Farm City Read online

  As Thanksgiving neared he perched on our back porch to sleep next to the laundry line, emitting enormous turkey poops as he slumbered. In the morning, when I went out to feed the chickens, he greeted me like a lover, his tail up and feathers puffed. Two months to Thanksgiving and it was looking like Harold’s end was going to be more of a mercy killing.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I stood in a circle of light. I wore a hastily thrown-on pair of shorts and mismatched flip-flops. It was September and 3 a.m. I had a rusty shovel in my hand. Over and over, I chanted, “Don’t.” Clang. “Kill.” Thud. “My.” Wump. “Ducks.” My chant was instructional but also moot, as the opossum I was beating had already killed a duck and a goose. Now he was going to die himself. He would take the lesson with him to hell.

  I had awoken to the sound of the ducks quacking their heads off in the pen in the garden. I dashed downstairs and saw two fallen forms and a pair of reflection-lit green eyes inside the pen. Two ducks hunkered together near the pen entrance, quacking urgently, trying to get out. Their brother and the goose lay in the straw, not moving. Behind them, now trapped, their murderer, the opossum. Bill, who had followed me downstairs, wordlessly handed me a shovel.

  Perhaps sensing a potentially painful situation, the opossum came at me and pushed his way out of the pen. I loathed how he moved—prehistoric, uncoordinated. His tail curled out behind him like a skeletal finger. I raised my shovel as he got closer and swung. With that one tap, he immediately fell into the grass. Lying there, he looked like a stuffed animal, or maybe a hairy taxidermied armadillo. One might have been tempted to think him deceased, but I knew the creature’s patented skill: playing possum. If I stopped, he would eventually creep away, living another day to kill more of my farm animals. My weapon continued clanging against the marsupial’s side.

  Bill scooped up the surviving ducks and carried them upstairs. From the kitchen, he mounted a spotlight he used for fixing cars to help me to dispatch the murderer. The light also lit up my fallen animals—the bright white of the duck’s feathers gleamed in the night. The goose slumped over in her cage, her neck broken.

  My neighbor Neruda came outside and handed me her gun. I abandoned my shovel and tried to remember how to fire it. The gun was small, a purse gun, really, about the size of a butane torch that fancy people use to caramelize the top of crème brûlée. I had shot guns before, in gun-safety class at the middle school in the hick town where I grew up.

  Neruda, in a fluffy pink terrycloth robe, shrugged and smiled in encouragement. Her daughter, Sophia, was asleep. Neruda must have needed the gun to feel safe in this neighborhood. That I could borrow a firearm like a cup of sugar sure felt neighborly. But in this case, it didn’t seem right. With one eye on the opossum playing dead, I passed the purse gun back to her.

  I picked up my weapon of choice again. If I were a movie gangster, I would’ve been the hit lady with a shovel in the back of my Cadillac. Channeling my rage, remembering the cuteness of my ducks, and the goose who would rest her head in my lap, I raised the shovel and came down on the opossum’s neck. After a few thrusts—and, I admit it, grunts—head separated from body. I had my bloody revenge.

  Somehow, this wasn’t quite what I had imagined when I decided to expand my farm enterprise.

  Only a few months ago, I had been signing for an air-hole-riddled box clutched by a mailman, anticipating liberation from the meat market. And now the mangled bodies of some members of the poultry package lay in a heap. How far I had fallen.

  I had once wanted to be a naturalist, so I had read all the nature-loving books—Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Sand County Almanac, even Barry Lopez’s Apologia, in which he describes tenderly burying roadkill. Now there was a headless opossum in my garden, and I was seriously contemplating putting his head on a spike and posting it in the garden as a warning to all other predators.

  Oakland’s city code section 6.04.260 reads: “It shall be the duty of all persons having dead animals upon premises . . . to bury the same under at least four feet packed earth cover.” If I didn’t want to bury the opossum, I was supposed to call animal control and pay them to take the animal away for cremation. Otherwise, I would be guilty of an infraction. Forget the law. Even in my full-blown rage, I could see that the magnanimous thing to do would be to bury him.

