“What’re you two doing?” Ernie walked towards them from the back door of the house.
“We just buried Beansy,” Helen said. “The truck got her this morning.”
“Oh.” Ernie’s smile disappeared. “That’s too bad. That’s really too bad, Helen.”
But at lunch Ernie was cheerful enough, talking of vitamins and antibiotics in his chicken feed, and his produce of one and a quarter eggs per day per hen. Though it was July, Ernie was lengthening the chicken’s “day” by artificial light.
“All birds are geared to spring,” Ernie said. “They lay more when they think spring is coming. The ones I’ve got are at peak. In October they’ll be under a year old, and I’ll sell them and take on a new batch.”
John listened attentively. He was to be here a month. He wanted to be helpful. “They really do eat, don’t they? A lot of them have worn off their beaks, I noticed.”
Ernie laughed. “They’re de-beaked. They’d peck each other through the wire, if they weren’t. Two of ’em got loose in my first batch and nearly killed each other. Well, one did kill the other. Believe me, I de-beak ’em now, according to instructions.”
“And one chicken went on eating the other,” Helen said. “Cannibalism.” She laughed uneasily. “Ever hear of cannibalism among chickens, John?”
“No.”
“Our chickens are insane,” Helen said.
Insane. John smiled a little. Maybe Helen was right. Their noises had sounded pretty crazy.
“Helen doesn’t much like battery farming,” Ernie said apologetically to John. “She’s always thinking about the old days. But we weren’t doing so well then.”
That afternoon, John helped his uncle draw the conveyor belts back into the barn. He began learning the levers and switches that worked things. Belts removed eggs and deposited them gently into plastic containers. It was nearly 5 p.m. before John could get away. He wanted to say hello to his cousin Susan, a lively little girl with hair like her mother’s.
As John crossed the front porch, he heard a child’s weeping, and he remembered the kitten. He decided to go ahead anyway and speak to Susan.
Susan and her mother were in the living room—a front room with flowered print curtains and cherrywood furniture. Some additions, such as a bigger television set, had been made since John had seen the room last. Helen was on her knees beside the sofa on which Susan lay, her face buried in one arm.
“Hello, Susan,” John said. “I’m sorry about your kitten.”
Susan lifted a round, wet face. A bubble started at her lips and broke. “Beansy—”
John embraced her impulsively. “We’ll find another kitten. I promise. Maybe tomorrow. Yes?” He looked at Helen.
Helen nodded and smiled a little. “Yes, we will.”
The next afternoon, as soon as the lunch dishes had been washed, John and Helen set out in the station wagon for a farm eight miles away belonging to some people called Ferguson. The Fergusons had two female cats that frequently had kittens, Helen said. And they were in luck this time. One of the cats had a litter of five—one black, one white, three mixed—and the other cat was pregnant.
“White?” John suggested. The Fergusons had given them a choice.
“Mixed,” Helen said. “White is all good and black is—maybe unlucky.”
They chose a black and white female with white feet.
“I can see this one being called Bootsy,” Helen said, laughing.
The Fergusons were simple people, getting on in years, and very hospitable. Mrs. Ferguson insisted they partake of a freshly baked coconut cake along with some rather powerful homemade wine. The kitten romped around the kitchen, playing with gray rolls of dust that she dragged out from under a big cupboard.
“That ain’t no battery kitten!” Frank Ferguson remarked, and drank deep.
“Can we see your chickens, Frank?” Helen asked. She slapped John’s knee suddenly. “Frank has the most wonderful chickens, almost a hundred!”
“What’s wonderful about ’em?” Frank said, getting up on a stiff leg. He opened the back screen door. “You know where they are, Helen.”
John’s head was buzzing pleasantly from the wine as he walked with Helen out to the chicken yard. Here were Rhode Island Reds, big white Leghorns, roosters strutting and tossing their combs, half-grown speckled chickens, and lots of little chicks about six inches high. The ground was covered with claw-scored watermelon rinds, tin bowls of grain and mush, and there was much chicken dung. A wheelless wreck of a car seemed to be a favorite laying spot: three hens sat on the back of the front seat with their eyes half closed, ready to drop eggs which would surely break on the floor behind them.
