Prairie Ostrich (4 page)

Bye bye Martin Fisken. So long Snooty Syms.

Egg turns to the barn, holds her head up to the scent of green: alfalfa hay. It smells like Mama's fragrant tea leaves in the black lacquered bowl. She can see her Mama through the kitchen window, the frame squeezing her smaller and smaller. The sonorous boom of the ostrich call fills the late afternoon air. Two ostriches, a black plume and a smaller brown plume weave from side to side in their outdoor pen. Their kantling dance, the awkward loping, wings stretched wide, that ridiculous bobbing head as the neck flails from side to side — Egg knows that this is ostrich S - E - X. From what Egg knows of S - E - X, she thinks it is just stupid.

She makes her way into the barn. As she opens the gate, her eyes scan the three indoor pens that line the south side. There are two pens for the adult ostriches (one for each breeding pair) and each pen has a grill that opens to the outside enclosure. The last pen is for the chicks' run. Egg drops her bag, hears the
glug glug
of the jerry can, and turns. Her father fills the water trough, twisting the spout in the corner. He looks up and gives her a nod. Papa's movements are precise, just enough and nothing extra. His features are sharp, as if cut by a razor, his frame is wiry, with a strength that compacts and contains. In her father, there are pressures of time and the patience of ages. Like the glaciers, Egg thinks, like the erratics. As she climbs onto the stool by the old wood stove, she catches the swing of her legs by hooking her ankles on the bar. She knows he likes the calm, how he wraps himself up in a cocoon of quiet. Butterflies come from cocoons. Egg knows that bears hibernate, that frogs come from tadpoles after a string of jelly eggs.
Metamorphosis.
The word sits on the tip of her tongue.

His cot, neatly made, is tucked in by the boxes at the back of the barn. Albert's boxes. Albert's room is empty now. Like a hole where the heart used to be.

“How was your first day of school?” Papa asks.

“Good,” Egg chirps. He would expect nothing less.

Her father lays out the pellets and alfalfa in a pan to lure the first pen into the barn. He gives a piercing whistle to announce that the feed is in. The ostriches, with their awkward stick-like gait, make their way towards the pan, their necks scooping and curving. When they are all inside, her father latches the grill behind them.

Egg straightens. “Can I get the eggs? I'll be extra careful.”

“All right.”

Egg slips off her stool and runs outside to the pens. The wind rises, lifting as it gathers force, funnelling down the foothills to roar across the plains. Tumbleweed clouds in a churning sky. Through the wire gate, she dashes to the scratched-out nest and scoops out the two large eggs, one in each arm. She braces them against her chest, cradles the bulk of them, these strange, stone-like spheres. “Metamorphosis,” she whispers. She walks back inside the barn, her footsteps slow and cautious as the wind makes mischief of her hair. She places these treasures into her father's arms. As he wipes the eggs clean, he strokes the rough, pitted pores of the shell. He holds, feels the weight in his palm.

“Look,” he murmurs. Arm extended, he candles the egg, clicks on his flashlight, and casts the beam upward. Lit from below, he traces the thin outline of the air sac, the yellow glow of the yolk. A satisfied grunt sounds from his throat. He places the egg on the setting tray, the slight point of the shell down, with the concave curve of the air cell at the top. He pencils in the date, a bumpy scrawl.

Egg rocks back on her heels, then taps them together. When her father laughs, it is like air leaking out of him, but that was before Albert's accident. He was bigger then, a thousand feet taller. To Egg, it seems as if he is shrinking, shrinking to fit the smallness under the beams, drawing in the shadows of the barn and the pens.

Egg would like to ask him why he won't leave the ostrich barn but she can't quite get out the words. It's like her mouth is full of gumballs, so sour she can't even spit. There are a million questions she would like to ask: Why does their family have to be so different? Why does different feel so wrong?

Was it always this way? No, not until Albert died.

The kettle whistles on the stove. Sharp.

