Fresh Eggs (30 page)

“Folks,” Sophia tells them in a 5 a.m. phone call, “we've got oodles of healthy embryos.”

And so one of them is implanted in Donna's uterus and, to everyone's delight, it keeps right on growing. Success the very first try. A triumph for science. Proof, perhaps, that God does indeed approve, that nightmares are only that.

They keep their secret all summer. On Labor Day, they have a picnic. Ben and Betsy Betz drive up from Columbus. Donna's parents drive all the way from their retirement condo in North Carolina. Jimmy Faldstool and his wife are invited, Norman Marek, too. Everyone fills up on hamburgers and sweet corn, and when everyone is sitting in a circle of lawn chairs spitting watermelon seeds, Calvin announces that he and Donna are going to have a baby.

“And you're announcing it on Labor Day,” Donna's mother coos. “How cute is that?”

Early the next morning Joon Faldstool shows up on the porch.

Calvin, still in his bathrobe, is surprised to see him. He forces the worried frown that's been on his face for several months now into a welcoming smile. “Joon! How are you?”

Joon had quit his job at the Cassowary farm three years ago, to move down to his grandfather Hap Aspergres's place in Acorn County. He's taken over the dowsing business, finding new wells all over southern Ohio. Northern Kentucky, too. “I was visiting dad—figured I'd stop at the house and see how you and Mrs. Cassowary are doing.”

“We're doing great. Your dad tell you that Donna's pregnant?”

“Yeah. Terrific news, huh?”

“You bet,” says Calvin.

When Joon's cheek muscles start to twitch, Calvin knows he has something on his mind. Like father like son. “So, what can I do for you, Joon?”

“Those three old chickens of Rhea's you've still got? I was wondering if I could I have them. For my Grampa Hap's place.”

Calvin Cassowary doesn't answer right away. He just stares at the little red coop. His memory sees Rhea inside the yard in her baggy sweatshirts and overalls, sun reflecting off her feathery face, tossing handfuls of cracked corn.

Then he grins. In just a few months his eyes will see Rhea, too. “You know what, Joon,” he says, “I think Rhea would want you to have them.”

Calvin wants to tell Joon about the new Rhea growing in Donna's uterus. But he can't tell anybody. And he never will tell anybody. Even if he wasn't under contract he wouldn't tell. He and Donna are going to keep their lips buttoned and when they have that baby girl and when people tell them how she looks just like Rhea, they'll scrunch their faces and ask, “You really think so?” And if the cloned Rhea starts growing feathers the way the original Rhea did, then no one will be able to see the similarity anyway. “I know you were just a boy when Rhea died,” Calvin says to Joon. “But I know you had feelings for her. And I suppose she had—”

“We were in love.”

Calvin finds himself pulling Joon Faldstool into his arms, kissing him square on the forehead.

Junior Jr. doesn't remember Joon Faldstool. George Herbert Walker Bush and Leili don't either. And they have never liked Calvin Cassowary much. So they resist being caught and caged and even after they are in the back of Joon's pickup they are
bruck-brucking
, their neck feathers flayed defiantly.

“You got time to see the new MAK carts?” Calvin asks Joon. “They're really something.”

“MAKs?” Joon asks.

Calvin walks him to layer house F. He explains: “Modified atmosphere killing. New way to dispose of our spent hens. Very economical.”

Inside the layer house there's a guy about Joon's age, filthy jeans, backward baseball cap, high-school-dropout face. He's pushing a huge aluminum box along on its dolly wheels. “That's one of the MAKs,” Calvin says.

Joon watches as the guy with the dropout face pulls a pleading hen from its cage and stuffs it in the top of the aluminum box. He pulls and stuffs until the cage is empty. Goes on to the next cage.

“As you know,” Calvin says, “we used to ship our spent hens to soup and pet food plants. But that market's disappearing. Too many chickens being bred just for meat today. So now
rendering!
”

Joon watches how quickly the pleading hens disappear into the metal box, into that MAK. “Rendering into what?”

“Poultry rations.”

“Food for other chickens?”

“Feathers and all. Extruded into high protein SHM. Spent hen meal. But the rendering plants don't want to mess with live hens. So—see that cylinder on the side of the box there? CO
_2.
”

“So it's a little gas chamber?”

