Dirty Chick (3 page)

“Oh,” I replied, ashamed. I had learned a lot of things growing up in San Francisco, such as how to speak French and prepare for a major earthquake. I had not, however, learned about laser beams and chicken beaks. I thanked the farmer and hung up the phone.

So now my second batch of chickens had beak rot, and I was taking it like a pro. I felt rather motherly toward my hens, so it wouldn't have been so easy to execute them for minor infractions such as leg mites. I fussed over them daily, making sure they could still peck for bugs with their artificially stunted beaks. I studied their behavior and announced my discoveries at the dinner table.

“They wallow in dirt,” I reported, once the chickens were old enough to live outside. I hadn't noticed this phenomenon with my first batch of hens.

Peter was skeptical. “Wallow? In dirt? I thought
pigs
wallowed.”

“No, it was definitely dirt. They were rolling it all over themselves. It was filthy.”

Silas sat beside me not eating his dinner. Hearing a word he knew, he joined the conversation. “DUHT!” he yelled. “Duh-tee!”

“I'm dirty, Mama,” Miranda joined in. “My
butt
is dirty!”

“Don't use potty talk,” I snapped. To Peter, I asked, “Do you think they're crazy? Maybe we should Google it.”

A little poking around on the Internet revealed that dirt wallowing is actually normal chicken behavior, called a dust bath. They roll around in the dirt, cover themselves in filth, and this rinses out the mites. So dirty chickens weren't our problem.

Our problem was the cow.

When Katya and Derek agreed to rent their home to us, they
gave us a big discount off the cost of their mortgage because the house also came with a number of responsibilities. There were six chickens to care for, an old shaggy dog named Phoenix, a couple of cats, and a large, probably pregnant cow.

This cow was supposedly named Lucky. I did not name her. If it had been up to me, she'd have been christened A Thousand Pounds of Anarchy, which would have been a lot more descriptive and, frankly, more accurate. Because Lucky jumped fences.

I'd been wary of this cow from the start. A hefty black Friesian with a ghostly white face, Lucky looked slightly malevolent to me, like an evil sorcerer engaged in some violent, black-hearted rite. Also, I had no idea how to care for her.

“So what does she need?” I'd asked Derek before he left, hopeful that he'd grace me with cow pointers.

“Aw, nothing, really,” Derek assured me, patting her affectionately on the snout. “She'll eat the grass and stay in her paddock. Just make sure she has water to drink, and she'll take care of herself, eh.”

Which was mostly true, apart from “stay in her paddock” and “nothing, really.” Actually, none of it was true. Because Lucky was trouble from the start.

To begin with, she didn't like grass. She'd much rather have eaten the tender new pea shoots or the sweetest baby lettuces from the garden. As soon as our backs were turned, she'd jump the fence. Then we'd find her in the veggie patch munching on organic chard or out on the road taking a pleasant stroll toward town.

As well as Lucky and the rest of the farm, we had our own family pets: a black-and-white cat named Catty and a hyperactive German shepherd puppy named Kowhai. Kowhai (pronounced KO-fai) is the name of a delicate New Zealand tree with tiny leaves and clusters of yellow blooms. It's a very feminine tree, and a terrible
name for our dog, who should probably have been named Mayhem or possibly Fang. She wants only to play, but unfortunately she weighs eighty pounds and has bone-crunching jaws, so sometimes people misunderstand her intentions.

You might say that things were not going swimmingly. One month into our stay, we'd managed to dispatch most of our charges: We executed the chickens. One of the cats disappeared, clearly disgusted with our urban ways. And Lucky was escaping almost daily. It seemed we didn't have much of a talent for farming.

And we still had eleven months to go.

PARTY TIME

M
ost of Purua is split up between five or six original families, the descendants of pioneers who established big farms on enormous landholdings. These old-school farmers had their own way of doing things, and they weren't really interested in hearing outside opinions, especially from an American woman wearing devil's horns. The first time some of our new neighbors invited us to dinner, we disgraced ourselves immediately.

Shortly before Silas's first day of school, a couple named Karl and Catherine invited us to their home—and the first thing we did was pee on their rug. Not Peter or me, but Kowhai, who was just a puppy at the time. “May I bring our dog inside?” I'd asked Catherine, thinking this was a casual country affair and that everyone liked hanging out with puppies.

“Er, sure,” she stammered, which I took to mean yes, but which actually meant “That's the most disgusting thing I've ever heard, because aren't you aware that dogs eat their own shit?” The evening
deteriorated from there. Silas started chasing their chickens, which seemed like a normal thing to do, except apparently there were lots of baby chicks in the flock, and some of them got trampled in the melee.

“Bud! Bud! Bud!” Silas crowed, tearing after the hens with a huge grin on his face. The chickens scattered in hysterical panic, leaving a few broken fluff balls in the dust.

“Oh, my God. I'm so sorry!” Peter stammered when he saw what had happened. He reached for a chick. “Are they going to be okay?”

“Probably not,” Catherine murmured. “They're dead.” Then she tried to make us feel better. “But these things happen sometimes on a farm.”