He takes his mason jars from the box by the door and fills them with the hot water, capping the lids with a firm twist. The jars he places around the setting tray. Patiently, he wraps a rolled blanket around the edges of the tray to keep in the warmth for as long as possible: his makeshift incubator for the next forty days.

He is an ostrich Papa, Egg thinks. Albert was the boy, he was everything. The rest of us don't matter.

“The chicks are filling up the crate, Dad,” Egg points to the male and female ostriches, their necks poking through the bars. “Gertie and Bertie, their feathers look thicker. And Griszelda —”

“Shouldn't give them names, Egg. You know that.” There is a lilt to his voice, the slightest accent.

Egg bites her lip and repeats his old admonishment, “Can't get too attached.”

Papa nods.

Behind him, at the back of the barn, behind the low tangle of thin wire, the ostrich chicks call from their brooder crate, a high trilling whinny. At a few weeks, their down is not quite feather, still blunted; the full majestic mass of plumage is yet to come. Egg clicks her tongue and watches as their heads perk, rising on their elongated necks like comical telescopes.

Ostrich Papa squats in front of the pen, peering at the chicks. Ostrich Papa, so close he can see only the hatchlings. Candling and turning his clutch.

Egg swallows past the tightness in her throat. “Can I run them?” she asks.

“You have to sweep the pen first,” Papa says. Egg goes to the corner that holds the rakes, pitchfork, and the spiky rust-harrow that gives her nightmares. She draws out the wide broom that has been cut to her size.

As she sweeps out the chicks' pen, her father checks his breeders: the four small females, their brown coats dull in the afternoon light. The two black-feather ostrich males, with their ridge of white feathers, have lost some weight in this season. Their pink necks bulge as they commence their evening call.
Wooh-wooh-wooohhh.
Egg lays down the hessian jute and spreads the grit for their gizzards. Jute, for the traction, and the grit, to help grind the feed in their stomachs. With the hatchlings, they will have to be careful. Infection, impaction, dehydration, and diarrhea, although the loop of twine between the legs may take care of the spraddle. The losses are high with the young ones. She eyes the floor for a stray piece of straw, an errant threat that could catch in their throats — because the ostriches will eat anything. Papa has wrapped the lower sides of the chick pen with fine wire for the bars are too wide to hold them in. Egg lays out the shallow pan of feed. As she opens the side of the crate, the chicks tumble out, at times their long legs splaying underneath the weight of their bodies. The biggest ones are nearly half her size. She stands, and stares, and feels the uncomplicated pull of their companionship, their animal nature. They are innocent, after all. Their chirps are a simple
me! me! me!
that pulls at her heart. Palms out, she feels them pass beneath her hands, the tickle of fuzz and incipient feathers as they scamper to the pan.

…

After dinner, Mama takes one look at Egg, at the yellow husks in her hair and the smear of Godknowswhat on her forehead, and declares that it is bath time.

As she sheds her clothes, Egg thinks
metamorphosis
.

In the bathtub, she ducks her head under the water and all the sounds of the house come booming, so close and so far. It is like she is inside herself. She holds her breath. A water cocoon. She knows that the blue whale is the biggest animal ever, in all of existence, even bigger than any dinosaur. At two hundred tons, its heart is as big as a car and it breathes through a blowhole. The blue whale, who can live a hundred years, older than elephants, they roam the oceans but no one knows where. What must they think of the sky, that other ocean, the harsh and alien air, something you need to live but you can't quite live in?

Egg wonders what they dream.

Ostriches dream. They tuck their heads beneath their wings but they don't fly. Sometimes they shudder and when the wind comes up, they dance in circles, feathers spread and spindly legs kicking. Their heads bob and weave. Egg, in the bath with her head underwater, thinks about ostriches. She wonders. No one else has an ostrich farm.

Kathy scoops her up from the tub, tousling Egg's wet hair with her blue towel, her Ninny Blankie with the corners chewed, but that was when Egg was a baby. After teeth brushing and pjs, Kathy tucks Egg into bed. With a snap of the wrist, Kathy floats the sheet down the length of the bed and draws the edge under Egg's chin.

Egg laughs. “You're like a magician.”

