26
OF THE MILLIONS of Angry Women who would eventually come to know and love Yesteryear Ranch, many of them would believe—and argue, and debate, and insist—that they had been there from the very start. That I created the account the day we signed the papers for the ranch, and that they—my beloved disciples, my furious little women—had been there for every single moment of the journey.
In a very simple sense, they were correct. I did create the account the day we signed for the ranch, and if a very simple person—and it seems many of my followers were very simple people—were to skim along the first pictures of my account, hopping from happy caption to happy caption, they might make the assumption that they were witnessing the foundation-setting of an empire. The brick-by-brick creation of a true American dream!
The only problem with that assumption would be the dates. Meaning: I shared a mere six pictures over the course of the first three years. Six images, six moments, were captured out of the millions that took place. Which is by design, I suppose. No one wants to learn life lessons or buy pie crusts from a woman who’s near-constantly covered in another animal’s shit.
—
Picture 1
There I am, rosy-cheeked in overalls, standing in front of the big red barn with Clementine, who is about to turn one year old. Clementine has an expression of grim determination on her face. I am young and beautiful and
smiling ear to ear.
Caption: Surprise! We bought a farm.
—
The day of the inspection, we flew into Sun Valley and drove three hours out to the ranch. Caleb insisted on renting a pickup truck, “just to get used to country life.” I rolled my eyes but said nothing, just stood there in my little closing-day outfit—navy blue prairie dress, heeled boots, a brand-new overcoat, all purchased after Doug’s deposit reached our checking account— and smiled at the parking garage attendants while Caleb pointed at the biggest, most unreasonable truck in the rental parking lot. “But we only have a twenty-minute drive,” I said as cheerily as I could manage—an argument that failed to sway my husband from his selection, and also incidentally turned out not to be true.
Initially, back at the Mills estate, I had looked up the distance from my mother’s house to the driveway entrance of Yesteryear and saw it was twenty miles. Utterly manageable, I thought, except I hadn’t accounted for all the lovely little details of rural life that would stretch those twenty miles into a marathon drive: the cattle pass grates, the winding mountain roads, the industrial-size tractors that motored along at five miles an hour in the middle of the road. Those three hours felt longer than the entirety of our twelve-hour road trip from Idaho to California, because my once-quiet husband was now fully incapable of shutting up. He talked nonstop about soil acidity and tractor options, the benefits of growing garlic versus buying it at the store, why raw milk was so much safer than pasteurized. At one point he glanced
out the side of the driver window and said, “See that?”
I gazed out at the mountains. “See what?”
“Nothing,” he said. “No chemtrails overhead.” As he set down the soda, burped, and rolled into a long monologue about how we should file right away for dark sky protections, I reminded myself to set screen limits for my husband when we got home. He’d been spending too much time on YouTube these days. He was starting to sound like a hick.
Eventually we finally turned off the highway and down the long dirt road that would become our long dirt road, and my mood brightened considerably.
For another five minutes, we rolled along bumpily beneath the trees in silence. Then we turned the final corner and climbed up and over the hill, and
— Oh.
The truck came to a stop by the barn. Caleb threw the car into park and said, “Damn.”
Breathtaking. It was breathtaking. The barn, the mountains, the house. All of it was so much more beautiful in three dimensions than I could’ve possibly imagined when I saw it online. Dead center in this tableau was one of my mother’s real-estate agent friends, who was standing by the porch stairs, nearly hopping with excitement to meet us. This was undoubtedly the biggest commission of her life.
A minute later, Caleb took that infamous first picture of me and Clementine. We’d upgraded our flip phones to smartphones recently; Caleb had downloaded social media apps for both of us. “This is how people share information now,” he had said, insisting I should create an account too, but all I saw on my feed once I did were bags and wine bottles and bright white teeth.
The picture would, on that first day, receive four likes in total from the
four people who followed me: my sister, my mother, my mother-in-law, and Caleb. I didn’t care. In fact it would be several years before I realized that the laws of social media were the same as the laws of physics, equal parts invisible and accumulative in their power. Like the scientists who first discovered the atom: How could they have possibly known that the identification of something so small, so elemental, could one day lead to the nuclear bomb?
—
Picture 2 A landscape portrait of the rolling, snow-covered hills of Yesteryear.
Blinding, untouched white, beneath a divinely blue sky.
Caption: there’s a season for everything.
—
During our inspection we learned about an infestation of black mold that had taken over one of the bathrooms in the house. I thought of that poor old man, who had been unknowingly breathing in the spores, and his son with the cancer. Very sad. Then I realized that dealing with the mold meant more time at Doug and Amelia’s house, so I said, “Can’t we just take our chances?”
Caleb gave me a look. “Clementine could develop asthma.”
“Plenty of people have asthma and go on to live perfectly full lives!”
Caleb didn’t buy that, and so we waited while the house was chemically treated, and they kept finding more mold—“There are so many black clouds, it almost looks like a fairy-tale curse,” the contractor said cheerfully—and before we knew it, another set of seasons passed with my in-laws. During that time, the strangest thing happened: my husband began waking up at the same
time as me. By five in the morning, as I was moving through my beauty routine, he would already be in front of his computer, scrolling through online chat forums about farming. It was shocking to witness such a sharp onset of ambition in a man previously defined by the lack thereof. Each morning, I thought, There’s no way this will last. And each new morning, it did.
