Blue jays are gorging themselves on the sunflower heads in the garden, tent-worm caterpillars make skeletons out of the elm tree, and late-season growth sprouts from the jack pines out by the road. These new pine branches grow in between the old ones and stick straight up, just like a middle finger. It feels like even the trees are flipping me off.
And I learn that a lowland jungle of leaves and vines have taken over the pasture on a Saturday when I hear one of the boys crying.
“Mom!” comes the sobbing holler from outside. It sounds like Will. And it sounds like he just said, “Luke squashed my head!”
I think of Luke’s precision with the BB gun and have just enough concern to get myself outside.
The holler is followed by a boy running toward the house, one hand pressed to the side of his blond head, the other still gripping his stick sword and pumping back and forth as he runs toward me on tireless boy legs. Dirty face, no shirt. Yes, it is Will—so aptly named—and even though he is crying, he isn’t sad at all, he is furious.
I am outside for the first time in days and we meet on the porch. He drops the stick at my feet and drops himself into my arms, pouring out an injustice he’s been subjected to during a fight with the enemy. Also known as his brother.
“No heads!” he spits out. “That’s the rule! Luke did it on purpose!”
I feel a lump starting to form on the side of his head when I peel away his sweaty hand. I look down at his weapon and see the end of it has been expertly sharpened. Probably with a jackknife—all the boys have one of their own, given to them by my brother, Ben, from his camping, hunting, and fishing stash. Someone has wrapped the handle of Will’s stick in duct tape for a better grip. I touch the business end with the tip of my finger; it is so sharp, it could spear fish.
“What’s this for?” I ask him, holding it up so the point is at eye level.
“For throwing,” he answers, looking me in the eye and crossing his arms tightly over his bare chest. “And jabbing.”
I’ve failed my sons. Again. For proof of this, just look at what they’ve been up to while I’m not paying attention. Owen, who has been such a help these past few weeks, isn’t here right now to step in and referee. He’s put together a rock band with some high school friends and they’re all off writing music somewhere. I should know exactly where, but I don’t. Because I haven’t been paying attention to that, either.
When I unravel Will’s story I find out he didn’t yell “Luke squashed my head” but, rather, “Luke threw a squash at my head.”
The leaves, vines, and manure piles at the edge of our fallow pasture are conspiring together to create log-sized super-squash the boys have each stockpiled in separate caches and are now heaving at each other like Olympic shot-putters. These squash bombs are an anomaly—unplanted volunteers freakishly large because they’ve grown in their own nutrient-rich greenhouse of sorts—a microclimate in the manure piles along the south side of the barn.
Any other year, I would have noticed them. Any other year, I would have noticed a lot of things.
One of the reasons I am divorcing their father is because he sleeps his way through life. Because he refuses to take any real action against his longtime perpetual melancholy.
This behavior was a shock to me when we got married. I grew up with parents who shared the work of a marriage but who shared the joy, too. It never felt like that was the case between Mr. Wonderful and me. It felt like I got the lion’s share of each. But now here I am, all wound up in a melancholy of my own. And what’s worse is that there isn’t another me to pick up the slack while I take a break from life.
At least in their Lord of the Flies moment, the boys have instituted rules. One rule anyway. According to Will, the single decree of pasture war is this: they are not allowed to aim their squash bombs at each other’s heads. Any hit to the body is fine, but no head shots.
And my first thought about their conflict is not all that maternal.
Because when I picture my beloved sons raining vegetable bombs down upon each other, the first thing that comes into my mind is not that one of them could have been badly hurt—the sharpened sticks are probably more dangerous than the squash bombs. Nor am I all that perturbed over Luke’s obvious lack of fair play. Will may look like a cherub, but I know that he has his own Cain-like tendencies. No, my first thought is that these boys are wasting a potential food source.
