Starbird Murphy and the World Outside (6 page)

“Chocolate is the nicest rooster we've ever had, and Brittle has eight black chicks following her around. Iron's going to help me patch the roof this week so we'll be ready for more rain in October.”

“Is Ursa a good apprentice?”

“The best.” I stretched the truth until it said “ouch.” “I believe she's ready to take over the coop.”

Gamma sighed. “Starbird, I know you don't think running the chicken coop is an important job, and I know you want to work in the office or become a Trader, but Ursa is only eleven. Maybe when EARTH comes back—”

“I'm as good at math as Doug Fir was,” I said. “EARTH would have wanted me to do something more . . . necessary than making chicken feed.”

“Chicken feed is highly necessary if you're a chicken. And the eggs are necessary to the café, and the income from the café is necessary to all of us. Pluto Storm specifically asked for you as her apprentice.”

I wanted to say,
Before she ran off and left me with the whole job
, but I bit my lip instead. I still had another favor to ask from Gamma and I didn't want to make her mad.

“Well, then can I move into the main house? The yurt is too small for me and Fern.”

Gamma stood up and walked around her desk to put an arm over my shoulder. Since she was barely five feet tall, it was an awkward comfort. “I'm sorry, Star, but we're full in the house. With Eve pregnant, three of us sharing EARTH's rooms, and Lyra living in the attic, we're bursting at the seams. Maybe you could join the group that's moving into the Sanctuary?”

“Maybe.” I felt my scalp getting hot. Indus and Caelum were moving into the Sanctuary along with Badger. The thought of setting up my bed feet away from Indus Stone, with his tan skin that always smelled like the back lot, made my heart chase its own tail. I couldn't allow Indus Stone to hear me sleep or see me get up at night to go to the outhouse or know how I look in the morning.

“Maybe I could move into the attic with Lyra?” I offered reluctantly, acknowledging my own desperation to get out of the yurt.

“With Adeona up there, too, there just isn't room for another bed. I'm really sorry,” Gamma added. “We're . . . stretched thin in a lot of ways right now. Speaking of which, can you handle the math class for Adeona tomorrow? She's not feeling well.”

Great. Teaching math class. Again. That's almost as exciting as feeding chickens
. Still, I nodded dutifully. It was up to all of us to keep the Family going until EARTH got back, and I planned to work as hard as anyone, no matter how insignificant the work. I wanted EARTH to know who he could count on. “Here's the check from Venus.” I handed her the slip of paper.

“Oh.” Gamma studied my hand before taking the check. “I'm sorry you had to handle that.”

“No big deal.” I shrugged.

Gamma walked back around the desk and sat down. “Do me a favor and close that door on your way out. I need to make a phone call.”

 5 

I
spent the rest of the day depressed in the chicken coop with Ursa, while a thin rain drizzled on the tin roof. Ursa couldn't officially be called my apprentice since she was only eleven, but with EARTH away on his Mission, all kinds of Family rules were being bent until they were in danger of breaking.

In the early days, Farm kids started their apprenticeships at age ten, but then the Family got hassled by Outsiders in the 1980s, when Washington State police raided us on charges of child labor. They interrogated the children, asking if they went to school and how many hours a day they had to work. Adam and Eve were two of the kids who were questioned, and they told us about it one Story Night. Police threatened to put adults in jail and children in foster homes. If terrifying children was the Outsiders' way of getting us to be more like them, it was a pretty stupid plan. EARTH and Mars Wolf spent months in court fighting for the Family's right to have apprenticeships and eventually won, but they had to agree to start them at thirteen and continue homeschooling through grade twelve. Outsiders will use any excuse to try to demoralize us. Their greed-driven, capitalist system is threatened by our commitment to shared property.

But after EARTH left for his Mission, when non- Believers started abandoning the Farm, we were so short- handed that apprenticeships had to start younger, and school days became inconsistent. Lately, classes happened only when someone was available to teach, and mostly in the winter when there was less work to do on the Farm.

Like most Farm kids, I had had dreams about receiving my apprenticeship, especially after seeing Doug Fir get his. But I didn't get to stand in front of the congregation and get assigned a mentor. EARTH had already left for his Mission before my thirteenth solstice. Instead, Pluto Storm came to my yurt one morning and told Fern that she needed my help. Lucky me.

I begged Fern, Gamma, Iron, anyone who would listen, to give me some assignment other than chickens. But they all said that I had to work where I was needed.

It was a hard job made worse by Pluto's mood swings. Some days she would start early, waking me up before the rooster crowed, insisting we remove all the old pine shavings and scrub every board in the coop before lunch. Other days, she would sleep into the afternoon or avoid showing up to the coop at all, leaving me to collect and store all the eggs on my own, which I did slavishly, intent on proving my value to the Family.

