Fresh Eggs Read online

  Marilyn does not like being intercepted. “How’s our Jeanie?” she asks.

  “Sleeping.”

  She frowns and digs into her purse. “You’re still gonna sell brown eggs after you get that big operation of yours running, ain’t you?”

  “Until the old hens die off.”

  She hands him four quarters. “White eggs ain’t no good for pies.”

  He hands her the cartons. “An egg’s an egg.”

  She flips her spent cigarette into the shrubs. “An egg’s an egg my Ohio ass.”

  There’s a break in the rain and the construction crew gets busy, completing an entire wall of metal sheeting by the time Calvin leaves for his afternoon bus run. When he gets home he finds a note fastened to the screen door with a safety pin. It’s in Dawn Van Varken’s handwriting: Jeanie’s water broke. Meet us at the hospital.

  Rhea Cassowary weighs four pounds, thirteen ounces. She’s seventeen and a half inches long. She’s got brown eyes. Quite a head of hair. She has all her toes and fingers and all her other little body parts appear perfect.

  “Rhea? Why Rhea?” Calvin’s mother, Betsy Betz, asks when he calls her from the hospital.

  “You know Jeanie and her literature,” he says. “Apparently Rhea was the oldest of the Greek gods. Mother of the universe.”

  “Don’t you think that’s a lot of responsibility to put on a little nubbin, Calvin? Mother of the universe? Thank your lucky stars you didn’t have a boy. She might’ve named him Jesus the way the Mexicans do.”

  Calvin laughs. “You’re close. She was set on Moses.”

  “Oh Lord,” his mother moans. “I’m glad I didn’t go to college and get my head filled with such foolishness.”

  Rhea is brought home after just three days in the hospital. When the crew from Buckshee Construction sees Calvin’s Pinto pull in, they gather on the side of the drive to applaud. Calvin just wishes they’d go back to work.

  Calvin’s mother has driven up from Columbus and Jeanie’s mother and father have driven down from Toledo. Neighbor Dawn Van Varken has walked over with enough tuna and noodle casserole to last a week. Inside, the kitchen counters are covered with casseroles from other neighbors. Jeanie’s mother takes tiny Rhea while Jeanie heads for the bathroom. Calvin pours himself a cup of coffee and watches the crew as it slowly gets back to work. The cage-units are being delivered first thing Monday morning and the roof had better be on. Automatic feeders are coming Wednesday. Egg conveyors Thursday.

  Calvin feels Jeanie’s arms around his neck. “Let’s take that beautiful daughter of yours upstairs,” she says. Everyone files up the narrow stairs. Every step creaks.

  They fill the first room at the top of the stairs. It’s a small room, nine by nine, with one window that looks out over the creek valley to the south. The walls, like all the walls in this old house, have several wavy layers of wallpaper over them, and who knows how many coats of paint. Not long after she found out she was pregnant, Jeanie painted the walls a pale peach and pasted a paper border around the ceiling with green turtles riding tricycles and blue geese jumping rope. The crib is Calvin’s old crib, freshly painted white. The mattress is new, a gift from Jeanie’s mother. Calvin’s mother bought the curtains, Beatrix Potter rabbits harvesting enormous carrots and cabbages. There are several boxes of disposable diapers stacked in one corner like bales of hay.

  “This room is so cute,” Jeanie’s mother says.

  “It’s the old Cassowary birthing room,” Calvin’s mother tells her. “Calvin wasn’t born here—I put my foot down about that—but Calvin’s father was born in this room and his father and all the Cassowarys going back to old Henry’s seven kids.”

  Jeanie’s mother is amazed. “Isn’t it something how women back then just plooped out their babies and went back to work? I was flat on my back for three weeks.”

  Jeanie puts Rhea in the crib. Calvin wraps his arms around her and kisses her sweaty neck. They stand over their child, swaying back and forth, grinning, giggling, wiping the tears from their eyes, unable to abandon the little life they created together, unable to join the others downstairs for tuna and noodles, even if it is getting cold.

  Three

  Rhea Cassowary spends her first weeks pressed against her mother’s steady heart, or cradled in the safe arms of her father, or inside the reassuring bars of her crib. She enjoys her mother’s warm nipples and the sweet milk that trickles out of them. She learns to lift her head and roll on her belly. She learns how to wrap her miniature fingers around her father’s big fingers. Discovers the joy of kicking empty air.