Other things happened during that time period, too. I finished weaning Clementine from breastmilk, and she started eating solid foods. She took her first steps and said her first word. Mama. Then she said it again, more insistently, and then soon it was not so much a word as a chant, a royal demand that rang in my ears even when she was rooms away, fast asleep at naptime. Mamamamamamamamamamama— It seemed that Doug and Amelia were both experiencing changes of their own during that time period, too. At family dinner one night, Doug said he was planning on paying a consulting team to do some hush-hush research on the relative viability of a third presidential campaign. This seemed unremarkable to me—we were always talking about the proverbial campaign —but Caleb and Amelia both seemed to stiffen at the news. This meant, apparently, that it was actually happening. Another bid for president was now on the family horizon. “Excuse me,” Amelia said softly, and I watched in surprise as she left the table. Later, Caleb told me the last presidential campaign (which took place when he was in middle school) had been hard on their marriage. “She doesn’t like all the cameras and questions,” he said, which made me realize that attention, or too much of it, could become another form of clutter.
After that, I started finding pudding cups hidden in the trash beneath coffee filters and banana peels. I began to suspect Amelia was having her me time more than once a day. As for Doug, he was away more frequently,
appearing on the news as many times as the networks would have him. He came home one day looking permanently frightened, and when I asked him if he was all right, he paused, then leaned into me and said confidentially, “It’s just a little bit of Botox. The consultants said it would keep me looking youthful.” He hesitated, then asked gruffly, “Is it obvious?”
—
Picture 3 A photo carousel: a cardboard box of yolk-yellow chicks; one chick peering through Clementine’s cupped hands; a single black-and-white cow standing alone in the paddock by the barn, staring at the camera with an almost humanlike expression of confusion; Caleb, grinning and covered in dirt, leaning his arm on a shovel stuck in the dirt.
Caption: #farmlife #happyhubbie #chickens #cows #blessed
—
From the first time Caleb suggested it, I told him it was a stupid idea. There was no reason to get farm animals so soon. But he did it anyway: he ordered a shipment of chicks, a dairy cow, and two packages of exotic vegetable seeds to arrive a day after we moved onto the farm.
Clementine was almost three years old by this point, and still an only child. No longer a baby at all but a toddler. I’d never been around just one child before. There was an intensity to our time together that I found exhausting and unnerving even when it was going well. I was desperate for more children, not just because of my agreement with Doug but also because I was certain the arrival of another child would have an alleviating effect on my relationship with the one I already had. Both of us, I think, were
frequently exhausted from being the recipient of so much focus from the other.
The day the chicks arrived, I picked one up and placed it into Clementine’s hands. The chick began to squeak wildly, like a little ambulance siren, PEEP PEEP PEEP PEEP— “He’s afraid,” she said. Just a moment ago, it seemed, she had said Mama for the first time, and already she was speaking almost exclusively in short sentences, ones that always felt like declarations of her mother’s failure. I’m hungry. You’re mad. He’s afraid.
“Hold on,” I commanded. She kept perfectly still as I took the picture, her face frozen in somberness, then she set him down on the floor. The chick waddle-sprinted back to the cluster of other chicks. Clementine stood back up and held out her hand, a small yellow-white dollop of excrement on her palm.
She looked at it for a long moment, then she stepped forward and wiped it on the thigh of my jeans.
—
All the chicks died shortly after arrival. Whatever killed them caused their bodies to bloat like little tennis balls. We tossed them. Then the dairy cow’s udders grew swollen and infected, and soon she was banging her head against the barn wall in a terrifying staccato rhythm, thud, thud, thud—out of boredom, Caleb thought. But how to entertain a cow?
“Look it up,” I said.
By that time, though, the online forum filled with experienced farmers was no longer receptive to Caleb’s questions. While the men had been helpful at first, eagerly answering Caleb’s questions, they’d recently grown angry, telling him he shouldn’t have gotten a dairy cow, that he should sell the cow immediately and get some certifications first. What was he thinking, they
asked. Did he really think he could do this overnight?
And so he went on another forum, this one titled DIY Farmers. The men were much nicer there.
—
“Mastitis!” Caleb said triumphantly, five days into the head-banging issue.
“She has all the symptoms of mastitis!”
“Great,” I said. “What’s mastitis?”
—
The cow died a month later. We stood over her body in the barn. I looked at Caleb. “What do farmers do with dead cows?”
—
They burn them. Or bury them in compost. Or call someone to pick up the body and take it to a facility where it can be processed into fertilizer, but only if there are no transmissible diseases, and even then, you should be careful, because too many calls for too many dead cows can lead to a formal investigation.
—
Caleb drove an hour to the Home Depot in town and paid three Mexican men to hop into the bed of his truck and help him drag the body out to a field. I watched from the kitchen window as the flames licked the sky. The bonfire smelled terrible.
