The Woefield Poultry Collective (26 page)

All around us were trucks and table straining under the weight of mountains of baby potatoes, herbs, freezers full of meat, breads, baked goods, baby carrots. Worse, every table seemed to be heaped with beautiful radishes of all different types. The other vendors’ radishes differed from ours in that there were large roots attached to the greens.

I pretended not to notice. Sara, however, was afflicted with the honesty of youth.

I felt sort of bad for Prudence. She tries really hard but that’s not always enough. For example, I once spent two whole days on a poster for our Poultry Club bake sale and it didn’t get chosen. Mary-Ellen Scottolini’s did and I know for a fact that she barely spent half an hour on hers. She didn’t even spell “poultry” right! Mr. Lymer chose hers as the winner because Mrs. Scottolini always wears low-cut shirts. Even Bethany knew it wasn’t fair.

The other people selling stuff at the farmers’ market were nice, except the lady with the fresh baked bread with stuff on it. She acted very competitive even though we had nothing to compete with. The other sellers waved and said hello and didn’t say anything about our radishes, which didn’t have hardly any radishes on them. The customers were meaner, though.

One lady who had a lot of hair on her face asked if we were joking and Prudence got this funny look that I think was supposed to be a smile. She tried to give the lady a recipe for pasta with radish greens. The lady asked Prudence what she was playing at and Prudence asked me to look after things while she went to “inspect the coolers.” Then she stared into an empty cooler while the lady told her friend that the farmers’ market was really going downhill.

That lady wasn’t even the meanest one. This one man with a German accent brought over his whole family and picked up our whole display of radish greens and our three eggs and laughed and laughed and said things in German or maybe it was English that just sounded
German and was very rude. Prudence did her fake smile again.

The only good points were when a couple of ladies at the local food security booth came over and bought all of Prudence’s radish recipes and radish fact pamphlets for five dollars and invited her to join their collective. Prudence’s smile got real then. They were very nice ladies and I think they felt sorry for her like I did. The bad part was that then all we had were our radish greens and the miniature radishes, which Prudence called the “fetal radishes,” and our eggs and people kept walking by and looking at us kind of quickly and then turning away. Prudence excused herself, saying she needed to take a walk and clear her head. She probably had a headache from staring into the empty coolers for so long. She’d been gone about five minutes when the nice vet came by and bought everything! Even the little leaves we had in glasses for decoration! He left us forty dollars! He told me not to tell Prudence he bought our stuff and I promised. He asked how Bertie was and I said she wasn’t up when we left but I thought she was fine, since Earl takes very good care of her on the porch. And he sort of frowned and then laughed and told me to have a good day and to remember our deal.

When Prudence came back, I gave her the money and her face went a bit funny, like she was going to cry and she asked who bought the radishes and I said a customer. And she said, “Well, that’s that then. I guess we can go.”

We were putting away our table when the man who runs the market came by and asked if we’d be back next week and Prudence said she’d get in touch! Then she gave him some of her money. I’m excited because I really like the farmers’ market.

We were home from the market by nine-thirty. I wasted no time. It was clear to me that serious measures were required. We weren’t going to be able to count on our produce to carry us for a while yet. As soon as I got the coolers washed and put away and prepared a snack for Sara, I headed for Earl’s cabin. By the time I was halfway across the field I’d forgotten the embarrassment of the market. The morning was glorious—wisps of cloud made their way west across the lid of the sky. The grass was sparse, yes, but damp and deeply rooted beneath my feet. No little radish setback was going to take me down or dislodge me from this place. The field, the house, the fences. The air. The rocks that popped relentlessly from the bedrock below. It was all mine to keep or lose. I stopped for a moment and took a deep, calming breath.

I felt slightly giddy from lack of sleep and from the intensity of the market.

When I got to the porch, I peered over the barrier at the top of the steps. Bertie, still wearing the duct-tape booties, was lying on Earl’s porch on a bed of hay and newspaper, munching contentedly. The menstrual absorbent pads were gone and the cuts were healing nicely. She looked more comfortable and she was certainly less embarrassing than she had been. I thought about Eustace and last night, and I gave my head a shake. I had to focus on the farm. On the future.

