The Wisdom of the Radish

by Lynda Browning

  This is especially true for many Greenhorn farmers, those of us who didn’t go to agriculture school or spend our teenage years as apprentices on working farms. Instead, we attended colleges, studied in computer labs, researched with online databases, and used Google Books to fill our bibliographies. We grew up in front of the keyboard. To us, the Internet search is a familiar art. Rather than relying on traditional networks of farmer-to-farmer support—calling up our neighbors to ask if they have any wisdom to dispense on prolapsed chicken vents, coughing goats, or shriveling winter squash—we are much more likely to first open up a Web browser and perform a quick search.

  I’m not saying that farming in the Internet age is an improvement, but I do know that it introduces a decidedly different approach to agricultural problem solving. We can pull up crop analyses from all the agricultural extension schools in the country from our living room sofas. We can look at photos of flea beetles, cucumber beetles, squash beetles, and predator beetles without even getting out of our pajamas. And in the case of chicken crisis management, we can communicate with a vast pool of other poultry people from all across the country, just by logging in. BackyardChickens.com gets a whopping six million page views per month,25 and its online forum is fifty thousand members strong. And although the individual chicken fanciers who frequent the website probably don’t have a veterinarian’s grasp of poultry problems, the collective intelligence of the group rises above its component parts.

  Another thing the guidebooks don’t mention but my Internet queries confirmed: how quickly the chicks develop distinct personalities. Stumpy the rooster—identified by the hatchery with a pink paint dot on his head—was a sweet, mellow guy who knew all too well that he was outnumbered. He let his twenty-nine lady companions walk all over him. (He was also slower to feather out than the fems; his wings, stubby by comparison, earned him his name.) The other Rhode Island Reds and the White Leghorns remained indistinctive, but a number of the Ameraucanas earned names thanks to their distinct down patterns: fluffy, gray Penguin; friendly Bandit with her raccoon mask; small but spunky Runt with her scruffy mottled head.

  And then there was the chick that quickly wiggled her dirty little butt straight into my heart: Buffy the Buff Orpington.

  She was the flock’s wild child—I’d requested one extra chick of a mystery breed from the hatchery—and a troublemaker from the start. Out of thirty chicks, she was the only one who suffered from persistent pasty butt. I cleaned her blonde bottom twice a day, taking her into the house for whichever torturous method seemed to be working best at the moment. Each time, two-inch-tall Buffy complained so loudly that the cat ran away and hid.

  After she conquered her pasty butt problem at one and a half weeks—when the chicks were just barely big enough to fly out of the brooder—Buffy became the mischief-maker who led an exodus every time I removed the lid. She endeared herself by not running away with her freedom, like some of the chickens, but by simply using it to watch whatever I was doing—sometimes scooting up my arm for a better view.

  Oh, and there’s one more thing that the poultry books don’t tell you: it only takes a few hours for the sweet, personable little chicks you’ve fallen in love with to turn into bloodthirsty cannibals.

  At first, there was just one victim. One victim, with fourteen potential perpetrators. There wasn’t any obvious evidence that would aid in charging a certain individual with the crime: no smoking gun, no bloody beak. Just one Ameraucana with a large open wound at the base of her tail, and fourteen other chicks going about their business as usual, as though they had no idea what caused the damage.

  I removed the wounded Ameraucana from the first brooder—the chicks had been split into two tubs, fifteen in each—applied antibacterial ointment to her wound, and placed her in a separate container with one other chick for company. A hospital room, so to speak, with the amiable and undersized Runt for a nurse.

  Then I turned back to my fourteen possible criminals. Whodunit? Was it the Red Rooster by the feeding trough with a beak? The White Leghorn by the waterer with a claw? I squatted over the brooder to see if I could pick out any aggressors. No one bit.

  I called a longtime poultry-owning friend, hoping for an empathic response. Instead he displayed a disconcerting level of surprise. “You have chicks eating each other? I’ve had fullgrown hens do that, but never chicks.”

  Clearly, my ravenous girls needed to move out to the coop, and pronto. In the meantime, I divided them up into six different boxes, hoping that less crowding would result in less eating each other. Three birds in the cat carrier, twelve split among three different cardboard boxes, and the remaining fifteen split between the original two brooders.

