Fresh Eggs

by Rob Levandoski

  Later Calvin and Jeanie worked with a pocket calculator, multiplying that guaranteed three-cents-per-dozen by the number of dozens a starter flock of 60,000 Leghorns would lay in a year. They subtracted loan payments they’d have to make on a layer house, as well as insurance and utility costs, and the higher real-estate taxes they’d have to pay on the farm. “Not as lucrative as teaching school,” Calvin joked, “but I think we can make it fly.”

  So Calvin Cassowary signed a contract with Gallinipper Foods, contingent on him getting a loan for the layer house. Ted Rapparee at First Sovereignty Savings Bank took one look at that contract—Gallinipper’s was the largest producer of poultry products east of the Mississippi—and gave Calvin all the money he needed. Now they’ve got three layer houses and 180,000 Leghorns, and a full-time man to help with the feed and manure, and next year this time they’ll have five layer houses and 300,000 Leghorns. And tonight Phil Bunyip is coming to cull the spent hens.

  The trucks arrive right at midnight. There are three of them, sleek black diesel cabs, tugging low flatbed trailers stacked high with empty cages. Their airbrakes fart as they plow to a stop alongside layer house A, the one built the summer Rhea was born. There are two or three chicken catchers in each cab. They jump to the ground and immediately start smoking cigarettes. When Phil Bunyip walks over to Calvin he not only has a cigarette teetering on his lower lip, he’s got a can of Pepsi in his left hand and a cinnamon roll in his right hand. “Your forklift all juiced up?” he asks.

  Calvin nods that it is.

  Phil expertly removes his cigarette with his Pepsi hand and finishes his roll in two efficient bites. The cigarette goes back on lip and he heads for the forklift. The chicken catchers know it’s time to get busy. They grind their own cigarette butts into the driveway gravel and feed their feet into the legs of the heavy paper coveralls they’ll wear. They walk their fingers into rubber gloves and pull dust masks down over their backwards baseball hats.

  Phil Bunyip maneuvers the forklift to the back of the nearest truck and takes down a rack of empty cages. He backs around and waits for Calvin to slide the layer house door open. He drives in. The catchers follow. They are young, brawny Indiana men, some of them enrolled at the technical college in South Bend, some high school dropouts just getting used to the hard labor they’ll be doing all their working lives.

  It’s dark inside the layer house. And quiet. The ammonia rising from the manure pits stings the catchers’ eyes and makes the nerve endings in their noses twitch. Phil lowers the rack of cages and backs out for another one. The chicken catchers go to work.

  There are some 50,000 spent Leghorns in the long silvery house. There were 60,000 hens originally, but 10,000 have already died of suffocation or disease. Just eighteen months ago they arrived as young ready-to-lay pullets. For eighteen months they stood wing to wing, six to a twelve by eighteen-inch cage, unable to flap their wings, their aching toes wrapped around the wire bottoms of their cages, their beaks unable to find a bug or a worm in their tasteless mash. For eighteen months they laid two eggs every three days. Now their human master says they’re spent, though they could go on laying an egg or two a week for a long time yet. But their master keeps very accurate records of their laying, and he has bills to pay, and if a hen can’t average those two eggs every three days, well, it’s time for a new batch of pullets, whose uteruses are still chock-full of happy ova, who can fulfill their biblical responsibility and keep the Cassowary farm in the Cassowary family for one more generation.

  Calvin doesn’t want to watch the catchers do their work. But he has to watch. His contract with Gallinipper Foods requires it. It’s part of the company’s quality control regimen. He stands in the doorway, where the air is only slightly better.

  As the catchers file into the dark and quiet throat of the layer house, their paper coveralls and masks make Calvin think of Dr. Mohandas Bandicoot, shuffling out of the operating room in his scrubs to assure him that Jeanie’s odds were good. When they reach for the latches on the cage doors he pictures the doctor lowering his scalpel toward Jeanie’s belly.

  “Let’s do it!” one of the chicken catchers yells. The first cage doors bang open. The catchers reach in and start grabbing. The quiet ends. The screeching begins. The futile flapping of wings and snapping of bones begins. The bleeding and befouling and begging for mercy begins.

