Fresh Eggs (31 page)

Joon still remembers the relief he felt when his grandfather used that word,
we'll
. It meant he was going to let her stay. “I told Rhea about how the old Aspergres farm used to be a stop on the Underground Railroad. How your great-great granddad John once killed a southern slave tracker and buried him under the smoke house.”

That made Grampa Hap smile. “I was just thinking about that story, too.”

“So it's okay?” Joon asked.

“Under one condition. If we get caught, we get caught. We don't make up a lot of stuff about me not knowing she's only fourteen, or that I'm senile or something. If you're going to take a stand against injustice, then you take it. You don't piss and moan and say you're sorry when the law comes down. When word got around there was a slave tracker buried under the smokehouse, John Aspergres ‘fessed up and said he was ready to spend the rest of his life in prison if that's what the law required.”

“Did he?” Rhea asked. She'd never heard that part of the story before.

“Not a day. Acorn County was deeply abolitionist. The sheriff just said let sleeping dogs lie. But people in the know did stop buying John's smoked hams.”

And so Grampa Hap took Rhea in and no one ever came looking for her. Sheriff's deputies had found her feathers and bloody clothes. She was dead. Joon kept working at the Cassowary farm shoveling chicken manure. He graduated from high school and announced that he was moving downstate to learn the dowsing business. His mother had a fit, but his father said, “Let the crazy boy go.”

Joon began his tutelage learning how to dowse for water and how to grow vegetables in a weedy garden. He kept his hands off Rhea until she was eighteen, asking her to marry him the first night they made love, on a blanket on the knob above Grampa Hap's trailer, one evening when the spring frogs were croaking.

Rhea drove a harder bargain. “You want me to marry you, you build me a house first.” And so right on the spot where they gave themselves to each other, Joon staked out a foundation and started digging a basement

It was after they started making love that Rhea's feathers began to fall off. Together they wondered if it was the sex, working some biological or psychological or even spiritual magic. “If it is,” Rhea said, “then let's screw these feathers off as fast as we can.”

Joon readily agreed.

As Joon began to learn the art and science of house building, Rhea took charge of the gardens and the yard, cleaning up Grampa Hap's junk the best she could. She talked Joon into buying her a dozen Buff Orpingtons and she let them roam free. Occasionally one would get eaten by a fox or a coyote, but the flock survived and grew. Today there are twenty-four hens and three roosters. There are three goats and several cats, some tame and some feral. And because they live on the edge of the swamp, there are raccoons rattling things at night and rabbits so tame they don't bounce an inch when somebody walks by. There are Canada geese and mallard ducks and ghostly blue heron. When Rhea mows the lawn she watches out for the toads and garter snakes.

When Hap finishes, they walk back to Tink's. Tink pays for the witching in cash. They drive back to the swamp. Rhea recognizes the three chickens immediately, just as Joon expected. She calls them by name and sets them free. They immediately join the Buff Orpingtons. The Buff rooster—Joon named him Rooster von Klinckowstroem after the great German dowser—immediately goes after Junior Jr., sensing that he was once The Rooster and needs a readjustment in attitude. Junior Jr. quickly accepts his new station. Then Rooster von Klinckowstroem hops on the back of Leili. It is what roosters do. “I've got another surprise,” Joon says as they watch.

Rhea studies his twitching cheeks. “Not a good one, I gather.”

“Donna's pregnant,” he says.

That night they cuddle on an air mattress on the plywood floor of their unfinished house. “Maybe now's the time to go see your dad,” Joon says.

Rhea is not upset with him. He's tried to talk her into seeing her father a thousand times. “The baby means he's finally accepted my death,” she says. “Why upset the applecart?”

Thirty-six

Rhea Cassowary's brown egg business is up to thirty dozen a week—thirty-one when Louise Hoyle's arthritis takes a vacation and she can bake her famous poppyseed kuchens.

Joon and Grampa Hap still marvel at how many dozens Rhea sells. After all, Bear Swamp Road dead-ends into a swamp and anybody who wants eggs from Rhea's free-roaming flock has to go way out of their way. “It's the swamp bugs and the worms,” Rhea tells her customers when they rave about the big brown eggs. “The windblown seeds. The freedom.”

