Fresh Eggs (6 page)

The room Norman Marek has booked for them is a double and they each get a huge bed. Calvin showers and puts on his suit. He combs the French fry salt out of Rhea's hair and helps her put on her dress. It's the dress Jeanie's mother bought her to wear to the funeral. A serious dress for serious occasions. It's burgundy, made of soft corduroy. It has long sleeves and a row of gold buttons. It's also a short dress, so she has to wear white tights underneath, so no one can see her underwear. Last thing to go on are a pair of shiny, black shoes. “Well, look at you,” Calvin says.

They go down to the banquet. A woman at a table by the door gives them name tags. Someone in a chicken suit gives Rhea a bright yellow balloon. The banquet room is dark and there's a woman playing a harp. People are standing in bundles, drinks in their hands. Norman Marek is suddenly in front of them. “Hey! Calvin! Got here safe and sound I see!” He bends over Rhea. “Hey! Look at that balloon!” He promises to steer Bob Gallinipper their way just as soon as he gets a chance. “Bob's looking forward to meeting you,” he says.

That's the last they see of Norman Marek all evening. There's a sit-down dinner—baked chicken, wild rice and cold string beans—and then a welcoming speech by Bob Gallinipper himself, while the waitresses plunk down shallow glass bowls filled with balls of lime and raspberry sherbet.

Calvin has never seen Bob Gallinipper in person, though he has seen his smiling face on dozens of brochures and Christmas cards. Bob is older than his pictures. Balder. But the smile is exactly the same in person. It's as wide as a slice of cantaloupe, breaking all the physical laws of distance and perspective, as huge to the people at the back tables as it is to the people sitting up front. “I'm just as happy as the last rooster on earth to see y'all,” Bob says. “I look forward to chit-chatting with each and every one of you.” He introduces his wife of thirty-three years, his beautiful Bunny. “Without my Bunny, I'd be just another tractor jockey growin' corn and hemorrhoids.”

Everybody laughs.

“And God only knows where you'd all be!”

Everybody laughs harder and gives Bunny Gallinipper a standing ovation. Bob kisses her with his cantaloupe smile and then introduces former California Governor Ronald Reagan who says America has to stand tall again and cut taxes and get the government off the people's backs. At the end of his speech, the big chicken appears on the stage and hands him a bobbing bouquet of red, white and blue balloons. Reagan is enthralled by the balloons. When he releases them, and they wiggle like giant sperm toward the fertile chandeliers, the crowd applauds.

Bob Gallinipper steps to the microphone and says, “I think Mr. Reagan is going to be the next president of the United States, don't you?”

When the speeches are finished and the sherbet balls eaten, the tables are cleared and Grand Old Opry regular Louise Peavey bounds on the stage, singing her 1976 hit, “Send Me a Man With Dirty Fingers.”

“
I don't want no man who pushes papers
,

Who disco dances and burns the flag
.

I want a man who does his duty
,

Works hard all day, loves hard all night
.

So send me a man with dirty fingers
,

A clean-cut man with a dirty mind
,

Send me a man with dirty fingers

A real American man for this-here real American girl
.”

In the morning there's a big breakfast. While everyone eats their omelets, Wayne Demijohn, Gallinipper's vice president of manure management, speaks about the latest developments in his field. “I know some days it must seem like you're in the manure business, and not the egg business,” he begins, “and I'm sure the day will come when the folks in the genetic research department will develop non-defecating hens …”

There is a ripple of laughter as the sleepy omelet-eaters try to figure out if he's joking or not.

“… but until that glorious day comes …”

There's a near unanimous agreement that he is indeed joking and the laughter builds.

“… it's up to guano gurus like
moi
to help you get rid of that awful stuff.”

Wayne Demijohn gets serious now. Processes are being developed, he announces, to turn chicken manure into feed for beef cattle. “It's the most exciting development in the poultry industry since the invention of chicken wire,” he says. “We predict that within ten short years twenty percent or more of the nation's livestock feed will be comprised of chicken manure.”

Omelets eaten, the producers and their families head for the buses. There are five buses, big fancy excursion buses with tinted windows and air conditioning that works and comfortable jet-plane seats that recline with a push of a button. The person in the chicken suit who passed out balloons the night before is standing by the bus door, passing out coloring books and crayons to all the children.

