The Animal-Lover's Book of Beastly Murder (11 page)

It was two or three days before Bess felt anything like her usual self. She hadn’t needed to go into a hospital, but the doctor had advised her to rest a lot at home, which she had done. And Eleanor Poindexter had been an angel, and driven Bess twice to visit Marylou in the Danville hospital. Marylou’s legs had been broken, and she’d need an operation on both knees. She might always walk with a limp, one doctor told Bess. And Marylou was strangely bitter about Harry—that shocked Bess the most, considering they were newlyweds, and Bess assumed much in love.

“Stupid—selfish—so-and-so,” Marylou said. Her voice was bitter.

Bess felt Marylou might have said more, but didn’t want to or didn’t dare. Harry’s body had been sent to California, to Harry’s mother. After the brook, Bess had never seen Harry.

One day that same week, Bess took Fanny into the meadow for grazing. Bess was feeling a little happier. She’d had a letter from Sam, and he was willing to come back, providing Harry’s visit was over (Sam didn’t mince words), and Bess had just replied to him in a letter which the mailman would take away tomorrow morning.

Then Bess saw the dry and half-eaten body of the little gray cat, and a shock of pain went through her. She’d supposed the kitten had wandered on somewhere. What had happened to it? Crushed somehow. By what? A car or tractor never came into this meadow. Bess turned and looked at Fanny, whose thick neck was bent towards the ground. Fanny’s lips and teeth moved in the grass. Fanny couldn’t have stepped on the little thing, the kitten was much too quick, had been. Fanny had liked the kitten, Bess had seen that the morning she’d given the kitten the rib bone. And there, just a few feet away, was the long bone, stripped clean now by birds. Bess bent and picked it up. How the little kitten had loved this bone! Bess, after bracing herself, lifted the kitten’s body up too. Hadn’t Harry harnessed Fanny in the meadow that day? What had happened? What had happened to make Fanny so angry that day at the brook? It was Harry’s hands that had driven the wagon over the edge. Bess had seen it. Fanny would never have gone so near the edge, if she hadn’t been tugged that way.

In the afternoon, Bess buried the kitten in an old, clean dishtowel in a grave she dug in the far meadow, beyond the chickens’ and the ducks’ yard. It hadn’t seemed right to dispose of the kitten in the garbage, even if she’d wrapped the body well. The kitten had been so full of life! Harry had somehow killed the kitten, Bess felt sure. And Fanny had seen it. Bess knew too that Harry had meant to kill her. It was horrid, too horrid to think about.

The Day
of Reckoning

J
ohn took a taxi from the station, as his uncle had told him to do in case they weren’t there to meet him. It was less than two miles to Hanshaw Chickens, Inc., as his Uncle Ernie Hanshaw now called his farm. John knew the white two-story house well, but the long gray barn was new to him. It was huge, covering the whole area where the cow barn and the pigpens had been.

“Plenty of wishbones in that place!” the taxi driver said cheerfully as John paid him.

John smiled. “Yes, and I was just thinking—not a chicken in sight!”

John carried his suitcase towards the house. “Anybody home?” he called, thinking Helen would probably be in the kitchen now, getting lunch.

Then he saw the flattened cat. No, it was a kitten. Was it real or made of paper? John set his suitcase down and bent closer. It was real. It lay on its side, flat and level with the damp reddish earth, in the wide track of a tire. Its skull had been crushed and there was blood there, but not on the rest of the body which had been enlarged by pressure, so that the tail looked absurdly short. The kitten was white with patches of orange, brindle and black.

John heard a hum of machinery from the barn. He put his suitcase on the front porch, and hearing nothing from the house, set off at a trot for the new barn. He found the big front doors locked, and went round to the back, again at a trot, because the barn seemed to be a quarter of a mile long. Besides the machine hum, John heard a high-pitched sound, a din of cries and peeps from inside.

“Ernie?” John yelled. Then he saw Helen. “
Hello
, Helen!”

“John! Welcome! You took a taxi? We didn’t hear any car!” She gave him a kiss on the cheek. “You’ve grown another three inches!”

His uncle climbed down from a ladder and shook John’s hand. “How’re you, boy?”

“Okay, Ernie. What’s going on here?” John looked up at moving belts which disappeared somewhere inside the barn. A rectangular metal container, nearly as big as a boxcar, rested on the ground.

Ernie pulled John closer and shouted that the grain, a special mixture, had just been delivered and was being stored in the factory, as he called the barn. This afternoon a man would come to collect the container.

“Lights shouldn’t go on now, according to schedule, but we’ll make an exception so you can see. Look!” Ernie pulled a switch inside the barn door, and the semi-darkness changed to glaring light, bright as full sun.

The cackles and screams of the chickens augmented like a siren, like a thousand sirens, and John instinctively covered his ears. Ernie’s lips moved, but John could not hear him. John swung around to see Helen. She was standing farther back, and waved a hand, shook her head and smiled, as if to say she couldn’t bear the racket. Ernie drew John farther into the barn, but he had given up talking and merely pointed.

