Fresh Eggs

by Rob Levandoski

  She puts on the apron her mother used to wear. It’s many sizes too big, but Gammy Betz has pinned up the bottom, so it doesn’t drag on the ground and make her fall flat on her cute little face. She goes outside to feed Captain Bates and the Buff Orpingtons. And gather their eggs.

  As the day drags on Captain Bates and his hens will wander far and wide in their search for bugs and worms. But right now they’re gathered by the chicken coop door, waiting for that heaping scoop of cracked corn. Rhea showers them with it, just like her mother used to. “Peck-peck-peck,” she says to them, just like her mother used to do. “Peck-peck-peck.”

  There aren’t as many eggs in the nests in the morning as you find in the afternoon, but there are always a few, and you have to collect them, her father says, so no hen gets a notion to set. This morning there are five brown eggs waiting in the nests. Rhea gently puts them in the pouch of her apron. Then she hears a frail cluck-cluck coming from one of the top nests and she stands on her tip-toes to look inside. “What you doing in there Miss Lucky Pants?” she says.

  The white Leghorn pecks sassily at her hand.

  “That’s not nice,” says Rhea. She lovingly scratches the feathers on the hen’s breast. The hen softens her mood and purrs something like a kitten. “You got any eggs under there?”

  Miss Lucky Pants stands proudly. She has three eggs under her.

  It starts to itch between Rhea’s nippie nips. She knows she should collect those three white eggs, take them in the house so her father can scramble them for his breakfast. She knows she should obey her father. But Rhea also knows she’d feel terrible stealing those eggs out from under Miss Lucky Pants. She saved that poor Leghorn hen from the manure pit. Gave her a name. How can she now steal her babies away? How can she let her father scramble them?

  She pushes on Miss Lucky Pants until she’s back on her eggs. The hen kitten-purrs her gratitude.

  Rhea takes the other eggs inside. She washes off the manure and puts them in one of the cartons in the refrigerator. She turns on the television and clicks to the Nickelodeon channel and begins the long wait for her birthday.

  At noon her father comes in for lunch. “You watch too much television,” he yells.

  Rhea hears him, but goes on watching. Lassie is telling Timmy about the abandoned puppies she’s found. She wonders why Biscuit isn’t that concerned for the plight of others. Biscuit just eats and sleeps and leaves big piles of poop on the lawn.

  “Come make yourself a sandwich,” her father yells from the kitchen.

  “Yuk,” she yells back. They’ve had nothing but sandwiches for lunch since her mother died. Every week they go to the Stop’ N Go in Tuttwyler and get lunch meat, bread, and cheese. And it’s always the same kind of lunchmeat—pound of Dutchloaf, pound of bologna—and the same kind of cheese—half pound of Swiss—and the same kind of bread—jumbo loaf of wheat. And on Saturday when they have soup with their sandwiches, it’s always tomato soup, made Cassowary style, half a can of water, half a can of milk, tablespoon of butter, and a quick shake of pepper. Her father’s suppers are better, though just as predictable: hamburgers on Mondays and Saturdays, fried bologna and onions on Tuesdays and Thursdays, spaghetti on Wednesdays, on Sunday rubber pork chops, fried potatoes, and canned peas. Fridays they drive to the Pizza Teepee in Tuttwyler for a pepperoni and mushroom.

  Rhea’s mother made lunchmeat sandwiches for lunch, too, but not every day. Sometimes she’d make grilled cheese sandwiches. Sometimes tuna on toast sandwiches. Sometimes peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Sometimes she’d heat up a can of Franco-American spaghetti. There’d always be some kind of fruit, too, a banana or sliced pears or applesauce. On soup days it could be chicken noodle or beef vegetable just as well as tomato. Supper could be meatloaf or fish sticks and Tater Tots or made-from-scratch macaroni and cheese. Carrots or lima beans or asparagus or creamed corn might show up on the table. Some of her mothers choices for supper were uneatable, to be sure. But you never knew what it would be on any given night, except for Fridays, when the three of them would drive to the Pizza Teepee in Tuttwyler.

  After Lassie is praised for saving the puppies, Rhea goes to the kitchen for that sandwich.

  “What’s with Miss Lucky Pants?” her father asks as they sit at the wobbly table. “You haven’t brought in any white eggs for a couple days now.”