Rhea isn't wearing her somber burgundy dress today. She's wearing a pair of green bib overalls with a bright blue tee shirt underneath. She's got pink tennis shoes on her feet. A fun outfit for a fun day. “We going to go see the chickies hatching now?” Rhea asks her father.

“We sure are,” he says.

Bob Gallinipper gets on the same bus with Calvin and Rhea. Calvin prepares to shake hands with him, and thank him for the wild strawberry plant, which, yes, took root and produced a couple of sweet little berries this spring. But Bob doesn't come down the aisle. He just waves at everybody with a single swoop of his arm, then sits in the front seat and reads the
Wall Street Journal
. Calvin thinks about going up and introducing himself. But no one else is doing that. So he rests his forehead against the tinted window and watches the endless corn and soybean fields blur by.

It takes the buses about an hour to reach Gallinipper's hatchery operation outside the university town of Gombeen. It's a big place. The driveway alone is a quarter-mile long, paralleled on both sides by white rail fence. There are about a dozen long buildings, all painted egg-yolk yellow. The buses hiss to a stop and everyone piles out. It's ten o'clock already and the sun is high and bright. Adults squint. The children make awnings out of their coloring books. Everyone is given an opportunity to stretch their legs and use the restrooms. Then the tour begins.

The tour guide for Calvin's group is assistant hatchery manager Ben Hemphill. He's wearing spotless white coveralls and an egg-yolk yellow baseball cap. From the structure of his sentences it's clear he's an educated man. “Gallinipper Foods' Gombeen hatchery operation is the fifth largest in the United States,” he begins. “Also one of the most economical. State of the art, start to finish.”

Ben Hemphill first takes them into the receiving department where fertilized eggs from the company's eight breeding farms are collected. “On any given day we've got a quarter-million eggs under incubation,” he says. He shows them how the incoming eggs are washed and then fumigated with formaldehyde gas to kill any micro-organisms on the shells that could infect the chicks and eventually the humans who eat the eggs those chicks will later produce. “In the hatchery business,” Ben Hemphill jokes, “salmonella is a bigger threat than the Ayatollah.”

It's a terrible joke. Calvin's mind fills with images of the hostages in Teheran being pushed blindfolded through the chanting, fist-jabbing crowds. But he laughs along with everyone else.

“Follow me,” Ben Hemphill says, his arm swooping like John Wayne sending the 7th Cavalry into battle.

In the next room he explains how the eggs are
candled
—shot with beams of light to make sure there's a fertilized embryo inside—then graded to make sure they're the right size and shape to produce a healthy chick. He shows them how the suitable eggs are placed in
setting trays
and put in huge, walk-in incubators, where for the next 19 days they will receive just the right amount of heat and humidity, just as if they were under their mothers. “Just think of these machines as great big loving momma hens,” Ben Hemphill says.

In the next room he shows them how the eggs are now placed in
hatching trays
for the final three days of incubation. He opens a deep metal drawer full of hatching chicks. The children are invited to come closer, for a better look. The tiny black laser-beam eyes of the yellow-white chicks scar Rhea's soul. She runs back to her father and hides her face in his belly. “They look just like those packages of marshmallow chicks the Easter Bunny brings, don't they?” Ben Hemphill says to the children.

As they clop down the hallway Ben Hemphill laments that while someday it might be possible through chromosomal manipulation to produce only female chicks, that day has not yet arrived, and that therefore approximately half of all the chicks hatched are males. “Try as he might, a rooster can't lay an egg,” he jokes. And that, he says, means the male chicks have to be
culled
.

In the next room that's exactly what's happening. Trays of noisy chicks are lined up on long tables. Workers in white coveralls are checking their genitals. “There are various methods of differentiating male chicks from females,” Ben Hemphill says. “Here at Gallinippers we use the
Japanese Method
—that is, we visually identify the rudimentary male sex organs. As you can see, most of our sexors are of Japanese descent, so hence, the Japanese Method. For whatever reason, a number of Japanese-American families have developed a high-degree of skill at chicken sexing. We treasure their expertise and patriotism.”