—
Later that day, when the men were loitering by the truck, smoking cigarettes and waiting for Caleb to drive them back to town, I said to him, “I think it’s
time to hire some workers, don’t you?”
He looked reluctant. “I guess so.”
“And,” I added, “I think it’s also time for something else.”
“What? Dinner?”
I raised my eyebrows, which was intended to give the appearance of flirtation, but just made him look further alarmed. “What? What is it? Are you sick or something?”
—
That night we had three minutes of close-lipped missionary sex. The next morning, a new dairy cow arrived at the farm. We would never actually see the wolves, but we heard them howling all the time.
—
Picture 4 The photo: Caleb and Clementine and me, standing alongside his parents and his brothers and their families onstage at an election-night party in Salt Lake City, confetti frozen in the air around our faces.
Caption: Proud to be an American!
—
The night Doug won his eighth Senate reelection campaign, one of Caleb’s older brothers, David, found Amelia passed out in Doug’s dressing room, her
pink pantsuit splattered with chocolate-colored vomit.
“Jesus Christ,” George, another brother, said from the doorway, while David checked her wrist for a pulse. He gagged, then said, “Is that shit?”
“It’s pudding,” I said, and George said, “Thank God,” right as David said, “She’s breathing!”
—
I stood with Clementine in the hallway between the dressing room and the stage, watching the brothers hand out NDAs to the paramedics before they could step inside.
As they took Amelia away on a stretcher, her gaze drifted foggily toward me and Clementine. She muttered something at us, but it couldn’t be heard beneath her oxygen mask. “Say bye-bye to Grammy,” I instructed, and Clementine waved bye-bye, right as Doug’s voice boomed through the auditorium hallways. “At this very moment, my youngest son is working day and night to revitalize a working meat and dairy farm in southwest Idaho.” (Vegetables, I thought. Not meat. Caleb would be so disappointed.) “He could’ve been anything, my son, but he chose to get his hands dirty like a real American—and you know what? I couldn’t be prouder of him!”
“Do you hear that?” I told Clementine, over the waves of polite applause.
“Grandpa’s trying to be electable. Can you say electable?”
“Electable,” she repeated, in a tone I could only describe as bored, and we both fell silent.
—
Picture 5 The photo: Caleb and I in the fields at sunset, kissing, him dipping me
low.
The caption: I always wanted my very own cowboy.
—
“Let’s have sex,” I said one night.
Caleb gave my vagina a long, skeptical look. “Is it safe?”
“Of course it is. This is what we’re designed to do.”
“But what about—”
“For the last time: That wasn’t a miscarriage! It was just a heavy period!”
This is what my mother had encouraged me to tell Caleb a month earlier, after he walked into the bathroom to find me sobbing wildly, my hands and thighs covered in blood. We’d been trying to have another baby for more than two years now. The panic I felt about this situation was indescribable.
I tried my best to give a sexy look, but Caleb seemed put off by the expression on my face, so I dropped the put-on and said, like always: “You promised.”
—
I massaged Caleb’s penis for ten minutes, squeezing and twisting slowly at the base of the shaft with one hand and milking the tip with the other.
Usually, this worked to get him erect enough for us to have sex. Tonight, though, nothing came of my efforts. Each time I glanced back up at Caleb’s face, his eyes were closed and scrunched up, his mouth in a sort of grimace, so that I couldn’t tell if he was trying hard himself to get into the mood, or waiting for me to give up.
Finally I sat back, letting his penis flop away like a slinky. “What is it?”
“It’s nothing. I’m just exhausted.” He did look exhausted. He was
working hard. Up at sunrise, outside all day long, then at the computer for hours each night. But wasn’t this, too, an essential part of being a husband? A relentless, almost mechanical drive to repeatedly impregnate your wife?
“But I’m ovulating. If we don’t have sex now, we’ll have to wait another month.”
“Shouldn’t we just leave this up to the Lord?”
He’d said this once before, several months earlier, after someone on one of his forums suggested it was blasphemy for women to track their menstruation in such a fashion. These things should be left up to the Lord, full stop. Now I cut him off before he could start on that tangent again. “The Lord wants us to try, Caleb. He wants us to care.”
He didn’t respond. His eyes were closed now. A second later, he was making soft little sleep snuffles. Even his penis seemed to be dead asleep and snoring against the bed of his thigh. Infuriating. I thought of what he said to me on the day of our wedding—I can’t wait to taste you—and then I thought of the horrible graphics I’d seen on his computer screen—Intense kissing leads to squirting orgasm!!!!—and I swallowed the urge to crack a lampshade over his head.
Instead, I got out of bed and went to the kitchen, then came back into the bedroom with a cereal bowl and dropped it onto Caleb’s stomach, startling
him awake.
“Wha? What’s this?”
“I don’t care how you get it done. Just get it done.”
“But—”
“You promised.”
Caleb was silent for a long time. Then he got out of bed.
—
Five minutes later, he came out of the bathroom and handed me the bowl.
“Thank you,” I said. “Now go to sleep.”
In the kitchen, I set the bowl on the counter then pulled a sauce baster out of the drawer.
—
Picture 6 The picture: Me, five months pregnant, with Clementine on my hip.
The caption: God bless this growing family!