“Absolutely ludicrous. I’d love to know your source on that one.”
A reporter shouts: “What about the long hours they force her to work?”
“Rhea is a farm girl. Children on farms start helping their parents at an early age. I grew up on a farm myself, helped bale hay when I was nine.”
A reporter shouts: “Being a side show freak is not the same as baling hay.”
Michael Rood III feels the stem of his pipe begin to crack and he wiggles it out of his clenched teeth. “Rhea is not a freak. She is a beautiful, intelligent girl. And she was not in a side show. She was participating in a county fair, as thousands of farm children do every summer. There is nothing more American than a county fair, my friends.”
Norman Marek shows his business card to the deputy, and, getting a thoughtful nod of approval, stoops under the crime tape and jogs up the driveway. He climbs to the porch, ignoring Biscuit’s appeal for a pat on the head, and rattles the screen door with his knuckles. When Donna lets him in, he goes straight to the Mr. Coffee. His eyes are blinking like railroad crossing lights. “Who’s the horse’s ass talking to the press out there?”
Calvin, still at the table, pushes out a chair with his foot. “That’s the second-best lawyer in town you told me to hire.”
Norman sips his way across the kitchen and sits. “You have confidence in him, do you?”
“Not especially. But he has quite a bit of confidence in himself.”
“Good enough. I tried calling you all morning.”
“We unplugged the phone.”
“Wise move.” Norman leans and peeks through the blinds. “At least the trucks got through. Eggs have to keep moving no matter what—rain, shine or media circus. Christ, Cal! What in the hell were you thinking?”
“I had to do something.”
“You got Bob’s attention, that’s for sure.”
“Mr. Gallinipper knows already?”
“It was in this morning’s New York Times.”
“That was fast.”
“Those liberal pukes at the Times have been out to get the chicken people for years. Every time a fish dies downstream from a processing plant—take a free swing at the chicken people.”
“So the story mentioned that I supplied eggs to Gallinipper Foods?”
“First paragraph. Bob is really pissed at you, Cal. El pisso grande.”
“I’m pissed at me, too.”
“In case you didn’t see it, Cal, there’s a Good Citizen clause in your contract. You’re expected to behave like a decent human being. First you get sued by your neighbors, then this.” Norman presses the coffee mug against his hurting head. “You’ve got to trust Bob, Cal. These depressed prices are a temporary thing. Our Egg-ceptional Breakfast campaign has already boosted consumption point-three-five percent. And we’re about ready to release a study showing that cholesterol can prevent impotence in men over fifty-five.”
“Does it prevent foreclosure?”
Norman slumps sympathetically. “Why didn’t you come to me, Cal?”
“Cassowarys solve their own problems.”
“And make their own problems, apparently.”
“So where do we stand? Is Gallinipper going to rip up my contract?”
“Cal! Shame on you! The Gallinipper family is exactly that—a family. Bob loves you like a son.”
“He’s never met me.”
Norman points at him and winks. “But he reads your spreadsheets, Cal.”
Betsy Betz has to park three hundreds yards up the road. She may be 65, but she can still jump a country ditch. She lands as gracefully as a young doe. Wades into the shoulder-high weeds. Were this fifteen years ago, and Betsy Betz still Betsy Cassowary, this field would have been filled with neat rows of green corn, just starting to tassel. Now the field is choking with thistles and teasel, wild carrot and wild rose, even some damn blackberry briars.
Storming between two of the long layer houses, she spots Biscuit. The old dog spots her. They run stiff-legged toward each other. “Bisky! Bisky!” she baby-coos. “Do you remember me?”
Biscuit does remember her. He licks the makeup off her face and runs around her in circles all the way to the house. He accepts her invitation to come inside. He hasn’t been invited inside since Donna arrived.
The slamming screen door doesn’t turn Calvin’s head, but the plink of Biscuit’s toenails on the linoleum does. “Mother?”
Betsy Betz comes at him with her arm extended like a fly swatter. Calls him a stupid bastard and smacks him hard on the forehead.
“Where’s Ben?” Calvin asks her.