Two months in and we are having some success with our living-off-the-farm efforts, but our money is still dwindling fast. We don’t have to buy vegetables at the store, and we have enough extra sweet corn, beans, broccoli, and cauliflower to freeze for the winter. Onions, carrots, and potatoes can be stored in the root cellar in our basement. I make homemade tomato sauce and pizza sauce and salsa, as well as huge batches of basil pesto. Strawberries from the garden mixed with fruit from two ancient mulberry trees in our front yard make great-tasting jam.
I know a bakery that sells day-old bread for half price, and a neighbor down the road has laying chickens and so we are eating a lot of farm-fresh eggs—deviled, fried, scrambled, poached, and hard-boiled. They aren’t free at $1.50 a dozen, but they are a cheap source of protein, so we eat a lot of them. So many, in fact, that one night when I put a platter of curried poached eggs and brown rice on the table for dinner, Luke looks first at the entrée and then up at me and says, cave-boy-style, “I want some meat.”
“Be patient,” I remind him. “That’s what Rocky’s for.”
We’ve chipped in with friends and bought two piglets. The friends took one and we took the other. Owen has recently turned vegetarian, but I’m still planning that our piglet will grow into a hog and then into enough prepared pork to satisfy those of us who are carnivores. The boys named him Rocky, after the boxing champ. From the glint in Luke’s eye, I know exactly what he’s thinking. At the mention of our pig, it’s not the stocky, bricklike animal with a curly tail and damp snout he sees, but a full-grown ham, propelled around its pen on maple-smoked-bacon legs.
Still, you can’t pay an electric bill with bacon and eggs. Or put gas in the car or pay the mortgage on this farm that feels big enough now to choke a turkey vulture. Can you eat turkey vulture? I wonder.
In a fate so purely rendered I’m now certain not only that there is a God, but that She has a crackerjack sense of humor, one of my freelance gigs has morphed into steady work with steady pay. The job? Helping a successful financial planner edit his children’s book, Finding Utopia. The irony of that title when coupled with our lives is so perfectly timed it shakes me to my agnostic core.
Even with this new source of income we are still short this month. So desperate am I for every penny that I file an insurance claim on the loss of Major. It isn’t fair, but it’s necessary: a horse’s whole life for one month of ours. That check plus the money from selling Pepper will pay our September bills with not a penny left over.
And so here we are, subsisting on eggs, vegetables, day-old bread, and homemade jam day after day, while my boys finish their chores and then decide to have a food fight. They might as well be throwing armloads of rolled coins at each other.
I am no innocent in this predicament, either. I might not be hurling squash bombs at my own family members, but I am letting my melancholy over the end of my marriage, over Major’s death, over selling Pepper, over our money problems, over my perfect rural life dissolving in front of my eyes, have its way with me. Grief has pinned me in this chair as tightly as if it were holding Will’s pointed stick to the white of my neck.
“Emotional turmoil can interfere with the mom and dad roles even though the husband and wife roles have ended,” I read in SMILE. “This is a time when the children need more affection and attention but there is too little of the parents to go around.”
Yearning for what I’ve lost is, I decide right now, an indulgence, An indulgence that’s certainly not in the best interest of my sons, but that’s also not in the budget.
It’s been a month since Major
died. My grief over his death will not end this soon, and maybe not ever, but my inaction has to. And when Will and I walk out to the edge of the pasture, I can hardly believe what I see. In less than a month the field of grass that had been bitten to the quick by Major and Pepper is now covered in rambling green. Leaves and vines serpentine everywhere, and hidden underneath, dozens of squashes, some with the heft and density of bowling balls.
“See?” Will says to me, satisfied at my shocked face. “Told you. Bombs.”
Luke is in a corner of the pasture, crouching down next to his stash of munitions, a battered lacrosse stick rigged into an arm-powered trebuchet at the ready. He has it loaded and ready to let fly.
Here in Will’s stronghold, the remains of shattered squashes are lying at our feet. Seeds, ripened flesh, and crescents of rinds are everywhere. I put my hands under the gigantic leaves, feel around, and wrestle two squash logs from their vines. With one under each arm I walk back toward the house. My sons look at me as if I’ve finally just gone ahead and lost my mind. Maybe they think I am headed across the road to launch these green torpedoes at their father.
