Fresh Eggs (16 page)

Donna has been to a doctor. Calvin, too. There's no reason in the world why she can't conceive. She just doesn't.

After the sex Calvin and Donna squeeze their pillows together. “Tilt your butt so it doesn't run out,” Calvin whispers.

Donna tilts, as instructed. “I don't know why you're so antsy about me getting pregnant. I'm young. We'll have babies.”

“We've been screwing for seven years.”

“And enjoying it. Yes?”

“Of course.”

“Then let's just keep enjoying it, okay?”

“It's psychological, Donna. Your subconscious doesn't want you to give birth to a baby with feathers.”

Donna raps him on the forehead with the flat of her hand, the same way she does when he's snoring. “Rhea is the one with the problem, Cal. Not me. One of these mornings I'll roll over and puke on your face and we'll know I'm pregnant.”

“This isn't something to joke about.”

“Isn't it? When you think I'm subconsciously telling myself not to conceive? Like that would be possible?”

“Mind over matter.”

“Not the way I orgasm.”

“What do your orgasms have to do with it?”

“They've done research on this. Orgasms aren't just for fun. They have a reproductive purpose. The muscle spasms in my uterus throw your sperm toward my Fallopian tubes, where the egg is waiting. So, if I didn't want your baby, I wouldn't come so easy.”

Calvin surrenders. His voice softens into a playful tease. “Smart women turn me on.”

Donna kisses the spot where she rapped him. “Then how about another ride, rooster boy? I feel a sneeze coming.”

Donna looks at the clock on the dresser. It's 5:30. Calvin's side of the bed is empty. Outside, Phil Bunyip's trucks are revving up. Mr. Shakyshiver is crowing for the sun to rise. Biscuit is barking just for the sake of barking. Donna sniffs back the mucus in her nostrils. Coughs. Sneezes. Exchanges her hot pillows for the cool ones on Calvin's side. Tries to sleep. But can't.

She has been unfaithful to her husband. Unfaithful to him with her half-truths. She wants to have children with him, yes. He is a magnificent man. But he is a man with a daughter with feathers. Yes, she opens her womb to him. Allows him to spend as much time in there as he wants. She loves their sex. Her orgasms are for real. She tells herself not to be silly. Or afraid. Calvin's sperm is normal, she tells herself. It has been tested and retested. No one in Calvin's or Jeanie's family had ever grown feathers before. There are no records of it. Or rumors of it.

Donna knows that she is a smart woman, just as Calvin said. With her intellect and her sensuality, she is able to override her silliness and her fears and copulate joyfully. But is he right about her subconscious fears? Have they, like dutiful medieval defenders, erected a castle wall around her eggs? Do they pour cauldrons of boiling oil onto his advancing spermatozoa?

It may not just be Rhea's feathers that keep her from getting pregnant. It also may be Calvin's lingering love for Jeanie Marabout. She knows that their marriage is founded on practicality. The need for fantastic, mind-numbing sex. The need for a business partner good in math. The need for a mother.

She knows, too, that Calvin's and Jeanie's marriage was founded on something more fundamental than practicality. It was founded on love. She has no way of knowing whether the sex between Calvin and Jeanie was better or worse than the sex between Calvin and her. But surely their
lovemaking
was better.

Maybe Calvin's subconscious is the problem. Maybe despite his eagerness for a son he doesn't want her to have equal status with the great Jeanie Marabout. Share the great Jeanie Marabout's high and heavenly pedestal.

Donna pulls the cotton sheet over her head and remembers the afternoon, just six weeks after they were married, when she explored the fruit cellar in the basement. It was a dark and musty little room that made her sneeze something terrible.

The walls were lined ceiling-to-floor with wide wooden shelves. There were maybe a hundred glass jars on those shelves, jars of tomatoes and pickles and rhubarb and green beans and beets and apples and pears, grape and raspberry jelly. Bundles of garlic and onions hung from the ceiling. There was a huge bin of wrinkled potatoes. There were webs of dust and webs made by spiders. There were mousetraps loaded with chunks of moldy cheese. And there was something else. Stuck behind the jugs of homemade wine was a small picture frame. Donna pulled it out and saw the drawing of Jeanie feeding chickens. When she saw the rooster trying to screw the cat, she laughed out loud. The drawing made her think of the empty rectangle on the wall above the table in the breakfast nook—the wallpaper inside that rectangle lighter than the rest—and she knew that this drawing once hung there. She wondered how long it would be before Calvin drew a picture of her? A drawing she could frame and hang on the wall.