“They expire pretty quick,” Calvin says.

They leave the layer house. Joon's eyes are burning. He'd forgotten how bad the air was in these buildings. They walk to Joon's pickup and shake hands. The three chickens in the back are confused but calm, good clean air circulating through the bars of their wooden cage.

Joon backs around and crackles down the driveway. He used to think shoveling manure was the worst job in the world. But that poor bastard pushing that MAK, he thinks, now that guy's got the worst job in the world.

Thirty-five

Joon Faldstool crosses the Chippewa Creek bridge and slides onto Bear Swamp Road. An endless cloud of dust follows the pickup. Ahead of him Grampa Hap's silver trailer glimmers like a UFO. Those three chickens in the back are really going to surprise Rhea.

He bounces past the house he's building for her. The outside is nearly completed—shingles on the roof and vinyl siding on the walls, windows and doors. The inside is another matter. No drywall, no plumbing, no nothing.

Joon reaches Hap's trailer and beeps. Rhea doesn't run out. So he takes the cage from the back of his truck and slips it under the trailer, to give the three chickens a bit of shade. “Rhea! Grampa Hap!”

Inside the trailer there's nobody but a note, stuck to the refrigerator with a Tweety Bird magnet. Says the note in Rhea's quick, scribbly hand:

Jooooooon
—

Couldn't talk Gramp out of witching Tink's new well
.

Sooooooo I went along
.

Joon gets a cold can of Dr. Pepper and heads back to his pickup. The dust on Bear Swamp Road has not even settled yet. He hops onto Route 83 and races south. Turns onto County Road 17 without making a complete stop. Pulls down the sun visor and squints all the way to Tink Shurebyrne's farm. Sees his grandfather's truck in Tink's drive.

Tink is outside his tractor barn, under his old John Deere, grease dribbled across his forehead. Fuzzy country music blares from a portable radio. Without saying hello, or anything else, Tink points Joon toward the hilly pastures east of the cow barn.

Joon nods his thanks and climbs the wooden gate. The pasture is a dangerous place. Bumblebees. Woodchuck holes to twist your ankles. Thick-crusted cow pies that explode up your pantlegs if you step on them.

He knows why Tink wants a new well out here. Tink's daughter has finally found someone to marry—a long-distance trucker who raises Jack Russell terriers—and Tink has given them five acres of land. Just where those five acres will be depends on where the well will be.

Joon doesn't want Grampa Hap to dowse anymore. The old man has been hospitalized with congestive heart failure twice in the last year and he refuses to get the bypass surgery he needs. “I can handle the witching now, Gramps,” Joon has told him a thousand times.

“I taught you how to witch so you could replace me after I was dead,” his grandfather always growls back. “Which ain't yet.”

So Grampa Hap goes on scheduling dowsing dates. And he always finds a good flow.

The first rule of dowsing is to find water where your client wants it found. So Joon figures he'll find Grampa Hap and Rhea fairly close to the road. He climbs the hill and battles his way through a hedgerow of thorny crabapple trees. There, not a hundred yards from him, is Rhea, sitting on a blanket, the brim of her straw hat shadowing her from shoulder to shoulder. Another hundred yards down the slope his grandfather is shuffling along with his Y of willow.

Joon squeezes his fists. He knows just how that willow rod in his grandfather's hands feels. Knows just what the tug of water feels like when you're over a good flow. It feels like you're bottom fishing for catfish and one of those big lunkers swallows your nightcrawler. A jolt that comes up your arms and shakes your spine from the tip of your tailbone to the top of your head.

Grampa Hap took his good time teaching Joon how to divine for water. Lectured him endlessly for three years as they walked the hot fields.

“Everybody thinks it's a bunch of hocus-pocus horse pucky,” Grampa Hap would say. “They say there's water everywhere and all a dowser does is take money from fools. But there ain't water everywhere. Not sweet strong flows there ain't. So let them laugh at you, Joonbug. And when they come running to you, desperate for water, you just smile and take their money.”