It would soon be time to move Bertie into the new enclosure, which Seth said was shaped like either a pile of fast-food vomit or a paramecium.

I’d promised everyone that we would put up proper fences and build a barn before winter, but I didn’t have enough money and I knew when I made the promises I was not being entirely truthful. Lying had become habitual since I became a farmer. When I lifted my leg over the barrier that kept Bertie confined on the porch, she stared at me with those peculiar yellow eyes of hers with rectangular black irises.

That’s when I noticed it. A guitar or maybe a banjo making lonely, country-sounding music. It sent a quiver running from the base of my spine into my scalp.

I hadn’t had the best handle on Earl, at least until Sara told me about his brother and I looked up their history on Wikipedia. After all, Earl looked like a farmer and talked like a trucker and, at the risk of sounding rude, he had a tendency to wander around looking lost and irritated any time there was something to do. I had been beginning to doubt whether he actually knew much about farming. My uncle Harold wouldn’t have known if Earl wasn’t a good farmer because, as had become apparent, Uncle Harold never did any farming. I suspect that for Harold, the fact that Earl looked the part would have been enough.

The music grew louder, which is probably why Earl didn’t hear me when I tripped climbing over the final piece of the barrier, which consisted of an old couch, two broken chairs that he’d taken from the porch on the big house and two lengths of frayed rope. The assemblage of furniture made it appear as though Bertie had barricaded herself up there.

Curiosity made me look in the window before I knocked on the door. The music was coming from Earl. He sat at the kitchen table, playing his banjo and singing. Keening, almost. A song so high and sweet that it made the breath catch in my throat. He was singing about sitting alone, too lonesome to cry, and then about water that rose high and a woman who left. A woman! Who left him!

Earl’s fingers moved over the banjo in this way that made me think that maybe he wasn’t the lifelong bachelor virgin I’d assumed.

A minute later the song was over and he’d moved into another song, this one faster. His fingers flew over the fret board. His head wobbled as he played, and he was singing sweet and clear.

It was like watching a great painter at work or reading a masterpiece. It was moving and startling and I knew that what I’d read online was true: Earl was an amazing musician from a famous musical family. And he lived on my farm!

When the song finished, I stepped to the side of the window so he wouldn’t see me if he looked out. Then I waited five minutes before I knocked on the door to tell him about the house meeting.

First she told us she told the bank that she turned the place into a treatment center. I don’t even know what in the high holy hell that is, but I sure as goddamn don’t want no part of it. Then she says she’s changed her mind and something about integrity and right livelihood and voodooists. I told her I didn’t want nothing to do with voodooists and Prudence said not voodooists, Buddhists. To tell the truth, I couldn’t figure out what the hell she was saying.

And Chubnuts was laying on the couch in the living room in his bathrobe, stinking like the worst rubbie you ever walked past in the city. He kept making these noises, like a sick heifer going into labor. Every time Prudence talked, he made one of them mooing noises. Them noises of his was enough to get on a deaf man’s nerves.

Then there was the kid. I didn’t even know if she should be listening. In a lot of ways, it was immoral, all Prudence’s talk about rehabs. The kid was already more worried about morals than a TV preacher man. But the kid wasn’t paying much attention. Prudence asked her to put the hen she was fooling with away after it crapped on the kitchen table. I’m having second thoughts about eating meals in that kitchen, I’ll tell you. Between Chubnuts and them birds, you’re as likely to catch bird flu as a full belly. Even the old man kept a better house than his niece.

I was thinking on that and wondering whether I might want to move up my plan to get the new camper and get the hell out when I realized they were all staring at me.

I asked what the hell they were all staring at.

Prudence said what did I think about her plan.

So I said, What plan? Because I was thinking on my camper and heading south and wasn’t really paying attention.

A concert, she said. Now she’d really lost me.

What concert are you talking about? I wanted to know.