The chickens were smallish and mostly white, and they all shuffled constantly. John saw that this was because the platforms on which they stood slanted forward, inclining them towards the slowly moving feed troughs. But not all of them were eating. Some were trying to peck the chickens next to them. Each chicken had its own little wire coop. There must have been forty rows of chickens on the ground floor, and eight or ten tiers of chickens went up to the ceiling. Between the double rows of back-to-back chickens were aisles wide enough for a man to pass and sweep the floor, John supposed, and just as he thought this, Ernie turned a wheel, and water began to shoot over the floor. The floor slanted towards various drain holes.

“
All automatic! Somethin’, eh?
”

John recognized the words from Ernie’s lips, and nodded appreciatively. “Terrific!” But he was ready to get away from the noise.

Ernie shut off the water.

John noticed that the chickens had worn their beaks down to blunt stubs, and their white breasts dripped blood where the horizontal bar supported their weight. What else could they do but eat? John had read a little about battery chicken farming. These hens of Ernie’s, like the hens he had read about, couldn’t turn around in their coops. Much of the general flurry in the barn was caused by chickens trying to fly upward. Ernie cut the lights. The doors closed after them, apparently also automatically.

“Machine farming has really got me over the hump,” Ernie said, still talking loudly. “I’m making good money now. And just imagine, one man—me—can run the whole show!”

John grinned. “You mean you won’t have anything for me to do?”

“Oh, there’s plenty to do. You’ll see. How about some lunch first? Tell Helen I’ll be in in about fifteen minutes.”

John walked towards Helen. “Fabulous.”

“Yes. Ernie’s in love with it.”

They went on towards the house, Helen looking down at her feet, because the ground was muddy in spots. She wore old tennis shoes, black corduroy pants, and a rust-colored sweater. John purposely walked between her and where the kitten lay, not wanting to mention it now.

He carried his suitcase up to the square, sunny corner room which he had slept in since he was a boy of ten, when Helen and Ernie had bought the farm. He changed into blue jeans, and went down to join Helen in the kitchen.

“Would you like an old-fashioned? We’ve got to celebrate your arrival,” Helen said. She was making two drinks at the wooden table.

“Fine.—Where’s Susan?” Susan was their eight-year-old daughter.

“She’s at a—Well, sort of summer school. They’ll bring her back around four-thirty. Helps fill in the summer holidays. They make awful clay ashtrays and fringed money-purses—you know. Then you’ve got to praise them.”

John laughed. He gazed at his aunt-by-marriage, thinking she was still very attractive at—what was it? Thirty-one, he thought. She was about five feet four, slender, with reddish blonde curly hair and eyes that sometimes looked green, sometimes blue. And she had a very pleasant voice. “Oh, thank you.” John accepted his drink. There were pineapple chunks in it, topped with a cherry.

“Awfully good to see you, John. How’s college? And how’re your folks?”

Both those items were all right. John would graduate from Ohio State next year when he would be twenty, then he was going to take a post-graduate course in government. He was an only child, and his parents lived in Dayton, a hundred and twenty miles away.

Then John mentioned the kitten. “I hope it’s not yours,” he said, and realized at once that it must be, because Helen put her glass down and stood up. Who else could the kitten have belonged to, John thought, since there was no other house around?

“Oh, Lord! Susan’s going to be—” Helen rushed out of the back door.

John ran after her, straight for the kitten which Helen had seen from a distance.

“It was that big truck this morning,” Helen said. “The driver sits so high up he can’t see what’s—”

“I’ll help you,” John said, looking around for a spade or a trowel. He found a shovel and returned, and prized the flattened body up gently, as if it were still alive. He held it in both his hands. “We ought to bury it.”

“Of course. Susan mustn’t see it, but I’ve got to tell her.—There’s a fork in back of the house.”

John dug where Helen suggested, a spot near an apple tree behind the house. He covered the grave over, and put some tufts of grass back so it would not catch the eye.

“The times I’ve brought that kitten in the house when the damned trucks came!” Helen said. “She was barely four months, wasn’t afraid of anything, just went trotting up to cars as if they were something to play with, you know?” She gave a nervous laugh. “And this morning the truck came at eleven, and I was watching a pie in the oven, just about to take it out.”

John didn’t know what to say. “Maybe you should get another kitten for Susan as soon as you can.”

“What’re you two doing?” Ernie walked towards them from the back door of the house.

“We just buried Beansy,” Helen said. “The truck got her this morning.”

“Oh.” Ernie’s smile disappeared. “That’s too bad. That’s really too bad, Helen.”

But at lunch Ernie was cheerful enough, talking of vitamins and antibiotics in his chicken feed, and his produce of one and a quarter eggs per day per hen. Though it was July, Ernie was lengthening the chicken’s “day” by artificial light.

“All birds are geared to spring,” Ernie said. “They lay more when they think spring is coming. The ones I’ve got are at peak. In October they’ll be under a year old, and I’ll sell them and take on a new batch.”

John listened attentively. He was to be here a month. He wanted to be helpful. “They really do eat, don’t they? A lot of them have worn off their beaks, I noticed.”

Ernie laughed. “They’re de-beaked. They’d peck each other through the wire, if they weren’t. Two of ’em got loose in my first batch and nearly killed each other. Well, one did kill the other. Believe me, I de-beak ’em now, according to instructions.”