  Her eyes start seeing things more clearly: those marvelous nipples she’s been sucking on; the silvery sunlight beaming into her room through the shimmering square in the wall; the curtains alive with wind; the soft motionless creatures that share her crib, that come to life and twist and shake when her father holds them close to her face.

  Her ears start hearing things more sharply: the comforting sounds that come out of her mother’s mouth; the funny sounds that come out of her father’s mouth; the distant banging-banging-banging that lasts all day long.

  She begins to learn that her new world is actually two worlds: there is the inside world, divided into squares, some bigger and some smaller, some noisy and some quiet, some smelling wonderful, some smelling not so good; there is the outside world, where the sun and wind roam free, where sounds and smells have boundless energy and infinite imaginations, where creatures twist and shake and move about on their own, where the banging-banging-banging is louder.

  Her carefree acceptance of life gives way to worrying and wondering: why is there an inside world and an outside world? Who are these two people who pick her up and put her down, fill her mouth with mushy substances, wrap and unwrap her, douse her and dry her, jabber away at her, who have the power to make the light come and go by simply slapping the walls? Why is there that constant banging? That banging-banging-banging? And why can’t these two people put an end to it? Why can’t they just slap the wall and make it quiet?

  One day the banging does stop and for the first time in her life, Rhea has a restful day.

  More restful days follow. The banging-banging-banging fades from her thoughts, though some nights the banging-banging-banging drifts into her dreams, into that third world she has discovered. Luckily her cries quickly bring her mother, who picks her up and jiggle-dances her around the room and whisper-sings in her ear.

  One morning her father takes her outside. They walk a long way, toward a long, low silvery building. He is jibber-jabbering about something nonstop. When they reach the building, and her father pulls the door open, she starts to tremble, knowing from the hollow rumble that this building was the source of that banging-banging-banging all those weeks she lay in her crib.

  Now they are walking down an endless square tunnel, noisy and smelly and blurry. Her father has raised her up so she can see over his shoulder. She feels as if she is being born again. The tunnel is filled from floor to ceiling with rows of strange white creatures. Their faces come to sharp points. They have wild sideways eyes. Bags of red skin hang from their chins. They are packed so tightly in their cribs—their cages—that it is hard to tell where one creature ends and another begins. They are all afraid, that much is for certain. And they are all crying and begging to be set free. So Rhea cries, too, and begs to be free of this terrible square tunnel. But the tunnel goes on forever, and the air is heavy and wet and hard to breathe, and the dizzying lights hanging overhead are much too bright, and her father’s jibber-jabbering and reassuring pats on her wet bottom assure her of nothing. The tunnel just goes on and on. The white creatures just cry and beg and stare at her sideways, necks stretched long through the bars in their crowded cribs.

  Calvin Cassowary’s father was named Donald. He was fifty-two when he died. He was a farmer. He had milk cows and hogs, sometimes goats or sheep, always that little flock of chickens. He grew corn and baled enough hay to keep his stock fed all winter. He ke
pt a magnificent vegetable garden, producing all the potatoes, tomatoes, squash, sweet corn, green peppers, string beans, beets, carrots, parsnips, cucumbers, and cabbage the family needed. He also grew a bit of garlic and horseradish and asparagus and rhubarb. Every June he covered his blueberry bushes with netting so the robins wouldn’t clean them out. Behind the blueberry bushes was a row of grapes for jelly making. Most years he had a bed of strawberries. He also had apple trees and peach trees and pear trees, and there was a tangle of raspberry briars on the north side of the old barn.

  Donald Cassowary loved farming. He had an affinity for the soil—just like his father and grandfather and all the Cassowarys back to Henry had an affinity for it. He could tell what kind of fertilizers his fields needed just by sticking his nose in a handful of dirt. He also had an affinity for his animals, and they an affinity for him. They gave him all the milk and eggs he wanted, and when the time came, they gave him their meat, understanding their biblical role as well as their master did. God, after all, had put men like Donald Cassowary in charge of His creation; told them to be fruitful and to multiply and to replenish the earth and to subdue it; gave them dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over every creeping thing that creepeth.

  Donald also was a damn fine carpenter who could build a new corn crib as well as he could repair an old one. He knew the ins and outs of plumbing, welding, and electrical wiring. He could keep his old Ford tractor running no matter what.

