A Growing Season

Six months after the fire, the workmen started digging while Terri was in the chicken house culling for birds that didn't live through the night. When she finished and walked back up the dusty lane, she found the landscape of her farm on the Eastern Shore had changed yet again.

Seeing the hole for the new house did not make her sad. Nor did it fill her with optimism, as some neighbors and townspeople in Hurlock had assumed it would. What Terri Wolf felt was hope peeking through sorrow.

The builder had asked what kind of house she wanted, and she wasn't trying to be glib when she said: "I want what I had."

She needed only to point across the two-lane road to show what she meant: an old white farmhouse with a wide porch and big windows. Hers, too, had stood tall, amid barley and corn. Every room had offered a view, and to Terri and her family it seemed as if they could see whatever was headed their way: the school bus from Federalsburg, railroad cars from Hurlock, feed trucks from the granary bound for their farm.

But they had not seen everything coming.

It was not so much the house Terri wanted back as it was the life she'd known inside it. Before the fire and its cruel choices. When her husband Ray and her son Cody were still alive. She could not imagine now how any house could cover such a hole.

Morning became afternoon as Terri stood transfixed, and the summer sun burned her face. At 35, she looked younger than her age. Strangers assumed she and 16-year-old Jamie were sisters instead of mother and daughter. They shared fair skin that freckled, eyes that could appear blue or green, and a hesitance to reveal their feelings.

The children milled around the site, as absorbed as their mother by the construction. Landon, who was 7, longed to ride in the backhoe. Nathan, at 12, wanted to drive the truck that dumped the dirt behind the chicken houses. Even Jamie put down her book to watch the men dig.

All day, they stayed near the hole. Only at lunchtime did they tear themselves away and go inside their trailer. It had been their home since soon after the December fire, but none of them liked to spend time there. Its hitch and wheels reminded them that their lives were not as stable or secure as they had once been.

When the men, at last, had gone for the day, Terri and the kids wandered around the hole, breathing in the smell of fresh dirt and a new beginning.

Rain fell during the night. Heavy drops flooded the hole and pounded the roof of the trailer, waking Terri.

In the morning she dumped the rain gauge and was not surprised to see more than a half-inch had fallen. She wore blue-jean shorts, a T-shirt, and an old pair of boots as she stepped around puddles on her way to the chicken houses.

The morning ritual of checking on the birds gave shape to days that felt shapeless after the fire. When the worst moments of that night, last Dec. 22nd, appeared in her mind, she chased them away. She told her mother were it not for 54,000 biddies and three children, she wouldn't get out of bed.

Terri passed the grain tanks on her way to the back side of the farm.

Nearing the two chicken houses, 500 feet long and as narrow as train cars, she could hear the cheep-cheep-cheeping of the boisterous chicks.

They had arrived 10 days ago, hours old. Perdue Farms Inc. would return in five weeks to take them to a processing plant, and later Terri would be judged against other growers: How much grain did she use? How much water? How many birds lived? How much did they weigh? The most efficient farmer was paid the most, and the last three flocks Ray raised had finished first.

The job of a contract chicken farmer came naturally to Ray, though growing up in Ohio he had worked with cattle. Terri was raised on an Eastern Shore farm in Ridgely, with cattle and hogs, so she was still learning about chickens.

When she opened the wooden door of the first house, darkness enveloped her. She and Ray used to split this duty. He culled one house, she the other. They met in the pump house afterward and compared notes.

The houses were dimly lit to calm the birds, and stepping into the first house, Terri felt calmed, too. She checked the flock four times a day, and she liked the work because it gave her time to think.

Her job was to walk from one end of the building to the other, scanning the yellow tide of chicks that ran freely inside the house. The noise of the birds didn't bother her. Neither did the warm temperatures or the smell of ammonia in their waste.

In her wake, the chicks scattered. Terri's eyes followed them, looking for wings that didn't flap and legs that couldn't stand. She eyed chicks that limped or were small and weak. She found some struggling in a feeder. Others, she found already dead.

Alone in the pump house afterward, before she took the dead chicks to compost bins, Terri wrote the number she'd found on a daily log. The sound of the lines carrying feed, a metallic tick, tick, tick, was a reminder of other mouths to be fed.

Of all Terri's children, only Cody had wanted to farm. He had been Ray's shadow. They even looked alike, from the way they wore their baseball hats to the cowlicks over their foreheads. Cody was just 9 when he asked Ray, in the month before the fire, "How old do you have to be to have a chicken house?" She couldn't remember exactly how Ray had replied. Some questions, she had learned, are not easily answered.

