Fresh Eggs (2 page)

Two

Calvin Cassowary drives his Pinto to the bus garage in Tuttwyler and starts his morning high school run. There are only ten days of school left, counting the three-day Memorial Day weekend, and the kids on the bus are loud and antsy. Before starting his junior high school run he calls Jeanie and makes her swear she's not in labor. He also calls Dawn Van Varken and makes her swear she won't drift more than twenty feet from her phone. He rushes home as soon as his elementary run is finished, driving right past the Pile Inn, where fellow school bus driver Paul Bilderback is waiting to have coffee with him.

It's raining hard when Calvin pulls into the drive. The crew from Buckshee Construction is huddled inside the tractor shed. Inside the house he finds Jeanie on the living room sofa, watching
Phil Donahue
. She's got several pillows wedged behind her and there's half a glass of orange juice balancing on her belly. “You didn't stop for coffee with Paul?” she asks.

“Paul isn't nine months pregnant.”

Jeanie pounds some air into her pillows. “Paul's a lucky man.”

Calvin kisses Jeanie on the forehead and goes back out on the porch. If the crew from Buckshee Construction has accomplished anything this morning, he can't see it. He checks the sky. Nothing but gray. He goes inside and opens a can of tomato soup. He makes it in the Cassowary style: half a can of water, half a can of milk; tablespoon of real butter, quick shake of pepper.

So with Jeanie on the sofa, the construction crew dragging their asses, Calvin ladles himself a bowl of soup and opens one of the Proper Poultry Management manuals given him by Norman Marek, Gallinipper's Midwest producer relations manager. This one is titled, “Feeding Standards and Rations.” Every time he lifts his elbow to take a spoonful of soup or turn a page, the Shaker-style table Henry Cassowary made wobbles.

But Calvin doesn't feel the wobble, no more than his father felt it, or his grandfather, or any of the fifty or sixty Cassowarys who'd sat around that table over the generations. But he sure feels the presence of those other Cassowarys. Generation after generation, they took care of that farm, making sure the farm took care of them. And he will do the same. And he's sure that with the help of Gallinipper Foods, he'll find fulfillment and joy and financial success, even if running the family farm is the last thing in the world he wants to do.

Things are scary right now. But pretty soon the old Cassowarys will be looking down with pride, and that baby in Jeanie's belly will be looking up from its crib with pride. So what if he hadn't planned on being a farmer? Great-great grandfather Henry hadn't planned on it either.

Henry Cassowary was the son of a Cincinnati barrel maker. He grew up planning to work on his uncle's grain barge, floating up and down the Ohio and the wide Mississippi, collecting scandalous first-hand experiences like the ones his cousins bragged about. But that dream ended in 1847 when nineteen-year-old Henry met Hannah Drindlekeid.

Hannah was devoutly religious. A month after she accepted his marriage proposal, she decided that instead of a traditional marriage encumbered by carnality and children, they would live chaste, ethereal lives in the service of Jesus Christ, as members of the United Society of Believers, as Shakers.

Henry was all for carnality and children; yet, how could he resist the wishes of this wonderful woman who used words like
chaste
and
ethereal
and aspired to an elevated existence? Immediately after the wedding they boarded the stagecoach for the Shaker community in Union, carefully avoiding even one night of sexual temptation.

Just as Hannah had put her trust in God, Henry now put his trust in Hannah. He went to work in the carpentry shop, rewarding each long day of labor with an hour of shoveling manure in the cow barns. He dutifully attended all the Sabbath services and sang all the joyous songs and learned to dance and twitch. He admired his wife from afar, the roundness of her hips and fullness of her bosom, the delicate white chin protruding from her bonnet, the serene motion of her tiny hand when she scattered cracked corn to the chickens.

Summer and autumn flew by. But the winter kept its toes on the ground and no amount of carpentry or manure-shoveling made the days pass. By the time spring finally arrived, Henry was shaking all the time, not for the love of God, but for the love of his wife, and on the Friday before Easter when he was fitting the hen house with new perches, Hannah came in to gather eggs. “Sister,” he said. “Brother,” she said. Before he knew it he had her flat over the feed bin. The rooster started squawking and the hens clucked and flapped and Henry did to Hannah what that rooster regularly did to his hens. What Adam did to Eve at the serpent's urging.