  This meant six waterers, six feeders, and six litters to monitor. And, just to make sure they had enough fresh air, each morning I ferried all six containers out from the garage to the backyard, and then back into the garage each night. Tending these rambunctious teenagers had become a full-time job: it was time they left the nest.

  In the midst of sowing, watering, weeding, and farmers’ marketing, Emmett and I also started working double time on the coop, screwing together salvaged wood scraps, stapling wire mesh, and bolting down metal roofing. All the while, we tried to keep the structure small enough to move in a pick-up truck, should the time come when we need to cart our chickens off to another piece of land. Our challenge was to give the chickens adequate space—at least two interior square feet per bird, in addition to a huge yard—while also keeping their home portable. After scribbling dozens of floor plans onto brown paper napkins, we accomplished our goal by making a stackable, two-story coop whose component pieces could come apart for easy transport. We included a foot-long chicken wire skirt on the bottom level to discourage predators from digging past the walls.

  By the time the new home was ready to go, three more chicks had been cannibalized. The four patients—plus nurse Runt—stayed back in the garage-turned-infirmary, while we shuttled the other twenty-five off to the coop.

  We spent the better part of the first day trying to teach the birds how to use the ramp that connected the coop’s two stories. Their food was on the upper floor, their water on the lower, so they’d either use the ramp or quickly become hungry or thirsty. When we tucked them in for the night, Buffy was leading the charge with a handful of chicks who’d become ramp-savvy.

  The following morning, I drove over to the field to check on my babies. I was relieved to hear cheeping as I approached the coop—they’d made it through their coldest night yet. As we checked on them throughout the day, more and more chicks were learning to navigate the ramp. At dusk, they hunkered down for another chilly night.

  Only four chicks had decided to sleep on the upper level, right up against the screen door: Buffy, a White Leghorn, and two Ameraucanas. “Should we move them down? They’ll be warmer that way.” Emmett nodded, and we tucked the chicks in with the rest of the flock downstairs.

  It was the last time we would see them. In the morning, Emmett’s father drove over to town to tell us they were gone.

  I was just finishing up breakfast. Before I had a clue what was happening, Emmett was walking toward me with his hands extended, sobbing.

  “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he sputtered. He reached for my shoulders; I pushed him away.

  “No!” I shouted. “What happened?”

  “They’re gone,” he said. “They’re all gone. My dad went to the coop this morning, and they’re all gone.”

  “No,” I told him. “Let’s go. We have to go find them.”

  Emmett drove me over to the field; my head was in my hands and I couldn’t stop saying no. But when we pulled up to the coop, no Buffy rushed to the screen door to say hello. No cheeps greeted our arrival—just the silence left behind by twenty-five young birds.

  It took only moments to piece together the night’s events. Despite the wire skirt, a fox had dug a hole, one foot in diameter, clear under the coop—a hole that terminated precisely where th
e chicks had snuggled down to sleep. Precisely where I’d tucked four birds in with the rest of the flock last night.

  I tried once more to say no but the word became too heavy, sinking before it left my mouth, finally falling out as a wet rage of unfiltered noise. My vision blurred. It took me a few minutes to find a voice.

  “I hate this place,” I said. “I never want to live here. The one thing I try to do to make myself a home, and it goes to shit. It’s ruined. Fuck this place. I fucking hate it.”

  Emmett tried to gather me in his arms but I shoved him off. I threw a rock at the unrepentant hillside, took off my shoes, threw those, screamed a few times, threw another rock. Then, stiff with the anger that was keeping my guilt at bay, I walked around the coop to survey the damage. Emmett quietly collected my shoes.

  The fox hadn’t felt compelled to take all of the birds he killed. He abandoned two bodies and a wing by the inconvenient salad bed. Inside the coop’s lower level, one White Leghorn lay half-buried in the loosened soil, her yellow legs jutting out at an awkward angle, her white wings gray with dirt. No obvious marks on her—but all around the coop floor, dark spatters of blood and clumps of feathers.

