Chicken Feathers (2 page)

But Tucker himself had his mouth closed thin. He just put the bottle in the trash can, his face as heavy as a rainy day, and sat on the porch swing, where he clasped and unclasped his bony hands and sighed so deep the air seemed to come from the soles of his feet.

Josh stomped into his room and threw himself on the
blue patchwork quilt. Semolina was in her usual place on the wrought iron bedpost. She fidgeted, and a reddish brown feather floated down to the pillow.

Josh glared at her. “What kind of hen drinks brew?”

“My kind, buddy.” She snapped a yellow eye at him. “Ain’t my fault you was caught.”

She flopped from the bedpost to his bookcase, her claws scrabbling on the top shelf and upsetting a can of pencils. As she leaned against his picture of a three-masted sloop, Josh thought she looked mighty unsteady. “Talk to Dad, will you?” he begged. “Please? Just this once? Explain you made me get Grandma’s brew.”

She shook her wing feathers. “I told you umpteen times I ain’t never wasting words on biggies. They got no ears for it. I made you do nothing, buddy. Fair trade, I said. Brown water for news about the fox.”

Josh turned on his bed until his head was over the edge, his legs up the wall. “You got to tell him, Semolina. He thinks I drank it!”

“What a biggie dumb cluck!” she trilled. “One huff of your breath and he’d know it wasn’t you.”

Josh whirled around. In a quick, swooping movement he was on his feet, his hands outstretched. “I’ll get him to smell
you
r breath!” he cried. “That’ll convince him!”

Semolina flew up in a frenzy of feathers, and Josh’s fingers closed on air. Before he could open his hands again, that old fowl was out the window and onto the back porch, lurching across the boards, feathers ruffled.

“Come back!” Josh yelled.

She briefly turned her head. “Aw, shut your beak,” she said as she disappeared into the garden.

The open bottle of brew had gone clean out of Tucker Miller’s head by egg collection time. He had more important things to think about.

“Had a phone call from the doctor,” he said as Josh climbed into the egg trailer. “They’re keeping your mom in the hospital.”

“Keeping her?” Josh frowned. His mother was never this sick. “Can’t they fix what’s wrong and send her home?”

“She could lose the baby—like those other times.” Tucker started the tractor and yelled above the engine noise. “They reckon she’ll be in the hospital till it’s born.” He put the tractor in gear, and his voice got swallowed up in the rattles as they rolled down the hill toward the barns. The trailer swung from side to side over ground as hard as nails. Most of the grass had dried and the wheels sent up dust behind them, like brown smoke.

Josh took off his shirt. This surely was the hottest day of all summer. The sun swam in a big blue bowl of sky, and shadows crouched small as though they were scared of
getting burned on the scorched earth. Days like this, his mother usually took him swimming in the river behind the woods. Josh counted weeks on his fingers. If babies took nine months to grow and his mother was six months pregnant, then he’d be back at school before she was home again. He wiped his shirt across his face. Spittin’ bugs! He wanted a baby sister, sure, but there were limits to the cost.

His father stopped the tractor and swung his long legs down. “Okay, son. Back to the salt mines. Another day, another dollar.”

He always said that.

Other chicken farmers had red barns, but Tucker Miller painted his inside and out with tar to keep the chickens free of parasites like lice and red mites. Since black was a color that sucked up heat, there were cooling systems in each of the nine big chicken houses.

“Yes, sir,” Tucker had said to the reporter from the newspaper. “Our chickens are spoiled rich. Not only free range, they also have air-conditioning, cool in summer, and heaters to keep warm in winter. Take it from me, these hen hotels produce right royal eggs.”

Josh thought that free range was a matter of opinion. The only chicken truly free was Semolina. The others were always kept inside the chicken houses but not in little cages. They could wander around, scratching in the straw, giving themselves dust baths, and when it was time to lay, they hopped up into one of a long line of nesting boxes and plopped out perfect little brown eggs. Well, mostly perfect. The eggs too small, too big or soft-shelled were sold cheap to Mr. Sorensen, who made wedding and birthday cakes.

Josh jumped off the trailer with a stack of egg baskets. “If she came home now, she could stay in bed—the same as in the hospital.”

“Not the same. She’s got a nurse checks her every four hours, and all the medicine right there—” Tucker took a load of baskets from Josh. “We’re not taking any more risks, Josh. Not after trying seven years to get you a brother or sister.”

“Did you try a long time to get me?”

“Yup.” Tucker ruffled Josh’s hair. “Some people are like that pesky chicken of yours—they just ain’t good at laying. They got other talents.”

“Semolina doesn’t lay because she’s old,” Josh said.

“Right, son, and me and your mom ain’t no spring chickens either. I reckon this’ll be our last chance. Don’t fret.”

“Who’s fretting?” Josh chewed the edge of his thumbnail. “It’d be okay to be a big brother, but I’m not holding my breath. I just want Mom home.”

Tucker nodded. “That makes two of us. But I don’t expect you to choke on pizza every night. We’ll get someone in to cook regular meals and help with the house.”

Josh shrugged. “It’s okay, Dad. I like pizza.”

