My Empire of Dirt: How One Man Turned His Big-City Backyard into a Farm

by Manny Howard

  “We really have to go,” Josh urges.

  “Yes, of course,” says Lisa, looking at me, forlorn.

  From the perch Bevan Jake has scrambled into amid the white dogwood tree on our lawn, he warbles, “Be brave, Dadda!” Then he smiles and waves theatrically. I manage to smile back.

  “What have you done, Mr. Howard?” asks Alvin calmly.

  “Cut it pretty bad, Mr. Hemmings,” I reply, sliding across the backseat.

  “Off?” asks Alvin.

  “Maybe,” Josh and I reply in unison. Twenty-eight minutes later, Josh ushers me through the door and into the office of Danny Fong, MD, PC. Fong’s wife and daughters are out of the city; we’re here because he is staying at the office late catching up on paperwork and answers Josh’s phone call. “A table saw, huh? Why don’t you come by the office. I’ll see what we can do from here,” says Dr. Fong.

  Most of the lights in the office are already off, and his two assistants are busying themselves, preparing to leave for the evening. The taller of the two smiles sympathetically at me and asks Dr. Fong if she should lock the door behind her. Fong nods, then gestures for me to follow him down the hall to an outpatient surgery. Josh grabs the summer issue of Gourmet magazine from an end table and sits down in the near dark of the waiting room.

  Dr. Fong initially reserves an opinion regarding the return to full service for the pinkie, as the saw blade blasted most of the bone below the joint, or proximal phalange, and the cartilage is shredded. Initially he talks of the possibility of a prosthetic joint and some modest hope of preserving the finger and even the slim possibility of some retained motion.

  “Hey, do you mind if I ask Josh to join us?” I interrupt. “He’s taken great care of me and I’d hate for him to miss the good part.”

  “Why don’t I go ask him? You sit down,” Dr. Fong says, smiling. The two return, Josh with Gourmet, Dr. Fong with some large hypodermic needles and what I suppose is a vial of anesthetic. “Thanks,” says Josh, smiling, sardonic, and plunks himself in a plastic chair that turns out to be a front-row seat.

  Dr. Fong ought never to play poker. He does not have the face for it. As he explores the extent of the damage, he alternately grimaces, clucks his tongue dismissively, sighs forlornly, and rolls his eyes in utter hopelessness. By the end of his examination I won’t be surprised if he says the whole arm has to come off at the elbow. “If we have to do a skin graft, we’ll need to take this show to a real operating room,” he offers, both promise and threat.

  Josh has been a fireman for twelve years; a hero rookie and a veteran of calls to fatal house fires and car wrecks, countless overdoses, and everything in between. Josh worked The Pile at Ground Zero for months. He never speaks of the horrors he witnessed there, and I have never asked. But this is the first summer since The Attack that the Josh of my childhood memories has been visible through the armor he erected around himself. True to form, Josh has been unflappable since the moment he walked into the kitchen and found me at the sink with my hand wrapped in a bloody towel and jammed in a slush of ice cubes and water. As I knew it would, his calm resolve has kept me moving forward, focused on the only job in front of me: getting my hand to a good surgeon. Now, less than an hour later, here we are and Josh is craning his neck to watch the surgery without blocking Dr. Fong’s operating klieg lights.

  I feel a hard tug. Josh sits up erect and grips the rolled-up Gourmet. His eyes are fixed on the acoustic tile on the ceiling, and the blood drains from his face momentarily. I am also craning my neck to watch the operation, but to get the proper presentation of the wound, Dr. Fong has me positioned in what I suppose to be a quarter nelson, my shoulder twisted at a right angle behind my back so that my straight elbow points at him and my fingers splay with the tension of the twist. I can only see hints and shadows of what is going on. An hour and a half later, over dumplings and beer at Joe’s Shanghai, seven blocks away, Josh recounts how Fong had irrigated the last pieces of shattered bone from the wound. “It was crazy,” Josh says, shaking his head and slurping up a pork-and-crab soup dumpling. “Fong basically jammed a clamp into the far side of the wound and pushed. The skin stretched about four times the length of your pinkie—like rubber!—and he blasted the last slivers of bone out with the irrigator.”

