Michael Perry
Coop
A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting
For the tiny pilot
Contents
Author’s Note
Prologue
At the earliest edges of my memory, my father is…
Chapter 1
This morning while splitting wood, I attempted to clear my…
Chapter 2
I am building a glorious chicken coop in my mind.
Chapter 3
I am in the office working after supper when Anneliese…
Chapter 4
Winter is on the fizzle, and Mister Big Shot is…
Chapter 5
Across the valley, the bare-bone tree line is thickening. The…
Chapter 6
Today a dog bit me grievously upon the ass. I…
Chapter 7
My daughter is weeping in the timothy. She is a…
Chapter 8
At some point every Sunday evening of my childhood there…
Chapter 9
One summer evening when the other kids got to go…
Chapter 10
Sunday mornings when I was a boy I worshipped the…
Epilogue
Before our family grew large, my brother John and I…
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Other Books by Michael Perry
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Recently I had an apparently deep thought. I scribbled it down quickly so that it might not escape the loosely woven sieve that is my brain. I then spent untold hours polishing the scribble until it was an aphoristic gem of original profundity. Shortly after that, I revisited an essay I had written seven years previous only to find the exact same observation, typed nearly word for word. I have reached that point in my life where every other thing I say is something I’ve said before. For instance, I regularly catch myself trying to describe the scent of dirt. I am repetitively waylaid by my affection for particular words. (The modifier “little” pops up like Whac-A-Mole in my rough drafts and is never completely eradicated.) Further amplifying the echo, bits and pieces of this book were worked out in shorter, previously published pieces some readers may recognize. I like to imagine this reflects the development of a “certain literary style” when in fact it is more likely I am developing “certain nervous tics.” To say nothing of engaging in a freelance writer’s favorite sport: recycling.
When I’m not repeating myself, I’m contradicting myself. For instance, in the book Truck: A Love Story I stated that my father never allowed us to have toy guns; lately I recall we were allowed to keep a pair of realistic-looking squirt guns given to us by a relative. I once wrote of a cow called Angie only to find out her real name was Aggie. (Other mistakes of bovine nomenclature have likely been made—I tell you this because the cows cannot speak for themselves.) The “ten-day” Wisconsin deer hunting season is only nine days long, no matter what I wrote in my most recent hardcover. Sometimes readers point out these contradictions. If they are offered in collegial spirit (we are in this together) I am nearly always happy to post them on my Web site as evidence that my head and feet are a matching set of clay.
Finally, since I believe the term nonfiction depends above all on a reader’s trust, I must disclose a few intentional partialities. I often change names to give friends and neighbors a veneer of privacy. I use the term recently with some latitude, and for the sake of forward motion I reference the lambing season of 2006 in the context of 2007. Finally, when I write of the church of my childhood, I do so knowing that some will object to the portrayal as either too critical or too benign, and all will find it incomplete, especially when the sect is small and history is spare.
I am grateful for anyone who reads my writing, even—or especially—with a critical eye, and one phrase never suffers from repetition: Thank you, reader.
PROLOGUE
At the earliest edges of my memory, my father is plowing, and I am running behind him. I see my feet, going pat-pat-pat over the soil, I see my father, left hand on the wheel, right forearm braced against the fender, head turning back to check the depth of the plow, then forward to gauge his progress. The soil is red and sandy in the high spots and dark and loamy in the low spots, where it curls from the plowshares like strips of licorice, leaving me this square, shin-deep trough in which to travel. I trail the sound of the little tractor, so close to ground I can hear the soft plop of the overturned clods. Now and then the plow slices the soil so cleanly that a chubby white grub drops into the furrow, unscathed. The grubs are translucent white, their black guts dimly visible, as if through rice paper. Grackles and cow-birds flock the plow, pecking through the new-turned dirt. The grub will not last long. There is my father on his underpowered Ford Ferguson, and there is me trotting right behind him, and there is God above, looking down as I run the straight groove of the furrow, my life laid out on a line drawn in the earth.
