Bob Gallinipper seats Calvin and Donna on a puffy white sofa. He lowers himself into a puffy yellow chair. Fifty feet below them is a pond with a fountain of bronze baby chicks spitting water from their open beaks.
For an hour Bob talks nonstop about his hardscrabble boyhood, his long and wonderful marriage to Bunny, his five wonderful children. He talks about how it saddened him to the roots when Rhea went home to live with the Lord. “How many years has it been since she passed?” he asks Calvin.
“Almost six,” Calvin answers.
At precisely ten the golden doors swing open and the emaciated woman enters with a tray of sugar cookies and a decanter of hot chocolate. Bob pours the hot chocolate himself, making sure everyone got a few bobbing marshmallows. While Calvin and Donna sip and munch, and wonder what’s coming next, he says this:
“Folks, the day Rhea joined the Gallinipper Family as company mascot was one of the happiest of my life. She was a gift from God. The most beautiful little creature ever born, inside and out. I’ve never lost a child, but I’ve lost people I loved. I know the sting never goes away. Anyhoo, your Rhea was a gift from God and all of a sudden here she was, helping Bob Gallinipper feed the world. And feeding the world is a wonderful thing, Calvin. And God is a wonderful God. Gave us big wonderful hearts. Gave us big wonderful brains to discover new and better ways of feeding the world. Jesus could just point at those few measly loaves and fishes with his holy fingers, and presto! There’s enough there to feed the multitudes. We mortals got a tougher row to hoe. No divine abracadabra for us. But God gave us something just as magical. He gave us biotechnology.
“Take those 7-52 Super Hens of yours. Years of work went into those babies. All the other egg men said to me, ‘Bob, you’ll never design a hen that can lay the same number of eggs on half the feed. But Bob Gallinipper did it. Then they said, ‘Bob, you’ll never design a hen with a uterus strong enough to lay two eggs every three days.’ But Bob Gallinipper did it. And when they heard about my idea to design a hen that could lay seven eggs a week, fifty-two weeks a year, they laughed their behinds off. Look who’s laughing now. Bob Gallinipper and the Cassowarys.
“And look what we’ve done with the eggs themselves! Developed eggs low in cholesterol—not that cholesterol’s bad for you—but people said they wanted them, and now they got them. Developed eggs that help with brain cell growth and blood clotting and digestion. Not a peep about this to anyone, but the wizkids in EggGenics are less than a year away from an estrogen-enriched egg for women going through the change. In five years we’ll have a birth control egg.
“God shares his secrets. First the Bible, now genetics. So tell me—how much do you folks know about cloning?”
On his way to the cemetery, Calvin stops at the Pile Inn. It’s nearly midnight and the place is empty except for a pair of sheriff’s deputies at the far end of the counter. They recognize him and wave with their pie forks. He waves back with his coffee cup. He sips his way through three refills, then drives out South Mill. It’s the fourth week of October and it’s been raining on and off all day and every thermometer in the county has been clogged at forty for a week now.
Calvin doesn’t pull directly into the cemetery. Too dangerous. Instead he drives another block and crunches into the gravel parking lot of St. Peregrine’s Catholic Church, pulling right up to the rectory, parking right alongside the priests’ dark blue Chevrolets. He closes the car door gently and sticks the garden trowel in his back pocket.
It’s a big cemetery, but Calvin knows where he’s going. He heads straight for the granite Union soldier and then weaves through the gravestones to the oak-covered knoll above the lily pond where Jeanie and Rhea Cassowary are buried. It’s spooky being here at night.
Rhea’s stone is right next to Jeanie’s. It isn’t a real big stone, just big enough for her name and a single soaring dove. How big does a stone have to be for an urn of feathers, after all? Like Jeanie’s stone, and the other Cassowary stones, it is nestled in a bed of wild strawberry plants. Little white picket fences prevent the berry plants from being mowed over by the cemetery caretakers.
Calvin kneels at his daughter’s grave. Rhea would have been twenty by now. Had she lived. And Jeanie? Had she lived. Forty-three? No, this is October already. She would be forty-four.
