Fresh Eggs

  Fresh Eggs

  Rob Levandoski

  New York

  To Jenifer and Kary, My daughters.

  Thanks for growing into such wonderful women.

  PART I

  “Farming is not a game of chance. Nothing grows by chance. Not even the weeds. Neither does a crop grow in a day. If we want results we must wait. This is rule one of the farm.”

  Ohio farmer Will H. Evans, 1891

  One

  Calvin Cassowary sits alone at the table in the breakfast nook. His fingers are wrapped around the coffee mug First Sovereignty Savings Bank gave him when he took out that quarter-million-dollar loan. It’s 5:30 a.m. Rain is streaming down the window.

  Out in the chicken yard Captain Bates is crowing. The big dumb rooster has been crowing for a half hour. Calvin wishes he would shut up. Jeanie is going into labor any day now—maybe any minute now—and she needs all the sleep she can get.

  When Calvin lifts his elbow to take a sip, the table wobbles. The table has been wobbling under the elbows of Cassowarys since the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant. It was built by Calvin’s great-great grandfather, Henry Cassowary. Henry spent a year with the Shakers when he was a young man. He left hating everything about them except their furniture. So years later when Henry got the bug to make a new kitchen table for his growing family, he built it in the no-nonsense Shaker style. Except for that one short leg, it came out pretty good, too.

  Calvin finally sees what he’s been waiting for, the blurry lights of Helen Abelard’s Pontiac zeroing in on the plastic Gazette box at the end of the driveway. He struggles into his waterproof poncho and heads out for the paper. He takes his coffee with him. As Helen pulls away, her headlights wash across the FRESH EGGS sign on the front lawn. It’s a wooden sign, red letters painted on white. In the rain it glows like Las Vegas neon.

  Calvin isn’t happy with the rain, though everybody’s cornfields sure need it. The rain means another go-slow day on the new layer house. The crew from Buckshee Construction can’t help it if it rains, of course, but that first truckload of young Leghorns from Gallinipper Foods will be arriving on the seventh of July, layer house or no layer house.

  Halfway to the road Calvin stops and takes a sip of coffee. There is the smell of cow manure in the air, but there are no longer cows on the Cassowary farm. Calvin sold them off six months ago. He also had his father’s six remaining hogs slaughtered and he gave the goats to Dawn Van Varken. He kept Biscuit, the Shetland sheepdog his mother rescued from the pound just a week before his dad died. He also kept the cats and the little flock of Buff Orpington hens his mother used to tend.

  Calvin Cassowary has bitten off quite a mouthful for a kid of twenty-four with a B.A. in Fine Arts. While his old high school buddies are still talking about the kind of cars they’d buy if they had the money, he’s risked the family farm on a quarter-million-dollar loan to go into the egg business—not the kind of egg business his grandfather started in the 1920s, but a real, full-tilt egg operation, with a layer house as long as a football field and 60,000 Leghorns, each hen pooping two Grade A eggs every three days for Gallinipper Foods.

  Quite a mouthful. But what’s a man to do? When your father drops dead from a heart attack at fifty-two? When your older brother opts for a career in the Navy? When your mother remarries and moves to Columbus? When the deed to the farm suddenly has your name on it? When you’ve got a wife carrying your first baby? You give up your dream of being a high school art teacher. You sign a contract with Gallinipper Foods. You borrow a quarter-million bucks. You do whatever it takes to keep the family farm in the family for at least one more generation.

  Calvin pulls the Gazette from the tube and, despite the rain, reads the top story: Watergate Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski has taken his demand for sixty-four taped presidential conversations directly to the Supreme Court. It looks like Nixon’s days are numbered, which makes Calvin happy. He hates Nixon. Hates him for those bulldog jowls and all the kids he kept sending to Vietnam. “They got you this time, Dickie boy.”

  It’s not easy for a Cassowary to hate a Republican president. The Cassowarys have been voting Republican since Abraham Lincoln took up the cause in 1860. His granddad didn’t even vote for Franklin Roosevelt during World War II. But Calvin sure as hell didn’t vote for Nixon in ’72. He voted for George McGovern. Everybody in the art department at Kent State University voted for George McGovern.

