Fresh Eggs (7 page)

Norman Marek won't let Calvin and Rhea take the bus back to the Marriott with the others. He drives them in a bright yellow company car. He's none too happy. “Bob Gallinipper saw it all, Cal.”

“Rhea was just tired,” Calvin assures him.

“Then she should have fallen asleep not jumped on the tables and kicked the tubs of fried chicken all over kingdom come.”

Rhea is in the back seat, rolled into a ball, hands over her face, wishing she had the magic blanky that makes her invisible. The images of chicks having their beaks and combs sliced off, of boy chicks being tossed into barrels and ground into cans of stinky slop for cats and dogs, are pushing tears out of the corners of her eyes. She's shaking. And itching something awful, on her chest, right between those little red dots her mother used to call her nippie-nips.

“Norman, I'm sorry,” Calvin says.

Norman exhales a long gurgle of stale air. “You and Rhea have gone through so much. I realize that. I'm sure Bob realizes it, too. Jeanie was a princess. You met her in college, didn't you?”

“That's right.”

“I know what my divorce did to me,” Norman says. “So I can imagine how rough it is to lose someone you actually love.”

Calvin looks back at Rhea, then out the window. The flat fields are blurring by. “We thought we were going to be teachers. Then my dad died.”

“I lost my dad when I was fifteen,” Norman says. Afraid that either he or Calvin will start crying, he quickly gets back to the subject. “Gallinipper Foods is a big family. In order to compete and grow, everything's got to be copacetic. Copacetic in the corporate offices. Copacetic at the hatcheries and brooding farms. Copacetic at the layer operations. Copacetic top to bottom. Up and down the line.” Now he reaches down and shakes Calvin's knee, demonstrating the depth of his friendship and concern. “Rhea's a sweet girl. But it's obvious everything's not copacetic with her. Ben Hemphill told me she was a brat the entire tour. So it isn't just kicking the chicken tubs, Cal. Maybe Rhea needs help.”

“If I thought she needed professional help, I'd take her,” Calvin says.

“Maybe I'm way out of line, Cal, but I don't think she likes chickens.”

The spot between Rhea's nippie-nips is not only itching, it's burning, as if her heart was lighting matches.

“Just the opposite,” Calvin tells Norman Marek. “She loves chickens. Thinks they're all pets. Last summer she rescued one of the spent hens from the manure pits. She calls her Miss Lucky Pants.”

Norman's hands are wringing the sweat out of the steering wheel. “Girl thing, I suppose.”

Rhea reaches under the bib of her overalls and works her fingers down the front of her blue turtleneck. She scratches the spot between her nippie-nips that's itching and burning. She feels something. At first she's afraid it's a spider. But it's too fuzzy to be a spider. And it's not crawling away. Or biting her fingers. She claws at it. It seems to be stuck right there in her skin. She pinches it. Yanks it. Cries out.

Her father twists. “What'd you do?”

Rhea pulls her hand from her turtleneck and examines the soft and fuzzy thing pinched between her fingers. It's nothing but a tiny white feather. “I had a feather growing between my nippie-nips,” she says.

“Behave,” her father says.

Eight

The same afternoon they return from Bob Gallinipper's corporate get-together in Gombeen, Calvin Cassowary sits his daughter down on the picnic table in the backyard. “I know the layer houses frighten you,” he begins. “They're frightening places—if you let your imagination get in the way.”

Rhea has her elbows on her knees and her hands under her chin. She is watching Captain Bates trot after Miss Lucky Pants in the overgrown vegetable garden next to the garage. In the past the little flock wouldn't be allowed to roam free this late in the spring. Once the garden was planted, they'd be confined to their coop and yard to protect the tomatoes, squash, and green beans from their dawn-to-dusk pecking. But with half of her mother in Heaven, and the other half in the Tuttwyler cemetery, her father says there's no time for a garden. So Captain Bates and his hens have all summer to be the free birds of the jungle the Creator intended. “I don't like the cages,” she tells her father.

Calvin drags his forearm across his sweaty face. This difficult talk with his daughter reminds him of the difficult talks he used to have with his own father, about things like sex and a young man's responsibility to his family, his country and his God. “I know.”

“The chickens don't like them either.”

“We can't have 300,000 thousand hens running around loose.”