“Dinner,” I say instead.
Wordlessly, the young soldiers follow me in. An army, even one noticeably short in stature and including only two troops, still marches on its stomach.
“Even Napoleon Bonaparte had to eat,” I yell to them over my shoulder.
The boys will just have to declare a temporary cease-fire. Tonight for dinner we’re having squash-crusted pizza out of The Moosewood Cookbook. Tomorrow morning for breakfast, eggs Benedict with fried squash medallions in place of the Canadian bacon, and for lunch, some kind of vegetable soup I’ll think up, and squash bread with jam. Luke might be having visions of a full ham running around our friends’ pigpen, but I’m seeing the dollars on our grocery bill ratcheting down.
“Who is Napoleon Blown Apart?” Will asks, sitting at the kitchen counter watching me cook.
The next morning, Sunday, Owen asks if his rock band can practice in the Quonset hut. All that corrugated metal has got to have some great acoustics, he says. I make a mental note to buy extra bread today on my weekly trip to the bakery. This bakery opens at 9 a.m. on Sundays and everything is half price on this day only. They stay open until they’ve sold all their wares, which means they almost always close before noon.
For the past month I’ve been coming here almost every Sunday morning. Their bread is twice as good as store-bought and less than half the price. Although I grew up on my mother’s homemade bread, and I know how to bake it, that’s a luxury I can’t afford. It’s actually cheaper to buy this half-price bread than it is to purchase all of the ingredients for my mother’s and make it myself.
Even small savings like this one become exponentially more important when you are making enough sandwiches for three hungry boys, yourself, and now extras to fuel the creation of heavy-metal music, too. To quote my bass-guitar-playing son, metal burns a lot more carbs than classic rock or country. And don’t even get him started on rap.
With his bass solo jamming its way through the open windows of my minivan, I drive to the bakery. On this particular visit I see a new sign on the counter next to the cash register. In dark-green marker it reads:
ENTER TO WIN!
Annual Biggest Zucchini Contest!
First Prize—$100
Second Prize—$50
Third Prize—$25
For the first time I wonder what the breed or species or ilk or genome the squash bombs in my pasture belong to. Are they, could they be, just maybe, a member of the oft-derided zucchini family?
I try to picture the mystery squash clearly in my mind, without the trappings of combat. I see one, resting under its leafy canopy. It is the shape and texture of zucchini but not the color. Pale green fading almost to white, with darker-green speckles. I wonder how specific the head baker will be in his definition of the word “zucchini.”
I see him in the back, kneading some dough. He is average-sized, with a little paunch around the middle, coarse black hair with salt-and-pepper trimmings. White pants, white T-shirt, white apron, hairnet. His hairless forearms look like Popeye’s without the tattoo, veined and bulging, and he is focused in on his work. All business.
What, I wonder, will this man think of my squashes?
“Excuse me,” I say to the woman behind the counter with the cat-eye glasses, “could you tell me the rules for your zucchini contest?”
Birdlike, she cocks her head at me. “Rules? What do you mean, rules?”
“Oh, you know,” I answer innocently. “How many can I enter, when should I bring them in, what do you do with them after, stuff like that.”
She waves a bony claw in the air. “As many as you want! We make zucchini bread to sell! Friday, okay? You bring them in Friday.”
“And I can really win a hundred dollars?”
“Yes. We put one hundred dollars on a card for you here.”
“Oh. You mean it’s not cash, but bread and rolls and stuff.”
“Yes! Yes! Or cakes! Or cookies! Lucky, lucky winner!”
I think about it. I would prefer the cash, but she is right. Someone, or rather three someones, are going to be lucky winners indeed. At eighty cents a loaf for their day-old homemade bread, first place would pay for a whole year’s worth for me and for the boys. That’s sandwiches for school lunches, or French toast on weekends, or breadcrumbs for meat loaf, and enough store credit left over for a dozen cookies or even a coffee cake.