“Why did you drink all that coffee?” he whispers at himself. It’s tough enough doing what he has to do without having to hold his urine. A man gets in his mid-forties and that prostate starts to swell and he just doesn’t have the same control he once had. In college, he could drink 3.2 beer until two in the morning and wouldn’t have to piss until he got back to his apartment. Now liquids just whistle through his bladder like the wind through these bare-naked oaks.
Calvin starts to dig. He skims off the grass and sod in wide strips and stacks them neatly to one side. When he’s finished, he’ll stomp the strips back into place.
Beneath the grass and sod he finds hard, gritty clay. It makes him cry. Rhea’s death is still so hard to understand and there are still so many unsettled questions. Who ever heard of coyotes eating a human being? It just doesn’t happen.
Yet it happened.
No one wanted to believe it at first. Maybe Rhea had escaped. But this is Wyssock County, not the goddamned Yukon. Rhea never showed up at anybody’s house. Searchers never found her cowering high in a tree. Never found her at all. Not dead. Not alive. Just some feathers and a little blood and strewn clothing.
Sheriff Skip Affenpinscher was skeptical from the start, figuring Rhea was kidnapped by someone trying to get their hands on the Cassowary egg fortune. That blood and those feathers and those chewed up overalls were just a ruse until the kidnappers got far away. But kidnappers never called or sent a ransom note, and when he learned there was no egg fortune, only a huge egg debt, the sheriff changed theories and tried to get Calvin and Donna to confess to staging Rhea’s disappearance themselves, as part of some sick money-making scheme.
“How could you think we’d do that?” Calvin asked, throwing his coffee cup against the kitchen wall.
“Number one, you’re broke,” answered the sheriff. “Number two, you’ve already demonstrated how desperate for money you are—carting her from county fair to county fair like she was a prize bull.”
Sheriff Skip Affenpinscher wasn’t the only one with theories. One evening after work, Joon Faldstool shuffled nervously across the porch and through the screen door and suggested that maybe Rhea had faked her own death and run away. “I don’t think she was very happy about making those commercials,” he said.
But Calvin assured him that Rhea was very happy making those commercials. “I know you were friends, Joon. But there’s blood and feathers and Rhea’s not coming back.”
The trowel clunks the top of the urn. Calvin digs around it carefully, as if the urn was Rhea herself, a gentle treasure waiting to be resurrected.
The digging not only fills him with memories of Rhea—newborn baby Rhea, toddler Rhea, gangly Rhea, graceful Rhea, Rhea with feathers, Rhea without feathers, angry obstinate Rhea, sad brooding Rhea, sweet laughing Rhea—but also Biscuit. The old sheltie died just five weeks after Rhea’s memorial service. Calvin found him in his house by the garage, faded dog nose poking out the rounded door. He figured he was just sleeping. But when he called his name—“Bisky! Bisky!”—Biscuit’s ears didn’t fly up, his brown eyes didn’t explode with love. He buried Biscuit by the ceramic birdbath, inside the circle of marigolds. Donna watched from the kitchen window, allergic as she was to dog hair and marigolds. But Calvin could see that she, too, was crying.
Calvin lifts the urn from the hole. He takes the empty Ziploc bag from his pocket and opens it. He opens the urn and, one by one, transfers Rhea’s feathers.
Calvin Cassowary is not a religious man. He hates church. Hates the hard benches. Hates having to sing all five verses of those impossible hymns. Hates the icky-picky Rube Goldberg rules for achieving salvation. But he believes in God. Believes that the so
uls of sweet children like his Rhea are rewarded with eternal happiness.
So Rhea is with God, and with Jeanie, and while that’s all to the good, all Calvin has are his memories and this plastic bag of feathers. He cries all the way back to his car and all the way back to the farm. When he pulls in shortly before two, the gravel under his tires explodes like cherry bombs. Digging up Rhea’s feathers after all these years is a bad and dangerous thing. But it still doesn’t mean he’s going along with the cloning thing.
The egg business started turning around about a year after Rhea’s death. Weekly per capita consumption of eggs went up one entire egg. Retail prices rebounded and the bean counters at Gallinipper’s found another penny per dozen to pay producers. And those 7-52 Super Hens!