  The catchers grab until they’ve got the legs of three hens in one hand. Then they twist their backs and reach in with their other hand, and grab the legs of the other three. The six hens are carried, heads flopping, to the transport cages and stuffed inside, like underwear into a dresser drawer. Leg bones and wing bones and neck bones snap. The catchers go back for six more hens.

  Phil Bunyip brings another rack of cages and takes the full one to the truck. The hours pass. The catchers cough and sneeze and blame the “friggin’ chickens” for their own miserable lives. Calvin watches one catcher, a boy with freckles and a mop of frizzy red hair, who’s perhaps a little pudgy for this kind of work, as he chases a squawking Leghorn up the dark center aisle. The hen has a broken wing, but not a broken spirit. She darts left and right, always out of the boy’s reach. The hen sees moonlight and freedom. The hen does not see Phil Bunyip driving in with another rack of empty cages. But Phil sees the hen and he darts to his left and crushes it under his front wheel. Phil and the boy give each other thumbs up and go on with their work. Calvin is reviled, but not surprised. Over the years he’s seen Phil crush dozens of fleeing hens like that.

  Rhea wakes up at about two. Immediately she remembers that her mother is in the hospital and her Columbus grandmother—her Gammy Betz—is downstairs sleeping on the sofa. A faint stench is slithering through the screen in her window. She slides out of bed and wraps her blanky around her head, a magic cape that will render her invisible to any monsters hiding in the hallway. She shuffles to her parents’ room. She feels the edge of the bed and leans over it. “Wake up, Daddy. Something stinks.”

  But her father’s side of the bed is as empty as her mother’s side. She hurries to the stairway and hurries down. The blue-gray light of the television illuminates her grandmother’s waxy face. “Something stinks, Gammy Betz.”

  Three times Rhea tells her this, but her grandmother’s snoring and the middle-of-the-night jibber-jabber on the television soaks up her tiny voice. She pulls her magic cape tighter and shuffles to the kitchen. Both cats are sleeping illegally on the counter. Biscuit the shaggy sheltie is sleeping on his rug by the porch door, surrounded by his rubber toys. Rhea pets him. Without opening his eyes he licks her hand.

  Rhea reaches high and opens the door. She shuffles across the porch. The stench is strong enough out here for her to identify it. It’s the feather-and-manure stench of Leghorns. She squints at the layer houses. One of them is surrounded by big trucks. She sees the forklift as it rounds the corner and slips through the open door.

  As she shuffles across the wet grass she begins to hear voices: men using bad words, chickens begging. The thin coating of moonlight on the driveway does not protect Rhea’s bare feet from the gravel. She silently ouches her way across. Soon she is close enough to see her father standing in the doorway. She starts to run toward him, but the rumble of the forklift stops her. She shrinks inside her magic cloak as the forklift backs out with a tall stack of cages, cages crammed with begging hens. There’s an old lilac bush on the side of the tractor shed. It’s several feet around with a hollow hiding place in the middle. Rhea runs to it. She slips through the spindly limbs and sits like an Indian.

  For what seems like hours the man on the forklift takes empty cages in and full cages out. For what seems like hours men shout bad words and chickens beg. For what seems like hours her father stands in the doorway, half in shadow, half in moonlight. For what seems like hours the stench of manure and feathers billows across the yard, seeping through the lilac’s spindly limbs, through the holes in Rhea’s magic cloak, into Rhea’s porous memory.

  Sudd
enly the layer house is quiet. Men pour out and gather in the driveway to light cigarettes. They wiggle out of their coveralls. They walk right past her and wash their hands at the pump by the willow, where her mother gets water for Captain Bates and the Buff Orpingtons.

  Her father is still by the open layer house door talking to the man who’s just crawled off the forklift. She hears her father use as many bad words as the forklift man does. She has never heard her father use these words before. She pulls the magic cloak down to her chin, wishing it made her not only invisible, but deaf, too. The trucks pull out, the hens stuffed in the cages glistening in the fading moonlight. She watches her father walk to the house. Through the window she can see him knock the cats off the counter with one sweep of his arm.

