Greenhorns

by Paula Manalo

  At Gwen’s side, the streams of cream turned to drops and for the first time I allowed my tears to fall to the straw. I felt gratitude to the small animal that required me to spend those quiet hours in the barn and now enabled me to grieve. As I carried the bucket of milk back to the house, I wished Grandma could have been with us a few months longer.

  A day earlier, I’d taken the ripened cream from the kitchen counter and poured it into the Kitchen Aid mixer she gave us for our wedding. The cream rose and whipped and flattened. And stayed flat, never producing butter. I looked for advice online, longing for the customized guidance Grandma would have given. She would have known how to make butter from a Jersey eating our grass and our grain at our exact elevation. There was no substitute for what she knew and what I lost when I lost her. Even though I wanted her to see me pay off our loan, even though I longed for that lesson in butter-making, even though I have many new questions to ask her, I cling to the answers she already gave me, especially this one: We are on a familiar path and, through stubborn perseverance, we too will make our living on the ranch.

  The Ambush

  * * *

  BY CARDEN WILLIS

  Carden Willis runs A Place on Earth CSA Farm in Turners Station, Kentucky. He and his wife, Courtney, became the proud parents of Clark on Thanksgiving Day, 2010. They are blessed with a wonderfully supportive community and a sublime life — ecstasy, agony, and all.

  * * *

  Yesterday was the first rainy day in many moons. No fieldwork could be done, no chainsawing. But I knew I couldn’t leave the farm for long. Not with Courtney more than forty weeks’ pregnant, teaching at school, potentially calling at any moment to say, “Come and get me!”

  I was gone only a couple of hours, and as soon as I got home, I made a beeline to the answering machine. No dramatic blinking lights, no good tidings. I recalled that Tierra, our dog, was acting a little odd as she welcomed me home. I called her to come inside. She didn’t.

  Strange.

  Stranger yet was the sight out the window from our bedroom: The chickens, spread across their yard as usual, were not moving. No, those couldn’t be chickens. They were . . . lumps of . . . something. Something else. Even from fifty yards, though, the truth was starting to sink in, like blood into straw.

  I followed Tierra to the scene, as if in a dream, and several possibilities suggested themselves to me. Each was successively dismissed, crushed by reality. The chicken-size shapes on the ground were not giant leaves. They were not chickens taking deep dust baths in the rain.

  As I got closer I started to feel dazed; I wanted to wake up, to open my eyes, to turn over in bed, to try a different dream. The silence and stillness were stark and surreal, the quietest space I had ever been in. Not a cluck, not a twitching feather. No alarm clock clicked on to save the day. The dog and I, together at a standstill and stunned, were in a sort of netherworld, stuck between suffering and acting.

  My feet somehow carried me through the carnage. The circumstances of the massacre piled up: the fence pulled down, chunks of chickens missing, scalps of feathers strewn about.

  I rolled the stones away from the door of the coop. The floor of straw litter was gray and black and wrong. More stiff, broken bodies. The bustling metropolis of a few hours before had turned into a ghost town. I had let down my flock. I believe Tierra felt this too.

  One of our two roosters, Bono, had been our constant companion for almost five years — years of crowing his heart out every day like a rock star. I could almost feel his last throes of rage and honor. I could feel also the mass panic and terror that swept through the crowd of sixty hens. But mostly I felt the unsettling calm after the storm and my broken promise to protect my family.

  How do I tell Courtney? What if she sees this? What do I do?

  As I left the coop, I heard a movement. A shocked Australorp nervously tried to balance atop a feed can in the corner. I knew what she had seen, and my heart broke for her. I wanted to explain: a big mistake. I’m so sorry. Whose eyes could ever recover from watching her family murdered, one by one? What would “I’m sorry” be worth?

  My mind moved to the impending birth of the fully formed life in Courtney’s belly, the polarity of life and death, the single heartbeat that divides the two, the eggshell fragility.

  * * *

  The chickens, spread across their yard as usual, were not moving. Even from fifty yards away the truth was starting to sink in, like blood into straw.

  * * *

  On April 16, 1998, during spring break of my junior year in high school, I was visiting my grandparents in Nashville. My grandfather was out grocery shopping while my grandmother and I watched an old movie. By the time we figured out that something was happening outside and had made it to the bathroom, the event was over. The tornado, with winds up to two hundred miles an hour, had come and gone. I saw a new world as I emerged from the house. All was eerily still and uncannily changed. The world, at that moment, was otherworldly.

  Trees were bowled over and strung about like children’s toys, including one on top of my dad’s Camry, which I had driven, and many others crisscrossing the driveway and Rosebank Avenue. With all the tall old trees down, the quality and the quantity of light in the sky were different. The carport was gone, later to be found in a backyard several houses away. It’s in a rare blink of the eye when reality is profoundly altered, but when that happens, there is no amount of rubbing your eyes that will recover what has vanished.