“It’s such a wonderful mess!” John shouted, laughing.
Helen hung by her fingers in the wire fence, rapt. “Like the chickens I knew when I was a kid. Well, Ernie and I had them too, till about—” She smiled at John. “You know—a year ago. Let’s go in!”
John found the gate, a limp thing made of wire that fastened with a wooden bar. They went in and closed it behind them.
Several hens drew back and regarded them with curiosity, making throaty, skeptical noises.
“They’re such stupid darlings!” Helen watched a hen fly up and perch herself in a peach tree. “They can see the sun! They can fly!”
“And scratch for worms—and eat watermelon!” John said.
“When I was little, I used to dig worms for them at my grandmother’s farm. With a hoe. And sometimes I’d step on their droppings, you know—well, on purpose—and it’d go between my toes. I loved it. Grandma always made me wash my feet under the garden hydrant before I came in the house.” She laughed. A chicken evaded her outstretched hand with an “Urrr-rrk!” “Grandma’s chickens were so tame, I could touch them. All bony and warm with the sun, their feathers. Sometimes I want to open all the coops in the barn and open the doors and let ours loose, just to see them walking on the grass for a few minutes.”
“Say, Helen, want to buy one of these chickens to take home? Just for fun? A couple of ’em?”
“No.”
“How much did the kitten cost? Anything?”
“No, nothing.”
SUSAN TOOK THE KITTEN INTO HER ARMS, and John could see that the tragedy of Beansy would soon be forgotten. To John’s disappointment, Helen lost her gaiety during dinner. Maybe it was because Ernie was droning on about his profit and loss—not loss really, but outlay. Ernie was obsessed, John realized. That was why Helen was bored. Ernie worked hard now, regardless of what he said about machinery doing everything. There were creases on either side of his mouth, and they were not from laughing. He was starting to get a paunch. Helen had told John that last year Ernie had dismissed their handyman, Sam, who’d been with them seven years.
“Say,” Ernie said, demanding John’s attention. “What d’you think of the idea? Start a battery chicken farm when you finish school, and hire one man to run it. You could take another job in Chicago or Washington or wherever, and you’d have a steady separate income for life.”
John was silent. He couldn’t imagine owning a battery chicken farm.
“Any bank would finance you—with a word from Clive, of course.”
Clive was John’s father.
Helen was looking down at her plate, perhaps thinking of something else.
“Not really my lifestyle, I think,” John answered finally. “I know it’s profitable.”
After dinner, Ernie went into the living room to do his reckoning, as he called it. He did some reckoning almost every night. John helped Helen with the dishes. She put a Mozart symphony on the record player. The music was nice, but John would have liked to talk with Helen. On the other hand, what would he have said, exactly? I understand why you’re bored. I think you’d prefer pouring slop for pigs and tossing grain to real chi
ckens, the way you used to do. John had a desire to put his arms around Helen as she bent over the sink, to turn her face to his and kiss her. What would Helen think if he did?
That night, lying in bed, John dutifully read the brochures on battery chicken farming which Ernie had given him.
. . . The chickens are bred small so that they do not eat so much, and they rarely reach more than 3 1/2 pounds . . . Young chickens are subjected to a light routine which tricks them into thinking that a day is 6 hours long. The objective of the factory farmer is to increase the original 6-hour day by leaving the lights on for a longer period each week. Artificial Spring Period is maintained for the hen’s whole lifetime of 10 months . . . There is no real falling off of egg-laying in the natural sense, though the hen won’t lay quite so many eggs towards the end . . . [Why, John wondered. And wasn’t “not quite so many” the same as “falling off”?] At 10 months the hen is sold for about 30¢ a pound, depending on the market . . .