  Mr. Nguyen came outside smoking a cigarette and surveyed the damage. My yells had awoken him. Not that yells are uncommon in our neighborhood. There’s one neighbor who shouts at her boyfriends and smashes dishes on the street late in the night. There are the shopping-cart crazies who smoke crack and then stand in the street yelling at their ghosts. But this was the first time in my three years in GhostTown that I had added my voice to the choir.

  Mr. Nguyen clucked his tongue and shook his head when he saw the dead poultry. “Wow!” he said, gesturing at the opossum. I threw down my shovel. Mr. Nguyen picked up—no, cradled—the dead duck and gently set it out on the grass. He did the same with the goose. Then he disappeared back into his house with a wave.

  This act of tenderness strangely inflamed my rage against the opossum.

  Forget the spike. I would place the opossum in the middle of Martin Luther King Jr. Way, where he would be run over repeatedly. I shoveled him up.

  I walked toward the main street, the opossum balanced on the end of my shovel. For a moment, I had the illogical fear that he would come back to life. But no, no, the head was definitely separated from the body.

  Before I heaved the carcass into the street, I leaned against the bus stop to think. I felt jittery and wide awake. A few shadowy figures stood on the corner a few blocks away. What would they have thought had they looked my way: a perspiring white lady carrying a mangled corpse in a bloody shovel down MLK at three in the morning?

  The abandoned building across the street loomed. Graffiti writers had been up there recently; an infamous tagger, Logo, had made his mark on the tallest part of the building. A lone car bobbed down the interstate.

  The opossum must have lived there, in the slim greenbelt next to the highway. He eked out a living there on the margins, probably eating garbage and insects, nested up against the concrete. My ducks must have been a welcome snack for him, something fresh and delicious rather than the boring old garbage and grubs along the highway. Most likely this had been his first experience with a real farm animal. Like the junkyard dogs who killed Maude, this beast was just following instinct.

  With the death of Maude, and now the duck and goose, I saw what a gamble it is to raise something that you care about. But the paradox was, I had planned to kill them myself, to eat. The dogs, the headless opossum—they were not the biggest killers. I was. Compared to what I had planned to do—roast the goose, confit the ducks, and truss the turkey—this opossum was a small-time player.

  I tightened my grip on the shovel and looked down at the beast. His fur, I noticed, was a mixture of white and gray hairs. His paws were tiny and had sharp-looking claws. Small teeth peeked out from his mouth. His nose was pink, like that of a kitten.

  Caught up in protecting my babies, I realized, I had become a savage. I was a little shocked to see the wildness in myself. That I could lose myself in human rage and commit this act of savage hate—I hadn’t known I had it in me.

  A few blocks away I could see a flickering-candle memorial. Churches in GhostTown had started a program called Stop the Violence. Bobby had even erected an instructional sign: STOP KILLIN’ EACH OTHER. I suddenly felt very tired and sick of death.

  My anger turned into exhaustion, I tossed the mangled opossum into the garbage can next to the bus stop. Take that, I thought, and went back into the garden, where I buried the duck and the goose under the apple tree next to Maude. I returned to bed just as the sun came up, a murderer.

  A few weeks after the opossum incident, I went out to the garden to examine my watermelon. Yes, singular. The vines had unfurled throughout August and ran along the bed. Pale yellow flowers had come out. A watermelon must be visited by a p
ollinator eight times to ensure fertilization, so I had chastised my bees if I saw them working the cheap and easy fennel that chokes our parking strip. “Check out those melon flowers,” I had urged them.

  Deep in August, I had spied a swelling at the end of the vine. Just one. It had been a terribly cold Bay Area summer, and the rest of the plants were barren. Now the thing had ballooned, and its black stripes were beginning to show.

  As I admired my sole, soon-to-be-harvested watermelon Jack Chan walked through the garden gate with a tall white man. The man wore a sunhat and had a bushy white beard. He carried a spray-paint can in one hand and some iron rods in the other. Somehow I had come to think of Jack Chan as my Emerson—a man not concerned with ownership, perhaps a transcendentalist who enjoyed communing with nature. Maybe he came to our garden and enjoyed its appearance, smiled beneficently at the towhee, a sweet but territorial sparrow that had come to live in the garden, along with the hummingbirds and fritillary butterflies.

