Fresh Eggs (15 page)

“Thanks,” Mr. Cassowary will say.

So Joon puts down his books and duffel bag and walks across the lawn to the chicken coop. He looks in the dirty window. The light is not coming from the light bulb in the ceiling, but from a flashlight. He presses his face against the glass and squints. He sees the Cassowary's daughter, Rhea, sitting on the bottom perch, surrounded by chickens. The beam of the flashlight is bouncing off an open book cradled in her lap.

In the pink glow of the flashlight's red cap, he can see the feathers covering her face. She looks like a giant owl sitting there, deep-set eyes blinking, stiff neck turning from side to side. When he squints he can see that her lips are moving, just slightly.
Whoa! Look at that! She is reading to her chickens!
He runs back to the bench. In a few minutes the light in the chicken coop goes out and the door bumps open. He sees Rhea running across the dark lawn to the house. He sees the blinds in the breakfast nook go down.

The next afternoon Joon can't wait for the sun to go down. He washes and rushes outside to see if there's a light in the chicken coop. There is a light. He goes to the window and watches Rhea read to her chickens. Very weird, he thinks. It's the kind of thing he might do himself, he thinks, if he were covered with feathers.

All weekend Joon thinks about Rhea reading to her chickens, especially when he is raking the wet leaves that are ankle-deep all over the backyard.

Over the years his father has told him quite a bit about the girl and her chickens: about the Leghorn she rescued from the manure pit; about the name she gave the fortunate hen, Miss Lucky Pants; about how she let her set and have a brood of chicks; about how her father had a fit; about how the rooster she named Blackbutt was killed by a coyote.

His father talked about darker things, too: about Rhea's mother dying; about Rhea one night trying to free an entire layer house of hens; about the time he came out of layer house B and saw Mr. Cassowary yanking fistfuls of feathers from Rhea's naked chest.

On Monday Joon doesn't work until six as usual. He stops at a quarter after five and, after giving himself an extra spritz of Old Spice, sneaks to the chicken coop. He doesn't go to the window. He goes to the door. He opens it gently, not to sneak in, but so he doesn't startle Rhea or the chickens. “I'm Joon Faldstool,” he says. “Jimmy Faldstool Jr.”

Rhea swings the flashlight beam into his eyes. “Tired of watching through the window?”

Joon shuffles across the floor and kneels by the perches. Rhea is sitting on the first perch, slightly above him. The chickens, huddled on the ascending perches like people at a football game,
cluck
and
bruck
a little, but quickly accept him. “I know about your feathers,” he says.

“I know about your ears,” she says.

Joon wishes that his head would shrivel up and drop inside his shirt collar. “They're gigundo, aren't they?”

“Not as gigundo as my father said.”

Joon changes the subject. “Do the chickens understand what you're reading?”

The feathers around Rhea's eyes stick out a bit, as if she's snickering underneath. “Duh? They're chickens!” Her feathers smooth and her eyes soften. “But I think they like hearing my voice. I know I like hearing it. That's why I read to them, I guess. To hear my own voice.”

“Like the sound of your own voice, do you?”

“Not especially. But I don't get to hear it much in the house. Nobody talks to me unless they're yelling. Which means I'm always yelling, too. So it's nice to hear myself talking calmly once in a while.”

Joon wants to know all about her feathers—how she got them, what it's like to have them, how she goes to the bathroom, the whole shebang—but he decides it'll be smarter to talk about something else. “What's the book about?”

Rhea picks up a long tail feather from the floor and uses it as a bookmark. “It's a poem. But it's pretty neat. There's this one kind of bird, called a
Hoopoe
or something, that wants to take a bunch of other birds to see the king of birds, the
Simorgh
or something. They all have an excuse why they can't go. But the Hoopoe tells each of them a story and they feel guilty and go along. That's as far as I've gotten.”

Joon finds it bizarre that a girl covered with feathers is reading a story about birds to a coop full of chickens. He also finds it sweet and kind and mystical and incredibly feminine. “Your parents don't mind you reading to them?”

