Fresh Eggs

by Rob Levandoski

  Eighteen

  “What’s your rooster’s name again?” Gammy Betz asks Rhea.

  “Mr. Shakyshiver.”

  They are sitting at the long table in the dining room, in the cold northwest corner of the old farmhouse. Thanksgiving dinner has been over for an hour. The table has been cleared, the dishes washed. The others are in the living room—Donna and Rhea’s father, her grandmother’s husband Ben, her uncle Dan and the Latino woman he brought with him from San Diego.

  “And the one the coyote killed?” Gammy Betz asks.

  “That was Blackbutt,” says Rhea. “He looked a lot more like Captain Bates than Mr. Shakyshiver does.”

  Rhea’s grandmother pushes up her sagging cheeks with the heels of her hands. “Oh, I liked that Captain Bates.”

  Rhea knows she is in for a treat now, a rambling, wistful soliloquy on her grandmother’s old rooster. Woven in this story about Captain Bates will be the story about Maximo Gomez, Alfred making that FRESH EGGS sign, the story about her father being afraid to reach under the pecking hens for eggs when he was a little boy, so many wonderful Cassowary stories.

  Instead Rhea’s grandmother starts to tell a new story, about the giant she named her rooster after. “Did I ever tell you about the real Captain Bates?” she begins.

  “Only that you once tried on his big boots,” Rhea says. “And that they came up to your rear end.”

  Her grandmother laughs and begins, telling her that Martin VanBuren Bates was born in eastern Kentucky in 1845; that he joined the Confederate army when he was sixteen; that he was a big boy when he joined and kept growing right through the war, to seven feet, eight inches and 470 pounds; that by the end of the war he had risen to the rank of captain.

  (She does not tell Rhea that after the Civil War, Americans developed a huge interest in human oddities—giants and midgets and women with beards, people who could swallow swords or twist themselves into pretzels, dark thick-lipped people said to be cannibals from faraway islands.)

  She tells Rhea that a man who puts on shows—an impresario—lured Bates into show business with promises of fame and fortune; that during a tour of Europe, Captain Bates met and fell in love with a woman even bigger than he was; that her name was Anna Swan and that she was from Nova Scotia and that she was seven feet, eleven inches; that when they were married Queen Victoria gave them expensive wedding presents.

  She tells her that after years of traveling the world, the captain and Anna bought a farm in Seville, which, as Rhea knows, is only a few miles north of Tuttwyler; that the house they built had big doors and big windows and fourteen-foot ceilings.

  She tells her that despite their height, despite the fact that people were always gawking at them, despite their fame, Captain Bates and Anna considered themselves normal people who deserved a normal life.

  (She does not tell her that while living in that big house in Seville, Anna, after gushing six gallons of embryonic fluid from her uterus, gave birth to the largest baby known to medical history, a twenty-three and three-quarter-pound boy thirty inches long, with a head nineteen inches in diameter; and that he lived less than a day.)

  She does tell her that many of the friends they’d made while touring came to visit them at their farm: midgets and Siamese twins and a man with very little meat on his bones who billed himself as a living skeleton; that these people, like the Captain and Anna, despite the way people gawked at them, were ordinary everyday people, like everybody else.

  (She does not tell her about the time the floor beneath Anna and the captain collapsed while they were dancing at a neighbor’s house; about the captain being a sour and angry man always coming to blows with smaller men; that when Anna died, the coffin-maker thought the dimensions the captain sent him were a mistake, and so when Anna’s coffin arrived, it was much too small for her; that the funeral had to be delayed until a new coffin could be built; that to avoid the same humiliating mix-up when he died, he had his own coffin made and kept it in his barn for thirty years.)

  Rhea loves her grandmother too much to tell her she already knows all those stories, both the good ones she’s telling and the bad ones she’s leaving out. She knows them because a month ago her father went to the library in Tuttwyler to get books for her homeschooling and came home with one on Captain Bates and Anna. It was called There Were Giants on the Earth. Rhea also knows why Gammy Betz is telling her only the good stories. It’s because Gammy wants her to think of herself as normal. Instead of the human oddity she is.

