Fresh Eggs

by Rob Levandoski

  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’ pecki
ng 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.

  Norman Marek won’t let Calvin and Rhea take the bus back to the Marriott with the others. He drives them in a bright yellow company car. He’s none too happy. “Bob Gallinipper saw it all, Cal.”

  “Rhea was just tired,” Calvin assures him.

  “Then she should have fallen asleep not jumped on the tables and kicked the tubs of fried chicken all over kingdom come.”

  Rhea is in the back seat, rolled into a ball, hands over her face, wishing she had the magic blanky that makes her invisible. The images of chicks having their beaks and combs sliced off, of boy chicks being tossed into barrels and ground into cans of stinky slop for cats and dogs, are pushing tears out of the corners of her eyes. She’s shaking. And itching something awful, on her chest, right between those little red dots her mother used to call her nippie-nips.

  “Norman, I’m sorry,” Calvin says.

  Norman exhales a long gurgle of stale air. “You and Rhea have gone through so much. I realize that. I’m sure Bob realizes it, too. Jeanie was a princess. You met her in college, didn’t you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I know what my divorce did to me,” Norman says. “So I can imagine how rough it is to lose someone you actually love.”

  Calvin looks back at Rhea, then out the window. The flat fields are blurring by. “We thought we were going to be teachers. Then my dad died.”

  “I lost my dad when I was fifteen,” Norman says. Afraid that either he or Calvin will start crying, he quickly gets back to the subject. “Gallinipper Foods is a big family. In order to compete and grow, everything’s got to be copacetic. Copacetic in the corporate offices. Copacetic at the hatcheries and brooding farms. Copacetic at the layer operations. Copacetic top to bottom. Up and down the line.” Now he reaches down and shakes Calvin’s knee, demonstrating the depth of his friendship and concern. “Rhea’s a sweet girl. But it’s obvious everything’s not copacetic with her. Ben Hemphill told me she was a brat the entire tour. So it isn’t just kicking the chicken tubs, Cal. Maybe Rhea needs help.”

  “If I thought she needed professional help, I’d take her,” Calvin says.

  “Maybe I’m way out of line, Cal, but I don’t think she likes chickens.”

  The spot between Rhea’s nippie-nips is not only itching, it’s burning, as if her heart was lighting matches.

  “Just the opposite,” Calvin tells Norman Marek. “She loves chickens. Thinks they’re all pets. Last summer she rescued one of the spent hens from the manure pits. She calls her Miss Lucky Pants.”

  Norman’s hands are wringing the sweat out of the steering wheel. “Girl thing, I suppose.”

  Rhea reaches under the bib of her overalls and works her fingers down the front of her blue turtleneck. She scratches the spot between her nippie-nips that’s itching and burning. She feels something. At first she’s afraid it’s a spider. But it’s too fuzzy to be a spider. And it’s not crawling away. Or biting her fingers. She claws at it. It seems to be stuck right there in her skin. She pinches it. Yanks it. Cries out.

  Her father twists. “What’d you do?”

  Rhea pulls her hand from her turtleneck and examines the soft and fuzzy thing pinched between her fingers. It’s nothing but a tiny white feather. “I had a feather growing between my nippie-nips,” she says.

  “Behave,” her father says.

  Eight

  The same afternoon they return from Bob Gallinipper’s corporate get-together in Gombeen, Calvin Cassowary sits his daughter down on the picnic table in the backyard. “I know the layer houses frighten you,” he begins. “They’re frightening places—if you let your imagination get in the way.”

  Rhea has her elbows on her knees and her hands under her chin. She is watching Captain Bates trot after Miss Lucky Pants in the overgrown vegetable garden next to the garage. In the past the little flock wouldn’t be allowed to roam free this late in the spring. Once the garden was planted, they’d be confined to their coop and yard to protect the tomatoes, squash, and green beans from their dawn-to-dusk pecking. But with half of her mother in Heaven, and the other half in the Tuttwyler cemetery, her father says there’s no time for a garden. So Captain Bates and his hens have all summer to be the free birds of the jungle the Creator intended. “I don’t like the cages,” she tells her father.

  Calvin drags his forearm across his sweaty face. This difficult talk with his daughter reminds him of the difficult talks he used to have with his own father, about things like sex and a young man’s responsibility to his family, his country and his God. “I know.”