Rhea ignores the question. “This psychiatrist I used to see sent me the book. He thinks it'll help me adjust to having feathers.”

“You think it will?”

Rhea eases herself off the perch and goes to the window. She cups her hand around her eyes and peers into the kitchen. Her stepmother has a meat fork in one hand and a Kleenex in the other. “He was really strange. Always wearing these funny hats. But he didn't think my feathers were
my
problem. He thought they were everybody else's problem. Like your gigundo ears aren't
your
problem. But the problem of the people who think you look goofy. You know?”

“So you don't go to the funny hat doctor anymore?”

“My father wants my feathers to be
my
problem. I better go in.”

Joon follows her outside. She's wearing a baggy coat, so he can't tell for sure, but she doesn't appear to have poofy butt feathers like real chickens do. “Can I listen to you read tomorrow?”

“No way,” Rhea says. “We'd get caught and then I couldn't come out here anymore. I don't even want you looking through the window. You saw me and heard me talk. You know I don't cluck or tweet or have a beak. And if you're wondering, I don't lay eggs.”

They teeter on the chicken coop step trying not to look at each other. It's getting colder and there's a drizzle. “I suppose I'll see you around,” Joon finally says.

Rhea runs to the house.

As Joon walks back to the bench there is a sudden halo of light around his head. Rhea must be shining her flashlight at him. His huge Aspergres ears must be glowing red.

Eighteen

“What's your rooster's name again?” Gammy Betz asks Rhea.

“Mr. Shakyshiver.”

They are sitting at the long table in the dining room, in the cold northwest corner of the old farmhouse. Thanksgiving dinner has been over for an hour. The table has been cleared, the dishes washed. The others are in the living room—Donna and Rhea's father, her grandmother's husband Ben, her uncle Dan and the Latino woman he brought with him from San Diego.

“And the one the coyote killed?” Gammy Betz asks.

“That was Blackbutt,” says Rhea. “He looked a lot more like Captain Bates than Mr. Shakyshiver does.”

Rhea's grandmother pushes up her sagging cheeks with the heels of her hands. “Oh, I liked that Captain Bates.”

Rhea knows she is in for a treat now, a rambling, wistful soliloquy on her grandmother's old rooster. Woven in this story about Captain Bates will be the story about Maximo Gomez, Alfred making that FRESH EGGS sign, the story about her father being afraid to reach under the pecking hens for eggs when he was a little boy, so many wonderful Cassowary stories.

Instead Rhea's grandmother starts to tell a new story, about the giant she named her rooster after. “Did I ever tell you about the real Captain Bates?” she begins.

“Only that you once tried on his big boots,” Rhea says. “And that they came up to your rear end.”

Her grandmother laughs and begins, telling her that Martin VanBuren Bates was born in eastern Kentucky in 1845; that he joined the Confederate army when he was sixteen; that he was a big boy when he joined and kept growing right through the war, to seven feet, eight inches and 470 pounds; that by the end of the war he had risen to the rank of captain.

(She does not tell Rhea that after the Civil War, Americans developed a huge interest in human oddities—giants and midgets and women with beards, people who could swallow swords or twist themselves into pretzels, dark thick-lipped people said to be cannibals from faraway islands.)

She tells Rhea that a man who puts on shows—an
impresario
—lured Bates into show business with promises of fame and fortune; that during a tour of Europe, Captain Bates met and fell in love with a woman even bigger than he was; that her name was Anna Swan and that she was from Nova Scotia and that she was seven feet, eleven inches; that when they were married Queen Victoria gave them expensive wedding presents.

She tells her that after years of traveling the world, the captain and Anna bought a farm in Seville, which, as Rhea knows, is only a few miles north of Tuttwyler; that the house they built had big doors and big windows and fourteen-foot ceilings.

She tells her that despite their height, despite the fact that people were always gawking at them, despite their fame, Captain Bates and Anna considered themselves normal people who deserved a normal life.

(She does not tell her that while living in that big house in Seville, Anna, after gushing six gallons of embryonic fluid from her uterus, gave birth to the largest baby known to medical history, a twenty-three and three-quarter-pound boy thirty inches long, with a head nineteen inches in diameter; and that he lived less than a day.)