  While behind me Emmett walked up the hill, calling, “Here, chick-chick-chick” to see if there were any survivors, I moved the ramp to look for more bodies.

  Cheep, cheep.

  I froze. I must be imagining things. I glanced down at the Leghorn: still very dead. The wooden ramp was in my hands and I pulled it up the rest of the way onto the second floor of the coop. The chickens wouldn’t need it anymore.

  Cheep, cheep.

  There, where the ramp had been, was a bird: one survivor out of twenty-five.

  It was the chick I’d named Penguin after her fluffy, gray baby down. In the instant that I saw her there—admittedly out of an entirely maudlin sense of metaphor—I renamed her Hope, thinking that the following couple of days would tell whether she’d live or die.

  In my quick assessment of the situation, her odds didn’t look good. First of all, she’d always been one of the flightiest chicks. She never wanted to be held and always avoided human contact at all costs, but now she was hurt enough not to try running away. I grabbed some food from the top floor and extended my hand. She lurched toward me, each movement off-balance, her right wing sagging. Blood stained her neck feathers. Five puncture wounds peppered her back and chest. Clearly, she’d been in the jaws of death, had somehow managed to get away, and had hidden by herself in the darkest, tightest corner of the coop through a long and cold night.

  Emmett didn’t find any more chicks, and he came back down to the coop to help me pull the White Leghorn out of the dirt. I couldn’t quite bring myself to do it, so he picked her up by one yellow leg, gingerly. When I saw her dangling, I reached out and placed a hand underneath her cold torso, cradling her the way I would have when she was alive.

  Surely we’d find most of them soon—maybe roosting high in a nearby tree, or snuggled down in an old abandoned shed, somewhere together. Twenty-four birds just couldn’t be gone. But on the car ride home, my body resigned itself to what my mind couldn’t: tears kept creeping down my face, even as my one little wounded thing with feathers snuggled in the crook of my neck, burying her head in my hair, cheeping.

  To be perfectly honest, I wanted to give up. I wanted to buy a one-way plane ticket to somewhere I didn’t know anyone, so I could revel in my failure and wallow in my misery without fear of retribution. I didn’t want to face customers at the farmers’ market, who had been hearing all of the adorable details of my chicken project; I didn’t want to confess to family and friends that I had failed to protect twenty-five of the tiny creatures under my care. To hell with livestock. I couldn’t care that much about things that died so easily—it was simpler not to eat eggs.

  And at the same time, I was furious with myself for not knowing better. In middle school I’d read A Day No Pigs Would Die. Spoiler alert: the goddamn pig dies! And that’s after the dog is mortally wounded. You’re not supposed to name things, you’re not supposed to anthropomorphize them, and you’re sure as hell not supposed to love them. Livestock is inevitably killed, and the fool with the heart just ends up hurt.

  Why bother? Why do this at all? Emmett and I could pretend that my little tirade was just brief, grief-stricken insanity, but the real question remained: what was I doing here, and would it ever start to feel like home? The things I cared about most didn’t seem to work. I was constantly reminded of my foreignness, whether it was the interactions with people I didn’t know at the farmers’ market who had known Emmett since he was knee-high, or the fact that I could never remember the names of the twenty or so tiny towns that are sprinkled across the county, let alone have any clue how to get to one of them. I was always nodding dumbly and pretending I knew what someone was talking about; it was like I didn’t speak the language.

  And then there was the sheer awkwardness of explaining my relationship to the land and to the farm, a relationship I didn’t even understand myself. I was some sort of sharecropper, I supposed, tangentially related by an entirely undefined relationship. The people who owned the land were not my in-laws, not even my almost in-laws; they were my boyfriend’s parents. I had moved here, but at what point would I become family? At what point would I become a part of the land, and at what point would it become a part of me?