There are about a hundred chickens in the flock now. From April to November the chickens roost wherever they like—in trees, on top of the trucks, on the arms of Hap's many broken lawn chairs. In the winter they huddle inside the low-roofed coop Joon bought from Bud Miller. Joon had to take it apart, board by board, and then reassemble it.

Yes, the brown eggs are good. And getting better. Bigger and richer. Grampa Hap thinks it's the new genes being introduced into the flock by George Herbert Walker Bush. He's The Rooster now. Rooster von Klinckowstroem died trying to swallow a wasp and Junior Jr. died trying to mount one of the feral cats. That freed the way for George Herbert Walker Bush, whose ancestry goes all the way back to Maximo Gomez, the Black Spanish cockerel rescued from a Cuban brothel by Chuck Cowrie, during the Spanish-American War.

This warm May morning Rhea is trying to get the lawnmower started. Joon bought it last summer at a yard sale. It starts hard. Sometimes not at all. Midway through her seventh unsuccessful pull she sees a car coming down the hill. She hopes it's Gammy Betz and not another egg customer.

It's been two weeks since she called her grandmother. It was while Joon and Hap were dowsing a well down in Union County. “Hello?” the woman on the other end said.

“Hello,” Rhea said. “Is this Betsy Betz?”

“Yes it is,” the woman said.

“Gammy, we have to talk,” Rhea said.

And they did talk, on the phone that morning two weeks ago—running up an enormous long-distance bill—and again the next day in the almost-finished living room of the new house on the knob above Hap's trailer. And now, just twenty-one hours before the wedding, Rhea's grandmother is driving up again, to walk her down the aisle and give her to James Faldstool, Jr.

Her grandmother had begged her to call her father—to tell him she is alive, beautiful and featherless, and about to be married—but she'd stopped begging as soon as she saw it wasn't going to do any good. Gammy Betz always knew when enough was enough. “Okay,” she said, “it's your wedding. But as soon as that wedding music starts you're going to regret it.”

“Probably,” said Rhea. “But there's just so much ugly stuff between Daddy and me. Who knows what Daddy would do at the wedding. You know how he gets when there's too much pressure. I don't want him throwing dishes or jumping up and down on the cake. So we'll save the reunion for another time, Gammy. Though I'm dying to see the new baby.”

That's when her grandmother said, “So am I.”

“You haven't seen Donna's baby yet?”

“They're really protective,” her grandmother said, adding in a whisper, “They're not saying anything, but I think the baby has Donna's allergies.”

The car pulls up. The cloud of dust that followed it down the hill settles. It is Gammy Betz. Her husband has come, too. He pops the trunk and takes out a beautifully wrapped package that could only be a toaster oven.

Dr. Pirooz Aram, more rumpled than usual in his baggy Saturday shorts, goes to the mailbox. There is the usual collection of catalogs addressed to his wife and the offers of credit cards. There is one hand-written letter that forces him to sit on his front step and read it immediately. The return address simply says GRANDMA!

When the letter is read he stares at his azalea bushes for a while, then goes inside. “Sitareh,” he yells, hoping his wife will hear him over the Yobisch Podka CD filling the house with monotonous New Age harmonies. “Do you remember that patient of mine who was eaten by wolves?”

Sitareh is in the kitchen chopping endive for a salad. “The one with the feathers?” she yells back. “I though it was coyotes!”

“Coyotes? Are you sure, Sitareh? I thought it was wolves.”

“It was coyotes, Pirooz.”

He is in the kitchen now, nibbling first on the endive, then on his wife's neck. “Anyway, this girl who was eaten by animals has just invited us to her wedding.”

“Are we going?”

“We should, don't you think?”

And so three Saturdays later, Dr. Pirooz Aram and wife Sitareh drive deep into the state of Ohio, to Acorn County. The letter from GRANDMA! included a map. So they stumble across Bear Swamp Road rather easily.

They first spot the silver trailer and then the almost-completed house on the hill above it. They approach slowly, careful not to hit one of the many loose chickens. “What is it with this family and chickens?” Dr. Aram says to his wife. There is a collection of cars and pickup trucks already parked in a field of tall grass. They park next to a red truck with a blue camper on its back. Dr. Pirooz Aram gets a box from the trunk of his red Toyota. It is wrapped with silver paper. There is a toaster oven inside, something Sitareh says every young American couple needs. Sitareh carries the basket of painted eggs her husband insisted on bringing. They are the ancient Persian symbol of fertility.

