The Woefield Poultry Collective (14 page)

“Yes, of course.”

“Maybe Laureen could talk to one of them. Just for an hour or so. Something like an outpatient visit.”

I exhaled. I could not afford to antagonize this woman.

“Well, our counselors are sort of busy. Getting ready for the big opening. You know.”

“But you might be able to squeeze her in?”

“Well, I …”

“She’ll pay. Of course. We’re not trying to get anything for free.”

I realized that it was one thing to tell the bank a lie to delay our payments but if we started taking money for counseling we could be in serious trouble.

“I’m sure we can work something out. Someone will be able see her for a little while. Have a talk. Off the books.”

Phyllis smiled and her face became momentarily beautiful.

“That’s great. Really great. Verna will be so happy. She’ll call you. I’ll give her one of your brochures.”

“Excellent,” I said.

Brady walked past.

“Don’t let me interrupt!” he said. “See you soon! I can’t tell you how grateful I am.”

“He’s right, you know,” said Phyllis. “This town really needs you.”

I didn’t hardly have the chicken coop done and them boards packed full of dirt before the kid was on me about the goddamn sheep. She brung me a whole stack of books and one of them movie discs. I told her I didn’t have no VHS or Betamax for watching movies and she said I’d need a DVD player, which I guess makes sense. I told her I didn’t have one of them, either.

She said I could just read the books until she brought her DVD player from home and I told her I wasn’t reading no goddamn books. I was wore out from making the raised beds and chicken coop. That kind of fine finishing takes it out of a man. She said that sheep care is more complicated than many people realize.

I told her if old Bertie needed shearing, she should call Patty from Salt Spring. Or maybe she should ask Chubnuts. The kid asked what a chubnuts was and I said it was just a word. And she said, You mean Seth, and I said I did. She said he was busy doing stuff on the computer all the time and that she already called and Patty had gone to Australia for a month for a sheep-shearing contest. And besides I was supposed to be in charge of the sheep now.

I said we should just leave her. She’d learn to stand to one side to catch the breeze. The kid thought I was making a joke but I wasn’t.

Finally, the little bugger got me to agree to do Bertie’s feet. I’d seen Patty wrassling with her. Didn’t look too hard. So I said yes. Stupidest goddamn move I ever made. Besides not leaving here when I had the chance. That’s the story of my life. Jesus Christ. I must have said that
last part out loud, because the kid told me I should be careful or I’d get left behind.

I told her that, far as I knew, I already had.

Being a leader is very tiring but also rewarding. It’s like we learned in Jr. Poultry: The secret for getting ahead is Getting Started. It seems like a lot of adults have trouble Getting Started. Or maybe they just get started on the wrong things.

Like my dad. He’s always saying how he’s had enough of his new boss on the construction crew and he’s too well educated to do that kind of work. He always says he’s going to tell his boss that he can shove the job up his you know what. But my dad never does. Instead he comes home and complains to my mom. The other thing my dad does is watch sports on TV. But he is always watching new sports that he has to learn about. He watches a whole bunch of soccer or maybe tennis and then he tells us all about it in a lot of detail. But when the people or teams he wants to win lose, he quits watching and says he hates the sport and that it’s corrupt and everyone’s on steroids. Once my mom told him he might like it better if he tried to play one of the sports and he threw the remote and broke it on the wall.

Being a leader gives me a lot of confidence, but it is also quite a lot of pressure. You have to think about everything. Like in the case of my chickens, what if I move them and they don’t like it and get sick and die? That could happen. One of the kids at Poultry Club got twenty new pullets last year and the stress of being shipped killed all but four. Mr. Lymer said that the kid, whose name I won’t mention, may have forgotten to plug in the heat lamp, but I like to think the best of people, even direct competitors, so I am going to assume it was stress that did it.

New things and places are often stressful. So are old ones. I was sure Bertie the sheep found it stressful to not be looked after properly. And because she’s just a sheep, I can’t even tell her that I’m going to make sure someone helps her.