She does tell her that many of the friends they'd made while touring came to visit them at their farm: midgets and Siamese twins and a man with very little meat on his bones who billed himself as a living skeleton; that these people, like the Captain and Anna, despite the way people gawked at them, were ordinary everyday people, like everybody else.

(She does not tell her about the time the floor beneath Anna and the captain collapsed while they were dancing at a neighbor's house; about the captain being a sour and angry man always coming to blows with smaller men; that when Anna died, the coffin-maker thought the dimensions the captain sent him were a mistake, and so when Anna's coffin arrived, it was much too small for her; that the funeral had to be delayed until a new coffin could be built; that to avoid the same humiliating mix-up when he died, he had his own coffin made and kept it in his barn for thirty years.)

Rhea loves her grandmother too much to tell her she already knows all those stories, both the good ones she's telling and the bad ones she's leaving out. She knows them because a month ago her father went to the library in Tuttwyler to get books for her homeschooling and came home with one on Captain Bates and Anna. It was called
There Were Giants on the Earth
. Rhea also knows why Gammy Betz is telling her only the good stories. It's because Gammy wants her to think of herself as normal. Instead of the human oddity she is.

“For years and years they put his huge boots on display at the fair and let people try them on,” her grandmother says. “And yes, Rhea,. they came right up to my rear end. I couldn't have been more than five or six.”

Rhea finishes the story for her. “And years later when your new rooster kept growing and growing, and strutting liked he owned the world, you thought of Captain Bates and those big boots.”

“That's right,” her grandmother says.

Rhea loves her Gammy Betz more than anything. During dinner, she was the only person who didn't try to force a piece of turkey on her. Even the Latino woman had tried that. “Come on!” she said, her eyes looking everywhere but at Rhea's feathers. “Everybody eats the big bird on Thanksgiving! What kind of American are you?”

Gammy Betz hadn't said anything like that. She just made sure she ate her mashed potatoes and a slice of cranberry sauce and one of the rolls while they were still warm.

Nineteen

The accident on the Ohio turnpike cost Phil Bunyip his left eye, but it has not affected his punctuality. As always he arrives right at midnight. As always he jumps out of his truck drinking a Pepsi, smoking a cigarette, and eating cheap pastry. “That forklift of yours all juiced up?” he asks.

Calvin Cassowary gives him an exaggerated nod, one that can be seen in the dark.

Phil signals to his chicken catchers and they start putting on their paper overalls, rubber gloves and masks.

Calvin can see the wrinkles of concern around Phil's eyes. “Anything wrong?”

Phil draws on his cigarette and licks the icing off his little finger. “I just hope the boys don't let their emotions get in the way with this load.”

“Know what you mean,” Calvin says. And he does know what Phil means. Tonight's work will be different than usual. The hundred thousand Leghorns they'll be ripping from their cages tonight aren't spent. They're year-old hens at the peak of their laying, two eggs every three days. Ordinarily they'd have another six months of laying before being trucked to the pet food plant. But these are the 100,000 hens Calvin has to cut from his flock.

“It's not like chickens have souls or anything,” Phil Bunyip says. “But you do catch yourself feeling a little funny snuffing out these young hens before their time.”

Calvin does not stand in the doorway to the layer house and watch the culling, as his contract with Gallinipper Foods requires him to do. Instead he goes back to the house and climbs the stairs to his bedroom and closes the door behind him.

“You coming to bed already?” Donna asks with sleepy surprise.

Calvin takes off his pants and sits on the edge of the bed. He peels back the allergen-free cotton blankets and puts his hand under her allergen-free cotton nightgown. Calvin has no reason to feel guilty in the bedroom. Donna is always receptive to unplanned sex. The endorphins her brain releases numb her ever-present itch to sneeze.

So Calvin just goes ahead and enjoys himself—enjoys the way his own endorphins numb his many problems—his life without Jeanie, his daughter with the feathers, his bills and bank loans, his need to husband the Cassowary family farm through one more generation, his young wife's inability to conceive.