Calvin doesn’t like the way the phone call ended. Doesn’t like the sound of need to talk to you about something. He and Rick have always gotten along fine. As boys they camped out in the woods and swam naked in the deep holes on Three Fish Creek. They were in the Boy Scouts together. For a few years there, when Calvin was protected by his student deferment and Rick was sweating out the draft lottery, they kept their distance. But that’s all water under the bridge now.
Dawn and Donna are another matter. Part of the problem is that Dawn and Jeanie were pretty close. They gabbed on the phone and went shopping together. Dawn drove Jeanie to the hospital when her water broke with Rhea. Another part of the problem is that Donna is so damn young. Her body so damn perfect. Dawn’s not so young any more and the five boys she bore to carry on the Van Varken name have wreaked havoc with her stomach muscles and the veins in her legs.
While Calvin and Rick talk about the coyote incident in the living room, Donna helps Dawn with the elderberry pie and vanilla ice cream in the kitchen. Everybody’s having ice cream except the lactose-intolerant Donna. “I see Rhea’s starting to blossom,” Dawn says, getting down her best dessert plates from the hard-to-reach cupboard above the sink. “How old is she now?”
“Twelve,” Donna says.
Donna’s uncomfortable smile doesn’t deter Dawn one bit. “Jeanie’s boobs were quite big—not Dolly Parton or anything—but I think you and Cal are going to have some serious boy trouble down the road. You get Rhea a training bra yet?”
As soon as they deliver the pie and ice cream to their husbands the talk turns from training bras and coyotes to the real reason for the get-together. “Our families have been living side by side for a hundred years,” Rick Van Varken begins. “So I wanted you to know about this first.”
It’s good pie. Sweet sugary crust. Tangy filling. Calvin stops chewing. “Good lord, Rick. You’re not sick are you?”
Rick shakes his head and bites his bottom lip. “I’ve sold the farm.”
While Calvin’s wedge of pie goes uneaten, while his ice cream melts, Rick tells him about the financial pinch he’s in. Tells him about the five sons he’s got to think about. “Hogs aren’t like chickens. I can’t stack ’em five high in cages. Even if pork prices got up to where they should be, I just don’t have enough land here. And you know what the taxes are like in this damn county now.”
Calvin sees the tears running down Donna’s face, knowing it’s not sympathy but the spicy air freshener Dawn sprayed to kill the smell of pig that’s soaked into the house. “Good Lord. Where you moving to?”
“South Carolina,” Dawn says. “The weather is wonderful!”
“Good climate for hogs, both politically and economically,” Rick says, enjoying his own joke. “Cheap labor. Low taxes. Southern politicians don’t worry about manure they way they do up here.” He drops his head and plays with his pie. He’s got more bad news for his neighbor. “The thing is—I sold the farm to the Gumboro Brothers.”
“Those bastards building all those big houses north of Tuttwyler? Son of a bitch, Rick.”
“I’m not the first farmer selling out to developers and I’m not going to be the last.”
“I don’t want to hear this, Rick.”
“I just wanted you to know first.”
“So I could sell out, too?”
“The climate in South Carolina is also good for chickens.”
Calvin puts his uneaten pie on the coffee table. “I’m not moving to fucking South Carolina.”
So the Cassowarys drive home. And while Donna is upstairs deciding which of her allergy tablets will counteract Dawn Van Varken’s air freshener best, Calvin sits on the porch, scratching Biscuit’s rump, and thinking about the two new layer houses Norman Marek is bugging him to build, F and G. Thinking about the people houses the Gumboro Brothers soon will be building on the Van Varken farm.
When Donna comes out, Biscuit and the cats dutifully jump off the porch and disappear into the night. “Dawn thinks Rhea should start wearing a training bra,” she says.
“I hope those coyotes kill every pig that bastard’s got over there,” Calvin answers.
Rhea doesn’t want to feed her chickens this morning. But she knows she has to. Her chickens are counting on her. So she goes. Feeds them. Gives them fresh water. Makes sure the calcium dish is filled. Each time she goes in and out of the coop she sees the bloody grass and the feathers still scattered about. She loved Blackbutt and Nancy.