  Still, Calvin knows he owes his degree to Nixon. If Nixon hadn’t kept the war going, he wouldn’t have gone to college. No Cassowary had ever seen the need for an education. Calvin hadn’t either. He did, however, see the need for a 2-S draft deferment. And he held onto that deferment for four years, majoring in the only thing he was even remotely good at—drawing pictures.

  At first drawing pictures was just an easy way to stay off that plane to Vietnam. But as he drew, and painted, and sculpted in clay, he also began to see it as a way to escape the farm—the farm that had kept the Cassowarys pinned down for five generations, while the rest of America was living it up in the suburbs. Hard as it was to believe, the war in Vietnam outlasted Calvin’s four years in college. So he took out another student loan and enrolled in the College of Education.

  Once the war was over he planned to run just as fast as he could to one of those suburbs and teach other kids how to un-pin themselves from the expectations of their families and their presidents. Brown-eyed Jeanie Marabout was going to run off with him, he with his art degree and she with her degree in English. They’d get teaching jobs and buy a big old rickety Victorian and they’d fill it with his paintings and her books, and eventually some kids. Then just three weeks after graduation his dad dropped dead, and everything changed.

  That FRESH EGGS sign at the end of the driveway is the same sign his grandfather, Alfred E. Cassowary, erected in 1928, two by three feet, one inch thick, cut from a piece of floor planking from the old barn.

  Alfred was a prosperous farmer always looking for ways to become even more prosperous: he bought eighty acres of worthless swamp from Louie Flexner, and with the help of a couple of long ditches and a windmill, doubled his corn acreage; he bought thirty acres of jungle from Harold Van Varken, cut out everything but the maples, and in a few winters had the best sugar bush in Wyssock County; he fenced off a corner of the old potato field, added thirty-three young Rhode Island Reds to his small flock of New Hampshires, almost overnight establishing the best drive-in egg business in the township.

  “What’s your trick, Al?” Minnie Rogers asked every time she pulled in for a dozen or two. “Them’s the fattest eggs I’ve ever laid eyes on.”

  Being a modest man, Alfred always shrugged off the question. But he knew the answer. It was the rooster riding the backs of his hens that made those eggs so big and rich, a big black-feathered mongrel cock named Buster, the fifth-generation grandson of Maximo Gomez.

  Alfred’s granddad on his mother’s side, Chuck Cowrie, had acquired Maximo Gomez in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. Granddad Cowrie was a supply sergeant in the nine thousandman expeditionary force led by Major General W. R. Shafter, deployed for the duration of that funny little war in the coastal town of Baiquiri. Maximo Gomez was a champion fighting cock, named in honor of the general-in-chief of the Cuban revolutionary forces. He was a nine-pound Spanish, with shiny black feathers, a bone-white face, a tall red comb, wattles the size of chili peppers. There wasn’t a cock in Baiquiri that hadn’t been spurred senseless by him. Nor was there a campesino within twenty miles who hadn’t happily paid the cock’s owner, a brothel owner named Calixto Cervera y Cisnaros, two or three centavos for the honor of letting Maximo Gomez ride the backs of their hens. Chuck Cowrie, an experienced cock fighter himself, paid Señor Cisnaros one hundred dollars American f
or the bird, an enormous sum in those strife-filled years in Cuba, even for the proprietor of a brothel.

  Granddad Cowrie smuggled Maximo Gomez back into Florida in an ammunition crate. After a few years touring the barns and pool halls of Western Ohio and Indiana, Maximo was retired to the Cassowary farm in Wyssock County, where he immediately proved himself king of the roost and sent his hot Spanish blood coursing through the veins of the Cassowary’s plump and placid New Hampshires. And that’s why Alfred Cassowary did so well selling eggs in the twenties and thirties, and why even today, now and again, one of the Cassowary roosters sports black tailfeathers.

  The Gazette thoroughly read, Calvin eats a quick bowl of shredded wheat and then goes upstairs to check on Jeanie. “Looks like it’s going to rain all day,” he says, kissing her big belly.

  Jeanie hadn’t complained one iota about their change in plans when his dad died. She packed up her books and dreams and moved with her new husband to the farm. She got a part-time job at the library in Tuttwyler and put in all the days she could as a substitute teacher, right up until a week ago. “Maybe I should call off today,” Calvin says. “You look about ready to pop.”

