Bootstrapper

by Mardi Jo Link

  “I’m thinking,” he says, without looking at me.

  A minute later he suggests calling into use an old wooden playhouse he and his brothers have long since abandoned. It’s heavy, it’s an eyesore, and it’s stuck back at the edge of the woods. But it is the right size and has another obvious advantage—it’s already built. I like the idea, and the job changes from one of building to one of moving. He knows the drill.

  “I’ll get some kids,” he says.

  Luke has always been good at getting kids here to help us with big jobs like this. Quite an accomplishment, considering how far we live outside of town, with no neighbors, sidewalks, or bike paths. But somehow, he still gets them here.

  Kids arrive on their bikes, on foot, and even get dropped off by their busy parents in their SUVs. One friend of Luke’s has a flock of chickens at his house that range free, and he doesn’t understand why we are building a coop but comes by to help out anyway. Maybe it’s the curiosity factor.

  Then Owen catches wind of what we’re up to, gets on the phone, and Aberration shows up to help, too. The project, the band members say with utter seriousness, has songwriting potential, and I can’t help it, I think “Armageddon Chicken” has a nice ring to it. Perhaps that’s just my desperation talking.

  These kids do not ask to be paid for their labor, which I couldn’t do anyway, but only expect macaroni and cheese from a box, homemade cookies, cheese quesadillas, and, depending on the season, Kool-Aid or hot chocolate, plus plenty of admiration, which I do have.

  The kids and the rock band arrive and we gather at the playhouse. There is a lot of pushing and lifting and groaning, but the playhouse is just too heavy to move.

  “It’s built too well,” I say. “The wood is too heavy.”

  Luke not only looks a little like me, he has my stubbornness. Tell him something can’t be done and he has an irresistible urge to floor his internal accelerator. But where I tend to bulldoze, he problem-solves.

  “We could roll it,” he says, “like a ginormous snowball.”

  And that is what we do. We tip the four-by-seven-foot wood playhouse on its side and roll it out of the woods, up a little hill, around the barn, and down another hill toward the edge of the garden. Just exactly like a ginormous snowball.

  There is something silly about a small building rolling down a hill on its side. And I can’t help it, this image reminds me of my own ridiculous effort over the past several weeks to obtain a mortgage. You wouldn’t think so, but a weather-beaten, waterlogged wooden playhouse somersaulting, picking up speed, and tossing off paint chips and loose boards on the way down does call to mind principal and interest.

  Once it’s at the proper location, though, we right the playhouse, shove it back and forth until the door faces the garden, and cheer. The younger boys bend one knee and shove their fists in the air like the soldiers of Iwo Jima. Will’s best friend, Joey, puts his cupped hand to his mouth and makes a bugling sound.

  Thank God for boys, I say to myself. Thank God for comic relief.

  “Hot chocolate and cookies for the coop brigade!” I say out loud.

  While they’re snacking in the kitchen, I come back outside and take another look at the thing. It is crooked, the door is broken off, and it’s two and a half feet out from the garden shed. It would look better and be a more efficient use of space if the two buildings were in line with each other. Two feet is too small a distance for another roll, but too far to push the heavy thing.

  “Got any ideas?” Luke asks, chewing on a cookie.

  “I’m thinking,” I say.

  After a minute, I walk to my new used minivan, start it up, drive it off our paved driveway, over the grass, and down the hill toward the garden, until the rubber bumper just touches the side of the playhouse. I gently press on the gas pedal and the playhouse and the minivan and I move forward. I keep this up until the two buildings are even, then I drive the minivan back and park it in its spot in the driveway.

  When I get out, Luke is grinning at me. I go fetch the roll of chicken wire and he holds up his staple gun in salute. We study what is no longer an abandoned playhouse but, in our minds, a respectable coop.

  “Not bad lodging,” he says, “if you’re a chicken.”

  Over the next several days we finish the coop, move the chickens in, and I turn my attention from animals to plants. It’s time to plot out the garden beds, and I sort seeds like the Big Valley is already ours. Growing a garden is a sign of permanence. Of faith.