I got Earl some books on sheep care and on sheep shearing but he isn’t really a self-starter, I don’t think. It shouldn’t be too hard. All we have to do is fix her feet and finish shearing her. I hope that when Prudence sees what a good job we’ve done, she’ll be so happy she’ll want to get some more sheep.

First off, I never knew a sheep could kick like that. Especially not Bertie, who has always seemed more like a gob of phlegm hanging around the place than a farm animal. When I went outside I found Earl sitting down. He had Bertie by the back legs, or one back leg, anyway. And she was methodically kicking him in the arm and the chest with the other one. Just like
whump! whump! whump!
Steady like that.

“Holy shit,” I said. As you may have noticed, Earl is old and played out as hell. I figured if that sheep hit him in the wrong place the old man could drop dead. It seemed like a real possibility.

Little Sara was standing beside them. She had hold of her book with one hand and with the other hand she kept trying to shove the sheep over onto its side. I have no idea why. I think it was just making matters worse.

Before I got in there to help, I took a picture. My blogging has probably given me a reporter’s instincts.

Earl grunted
oof
every time a kick landed. Between Bertie’s bleats and Earl’s
oofs
, they sounded like an Oompa Loompa concert.

Anyway, once I got a little closer, I had no idea what to do. I didn’t want to insert myself into the kicking, stinking, woolly tangle of old man and sheep.

“We’ve got to flip her over,” said Sara. “I told Earl that, but he didn’t listen.”

So without even thinking about it too much, I took her, Bertie I mean, and flipped her over. The crazy thing is that she stopped struggling.

She reeked like some homeless dude’s sweater. I held her on her back. To keep her there, I straddled her, crouching over her in this highly dangerous way for my family Js. I was glad we were behind the house so my mom and Bobby couldn’t see me.

Sara handed Earl some clippers.

“Can’t,” he gasped.

No shit, I thought. Poor bastard’s probably going to die in the next couple of minutes.

“Give them to me.” I was as surprised as anyone to hear myself saying the words.

“We’ve got to trim her feet and then put Coppertox on them,” said Sara.

“Got to keep the dirt out, too,” said Earl, sucking air between each word.

“Okay, I’ll hold the feet and you trim them,” I said to Sara. So the kid took the massive bloody clippers, like garden shears, from me and started going after the sheep like she was Jack the Ripper and the sheep was a Victorian prostitute. The thing was, she wasn’t getting anywhere near the sheep. No, those big fucking clackers were jabbing perilously close to my eye.

“Little dude,” I said. “Watch it. You’re going to maim somebody. I’ll clip. You hold her feet.”

This Sara could do. Once Bertie was on her back, she seemed to give up all hope and she had stopped kicking. The kid hung onto Bertie’s hooves and I cut off a gnarly piece that looked like it was extra. How the fuck did I know, right? They smelled terrible, like the homeless guy’s sweater had a gangrenous arm in it. After I’d cut as much as I could without amputating the poor sheep’s foot entirely, Sara rubbed some of the toxic-smelling stuff from the tub on them. I could practically feel myself getting cancer from the smell alone.

“You should be wearing gloves,” I told her.

By this time, Earl had caught his breath and was helping Sara. “How are we supposed to keep these bastards clean?” he asked. I think he was talking about Bertie’s hooves. I’ll say this about him: He’s got a masterful and winning way with children and sheep.

“I can’t hold her like this until June,” I told them. I wasn’t used to wrestling with sheep. Contrary to what some people from my high school might have said.

“I know!” said Sara. And she ran off into the house, leaving me and Earl to finish cutting Bertie’s other three feet and putting the carcinogenic goop all over them. Earl had to do the back feet, because I couldn’t hold her steady and turn myself around to face the other way.

We’d just trimmed the last foot when Sara came back. She was carrying a box of maxipads.

“Look, kid, you should talk to your mom about whatever’s going on with you,” I said, breathing hard myself now. I was also thinking that kids are insane and I was definitely going to wear a rubber if I ever got to have sex with another person and not just myself. Seriously. What a time for the kid to explore the wonders of menstruation. And to pick me and old Earl of all people.