“Why do we have to have 300,000 hens at all?”

“Because we're chicken farmers, Rhea. It's what we do.”

“Maybe we should do something else.”

Calvin scratches the top of her head. Her hair is the same deep red-brown as Jeanie's now. “When you have a farm, you have to farm.” For some reason his mind travels back to the intellectual drivel of his art student days. “It's what the Hindus call karma. It's our destiny. What we are and what we do. Eggs are our karma.”

“Chicken jail,” Rhea says as Captain Bates hops up on Miss Lucky Pants' back and flaps his wings. “That's what we do. We run a chicken jail.”

Calvin stops playing with his daughter's hair, to keep himself from yanking it. “People need eggs. We produce eggs. It's a good thing, Rhea. Something to be proud of.”

“I'm proud I saved Miss Lucky Pants from the chicken shit.”

Calvin's face needs wiping again. “I'm proud you did, too. But we can't make pets out of all the old hens. We'd lose the farm. So we do what we gotta do, pumpkin seed. You and me.”

Rhea scratches between her nippie nips. “You and me, pumpkin seed,” she says.

Calvin looks at the empty end of the picnic table. He wants Jeanie to be sitting there, reading a book, eating an apple, curling her hair around her finger, just being alive. “That's right. You and me. And you are going to be six years old in a couple of weeks. Old enough for a few outside chores.”

And so Calvin tells Rhea that Captain Bates and the Buff Orpingtons are going to be her responsibility from now on. She's going to start feeding them; gathering the eggs, washing off the poop and putting them in cartons in the refrigerator; making sure the chicken coop door is closed and latched at night. “But remember, Rhea,” he says, shaking his finger at her nose, “the Orpingtons are not pets. We take care of them for the eggs and we sell the eggs because we need the money. We don't play with them or give them names.”

“Captain Bates has a name,” she says. “Miss Lucky Pants has a name.”

“It would be better if they didn't.” Calvin takes Rhea by the chin and turns her face toward his. She has Jeanie's brown eyes, too, and her always questioning eyebrows. “It's a deal then?”

“Okay,” she says, “but if they have chicks I'm not going to cut off their beaks or look up their butts.”

Calvin tells her that there won't be any Orpington chicks, that when those hens get old and die off, that's going to be the end of the brown egg business, that the FRESH EGGS sign is coming down for good.

On Saturday they drive to the cemetery in Tuttwyler. They walk across the thick grass to Jeanie's grave. Calvin is still amazed at how well the wild strawberries are doing. He didn't expect that pot of scraggly vines to survive. But the roots took hold and that one plant has turned into three. They find exactly three ripe berries to eat, one for Rhea, one for him, one for Jeanie.

Nine

Flies are already banging into the window when Rhea wakes. The stench of 300,000 Leghorns is oozing in. Rhea Cassowary stretches and yawns. She pulls up her Holly Hobby nightgown and feels between her nippie nips. There's another feather growing.

She bites down on her tongue and plucks it. And looks at it. White. Silky. Delicate. Sharp as a pin, too. Rolling onto her stomach, Rhea worms her body over the edge of the bed until she can reach the Nestlé's Quik can on her toy shelves. The can already has several of the little feathers in it. She drops the new feather inside and pounds down the lid. Later today she'll be celebrating her sixth birthday. Until then it'll be just another day. She squeaks into the bathroom, pees, and brushes her teeth. She puts on her dirty jeans and a clean tee shirt and goes downstairs. “Daddy? Biscuit?”

Neither answer. Neither are there. Nor are the cats. She plans to have a bowl of Rice Krispies for breakfast but sees the box of Hostess donuts on the table and decides to have one of those instead. When the donut is gone, and the powdered sugar brushed on the floor, she pours an inch of orange juice into a glass and fishes in her bottle of Flintstone vitamins for a Barney. She finds one of her tennis shoes in the box by the refrigerator and one under the table in the dining room. Tonight there'll be a birthday cake on that table and some balloons and crêpe paper dangling from the light fixture. There'll be presents stacked on the buffet. At least that's the way birthdays went before God moved her mother's soul up to heaven.

She puts on the apron her mother used to wear. It's many sizes too big, but Gammy Betz has pinned up the bottom, so it doesn't drag on the ground and make her fall flat on her cute little face. She goes outside to feed Captain Bates and the Buff Orpingtons. And gather their eggs.

