Chicken Feathers (5 page)

When egg sorting was over, Josh worked on his boat. The skiff was upside down on the concrete floor and Josh was caulking the plywood joins when Semolina waddled in, the silver ring glinting on her right foot. She walked right up to the can of caulking cement.

“Watch that stuff,” Josh said, pointing with his knife. “It sets hard as rock. Dip your beak in that and you’ll never open it again.”

She shifted to a safe distance and pulled her head in against her body.

“I was only joking,” Josh said. “You still mad at me on
account of Grandma? That’s not my doing. Grandma is Grandma. You know, she’s not as crabby as she looks. You can still come in my window.”

Semolina hopped onto a drum of engine oil and became busy pecking an itch under her wing feathers.

“You got nothing to say?” Josh shrugged and went back to spreading the paste over the plywood seams. If he didn’t do a good job on this, the gaps would become leaks. With the putty knife he eased the paste into the cracks. He glanced up at Semolina. “I never knew a chicken so moody. What’s wrong with you?”

For answer, Semolina’s claws rattled on the oil drum as she turned her back to him.

“Aw, come on, Semolina. Who are you mad at? Grandma? Me? Or yourself? You talked in front of Annalee. The silver ring did it. You forgot, didn’t you?”

Semolina groomed the feathers under the other wing.

“You could have said more. With Mom and Dad, I get your point, but Annalee? Put yourself in my shoes. It’s bug-spittin’ embarrassing her thinking I make it up. You like Annalee, so what’s the problem?”

She did an all-over feather shake that sounded like a shower of hail. Then she stretched her neck toward the boat and said, “That thing going on Grayhawk River?”

“Yep.”

“Where?”

“The back of Annalee’s place. It’ll fit on Dad’s trailer. Me and Annalee are going upriver to fish, and don’t worry, you’re not invited.”

She clacked her beak in disapproval. “Water ain’t natural—except for drinking.” She paused and clucked twice, a cooing sound. “The brown kind,” she said hopefully.

“No!” Josh pointed his caulking knife at her. “No more brew.”

“I got extra news for you.”

“Semolina! I can’t. That’s definite. Good-bye apple pie. Hard cheer, no brew.”

“What’s with the apple pie?”

“I don’t know. I made it up. I’m just trying to tell you, Semolina. I couldn’t get you brown water if I tried.”

She fixed him with a yellow eye. “The fox is wanting more eggs.”

“You’re kidding!” He sat back on his heels. “More?”

“That’s what I said, buddy. He’s got a racket going with raccoons, rats, ferrets, some bears. Maybe not the bears. Those girls in house three like a good story. But the old fox wanting more eggs, that’s no story. If they don’t deliver, then he switches to eating chickens, quick as a blink. Better tell your father.”

“Semolina, my father is definite there hasn’t been a fox around these parts for years. He thinks I’m making it up. You talk to him! He’s a nice guy. If he catches that old fox, he’ll serve you Grandma’s brew for the rest of your days.”

“No.”

“Semolina, please! Give me a break!”

She turned her head away.

“I can get you ginger ale, lemonade, cold tea with lemon. Look, I bring you Grandma’s pancakes, don’t I? You had the bowl of leftover whipped cream.” He scooped up some more caulking cement. “Dad says no way can the fox get those eggs.”

“There’s a hole,” she said.

He shook his head. “No hole. I been over the
number-three chicken house about a hundred times and there’s no hole for a fox to get in.”

“There is a hole,” she repeated.

“Tell me where,” he demanded.

Slowly, she turned to face him. “I’ll tell you when you get me brown water.”

“Semolina, you drive me crazy!” He put down the putty knife and held out his hands to her.

She flew from the oil drum and collided with his chest, knowing that he would catch her. He scratched the back of her neck as she settled her head against his neck. “You are one terrible old bird,” he said. “What am I going to do with you?”

“Brown water,” she replied.

When Grandma went with them on hospital visits, Josh and his dad didn’t get much talking space. Grandma took over her daughter, telling her how to look after herself, what to say to the doctors and nurses, what she should be doing for the baby.