The farm’s finances got so much better, so fast, that Calvin, despite his resistance to divine interference, could not help feel that maybe Rhea’s death was a family sacrifice of sorts. Dying for the farm the way Jesus died for our sins. A ridiculous notion, of course. But you can’t stop notions like that from popping into your head when you’re so full of guilt.
Adding to the spookiness was the way the lawsuit brought by the Maple Creek Homeowners’ Association ended. The jury found in Calvin’s favor, just as attorney Michael Rood III said it would. The jury foreman, Doug Chervil of D&D Tractor Sales, later told Sam Guss of the Gazette that “havin’ a smelly farm ain’t no crime.”
The homeowners’ association responded to the verdict by installing a ten-foot-high brick privacy fence. From the Cassowary farm it looked like the Great Wall of China. When Norman Marek first saw the fence he doubled over and laughed into his knees. “The stink’ll pour over that fence like water over Niagara Falls,” he said.
The lawsuit did get the attention of the Ohio Environmental Protection Administration and a van-load of biologists drove up from Columbus and took water samples from Three Fish Creek. They checked nearby wells and ponds and took soil samples, too.
“Let them test,” Norman Marek said. “By the time they prove you’ve killed any little fishies, we’ll be processing every squirt of poop your hens produce into livestock feed. I’ve heard through the grapevine that our Manure Management gnomes are just that far away from announcing a breakthrough.” His thumb and forefinger were just a quarter-inch away when he said that.
Calvin Cassowary not only rebuilt his flock to a million hens, but with new loans, expanded it to a million-three.
The flight to Chicago seems to last forever, even though it only takes an hour. Calvin and Donna are a million miles away from each other, even though their shoulders are touching. The Ziploc bag of feathers is safely stored in the breast pocket of Calvin’s sports jacket, making him look like he’s got one breast.
The egg-yolk yellow limo again takes them to Gallinipper Foods and the emaciated woman again takes them up to Bob Gallinipper’s office. Bob hugs them and leads them over the skyway to EggGenics. When they reach the windowless stainless steel door, Bob pulls an electronic card from his shirt pocket. “Even I need one of these to get inside,” he says. He inserts the card in a slot that for all the world looks like the menacing mouth of a snake.
EggGenics is cleaner than a hospital. White floors. White wall tile. People in white scrubs and white tennis shoes, identification cards clipped to their collars.
In a small office with a stainless steel desk, Bob Gallinipper introduccs them to Special Projects Director Sophia Theophaneia. Her curly Greek hair, despite the many barrettes, goes just everywhere. Under her lab coat she wears a EuroDisney tee shirt.
“Are those the you-know-whats in your coat there?” Sophia Theophaneia asks, pointing at the bulge over Calvin’s heart.
Calvin hands her the bag of feathers.
Sophia puts the bag in a plastic picnic cooler. Then she says this:
“Any day now the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh is going to announce to the world that they’ve successfully cloned a sheep. Half the world is going to pat them on the back and the other half is going to whine about them playing God. Truth is, we’ve been successfully cloning hens right here in this building for twenty-two months. So we can do this thing.”
She lets those last five words of hers soak in. Then after an appreciative wink from Bob Gallinipper, she continues: “There is nothing illegal about human cloning. Nothing inherently unethical about it either. I consider myself a religious person. I see it as just another reproductive option, like adoption or artificial insemination. Children no different than other children except they have the exact superimposed physical image of the donor. Imago dei as we embryologists like to say. It’s your decision to proceed, of course. But I want you to know that as a Christian and a woman and a scientist, I’m comfortable with it.”
Calvin’s eyes are glued on the picnic cooler. “We’re comfortable with it, too, philosophically, but whether it’s something we’re actually going to do—”
Sophia is nodding. “It’s a huge decision. One you won’t have to make for some time yet. We’ll have to successfully remove Rhea’s DNA from the feathers first. Then see if we can activate it, so all the genetic codes are functioning, just as they would be in an egg cell. Then, Donna, we’ll take some of your unfertilized eggs and remove the nuclei, where your genetic codes are kept. Then we’ll implant Rhea’s DNA in your eggs. If and when we get a healthy embryo, we’ll attach it to the wall of your uterus. And pray for a successful pregnancy.”