Kathy scoops the
moufu,
the heavy blanket, from the foot of the bed and plops it down on Egg's head. It is like an old game of avalanche.

Egg's head pops from beneath the blanket. “You going out with Stacey tonight?”

“Yeah. What about it?” Kathy, straightening out the corners of the bed, has her prickles up.

Egg sighs. She knows that her sister will keep her secrets until the day she dies but they are written all over her face. “Nothing…Could you tell me a story?”

“Egg —”

“A short one. Promise not to interrupt.” Egg crosses her heart. “Hope to die.”

Kathy puffs out her cheeks.

“Or I can tell you about the Vast Open Plains of the Northern—”

“Okay, okay,” Kathy rubs her chin, “give me a sec.”

Egg sits and draws the blanket around her. “Is Papa ever coming out of the ostrich barn?”

“I don't know.”

“Kathy?”

“Yeah?” Kathy's hand pats the bottom of the bed for Nekoneko, Egg's puppet Kitty. Egg can't sleep without Nekoneko.

“How did you get Popular?”

“Well, I don't know that I'm Popular.”

“No one teases you, and I've seen you stand up for Raymond.”

“Is that what this is about? Is someone teasing you? Is it Martin?”

Egg sinks a little. “No.” She worries the corner of the moufu. “I just wish things were different.”

Kathy pulls out Nekoneko from beneath the bed and knocks off the dust. “Yeah,” she says softly.

Humpty Dumpty, Egg thinks.

“It's time for you to go to sleep.” Kathy raises her hand to the lamp but her eyes fall to the book on the bedside table. “Hey,” she says as she picks up the worn paperback of
Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl
. “If you want me to read this to you, don't read ahead, okay?” She squints at Egg. “Have you been going through my room again?”

Egg hugs the book to her chest. “I just like to hold it. Let me keep it, please — I won't read ahead, I promise. I just like to look at her picture.” Egg rubs the outline of Anne's photograph at the back of the book and thinks of her own notebook. It's the first day of school and her pages are blank but she is too tired and enough is enough. Egg rolls onto her back and sighs. “I would like a best friend, Kathy.”

Kathy turns off the lamp.

Egg tosses dramatically. “I can't sleep.”

Kathy strokes Egg's head, her fingers threading through her thick, stubborn hair. She whispers, “Just think of all the alphabet animals.”

Egg closes her eyes. The first day of school. The first September without Albert. She thinks of Mama and retreats into her blanket. “Do you think we're broken?”

“Shh, Egg. Shh.”

Egg feels the lulling motion of Kathy's hand stroking her hair, hears the rhythm of Kathy's breathing. Through her window, she can see the swirl of constellations. She thinks of the big blue whale, a pod of leaping dolphins — and Raymond— she smiles. If penguin Raymond can make it through school, maybe Egghead ostriches can too.

She sleeps.

…

Egg opens her eyes. The moonlight falls through her window. The curtains waver, stirred by the faintest draft in this quiet, quiet dark.

Quiet. But no. That sound.

Egg sits up.

She hears a cry from down the hall. Mama's room. Egg darts to her door, the shock of the cold floor on her bare feet making her run faster and faster, a tiptoe mouse scurry to the bedroom down the hall. She pauses at her Mama's door and peeks through the crack.

Mama slumps by the side of the bed, her back to Egg. Her hands are clasped in prayer.

“Why, Albert?” Mama sobs.

Egg steps back, steps away. She thinks of her father in the ostrich barn, of Kathy — Egg jerks towards the shadows of her sister's open bedroom door — Kathy is still out with Stacey. Mama cries, Mama cries but Egg cannot go to her. Egg is frozen, like the Vast Open Plains of the Northern Tundra. First day of school and Albert was not with them. Albert will never be with them. He has been dead for three months, two weeks, and five days — such a long, long time. Now they are all broken apart and Mama's lost and drifting and all the king's horses and all the king's men will never be able to put them back together again.

