Chicken Feathers (4 page)

B
ECAUSE THE EGGS HAD TO
be kept at a temperature under seventy degrees, the sorting barn was always cool, and Annalee’s arms were dotted with shivery spots she called chicken flesh. Today she was wearing a pink T-shirt with
I love Paris
in gold letters across her chest. He read it more slowly than was necessary and then, in case she’d noticed, he asked, “Does that gold stuff come off in the washing machine?”

She shrugged the question away. “I heard about your mom. Is she—I mean the baby…Are they going to be okay?”

“Yeah, the doctors think so. But she has to stay in the hospital a real long time.”

“I know. Your grandma called my mother.”

Phone calls already? He stepped up beside Annalee to help with the eggs and to breathe in the flower smell of her shampoo. Today her hair was tied back with a ribbon. “Until the baby’s born,” he said. “Three whole months.”

She nodded, her arms moving across each other in an easy rhythm, separating large- and small-grade eggs and slotting each into spaces in the cardboard trays. “How’s your boat?” she asked.

“Haven’t had time to work on it, but now that Grandma’s here, I reckon I’ll finish it. I’ve got the engine.”

“Really?”

“Yep. Nearly new Johnson. It gets here in two weeks.”

“Cool!” Annalee’s smile was like an explosion. “Remember you promised me a ride on the river.”

“Sure thing.” He stood taller so that his eyes were in line with the freckles on her nose. “You still want to go fishing?”

“Josh, that would be so neat! How come you already got a motor?”

“Dad did it for me. He fixed it—part of my wages.”

She paused, an egg in each hand. “So when will you be able to go fishing?”

“Soon. Next month, maybe.” His eyes slid sideways to
I love Paris,
and he wondered how come girls grew up so
quick. She looked better now than she did last year, but he preferred last summer’s Annalee Binochette. He couldn’t imagine those long pink fingernails scooping up mud to throw at him.

“That will be so exciting,” she said. “I told Bob about your skiff. He was extra interested—I mean really intense. Do you mind if he comes to see it?”

Bob. That was the guy in her class who’d given her the silver toe ring. She was wearing it again today. It poked out the front of her right sandal like a dog collar on her second toe.

Josh didn’t know what to say. He watched her busy with eggs, her hands moving fast, picking up, crossing over, up, down, like a piano player.

“Bob said he’s going to build a boat too. Maybe you could give him some tips.”

The silence went on too long. Josh could hear his heartbeat in his ears. He turned toward the door. “What was that?”

“What was what?”

“Scratching noise, sort of. Might be that old Semolina.” He went over, turned the door handle and put his head out.
“Nah. Not her. She must still be under the house in a sulking fit. Grandma whopped her on the tail feathers, lunchtime.”

“No!” Annalee’s face creased in sympathy.

“Not real hard,” he said quickly. “More about hurt feelings, I guess. She won’t talk to me.”

“Your grandmother won’t talk to you? Why?”

“Not her. Semolina.”

“Oh. Yes. I forgot.” Annalee’s eyes went all careful, and she turned back to the egg crates.

Josh had seen his parents exchange that same look. “You said you believed me.”

Annalee frowned. “Josh, I—I do believe. I believe that you really, truly think Semolina talks to you.”

“But not that she talks.”

“I didn’t say that. It’s just—well, chickens don’t. They can’t.”

“Yes, they can!” he cried. “Parrots can. Budgies. Ravens.”

“Not chickens. And not like you say—” Annalee’s face was scrunched up into lines of effort. “Semolina is very smart and I think she’s special, but—let’s not discuss this, Josh.”

“I told you,” Josh said. “She started just like a parrot. A few words. Then more. But not to other people. There are parrots who only speak to their owners. I read that somewhere.”

Annalee whirled around. Her face smoothed out, and her eyes widened. “It’s there again!”

“What?”

“The scratching on the door—only I think it’s more a tapping.”

Josh heard it too. That crazy old Semolina was turning his lie into the truth. He opened the door and saw her crouched on the top step as though she were laying an egg. “So you changed your mind,” he said. “Okay. Come in, and hurry. It’s hot outside.”

She stood up, shook herself, and small puffs of dust rose from her feathers. Then, taking her time, she arched her feet over the step and onto the floor. She didn’t look at Josh. A few more steps and she flew up to the sorting bench to sit beside Annalee.

Josh laughed. “I don’t know why she’s still mad at me. It was Grandma who knocked her off the table.”

The membranes closed over Semolina’s eyes as fast as a camera shutter.

“Poor Semolina!” Annalee raised pink pointed fingers and stroked the reddish brown feathers from head to neck to back. “I hope she wasn’t hurt.”

Semolina opened her beak and made a soft cawing noise like a dove.

“She likes me,” Annalee said.

“Of course she does. If she didn’t like you so much, she wouldn’t poke her beak in here. She’s gotten very political about it.”

Annalee had turned her hand over so that the backs of her nails combed the chicken’s feathers. “You mean, the eggs?”

“Uh-huh. You know how she describes us eating eggs? Murder. Don’t ask me how she got a word like
murder
. I told her eggs don’t turn into chickens if they aren’t fertile. So she goes on about roosters too, how biggies kill all newly hatched roosters.”

“Biggies?”

“That’s what she calls human beings, remember? She thinks people are cruel monsters. I told her most slugs
and snails think chickens are evil. She doesn’t take notice. Semolina can never bear to lose an argument—” Josh stopped. Annalee’s face was a closed door and her fingers, trailing over Semolina’s wing tips, were slow and without direction.

