Farm City

by Novella Carpenter

  Riana and I had always been into cooking. We could make a marinara and a béchamel sauce before we hit puberty. We learned to cook because we had to. When I was ten and Riana twelve, our mom was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. One morning, she went blind in her left eye and had to wear a patch. She had trouble walking. And since she was a single parent with a full-time job and a sickness that left her exhausted after a day of work, my sister and I learned to make dinner.

  My parents had divorced in 1977. My mom then took us to Shelton, Washington, a rainy logging town near Seattle, where she got a job as a schoolteacher. Times were tough—teaching didn’t pay well, and my dad didn’t pay child support and rarely saw us. I remember overhearing my mom talking with one of her friends. “You’re like a mother wolf, taking care of your babies,” her friend had whispered. My mom protected us and wanted us to thrive.

  The image of my mom as a wolf stuck with me, because my mom brought home all manner of free food for us. She worked at a school on the Skokomish Indian reservation, so her students often gave her whole salmon caught in the Skok River and sacks of oysters from Hood Canal. She and friends would go out on chanterelle-mushroom-picking expeditions. My mom also grew—and had Riana and me tend—a large kitchen garden next to our house. It was a small reminder of her ranch days, except instead of fields of corn and tomatoes, it was just a few rows.

  The door to the guest bedroom opened. My mom, jet-lagged, staggered out. She sniffed the air with her long nose, which I inherited.

  “Smells like rabbit,” she said. We hugged, and then Mom sat down at one of the kitchen stools to watch Riana cook. “I remember when I would take you two girls out to the rabbit hutches . . . ,” she began, fingering her long, dangly turquoise earrings. Despite her jet lag, she was awake enough to recount another one of her farm stories.

  Riana glanced at me, and we simultaneously rolled our eyes.

  We’ve heard all the Idaho farm stories so many times that if Mom starts one, Riana and I can recite it verbatim. The time Zachary the dog killed the chickens and Dad had to shoot him. How we would watch my mom milking the cow, waiting with bottles in hand for our milk fix. And, yes, the rabbit butchering, when Mom, wearing a down coat that she had stuffed herself with goose feathers from the farm, would give us a tour of the inside of a rabbit. “These are the small intestines; this is the heart,” she would instruct as she’d point with her knife tip, the rabbit, tied to a tree branch and flayed open, steaming in the cold air.

  There’s also a piece of photographic evidence for this ranch tale: Riana and I standing in a snowy glade with bad haircuts, Riana holding a big white and black rabbit in her arms. These animals were not pets.

  But that was a long time ago. Along with most of the other back-to-the- landers, my mom had realized that the remaking of our entire American society might not be possible in her lifetime. That spinning wool or churning butter might be fun for a while, but eventually the conveniences of modern life—grocery stores, clothes driers—seemed pretty wonderful. The possibilities for mockery, in hindsight, are endless. The back-to-the-land movement’s failure, as inevitable as the collapse of every other utopia, became a buffet of schadenfreude at which even I had occasionally feasted.

  But now that I was farming, I knew it was hard work and that plans never went the way you thought they would. After the Maude tragedy and the watermelon debacle, I would never laugh at my parents’ hapless experiment again. I’m sure my mom had many a run-in with an opossum—and that shit is not funny.

  Most of my memories of the farm disappeared in the 1980s, replaced by neon-hued socks and crimping irons. But our mom kept the idea alive with her endless retelling of farm stories.

  Although Riana and I give her grief for it, I could see why she did it. Her time on the farm had been filled with defining moments: the first beam raised in their house, her first homemade cheese, her first baby. It was an era when creatures had become characters in the fabric of her life, when the apple harvest meant there would be fruit throughout the winter, when a rabbit raised and slaughtered behind the house meant both a biology lesson and a tasty dinner. There was a lot of room for nostalgia. It was also a time when she was young and healthy and could do anything. And so Riana and I let her tell her stories, out of respect and sometimes curiosity, and tried to imagine what she had been like then.

