“Do you think you can sit up?” he asked.
Again, I nodded, and he put one hand behind my back and pushed me to a sitting position. The room was wobbly, the tables off-kilter. People sounded as if they were underwater. Or maybe I was the one underwater. Then gradually, everything slowly settled back into place. The napkin holders righted themselves. The walls straightened. I began to regain my senses. Which is exactly what must have happened to our chicken.
The hen was still for what seemed like a long time. One of our three spangled Hamburgs, she was smaller than the other chickens, and her feathers were white with black flecks, like someone had flicked a black paintbrush across her body. We still hadn’t thought of a fitting name for her, so we had been referring to her and her sisters simply as “the speckled chickens.” Now, very slowly, she raised her head, and one by one, the other chickens crept out of the coop. Some of the hens nudged her. Others walked around her. A few minutes later, she got up and began pecking in the dirt, like she had simply been taking a nap. The cackling and trilling of the other hens died down. The girls were relieved. David and I were relieved.
“I know what we can call her,” David said. “Chicken Seizure Salad.”
So that was her name for the rest of her days, which were, unfortunately, limited. Later that week, we came home after dark one night. David parked in the road next to the coop and left the car headlights on, but the lights pointed up the road, not toward the coop. Since chickens instinctively go into their coops at night, David assumed all the hens were already inside, but as he ran into the lot to close the door, he felt something soft beneath his shoe. And then he heard a loud snap. Chicken Seizure Salad gasped, then emitted one soft, faint cry before dying. Something had been wrong with her. That was evident. Still, David was despondent. He felt responsible for not looking before he went in the coop yard, and he could not get the sound of her dying out of his head.
“I felt her bones snap,” he said over and over.
That night, he buried the hen in the barnyard by moonlight, then placed a cement block on her grave to discourage the other chickens from digging near the burial site. Other than the two chickens that had died within the first twenty-four hours after arriving, it was our first hard lesson in farming. If I had been a religious person, I might have thought of this lesson in terms of “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away,” but since I was not, I thought of it instead as a sort of bargain we had made with the universe: we got to start over, but we didn’t get any guarantees.
All the information we had read said that hens began laying when they were around sixteen weeks old, so soon after Chicken Seizure Salad died, David prepared the nesting boxes—two rows of three boxes next to the perches. We filled the boxes with straw, then put a golf ball in each box, a strategy to trick the girls into thinking there was already an egg there, thus encouraging them to lay. It was the equivalent of erecting a sign: Please lay here.
At first, the hens completely ignored the boxes. They walked around them, flew past them, sat on the perch outside the boxes with their backs to them. Then one afternoon, four months to the day after we had gotten the chicks in the mail, I was walking Hester in the forest when David texted me: A Leghorn is sitting on a nest.
Until that moment, self-sufficiency had been a strange and abstract concept, something my forebears had had to do, but nothing I would have chosen. Now, the enormity of what I had been missing all along struck me—this, the simplest of joys, the pleasure of nurturing living things that would then give back to me in return. Hester and I began to jog. And then we ran—across the wooden footbridges, past English Chapel and the big grassy field, along the Davidson River until we reached the parking lot.
At home, I pulled to a stop in the driveway next to the girls’ lot. The rain of the previous weeks had left the ground soggy, the girls’ feet perpetually caked in mud. Inside the coop, the air was stale and sour. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust, but when they did, I saw on the nest one of the lovely brown hens that had only weeks before more closely resembled a chipmunk. I tiptoed over, and she greeted me with a soft coo. And there, right next to a golf ball, it was: a perfectly oval, perfectly pristine white egg.
Startled by my presence, the hen flew out of the nest. I lifted the egg from the straw. Warm and smooth and flecked with red, it was unlike any egg I had ever seen or held, unlike any other egg that had ever been laid. And I was the mother of all mothers. I was Eve.
