My Million-Dollar Donkey (24 page)

I took those dinners to heart, striving to prepare elaborate menus filled with country goodness. I used veggies from my garden, eggs from my chickens, and served homemade wine. I prepared apple cobbler from apples I picked at the local orchard. I cooked twice as much food as necessary so there would be ample leftovers to send off with everyone. Feeding my family was my way of loving them, so I drowned them in casseroles, side dishes, and muffins. Even if their bills weren’t paid, their stomachs would at least be full. Even if my family no longer saw me as a dynamic, efficient woman who had the respect of an entire community, at least they would see me as a worthy homemaker.

After each dinner, I’d clean up while everyone gathered downstairs with dessert and coffee to watch American Idol. I loved knowing they were all cuddled up before a fire together, even if I was upstairs alone washing dishes. I’d spent 40 minutes with my hands sunk in suds, happy to know that I had connected my family and nourished them. But I’d also be thinking of my own mother, of how she would have loved to spend one meal a week with her grandkids and been a casual part of their everyday lives. For years we lived right by my parents, yet we were too busy running a business and juggling kids and work to spend any quality time with them. Now that we did have the time, these moments were entirely devoted to Mark’s family. I imagined my own daughters growing up and having families of their own, showing consideration and care to their in-laws while pushing me away. I didn’t know how I could bear losing my own daughter’s trust and respect, and as a result I suffered guilt over my own mother’s pain.

I had always been kind to Mark’s family, always gone out of my way to help financially and emotionally. I made them a part of every holiday and family celebration. I bought them gifts, and went to great lengths to build positive associations to them in my childrens’ viewpoints. I encouraged Mark to help his sister out even when he didn’t feel so inclined, and insisted she be included in family vacations and special occasions because she didn’t have a family of her own. I did this not because I loved my in-laws (although as the years passed I truly did) but because I loved Mark.

To me, one way of honoring and respecting your partner is to honor and respect their family. Promoting harmony eases the personal torture that can come with complex family dynamics. I desperately wanted Mark to help me repair the damage that had erupted with my folks—as an act of love for me, if not from his own sense of obligation for all they had done for him over the years. And I wanted him to note the effort I made to create positive family relationships on his side and act accordingly.

“I moved to Georgia to get away from your family,” he said. “Sorry, but you can’t make me like them.”

“Can’t you do this for me? I’ve always been good to your family.” “I never asked you to be nice to my family. I think you’re a fool to do as much for them as you do,” he said.

I wasn’t someone who would change her behavior out of tit-for-tat frustration. Besides which, I thought his mother was sweet and his sister a soulful, kind friend. After seventeen years of marriage, I felt protective of them both. They were
my
family now too, and deserving of the same devotion I felt for my own family of origin.

Mark’s mother was hard of hearing. He thought it was funny to playfully insult her when she was only a few feet away. The insensitivity always disturbed me and I was forever reprimanding his boorish behavior like some kind of uptight prig. Even if Mark wasn’t hurting his mother’s feelings, I believed he should have been more mindful of the message he was sending our own children. He was teaching them that mothers don’t deserve respect, and I didn’t want to grow old and ever experience my children speaking to me with such discourtesy. Belittling one’s mother lacked class and seemed unforgivably rude.

“We’re just having fun. Everyone knows I love my mother. Get over yourself. You have no sense of humor,” Mark said.

I couldn’t defend myself because he was right. I
had
lost my sense of humor. Lately, fewer and fewer of the things he said and did seemed funny.

Death converged on our hobby farm, starting with the animals, and moving on to our dreams, our hopes, and finally, our love...

An opossum, or perhaps a weasel, got into the henhouse and ate the heads off of thirteen chickens in a single night. Trying my best to maintain a stalwart composure, I bagged up the headless birds. Shortly afterwards, four of my six ducks were attacked, leaving me with partial carcasses and a pile of feathers floating on the lake like dandelion wisps blown in from the overgrown weeds.

“Why not leave?”
The trees seemed to whisper as I passed by bloody carcasses.
“You’re too smart, too sophisticated, and too worldly to spend your days picking up dead poultry. Face it, you don’t fit in here.”

I started imagining my return to the dance world, older, out of shape and slightly bitter, which drove me back to the barnyard with determination to get a handle on my life. A neighbor’s dog killed off a few more chickens, so I took to keeping poultry in their pens unless I was working around the barn. Now that my birds were no longer in the pasture eating fly larvae, I was battling a siege of flying pests along with my depression.

