Fresh Eggs (27 page)

Rhea walks until she's on the back pastures of Andy Abram's dairy farm. The grass is short but thick. Her father says the coyotes gather here at night, climbing from their holes along Three Fish Creek, to tease the farmer's dogs with their howls.

A coyote killed Blackbutt and Nancy. Years ago now.

She opens the shopping bag and pulls out the shredded and bloody tee shirt and overalls. She scatters them. She pulls the cork on the test tube of her own blood and sprinkles it here and there on the grass. She pulls off her tennis shoes and sprinkles a little blood inside them, then throws them as far as she can.

Now she opens the Ziploc bag and retrieves a handful of feathers. She tosses them. Lets them twist and drift and fall. She begins walking, in a circle, tossing her feathers, until the bag is empty.

She knows this is a goofy plan. Knows it can't possibly work. No one will believe for a minute that coyotes ate her. But she will get her father's attention, that's for sure.

Rhea walks until she reaches the bridge on Townline Road. She waits underneath, scratching Biscuit until she hears a car pull up. She crawls up the embankment. Joon opens the door for her. Biscuit stands in the gravel, head tipping one way then the other, watching the green Gremlin chug away.

PART IV

“
The first man I saw was of a meager aspect, with sooty hands and face, his hair and beard long, ragged and singed in several places. He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put into vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw, inclement summers
.”

Lemuel Gulliver

Jonathan Swift's
Gulliver's Travels
, 1726

Thirty-two

Calvin Cassowary reaches over his wife and feels for the phone amongst the pill bottles and wadded Kleenexes on her nightstand. “Hello?”

“Bob Gallinipper, Calvin. I've just reserved the presidential suite for you and Donna at the Hyatt. Wednesday and Thursday night. How about that?”

And so on the eighth of July, Calvin and Donna fly to Chicago and spend the night in a huge room, in a huge bed, nibbling on fruit and drinking champagne, wondering what in the hell this is all about.

Why shouldn't they wonder? Calvin has been shipping eggs to Gallinipper Foods for twenty years and not once has Bob Gallinipper spoken to him. Business between them has been conducted through Norman Marek. Norman even delivered those wild strawberry plants after Jeanie died.

In the morning an egg yolk-yellow limo drives them to a sprawling office building in the suburbs. In front stands a thirty-foot revolving egg with gold longitude and latitude lines and buffed aluminum continents. They are met at the door by an emaciated woman in a gray suit. All the way to the fifth floor she tries to look pleasant, but simply does not have enough muscle in her face to pull it off.

The elevator empties onto a egg yolk-yellow hallway. They follow the woman toward a pair of golden doors. On both sides of the hallway, every three feet, huge photographs of beautiful white Leghorn roosters are hanging. Each rooster has a sign around its neck, reporting the number of eggs sold in a particular year:

1983

772.4 MILLION DOZEN

Under that, in script, with an exclamation point, is written:

Something to Crow About!

The emaciated woman pushes a button on the wall. There is a
buzzt
. The golden doors swing open. A friendly Midwestern voice rolls out: “Cassowarys! Get your beautiful Ohio bee-hinds in here!”

Bob Gallinipper seats Calvin and Donna on a puffy white sofa. He lowers himself into a puffy yellow chair. Fifty feet below them is a pond with a fountain of bronze baby chicks spitting water from their open beaks.

For an hour Bob talks nonstop about his hardscrabble boyhood, his long and wonderful marriage to Bunny, his five wonderful children. He talks about how it saddened him to the roots when Rhea went home to live with the Lord. “How many years has it been since she passed?” he asks Calvin.

“Almost six,” Calvin answers.

At precisely ten the golden doors swing open and the emaciated woman enters with a tray of sugar cookies and a decanter of hot chocolate. Bob pours the hot chocolate himself, making sure everyone got a few bobbing marshmallows. While Calvin and Donna sip and munch, and wonder what's coming next, he says this:

“Folks, the day Rhea joined the Gallinipper Family as company mascot was one of the happiest of my life. She was a gift from God. The most beautiful little creature ever born, inside and out. I've never lost a child, but I've lost people I loved. I know the sting never goes away. Anyhoo, your Rhea was a gift from God and all of a sudden here she was, helping Bob Gallinipper feed the world. And feeding the world is a wonderful thing, Calvin. And God is a wonderful God. Gave us big wonderful hearts. Gave us big wonderful brains to discover new and better ways of feeding the world. Jesus could just point at those few measly loaves and fishes with his holy fingers, and presto! There's enough there to feed the multitudes. We mortals got a tougher row to hoe. No divine abracadabra for us. But God gave us something just as magical. He gave us biotechnology.

