Meanwhile back at the farm, I found raspberries.
When we built the house, a lot of ground was disrupted. I’d looked and looked, hoping for wild blackberries and raspberries, but didn’t find any. That summer, while I was trying to get Beulah Petunia bred, I found both—and lots of them. There was a huge patch of blackberries back behind the house, on the hillside between the house and the cow pasture. I found more small patches of wild raspberries every day, up and down the driveway and even up by the house. Once I started looking, they popped up everywhere.
Over the past few years, desperate for my own berries, we’d planted a number of bushes—blackberry (the thornless kind), blueberries, elderberries, and raspberries. I was hoping to get a few berries that summer off those plants—if the chickens didn’t get them first.
I was especially excited about the wild raspberries because I wasn’t expecting them at all. Wild blackberries were more common around those parts than raspberries, so it felt like magic.
But then, Stringtown Rising was magic in so many ways. Whip-poor-wills were rare, too, but we had them and had the rare pleasure of listening to them every spring. Now we had raspberries, too.
I became every bit as obsessed with the berries as I was with Beulah Petunia’s love life. Every day, I’d check on my newly discovered magic berries.
I collected them as they ripened for fear the birds would get them if I waited till they were all ripe. It was me against the birds. Every once in a while, I’d find a ripe one that had been half eaten and I knew they’d gotten there before me, but most of the time I’d pull off the plump, juicy berries first. I’d go out collecting every day. It became a little daily ritual, my walk around the farm to all my spots. While I was walking, I’d look for new spots—and sometimes I found them. I found more raspberry patches than I ever imagined the day I found what I thought was just one patch by the driveway. I found more along the driveway, then I found them up by the house, below the driveway, and across the road.
I grew better at finding them along the sunny edges of the woods, and also better at identifying the new canes shooting up first-year growth. I knew where more raspberries would be the next year.
I also grew bolder as my obsession grew. I collected raspberries high. I collected raspberries low. No ripe berry was left behind. I leaped to raspberries along cliffs. I clambered up banks and dived into underbrush and through trees. You had to get down in there because sometimes the berries were hiding.
I’d hear the phone ringing back at the house and I didn’t care. I was collecting raspberries.
One of my favorite patches was a huge sprawling patch of both raspberries and blackberries below the driveway, between the driveway and Frank’s field. There was about a six-foot steep bank dropping off from the driveway down to a run that drained into the creek. On the other side of the run, the ground sloped down to the fence and the field beyond. I walked along the fence, risking life and limb to reach across the ditch to the berries growing along the steep bank.
The sheep thought it would be funny if I fell in. Or not notice, because sheep don’t care much about people. Unless you are carrying a feed bucket.
The flora was exploding on our farm that year. Before the disruption of our construction three years earlier, there had been a previous disruption by loggers when the farm was selectively timbered a few years before we bought it. Our driveway was built by the loggers, and the location of the house was a large cleared area once used as a staging ground by the loggers who spread and graded it, widening the area, which provided space for our garden and goat yard in front of the house. The wide cleared swaths out past the duck ’n’ buck yard and out through the cow pasture were originally logging roads.
Because of the loggers, the hillside behind the house was also disrupted quite a bit before we got there and added to the general disruption with our construction. The forest was bursting back. The land was recovering, and it was gorgeous—and filled with berries.
When I’d get all the way down the driveway in my raspberry collecting each day, I’d look up the driveway and barely recognize the entrance to our farm because of the lush growth. Things were starting to look not only settled but well established. My daily walks among the berries were a chance to notice, and to enjoy, and to cross my fingers that it would all last.
52 was on a ranting binge that summer. This meant that the ranting wasn’t just sporadic but constant, night after night in a row. He couldn’t see me without telling me how selfish I was. One evening, after a particularly lengthy browbeating, I took off my ring when he went down to feed the sheep. We each wore a silver ring on our ring fingers. We didn’t have a particular name for the rings. They weren’t engagement rings and didn’t signify anything other than that we were together. I’d bought the ring for myself and had given a matching one to him for Christmas one year early in our relationship.
