500 Acres and No Place to Hide

by Susan McCorkindale

  My dad keeps telling me not to worry; it’ll break. I’ll get inspired and wham! I’ll be writing. But what if it doesn’t? What if I can never again poke fun at our farm and the chickens that refuse to stay cooped in their coop and instead stroll my front porch with impunity, burrowing into my window boxes, laying, like, one egg a week, and brutalizing my poor petunias? What if I start wearing T-shirts that read COWS ARE FRIENDS, NOT FOOD, instead of running out into the pasture, scouring our herd of beef cattle, and bellowing, “Ninety-five sure would be great for our barbecue, hon!” What if I stop kicking our goat Duke out of the Mustang and instead slap a diaper and a pair of Ray-Bans on him and let him sit on my lap like a dog while I do errands? What if, God forbid, my fast mouth fails me forever? What if I can no longer be Her Royal Highness the Most Petulant Princess of the Pastures, the Ranter in Residence, or, and this is the kids’ new favorite nickname for their miserable mom, Little Miss Nasty of Nate’s Place?

  Riddled with self-doubt, tired of memorizing synonyms for hack and loser on Thesaurus.com,150 and unable to complete even the suicide note I started, I realized I had to do something. Something radical. Something totally out of character. Something I usually avoid at all costs. Something I fear more than the return of the striped leg warmer or the poncho. Something that frightens me more than the collapse of the California chardonnay industry, the complete and total failure of the fake-bake and false-eyelash businesses, the discontinuation of Victoria’s Secret’s “butt lift” jeans and Sally Hansen’s Navy Baby nail color, or the prohibition of the push-up bra, Spanx panties, and do-it-yourself face-lift kits. (Okay, they don’t exist. But someday they will and I’ll be addicted to them and then the bastards at the Food and Drug Administration will pull them and I’ll wind up racing around the country scouring drugstore shelves, buying whatever’s left and then hoarding them like Elaine Benes’s contraceptive sponges and asking myself every single day for the rest of my life if a wrinkle is lift-worthy or if I should wait until it becomes a crevasse so deep it sucks in an eye.)

  I had to muster up all my Jersey and confront the situation head-on.

  I popped an Ativan, put on my big-girl pants, and picked up the phone.

  “Hello!” I blurted when the newspaper’s managing editor answered. “How have you been, and where have I been?”151

  Her response? The dark side. At least as far as folks in the community are concerned. Readers have complained I’m a bit bawdy, rather ribald, even risqué. Seems my pining for bigger breasts and a smaller butt, my unabashed enthusiasm for high heels, tattoos,152 and margaritas, my desire for well-behaved kids who love family vacations and don’t mind taking them with other families so I can stay home and break in a new blender, even my reminiscences about high school boyfriends and the days when I could wear a two-piece bathing suit without wishing everyone on the beach would go blind are inappropriate. Verboten. Taboo.

  Who knew?

  Hmm. I would’ve if I’d paid any attention to my Cosmo Girl–less library.

  “Let me get this straight. I can’t write about boobs, and Miracle Bras, and implants, right?” I asked. “Not a problem. But how about man boobs? You know, moobs? That usually leaves ’em laughing. No, huh? Maybe cow udders? They crack me right up. Don’t they just look like one big boob with lots of long nipples hanging off them? What’s that? Okay, okay, no boobs of any kind. But maybe I could still write about the two I gave birth to?”

  Not a chance, chiquita.

  And so I’ve been banished, blackballed, cut off, cast out, shown the door—dumped is what it comes down to—for columnists who’d never write about wanting to sell their kids,153 or how they once spent five, maybe ten, but no more than fifteen seconds tops, I swear, trying to figure out how to trade their husband for a Birkin bag.

  I hung up the phone feeling awful that I’d offended people. I mean, I’m the type who apologizes when the waitress gets my order wrong (“Oh, I’m so sorry. I wanted the roast beef, but it’s okay; tuna’s great. Sure, sometimes I break out in hives or get a little short of breath, but as long as my throat doesn’t close, it’s cool”), or because someone lost an earring (“It was your grandmother’s? It has three diamonds? And it fell off right here, in the ER, while you were taking care of me? Oh, I’m so sorry. Forget my gush-ing head wound. I’ll help you find that sucker. And maybe you’ll let me keep a carat?”). I take on responsibility for everything. The war in Iraq? You have no idea how bad I feel about that. The crappy spaghetti sauce selection in the supermarket? What can I do to make it up to you? The stain on your pretty silk blouse? Let’s trade. Mine was doomed come cocktail hour anyway. No matter what it is, I’m sorry for it. In fact, if there were any money to be made as a professional apologizer,154 believe me, I’d pursue it. But there isn’t. And for that, I’m really, well, you know.

