Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm (15 page)

I remember the bonfire I lit months ago in our front yard. All it did was kill the grass and leave a big scorch mark. At least the boys didn’t witness that one. This fire is something else, though, something unifying. This fire, small and under control, has a practical use and is more than just a lesson in match management and winter survival.

My frayed red daypack hangs on a nearby tree branch. In it is our Christmas dinner: a package of Rocky hot dogs (my sons have forbidden me from ever calling them “wieners”), a Tofurky dog for Owen, a package of hot dog buns, ketchup, mustard, four
small apples, all the ingredients for S’mores, and four metal roasting forks.

We take turns adding bigger and bigger logs, until the fire burns so hot that we take off our jackets. Sparks float upward. Our woods, so loud with birdsong and squirrel chatter and road noise during the day, is absolutely silent tonight. The snow dripping off the trees like meringue muffles everything, even the sound of the fire and of our own breathing. We’re protected in this valley, this big valley, the namesake of our little farm, at least for tonight.

I launch into a round of “Silent Night,” and the boys join in, but not for long. When we get to the part about the “round yon Virgin,” Owen starts snickering, Luke follows suit and Will asks what a virgin is anyway and what’s so funny, the infant with holes in it?, and the song falls apart. It must be time to eat.

We made it through this year
, I silently pray,
barely—please let us make it through the next one, too
.

Around the circle are stumps cut flat long ago by someone else with a chain saw, and they are good stools. I make a show of pulling out our red-and-green, gold-flecked holiday tablecloth with a flourish, fold it in thirds, and drape it over the biggest stump. Our holiday table.

As soon as there are coals I unpack our supplies and dole them out. Everyone gets a hot dog to roast, and I line up the buns on the stump table and set out the ketchup, mustard, and apples.

“We’re like the hoboes,” Owen says, sliding his soy dog onto his roasting fork and holding it over the fire. “Just free and out on the land.”

Will leans back on his stump and looks up at the night sky. I look where he is looking and so does Luke and we see the Milky
Way. The Big Valley is far enough away from the lights of town that this celestial pathway is often visible on cloudless nights like this one, especially in the winter.

It isn’t late, only dinnertime, probably seven or seven-thirty, but it has already been dark for what seems like hours. The heat has made pink circles on Will’s cheeks, he’s taken off his hat, and his blond hair is sticking out from the static. It isn’t the North Star or any particular constellation or a satellite that he sees when he looks up, but an entirely different kind of celestial being.

“Santa’s up there right now,” he says, his voice filled with the magic of this instant, of Christmas, and of the fire he built himself but that is feeding all of us. Anything should be possible on such a night, shouldn’t it? Even having your youngest son, who will turn nine years old in less than a week, still believe in Santa Claus.

I hold my breath and wait for his brothers to laugh at him, or say something sarcastic, or in some other way break the spell, but there is only the crackling sound of the fire, and the colored lights decorating our porch up on the hill, and the faraway stars like sequins sprinkled on this purple velvet sky floating a million miles above our heads.

I’ve hung the boys’ Christmas stockings on the fireplace mantel, but they are pretty empty. Gift cards I got for free from my bank by cashing in the points I’ve earned all year by paying for gas and groceries with my debit card, some candy, and a few music CDs I burned from my computer.

“What’s a hobo again?” Luke asks. He’s eating his Rocky hot dog with his gloves on, and there is ketchup smeared on his nylon fingers.

“You know, guys who are poor, but they don’t know they’re poor,” Owen says. “They don’t have cars or houses or jobs or anything,
so they go around having adventures and camping out and stuff.”

I look through the trees and up the hill toward our house. It seems so far away, but I know it’s right there. I’ve left the porch light on. Inside, the house smells wintery-good, like the pine cleaner from my mother and the pine needles from our fresh-cut tree.

A few feet from the Christmas stockings, on top of a stack of bills on the sewing-machine table I use for a desk, is a legal-sized envelope addressed to me. The seal has been broken and there is a ten-page document inside. It looks harmless enough, but for all the destruction it contains, it might as well be a mail bomb.