I set my ring on his pipe ashtray, where I knew he would see it. It was dark when I drove down the driveway. I didn’t know where I was going. I just knew I had to get away. I set off across the river ford, thinking I’d go to Ripley in the next county over, where there were hotels. By the time I got down the road, I decided I was too tired to drive all the way to Ripley. When I got to the highway, I headed back in the direction of the Slanted Little House.
I spent the night in my old bedroom. The house was unlocked, and it was almost as if nothing had changed at all since I’d lived there. My bedding was still on the bed. I woke up in the middle of the night and heard Elvis singing. It freaked me out until I realized the radio had been left on in the cellar porch. My cousin must have been doing something in there that day.
In the morning, I sneaked out without anyone seeing me. I couldn’t think of anything to do but go home to 52.
He was up early—and angry. He asked me where I’d been.
“I went to the old farmhouse,” I told him.
“You didn’t drive out in that direction.”
“I didn’t know where I was going when I left,” I said.
“What are you planning to do?”
I sat down on the porch, shaking. I’d hardly slept, and I was scared for my future. “I don’t have a plan.”
“You always have a plan. What’s your plan?”
I wished I had a real plan. I had hopes and dreams and desperate wishes, fantasies masquerading as plans. I could streamline the animals and take imaginary flights in which I would somehow manage the farm on my own, but a workable plan was nowhere in sight.
“My plan,” I told him, “is to stay here as long as I can. It’s my home, and it’s my children’s home.”
He sat in his rocking chair, puffing at his pipe. A long beat passed. He was staring straight ahead, at our view across to the hills.
I said, “I’m really disappointed that things have ended this way for us. I think it’s time for us to redefine our relationship.”
He didn’t say anything.
Had I just broken up with him? Another long, long beat passed. I got up and walked inside the house. He had taken my ring from his ashtray and I didn’t know where it was. I didn’t ask for it back.
The kids were coming home from Texas, and the Chickens in the Road Retreat was looming on the horizon. I got Weston settled into college, started up again with Morgan’s sports, and threw myself into the retreat preparations. At first, the mere notion had terrified me. I was going to organize, manage, and host an event bringing in sixty people, providing accommodations, meals, and homesteading-styled workshops over a two-day period? By this time, I’d been throwing a Party on the Farm at Stringtown Rising every fall. I invited any of my readers who wanted to come. And they did, from far and wide and even out of state. I’d ask everyone to bring a dish, and I organized demonstrations of things like cheese making and soap making. The “petting zoo” was open for feeding cookies to the goats, and it was a fun but exhausting time. People never believed me, but I was actually quite shy. Sometimes I spent a good part of the party hiding in the bathroom. I preferred to remain behind my laptop, spinning my stories, but I also knew I needed to connect with my readers face-to-face, and I wanted to be as open as possible with my life and my farm—in spite of the veil I kept over my private secrets.
52 was always helpful with the party, cleaning up the farm, which was usually a mess, so it was our annual “spring” cleaning in the fall. He didn’t throw his junk out, but at least he would tidy the piles and stacks. Cindy came ahead of the retreat to help me prepare and stayed for several days following the retreat and the party. She was one of the few people who knew the truth about my relationship with 52. She was smart and practical, and I had come to trust her judgment. The extremely nice and polite veneer 52 presented in front of other people cracked after a few days, and she caught a glimpse of his disdainful treatment of me.
She told me she didn’t know how I could stand it. I told her I didn’t know how I was standing it either. I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving the farm. She encouraged me to find a way out—for me, for my animals, and for my business, but I had no clue what it could be. Winter was coming, and I couldn’t survive at Stringtown Rising without 52’s help.
After months of working to get Beulah Petunia bred, I was hoping I’d succeeded. I wished Dr. Casto would show up, but the scrapie tests on our sheep had been negative, so we hadn’t seen him again. I cast about for an alternative, a country preg checker. As usual, you could find someone willing to undertake any odd farm task if you asked around enough.