“Still in Columbus begging me not to drive when I’m this worked up.” She goes to the cupboard and gets down a cereal bowl. Fills it with water for Biscuit. “Where’s Rhea?”
“Upstairs. Donna, too.”
She starts for the stairs, then turns back and smacks him across the forehead again. “You’ve got a million chickens and you can’t make a living?”
He tells her it’s only 810,000 now. He tries to explain the depressed market and corresponding low wholesale prices. He holds up his thumb and forefinger. “I’m that close to losing the farm.”
“Then lose it! Sell the damn place if you can’t make a go.”
“I can’t sell the farm and you know it.”
“But you can sell your daughter?”
The stairs squeak. A sneeze echoes down. Donna appears, blurry eyed from trying to nap. “You didn’t drive up by yourself, did you?”
Betsy holds out her arms, inviting a hug. “You holding up okay, honey?”
Donna bends over and hugs, her nose immediately stuffing up from the makeup, perfume and polyester pantsuit. “Why don’t you go up and surprise Rhea? She’s reading that book you sent her, I think.”
“What book is that?”
“The one about the birds. She absolutely loves it. She sneaks out at night and reads it to her chickens. I’ll make us some soup.”
And so Betsy Betz goes upstairs and finds her granddaughter curled on her bed, huge stereo earphones over the crown of her feathered head, a book with birds on the cover in front of her face.
“Knock knock,” Betsy sings out.
“Gammy Betz!” Rhea tosses the book and the earphones and crawls across the bed into her grandmother’s arms. There are tears. Assurances that everything is going to be fine.
“Now tell me all about this wonderful book I didn’t send you,” Betsy says.
Betsy Betz is not upstairs five minutes when the screen door bangs again. A woman with tight gray curls hobbles in on a three-legged aluminum cane. It is Kitty Marabout, Jeanie’s mom, Rhea’s Toledo grandmother. “I’m filing for custody,” she announces.
Twenty-eight
Sitareh Aram finds her husband sitting on his yoga rug, in the lotus position, his toes tucked behind his knees. His face is as pink as a baked salmon, and glistening, as if the salmon had just been basted with butter. “Why are you crying, Pirooz?”
“I am not crying.”
“Then you are leaking badly.”
“I am meditating, my dear Sitareh.”
“And crying.”
Dr. Pirooz Aram surrenders. “Yes, dammit, I am crying. You are happy now?”
His wife bends over him, lifts his black felt beret like the lid of a kettle and kisses the hairless circle on the top of his head. “About what?”
“About one of my patients.”
“They usually make you laugh.”
“This one makes me cry.”
“Anything I can do?”
“Other than leave me to my yoga?”
She replaces his beret and goes about collecting the newspapers he has tossed on the floor. It is his way: read a few pages then toss them, as if discarding pistachio shells after the meats are chewed and swallowed. “I know their sanity is your business, Pirooz. But your sadness is mine.”
“You are tippy-toeing a delicate line, Sitareh. Don’t you have some exams to grade? Your studen
ts are anxious to know how ignorant they are.”
Pirooz finishes his yoga. Takes a shower. Eats his granola on the bedroom balcony, wearing nothing but baby powder and his beret. He does not put on a business suit today, but dresses in a pair of white slacks and one of the Hawaiian shirts he bought on vacation, the blue one with the white palm trees. He exchanges his black beret for a red one.
“Not working today, Pirooz?” his wife asks when she sees his outfit.
“You are tippy-toeing again,” he says.
He leaves his house and drives his red Toyota to the interstate. Instead of going north toward the huge medical building where he keeps his office, he goes south, toward Wyssock County.
In the days before Abraham, he thinks as he drives, before religion became so filled with guilt and misery, a girl with Rhea’s gifts would have been made a goddess, worshipped with wonderful feasts, wonderful poems, wonderful songs and dances. He is surprised to find the Cassowary farm after only a few wrong turns.
There are dozens of cars parked along the road. There are vans from television stations. There are police cars, some blinking red, some blinking blue. There are dozens of people, bunched like grapes, staring at the white farmhouse, as if at any moment it will metamorphosize into a huge flying saucer and screw itself into the sky. Just as he gets out of his Toyota, a phalanx of boys on bicycles charge the wide yellow ribbon someone has tied between the telephone poles. “Be careful Pirooz,” he warns himself, “you have just landed in one of Salvador Dali’s paintings.”