Inside the first chicken house, sunlight melted dust and filled the air with gold. The floor was as busy as a city mall on Friday night. More than three hundred chickens scratched, clucked, pecked, fluffed in the straw in a haze that gave their feathers an orange glow. Josh closed the door and breathed in deep, the smell as thick as gravy. Everything about chickens, their feathers, feet, eggs, smelled like their poop. It was a rich smell, and Josh loved it. He wanted to believe that God had made people out of clay that smelled like chicken
poop, warm and friendly, full of good stuff for growth. His father said you could raise anything on chicken manure, and he would know. They sold the old chicken house straw by the truckload, and Tucker reckoned it made tomatoes as big as pumpkins.

Josh walked slow and light-footed lest he trod on something. The chickens were so used to him, they didn’t get out of the way, and there were eggs hidden in the straw like Easter surprises. They got laid there when all the nesting boxes were full. Josh understood how that happened. Once when they had guests in the bathrooms, he had to go under
a tree in the backyard and hope no one was watching. You couldn’t expect a chicken to hold off when an egg was coming into the world.

He found twenty-seven good eggs in the straw and two that were broken.

The morning Elizabeth was admitted to the hospital, Josh had sat on the swing seat on the back porch, Semolina beside him. He told Semolina how scary it was seeing his mom in bed with a needle in the back of her hand, a long tube joining her to a bag of fluid.

“So you took her to the vet,” Semolina said.

“Animals and birds have vets,” Josh said. “Human beings have doctors.”

Semolina did not like to be corrected. “Excuse me. I forgot to tell you I know the difference between biggies and chickens. So your mom’s gone broody. That’s natural, buddy.”

He tried to explain without offending her. “The baby’s not due until September. If it comes now, it’ll die.”

Semolina’s mood changed. She hopped onto his knee, her claws sharp through his jeans, and clacked her beak. “Aw, aw,” she crooned.

Josh felt his eyes become hot. “They’ll be heartbroken if they lose it.”

Step by step, the old hen crawled up his shirt until she was resting her beak on his shoulder. Her feathers quivered as a sigh went through her. “Eggs is easier,” she said. “They only take three weeks to hatch.”

While Josh went through the barns searching for the eggs that had been laid on the straw, Tucker did the nest boxes from outside, lifting up the lids, filling his baskets, cleaning out the occasional blob of gray-and-white poop.

“The water all right?” he asked Josh.

Josh nodded. Each of the nine chicken houses had two fresh water fountains that had to be checked daily. “No problems,” he said as he put the last lot of eggs in the trailer. “How was number three today?”

In answer, Tucker scrunched up his mouth and shoulders. That meant the egg count in the number-three shed was still down.

“How much?”

“Same. Three to four dozen missing.”

Josh said carefully, “You don’t think it could be a fox?”

Tucker frowned. “How would a fox get in?”

Josh was stuck. Any mention of a talking chicken would send his dad into a silence colder than snow.

“I—I just thought—it might be a fox.”

Tucker said, “Ain’t been a fox here in years. Anyways, foxes come at night. Chickens lay in the morning. Even if a fox did find a way in, which is downright impossible, the timing’s all wrong, and what makes you think a fox would prefer eggs to chicken? You ever consider that?”

Josh was silent. Maybe Semolina lied about the fox to get brew. That was unlikely but possible.

A long breath went out of Tucker, and his shoulders dropped. He put his hand on Josh’s head. “Sorry, son. When a man’s got worries, his jaw can get snappier than a turtle’s.
Come on. Let’s get this lot down to the sorting shed. We need to get ourselves cleaned up before visiting hour.”

Elizabeth Miller had a room of her own in the hospital and a bed that was bent like a V, with the bottom part steeper than the top. Josh ran to her, the toes of his shoes squeaking on the smooth floor. As he hugged her, he asked, “Doesn’t all your blood flow up to your head?”

She laughed and tickled him under the arms. “It might improve my brain.”

He laughed. “Mom, your brain couldn’t get improved. It’s a best-Mom-in-the-world super-brain!” He put his head on the pillow beside her. “What about the baby?”

“I guess she’s getting her share. I can feel her wriggling. Want to feel?” She grabbed his hand and held it on her stomach, but all he could feel was the rise and fall of his mom’s breathing.

He sat beside her, took some grapes out of a paper sack and put them in the white fruit bowl on her nightstand.
Nearly everything in the room was white, but Elizabeth Miller shone with color—skin like polished wood, dark red hair, pink cheeks, brown eyes. She looked like the magazine ad for Dr. Granger’s Elixir of Life, good for everything from sore feet to earwax. “Do you really have to stay here until the baby’s born?”

“Oh, honey, I hope not. But if it has to be that way, we’ll cope. Won’t we?”

He nodded. “Sure.”

“It’ll be worth it,” she said. “When the baby’s here, you’ll forget about the long wait and I’ll forget that I lay in the hospital bored out of my skull. Tell me about your day. Have you been working on your boat?”

“Not much time. I’ll get back to it.”

“You like the motor Daddy bought you?”

“It hasn’t come yet. We figured maybe a week or two before we pick it up. I promised Annalee first ride on the river. That okay?”