It’s the official appraisal of our farm, and it arrived yesterday afternoon, Christmas Eve. According to the balding appraiser with the snow-ruined wing-tip shoes, our farmhouse, outbuildings, and land are worth $312,800.

“Mom, is that really what a hobo is?” Luke asks.

Nope, I think, there’s actually a little more to it than that. Because you can be a mother who lives in a house that’s apparently worth a small fortune, but if you still can’t offer your sons anything better than hot dogs for Christmas dinner, that can qualify you as a kind of hobo, too. Or at least make you feel like one.

But of course I can’t say this to Luke.

“Yeah,” I tell him instead. “Pretty much.”

Two weeks after Christmas, it begins. It’s late on a Monday morning and it starts with an ache buried real deep, somewhere along the axis that runs down my neck and in between my shoulder blades. In hours every muscle in my body feels worked over by the wrong end of a claw hammer. By the time Owen and Luke get home from school, just before four o’clock, I’m upstairs in my bedroom, in bed, fully clothed, shivering and sweating, under a wool comforter. I’ve slept most of the day and I’m still exhausted.

The mortgage is two months overdue, but work is going to be missed, deadlines are going to be missed, assignments not turned in, invoices not sent.

“Watch TV,” I mumble to the kids from somewhere deep in my pillow. This command is a bigger clue to them that something
is amiss than the sight of me in bed in the middle of the day. They’ve seen me take a late-afternoon nap before, although not too often, but a directive that they turn on the idiot box in the afternoon on a school day? A Monday no less, just a couple of weeks after their holiday break with homework assignments galore? Pure craziness.

The boys are not allowed to watch television or play video games during the week. When they were babies, they didn’t sit in front of any screens, at all, ever, not a one of them. We owned one television set, but it was stored on the floor in the closet. Reception never has been too good in there, which was exactly the point.

I wanted my sons to do what I did as a kid—read books, climb trees, build forts, play kick-the-can, and skin their knees sliding into second—not spend their childhoods in front of a screen.

Our TV was eventually dusted off and brought out into the open for one reason and one reason only: so that I could watch football. (If I’m ever given one of those questionnaires that ask me to reveal something about myself that few people know, I’d put down “rabid Detroit Lions fan.” Someday we will be in the Super Bowl. And win.)

After football season, the idiot box stayed out of the closet and was eventually hooked up to basic cable. Owen and Luke were in elementary school by then, and Will was in preschool, but the boys were allowed to watch only a limited amount of television (an hour per day), and even then only on the weekends.

So of course they are stunned when today I’m actually
telling
them to turn the thing on. Usually when they get home from school I’m prompting them toward, first, a snack, then their homework, then music practice, then their chores, then, if there’s
time, going out to play. If it’s bad weather, they can read a book, play a board game, bake with me, or do a craft project.

In their defense, when I tell them to go watch TV, they do seem a little worried about me; yet they still can’t believe their luck and waste no time thundering down the stairs, running into the family room, and body-slamming each other for the remote. Will won’t be home for another hour, so it’s just the two of them. I don’t actually see any of this activity, I only hear it, because I can’t move from the warm magnet that is my bed.

So what, I rationalize, as my eyelids begin to latch themselves shut again. So they’ll watch some
Dragon Ball Z
or
Captain Planet
for a couple of hours. Just this one time. How bad can that really be? I know they’ve watched these programs at their friends’ houses, and they don’t seem any worse for wear afterward.

But just as I’m about to fold back into my influenza coma, the sound of deviant stoner cartoon laughter filters upstairs and into my fading consciousness, now located in some distant land between my twin earaches. Through the mung I hear two TV voices chortle and then have an exchange along these lines:

“Uh, I have an injury. Huh-huh-huh.”

“You do? Heh-heh.”

“Yeah, I have this great big crack in my butt. Eh-heh-heh.”

My two older sons are fifteen and thirteen now. And their virgin ears have just been breached by MTV’s couch-sitting anti-heroes, Beavis and Butt-head. Or, if you prefer, “Ass-munch” and “Bung-hole.” Help me, Jesus.