  “The chickens don’t like them either.”

  “We can’t have 300,000 thousand hens running around loose.”

  “Why do we have to have 300,000 hens at all?”

  “Because we’re chicken farmers, Rhea. It’s what we do.”

  “Maybe we should do something else.”

  Calvin scratches the top of her head. Her hair is the same deep red-brown as Jeanie’s now. “When you have a farm, you have to farm.” For some reason his mind travels back to the intellectual drivel of his art student days. “It’s what the Hindus call karma. It’s our destiny. What we are and what we do. Eggs are our karma.”

  “Chicken jail,” Rhea says as Captain Bates hops up on Miss Lucky Pants’ back and flaps his wings. “That’s what we do. We run a chicken jail.”

  Calvin stops playing with his daughter’s hair, to keep himself from yanking it. “People need eggs. We produce eggs. It’s a good thing, Rhea. Something to be proud of.”

  “I’m proud I saved Miss Lucky Pants from the chicken shit.”

  Calvin’s face needs wiping again. “I’m proud you did, too. But we can’t make pets out of all the old hens. We’d lose the farm. So we do what we gotta do, pumpkin seed. You and me.”

  Rhea scratches between her nippie nips. “You and me, pumpkin seed,” she says.

  Calvin looks at the empty end of the picnic table. He wants Jeanie to be sitting there, reading a book, eating an apple, curling her hair around her finger, just being alive. “That’s right. You and me. And you are going to be six years old in a couple of weeks. Old enough for a few outside chores.”

  And so Calvin tells Rhea that Captain Bates and the Buff Orpingtons are going to be her responsibility from now on. She’s going to start feeding them; gathering the eggs, washing off the poop and putting them in cartons in the refrigerator; making sure the chicken coop door is closed and latched at night. “But remember, Rhea,” he says, shaking his finger at her nose, “the Orpingtons are not pets. We take care of them for the eggs and we sell the eggs because we need the money. We don’t play with them or give them names.”

  “Captain Bates has a name,” she says. “Miss Lucky Pants has a name.”

  “It would be better if they didn’t.” Calvin takes Rhea by the chin and turns her face toward his. She has Jeanie’s brown eyes, too, and her always questioning eyebrows. “It’s a deal then?”

  “Okay,” she says, “but if they have chicks I’m not going to cut off their beaks or look up their butts.”

  Calvin tells her that ther
e won’t be any Orpington chicks, that when those hens get old and die off, that’s going to be the end of the brown egg business, that the FRESH EGGS sign is coming down for good.

  On Saturday they drive to the cemetery in Tuttwyler. They walk across the thick grass to Jeanie’s grave. Calvin is still amazed at how well the wild strawberries are doing. He didn’t expect that pot of scraggly vines to survive. But the roots took hold and that one plant has turned into three. They find exactly three ripe berries to eat, one for Rhea, one for him, one for Jeanie.

  Nine

  Flies are already banging into the window when Rhea wakes. The stench of 300,000 Leghorns is oozing in. Rhea Cassowary stretches and yawns. She pulls up her Holly Hobby nightgown and feels between her nippie nips. There’s another feather growing.

  She bites down on her tongue and plucks it. And looks at it. White. Silky. Delicate. Sharp as a pin, too. Rolling onto her stomach, Rhea worms her body over the edge of the bed until she can reach the Nestlé’s Quik can on her toy shelves. The can already has several of the little feathers in it. She drops the new feather inside and pounds down the lid. Later today she’ll be celebrating her sixth birthday. Until then it’ll be just another day. She squeaks into the bathroom, pees, and brushes her teeth. She puts on her dirty jeans and a clean tee shirt and goes downstairs. “Daddy? Biscuit?”

  Neither answer. Neither are there. Nor are the cats. She plans to have a bowl of Rice Krispies for breakfast but sees the box of Hostess donuts on the table and decides to have one of those instead. When the donut is gone, and the powdered sugar brushed on the floor, she pours an inch of orange juice into a glass and fishes in her bottle of Flintstone vitamins for a Barney. She finds one of her tennis shoes in the box by the refrigerator and one under the table in the dining room. Tonight there’ll be a birthday cake on that table and some balloons and crêpe paper dangling from the light fixture. There’ll be presents stacked on the buffet. At least that’s the way birthdays went before God moved her mother’s soul up to heaven.