When she’s finished with her chores she goes to that horrible spot, squats and wraps her arms around her knees, and gathers up the feathers. She puts the feathers in her Nestlé’s Quik can, with her own feathers. She snaps the lid in place and reaches for the blue jumper hanging on the doorknob.
Twelve
Rhea Cassowary hops off the bus and runs up the driveway, using her social studies book as an umbrella. The fat drops on the metal roofs of the layer houses sound like a thousand machine guns. Biscuit is waiting on the porch, wet and stinky. Rhea scratches his happy ears.
She pries her feet out of her shoes and goes in. She can smell the macaroni baking in the oven, hear Donna sniffling in the living room.
“That you, Rhea?”
Rhea, wet shoes in one hand, slippery social studies book in the other, takes just one step into the room.
“I bought you something today,” Donna says. She’s curled on the sofa with the farm books, her calculator, and a box of tissues. “It’s on your bed, big girl.”
Rhea has had a difficult day at school. Jennifer Babirusa intentionally bumped into her with her trombone case again, and she got seven of ten problems wrong on the math quiz. So she doesn’t need Donna buying her things—it’s always something ugly—and she sure doesn’t need that condescending big girl crap. She goes upstairs without saying thanks.
The bag on her bed is from Kmart. That means Donna was in Akron today, seeing either her allergist or her dermatologist. It’s not a particularly big bag and it’s not very full. So at least it’s not another dumb shapeless jumper. She shakes the bag onto the bedspread. It’s a bra.
“Try it on for me,” Donna calls up the stairs.
Rhea takes off her blouse and undershirt. She looks at herself in the dresser mirror for as long as she dares, then slips her arms through the bra straps and fastens it.
“Can I come up now?” Donna asks.
Before Rhea can answer that there’s no need for her to come up, she can hear the steps squeaking. She quickly puts on a baggy, everyday flannel shirt and sits on her bed, up by the pillows.
Donna comes in and sits on the edge of the bed, blocked from any physical contact by Rhea’s stiff outstretched legs. “Does it fit okay?”
“Sure.”
“You hooked it okay? Sometimes that can be trouble.”
“I didn’t have any trouble.”
Donna is having trouble keeping her smile up. “Why don’t you let me see if it fits right. I’ve had lots of experience with those suckers.”
“It fits.”
“I know it’s embarrassing—”
“I’m not embarrassed.”
“I think you should let me see it, Rhea. You’re starting puberty. You’re going to need my help on lots of personal things.”
Rhea squeezes against the headboard. She could have showed her mother. Her mother, after all, was her mother. Her mother would have understood. “It fits okay and I put it on right.”
Donna looks around for a Kleenex box. Not finding one, she wipes her nose with the back of her hand, then reaches toward the buttons on Rhea’s shirt. “I want to see it.”
Rhea barricades herself behind her knees. “No.”
Donna sneezes loudly and pushes Rhea’s legs aside. She slides forward. Her fingers hook around Rhea’s collar. She starts thumbing the buttons. “Sit still!”
Rhea wants to fight her off. But her arms suddenly feel like they’re nailed to the headboard. She squeezes her eyelids. This day had to come.
&n
bsp; Donna does five of the six buttons and pushes the shirt off Rhea’s shoulders. She finds more than the tiny breasts she expected. “What is this?”
She means, of course, the patch of small white feathers that stretches from the center of Rhea’s chest to her collar bones. They fluff up around the bra’s padded cups like delicate lace.
“Those are my feathers,” Rhea says.
“Why did you glue feathers to your boobs?”
“They’re not glued,” Rhea says. She is breathing as if her lungs are filled with pudding.
Donna’s patience is gone. She takes a pinch of feathers and pulls. “You’re too old for silly stuff like this.” The feathers don’t budge.
Rhea tells her again, “They just grow.”
Donna pulls harder. Rhea’s skin resists, pulling away from her chest like rubber. “You’re the most stubborn girl I ever saw in my life.”
One of Rhea’s arms becomes unnailed and she slaps her father’s wife hard across the face.
Her father’s wife slaps her back, screams “Damn you!” and, with her angry strength, rips out a handful of feathers. There is blood on the quills.
