Fresh Eggs (3 page)

Donald Cassowary loved farming. He had an affinity for the soil—just like his father and grandfather and all the Cassowarys back to Henry had an affinity for it. He could tell what kind of fertilizers his fields needed just by sticking his nose in a handful of dirt. He also had an affinity for his animals, and they an affinity for him. They gave him all the milk and eggs he wanted, and when the time came, they gave him their meat, understanding their biblical role as well as their master did. God, after all, had put men like Donald Cassowary in charge of His creation; told them to be fruitful and to multiply and to replenish the earth and to subdue it; gave them dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over every creeping thing that creepeth.

Donald also was a damn fine carpenter who could build a new corn crib as well as he could repair an old one. He knew the ins and outs of plumbing, welding, and electrical wiring. He could keep his old Ford tractor running no matter what.

He also was good at the nasty parts of farming. He could put a bullet through the head of a favorite cow when it dropped to its knees with some incurable disease. He could walk his gardens at dusk, popping off rabbits and chipmunks and groundhogs with his .22 rifle. He could set out steel-jawed traps for the raccoon when they got into the corn. He could smash potato bugs with his thumb. When one of his favorite hens got too old to lay eggs, he could chop off her head, yank her guts and feathers, have his wife Betsy serve it for Sunday supper. God had given him dominion, and dominion comes at a high price. You do the things you have to do.

Donald had everything it took to be a successful farmer but the money. He just didn't have enough acres. So that meant a job away from the farm. For many years he drove a tow motor at the snack cake plant in Tuttwyler. He always worked second shift, so his daylight hours were free for the farm. When the snack cake plant moved to Tennessee, he drove a school bus for the local district. The money wasn't as good, and it ate up his mornings and afternoons, but it did leave a few more hours each day for farming, and being happy. The egg money was a big help, too.

Donald looked forward to the day when he could retire, and with his Social Security and his little pension from the school district, farm full time for a few years, the way his father and grandfather and great-grandfather did all their lives. But sixteen days after his 52nd birthday, Donald Cassowary's heart stopped beating. He had just come home from driving the high school football team to an away game in Orrville and was using the full moon to toss a wagonload of hay bales into the loft of the old barn. “Everything dies before its time on a farm,” his wife Betsy told Helen Abelard at the funeral.

Jeanie Cassowary changes Rhea's diaper and bends her arms and legs into the tiniest pair of bib overalls ever made. She ties a white bonnet around Rhea's face so the sun won't scorch the top of her tender head. She kisses her nose and slips her into the canvas baby carrier she wears on her chest, the one her mother-in-law ordered for her from the JCPenney catalog. “Let's go feed the chickies,” she says. She doesn't mean the 60,000 Leghorns stacked in that long silvery laying house—Calvin and his automatic feeding machines feed those chickens—she means Captain Bates and his harem of caramel-red Buff Orpingtons.

The chicken coop is dark and empty and stinks to high heaven. Cobwebs hang from the rafters. Splotches of black and white manure cover the floor. Jeanie takes the lid off the feed drum and digs the metal scoop into the cracked corn. Rhea likes the crunching sound the scoop makes and she kicks her arms and legs playfully.

Now they go into the chicken yard. Captain Bates and his hens cluck and waddle forward on their skinny yellow legs. Jeanie showers them with corn. “Look how hungry the chickies are,” Jeanie says to Rhea. “Peck-peck-peck. Peck-peck-peck.”

Back inside the dark coop, they move along the double row of nests. All but two nests have a brown egg inside. One nest has a hen. Jeanie talks to the hen the same way she talks to her daughter, calmly, lovingly. She rubs the hen's soft breast and then reaches under her to see if there's an egg yet. The hen is no more frightened or offended by Jeanie's intruding hand than Rhea is when she feels inside her diaper. One by one the eggs go into the pockets of Jeanie's floppy apron.

When Calvin made the decision to go into the egg business with Gallinipper Foods, he and Jeanie discussed whether to keep the Buff Orpingtons and keep selling brown eggs to their neighbors. Calvin said it would be a lot of unnecessary work for only a few extra bucks. “But if you want to take care of them, we'll keep them until they die off,” he said. “My mother always enjoyed gabbing with the customers.”