“Take those 7-52 Super Hens of yours. Years of work went into those babies. All the other egg men said to me, ‘Bob, you'll never design a hen that can lay the same number of eggs on half the feed. But Bob Gallinipper did it. Then they said, ‘Bob, you'll never design a hen with a uterus strong enough to lay two eggs every three days.' But Bob Gallinipper did it. And when they heard about my idea to design a hen that could lay seven eggs a week, fifty-two weeks a year, they laughed their behinds off. Look who's laughing now. Bob Gallinipper and the Cassowarys.

“And look what we've done with the eggs themselves! Developed eggs low in cholesterol—not that cholesterol's bad for you—but people said they wanted them, and now they got them. Developed eggs that help with brain cell growth and blood clotting and digestion. Not a peep about this to anyone, but the wizkids in EggGenics are less than a year away from an estrogen-enriched egg for women going through the change. In five years we'll have a birth control egg.

“God shares his secrets. First the Bible, now genetics. So tell me—how much do you folks know about cloning?”

On his way to the cemetery, Calvin stops at the Pile Inn. It's nearly midnight and the place is empty except for a pair of sheriff's deputies at the far end of the counter. They recognize him and wave with their pie forks. He waves back with his coffee cup. He sips his way through three refills, then drives out South Mill. It's the fourth week of October and it's been raining on and off all day and every thermometer in the county has been clogged at forty for a week now.

Calvin doesn't pull directly into the cemetery. Too dangerous. Instead he drives another block and crunches into the gravel parking lot of St. Peregrine's Catholic Church, pulling right up to the rectory, parking right alongside the priests' dark blue Chevrolets. He closes the car door gently and sticks the garden trowel in his back pocket.

It's a big cemetery, but Calvin knows where he's going. He heads straight for the granite Union soldier and then weaves through the gravestones to the oak-covered knoll above the lily pond where Jeanie and Rhea Cassowary are buried. It's spooky being here at night.

Rhea's stone is right next to Jeanie's. It isn't a real big stone, just big enough for her name and a single soaring dove. How big does a stone have to be for an urn of feathers, after all? Like Jeanie's stone, and the other Cassowary stones, it is nestled in a bed of wild strawberry plants. Little white picket fences prevent the berry plants from being mowed over by the cemetery caretakers.

Calvin kneels at his daughter's grave. Rhea would have been twenty by now. Had she lived. And Jeanie? Had she lived. Forty-three? No, this is October already. She would be forty-four.

“Why did you drink all that coffee?” he whispers at himself. It's tough enough doing what he has to do without having to hold his urine. A man gets in his mid-forties and that prostate starts to swell and he just doesn't have the same control he once had. In college, he could drink 3.2 beer until two in the morning and wouldn't have to piss until he got back to his apartment. Now liquids just whistle through his bladder like the wind through these bare-naked oaks.

Calvin starts to dig. He skims off the grass and sod in wide strips and stacks them neatly to one side. When he's finished, he'll stomp the strips back into place.

Beneath the grass and sod he finds hard, gritty clay. It makes him cry. Rhea's death is still so hard to understand and there are still so many unsettled questions. Who ever heard of coyotes eating a human being? It just doesn't happen.

Yet it happened.

No one wanted to believe it at first. Maybe Rhea had escaped. But this is Wyssock County, not the goddamned Yukon. Rhea never showed up at anybody's house. Searchers never found her cowering high in a tree. Never found her at all. Not dead. Not alive. Just some feathers and a little blood and strewn clothing.

Sheriff Skip Affenpinscher was skeptical from the start, figuring Rhea was kidnapped by someone trying to get their hands on the Cassowary egg fortune. That blood and those feathers and those chewed up overalls were just a ruse until the kidnappers got far away. But kidnappers never called or sent a ransom note, and when he learned there was no egg fortune, only a huge egg debt, the sheriff changed theories and tried to get Calvin and Donna to confess to staging Rhea's disappearance themselves, as part of some sick money-making scheme.

