Fresh Eggs (12 page)

“I wondered about the turtlenecks,” the teacher says.

“Nothing contagious?” the principal asks.

Calvin shakes his head. “But it's spreading to her face. It's not very pretty. I'm thinking about home schooling.”

“Very dangerous,” the teacher says.

“I have a degree in art education,” Calvin says. “My wife has an associate's degree in accounting.”

“Socialization is as important as academic work, especially at Rhea's age,” the teacher says. “Cutting her off from other children could be more devastating than whatever teasing she might encounter.”

“You sure this skin condition isn't contagious?” the principal asks. “We have seven hundred boys and girls to worry about here.”

Calvin can see that the principal is a farmer at heart, that, like himself, he understands that the survival of the flock takes precedent over the problems of a single hen. So Calvin hems and haws and says, “We're pretty sure it isn't.”

The hemming and hawing alarms the principal. “Pretty sure?”

Calvin shrugs and the school agrees to help Calvin and Donna homeschool Rhea.

By May, Rhea's entire face is covered with feathers. So are her hands, right down to the middle row of knuckles. She keeps up with her English and science and social studies work just fine, but her math suffers. Donna simply sneezes too much for either of them to concentrate on the problems.

By the Fourth of July, layer houses F and G are finished. They are longer and wider than A, B, C, D, and E. They have automated manure accumulators that eliminate the need for shoveling. Jimmy Faldstool can't remember being happier. “You mean I can just stand here and punch these red buttons?” he asks Wayne Demijohn, Gallinipper's top manure man, who has showed up for the christening of the state-of-the-art system.

“That's pretty much it,” Demijohn says. He shows Calvin and Jimmy how the manure will drop out of the hens' rectums onto conveyor belts located under their cages, and how those belts will take it to a big drive-in pit at the end of the building, where Jimmy can charge right in with his front-end loader and fill the trucks without ever wielding a shovel.

“You should install these in the other layer houses,” Jimmy says to Calvin. “I'd never have to shovel chicken shit again.”

“Maybe someday I will,” Calvin says.

The next day a caravan of egg-yolk-yellow trucks arrive from Gallinipper Foods with 200,000 noisy young pullets. Calvin Cassowary now has a million Leghorns. He is also a million dollars in debt. To celebrate his accomplishment Bob Gallinipper sends a case of Indiana wine and a mahogany plaque with a brass plate that reads:

C
ALVIN
C
ASSOWARY

MILLION CHICKEN MAN

The truck drivers bringing the 200,000 pullets for the new layer houses don't see Rhea. Calvin has seen to it that no one sees her. Rhea has been instructed to go to her room when someone comes. If she's caught outside when the gravel in the driveway starts to crackle, she can hide in the chicken coop. “Your little problem isn't anybody's business but ours,” he tells her.

Only Jimmy Faldstool has seen Rhea since the feathers grew on her face and hands, and he has promised to keep his mouth shut. “It's more than just me knowing where my bread's buttered,” he tells Calvin. “You Cassowarys are like family to me. I'd no more blab about Rhea's feathers than I'd blab about my being born with only one testicle.”

“You've only got one testicle?” Calvin asks.

“Maybe I do and maybe I don't,” answers Jimmy.

So the family secret is safe with Jimmy Faldstool. And Rhea runs and hides whenever someone drives in. She feeds her chickens and gathers their eggs and does her homework and stands naked in front of the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. Other than the palms of her hands and the bottoms of her feet, she has very little bare skin left. Just a little bit around her elbows and knees.

Late in August a cold front sweeps across the Midwest. Hail stones as big as glass eyes mutilate corn crops from Nebraska to Pennsylvania. Several inches of rain swell the rivers and creeks and flood soybean fields as far south as Tennessee. Winds topple trees like so many toothpicks. Phil Bunyip, taking a load of Calvin Cassowary's spent Leghorn hens to a pet food plant in Fort Wayne, almost gets himself killed when he loses control of his rig on the Ohio Turnpike.

Rhea sees it on the six o'clock news. It seems that Phil Bunyip, rolling along through the rain and hail, swerved to miss a stalled Winnebago. His rig jackknifed and toppled over, just thirty yards shy of the Maumee River bridge.