  “I feel about ready to pop,” Jeanie says. She’s gained weight in her face since becoming pregnant and her doughy cheeks flop over the corners of her mouth when she smiles. “But you go ahead. I’ll call Dawn if something happens.”

  Calvin knows he should drive the school bus that morning. They need the money. Still he’s worried. “What if Dawn isn’t home?”

  Jeanie tries not to laugh, but does. Her belly swells like a wave. The baby inside her bobs like a rowboat. “Five boys? Five hundred hogs? When isn’t Dawn Van Varken at home?”

  Before leaving for the bus garage, Calvin goes to the chicken coop to feed Captain Bates and the sixteen remaining Buff Orpington hens. It’s a small coop, just twelve by twelve feet. The outside yard is twenty feet wide and forty-four feet long. Raining as it is, Captain Bates and the hens are inside the coop today. Calvin scatters a large scoop of cracked corn. The hens go crazy.

  Calvin does not like the way Captain Bates is looking at him, or, more correctly, not looking at him. The rooster’s head is turned sideways, close to the floor, as if looking for something to eat. Calvin doesn’t know a lot about chicken behavior, not yet, but he knows that’s a fighting posture; any second that rooster’s toes could be in his face.

  It’s hard to say just what kind of rooster Captain Bates is. Over the generations many different varieties of chickens have been introduced to the Cassowary flock, most recently the Buff Orpingtons, a hale and hardy breed renowned for their big beautiful brown eggs. So who knows what kind of rooster the captain is, except that, like all the Cassowary roosters, his blood goes back to the famous Maximo Gomez. He’s a huge caramel-red cock with fiery wattles, floppy comb, and shiny black tail feathers that curl around and almost stick him in the ass.

  Captain Bates does not particularly like Calvin either. He misses Betsy, the mother of this worthless man. Betsy always sang to him and his hens, a song with endless verses called “How Are My Chickie-Chickie Cluck-Clucks Today?” Besides singing, she always gave them an extra half-scoop of cracked corn. And when she reached under his hens for their eggs, she did it slowly and respectfully, with a friendly, “Thank you, ma’am.” This Calvin just jams his hands under them, as if a peck on the knuckles will kill him, and jerks out their eggs with the grace of a starving opossum.

  More than anything, Betsy was respectful to him. “You’re in charge now, Capt’n Bates,” she’d always say before leaving the coop. This Calvin just slams the door. Whatever happened to Betsy anyway? Did she get old? Stop laying? Did they eat her?

  The old rooster has no way of knowing that six months after her husband died, Betsy went to her 30th high school reunion in Columbus and met an old boyfriend, a widowed insurance agent named Ben Betz, and, without consulting her children or her chickens, accepted his marriage proposal, transforming herself from a farm wife named Betsy Cassowary into a suburban wife named Betsy Betz, putting his fate, and the fate of his hens, in the uncertain hands of this Calvin.

  Two

  Calvin Cassowary drives his Pinto to the bus garage in Tuttwyler and starts his morning high school run. There are only ten days of school left, counting the three-day Memorial Day weekend, and the kids on the bus are loud and antsy. Before starting his junior high school run he calls Jeanie and makes her swear she’s not in labor. He also calls Dawn Van Varken and makes her swear she won’t drift more than twenty feet from her phone. He rushes home as soon as his elementary run is finished, driving right past the Pile Inn, where fellow school bus driver Paul Bilderback is waiting to have coffee with him.

  It’s raining hard when Calvin pulls into the drive. The crew from Buckshee Construction is huddled inside the tractor shed. Inside the house he finds Jeanie on the living room sofa, watching Phil Donahue. She’s got several pillows wedged behind her and there’s half a glass of orange juice balancing on her belly. “You didn’t stop for coffee with Paul?” she asks.

  “Paul isn’t nine months pregnant.”

  Jeanie pounds some air into her pillows. “Paul’s a lucky man.”