A happy young woman runs toward them. She is wearing a short white dress. There is a circlet of yellow roses on her head. “Rhea, is that you?” Dr. Pirooz Aram asks.

She hugs him. “It's me.”

“Where are your beautiful feathers?”

“Gone.”

“And you weren't eaten by wolves?”

Rhea walks them, arm-in-arm, past the card tables covered with food and the coolers filled with pop and beer, to the short rows of folding chairs by a great drooping willow. “That fellow in the white tuxedo there, he is your husband?”

“Pretty soon he is,” says Rhea. She sits them next to Jelly Bean and Robert Charles. “A beautiful day for a wedding, isn't it?” Pirooz says to them, his eyes marveling at their tiny turnip heads.

“Bingo!” answers Robert Charles.

A man starts playing an accordion. People scramble for chairs. Some have to stand.

Joon hugs his mother and then shakes his father's hand, without words thanking him for keeping their secret all these years. He trots to the willow and stands under a trellis woven thick with water lillies gathered from the swamp.

Now Rhea starts down the aisle, her arm locked in Gammy Betz's arm.

The service is conducted by a huge woman wearing a bright green pantsuit. Pirooz whispers to Sitareh that she looks like an avocado. Later he will learn that she is Rita Afflatus Ball, pastor of the Unitarian Universalist Church in Yellow Springs. To his delight, there is no talk of sacrifice or duty. No talk of better-or-worse. No talk of death. Or parting. There is only talk of love.

Says Rita Afflatus Ball: “We have not gathered here today to marry Rhea and Joon—as if we had the power or the right to do that. Rather, we have gathered as friends and family to acknowledge that they have already married themselves, many years ago, when they were children, and their eyes first met, and burned a secret passageway through space and time, through self and selfishness, through apprehension and vulnerability, so that their souls could freely pass and entwine as one.

“Only Rhea and Joon can say they are married and only Rhea and Joon can decide how long their marriage will last. But Rhea and Joon have loved each other for a long time already, and it is my guess they will love each other for a long time to come. I would not be surprised if it proves to be the better part of eternity. So, Rhea Jeanette Cassowary, it comes to this moment: Are you married to James Harold Faldstool Jr.?”

“I am,” answers Rhea.

“And James Harold Faldstool Jr., are you married to Rhea Jeanette Cassowary?”

“I am,” answers Joon.

“Then why am I talking when we should be eating and dancing?” asks Rita Afflatus Ball.

There is laughter and applause and the man with the accordion starts playing a polka. Rhea and Joon kiss.

Dr. Aram scoops Jelly Bean into his arms. Dances her around the trellis.

“You go, Mrs. Roosevelt!” Robert Charles bellows as he claps to the music.

A meaty red pick-up crackles to the edge of the hill and stops. Below, on the edge of the marsh, glistens a silver house trailer. There are a couple of dozen cars and trucks parked in front of it. One of those trucks has a blue camper on the back. Just up the slope from the silver trailer sits a small house. Behind that house a party is going on. People are dancing. When the driver of the pickup rolls down his window, he hears polka music.

The driver takes his sweaty hands off the steering wheel and presses them against his cold cheeks. He looks to the woman next to him for guidance. She is holding a Kleenex to her nose. Between them, strapped into a plastic safety seat, is a baby. The baby's yellow sleeper is zipped to the chin. The baby's yellow knit cap hides everything but a pair of brown eyes and a nubby pink nose.

The woman smiles grimly. The man takes his foot off the brake. As they descend, the FRESH EGGS sign in the back of the truck, wrapped in beautiful blue paper and tied with beautiful white ribbons, rattles and rattles.

Thirty-seven

Rhea Faldstool sits by her mother's grave, Indian style. Inside the hollow diamond created by her folded legs she places the tiny girl named Joy. Joy is three years old now, squirmy and irritable. Rhea holds her in place with one hand and with the other opens the little book Dr. Pirooz Aram gave her when she was a child.

The wild strawberries already have been eaten and Joon and her father have wandered across the cemetery, searching for the graves of Civil War veterans. Donna is waiting in the truck, with the windows up, afraid of the thick June grass and the pollen-soaked air. So there is just Rhea and Joy and the half of Jeanie Cassowary not in heaven.