  “For years and years they put his huge boots on display at the fair and let people try them on,” her grandmother says. “And yes, Rhea,. they came right up to my rear end. I couldn’t have been more than five or six.”

  Rhea finishes the story for her. “And years later when your new rooster kept growing and growing, and strutting liked he owned the world, you thought of Captain Bates and those big boots.”

  “That’s right,” her grandmother says.

  Rhea loves her Gammy Betz more than anything. During dinner, she was the only person who didn’t try to force a piece of turkey on her. Even the Latino woman had tried that. “Come on!” she said, her eyes looking everywhere but at Rhea’s feathers. “Everybody eats the big bird on Thanksgiving! What kind of American are you?”

  Gammy Betz hadn’t said anything like that. She just made sure she ate her mashed potatoes and a slice of cranberry sauce and one of the rolls while they were still warm.

  Nineteen

  The accident on the Ohio turnpike cost Phil Bunyip his left eye, but it has not affected his punctuality. As always he arrives right at midnight. As always he jumps out of his truck drinking a Pepsi, smoking a cigarette, and eating cheap pastry. “That forklift of yours all juiced up?” he asks.

  Calvin Cassowary gives him an exaggerated nod, one that can be seen in the dark.

  Phil signals to his chicken catchers and they start putting on their paper overalls, rubber gloves and masks.

  Calvin can see the wrinkles of concern around Phil’s eyes. “Anything wrong?”

  Phil draws on his cigarette and licks the icing off his little finger. “I just hope the boys don’t let their emotions get in the way with this load.”

  “Know what you mean,” Calvin says. And he does know what Phil means. Tonight’s work will be different than usual. The hundred thousand Leghorns they’ll be ripping from their cages tonight aren’t spent. They’re year-old hens at the peak of their laying, two eggs every three days. Ordinarily they’d have another six months of laying before being trucked to the pet food plant. But these are the 100,000 hens Calvin has to cut from his flock.

  “It’s not like chickens have souls or anything,” Phil Bunyip says. “But you do catch yourself feeling a little funny snuffing out these young hens before their time.”

  Calvin does not stand in the doorway to the layer house and watch the culling, as his contract with Gallinipper Foods requires him to do. Instead he goes back to the house and climbs the stairs to his bedroom and closes the door behind him.

  “You coming to bed already?” Donna asks with sleepy surprise.

  Calvin takes off his pants and sits on the edge of the bed. He peels back the allergen-free cotton blankets and puts his hand under her allergen-free cotton nightgown. Calvin has no reason to feel guilty in the bedroom. Donna is always receptive to unplanned sex. The endorphins her brain releases numb her ever-present itch to sneeze.

  So Calvin just goes ahead and enjoys himself—enjoys the way his own endorphins numb his many problems—his life without Jeanie, his daughter with the feathers, his bills and bank loans, his need to husband the Cassowary family farm through one more generation, his young wife’s inability to conceive.

  Donna has been to a doctor. Calvin, too. There’s no reason in the world why she can’t conceive. She just doesn’t.

  After the sex Calvin and Donna squeeze their pillows together. “Tilt your butt so it doesn’t run out,” Calvin whispers.

  Donna tilts, as ins
tructed. “I don’t know why you’re so antsy about me getting pregnant. I’m young. We’ll have babies.”

  “We’ve been screwing for seven years.”

  “And enjoying it. Yes?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then let’s just keep enjoying it, okay?”

  “It’s psychological, Donna. Your subconscious doesn’t want you to give birth to a baby with feathers.”

  Donna raps him on the forehead with the flat of her hand, the same way she does when he’s snoring. “Rhea is the one with the problem, Cal. Not me. One of these mornings I’ll roll over and puke on your face and we’ll know I’m pregnant.”

  “This isn’t something to joke about.”

  “Isn’t it? When you think I’m subconsciously telling myself not to conceive? Like that would be possible?”

  “Mind over matter.”

  “Not the way I orgasm.”

  “What do your orgasms have to do with it?”

  “They’ve done research on this. Orgasms aren’t just for fun. They have a reproductive purpose. The muscle spasms in my uterus throw your sperm toward my Fallopian tubes, where the egg is waiting. So, if I didn’t want your baby, I wouldn’t come so easy.”