The Annalee of last year had believed him. She had wanted him to repeat every word Semolina said, and once, on the porch swing, she begged the old hen to talk to her too. But a year away at school had changed more than her body—it had done something to her mind as well. Now he sometimes felt that he and Annalee were living on different planets. He picked up Semolina and put her on the floor. “We’d better get these eggs done,” he said.

Annalee looked sideways at him. “I’m sorry, Josh.”

“It’s okay.”

“You’re my friend. Semolina’s my friend.”

“I know.” But the truth of it was he didn’t know. He pulled down some empty cartons from the top shelf and moved farther down the bench.

Suddenly Annalee squealed and jumped backward. Then she laughed with her hand over her mouth. “Semolina! Oh, Josh, she just picked at my toe ring.”

Semolina advanced, wings spread, neck stretched low to the ground, eye fixed on the shining silver bar behind the pink toenail. But Annalee was too quick. She pulled her foot back. The old hen paused, and in that instant, Josh grabbed her. “Semolina, that’s not nice!”

“She likes it!” Annalee cried. “Look at her. She can’t take her eyes off it.”

“It’s shiny, that’s why.”

Then Annalee did an amazing thing. She drew her knee up to her chin and said, “She can have it. It’ll be Lady Semolina’s leg ring.” With that she slid the band of silver off her toe, and Josh saw that it wasn’t a ring at all but a thin strip of metal bent almost in a circle. It could fit any size. Annalee held it toward Josh. “Lift her up and I’ll put it on her.”

“You sure?”

“Sure, I’m sure.” Gently, Annalee bent the silver around Semolina’s scaly right leg. When she let it go, the ring fell down to the top of the foot and hung like a bracelet. Annalee laughed. “It looks so elegant!”

“But it’s yours,” said Josh. “He—someone gave it to you.”

“Oh, Bob won’t mind. Put her down, Josh. Let’s see how it looks when she walks.”

Josh expected Semolina to peck at it and make a fuss, but she didn’t. She walked across the sorting shed floor with her head bent, foot lifted high.

“What do you think of that?” Josh asked her.

“Cool!” said Semolina.

It had happened. Semolina had talked. He looked at Annalee, whose eyes were wide with shock. “Did you hear that?” he asked.

“She said—cool!”

“Yeah. She forgot herself. Well done, Semolina. Now say thank you to Annalee.”

Semolina raised the ringed foot and put it down again.

“Say something else,” Josh insisted.

Annalee crouched in front of the hen. “Say
cool
again. Please?”

Semolina blinked. “Caw. Caw-caw-caw.”

“Oh.” Annalee stood up. “My mistake. It was just a chicken noise.”

“No, it wasn’t! She said
cool
, and then she said
caw
to cover up
her
mistake. That’s the truth, isn’t it, Semolina?” Josh waited, but the cunning old bird wasn’t saying a word. That did it for Josh. He picked her up, carried her to the door like an old feather duster and set her on the ground. “Go back to the house and talk to Grandma,” he said.

Softly, in a hen noise the size of a whisper, she said, “Aw, shut your beak,” and stalked off, jingling the silver ring on her right leg.

N
O ONE COULD EXPLAIN WHY
a boy raised on a chicken farm, hundreds of miles from the sea, was so fascinated by boats. Josh couldn’t explain it himself. While other toddlers wheeled plastic cars across the carpet chanting, “Brrrm, brrm!” Josh had climbed on a chair and sailed his drinking cup around the kitchen sink. When he was four, Tucker took
him down to the Grayhawk River at the back of the Binochettes’ farm and together they made boats from folded magazine pages to sail on a slow brown current that sucked and swallowed their little paper craft. Even then Josh wanted to make a boat that wouldn’t sink.

He collected pictures of ships, everything from Spanish galleons and Chinese junks to oceangoing liners, and for the bathtub, he made toy boats with propellers powered by twisted rubber bands.

Last winter, Tucker and Elizabeth had promised to drive him clear across five states to the California coast, where waves crashed on white sand beaches and boats sat side by side in huge parking lots called marinas. That was before the baby began.

“Don’t worry. We’ll do it as soon as the baby’s big enough to travel,” promised Tucker. “We’ll take a boat trip to Catalina Island and you can swim with those seeing glasses, taste the salt. It’s a different world under the ocean.”

“He’s already tasted the sea.” Elizabeth smiled.

“When?” said Josh. “I don’t remember.”

Elizabeth put her hand on her stomach. “Before a baby’s
born, it swims in a little sea inside its mother. It’s called amniotic fluid. The little sea is salty just like the big sea.”

“How did I breathe in it?” Josh asked.

“You didn’t,” she replied. “Babies breathe when they leave the little sea for the dry land. But they remember the little sea. The salt is in their blood. It’s in their tears.”

Tucker drummed his fingers on the table. “Next year, California. This year, son, you’ll build a real boat.”

Josh sat bolt upright. “Spittin’ bugs, Dad! You mean that? What kind of boat?”

“Oh, I dunno. I reckon a skiff like in those old
Popular Mechanics
magazines, beechwood frame, double-skin ply. You can paddle it on the river. Might even get a little outboard motor, go upstream fishing.” Tucker laughed his long slow laugh. “I guess building a boat will take about as long as building a baby, and it’ll be just as much a blessed miracle.”

Josh’s boat grew in the tractor shed. The skiff was eight feet long and nearly three feet wide, with a shallow V bottom and flotation blocks under the seats in the bow and stern.
Tucker had helped Josh cut the frames from laminated beech wood and shown him how to steam ply panels for the hull over the old boiler. The panels, warm and wet, bent easily along the curves of the frame, nesting tight against the keel. Tucker fastened the ply covering with bronze screws that wouldn’t rust no how, no way. After that, though, Josh did all the work himself, with his father keeping an eye on things by pretending he needed to come into the shed for tools.