I don’t have the energy to halt this or even comment on it, and after I register what they’re watching, I fall back asleep. Was this objectionable program still on the TV when Will, who turned nine right after Christmas, came home an hour later? Who knows.

Did I fix them any dinner? Probably not, and the next several days pass with me in feverish suspension, not awake but not asleep, either. What do they eat? How do they get ready for school? Who helps them with their homework? I don’t know.

I have one memory of standing at the front window in sweatpants, watching Will stand at the bus stop, in the dark, in a snowstorm, alone. I see the bus slow to a stop, the light go on inside the bus as the hinged door opens, I see Will’s backlit form walking up the steps out of the swirling snow and into safety, and then I collapse on the couch for the rest of that day and maybe for the next one, too.

I know Will doesn’t miss a single hour of school the whole ten days I am sick, because he receives an award for being one of only two kids in his entire elementary school of more than three hundred students with perfect attendance. How did he manage this? How did his brothers? I don’t know.

By luck, the flu strikes when their father and I have switched weekends, and so the boys are here with me for two weeks straight. They bring glasses of water and juice upstairs and stand watch while I drink them. Owen makes me a cheese sandwich, which I can’t even think of eating, and Will brings me a sweaty handful of Fritos. He knows they are my favorite. In another life I could eat half a bag. I eat two, maybe three chips.

CNN must be on, because I hear recurring headlines that nauseate me further: if we are headed for a recession, Michigan will feel it earlier, deeper, and longer than the rest of the country; Ford is closing fourteen auto plants and cutting a quarter of its Michigan workforce; and mad cow disease is spreading through Canada, perhaps heading our way.

Is there such a thing as mad pig disease? I consider the last
shankburger from Rocky that I ate—was it too rare?—before I fall asleep again.

The flu bug keeps right on biting me through the weekend, unabated. I am too sick to even wonder what I’ve been infected with after that contaminated-meat headline fades. Later I will learn that I don’t have food poisoning, I have a virus. And I will eventually understand that virus’s probable ancestry when its spread becomes the medical story of the moment.

In September a teenage boy butchered pigs at a slaughterhouse in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, some ninety miles southwest and across Lake Michigan from my sweaty bedroom. I can see a bay of this very body of water out the window from the sickbed I’ve taken to. The Wisconsin pig slaughterer is stricken with a bad flu virus, later found to be unlike any ever before encountered by medical science—a mutation of the swine flu—and I’m pretty sure this microscopic freeloader migrated—yes, maybe even flew—its evil piggy self across the water and into what feels like every single one of my cells.

How is it that a bout with the flu can take me down so completely?

I can do pain. I’m actually the stuff of extended family legend where pain tolerance is concerned. After Will was born via emergency C-section, a nurse on duty in the maternity ward overlooked that teensy-weensy detail called an IV drip. For the first eight hours after surgery, my nervous system was flying commando. No fluids, no anti-inflammatories, no pain meds at all, not even a baby aspirin. It wasn’t until the nurse on duty
the day after
my surgery noticed that I didn’t have an IV and opened a drawer in the cabinet next to my bed and found my unused bag of new-mommy drugs inside that I knew something was amiss.

I just had my core sliced open from hip to hip, pain was to be expected, right? I just ground my teeth and bore it. I didn’t complain, I kept my dobbers up. But this flu is even worse than that and it is taking me down.

The boys keep me in fluids and Tylenol, bless their beating hearts, and somehow keep themselves fed, dressed, and in school. One night Will comes upstairs and reads me a chapter of the book I was reading to him before I got sick. The lost china rabbit is now in the care of a girl with a mean father and a bad cough.

Another night Luke stands at the foot of my bed and models the costume he made for history day at school. He is going as Albert Einstein, of course. He uses a fuzzy gray hat of mine for the hair and is wearing a white button-down shirt and the black dress pants he grew out of last year that I was saving to hand down to Will. I point at his naked ankles sticking out of his leather dress shoes. Apparently, even in January, one does not need socks to understand the structure of the universe. Einstein didn’t believe in time and it looks like he didn’t believe in socks, either.