  The long and short of it is, I was pretty pained I’d put people off. When Hem came in, I told him what happened, and then I called my mom, and my shrink, and when I was finished crying (you’d cry, too: She charges fifty bucks for a phone session, which is a bargain compared with the seventy-five big ones my mom bills me), it hit me: I was okay with it. In fact, I felt fine. Incredible. Formidable. Like a force to be reckoned with. I’m not happy the reckoning went the way it did, but you know what? By being banned, I’d finally arrived.

  Right this moment I feel Mae West, Madonna, Cher, Shelley Winters, Helen Gurley Brown, and Bonnie Raitt great.

  I’m too risqué.

  But I’m not shit-tay.

  Good-bye, local paper. Good-bye, guest columnist gig. Don’t let my writer’s block hit you in your ample butt or tacky tattoo on the way out!

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  CHRISTMAS IN COW COUNTRY

  (OR, SUBURBANITES DECK THE HALLS, FARM FOLK DECK THE HEIFERS)

  Hard to believe, but this will be our fourth Christmas on the farm. I really thought we’d have run screaming back to suburbia by now (or at least I would have), but no. Here we are. Still in cow country. And we’ve got several new family traditions to show for it.

  Number one is my favorite, although all five are fun. Feel free to take ’em and tweak ’em. No cow? Light up the cat. No chicken to chase? Free the kids’ ferret. There’s no more magical way to make merry than by releasing your inner redneck.

  So don’t wait a moment more. Deep-fry your turkey, stick chewing tobacco in your sweetie’s stocking, and absolutely, positively go for the gusto and give your whole gang—yes, even the baby—new double-barrel black-powder shotguns. They’re eleven hundred bucks a pop, but it’s the holidays. What’s a lung shot for the ones you love?

  Oh, and while you’re at it? Don’t forget to have your Christmas picture taken with a camo-clad Santa. You haven’t lived until you’ve celebrated at least one holiday season sticks style.

  #5. Annual “Plug in the Porch Lights (’Cause They’re Up Year-round)” Ritual

  Time was when we spent Black Friday at the mall. Now that we’re farm folk and a trip to the stores means packing a lunch, we spend it on the porch. We gather the dogs, the kids, and the camera, and watch as dear Hemingway plugs in the outside lights. Once the sole province of the trailer-park set, leaving the lights up year-round makes seasonal exterior adornment a snap. Plus it’s frozen-hands- and four-letter-words-free!

  #4. Cattle Lighting Ceremony

  We’re unsure whether other farmers light up their livestock, but we’ve been doing so since our first holiday here. Each year Casey and Cuyler select the most docile and beautiful (i.e., least covered in crap) of our bovines, and then together we affix battery-operated Christmas-tree pins to their ear tags, and tiny holiday lights to their horns. Suburbanites deck the halls. We deck the heifers.

  #3. Holiday Hog Day

  Once we’ve bedecked the beasts and trimmed the swine! It’s not easy, since the little fatties are so darn cute, but on Holiday Hog Day we stiffen our resolve, head to a friend’s pigpen, and pick out Christmas dinner. There’s nothing like the
taste of a homegrown, all-natural, country-cured ham. If you can forget it was once called Kirby.

  #2. Catch and Wrap a Live Chicken Contest

  The first one to catch a chicken, wrap it in a burlap sack, and tie it with a big red bow wins a fifty-dollar gift card to the retailer of his choice. Yes, it’s a weird tradition, but for ten minutes a year we get to see our sons interested in a real game and not video games. Happy holidays to us!