  In honor of Mother, Riana was making civet de lapin, rabbit in blood sauce, a step up from how it was usually prepared on the ranch in Idaho, fried like chicken. Riana put the browned rabbit into a tagine, a ceramic cooking vessel. The still-raw liver went on top, and a bottle of wine was poured over the whole thing. This all was covered with the smokestack lid of the tagine and whisked into the oven.

  We sipped the local rosé and watched the sun dip into the Mediterranean. My sister and I dutifully listened to my mom tell the rabbits-on-the-ranch story again, happy to be together, making new memories in France. I halfheartedly wished that my dad could have been there, too. He spoke perfect French—he had studied for a year in Grenoble when he was a young man. After he and my mom got together, they traveled through France. Not far from my sister and Benji’s home, my parents had picked grapes as hippie gypsies. My mom loved to tell the story about how the other pickers would call her the Snail. She was slow because she was pregnant with my sister, and she had to periodically stop her work and quietly vomit into the grapevines.

  My sister was born in Idaho but had, thirty-five years later, found her way—all this way—back to where she had been conceived. It is my mom’s—our family’s—most amazing story.

  Later that night, Riana was up with the baby. Since I was sleeping on the couch next to Amaya’s crib, I was up, too.

  “How did Mom do this?” Riana said, looking down at Amaya nursing. While Riana couldn’t relate through farming, motherhood had made her see my mom in a different light.

  “Dude,” I said, “they didn’t even have electricity.”

  “And they—we—lived in the trailer while they built the house,” Riana whispered. “That tiny trailer,” she said, and wiped Amaya’s chin. “I can barely cook dinner with a baby, much less build a house.”

  “All those animals,” I added. Our minds were boggled at our parents’ moxie.

  That night, lying there on the couch, I thought about my life in Oakland and its general trajectory. My parents had, by my age, built a house from scratch, had two children, and fed themselves from their land. My sister had, in the past five years, gotten married, given birth to a beautiful child, and learned to speak fluent French and cook flawless French food. I, meanwhile, had some raggedy chickens, some borrowed rabbits, and a dead beehive. On land that could be bulldozed at any moment. My peers were homeless people and freaks.

  In France, I noticed that I had even come to pick up some of the patois of the rough-and-tumble streets of Oakland. At dinner, I found myself saying “How you?” and “Hella cool.” My clothes were stained and starting to disintegrate—part and parcel, I suppose, of being an urban farmer.

  However, even that identity, viewed from a distance, was starting to seem rather . . . thin. When I explained to my sister and mom that I was an urban farmer now, I could see that they had concerns about that self-definition. Because whom was I really feeding? Yes, I had successfully raised a perfect heritage-breed turkey, and it had been delicious. But was there any evidence that I could actually feed myself on a day-to-day basis? I was young and healthy, in my prime, I could do anything, and I was ready for a challenge.

  Around 2 a.m., a reckless thought about self-sufficiency came into my head. It niggled at my brain while I tossed, wide awake, on the couch. It made me do some math involving rabbit-breeding cycles. In the morning, over the first of many cafés noir, the idea hatched: for the month of July, when the first of my so-far unborn rabbits would be ready to harvest, I would feed myself exclusively off my urban farm.

  “Hey, Riana, can I get that rabbit recipe?” I asked, rocking Amaya in my arms.

&nb
sp; CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I arrived home from France on a Wednesday night in April. Bill picked me up in our jalopy. Though it was late, I was wide awake. I also had a smuggler’s high from successfully getting contraband stinky cheese and cured duck breast from Les Halles past customs, wrapped in my dirty underwear and socks. I waved a Ste. Maure goat cheese in Bill’s face as he drove.

  “Vella, I got bad news,” he said.

  My stomach dropped. I immediately thought of the rabbits, the chickens, our cat. Dead. Or that Jack Chan had reared his real-estate-developing head again.

  “What?”

  “Lana’s moving away.”

  “Oh, no.”