Everyone watches as the sexors peer into the rectums of the chicks.

Rhea notices something else. The Japanese people are putting some of the chicks in blue plastic boxes and tossing others into metal drums. “How come they're throwing those chickies away?” she asks Ben Hemphill.

He answers calmly. “The male chicks are recycled along with other hatchery by-products, into food for doggies and kitty cats.”

The tour moves on to the
de-beaking
room. “As you know only too well, chickens like to peck on each other,” Ben Hemphill says. “So to prevent future cannibalism in the layer houses, chicks are de-beaked.”

“What's de-beaked mean?” Rhea asks her father as they shuffle toward another set of tables stacked high with trays of chicks. Calvin makes a pair of scissors with his fingers and pretends to snip the end of her nose. “They trim the point of the chicks' beaks so they can't peck each other to death.”

“Captain Bates and the Orpingtons don't peck each other to death, and they got their beaks,” she points out.

Calvin pats her on the head. “That's because they've got a big yard, and lots of other things to peck at. But in the little cages in the layer houses, the hens turn on each other. So, it's to everybody's advantage that they're de-beaked.”

Ben Hemphill stands next to a woman in white coveralls and an egg-yolk yellow baseball cap. She has a small gray metal machine in front of her. A thick black electrical cord coils out the back. “Experienced operators like Mindy here can de-beak a chick every three seconds,” Ben says. He gives her a squeeze on the neck and asks, “How long you been with us, Mindy?”

“Eight years,” she says.

The woman named Mindy can indeed de-beak one chick every three seconds. With her left hand she snatches a chick out of the tray, and bringing her hands together in front of the gray machine, guides the chick's nub of a beak toward a pair of blades
Bzzzzzzp
. The chick sprays the palm of Mindy's hand with watery manure. Mindy's right hand drops the de-beaked chick into a tray of other de-beaked chicks as her left hand snatches another.

“The chicks feel no more pain than you do when you clip your toenails,” Ben Hemphill says. “The process scares the little buggers, that's for sure. But it doesn't hurt them.”

“If it doesn't hurt, why don't you put
your
nose in there?” Rhea says. Her voice is cold, loud, and startling, as if her little-girl body has been possessed by a demon.

Ben Hemphill laughs and motions for everyone to follow. “Down at this end of the room are the
dubbing
stations—where the chicks' combs are trimmed off.

Rhea holds her hands over her face and watches through the slits in her fingers as women in white coveralls and egg-yolk yellow baseball caps run a pair of curved scissors over the chicks' tiny heads.

Rhea knows all about chicken combs, those zig-zag ridges of red skin on the top of their heads. Captain Bates has a magnificent comb; in the front it flops comically over his right eye and in the back it stands as stiff as a handful of frozen fingers. The Buff Orpington hens have impressive combs, too; from the top of their breaks the fleshy red spears rise like the scallops on the back of a fairy tale dragon. Miss Lucky Pants has no comb to speak of and now Rhea knows why.

“Dubbing increases egg production by one to two percent,” Ben Hemphill says. “Floppy combs get in the hens' way when they eat and drink. And they're susceptible to injury from getting them caught in the cage wires. Dubbing also puts the hens on an equal social basis. Confuses the ol' pecking order. Our research shows that chickens recognize each other by their distinctive combs. So if they all look the same, they can't tell who's stronger or weaker, so there's less fighting. Fewer injuries, more eggs.”

“A dubbed flock is a happy flock,” a wise man in the crowd says.

“Amen,” Ben Hemphill says. He starts out the door, then swivels, and gives his arm that John Wayne swoop. “Lunch time, everybody! Hope you like fried chicken!”

Lunch is held in a circus tent, in a grove of maples upwind from the hatchery buildings. Bouquets of yellow balloons bob from the tent poles. The picnic tables inside are covered with red-striped tubs of chicken. A German oompa band wearing green felt hats and lederhosen plays polkas. The guy in the chicken suit dances with Bunny Gallinipper. Rhea Cassowary not only refuses to eat, but climbs up on the tables and runs the full length of the tent, kicking the chicken tubs left and right.