Smoky Poached Eggs with Chickpeas and Feta
•2 tablespoons olive oil
•1 medium onion, chopped
•4 cloves garlic, chopped
•1 to 2 jalapeños, seeded, finely chopped
•1 (15-ounce) can chickpeas, drained
•2 teaspoons Hungarian smoked paprika
•1 teaspoon ground cumin
•1 (28-ounce) can crushed tomatoes
•Salt and freshly ground black pepper
•1 cup coarsely crumbled feta
•8 large farm-fresh eggs
•Chopped fresh cilantro for garnish (optional)
•Smoking J’s Fiery Foods chipotle hot sauce or other good quality sauce
Preheat oven to 425°. Sauté the onion, garlic, and jalapeño in a large ovenproof skillet over medium-high heat until onion is soft, about 8 minutes. Add chickpeas, paprika, and cumin, and cook for 2 minutes longer. Add crushed tomatoes. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to medium-low, and simmer about 15 minutes. Take off heat. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Sprinkle feta evenly over sauce. Crack eggs one at a time and place over sauce, spacing evenly apart. Transfer skillet to oven, and bake until whites are just set but yolks are still runny, 5 to 8 minutes. Garnish with cilantro. Serve with hearty brown bread and, of course, hot sauce.
Chapter Eleven
As much as I loved raising chickens, my adjustment to life at the cabin was still slow and fraught with setbacks. My emotions wildly vacillated. Some days, I loved the adventure—the wood fires and cozy jackets and wild creatures, the constant fine mist the waterfall sprayed over the grass and our cars, the way it grew foggy at the top when it rained, the falls spewing forth from the clouds. Other days, such as when heavy rains dragged debris down the mountainside and clogged our water pipes or when David forgot to build a fire and we had no hot water, I seemed to be back on page one, the mailman pulling into the drive, the foreclosure notice fresh in my hands. My new life was a constant exercise in patience and fortitude, and sometimes I just wanted everything to be easy again. I wanted my old life back. On those days, my anger at David felt fresh again, my sense of despair raw and new.
One day, I came home after mountain biking for hours. I was sweaty and muddy, my leg bruised and bloody from where I had grazed a tree. There was nothing I wanted more than a hot shower. When I stripped off all my clothes and hopped in the shower only to find there was no hot water, I was furious. I pulled a towel around me and went downstairs to find David.
“I didn’t choose to live here,” I said. “You did. And if you want me to stay, you will make sure we have hot, running water in this house.”
It wasn’t fair, but I was angry, and I needed someone other than myself to blame for my unhappiness. David looked stunned. He loved living here, could not imagine ever living in a real house or neighborhood again.
“It’s like Disneyland here,” he told me once. “There is so much fun stuff to do!”
Sometimes, after we argued, we went days without speaking to each other in any meaningful way. During times like that, I thought a lot about Macomb—about my cozy little boxcar, the long walks Hester and I took around the lake, the way we curled up at night, just the two of us. Macomb was more than just a memory for me. It was a safe place, a place where I had, for the first time in my life, felt competent and whole. It wasn’t that I wanted to go back there, but I wanted to feel that way again, as if I had some power over the direction my
life was headed, as if my future weren’t so uncertain.
Maybe David and I argued because we wanted different things. Or maybe we had different ideas of what the same things looked like. David could live in this house forever and never want anything more. But I still thought of this as a temporary stop on our path to somewhere else, somewhere brighter, somewhere with better insulation, a paved carport, and good city drinking water. Homesteading, to me, seemed too hard, too unpredictable, and some days, I longed for things to be uncomplicated again. Even growing a basic garden seemed impossible here.
