Shit Show

I don’t know what got me and my sisters talking about life at the A-frame. I was home in Kentucky last week visiting my family and we had just finished our standard meal — Old Hickory chopped mutton sandwiches, baked beans, slaw and chips. We were settled in Heather’s living room with our wine or beer, digesting our meal and half-way watching TV. Stacy and her husband, Lee and myself sat sunk into the couch. Mom’s wheelchair was pulled up to the coffee table where she could set her oversized glass of pink wine. Nick sat in a dining room chair posting furiously on Twitter and Heather stood in her coat with a cigarette at the sliding glass door, opened a half inch for the smoke. Her kids, Ethan and Summer sat in the recliners, quiet. I don’t know if the subject of horses or cows came up or what, but someone mentioned Heather’s horse, the one she got for Christmas in 1975.

“Remember when Heather saw that horse on Christmas morning,” I said to Stacy. “She stared at it for a minute and then asked Mom, ‘Where are the roller skates I asked for?’” 

“I still don’t know why Heather got a horse!” Stacy said. “I was the one who loved horses! I jumped on every horse I ever saw. I collected the statues and everything.” She was still mad about it.

“Stacy, you loved every animal,” Mom said. “I don’t know how many dogs and cats and whatnot you drug home to the A-frame. That mangy old cat with no teeth and the tip of its tail gone…” The A-frame sat right on the highway and Stacy always claimed she found stray animals on the road about to get run over.

“What was that horse’s name?” I asked.

“Stardust,” Heather said.

“That horse was mean as shit,” Stacy said.

“Is that the horse that foundered?” Nick asked. 

We all chimed in with, “Yes!” and “Can you believe that?” and “Animals never lasted long at the A-frame.”

“I knew Leslie was the one for me when I met her up in New York,” Nick said, looking up from his phone. “When we finished dinner one time, I said I was foundered and Leslie said, ‘Me too.’ She knew exactly what I was talking about.”

“I remember that time Stacy went up to feed him,” Heather said. “I was standing down at the A-frame looking up the hill and I saw her come flying out the barn door.” 

“I had just given him some feed,” Stacy said, “And when I turned around, he kicked me so hard, I flew up in the air and out the door. That little MF. I came back in cussing him and walloped him with the bucket.”

“Good thing you were meaner than that horse, Stacy,” Lee said.

I don’t know what possessed Grandmom and Grandad to buy fifteen acres of pasture land in Masonville, a few miles outside of Owensboro right before my freshman year in high school. I think my mom had a dream home in mind and the plan was for our new stepdad, Gardner, to build it for her. She fantasized about a cozy chalet on the rise with a tree-lined driveway sweeping down towards the road but what she got instead was a drafty mess with a wet, moldy basement and a slash of gravel mixed with mud cutting through the pasture down to the mailbox where we caught the bus. I’m sure she had some idyllic life in mind for her and Gardner and us girls. 

“Well, of course you and Stacy left me to the wolves when you went down to the river for the Regatta,” Heather started in on one of our favorite stories of that period. 

“You shouldn’t have answered the phone!” I said. This was my line every time. Stacy and I had decided we would get down to the party at the Ohio River come Hell or highwater. We couldn’t drag a nine-year-old kid with us.

“Y’all left me there and told me if Mom called to tell her you were up at the barn!” Heather said. “I yelled and yelled for you when she called.”

“I said, ‘You go and get Leslie right now, Heather.’” Mom said, leaning forward in her wheelchair. “And poor little Heather went to the back door yelling for you and then came back to the phone crying ‘They won’t come!’”

“I knew that plan wasn’t gonna work,” I said, then turning to Stacy, asking, “Remember I called one boyfriend to drive us down there so I could meet another boyfriend?”

“You all had been down there every night of the week and I told you that you were staying home that night,” Mom said, taking a big swig of wine. I didn’t say what I was thinking, “You guys are down there every night of the year.”