But we could never keep up with the demands from the restaurant and Farm. When I first started, we had seventy-five laying hens and were collecting an average of four hundred and fifty eggs a week. But the farm alone could go through thirty dozen, leaving a measly seven dozen eggs for the restaurant. Gamma put pressure on Pluto to increase production, and soon we were squeezing thirty-five new hens into a coop just large enough for the original seventy. Peckings were brutal, with some of our newer hens bleeding heavily from their combs, and our egg production plummeted.

Maybe the stress was too much for Pluto. Six months after EARTH departed on his Mission, she left, too, packing up all of her belongings one day and standing on the main road with her thumb out. No one tried to convince her to stay.

So before I was even fourteen years old, I became the principal caretaker of a hundred and ten hens, one rooster, and a chicken coop full of mites and strife. I cried every day for a week, and I don't know what I would have done without Iron. Even with the harvest to manage, he met me every morning at dawn to collect eggs and every evening to strategize managing the flock. It took a full year and plenty of planning for us to triple the size of the coop and outdoor run, improve ventilation and watering units, and strengthen the fencing from predators. Now I am the keeper of two hundred healthy laying hens producing nearly eighty-seven dozen eggs a week, six roosters, and a constant crop of chicks.

 
 

“No more questions about my Calling,” I said to Ursa after ten minutes of her babbling on the subject. We were moving a few of the hens so we could clean out the laying boxes.

“But it's exciting.” She was holding White Chocolate, our most productive Delaware hen. With so many chickens, I only let her name a handful.

“It's a job as a waitress.” I was using a scrub brush to vigorously clean the corners of a box. “That's even less exciting than making chicken feed.”

I put the box down and grabbed another one. What I told Ursa about waitressing was true—it did sound boring and unimportant—but I didn't tell her that there were other reasons I didn't want to leave the Farm. The image of Indus Stone crossed my mind. Specifically, a picture of him, shirt off, bringing us fresh pine from the wood chipper, walked right through my thoughts. “Besides, what if EARTH came back and I was gone? The Believers have to be here to welcome him when his Mission is finished.”

Ursa moved Cocoa, one of our Sussex hens, from a box to the yard. When she came back in, she was brushing feathers off of her threadbare pants legs. “Well,
I
want to be a waitress in Seattle. How would you like your eggs?” She pulled an egg from each pocket of her worn corduroys.

“You couldn't be a waitress in those pants,” I said. “You can have my blue skirt. Eve made it for me and I can't fit into it anymore.”

“Thanks, Starbird.” Ursa pulled her loose-fitting pants away from her legs. “There's nothing left in the vintage closet but polyester.”

In the earliest days of our Family, members made all their own clothing by hand. According to Fern, there was even a time when they sheared sheep and cleaned and spun the wool for sweaters and hats. But as the Family grew, our demand for clothing was too much for the sewing group. So EARTH befriended a man named Jimmy in Bellingham who owned a vintage clothing store. Jimmy would visit the Farm and bring boxes of old clothes with him to refill the coat closet in our living room. Any Family member who needed something could take it. Whenever the Family needed something, EARTH always seemed to meet a person who would fill the need for us. EARTH called it Divine Receiving. Jimmy stopped coming around after EARTH left, and the closet had slowly emptied.

“I wonder if they wear uniforms at the restaurant in Seattle,” said Ursa.

“Enough restaurant talk.” I splashed water into a laying box, and resisted the urge to splash Ursa. “Go ask Caelum for soybeans so we can make the feed tomorrow. The recipe is three to one, corn to soybeans. We'll know more after we shell the corn, but I'm guessing he gave me ten pounds. So go ask him for the right amount of soybeans.”

“Say it again, slower.” Ursa opened our bag of diatomaceous earth and prepared to add it to the layer of pine shavings on the floor of the coop.

“Three parts corn to one part soybeans. We have ten pounds of corn,” I repeated.

“I need . . . three and a third pounds of soybeans?”

“Good. I already put in our seed order with Adam for the co-op. We should be ready to mix by tomorrow afternoon.” I had been working with Ursa on her math, since I had a knack for it. When Iron and I were expanding the coop, we spent long hours calculating the square footage needed for each hen, indoors and out, the number of laying boxes and watering containers. Not to mention the amount of lumber and building details for the construction. We spent as much time with pencil and paper as we did with hammers and saws. Fern Moon said I was as good with numbers as Douglas Fir. I think that was the reason EARTH made Doug his apprentice. EARTH was always working in numbers.