Sara ignored me, pulled out a pad, ripped the adhesive strip off and folded it over one of Bertie’s feet. She held the pad in place and told Earl to get the duct tape. Which he did. Together, they wrapped about twelve feet of duct tape around Bertie’s little hoof. No dirt was getting in there anytime soon. The poor sheep looked like some dying raver in moon boots.

“Nice work,” I said, impressed, even though I felt like Angus Young at the end of a show, totally wrung out from physical and emotional exhaustion.

Prudence got home just as Earl and Sara were putting a final sanitary napkin on Bertie’s left back foot, while I held her front moon boots steady. Even in my weakened condition I could see that something wasn’t right. I’d never seen Prudence walk slowly before.

“Hi,” she said, in a flat voice. She walked right past us into the house while Bertie’s maxipad-clad feet paddled in the wool-smelling wind.

I’d read numerous books in which New Yorkers make their escape from the big city and realize their dreams of becoming farmers. In every case they experience a small but entertaining setback or two, and eventually they become quite successful and never betray their values. One woman moved from New York to the Ozarks and became a renowned beekeeper and writer. Another woman moved to the east coast, bought a cow and started making world-famous yogurt. A third guy wrote a bestseller about living beside a saltwater marsh.

Not one of them talked about meetings with bankers or creating fake businesses in order to defer tax and mortgage payments. They certainly didn’t mention getting roped into giving creative writing workshops. I admit to experiencing a moment of discouragement after my trip to the bank. I allowed the mood to continue for twenty minutes. Any longer than that would have been wallowing. Ultimately I knew all my problem solving would be good training for later, when I had to deal with things like harvesting and deciding how much seed to buy.

To cheer myself up I found the listing for the local farmers’ market in the community paper and sent the organizer an email asking to reserve space for a table next month. I thought that would be an excellent incentive to get our garden growing, so to speak. The radish seeds I’d planted were already sprouting and I was sure the swiss chard, to which I’d devoted a whole bed, wouldn’t be far behind.

I was hoping we’d become well known for one or two outstanding items. I had a friend in Brooklyn who used to go all the way to the little
farmers’ market outside the Botanical Gardens in the Bronx because she said one of the vendors there had the best honey crisp apples in the United States. I wanted our table to become a
destination
like that.

The arrival of Sara’s chickens was a welcome change from the accumulating complications. When they came, a week late due to delays in the chicken coop construction, I felt as though we were really getting started, agriculturally speaking. As Michael Pollan points out in
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
, what’s missing from many farms in this era of conglomerate agriculture and monoculture crops is actual animals.

At Woefield, I wanted us to have a harmonious balance of animals and vegetable crops. Of course we already had Bertie the sheep, and the chickens were another step in the right direction, even if they were just boarders.

Earl finished painting the Chicken Hilton a few minutes before Sara’s mother arrived with the birds. As I watched Earl work, I noticed that he seemed to have aged several years in only a couple of weeks. That got me thinking that perhaps in addition to standard crops, we should also grow some medicinal herbs. I mean, if that famous yogurt company could start from just one cow, perhaps we could put in a bed of Saint-John’s-wort and some valerian and see where it leads.

Seth came outside to watch the action. He brought his laptop and a camera with him as though he was expecting a flock of celebrities rather than chickens.

He started snapping pictures as soon as Sara’s mother came around the corner, lugging a large wire cage covered with a flowered sheet.

Sara rushed to meet her mother, calling out orders for how to proceed with the cage.

“Don’t jostle them!” she instructed. “Be careful!”

“Sara,” said her mother, who was pink and panting from exertion in the warm May morning, “just tell me where to put the damned things.”

Sara ran to open the door of the chicken run, which was neatly enclosed on all sides with boards and wire fencing.

Mrs. Spratt stooped low to duck into the doorway of the run and set the big cage down inside.

“Careful!” said Sara.

“You’re welcome,” puffed Mrs. Spratt.

Earl, Seth and I stepped forward to get a look at the birds. Bright morning light dappled the cage and the grass was damp underfoot. The birds were still hidden by the sheet.