders for most of the buildings, but the original farmhouse was in shambles, and no amount of paint was going to fix that pit. The tenant who had lived in it for a decade never cleaned, never dusted, never repaired anything. So we inherited an avalanche of problems. Jeff wanted to just tear it down or torch it. I’d smile and nod, but I knew neither of those things was going to happen. I was in love with the house where the Mischief cats had lived, and I knew I was going to be the princess who kissed that frog and transformed it.
“Just promise me that you’re not gonna waste all your time on that old dump,” Jeff would say. “There’s plenty of real work that needs to be done around here.”
True. But now that I didn’t have my old haunted house in North Carolina, this “dump” became my grownup tree house.
That spring, in the two short months we had lived at the farm, Jeff continued to get job offers that would take him far, far away. I figured I would wait till he was gone and surprise him. Cuz that always works, right?
I repaired the walls. All the original wood floors had been painted a clinical beige, so I rented a sander to restore them. I ripped out all the cabinets and put in new cabinetry and appliances. Although I can’t run wires, I can install a new electrical fixture. The challenge in the farmhouse was that the wiring was from the 1930s—old, corroded copper wires wrapped in cloth—so I toiled with visions of electrocuting myself drifting through my brain.
While I worked, Gus sat at the picnic table outside and colored or played with cars or Thomas the Train. I set up a teepee in the yard where he stowed all his toys, and he’d run into the house from time to time to tell me what he was up to. It felt nice to know he had some freedom here. I felt fairly certain that he could run around our seventy acres and he wouldn’t kill himself.
Before we’d even moved in, Sunny started sending me emails about how to take care of the property and who to go to in town to, for instance, get a fence built. She gave me a whole notebook full of resources—a guy who could do the septic work, someone who knew about chickens. One of the major resources she shared with us was the store where we’d bought the chicks, Hackett Farm Supply, which is the local resource for all your farming needs—seeds, equipment, and muck boots. Whatever you need to be a farmer, you can find it at Hackett, so naturally, Jeffrey and I overzealously started going there all the time.
Ed Hackett is one of those men who will talk shit to you until he figures out that you’re someone he can trust. He’s a button pusher, and he reminded me of guys who would come around when I was younger—guys my dad would coach Little League with or who had served in the military with him. Good guys who aren’t intimidated by anything and will tell you to fuck off as fast as they’ll say hello.
When we started shopping there, everyone gave us side-eye. I was pretty sure I could hear them thinking, Who are these city idiots who bought Sunny’s farm? But Jeffrey and Ed quickly started getting along. We’d be nosing around the aisles looking for work gloves, and Ed would tell him, “Hey, you know what you need for the farm? You need a feeding trough.” Or, “What are those boots you’re wearing? You’ve got to try these.” I was raised to be wary of salesmen, but Jeffrey was so excited to be living the farm life that he bought one of everything.
One day, Jeffrey came back from the feed store excited, saying, “Hey, I told Ed that you wanted a female alpaca, and he has two!”
“Really? He’s got two?” My radar was up. I had decided I wanted to get a girl alpaca and was looking for free animals on Craigslist. There had been a big alpaca boom, and a lot of retired people had purchased them as an investment pet because the fiber is highly desirable for being hypoallergenic and softer than cashmere. And they’d get an agricultural tax exemption. But those people were getting older, and they didn’t want to deal with the upkeep of the animals. So they were literally giving away alpacas that they had spent thousands of dollars on.
Jeff continued. “Yeah and they’re only six hundred each, honey. Twelve hundred bucks, easy peasy.”
I was listening to Jeff, thinking, Ed! That snake oil salesman!
We went back to the feed store the next day to get dog food. Ed came over, his blue eyes alight. “So Hilarie, I hear you want a couple girl alpacas.”
I looked him in the eye. “I don’t want your dirty alpacas. I’ll get my own animals. I know what you’re up to.”
When we got in the car, Jeff just stared at me, mortified. “Why were you so rude?”
“Jeffrey, I grew up around this shit. He’s not going to respect you if you just keep pulling out your credit card.”
Jeffrey went back an hour later and apologized, but he shouldn’t have bothered. Ed delighted in it. Ed Hackett doesn’t like sissies. I had to prove to him that I wasn’t a sissy.
After that, whenever I walked into the store, Ed would announce, “You’re the meanest, toughest little girl I’ve ever met.” Or he’d corner Jeff on the porch outside and in a loud stage whisper say, “Your wife is so scary.” The ultimate compliment.