“How could you think we'd do that?” Calvin asked, throwing his coffee cup against the kitchen wall.

“Number one, you're broke,” answered the sheriff. “Number two, you've already demonstrated how desperate for money you are—carting her from county fair to county fair like she was a prize bull.”

Sheriff Skip Affenpinscher wasn't the only one with theories. One evening after work, Joon Faldstool shuffled nervously across the porch and through the screen door and suggested that maybe Rhea had faked her own death and run away. “I don't think she was very happy about making those commercials,” he said.

But Calvin assured him that Rhea was very happy making those commercials. “I know you were friends, Joon. But there's blood and feathers and Rhea's not coming back.”

The trowel clunks the top of the urn. Calvin digs around it carefully, as if the urn was Rhea herself, a gentle treasure waiting to be resurrected.

The digging not only fills him with memories of Rhea—newborn baby Rhea, toddler Rhea, gangly Rhea, graceful Rhea, Rhea with feathers, Rhea without feathers, angry obstinate Rhea, sad brooding Rhea, sweet laughing Rhea—but also Biscuit. The old sheltie died just five weeks after Rhea's memorial service. Calvin found him in his house by the garage, faded dog nose poking out the rounded door. He figured he was just sleeping. But when he called his name—“Bisky! Bisky!”—Biscuit's ears didn't fly up, his brown eyes didn't explode with love. He buried Biscuit by the ceramic birdbath, inside the circle of marigolds. Donna watched from the kitchen window, allergic as she was to dog hair and marigolds. But Calvin could see that she, too, was crying.

Calvin lifts the urn from the hole. He takes the empty Ziploc bag from his pocket and opens it. He opens the urn and, one by one, transfers Rhea's feathers.

Calvin Cassowary is not a religious man. He hates church. Hates the hard benches. Hates having to sing all five verses of those impossible hymns. Hates the icky-picky Rube Goldberg rules for achieving salvation. But he believes in God. Believes that the souls of sweet children like his Rhea are rewarded with eternal happiness.

So Rhea is with God, and with Jeanie, and while that's all to the good, all Calvin has are his memories and this plastic bag of feathers. He cries all the way back to his car and all the way back to the farm. When he pulls in shortly before two, the gravel under his tires explodes like cherry bombs. Digging up Rhea's feathers after all these years is a bad and dangerous thing. But it still doesn't mean he's going along with the cloning thing.

The egg business started turning around about a year after Rhea's death. Weekly per capita consumption of eggs went up one entire egg. Retail prices rebounded and the bean counters at Gallinipper's found another penny per dozen to pay producers. And those 7-52 Super Hens!

The farm's finances got so much better, so fast, that Calvin, despite his resistance to divine interference, could not help feel that maybe Rhea's death was a family sacrifice of sorts. Dying for the farm the way Jesus died for our sins. A ridiculous notion, of course. But you can't stop notions like that from popping into your head when you're so full of guilt.

Adding to the spookiness was the way the lawsuit brought by the Maple Creek Homeowners' Association ended. The jury found in Calvin's favor, just as attorney Michael Rood III said it would. The jury foreman, Doug Chervil of D&D Tractor Sales, later told Sam Guss of the
Gazette
that “havin' a smelly farm ain't no crime.”

The homeowners' association responded to the verdict by installing a ten-foot-high brick privacy fence. From the Cassowary farm it looked like the Great Wall of China. When Norman Marek first saw the fence he doubled over and laughed into his knees. “The stink'll pour over that fence like water over Niagara Falls,” he said.

The lawsuit did get the attention of the Ohio Environmental Protection Administration and a van-load of biologists drove up from Columbus and took water samples from Three Fish Creek. They checked nearby wells and ponds and took soil samples, too.

“Let them test,” Norman Marek said. “By the time they prove you've killed any little fishies, we'll be processing every squirt of poop your hens produce into livestock feed. I've heard through the grapevine that our Manure Management gnomes are just that far away from announcing a breakthrough.” His thumb and forefinger were just a quarter-inch away when he said that.