“There are just thousands of chickens everywhere,” the on-the-scene television reporter is telling the wig-wearing anchorman back in Cleveland. The cameraman pans so people watching at home can see the hens darting in and out of traffic, many getting smashed, but many surviving, dashing into the fields and woods along the highway.

“A very bad day for Gallinipper Foods,” the reporter says, “but a good day for a lot of these chickens.”

The feathers under Rhea's eyes are wet with tears as she goes upstairs. She curls up on her bed and tries to read one of her Judy Blume novels. She loves Judy Blume. But tonight the words that usually make her feel like a normal girl dash across the page like those loose hens on the turnpike.

Those hens had been doomed. Their final resting place in squat tin cans of food for cats and dogs predetermined. Now some are running free. It seems that Nature intervened. It seems that Nature sent wind and rain and hail, sent Phil Bunyip's big rig skidding.

A few minutes after two, Nature wakes Rhea from her sleep. Sends her downstairs to the kitchen, to the keys hanging on the wall above the wobbly table in the breakfast nook. Nature calls Rhea to the porch and then leads her across the wet grass to the layer house with the lock that matches the key in her hand. Nature sends Rhea inside.

It is not dark inside. The lights in the layer houses are on sixteen hours a day, to trick the Leghorns into thinking it's day, so they lay and lay.

Nature tells Rhea to start opening cages. Start coaxing the hens inside to jump free. “Don't be afraid,” Rhea says each time her feathered hand wraps softly around the bottom of a clucking hen.

And the hens are not afraid. The big creature setting them free looks just like them. Has their same gentle way.

There is not time for Nature and Rhea to pardon all 100,000 hens in the building. But by the time Jimmy Faldstool shows up to begin his long shift, hundreds of the young pullets are spread across the empty, moonlit fields where previous generations of Cassowarys used to pasture cows and grow corn and wheat and vegetables for the table. “Egads and little fishes,” he says when he finds Rhea in the layer house, “what have you done to complicate my life now?”

Fourteen

Rhea Cassowary has been sitting in this huge over-stuffed green chair for ten minutes. Except for the Van Gogh posters on the walls, she is alone. But now the door opens and a man comes in. He has a trim white beard. Curly white hair surrounds the brim of his black velvet hat. A red flower droops from the lapel of his suit-coat. His eyes are the same size and color of the chocolate-covered cherries her Toledo grandmother eats. His skin is the same light caramel of a Buff Orpington. He is carrying a tiny cup of coffee on a tiny saucer.

At first Rhea worries that this man may be the Santa Claus God she no longer believes in, come to punish her for her lack of faith. As soon as he opens his mouth she is relieved. He is not God. He is merely a man with an accent.

“Do you like my chapeau?” he asks. His words are thick and musical. His chocolate-cherry eyes are fixed on her.

“What's a chapeau?”

“My new hat. I paid a hundred dollars for it.”

“It's a pretty hat.”

The man tilts his head sheepishly. He smiles. “You are very pretty, too. You look like a beautiful swan.” He takes a sip from his tiny cup. “You don't want an espresso, do you?”

Rhea is tickled by the unfamiliar words this man uses. “What's an espresso?”

“This very strong coffee I drink too much of.”

“I don't like coffee.”

The man puts his tiny cup and saucer on the corner of his desk. He sits in the other huge green chair. “I am Dr. Pirooz Aram,” he says. “Your parents think you need my help.”

The feathers on Rhea's neck puff out. “You're a psychiatrist.”

He pushes back his velvet hat to scratch the top of his balding head. “That is one of the things I am. But I am also many others things.”

Already Rhea is feeling comfortable with him. She can see right through his playful, phony baloney exterior. See that his interior is serious and sincere. “Like what for example?”

Dr. Pirooz Aram's eyes melt wide. “For one thing, I am also a Persian. For another thing, I am an American. I am a fine dancer and an even better chess player. I am a pretty good cook. I am an expert on the ancient poets of my homeland. I am also full of hot air much of the time, and more often than not, helplessly confused by modern machinery.”

“I'm lots of things, too,” Rhea says.

“Besides a beautiful swan, you mean?”

“Besides a freak,” she answers.