  What’s the point of planting at all if we’re just going to lose the place? There isn’t one. Even though planting makes me feel grounded to this spot, to my land, to my home; even I know that it isn’t an assurance of anything.

  The spinach, lettuce, and radishes are in, but I’m running late with the sweet corn and the tomatoes. These tender-stalked heavy feeders each need a long season to mature—seventy to ninety days for the corn and about fifty to sixty-five days for the tomatoes if you plant seedlings instead of seeds—and time’s a-wasting.

  The Big Valley is located in the USDA’s Hardiness Zone 5, which means it doesn’t usually get colder than twenty degrees below zero in the winter. It also means that the last day that gardeners here can expect a frost is June 9, and the first day we need to start worrying about frost again is September 17. In between is time to make hay—and tomatoes, broccoli, corn, lettuce, spinach, and all the rest if we want to eat this winter.

  Our official growing season is approximately one hundred days long, but I’ve got to extend it if I want to grow enough food to sustain us. Where will we be in one hundred days? Here, eating our own sweet corn and our own chickens, if I have anything to say about it.

  By mid-May, then, the corn seeds should be soaked, planted, and covered over with a tarp to protect them from the crows until they germinate. The tomato seedlings should be in the ground now, their roots turned out at a right angle to stimulate good growth and a big root system. And each plant should be buried up to its neck in compost and crushed eggshells.

  I use ingenious little individual greenhouses called Wall O’ Water to extend our growing season. These are a simple invention, just bands of vinyl tubes you fill with tap water and shape in a cone around tender seedlings like tomato, eggplant, pepper, and herbs. They soak up the warmth of the sun during the day and keep the plants from freezing at night. Time it right and even on the cold edge of Zone 5, you can have ripe tomatoes by the end of July or the beginning of August.

  That’s always been my goal—tomatoes by July 31. Some years I make it and some years I don’t, but like most deadlines, in order to have a chance of meeting this one you have to calculate backwards. And my seedlings should have been hardened off and planted, like, yesterday.

  “Making the earth say beans instead of grass—this was my daily work,” writes Thoreau in Walden.

  By the end of May, my daily work should have been making the garden say spaghetti sauce and salsa. Making it say corn fresh from the cob stuck in my sons’ teeth at dinner, canning jars hot-packed with dilly beans and cucumber pickles.

  But this week I’ve been busy with writing assignments and filling out mortgage paperwork and I’m behind schedule, and instead of saying beans, the 60-by-140-foot patch of compost-and-horse-manure-enriched dirt where I am supposed to be growing our breakfast, lunch, and dinner is saying, “Rototill me.”

  And it’s when my mind has gone slack and is focused on worms that I figure out how to deal with the mortgage company. The day is warm and steam rises off the soil as I walk behind a borrowed garden tiller. Dead leaves, brown pine needles, compost from our compost pile, calcified horse turds from Major and Pepper, food scraps, my own sweat, and the soy-ink newspapers I used as pathways last season all grind in. I watch my soil turn from a dusty and overwintered gray to a lovely black, rich and moist as devil’s food cake.

  Tilling this large plot makes planting easier, but there is a downside to it: you destroy the worm casts—tunnels of worm poo that make te
rrific fertilizer and also aerate the soil so it holds water better—and cut up many of the helpful worms that made them. Because of this, I only till every third year. This is a tilling year, and worms are going to suffer for it. Most of them will grow into full worms again, but some will die, and as I watch pieces of worms come to the surface I have my first helpful thought.

  Like the worms, this land was also once in pieces too—on paper, anyway.

  The house sits on a two-and-a-half-acre piece, and the pasture and the woods were once divided into two additional two-acre pieces. I had all three parcels resurveyed into a single one again when we built the barn, because in order to keep horses in our township, there’s a five-acre minimum lot size.