Walking back to the trailer, Terri passed the garden. It was a fraction of what they used to tend -- watermelon, cantaloupes, tomatoes, cucumbers, sweet corn, green peppers, yellow squash -- when a produce stand by the road brought in extra money.

In past seasons, Jamie had watched the stand. Bored with her book one afternoon, she painted pictures of her family on a wooden sign. For herself, she drew a skinny ear of corn. For Nathan, a slice of watermelon; Cody a pepper; Landon a little tomato. Her sign on Route 307 wasn't as visible as the billboard photograph of the Wolfs, a Perdue advertisement depicting the ideal farm family, that hung over U.S 50 in Salisbury. Their six happy faces greeted beach traffic on the way to Ocean City.

Terri finished culling and returned to the front of the farm, where she saw the workmen had arrived and started digging footers for the new house just 30 feet from where the back porch of the old house had stood. When Landon saw the men, he ran inside the trailer to change into jeans. He wanted to ride in the backhoe.

The sight of her youngest son, his bare, lanky legs running up the cement steps, made Terri smile. Precocious Landon, he talked more freely about missing his father and brother than the other kids did.

On a walk to the pond one day, Landon had said, "Mom, I wish I was a fish."

"Why would you like to be a fish?" she'd asked.

"Fish don't have to worry about their house getting burnt down."

When she heard his answer, she'd tried to reassure him. "Yeah, but fish have other things to worry about. There's always going to be things that concern you or things you have to face in life. Always.

"Fish," she told him, "have to worry about other fish eating them or somebody coming in with their hook and line."

It was Landon who noticed it had rained on all the important days since the fire -- Valentine's Day, their wedding anniversary, and Mother's Day, too. His own birthday was coming in a few weeks, and he expected showers. He predicted the same for Nathan's birthday and the father-son deer hunt in November.

The way he saw things, the rain was really the tears of his father and brother falling through holes in the floor of heaven. He knew they missed him. The rain since the fire had ruined the strawberry crop, flooded the corn in the lowlands and pushed back the barley harvest.

Last night's rain had flooded the hole for the new house, but the water dried quickly and by mid-morning Landon was riding in the backhoe as the workmen continued to dig.

Everyone who came for Landon's birthday knew the farm well enough to come the back way, off Gravel Branch Road, through the corn fields Terri leased to a neighbor. The guests turned at the grain tanks and parked on the gravel beside the packing shed or directly in front of the shop.

The packing shed is a wooden vestige from the land's early days as a cantaloupe farm. More useful now is the barn-sized shop, where Ray worked on the combine they borrowed for harvest, repaired their tractor, and parked his pickup the last time.

Sometimes, coming back from the chicken houses, Terri stopped in the shop and sat in Ray's truck. The inside smelled familiar, and she liked to sit there, although the last time she did she thought his scent was beginning to fade.

Other days, Terri found her oldest son alone in the shop. Nathan is huskier than Landon. He has broad shoulders and his voice has started to deepen. He's the one who leaves big footprints in the sand floor of the packing shed.

Terri assumed he lingered in the shop because he wanted to be with his father's tools, his hunting gear, his bow and arrow. They were the only things of his father's to survive the fire.

Ray had made a big deal of family gatherings. The last birthday party they'd had was Cody's 9th, and it had been in the shop. The last Thanksgiving dinner had been there, too. So when Terri carried Landon's birthday cake from the trailer she felt wary, unsure what emotions would surface.

The day had begun under an overcast sky. By the time guests arrived, it began to drizzle off and on. While Landon blew out his candles and the family cut the cake, the rain fell so hard it rolled off the shop roof in a clear steady stream. Everyone said they were pleased to see the new house taking shape, though they ached for the life they'd known in the old.

The workmen had finished the footers, poured the cement floor of the basement, and the mason had laid concrete walls. Soon, they would install the joists that would support the first floor. In the shop, Landon's party went as well as Terri could have expected. By the time it ended, the rain had stopped. As guests were leaving, she saw the sun on the horizon, struggling to break through the clouds.

On the Monday after the party, the automated system Terri had installed after the fire to help her monitor conditions in the chicken houses rang an alarm.

This time when Terri opened the door she found dozens of chickens wet, agitated and bunched together to avoid a stream of water from a problem faucet. She spent the rest of the day shoveling wet manure. She and a neighbor took off their shoes and socks because they were soaked and worked barefoot.

In a week's time, her car had broken down on the way to a cookout at her brother's house, and she'd awakened to find ants crawling in the two cherry pies she had baked for her father. Now this. No wonder she felt depressed and overwhelmed.

