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  BEING POOR is a condition I’ve known all too well in my life. Don’t be fooled into thinking that when I was a child we grew our own food because we were part of some hipster sustainability movement. We did it because we were nearly destitute. Neither Larry nor Ruthanne had a college degree or, for much of their lives, any sort of dependable job. When I was eight, Larry, in addition to some occasional part-time work surveying land, started working as an EMT with the local ambulance crew, but it was a volunteer position. Three years later, he was elected county commissioner, but the pay was so poor that most of his colleagues were retirees who did it more as a hobby than anything else. Our family’s income was so low we regularly qualified for food stamps, although we never actually received them because my parents believed it was shameful to accept handouts from the government. If Larry and Ruthanne hadn’t been so adept at following a subsistence lifestyle (and wringing as much labor out of each child as possible), they would have had a hard time keeping us fed and paying the bills.

  As I learned about U.S. history in school, I empathized with those whose free labor helped build this country. It never fails to trouble my mind (and hurt my heart) to think that just over a hundred and fifty years ago in the so-called land of the free, people owned other people. The institution of chattel slavery in America was as horrific as it was unconscionable. Millions of Black Africans were kidnapped, packed into the cargo holds of ships, and taken to a foreign land where they were treated as property. All connections to their homelands, including language, customs, hairstyles, religion, culture—even the use of their birth names—were severed. Families were ripped apart. Women were raped. Malnutrition was commonplace. Punishment for even the most trivial offenses was often decided on a whim and included such atrocities as being boiled in oil or drawn and quartered. Meanwhile, those committing these human rights abuses did so with a clear conscience, as they believed they were the “superior race.” That dubious distinction allowed them to wantonly abuse Black people, who they often referred to, apparently with no sense of irony, as “uncivilized.”

  For Black slaves to survive such sustained trauma took an incredible amount of inner fortitude and day-to-day resourcefulness. Learning a different language (while being denied the ability to read) and navigating the ways of a strange new culture were matters of survival. From food and shelter to hair care and clothing, ingenuity was a skill passed from one generation of slaves to the next.

  I developed a similar resourcefulness at a very young age. I knew that if I ever wanted to spend any money on myself I’d have to make it on my own, and after being constantly teased at school about my homemade clothes, I became extremely motivated to do so. By the time I was nine years old, I was paying for all my clothes and shoes. I found a variety of ways to earn money. Soon after learning to thread a needle when I was five, I started crafting homemade dolls that I called “Wee Woods Wooleys.” Their design was simple, but the actual construction was time-consuming. I cut two circles of scrap cloth, stuffed them with a pinch of sheep’s wool, sewed them together to form a head and body, attached a pair of shoes made out of deer hide, applied another pinch of sheep’s wool to the top of the head to serve as hair, used recycled beads to make eyes and a mouth, and, as a final touch, added a triangular hat for male dolls or a head scarf for females. A cross between a hobbit, a troll, and a rag doll, these ugly yet cute ornaments proved to be great sellers at the local Christmas arts and crafts fair. I’d attach them to a small tree I’d cut from the mountain behind our house and sell them for two dollars apiece.

  After seeing a Smith & Hawken catalogue for the first time and noticing that dried flower wreaths were being sold for more than fifty dollars (and sometimes as much as a hundred!), I started a new business, which I called “Treasures of Field and Forest.” I picked as many wildflowers as I could find (and grew others that I couldn’t) and pressed them or hung them upside down until they’d dried. I even learned how to dehydrate roses with their blooms intact by baking them in silica sand. I arranged the pressed flowers on greeting cards I’d made and sealed them in place with clear contact paper, and I assembled the flowers I’d hung upside down into wreaths that closely resembled the ones I’d seen in Smith & Hawken. Stuffing the greeting cards into envelopes, I fanned them out on a table, and I displayed the wreaths on a large pegboard panel placed directly behind my card display. Using a small tackle box to store money in, I set up shop at crafts fairs in Troy and nearby Libby.