As the day drags on Captain Bates and his hens will wander far and wide in their search for bugs and worms. But right now they're gathered by the chicken coop door, waiting for that heaping scoop of cracked corn. Rhea showers them with it, just like her mother used to. “Peck-peck-peck,” she says to them, just like her mother used to do. “Peck-peck-peck.”

There aren't as many eggs in the nests in the morning as you find in the afternoon, but there are always a few, and you have to collect them, her father says, so no hen gets a notion to
set
. This morning there are five brown eggs waiting in the nests. Rhea gently puts them in the pouch of her apron. Then she hears a frail
cluck-cluck
coming from one of the top nests and she stands on her tip-toes to look inside. “What you doing in there Miss Lucky Pants?” she says.

The white Leghorn pecks sassily at her hand.

“That's not nice,” says Rhea. She lovingly scratches the feathers on the hen's breast. The hen softens her mood and purrs something like a kitten. “You got any eggs under there?”

Miss Lucky Pants stands proudly. She has three eggs under her.

It starts to itch between Rhea's nippie nips. She knows she should collect those three white eggs, take them in the house so her father can scramble them for his breakfast. She knows she should obey her father. But Rhea also knows she'd feel terrible stealing those eggs out from under Miss Lucky Pants. She saved that poor Leghorn hen from the manure pit. Gave her a name. How can she now steal her babies away? How can she let her father scramble them?

She pushes on Miss Lucky Pants until she's back on her eggs. The hen kitten-purrs her gratitude.

Rhea takes the other eggs inside. She washes off the manure and puts them in one of the cartons in the refrigerator. She turns on the television and clicks to the Nickelodeon channel and begins the long wait for her birthday.

At noon her father comes in for lunch. “You watch too much television,” he yells.

Rhea hears him, but goes on watching. Lassie is telling Timmy about the abandoned puppies she's found. She wonders why Biscuit isn't that concerned for the plight of others. Biscuit just eats and sleeps and leaves big piles of poop on the lawn.

“Come make yourself a sandwich,” her father yells from the kitchen.

“Yuk,” she yells back. They've had nothing but sandwiches for lunch since her mother died. Every week they go to the Stop' N Go in Tuttwyler and get lunch meat, bread, and cheese. And it's always the same kind of lunchmeat—pound of Dutchloaf, pound of bologna—and the same kind of cheese—half pound of Swiss—and the same kind of bread—jumbo loaf of wheat. And on Saturday when they have soup with their sandwiches, it's always tomato soup, made Cassowary style, half a can of water, half a can of milk, tablespoon of butter, and a quick shake of pepper. Her father's suppers are better, though just as predictable: hamburgers on Mondays and Saturdays, fried bologna and onions on Tuesdays and Thursdays, spaghetti on Wednesdays, on Sunday rubber pork chops, fried potatoes, and canned peas. Fridays they drive to the Pizza Teepee in Tuttwyler for a pepperoni and mushroom.

Rhea's mother made lunchmeat sandwiches for lunch, too, but not every day. Sometimes she'd make grilled cheese sandwiches. Sometimes tuna on toast sandwiches. Sometimes peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Sometimes she'd heat up a can of Franco-American spaghetti. There'd always be some kind of fruit, too, a banana or sliced pears or applesauce. On soup days it could be chicken noodle or beef vegetable just as well as tomato. Supper could be meatloaf or fish sticks and Tater Tots or made-from-scratch macaroni and cheese. Carrots or lima beans or asparagus or creamed corn might show up on the table. Some of her mothers choices for supper were uneatable, to be sure. But you never knew what it would be on any given night, except for Fridays, when the three of them would drive to the Pizza Teepee in Tuttwyler.

After Lassie is praised for saving the puppies, Rhea goes to the kitchen for that sandwich.

“What's with Miss Lucky Pants?” her father asks as they sit at the wobbly table. “You haven't brought in any white eggs for a couple days now.”

Rhea plays dumb, putting her full concentration on the face she's drawing on her bolonga with the squeeze-jar of mustard. “Maybe she's spent.”

“Maybe you're not checking all the nests.”

She gives the bologna slice a frown. “Maybe some of the nests are too high for me.”