  I don’t trust my memory. I’m curious how long the stillness lasted. However long, it was enough to buoy my faith in black holes. At some point, though — after an infinity — consciousness returned. From the great void resumed the familiar sound of chain saws, men and women talking, crying, strategizing. The pieces were picked up but could not be entirely put back in place. It was some time before the roads were cleared, and eventually we heard from my grandfather. He was all right. That much reality was restored.

  Luckily, now, our neighbor Bonnie was home yesterday afternoon. The task before me — alone — seemed huge. When she opened her front door, I only had to say “I need your help” and she sprang to action. Together we gathered up all the birds, dead, dying, and alive but shocked. In the end, we recovered forty-four bodies and thirteen hens still alive.

  Bonnie’s husband, John, helped me bag up my old friends. Then the three of us went on a search party through the wet weeds and blowing rain. I found a couple of feathers leading to another neighbor’s place, and John and Bonnie saw the Mayses’ guilty dog with a chicken in its mouth. Tierra, with her keen nose, discovered a body in the tall grass behind their house. By dark, the case was closed and we were drenched.

  Later in the evening, Bonnie came back and we tended to the living. She packed antibiotic cream into the maimed flesh and puncture holes while I held the poor creatures in place. In times of deepest distress, we survive by the power of courageous human kin who don the rubber gloves and fighting spirit and care for the living. What would we do without angels?

  I believe in the opening of eyes. I believe in instantaneous transformation. I believe the very walls around us can collapse and, as long as we have community, the beautiful human spirit will rise up from the rubble, heal the broken bones, and rebuild, one precious life at a time.

  Yesterday, when all but one of the surviving chickens had turned up, I was heading back to the house from the coop when I saw a shape in the distance. Soaked and with a few feathers missing, there stood Little Richard, our other rooster, bewildered, making his way to his ravaged home. My heart leapt when I beheld him. A humble triumph. Thanks be for survivors.

  Notes from a Novice Horse Farmer

  * * *

  BY ALYSSA JUMARS

  With her Belgian draft mare, Ray, Alyssa Jumars farms on the east side of Washington’s North Cascades. She’s still on the steep part of the learning-to-use-draft-power curve and imagines she’ll be there for quite a while. At the moment, there’s no place she’d rather be
.

  * * *

  If I had known then what I know now, I wouldn’t be trying to farm with draft power. But I’ll readily admit that buying my first team of draft horses was the very best mistake I’ve ever made.

  It sounded like a good idea at the time: What could be more sustainable or more romantic than farming with horses? I’m of the mind that there are many old-time manual skills on the chopping block that would be well worth preserving, and knowing how to farm with a power source other than petroleum is one of them. Two years ago, then, I let myself be persuaded by a former business partner into buying a team of beautiful, six-year-old, recently broke Belgian mares.

  The first month, we were giddy. Every chance we got, we would hook the mares to our newly acquired wagon and take off through the hayfields and into the neighboring orchard, sun in our faces, lines in our hands, the smell of dust and horse sweat all around us. There was the creaking of running gears, the jingling of trace chains, the rhythmic clop, clop, clop as we bumped along rutted farm roads. We would head for the far end of the orchard, where the road ran straight for a quarter mile, kiss to the girls, and push them into a trot. Bracing ourselves against the front of the wagon, we would glide past the rows of pears and apples.

  My favorite experience, though, was our first time plowing. We were turning under a section of winter peas and rye, getting it ready to plant a big patch of black-seeded sunflowers for chicken feed. My partner and I took turns steering the walking plow and driving the horses. For the first half hour, we wore ourselves out wrestling with the plow and trying to keep it straight and in the ground. Only when we were almost spent did we begin to realize that the plow drives itself and that you merely have to guide it subtly one way or the other to keep the landside suctioned into the unturned sod and the bottom of the share suctioned into the dirt. It was so simple, so elegant. I’ll never forget being behind the plow, feeling the raw power as it surged from the girls and watching the sod bust open and fold into ribbons before me. I had never felt so alive as behind the great ass of a draft horse.

  In the beginning it all seemed so easy: The horses were gentle, obliging, and trusting. We plowed close to three acres with them and drove countless miles on the farm roads. But the honeymoon would soon come to an end. In our novice hands, the training they had received from the breeder began to wear off, and the horses started to test our authority in small ways. They would turn away and walk off when we came to halter. They’d try to walk ahead when we led them from the pasture to the barn. They’d take a step to the side when we slid the harness over their backs, or raise their heads when we bridled them.

  Slowly but quite surely, their gestures became more exaggerated. At the sight and the jingling of harness, they would swing ninety degrees, twitch as we put the hames over their shoulders, and generally act terrified of the jumble of leather they had seen a hundred times before. When we bridled, they would pull back on the lead rope as if their lives depended on it. Our reaction to this nonsense was to assume that the horses were fearful; really, they were just looking for creative ways to avoid us and to find out how much they could get away with. If one of the horses began pulling back when we brought the bridle to her nose, we would take away the bridle, talk soothingly, stroke her neck. What we unwittingly taught them was this: Throw a fit or act terrified of something and we will make it go away.

  This is the single most dangerous lesson a horse can learn, and we taught it well. Our horses learned that we were pushovers and that they could get away with holding their own opinions and, ultimately, making their own decisions. As a result, we had three major wrecks.

