Fresh Eggs (14 page)

“Washing up is the key to this job,” his father says. He shows him how much liquid soap to squirt on his palms. He shows him where the clean towels are kept.

Calvin makes Rhea go upstairs when he sees Norman Marek's car coming up the driveway. He gathers the homeschooling workbooks off the table and gets out the farm ledgers. He also gets out two of the better coffee cups. Saucers, too.

Norman is as friendly as ever. But he's also a bit nervous and he puts more sugar in his coffee than usual. “Cal,” he says, “let me get right to the skinny. All this crap about cholesterol is taking a toll on egg consumption. Now we know this health and fitness stuff is just a fad—a five-minute Hoola Hoop thing—but until the industry can wind up its PR machinery, well, we've got an egg glut.”

Calvin may have majored in art, but he understands the laws of supply and demand as well as anybody. “My contract locks me in at three cents a dozen.”

Norman splays his fingers and calms the air between Calvin and him. “Of course your contract locks you in. Nobody's gonna dick with that. But still the pain has got to be spread around somehow, doesn't it?”

“Meaning what?”

Norman Marek sips and puckers and plays with the button on his ballpoint.
Click-click. Click-click. Click-click
. “What it means,” he finally says, “is that Bob's asking all the producers to take ten percent of their hens out of production—for the time being.”

“That's a hundred thousand hens. That's a lot of money out of my pocket.”

“Out of my pocket, too,” Norman Marek says. “Everybody at corporate has been asked to take a temporary ten percent cut in pay. Everybody tithes ten percent to the god of over-production and before you know it prices have re-couped and everything's copacetic—”

Calvin takes Norman's half-full coffee cup away from him. “Copacetic, my ass.”

Norman cranes his neck to see if Calvin is refilling the cup or putting it in the sink. He's relieved when he sees it's a refill. “It's only a matter of time before people come to their senses and start eating eggs for breakfast again, instead of those damn rice cakes. So I'm counseling patience, Cal. P-a-t-i-e-n-c-e.”

“I can't lose this farm, Norman.”

“We'll work with you, Cal. Bob loves you like a son.”

“The Bob I've never met?”

“I keep him apprised.”

The refilled cup lands hard on the table. “Apprise Bob of this—at his urging I've grown my flock to a million hens, taken on a million dollars in debt. I've got manure and flies up the wazoo. I've got a daughter who hates my guts and breaks out in feathers the way other kids break out in pimples. I've got—”

Norman stops spooning sugar. “Then all that feather stuff is true?”

Calvin throws Norman's coffee cup against the wall.

Sixteen

Donna Cassowary puts on her parka, knit cap and gloves, and skates down the icy driveway to the mailbox. Stuffed in the box with the bills and Christmas catalogs is a thick brown envelope. It is addressed to Rhea. There is no return address in the corner except for the word GRANDMA! The flap is heavily Scotch-taped. There also is a row of staples.

Donna hurries back inside where she has left herself a hot cup of tea. “Rhea!” she yells, loud enough for her voice to carry up the stairs, “your grandma sent you a package.”

The steps squeak and Rhea pops into the kitchen. “Which grandma?”

Donna shrugs and holds it out for her. “Feels like a book.”

Rhea looks at the single word and exclamation mark in the corner. “Probably Gammy Betz.” She squeaks back upstairs and flops on her bed. It takes a couple minutes for her to dig off the tape and pry off the staples. Finally the flap is open and she shakes out the book. A note is taped to the cover:

Dear Rhea,

This is not a package from your grandma as the wrapper says. It is from me, Dr. Pirooz Aram.

It is very unprofessional of me to send you this book. For some reason your father does not want you to see me. Which is his right. But I never had a patient with feathers before!

So if I cannot be your doctor may I be your friend? A friend you cannot see but is always thinking of you?

If you do accept my friendship, Rhea, then also please accept this little book. It is called Manteq at-Tair. In English it is called
The Conference of the Birds
. It was written 800 years ago by a man from my homeland named Farid ud-Din Attar.

The book is about a journey. And I hope that you will find the time to read it during your own journey.

Never forget, Rhea, you are a swan! Do you hear me? A swan!