Egg runs back to her room, to her bed. She pulls the covers over her head. She does not want to see, she does not want to hear. She feels her heart shrivel up in her chest, a small, hard thing, not like the blue whale at all. The blue whale will not help her; not even the speed of light will bring Albert back. She curls and tucks her knees up to her chin and thinks of the stolen mints from the drawer, the matches from her Papa's tool box. She cannot be good. And if she is not good, then she is damned.

Egg knows that Mama wants Albert. But Egg is alive and Albert isn't.

October

Time crawls in the classroom. It is not even lunchtime and it already feels like forever. As Egg looks out the window, she can see the low-lying clouds streaking against a duller grey. The trees have begun shedding their leaves, the fields fading slowly to yellow. Egg wiggles in her chair. She's placed
The Mixed-Up Files
and
A Wrinkle in Time
on the corner of her desk for her lunchtime library trek.

Egg likes Claudia and Jamie in the
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
, their idea to live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, although Egg would have chosen the big Eaton's in Calgary instead. It's a good story — research — if ever she should run away. Money and a good bed: these are important. Egg thinks that the most important thing about running away is not the away part. The most important thing is the destination, the running to, or it all just becomes about running and that's another kind of stuck. Also, violin cases are handy to pack your clothes.

Stories are imagination. Stories aren't real. But stories tell us something, don't they, even if they are fiction? That's what troubles Egg. That Claudia Kincaid is so real.

In math, she raises her hand to go to the bathroom.

Egg takes the long way around. You're not supposed to take the long way around, but sometimes, especially during junior recess, Egg takes the hallway into the high school wing. Kathy has a new English teacher called Miss Chapman who has a whole bunch of new words that Egg is trying to wrap her head around. She likes onomatopoeia but oxymoron makes her laugh. Kathy says that Egg collects words like dogs collect bones. As Egg peers into Miss Chapman's classroom, she sees this new teacher at the front of her class.

The older you get, you either fatten or you shrivel, that's what Kathy says. Egg watches Miss Chapman at the blackboard; her writing slants and slashes — the
y
's drop like daggers and the
v
's leap off the slate.
Dostoyevsky Tolstoy Chekhov
. Miss Chapman stands rigid, in a charcoal dress, her midnight-black hair in a blunt bowl cut. Her fingernails are ruby red, stark against the chalk. Snow White's stepmother. Egg can see that Miss Chapman is not shrunken nor shrivelled but compressed and contained. The forces of gravity are working on Miss Chapman. She could go off at any second.

Grown-ups are a mystery. Principal Crawley has a thin mustache, beady eyes, and a weasel's twitch. Vice Principal Geary is always clutching his pockets, his fingers thick as sausages. Everyone knows that Vice Principal Geary will come in drunk at least once during the semester and blubber during the Easter play. It is best to stay away from his bratwurst fingers. Mrs. Ayslin, skittish in her long summer sleeves, is always hovering on the edge of the teacher's assembly. Mrs. Ayslin will sport a shiner after Christmas break, always running into a wall, a door, whatever is handy, everyone knows.

It's grown-ups who play pretend most of all.

Miss Chapman's voice pierces the air. “Now why does Ivan Ilyich feel such torment? He's dying, but why at that moment?”

All heads are bowed.

“Debbie.”

Debbie Duncan, Kathy's friend. Debbie's mum takes in the wash for the Crawleys and Stintons and Fiskens. Her father is nowhere to be found.

Debbie falters, “Sorry, Mrs. Chapman. I wasn't —”

“That's
Ms.
Ms. Chapman,” she cuts in, “and no, you weren't.”

Egg stares at the curve of Ms. Chapman's eyebrows, the twist of her lips. Ms. Chapman, from outside Bittercreek. They do things differently there.

Ms. Chapman's head swivels and snaps. “Kathy. What about Ivan Ilyich? His torment?”

Kathy unfurls herself from her don't-pick-me slouch. “Ah, it's the world that he's in, it's so hypocritical, and it's — he had his chance but he blew it.” Chapman turns, a dismissal but Kathy continues, “It doesn't seem fair though, like he only had this one chance then —”

“Fair has nothing to do with it.” Chapman clicks and rattles. “Irrevocable moments. But he chooses, he chooses not to save himself. Character is destiny,” she proclaims. She whips out her last statement and slams it down like a cosmic gavel.