Since my regular paycheck doesn’t cover us, maybe this is how we’re going to make it—by assigning odd little tasks to all our individual needs. Rocky the pig for protein, the garden for vegetables, the SMILE handbook for mental health, the Zen lit for spiritual health, and a crop of volunteer squashes to win our daily bread. I have no idea how I’m going to find the money to finish the remodeling project, but weirder things have happened, I’m sure, even if right now I can’t think what they might be.
A bag of sliced seven-grain in each hand, I exit through the automatic door and practically run to the car. I must speak with my troops ASAP and order up some peacetime cooperation.
Once home, I try to explain the maneuver. Owen waves me off, as a carload of boys all dressed in black unloads amplifiers, a drum set, and microphone stands from the trunk of a rusty sedan parked in our driveway.
“Band practice, remember?” he says, laying down a labyrinth of extension cords. I have got to be kidding if I think he has time for vegetables.
But I am not kidding, I am totally serious, and Will and Luke take one look at my face and agree to each select the most worthy squash they can find to enter into the contest. From now until Friday morning they’ll water their squashes daily, or more often if necessary; they’ll pick off any bugs and scare away the crows. They will not, I repeat not, use their prize specimens for bombs.
“We’re on it,” Luke says, saluting sarcastically but still committed to the contest. If he can’t outwar his little brother, he’ll just outgrow him.
“All right, guys, these squashes are depending on you,” I tell them, like the drill sergeant I’ve become. I need that $100 bakery card. “They’re like your babies now.”
Luke nods his agreement. Will is still thinking about it.
“How about they’re like our prisoners?” he finally asks.
“Sure, okay, your prisoners. Just treat ’em good.”
“They’re prisoners, Mom, duh,” Will says, as if I were an idiot in the ways of war or he were recalling his treatment at the hands of his brother. Maybe both. “You don’t treat prisoners good.”
From Napoleon to the Geneva Convention: who knew summer squash came with so many opportunities for edification?
“What about the Geneva Convention?” I ask.
They have never heard of it. Will gets a pass, as I didn’t really expect this to be a chapter in his third-grade history book. But Luke just started eighth grade. I would have expected him to know about this importa
nt piece of world history and international law by now. Note to self: start attending those school curriculum meetings.
I tell the boys that the Geneva Convention is a worldwide law that countries at war have to obey. We open the big atlas and find the city of Geneva, where the treaties were negotiated and signed. I explain that victors of war still have to care for the wounded and the sick, that they have to treat the imprisoned with respect. They listen intently, as if they’re really getting it; then Luke lobs a zinger.
“What about Abu Ghraib? Where was the whole Convention thingy on that?”
Even with restrictive TV privileges, even living on our little farm miles outside of town, even with this exchange occurring when Luke is so busy with school and chores that he has little time to spend with his friends where our country’s involvement in Iraq might be discussed, he’s got it. And I feel a tenderness toward him, my boy considering war.
Don’t forget, I remind myself, he is also the same boy who aimed an eight-pound squash directly at his little brother’s head.
“That was a war crime,” I say. “Those soldiers are going to jail, did you know that? What they did was wrong. Even your enemies deserve your respect. Not your surrender—never, ever that. But your respect.”
“Right,” comes a brand-new voice on this topic. “Like you do with Dad?”
The band has come inside for a sandwich break, and so Owen has an audience of his peers for this bit of family theater. Throughout my whole zucchini-crop repurposing—from war to (hopefully) wealth building, Owen has been noticeably absent from our efforts. He didn’t play war with his brothers, because he was off practicing his cello or his bass guitar. He isn’t usually around on most Sunday mornings when I go to the bakery, because he has slept over at some friend’s house where they’ve stayed up late to play and write music. He didn’t want to hear my plan for winning the contest, because it is, in his fifteen-year-old world, “so über lame.”
Bootstrapper Page 5