“And one chicken went on eating the other,” Helen said. “Cannibalism.” She laughed uneasily. “Ever hear of cannibalism among chickens, John?”

“No.”

“Our chickens are insane,” Helen said.

Insane. John smiled a little. Maybe Helen was right. Their noises had sounded pretty crazy.

“Helen doesn’t much like battery farming,” Ernie said apologetically to John. “She’s always thinking about the old days. But we weren’t doing so well then.”

That afternoon, John helped his uncle draw the conveyor belts back into the barn. He began learning the levers and switches that worked things. Belts removed eggs and deposited them gently into plastic containers. It was nearly 5 p.m. before John could get away. He wanted to say hello to his cousin Susan, a lively little girl with hair like her mother’s.

As John crossed the front porch, he heard a child’s weeping, and he remembered the kitten. He decided to go ahead anyway and speak to Susan.

Susan and her mother were in the living room—a front room with flowered print curtains and cherrywood furniture. Some additions, such as a bigger television set, had been made since John had seen the room last. Helen was on her knees beside the sofa on which Susan lay, her face buried in one arm.

“Hello, Susan,” John said. “I’m sorry about your kitten.”

Susan lifted a round, wet face. A bubble started at her lips and broke. “Beansy—”

John embraced her impulsively. “We’ll find another kitten. I promise. Maybe tomorrow. Yes?” He looked at Helen.

Helen nodded and smiled a little. “Yes, we will.”

The next afternoon, as soon as the lunch dishes had been washed, John and Helen set out in the station wagon for a farm eight miles away belonging to some people called Ferguson. The Fergusons had two female cats that frequently had kittens, Helen said. And they were in luck this time. One of the cats had a litter of five—one black, one white, three mixed—and the other cat was pregnant.

“White?” John suggested. The Fergusons had given them a choice.

“Mixed,” Helen said. “White is all good and black is—maybe unlucky.”

They chose a black and white female with white feet.

“I can see this one being called Bootsy,” Helen said, laughing.

The Fergusons were simple people, getting on in years, and very hospitable. Mrs. Ferguson insisted they partake of a freshly baked coconut cake along with some rather powerful homemade wine. The kitten romped around the kitchen, playing with gray rolls of dust that she dragged out from under a big cupboard.

“That ain’t no battery kitten!” Frank Ferguson remarked, and drank deep.

“Can we see your chickens, Frank?” Helen asked. She slapped John’s knee suddenly. “Frank has the most
wonderful
chickens, almost a hundred!”

“What’s wonderful about ’em?” Frank said, getting up on a stiff leg. He opened the back screen door. “You know where they are, Helen.”

John’s head was buzzing pleasantly from the wine as he walked with Helen out to the chicken yard. Here were Rhode Island Reds, big white Leghorns, roosters strutting and tossing their combs, half-grown speckled chickens, and lots of little chicks about six inches high. The ground was covered with claw-scored watermelon rinds, tin bowls of grain and mush, and there was much chicken dung. A wheelless wreck of a car seemed to be a favorite laying spot: three hens sat on the back of the front seat with their eyes half closed, ready to drop eggs which would surely break on the floor behind them.

“It’s such a wonderful
mess
!” John shouted, laughing.

Helen hung by her fingers in the wire fence, rapt. “Like the chickens I knew when I was a kid. Well, Ernie and I had them too, till about—” She smiled at John. “You know—a year ago. Let’s go in!”

John found the gate, a limp thing made of wire that fastened with a wooden bar. They went in and closed it behind them.

Several hens drew back and regarded them with curiosity, making throaty, skeptical noises.

“They’re such stupid darlings!” Helen watched a hen fly up and perch herself in a peach tree. “They can see the sun! They can fly!”

“And scratch for worms—and eat watermelon!” John said.

“When I was little, I used to dig worms for them at my grandmother’s farm. With a hoe. And sometimes I’d step on their droppings, you know—well, on purpose—and it’d go between my toes. I loved it. Grandma always made me wash my feet under the garden hydrant before I came in the house.” She laughed. A chicken evaded her outstretched hand with an “
Urrr-rrk!
” “Grandma’s chickens were so tame, I could touch them. All bony and warm with the sun, their feathers. Sometimes I want to open all the coops in the barn and open the doors and let ours loose, just to see them walking on the grass for a few minutes.”

“Say, Helen, want to buy one of these chickens to take home? Just for fun? A couple of ’em?”

“No.”

“How much did the kitten cost? Anything?”

“No, nothing.”

S
USAN TOOK THE KITTEN INTO HER ARMS
, and John could see that the tragedy of Beansy would soon be forgotten. To John’s disappointment, Helen lost her gaiety during dinner. Maybe it was because Ernie was droning on about his profit and loss—not loss really, but outlay. Ernie was obsessed, John realized. That was why Helen was bored. Ernie worked hard now, regardless of what he said about machinery doing everything. There were creases on either side of his mouth, and they were not from laughing. He was starting to get a paunch. Helen had told John that last year Ernie had dismissed their handyman, Sam, who’d been with them seven years.