The garden we planted the first year—in the grassy field down the road—produced nothing. The space we plowed was a large rectangular indentation, an indication, we thought, that someone had once had a productive garden there, so we planted rows of tomatoes, peppers, beans, cabbage, lettuce, kale, squash, potatoes, corn. But the sun didn’t rise over the ridge until midmorning, and it disappeared behind the ridge by three in the afternoon. And when it rained, which was very, very often, the water gushed down the mountainsides and gathered in pools, soaking green peppers on the vine, unearthing potatoes, rotting squash blossoms before they could produce. Eventually, we gave up, and instead, next to the chicken coop, David began building a barn out of pallets and tin and salvaged wood. If we couldn’t grow vegetables there, maybe it would be a good spot to raise goats.
Though I knew nothing about raising goats, I had wanted dairy goats for over thirty years, ever since I had read Heidi. It seemed to me they were a lot like dogs—quiet, vegetarian dogs who slept in a barn. And while I enjoyed visiting goats during various farm tours in the area, I knew it would be different to have my own herd. I had watched other goat farmers with their animals, had seen how their animals ran to them when they were called, how the farmers could pick one specific goat out of a whole herd that all looked the same. He calls his own sheep by name. I had learned that in Sunday school when I was a kid, the message driven home by colorful illustrations of sheep and kindly shepherds and lovely green hillsides.
Now, though, the idea of knowing one animal out of an entire herd took on a new, more literal significance. What did it mean to know your animals that intimately, to know the source of your food, to be able to say, “This cheese was made with milk from that particular goat”? How did that change a person? Did it make you kinder, more grateful, less greedy? I wanted to know. I wanted to be able to look across a pasture and pick out a doe by the particular tilt of her head, the throatiness of her calls, by those traits that made her her and not just any other doe. I wanted goats of my own.
Of course, it wasn’t reasonable to believe that getting goats would make our lives better. First, under the terms of our lease, our landlords could decide to no longer lease the cabin to us with six months’ notice. If that happened, we would have to either find a similar situation—which would be next to impossible—or try to rehome all the goats. Second, we would be investing in animals that we hoped would eventually be able to produce food, but given our lack of farming experience, there was no guarantee we would be successful. And finally, there was the scary fact that we would be learning animal husbandry as we went along. If we got it wrong, there was so very much at stake.
And then there was the cost. David still had accounting clients, not as many as he had had years before but enough to cover the basics—our rent, utilities, food, gas, and so on—and I had returned to teaching as an adjunct at the local college. In addition, I made a couple thousand dollars per year teaching part time in a writing program through the state university in Asheville. Though the Department of Revenue still garnished my wages, I had enough money leftover to pay for essentials like gas. However, the state still occasionally wiped out both of our bank accounts, and they seized all the money I made from leading occasional workshops—a couple hundred dollars at a time—as there was no maximum on the amount they could take for work done on a contract basis.
The tax situation was an endless quagmire, a complex labyrinth we traveled around and around without finding any new insights. It was frustrating and demoralizing, a constant source of stress and strain. So since there was nothing we could do, we did nothing. Until we could reach settlement agreements for both the federal and state taxes, we were going to have to either go on with our lives or not. Those were our choices as I saw them. We could spend the rest of our lives being miserable—and still not free of the tax burden—or we could try to create the best lives we could under the circumstances while still hoping to settle our debts. In order to do that, I needed to do something new, something real, something that would soothe and strengthen my spirit. I needed to be ankle-deep in mud and goat poop, to sneeze incessantly from the scents of hay and straw, to have every shirt I own nibbled off at the hems. I needed to raise dairy goats.
So after much reading and research and discussion about what kind of goats to get, and where and when to get them, we found a listing on Craigslist for LaMancha does “in milk” in nearby Hendersonville. In milk was one of the many new terms I was learning. It meant that the does were currently producing milk, and in this case, it meant the does had recently kidded, or given birth. I didn’t know anything about LaManchas. Still, they sounded perfect. We could have milk right away plus possibly two does in milk by the following fall.