And below:
Richard K. Schultz of Poon’s Cross, Pa., writes: “I am more than pleased and so is my wife with the modernization of my farm into a battery chicken farm operated with Muskeego-Ryan Electric equipment. Profits have quadrupled in a year and a half and we have even bigger hopes for the future . . .”
Writes Henry Vliess of Farnham, Kentucky: “My old farm was barely breaking even. I had chickens, pigs, cows, the usual. My friends used to laugh at my hard work combined with all my tough luck. Then I . . .”
John had a dream. He was flying like Superman in Ernie’s chicken barn, and the lights were all blazing brightly. Many of the imprisoned chickens looked up at him, their eyes flashed silver, and they were struck blind. The noise they made was fantastic. They wanted to escape, but could no longer see, and the whole barn heaved with their efforts to fly upward. John flew about frantically, trying to find the lever to open the coops, the doors, anything, but he couldn’t. Then he woke up, startled to find himself in bed, propped on one elbow. His forehead and chest were damp with sweat. Moonlight came strong through the window. In the night’s silence, he could hear the steady high-pitched din of the hundreds of chickens in the barn, though Ernie had said the barn was absolutely soundproofed. Maybe it was “daytime” for the chickens now. Ernie said they had three more months to live.
John became more adept with the barn’s machinery and the fast artificial clocks, but since his dream he no longer looked at the chickens as he had the first day. He did not look at them at all if he could help it. Once Ernie pointed out a dead one, and John removed it. Its breast, bloody from the coop’s barrier, was so distended, it might have eaten itself to death.
Susan had named her kitten “Bibsy,” because it had a white oval on its chest like a bib.
“Beansy and now Bibsy,” Helen said to John. “You’d think all Susan thinks about is food!”
Helen and John drove to town one Saturday morning. It was alternately sunny and showery, and they walked close together under an umbrella when the showers came. They bought meat, potatoes, washing powder, white paint for a kitchen shelf, and Helen bought a pink-and-white striped blouse for herself. At a pet shop, John acquired a basket with a pillow to give Susan for Bibsy.
When they got home, there was a long dark gray car in front of the house.
“Why, that’s the doctor’s car!” Helen said.
“Does he come by just to visit?” John asked, and at once felt stupid, because something might have happened to Ernie. A grain delivery had been due that morning, and Ernie was always climbing about to see that everything was going all right.
There was another car, dark green, which Helen didn’t recognize beside the chicken factory. Helen and John went into the house.
It was Susan. She lay on the living room floor under a plaid blanket, only one sandaled foot and yellow sock visible under the fringed edge. Dr. Geller was there, and a man Helen didn’t know. Ernie stood rigid and panicked beside his daughter.
Dr. Geller came towards Helen and said, “I’m sorry, Helen. Susan was dead by the time the ambulance got here. I sent for the coroner.”
“What happened?” Helen started to touch Susan, and instinctively John caught her.
“Honey, I didn’t see her in time,” Ernie said. “She was chasing under that damned container after the kitten just as it was lowering.”
“Yeah, it bumped her on the head,” said a husky man in tan workclothes, one of the delivery men. “She was running out from under it, Ernie said. My gosh, I’m sorry, Mrs. Hanshaw!”
Helen gasped, then she covered her face.
“You’ll need a sedative, Helen,” Dr. Geller said.
The doctor gave Helen a needle in her arm. Helen said nothing. Her mouth was slightly open, and her eyes stared straight ahead. Another car came and took the body away on a stretcher. The coroner took his leave then too.
With a shaky hand, Ernie poured whiskeys.
Bibsy leapt about the room, and sniffed at the red splotch on the carpet. John went to the kitchen to get a sponge. It was best to try to get it up, John thought, while the others were in the kitchen. He went back to the kitchen for a saucepan of water, and scrubbed again at the abundant red. His head was ringing, and he had difficulty keeping his balance. In the kitchen, he drank off his whiskey at a gulp and it at once burnt his ears.
“Ernie, I think I’d better take off,” the delivery man said solemnly. “You know where to find me.”