  But the horses are gone. That girlhood dream is over, and I can’t bear the thought of ever having horses here again. So it’s possible that I could have the lots resurveyed, replotted back into three separate parcels, improving my on-paper finances. The current mortgage was written back when the property was in three pieces and it was written only on the farmhouse’s parcel. I own the other two vacant parcels outright. They are unmortgaged real estate. And it’s possible that I could get approved for a new mortgage just by resurveying my property and using the vacant land as collateral.

  I leave the tiller parked in the middle of the garden, surrounded by writhing worms glinting in the sun. My sprint leaves big footprints in the new soil, headed straight for the house. Inside, I go right to my file cabinet and dig out the old survey. I was right. It shows my farmhouse and my six and one-half acres divided as three separate parcels. At the bottom is the surveyor’s name and telephone number.

  Could it really be this easy? Just make a phone call to the surveyor, ask him to resurvey my property, pass the information on to my broker, and get approved for a new mortgage?

  Like most questions in my life now, the answer turns out to be yes and no. Yes, it is almost that easy to resurvey the property—for a fee, of course—and yes, once my adjacent land is resurveyed it will be free of debt and can be used as collateral on the application. But no, the mortgage broker says, it’s not enough collateral on its own to get the application approved. I’m still going to need something else too, something liquid and real that can be turned into quick cash, not something manipulated out of thin air with survey tape and a compass.

  While digging through the file cabinet looking for the land survey, my fingers walked over another file folder, marked “Boys’ Stock.” It’s been down here all along, but it never occurred to me to use it as collateral. That’s because this stock doesn’t belong to me, it belongs to my sons.

  A note inside the file, in the shaky handwriting of my ninety-six-year-old grandpa, reads: “I would hope that this fund would be used for education. If not, down payment on property for these kids when they grow up. But I won’t be here so you will need to make the decision.” Signed “GP,” for Grandpa.

  My parents would cringe if they knew I was even thinking these thoughts. They are both educators. Nothing in life is more important to them than education. But they don’t know everything. And keeping the farm isn’t just for me, I rationalize; it’s for my sons, too. They’ll only lose their college money if I default. Which I won’t. Will. Not.

  And so with sixteen days to spare, my mortgage application is approved. By sheer force of will, or desperation, or manipulation, or all three, I am approved for a mortgage on the Big Valley. And that’s not nothing.

  · · ·

  The good-bye that puts an ache in my chest so deep it feels almost ancestral begins with, of all things, a picnic. Believe me, I’ve tried to think of something else—anything else. But there’s no getting around it.

  It’s the last Saturday in May, three days after I’ve signed the new mortgage, and it’s sunny outside. A little chilly, a little windy, but tomorrow a thunderstorm is predicted, and so if I’m going to do this at all, it has to be today. And I have to do it.

  All three boys are in the garden, subjected to their daily weeding torture. The spinach, lettuce, beets, and radishes are up, the onion sets are in, and so is the sweet corn.

  I’ve got forty-five tomato seedlings on a rack on the porch, just beginning to accept the idea of going into the ground, and forty-five boy-dug holes to put them in when they do. That will probably happen tomorrow, Sunday, after the storm comes through.

  We haven’t been to church in a month and there won’t be time to go this week, either. And, truth be told, I don’t miss it. There’s too much work to do here this time of year, and the boys and I need all seven days to complete it. A day of rest is out of the question. We barely have time for this lunch break, but it isn’t optional.

  “Picnic lunch time!” I holler.

  The boys lift their heads from their rakes, and from their dirty fingernails, and from the evil dead nettle, pokeweed, and curly dock that have become their enemy. They see me walking out the door, carrying a blanket and a Thermos of lemonade.

  “Picnics are for girls,” Luke says.

  “So are cookies!” I yell back, holding up four bulging brown lunch sacks. At the sight of actual food, they put down their tools, turn on the pump, wash their hands, and follow me away from the garden, around the edge of the pasture, and toward a flat place in the grass on the back lot.

  Over my shoulder I see them twenty paces behind me, boys in various stages of becoming men, stuck following a woman, and I wonder how much longer this will last. They are sixteen, thirteen, and nine now. Soon they are not going to want to follow me at all anymore, especially not Owen.