“Be positive, Elizabeth. Don’t even think of popping it out.”

“I don’t,” said Elizabeth.

“What we believe will be our reality, Elizabeth. Strong thoughts make a strong child. No room for any of your slippy-sloppy fatalistic stuff.”

“Yes, Mother.” Elizabeth Miller smiled and reached out to ruffle Josh’s hair.

“Your problem always, Elizabeth, is you get too easily discouraged,” Grandma said. “As a child you bent every which way the wind blew. You didn’t get that from my side of the family.”

“No, Mother.”

Grandma reached into her knitting bag and pulled out a tiny knitted coat. “Green suits a girl or a boy. Natural fibers, Elizabeth. Pure wool off a sheep’s back. I’ve always thought it a shame I could never teach you how to knit.”

Later that day, when Josh and Tucker were putting grain into the chicken feeders, Josh said, “Why is Grandma like that?”

“Like what, son?”

“So picky, so scratchy mean to Mom.”

Tucker spread a rain of yellow wheat off the end of his shovel and dust danced in the sunlight. “She ain’t mean, Josh. She loves your mother to pieces, but she’s never let go of the little girl that was once hers. Elizabeth knows and she takes it all kindly.”

Josh had a small shovel with a cutoff handle, but he worked as hard as Tucker, the muscles on his arms moving like snakes. “I wish she’d be, you know, nice.”

“Nice comes in all shapes and sizes,” said Tucker. “Your grandma’s got a good heart, bless her, but she worries too much. That’s the way of picky people. They need lots of love to make them stop picking on others. Bible says so.”

“Does it?”

“Well, if it doesn’t, it should. Your grandma’s been mighty lonely since Grandpa died. You could pass more time with her. She’d like that.”

Josh was silent. It wasn’t easy to sit with a grandmother who wiped a toothpaste smudge off the corner of your mouth with a spit-wet handkerchief and looked in your ears to see if you washed.

Tucker emptied another sack of wheat into the trailer. “Price of wheat’s gone up, egg count down again—the teeter-totter of economics, Josh.”

“Number-three house?”

“Yup. Way down yesterday. Only fourteen dozen eggs. It’s not easy, son. Insurance don’t pay all the hospital either. We should be down-on-our-knees grateful your grandma’s working here for nothing.”

Wheat dust filled Josh’s nose and throat, and he coughed. “Dad, you’re sure it’s not a fox getting the eggs? What if it was really a fox, and maybe raccoons and other critters?”

Tucker had heard Josh’s fox theory so often, he would not waste more breath on it. He pushed his shovel into the mound of wheat on the trailer. “I just reminded myself. Yesterday Annalee went home without her pay. You mind running over to the Binochettes’ when you finish here?”

Josh agreed a mite too quickly. His father looked up and smiled. “Didn’t think it’d be any hardship,” he said.

Grandma was one of those worry wrinkles that Josh couldn’t quite straighten out. He knew she thought the Binochette family was up there with the president and the Queen of England. She would have jumped at a chance to go to the Binochette farm with him, but he deliberately didn’t ask her. I’ll make up for it, he promised himself. I’ll help her with supper. I’ll do the dishes. He tucked the pay envelope into the pocket of his overalls and made off, lickety-split, past the chicken houses, through the fence and over green fields of
summer grass. He had long legs like his father, but he went so fast they were shaky by the time he got to the Binochettes’ front porch. Annalee and Harrison were sitting on the step with playing cards spread around them. Josh stopped on the path and bent over, hands on his knees, to get his breath back.

“Hi, Splosh,” said Harrison. “Two aces, a king and a queen. Beat that.”

Annalee stood up and swept her hair back. It was hanging loose on her shoulders like a black waterfall. “Is something wrong?” she asked.

“No.” He felt in his pocket. “Dad said he didn’t give you your pay.”

“Oh, that.”

She walked toward him, and again he inhaled the mist of flowers that seemed to hang around her hair. It made him aware that his clothes were steeped in chicken smell and wheat dust.