Afterwards Henry ran as fast as a rabbit across the neat Shaker fields, and through the neat Shaker woods, jumping the neat Shaker fence rows, until he reached the road. He walked all the way to Cincinnati, filled with shame and relief. After a while he signed on with the CC&C, the Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati Railroad, and was sent north to Wyssock County, to help build a trestle over Three Fish Creek. It was here that he met Camellia Bloom, an earthy young widow with a farm. Henry wrote Hannah and asked for a divorce, which she granted with Shaker joy. On a rainy day just before Halloween, Henry and Camellia were married, and the Bloom farm passed into the ownership of the Cassowarys. Sometime during the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant, Henry built that wobbly table.

Shortly after one o'clock Marilyn Dickcissel pulls in for her weekly two dozen. Calvin dog-ears his manual and rushes to the refrigerator for the eggs. If Marilyn gets her foot in the door she'll spend half the afternoon yakking about her dog grooming business. He reaches the porch just as Marilyn is navigating the stone steps. “Two dozen, right?”

Marilyn does not like being intercepted. “How's our Jeanie?” she asks.

“Sleeping.”

She frowns and digs into her purse. “You're still gonna sell brown eggs after you get that big operation of yours running, ain't you?”

“Until the old hens die off.”

She hands him four quarters. “White eggs ain't no good for pies.”

He hands her the cartons. “An egg's an egg.”

She flips her spent cigarette into the shrubs. “An egg's an egg my Ohio ass.”

There's a break in the rain and the construction crew gets busy, completing an entire wall of metal sheeting by the time Calvin leaves for his afternoon bus run. When he gets home he finds a note fastened to the screen door with a safety pin. It's in Dawn Van Varken's handwriting:
Jeanie's water broke. Meet us at the hospital
.

Rhea Cassowary weighs four pounds, thirteen ounces. She's seventeen and a half inches long. She's got brown eyes. Quite a head of hair. She has all her toes and fingers and all her other little body parts appear perfect.

“Rhea? Why Rhea?” Calvin's mother, Betsy Betz, asks when he calls her from the hospital.

“You know Jeanie and her literature,” he says. “Apparently Rhea was the oldest of the Greek gods. Mother of the universe.”

“Don't you think that's a lot of responsibility to put on a little nubbin, Calvin? Mother of the universe? Thank your lucky stars you didn't have a boy. She might've named him Jesus the way the Mexicans do.”

Calvin laughs. “You're close. She was set on Moses.”

“Oh Lord,” his mother moans. “I'm glad I didn't go to college and get my head filled with such foolishness.”

Rhea is brought home after just three days in the hospital. When the crew from Buckshee Construction sees Calvin's Pinto pull in, they gather on the side of the drive to applaud. Calvin just wishes they'd go back to work.

Calvin's mother has driven up from Columbus and Jeanie's mother and father have driven down from Toledo. Neighbor Dawn Van Varken has walked over with enough tuna and noodle casserole to last a week. Inside, the kitchen counters are covered with casseroles from other neighbors. Jeanie's mother takes tiny Rhea while Jeanie heads for the bathroom. Calvin pours himself a cup of coffee and watches the crew as it slowly gets back to work. The cage-units are being delivered first thing Monday morning and the roof had better be on. Automatic feeders are coming Wednesday. Egg conveyors Thursday.

Calvin feels Jeanie's arms around his neck. “Let's take that beautiful daughter of yours upstairs,” she says. Everyone files up the narrow stairs. Every step creaks.

They fill the first room at the top of the stairs. It's a small room, nine by nine, with one window that looks out over the creek valley to the south. The walls, like all the walls in this old house, have several wavy layers of wallpaper over them, and who knows how many coats of paint. Not long after she found out she was pregnant, Jeanie painted the walls a pale peach and pasted a paper border around the ceiling with green turtles riding tricycles and blue geese jumping rope. The crib is Calvin's old crib, freshly painted white. The mattress is new, a gift from Jeanie's mother. Calvin's mother bought the curtains, Beatrix Potter rabbits harvesting enormous carrots and cabbages. There are several boxes of disposable diapers stacked in one corner like bales of hay.

“This room is so cute,” Jeanie's mother says.

“It's the old Cassowary birthing room,” Calvin's mother tells her. “Calvin wasn't born here—I put my foot down about that—but Calvin's father was born in this room and his father and all the Cassowarys going back to old Henry's seven kids.”