  Bill took the overland route instead of the highway. As we cruised up MLK, I reacquainted myself with the sprawling garbage, the guys pulling shopping carts, the drug dealers on the corners. I had only been gone for ten days, but GhostTown looked grittier than I remembered. I wondered what Benji would think of this place.

  When we pulled up to our house, I suddenly had a fear: Was my diamond in the rough actually a cubic zirconia in a pile of shit? Had I been deluding myself? I pushed past the gate to the garden. The air that greeted me smelled fresh and clean. Even though it was dark, I knelt to examine the lettuces growing in the raised beds; they were sturdy and vibrant. I sniffed at the sweet peas that sprawled up a trellis. The garlic shoots, I was pleased to see, had grown a few inches. Yes, yes, this was a worthwhile project.

  While Bill carried my backpack upstairs, I went around to the chicken house with his flashlight. “Hello, hello,” I said at the door, preparing them for my intrusion. They clucked and made a high-pitched trilling noise. Chickens are immobilized by the dark. I shined the light across the perch, catching glints of their feathers, a chicken eye, the cocked comb of another—all huddled together. They were fine. I shined the light down to the rabbits. They ran around in circles, biting each other. I squatted down closer and saw that they were—yes, that’s what they’re doing—humping. Does on does, a doe humping Simon the buck. I would have to separate them tomorrow. The humping was good news, though. It meant they were ready to start breeding.

  After checking on the animals and reassuring myself that the farm was worthwhile, I went over to Lana’s. A sign posted on the metal door of the warehouse said the speakeasy had closed. Years ago, Lana had given me the key with permission to enter at will, so I let myself in.

  Inside, Lana and her sister were sitting near the faux fireplace, the clutter of fifteen years billowing around them.

  “Everyone just gets drunk,” Lana said when I asked why she was calling it quits.

  “No one performs anymore,” I agreed. I had stopped going months and months ago.

  We heard some frantic knocking at the door. Lana ignored it.

  “Let’s burn the couch,” Lana’s sister said to cheer her up. “Under the overpass.” Lana shook her head no.

  Lana told me she was moving to Mexico. I nodded—I had seen it coming. She had recently lost Maya and had been devastated. I helped bury the guinea pig in the garden. We interred her next to Maude and the duck and goose. Lana placed a large pair of praying hands on the grave to mark it. While we buried the little brown and black guinea pig, I couldn’t help but think that people in South America eat guinea pigs. I was terrible.

  Sitting at the bar talking with Lana and her sister, I had a horrible thought: Were my animal-killing ways causing her to move away?

  “I’m sorry about killing Harold,” I told her. Not that I had killed him, but that she was upset by this act.

  “It’s better than most meat eaters,” said Lana’s sister. “At least you faced it.”

  Lana shook her head. But I knew I had bummed her out. She was like a child in her love of animals. The day after I killed Harold, Joel called to say Jackson woke up in the morning, pulled a turkey feather from underneath his pillow, and cried, “I miss Harold!” Jackson pledged to never eat an animal that he had known personally. Joel and I sighed. Another plan had backfired—did this mean he would insist on factory-farmed meat exclusively? I had hoped, in the back of my mind, that I would become for Jackson like one of my mom’s friends whom I fondly remembered from my childhood. Now I was afraid his only memory of me would be a ghoulish, frightening one.

  Lana and I looked through photos, and I helped her pack. She ordered a pizza, and Oscar barked at us until we fed him a slice. She found one picture of us standing in the clearing of the lot before any of the beds or plants had gone in. Because of the angle of the photo, we looked like homesteaders on the prairie. The grass and weeds were a tawny gold.

  I didn’t know how to thank her. She was a big reason we came to live on 28th Street. She had been directly and indirectly responsible for so much of my happiness.

  “Lana, I’m going to miss you,” I said, unable to think of anything better.

  But as I walked back to my apartment I knew that with Lana gone, as much as I would miss her, my experiment in self-sufficiency—in proving to myself that I was a real farmer capable of feeding myself—was going to be so much easier.