  #1. New Year’s Naked Hayride

  The ball drops, we toast, and we send the boys to bed. Then it’s just me and my handsome honey in the hay. We don’t actually ride around the farm, but that doesn’t mean we don’t get anywhere.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  YOU SAY YOU WANT A RESOLUTION

  I’ve been thinking a lot about New Year’s resolutions. Like most people, every year I make them. And every year I break them. Fast, too. Despite the fact that I exercise just about every day, on January first, I’m training for a triathlon. On January second, I’m icing shin splints so severe it’s as if I’ve been a sloth since the invention of the wheel. A bag of frozen peas strapped to each calf works well. Two pints of Peanut Butter Swirl and a spoon work better.

  Of course, even before I ratchet up my personal boot camp, while others are still nibbling and toasting, I go Gandhi. And I don’t simply cut back. I abstain. I fast. I seek a deeper level of purity. A higher level of consciousness. The corkscrew I had Hemingway hide. Why? Because by dinnertime I’m delirious; Mahatma could subsist on water, but this woman needs wine.

  Maybe I can’t sustain my patented Delay Death Program because I start out too gung ho. Boost my immune system and crinkling complexion by drinking eight glasses of water a day? Please, only sissies drink less than sixteen. Good thing Santa brought me a bedpan. Sleeping on the toilet is tough.

  And then there are the resolutions that get broken not by me, but by those I’ve given birth to. If I vow to be more involved in the lives of both my boys, and then offer to, say, help Cuyler finish the fort he’s been building, his response is quick and incredulous.

  Cuy, peering at me from beneath bangs that would blind a Jonas Brother: “Mom, does Dad know you’re sick?”

  Me: “I’m not sick. Who said anything about being sick?”

  Cuy, shouting up the stairs: “Dad? Mom’s offering to help me fix the fort.”

  Hemingway, shouting down at them: “Stay back! She could be contagious!”

  So much for familial support.

  To be frank, I’m tired of the same old declarations. Doesn’t a new year deserve new resolutions? Or barring that, at least a little variation to the ones I love to break?

  For instance, I don’t always eat right every day. But what if I vow to do so every other day? Ah. Just that little tweak’s made the prospect more palatable. In fact, I’m so enamored with the day-on/day-off tack, I think I’ll take it with all my resolutions. One day I’ll exercise; the next I’ll use my dumbbells as bookends. One day I’ll look for real, paying work. The next I’ll revel in this writer/slacker/ gym-teacher gig I’ve got going. One day I’ll stop at nothing to put “color” on my family’s plates; the next I’ll resume my quest to have corn dogs reclassified as a vegetable.

  I have to confess that for a true type A, this rather type B approach is a little off-putting. But in the interest of not declaring myself a loser by, say, January second, I think I’ll try it. I like the kinder, gentler concept, and the idea of feeling halfway successful instead of like a full-on failure is pretty appealing, too.

  Thanks to this revolution in resolutions, this could be the first New Year in years that I actually stick to my self improvement plans. One day I’ll floss. The next I’ll forget I have teeth. One day I’ll toss the chickens some scratch. The next, they can go scratch. One day I’ll drink nothing but water. The next day nothing but wine. I won’t be able to work, exercise, or make dinner, but as long as it’s slacker-bookend–corn dog day, it should be fine.

  A Note from Suzy, Princess of the Pastures

  Remember the old Tareyton cigarette ads, the ones that featured people sporting black eyes and the slogan “I’d Rather Fight than Switch”? I hadn’t thought of that line in years. But the other day, as I watched a nurse access Hemingway’s mediport to start his chemotherapy, it popped into my head. With just a slight tweak, I made it “We’d Rather Fight than Switch”; it was suddenly the perfect description of the way in which we’re struggling to hold on to our identity as a couple since he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

  Sorry to spring that on you. There’s really no easy way to tell people. And trust me, there’s no easy way to be told, either.

  Now, it goes without saying that there’s a whole lot to hate about cancer. For starters, there’s the fact that it’s, well, cancer, and it’s having its way with someone you love. But there are dozens of other little stupid and not-so-stupid reasons cancer’s completely reprehensible. Like the fact that it’s not satisfied with trying to take a life. Oh, no. It has to try to take your way of life, too.

  Consider for a second a simple argument between husband and wife. You can hardly have one. You know it’s foolish to fight. One of you has cancer, for God’s sake. Why spend what little time you may have left locked in a battle over whether to add more Rhode Island Reds or Barred Rocks to your supply of egg layers? Or whether to buy another half dozen Holstein bull calves that have to be bottle-fed twice a day, every day, for twelve weeks, no matter what the weather?155 Or whether white or colored Christmas lights should glisten on the porch this holiday?156

  Or—and this is our favorite thing to feud over—what we’d do if we hit the lottery.