“Well, we didn’t want to,” I said to Mom. I realized I didn’t want Mom in on the pleasure of this story. She was the bad guy. “Then Mom and Gardner are the first thing we see when we get out of the car.”

“Remember the names we called them from the back seat all the way back to the A-frame?” Stacy asked. I had forgotten that part. We laughed in solidarity and I clinked my wine glass on her beer can.

“That was the one time Mom tried to ground us,” I said. “She said she was so disappointed and told me, “I trusted you,’ and I yelled back at her (and here I imitate my angry, gesticulating teenage self), “I’m fourteen! Don’t trust me!”

Mom thought moving us out to the middle of nowhere would keep Stacy and me from getting into the kinds of trouble that we had started finding in the old neighborhood. But leaving us unsupervised in the middle of a hay field was not working. Since Mom’s marriage to Gardner (we just called him The Goob), we were both growing progressively more rebellious and angry. In those days, we mostly took our anger out on one another, but that night we were in cahoots. And reliving the story with Stacy next to me on the sofa smoothed the rough surfaces of our memories. 

“Remember when the cows got loose and ended up down on the highway?” Heather asked.

“My god, yes,” Mom said. “Right in the middle of a snow storm…”

“I know, it was a snow day and we were home from school,” I said, overlapping her.

“Someone called to tell me the cows were loose on the highway…”

I added, … “and we had to go round them all up. So embarrassing.”

“And I slid and fell on the ice going down the driveway,” Mom said as if that were the unfortunate part of the story. We were the ones who had to show our faces at school the next day after having been seen on Hwy 231 trying to herd our cows back to the barn. 

“That was hilarious,” Stacy said, “Leslie and I laughed our asses off.” 

“Jerry was the one who wanted those cows but he was too cheap to put up a fence,” Mom said. Grandad was famously tight with his money, so this wasn’t a surprise. I guess it was Grandad who wanted to have the garden as well. And it was most likely his idea to plant and harvest tobacco. I hated all of it.

“Remember Grandad had to bring meat with him when he came out to the A-frame?” Heather asked. “He had to hold the meat out to the dogs when he was getting out of his truck so they wouldn’t bite him.” All dogs hated Grandad. He was too big and loud.

“Remember when your pet cow ended up on the dinner table?” I said to Heather. “You didn’t eat meat for a year.”

“Yeah, Bessie,” Heather said. We used to ride that cow. “When I found out they were going to take her to the slaughterhouse, I opened the gate and let her loose. They couldn’t find her for three days.” 

“The worst thing was Mr. Norris announcing to my whole class what a travesty our driveway was,” I said. My American Government teacher lived up the street and had described in detail the mud and gravel spilling off our property onto the main road. “He told the whole class that he was going to start a petition against our driveway. That was so humiliating.”

All the feelings from that time were creeping back to me.

“No, the worst thing was that cow who went around with a big sac hanging from her back end for three or four days,” Heather said.

“Ew, I don’t remember that! I must have moved to Grandmom’s by then,” I said.

“Yeah, the vet finally had to come out. He put his arm up way up inside her, and had to wrap a chain around the calf to pull it out.” Those cows. They would just break your heart. Why wasn’t someone keeping an eye on them? 

“How horrifying. That poor cow,” I said. Mom didn’t hear this, and continued talking merrily to the others in the room about how many times she had to call the vet while we lived at the A-frame. One of our dogs got tangled up in the barbed wire fence and died hanging there. And that poor heifer had to walk around for three days trying to give birth, and no adults noticed or tried to help her? No wonder we remembered that time as so scary and confusing.

“God, what a shit show that was,” I said under my breath to Stacy. “That was just complete chaos, wasn’t it?” When Stacy’s face scrunched up, red with silent laughter, I started laughing too and added, “Shouldn’t someone have been in charge out there?” 

Stacy wiped her eyes and shook her head. Only she could have understood what I meant. She turned her head so Mom couldn’t see and said, “No one was in charge of anything.”