  He also was good at the nasty parts of farming. He could put a bullet through the head of a favorite cow when it dropped to its knees with some incurable disease. He could walk his gardens at dusk, popping off rabbits and chipmunks and groundhogs with his .22 rifle. He could set out steel-jawed traps for the raccoon when they got into the corn. He could smash potato bugs with his thumb. When one of his favorite hens got too old to lay eggs, he could chop off her head, yank her guts and feathers, have his wife Betsy serve it for Sunday supper. God had given him dominion, and dominion comes at a high price. You do the things you have to do.

  Donald had everything it took to be a successful farmer but the money. He just didn’t have enough acres. So that meant a job away from the farm. For many years he drove a tow motor at the snack cake plant in Tuttwyler. He always worked second shift, so his daylight hours were free for the farm. When the snack cake plant moved to Tennessee, he drove a school bus for the local district. The money wasn’t as good, and it ate up his mornings and afternoons, but it did leave a few more hours each day for farming, and being happy. The egg money was a big help, too.

  Donald looked forward to the day when he could retire, and with his Social Security and his little pension from the school district, farm full time for a few years, the way his father and grandfather and great-grandfather did all their lives. But sixteen days after his 52nd birthday, Donald Cassowary’s heart stopped beating. He had just come home from driving the high school football team to an away game in Orrville and was using the full moon to toss a wagonload of hay bales into the loft of the old barn. “Everything dies before its time on a farm,” his wife Betsy told Helen Abelard at the funeral.

  Jeanie Cassowary changes Rhea’s diaper and bends her arms and legs into the tiniest pair of bib overalls ever made. She ties a white bonnet around Rhea’s face so the sun won’t scorch the top of her tender head. She kisses her nose and slips her into the canvas baby carrier she wears on her chest, the one her mother-in-law ordered for her from the JCPenney catalog. “Let’s go feed the chickies,” she says. She doesn’t mean the 60,000 Leghorns stacked in that long silvery laying house—Calvin and his automatic feeding machines feed those chickens—she means Captain Bates and his harem of caramel-red Buff Orpingtons.

  The chicken coop is dark and empty and stinks to high heaven. Cobwebs hang from the rafters. Splotches of black and white manure cover the floor. Jeanie takes the lid off the feed drum and digs the metal scoop into the cracked corn. Rhea likes the crunching sound the scoop makes and she kicks her arms and legs playfully.

  Now they go into the chicken yard. Captain Bates and his hens cluck and waddle forward on their skinny yellow legs. Jeanie showers them with corn. “Look how hungry the chickies are,” Jeanie says to Rhea. “Peck-peck-peck. Peck-peck-peck.”

  Back inside the dark coop, they move along the double row of nests. All but two nests have a brown egg inside. One nest has a hen. Jeanie talks to the hen the same way she talks to her daughter, calmly, lovingly. She rubs the hen’s soft breast and then reaches under her to see if there’s an egg yet. The hen is no more frightened or offended by Jeanie’s intruding hand than Rhea is when she feels inside her diaper. One by one the eggs go into the pockets of Jeanie’s floppy apron.

  When Calvin made the decision to go into the egg business with Gallinipper Foods, he and Jeanie discussed whether to keep the Buff Orpingtons and keep selling brown eggs to their neighbors. Calvin said it would be a lot of unnecessary work for only a few extra bucks. “But if you want to take care of them, we’ll keep them until they die off,” he said. “My mother always enjoyed gabbing with the customers.”

  Jeanie thought that sounded uncharacteristically sexist for her artist husband: He’ll take care of the real egg business, managing that huge layer house with its automatic feeders and waterers and egg-collectors. Wifey can have her little yard of hens, and gab all afternoon with the other wifeys when they come for their weekly dozen or two. It worried her that he was becoming too serious, too responsible, too Republican, too much like her father back in Toledo. But then Calvin drew a hilarious charcoal sketch of her, standing among the Buff Orpingtons, scattering cracked corn, while Captain Bates tried to mate with one of the cats. It’s framed now, hanging right behind her chair in the breakfast nook.