  We love this game. We pretend we just won ninety-five million dollars, then take turns describing how we’d spend it. Why his stadium-size custom train layout trumps my three-thousand-square-foot shoe closet, I don’t know. But I do know we’ve agreed on at least one thing: We’d definitely build a brand-new house.

  The fact that I want it on a beach and he wants it on a lake157 is why things usually get a little loud.

  I know. We shouldn’t fuss. But to us it’s fun. We enjoy the verbal jousting. The running word circles around each other. The poking. The prodding. The “kiss me and I’ll forgive you” expression Hem uses to cap each of our “energetic conversations” that makes me want to put a pillow over his face while he’s sleeping.

  Or while he’s awake. Unfortunately, these days I could totally take my skinny former marine.

  Heated, passionate exchanges are just how we do things. Or at least it was until cancer came along and cramped our style. Now, just as we’re making our approach to the rip-roaring debate runway—about, not to beat a dead decoration, the Christmas lights, which I think should impart a lovely Helmsley Palace–like sophistication rather than an Evening at the Tractor Pull–type ambience, sweetheart—we both stop. Simultaneously. And apologize. And give in to the other’s request.

  Yick. Blech. Boring.

  I won’t do it, you know. We won’t do it. We’re going to let it rip and get rowdy over whether John Deere or New Holland takes the gold in the tractor games,158 whether mashed potatoes beat macaroni and cheese on the comfort-food food chain, whether Dave Matthews should be killed or simply have his vocal cords cut out, or whether Marshall Faulk or Tiki Barber was the better running back. We’re going to debate train layouts and lake houses, shoe closets and shore property, and we are going to enjoy every single strident second of it.

  We’re not going to capitulate to cancer’s crap. You hear me, cancer? You can’t have my husband’s life, or one iota of the way we live our life. And you’re certainly not invited for Christmas. I don’t care how much you like white lights.

  Part Three

  WILL FARM FOR LOVE

  “If you can’t make it better, you can laugh at it.”

  —ERMA BOMBECK

  Chapter Thirty

  WILL FARM FOR LOVE

  I’ve come to the conclusion that God has quite the sens
e of humor. That or He’s really ticked off at me. Why? Because in the past few months, since Hemingway got sick, I have taken charge of the farm.

  That’s right. Me. The city chick who still prefers calling a taxi (especially the Takeout Taxi) to driving a pickup truck, and who’d still much rather be surrounded by people than poultry any day.

  Trust me, it’s not a promotion I wanted or worked for or ever showed any interest in receiving. It was thrust upon me when Hem had emergency gallbladder surgery that ultimately unmasked a much more serious condition.

  Specifically, stage-four pancreatic cancer, with metastases to his liver and lymph nodes.

  In his moment of need and fear, what could I do? Kick the hens in their heinies and suggest they apply at Perdue? Sell his goats, Willie and Duke, just because they keep coming into the kitchen? Neglect the vegetable garden he gave his heart and soul to, even though it had to be harvested at the same time I needed to be in the hospital with him? Take the steer he and Cuyler bottle-fed, nursed through “the scours,”159 and love like pets to the livestock exchange?

  No. I couldn’t dismantle his life in the name of saving it.

  Instead, I tiptoed up to the plate, stared at it long and hard, and flashed on “What I Did for Love” from A Chorus Line. And then, very quietly, so as not to attract the attention of those only too eager to see me fall face-first into a cow pie, I slipped into a pair of work boots. Yes, you read that right. I not only own but wear the cutest pair Tractor Supply had in stock. I even almost like them, but not with shorts; our Boer wether billy goats have better legs than I do.

  If I told Hem it was just too much to care for the farm on top of caring for him, the house, the kids, and our three crazy canines, we’d be out of here faster than Susan Boyle’s stint in the spotlight. But it’s not too much. We have wonderful friends who pitch in and help cut the fields and corral escaped cattle and fix fence boards and cart our boys to school and work and football practice and who show up with dinner piping hot and so delicious that it’s painfully clear my cooking’s about as good as my farming.