On Wednesday, it was just before 10 p.m. when she returned from the final check on the birds. She didn't feel like going inside the trailer, where lights glowed through the picture window. So she walked around the construction site, sat on a pile of lumber, and then climbed down a metal ladder into the hole.

When she looked up at the cloudless sky, a thousand stars looked back.

Terri remembered nights when she and Ray sat outside after the final check, on the tailgate of his pickup or on the back steps of the porch, and admired the stars. He had found it amazing that all those stars had been there for hundreds of years guiding wanderers and explorers, and they were there still, to guide him and her.

When they met, Ray worked for Maryland Plastics and was staying temporarily at the Mariner Motor Lodge in Easton. Terri had gone to see a friend's country-and-western band in the hotel bar and Ray was there that night. Terri's friend bet her $10 she wouldn't ask the handsome, dark-haired stranger to dance.

She did, and they stayed up late talking, leaning against the hood of his Monte Carlo until sunrise. He proposed later that year after Christmas dinner at her grandparents' house. Terri was in the kitchen washing dishes when he called her back into the living room, saying "I have one more gift." He held her wet hands and, in front of the whole family, asked her to marry him.

Alone in the basement, Terri looked up and tried to imagine where things would go in the house that would rise up and someday cover this hole. The TV and couch, the refrigerator, sink and stove. Where would she put the kids? Which bedroom would be hers?

They had fallen in love with the old house the night they first saw it, and they had the farm named before the bank approved the loan. The inspiration came one day while they were in the pickup. Ray was driving and Terri was flipping through the concordance of her Bible. She first suggested "The Mustard Seed Farm" from the passage about how a man with a little faith can move mountains, but later she said "Cornerstone," from another passage, and Ray declared it perfect.

And for Terri, their life together had been perfect.

She climbed up the ladder, out of the hole and into the starry night. The mosquitoes were bothering her, and she'd had all the longing she could take.

Corn sprouted tassels; soybeans were planted in the place of barley; tomatoes ripened on the vine. On Cornerstone Farm, the growing season progressed.

Workmen laid the block foundation for the porch and garage, nailed plywood for the first floor, and for many days kept Terri wondering what it was they were doing -- hammering, sawing, and banging around -- until they lifted and set the walls into place.

As the house grew, so did the flock. The chicks lost their fuzzy yellow feathers and grew coarse white ones in their place. On the heads of the males appeared the first hints of red combs. And in time, the farmer's widow learned that of all the difficulties she faced, her work was not chief among them.

Her mother and father bought a lot nearby on Gravel Branch Road and helped when chores overwhelmed her. So did neighbors. Friends from her church, First Baptist Church Hurlock, pitched in before she had time to ask.

Dozens of people sent checks, clothing, shoes, coats and furniture when news of the fire spread west over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and across Maryland.

The family had lost nearly everything: The antique oak desk she and Ray stayed late at an auction to buy. The cherry bedroom suite handed down from her grandmother. The school pictures hanging beside the stairs. Even Cody's miniature tractor-trailer collection. All of it had burned or melted.

Farmers came with trucks, loaders and excavators to clean up, and their wives brought soup and sandwiches. They filled in the hole left by the first house, leveled the yard, and put in a septic tank for the trailer. When Terri said the only photos she had were those found floating in a cedar chest in the basement, friends and neighbors gave her theirs.

In the trailer, the kids talked about things that happened as "before the fire" or "after." Even the pages of the John Deere calendar on the door turned at an entirely different pace now.

Before the fire, the kids had played Wiffle ball in the grass and done simple things, always together, and with Skeeter their mutt running behind them. After the fire, well-meaning people carted Jamie and the boys to fairs, carnivals and Friday night races in an effort to make them happy.

Some people told Terri that time would heal her wounds, but they were wrong. Time only made her miss Ray and Cody more. She tried to return to the activities that had made up their life, but most just reminded her of what she already knew: Ray and Cody were gone.

At Vacation Bible School, she volunteered to help with crafts. It was her job to prepare felt circles that would be sewn into pouches for a lesson on the story of Jesus chasing the money changers from the temple. Terri wrote each child's initials on the back of a circle, one after another, until she came to a boy who shared Cody's. Only later did Terri break down. Outside in the parking lot, the pastor's wife hugged her for a long time. The children who wandered out stared at the two. No one expected them to understand how a C and a W could make a grown woman cry.

The night of the fire, they had gone to bed early.

Perdue had come for the flock the week before, so there were no birds to check on. Jamie had switched shifts with another teen-age waitress at the Pizza Palace in Hurlock, so neither Ray nor Terri had to stay awake to pick her up at 11.