Helen went up to the bedroom she shared with Ernie, and did not come down when it was time for dinner. From his room, John heard floorboards creaking faintly, and knew that Helen was walking about in the room. He wanted to go in and speak to her, but he was afraid he would not be capable of saying the right thing. Ernie should be with her, John thought.
John and Ernie gloomily scrambled some eggs, and John went to ask Helen if she would come down or would prefer him to bring her something. He knocked on the door.
“Come in,” Helen said.
He loved her voice, and was somehow surprised to find that it wasn’t any different since her child had died. She was lying on the double bed, still in the same clothes, smoking a cigarette.
“I don’t care to eat, thanks, but I’d like a whiskey.”
John rushed down, eager to get something that she wanted. He brought ice, a glass, and the bottle on a tray. “Do you just want to go to sleep?” John asked.
“Yes.”
She had not turned on a light. John kissed her cheek, and for an instant she slipped her arm around his neck and kissed his cheek also. Then he left the room.
Downstairs the eggs tasted dry, and John could hardly swallow even with sips of milk.
“My God, what a day,” Ernie said. “My God.” He was evidently trying to say more, looked at John with an effort at politeness, or closeness.
And John, like Helen, found himself looking down at his plate, wordless. Finally, miserable in the silence, John got up with his plate and patted Ernie awkwardly on the shoulder. “I am sorry, Ernie.”
They opened another bottle of whiskey, one of the two bottles left in the living room cabinet.
“If I’d known this would happen, I’d never have started this damned chicken farm. You know that. I meant to earn something for my family—not go limping along year after year.”
John saw that the kitten had found the new basket and gone to sleep in it on the living room floor. “Ernie, you probably want to talk to Helen. I’ll be up at the usual time to give you a hand.” That meant 7 a.m.
“Okay. I’m in a daze tonight. Forgive me, John.”
John lay for nearly an hour in his bed without sleeping. He heard Ernie go quietly into the bedroom across the hall, but he heard no voices or even a murmur after that. Ernie was not much like Clive, John thought. John’s father might have given way to tears for a minute, might have cursed. Then wit
h his father it would have been all over, except for comforting his wife.
A raucous noise, rising and falling, woke John up. The chickens, of course. What the hell was it now? They were louder than he’d ever heard them. He looked out of the front window. In the pre-dawn light, he could see that the barn’s front doors were open. Then the lights in the barn came on, blazing out on to the grass. John pulled on his tennis shoes without tying them, and rushed into the hall.
“Ernie!—Helen!” he yelled at their closed door.
John ran out of the house. A white tide of chickens was now oozing through the wide front doors of the barn. What on earth had happened? “Get back!” he yelled at the chickens, flailing his arms.
The little hens might have been blind or might not have heard him at all through their own squawks. They kept on flowing from the barn, some fluttering over the others, and sinking again in the white sea.
John cupped his hands to his mouth. “Ernie! The doors!” He was shouting into the barn, because Ernie must be there.
John plunged into the hens and made another effort to shoo them back. It was hopeless. Unused to walking, the chickens teetered like drunks, lurched against each other, stumbled forward, fell back on their tails, but they kept pouring out, many borne on the backs of those who walked. They were pecking at John’s ankles. John kicked some aside and moved towards the barn doors again, but the pain of the blunt beaks on his ankles and lower legs made him stop. Some chickens tried to fly up to attack him, but had no strength in their wings. They are insane, John remembered. Suddenly frightened, John ran towards the clearer area at the side of the barn, then on towards the back door. He knew how to open the back door. It had a combination lock.
Helen was standing at the corner of the barn in her bathrobe, where John had first seen her when he arrived. The back door was closed.
“What’s happening?” John shouted.
“I opened the coops,” Helen said.
“Opened them—why?—Where’s Ernie?”
“He’s in there.” Helen was oddly calm, as if she were standing and talking in her sleep.
The Animal-Lover's Book of Beastly Murder Page 12