  For my next business venture, I focused on a product for which I knew there was almost limitless demand among my classmates: candy. I found a recipe for hard suckers that only required three basic ingredients (sugar, water, and corn syrup), and I ordered molds, colorings, flavorings, and wrappers via mail order with money I’d saved from previous sales. In my final two years of elementary school, I made a batch (approximately twenty suckers) every single day. I was able to produce more than twenty different flavors, which I sold to my classmates in quick hallway transactions between classes for a quarter apiece. Almost without fail, I’d sell out before lunch. Five dollars a day, twenty-five dollars a week, a hundred dollars a month—not bad for a ten-year-old. But the real payoff came at the end of the year when a local Christmas tree company would order a thousand tree-shaped suckers to give to their customers. The company placed this order three years in a row, and I always looked forward to the nice end-of-the-year bonus. Larry and Ruthanne were just as delighted by my moneymaking enterprises as I was, as the profits not only allowed me to buy my own clothes and shoes but also chip in for the occasional tank of gas and purchase gifts for them and Josh in my ongoing effort to win their love.

  I derived an equally profitable stream of income from the many natural resources we had at our disposal, although this revenue was inconsistent due to seasonal fluctuations. The raspberry canes we had on our property produced a tremendous amount of berries, far more than we could eat ourselves, so I would pick them and store them in our refrigerator in green pint-sized berry baskets salvaged from the grocery store. I painted “Raspberries for Sale” on a piece of plywood, attached it to another piece of plywood with a hinge to make a self-standing sign, and placed it at the end of our driveway. If no buyers came, I would turn the berries into jam, which I could then sell at the next craft fair.

  I could make even more money picking and selling huckleberries, which look like, but in my opinion taste better than, blueberries and appear in late July, August, and early September in the mountains of the Northwest. Gathering them was hard work. Larry, Ruthanne, Josh, and I would rise before dawn and take bumpy dirt roads high into the mountains in our blue Ford pickup. Arriving at one of our secret spots, each of us would grab a five-quart and ten-quart bucket and tie them to our waists with strips of cloth. As we headed into the woods, we would beat the empty buckets as if they were drums to scare off any bears. When we came to a patch of huckleberry bushes, we would move methodically from one bush to the next, our hands slowly filling our buckets, our eyes continually searching for more bushes ahead.

  As a small child, I dreaded the long days in the mountains, as my back grew sore and I got eaten alive by mosquitoes. I initially struggled to collect a single gallon of berries, but, motivated to improve my standing in my school’s social hierarchy by buying myself clothes and footwear that were actually in style, I was soon out-picking Josh and Ruthanne, bringing in as much as four gallons. However, none of us could match Larry’s frenetic five-gallon-per-day pace. We didn’t quite know how he did it. Before the dust our truck had kicked up on the washboard roads had even settled, he would have wandered out of earshot, and we wouldn’t see him until lunchtime. We eagerly anticipated his return because we weren’t allowed to take a break until he got back to the truck. After lunch, we’d store the berries we’d picked in a large cooler, head back up the mountain, and continue picking until dark. On good days, I could make more than a hundred dollars, and on exceptional ones as much as two hundred and fifty.

  As I grew old
er, I began to feel a connection to the mountains and the secret spots tucked within them where I found berries and a momentary respite from my life. In these high-altitude locations, where the air was even thinner than what I was used to, my thoughts seemed clearer. While I was picking, I would often imagine I was an indigenous person, gathering food for the winter. My previous fantasy about being a Bantu woman living in the Congo often returned. I imagined I was an only child, and my mother was ill or dead, and I had to dig up enough cassava to feed my entire family. These fantasies came easily, left just as quickly, and helped me get me through grueling thirteen-hour workdays while making my back and neck hurt a little less.

  Morels were similar to huckleberries in that they were a natural resource that could be sold for an enormous profit. I earned enough money gathering them to buy myself a $750 Pfaff sewing machine before I’d turned twelve. Josh and Ruthanne never showed much interest in this line of work, so it was usually just Larry and I who hunted for these elusive black and brown mushrooms. They tended to grow in areas that had been burned by forest fires the previous year, but, even armed with this knowledge, I still had a difficult time finding them because they were so well camouflaged amidst the ashes and dirt.

