Flat Broke with Two Goats

by Jennifer McGaha

I did not yet know that I deserved better. I only knew that she did, and I had to get us out of there.

On the one hand, your husband beats you. On the other hand, you believe that is not who he really is and that, one day, your real husband—the kind and loving one you see in your mind—will emerge. On the one hand, you know you and your husband are having trouble paying your bills. On the other hand, you believe this is not actually a problem, that the money is there somewhere and your husband just needs to look harder to find it. And when the money doesn’t materialize, you are astounded, your fantasy world obliterated.

Our situation felt different, not a Thoreauvian quest so much as an exile of sorts, a banishment from mainstream society.

In my past life, I was impatient, high-strung, constantly flitting from one task to the next, but here, if I wanted hot water, I had to wait for a fire. If I wanted enough water pressure to take a shower, I had to wait for the dishwasher to finish running. If I needed to use the bathroom, I had to wait my turn. In fact, things were so serene here compared to the rest of the world that whenever I drove into town to the grocery store, I felt overwhelmed by the people and traffic.

Finally, I asked a farmer at our local market where I should get chickens. McMurray Hatchery, he told me, a mail-order company based in Iowa. It seemed like an awfully long way for a baby chick to travel. Plus, it seemed odd to begin our foray into local food by buying chickens from halfway across the country.

“Iowa?” I asked. “Are you sure?” He was sure.

I realized that if someone told me right then that I could go back ten years, have my old life back exactly as it was, a life where I never saw my husband, where our lives were always about becoming instead of being, I would have refused.

But it did seem to me that until this very moment, I had lacked an understanding of some fundamental truths that farm kids must have grown up knowing—how a buck or bull or boar will instinctively and aggressively pursue any ready-and-willing female. Knowing that might have made the rejections and betrayals I experienced in my young dating years a whole lot easier to take.

When you have gone through a sort of travesty of your own making, failure begins to feel like part of you. You get used to it. People around you expect you to fail, and you learn to expect it from yourself, to see it as almost comforting in its familiarity. You begin to believe you are destined to make a mess of things. But then there are those unexpected kindnesses, those moments when someone does something to make you believe that perhaps you are more than the sum of everything you have done wrong, that perhaps you are worth more than you think.

“You drive,” he said. “I’ll ride in the back with the possum.”

I realized that the waterfall I saw in front of me was not the exact waterfall I would see tomorrow.