In the company of our six-year-old daughter Amy, my wife Anneliese and I have recently moved to a farm. I would like to present some sort of grand agrarian charter, but the whole deal is predicated mainly on the idea of having chickens. We are not alone in this: These Troubled Times seem to have precipitated a fowl renaissance. Mail carriers labor under a groaning load of multicolored hatchery catalogs, the latest issue of Backyard Poultry, and perforated containers that peep. Drop the term chicken tractor in mixed company and behold the knowing nods. The online world is alive with Subaru-driving National Public Radio supporters trading tips on eco-friendly coop construction and the pros and cons of laying mash; my NASCAR-loving brother-in-law tenderly minds a box of chicks beneath a heat lamp in his garage; my biker bar bouncer–turned–Zen Buddhist pal Billy and his wife the certified nursing assistant are building their second backyard coop with an eye toward expanding into “ornamentals.” Anecdotal evidence to be sure, and a drop in the Colonel’s bucket, but something is afoot. The subject of chickens was raised between my wife and me fairly early in our courtship, and has sustained us. We are enthused by the idea of fresh eggs, homegrown coq au vin, and (at least until butchering day) a twenty-four-hour turnaround on the compost. In addition, it is my long-standing opinion that entertainment-wise, chickens beat TV.
Our move is also family-driven. We are assuming responsibility for a farmstead previously owned by my wife’s mother. Faced with an unexpected relocation, my mother-in-law wants to keep the place in the family. And in a bit of a flip, we are moving from a northern village to the country in order that my wife might be closer to the university where she sometimes teaches. This will save gas and time, although that glow on the horizon is a mall, and whenever we notice a Prime Commercial sign forty acres nearer, we review our escape plan from a place on which we have yet to pay the property tax.
We are also going rural in the hope that we might become more self-sufficient in terms of firewood, an expanded garden, and perhaps a pair of pigs. Whether through prescience or too much nervous reading, we have developed a low-key doomsday mind-set regarding the imminent future, and believe the time has come to store up some potatoes and teach the young’uns how to forage. Amy can already identify a coyote track, and I intend to see to it that she carry the phrase “slop the hogs” a generation further. To an extent, my wife and I are acting on positive recollections of our own childhood—I was a farm kid from the age of two, and much of my wife’s childhood was spent on a farm just one valley over from the spot to which we have moved. But I hope we don’t burden Amy with the idea that living outside the city limits is an inherently pious act. That rural equals righteous. As a country kid, I took a while to round the bend on that one, but thanks to a blend of peak oil posts, Kwame Anthony Appiah�
��s Cosmopolitanism, and a week spent buying groceries at a bodega in Bushwick, I am well on my way to reconstructing all residual prejudice. Let’s hear it for sensible urbanism. Whenever I catch myself waxing unctuous on the subject of getting “back to the land,” I think of the Parisian Jim Haynes, who has said city dwellers protect the ecological balance of the countryside by staying away from it. And then there is Ben Logan and his touchstone book The Land Remembers, in which he wrote, “All around were reminders that the land was more important than we were. The land could do without us.”
This new place of ours is not far from where I was raised—you can throw in your Essential Steve Earle, go the speed limit, and arrive well before “Continental Trailways Blues”—but it feels far. I arrived at our New Auburn farm in diapers and departed at the age of emancipation. Spent a dozen years away, then returned to live in the village itself. Twelve years into my second citizenship, I was settled and content within the rough bounds of an area framed largely in terms of memories and gratitude. I was in the fire department, I never missed Jamboree Days, I shot the breeze with folks in the post office lobby, and I caught up on politics at the village dump. Over half my life, I have happily punctuated my return address with the same zip code, the nicely rhythmic five-four-seven, five-seven. New Auburn, Wisconsin. The idea of forwarding the mail leaves me queasy and blue.