Jeanie's mother is amazed. “Isn't it something how women back then just
plooped
out their babies and went back to work? I was flat on my back for three weeks.”

Jeanie puts Rhea in the crib. Calvin wraps his arms around her and kisses her sweaty neck. They stand over their child, swaying back and forth, grinning, giggling, wiping the tears from their eyes, unable to abandon the little life they created together, unable to join the others downstairs for tuna and noodles, even if it is getting cold.

Three

Rhea Cassowary spends her first weeks pressed against her mother's steady heart, or cradled in the safe arms of her father, or inside the reassuring bars of her crib. She enjoys her mother's warm nipples and the sweet milk that trickles out of them. She learns to lift her head and roll on her belly. She learns how to wrap her miniature fingers around her father's big fingers. Discovers the joy of kicking empty air.

Her eyes start seeing things more clearly: those marvelous nipples she's been sucking on; the silvery sunlight beaming into her room through the shimmering square in the wall; the curtains alive with wind; the soft motionless creatures that share her crib, that come to life and twist and shake when her father holds them close to her face.

Her ears start hearing things more sharply: the comforting sounds that come out of her mother's mouth; the funny sounds that come out of her father's mouth; the distant
banging-banging-banging
that lasts all day long.

She begins to learn that her new world is actually two worlds: there is the inside world, divided into squares, some bigger and some smaller, some noisy and some quiet, some smelling wonderful, some smelling not so good; there is the outside world, where the sun and wind roam free, where sounds and smells have boundless energy and infinite imaginations, where creatures twist and shake and move about on their own, where the
banging-banging-banging
is louder.

Her carefree acceptance of life gives way to worrying and wondering: why is there an inside world and an outside world? Who are these two people who pick her up and put her down, fill her mouth with mushy substances, wrap and unwrap her, douse her and dry her, jabber away at her, who have the power to make the light come and go by simply slapping the walls? Why is there that constant banging? That
banging-banging-banging
? And why can't these two people put an end to it? Why can't they just slap the wall and make it quiet?

One day the banging does stop and for the first time in her life, Rhea has a restful day.

More restful days follow. The
banging-banging-banging
fades from her thoughts, though some nights the
banging-banging-banging
drifts into her dreams, into that third world she has discovered. Luckily her cries quickly bring her mother, who picks her up and jiggle-dances her around the room and whisper-sings in her ear.

One morning her father takes her outside. They walk a long way, toward a long, low silvery building. He is jibber-jabbering about something nonstop. When they reach the building, and her father pulls the door open, she starts to tremble, knowing from the hollow rumble that this building was the source of that
banging-banging-banging
all those weeks she lay in her crib.

Now they are walking down an endless square tunnel, noisy and smelly and blurry. Her father has raised her up so she can see over his shoulder. She feels as if she is being born again. The tunnel is filled from floor to ceiling with rows of strange white creatures. Their faces come to sharp points. They have wild sideways eyes. Bags of red skin hang from their chins. They are packed so tightly in their cribs—their cages—that it is hard to tell where one creature ends and another begins. They are all afraid, that much is for certain. And they are all crying and begging to be set free. So Rhea cries, too, and begs to be free of this terrible square tunnel. But the tunnel goes on forever, and the air is heavy and wet and hard to breathe, and the dizzying lights hanging overhead are much too bright, and her father's jibber-jabbering and reassuring pats on her wet bottom assure her of nothing. The tunnel just goes on and on. The white creatures just cry and beg and stare at her sideways, necks stretched long through the bars in their crowded cribs.

Calvin Cassowary's father was named Donald. He was fifty-two when he died. He was a farmer. He had milk cows and hogs, sometimes goats or sheep, always that little flock of chickens. He grew corn and baled enough hay to keep his stock fed all winter. He kept a magnificent vegetable garden, producing all the potatoes, tomatoes, squash, sweet corn, green peppers, string beans, beets, carrots, parsnips, cucumbers, and cabbage the family needed. He also grew a bit of garlic and horseradish and asparagus and rhubarb. Every June he covered his blueberry bushes with netting so the robins wouldn't clean them out. Behind the blueberry bushes was a row of grapes for jelly making. Most years he had a bed of strawberries. He also had apple trees and peach trees and pear trees, and there was a tangle of raspberry briars on the north side of the old barn.