Jeanie thought that sounded uncharacteristically sexist for her artist husband: He'll take care of the real egg business, managing that huge layer house with its automatic feeders and waterers and egg-collectors. Wifey can have her little yard of hens, and
gab
all afternoon with the other wifeys when they come for their weekly dozen or two. It worried her that he was becoming too serious, too responsible, too Republican, too much like her father back in Toledo. But then Calvin drew a hilarious charcoal sketch of her, standing among the Buff Orpingtons, scattering cracked corn, while Captain Bates tried to mate with one of the cats. It's framed now, hanging right behind her chair in the breakfast nook.

After putting the eggs in the refrigerator she sits in that chair and guides baby Rhea to her breast. She hears the driveway crackle and pulls back the gingham curtain. The semi has finally arrived to haul away their first load of eggs for Gallinipper Foods. Calvin is standing by his layer house, arms folded proudly around his clipboard. With him is Norman Marek, Gallinipper's Midwest producer relations manager, pecking away at a bright yellow pocket calculator.

Four

Norman Marek greets the Cassowarys with that big friendly yank of a handshake he's perfected over the years. “Cal, my man! Jeanie!” He bends low over Rhea, who's holding onto her father's leg as if it was the strong trunk of an oak tree. “Your daddy tells me you're all ready for kindergarten.”

Rhea hides her head under the flaps of her father's sport coat.

The maître d' leads them through a maze of round tables to a plush booth under an arbor dripping with plastic grapes. Presello's is the finest Italian restaurant in Wyssock County, the only one with candles on the tables and recorded accordion music floating through the air. Norman orders the chicken parmigiana and a carafe of the house red. Calvin orders linguini and clams. Jeanie gets the ravioli Bolognese. Rhea is talked into ordering the spaghetti and meatballs, and a chocolate milk.

Norman has invited the Cassowarys to Presello's to present Calvin with a five-year pin—it's in the shape of a rooster's head—and a Certificate of Egg-cellence signed personally by Bob Gallinipper, chairman of Gallinipper Foods. He surprises Jeanie with a pewter necklace of interlocking baby chicks. He frightens Rhea with a tin wind-up hen that bangs away at the tabletop with her beak and then poops a rubber egg, which bounces off the table and rolls under a table of men wearing Softball uniforms.

The wine and chocolate milk come and Norman offers a toast: “May the next five years be five times better than the first five.”

Calvin clinks glasses with him and smiles. But he doesn't feel like smiling. It's only been three weeks since Jeanie learned from the specialist in Wooster that cancer is eating away at her uterus. There'll be no more Cassowary children. Maybe no Jeanie if the surgery scheduled for Tuesday doesn't go well.

The rain doesn't make the drive home any easier. Jeanie hugs Calvin's arm as if it was the strong limb of an oak. Her free hand plays with the baby chick necklace. “I wonder if Bob Gallinipper's wife wears one of these?”

“If she does, you can bet it isn't made out of pewter.”

Neither of them like the bitterness in their voices. They smile at each other and tears fill their eyes. Jeanie puts the necklace back in the cardboard box and sticks it in the glove compartment, with the maps and owner's manual and the ketchup packs from McDonald's.

Dr. Mohandas Bandicoot is still wearing his paper slippers when he comes out to tell Calvin how Jeanie's surgery went. “It looks like we got it all.”

It is not the reassuring appraisal Calvin hoped for. He studies the doctor's loamy eyes. “Looks like?”

When Calvin calls the farm, his mother puts Rhea on the phone. “Did the doctor fix mommy's tummy?” she asks.

“He sure did.”

Calvin stays at the hospital all day, watching Jeanie sleep. He buys her a pot of violets and a Minnie Mouse balloon. He buys a newspaper and reads about President Carter's latest plan for breaking the backs of those twin demons, inflation and high interest rates. “This one better work, Mr. Caw-tuh,” he mutters, imitating the new president's Georgia-mush voice. His contract with Gallinipper Foods pays him only three cents per dozen eggs produced. That three cents isn't worth half as much as it was five years ago. To keep their heads above water he's added two new layer houses—layer houses B and C—and 120,000 more hens. In the spring he'll have to go back to First Sovereignty for the capital to build layer houses D and E.