  Calvin surrenders. His voice softens into a playful tease. “Smart women turn me on.”

  Donna kisses the spot where she rapped him. “Then how about another ride, rooster boy? I feel a sneeze coming.”

  Donna looks at the clock on the dresser. It’s 5:30. Calvin’s side of the bed is empty. Outside, Phil Bunyip’s trucks are revving up. Mr. Shakyshiver is crowing for the sun to rise. Biscuit is barking just for the sake of barking. Donna sniffs back the mucus in her nostrils. Coughs. Sneezes. Exchanges her hot pillows for the cool ones on Calvin’s side. Tries to sleep. But can’t.

  She has been unfaithful to her husband. Unfaithful to him with her half-truths. She wants to have children with him, yes. He is a magnificent man. But he is a man with a daughter with feathers. Yes, she opens her womb to him. Allows him to spend as much time in there as he wants. She loves their sex. Her orgasms are for real. She tells herself not to be silly. Or afraid. Calvin’s sperm is normal, she tells herself. It has been tested and retested. No one in Calvin’s or Jeanie’s family had ever grown feathers before. There are no records of it. Or rumors of it.

  Donna knows that she is a smart woman, just as Calvin said. With her intellect and her sensuality, she is able to override her silliness and her fears and copulate joyfully. But is he right about her subconscious fears? Have they, like dutiful medieval defenders, erected a castle wall around her eggs? Do they pour cauldrons of boiling oil onto his advancing spermatozoa?

  It may not just be Rhea’s feathers that keep her from getting pregnant. It also may be Calvin’s lingering love for Jeanie Marabout. She knows that their marriage is founded on practicality. The need for fantastic, mind-numbing sex. The need for a business partner good in math. The need for a mother.

  She knows, too, that Calvin’s and Jeanie’s marriage was founded on something more fundamental than practicality. It was founded on love. She has no way of knowing whether the sex between Calvin and Jeanie was better or worse than the sex between Calvin and her. But surely their lovemaking was better.

  Maybe Calvin’s subconscious is the problem. Maybe despite his eagerness for a son he doesn’t want her to have equal status with the great Jeanie Marabout. Share the great Jeanie Marabout’s high and heavenly pedestal.

  Donna pulls the cotton sheet over her head and remembers the afternoon, just six weeks after they were married, when she explored the fruit cellar in the basement. It was a dark and musty little room that made her sneeze something terrible.

  The walls were lined ceiling-to-floor with wide wooden shelves. There were maybe a hundred glass jars on those shelves, jars of tomatoes and pickles and rhubarb and green beans and beets and apples and pears, grape and raspberry jelly. Bundles of garlic and onions hung from the ceiling. There was a huge bin of wrinkled potatoes. There were webs of dust and webs made by spiders. There were mousetraps loaded with chunks of moldy cheese. And there was something else. Stuck behind the jugs of homemade wine was a small picture frame. Donna pulled it out and saw the drawing of Jeanie feeding chickens. When she saw the rooster trying to screw the cat, she laughed out loud. The drawing made her think of the empty rectangle on the wall above the table in the breakfast nook—the wallpaper inside that rectangle lighter than the rest—and she knew that this drawing once hung there. She wondered how long it would be before Calvin drew a picture of her? A drawing she could frame and hang on the wall.

  Eight years have passed. Calvin has not drawn a picture of her. Calvin has not drawn a picture of anything. Jeanie Marabout was married to an artist. She is married to a man with a million chickens.

  She can hear Phil Bunyip’s trucks pulling onto the road, heading west toward a pet food plant somewhere in Indiana. Now she is married to a man with 900,000 chickens.

  Rhea follows the flashlight beam to the chicken coop. This second week of December is unseasonably cold. The kind of cold that makes the tips of your ears ache and your breath smolder. The kind of cold that makes a door slam louder. The chickens, already settled on their perches, gauk-bwauk for mercy, then, seeing that the sudden intruder is only their mistress, and not a coyote or that jumpy old dog who lives on the porch, cluck until everybody’s calm again.

