Link Mardi - Bootstrapper : from broke to badass on a northern Michigan farm

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright 2013 by Mardi Jo Link

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Selected chapters in this work were previously published, in different form, in the following: Bear River Review (20082009), Bellingham Review (Spring 2009), Creative Nonfiction (Fall 2012), and Writing It Real (February 2009).

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Alfred A. Knopf: Excerpt from Mars and Her Children by Marge Piercy.
Copyright 1992 by Middlemarsh, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
Graywolf Press: Excerpt from Windchime from What Narcissism Means to Me by Tony Hoagland. Copyright 2003 by Tony Hoagland. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company: Excerpt from Another Night in the Ruins from Three Books by Galway Kinnell. Copyright 1993 by Galway Kinnell. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
Jennifer Michael Hecht: Excerpt from Chicken Pig from Funny by Jennifer Michael Hecht. University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Linda Parsons Marion: Excerpt from Home Fire from Home Fires: Poems by Linda Parsons Marion. Sows Ear Press, 1997. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Link, Mardi.
Bootstrapper / Mardi Jo Link.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-385-34967-3
1. Link, Mardi. 2. Link, MardiHomes and hauntsMichigan. I. Title.
HV28.L57A3 2013
630.92dc23 2012042425
[B]

Front-of-jacket photograph: Image Source / Getty Images
Jacket design by Kelly Blair

v3.1

TO THE HARDWORKING MEN OF THE BIG VALLEY ,

Owen, Luke, Will, and Pete

The thought gradually permeated Mr. Jeremiah Cobbs slow-moving mind that the bird perched by his side was a bird of very different feather from those to which he was accustomed Rebeccas eyes were like faiththe substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN , Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm

A perfectly bonny summer morning on the farm and Im just this side of plowed. Nobody likes a drunk farmer. Or rather, farmeress. Nobody likes a drunk farmeress. Nobody likes a drunk, soon-to-be divorced, in-debt, swollen-eyed, single-mother farmeress, because she simply cant get any work done this way.

It is almost July, the time of year when work piles up like cordwood. I should be weeding, I should be watering, I should be mucking out stalls, I should be turning the compost pile. Last nights honey moon is a waning moon today; time to sow root crops again. Beets, carrots, radishes, onions. So at the very least, I should be planting.

Instead, I grab another beer.

My physical safety behind the wheel of farm machinery is not in any jeopardy, because Im too broke to own a tractor. This place, at only six acres, is too small to justify one anyway. A blessing really, because right now I could harrow something. I could harrow something real good.

If I know anything I know this: no two states of being entice the unsuspecting female bystander with more money-for-jam-promise than farming and marriage. And I fell for both of them. Fell for them like Scarlett fell for Rhett and Tara, like Isak Dinesen fell for that big-game hunter and a farm in Africa, like Eve fell for the garden snake.

The serpent beguiled me, Eve admitted, and I did eat.

I hear you, sister. I took a big old bite out of that very same apple and look what it got me: debt, heartbreak, and perpetually ragged cuticles. The only thing growing here today is my livestock-sized thirst.

Through binoculars I watch my new neighbor, Mr. Wonderful, take out his trash. He lugs, jerks, drags, and kicks the floppy bags down his dirt driveway. His slipper tears a hole in one of them and a buffet of stink dribbles out.

My view of his activity is unobstructed for two reasons. One, because my farmhouse has a wraparound front porch, the kind that invites a long pull on a mid-morning beer, and two, because Mr. Wonderfuls driveway is dead ahead.

A week ago this man lived with me; now he lives right across the road from me. In this rural spot on a hill several miles outside of town where drivers are all going somewhere, or coming from somewhere, hes one of my only neighbors. Hes also the father of our three sons and my husband of more than nineteen years. We wont make it to twenty. Which is why hes now in binocular range.

Wonderful is not the name on his mailbox, of course, but it is the name my friends have bestowed upon him. A name my high-school English teacher taught us was a euphemism: a polite way to express something blunt or offensive. I have a euphemism living directly across the road. Walk to the end of my long driveway, turn right, sashay past a hedge of the now apocalyptically named Bridal Veil bushes, face the road, and there you arestaring at his chipped cement doorstep.

Depending upon your viewpoint, it is either good luck or an epic fail that the place was available for rent when I finally found my voice and said the word divorce.

Easier for the kids, he said.

Wont need a moving van, he said.

Okay, I said.

When you live out in the country and find you have arrived, through great fault of your own, at a footing so precarious you can barely communicate without cusswords, is having your soon-to-be-ex-husband and father of your three sons living across the road from you a good thing? Im still trying to figure that out. The beer may or may not be helping.

Do you think its been easy for me? hed shouted, his body ridged and jutting forward in a way that seemed to defy gravity. Waking up every goddamn morning next to Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm?

Perpetual good cheer, it turns out, can kill a marriage. And really, who knew?

What, I wondered, was there not to be cheerful about?

Ive wanted to live on a farm ever since I was a little girl and my upwardly mobile parents moved my brother and me from one apartment, duplex, and bi-level to the next, finally settling down for good in a ranch-style house in Country Estates. But real farms were where you had gardens. Real farms were where you had space. Best of all, real farms, and not subdivisions, were where you had horses.

I am a Sagittarius, of course, the zodiac sign that is half horse, half human, and we want what we want and we want it now. Its taken some doing, but I finally have an honest-to-God country estate of my own. Six precious acres, a mammoth garden, a red barn, and inside it, custom stalls for my two blessed horses.

We Sagittarians do indeed want what we want, and we do indeed want it now, but we are willing to work hard to get it. And anywhere you look around here, that is exactly what you see: work.