Rhea collapses on her pillows.
Donna jumps off the bed and backs into the dresser. She is quivering like a sparrow in the mouth of a cat. She is staring through cloudy eyes at the feathers and drops of blood in her hand.
Suddenly she has Rhea by the arm, pulling her down the stairs, through the kitchen, across the lawn toward the layer houses. She is yelling, “Calvin! Calvin!”
Rhea is yelling, “Daddy! Daddy!” Her free hand is trying to rebutton her shirt. She can see her father running toward them. Hear him yelling, “Hold on! Hold on!”
When he is only a few yards away, Rhea yanks her arm free. She runs to him and throws her arms around his waist. She feels his arms wrap around her back. Feels his prickly chin on her neck. “What’s wrong, pumpkin seed?” he asks.
Donna pulls her away from her father and holds her tightly by the arms. “She’s got feathers, Calvin! Like some goddamn chicken!” She shows him the tiny white feathers in her hand. Shows him the blood. She tears open Rhea’s shirt and shows him that the feathers on her chest aren’t glued on, but growing there. “I’ve tried to be a good mother to her, Calvin, but she just fights me every step of the way.”
Rhea struggles into her father’s arms again. “They just grow, Daddy. I don’t want them to.”
Her father drops to his knees. His right hand holds her by the belt buckle. His left hand, fingers shaking, strokes the patch of feathers between the flat cups of her new bra. “They’re growing there?”
“I can’t help it, Daddy.”
Rhea sees the worry in her father’s eyes. Waits for him to hug her and kiss her forehead. Tell her everything will be all right. Instead she feels him rip a feather from her chest. Feels the electric-shock of it. The lingering toothache-pain of it.
Donna is screeching. “See? See?”
Now Rhea sees panic in her father’s eyes. She feels his fingers dig into her feathers. Feels the fire as he rips them out. She does not look down at her chest, but straight into his eyes. He rips. He rips. His fingers claw at the hollow of her neck, at the thin tender skin beneath her collar bones. His fingers invade the cups of her bra, finding each tiny feather in the soft swollen skin.
When at last he finishes and slumps back, she can see the bloody feathers in his palms. “They just grow,” she says.
Sometime in the early morning Rhea gets out of bed and gets the Nestlé’s Quik can from the shelf. She goes down to the kitchen, stepping on the least-squeaky parts of the steps. She gets the flashlight from the drawer by the sink and sits on the edge of the porch for a while, scratching Biscuit’s ears, crying into his shaggy mane. Then she follows the flashlight’s amber beam across the wet grass until she sees her feathers. They’re scattered in little lumps, like Blackbutt’s and Nancy’s after that coyote chewed them up. She puts them in the can.
For years she’s been plucking the little feathers and hiding them in that can. But they just grow back, each time, it seems, a little bigger and a little stiffen And each time it hurts a little more, too. Not just on her skin, but deep in her heart.
Now her father knows. Now her father has ripped them from her chest. Why did he do that to her? How could he do that to her? Would he tear out her hair? Her fingernails or toenails? Her teeth? Her eyes? Why her feathers? Because a girl is not supposed to have feathers. That’s why he did that. But she does have feathers—the same as she has hair and teeth and eyes and fingernails and toenails.
The school year ends. The first Saturday of June arrives. Rhea waits for her father to say, “Come on, pumpkin seed, let’s go to the cemetery for our strawberries with Mom.”
But this year he doesn’t say it.
They have been going to the cemetery for strawberries on the first Saturday in June since Rhea was six. The wild strawberry plants have spread completely around the gravestone and sent out runners to some of the other Cassowary graves. Last year the three of them had at least twenty-five berries apiece to eat.
When the first week of June turns into the third week of June, Rhea knows she’ll have to take matters into her own hands. All morning she practices marching up to her father and asking, “Daddy, why aren’t we going to the cemetery for strawberries this year?” But when he comes in for lunch she can’t make herself do it. She is too afraid of him. She has been afraid of him since that day he plucked her feathers. Since that day they’ve said hardly anything to each other. Their eyes have rolled away from each other. Their feet have kept each other in separate rooms of the house.