Best wishes,

Pirooz Aram

p.s. In case your parents have opened this package instead of you, let me say Mr. and Mrs. Cassowary that I apologize for meddling, and that if you wish to sue me for malpractice, I understand fully and promise I will not try to defend myself.

Rhea studies the cover. Below the title is a wonderful painting of a large tree with star-shaped leaves. Gathered under the tree are many types of birds. There are peacocks and roosters and ducks, cranes and doves and woodpeckers, white birds and black birds and red birds and blue birds.

The book begins with a long introduction, apparently explaining why it is such an important book. The print is very small and the words very big. Rhea reads only a few lines before putting the book under her mattress. She smoothes the feathers on her face and lowers herself to her pillow. She wants to nap but the birds on the book's cover are fluttering on the insides of her eyelids. The funny man who sent her the book is dancing in her mind, waving that fancy hat he called his chapeau. She pulls out the book and leafs through the introduction until she finds the first chapter. The page surprises her. It is a poem. She flips further. The entire book is a poem. She turns back to the beginning and reads:

“
Dear Hoopoe, welcome! You will be our guide
;

It was on you King Solomon relied

To carry secret messages between

His court and distant Sheba's lovely queen
.”

She reads no more than that when Donna appears in the doorway, a wadded tissue in each hand. “So which grandma is it from?”

“Gammy Betz,” Rhea lies, “like I figured.”

“What's it about?”

“Birds.”

Donna winces. “Birds?”

“I think. I haven't read very much yet.”

Donna dabs her nostrils with one tissue and then the other. “I'm sure your grandma means well. But you are not a bird.”

Rhea knows what's coming next, the you're-a-normal-human-being speech. “What would you do if I laid an egg?” she asks her stepmother.

“You are not going to lay a egg.”

“And how do you know that?”

“Because you don't have an egg thing inside.”

“All females have an egg thing inside.”

“You know what I mean. You don't have a bird egg thing.”

Rhea tells her that a bird's egg thing is called an oviduct.

Donna is not impressed with her knowledge of bird anatomy. “Well, you don't have one of those. You've just got feathers. Which one of these days will fall out and you'll be normal again.”

Rhea closes her book. “You don't know that. For all you know I'll have these feathers forever. For all you know I'll start clucking and lay a big egg.”

“You are not—”

Rhea start clucking. Bends her arms into wings and starts flapping. Starts grunting. Rolls over and looks at the indent her butt made in the mattress. She pretends to pout. “Maybe next time.”

“This is difficult enough for us—you don't have to add to it with a shitty attitude.”

Rhea duckwalks across the bed. “Wouldn't it be terrible if my feathers were contagious? Some morning you'll wake up with feathers between your boobs. Just like I did.”

Donna retreats to the hallway. “It is not contagious.”

Rhea stands up at the bottom of the bed and, flapping furiously, leaps to the floor. “Maybe you'll start laying eggs, too. Ooooh, the stretch marks! Ooooh, the stretch marks!”

Seventeen

Joon Faldstool likes working at the Cassowary farm. It gives him something to do while other boys his age are playing sports, talking sports, or pursuing their first sexual experiences. Joon doesn't have any real friends. Doesn't have any real talents. Doesn't have a chance in hell of ever having sex with anyone but himself.

He works every weekday from 3:30 to 6:00. And until he gets his driver's license—which could be quite a while, given that he still hasn't passed the test for his temporary—he will continue to have the school bus drop him off.

No, it isn't easy being a Faldstool. First, the Faldstools are short—no Faldstool male has ever topped five-four. Secondly, the Faldstools are not very bright—no Faldstool male has ever possessed the capacity for anything but the most mundane and monotonous work. Remarkably, in the three centuries since the first Faldstool arrived in the New World from England as an indentured servant, no Faldstool male has been able to elevate the family's physical, mental or economic stature by breeding with a woman of superior strain. His own father's choice of a mate—Eileen Aspergres—not only failed to move the family forward economically, but saddled future generations with a third inhibiting trait: big ears.

Yes, Joon Faldstool has the Aspergres ears. Big, thin, red ears that look like someone held him down and flattened them with a mallet. When the sun's behind him they glow.