Given the fact that we'd defiled their home and started a poultry stampede, I wasn't surprised that our friendship with Karl and Catherine didn't bloom right away. As Karl liked to say, “You're not really in this community till you've been here seven years,” which seemed like a high bar to set for the rest of us. But since his family had been there for about a century and a half, I could see where he was coming from.

To our relief, serious professional farmers weren't the only ones who lived out here. There were also the “lifestylers,” and that's the group we fit into. “Lifestyle farmers,” “hobby farmers,” or, for the pretentious foodies, “artisan farmers”—we're all pretty much the same. We're the pretend farmers, the ones who live on a few acres of land, keep some animals, and for the most part maintain professional jobs in town. We raise chickens, heirloom tomatoes, and cats, while the real farmers raise cows and sheep, for milk or meat.

The first lifestyler couple we befriended was Nick and Amanda,
because Nick was an occupational therapist who'd worked with Silas for a number of years in town. A Malaysian guy who'd grown up in New Zealand, Nick was the one who'd patiently taught Silas how to use a spoon and pedal a trike. When Silas was driving us nuts with his moaning, so much so that we felt we were being haunted by a midget ghoul, it was Nick who calmly suggested we make a “log of the moan,” describing when Silas moaned and what was happening at the time. Very quickly, we came to realize that those awful sounds weren't random. Silas would moan when he needed something, such as water or food, but didn't have the words to ask. Nick was so gentle and intuitive with Silas that we were surprised to learn he spent his spare time as a committed martial artist. The guy was not much taller than I, and he could kill most people with his bare hands.

There were other surprises. Despite his professional decorum, Nick would often laugh out loud at my off-color jokes—such as when I described my disabled son as a “midget ghoul.” I was delighted to find that his wife, Amanda, was just as irreverent, and sharp as a whip.

Five feet nothing, with thick dark hair and fierce black eyebrows, Amanda was also an impressive mother. Her three daughters were intelligent, confident, and beautiful, with high cheekbones and wide, dark eyes. There was Sophie, a thoughtful and serious nine-year-old; Amelia, who at five was all sweetness and cuddles; and Lucy, the baby.

In our first weeks in Purua, I closely observed Amanda's parenting style, which seemed to consist of ignoring the children while they ran around outside and tackled sheep. At first I expressed some concern: Wouldn't they get lost in the forest? Fall into a river? Get mauled by a possum?

“This is your life now,” Amanda informed me, sipping a chilled Sauvignon Blanc. “You just let them run off, then sit down and have a wine. They take care of each other.”

She seemed very relaxed about it, so I tried to adjust.
This is how you raise kids in the country
, I considered.
You lounge around and drink, while they tear through the bush like a pack of wild dogs.
This suited me just fine. Actually, it was everything I'd ever dreamed of: the moral high ground of parenting without any of the effort.

Shortly after we moved to Purua, Amanda and Nick invited us to Lucy's second birthday party. It was how I'd imagined country living, with red-and-white-checked tablecloths and a birthday cake shaped like a teddy bear. There were chickens scampering in the grass and a beautiful pearly white goat with a slender black stripe down the middle of her back. Her ears were long and silky, framing her face in a feminine way. When I saw her, I caught my breath.

“I
love
your goat,” I told Amanda, who was rushing around with a tray of fruit salad.

“What, Pearl?” Amanda asked, setting paper plates in front of the children. “You can have her. Come and get her anytime.”

“You don't want her?”

Amanda cocked her head and looked skeptically at the goat. “It's not that . . .” she hedged. “Pearl's lovely. But goats are a lot of work.” She turned her eyebrows on me. “A
lot
of work.”

I should have listened, but once Amanda told me I could have her, Pearl was all I could think about. I sat down with the other mothers and helped myself to a plate of fruit salad.
We can get milk from a goat
,
I fantasized.
We can make cheese!

The kids raced around solving riddles for a scavenger hunt, while the mothers languished idly in the shade. Abi was one of the first
women I spoke to at the party. With wide blue eyes and blonde hair in perpetual disarray, Abi gave the impression she was constantly overwhelmed. She claimed this was because she was frightened of her children, but I had my doubts. Since she worked as an occupational therapist while raising two kids, she probably had her life in order.

“Does lettuce give chickens diarrhea?” Abi wanted to know. “Because I read it gives them diarrhea, and now I'm not sure what to do with my old lettuce anymore.”

“Vinegar,” suggested Michiko. Michiko seemed like a very sweet lady, but I didn't know much about her except that she worked as an accountant in town and was an accomplished classical pianist. Her Japanese accent made it hard for me to understand her. “Feed vinegar,” she repeated. “And cinnamon. Very good for chicken.”

We discussed the finer points of chicken bowels, and then we moved on to husbands.

“I heard Nick's really into martial arts,” I ventured. “Which one does he do?”

Amanda rolled her eyes. “Which one
doesn't
he do, more like. Karate, ninjutsu, kickboxing. Now he's into this thing called Krav Maga. They developed it for the Israeli military so unarmed soldiers could kill two people at once.”

Abi's blue eyes widened. “Oh, my gosh,” she said. “It's all I can do to get Zane to mow the lawn.”