  Rhea plays dumb, putting her full concentration on the face she’s drawing on her bolonga with the squeeze-jar of mustard. “Maybe she’s spent.”

  “Maybe you’re not checking all the nests.”

  She gives the bologna slice a frown. “Maybe some of the nests are too high for me.”

  “Then stand on a box.”

  “I don’t have a box.”

  “I’ll get you one.”

  That night after the spaghetti, Rhea’s Toledo grandmother and grandfather arrive. They bring a big cake with them and put it on the dining room table. They put a present on the buffet.

  Gammy Betz arrives, too, along with her husband Ben and another present for the buffet. They help her other grandparents hang the balloons and crepe paper.

  For some reason, one of their regular brown egg customers shows up for the party. It’s Donna Digamy, the one who works at Marilyn Dickcissel’s dog grooming business. She sniffles all through the singing of “Happy Birthday.”

  When it is time to make a secret wish and blow out the candles, Rhea wishes for the same thing she prays for every night—for those little feathers to stop growing between her nippie nips. She knows that people are not supposed to grow feathers there, or anywhere else on their bodies. She knows sooner or later those feathers are going to give her big problems.

  The birthday wish doesn’t work any better than the prayers. Rhea wakes up itching and plucks another feather from her chest and hides it in the Nestlés Quik can.

  Again this morning the house is empty. Again this morning she eats breakfast alone. She finds her tennis shoes, puts on the pinned-up apron, and goes out to feed Captain Bates and the Buff Orpingtons. And gather the eggs.

  She finds that her father has kept his word. He’s placed a wooden box alongside the nests so she can check the top ones for eggs.

  Miss Lucky Pants has another egg under her, and Rhea, though a year older than she was yesterday at this time, faces the same old predicament: Does she listen to her father, or does she listen to her heart? Does she snatch the white eggs out from under Miss Lucky Pants, or does she let her set?

  “You’re a pain in the butt, Miss Lucky Pants,” she growls as she scratches the hen’s soft breast.

  Miss Lucky Pants tips her head and stares at her with a round, unblinking eye. Rhea leaves her eggs alone.

  Only after collecting four brown eggs from the Buff Orpingtons hens does Rhea get a brainstorm. The first thing she must do is make sure her father is busy with something. She finds him in the tractor shed with Jimmy Faldstool, working on the tow motor. Their hands and forearms are covered with grease. Sweat is dripping off their chins. “Are you real busy right now?” she asks.

  “Go play,” her father says.

  “Okay,” she says. She runs to the cement block building behind the layer houses. Before going inside she turns and makes sure neither her father nor Mr. Faldstool are watching. This building is the egg house, where the collected eggs are graded and candled and put in heavy cardboard cases for shipping to Gallinipper’s. She opens one of the cases and takes out one white egg. She puts it in her apron. Then she takes another egg from another box and another from another.

  She goes back to the tractor shed. “I collected Miss Lucky Pants’s white eggs today,” she tells her father. “Thanks for the box.”

  “Go play,” her father says.

  Rhea’s deceit lasts only three weeks.

  On the same day she and her father are supposed to go to the Wyssock County Fair she discovers that Miss Lucky Pants’s eggs have hatched. One chick has already fallen out of the high nest and two of the Orpington hens are fi
ghting over its body. Rhea chases the hens away and puts the mangled chick in the pouch of her apron. She steps on the box and looks in the nest. Miss Lucky Pants proudly rises and spreads her wings. Peeping among the broken egg shells are six healthy chicks.

  Rhea breaks the news to her father when they are sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic outside the fairgrounds. This is the day country singer Louise Peavey performs in the grandstand, right before the demolition derby. So there are lots of cars funneling into the fairgrounds today. For some reason, her father has brought Donna Digamy with them.

  “Guess what, Daddy,” Rhea says from the back seat.

  She has to say it three times before he answers, “What?”

  “Miss Lucky Pants has babies.”

  Donna Digamy rests her chin on the back of her seat and sniffs a trickle of mucus back up her nostril. “Isn’t that neat! How many?”

  “Seven,” Rhea says, “but one fell out of the nest and died already.”

  “So you’ve got six?” Donna Digamy asks.