Tucker was an older man who worked pipeline when he wasn’t poking his entire arm inside a cow for a mere $20. He went in and out of Beulah Petunia’s privates about five or six times while I stood by anxiously. He didn’t give up easily, but he said he felt nothing in there. Nothing! He punched her side for good measure, and again, came up empty.
Punching a cow’s side is an optional method for determining pregnancy. If you know what you’re doing, you can feel a calf. I’ve tried punching cows myself, and any time I do it, I feel the side of a cow (and a sense of guilt for punching a cow). But an experienced cow-puncher knows a calf when he feels it.
I couldn’t believe it. How could she not be pregnant by now? I wanted a second opinion and arranged for a vet to pay a visit to the farm. I picked up Morgan after volleyball practice and swung by the vet’s office so he could follow me to the farm. It was close to dark, and I knew Beulah Petunia better be ready for him when we arrived. We wouldn’t have time to call her up from the hinterlands of her field. She needed to be up at the gate and waiting. I told Morgan to call the house on her cell phone to let 52 know we were on our way. “Tell him to get BP up,” I said.
Morgan called the house. 52 answered. Morgan said, “Mom wants you to wake up BP.”
Obviously, Morgan hadn’t spent much time with the cows.
I imagined 52 out in the field shaking a slumbering cow. “Wake up, BP, wake up!”
I was lucky we didn’t roll off the road, I was laughing so hard at her misunderstanding of what I meant when I said I needed 52 to get the cow up. Morgan was a farm girl to a degree and no further. I called her the “donkey whisperer” because she always helped when we moved the donkeys from one field to another. She often helped move the sheep, too, and she was my assistant when I did my annual Christmas photo shoots with Clover, but she was too busy with sports to get involved with the farm on a daily basis, as was Weston. In the summers, when school was out, the kids were with their dad most of the time. They weren’t as fascinated with farm life as I was anyway.
I stood by as the vet pulled on the long gloves. This might sound weird, but I wished it was my arm going in there. I wanted to preg check my cow for myself. The vet told me how if the cow sat down, it could break your arm. That put me off a little or I probably would have gone out and bought long gloves. Or gone somewhere to have my head examined. In any case, after months of back and forthing to Skip’s, the vet confirmed that she wasn’t bred. I didn’t know if she was too old to breed again, or if I’d just gotten my timing repeatedly wrong. Glory Bee was nearly old enough to breed by then, but I was tired of taking cows up the road. Fall had arrived. Winter was around the corner, and no way could I take cows back and forth once the snows hit. I didn’t know what I was going to do.
My life as a farmer seemed at a standstill.
Sometimes I felt crushed by the hard work of Stringtown Rising. It could be an act of gymnastics just to get a bale of hay to the cows due to the poor layout and management of the farm. But it wasn’t my body that was failing me. It was my spirit.
I’d been strong enough to walk away from an unhealthy marriage, but I thought I was being strong by staying in another unhealthy environment at Stringtown Rising?
Your readers think you’re so wonderful, but you’re not. You’re selfish, selfish, selfish.
52 beat those words and similar ones into my head every time he got a chance. If I halfway opened my mouth, he told me to stop arguing. Often, he put words in my mouth for me. “I know what you’re going to say. You think you’re perfect. You think you’re right about everything.” Then he’d take off again for another twenty minutes, responding to my imaginary statements.
Most of the time, I wasn’t even sure what brought on his tirades. They seemed to come out of nowhere or stem from some trivial matter. Eventually I stopped trying to figure it out because I felt like an outsider in an argument that didn’t involve me.
I got home late one night from one of Morgan’s volleyball games. I had e-mailed 52 just before he left work at five to let him know that I’d be going to the game and would be home late. I sat down with him on the porch, and he asked me if I had watched the game.
I said, “No, I read a book.” I’m the worst sports mother in the history of sports mothers. I hate sports.