Character is destiny.
Egg furrows her brow. How is that so? Character is character and destiny is destiny. That's why they have different words. Kathy has told her that metaphors are lies that tell the truth but what's the truth in that?

At the end of the day, Egg slaps the blackboard brushes together by the pencil sharpener. She doesn't mind the chores. This keeps her out of harm's way until the school bus pickup and maybe Mrs. Syms won't be so mean. Fresh pencil smell but the chalk dust makes her sneeze. Egg likes to sneeze. The heart stops when you sneeze, that's why you say “Bless you.” She empties the cylindrical sharpener and pokes her fingers through the different sized holes. The sharpener is like the sausage maker down at Gustafsson's, only in reverse. Reverse and opposite are kind of like the same but not.

Egg dashes to the open doors of the school bus. Mr. Johnston, the bus driver, must be in the teacher's lounge scrounging up a cup of coffee and maybe even one of Mrs. McCracken's homemade butter biscuits. Egg scans the schoolyard. Martin Fisken is nowhere in sight. But she can see Kathy on the basketball court, showing off for Stacey. All the rest of the bus kids are far to the other side of the yard, by the picnic tables or on the jungle gym; their squeals bounce off the concrete. Egg looks back at her sister, at Stacey, who waits on the sidelines. The late autumn light blazes behind them, two silhouettes made smaller by the crush of the sky. Kathy holds the ball in her hands, standing in the free throw circle. Egg watches, waits for her sister to take that shot. But the shot never comes. Why, Egg wonders, why is Kathy just standing there? Egg feels a sudden sense of things beyond her grasp. She wants to call out to her sister, to shout some warning, for Kathy seems so lost and alone. But Kathy is not alone. Stacey slowly walks onto the court. It seems to Egg that it takes Stacey a long time to reach her sister. Kathy, head down, stares at the ground, her body small, as if she has folded something precious, tucked it up inside herself and hidden it away. She stands so still. But Stacey just walks out to Kathy and places her hands on Kathy's face, brings her chin up. Egg sees the ball fall away, bump bump bump bump bump. It rolls unevenly across the court.

The afternoon light, the shift and flare. Egg can't tell exactly what she has seen.

Mr. Johnston's whistle blasts as he strides towards the bus, the spring in his step sloshing the coffee over the rim of his mug. He stuffs a shortbread cookie in his mouth, as he jangles the keys. The kids come streaming from the yard, pouring off the jungle gym. They run towards the bus, all shouts and screams. The floor jounces beneath Egg's feet. She looks back to the basketball court. But the moment has passed and Kathy and Stacey have already joined the raucous line to the bus doors.

Mr. Johnston pulls the lever and then they are off.

At the house Egg rushes to her room and slides under the bed with a pencil and paper, pushing the bits of Lego and rolling the dinky cars away.
Character is destiny.
That means if you change who you are, you change what happens.
Metamorphosis.
Egg thinks of Claudia Kincaid in
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
. Claudia needed a mystery to uncover, to complete her adventure. Claudia needed a mystery to solve, to come back changed.

This makes Egg wonder.

Kathy says fairy tales are stories told to children so they can learn about the world. The Moral of the Story is Don't be So Stupid like in Little Red Riding Hood or Don't be So Greedy like in Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Egg's favourite story is Rumpelstiltskin. You would think the hero would be the queen but she didn't do anything, just cried until Rumpel came around and saved her butt. He was the one who could spin straw into gold. The king was the evil one, telling her that if she didn't spin the straw into gold he would kill her, and he got all the gold in the end. Kathy says that is called Capitalism.

Egg is not quite sure what the Moral of the Story is.

In an adventure tale, you can be a Hero or a Damsel Fair. But not both. Girls are never heroes. In an adventure story, someone is saved. The dragon is slain. The moral is that good triumphs over evil, just like in real life.