  During one excursion high in the mountains, Larry and I came to a spot where the narrow trail crossed a long precarious rock face. On the trail ahead of us, we saw a mountain goat, a creature known for its agility in steep terrain, but even it seemed to be choosing its steps with care.

  “If the mountain goats can get around it,” Larry said, “we can, too.”

  Hearing this did not reassure me. I was terrified. The footholds were no more than three or four inches wide, only big enough to place a foot if you set it down parallel to the mountain. The rocks were slick with water. There was a thousand-foot drop below. And I was carrying two five-gallon buckets half full of morels.

  “Just lean into the rock wall. You’ll be fine.” Larry forged ahead, and once he’d gotten past the most dangerous stretch, he stopped and turned around to face me. “You’d better not drop those buckets,” he yelled. “I’ll see you at the truck. If you’re not there by dark, I’m leaving without you.”

  He continued walking, and soon I couldn’t see him anymore. I had no idea how to get back to the truck in any other direction besides the one Larry had just gone. With daylight quickly fading, I had no choice but to move forward. The rock face offered few handholds to grab onto, but with each of my hands clutching the handle of a bucket it didn’t matter anyway. I leaned my chest against the rock wall and put one trembling foot in front of the other, tears streaming down my face. As I slid each foot forward, I dragged my body with it, doing my best to ignore the long drop below. In this painstaking fashion, I eventually made it past the treacherous rock face and onto more stable ground.

  While Larry may have taken it for granted that I’d make it, I never did. It was at this moment that I first wondered about the place I held in my parents’ hearts. Up until this point, I just assumed, as most children do, that my parents loved me without reservation, even if I wasn’t their favorite child. I wanted to believe that parental love was like gravity, a natural force that can’t be denied or debated. But if Larry was willing to gamble with my life as he’d just done, what did that say about his love for me? What was my life really worth to him? What would Ruthanne have said if she’d known what he’d done? For the entire ride home, I imagined myself slipping on the rocks, falling off the side of the mountain, and landing in a bloody and broken heap, with a trail of morels tracing my long, painful descent to the bottom.

  During another trip into the mountains around the same time, Larry shot a six-point bull elk but only succeeded in wounding it. His failure to kill the animal outright was a little surprising, as he was an expert hunter, the type who’s willing to smear himself with animal urine and dung to mask his scent, camouflage his face with paint, and tiptoe through the forest for hours on end. The six-point elk antlers, eight-point deer antlers, and mountain goat head displayed on our living room walls were testaments to his hunting expertise—as was the bear draped across the bed he shared with Ruthanne. He’d killed that bear with the bow he’d come to favor after shooting an animal with a rifle from several hundred yards away stopped feeling sporting. With archery season over and plenty of space left in our freezer for meat, he resorted to using a rifle on this excursion. After all, the Doležals didn’t eat store-bought meat. One elk could keep us in food for months, if not a whole year.

  Following the blood trail, we tracked the wounded animal until it was so weak it was forced to bed down in the snow. I happened to be in front when the bull suddenly stood up directly in front of me. It was standing broadside to me and I had a clear shot, but, awestruck by its majesty, I couldn’t bring myself to pull the trigger. I could hear the animal’s labored breathing and could tell that it was scared. I wanted the elk to break free and run away, which after a moment of hesitation it did. As punishment for my failure to shoot, Larry made me track the elk with him through the deep snow for what felt like another ten miles until the sun was going down and we’d come to a place where he was sure the animal would bed down for the night.

  Just as he’d predicted, when we returned in the morning, we found the same bull elk we’d tracked the day before, and Larry shot it. The elk was dead, but Larry wasn’t finished with the lesson he’d started giving me the day before. Handing me his rifle, he told me to shoot the elk in the head.

  That was the last time I ever hunted.