  Joe’s Shanghai is a venerated mainstay of Chinatown’s restaurant scene, and there is always something of a line. The tables seat ten or more, and diners are thrown together as space becomes available. We order a second plate of dumplings and a beef dish that Josh says he likes a lot. We drink a second and third beer while the other diners stare at the hand bandaged to my shoulder, the fresh iodine stains visible on my forearm below the bandaged wrist. We hail a cab and I’m home and lowering myself into bed next to Lisa by ten thirty.

  “Does it hurt?” she asks without turning to face me.

  “Not as much as I thought it would,” I lie.

  The next morning the coop still needs final touches, so Caleb, who heard about my injury, shows up before noon—early. Once simply my right-hand man, Caleb becomes both of my arms and hands and half my brain—double-checking pain-addled misdirects on my part, and we get the multistory coop fully operational.

  The next day, we follow the advice of my buddy Tex, “A duck must swim,” and we build the ducklings an above-ground swimming pool. They will have nothing to do with it, however. We also build the meat birds an eight-foot-long covered food trough from PVC pipe. The legs of the trough are eight-inch lag bolts, each held in place by a pair of nuts and washers. The trough takes up almost the entire length of the run. We build it in the hope that the birds will not crap where they eat with such gusto.

  A transparent effort to appease my wife, craven, that’s how Caleb characterizes it. All the same, the first day back to work I roll out a five-by-twenty-foot swath of turf against the southern edge of the garden. The kids love it, play house with the ducks on it every chance they get. Usually an appellation granted giant pandas, blue whales, or Asian elephants, here on The Farm the ducks are our charismatic megafauna, and so, more equal than others; thanks to Heath, long ago the ducks’ death sentence had been commuted. When Heath fully digested the details of my plan, gleaned the true purpose of all the livestock now in residence behind her house, she called me out on the mat. “Daddy, are you going to eat all the animals?” she inquires, stern.

  “Yes, honey girl, that’s the plan. You can try some, too, if you want.”

  “No,” she said, a reflection of her mother, putting an end to my foolishness.

  “I’m building a farm in Brooklyn because nobody else has done this in one hundred years.”

  “One hundred,” she repeats. “Is that a long time?”

  “Pretty long.”

  “Are you going to eat the ducks, too?”

  “Yes, hon.” Resolute now. I am not sorry and I will not pretend that I am. “Thing is, I need the fat they have in them for cooking. Also, they are very tasty.”

  “Dad,” says Heath, pausing for effect, “I’m serious. You cannot eat the ducks. You can eat as many chickens as you want, but you cannot eat the ducks. Me and Jakey play with the ducks all the time. Ducks are nicer than chickens. You eat them.” She points at the riot in the run two yards away.

  “I promise,” I reply, with every intention of keeping it.

  “You have to really promise.”

  “I really promise.”

  “I love you, Dadda.”

  “I love you, too, Heathy.”

  “I like the little black chicken, too, Daddy,” she whines.

  “No moaning. No more negotiations. Go on, play with your ducks.”

  Setting the meat birds up requires two important first steps. First, Caleb and I built the chicken coop; now, we must set up the caponizing station. Seventy percent of our meat birds are male. Not that we have bothered to determine the sex of the chickens—we simply generated the number in conversation on the journey between the Agway and home—but we plan to act on it all the same. Th
is means we need to castrate the birds before they find their voice. There’s no way the neighbors will abide a chorus of cock-a-doodle-do on top of everything else I have put them through. That’s all a capon is, a castrated rooster. Like all the other gelded males on a farm, once castrated a male chicken loses all his ambition and gets absurdly big and juicy. Of primary importance for me and the priorities of my agricultural microgeography, castrated roosters lose their voice. Unlike those of most every other livestock on a farm, a chicken’s testicles do not dangle, easy prey for a pair of bricks or even a strangulating rubber band; no, rooster testicles are held internally, packed up right against the spine behind the second rib. Castration is, therefore, a surgical procedure requiring a somewhat sterile surface and an assortment of tools. As daunting as the procedure is, all the meat birds must be castrated. Once they start crowing, the neighbors will start to get pissed and Animal Control won’t be far behind.