The kid was all excited and said because I’m famous. And my brother was on TV.

And I thought to myself, No goddamn way I’m going down that road. Prudence could stick that plan in her ear and give it a jerk.

That’s when the kid’s mother showed up and took a bad situation and made it worse.

Even in my extremely weakened condition, I was able to work up some sympathy for Mrs. Spratt. I saw her husband at the strawberry party when I first moved over here and a bigger douche bag would be hard to find.

Prudence was talking all sorts of nonsense about a concert. Some kind of hillbilly hoedown–type concept. She’d also said some highly offensive shit about me sobering up and how no one on the farm was going to “enable me” anymore because it was bad for all of us, but that everyone, even someone like me, deserved at least one more chance. Like we were on an episode of celebrity rehab without any celebrities.

She seemed to think Earl was going to be the big attraction at her concert. At that point I was pretty sure she’d lost her mind. She was never completely, you know, sane, what with the wanting to live on the scabby-ass farm and all, but the shit she was talking during this house meeting was like Britney at her baldest. I half expected her to step out for a second to shave her head or go to a gas station bathroom in her bare feet.

I tried to get things back on track by asking a few clarifying questions, but I was too sick. All I could do was groan to give her some sense of audience reaction. When I tried to speak, vomit surged up in my throat, so I kept it general.

Then the kid’s mother showed up.

“Excuse me,” I heard her say. “Am I interrupting?”

It was pretty clear she was. There were three people sitting around the kitchen table and I was listening hard from the living room. You could tell from the way my head was angled.

Mrs. Spratt stepped into the kitchen. She looked thrashed. Deeply, internally thrashed. Worse than me after the premiere of Harewood Technical’s production of
Jesus Christ Superstar
. Sara’s mom had on a blue cardigan and a blue flowered dress made out of some clingy nylon or rayon or something. Not clingy sexy, but clingy from static. She had on these terrible light brown not-quite-leather shoes. It was a horrible outfit, and I’m a person with virtually no standards. It was the outfit of a woman who has given up some time ago. Her face was pale and puffy
and
wrinkly, which is the worst combination and one of my biggest fears. Before I came here and started being force-fed health food, I used to eat a lot of carbs but I made of point of not worrying about MSG because I’d rather go with straight puff than wrinkly puff.

“Hi honey,” she said to Sara.

The kid looked up and I couldn’t tell you what was going on in her blank little face. Something complicated and too old by half.

“Hi Mom,” she said.

Mrs. Spratt seemed to be trying to act normal, but you could see she was a short step from a total crack-up.

“Thanks so much for letting her here stay last night,” she said.

I was like, oh shit. I hoped the kid hadn’t seen me when I got home. I wasn’t in very good shape. Not that I remember any of it. On the other hand, with an asshole father like hers, she’s probably seen worse than a guy passed out in his own piss. Still, it wasn’t the image of myself that I wanted to promote.

“It was our pleasure, Mrs. Spratt,” said Prudence. And she meant it. She’s pretty open-hearted. Plus, we all like the kid. She’s very cool, for a kid, and she’s the only one of us who has it half together. Of course, she’ll lose that when she gets older.

Mrs. Spratt coughed into her hand in a weird-ass gesture. Her hand was all red, like she did a lot of housework without using gloves or Palmolive or anything.

“I need to go away for a couple of days. I know it’s short notice, but could you keep Sara?”

Earl looked at Prudence and I looked at the kid and Prudence looked at Mrs. Spratt.

“Oh, of course. I mean, as long as …”

“Is that okay with you, honey?” asked Mrs. Spratt.

The kid nodded, solemn as a little judge at family court.

“Your dad might come by. If he does, just tell him I’ve gone to your aunt Steph’s for a few days. Tell him I’ve made arrangements for you to stay here. So you can be closer to your birds.”

“He won’t come,” said Sara.

Mrs. Spratt kept going like Sara hadn’t spoken.

“I packed some things for you.” She set down a small suitcase on the floor.

“I already have everything I need,” said Sara.