  Totally ignoring me, they began to mark property lines. I walked over to them.

  They were standing smack-dab in the middle of one of my raised beds, whacking an iron post into the dirt.

  “So, you’re—” I started.

  “Condos, right here. Three months,” Chan, master of few words, said, turning to me.

  “Oh,” I said. My Emerson bubble popped. Chan was simply a real estate developer.

  He smiled. “It looks great, thanks for cutting the weeds, but you will have to move it.”

  Then the white guy spray-painted the rod he had just placed, spritzing some of the leaves of my passion vine yellow.

  I looked around the garden. What about my prized watermelon? According to a directory of heritage seeds called The Seeds of Kokopelli, the Saskatchewan promised to be “pale green with dark stripes. The seeds are black. The fruits are ovoid with very sweet-tasting cream colored flesh.” Heirloom varietals often don’t ship long distances well, the book explained, which makes them difficult to find in stores. In the case of the Cream of Saskatchewan, it has an explosive gene—if the fruit is knocked, it will split open. This seemed unbelievably sexy. What store could stock an exploding watermelon? It was now poised to be the last thing we harvested from the lot.

  The empty duck pen lay near the blackberry bushes, where I had dismantled it after the opossum attack. Absurdly, I found myself relieved that the surviving ducks—they were living on the back stairs now—weren’t here to see this. Suddenly, all the plants and trees I had regarded with delight seemed like a burden. I would have to dig them up? All that horse manure and dirt we had struggled to bring here, we’d have to get rid of it all?

  I went upstairs, dread-filled, and watched Chan and his friend move around the lot casually, stepping in and out of beds, mindlessly crushing lettuces and herbs. They placed a total of four posts in the garden, sprayed them with yellow paint, and then left.

  The bulldozers would arrive and level everything. They might even excavate the graves of my various dead animals. Inspired, perhaps they would name the condos Rotten Poultry Townhomes.

  I heard Harold crying in the backyard. It’s really a barking noise—three short yips. Harold had begun regularly flying to our neighbor’s backyard, but he always had trouble getting back. After hours of dabbling, he would finally grow hungry and gobble and bark until I came to rescue him. This involved a ladder, a bucket, and furtive looks at my neighbor’s back door.

  I climbed up the ladder that I kept against the fence for just such instances. There he was, under the apple tree. Harold chirped and took a few steps in my direction. “Get your ass over here now,” I ordered.

  The woman of the house, a silent Vietnamese lady, came out at just this moment. She took in this ridiculous sight—me on the ladder, peeking over her fence and rebuking Harold the turkey—and flew into action.

  Within five seconds, she had grabbed Harold (faster than I could ever catch him) and passed him over the fence to my waiting arms. Harold pretended to be a regal creature, used to being carried in the arms of a beautiful young woman. But once he returned to our side, it was back to the same old routine: chicken shit, circling flies, and loneliness.

  I walked back to the lot. I saw that Chan and friend had posted NO TRESPASSING signs on the gate to the garden. Did that mean everyone? Or were these signs a directive to me, their resident squatter?

  I stood at the gate to the garden and peered in. The scarlet runner beans wound through the chain-link fence and were heavy with furry green beans. Huge squash rolled on vines. Malabar spinach, a heat-loving variety, twined up a trellis. Apples were ripening on the tree. Blood-red beet stems sprouted next to bushy basil plants. Eight varieties of tomatoes ripened in various beds. A stand of corn rustled in the corner. My presence, my influence, was evident all around me.

  Thoreau, my fellow squat farmer, eventually ceded his bean field to the woodchucks. I would soon have to cede my garden to an urban farmer’s most dreaded pest, the real estate developer.

  From my window I would be able to watch the rewilding before the destruction. The tomatoes would turn red, burst open, ooze down their seeds in a slurry. The carrots would swell and split, send out a flower stalk, become fibrous. Armies of slugs and snails would slide across the wooden beds, tuck into the soil, and reproduce deliriously. The corn, neglected and unharvested, would crumple into the earth.