For a few minutes he listens to a man with a pipe and a seersucker coat talking to the television cameras. He wonders if the man knows that the name of his coat comes from an old Persian word, shíoshakar, meaning milk and sugar. The Hindus stole the word to describe the light, bumpy fabric they wore to keep from boiling in the liquid heat of India. They passed it on to the British and the British passed it on to the Americans. And now here is this bumpy-coated American in front of the cameras, thinking he knows everything, but knowing nothing. How is it, Pirooz wonders, that these Americans have conquered the world so easily when they know nothing about it? He knows the answer, of course. It is because they are blissfully ignorant. The tactic of all barbarians.
Now Dr. Pirooz Aram meanders through the crowd, wishing he hadn’t driven here this morning, wishing he had worn something a little less flashy. More people are looking at him than at the house. Perhaps they think he is the captain of the flying saucer.
He wants to mind his own business, to see for himself what greed and stupidity have done to the beautiful swan named Rhea. But the words flying between the two men standing next to him wriggle into his ears.
“It’s all a publicity stunt,” one of the men says. “You’ve been had, Sam.”
“I wish it was a stunt,” says the man named Sam. “But the poor girl is covered with feathers all right.”
Suddenly Pirooz finds himself in the conversation. “Why do you call her poor? She is very rich.”
The man named Sam shakes his head impatiently. “I don’t mean poor as in not having any money. I mean poor as in pitiful.”
Pirooz bubbles with anger. “Sir! My English may have an accent, but I know that poor has two meanings. And I know which one you meant. And when I said rich I did not mean money either. She is rich in her beauty, inside and out. No one needs to pity her.”
“You know her then?” asks Sam.
“Sort of.”
“Sort of?”
Pirooz wishes he had kept his mouth shut. “Sort of is all you’re going to get.”
The man named Sam yawns and starts talking to his friend about Ohio State’s chances of beating Michigan. Knowing and caring nothing about the crazy American game of football, Pirooz is about to resume his meandering when the man named Sam asks him, “How does something like this happen? Growing feathers? Exposure to toxic chemicals, maybe?”
“There are many things more toxic than chemicals,” Pirooz says.
“Such as?”
“Such as living on a concentration camp for chickens.”
“She’s allergic to chickens?”
“To the way they are forced to live perhaps.”
“A psychological allergy you mean?”
Pirooz nods and shrugs at the same time. “Perhaps a spiritual one.” He says this knowing that he shouldn’t. Not for Rhea’s sake. Or his own. She was his patient, his friend. A doctor cannot discuss a patient’s problems. And a friend should never betray a friend. No tippy-toeing. But these two barbarians are so incredibly ignorant. He tells them of St. Francis’s wounds, of the stigmata suffered by so many others. “They bleed from their hands as if the Romans had crucified them.”
“Can my Toledo grandmother really make me live with her?” Rhea asks Gammy Betz as they shuffle through the dark. They have a flashlight but they’re not using it. It’s ten o’clock but the road in front of the farm is still crowded with police cars and television crews.
“Of course she can’t.”
“If I had to go live with anybody it would be you.”
“And if I had to have somebody live with me it would be you.”
They reach the chicken coop. A nervous cluck works it way up the perches when the latch rattles. Rhea pulls the door open just an inch. “It’s only me and Gammy,” she says. The chickens relax.
Rhea clicks on her flashlight now and moves the beam from face to face. Sideway eyes beam back like buttons of neon. “Your old Buff Orpingtons are all gone,” Rhea tells her grandmother.
“Nobody lives forever,” Gammy Betz says, “but there’s more than a little Orpington in these new girls.” The beam reaches the big head of a rooster. “And who is that ugly cuss?”
“Mr. Shakyshiver. He took over sperm duty when the coyotes killed Blackbutt.”
Gammy Betz laughs, surprised and delighted by her granddaughter’s maturity. “Sperm duty?”