  Calvin kisses Jeanie on the forehead and goes back out on the porch. If the crew from Buckshee Construction has accomplished anything this morning, he can’t see it. He checks the sky. Nothing but gray. He goes inside and opens a can of tomato soup. He makes it in the Cassowary style: half a can of water, half a can of milk; tablespoon of real butter, quick shake of pepper.

  So with Jeanie on the sofa, the construction crew dragging their asses, Calvin ladles himself a bowl of soup and opens one of the Proper Poultry Management manuals given him by Norman Marek, Gallinipper’s Midwest producer relations manager. This one is titled, “Feeding Standards and Rations.” Every time he lifts his elbow to take a spoonful of soup or turn a page, the Shaker-style table Henry Cassowary made wobbles.

  But Calvin doesn’t feel the wobble, no more than his father felt it, or his grandfather, or any of the fifty or sixty Cassowarys who’d sat around that table over the generations. But he sure feels the presence of those other Cassowarys. Generation after generation, they took care of that farm, making sure the farm took care of them. And he will do the same. And he’s sure that with the help of Gallinipper Foods, he’ll find fulfillment and joy and financial success, even if running the family farm is the last thing in the world he wants to do.

  Things are scary right now. But pretty soon the old Cassowarys will be looking down with pride, and that baby in Jeanie’s belly will be looking up from its crib with pride. So what if he hadn’t planned on being a farmer? Great-great grandfather Henry hadn’t planned on it either.

  Henry Cassowary was the son of a Cincinnati barrel maker. He grew up planning to work on his uncle’s grain barge, floating up and down the Ohio and the wide Mississippi, collecting scandalous first-hand experiences like the ones his cousins bragged about. But that dream ended in 1847 when nineteen-year-old Henry met Hannah Drindlekeid.

  Hannah was devoutly religious. A month after she accepted his marriage proposal, she decided that instead of a traditional marriage encumbered by carnality and children, they would live chaste, ethereal lives in the service of Jesus Christ, as members of the United Society of Believers, as Shakers.

  Henry was all for carnality and children; yet, how could he resist the wishes of this wonderful woman who used words like chaste and ethereal and aspired to an elevated existence? Immediately after the wedding they boarded the stagecoach for the Shaker community in Union, carefully avoiding even one night of sexual temptation.

  Just as Hannah had put her trust in God, Henry now put his trust in Hannah. He went to work in the carpentry shop, rewarding each long day of labor with an hour of shoveling manure in the cow barns. He dutifully attended all the Sabbath services and sang all the joyous songs and learned to dance and twitch. He admired his wife from afar, the roundness of her hips and fullness of h
er bosom, the delicate white chin protruding from her bonnet, the serene motion of her tiny hand when she scattered cracked corn to the chickens.

  Summer and autumn flew by. But the winter kept its toes on the ground and no amount of carpentry or manure-shoveling made the days pass. By the time spring finally arrived, Henry was shaking all the time, not for the love of God, but for the love of his wife, and on the Friday before Easter when he was fitting the hen house with new perches, Hannah came in to gather eggs. “Sister,” he said. “Brother,” she said. Before he knew it he had her flat over the feed bin. The rooster started squawking and the hens clucked and flapped and Henry did to Hannah what that rooster regularly did to his hens. What Adam did to Eve at the serpent’s urging.

  Afterwards Henry ran as fast as a rabbit across the neat Shaker fields, and through the neat Shaker woods, jumping the neat Shaker fence rows, until he reached the road. He walked all the way to Cincinnati, filled with shame and relief. After a while he signed on with the CC&C, the Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati Railroad, and was sent north to Wyssock County, to help build a trestle over Three Fish Creek. It was here that he met Camellia Bloom, an earthy young widow with a farm. Henry wrote Hannah and asked for a divorce, which she granted with Shaker joy. On a rainy day just before Halloween, Henry and Camellia were married, and the Bloom farm passed into the ownership of the Cassowarys. Sometime during the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant, Henry built that wobbly table.

  Shortly after one o’clock Marilyn Dickcissel pulls in for her weekly two dozen. Calvin dog-ears his manual and rushes to the refrigerator for the eggs. If Marilyn gets her foot in the door she’ll spend half the afternoon yakking about her dog grooming business. He reaches the porch just as Marilyn is navigating the stone steps. “Two dozen, right?”