After her father goes back out to the layer houses, Rhea rounds up Biscuit and walks down the fields toward the creek, and in the high grass by the rock pile she kneels by the wild strawberries that grow there. The berries are overripe, brownish and mushy, but she picks a handful and nibbles them anyway. “Hi, Momma,” she says as Biscuit sniffs the rocks for garter snakes. “It doesn’t look like we’re coming to the cemetery this year. So I hope this will do.”
Thirteen
The bulldozers are already rumbling when Rhea Cassowary wakes up. She goes to her window and looks across the valley. The maples are red and the oaks are yellow. It’s October.
There are several bulldozers on the old Van Varken farm, pushing over the hog barns, rearranging the hills to accommodate the one hundred and seven big homes the Gumboro Brothers plan to build. There’s also a bulldozer on the Cassowary farm, leveling ground for layer houses F and G.
Rhea gets ready for school. She can hear Donna and her father downstairs, walking nervously from room to room, whispering. She goes down. The bus will be there in ten minutes. Just enough time for her to have a bowl of cereal over the sink.
Her father surprises her. He’s wearing a pair of his Sunday slacks and a new shirt. “We’re keeping you home from school today,” he says.
Donna is wearing a dress. “We’re taking you to see Dr. Hauberk,” she says.
Rhea knows who Dr. Hauberk is: Donna’s dermatologist. “I don’t have pimples,” she says. “I have feathers.”
They wait for Rhea to eat her cereal, then go out to the car. They crackle down the driveway. Turn left toward Tuttwyler and the highway that meanders east to Akron.
Her father hasn’t mentioned the feather incident since it occurred. He hasn’t said much to her at all. He has barely looked at her. Now he won’t shut up. “I know what I did was wrong, pumpkin seed. I didn’t mean to hurt you. You know that, don’t you? I just wigged out. I was scared.”
“So was I,” Rhea says from the back seat.
“Dr. Hauberk is really good,” Donna says. She’s sniffling, as she always does in the car. She’s allergic to the fabric on the seats. The drive takes a long hour.
Dr. Hauberk’s nurse takes Rhea into an examining room. Gives her a gown to put on. “You can leave your panties on,” the nurse says, “but everything else has to go.”
&nb
sp; Dr. Hauberk comes in twenty minutes later. Rhea is relieved. Dr. Hauberk is a woman. She’s got freckles and long hair the same orange-brown as Biscuit’s. She is very nervous for a doctor. “I have to confess, I’ve never had a patient with feathers. I don’t think anyone else has either.” She smiles bravely. “But we’ll see what we can do. Okay?”
Dr. Hauberk removes Rhea’s gown. She studies the feathers on her chest: they’re growing over her collar bones and her nipples now, right down her ribs to her belly button. She studies the feathers on Rhea’s back: they extend from her shoulder blades to her tailbone dimples. She slowly pulls Rhea’s panties down and studies the feathers covering her vulva and her thighs. She lets Rhea pull up her panties and put the gown back on. “They started growing when?” she asks.
“I think I was five.”
“About the time your mother died?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You miss your mother?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I miss my mother.”
“Is she dead, too?”
“She lives in Arizona. But my dad’s dead. I miss him like you miss your mother.” Dr. Hauberk frowns. “Your father has a lot of chickens.”
“Pretty soon he’s going to have a million.”
“That’s a lot of chickens.”
Dr. Hauberk takes a syringe from the pocket of her white coat. “I’m not sure what I can do for you, Rhea. I’m pretty good at rashes—like the one’s your stepmother gets—but this feather thing is a new one on me. But I’m going to take a blood sample, just to make sure everything else is okay.” She spreads the feathers just below Rhea’s elbow. The needle slides in. “First try—how about that?” The blood leaks into the syringe. “Have you started having your periods yet?”
“Since July.”
The doctor scrunches her nose. “Fun, aren’t they?”
“They’re okay.”
The syringe is full. Dr. Hauberk pulls it out and wedges an alcohol-soaked cotton ball between her ruffled feathers. “I know you’re getting more and more feathers all the time, but are they getting bigger, too?”
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