  After putting the eggs in the refrigerator she sits in that chair and guides baby Rhea to her breast. She hears the driveway crackle and pulls back the gingham curtain. The semi has finally arrived to haul away their first load of eggs for Gallinipper Foods. Calvin is standing by his layer house, arms folded proudly around his clipboard. With him is Norman Marek, Gallinipper’s Midwest producer relations manager, pecking away at a bright yellow pocket calculator.

  Four

  Norman Marek greets the Cassowarys with that big friendly yank of a handshake he’s perfected over the years. “Cal, my man! Jeanie!” He bends low over Rhea, who’s holding onto her father’s leg as if it was the strong trunk of an oak tree. “Your daddy tells me you’re all ready for kindergarten.”

  Rhea hides her head under the flaps of her father’s sport coat.

  The maître d’ leads them through a maze of round tables to a plush booth under an arbor dripping with plastic grapes. Presello’s is the finest Italian restaurant in Wyssock County, the only one with candles on the tables and recorded accordion music floating through the air. Norman orders the chicken parmigiana and a carafe of the house red. Calvin orders linguini and clams. Jeanie gets the ravioli Bolognese. Rhea is talked into ordering the spaghetti and meatballs, and a chocolate milk.

  Norman has invited the Cassowarys to Presello’s to present Calvin with a five-year pin—it’s in the shape of a rooster’s head—and a Certificate of Egg-cellence signed personally by Bob Gallinipper, chairman of Gallinipper Foods. He surprises Jeanie with a pewter necklace of interlocking baby chicks. He frightens Rhea with a tin wind-up hen that bangs away at the tabletop with her beak and then poops a rubber egg, which bounces off the table and rolls under a table of men wearing Softball uniforms.

  The wine and chocolate milk come and Norman offers a toast: “May the next five years be five times better than the first five.”

  Calvin clinks glasses with him and smiles. But he doesn’t feel like smiling. It’s only been three weeks since Jeanie learned from the specialist in Wooster that cancer is eating away at her uterus. There’ll be no more Cassowary children. Maybe no Jeanie if the surgery scheduled for Tuesday doesn’t go well.

  The rain do
esn’t make the drive home any easier. Jeanie hugs Calvin’s arm as if it was the strong limb of an oak. Her free hand plays with the baby chick necklace. “I wonder if Bob Gallinipper’s wife wears one of these?”

  “If she does, you can bet it isn’t made out of pewter.”

  Neither of them like the bitterness in their voices. They smile at each other and tears fill their eyes. Jeanie puts the necklace back in the cardboard box and sticks it in the glove compartment, with the maps and owner’s manual and the ketchup packs from McDonald’s.

  Dr. Mohandas Bandicoot is still wearing his paper slippers when he comes out to tell Calvin how Jeanie’s surgery went. “It looks like we got it all.”

  It is not the reassuring appraisal Calvin hoped for. He studies the doctor’s loamy eyes. “Looks like?”

  When Calvin calls the farm, his mother puts Rhea on the phone. “Did the doctor fix mommy’s tummy?” she asks.

  “He sure did.”

  Calvin stays at the hospital all day, watching Jeanie sleep. He buys her a pot of violets and a Minnie Mouse balloon. He buys a newspaper and reads about President Carter’s latest plan for breaking the backs of those twin demons, inflation and high interest rates. “This one better work, Mr. Caw-tuh,” he mutters, imitating the new president’s Georgia-mush voice. His contract with Gallinipper Foods pays him only three cents per dozen eggs produced. That three cents isn’t worth half as much as it was five years ago. To keep their heads above water he’s added two new layer houses—layer houses B and C—and 120,000 more hens. In the spring he’ll have to go back to First Sovereignty for the capital to build layer houses D and E.

  So those interest rates have got to come down—and soon.

  Calvin doesn’t leave the hospital until ten. He’s tired and the highway is one bend after another and he knows he shouldn’t drive this fast, but he’s got to be home when Phil Bunyip arrives.

  Eggs sounded like a good idea after his father died and the farm fell into his hands. “It’s a piece of cake,” Norman Marek said that evening as they sat at the wobbly table in the breakfast nook, watching the cows graze on the hillside. “Gallinipper furnishes the hens, the feed, the medication to keep them healthy. We even haul off the old hens when they’re spent. All you do is furnish the housing and the labor, pay the light bills and clean out the manure. And we protect you with a long contract, a guaranteed price, no matter what.”