  Suddenly the lilac bush is a scary place—the spindly limbs are dangling snakes and the tickling leaves are spiders. Rhea scrambles out. She takes a few steps toward the porch, then stops and turns toward the empty layer house. She hates the layer houses. The air inside is thick and stinky. The rows of sad chickens give her bad dreams and bad thoughts. Still she is drawn toward the open door and the quiet that’s oozing out.

  Her magic cloak is Superman’s cape now, and she flies to the layer house. She lands in the doorway. The air is gray and as thick as gravy. Feathers float. The hens are gone but not their fear. Rhea can feel it in her nostrils and on her tongue. She starts down the aisle, the empty cages leaning and squeezing.

  Then the long silvery building suddenly shudders and the big overhead lights blink on and the big ventilation fans in the ceiling roar. Rhea sees the splotches of blood and runny manure. Sees the flattened chickens on the floor. Sees that some of the empty cages are not empty. She sees torn legs—translucent white bones, dribbles of yellow fat, shreds of white skin, bloody pink meat—fixed to the wire floors by gripping toes. She sees torn wings caught in the wire walls. She sees severed heads, beaks plier-locked on the wire doors, necks like feathery spigots dripping blood.

  She hears a throaty plea. In the manure pit beneath the cages she finds a living hen. Its legs and wings and spirit are intact. It wants out. Rhea lays on her stomach and reaches. Her fingers wriggle empty air. So she swings her body and drops feet-first into the pit. The manure mooshes around her ankles. She eases her hands around the hen’s throbbing breast, lifts her, and sets her on the floor. The hen springs for the open door. Now Rhea must lift herself out. But her feet are trapped in the slippery manure, and her hands are covered with it, and there is nothing she can do but cry.

  Five

  It is Jimmy Faldstool who rescues Rhea from the manure pit. “Good gravy little girl,” he says. “What you doing down there in the chicken shit?”

  Jimmy is in his late thirties, but cold beer keeps his mind much younger. He’s been working for Calvin Cassowary for three years now, cleaning out the manure pits, spreading it on the fields, burying the dead hens. Despite the cold beer and low esteem, Jimmy is a good man. He always shows up for work on time.

  He pulls Rhea out by the arms and carries her to the house. “Your daddy’s gonna whoop your little butt,” he tells her.

  But Rhea doesn’t get whooped. Or yelled at. Or hugged. Her father simply has too much on his mind. Instead Gammy Betz gives her a bath and makes her a bowl of Cream of Wheat and calls her Miss Lucky Pants for not drowning in all that chicken poop.

  Two days later trucks begin arriving with new pullets for the empty layer house. Each truck carries about 5,000 of the five-month-old hens. The trucks come and go all day. By suppertime layer house A, scrubbed clean of death by Jimmy Faldstool, is filled with 60,000 young, disease-free Leghorns, genetically engineered at Gallinipper’s big brooding operation in West Farrago, Illinois, to lay two big grade A eggs every three days for the next eighteen months.

  The morning after the pullets arrive Norman Marek calls to make sure the delivery went well. “Everything copacetic?”

  “They look good,” Calvin reports.

  “Didn’t lose too many in transport did we?”

  “Couple of hundred max.”

  Norman is pleased. “Is that right? In this heat?” He pauses to make a notation. “And how’d things go with Jeanie? Everything copacetic there, I hope?”

  Jeanie comes home from the hospital the day before Rhea starts kindergarten. Her legs are weak and she can barely keep from vomiting but she manages to dress her daughter in a new blue corduroy jumper and make sure there are fresh peach slices on her Frosted Flakes. She props herself against the porch post while Calvin walks their daughter to the end of the driveway. The school bus gobbles her up. “Our baby’s growing up,” Calvin says when he gets back to the porch.

  “And I’m dying,” Jeanie says.

  Calvin presses his lips against her forehead and holds her in his arms. “You’re not dying.”

  She can smell the stale sweat on the collar of his workshirt. She likes the smell. “I’m not exactly living.”