Dr. Pirooz angers. “You are not a freak. You are a swan. You must never forget that, Rhea. You are a swan!” He calms himself and folds his hands across his chest, as if he is about to pray. “So, you do not like having feathers?”

“Of course not.”

The fingers on his folded hands rise like little cobras and play with his beard. “I want you to think harder about your answer,” he says. “Do you really not like having feathers, or is it the way people treat you for having feathers that makes you not like your feathers?”

This question bewilders Rhea. “Huh?”

Dr. Aram laughs with his entire face. “I feel very comfortable with my accent—proud that I am able to pronounce any English words at all—but when I see other people screwing up their faces trying to figure out what I'm saying, I feel ashamed, and sometimes angry. Maybe this is how you feel about your feathers?”

“I never thought about it that way,” Rhea confesses.

Dr. Aram takes off his hat. Leaning forward as far as he can, he places it on Rhea's head. “Of course you've never thought of it that way! If you had, I'd be sitting where you're sitting, and you'd be sitting here, asking me about
my
problems. Which would fill a good-sized kettle, by the way.”

The next week when Rhea comes for her session, Dr. Pirooz Aram is wearing a bright yellow beret. “Do you like it?” he asks. “My wife says it makes me look like a dandelion.” He puts it on Rhea's head. “I know she doesn't mean it as a compliment, but I pretend she does. ‘Thank you,' I say.”

The little story makes Rhea laugh.

And Rhea's laugh makes Dr. Aram laugh. “So, tell me Rhea Cassowary, are you sorry you let your father's chickens loose?”

“I only let a couple hundred loose.”

“A couple hundred is a lot.”

“Not when you have a million.”

“Your father has a million chickens?”

Rhea nods.

“And you wish he didn't have so many chickens?”

“I don't care how many chickens he has. It's the cages.”

“Ah, the cages! You hate the cages!”

“I guess.”

Dr. Aram angrily snatches his beret from Rhea's head. “I do not allow guessing. Either you hate the cages or you don't hate the cages.”

“Sorry.”

Dr. Aram grins and winks. “You are sorry that you break my rules but not so sorry that you let your father's chickens go free?”

Two days later Dr. Pirooz Aram summons Calvin and Donna Cassowary to his office. The first question the doctor asks Calvin is this: “Why do you keep all those chickens of yours in cages?”

Calvin explains that the cages increase efficiency. “Eggs are a high-volume, low-profit business,” he says.

Dr. Aram chuckles. “Fortunately for me, the psychiatry business is exactly the opposite. Very few patients and lots of fancy vacations.” Seeing that neither Cassowary is amused by his honesty, he removes the Greek fisherman's cap he's wearing today, sits up straight, and begins to act like the professional they're paying for. “It is going to take a long time to make Rhea a happy person. But I thought I might give you my initial impressions.”

Donna Cassowary wipes her nose and picks suspiciously at the fabric of the arm of her chair. “We'd appreciate that.”

And so Dr. Aram begins: “No one really knows what the mind is—except that it is as distinct from our brains as a bucket from the water it carries. But we do know that the thoughts and images our minds create can have physical effects. Fear gives us goosebumps. We get red in the face. We go white with worry. Our flesh is a mirror of our minds. You are following me? Sometimes my ideas are as confusing as my accent.”

Calvin reassures him. “I think I know what you're getting at.”

Dr. Aram is surprised. “You do? I'm not so sure I know what I'm getting at myself. I'm a student of the thinking-out-loud school, I'm afraid.”

Checking his watch—there's a shipment of replacement pullets coming at two o'clock—Calvin tells the doctor what he thinks he was getting at: “You're saying Rhea's feathers are a psychological reaction to the way I treat my chickens—which is a lot of bullshit.”

“You think so?”

“I think so.”

Apparently Donna thinks it's bullshit, too. “There's a big difference between getting goosebumps and growing feathers,” she says into her soggy handkerchief.

Dr. Aram is nodding. “You are right, of course. Rhea's feathers could be caused by a defective chromosome. But am I safe in guessing, Mr. Cassowary, that there are no other people in your family with feathers? An uncle or a distant cousin? A great-great-grandmother who looked like a turkey?”