  Even my tantrum—the very act of throwing my shoes—reminded me that I was an alien. My feet were used to seasmoothed stones and sand, not this prickly oak meadow full of thorns and burrs. This wasn’t a place to walk barefoot. When Emmett gathered my shoes I wanted to throw them again, but my feet thought better of it. As soon as he wasn’t paying attention I slipped them back on, feeling rather selfconscious, and entertained fleeting visions of getting in the car and driving to the coast. There was a time, early in our relationship, that whenever I was upset or feeling lost I would disappear to do just that. It scared Emmett because he knew I drove fast, windows down, heat and music blasting, sometimes taking long-exposure photos as I passed the semis on Route 1 late at night. So I stopped. I’d given up the wandering, but where was the safety and comfort I thought I’d get in return? I once promised myself that I would sail around the world. Maybe it was finally the time to do that—cut and run until Emmett wore out his farming fantasies and we could settle down somewhere neutral.

  But there were still six chickens. Six chickens that, by the simple act of purchasing them, I had promised to care for. To quit now was to lose my credibility as a farmer, and for some reason that mattered. In the face of failed crops, farmers replant. Thrown from a horse, they remount. Faced with crashing produce prices, they expand. It may be nonsensical from an intellectual’s point of view, but to do otherwise would be to admit defeat. And defeat was unacceptable.

  Besides, Emmett, the one who didn’t want chickens in the first place, was suddenly telling me to get more chickens. I think that mostly he wanted to do anything to pull me out of my guilty wallowing, but still, the fact that he had suddenly become a chicken advocate was a shock to my system. We’ll fix the coop, he told me. Put a wooden floor on it, make sure the new chicks are safe. You don’t even have to work on it, I’ll take care of it. We can’t know everything—but we can keep trying.

  So, like those stubborn old men who continue to pour money into failing enterprises—thinking that maybe just a bigger, better, shinier tractor would do the trick—I agreed to buy more chicks. In fact, rather than just replacing the lost twenty-four birds, I ordered twenty-eight, bringing the grand chicken total to thirty-four.e And instead of just buying the standard White Leghorns, Rhode Island Reds, and Ameraucanas, I ordered another Buff Orpington. And a Silver-Laced Wyandotte. And a Barred Rock. Take that, Fox.

  Five hours after I plucked Hope out of her bloody, broken coop, I dialed the hatchery’s phone number. Just my luck, they happened to have all of the breeds I wanted in stock today. Would I like them shipped out this afternoon?

  Feelin
g just a wee bit emotional, I said yes. And the following morning, one month to the day after I picked up my first group of babies, I got my second call from the post office.

  We picked up the box, brought it home, settled the new chicks into the brooder. Quickly, this time, quietly. Practiced. And then we drove back to the field for the funeral.

  We buried three bodies and one wing. The bodies were unnamed: two Rhode Island Reds, one White Leghorn. The wing was Buffy’s. Emmett marked the graves with pieces of abalone shell, and I placed rosebuds in their hollows: two reds, one white, one yellow.

  It was then that I understood what poultry owners meant when they said that chickens didn’t take up much of your time—unless something went wrong. The four-bird funeral didn’t mark the end of the dying. Instead, it seemed to kickstart a streak of tragedies. It didn’t rain but it poured.

  The following day I went into the garage to check on the new chicks and found one tiny White Leghorn mysteriously dead inside the brooder. As I crouched beside the glowing plastic crate, the hairs along my neck rose and my chest tightened. I squeezed my eyes shut. When I opened them, the little yellow body was still there, deflated and flat, eyelids closed, legs bent, and toes curled inward.

  Worried that somehow it might be getting too cold in the garage—that she might have been smothered in a pile-up, despite the heat lamp—I moved the brooder into the house. During the following morning’s routine check-in, I discovered a Rhode Island Red with a broken leg, barely able to hobble. I moved her into a tissue box inside the brooder to protect her from her overzealous sisters, checked on her constantly, splinted her broken leg with a toothpick, and adjusted the angle of the heat lamp to make sure she was warm, but not too warm. Splitting my caretaking time between her and Hope—who was receiving antibiotics, a microwaved heat pad, and brief social visits with the cannibalized sisters that had been kept back—I coaxed the tiny Rhode Island girl along for days, forcing her to eat and drink, waking twice a night to try and get food into her every few hours. But her appetite was weak. After a week, she hadn’t grown one bit. The other chicks were twice her size. She passed away in the night after one of my checkins; Emmett found her in the morning. Another funeral.