Fresh Eggs (8 page)

“Then stand on a box.”

“I don't have a box.”

“I'll get you one.”

That night after the spaghetti, Rhea's Toledo grandmother and grandfather arrive. They bring a big cake with them and put it on the dining room table. They put a present on the buffet.

Gammy Betz arrives, too, along with her husband Ben and another present for the buffet. They help her other grandparents hang the balloons and crepe paper.

For some reason, one of their regular brown egg customers shows up for the party. It's Donna Digamy, the one who works at Marilyn Dickcissel's dog grooming business. She sniffles all through the singing of “Happy Birthday.”

When it is time to make a secret wish and blow out the candles, Rhea wishes for the same thing she prays for every night—for those little feathers to stop growing between her nippie nips. She knows that people are not supposed to grow feathers there, or anywhere else on their bodies. She knows sooner or later those feathers are going to give her big problems.

The birthday wish doesn't work any better than the prayers. Rhea wakes up itching and plucks another feather from her chest and hides it in the Nestlés Quik can.

Again this morning the house is empty. Again this morning she eats breakfast alone. She finds her tennis shoes, puts on the pinned-up apron, and goes out to feed Captain Bates and the Buff Orpingtons. And gather the eggs.

She finds that her father has kept his word. He's placed a wooden box alongside the nests so she can check the top ones for eggs.

Miss Lucky Pants has another egg under her, and Rhea, though a year older than she was yesterday at this time, faces the same old predicament: Does she listen to her father, or does she listen to her heart? Does she snatch the white eggs out from under Miss Lucky Pants, or does she let her set?

“You're a pain in the butt, Miss Lucky Pants,” she growls as she scratches the hen's soft breast.

Miss Lucky Pants tips her head and stares at her with a round, unblinking eye. Rhea leaves her eggs alone.

Only after collecting four brown eggs from the Buff Orpingtons hens does Rhea get a brainstorm. The first thing she must do is make sure her father is busy with something. She finds him in the tractor shed with Jimmy Faldstool, working on the tow motor. Their hands and forearms are covered with grease. Sweat is dripping off their chins. “Are you real busy right now?” she asks.

“Go play,” her father says.

“Okay,” she says. She runs to the cement block building behind the layer houses. Before going inside she turns and makes sure neither her father nor Mr. Faldstool are watching. This building is the egg house, where the collected eggs are graded and candled and put in heavy cardboard cases for shipping to Gallinipper's. She opens one of the cases and takes out one white egg. She puts it in her apron. Then she takes another egg from another box and another from another.

She goes back to the tractor shed. “I collected Miss Lucky Pants's white eggs today,” she tells her father. “Thanks for the box.”

“Go play,” her father says.

Rhea's deceit lasts only three weeks.

On the same day she and her father are supposed to go to the Wyssock County Fair she discovers that Miss Lucky Pants's eggs have hatched. One chick has already fallen out of the high nest and two of the Orpington hens are fighting over its body. Rhea chases the hens away and puts the mangled chick in the pouch of her apron. She steps on the box and looks in the nest. Miss Lucky Pants proudly rises and spreads her wings. Peeping among the broken egg shells are six healthy chicks.

Rhea breaks the news to her father when they are sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic outside the fairgrounds. This is the day country singer Louise Peavey performs in the grandstand, right before the demolition derby. So there are lots of cars funneling into the fairgrounds today. For some reason, her father has brought Donna Digamy with them.

“Guess what, Daddy,” Rhea says from the back seat.

She has to say it three times before he answers, “What?”

“Miss Lucky Pants has babies.”

Donna Digamy rests her chin on the back of her seat and sniffs a trickle of mucus back up her nostril. “Isn't that neat! How many?”

“Seven,” Rhea says, “but one fell out of the nest and died already.”

“So you've got six?” Donna Digamy asks.

“That's right,” says Rhea, “seven minus one is six.”

Their day at the fair goes well enough. They eat French fries drenched with vinegar. They eat deep-fried pieces of dough called elephant ears. They walk through all the animal barns. In the cattle barn the cows are standing with their heads facing the wall and their ugly butt-holes facing the people walking along the center aisle. In the pig barn all the pigs are asleep. In the sheep barn all the sheep are asleep. In the goat barn a ram with curly horns bites a button off Rhea's flannel shirt. In the rabbit house the rabbits are asleep.