  “That’s right,” says Rhea, “seven minus one is six.”

  Their day at the fair goes well enough. They eat French fries drenched with vinegar. They eat deep-fried pieces of dough called elephant ears. They walk through all the animal barns. In the cattle barn the cows are standing with their heads facing the wall and their ugly butt-holes facing the people walking along the center aisle. In the pig barn all the pigs are asleep. In the sheep barn all the sheep are asleep. In the goat barn a ram with curly horns bites a button off Rhea’s flannel shirt. In the rabbit house the rabbits are asleep.

  In the poultry barn the chickens are crowded into cages, just like the Leghorns in the layer houses. The cages are plastered with ribbons, red ones and white ones and blue ones. “What’s all those ribbons for?” Rhea asks.

  “For first, second and third place,” her father explains.

  “For running a race?”

  “For looking healthy.”

  Rhea stands on her toes and looks in the cages. Yes, these chickens do look healthy. They have their beaks and their combs. They have all their feathers. They’re clean. They’re calm. And some are very fancy. “What kind of chickens are these with the feathers on their feet?” Rhea asks her father. There’s a big blue ribbon stuck to the cage.

  “Chochins.”

  “How come we don’t have any of those?” Rhea asks.

  “They’re just for show. A lot of food and poop for nothing.”

  In one cage Rhea sees an enormous black rooster with a white face and huge droopy waddles. “That one looks like Captain Bates.”

  “That’s a Black Spanish,” her father says. As they walk down the aisle, he tells Donna Digamy the story about Maximo Gomez, how Chuck Cowrie bought the rooster from a brothel owner in Cuba, during the Spanish-American War. No matter how fancy the chickens are, they all make Donna Digamy sneeze. So they leave the chicken barn and go to the midway and ride the belly churning tilt-the-whirl and pay fifty cents each to see the world’s smallest horse.

  “You should get one of these for Rhea,” Donna Digamy says to Calvin, who’s holding Rhea up so she can scratch the tiny horse’s big head.

  Rhea sees the anxiety on her father’s face and answers for him. “A lot of food and poop for nothing,” she says.

  That night Calvin goes with Rhea to the chicken coop. While she feeds the Buff Orpingtons, he places Miss Lucky Pants and her six chicks in a cardboard box. “This never should have happened,” he says.

  “But it did,” Rhea says, shrugging the way her mother used to shrug.

  “And now we’ve got all these worthless chicks.”

  “You’re not going to make them live in that box, are you?”

  “We’re going to make a pen for them in the old cow barn—until they’re big enough to join the others.”

  Worry wrinkles Rhea’s face.

  “Not with the Leghorns,” he says. “In here with your grandmother’s Buffs. We can’t send Gallinippers any of the eggs from these little half-breed buggers.”

  “We can’t have that,” says Rhea.

  “No we can’t. And we can’t have any more of your sneaking and lying either.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Are you, Rhea? If you can’t live up to your end of the bargain, Captain Bates is Sunday dinner.”

  Her father carries the box to the cow barn. The cows have been gone for years but the barn still smells like cows. Rhea sits on an old bale of straw and watches as her father untangles a roll of rusted chicken wire—fencing with holes so small even tiny chicks can’t crawl out—and makes a pen in the corner. He sets the box with Miss Lucky Pants and the chicks inside the pen. He reaches into his pants pocket and takes out his jackknife and cuts a rounded door in one end of the box.

  “Is that their little house?” Rhea asks.

  “Uh huh. That’s their little house.” Calvin scoops Rhea off the bale and makes a swing out of his arms. “Now you’ve got to understand, some of your chicks are probably going to die. Some always do. But if you keep them fed and watered, most will grow up fine. And then we’ll have a few more worthless chickens. Okay, pumpkin seed?”

  Rhea swings back and forth in her father’s arms. Her chest is itching, but she doesn’t dare reach down her shirt and pluck the little feather that’s surely growing there. “Okay, pumpkin seed,” she says.

  And so Rhea begins taking care of Miss Lucky Pants and her six chicks.

  Unlike the chicks stuffed in the trays at the hatchery they visited in Gombeen, these chicks have room to run around. And they do. They run and hop and peck at everything. Miss Lucky Pants teaches them how to drink water from the shallow clay bowl and how to peck at the mash in the metal tray. She also teaches them how to preen—clean and smooth their tiny feathers with their tiny beaks.