  There is almost nothing more terrible than that second when you realize you’re no longer in control, that you’re not going to be able to hold them back with the lines, that these animals you so dearly love are about to run themselves blind through barbed-wire fences, cut themselves on the implement they’re dragging, get tangled in harness, or worse. And it’s entirely your fault: for not reading the signals they were giving you; for not insisting that you were the boss; for asking of them more than they were psychologically ready to do; for not paying close enough attention and missing that split second when you had an opportunity to correct the disaster now unfolding in front of your eyes.

  Our first wreck happened with a riding cultivator. We had picked it up at the Small Farmers’ Journal auction that April, and we couldn’t wait to try it out. We were doing a fifty-five-share CSA, and we had about four acres of row crops that we were eager to weed any way other than by hand. A riding cultivator straddles a bed of vegetables and drags adjustable sweeps that are spaced at exactly the right distances to weed around your one, two, three, or four rows of crop. You sit on the machine and the horses walk in the paths on either side of a bed.

  * * *

  I had never felt so alive as behind the great ass of a draft horse.

  * * *

  After spending a dozen hours in the shop, scraping out and replacing all the fifty-year-old rock-hard grease, we rolled the cultivator out to the barnyard. We tried to think of ways to gradually introduce the new tool to the girls. One of us walked them around and around the cultivator so they could get a good look. The other lifted up the tongue and jiggled it so they could see that it moved and could listen to it rattle and clank. Then we hooked them up and made them stand for a few minutes. We took just a few steps down the farm road and stopped. A couple of more steps and stopped. They acted like they were quite comfortable with the situation, so we proceeded to the field and made a dozen passes on a bare bed. Everything went great, and we called it a day.

  * * *

  The intensity of working with the horses exposed the fragility of our relationship and our incurable mistrust of each others’ judgment.

  * * *

  The following morning, we brought in the girls, harnessed them up, and began hitching, confident that they were now accustomed to the new machine. We went about things with a good deal more speed and a good deal less caution than we had done the day before. I held the lines while my partner hooked the yoke and the traces. He had one of the girls hooked in and was walking around to hook in the second horse when the second horse swung her back end around a hundred and eighty degrees.

  We learned a cardinal rule of working with young teams and new tools that day: Don’t ever try to hitch without using a butt rope. A butt rope essentially ties their back ends together, preventing them from being able to fan and turn inside out. Our second horse was now turned inside out, the lines were reversed relative to the other horse, and she was standing looking directly back at this new machine — that, as it turns out, she was in no way fully accustomed to or comfortable with.

  She panicked, the other horse panicked, and away they went with the cultivator. They lost the cultivator pretty quickly, but it wasn’t until they ran through an old fence, going on either side of a post, that they broke free of each other. One horse got tangled in the fence and the other headed for the main road.

  Our second runaway took place a few weeks later. After that first wreck, we decided we would stick with tools we knew they had used on the farm they came from until we had all rebuilt our confidence in each other. We decided we would hitch them to a spring-tooth harrow and bust some clods in a field that had recently been disked. What neither of us understood was that an old tool in a new place with a new driver is, to a horse, effectively a new tool. We assumed that because the horses had harrowed before, there would be no problem.

  We didn’t think to take any precautions, like trying out the harrow in a small, fenced pasture. The horses took three steps, felt this strange new weight behind them, panicked, and took off again. It hadn’t even crossed my mind that they would run and that I might want to be ready to use a lot of extra line pressure to stop any momentum before it built up. By the time I reacted to the situation, a split second later, it was too late.

  Amazingly, the young mares never suffered any major physical injury in either of the runaways.
But their confidence in harness was irreparably damaged, and they had learned how to run. By all accounts, my attempt to farm with horses had been an utter failure. I had ruined a good young team, and if I had been any less lucky, I could have killed them.

  I tried to convince my partner that we should bring the girls back to the breeder, that we had no business owning horses, but he was sure he could find a way to make it all work. Maybe he has, I don’t know. I left the farm at the end of that summer. It was the horses that split us apart; the intensity of working with them exposed the fragility of our relationship and our incurable mistrust of each others’ judgment. When I left, I felt like I was abandoning the girls, and for months afterward I tried to talk my old partner into giving them up. But in the end, I had to let go and move on, so I sold him my share in the team.

  At that point, I probably should have returned to tractor farming. But I was hooked. There was something about partnering with another creature that I could now never give up. The sheer implausibility of asking an eighteen-hundred-pound beast to do exactly as you ask, in a language consisting of four words and a hundred subtle gestures, blew my mind. So I went in search of mentorship. I found some, though not as much as I would have liked.

  Finding someone with the ability, the patience, the inclination, and the time to teach you everything you want to know about drafts is a challenge in and of itself. I spent a lot of time observing other farmers’ workhorses, but not a lot of time with the lines in my hands. I slowly came to realize that I could learn bits and pieces from different people, but that the only way I was ever going to get a chance to practice and put it all together was to have horses again.