In the poultry barn the chickens are crowded into cages, just like the Leghorns in the layer houses. The cages are plastered with ribbons, red ones and white ones and blue ones. “What's all those ribbons for?” Rhea asks.

“For first, second and third place,” her father explains.

“For running a race?”

“For looking healthy.”

Rhea stands on her toes and looks in the cages. Yes, these chickens do look healthy. They have their beaks and their combs. They have all their feathers. They're clean. They're calm. And some are very fancy. “What kind of chickens are these with the feathers on their feet?” Rhea asks her father. There's a big blue ribbon stuck to the cage.

“Chochins.”

“How come we don't have any of those?” Rhea asks.

“They're just for show. A lot of food and poop for nothing.”

In one cage Rhea sees an enormous black rooster with a white face and huge droopy waddles. “That one looks like Captain Bates.”

“That's a Black Spanish,” her father says. As they walk down the aisle, he tells Donna Digamy the story about Maximo Gomez, how Chuck Cowrie bought the rooster from a brothel owner in Cuba, during the Spanish-American War. No matter how fancy the chickens are, they all make Donna Digamy sneeze. So they leave the chicken barn and go to the midway and ride the belly churning tilt-the-whirl and pay fifty cents each to see the world's smallest horse.

“You should get one of these for Rhea,” Donna Digamy says to Calvin, who's holding Rhea up so she can scratch the tiny horse's big head.

Rhea sees the anxiety on her father's face and answers for him. “A lot of food and poop for nothing,” she says.

That night Calvin goes with Rhea to the chicken coop. While she feeds the Buff Orpingtons, he places Miss Lucky Pants and her six chicks in a cardboard box. “This never should have happened,” he says.

“But it did,” Rhea says, shrugging the way her mother used to shrug.

“And now we've got all these worthless chicks.”

“You're not going to make them live in that box, are you?”

“We're going to make a pen for them in the old cow barn—until they're big enough to join the others.”

Worry wrinkles Rhea's face.

“Not with the Leghorns,” he says. “In here with your grandmother's Buffs. We can't send Gallinippers any of the eggs from these little half-breed buggers.”

“We can't have that,” says Rhea.

“No we can't. And we can't have any more of your sneaking and lying either.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Are you, Rhea? If you can't live up to your end of the bargain, Captain Bates is Sunday dinner.”

Her father carries the box to the cow barn. The cows have been gone for years but the barn still smells like cows. Rhea sits on an old bale of straw and watches as her father untangles a roll of rusted chicken wire—fencing with holes so small even tiny chicks can't crawl out—and makes a pen in the corner. He sets the box with Miss Lucky Pants and the chicks inside the pen. He reaches into his pants pocket and takes out his jackknife and cuts a rounded door in one end of the box.

“Is that their little house?” Rhea asks.

“Uh huh. That's their little house.” Calvin scoops Rhea off the bale and makes a swing out of his arms. “Now you've got to understand, some of your chicks are probably going to die. Some always do. But if you keep them fed and watered, most will grow up fine. And then we'll have a few more worthless chickens. Okay, pumpkin seed?”

Rhea swings back and forth in her father's arms. Her chest is itching, but she doesn't dare reach down her shirt and pluck the little feather that's surely growing there. “Okay, pumpkin seed,” she says.

And so Rhea begins taking care of Miss Lucky Pants and her six chicks.

Unlike the chicks stuffed in the trays at the hatchery they visited in Gombeen, these chicks have room to run around. And they do. They run and hop and peck at everything. Miss Lucky Pants teaches them how to drink water from the shallow clay bowl and how to peck at the mash in the metal tray. She also teaches them how to
preen
—clean and smooth their tiny feathers with their tiny beaks.

Although she was born in a metal hatching drawer, Miss Lucky Pants is a wise and attentive mother. When her chicks peep that they're getting cold, she spreads her wings and lets them scramble under her.

One of the chicks dies—Rhea's father said that might happen—but the other five keep eating and growing. Rhea spends as much time as she can in the old cowless cow barn, squatting outside the chicken-wire pen, watching and worrying. The chicks lose their silky yellow feathers and start growing stiff white adult feathers. They start to grow their own wings and pretty soon they are too big to fit under Miss Lucky Pants.