One day, I went to let Early out of her cage to roam freely around the barnyard. She seemed oddly quiet, so I stroked her and placed her in a comfortable position by the food bowl. Later, she lay peacefully but lifeless in the very same position. I was grateful she hadn’t died by dog attack or opossum raid, leaving me with a gruesome last view of my beloved peacock’s remains, but that didn’t lessen my feelings of loss. Did I feed her too much, too little, or the wrong combination of nutrients? Was the water bowl tainted? Was the floor of her cage so dirty it created a hothouse for bacteria? Who was I to think I could raise a peacock?

“Maybe it was the heat,” Mark said.

“Early usually spends her time in the shade, not to mention that peacocks are tropical by nature. She just died...like everything else around here seems to be doing.”

“I’ll buy you some healthy, grown peacocks. No more guessing or disappointment that way.”

“We are unlikely to be living here next spring. Can’t take them with us after all.”

“Don’t say that. Someone is going to buy my house for top dollar, and you’ll see I was right all along.”

How desperately he needed to be “right” all along. The people who bought our business crashed and burned due to self-indulgence and an unwillingness to make conservative choices in a field they really didn’t know anything about. Mark was quick to point out their stupidity, yet he had been doing the very same thing as he moved along with far more self-confidence than reasonable considering he had no real experience in the construction field. Perhaps karma was at hand, and Mark and I deserved to lose everything. Perhaps life was giving us our much-needed lesson in humility. Perhaps the universe was testing our love, as is the case for many couples who live together for years and years and forget why they came together in the first place. Might we come out wiser and stronger for our mistakes? Might our love grow stronger from this adversity? I prayed this would be the case.

The next day, I went to the barn and found my rabbit cage had been ripped open and an angora killed. I buried the remains in the base of the fire pit, then spent the afternoon putting together new cages and hanging them high on the side of the chicken house to protect the other rabbits.

“Unless coyotes can fly, you’ll be safe here,” I told the angoras, but in the morning I discovered the side of my new metal cages had been peeled back like a banana. Another rabbit lay dead on the ground.

“I don’t see how a coyote can do this,” I said.

“I’ll ask Ronnie to look at the carnage. He’ll know what we’re dealing with,” Mark said.

Ronnie came out later and shook his head. “That’s a bear for sure,” he said. “They don’t usually attack rabbits, but they’d tear open the cage for the food, and if a bunny is easy pickin’s, he might just get scooped up, too. I’d be happy to camp out here and shoot a bear for ya, but it’s not bear season, so you can’t tell nobody if I clip one.”

“Thanks, but no thanks.”

I still had two other angoras to worry about, so I repaired the cage and wound extra wire around the joints. Mark had bought me three young peacocks a week prior, a gift of good faith to convince me things were going to be fine. I heightened the security of their pen, but extra wire didn’t protect the poor things when an unexpected cold snap rolled in later that week. One bitterly cold morning, I found them huddled together, dead from exposure.

Mark said, “These things happen.”

“After all I’ve read about raising poultry, I should have known better. I should have set up a warming bulb in a nesting box or something.”

My little peacocks joined Early and the others in the fire pit, my designated cremation center now.

“Let’s go to the flea market,” Mark said as he and Ronnie piled into his pickup the next Saturday.

While the boys were looking over used tools, I wandered to the livestock area, my eyes caught by what appeared to be a bag of peacock feathers. A closer look showed that they were attached to a fully-grown peacock trussed up in a sling like a broken arm.

“You like peacocks?” the woman selling the birds asked.

“Oh, yes. Lost one I loved dearly just recently.” I didn’t mention the other young birds I’d lost through stupidity.

She gestured to the back of her truck. “These two gotta go to someone who will really appreciate them,” she said with a wink. “They’re beauties, and for some reason I like you so I’ll make you a special deal. A hundred dollars for the pair.”

The last thing I needed was to spend money on birds, but buying them somehow established my faith in a Georgia future in some way, so I turned over my small stash of mad money and within minutes the birds were inside our truck wedged under the back seats.

Once home, I cut the binding off their bodies and let the peacocks run free in my big chicken run. I named them Prism and Palate and kept them in the pen for a full six weeks so they wouldn’t run off.

Each morning I stared in awe as the male displayed his tail in colorful splendor, the symbol of elegance I sorely needed in my mud-filled world. I imagined baby peacocks following in their wake, and in time, a barnyard filled with graceful birds in a home saved by our trust in the universe. But the first time I opened the pen, the male peacock flew up over the trees and without so much as a backward glance over his shoulder, left forevermore. I had, with good intention, tried to create a world of colorful, dramatic poultry, but in the end all I had to show for my trust was one gray, unremarkable bird. The peacocks were a living metaphor of our entire country adventure. Colorful dreams. Drab reality.