That day we passed the Ed Hackett inspection. It’s a good thing, too, since he’s basically the unofficial mayor around here. He’s been in this community his whole life, so when he invited Jeff to drink whiskey by the woodstove with the guys on Sundays (sorry Hil, no chicks allowed), we knew we’d earned our stripes.
* * *
Our good fortune was snowballing. We’d been farmers for just a few short months, and Jeff got offered dream jobs, back to back. The only catch was that they were in Mexico. The first was a no-brainer. Alfonso and Jonás Cuarón, fresh off the success of Gravity, wanted him to play the bad guy versus Gael García Bernal in a story about the Texas-Mexico border, Desierto. It was a great script. The moment Jeff said yes, his next bucket-list job presented itself—the miniseries Texas Rising. This project would also shoot in Mexico, and not in coastal resort–jeweled Mexico either, so it wouldn’t be easy to travel back and forth, and cell phone coverage would be spotty. They were shooting in Durango, a little town where there had recently been a series of beheadings related to drug trafficking. When I googled “Durango,” a big red State Department alert popped up, which basically said that Americans shouldn’t go there and federal employees couldn’t go there.
I never told Jeff not to do it. I knew it was his dream job, and if he didn’t go, it would be four months of moaning about not doing it. But I still struggled with how he had to leave so quickly, especially to a place that was so dangerous. There was even some fear about danger on set. He’d be riding a horse for the role, and before he left, he was adamant about making sure there was a good trainer and the horse was healthy and comfortable being on the set. But once he got down there, he found that his horse was just a baby and wasn’t broken at all. Jeff is an animal whisperer and all, but they had cannons going off and were filming huge raid scenes at full gallop with guns a-firing. In my mind, every day on that bucking horse meant possible impending death.
Meanwhile, back at the farm, I had a bathtub full of birds, and was just trying not to get electrocuted.
9
My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—It gives a lovely light!
—Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Figs from Thistles: First Fig”
We had record snows that first winter at Mischief Farm, which meant that when April came around and the sun was out, swift creeks were flowing all over the property. It was perfect territory for a wild little boy. One day, I was up to my eyeballs in the wallpaper I was taking down in the old farmhouse when Gus called me out to play in the creek. Bisou pranced down the driveway to join us, stopping to stare down and reluctantly touch noses with the alpacas. Bisou was the grand dame of the farm and made sure every creature knew it
. I showed Gus how to make little boats out of leaves, and we discarded our shoes and soaked our feet in the snow-cold water till they were numb. We lay in the neon green first grass of the season, Gus in the crook of my arm, the sun warm on our faces, Bisou rolling in the grass beside us.
I was blissfully happy, but even so, I could feel tears spring to my eyes. Jeff would love this, I thought. Where was he right now? Was he safe? We’d bought this farm together, and he was missing this glorious first spring. We had everything we ever wanted, and yet we were apart.
To keep myself from missing Jeff too much, I filled the days with busy work. Dozens of half barrels with questionable plantings in them were on the property, and I was determined to make each one a ruckus of color. Every day on my way to drop Gus at school I’d see a “U-Cut” flower farm. Hell, I can do that!, I thought. There was a large, unsightly mess of mud outside the big barn where the thoroughbred horse manure pile had been. Could I have planted grass and let it gradually fill in? Sure. But that would have been boring. Instead, I piled up rocks from all over the property, built a minor retaining wall around the irregular shape, and overturned the earth, making rows of sunflowers and zinnias and bachelor buttons and snapdragons. Sunny had left behind a lone raised bed. It was ten feet wide and thirty feet long and just enough space to give vegetables the old college try. To the left I put in trellises to catch snow peas as they climbed. In front I popped in bush green beans, hoping Gus would take to them the way my little brother John had as a kid. To split the garden in half longways, I put in a row of carrots and beets. The middle of the garden was home to yellow squash and zucchini (which really do need all the space that’s called for on the back of the seed packet!), and the right side of the garden was tomato city. My mother always said, “Don’t grow anything you can find in the grocery store.” I heeded that and was lucky enough to find the local Hudson Valley Seed Company, which promoted heritage versions of native plants. Purple carrots? Yes, please. If Jeff was going to risk life and limb, the least I could do was ensure that the home he returned to was a fairy tale.
The Rural Diaries Page 9