The Greeks didn't have morals. Or maybe it's just Get Out of the Way of the Gods. Egg thinks that the story of Job in the Bible is like that. He is rewarded in the end with a new wife and new kids but what about the old wife and old kids? They didn't do anything wrong and they were smoted, just like that. What if Job liked his old wife better? And Egg wonders what the old wife thought about how things turned out.

Her Mama clinks the glasses in the kitchen. Egg tries to think about Albert's story. There doesn't seem to be a moral except Stay Off the Train Tracks and You Won't Be Hit and Flung into the River. You can only have a moral at the very end. That's when you know how the story turns out.

Egg looks down at her paper. There are so many ideas but they are all jumbled up in her brain. Her notebook helps. Anne Frank wrote down all her thoughts in her diary and she made it into her best friend, Kitty. She put up posters of her favourite film stars in the Secret Annex and made family trees of People in History. She even read books of folks Egg has never heard of — all to make sense of what was happening to her and her family.

Egg bites her lip. If her life were a story, what would she write?

Once upon a time

There was a family

With ostriches

They were Japanese

Not the ostriches.

Egg pauses. She thinks, people die all the time. You make up a story to make sense of the world. But what if the world doesn't make sense?

No no no. The world must make sense. Like Our Father who Art in Heaven. Like Character is Destiny. There must be some kind of clue, some kind of sign. Yes, there must be. She just needs more facts. Like a scientist. Like a detective.

Egg stares down at the page. Stories are harder than they seem. She flips over the sheet and begins to write
I promise to be good
over and over again, filling the lines with her scrawl. It is her pact with the world. She knows that it only comes true if you believe it. It only becomes real when you write it down.

…

Egg crouches in the shadows of the kitchen table. It's like the
Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom
— the cheetahs and the leopards on the Vast Open Plains of the Serengeti. Egg likes the part about the mama cheetahs romping with her cubs in the tall grasses, climbing into the low spreading, branching arms of the acacia trees. The papa cheetahs are nowhere to be found. That's just the way it is. Egg looks away at the stalking, at the poor gazelles and impalas, but she knows the facts of life. Here, beneath the kitchen table, as Egg weaves her body around the legs of the kitchen chairs, it is like playing hide-and-seek with herself but tonight she is watching Mama. It's like the empirical method that way. Mama, with her bluebird apron, the steam fogging the window, the click-clack of forks and spoons settling in the big sink, the splosh of dishes as Mama submerges them in the sudsy water.

Mama's thick black hair is cut to a no-nonsense bob. Her bangs fall over her eyes as she leans over the sink and scrubs the big pot.
Scratch scratch scratch
— Egg doesn't like the sound of the bristle brush. The grey at Mama's temples came after Albert's accident. Mama's hair was once as long and as thick as a rope, just like a fairy tale Rapunzel, a once upon a time of sleepy tuck-ins, of good nights, of Mama's long, black strands flowing through Egg's fingers, like water, like wind.

After Albert's funeral Mama cut her hair so that's the end of that.

Mama wipes her hands on the apron. Mama's hands always surprise Egg. They are swift and delicate, flitting like a small bird.

“Careful of your head, little one,” Mama says without turning.

Egg jerks up — her forehead smashes on the bottom of the chair. She catches the whimper in her teeth.

“What are you doing down there?” Mama asks. She turns from the dishes, the bubbles still clinging to her fingers, and sits by the kitchen table. “Let me see that,” she coaxes, sliding Egg onto her lap. She pushes back Egg's hair, to reveal the bump on her forehead. “You've got an egg-bump,” Mama says playfully and kisses the small welt lightly.

“I'm all right,” Egg sniffs, blinking away her tears.

Mama strokes back Egg's tumbled hair, looping a strand behind her ears. “You're a Murakami. A stoic through and through.”

“What's a stoic?”

Mama purses her lips. She slips her hand into her apron pocket and pops a mint into Egg's mouth. A melty mint, white on the outside, green on the inside. Egg's favourite.

“How come you don't talk like Papa?”