In what would later become a familiar scene when we were buying goats, we followed a winding, mountain road until it dead-ended. And then we kept going, down a lonesome, treacherous dirt road until, finally, we came to a house perched precariously on a rocky precipice. There was no grass, no yard, no fence, just red clay and rocks. A buck was staked to a fence post just below the house, and several goats grazed on the brush on the hillside. The whole atmosphere was vaguely menacing.
“I don’t know about this,” I said.
In my old life, I had visited homes with hanging baskets, decorative doormats, seasonal wreaths. Here, there was no indication that anyone had attempted to make the place look cheerful or homey or even not scary. As we stopped the car, a woman stepped onto the porch. She was about my age and wore jeans, an oversized flannel shirt, and work boots. A teenaged boy dressed head-to-toe in black stood a few feet behind her, not speaking, not moving, his arms crossed, like a bodyguard. After we had all been rather formally introduced—a ritual that seemed odd under the circumstances—David and I followed the woman to the large, sturdy barn, just a few hundred feet from the house. Just outside the barn, two chained pit bulls snarled and lunged.
“Watch out,” Sheila said. “They’re not very friendly.”
Giving the dogs a wide berth, we entered the barn through a series of locks and gates and large oak doors. Inside, we waited for our eyes to adjust to the dim light while Sheila’s son lurked just behind us. He was not tall, but he was sturdy and muscular, his eyes watchful, and I thought of all the horror movies I had seen where bad things happened in barns—torture, murders, dismemberings. If we needed to, we could make a run for it out the back gate, which would give us a clear path. Well, except for the bull. We would have to go around one massive, angry-looking bull. I tried to convey all of this to David in furtive glances at the boy, then the door, but David was oblivious. He was already mesmerized by a white doe and her doeling.
“Look!” he said.
He leaned over the stall and rubbed her head. She reared back and butted the stall door. He tried again. She butted the stall again. Though she didn’t look like any goat I had ever seen before, she was beautiful. Grumpy, but beautiful. Her eyes were watchful, her ears so tiny, so ungoatlike that she appeared earless.
“They’re supposed to look like that,” Sheila said, following my gaze.
Making our rounds through the barn, we looked at one lovely animal after another—tan does with hazel eyes, dark brown ones with chocolate eyes. Their coats were smooth and sleek, their eyes mesmerizing, and soon I too was able to forget the boy, to remember all the questions I had read I should ask: Have they had their sh
ots? Have they been wormed? Will the babies be disbudded? All of Sheila’s answers seemed right, but there was one problem: whenever we got too close to the does, they aggressively butted us.
“They don’t like it when you touch them there,” Sheila said after David touched a doe on the bridge of her nose and she almost rammed him to the ground. “That’s a sign of aggression.”
At the time, we accepted this as normal goat behavior, but later, we would realize this was not typical, and after things went wrong, we would begin to wonder how much human interaction the goats had had, how much time they had actually spent outside their stalls. Sheila seemed to be doing her best to care for them. Still, there were so many of them, and dairy goats needed to be handled from an early age so that they weren’t afraid of people. That day, though, we were too enamored with the goats, or perhaps with the idea of goats, to realize any of this. We were simply overcome by their beauty. So after much debate, we chose a sable-colored doe named Maple and her doeling, Cinnamon.
David still had work to do to complete the barn and fence, so it would be a few days before we would be ready to take the goats, but Sheila agreed to hold them for us if we paid in full—$450. Those were her terms. We all signed an informal agreement, scribbled on a notepad, and David and I headed home. A few days later, when we returned, I was uneasy. We bumped and thumped down the worn-out road until we reached the house. Sheila’s car was not in the drive. Instead, a tall, broad-shouldered, solemn man met us in the driveway.
“Oh no,” I said to David.
Sheila, it seemed, was delayed getting home, but she was coming. We would have to wait. The man, who smelled vaguely of whiskey and motor oil, relayed this information to us, then asked if we wanted to see something. I was not at all sure I did, but David was game.
Flat Broke with Two Goats Page 13