  The Bermuda grass, my enemy, would creep over the whole lot in a ragged green mat. The oxalis would run rampant, and its flowers would light up the street with their lurid yellow. Eventually, fennel would sow itself in the raised beds. Then the boards would break apart. The propagation table would become covered with small sprouts, water glasses filling with rain. My garden would become feral, transforming back to what it had been three years earlier: a weed-choked, unloved, abandoned lot.

  Imagining this place doomed, I wondered, Why hadn’t I done more? Why hadn’t I subsisted off this piece of verdant land? Why hadn’t I sowed more, harvested more, given more to this piece of earth that I had grown to love?

  Nature had been so good to me. The sun shone down. The rains came—and when they didn’t, my socialist landlord paid the water bill. The worms and horses exuded nutrients. And the plants, which did all the work catching and using these gifts from nature, then produced a harvest. As a squat farmer, I had been a freeloader on many levels.

  And yet, by doing this work, wasn’t I simply repeating what humans have been doing for thousands of years? The seeds, these seeds that I had so carefully selected, were tangible proof of man’s culture, of my culture, a continuation of a line. Even in this ghetto squat lot, I was cultivating human history. Watermelons from Africa. Squash from the Americas. Potatoes with a history in Peru. Radishes native to Asia but domesticated in Egypt. All now growing here in Oakland.

  Standing near the fence, I realized that not only did I make the garden; it made me. I ate out of this place every day. I had become this garden—its air, water, soil. If I abandoned the lot, I would abandon myself. When Jack Chan told me no building—no permanent structures—only garden, did he realize that by building the soil, perhaps I was making something more permanent than he could have ever imagined?

  I stared at the red letters: NO TRESPASSING. What does a sign in GhostTown mean anyway? Just as much as my signs urging people not to pick the garlic. In this forsaken place, NO TRESPASSING is merely a suggestion, a doomed hope. It might even be an invitation. I looked around for Chan and his sidekick. Then I pulled down the signs. I pretended that I was the wind and threw them into the street, and they became another piece of garbage blowing around the neighborhood.

  CHAPTER NINE

  It was time to rob the bees.

  I walked out to the deck. The smell around the hives this time of year was both divine and fetid. Divine near the two top boxes, full of honey and pollen. The bees seal the cracks in the stacked boxes with a kind of yellow caulk called propolis—a sticky substance collected from tree sap and leaf buds—to keep o
ut ants, drafts, and moisture. In the brood box, the deeper container through which the bees enter the hive after a day of foraging, the queen quietly lays all the eggs for the colony. In the fall, her production slows. The colony spends cold nights huddled in a ball in order to keep one another, but mostly the queen, warm. The smell from these stacked boxes is ambrosial—earthy pine, beeswax, and sweetness.

  Not so sweet smelling is the quagmire of dead bees piled up outside the hive at the end of a season. During prime nectar-gathering time, up to one hundred bees a day die inside a nest, The ABC and XYZ of Bee Culture told me. The corpses are “carried away from the colony in the mandibles” of a caste of bees known as the undertakers, which recognize the dead by a chemical odor. It looked as if my undertaker bees just tossed the dead over the edge of the hive. Since it was on a deck in the middle of a city, the corpses didn’t gently rot into the soil or get blown away by the wind. They simply rotted on the hot roof—and the resultant reek was piercing.

  On a sunny October day, Bill and I stood on the deck, taking in these odors. After cracking the propolis caulk around the bee boxes, he hefted the uppermost box, or super, and I slipped the bee escape—a beekeeping tool that consists of a wooden box with a pattern of openings—underneath it.

  The bees in the now-sequestered honey super could leave through the bee escape’s little tunnels, but they couldn’t get back up. It would take about twenty-four hours for all the bees to empty out of the hive’s honey storehouse. Most commercial operations use blowers or noxious fumes to drive the bees out. The bee escape seemed less offensive, and sort of fun, like a practical joke played on the bees.