  Although she was born in a metal hatching drawer, Miss Lucky Pants is a wise and attentive mother. When her chicks peep that they’re getting cold, she spreads her wings and lets them scramble under her.

  One of the chicks dies—Rhea’s father said that might happen—but the other five keep eating and growing. Rhea spends as much time as she can in the old cowless cow barn, squatting outside the chicken-wire pen, watching and worrying. The chicks lose their silky yellow feathers and start growing stiff white adult feathers. They start to grow their own wings and pretty soon they are too big to fit under Miss Lucky Pants.

  Rhea knows she shouldn’t name the chicks. Or make pets out of them. Her father has laid the law down about that. But they are so cute.

  So the three female chicks she names Nancy, Mary Mary Bo Berry, and Half Pint—Nancy after President Reagan’s skinny wife; Mary Mary Bo Berry after a funny song her mother used to sing to her; Half Pint after the nickname Pa Ingles calls Laura on Little House on the Prairie. Despite the clever names she gives them, the female chicks prove to be three boring bumps-on-a-log.

  They look alike and act alike. Try as Rhea might to coax them out their sameness, to get them to play and squabble and show a little personality, they just eat and poop and grow white feathers. “Egg machines,” Rhea complains, “that’s all you’re ever going to be. Three dumb Gallinipper egg machines.”

  The two male chicks have too much personality. The nasty, strutty one with a full spray of black tail feathers she names Black-butt. The scrawny, nervous one with the lopsided wattles and the single black feather curling from its rump like a question mark, she names Mr. Shakyshiver. Blackbutt does everything he possibly can to make Mr. Shakyshiver sorry he was born.

  On Thanksgiving Day, Rhea’s father takes Miss Lucky Pants and her now-grown family out of the cow barn and puts them in the coop with Captain Bates and the Buff Orpingtons. Immediately the Captain gives Blackbutt a taste of his own medicine, pecking him hard on the toes and chasing him into the corner. Mr. Shakyshiver immediately retreats to another corner on his own. That out of the way, the Captain hops on the backs of the three young white hens, one right after the other.

/>   Ten

  Three days before Christmas, Calvin Cassowary decides to propose marriage to Donna Digamy. They’ve been dating for seven months now. Sleeping together for five.

  He is surprised by his decision.

  Jeanie has been dead for only 13 months. They’d been, as his roommate at Kent State, Dave D’Hoy, once said, “Two peas in a pod, man.” Calvin was a daydreamy art major then, Jeanie a daydreamy English major. He could sit on Blanket Hill and make charcoal sketches all afternoon. She could read all night. They shared the same bewildered view of the world as it was—the wars and the racism and the pollution and the sexism and the preoccupation with making money—and the same optimistic view of what the world could be if people just let other people do their own thing.

  Calvin met Jeanie at Boinky’s Pizza, just off the campus. She was waitressing and he was eating. It was the fall after the Ohio National Guard went berserk and killed four students during a protest over Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia. So Peace and Love and Tragedy was still in the air and when Jeanie brought Calvin his pepperoni pizza, the pepperonis were lined up in the shape of a peace symbol. She did this, she later told him, because she liked his blue-gray eyes and his fu-manchu mustache.

  Calvin liked Jeanie’s brown eyes and the dimples on her chin, not to mention the braless breasts inside her tee shirt and the smiling cheeks inside her bellbottoms. He came to Boinky’s for pizza every night for a week, and each time was served a peace symbol pizza from the waitress with the brown eyes and dimpled chin. Calvin was the shy artist type, but one night summoned the balls to say, “Instead of a peace symbol, why don’t you spell out you name?”

  When she brought out the pizza it said JEANIE.

  And now, just thirteen months after Jeanie’s death, Calvin has decided to propose to Donna Digamy. He doesn’t love her the way he still loves Jeanie. Doesn’t love her soul. But he sure loves her body and her resolve to work hard and get somewhere. He loves the way she marvels at his plans to be the largest egg producer in the state of Ohio. He loves her selective Catholicism, her ability to have guiltless sex outside marriage while still trusting God to look out for her.