By 10:15 p.m., the house was dark.

Outside, the temperature dropped to 10 degrees, and a wind from the south blew snow over the tracks made when Ray hitched the boys' sleds to the tractor and pulled them around the farm that afternoon.

Inside, the Christmas tree in the living room was unplugged. The advent candles on the coffee table had been blown out. Stockings hung from the mantle beneath Styrofoam snowmen the children had made. Only the faint rays of the stars and the moon lit the house.

Upstairs, in their bedroom, Ray awoke with a start. Terri sat up in bed and smelled smoke.

The fire marshal would tell her later that the flames started underneath a corner of the back porch where a wire had shorted. It crept up the wooden studs inside the walls of the old house and burned for a few hours before it broke through the roof. By the time the couple awoke, they had only minutes to escape.

Terri could hear Ray, downstairs, hollering: "The house is on fire!" She ran into the bedroom next door and tried to wake Landon and Cody. They were limp and unresponsive, so she dragged them from their beds. In the hall, the smoke was thick and dark, but Terri could make out Nathan. She pointed to her bedroom.

Her eyes burned. She felt light-headed. The smoke was so thick she dropped to her knees and dragged the two youngest boys toward the window, where she could see the security light outside the packing shed.

At the window, Nathan looked confused. Terri let go of Cody and Landon, opened the window and pushed Nathan onto the roof of the back porch. When she turned to get the others, she groped through the black smoke until she found one. It was Landon. She propped him on the window sill and when he didn't move, she dragged him out.

Terri held her breath and went back to find Cody but the smoke blocked her way. She felt herself passing out. She couldn't breathe.

Outside, Ray hollered for them to come down the ladder he had dragged to the back side of the house. He must have gotten Jamie out; Terri could see her on the ground beside him.

I can't find Cody, she told Ray. And when he insisted she climb down from the porch roof, she did.

There were no last words between them. Ray climbed up the ladder and into the burning house. Terri knew he wouldn't be able to live with himself unless he went in after Cody.

Though it was only a few minutes until the firefighters and their engines arrived, time for Terri had stopped. The fire roared from every window. Flames seemed to leap across the road. The night sky clouded with smoke. The porch broke and fell off, then the burning house collapsed. What could she do but watch and pray?

In July, six weeks and two days after Perdue delivered 54,000 chicks to Terri's farm, the company sent a crew to gather half of the birds and take them to a processing plant.

The crew arrived at midnight, because the Wolf farm is just one of many the company visits in a round-the-clock operation. The work lasted until morning, and Terri napped briefly on a propped-up chair in the pump house while her father slept off and on in his pickup.

Three weeks later, at 2 a.m., Perdue returned for the other half. To celebrate, Terri fixed creamed chipped beef and hash-browned potatoes for breakfast -- like she and Ray used to do.

The Perdue representative came out on Friday of the following week with a check and surprising news. Despite the flood, and despite the heat of the late-season drought, Terri had surpassed the other farmers. Like Ray, she had finished first.

Soon after the birds went out, Nathan turned 13. It wasn't until the day after Terri took him and a few friends to a tractor-pull to celebrate that it hit her: It hadn't rained on his birthday.

She cleaned the chicken houses while the workmen put the final touches on the second floor of the new house.

Terri waited until they drove down the driveway, the tires of their truck churning up a wake of dust, before she climbed into the shell. Her bare feet picked up flakes of sawdust as she walked across the living room and into the front hall.

Then she had a choice. There were steps going down to the basement and another set leading up to the second floor.

Terri chose the stairs that went up. She crossed the plywood to the corner of the house near the road. She put her hands on her hips and, like a captain on the bow of his ship, looked out. The sea of corn was ready for harvest; the waves of soybean were white with flowers.

Terri's hands slid into her back pockets, and her posture relaxed. The cedar trees along the property line had grown a little since the old house had stood here, and she could no longer see clearly into town. But she could see the horizon and feel the sun on her face.

This is where she would live for a long time. Here in a house that isn't yet a home, between past and future, in the place every heart must pass through before it can begin to grow again.

Larry Bingham, 36, grew up in the coalfields of southwest Virginia and is the first of four generations not to mine for a living. Since graduating from Virginia Tech in 1989 he has worked at newspapers in Virginia, North Carolina, Texas and Maryland. He is currently a features writer for The Baltimore Sun. This is Larry’s third first-place award in the annual competition sponsored by the American Association of Sunday and Features Editors, and the second in consecutive years.