Rhea laughs back, embarrassed but proud that she is old enough to say adult things to her grandmother. She washes the flashlight across the empty bottom perch to make sure it is free of manure. They sit, side by side. Rhea hands her grandmother the flashlight and takes her book from the big pocket on the bib of her overalls. She’d told her grandmother what it was about when they were in her room, just before her Toledo grandmother stormed in and promised she’d get her out of this hell hole just as soon as she could. So Gammy Betz is up to speed on the story about the cowardly birds following the Hoopoe through the seven valleys. Rhea reads:
“Next comes the Valley of Bewilderment,
A place of pain and gnawing discontent—
Each second you will sigh, and every breath
Will be a sword to make you long for death.”
Gammy Betz and the chickens listen without a single cluck as the poem rhymes on and on, to a story about a princess:
“A great king had a daughter whose fair face
Was like the full moon in its radiant grace,
She seemed a Joseph, and her dimpled chin
The well that lovely youth was hidden in—”
In this poem the king brings a young slave into the court. The slave is so incredibly handsome that when he goes to the market, crowds gather around him just to see his face. It is only a matter of time before the princess sees him:
“One day the princess, by some fateful chance,
Caught sight of this surpassing elegance,
And as she glimpsed his face she felt her heart,
Her intellect, her self-control depart—”
Rhea closes the book and wedges it between her knees. “Gammy, did I ever tell you about Joon?”
Calvin Cassowary opens the screen door just wide enough for Jimmy Faldstool to slide that morning’s Gazette into his hand. Jimmy salutes and heads for the layer houses.
Calvin unfolds the paper. The headline across the top screams:
STIGMATA!
The smaller headline under that asks this:
DID DAUGHTER GROW FEATHERS OU
T OF SYMPATHY FOR DAD’S CHICKENS?
“This is all I need,” he says calmly, before kicking the screen door and screaming, “SON. OF. A. BITCH!”
The story quotes a knowledgeable unnamed source who claims that the horrible treatment of the farm’s chickens may be responsible for Rhea’s condition. The story also quotes a Cleveland dermatologist, a Dr. Kimberly Kolacky, who cautions that while she has never met the Wyssock County girl, or studied her particular case, it is a well-documented medical fact that “psychological distress can have physiological manifestations.”
The story also quotes Brother Edward Nogasto, adjunct professor of comparative religion at Lewis Lutwidge University: “Obviously I can’t say whether this girl’s feathers are a stigmatic reaction, but the cases of Christians bleeding from their palms and feet—usually middle-aged women in England and teen-aged girls in South America—are quite genuine.”
Bob Gallinipper crumples his New York Times into a ball, the entire paper. “Dinky!” he screams to his secretary: “Get Norman Marek on the horn—pronto!”
Scott Snitzen, national president of Animals Are People Too, the AAPT, is in his kitchen making a broccoli, cauliflower and peanut stir fry when Brenda Berdache, his Midwest coordinator, calls. “You see the CBS News?” she asks.
“Nada. Dan Rather gives me the heebie-jeebies.”
And so Brenda tells him what she saw: “Well, they did this story on this girl from Ohio, who—”
Fifteen minutes later an AAPT ACTION ALERT is being faxed all over the United States and Canada.
All night the low rumble-hum of the window fan helped Rhea sleep. Now it wakes her up. She squeaks across the floor and turns it off. Closes her eyes and listens to the quiet.
It is only seven but already the AAPT is demonstrating. They showed up three mornings ago. Twenty or thirty of them. Their signs say SAINT RHEA. When the television crews turn on their cameras they begin their chant:
Free Rhea! Free the hens! Free Rhea! Free the hens!
She puts on her sweatshirt and overalls and squeaks down to the kitchen. The man in the uniform leaning against the refrigerator smiles grimly at her. She smiles grimly back. She goes to the cupboard where the cereal boxes are kept. The man in the black and blue uniform is not just a deputy, but Sheriff Skip Affenpinscher himself. Rhea knows that because yesterday when he came to the door Donna said, “Come in, deputy.”
Fresh Eggs Page 18