Autumn leaned forward, reaching for the bowl of fruit salad. She struck me as an interesting woman. With curly brown hair, broad shoulders, and formidable curves, she nonetheless had a delicate way about her, but she didn't mind being brutally honest. Also, she loved food. Her husband, Patrice, was a French chef, and she'd rather have talked about food than martial arts.

“Kids went eeling the other day,” she volunteered. “Caught a bloody big eel, and now Patrice has to take its skin off with pliers.”

“You eat
eel
?”
I asked.

“Ah, it's
gorgeous
,”
Autumn told me. “S'long as you scrape off the slime coat.”

“Slime
what
?”

“You boil it in a pot, you see,” Autumn explained. “Then the slime goes white, like an egg white. You scrape it off, and it's fabulous.”

I leaned back in my chair, taking in the view of rolling green hills dotted here and there with little sheep frolicking in the sunshine. And that's when the screaming started.

“Mama!” Amelia howled. “
My eye! Miranda stabbed me in my eye
!
”

I glared at my three-year-old daughter, who had somehow got ahold of a vegetable peeler. She had a peculiar smile on her face that I'd seen only in horror movies. “
That's it!
” I shrieked. “
You're going to sit in the car!
”

Amanda reached for Amelia, examining the wound. “Her eye's fine,” she noted. “She's not blind.”

Silas had been quiet for some time, but just then I heard him yelling from the far side of the house. “
Toit!
” he hollered. “
Toit!
Toit!
”

Peter broke off from the cluster of local dads he'd been chatting with. “What the hell's he saying?” he asked.

“Beats the hell out of me,” I said, shrugging. “He's an alien.” I was wrestling Miranda into the car, where I planned to incarcerate her until she calmed down. My strategy was failing. Far from calm, Miranda was now hurtling herself against the glass like a tiny meth addict.

“Are you ready to come out?” I called.

“Yes,” came a meek voice. I opened the car door. “Mama, what the hell?” Miranda scowled at me. “What the hell is you doing?”

A mind-bending shriek tore through the air, the kind that makes you think of axe murderers and their hapless victims. We rushed to the far side of the house expecting blood, only to find Silas bent over in the grass giving birth to a well-formed poo. For some reason, this always upsets him.

“You okay, Silas?” Peter asked, approaching. “Do you need help?”

Silas picked up the poo and admired it, then presented the gift to his father. “TOIT,” he announced.

“Toilet,” I suddenly realized. “He wants to put it in the toilet!”

“Yes, it should go in the toilet,” Peter corrected, “but you're outside now. Just throw it in the bushes.”

Silas was having none of this. He clutched the poo like a cupcake in a world full of famine.

“Drop it,” Peter ordered.

This time the poo tumbled to the ground. A look of consternation passed across Silas's face. He bent down and picked it up, then brushed off some stray bits of dirt from the turd. “
Toit,
” he persisted.

Peter threw up his hands. “
Fine
. We'll take it to the toilet.”

Attempting a casual smile, I glanced back at the party guests. Amanda was still clutching her wounded five-year-old, and the others were openly staring.

“It's fine,” I assured them. “We're fine. Just . . . kids being silly!” I went back to sit down with them, casually popping a grape in my mouth.

Amanda put her hand over mine. “You might not want to call
him an alien. You know, in front of people. They might get the wrong idea.”

I smiled and agreed, because I didn't know how to explain that it's easier to think of Silas as a perfect little alien with different social norms than a developmentally delayed human child who wreaks havoc at parties.

Maria, who is from England, seemed expert at changing the subject in an awkward situation. “Did you want any beef?” she interjected. “We're slaughtering a steer this weekend. It's six hundred pounds of meat, so we're looking for someone to go halves with.”

This gave me pause. I turned to her, noting her long, shapely legs and firm upper arms. She didn't look like a person who handled beef by the hundreds of pounds. “
Three hundred pounds?
” I repeated. “That's a lot of cow.”

“Well, it's for the whole year,” she explained. “You just chuck it in the deep freeze, then you eat it the rest of the year.”

I thought about this. “But isn't that, like, six pounds of beef every week?”

“Yeah, but it's great meat. Grass-fed! You'll love it.”

I wasn't sure how I could backpedal out of buying half a steer's worth of heart attack, but in the end, I didn't have to. Because that's when Kowhai bit the baby.

“
Ow!
” Lucy screamed. “
Mama
!
” All the mothers instinctively scrambled to their feet, and there was Amanda's husband, Nick, dangling Lucy over Kowhai's head. She looked like bait.

“
Kowhai!
” I roared. “
No biting!
”

Kowhai ran to me looking guilty, her tail between her legs.

“It's fine,” Amanda assured me. “Don't worry about it. Lucy's fine. She's just a little drama queen.”

I cast a wary glance at Nick, who had his eyes locked on Kowhai.
With his arsenal of international killing skills, Nick could probably have dispatched our dog with a flick of his wrist. At this point, we'd stabbed one child in the eye, shat on his lawn, and savaged the birthday girl with our German shepherd. If he chose to go Krav on us, we'd have had only ourselves to blame.

“You're sweet,” I told Amanda. “But I think it's time to go home.”