  Rising at dawn because of jet lag the next morning, I went out to our seventy-five-square-foot deck, where the defunct beehive still sat, and created a rabbitry: a series of tunnels and boxes, hutches and cages. I threw hay and tossed sawdust onto the deck floor, which was made of rough roofing material. To add a festive air, I hung a clattering bamboo and coconut-shell wind chime over the whole thing.

  Then I got the rabbits.

  Adult rabbits, I had read in the Whole Earth Catalog, need to live in their own private quarters. They are considered adults when they start humping each other. If I didn’t separate my rabbits, Simon would relentlessly try to breed with the females, and the females might kill each other’s babies, maybe each other.

  At the chicken-run door, I held out a stalk of celery. Simon hopped over. His nose was just like one in a children’s tale—remarkably dislocated from his body, and fuzzy. Like cats, rabbits have a flabby layer of skin along their necks and backs that makes a great place to hold on to. I just had to get close enough for a grab. I petted Simon, but he seemed uneasy. Tentatively, he pulled the celery out of my hand. Then I collared him.

  Instead of running, Simon tensed up every muscle in his body so I couldn’t get a handle. Buying that critical second, he heaved to the far side of the hutch. The females cowered in the corner.

  I had to go in after him. By turning my shoulders, I crammed my five-foot-eight frame through the small doorway of the rabbit run so half my body was inside the cage, half out, and managed to grab Simon. As I shimmied out, for a second I had the irrational fear that I would be stuck inside this cage, my legs dangling out. The chickens would eventually start pecking me, the ingrates. But luckily, my hips cleared the door with no problem, and Simon and I left the cage together, farmer and bunny.

  His legs drew up and his body curved into a C shape. His fur was impossibly soft. Wading my way through the chickens, I cradled Simon close to my body. He, in true rabbit style, tucked his head under my armpit. If he can’t see what’s happening, nothing bad will happen. Fuzzy logic.

  When I opened the door to his very own cage (feathered with timothy hay, straw, wood chips, one of my old wool sweaters, and his personal water bottle), he arched his back and pushed both his hind legs off my body to leap into his new home. His feet have claws—remember those ’80s rabbit’s-foot keychains?—and I winced as they ripped into soft flesh.

  “Hi, Novella!” Lana yelled from across the street. I waved back, standing in front of the rabbit cage so she wouldn’t see the newest meat on the farm. She had a box in her arms and added it to a growing pile on the sidewalk, then disappeared back into her warehouse.

  I looked down at my Simon-inflicted wound. Two parallel scratches, four inches long, puckered my forearm. A bit of blood oozed out. A man in a truck with an enormous MICHOACÁN bumper sticker pulled up in front of Lana’s.

  I went downstairs to say goodbye. Lana seeme
d calm, determined even. Her hazel eyes were a bit red when we hugged. She eyed the scratch on my arm but didn’t say anything. I made plans to pour some hydrogen peroxide on my wound.

  Lana gave us some stuff from her house: a giant puppet hand, a cracked salad bowl from Italy that had been glued back together, some espresso cups. The guy with the truck attached her bike to the truck bed with a bungee cord, then Lana climbed into the vehicle with Oscar the dog and was gone forever. I saw her in profile as she left, looking forward, her chin jutting out a bit. Oscar stuck his head out the window.

  One by one I relocated the female rabbits. They each got their own box (to hide in), water bottle, and food dish. I put the cages close together so the rabbits could smell one another. The deck was utterly transformed. The straw on the floor glowed gold. The rabbits scurried around in their private cages, smearing their noses against the new surfaces. Simon thoughtfully chewed a piece of celery clutched between his paws. My deck looked like a third world country. And I liked it.

  Downstairs, while I was watering the garden, I heard a commotion on the street. It was Bobby going through the boxes of stuff Lana had left in front of her house. It looked like he was rearranging his living situation, moving the television over to a table he had set up directly in front of Lana’s former gate.

  We Americans relocate with impunity, most of us on a regular basis. I thought about Benji, my sister’s husband. He still lived in the town where he was born. His great-great-grandfather lived there. But in the States, an idea strikes and we’re gone.