  “You’re going to be fine.”

  Jeanie closes her eyes, tightly, to keep the tears inside. “Everything’s going to be copacetic, is it?”

  “Copacetic as hell.”

  Rhea gets off the bus shortly after noon. Jeanie is waiting for her with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a hug. The phone rings shortly after one. It’s Rhea’s kindergarten teacher. She’s mildly concerned. “One of the first things I like to do is have the children draw a picture of themselves. It helps me determine if they view themselves positively. If they’re introverted, or extroverted.”

  “And what did Rhea draw?” Jeanie asks.

  “She drew a very pretty picture of herself. I could actually tell it was her.”

  “Her father’s an art major.”

  “But then she scribbled over her picture with black crayon. She said the scribbles were chicken shit, Mrs. Cassowary. She used those actual words—chicken shit.”

  The first thing Rhea does after changing her school clothes is run to the chicken coop and dig out a handful of cracked corn from the feed barrel. Then she runs to the old corn crib and crouches until her knees are higher than her ears. The crib sits two feet off the ground on cement block pillars, to keep snakes and rodents from getting in. The ground underneath is a jumble of old lumber, broken baskets, and rusted lawnmowers. The Leghorn she saved from the manure pit has been busy. Though she is closing in on her second birthday, and is officially spent, she does manage one egg every four days. So there are eggs everywhere. Unfortunately the mice and rats and chipmunks and raccoons have been busy, too. Almost all of the eggs have been broken open and their yolks and white sucked dry. “You under there, Miss Lucky Pants?” Rhea asks, giving the hen the name her grandmother gave her.

  Every fall, the door to the chicken coop is left open, so Captain Bates and the Buff Orpingtons can range free and feast on bugs and worms and swallow tiny bits of gravel from the driveway to resupply their gizzards with the grit they need to grind and digest their food. They also can scratch and peck to their hearts’ content in the vegetable gardens, making quick work of the tomatoes and cucumbers overlooked by their human masters. They can explore the high grass and the shrubbery and hop up on the low branches of the peach and apple trees to look sideways at the endless world and feel the clean fresh breezes. They can pretend to be what nature intended, free birds of the jungle; free to eat and run and sleep; free to lay eggs where and when they want; free to squirt their manure where they won’t have to step in it; free to strut as far in any one direction as they wish, without a wall of wire to change their direction; free to risk the hawks in the sky and the fast cats cringing in the shadows.

  Yes, when the sun sets they will hurry back to their perches in the coop and their human masters will close and latch the door—after all, they are not truly free birds of the jungle—but at dawn the door will swing open again and another day of sweet pretending can begin.

  The white Leghorn looks out from her broken basket beneath the corn crib and sees the Buff Orpingtons scratching i
n the garden. She sees the magnificent caramel-red rooster with his great red comb and dangling wattles and great curl of black tail feathers and realizes for the first time what this egg laying business is really all about. She scoots out from the dark jumbled safety of the corn crib and nonchalantly pecks her way toward the garden.

  Captain Bates sees her among the tomato vines and remembers her from the day she fled past the chicken yard. He calls out his intentions to her. She pecks closer. He fluffs out his neck feathers. She pecks closer. He prances through the tangles of rotting cucumber vines. She coyly trots away. He pursues. True, she is not much to look at. She is small and a good many of her feathers are gone. But Captain Bates knows from her body language what she wants.

  And so that afternoon the chromosomes of old Maximo Gomez find their way into the scientifically perfected uterus of a Gallinipper Leghorn. And so it is that Miss Lucky Pants is invited to spend the night on the perches in the coop.

  “How in hell did that Leghorn get in with the Orpingtons?” Calvin wonders as he and Jeanie walk with Rhea along the row of grapes Alfred Cassowary planted so many years ago. The grapes are finally sweet enough to eat and they stop every few seconds to pinch one off and suck it out of its purple-blue skin. It’s late in the afternoon and a huge flock of starlings is washing back and forth across the empty cow pasture below the layer houses. Captain Bates and his hens are in the garden scratching among the potato vines.