52 said, “Why did you go up there at five if you weren’t going to watch the game?”
I said, “I didn’t go up there at five. I went up there at seven because I had concession stand duty for the second half, but they weren’t done playing because there were three teams there for some reason and they kept playing games and it was like there were three halfs.” I know that halfs is not a proper word, but I think it might be in volleyball.
“Then you shouldn’t have gone up there at five.”
“I didn’t go up there at—”
“Stop arguing with me.”
Then I just stopped talking and let him finish explaining how I had to be right about everything and thought I was perfect, and not to mention, how I shouldn’t have gone up there at five.
When he wound down, I said good night like a good girl and went to bed.
As I opened the door to go inside, he heaved a great sigh and said, “You know that you are a really frustrating person, don’t you?”
I said, “Yes, I know. You’ve told me.”
He’d taught me a lot about West Virginia and country life. He knew his way around a farm, and into the woods. I’d take a photo of a wildflower or a tree and show it to him—and he always knew what it was called. He taught me how to hear the whip-poor-wills and see the spring peepers. He helped me learn to light a woodstove and milk a cow. He was always willing to hop in his truck and drive me anywhere I wanted to explore, especially if it involved a dirt road or an abandoned outhouse. He’d pull down grapevines for a craft or build me a homemade cheese press.
He’d do everything I asked him to do, no matter how nutty, but he couldn’t do the one thing I needed him to stop doing. He was driven by his own demons that I never completely understood.
I knew there was a good man inside somewhere. I’d known him, and I’d loved him. I believed he loved me, too, but I brought out the worst in him. I know he thought I was annoying, because he told me so constantly. At least once a week, I asked him where the trash cans were. He’d say, “How can you not remember where the trash cans are? They’re in the same place they always are and where I told you they were four days ago.” Me: “But then I made up a new recipe and now I can’t remember.” I was flighty and out of his control.
(No matter how many times he told me that my Explorer was an SUV or a truck, I kept referring to it as my car. Calling an SUV a car, how could anyone be expected to live with that?! And toward the end, I did have to start laughing at that kind of anal-retentive obsession over precision because otherwise, how could anyone be expected to live with that?! Laughing did not improve the situation. Except from my perspective.)
I lost my car keys (precisely, my Explorer keys) one time for a month. Luckily it was winter and I couldn’t go anywhere anyway. I searched. He even searched. I can’t remember where I found them eventually, but it was like on top of my head, the location was so ridiculously obvious, and I came out on the porch laughing so hard at myself that I had tears rolling down my face. When I got out what I thought was so hilarious, “You’re not going to believe where I found my car keys!” he bit my head off, explaining that it wasn’t funny at all. And probably using the word car didn’t help.
Despite the rigidity of my family’s beliefs, I was raised with a sense of humor and an appreciation for wacky behavior. My dad’s idea of a good joke was to tape a homemade bumper sticker to my mother’s car that said, “Honk if you’re gay.” It was difficult for me to relate to someone who couldn’t find humor in absurdity. Or who expected me to remember where the trash cans were, to panic if the goats’ water bucket was half full (or half empty), or to always remember to say good night before I fell asleep.
Persistence isn’t always a virtue.
I’d thought my tolerance of his behavior was my strength, but it was, in truth, my weakness. I tolerated his abuse because I was afraid of losing the farm and my job. I e-mailed Cindy and told her I was afraid I was about to crack.
“You can have a farm anywhere, Suzanne,” Cindy wrote back. “Your readers will follow you.”
I’d promised 52 that I would never tell him to leave again, but I’d never promised him that I wouldn’t be the one to leave.
I couldn’t imagine leaving.
I was sitting on the porch one night in mid-October when he came home from work. I thought it was just another ordinary day until he walked up to the porch from his truck and, without preamble, said, “I’m not going to pay my half of the mortgage and the second mortgage anymore.”
The words fell out of my mouth. “I’m moving out.”
He said, “Where are you going?”
I felt as stunned as he looked.
I said, “I don’t know.”