Eight years have passed. Calvin has not drawn a picture of her. Calvin has not drawn a picture of anything. Jeanie Marabout was married to an artist. She is married to a man with a million chickens.

She can hear Phil Bunyip's trucks pulling onto the road, heading west toward a pet food plant somewhere in Indiana. Now she is married to a man with 900,000 chickens.

Rhea follows the flashlight beam to the chicken coop. This second week of December is unseasonably cold. The kind of cold that makes the tips of your ears ache and your breath smolder. The kind of cold that makes a door slam louder. The chickens, already settled on their perches,
gauk-bwauk
for mercy, then, seeing that the sudden intruder is only their mistress, and not a coyote or that jumpy old dog who lives on the porch, cluck until everybody's calm again.

Rhea sits on the bottom perch and opens the book Dr. Pirooz Aram sent her. “If you remember,” she says to the chickens, “the birds are finally on their way to find their king. But now they're flying over spooky and empty lands.” The chickens cackle deep in their throats. She begins to read:

“
One of the birds lets out a helpless squeak
:

‘I can't go on this journey, I'm too weak
.

Dear guide, I know I can't fly anymore;

I've never tried a feat like this before
…”

After these few lines Rhea hears the coop door squeak open. “Hi,” a voice says.

She knows who the voice belongs to, but aims her flashlight anyway. “Didn't we agree you wouldn't come anymore?”

Joon Faldstool shuffles forward like a toy robot with weak batteries. “I just wanted to tell you I got my temporary.”

Rhea lets the flashlight beam burn into his eyes for several seconds—punishment for disobeying her—then lowers it to her book. “Big deal,” she says.

“It was my fourth try,” Joon says. “I'm really not that dumb. I just panic on tests.”

Rhea's voice softens. “My father says you should go with the first answer that pops in your head. ‘Trust your synapses,' he says.”

Joon kneels by her feet, as if she was a queen or a goddess or a great philosopher. “Synapses?”

Rhea pretends she knows what she's talking about. “They're the microscopic thingamabobs that pass information between your brain cells. They only let you down if you think too hard and short-circuit yourself.”

“Your father teaches you at home, huh?”

“He was going to be a teacher until he inherited the farm.”

“But he teaches you at home because of your feathers, right?”

“He figured everybody would make fun of me.”

“They would, too. Everybody makes fun of my ears.”

“I can see why.”

Now they laugh. Not just giggle in a nervous way. But
laugh
. It frightens the chickens.

“When are you going to get your real license?” Rhea asks.

Dread wrinkles Joon's face. “I'll still be taking that test when I'm fifty.”

“Not if you trust your synapses.”

They laugh again. Frighten the chickens again.

When there is silence again, Joon says to Rhea, “You have a good attitude about things.”

“For someone with feathers?”

“I mean for anybody.”

Rhea bites down on her lip, suppressing a pang of self-pity. “That's not what you meant. But that's okay. Actually I have a shitty attitude.”

“Not as shitty as mine.”

“We're not going to play ‘My Attitude Is Shittier Than Yours,' are we?”

He shakes his head no and she continues reading:

“
Your heart's congealed like ice;

when will you free yourself from cowardice
?”

The next night Joon shovels manure furiously so he can sneak away to the coop and listen to Rhea read to her chickens. “You want to take a walk?” Rhea asks him when he slips through the door.

They sneak around the side of the coop and Rhea whisper-yells for Biscuit. The old dog comes loping. They head down the hill toward Three Fish Creek, their breath smoldering around their heads.

“Don't tell your father,” Rhea says, “but I sneak out at night all the time and walk in the woods.”

“Faldstools don't blab,” Joon insists.

“Everybody blabs,” Rhea says.