  I download the instructions from the 1922 edition of Sears, Roebuck & Co.’s “Easy-On” Caponizing Set. Seven pages long, it includes six rudimentary illustrations and, on page seven, a photograph of a ten-month-old Black Langshan capon that is said to weigh a whopping eleven pounds—proof, I suppose, that the instructions work. A Nasco’s Caponizing Kit is already in the mail, on its way to The Farm—such a kit typically contains scalpel, forceps, spreader, probe, needle, gland remover, confinement hooks, and cords. I ordered it yesterday and am told it will be delivered tomorrow.

  I dread its arrival.

  Caleb figures that the operation—which he has already threatened to be absent for—will greatly reduce the population that survives to the butchering/food stage. His initial wager is that fifteen of the twenty-five will survive long enough to be eaten; now, in light of the information about what caponizing entails and how much of it there is to be done, Caleb says he needs more time to reconsider his bet.

  He needn’t bother. All the literature supports his grim forecast. Even Gail Damerow, the guru of DIY poultry, is pretty cavalier about the collateral damage associated with caponizing. “If you chance to kill a bird,” Damerow counsels, “don’t feel bad about it—even the most experienced caponizer occasionally loses one.” She warns that if while you make every effort not to kill the bird you’re working on, you leave even a portion of a testicle behind in the body cavity, you will have labored in vain. This bird, a “slip,” is neither capon nor cockerel; it doesn’t grow fat like the gelding bird, and it will remain aggressive and make life hell for the eunuchs. Loyl Stromberg, the author of a fifty-two-page treatise on caponizing and capon management, is just as discouraging.

  Caleb will have too much to do come tomorrow morning to worry about the finer points of bird castration, anyhow. Events have conspired, and between my losing the use of my right hand and my imminent departure from The Farm for nobody seems to know how long, Caleb will have to preside over the chaos. At dawn tomorrow Heath is having her knee operated on. It is still impossible to glean whether her surgeon is skillfully limiting expectations by telling us to anticipate six weeks of immobility, or if that will really be the situation. I’m glad I never disassembled the wheelchair ramp. Lisa would have been delighted if I had taken it down and put it back up. That’s make-work. No time for such antics.

  The next morning Heath sits on Lisa’s knee in the surgery intake room, drowning in a pair of surgery robes that fit her more like a ball gown. Dr. van Bosse, a retinue of surgical internists in tow, greets Heath and presents her with a pair of diminutive stuffed animals, one a pink elephant and the other a white mouse. “Here, these are for you, Heath,” the surgeon says, his internists studying the interaction intensely.

  “Thanks,” replies Heath, polite but all business, trying to make sense of the scene here in pre-op.

  “I’ll be back in a few minutes. We’re gonna do just fine together today, okay?”

  “Okay,” says Heath, looking up at Lisa, who nods encouragement.

  “How’s that hand?” asks van Bosse as he turns away from Heath and Lisa. My hand is bound up in a bandage and strapped tightly to my collarbone in a sling so that the wound hovers above my heart.

  “It smarts, Doc,” I reply. “Not as painful as I thought it would be, though.”

  “This guy cut his finger off on a table saw,” he says to the internists, who perk up at the news, “what was it, yesterday?”

  “Three days now.”

  “Right through the knuckle, isn’t that something?” says van Bosse to the young, nodding doctors.

  “Stupid, more like,” I say, trying to shift the focus off me and back onto Heath. Lisa scowls. I am upstaging my own daughter.

  “You take care,” says van Bosse, off to greet the rest of his surgical calendar.

  Van Bosse returns a few minutes later. Heath’s gurney is in the offing, attended by members of van Bosse’s surgical team. Lisa regards them with dread. They smile back benignly. “Hi there, darling,” says van Bosse, his preternatural cheerfulness spiking. “Hey, have you named your animals yet, Heath?”

  Heath regards the surgeon and then the pink elephant and the white mouse. She furrows her brow, never more serious, and looks right at van Bosse. “We don’t name our animals.”