So those interest rates have got to come down—and soon.

Calvin doesn't leave the hospital until ten. He's tired and the highway is one bend after another and he knows he shouldn't drive this fast, but he's got to be home when Phil Bunyip arrives.

Eggs sounded like a good idea after his father died and the farm fell into his hands. “It's a piece of cake,” Norman Marek said that evening as they sat at the wobbly table in the breakfast nook, watching the cows graze on the hillside. “Gallinipper furnishes the hens, the feed, the medication to keep them healthy. We even haul off the old hens when they're spent. All you do is furnish the housing and the labor, pay the light bills and clean out the manure. And we protect you with a long contract, a guaranteed price, no matter what.”

Later Calvin and Jeanie worked with a pocket calculator, multiplying that guaranteed three-cents-per-dozen by the number of dozens a starter flock of 60,000 Leghorns would lay in a year. They subtracted loan payments they'd have to make on a layer house, as well as insurance and utility costs, and the higher real-estate taxes they'd have to pay on the farm. “Not as lucrative as teaching school,” Calvin joked, “but I think we can make it fly.”

So Calvin Cassowary signed a contract with Gallinipper Foods, contingent on him getting a loan for the layer house. Ted Rapparee at First Sovereignty Savings Bank took one look at that contract—Gallinipper's was the largest producer of poultry products east of the Mississippi—and gave Calvin all the money he needed. Now they've got three layer houses and 180,000 Leghorns, and a full-time man to help with the feed and manure, and next year this time they'll have five layer houses and 300,000 Leghorns. And tonight Phil Bunyip is coming to cull the spent hens.

The trucks arrive right at midnight. There are three of them, sleek black diesel cabs, tugging low flatbed trailers stacked high with empty cages. Their airbrakes fart as they plow to a stop alongside layer house A, the one built the summer Rhea was born. There are two or three chicken catchers in each cab. They jump to the ground and immediately start smoking cigarettes. When Phil Bunyip walks over to Calvin he not only has a cigarette teetering on his lower lip, he's got a can of Pepsi in his left hand and a cinnamon roll in his right hand. “Your forklift all juiced up?” he asks.

Calvin nods that it is.

Phil expertly removes his cigarette with his Pepsi hand and finishes his roll in two efficient bites. The cigarette goes back on lip and he heads for the forklift. The chicken catchers know it's time to get busy. They grind their own cigarette butts into the driveway gravel and feed their feet into the legs of the heavy paper coveralls they'll wear. They walk their fingers into rubber gloves and pull dust masks down over their backwards baseball hats.

Phil Bunyip maneuvers the forklift to the back of the nearest truck and takes down a rack of empty cages. He backs around and waits for Calvin to slide the layer house door open. He drives in. The catchers follow. They are young, brawny Indiana men, some of them enrolled at the technical college in South Bend, some high school dropouts just getting used to the hard labor they'll be doing all their working lives.

It's dark inside the layer house. And quiet. The ammonia rising from the manure pits stings the catchers' eyes and makes the nerve endings in their noses twitch. Phil lowers the rack of cages and backs out for another one. The chicken catchers go to work.

There are some 50,000 spent Leghorns in the long silvery house. There were 60,000 hens originally, but 10,000 have already died of suffocation or disease. Just eighteen months ago they arrived as young ready-to-lay pullets. For eighteen months they stood wing to wing, six to a twelve by eighteen-inch cage, unable to flap their wings, their aching toes wrapped around the wire bottoms of their cages, their beaks unable to find a bug or a worm in their tasteless mash. For eighteen months they laid two eggs every three days. Now their human master says they're
spent
, though they could go on laying an egg or two a week for a long time yet. But their master keeps very accurate records of their laying, and he has bills to pay, and if a hen can't average those two eggs every three days, well, it's time for a new batch of pullets, whose uteruses are still chock-full of happy ova, who can fulfill their biblical responsibility and keep the Cassowary farm in the Cassowary family for one more generation.

Calvin doesn't want to watch the catchers do their work. But he has to watch. His contract with Gallinipper Foods requires it. It's part of the company's quality control regimen. He stands in the doorway, where the air is only slightly better.