  I spread the blanket out on the grass under a group of doomed elm saplings, rooted here by chance from seeds released to the wind by their slowly dying ancestor, the big tree near the house shriveled by disease and parasitic beetles. These saplings show signs of the same malady, and will probably have the energy to leaf out only one or two more summers. Perhaps a bulldozer will just take them quick.

  I pour cups of lemonade while the boys unfold the wax paper on their sandwiches—Swiss cheese and hummus for Owen, the vegetarian; turkey, peanut butter, pickles, and lettuce for Luke, the epicurean adventurer; and the usual for Will, crunchy peanut butter and our homemade jam.

  We chew and discuss the breaking news of the morning—the broad-winged hawk that has been circling the chicken coop again; the poisonous northern black widow spider they found in its web on a fence post, captured in a screen-sided bug cage, then drowned in a bucket; their own weeding prowess.

  “The ragweed sees me coming and starts shaking in its roots!” Luke says, laughing at his own pun.

  When we’re almost finished with our sandwiches and apples, I bring out the homemade snickerdoodles I’ve promised them. It’s weak, I know, thinking cinnamon sugar cookies can offset what I’m about to tell them, but when it comes right down to it, that’s what I’ve got.

  “I have some sad news,” I tell them.

  All chewing stops. What, they must be wondering, is she going to lay on us now? In the past eleven months I have used this line to announce my divorce from their father, to break the news of Major’s death, to tell them I sold Pepper, to tell them Rocky’s time was up, and even to ease into my admission that they were on the free-lunch list at school. After getting approved for the mortgage, it took me about a day to realize it was a mortgage I could afford only on paper. I’m going to go broke without a big infusion of cash. News I can’t hide from my sons. I’m not getting any better at ripping off the Band-Aid, though.

  “We’ve got to sell the land. It’s the only way we can afford to keep the house.”

  “What land?” Luke asks, his mouth full of sandwich. His tone suggests we own large tracts in exotic places far, far away that he’s never contemplated or seen. I wish.

  “This land,” I say. “The land you’re sitting on.”

  Owen just shakes his head, but Will gets that frown his forehead produces when our shifting life doesn’t yet make sense to him.

  “This isn’t land,” he
says, as if my announcement were the most foolish thing he’s ever heard. “This is our yard.”

  The survey simply calls this square of dirt “Parcel A,” and its neighbor “Parcel B.” The dimensions and legal description have been notarized, so they must be spot-on. Yet that document can’t begin to describe what this land means to me. To us.

  Because where on that piece of paper does it record Will and me walking hand in hand on a bug safari, him sad because his brothers left him every day to go to school? Where is the route all four of us would take on moonlit walks in the summertime, turning off the flashlight, lying on our backs in the field, and looking up at all creation? And there are no X’s for Luke’s bow-and-arrow targets, or for the boys’ tree forts, or Owen’s bike trails. Nothing identifies our award-winning zucchini patch, either.

  Major’s last stand will not go down into this record, either, I guess.

  And all of these things, these memories, are what I’m really selling, not just a couple acres of dirt.

  But there are no real secrets in families, and so I have to tell them this. And so I bottom-line them.

  “Monday a For Sale sign is going up,” I manage to choke out.

  I see my own face then reflected back at me in their navy, hazel-green, and blue eyes. And I see that I’ve aged. I am a hundred years older and a hundred winters wearier now, when our six and a half acres are about to become four, than I was last summer, when the five of us became four.

  I think of those displaced meadow voles and Will’s pronouncement that people wreck everything, and I have never felt so defeated. Not when I sat in the courtroom, not when I drove my children around collecting firewood, not even when I had the flu.

  A year ago, selling even a blade of grass off Big Valley land was unthinkable. But every moon’s relentless shine since then has brought me, heels dragging, nearer and nearer to casting this crescent-shaped shadow over the four of us. And now, this afternoon, gripped in my very own hand, if it isn’t the devil’s scythe—and I’ve even got it raised up, poised to swing.