For weeks, the bear continued to return on a reliable seven-day schedule, tearing apart rabbit cages and defecating on the ground around the chicken house no matter what I did to thwart further destruction. One morning, I spied the backside of a bear going into the woods. I chased the beast, with no idea what I might do had I come face to face with a testy bear. I just felt compelled to face down anything and everything that was killing off the things I loved. I hiked several yards into the thicket, but there was no sign of him, so I returned to the barn to inspect the damage.

The peacock was lazily taking a dust bath in the sun and my rabbits were nestled in their wooden privacy boxes. When I went to feed the bigger animals, Dalai was missing. I assumed my llama was just hiding in the trees to escape the heat. When Dalai didn’t show up for a second feeding, I turned to Ronnie for a dash of country advice.

“Now, I’m not claiming to know everything, ‘cause I only have ‘bout a sixth grade education, but it seems to me a bear wouldn’t be a threat to a llama ‘cause bears really don’t eat meat. Dalai probably just escaped. Have you checked with the neighbors?”

I asked around, but no one had seen a loose llama. I walked the perimeter of the fence in case he was hiding in the trees, but Dalai wasn’t inside. No llama. No llama remains either. I spent two days searching, then put posters around town and an ad in the paper offering a reward for my lost llama. People hinted that the animal might have been stolen. Llamas are territorial, so even if he did slip out of the pasture, he’d stick nearby unless foul play was at hand. Everyone I saw driving down the road with a livestock trailer became suspect. The very thought that someone might steal my beloved llama made me crazy.

Two weeks later, Mark noticed a horrible smell. He followed his nose to discover Dalai’s remains in the overgrown weeds near the creek. Losing a chicken or a rabbit is one thing, but losing a llama is quite another. I cried all afternoon, unable to get the vision of my mangled pet out of my mind. Then I called the Georgia game warden and made arrangements for him to come out to give me advice.

I said, “Joe, look at this poop. What do you think?”

Joe spat. Joe had to spit every third sentence due to the chew in his mouth. He inspected the damaged cages, kicked at the pile of poop left by the renegade attacker and made an assessment.

“You have a bear. He seems to be appearing every seven days or so, which means he is making regular rounds.” (Spit.)

“How long will he keep coming?”

“As long as he finds good things to eat. You need to stop leaving food in your rabbit cages. Your bear thinks this a grocery stop now. I can set a trap, but traps are dangerous for dogs and kids, often more trouble than the bear.” (Spit.) “Bear season is around the corner. You can always just shoot the bear then, if ’n you want.”

As mad as I was at the animal, I couldn’t imagine killing something as majestic as a bear. “What if I feed the bear? If I leave a bucket of food he likes, perhaps he won’t bother my animals.”

Joe just about choked on his tobacco. “Feeding a wild bear is a really bad idea.”

I led him to the remains of my beloved llama. “Do you think the bear did this, too?”

He narrowed his eyes and spat, inspecting Dalai’s remains. “Looks to me like this animal was taken down by coyotes. You can tell because they gnaw at the flanks but leave the rest for other creatures to polish off. They do this with deer, too.”

“Llamas are supposed to be guard animals. I thought they chased coyotes away.”

“One llama can’t fight off an entire pack.”

“Can a donkey?”

“They’re better at keeping predators away, but even so...” (Spit.) My arms broke out in goose bumps as I imagined my donkey being the next prey. “How do I get rid of coyotes?”

“They’re not indigenous to the area so there’s no law against killing ‘em. But, even if you’re a crack shot, you won’t get rid of them ‘cause coyotes repopulate faster than you can reload a gun.”

Gritting my teeth, I described the thirteen headless chickens I found previously and asked if I should assign blame to the coyotes or the bear.

“Probably a possum, weasel, fox, or something else.”

“So, what you’re telling me is nature is going to keep coming at me over and over again, despite my best efforts to thwart her.”

“’Fraid so.” (Spit.) “Don’t feel too bad. You know what they say; anyone raising livestock is raising dead stock.” He chuckled at his joke and got into his truck.

After he left, I stood staring at my barnyard, mad enough to spit, myself.

We may have had one foot firmly planted in the country now, but the other shoe still hadn’t dropped.
Where do we belong?
I kept wondering. For all that I was frustrated with the country, I couldn’t imagine our returning to the rat race either. My farm experiments and reading had turned me into a passionate environmentalist with a serious commitment to lower my carbon footprint. If we lived in some metropolis, we could do without a car and walk or take public transportation to work or the grocery store, a choice that is more earth-friendly than growing your own chicken eggs ever could be. Cities have a decent library and all the other intellectual pursuits I missed too, but is a culture fix worth living where noise and pollution assail the senses and people have long since forgotten to pause to say

“how do?” to a neighbor? Could I ever again live where houses were so crowded together you could hear neighbors’ conversations from your back porch? Could I return to a life without a donkey? Then again, if everything I ever cared about and loved was dying in the country, would I even have a choice?