“Worse than those who say dowsing doesn't work are those who say they know how it works,” his grandfather would say. Then he'd go into all the theories: “There's the
psycho-physiological
theory of the great German dowser Carl von Klinckowstroem. There's the magnetic and electrical current theories that got popular about the time Ben Franklin was playing with his kites. There's the mind-reaching theories of the sixteenth century Spanish
Zahoris
, who claimed they could see things hidden in the bowels of the earth—reaching out with their superior minds. It could be all those things, Joonbug. All those things or none of those things. All I know is that it works.”

His grandfather would show him how to grasp the forked willow rod, palms up, fingers curled, so that the end of the rod was pointed skyward. “It don't much matter what a divining rod's made of. Some like to cut it from hazel or apple, some from wild cherry or peach. But me, I like a Y of willow, eighteen inches long, half-inch thick, branches angled out about seventy degrees. Gives you a good bob. But it don't matter. Your rod is just your instrument. It's you that finds the water.”

They'd dowse for an hour or two, then find some shade. His grandfather would keep talking: “Bible says Moses struck a rock twice with his rod and water just poured out. Oh, Joonbug, it goes way back. The Scythians, the Persians, the Medes, and the Chinese, they all witched for water.”

“For thousands of years no one doubted that it worked,” he'd tell him. “Then the Christians came along and called it the work of witches and sorcerers. Even though Moses himself could raise his rod and divide the Red Sea! Then if the Christians weren't bad enough, along came the
scientists
, pooh-poohing a proven fact, calling practitioners of the old art charlatans and crooks. But it keeps on working.”

Then they'd dowse some more. Rest some more. “Just because something can't be explained, don't mean it ain't true,” Hap would say. “Nobody knows why Rhea's got those feathers. But she's got them. There's lots of things that can't be explained. Lost dogs and cats that find their way home, hundreds of miles away. Birds that migrate half way around the world, always ending up in the same tree in the same backyard. And women's intuition—every man alive knows that's true. So why can't a dowser know where there's a good flow of water?”

“Just believe you'll do it,” he'd say as they walked the fields, Joon holding the willow rod in front of him. “Just relax and rely on your seventh sense. Divination means knowing something through your hidden senses. It's from the old Latin word
divinus
, don't you know, meaning one who's inspired by the gods.”

And the tip of the rod would bow like a bamboo pole with a big catfish on the end. And Grampa Hap would grin and say, “There you go, Joonbug!”

So how can Joon be mad at his grandfather? Yet he worries about him. Doesn't want to lose him. Wants him to live on forever in that old silver trailer.

Joon sneaks across the field and kneels behind Rhea, kissing the back of her neck. “How long has he been at it?”

When Rhea turns, the wide brim of her hat slices across Joon's eyes. “Just half an hour.”

“Water yet?”

“Right off the bat. But you know Hap. He wants to give Tink his money's worth.”

Joon flops his head in Rhea's lap. Grins up at her. It's been two years since she lost her feathers. Her face is smooth as can be. For a long while after her feathers fell out, her skin was rough and red, like a bad case of pimples. You'd never know she'd had a single feather now.

“I've got a surprise for you,” Joon teases as he plays with the soft skin under Rhea's chin.

“Drywall for the house, I hope.”

“Better than drywall,” he says.

She begs him to tell her but Joon just smiles. He's not about to tell her about the three chickens now. He wants her to see the cage and go running to them and call them by name, Junior Jr. and George Herbert Walker Bush and Leili. It's been six years since she's seen them. They were only chicks. But he knows she'll recognize them. Recognize their walks and the way they peck. Recognize their little souls.

After all these years Rhea and Joon are still amazed that they got away with their crazy plan. They wanted to get people's attention. Instead Rhea got a new life.

After Rhea's blood and feathers were scattered, they drove all night, arriving at Grampa Hap's early in the morning. They decided to sleep outside in the Gremlin until he stirred. It was Grampa Hap who woke them, rapping on the car window. They confessed immediately.

Grampa Hap made them breakfast. Soggy pancakes. Burned bacon. “And you just figured Rhea could live here happily ever after, did you?”

Joon knew his grandfather well enough to be honest with him. “Yeah.”

“You know we'll get caught,” Grampa Hap said.