  Rhea sits on the bottom perch and opens the book Dr. Pirooz Aram sent her. “If you remember,” she says to the chickens, “the birds are finally on their way to find their king. But now they’re flying over spooky and empty lands.” The chickens cackle deep in their throats. She begins to read:

  “One of the birds lets out a helpless squeak:

  ‘I can’t go on this journey, I’m too weak.

  Dear guide, I know I can’t fly anymore;

  I’ve never tried a feat like this before…”

  After these few lines Rhea hears the coop door squeak open. “Hi,” a voice says.

  She knows who the voice belongs to, but aims her flashlight anyway. “Didn’t we agree you wouldn’t come anymore?”

  Joon Faldstool shuffles forward like a toy robot with weak batteries. “I just wanted to tell you I got my temporary.”

  Rhea lets the flashlight beam burn into his eyes for several seconds—punishment for disobeying her—then lowers it to her book. “Big deal,” she says.

  “It was my fourth try,” Joon says. “I’m really not that dumb. I just panic on tests.”

  Rhea’s voice softens. “My father says you should go with the first answer that pops in your head. ‘Trust your synapses,’ he says.”

  Joon kneels by her feet, as if she was a queen or a goddess or a great philosopher. “Synapses?”

  Rhea pretends she knows what she’s talking about. “They’re the microscopic thingamabobs that pass information between your brain cells. They only let you down if you think too hard and short-circuit yourself.”

  “Your father teaches you at home, huh?”

  “He was going to be a teacher until he inherited the farm.”

  “But he teaches you at home because of your feathers, right?”

  “He figured everybody would make fun of me.”

  “They would, too. Everybody makes fun of my ears.”

  “I can see why.”

  Now they laugh. Not just giggle in a nervous way. But laugh. It frightens the chickens.

  “When are you going to get your real license?” Rhea asks.

  Dread wrinkles Joon’s face. “I’ll still be taking that test when I’m fifty.”

  “Not if you trust your synapses.”

  They laugh again. Frighten the chickens again.

  When there is silence again, Joon says to Rhea, “You have a good attitude about things.”

  “For someone with feathers?”

  “I mean for anybody.”

  Rhea bites down on her lip, suppressing a pang of self-pity. “That’s not what you meant. But that�
��s okay. Actually I have a shitty attitude.”

  “Not as shitty as mine.”

  “We’re not going to play ‘My Attitude Is Shittier Than Yours,’ are we?”

  He shakes his head no and she continues reading:

  “Your heart’s congealed like ice;

  when will you free yourself from cowardice?”

  The next night Joon shovels manure furiously so he can sneak away to the coop and listen to Rhea read to her chickens. “You want to take a walk?” Rhea asks him when he slips through the door.

  They sneak around the side of the coop and Rhea whisper-yells for Biscuit. The old dog comes loping. They head down the hill toward Three Fish Creek, their breath smoldering around their heads.

  “Don’t tell your father,” Rhea says, “but I sneak out at night all the time and walk in the woods.”

  “Faldstools don’t blab,” Joon insists.

  “Everybody blabs,” Rhea says.

  They follow the creek until they find a spot where the ice looks thick enough to hold them. They slide to the other side and wind their way through the huge naked maples. Biscuit sniffs in circles, stopping often to raise his hind leg.

  “My great-grandfather used to tap these trees to make syrup,” Rhea says. “We had a real farm then. Cows and pigs and maple syrup and brown eggs laid by hens who ran around free and ate bugs. Now we run a concentration camp.”

  They head up the slope toward the Van Varken farm, where huge homes now grow. “My father told me about the time you set a bunch of them free,” Joon says.

  Rhea slaps him hard on the chest. “I thought Faldstools didn’t blab?”

  He rubs the spot. “I thought what you did was pretty cool.”

  PART III

  “God the Most High created the angels and placed within them the intellect, He created the beasts and placed within them sensuality, He created the children of Adam and placed within them both intellect and sensuality. So he whose intellect dominates his sensuality is higher than the angels, and he whose sensuality dominates his intellect is lower than the beasts.”