So Joon Faldstool is short. So Joon Faldstool is dumb. So Joon Faldstool has big ears. So Joon Faldstool works every day after school at the Cassowary egg farm shoveling manure. And he likes it just fine.

Yesterday was the last Sunday in October. In Ohio, that means the end of Daylight Savings Time, that extra hour of sunlight giving people another hour to be productive. Today it will get dark an hour earlier than yesterday. People will drive home from work in the dark. Eat their supper with the kitchen light on for the first time since March.

For a not-too-smart sixteen-year-old, Joon knows quite a bit about Daylight Savings Time. He learned it from his big-eared grandfather, Hap Aspergres. Hap, who lives in self-imposed squalor in an ancient silver housetrailer in Acorn County, decades ago forsook the accumulation of money for the accumulation of useless knowledge.

Joon made the mistake of asking Hap about Daylight Savings Time when he was nine or ten, after his father and mother had argued for several hours one April night about whether they were supposed to move the hour hand on the kitchen clock ahead an hour, or back an hour. Joon's father said it should be moved back. His mother insisted ahead.

Hap shook his head sadly. “Your mother's right. In the spring you move the hour hand ahead one hour, so that when it's nine o'clock at night and still light out, it's because it's really only eight o'clock.”

“I think I understand that,” said Joon.

“Just remember, in spring you spring forward and in the fall you fall back.” Hap went on to tell him more about Daylight Savings Time than he or anyone needed to know. “It's said Benjamin Franklin came up with the idea, way back in the 1780s, as a way to save on candle wax. Idea didn't get very far. Wasn't until World War I, when every last drop of oil and spurt of electricity was needed for the war machine, that politicians took the idea seriously. Congress adopted it in 1917, the year I was born. Farmers hated it, though, and after the war Daylight Savings Time was repealed. Came back during World War II and stayed. It's all a bunch of nonsense as far as I'm concerned. Like God doesn't know what he's doing. But it's to be expected, Joonbug. Mankind jiggles with everything the Almighty took sixteen billion years to perfect.”

Joon gets off the bus and runs up the Cassowary's driveway. In the employee locker room he puts on his overalls and rubber boots. He goes to Layer House D, to being shoveling.

Man—Calvin Cassowary in particular—has jiggled with time inside the layer houses, too. In the layer houses it is high noon sixteen hours a day. That's how many hours a day the ceiling lights are kept on—sixteen hours on, eight hours off—so the Leghorns lay extra eggs. Joon's father explained it to him on his first day there. It was, Joon thought, an impressive explanation for a man who couldn't figure out when to spring forward or fall back.

“In order to get 250 eggs a year out of these ladies,” his father said as they walked the length of a layer house, “you got to keep their ovaries pumping. Keeping the layer houses lit sixteen hours rain or shine does just that. It ain't easy on their assholes, but a hen's got to pay for her keep like anybody else.”

Joon shovels manure for two hours. He knows it's getting dark outside. But inside the layer house it's high noon and the hens are squirting eggs. Those eggs are rolling forward across the wire floors of their cages to a conveyor belt that takes them right to the shipping room.

At a quarter to six Joon hurries to the locker room and slips out of his boots and overalls and washes. He spritzes himself with Old Spice, gathers up his books and gym bag, and goes outside. It is already dark. He sits on the bench by the door and waits. Sometimes his father comes out right away. Sometimes it's not for a half hour.

From the bench Joon can see the light on in the Cassowary kitchen, see Calvin Cassowary's wife, Donna, fixing supper. She has an electric mixer in one hand and a Kleenex in the other. His father has told him that she sneezes a lot. Maybe so, Joon thinks, but she is nothing to sneeze at. He feels himself getting an erection and forces his eyes away from the kitchen window. He sees the dim light inside the little chicken coop where the scraggly little flock is kept. He knows that the Cassowarys are pinching every penny these days. Knows the coop should be dark. Knows that the hens in there are allowed to lay when they feel like it. He can make points with the Cassowarys, and his father, he thinks, if he turns that light out. “By the way,” he could tell Mr. Cassowary the next time he sees him, “I turned off the light in the little coop for you the other day.”