They follow the creek until they find a spot where the ice looks thick enough to hold them. They slide to the other side and wind their way through the huge naked maples. Biscuit sniffs in circles, stopping often to raise his hind leg.

“My great-grandfather used to tap these trees to make syrup,” Rhea says. “We had a real farm then. Cows and pigs and maple syrup and brown eggs laid by hens who ran around free and ate bugs. Now we run a concentration camp.”

They head up the slope toward the Van Varken farm, where huge homes now grow. “My father told me about the time you set a bunch of them free,” Joon says.

Rhea slaps him hard on the chest. “I thought Faldstools didn't blab?”

He rubs the spot. “I thought what you did was pretty cool.”

PART III

“
God the Most High created the angels and placed within them the intellect, He created the beasts and placed within them sensuality, He created the children of Adam and placed within them both intellect and sensuality. So he whose intellect dominates his sensuality is higher than the angels, and he whose sensuality dominates his intellect is lower than the beasts
.”

Jalaluddin Rumi

The Mathnawi
, c. 1260

Twenty

It's 5:30
A
.
M
. It's March. It's raining. Calvin Cassowary sees the headlights of Helen Abelard's car. It's amazing how many years that woman has been delivering the
Wyssock County Gazette
.

He puts on his poncho and boots and heads for the mailbox. Rivulets of gray water are zig-zagging down the driveway, collecting in a muddy pool by the road. If the FRESH EGGS sign was still up, it would be swaying and shimmering.

He watches the tail lights of Helen's car as it rolls up the hill toward Maple Creek Estates, the housing development being built on the Van Varken's old hog farm. At least fifty homes are up already, half already occupied. None of the quarter-acre
estates
that comprise Maple Creek have either maple trees or a creek. The creek and the maples are all on the Cassowary estate.

As Calvin pulls the paper from the tube he sees another pair of headlights coming. They are low and close together. A Saab or a BMW, Calvin figures. The car is moving fast but when its lights hit him, it decelerates and stops. The window zips halfway. A pair of gold-framed glasses appear. They are attached to a melon-shaped head. An impatient “Hey!” comes out of the head.

Calvin makes sure no other car is coming—these days you have to worry about that sort of thing—and walks to the car, which he can now see is a small Mercedes coupe. In order to be somewhat even with the melon-shaped head inside, he has to bend. “Hello,” he says.

“You work here, do you?” the head says.

“Every day,” Calvin says. “It's my place.”

“Even better,” says the head. “What's with the smell?”

Calvin knows the man in the Mercedes is not talking abut the way he smells personally. He knows it's about the chicken manure. It's especially ripe this morning, given that it's finally spring, given that it's raining and the wind is blowing. “You're one of the new Maple Creek people, I gather?”

“Correct!”

“Well,” says Calvin, consciously giving himself the slow, stereotypical, by-crackie voice of a farmer, “this is a chicken farm, so the smell would be that of chickens.”

The head is not amused. “Not acceptable.”

“Not acceptable? Don't think I get your drift.”

“This is the country, pal—clean fresh air.”

Calvin grins and squats and rests his forearms on the car door, so his face is only inches away from the head. It is obvious that this man is not aware of Calvin's loans, or his bills or his taxes, or that he has a daughter covered with feathers, or that his wife can't seem to get pregnant. “That's why you moved out here, isn't it? The clean fresh air. And the big red barns and the rolling fields and the romping horsies as far as you can see.”

“You getting smart with me?”

Calvin chuckles. No, this guy doesn't know anything about his problems. “You see, there is lots of clean fresh air in the country. But there's also lots of shit. Chicken shit and cow shit and pig shit. And shit stinks.”

“You're spreading it on your fields,” the head points out.

“I've thought about installing a million little flush toilets. But I'm not sure the chickens would use them even if I did.”

“The stench comes right inside my house.”

“Mine, too,” Calvin says.

“Completely unacceptable.”

Daylight is spreading and cars are beginning to pull out of Maple Creek Estates. Calvin stands. He no longer speaks in his by-crackie voice. “The truth is, you haven't smelled anything yet. Wait until the summer months.”