It would be sweet to noodle along in this minor key, but I’m stopping now because having pried my eyes from the compass mounted in my navel, I see the world is gray with the dust of diaspora and displacement. Any given moment, put your ear to the earth, and you will hear ten million shifting feet. Vicious herdings and abject decampments, perpetually under way and commenced at the business end of boots, bullets, and bulldozers. Whereas we have simply eased down the road a piece.
Our new farm is on hilly terrain, and when I come up the driveway I find myself reflexively checking the windshield to verify that my state park stickers are up-to-date. Having been raised a swamp and flatlands boy, I view all topographical rumples as exotic. I am more attuned to brush than vistas. When I walk the ridge, I can’t help but remember all those Louis L’Amour books I read as a kid, where some fool skylines himself and is culled by a Sharps 50. When we were tots, my friend Harley was orphaned by a tractor when it pitched on a hill and crushed his father, and I have conflated hills and farms with danger ever since.
The ridge runs from the house at an angle straying off the east-west axis. As a result, the first time I came here I got my directions wrong, and I’m still trying to rewire. My disorientation is exacerbated by the fact that some of the outbuildings align with the ridge, while others are set square to the four directions. I am regularly startled by the apparent repositioning of sunrise.
I am nervous about some of the newer houses nearby. They tend to be grand. Again, I must disabuse myself of reverse classism—orthopedic surgeons want chickens too—but I cherish a regular salting of trash heaps and trailers, signaling as they do that the neighborhood will tolerate bad luck and alternative preference. It soothes me that our screen door does not latch, and you can entertain yourself during downtime by dropping a glass marble beside the toilet and quietly betting as to whether or not it will clear the tub surround and roll clear out into the kitchen.
I first perceived my father as a farmer the night he drove home with a giant lactating Holstein tethered to the bumper of his Ford Falcon. There was no cart, just a cow on a rope. And Dad, motoring real slow.
It wasn’t the sort of scene you’d see on the cover of Hoard’s Dairyman.
We went to fetch the cow after supper, from a farm some three miles distant. Owning neither truck nor trailer suitable for transporting the beast, Dad chose the Falcon—a station wagon model with a nifty roll-up rear window and a naughtily noisy Hollywood muffler. This being a momentous event, we kids—six of us at the time—clamored to come along, and we made a carful. That said, I have not discovered any photographic documentation of the event. Perhaps a couple of the younger children remained at home with Mom. When we arrived at the farm, a man led the cow from the barn on a rope halter. Dad cinched a granny knot around the bumper and set off at a stately pace. My smaller siblings knelt facing rearward in the seats, while my brother John and I sat backward on the lowered tailgate, legs swinging on either side of the Holstein’s raccoon-sized head.
Three miles is not so far as the crow flies, but it is a fair distance when you are towing a Holstein behind a Ford Falcon full of jabbering rug rats. Dad rode the clutch and kept one eye on the mirror. The cow stubbed along reluctantly at first, all straight-necked and flat-eared, but eventually she calmed and found her road gear. For the balance of the journey she shambled along easy, following her nose through a faint blue haze. That Falcon burned a little oil.
As we neared home that night, John and I bailed off the tailgate to run alongside. The other kids hung out the windows, hair in the wind, arms dangling, all eyes on the cow. We tripped along through the lowering salt marsh mist, that sweet-brine scent still imprinted on my consciousness to a depth that zips me back to the far western corner of Sampson Township at first whiff. How happily and goofily we skipped, the scratch and scuff of the Holstein’s hooves echoing among the roadside pines. Mom was in the house at the sink when we broke into the open, the blue station wagon rolling turtle-slow and trolling a lumbering milk cow through the lowering light and fireflies rising, John and I cavorting like redneck leprechauns, our father up there at the wheel thinking who knows what but proving that even the humblest man is capable of spectacle.