  Chapter Six

  Chicken Head Baseball & Huckleberry Stains

  MY CHILDHOOD WAS RIDDLED with corporal punishment. I got punished so frequently that I began to believe what the derogatory comments about my difficult birth, my obstinacy, and my “carnal nature” had always implied: that I was born evil and was destined to go to Hell. For me, sin lurked around every corner, and I could never predict its arrival.

  I was told one of the most disrespectful things you could do was laugh at the wrong time. In fifth grade, a classmate made a funny observation about our teacher in the middle of class, and I snickered. The appalled expression that came over the teacher’s face when he whipped around and confronted me made me laugh even harder. He kept telling me to stop, but the more insistent he grew, the funnier it was to me. He sent me to the principal’s office, where I was given a lecture about why being disruptive in class was so bad. The way he did it seemed so forced and fake it reignited my laughing fit. I got sent home from school, and Larry gave me a whooping three days in a row as punishment.

  I suppose my tendency to laugh at all the wrong moments sprung from some sort of social awkwardness. Because we lived halfway up a mountain and I was required to do so much work at home, I simply didn’t hang out with other kids my age very often. There was also an enormous gulf that lay between me and them, and its name was Christianity. By the time I got to junior high school, I felt like my classmates were engaging in the devil’s work whenever they played with their Ouija boards or snuck beers from their parents’ refrigerators, and that’s the last thing I needed in my life. Every time I hung out with them, I felt as if my very salvation was at risk.

  In seventh grade, the pressure I felt to conform to my classmates’ heathen ways became so intense I started researching homeschooling options for myself. Initially, Larry was not in favor of the idea. As a county commissioner, he felt it would reflect badly on him if I wasn’t enrolled in the local public school system, but I was determined to see my plan become a reality. After doing some research, I found Christian Liberty Academy Satellite Schools (CLASS), a private school in Indiana that allowed students to register and attend through the mail, but Larry insisted I finish the school year at the local junior high.

  Feeling increasingly disconnected from my classmates as well as from Larry and Ruthanne, the only person I could really relate to during this time was Josh, and it was in a very specific, very morbid, way. One of our many chores was looking after the chick
ens our family raised. It was a year-round job that encompassed their entire life cycle, starting when they were chicks and often ending when we ate them. Every single day, their eggs needed to be collected, their feed scattered, their water topped off.

  It’s become fashionable for people in cities to raise a backyard flock of chickens, but before they get into it, they’re only thinking about the payoff (eating the eggs) and not the often difficult and disgusting work that’s required to keep the birds healthy. Cleaning up manure that burns your nostrils with its ammonia-like odor, and having to bury the stiff bodies of dead chicks deep enough in the ground that other animals can’t dig them up and eat them, are just a few of the challenging aspects of poultry farming. I can’t tell you how many times I got pecked on my hands and arms by an overprotective hen as I was collecting eggs from her nest. All a hen had to do was turn her head toward me, and I’d flinch, a Pavlovian response I’d developed over time. Not unlike humans, chickens also possess an uncanny and lamentable ability to identify and pick on any bird in the flock that stands out in any way, a trait that always bothered me. If one chicken had a slight wound on its head or one of its feathers was sticking out, the other chickens would gang up on it.

  When one of our hens got a prolapsed vent, the rest of the chickens wouldn’t leave it alone. With reptilian bobs of their heads, they pecked at the increasingly bloody protrusion. The hen was in so much pain I decided that the most merciful option would be for me to end its life. Butchering was typically a man’s job, but neither Larry nor Josh was home at the time, so I took it upon myself to do it. I will never forget chasing after that hen, and taking it to the chopping block as its wings flapped wildly. The headless body twitched and writhed long after I’d used an axe to behead it. Following Ruthanne’s instructions not to let the hen go to waste, I prepared the body to be stored in the freezer for a future meal. Only after a bowl of chicken soup was set before me that evening did I discover that she’d used the hen to make our dinner. I nearly threw up on the table. I grew up eating chickens we’d raised from birth, but for first time in my life I thought burying this hen in the yard would have been a more humane conclusion to its life than eating it for dinner.