“I could have gotten it next week,” she said.

Harrison had scooped up the cards and was shuffling them awkwardly, dropping them between his fingers. Josh
was pleased to see his clumsiness, and then he felt bad for being pleased.

Harrison smiled up at him. “Now she can buy a new dress to go out with her boyfriend.”

Josh didn’t say anything. He could shuffle cards when he was only seven. He never dropped them. For a while he stood on the path in front of Annalee, who had the pay envelope squished between two hands as though she didn’t know what to say either. Then he nodded, the way his father sometimes did, and turned to walk away.

It was Harrison who called out. “Hey, Splosh! Guess what I saw yesterday. In the woods at the back of your place! A great big red fox!”

Wang-a-dang! Now there was proof! Harrison Binochette had seen the fox with his very own eyes. Josh ran back home, lit up with excitement, tingling to tell his father he’d been right all along. But the only person around was Grandma, and she was not impressed.

“Fox? That’s nothing. We had wolves in our woods. Big and mean. You could hear them howling from one hilltop to another. Found wolf bones in a cave once. Bear got it. You washed your hands? Go and scrub up and make a job of it. You can set the table.”

The light inside him went out. He looked at his hands. “Sure, Grandma.”

“I hope you’re hungry, Joshua. It’s a good one tonight. Those cornmeal hush puppies you like and catfish in beer batter.”

“Beer batter?” He looked at her. “Made with your brew?”

“Best batter there is,” she said. “Don’t worry. Cooking drives off the alcohol. No kid gets drunk on my fried fish.”

Beer batter, he thought. Brew, fox, hole, eggs. He headed for the door. “How long will supper be, Grandma?”

“About as long as a piece of string. Don’t you forget that table!”

“Right now, Grandma,” he said, and he went outside to find Semolina.

C
AULKING CEMENT HAD DRIED
on Josh’s hands, and the only way to get it off was with a file from the tractor tool kit. He sat on the oil drum in the fading light, trying to see the difference between cement and skin. The setting sun shone through the poplars, touched the chicken houses with patches of fire and painted an orange glow on the floor of the tractor shed. “People still go around the world by sail,” he
said to Semolina, who was crouched at his feet. “I want to do that one day.”

“I ain’t going with you, buddy,” she said, wiping her beak on his shoe. With some effort she stood up and tottered over to the old cracked cup without a handle. It sat on the floor, empty. She let out a sound that was as close to a chicken sigh as he’d heard, then she used one of her longer words. “Pathetic!”

“Sorry. Grandma’s catfish batter took most of the bottle. I only got what was left.” He rubbed his hands together. They sounded like sandpaper. “Folk say when the sun sets over the sea, there’s a green flash on the horizon.”

“Ain’t so,” said Semolina. “Tarkah never lays her eggs over the sea. You ever see a chicken lay in water?”

Josh laughed and slid down to the concrete floor. He patted his shirt, and the old hen waddled over and settled against his chest. He could feel her warmth, her heartbeat inches away from his own, and smell the brew on her breath. “I haven’t heard those Tarkah stories in the longest time,” he said. “Tell me again.”

A veil of skin closed over her eyes, as though she was
dreaming. “Tarkah is the first chicken, the mother of all the universe. One by one, she laid every star in the sky.”

“You’re talking about God,” said Josh.

“Yeah. You got it, buddy.”

“But God isn’t a chicken,” Josh argued.

“She is to chickens.” Semolina turned her head and unveiled a yellow eye. “You want me to tell this story or what?”

“Go on.”

“The earth egg was a real goodie. So Tarkah said, ‘This egg will grow all my family.’ So she sat on the earth egg for thousands of years until the mountains cracked and out flew birds of all kinds, eagles, sparrows, owls. But her favorite birds were the chickens.”

“What about people?” Josh asked.

“Biggies don’t get into this story.”

“They should,” said Josh. “The Bible says human beings are the highest creation.”

“Not to chickens, they ain’t. Look, buddy. You gonna keep your beak shut?”

“Sorry,” he said.