Bob Gallinipper claps his hands, startling everybody. “And bingo! Our new little Rhea!”
Sophia tugs nervously on her curly, everywhere hair, wishing the man who signs her paycheck hadn’t said that. “Not really Rhea, of course, we all understand that. But, yes, an exact genetic copy of her. Your new baby would be a separate and unique individual. This isn’t a resurrection.”
Bob Gallinipper doesn’t appreciate the religious reference. “They understand that,” he growls.
Sophia Theophaneia didn’t get to be Special Projects director by not understanding the corporate ladder as much as she understands those spiral staircases of life called the double helix. “We embryologists like to babble on,” she says softly.
Donna sympathetically waves off her apology. “Cal and I haven’t been able to have a baby. So this could be a godsend for us. Rhea was special and saw the world in a special way. Maybe we can have another special child.”
“It could take many tries,” Sophia cautions.
“We understand that,” Donna says.
“So the first thing,” says Sophia, studying Calvin’s uncertain eyes, “is to get to work on these feathers. See if we can extract some good DNA. It could take months. Then we can proceed. If that’s what you both finally decide.”
Bob Gallinipper claps his hands again “I can almost feel that new little ball of feathers bouncing on my knee.”
Thirty-three
Bob Gallinipper walks the Cassowarys back across the skyway, his arms tucked in their arms. “I’ll call you the minute Sophia has something to report,” he tells them when they reach the elevator. “It’ll be good news, too. I can feel that in my ol’ Indiana bones.”
After the elevator door closes he pulls out his hanky and blows his nose, the honk echoing down the empty corridor. He does not want to go back to his office, not now, not after this. He wants to jump in his car and drive like a bat out of hell to that cemetery where his granddad is buried, just below that line of wonderful old hickory trees. He wants to sit by his granddad’s granite gravestone, and run his hands through the wild strawberry leaves, the way he used to run his hands through the old man’s bushy white beard when he was a kid. He wants to say, “Gramps, I’m doing something good for somebody again.”
That’s what he wants to do. But he has to go back to his office. He has three more meetings before lunch. Two meetings during lunch. Who knows how many meetings after lunch.
It’s tough being The Rooster. Sure you get the perks of office—perching where you want, shitting where you want, riding the
backs of all the hens you want—but you’ve also got The Responsibility. You’ve got to be the first one up every morning and crow like there’s no tomorrow, even if your throat’s sore. You’ve got to puff up and strut even though you’re as frightened as everybody else. And it’s always your carcass on the dining room table. Take, eat: this is Bob Gallinipper’s body.
Bob Gallinipper was born in Pennibone, Indiana, at the height of the Great Depression. He was too young to truly understand how bad things were. But his father and mother were old enough to know how bad things were and they made sure he suffered right along with them. He grew up understanding that life was about working hard and going without, even if you didn’t have to.
They had a farm right where the Wabash River swung south to begin its long fall to the Ohio. It was a good spot for a farm. Indianapolis to the east, Chicago to the north, two big cities where people had to eat food grown by somebody else. After World War II, his father saw the factories in these big cities sucking up even more people. The 1950s were coming. The suburbs were swelling. “Eggs,” his father said one night at supper when young Bob was gnawing on a porkchop. “We’re going to specialize in eggs.”
And so the Gallinippers gave up cows and corn and built a long layer house and filled it with four thousand chickens. Bob learned all about gathering and candling eggs. Learned how to keep shoveling chicken manure when the ammonia was so thick he could barely breathe. By the time he was ready for college, they had three layer houses, each one bigger than the next, twenty thousand hens in all.
Bob Gallinipper wanted to go away to college. Wanted to major in architecture and be the next Frank Lloyd Wright. But Purdue University was just twenty-four miles up the road and it had a damn good agriculture department. So it was Purdue during the day, eggs at night. Even now he wonders how he ever found time to romance Bunny Yeddo. But where there’s a will there’s a way, and he sure had the will to romance pretty Bunny.
Fresh Eggs Page 21