  Lisa and I while away the morning, drifting like wraiths over the land, from the waiting room to the cafeteria, to the front steps and then back to the waiting room. We happen to be floating near the exit to the surgical suites when the doors automatically open and Heath calls to us from the end of a long hallway. She is grinning wide and so is van Bosse. “It went better than I could have hoped,” the surgeon explains. “My guess is she will be up and walking in a soft cast tomorrow, and out of that by the end of the week.”

  Lisa and I forget ourselves momentarily, hug passionately. The moment passes quickly. Van Bosse clocks it, but it does not register on his face.

  I meet Robert Lee O’Neill at a birthday dinner for a member of the documentary-film crew I worked with. Still taken with the brutality of my accident and what I consider to be its novelty, I have spent weeks recounting the event to anyone who will listen. O’Neill owns a ranch, what passes for a family farm, in Almeda, Texas, so I assume a kinship and am overcome by a desire to impress him. O’Neill listens patiently while I tell the story of my pinkie, using the bent and swollen digit as a baton. O’Neill is gracious and says he knows how much that kind of thing can hurt, explaining that some years ago, while helping out on a neighbor’s ranch, he crushed all four fingers off his right hand while swinging a fence gate shut. He recalls wrapping his hand—both of his hands look as if they could still crush a soup can—in a rag, then scrambling to retrieve his fingers from the dust, before rushing off to the doctor. “The doctor managed to put all three of them back on without too much fuss at all,” he says, clearly still grateful and a little bit surprised.

  “Three? Why didn’t the surgeon reattach all four?” I ask.

  “The dog beat me to the fourth one back in the stockyard,” says O’Neill, grinning widely; you win some, you lose some. “Dog grabbed it up and ran off and ate it behind a cotton tree.”

  “You kicked that dog?” I ask rhetorically.

  “Nope. Not at all. He was just doing what dogs do.”

  I nod, pretending to be much wiser than I am. In the days that follow, the way you do when you join a population you never gave much thought to before, I start to notice how many broken hands there are in the world. I never brag about my finger again after that night, not really. Never mind, then, about price supports and countless agricultural subsidies (both aboveboard and way below) imposed to close the million-dollar gap between what a chicken costs to make and the dollar or so a pound that Americans are willing to pay for it; banish concerns about a looming trade war with China over control of the market for chicken feet. For a few weeks I was certain something momentous had happened to me. I was wrong. I have simply joined the fraternity of old men with gnarly fingers. That is the real price of chicken.

  RABBIT SEASON />
  I still blanch when I recall my behavior among Lisa’s family in Georgia, but I have, for the most part, stopped fretting about the fate of my finger. It aches continually, but the shooting pains are gone. While I have been busy disrupting the foundations of my life the garden has turned a corner.

  • Tomatoes—are a bramble of robust leaves and branches with fruit aching to ripen.

  • Eggplant (various)—pathetically spindly after a life spent seeking more than partial sunlight; the rain has toppled half.

  • Collard greens—broad fans of vegetable greedy for space and sunlight.

  • Callaloo (Caribbean varietal spinach)—supple delicate leaves and tendrils holding their own against the collards, but not without our help.

  • Cabbage—never took hold; clearly sun-starved, the plants’ hardy stems never developed a convincing ball of leaf.

  • Corn—chest high, with some signs of life in the narrow cobs.

  • Beets—the greens are convincing, though I have my doubts about the size of the tuber, but there is still some time.

  • Pumpkin—plenty of plant; but after an exciting display of blossom, the plant seems to lack all ambition.

  • Peppers (various)—the grow boxes in the front yard have been a great success. The plants are strong and the food grows quickly now.

  • Squash (various)—there is not a weak sister among the half-dozen plants I put in. Each has produced food and, as long as I keep the food staked up off the wet earth, grows well.

  • Leek—certainly wispier than any I am used to buying, but pungent and flavorful all the same.

  • Fennel—the bulb is robust, the stalks a little spidery, but the feathery leaves are delightfully fragrant.

  • Fig—the limbs are not even remotely robust and it is already producing fruit.