Lately—when we are driving to piano lessons, or washing dishes, or stacking firewood—Amy has taken to saying, “Tell me a story from your child-hood.” She consistently uses the same formal phrasing (clearly enunciating “child” and “hood”), and I am tickled and troubled by the idea that to her mind my “child-hood” has achieved epoch status. Of course I remember asking my parents the same question, and I remember my fascination at their stories of boxing matches on the radio, ice delivered to the house in sawdusted blocks, and ladies who cooked with lard. To a child whose first retrievable memories are pegged just prior to the Summer of Love, it seemed remarkable that my parents were born into a black-and-white newsreel world, with still shots provided by my mother’s Brownie box camera, still stored in a long narrow closet upstairs at the farm.
“Tell me a story from your childhood,” says my daughter, and because I remember nothing before the farm, I tell her the first image I see when I think of spring is yellow dandelions in green grass beside a red barn. Ours was a classic Wisconsin homestead: white house, the red barn, a handful of simple outbuildings. All constructed from jack pine by second-generation Norwegian immigrants in the wake of the lumbering boom. The farm stood at the southern edge of what historians refer to as the cutover region. At one time the cutover was thick with century-old white pines, but by the 1900s they were long gone down the nearest river. As a short-term fix for the suddenly finite lumber supply, the loggers further stripped the land of lower-grade hemlock, cedar, and hardwoods. After the lumberjacks departed, the government encouraged farmers to settle the area, but the denuded sandy soil of the cutover was poorly suited to farming. Although there were many successful operations scattered throughout northwestern Wisconsin during my childhood, I came of age thinking of farming as a tough gig in which folks scrabbled and hung on—I was surprised in later life when I spent time in the Coulee Region to the southwest and discovered that farm families numbered among the prominent and well-to-do.
“Tell me a story from your childhood,” she says, and I tell her of waking on summer mornings so socked with fog I could make myself believe the world had fallen away to leave our isolated farmstead floating through space—and how that illusion was gently undone by disembodied voices drifting in through the mist as our neighbors to the north called their cows to milking: “M’bawssss…M’bawssss…” I tell her how those same neighbors—a pair of bachelor brothers named Art and Clarence—s
till took the Norwegian newspaper and spoke of my brothers Jack and Jed and Jud as “Yack and Yed and Yud.” I tell her of old men with knuckle stubs where fingers should be, and if you inquired after the digits the story invariably involved firewood and a homemade buzz saw. I tell her of Mr. Kenner up the road who can still tell you about the Indians who blocked the narrow bridge spanning Beaver Creek and charged a cut of tobacco for passage. I tell her of winters when we kids wobbled through the fields on our skates to play pom-pom-pullaway on a frozen drainage ditch carved through the middle of the woods by men serving in the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression. I tell her how we learned to milk cows and how we did flips from the haymow rafters, whirling and dropping through the cold winter air into the giant pile of chopped cornstalks below. Once I overrotated and slammed my knee into my nose. I remember the warm blood flowing out both nostrils toward my ears as I lay on my back. My brother John looked down at me without alarm. Squeezing my nose and looking up past him, I noticed that the nails protruding through the roof were furry with frost.
“Tell me a story from your childhood,” she says, and I simply do not know where to begin.
My father recently joined the community choir. Sounds innocuous enough—sweet, even—but my immediate reaction was to phone my brother John and ask if he thought Dad might be smoking reefer. Four decades I’ve known my father, and he has led an avowedly quiet life. He works hard, he works quiet, he works above all to avoid any public act more conspicuous than renewing his driver’s license. And now suddenly he’s out there on tour (Chetek…Bloomer…Sand Creek…it’s all a crazy blur), ascending the risers to raise his voice in public. For the Christmas concert, no less. My father is deeply devout, so on the face of it singing about the birth of Christ seems a natural match, but ours was a church so fundamental that the December holiday was banned as dangerously contrived pagan silliness—although my parents would certainly state their case in terms more demure.
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