Rhea knows she shouldn't name the chicks. Or make pets out of them. Her father has laid the law down about that. But they are so cute.

So the three female chicks she names Nancy, Mary Mary Bo Berry, and Half Pint—Nancy after President Reagan's skinny wife; Mary Mary Bo Berry after a funny song her mother used to sing to her; Half Pint after the nickname Pa Ingles calls Laura on
Little House on the Prairie
. Despite the clever names she gives them, the female chicks prove to be three boring bumps-on-a-log.

They look alike and act alike. Try as Rhea might to coax them out their sameness, to get them to play and squabble and show a little personality, they just eat and poop and grow white feathers. “Egg machines,” Rhea complains, “that's all you're ever going to be. Three dumb Gallinipper egg machines.”

The two male chicks have too much personality. The nasty, strutty one with a full spray of black tail feathers she names Black-butt. The scrawny, nervous one with the lopsided wattles and the single black feather curling from its rump like a question mark, she names Mr. Shakyshiver. Blackbutt does everything he possibly can to make Mr. Shakyshiver sorry he was born.

On Thanksgiving Day, Rhea's father takes Miss Lucky Pants and her now-grown family out of the cow barn and puts them in the coop with Captain Bates and the Buff Orpingtons. Immediately the Captain gives Blackbutt a taste of his own medicine, pecking him hard on the toes and chasing him into the corner. Mr. Shakyshiver immediately retreats to another corner on his own. That out of the way, the Captain hops on the backs of the three young white hens, one right after the other.

Ten

Three days before Christmas, Calvin Cassowary decides to propose marriage to Donna Digamy. They've been dating for seven months now. Sleeping together for five.

He is surprised by his decision.

Jeanie has been dead for only 13 months. They'd been, as his roommate at Kent State, Dave D'Hoy, once said, “Two peas in a pod, man.” Calvin was a daydreamy art major then, Jeanie a daydreamy English major. He could sit on Blanket Hill and make charcoal sketches all afternoon. She could read all night. They shared the same bewildered view of the world as it
was
—the wars and the racism and the pollution and the sexism and the preoccupation with making money—and the same optimistic view of what the world
could
be if people just let other people do their own thing.

Calvin met Jeanie at Boinky's Pizza, just off the campus. She was waitressing and he was eating. It was the fall after the Ohio National Guard went berserk and killed four students during a protest over Nixon's invasion of Cambodia. So Peace and Love and Tragedy was still in the air and when Jeanie brought Calvin his pepperoni pizza, the pepperonis were lined up in the shape of a peace symbol. She did this, she later told him, because she liked his blue-gray eyes and his fu-manchu mustache.

Calvin liked Jeanie's brown eyes and the dimples on her chin, not to mention the braless breasts inside her tee shirt and the smiling cheeks inside her bellbottoms. He came to Boinky's for pizza every night for a week, and each time was served a peace symbol pizza from the waitress with the brown eyes and dimpled chin. Calvin was the shy artist type, but one night summoned the balls to say, “Instead of a peace symbol, why don't you spell out you name?”

When she brought out the pizza it said JEANIE.

And now, just thirteen months after Jeanie's death, Calvin has decided to propose to Donna Digamy. He doesn't love her the way he still loves Jeanie. Doesn't love her soul. But he sure loves her body and her resolve to work hard and get somewhere. He loves the way she marvels at his plans to be the largest egg producer in the state of Ohio. He loves her selective Catholicism, her ability to have guiltless sex outside marriage while still trusting God to look out for her.

“I think we should get married,” Calvin says the night before Christmas Eve as they lay naked and spent in her apartment.

She takes a corner of the sheet and wipes a dribble of cold sperm off her leg. “I think so, too.”

The artist in Calvin tells him that he will never love Donna Digamy the way he still loves Jeanie Marabout. But a man needs a woman, and a farmer needs a wife, and hi-o-the derrio and e-i-e-i-o, and what the hell, the sex is so good, and she's getting that associate's degree in accounting, and she can handle the books while he handles the Leghorns. And Rhea does need a mom.